by Glenn Smith
“I noticed you’re limping when you came out,” Dylan said, glad for the chance to change the subject. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he said as he pulled a mug off of the stack and started filling it. “I fell on my sidearm when I tripped over that technician. My hip feels like someone took a few whacks at it with their nightstick, but I’m okay.”
“Ouch,” Dylan responded, having done the same thing on more than one occasion.
“Ouch is right,” Orwell agreed. “That’s why it took me so long to catch up to you, in case you were wondering. I had a dead leg for about five minutes after.”
“Yeah, I figured it was something like that,” Dylan pointed out, hoping that would help to ensure Orwell that he wasn’t holding anything against him. “No harm done,” he then added with a quick shrug of his shoulders for emphasis. Then, not wanting to give him a chance to steer the conversation back to Doctor Royer, he said, “So what’s the story on this guy whose brain I air-conditioned this morning? I know he recently assaulted a C-I-D agent, but what was he wanted for originally? What did he do to get C-I-D’s attention in the first place?”
Orwell sipped his coffee cautiously, then answered, “Nothing all that serious, really.” He took another sip, squinting as he filled his mouth with the hot brew, then swallowed—judging from the look on his face, it was a painful process—and further explained, “It’s kind of a strange case, actually. One of our troops was passing ‘For Official Use Only’ records to him. Sensitive information on some level, maybe, but nothing actually classified. Just odd stuff like deck plans to the facility and personnel records and what-not. I can understand where the deck plans might be useful to someone planning an attack or some kind of criminal activity here, but what the hell could they have wanted with personnel records?”
“Tracking someone down to kill them, maybe?” Dylan suggested. “A mob hit?”
“No,” Orwell strongly disagreed, shaking his head. “No, it had to be something more than that. That data-chip his contact passed him had files listing all personnel currently assigned to the shipyards, both military and civilian. Full P-I-I—names, I-D numbers, security clearances, access levels, job assignments... even all their background information, like where and when they were born. Everything someone might need to track them down later.”
‘Everything someone might need to track them down later.’ With that last sentence, the implications dawned on Dylan like the first rays of the morning sun breaking over the horizon. But before he could think it through and try to determine exactly what it all meant for him and his mission, Doctor Royer emerged from the hallway holding his handcomp close to his chest as though it were a potential winning hand in a high-stakes poker game. He walked up to Dylan and told him, “They’re all finished with me, Sergeant. Are you ready to go somewhere and talk?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” Dylan replied. He glanced back at Orwell and said, “See you tonight, Danny,” and then led Doctor Royer toward the exit.
“What time you seeing the shrink, Dylan?” Orwell called after him.
“Ten-thirty,” Dylan answered over his shoulder.
“Good. Get some sleep afterwards. I need you alert on shift tonight.”
“Will do.”
* * *
Dylan and Doctor Royer had barely spoken a single word to each other as they made their way through the corridors and back to the facility’s civilian sector, but that wasn’t because they didn’t feel comfortable with each other or didn’t trust one another... at least not from Dylan’s perspective it wasn’t. He’d held off starting a conversation for reasons of operational security, because any conversation they might have begun would have quickly turned to the only matter they had to discuss—what they were both doing in 2168. Obviously, too sensitive a matter to risk talking about in public corridors where any number of passersby or anyone standing around the next corner might overhear them. And although he’d only just met Doctor Royer, he felt pretty confident that the older man’s reasons for keeping quiet were the same as his. With the exception of that first moment of surprise at hearing Dylan utter his name, he hadn’t seemed uncomfortable in Dylan’s presence at all. In fact, he looked to be more relieved now than anything else.
Of course, that might only have been because he’d had a little more time to recover from his harrowing near death experience.
Prior to leaving the military sector, they’d stopped by Dylan’s quarters long enough for him to change into civilian clothes—simple jeans, sneakers, and a pullover shirt—so that he’d blend in with the civilian crowd and not draw any unwanted extra attention. Then they’d gone to the Rotunda and found a quiet restaurant away from the main shopping mall, where they could enjoy a nice breakfast and talk in relative privacy. They’d ordered their food and nursed a couple cups of coffee over small talk while they waited—Dylan was beginning to wonder if he might not be pushing the caffeine just a little too much—but when the waitress finally returned, set their steaming plates down in front of them, and then walked away, Dylan decided the time had come to get down to business.
