Steamrolled

by Pauline Baird Jones

  He was tall enough she had to look up to him, which didn’t happen that often. Her friends called her “leggy” when they were feeling kind. When they weren’t they called her beanpole. And freaking weird. They weren’t wrong. Robert knew it, and his friends appeared to know it, too, but Robert didn’t seem to mind. He did look curious. Was it just the museum that made him curious? Was there a smidge of it in there for her? Since he stared at the museum, she had to conclude not.

  “That’s paint?” Ric not-Jones sounded and looked disbelieving.

  The effect was remarkable. One had a hard time not believing that the ceiling arched high overhead, like a real warehouse or that one walked across wooden planking. The lack of creaking gave it away, of course. It was hard to pick the real wood beams from the painted ones. Her mom’s elevator hadn’t always made it to her attic, but she could slap paint on any surface that wasn’t canvas. Well, she could slap it on canvas, but it almost made the eyes bleed to look at the result. Her non-brick work sucked, but Emily had seen photos of the outside murals. Of course, they were beyond boring—even to someone with steam in her veins—but beautifully done.

  Fyn didn’t say anything. Emily suspected that was his norm. Robert didn’t talk much either, but she had no idea if it was his norm. She sensed shy in there, and there was that heaping helping of geek, but he moved, she mulled it for a few seconds, like a panther. Smooth and dangerous. It didn’t mix well with shy, which made her even more curious. He was like a puzzle with some wrong pieces—one of those complicated ones that you had to be a genius to finish.

  She wasn’t a genius.

  All four of them stopped in the center of the workshop, looking around with an inappropriate-to-the-situation intensity. It’s not like Uncle E achieved fame or fortune with his scientific studies. His main claim to fame was disappearing with or without his comely assistant. And if he disappeared without Olivia, that made him sadder than his great-great-great niece. She paused to add up the greats, but still wasn’t sure how many there were supposed to be. Math wasn’t her strong suit. She liked geeks, but her science skills were mostly fictional, if one didn’t count the steampunk stuff. Mostly no one did.

  Carey moved into her sightline, momentarily blocking her view of Robert. How weird was it that any mention of Olivia bothered Carey? He’d gone from relaxed to defensive in about a second. He’d stopped in front of the newspaper article with her picture featured prominently. Looked a bit lovesick, now that she thought about it. But he couldn’t be. That would be as weird as, well, her.

  Robert gave up studying the ceiling and headed for Uncle E’s big, old desk, increasing her longing to lean on something and admire his tush. She’d always liked jeans on a guy. Maybe that’s why she stayed in Wyoming. Lots of denim. And when the denim was wrapped around smart and yummy? Oh my darling. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t gotten it out of her system yet.

  A smaller desk for the comely assistant sat close by Uncle E’s desk. Robert stopped, a brow rising. It was a bit original Spock, but still cute.

  “A laptop?”

  “Oh, sorry.” Emily felt heat sting her cheeks. “That’s mine.” She hurried around Olivia’s desk, and tucked it under an arm. Not even Eddie knew she worked on her book down here. She’d hoped a book about her uncle might boost the museum’s profile, but she had to figure out how to end it. So far nothing felt right. The best ending would be figuring out where Uncle E went, but her study of his life, his inventions, and the time period had netted no clues.

  Robert’s companions stayed in the center, staring up at the ceiling, looking a bit gob smacked, except Fyn who didn’t seem to do expressions.

  “It smells,” Carey gave her a crooked, apologetic smile, “old.”

  “My grandma got the beams that aren’t painted from Uncle E’s actual New York warehouse. I think she chose them because they did smell. She was a bit crazy.” Okay, that wasn’t in the spiel, even if it was the truth. “My mom wanted to put in those rope things, you know, with the gold posts? But grandma didn’t want anything that interfered with her reality.”

  Grandma had been obsessed with preserving Uncle E’s memory. Not good at it, just obsessed. Emily was, she suspected, the first who’d wanted to know what really happened all those years ago. She’d spent enough time with his papers and his space to think she kind of knew him. A lot of it she didn’t understand, but she suspected he’d been a genius of sorts and a jerk for sure. Anal and as obsessive as his sisters, but with the power to do something about it because he was a man, when men ruled. All of it only made his disappearance more odd, not less. He wasn’t the kind of person to disappear. Despite his whacky inventions he was conventional to a fault. In fact, disappearing and hiring a woman to be his assistant were the most interesting things about him, trumping even all the inventing stuff.

  “She did have to take steps to preserve the papers and drawings in the file cabinet. Lucky for us, Uncle E was tidy, or Olivia was.” No surprise when Carey shifted a bit at the repetition of Olivia’s name. Emily had been around crazy long enough to recognize it when it walked into her museum. That it didn’t bother her should trouble her, but repeated exposure had shut that switch off a long time ago. She did wonder why it bothered him, of course, but not enough to ask.

  The museum was so familiar to her she could walk around it with the lights off. She knew it better than her own bedroom, but the curious quartet changed that by entering it, forcing her to study it as a stranger might. As museums go, it should have gone. Anything interesting about it was buried in the files, not in the stuff. With an almost painful internal shift, she began to see it the way it looked to them, like a past-its-time movie set. Only thing that saved it from being completely sad—it wasn’t dusty.

