by Lyn South
“At the risk of stating the obvious,” I say, jumping up to stand behind his commander’s chair. “we have to do more than just delay them from breaking in.”
“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Nico says through gritted teeth as he continues to pound on the control panel.
“Time jump.”
Working frantically to trying to stem the tide of the cyber-attack, he only manages a quick glance over his shoulder. “The fuck you say?”
“How does a lifetime prison sentence with a side of amnesia sound to you?” I shout.
He grimaces, then shakes his head. “What if the time portals aren’t working. Screwing history the way you did could mean time travel hasn’t been invented in what is no longer our future. Carter’s right. We could be stuck here.”
“Only one way to find out.” I reach past his shoulder and type the criteria into the computer. “Follow these geographic and temporal coordinates.”
Nico squints at the data and moans. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Go, Nico. Do it!” I say, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat and belting myself in.
Carter says, “In case you were wondering, I’m not the only one here. I have more Observers standing by to board your vessel once we break through the security codes.”
Glancing back at the hologram of Carter, I count more than a dozen soldiers have joined him, and they’re all waiting for the order to move. “Catch us first, asshole.” I reply. Then, to Nico. “I know I screwed up, but listen to me: We need time and space to figure out what went wrong. If Carter gets in here, they’ll find any excuse to kill or imprison us. If you ever trusted me before, trust me now.”
Nico takes a deep breath and mutters under his breath. “Fuck me running. I’m gonna regret this.”
“Tech team,” Carter shouts at his subordinates as our ship lifts off. “Breach the transporter controls. Get me on that ship!”
Outside the windows, the English countryside streaks by in a blur of winter gray as we race toward our time portal.
“Shit.” Nico breathes out, his eyes darting from the time portal coordinates to the display panel screen. “They’re almost in. I need you to get down to the transport pads and manually take them offline in case they break through Betty’s defenses.”
“But I don’t know—”
“I’ll walk you through it. Go!”
I unlatch the buckle on my restraint system and stumble to the ladder leading down to the lower deck just as the ship veers starboard, tossing me into a wall.
“Sorry,” Nico calls out. “Evasive maneuver. They’re on our ass.”
A quick slide down the ladder, a few stumbling steps to the right, and I’m at the transport pads. I tap the communication link on the wall panel.
“I’m in position. What now?”
“Open the control panel to the right of the pads. Tap the door release. It’s a small, square glass screen in the lower right corner.”
I open the panel door. “Got it. What’s next?”
“Second row of data displays from the bottom, there are two blue slider controls on the left side, two green in the middle, and two brown chips on the far right end of the next row down.”
My fingers float over the edges of the small chips; the chips are color-coded, just as he said. “Got ‘em.”
The ship pitches to the left, tossing me backward. I can’t hold my balance and sprawling out on the floor. I have to crawl back to the control panel. “What the hell was that?” I ask.
“Goddamn it, they’re chasing us!” Nico replies. “Hold on down there.”
One of the transporter pads glows blue. “The transporter pad is activated.” A faint outline of energy glimmers in the center of the transporter pad. “Someone’s trying to board the ship. There’s an energy signature on one pad.”
“Drag the brown sliders first, one at a time. Then, the blue, one at a time. Do the same thing with the green sliders. In that order. Brown. Blue. Green.”
“Brown first.” I repeat, and slide the control to the off position. The display glow dims as each one gets shut off. “They’re out,” I say when it’s done. The energy signature flickers and then dims, but doesn’t disappear. “What’s next?”
“Upper right quadrant of the panel. There’s another set of circuits. Both of them are red. Slide them to the off position. That should do it.”
The ship tilts to the right, just as violently as the last maneuver. I crack my head on the corner of the wall console and fall to the ground again. A warm damp spot grows on my scalp. I put my hand up to feel it and it comes away bloody.
The circuits I just switched off—the brown, green, and blue—glow bright and incandescent as they spring to life. “They’re overriding the system,” I say, struggling to regain my feet.
The energy signature glows bright on the pa once more and takes human form.
I lunge at the control panel and swipe my fingers over the circuits: brown, green, blue. Finally, red.
Before I can swipe the last red circuit, the lights in the transporter bay—including the lights on the transporter pads—blink out. It’s so dark, I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.
“Nico?” I call out. “What the hell—”
As quickly as they were extinguished, the lights flicker back on. All the lights except for the transporter pads, which pulsate several times before going dim.
“We’re in the cavern. At the entrance to the time portal,” Nico says. “Transporter offline?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “It was touch-and-go there for a minute. Carter almost boarded us.”
I climb the ladder up to the main deck and settle in the co-pilot’s seat. Outside the windows, the gemstone-lined cave glistens. Ahead of us, the star points of the portal glow a ghostly white.
“You sure about this?” Nico nods towards the coordinates on the display panel.
“It’s the one place they won’t think to look for us.” I reach over and put my hand on his. He stiffens, but doesn’t push me away. “I know you’re mad—”
He shoots me a look. “Mad doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“I know.” I take a deep breath and let it out. “I fucked up big time. I don’t know if I can make it right. What I know is that someone—probably Trevor—changed my letter and we have to figure out why. We can’t go home because they’ll be waiting for us.”
