D-Day

by Bob Mayer

  “Tell me something,” Pandora said. “How long has it been for you since we last met? I know it was not two years. Your mind has not matured two years, worth.”

  “I really wish it were longer since our last meeting,” Scout said. “In fact, I’d be happy to never see you again. I think you’re a little cray-cray.”

  Pandora frowned. “I’m not aware of the term.”

  Scout twirled her finger around her ear. “Crazy.”

  “We’re sisters,” Pandora said. “Did you consult with your teacher in your time to learn more about what we are?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “That’s a no.” Pandora shook her head. “A poor steward, sending you through time so ill-prepared. Especially if you let them, whoever you work for, know you ran into me. I don’t think they have your best interests at heart.” She nodded toward Cyra. “Your mother doesn’t have yours at heart, either, priestess.”

  “You lie,” Cyra said.

  “I could have killed both of you,” Pandora said. “You’ll have to accept that as enough of a sign of good faith for now. The priority is to find this killer.”

  Cyra was still behind. “Why would my mother say it was you, if it wasn’t you?”

  “I don’t think she likes me,” Pandora said.

  “She’s not alone in that,” Scout said.

  “Come with me,” Pandora said, indicating a thick grove of olive trees. “It’s best if we are in private for this.”

  “For what?” Scout asked.

  “Come,” Pandora said, the timbre of her voice vibrating with power.

  Scout and Cyra followed, their will suborned for the moment to Pandora. They slid between the trees, deeper into the grove, until they were alone in a small clearing.

  Pandora held out her hands, one toward Scout, and the other to Cyra. “If we work together, combine our power, we can find him.”

  Scout stared at the offered hand. “Do we have to dance in a circle and sing Kumbaya?”

  Pandora’s voice shifted up into power once more. “Take my hands.”

  Scout and Cyra did so before they could consciously make a decision about it, their fingers interlacing with Pandora’s. They also took each other’s hands, making a complete circle.

  “Close your eyes.” Pandora’s fingers tightened on theirs. Now her voice was in their heads: He is the essence of nothingness. Not anger. Not revenge. Not despair. A hole in humanity. He is what is not human.

  It made little sense, but Scout understood. She could feel Cyra’s presence, stronger than before when Scout had taken over her body. And Pandora’s presence was a pulsing tower of light, of power, pulling Cyra and Scout into her own stream, into her Sight, and then outward, a circle flowing, reaching out and—

  Danger close!

  Scout gasped as pain slashed into her brain. She almost passed out, falling to her knees. Cyra’s hand was jerked out of her own, along with Pandora’s.

  Scout opened her eyes, seeing Cyra tumbling over next to her, unconscious.

  “Forget her,” Pandora ordered, drawing a dagger and tossing it to Scout as she scrambled to her feet.

  Just in time, as a man dressed in a short blue tunic entered the clearing. “You summoned me.”

  He was short, wiry, with a narrow face and dark, piercing eyes. There were two daggers in sheaths hanging off a leather belt, but his hands were empty.

  “Why did you kill Pythagoras?” Pandora asked.

  Scout was getting the balance of the blade. She took a half step, away from Pandora and in front of Cyra.

  He looked from Pandora to Scout, then back at the older woman. “He was the honey that sweetened the pot to bring me to the three of you.” He looked down at Cyra. “Too weak. Like her mother.”

  “Who are you?” Scout asked.

  He drew his blades. “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

  “Going to be one less,” Scout said.

  United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, 6 June 1843 A.D.

  “‘Time, time, time, is on my side, yes it is’,” Ivar sang to himself in a low voice, and then changed the lyrics to his reality, “but no, it isn’t.”

  “What was that?” Grant looked over from the easel.

  “Oh, just a song I remember from when I was younger,” Ivar said.

  “I have no musical talent,” Grant said.

  “But you are an artist,” Ivar said. His eyes were black, his nose swollen, and he looked like hell. He could feel every beat of his heart in his face, pulsing, and it was in rhythm with the Rolling Stones song.

