“What’s your problem, wide-eyes? You got something you need to say?” She keeps her eyes locked on mine as she stops in front of me.
“Benjamin Travers, meet Kara LaCuesta.” Milo gestures toward her politely.
I extend my hand, but she merely raises her weapon and leans it against her shoulder.
“Did you murder your guide this morning, Travers?” Her words come out like bullets.
“No.”
“You a wiztard asshole like everybody says?”
“Everybody who?” I ask, frowning. “I just got here.”
“You stay out of our way, got it?” She points a finger at me with her other hand. I notice her fingerless glove has some sort of chronometer built into it. “I don’t like your face. So don’t put it anywhere where it’s going to get smashed, because I won’t hesitate to be the one to do it. And you’d better learn to keep your eyeballs to yourself or you’re gonna lose ’em.” She wheels about and marches back to her belongings.
I watch her go with my mouth hanging slightly open before turning back to Milo. “Well that conversation went exactly how I imagined it.”
Milo laughs. “She’s something, huh?”
“What’s a ‘wiztard?’”
“Beats me. Must be lingo from her century. Doesn’t sound flattering though, does it?”
“She’s your guide?”
“Yeah.” He grins. “She’s really nice to me, since we’re a team, but she’s like a junkyard dog with everybody else. It’s kinda sweet if you think about it.” He looks toward Kara with the smile still on his face.
“Oh yeah. Charming.” I turn my attention back to my apple. “How did you end up with her?”
“Ah. Well . . . she was the top scoring girl in the guide pool. I kind of figured she’d be an intellectual bookish type with the high marks she had on all her exams. Never expected to get a blaster-toting badass. But I’m pretty happy about it. We’ve been having a good time training together. I’m just excited she’s on my team and not someone else’s.”
“Yeah, lucky you, I guess.” The jumbo screens switch to a view of the official’s podium. “Speaking of guides, I should probably get back to mine. Looks like they’re getting ready to start this thing.”
“Good luck out there,” Milo says. “See you at the rendezvous.”
“Good luck to you, too.” I give Milo a casual salute and make my way back to Viznir, who is watching the screens attentively. He glances at me as I walk up.
“You found something?”
“Yeah, more or less.” I take the last bite from my apple core and toss it into the grass.
The audio for the Jumbotrons switches to the microphone at the official’s podium. I recognize the Indian woman from last night on the screen. She smiles and raises her hands amid cheers from the spectators.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my honor to welcome you to the starting line!”
The crowd erupts into another round of cheering. The woman smiles pleasantly and lets the noise settle before continuing. “Today you will see these competitors embark on stage one of what will undoubtedly be the most spectacular chronothon ever arranged. Our time gate building teams have made excursions farther into the depths of time than ever before, scouring timestreams previously untouched by time travelers, in a quest to bring you the most exotic, exciting, and fascinating events in competition history. Through the generosity of our sponsors, especially Digi-com, United Machine, and Ambrose Cybergenics, we are able to broadcast key scenes of this race from more in-level cameras than ever before, and bring the finest in entertainment to all of our viewers, both here in person, and linked into our broadcast from home.”
The woman pauses for dramatic effect. “Without further ado, I would like to present to you, our chairman for this committee, who will announce our race positions. Please put your hands together for Dr. Florian Schnyder!”
The chairman rises from his chair and waves to the crowd. He rests his palms on the edge of the podium until the crowd quiets. “Racers, your race bands are now being synched with the time gate for your departure to level one.”
The timer countdown on my bracelet has been erased. A green light and the number four are now flashing on the display.
“Your race bands will be your key to survival, as they are your ticket out of each level. Guard them well.” He gestures to the monoliths. “These ancient stones, in this unassuming corner of the universe, have been outfitted with the finest in transverse time gate technology. This blend of past and future is representative of all of you gathered here today. You take your knowledge of a broader world into the distant reaches of time, and through your experience, will bring back elements of past and future. You link together a larger universe into one family of time travelers. As competitors, you represent all of us. Do us proud!”
The crowd erupts into applause again. The chairman raises his hand. “In position number one, we have two students from The Academy of Temporal Sciences, Tad Masterson and Blaine Savage.” A section of the bleachers full of fans in red erupts into applause. “They will have a five minute head start on the other side. Let’s get you gentlemen into position.”
Blaine waves to the crowd as Tad climbs into the driver’s seat of the Humvee. He revs the engine and pulls up to the two standing stones. It looks like the vehicle will only narrowly fit through.
Viznir drops his eyes to his tablet. “They’ll only have about a fifteen minute lead on us through the gate. That’s not bad at all. We should be able to take advantage of our position. We’ll have almost an hour lead on the last team.”
“Even though lots of them have transportation?” Deanna, the blonde from the Academy, and her guide Preston, are mounting dirt bikes behind us. Like Tad and Blaine, they are both wearing their red Academy shirts. From a distance, the black hourglass logo reminds me of the markings on a black widow.