“If there’s a home to go back to.” He shifts in his seat and peers out the windows, assessing the situation. “The portal doesn’t look any different than it normally does, but I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics, or the way the portal works, to assess if that means it’s working or not.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask, leaning over to peer out the window with him. The walls of the cavern gleam with an unearthly light that radiates from inside the stone.
Nico shakes his head. “Either the portal doesn’t let us through, if it’s not working, or we get stuck in a temporal loop and never make it home.”
“Or we could end up exactly where my coordinates say we’ll land.”
“Can’t go back there.” Nico jerks a thumb toward the direction we just left. “Can’t go home because they’ll arrest us.”
“The only way out,” I reply, pointing ahead of us, “is through.”
“All right. Hang on.” Nico sighs and taps the control panel, locking the coordinates into the navigation system. “Gonna be a bumpy ride.”
There’s the familiar deep hum of the engine as it spins up. Nico swipes the navigation control circuits up, and the ship vaults forward into the portal.
Chapter 25
I’m aware of my body floating. Aside from this, I feel no other physical sensations: I must be breathing—if I weren’t I wouldn’t be conscious of everything around me—but I can’t feel the air exchange in my lungs. No inhales. No exhales.
There’s no sound.
No scents.
It’s pitch-black.
<
br /> I don’t even feel the weight of clothing on my skin.
Am I dreaming? Can you wonder if it’s a dream if you’re in the middle of one?
I can’t feel the muscles in my arm as I bring my hand up in front of my face. In fact, I can’t see my hand, though I know that it’s there.
Out of the silence, a sound like top-volume feedback from an amplifier blasts in my ears. Out of the cacophony, a vibration streaks from my head down to my toes; I wonder if my body is being recalibrated from floating nothingness back into physical matter.
The vibe concentrates in my chest—a warmth that spreads like someone’s pulling a wool blanket around me as I’m sucked down into my body. The sensation isn’t heavy. It’s lighter than the air I must be breathing but still can’t feel.
A voice calls out, so faint that I wonder if it’s human. It sounds like an echo and it’s growing louder with each iteration.
Yes, it is a voice. My name. Someone’s calling me.
“Dodger.”
The vibration in my core downshifts to the gentle pulse of my own heartbeat.
There’s a rough shake of my shoulders and a loud gasp; I’m startled to realize the sound came from me.
I open my eyes to Nico standing over me, peering down into my face.
“God, I thought I lost you,” he says with a relieved sigh. “Stay put while I get some water.”
He disappears—presumably to fetch the water—and I take blurry stock of my surroundings: I’m in the ship’s cockpit. The co-pilot’s seat. Outside the windows, dense fog obscures whatever lies beyond it.
My head hurts, a dull throb in my forehead and behind my eyes. Nico returns with a cup. “Drink this.”
The water hits the back of my throat with a hot metallic bite. “Did the replicator fill this thing with iron first? It tastes horrible. And it’s scalding.”
“No, it’s room temperature.” He takes a huge swig, something he wouldn’t be able to do if it were as hot as I think it is. “It’ll probably take a few more minutes before your body adjusts. There seem to be a few...side effects.”
“Side effects to what?”
“The time jump.”
“That makes no sense.”
I try to push myself vertical, but a head rush drops me into his arms. He settles me back into the seat.
“Don’t try to stand yet.”
“Merde.” I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “What happened?”
“Don’t know. I woke up fifteen minutes before you came ‘round. You scared the hell out of me,” he says, exhaling a loud breath. “I’m pretty sure we were knocked out when we hit the portal.”
“Felt like I was floating.”
He bends down on one knee, scrutinizing my face like a doctor examining a patient. He grabs a pen light and shines it into my eyes.
I cringe, squinting against the brightness. “Hey!”
“Everything go black?” he asks. “No sounds or smells?”
I nod. “There was a lot of buzzing, too. It was like—”
“Like your insides vibrated so hard they might bust through your skin?”
“Exactly.”
He drops the pen light on the command console. “If your recovery is like mine, you’ll be back to almost normal in a few minutes.”
“How are you feeling?” I ask, leaning forward to search his face for lingering physical symptoms. His skin is a little flushed, but no dilated pupils.
“The headache is almost gone,” he says, standing. “It took a few minutes to stay vertical without the head rush. I need to bring the transporter system back online. You sit and rest for a bit.” He gives a command to the computer. “Betty, get our chameleon cloaking up and running.”
“Chameleon cloaking up and running, Gorgeous,” she replies.
Nico turns to leave the cockpit, and I grab his hand. This time, he doesn’t pull away. Maybe because he was scared to death I was dead. I want to tell him, again, how I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but the look in his eyes talks me out of it: He’s still pissed as hell.
I drop his hand and the idea of defending myself. “Any idea where we are?”
“Hopefully, we’re exactly where your coordinates said we’d be: December 1755. One of the Acadian settlements just before...”
I pick up where he paused. “Just before The Expulsion. If we can find my parents—”
“We’ve impacting the timeline enough, don’t you think? The only reason we’re here is because it’s marginally better than doing prison time.”
