In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

  Tucket is nervous. His forehead is sweating, but he’s put on a brave face. Carson looks as cool as ever, but I can tell he’s tense with energy too. Years of friendship have given away his tells. The speed of his gestures and the way his eyes keep finding the clock on the wall, aware of each remaining second till our departure.

  Doctor Quickly and Professor Chun are behind Tucket, observing. The scientist is usually an enigma to me, his emotions as much of a puzzle as his brilliance, but as I count down from five, he looks me in the eyes and gives me a final nod. We both know the stakes. And we both love her.

  “Three . . . two . . . one.” I press the pin.

  We’re in a jump room. I recognize the layout—clean bare walls surrounding an unencumbered space for our arrival. A single anchor stand rises from the floor and supports a past version of the combat knife. Humming fans in the ceiling are keeping the room contaminant-free. The coordinates we’ve been given have taken us forward nearly a week and a half from my perspective, ten days since Mym was taken. I’m irritated to be going the wrong direction. If anything, I want to be preventing her capture, not prolonging it.

  One jump room door is labeled as an exit. We open it and find ourselves at the back of a dingy, dimly-lit bar.

  I’d always imagined the future to be shiny. That’s the way The Jetsons told me it would be on Saturday morning cartoons. The future was a world of clear glass houses and whizzing metal vehicles, sparkling and efficient. Of course there were other versions out there like the apocalyptic wastelands of Terminator movies and Mad Max. This bar might fit better into one of those futures. But this bar didn’t suffer nuclear fallout or deadly robots. It doesn’t need John Connor or a road warrior to save it. Its own apocalypse could have been easily forestalled by a mop bucket and a cleaning crew armed with bleach and Windex, but those saviors of sanitation clearly never arrived.

  “You just going to stand there or are you coming in?” A man in the shadows of a corner booth extends an arm into the light of a dusty overhead lamp. The glowing end of a recently extinguished match is flicked through the air toward an already overflowing trash can. The matchstick misses its mark and falls to the floor to land among a half dozen of its predecessors.

  The man in the booth draws on his thin cigar and gestures to us with his other hand. “We haven’t got all day, you know. Not getting paid by the hour on this one.”

  “Let them get their bearings, Rix.” A swinging door opens behind the bar and a huge black man in faded fatigues moves through, carrying two beers in each hand. He pauses near the front of the bar to take us in. “You look like you just fell down the rabbit hole ass backwards. You’re in the right place, though. Don’t worry, the bar only looks bad because it’s Rixon’s.”

  “This bar looks great,” the man called Rixon replies. He stretches one leg out along the bench he’s seated on. “It’s lived in.” He eyes us up with another pull on his cigar.

  “It’s a shithole,” the man holding the beers replies. He sets the beers on the nearest high top and steps over to us, extending a hand to me first. “Eon Whitaker.” His handshake is solid and somehow lenient at the same time. The rippling muscles of his forearm seem to be actively reducing the potential damage to my hand they might otherwise cause.

  “Ben Travers.”

  “Lazy, too-good-to-get-off-his-ass-to-greet-clients, shit-for-brains over there is Rixon Versa.”

  “That’s my family name actually,” Rixon replies, finally sliding out of the booth and standing. “But he forgot, ‘owner-of-all-the-beer-and-liquor-in-this-place.’ He tends to omit that part.” He slouches toward us, all sharp angles and jagged edges. Unlike his hulking companion, Rixon is slim, but he exudes danger, a razor turned man.

  Eon gathers up the beer bottles and moves toward a table in the middle of the room. “I collect these as compensation for putting up with you. Hazard pay. Or maybe it’s for pain and suffering.” The chair creaks under his weight but doesn’t dare break.

  Rixon motions us toward the other seats around the table. “Welcome, gentlemen. What’ll you be drinking?”

  “Didn’t really come to drink,” I say. “We’ve got work to do. I was told you were going to help us.”