“It will just depend on the terrain. Transportation may not help them in a swamp, or in a dense urban setting.”
A flash of light brings my attention back to the time gate. A shimmering wall has appeared between the stones, and the sight is met with more cheering from the stands. Tad revs the engine again, and as the Indian woman on the Jumbo-tron waves her flag, the Humvee accelerates through the opening. I watch in amazement as it vanishes into the space between the stones.
“That’s really cool.”
Viznir stuffs his tablet into a waterproof pocket on his pack and swings the pack onto his back. “Get ready. They’ll move us through quickly.”
“Aren’t they doing five minute intervals?”
“It’s programmed for that exiting the gate, yes, but that doesn’t mean they have to keep that spacing going in. The entrance spacing is irrelevant. They have the exits timed so we won’t get fused into one another coming out.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” I pick up my pack and get myself ready to go. My heart rate has gone up. Despite the horror of my morning, the excitement of the crowd is contagious. I can feel the adrenaline starting to build.
The next team to line up is an overweight man and a petite Asian woman. Both are wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and are dressed in lightweight, flowing clothing. They don’t have transportation, but do have their extra belongings aboard some type of sleigh. The sleigh is rigged to a harness over the man’s shoulders and glides along behind him as he steps toward the shimmering wall. The chairman waves them through after announcing their names, and they likewise disappear.
The team ahead of us I vaguely recognize from the dinner, a pair of black men wearing camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, and sporting some sort of military insignia on their packs.
“Marco Thomas and Andre Watts!” The chairman has no sooner announced their names than the duo sprints forward through the opening, their combat boots tromping blades of grass in time with one another.
The massive stones now loom over us as Viznir and I take our places before the gate. Upon closer inspection, I can see the monoliths
have symbols carved into them and it makes me wonder what Celtic meaning they might have had before they were elected for use by the chronothon committee.
“Benjamin Travers and Viznir Najjar!”
The crowd reaction is mostly polite clapping, but a few boos come from the fence line. Viznir’s eyes are fixed on the chairman as he watches for the signal. I take a deep breath.
Here we go.
“Now!” Viznir exclaims, and we trot quickly toward the iridescent wall. I can still make out the watery image of the clearing edge and the far fence through the gate, but with another step, both of us are swallowed by the multicolored light.
11
“We are a race of explorers and adventurers. Once we have expanded into the vast reaches of space, time will remain our greatest frontier.” –Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1996
My eyes are slow to adjust after the brilliance of the crossing. I wonder for a moment if I’m still stuck inside the gate somehow, but as the darkness around me comes into focus, I realize I’m not in a tunnel of time. I’m in a real tunnel. Bright sunlight is pouring through an opening fifty yards ahead, but it doesn’t reach where we’re standing. I turn to look at what we just passed through, but see only a limestone wall. I’m about to touch it, but Viznir’s voice stops me. “Leave it alone. We need to find our objective.”
I can’t see much of anything other than the sunlight at the distant end of the tunnel. The walls around us are still shrouded in darkness.
“I have a flashlight somewhere.” I begin to take my pack off, but Viznir is faster. A beam of light flicks on from his hand and he immediately scans it around the walls.
“There they are.” He aims the beam at a long row of silver rings anchored into the wall. Each one has a metal box hanging from it. He strides forward and points to one in particular. “This one’s ours.”
I stand next to him and look at the box. It has my name stamped on an ID plate on the outside. The box is secured to the ring with a metal loop that’s at least half an inch thick.
“How are we supposed to get it down?”
Viznir contemplates the problem momentarily, then grabs my shoulder and pushes me toward it. “It must be your bracelet. Use that.”
I lift my right wrist to the box, and sure enough, the attachment ring springs open. I catch the box before it can fall to the ground.
“Cool. Let’s get out into the light where we can see what’s in it.” I clutch the metal box tightly and make my way toward the exit of the tunnel. As we near the sunlight, I get a better sense of the tunnel. It’s made up of limestone bricks neatly set together to form the arch. The floor is likewise stone, but covered with more and more fine grains of sand as we reach the end. When we step into the direct sunlight, I can see exactly why. All around us are nothing but sand dunes. At my feet, two tire tracks are plainly visible exiting the tunnel and then veering sharply to the right. They disappear over a dune that’s at least twenty feet high.
“So much for a dense urban environment, huh?” I look to Viznir. He already has his tablet out and is using it to scan the sky and the sand dunes. He points it at the only cloud in the sky and shakes his head.
“No satellites. We’re definitely in the past. Not getting a good reading here though. I’ll check the spectrometer.” He rolls up his shirtsleeve and begins fiddling with the electronic pad on his arm.
I inspect the box in my hands, turning it over and considering its nondescript sides. Other than the nameplate riveted to the side, there appears to be nothing significant about it and no obvious means of getting it open. I turn it over a couple of times, checking each side, then finally do the only thing I can think of. I wave my bracelet at it again. There is an immediate click, and the side I’m looking at pops loose at one edge. I smile at my success and pry it open the rest of the way. Inside is a folded piece of thick brown paper.