  Some years beyond one hundred, her ancestor had lived and worked in a reasonable facsimile of this space. The geography had changed, but that was all. His desk area looked like an office straight out of an old movie. The desk had a rolled top, lots of drawers and compartments. True to the period accoutrements were neatly arranged around a blotter. Olivia’s desk was a smaller, as neat version, and had an early version typewriter on a stand close by. But it was first and foremost, a workshop with tools. Old tools. Big and small tools. He’d built stuff here, and according to great-grandma, one of them had been big. Massive even. And there’d been other stuff scattered around the big-being-built. She’d tried to draw from memory later, though not successfully, and there were drawings by Olivia in the ancient file cabinet, whacky drawings, but kind of cool, too.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, Robert headed toward the ancient file cabinet. He set his museum guide on the top, pausing when his hand was on a drawer handle. “May I?”

  Inside another of those odd wobbles, she felt an unexpected urge to ask what was going on, but they wouldn’t tell her, so what good would breaking her question ban do? They weren’t happy they’d given their names—or versions of them. She joined him at the file cabinet, her hand holding the drawer closed and waited. She’d had years of practice at not asking things.

  “It’s important,” he said, his light blue eyes intense and sincere.

  How did she know he was sincere? She didn’t. She wanted to believe she knew it. Did that count? It didn’t matter. She nodded and stepped back, but stayed close enough to watch him. Not that she thought he’d take anything. She just liked watching him. She’d gotten a bit of a zing from touching him. She’d read about zings in romance novels, but this was her first non-fictional zing. She flexed the fingers of the zinged hand, getting zing echo thinking about getting zinged.

  He pulled out a file and opened it, sifting through the contents with swift thoroughness. He froze, then liberated a drawing. Unlike the other drawings, this one didn’t have a label and had been filed in a miscellaneous folder. Might have been Uncle E’s to-do file.

  “I call it the bug.” Because it looked like a metal bug with crazy, bent legs and wheels and a pointed nose. Olivia had signed the drawing, so
Emily assumed she’d also added the “helpful” labels, like “correct angle to overcome issues of torque & inertia during transmogrification,” and “facilitates Emergency Absquatulation Device.” She tipped her head to one side. “I think Uncle E was a few quarts short on his mental lubricant when he came up with that one.”

  Robert turned, gesturing for Carey to join him. When he was close enough, he held up the drawing. He didn’t ask anything but Carey answered with a short, deliberate nod that he couldn’t possibly believe she wouldn’t notice, could he? Maybe Uncle E wasn’t the only one missing a few quarts of lubricant. Weird enough that they were interested in Uncle E, but now his bug?

  Ric not-Jones joined them. His eyes widened, but he didn’t speak. She could tell he wanted to. Her presence was inhibiting, but it was her museum. Three of them exchanged looks of a significant nature, like she wouldn’t notice them doing that either. The big one, Fyn, just looked. Maybe he didn’t do significant. She shifted her laptop to her other arm and waited. The silence stretched. Her curious quartet excelled at not talking. They weren’t as easy with silence as she was though. The silence stretched some more. Ric not-Jones shifted. Fyn didn’t. Carey drifted off toward a workbench and fiddled with the display. Emily shifted the laptop to the other arm, and then off loaded it to another workbench. Whatever had brought them here, it wasn’t historical accuracy.

  Robert cleared his throat. More silence, then, “Your uncle’s filing system is…unusual.”

  “Everything about Uncle E was unusual.” She paused. “But I believe the system was Olivia’s.” Carey limited his response to a rapid blink this time. She resisted the temptation to repeat the name a few times, just to see what he’d do. Besides, she already knew what he’d do.

  “Is there anything in the files that indicate what went missing?”

  Why would he care? Uncle E lived, worked and disappeared in the 1890’s, as had Olivia. Technology had moved on since then. Way on. One hundred plus years on. A sudden thought almost got her to ask a real question. Could one of them be a descendent, too? Of Olivia or even the nefarious Professor Smith—

  “What’s this thing?” Carey held up a small, black box.

  She couldn’t resist. “It’s a black box.” Robert’s perfectly arched brows arched some more and somehow she heard herself add, “I think it’s the Emergency Absquatulation Device.” Emily felt them still, saw it, too, and felt tension surge into the air around her. Crazy was in there, too. Funny how it always was. “He invented some crazy stuff. The Gyrocompass isn’t too weird, but Individual Discovery Velocipediator? Mapulator Retrieval Apparatus?”

  “Transmogrification machine is my personal favorite,” Carey muttered, prompting his companions and Emily to turn and stare at him.

  Emily frowned. A question almost made it to the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t imagine an answer to it she really wanted to know.

  “Oh-oh.” Carey held up the box. “It’s humming.”

  The floor tilted again, hard enough to make her grab the edge of the file cabinet to keep from meeting it with her nose. Robert didn’t notice because he’d joined the two guys not holding the black box in stampeding to the one who was. Carey handed it to Robert. Emily, once the floor dropped back into place, joined them at her normal pace, though she had mixed feelings about it.

