Steamrolled

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “Getting pictures. Being pissed with myself for not getting some at Roswell.”

  She felt him kick into thinking overdrive. The hum of his body was different from the steam engine, but she still felt it, felt temptation and caution go to war. Or she had a really good imagination.

  “I don’t think we should.” His frown said he wasn’t sure why. “Time is resilient, persistent…resistant?” He rubbed between his brows and sighed. “I didn’t believe it, but the proof is irrefutable.”

  It was difficult to come up with a comment for that. Proof was always irrefutable until it was refuted. She didn’t know where he was going with this. Wasn’t sure he knew where he was going. Couldn’t find out without asking.

  He looked at her, his gaze pinning her in place. “Close your eyes.”

  Her brows arched, though the question didn’t make it anywhere near her throat. As if he knew this and was willing to work around her issue with questions, he gave her that half smile, with a bit of crooked to it.

  “You sense things I don’t. Would you mind trying?”

  When he asked like that? “Okay.” What wouldn’t she do if he asked her like that? Not sure she wanted to answer that question, even alone inside her own head—a mental pause here when she realized she didn’t feel alone in her head. A mental shake at that. Of course she was alone. Too far into crazy. The thought side trip didn’t take long enough to make Robert restive as he waited for her to comply with his request. Next problem, her lids didn’t like shutting out the sight of him. Her eyes liked looking at him, liked it better when he looked at her. She dragged them down. With the loss of light other senses kicked on. Smell first. The warehouse was gnarly, no question, but Robert was close enough to trump that. He smelled real good. She didn’t try to sort his scent, just enjoyed it. Sounds outside kicked up a bit, too. A soft rustle of paper close at hand, then another one, a different piece? On its heels, as if something had been waiting for that, she felt a mini version of a bug ride. Her eyes snapped open. Her mouth might have sagged a bit, too. His arm came around her waist, supporting her.

  He held one of Uncle E’s papers. “You felt something.”

  She nodded. He reinserted it in the drawer and the feeling smoothed out.

  “You have a heightened sensitivity to time.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed his specific claim, but something weird was going on. She considered her family history. Something weird had been going on for a very long time. He watched her, those blue eyes fixed on her, not anxiously, but with a high level of intent. Regardless of what she believed, he believed it, she realized, not with shock, but with relief. He wasn’t lying to her. She hated lying. Crazy, she could handle.

  “Okay.” She was pleased with the neutral nature of her reply. It lacked judgment or agreement. It was.

  His eyes had questions in them that Emily didn’t know how to answer without also unleashing a firestorm of questions. If she got answers like this without asking, what might she get if she asked?

  He grinned, the first real one he’d produced since she’d met him—she tried to work out how long she’d known him and couldn’t. She didn’t know how to do math that involved negative sums and travel through time.

  “You felt something when I took that paper out,” his finger flicked the edge of it and a lighter version of that weird feeling danced across her nerve endings, “but you didn’t react to this one.” He touched a new file and she had to admit—to herself—he was right. There was something about the other file that bothered her. She angled her head to read the label and the room tilted on its side. Robert gripped her, half lifting her to her uncle’s chair. It felt weird to sit there, but not for the same reason. According to family legend, no one but Uncle E had ever sat there, though she wondered about that after the hinking with the drawings done by his siblings. They’d probably all bounced in it more than once.

  Robert crouched in front of her, clasping both her hands so he could look at her, forcing her to gaze into his sincere, and beautiful blue eyes. Little tingles of feeling much better than that other stuff crawled up her arms and dived into her middle, warming it into a nice glow. Did he think she didn’t know where he was headed? He was going to say—okay so maybe she didn’t know where he was headed. Or she didn’t want to go there before she had to.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, then wished she hadn’t, because he stood up. At least he didn’t let go. Questions bubbled inside her with a previously unknown insistence but each came with a Danger, Will Robinson attached. “So no pictures.”