“I’d say it’s better than the options Carter gave us.” Feeling brave enough, I push myself out of the co-pilot’s seat and—wrestling with the Tudor gown I’m still wearing—elbow past Nico to head for the galley. Maybe caffeine will help the time jump jet lag lift quicker. “At least we have a little bit of time to figure out what to do next.”
Nico follows me to the replicator. “I wouldn’t count on having time to do anything. The physical effects of this trip through the portal are singular. Unprecedented. To my knowledge, nothing like this has never happened before because, if it had, we’d have heard about it during training briefs. Something has changed.” He watches me make two cups of Nico’s chicory coffee blend. “Not to mention, if Carter follows us into the portal, he can pick up our energy signature through T-Jump Ops and get our location. For all we know, they could already be here.”
I hand a mug to him. He barely glances at it before setting it down with a thunk on the counter. I drink the liquid down, but can tell it will take at least a dozen cupfuls to clear the haze clouding my brain.
“That fog out there?” He points out the window. “I haven’t had time to run tests, yet. If we’re not where we’re supposed to be, that stuff could be anything. Who knows if we’re even still on Earth and whether it’s breathable out there.”
“Or it could be just fog off the Bay of Fundy. That stuff rolls in off of the ocean all the time.”
He doesn’t seem to appreciate the tone in my voice. He puts his fists on his hips, then gives me a smirk and a raised eyebrow. I roll my eyes. “Betty, can we breathe the air outside? Also...confirm current coordinates.”
“External atmospheric composition supports human life,” Betty says. “Current coordinates: Earth, 5.2733 degrees North, 66.0633 West. What is now Saint John, New Barcelona. Would you like to hear how the area was colonized by the Spanish in the late Sixteenth century or the weather report?”
“The Spanish?” My stomach churns and it’s not because of time travel jet lag. “So, it’s not a French-settled colony, then?”
“There are humans of French descent settled in the area, but they are the minority,” Betty says.
I haven’t worked missions in Spanish-colonized eras, but I know Observers who have. When I was a pint-sized recruit—Fagin had plucked me from Eighteenth Century New Orleans only weeks before—a first year Observer made it thirty-six hours into a month-long Spanish Inquisition mission before returning in a catatonic state. The experience so traumatized him, the agency created the Hot Zone policy: No First Years assigned to missions set in historically merciless, overly volatile, and brutal times.
Poor guy never recovered.
Trauma would be easier to manage if memory wipes were an exact science; if they could be targeted and selective enough to erase only the bad and leave the good. It doesn’t work that way. Wiping a mind is an all-or-nothing proposition. All Observers carry the burden of memory. Some better at it than others, and if they’re not, they at least hide the pain behind a believable mask.
All time travelers undergo regular psychological testing, especially after psychologically scarring work events, but there are ways to get around those tests. Self-medication is the most popular option Observers employ, to some degree or another, to manage the memories. As long as the situation doesn’t get out of hand, superiors usually turn a blind eye.
“Could be worse.” I offer a half-hearted shrug.
Nico mus
t be thinking about the same unlucky Observer. “Whether things are worse because of your meddling, or not, is a matter of perspective. Depending on who’s telling the story, the Spanish were among the more brutal colonizers. I’m sure the Aztecs would agree. And the ones who endured the inquisition.”
“You’re Spanish,” I say. “Do you really have so little affection for your own people?
“I’m a lot of things,” he says in dry, patient tone. “This time travel gig opens your world up, doesn’t it? Or at least it should. You know the rules: You can’t go back to your own time unless your memory is wiped. I have too many incredible memories to lose. You, for instance.” From the look on his face, that bit of information wasn’t supposed to make it out into the open. His eyes lock on mine as he runs his tongue across his bottom lip. He holds the gaze for a long minute and then, flustered, turns toward the nearest computer control panel. “You’re such a pain in the ass.”
A sliver of hope that Nico doesn’t hate me sparks my heart. Still, humility is probably the best approach. “I know.”
He huffs out a big breath and shakes his head. He taps a sequence of commands on the control pad. “I could do without all this bullshit, just so you know.”
“At least we’re still on Earth and the air is breathable. In case, you know, we wanted to—”
“Oh, no you don’t.” He spins around and points a finger at me. “You. Stay. Put.”
“Just hear me out.”
“No. There’s nothing to hear.” He shimmies down ladder, headed toward the transporter pads. I follow close behind. “We’re here because we were minutes away from that maniac boarding the ship and arresting us.”
“Carter said we can fix this mess,” I shout down to him.
“Could’ve been a trick to get in the door.”
“On the off chance he wasn’t, wouldn’t it make sense to get a good look at the environment out there and see what has changed, so we can figure out what we’re dealing with?”
“First, you have a nasty habit of going off-script. The de Medici job is a good example. Pretty much every job is a damn good example.” Nico works through the sequence to activate the transporters. He frowns when the device doesn’t come back online, then pops the composite panel off of the display panel to work. “Second, you don’t listen. I screamed at you to leave Tower Hill and you ignored me. Which meant I had to rescue your ass when Carter nearly snagged you the first time.”