  Rixon cocks his head to one side and takes another drag on the thin cigar. Finally he nods. “All right. Straight to business it is then.” He motions us toward the chairs again, then leans conspiratorially toward his partner. “Romeo has a hard-on for efficiency.”

  I take a seat on the opposite side of the two men, Carson beside me and Tucket cautiously taking the seat at the end.

  “We’ll get to the job at hand,” Eon says. “Noelle gave us your details with the contract. Few of them anyway. We don’t handle a lot of abduction cases as a rule, but it seems like you get some VIP status from her. She didn’t give us much on this girlfriend of yours, but we did our preliminary investigation into the abduction, and it seems straight enough.”

  “I’ve been giving the situation a lot of thought,” I say. “Since we’re meeting so long after the abduction happened, I think our first priority should be to get back there to the scene. Maybe they didn’t get far. The house they took her from had rough conditions, bad for time traveling, but wherever they took her, we might be able to jump in there, surprise them, and get Mym out before they ever have a chance to enact their plans for her. We can defuse this whole thing before they even know we’re there. Whatever they want after that is a moot point.”

  “Romeo has the whole thing figured out, Whit,” Rixon says. He flicks his cigar ash onto the floor. “Maybe we should just give Noelle her money back and tell her our services aren’t needed.”

  Eon frowns at his partner and turns to me. “It’s a good strategy, Ben. But in this case it’s not going to work.” He reaches deep into a pocket and extracts a phone-type device that he slides across the table. “If you want to access the meta scene, it’s all there.”

  “He doesn’t have a Third Eye,” Tucket says, piping up from the end of the table. Rixon turns and stares at him as if surprised he can speak. Tucket glances at him, but quickly turns away, his eyes finding me instead.

  “Yeah. We’re a little behind the times on the tech,” I say. “What does it show?”

  Eon grabs the device again. “My apologies. Noelle did mention you’d need some gear.” He fiddles with the device. “We did do some recon at the time of the abduction. Filmed the scene from a distance. We got satellite on it and a few remote viewing locations. All the short-range meta cameras were disabled. These guys were smart enough to shut those down before showing up.”

  “You have a satellite?” Carson asks. “That’s pretty sweet.”

  “It’s not strictly ours, legally speaking,” Rixon replies. “But it can become ours from time to time.”

  “What did you see?” I ask.

  “On vis, we got shit all,” Rixon replies. “These guys were blacked out darker than Batman’s asshole. But we got their heat signature on the satellite.”

  I lean forward, leaning my elbows on the table. “I didn’t see much after they grabbed Mym, but they went down the cliff. Looked like they had a boat. Seemed small from the drag marks. Not something they could take very far.”

  “They did indeed have a wee dinghy,” Rixon says, smirking.

  “So did you track it? Can we intercept it? We could get a faster boat, go after them and—”

  “We tracked it,” Rixon says. “Right to the point when it was blown up and sunk.”

  “Sunk?” Carson says. “How far out? Did they swim ashore?”

  Blown up? The idea that Mym could have been killed or gone down in the ocean hits me, and I catch myself holding my breath.

  “She’s all right,” Eon says, holding a hand out to ease the tension. “Rix is leaving out a few details, and failing to follow appropriate client protocols, I might add.” He glares at Rixon and then turns to me. “Everything is under control. Our target—your girlfriend—is safe. We assure you that everyth
ing is being done to ensure her continued safety.”

  “Whatever. I was getting to that,” Rixon replies. “Yeah. She’s fine. We just can’t get to her. They had a sub.”

  “A what?” I ask.

  “A sub,” Rixon replies. “You know, a submarine? Goes under water?” He makes a quick swishing motion with his hand. “Ringing any bells?”

  “I know what a submarine is,” I reply. “I just didn’t think the Eternals would be the type to have one. They seem like a bunch of religious whackos. Where did they get a submarine?”

  He gestures toward Carson and me. “Where did a couple of know-nothing yahoos from the land of yesteryear come up with their own personal time machines?”