  “What did you do?”

  Emily kind of envied Robert. He asked questions so easily. Perhaps his life had delivered better answers than hers.

  Carey shrugged. “I didn’t—” Robert looked at him with intent. He shrugged again. “There is a kind of depression on one side. I might have pushed it.”

  Robert’s fingers were long and confident. Could fingers be confident? They were cared for, but pale, like he’d been out of the sun for a while. The fingers stopped, one of them circling something on the side of the box. The box kicked up the vibrating, adding in a high-pitched whine.

  “Everyone get back out of the center,” Robert ordered, with unexpected authority. His arm went around her waist, half lifting her, half sweeping her to the edge of the room. He could have released her then, instead of keeping her clamped against his manly side, but he didn’t.

  She liked being swept, and she really liked being clamped. The moment called for gazing, so she tipped her head back to gaze. He didn’t seem to know what the moment called for. The now empty center of the room had his attention, while the box kicked up the vibration some more.

  It was about then that she realized it wasn’t just the box. It was the whole building.

  FIVE

  Ashe arrived in time to see the Council settling, with an obvious awareness of their importance, into their seats on the raised dais.

  They are all physically present.

  Usually the Council preferred to use their personal time zones, which allowed them to exist here and there—wherever their “there” was, something to do with monitoring across time or something. Without the flash of the inter-dimensional travel, their lack of what her Earth cousins called star power, was even more obvious. Maybe they were supposed to be pedestrian. A few petty bureaucrats might be awful to work with, but perhaps they’d limit each other’s potential for damaging time. Negatives canceling each other out? Since they had to be petty, it was a pity they weren’t pretty, despite the historic Gadi love of it. They ranged from the merely bland to the seriously ugly.

  It is possible that their lack of pretty is what drove them into Council work.

  It made a kind of sense.

  They know something is wrong.

  The comment by Lurch flowed from the obvious fact that it was highly unusual for all the Council to be physically present on the base, let alone be present to brief a slew of low-level trackers. Their expressions showed only majestic—as their uninspiring visages could manage—unconcern. No sign anyone noticed the tremors shaking the outpost or that they heard what sounded like thunder outside. A tremor hit the base hard enough to bleed through the shields, throwing it out of phase for several seconds. It almost knocked Ashe out of her “please underestimate me” pose. Okay, someone had to see that. At least tell me someone felt it?

  Do I have to tell you again that you have an unusual sensitivity to time?

  I’ll replay it with your patience lecture later. The high ceiling and stone everything chilled the air, but what sent ice to her core was her sense of time spiraling in strange ways out in the wider universe while the Council straightened their robes and got comfortable in their seats. Her time senses were going crazy, her gut telling her things she didn’t think it could. I think you are right.

  She felt Lurch’s surprise. About what?

  He didn’t have to feel so surprised. She’d admitted he was right at least once before. This time disturbance. I think it’s both. I think it might be natural and unnatural.

  You can feel the difference? Now he felt intrigued.

  I think so. It felt like two currents coming together, with an odd, uncomfortable turbulence where they bumped against each other. It was a sense, an instinct, more than real knowledge. Despite the buckets of data transferred into her brain when she made cadet, Ashe worked mostly from her instincts. She hadn’t been here long, but she’d already figured out that much of what they “knew” wasn’t actual knowledge. It fell more into the range of “we hope we know this.”

  Carig cleared his throat. “We’re going to have a practice emergency drill. Protocol twenty-five. You’ll deploy in teams of two to your assigned grids and check in at the time stations, collect data, attempt to locate a ‘missing’ tracker,” he flexed two fingers on each hand to make sure they knew is a drill and not real, even though it was, “and report. You will follow procedure and endeavor not to actually get lost.”

  If they’d had Control do the brief, and you weren’t you, it wouldn’t be a bad cover story for the fubar.

  Ashe gave an internal twitch. Fubar?

  Lurch twitched this time and felt almost embarrassed. It’s an Earth term, a somewhat cr
ude acronym for seriously messed up.

  She tried to figure out how the letters indicated messed up, crude or otherwise, and couldn’t. Perhaps it was an Earth dialect she hadn’t experienced yet. Odd. She refocused on their fearless leader. He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Or they don’t know the truth.

  He could be worried about your safety. He paused, probably for effect. But Carig has always had trust issues.

  Why do I get the feeling you’ve run into him in an alternate reality, too?

  Ashe hid a smug smile at his surprised jerk. Wasn’t easy to get the drop on Lurch. She was so busy being smug she almost missed her team assignment. Fubar. Selnick was a jerk among a wide cast of jerks infesting the service. He wasn’t a top tracker, though he was high level. Interesting that he was the only high-level tracker not missing. Suspiciously interesting. What’s his nanite like? Hard to imagine any nanite living comfortably in that jerk.

  His nanites aren’t sentient.

  That wasn’t a shock, but then he showed her the stats on sentient/non-sentient. Does the Service have an issue with sentient nanites, too?