  He nodded. “We need to get out of here before—”

  It was like bad karma, because as soon as he said “before” they heard a rattle at the door at the top of those stairs. Robert moved so fast, Emily felt like she was back in the bug, only this trip was behind some crates and involved more pleasant clasping. She angled her feet, feeling for floor and couldn’t. Not only wasn’t Robert breathing heavy from hoisting her up and out of sight, he was barely breathing. Oh my darling.

  The deliberate sound of booted feet descending the stairs made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. That sense of—was it time like Robert said—skewing wrong made her stomach lurch this time. She slid her arms up Robert’s shoulders and around his neck. There might have been some clutching. That and closing her eyes helped settle her stomach. She knew when whoever it was reached the bottom of the stairs because Robert tensed.

  Smith!

  He’d spoken so soft it felt like she heard him in her head, which was impossible. Not that there hadn’t been plenty of impossible to go around since he’d walked into her bowling alley.

  “Emelius?”

  It was obvious no one was there, so why the hesitant call, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to find Emelius? Or was afraid he would find him? Robert didn’t trust him—she didn’t waste time wondering how she knew that—because her thoughts got hooked on wondering if this was the Professor Smith, the other suspect in the disappearance. Her heart bumped up the pounding, which made it hard to slow her breathing in the deep, dangerous quiet. Dangerous? Okay, so getting seen by someone in the past was bad. She knew her fictional time travel science. The grandfather paradox and stuff. Science stuff, but this was more than that.

  Robert shifted, the movement in the ghost range of quiet. She opened her eyes and the room didn’t lurch, but things still felt off, like bad food. Through a gap in the crates she saw a tall man, and burly, wearing clothing appropriate to the period—if one overlooked the gizmo he held. Her uncle had made some weird stuff, but it had looked like 1894. This didn’t. This looked like something straight out of Wild Wild West. Wires and steam and flashing lights. He frowned down at it, then looked up, his hard gaze scanning the room as if he sensed their presence.

  He was dressed right, but he was wrong in those clothes. She knew it as someone who’d been schooled in the time by her obsessed family. He held himself like a soldier, not a gentleman. Will Robinson was feeling that danger call again. Confirmation on that danger when Smith turned the gizmo their direction and it started to hiss louder.

  Robert shifted, putting the craft between them and Smith. “Time to go.” His voice was a murmur for her ears alone. “Hang on.”

  Booted steps tracked their direction, but then space bent around them. Emily felt something grab her middle and yank. Robert still held her, but how it felt, how he held her felt different from before. Lights bent. So did they. This was like the bug trips, but not. And then it stopped. Again.

  SIXTEEN

  Doc—Delilah Oliver Clementyne—got the signal she’d been waiting for, the signal that the portal retrieval program had gone active, via her nanite peeps seconds before it came in over her headset. She headed for the portal room with controlled speed. The instinct to not attract attention had not lessened, even with her high profile marriage, or perhaps because of it. Whatever the reason, she still knew how to muddy a trail. No one from the future would be able to come
back and mess with her life. She’d made sure of that.

  Hel was across the outpost—putting a bit of stress on their ma’rasile link—dealing with a diplomatic something or other. He tried to keep her and diplomatic things as far apart as possible—since her idea of diplomacy involved weapons and body slams—but he got the peep call the same time she did.

  Is my presence required?

  It warmed her that he was willing to come. He knew she’d worried about sending Robert on this op, even though she had been unable to extrapolate a downside to a visit to a museum and bowling alley. Still, relief came in a flood. He’d started back. While she categorically denied Hel’s assertion that she hovered, she’d be glad when her big brother was back where she could see him. From a distance that wasn’t at all like hovering.

