Time Siege (36 page)

“You should stop,” said Smitt.

“You should shut up,” James spat. “You don't get to tell me what to do anymore. That's what you get for leaving me.” He stomped away from the parking garage.

“Come on,” Smitt called after him. “You think I wanted to die? Let me tell you. Dying sucks.”

“Yeah, well, so does living,” James growled. He stumbled along the harbor edge, oblivious to his surroundings. If he laid down and died right now, would anyone miss him? Probably not. It had already been proven how easily replaceable he was. He might as well just jump into the dark brown waters.

James downed the last of the jar and hurled it as hard as he could into the harbor. He heard the cracking of glass somewhere out there in the darkness. He turned around and realized that he was lost. It was so dark out, he could barely see past his hands, let alone make it past mounds of debris and ruins back to the hidden garage. He shivered as the ocean air blew in from the harbor.

James tried to walk back in the direction he had come from. He made a few wrong turns and tripped on the uneven ground as he stumbled, hands outstretched, trying to feel his way back. After he nearly stepped off a collapsed staircase and plummeted to his death, he decided to just sit wherever he was and wait until light. The passageway was a wind tunnel, a shrill whistle laid over the otherwise quiet night. Shivering, James pulled his coat tightly around his body and tucked his knees in.

The hallucination of Sasha appeared next to him, huddled in a similar fashion. She leaned in, sniffed his breath, and then made a face. She looked away, her tiny body shivering in the cold. He could hear her light coughs being carried away in the wind.

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled and reached for her. “I was supposed to take care of you.”

She got up and climbed farther up the broken stairwell, moving to the corner to huddle with her back to him.

“Look, James, this is probably not a good idea,” Smitt said, appearing next to her. He stood up and tried to pull James to his feet. “You're going to freeze to death, just like on Tethys. Come on, let's go.” James pulled away and pawed his way up the cracked stairs to get Sasha, but when he got to the upper level, she was no longer there. He looked back down at Smitt, who shook his head. “Come on. Follow me.”

James wasn't sure exactly where they went. He followed the voice of his friend, the darkened figure leading him deeper into the maze of buildings and ruins, through twists, turns, and small passageways until he was hopelessly lost. By now, he was so exhausted, staying on his feet was difficult. He collapsed again, sprawled on top of the jagged rocks, and closed his eyes.

A second later, he opened them, except this time, it was light outside, and Chawr was hovering over him with a worried expression on his face. The young flyguard was shaking him so hard he felt his head bouncing up and down against the hard rocks.

His eyes ached at the bright sky. He shielded them with his hands and sat up. “What happened? What time is it?”

“It is late morning.” Chawr's voice was hushed, rushed. “Please, Elder. We must leave.”

Late morning? They were supposed to have headed back toward the All Galaxy at first light. Moving the length of the downtown area during the day was dangerous. How could he have let this happen?

That was when James first heard it. Somewhere out there, the high-pitched whine of a Valkyrie attack ship whistled among the concrete ruins. He looked around and realized that he must have passed out not fifty meters from the garage entrance. “What am I doing here?”

“We woke up this morning to the sound of the enemy and then found you gone,” Chawr said. “A few of us went out to search for you. I found you lying out here in the open. Thought perhaps it was a trap. I could not leave without making sure, though. Would not know what words to speak to Oldest Elise.”

“Good kid,” James said, scrambling to his feet. What happened last night? Did that walk through the city actually happen? Did he even make it out of the garage, or was it all in his head?

He and Chawr crept back into the garage. The rolling doors were halfway up; he remembered raising them last night. The rest of the flyguards were stacking the debris back in front of the entrance. They wouldn't be able to lower the door without alerting that ship overhead.

“Leave it,” James said.

“But the gate is raised. Someone will steal—”

“That can't be helped. We'll come back and cover it later.” He took a quick head count. “Where's Aliette?”

“She went north to search for you. I went south. If she does not return and we have to leave, we are to meet at the forest desk next door or the waterfall three down as the backup spot.”