  I self-consciously touch the chronometer on my wrist. “Okay. Fair point, I guess. But we had help from legitimate people. Who would give these guys a sub?”

  “The Americans, the Russians, the Chinese—” Rixon counts off on his fingers.

  “The point is, they have one,” Eon interjects. “From whom is not really our concern. What’s more important is that it puts your rescue plan out of the realm of possibility. Water, as you know, is the least hospitable terrain for time travel. And even if your girlfriend were to get her hands on her own chronometer, without an anchor from somewhere outside the sub, no amount of jumping around inside is going to land her anywhere but still inside that sub. We can’t get in. She can’t get out.” He looks to me. “You have to hand it to these guys. They thought ahead on this.”

  The idea of Mym stuck aboard a submarine with a bunch of crazies has drained me of any sense of objectivity. “I’m not about to respect anything these shitheads have done. They’ve got Mym, and we have no idea what they’re doing to her.”

  Eon holds his hands up. “Right. I’m just saying that we can’t underestimate these guys.” He lays his hands back on the table. “Okay. So given what you know of Miss Quickly in situations of stress, how does she typically—”

  “How am I supposed to know? She’s never been—” I stand up and kick my chair out from under me. “Goddamn it!” I run my hands over my head, trying keep myself from throwing something. Mym could be being tortured right now for all I know. “Where did the sub go? Where are they taking her?”

  Rixon speaks up again. “We have the heat signature of the sub. We lose it for a while in the Atlantic, but it surfaces again in Florida in a few days. The whole trip takes about two weeks.”

  “TWO WEEKS?”

  I don’t know what to do with my own body. I feel like my mind is trying to jump out of my skin. “We can’t leave Mym trapped on a submarine with these people for two weeks. We can’t.”

  Eon is holding up his hands again. “Ben, please sit down. We have the situation under control.”

  “HOW IS THIS UNDER CONTROL?”

  Eon merely gestures to the place at the table again.

  I take a deep breath and pick up the chair I’ve knocked over, trying hard to disconnect my mind from the image of Mym as a prisoner. I exhale and sit back down. I ball my fists against my legs and do my best to stay calm. “Okay. What else do we know?”

  Eon fiddles with something on his phone device, then turns to Rixon. “What did you do with those meta headsets you made? The Z-grade ones you modified from the service.”

  “The mind hack?” Rixon says. “You want to use that on him?”

  Eon waves the response away. “No, the headset for non-meta users. The one we use for analogs and pre-AOA perps to show them their future crimes.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I’ve got those.”

  “Get one. Let’s show him the vid.”

  Rixon looks at me, then slides out of his chair and disappears into a side room. When he returns, he slides a pair of goggles across the table to me. I pick them up gingerly.

  “This is it?”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. It’s safe,” Rixon says.

  “I haven’t had the best luck with the metaspace. Sort of messes with my mind.”

  “You probably just had the wrong type of tech. Some cheap-ass civilian shit. This is military grade,” Eon says.

  I slide the goggles on and get an immediate sensation of extra depth from the surroundings. For a moment the lines and details of everything in the room blur, separating and then coming back into sharp focus. After that my view is normal.

  “All right, check this out,” Eon says. He presses something on his phone device and a 3D projection of a submarine materializes over the table. The view is not merely of the exterior, however. I can see inside the submarine, identifying the moving bodies of the crew. Each one glows with a unique heat signature.

  “We picked this up from a marine life monitoring station in the North Atlantic, just off the coast of France,” Eon says. “They have these stations all over the ocean in that area, keeping tabs on the whale population. Here’s the part of the recording you’ll want to see.” He points toward the front of the sub where four figures are walking along a corridor in a single line. The second silhouette in the row is a figure I’d recognize anywhere. Mym.

  Eon points to the bulkhead where the figures are about to traverse a doorway into a new section of the sub. “Watch this,” Eon says.