  Do you need me to require your presence, she sent back. Hel had less patience with diplomacy these days and she was happy to require his presence at any time. She knew General Halliwell still didn’t understand how she could like Hel, let alone marry him. If he knew all the ins and outs—and time shifts—of her courtship, he’d understand it even less. Fortunately, it wasn’t need-to-know. Doc may have fallen in love, but that had only increased her instinctive caution, not lessened it. There was no circumstance she could think of where it was a good idea to tell anyone that if she or Hel got too far apart they’d die. It had been need-to-do, but it made life awkward sometimes. Not that Doc regretted the deep bond with the man she loved. Granted it might make the General hesitate to kill Hel if he knew, but Hel’s enemies would see it as a win-win, since they hated her only slightly less than they hated Hel. Her husband knew how to influence people, but he didn’t do it by making friends with them.

  Not yet. The answer to her question was wry, a bit edged with impatience. Hel had relinquished his role as Leader of the Gadi people to oversee the Kikk Outpost—and because they both knew Doc was unsuited to being one of the Leader’s mates. She’d already “accidentally” kicked his cousin’s ass. Hel didn’t like the man, so he’d “accidentally” not noticed, but it had hastened the transfer of power to the newly elected Leader, Hel’s former aide, Naman. He was a good man and was the only one of the contenders for the position who hadn’t hit on her. While Doc could see the logic behind allowing the Leader’s strategic mates to transfer their loyalty to a new Leader, she hadn’t enjoyed the “courting” process the contenders had engaged in—though it had stopped when Glarmere hit the deck. The Gadi had issues about being beat up by a girl.

  She was in the building, so she just had to take the lift down to the portal level. Its speed was the same as always, but it felt slow. The peeps agreed. They’d bonded with Robert during the info dump. And he was infused with peeps, too—the same peeps she had, though her “them” was a them from an alternate reality. There were differences, there had to be, because the realities were subtly different. Both sets of peeps had formed three, distinct personalities as they achieved sentience. Robert’s had chosen Wynken, Blynken and Nod to differentiate themselves. Hers were still working on their names—or afraid to tell her what they’d picked.

  The doors slid back and she was there. Most of the portal rooms on the other planets throughout the galaxy had antechambers, but this one didn’t, so she knew as soon as the doors slid back that Robert hadn’t arrived yet. The portal itself was active, lights and patterns forming and dissipating inside the opening. Her stomach gave a slight lurch as it recalled what it felt like inside there. The four consoles, two on each side, twitched as she passed them, though Dr. Evans, the lone geek manning the portal controls, didn’t notice. Doc wasn’t surprised. Evans was brilliant but a walking cliché of clueless.

  Thanks to Colonel Carey’s test flight of the portal, they knew a bit more about how the portal worked. The peeps knew more than she did, but there was still a knowledge gap between what they knew and what she could understand despite her ridiculously high IQ. For the first time in her life, she felt like a first grader. She didn’t mind it until today. Today she wanted to know when her brother would pop out of that portal.

  Robert was her big brother, but when she’d used the portal to go back in time and heal his psychotic break, he’d lost nine years of his life and she’d become six years older. Added to that was the reality that if he’d had his break when he was sixteen and spent the years he hadn’t lost, he’d have lost them anyway. She hadn’t, she realized now, considered the impact on him of all those changes. She’d wanted her brother back. It was that simple, only it wasn’t. Robert hadn’t just lost the years, he’d lost the learning, the living, the knowing. He’d lost the progress, the education and degrees he’d have earned. She’d downloaded her progress into his head, but knowing couldn’t give him back the living of those lost years.

  While he’d struggled with his new reality, she’d gotten a new reality to deal with, too, one beyond adapting to life as the wife of an alien from another galaxy—she refused to think of herself as a mate, even a bond mate.

  Robert understood the Garradian knowledge base more than she did. He was smarter than she was. She hadn’t had to deal with sibling rivalry for twenty years. Back then her parents’ world had revolved around Robert and she was the spare brain, in case Robert didn’t work out. He’d warned her, saved her and fallen into the abyss that was them. It was only when he was back in her life that she’d realized how angry that little girl had been that he’d left her behind, left her alone with their shattered parents, left her alone with them and her guilt that she hadn’t fallen, too. And then her parents left, too. Okay, so they died, but she’d been fifteen. One could be smart and still be a child.

