“What did you do?”
Emily kind of envied Robert. He asked questions so easily. Perhaps his life had delivered better answers than hers.
Carey shrugged. “I didn’t—” Robert looked at him with intent. He shrugged again. “There is a kind of depression on one side. I might have pushed it.”
Robert’s fingers were long and confident. Could fingers be confident? They were cared for, but pale, like he’d been out of the sun for a while. The fingers stopped, one of them circling something on the side of the box. The box kicked up the vibrating, adding in a high-pitched whine.
“Everyone get back out of the center,” Robert ordered, with unexpected authority. His arm went around her waist, half lifting her, half sweeping her to the edge of the room. He could have released her then, instead of keeping her clamped against his manly side, but he didn’t.
She liked being swept, and she really liked being clamped. The moment called for gazing, so she tipped her head back to gaze. He didn’t seem to know what the moment called for. The now empty center of the room had his attention, while the box kicked up the vibration some more.
It was about then that she realized it wasn’t just the box. It was the whole building.
FIVE
Ashe arrived in time to see the Council settling, with an obvious awareness of their importance, into their seats on the raised dais.
They are all physically present.
Usually the Council preferred to use their personal time zones, which allowed them to exist here and there—wherever their “there” was, something to do with monitoring across time or something. Without the flash of the inter-dimensional travel, their lack of what her Earth cousins called star power, was even more obvious. Maybe they were supposed to be pedestrian. A few petty bureaucrats might be awful to work with, but perhaps they’d limit each other’s potential for damaging time. Negatives canceling each other out? Since they had to be petty, it was a pity they weren’t pretty, despite the historic Gadi love of it. They ranged from the merely bland to the seriously ugly.
It is possible that their lack of pretty is what drove them into Council work.
It made a kind of sense.
They know something is wrong.
The comment by Lurch flowed from the obvious fact that it was highly unusual for all the Council to be physically present on the base, let alone be present to brief a slew of low-level trackers. Their expressions showed only majestic—as their uninspiring visages could manage—unconcern. No sign anyone noticed the tremors shaking the outpost or that they heard what sounded like thunder outside. A tremor hit the base hard enough to bleed through the shields, throwing it out of phase for several seconds. It almost knocked Ashe out of her “please underestimate me” pose.
Okay, someone had to see that. At least tell me someone felt it?
Do I have to tell you again that you have an unusual sensitivity to time?
I’ll replay it with your patience lecture later.
The high ceiling and stone everything chilled the air, but what sent ice to her core was her sense of time spiraling in strange ways out in the wider universe while the Council straightened their robes and got comfortable in their seats. Her time senses were going crazy, her gut telling her things she didn’t think it could.
I think you are right.
She felt Lurch’s surprise.
About what?
He didn’t have to feel so surprised. She’d admitted he was right at least once before.
This time disturbance. I think it’s both. I think it might be natural
and
unnatural.
You can feel the difference?
Now he felt intrigued.
I think so.
It felt like two currents coming together, with an odd, uncomfortable turbulence where they bumped against each other. It was a sense, an instinct, more than real knowledge. Despite the buckets of data transferred into her brain when she made cadet, Ashe worked mostly from her instincts. She hadn’t been here long, but she’d already figured out that much of what they “knew” wasn’t actual knowledge. It fell more into the range of “we hope we know this.”
Carig cleared his throat. “We’re going to have a practice emergency drill. Protocol twenty-five. You’ll deploy in teams of two to your assigned grids and check in at the time stations, collect data, attempt to locate a ‘missing’ tracker,” he flexed two fingers on each hand to make sure they knew is a drill and not real, even though it was, “and report. You will follow procedure and endeavor not to actually get lost.”
If they’d had Control do the brief, and you weren’t you, it wouldn’t be a bad cover story for the fubar.
Ashe gave an internal twitch.
Fubar?
Lurch twitched this time and felt almost embarrassed.
It’s an Earth term, a somewhat crude acronym for seriously messed up
.
She tried to figure out how the letters indicated messed up, crude or otherwise, and couldn’t. Perhaps it was an Earth dialect she hadn’t experienced yet.
Odd.
She refocused on their fearless leader.
He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Or they don’t know the truth.
He could be worried about your safety.
He paused, probably for effect.
But Carig has always had trust issues.
Why do I get the feeling you’ve run into him in an alternate reality, too?
Ashe hid a smug smile at his surprised jerk. Wasn’t easy to get the drop on Lurch. She was so busy being smug she almost missed her team assignment.
Fubar.
Selnick was a jerk among a wide cast of jerks infesting the service. He wasn’t a top tracker, though he was high level. Interesting that he was the only high-level tracker not missing. Suspiciously interesting.
What’s his nanite like?
Hard to imagine any nanite living comfortably in that jerk.
His nanites aren’t sentient.
That wasn’t a shock, but then he showed her the stats on sentient/non-sentient.
Does the Service have an issue with sentient nanites, too?
Lurch may have shrugged. She wanted to protest the pairing but on its face it made sense. She was the least experienced. He was, on data screen, the most experienced, though she wouldn’t put it past him to try and lose her in the stream and then blame it on her.
Let’s hope he does.
Lurch had a point. If he lost her, then she could go do what the Council should be asking them to do: find the source of the time instability. If she could get to the time station ahead of Selnick, she could check the data—
Ashe felt her insides jerk.
If I was going to remove a tracker—
—a station is the only place someone would know for sure where they would be.
It was standard procedure to check in at the nearest station upon arrival in a zone. It was the fastest way to get updated time data, not available when one was in the stream.
Lurch managed to sound both pleased at her insight and grim at what it meant if someone was deliberately targeting trackers and using these safe stations to do it.