The rest of the flyguards gathered, and they moved single-file down to the lower level, through a crack in the wall, to the half-flooded basement of the adjacent building. They waded through waist-deep water up to a staircase through a lobby of a large building reclaimed by nature. They treaded carefully as large water snakes slithered through the waters, eying them with slitted, intelligent eyes before allowing them to pass.

Several black-barked trees had punched through a window and spread their branches, obstructing much of the ceiling. Enormous, twisted vines crawled up the walls and chest-high weeds wavered in the wind tunnel created by the the hallway.

The small group stayed low, moving deliberately through the brush until they got behind a counter covered by thorny flowers. They settled in and waited for Aliette, listening as the shrill whine of the Valkyrie overhead grew louder. It was soon followed by footsteps and voices, and then the sound of a blaster discharge and laughter.

The sounds of Co-op soldiers faded in and out, sometimes suggesting they had walked into the lobby, other times that they had moved on. James kept the group there for an hour, still hoping for Aliette to show up. Then, they moved two blocks down to the waterfall, where a river had diverted into a building and was now gushing out of the dozens of windows on its face. She wasn't there, either.

As night set, they decided to return to the garage. They found their transports reduced to burned husks, some of the metal still smoldering. Aliette's broken body, blaster burns on her back, lay just outside the entrance.

James and the rest of the flyguards stood around her, heads bowed. It was his fault; he knew that. No one looked his way, but he could feel their judging eyes even as they avoided him. If he had only not drank that accursed shine. If he had only stayed strong. He looked back up at the container they had used to brew the shit. It had been destroyed as well. It was a small solace.

“We bury her,” he said. “Scavenge for anything that's still useful.”

The flyguards spent the rest of the night burying their friend and recovering what was left of their small fleet of vehicles, their pride and joy. The mood was somber as they huddled in the darkness. This time, no one risked a fire.

The next morning, before dawn, as they prepared to leave, James made one more pass through the room to search for anything of value. He found a jar of shine tucked away behind one of the broken canisters. Anger flared and he stepped to kick the blasted thing as hard as he could.

He stopped. Something in him wouldn't allow him to be so wasteful. James glanced around at where the flyguards were prepping to leave and made sure no one was watching. He dipped down and tucked the jar into his sack, and then left to join the rest of the group as they began their long walk back to the All Galaxy Tower.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

R
ISKY
B
USINESS

Levin sat in front of a small café just off the main street near Paseo de Moret in Madrid, Spain. He sipped what looked like a child-size cup of a coffee derivative known as the
café
bonbon anís.
The thing looked so fragile and dainty in his hand he worried he'd crush it between his fingers. Not that it would matter in a few hours.

The drink had alcohol in it, something he wasn't aware of when he had placed the order. Levin didn't have a problem with alcohol; he had reigned himself in during his chronman days when he realized he was starting down the slippery slope toward the bottle, as many a chronman often did. Over the past few years, he tended to drink only on rare occasions. It wasn't that he feared the demon or temptation, but that it just wasn't a necessary part of his life anymore. The few drops of alcohol this tiny cup of coffee had were acceptable; it was actually quite tasty.

Down the street, Levin saw the cracked remnants of the Puerta de la Moncloa. Madrid's victory arch, damaged during the extensive bombings by the Libyans during World War III, had split in a dozen places. When the war had finally ended, the newly crowned Spanish Caliphate had decided to keep the arch standing, cracks and all, as a symbol of the struggle the country had endured in those dark years. Levin liked the way it looked, with the hundreds of pockmarks on its faces and the cracks like spiderwebs down its edges.

A new, smaller monument was built at its base with large letters, stating:

THROUGH WAR AND EVIL AND SIN, THE VICTORY ARCH STOOD—2131 CE

“Yes, it did,” he muttered, raising his child-size cup of alcoholic coffee in a salute. He checked the bright cloudless sky. The sun was halfway down. “And it will for about another hour.”