“This timestream is nothing I’ve seen on the charts. We must be in a very remote fringe right now.” Viznir has removed a device about the size of a TV remote from his pack and is busy aiming it at the sand in various locations. “This signature is a frequency that my spectrometer doesn’t recognize. We might be in a negative branch. It’s hard to know.” He tilts his head to the sky again. “Still appears to be Planet Earth from what I can tell. No atmospheric issues so far. We’ll just need a way to figure out where on the planet we might be.” He looks back to his electronic tablet and starts moving things around. “I think I can coordinate a sextant reading with this.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re in Egypt,” I say.
He looks up from his tablet and furrows his brow. “How did you make that calculation?”
“I didn’t. They gave us a map.” I hold it out to him. “There’s a drawing of a sphinx on it. Only one of those around that I know of.” I glance up at the sun, then point over a dune to our left. “I think it’s that way, but I’ll double-check.” Viznir takes the map from my hand and I reach into my pocket for Charlie’s compass. I flip it open and line up the needle with north. “Yep. Sphinx is that way.” I point again.
“It looks like we’re headed to something else, though,” Viznir says. He tilts his head to read the writing down the side of the map. “This picture on the side is what we’re after.” He lifts the map so I can see. “Looks like some sort of vase. It shows the symbols we need to identify. I’ll scan it and see what the research turns up.”
When he’s done scanning it, I take the map back. “Nice. Okay, so I see the next time gate here. What’s this other symbol next to it?”
“That’s the repository for our items. They never use items with gravitites installed so you can’t cheat by jumping back to an earlier moment than when you arrived in the level. Well, you can, I suppose, but your bracelet will still keep a record and you won’t be able to transport your item to earlier than when you discovered it. The clock doesn’t stop until the item is in the repository and the time gate has been opened.”
I look at my bracelet. The display has indeed changed to a clock again and is counting up by seconds and tenths of a second. The rapidly changing numbers give me a sense of urgency. “Okay, then I guess we’d better get moving.”
Viznir’s response is cut off by the sound of engines echoing in the tunnel. A moment later, Preston and Deanna come blasting into the sunlight on their dirt bikes. Preston sprays an arc of sand as he makes a turn at the base of the first dune. His shaggy hair is partially covering one eye. He guns the throttle and launches himself up the dune, disappearing immediately over the other side. Deanna is a second behind and pauses briefly when she sees us. She gives me a quick nod, then likewise guns her dirt bike over the dune and disappears.
“I guess they’re not going our way.” I check the map in my hands and note their direction was west. “We need to go northeast for our vase thingy.”
Viznir puts his spectrometer away and cinches his pack, but keeps his tablet out. “Okay, let’s get going.”
For the first few dips and rises we see nothing, but merely trudge our way up and down the gritty sand dunes. I do my best to keep sand out of my shoes, but have limited success.
“If the Sphinx is here, that narrows our timeline for where we might be. If we could get a look at its level of completion or erosion, we could date it further. We shouldn’t be farther back than 2500 BC in any event.”
“2500 BC?” I stop moving. “You think we’re that far back? That’s four and a half thousand years!”
Viznir nods. “There’s no telling just yet.” He fiddles with his tablet some more and keeps walking.
I observe the sky and sand with a new sense of awe, wondering what the world might be like over two thousand years before Christ.
As we struggle our way up a significantly bigger sand dune, I call out to Viznir ahead of me, “If we get over this hill and it turns out we’re in 2005, I’m going to kick you for getting my hopes up.”
Viznir reaches the crest of the dune and pauses, then extends a hand toward the h
orizon. “See for yourself.”
I ascend the last couple of feet to the top of the dune and assess the desert in the direction he’s pointing. Only it’s no longer just desert. A short distance farther on, the barren dunes turn to level ground, and as it nears the banks of the river, lush vegetation takes control. The riverbank is teeming with activity. Rafts and barges float their way northward along the water, carrying goods and passengers. Farther along the river, the irrigated farmlands turn to an urban metropolis like I’ve never seen. Stone walls and enormous columns surround elaborate temple structures. Lower class homes dot the landscape in clusters of reed-thatched roofs and clay walls.
I consult my map again. “It looks like our vase is somewhere near the river, but the exit gate is near the outskirts of the city.”
“We’ll need to hurry,” Viznir says. “The more teams get spotted entering the city, the more chaos it will create. If we can get in and out quickly, we can avoid trouble.”
“Sounds good to me.”
We slide our way down the dune to the hard-packed earth below, and after cutting though a farmer’s field, we hit a road. We’ve only made it about a quarter mile before we come upon the outer limits of the city. A couple of men pushing a cart give us a wide berth on the road, trying to avoid staring at us, but having a difficult time.
“The social class system here may be to our advantage,” Viznir says. “If they don’t know whether or not we are upper class citizens, they may steer clear.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 63