  The first figure in the line steps through the doorway and turns around. Mym climbs through after him, but when she clears the access, she stoops low then comes up fast, jamming an elbow into the jaw of the man in front of her. He keels over like a limp fish. Mym spins and kicks the man behind her, sending him tumbling back through the bulkhead door, before she turns and sprints away—her heat signature glowing brighter as she runs.

  “Where is she going?” I ask. “There’s nothing up there.”

  Mym heads toward the bow of the ship, then ducks into a side room off the passage and slams a door closed, sealing off the small space she’s now trapped herself in while the other figures who had been pursuing her pound against the door. It’s clear from their body language that there is some sort of conversation going on. Mym even goes so far as to press a button on the wall, communicating with the outside.

  A crowd of figures now assembles in the corridor, gesturing toward the door and occasionally pounding on it. The man whom Mym had knocked out in the hallway is revived and brought to the door, but none of their continued efforts convince her to open it.

  “What is she going to do?” Tucket asks. “She can’t stay in there the whole time, can she?”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Eon replies. “Watch.”

  As we look on, Mym sends another message through the submarine’s intercom, then moves to the front wall of the room. Once there, she fidgets with something on her right hand, then places it to the wall. A moment later, she disappears.

  “Holy shit,” I mutter.

  “Would have assumed these guys would have known enough to take her chronometer away from her, but they must not have been as bright as we figured,” Rixon says. “What are your thoughts?”

  I smile at the now-blank room in the sub. “They did take it away from her,” I say. “She has a pendant chronometer she usually wears around her neck, but that’s not what she used. The one she just used was on her hand.” I recall the ring I discovered on her finger. “She has a ring. She said it was a gift from her dad when she turned sixteen.” I can’t help but grin. “I didn’t even know that was a chronometer.”

  My smile fades when I remember what Eon had said. Without an anchor, she’s still not going to get off the ship.

  “What happened next? How long did she leave for?”

  “We don’t know,” Eon replies. “It’s our guess that she skipped over significant enough chunks of time that she didn’t have to worry about food or water on the trip. Maybe she popped in multiple times. Maybe she skipped to the end. It’s possible these guys were able to get a torch and cut through that door somehow, but it’s hard to say. What we do know is that the sub made the trip across the Atlantic and into the Gulf of Mexico. It turned right and headed up the coast.”

  “To Sai
nt Petersburg?” I ask.

  “Not quite. They stopped off earlier than that. Nyongo Harbor.”

  “Where’s that?” Carson asks. “Never heard of it.”

  “That’s because in your time it was named Charlotte Harbor. And the city was Port Charlotte. Now it’s Port Nyongo, named after the space explorer.”

  “What, like a NASA astronaut?” I ask.

  “First private citizen to set foot on Mars,” Rixon says. “Damian Nyongo. Built an entire empire from privatized space travel. They renamed the city after him.”

  “Sounds like an awesome guy,” Carson says.

  “Okay, so back on point, here,” I say. “Mym is in Port Nyongo?”

  “We believe so,” Eon replies. “According to heat signatures we picked up there, the sub lingered outside the harbor for three extra days after arrival. The only reason it would make sense to do that would be if they didn’t have their prize yet and were waiting for her to show back up. Either she told them when she was coming back, or they just waited her out. Either way, I doubt they came into port without her.”

  “Did they bring her ashore in Port Nyongo?” I ask.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Rixon replies. “We lost the sub off our scans once it came into port. There are too many inlets to monitor. We’ll have to search it out the hard way. But we figured you’d want in on that part of the mission.”

  “You figured right. How far is Port Nyongo? Do you have a way to get us there?”

  Rixon grins. “You could say that.” He picks absentmindedly at one of his fingernails.

  I rise from my chair and glare at him. “Well? What do we need? Another anchor? Time gate? Airplane? I’m good to go, man. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m ready to be there already.”

  Rixon stands up and meets my eye. “Providing transportation wasn’t part of our contract.”

  “What the hell kind of a contract is that, then? You tell us where she is, but you don’t have any kind of plan to get us there? Shit, I can figure that out. You have an airport nearby? Come on, Carson. Tucket? You ready?”