  “I do this to relax,” Grant said. “With the test coming later today, I wanted to take my mind from it.”

  He was doing a landscape of the Hudson River and the far bank. The two were in a garden at the foot of a set of stone steps that descended from the edge of the Plain. It was a quiet place, a cliff wall on one side, and a steep drop down to the Hudson on the other. Kosciuszko’s Garden, the download informed Ivar, had been built by the man who’d designed the fortifications at West Point during the Revolutionary War.

  “I don’t know what got into McClelland,” Grant said. “We graduate in a few weeks. It’s not normal for graduating cadets to even bother with the incoming class.” He grinned. “You’re the class of ‘44’s problem, although you’ll find some yearlings, the class just ahead of you, ‘46, to be the most vicious at hazing. It seems as soon as some plebes get out from under the boot by becoming yearlings, they want to try the boot on and stomp on the ones afterward, as if they have no memory of what they felt when they went through it.”

  “How do you feel about the hazing?” Ivar asked.

  “It’s stupid and pointless,” Grant said. “One can’t treat a soldier the way we treat plebes, so it’s developing and inculcating the wrong leadership style. The Army is indeed harsh, but my fear is that if we go to war on a large scale, our Army will be made mostly of volunteers, and one certainly cannot treat them like plebes.”

  “Are you concerned about Mexico?” Ivar asked, knowing he was skirting close to thin ice, given what he knew was coming, but it wasn’t every day one got to sit next to Ulysses S. Grant and have a chat.

  “It seems inevitable,” Grant said, “and it will be purely an imperial move to grab land. Mexico is no threat to the United States.” He’d paused in his painting, and a frown crossed his face. “I fear worse than Mexico, though.”

  “Slavery.”

  Grant nodded. “It is an inevitable problem. Let us hope the politicians sort it out, but they seem to have a predilection for making things more complicated rather than sorting them out.”

  “Mister Grant!” A voice called out from the top of the steps. An older man made his way down. He was in his forties, dressed in civilian clothes, and had an unruly mop of prematurely silver hair. Ivar began checking the download, but Grant supplied the answer.

  “Professor Weir. May I present a newly arrived cadet, Mister Ivar.”

  Weir shook Ivar’s hand. “You appear to have been on the wrong end of some hard object.”

  “An accident, sir,” Ivar said.

  “Professor Weir is the Professor of Drawing,” Grant clarified. Drawing was an integral part of the course of studies at West Point. Not to make artists, but because in this pre-camera age, the ability to draw was critical in engineering, topography, exploration, and a host of other skills graduates would be called upon to accomplish.

  “And Mister Grant is my best student,” Weir said.

  “At the moment, perhaps,” Grant said. “But in a few weeks, you’ll have a new best.”

  Weir held up three fingers. “You are in the top three since I began teaching here. That is what I wanted to speak to you about, with graduation so near. I was talking with Mister Havens the other day, and he said that your temperament was just the right type to be a teacher. That got me to thinking.”

  Grant put the pencil down. “I have hoped to be called back to the Academy some years hen
ce to teach in the Mathematics Department.”

  That hope was in the download, and it had never come to fruition, with Grant ending up fighting in the Mexican War and then being cashiered out of the Army in 1854 when stationed on the West Coast—reportedly for intemperance, although his official record held no blight against his character. He would then go through seven very tough years trying to make a go of it as a civilian and constantly failing. Despite his poverty, though, he would free his wife’s, i.e. his, only slave, instead of selling the man for a considerable amount of money.

  But this opportunity was nowhere in the download, which caused Ivar some consternation.

  “There is a very good chance I will have an opening in my department shortly,” Weir said. “Would you allow me to put your name in for consideration if this becomes a fact?”

  “This is a surprise, sir,” Grant said.