It was close to impossible to find a place or a time, to locate a specific person, in the morass that was the time stream. Trackers followed disruptions, unnatural eddies, they followed wrong time and tried to fix it without triggering a reset. A tracker could know a name, a history, and the time they lived in, but it was still close to impossible to make a pinpoint arrival without a beacon already in place to ride in, or a time disruption to follow—which still had a plus or minus factor that varied with the expertise of the tracker. Even the original Garradians had worked in plus or minus one-to-one-hundred year increments. Sometimes observers, sometimes time pins, were inserted into a trouble spot. They might wait years in place before being able to enact their “fix.”
The outpost used special beacons that sent out a dedicated signal for trackers and wardens to use to get back to the right time and place, but even with beacons, it was challenging to arrive on square. As far as Ashe knew, she was the only tracker who could come in hot and then do a sideslip so she’d arrive just off her mark. She liked to get there early and watch them watching for her. Her supervisor thought she was just sloppy about her arrivals, but what if someone else realized it was with intent? Could the breach have been intended to trap her? But how would they know which way she’d slip? She never made the same move the same way. And every now and again, she arrived exactly where she was supposed to just to mess with her supervisor’s head.
A thread of bitch runs through your family.
That truth didn’t hurt as much as it should have.
The time breach might not be all about you.
Got a bit of bitch in you, too.
But he did have a point. What if it had been her fault? What if her sideslip had somehow pierced the alternate reality? It had appeared to be a slice of life, not a whole scale alternate reality. Or worse, what if someone had created it and she’d accidentally landed inside it?
If someone can do that—
Ashe didn’t blame him for not knowing a word to describe how bad that could be. How dangerous.
We don’t know what research has gone on here, or is going on or will go on. The fact that it involved the base seems to indicate sanctioned research.
Or someone is trying to take over the base.
Aren’t you cheerful and optimistic this morning?
Not that she could fault his pessimism after what they’d seen and felt in the stream, or what she sensed now. Took a delusional Council to go for optimistic at the moment.
“You will activate your emergency beacons and keep them activated for the duration of the drill.”
Ashe didn’t like that, didn’t like being tracked for any reason, but she did it—for now. It’s not like they all wouldn’t rejoice if she managed to get lost. And she could shut it off as soon as she was off the base.
The Controller walked the line of trackers, checking the integrity of each signal with his gear before stepping back with a nod.
Carig glanced at Ashe, unable to hide his distaste. Not only was she a woman, and a descendent of people he hated, but her blood was “tainted” by several generations of Earth intermarriage—and a couple of other planets from other galaxies. Too bad for him her family had the influence to get her in. They’d always been loaded with pretty
and
power.
In some way, she believed the chemistry of her “tainted” blood heightened her sensitivity to time. Time tracking could be taught to some extent, but if one didn’t have the instincts for it, they ended up like Selnick—in it, but only able to do the most pedestrian tasks. Time sent up warnings when it went off true, but the resulting wake could muddy the trails, hiding the epicenter. In all her senses, she felt the trail, saw the slight differences in the threads, heard it like the out of tune notes of a harmonious, even smelled the nuances in time’s flow. The Council couldn’t know how she could track without being her, something they’d hate with every fiber of their beings if they did know. Living out of time hadn’t ended their girl issues.
The more things change, the more they don’t.
Lurch’s thoughts were tinged with wry humor.
Prejudice is a constant, just the object of it changes. And as challenging as it sometimes is, it is good they don’t know what you can do.
Ashe homed in on a flicker of something he hadn’t said.
Do you think one of them is involved?
If someone is manipulating time, it would require a high-level cover-up to manipulate records and sensors.
It was true that the sensor logs did not reflect what she’d felt in the stream prior to her arrival, but it was hard to see any of the five as a mastermind. It was possible one of them was being played by a mastermind. Or, like her, someone was hiding who they were and what they could do.
If I were an evil genius, would I hide in annoying or bland?
You would have to hide in annoying.
Funny.
Through her lashes, she studied Glarmere, Carig, and Faustus, the three members that Lurch knew from the past.
Their records are impeccable.
But one of them bothers you.
She felt a kick of something.
That alternate time line again
?
I have known Glarmere and Carig when they were less impeccable. But it would be unfair to judge either by behavior they did not, and have not done.
Ashe wasn’t required to be fair, but he did have a point. Ashe let her attention drift to Faustus, though she took care to make sure he didn’t see her looking. If bland had its own center of the universe, it would probably be him. Despite his ugly mug, he looked bland, sleepy even. He shifted as if he sensed being watched, so she moved on to the last two Council members, the ones Lurch didn’t know. If they were hiding in bland, they were doing a really good job of it.
No quivers about those two?
Lurch mentally shrugged.
Did that mean they had checked in from the future, or just that he’d never met them? The one on the end looked meek enough to be Keltinarian—
Ashe tensed as she felt her sense of off time heighten, felt the clarity of the track she needed to follow, and knew that it wouldn’t last. Like ripples on the water’s surface, the disturbance would fan out, getting wider and bigger, and harder to follow.
Time and tide wait for no man.
It didn’t help that she felt odd, almost itchy, in this time that wasn’t quite real time. Her time senses didn’t like the slower base time. Her expression stayed neutral even as her instincts insisted that this disturbance threatened
her
, that she had to go now. If a paradox formed in the midst of an instability of this magnitude—the complexity of time, having the past, the present and the future rubbing together, settled an ache behind her eyes. Even as Lurch acted to ease the pain, Ashe smoothed her thoughts. One of the real dangers of time tracking was becoming overwhelmed by the complexities of it and falling into a time spiral.
Carig finally fell silent. That helped the headache, too.