The year was 2170. At dusk, the city was going to get leveled by giant mountain walkers and then sunk underground by the AI hive mind's feared vanguard burrowers. Most of the district, about six square blocks of the city, would remain intact even as it fell a quarter of a kilometer underground and got buried under millions of tons of rubble.

Going down with it would be an emergency aid depot with forty tons of medical supplies slated for western Africa. Levin's job today would be to ride the fall of the district and retrieve the cache. He had come in two days ago to scout the area. Grace wanted him to hit a grain warehouse as a secondary objective if the situation permitted.

The job was already dicey enough. After all, the retrieval window was in the middle of the opening volleys of the AI War. He would have to work during a full-scale invasion, and then escape southeast to the coast and lay low until his return jump while a massive mechanical army on its way to Germany eviscerated Spain.

Then, after five days of hiding and hopefully not causing any ripples, he would have to move out to the sea and make a jump back to the present. It was an extreme hassle, but necessary. Madrid was a heavily time salvaged zone, and the region and this period were already littered with dozens of tears to the chronostream. Jumping from anywhere within thousands of kilometers was no longer an option in the time frame of the attack.

Fortunately, Grace, in her infinite intelligence, had found a narrow clean jump window. The odds of substantial ripples in a job like this were usually high, but the sheer destruction of the first few days of the AI War mitigated some of those risks.

“Levin, are you there?” Grace's voice popped into his head.

“Yes, Mother of Time.” At this moment in the present, Grace was in the
Frankenstein
a hundred meters under the surface of the Alboran Sea. She would rendezvous with him once they coordinated their return jump. All this felt a little haphazard.

She had originally wanted him to go ahead and steal the supplies now. After all, she argued, it all gets destroyed anyway. However, Levin refused. Who knew what sort of mayhem he could inflict on the chronostream by attacking a warehouse in a heavily-populated area days before a dead-end time-line event?

Maybe the military would send in investigators and security that otherwise might not have gone there, and they would all perish during the attack. Maybe his early theft would somehow bring the city to high alert and warn them of the impending attack. Maybe the government would call in more of their military as a precaution and actually fight off the mountain hawks.

There were too many unpredictable scenarios, and Levin would not play a part in changing history like this, not even if it was Grace Priestly who asked it of him. One terrible mistake in his lifetime was enough. He'd rather die than cause another. For whatever reason, it was the Mother of Time who played loosest with the Time Laws she had created. Someone like her would have never made the tier as a chronman. That thought coaxed a grin out of him.

“Levin, I've detected a jump near you. Be careful.”

He sat up a little straighter and lowered his head. That was the other fear of having a long-running job. ChronoCom may have detected his initial jump back here. The more time he spent in the past, the likelier it would be for the agency to send an auditor to investigate. If that was the case, he would be severely outgunned. Auditor bands were much more powerful than the chronman bands he had on, though strength of bands wasn't everything.

It could be coincidence as well. This was a heavily-salvaged area. It could be one of the hundreds of jobs ChronoCom had run here. Levin was pretty sure his luck these days wasn't that good. He considered dropping his paint job to save his levels for a possible fight. His paint job wouldn't do much good if he encountered an auditor. No doubt whoever was investigating would be armed with a band detector.

He decided against it. If the jump was just a mere coincidence and that chronman just happened to know him, he would have a difficult time talking his way out of it, especially if the chronman was from after he was tried and found guilty.

Levin got his answer a few seconds later. A woman in a beige lounge suit, fashionable in this time period, took a seat near his small table. She leaned forward, almost as if flirting with him. A waitress stopped by and asked if she wanted a drink, and the woman replied in perfect regional and period Spanish. Just like his comm band, it was too perfect.

When the waitress left, the woman leaned in. “No sudden movements, friend. You won't win a fight and you can't run. I'm Auditor Julia Gaenler-Phobos of ChronoCom, year 2512. You are under investigation for possible violation of Time Law Six for an unsanctioned jump from a nonauthorized governing body. You will immediately surrender, release your bands to me, and divulge the entities supporting your illegal activities. Are we clear?”