  Lots of issues on her side, lots of issues on his, but still a deep gratitude he was back in her life—and an unexpressed hope that he was glad as well.

  Despite birth order, Doc felt protective enough of her brother to send him out with lots of support. Richard Daniels, the resident alien expert from Area 51 had been an obvious choice, as was Colonel Carey, since he’d seen and been inside the machine they hoped to use to track down Dr. Smith. Fyn—Doc grimaced—he’d been chosen for the “expect the unexpected factor.” The evidence that Dr. Smith could arrive on the heels of the machine concerned her, despite the protective download of her black ops skills. It was the alternative to her going, though she’d much rather have been there, too. Getting permission for Hel to go to Earth with her was a level of impossible she hadn’t managed to make possible yet. And it was an uncomfortable fact that Robert had a better chance of figuring out the transmogrification machine than she did.

  With outward calm, and an internal sense of relief, she watched the active portal. If Carey’s return was typical, it shouldn’t be long now—

  It went dark. Shut off as if someone had flipped a switch.

  Hel felt her fear, read her thoughts, across the island. We’ll find him. He sounded confident, but then he always did.

  “What,” Doc had to clear her throat before she could finish the question, “just happened?”

  “I’m not sure,” Evans said, his focus on the science, not her lost brother. “There is power.” He turned to a console, frowning down at what it showed. “According to this only Professor Clementyne’s beacon activated.” His frown deepened. “This can’t be correct. I need to go to control and run a diagnostic.”

  “Go.” Her peeps were already running one, would finish before he got where he was going. Hel had jumped onto the island’s transport system and would be here soon. They’d do better without Evans. She felt the bond heighten and sharpen as he closed on her position, bringing comfort and strength. As Evans disappeared up the lift, she paced to a console, not because she thought it could help, but because she needed something to do. She pulled up the readings that had troubled Evans. According to them, Robert had requested retrieval from…not where they’d sent him—

  She felt something she’d hoped not to feel again, no, it wasn’t quite the same something, but it was close, too close. She was pretty sure
time didn’t stop this time, even though she was alone in the room, but she felt it pull and pulse. She pulled two of the weapons she always wore hidden on her body and got her back to a wall.

  The freaking lying time creeps seemed to be back.

  * * * *

  Ashe spotted the distinctive trail of portal transport cutting through the time stream and paused to study it, found the now familiar traces of Constilinium in the track, no, traces of the wrong Constilinium, the appeared-to-be-altered stuff. Since time tended to cross back over itself, this seemed like a better lead than her current one. She shifted course. She didn’t have to follow it to know where it headed, though when it was headed could be tricky. She could spike into the edges of it, let it pull her along until she had a fix, a trajectory that would give her a when, then she’d jump just ahead and, if all went well, be waiting for Smith to arrive.

  You do not know Smith is riding that transport stream.

  Lurch had a point, but anyone connected to the wrong Constilinium should provide clues, or at least a better lead to the source problem. While no one on the Council liked to admit it, much of what they did was with a certainty based on fragile hope. It felt weird to be heading to the Kikk Outpost before it became a base, weirder to be able to tell the difference in the portal transport trail from one in her time. She wasn’t sure if the knowledge came from her instincts or from Lurch, though it seemed likely to be Lurch. How could she instinctively know this transport was pre-Service when she’d never seen a pre-Service transport trail?

  She shot toward the trail, easing into position next to it, then hooking in. There was a jerk, then it yanked her with it, the increased velocity more unpleasant than she’d expected. She rode the turns—waiting for just the right moment to spike out. She used its velocity to shoot her ahead of the trail, coming in hot but on course for the portal room on Kikk. She landed hard, but Lurch helped her take the hit, stay upright and deploy her protective fields—