  Ivar wondered why Havens would have put such a bug in Weir’s ear. It seemed out of—and then he spotted McClelland, leaning over and peering down the stone stairs into the Garden. Realizing he’d been spotted, McClelland disappeared.

  “It’s something to consider,” Weir said. “I have enjoyed my time teaching here, Mister Grant. And it might be better for you to be here, than at some lonely frontier post.”

  “I’ve received my first posting,” Grant said. “While I will not be in the dragoons, where my heart desires, I will be in the Infantry and assigned to Jefferson Barracks, along with my good friend Frederick Dent. Another dear friend, Lieutenant Longstreet, is already there.”

  That clicked for Ivar. Grant would end up marrying Dent’s sister, Julia. Historians were uncertain what her influence on his life was, but one thing for certain: when he wasn’t around her, he tended to drink and fail. When she was in his orbit he flourished, in the military at least, not so much in civilian life.

  None of that mattered for Ivar except in one fundamental: Grant never taught art at the Academy.

  Weir nodded. “I understand. Keep my offer in mind, though. I look forward to observing you display your talent with horses later today.”

  Weir took his leave.

  Grant didn’t pick up the pencil to continue the drawing. He paced back and forth at the edge of the garden overlooking the river. “I thought I knew what the immediate future held. This is unexpected.”

  “You had no problem with the unexpected this morning,” Ivar said. “You handled jumping that creek quite easily.”

  “That’s different,” Grant said. “That was a task that needed to be done. This is a choice, a personal one with no clear-cut objective. I do want to teach, but I don’t think in art.”

  “You said mathematics,” Ivar said.

  Grant nodded.

  “Won’t accepting Professor Weir’s proposal negate the possibility of ever being a professor in the mathematics department?”

  Grant nodded once more. “That is true.”

  “Then stick to your original course,” Ivar said, knowing there would be no mathematics department in Grant’s future. “By the way, did you return the pistol to Mister Hill?”

  “No.” Grant gestured toward the small satchel of painting supplies next to the easel. “I’ve not crossed paths with him yet today.”

  “I’ll take care of it, then,” Ivar said. “Besides, you have a more important matter to attend to this afternoon, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Grant removed the pistol and handed it to Ivar. He checked a pocket watch. “And I must attend to the matter of York now.”

  “Good luck,” Ivar said as Grant packed up his easel and supplies. “There is something I, too, must attend to now.” He tucked the pistol inside his tunic.

  Chauvet Cave, Southern France, 6 June 32,415 Years B.P. (Before Present)

  Moms fervently wished she were back in the Possibility Palace, in a hospital bed like the one Eagle had occupied. The rock pressing into her side and the deep, throbbing pain in her shoulder and arm indicated otherwise.

  She opened her eyes to darkness, then blinked and focused. There was a dull glow in one direction: the cave.

  Why aren’t I back? she wondered. The mission was over. The cave, and its inhabitants, were safe. The art was preserved.

  Moms sat up, groaning as the pain in her shoulder multiplied. Eagle had been right when he said the shoulder was the most complicated joint in the body. She checked, and the fur had stopped the bleeding. She got to her feet and walked to a point where she could see the cave.

  There was a body lying just outside the entrance, curled into a ball.

  What had she missed?

  Moms scrambled forward, climbing, crawling, then running toward the cave. It was a young boy, and Moms dropped to her knees next to him. Before she could check for a pulse, she heard his snores, and relief flooded her. His mouth was wide open, gasping for oxygen, the snoring so loud, it was vibrating his body.

  They’d kicked him out because of the noise? Sleep apnea? That seemed rather much, given the possible dangers out here. Moms stood, then walked to the edge and peered into the narrow opening. The red glow of the dying fire filled the space. The others were on the floor in several clumps around the fire, close together for warmth.

  No security. Nada wouldn’t have approved.

  None of them stirred as Moms stealthily entered the cave. She paused, her eyes tearing, her throat irritated. Their faces were flushed and red, and they looked so peaceful.

  She knew why they weren’t stirring and why the fire was dying.

  She got to her knees, her breathing shallow, but the smoke was much less than it had been because the same lack of oxygen that had killed all of them had also tamped the fire down to red embers. She blinked tears out of her eyes.

  Moms crawled back outside the cave. She grabbed the boy, waking him.

  He was sluggish, then startled to be woken by a stranger. He grunted something, but Moms just shook her head. She looked at the little boy, whose apnea had caused him to be the first to awaken, to stumble outside, desperate for oxygen. The canary in the coal mine. The others had passed out before they had a warning, before they had a chance.

  What had she missed?

  It was an old fire pit, one that had been used many times. The only way— Moms looked up the rock wall.

  No one ever looks up.

  The download confirmed the Chauvet Cave had been found from above in 1994, via a very narrow fissure that led downward into it. This front entrance had been blocked long ago by a landslide, which was to occur probably about six thousand years from now, and the reason everything inside had been so well preserved for so long.

  The download confirmed that radiocarbon dating indicated two main periods of activity in the cave—now, and around five thousand years from now, when more drawings were made. Indeed, footprints belonging to a child with a dog walking next to him had been preserved from that latter era, one of the earliest signs of the domestication of dogs.

  Checking that the boy was all right and signaling for him to stay put, she went to the wall. Her anger at herself defeated the pain in her shoulder as she climbed. Fresh blood seeped out of the wound. The top of the ridgeline was a difficult seventy feet. She reached the top and saw the reason.

  The gutted warrior had crawled up here and completed his mission as best he could. He’d blocked the opening in the rock that served as the vent for cave’s fire pit with brush and branches, and rocks to anchor it all down. The dust that had once been him was on top of the makeshift arrangement. He’d lived long enough for his body to seal the vent completely. Moms pulled the brush out of the way and was hit in the face with smoke as the cave began to vent.

  “Brilliant, Brilliant,” Moms muttered, then her brain turned inward. “Stupid. Stupid.” She’d assumed he was mortally wounded and posed no danger. Nada’s take on assuming was the same as everyone else’s—no special insight needed there.

  Kill the artist and kill the art?

  Moms hustled to the edge and climbed down as best she could,
using her one, somewhat good arm.

  She reached the bottom.

  The boy wasn’t there. She looked about, close to panic, then saw him inside, kneeling next to the girl, her head in his lap. He was moaning something primal, pain-filled, and even if the download had been able to translate, Moms wouldn’t have needed it. She took a look around. The fire was crackling, fed by fresh oxygen drawn into the mouth of the cave and now vented properly.

  The boy crawled to a woman and shook her. He made a mewling noise when he realized she wouldn’t wake. He started slapping the woman’s hand, trying to rouse her.

  One of the tribe wasn’t with the dead around the fire. A man farther back in, with a hand stretched out. Moms went to him. He had several sticks next to him, the tips black or red. One was in his hand. He, too, looked like he was asleep, his cheeks rosy behind the beard, his eyes closed. Except his chest wasn’t moving.

  The artist.

  On the cave wall in front of him were the horses, the only paintings done so far. The horses were so beautifully rendered that in the flickering firelight, they appeared to be running. Moms was enraptured by the images, forgetting time and place.

  Where were the rest of the paintings discovered in her time? The bear? The Venus? The rhino? The bison, so well rendered they would end up with bear claw marks scratched through them during a time when the bears ruled the cave? Where were the other herds of animals? The red dots? The hand prints?

  They were yet to come. If they were to come.

  She startled when she realized the boy was next to her. He knelt, putting his hands into the man’s furs, gripping. He grunted something.

  “Father?” Moms said.

  The boy glanced at her, then buried his face in the furs covering the man’s chest.

  His world was gone. Moms sat back, looking at the horses.

  This was the beginning.

  She had to make sure it wasn’t the end.

  The Present

  Our Present

  Area 51

  “A LIVE GRENADE?” Eagle asked Orlando.