“So who exactly are you, Sergeant?” Royer quietly asked him, beating him to the punch before he shoveled a spoonful of fluffy, lightly salted and peppered and steaming scrambled eggs into his mouth.
Dylan glanced around, double-checking to make sure no one was sitting close enough to overhear them, then picked up the little metal cup of buttery syrup and started pouring it over his powdered French toast as he answered, “My name is Dylan Graves. I’m a... I work for Ad... for Icarus Hansen. He and your sister sent me.”
Royer grinned at the mention of his sister, then swallowed his mouthful of eggs and asked, completely unfazed, “When did you come from?”
“December, twenty-one ninety.”
Royer drew a deep breath and focused on a point in space somewhere between them as he slowly exhaled. “December, twenty-one ninety,” he echoed quietly. “Six years and change after I left and she still works with Hansen.” He paused for another moment, then looked up at Dylan again and asked him, “Is she still a lieutenant commander?”
Dylan sipped his coffee, shook his head as he set his cup back down on the table, then answered as he started cutting his French toast into bite-sized pieces, “Full commander when I met her, which wasn’t really all that long ago.”
“Good. Good for her. She’s wanted admiral’s stars for as long as she could say ‘admiral.’ It’s good to know she’s still advancing toward getting them.”
“She’s tough enough. I can tell you that much,” Dylan told him.
Royer laughed. “I know that’s true.”
“She can be pretty devious, too,” Dylan added as he stabbed several squares of French toast one after another with his fork as though he were trying to kill them. “And she’s sure as hell not afraid to act without orders, whether the admiral would likely approve of her actions or not.”
“For someone who just met her not that long ago, you sure seem to know a lot about her,” Royer observed.
“I speak from personal experience,” Dylan pointed out. Then he shoved his fork into his mouth and pulled it out clean. The French toast tasted perfect—steaming hot, made with just the right amount of cinnamon—and the maple butter syrup was some of the best he’d ever tasted.
“Oh, I see,” Royer said. “Let me guess. She tricked you into coming back for me against the admiral’s better judgment and then nagged him into agreeing with her, right?” That question lingered in the air between them while Royer waited for Dylan to chew his food and swallow, but when he did so and then didn’t answer, and when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to answer, another question revealed itself as an expression of confusion and concern appeared on the doctor’s features. “I am your primary objective, am I not? There’s nothing else...”
“No, sir, you’re not,” Dylan answered honestly. Despite the fact that he hardly knew the old man sitting across from him, he already felt a measure of res
pect for him. He didn’t want to lie to him. He licked his lips, then added, “You’re actually my secondary objective.”
“I see,” Royer quietly responded, visibly discouraged. “I take it the situation hasn’t gotten any better since I left.”
“No, sir, it hasn’t,” Dylan confirmed, shaking his head. Then he expanded on his answer, explaining, “As a matter of fact, when I left we were within a few months of losing the whole...” He hesitated and looked around again when a couple walked past their table. The restaurant was beginning to fill with customers. He and Royer were going to have to be careful—were going to have to keep their voices as low as they could. “...of losing the whole show,” he concluded after another moment. “I’m pretty sure Window World is gone. At least the... the important part.”
“If that’s true then we’re both stuck here, you and I.” Royer sighed and dropped his gaze to his plate. “Suddenly I’m not very hungry anymore,” he said as he set his spoon down on his plate. “I failed them. I failed them all.”
“You still have time,” Dylan pointed out, hoping to encourage him a little bit, the irony of his words lost to both of them.
“Not enough,” Royer countered, shaking his head. “Not for the original plan, at least. No, that window closed a long time ago.”
“What happened, Doctor?” Dylan asked, finally getting down to business after he glanced around one more time. “Your sister included a briefing on your mission with my instructions, so I know what you were sent here to do. What went wrong?”
Royer drew another deep breath, then picked up his spoon and played with his eggs as if considering whether or not to resume eating as he exhaled even more slowly than he had before. He looked around the restaurant just as Dylan had, then finally set his spoon down again, looked Dylan in the eye, and told his story. “I arrived on Earth—Germany, as it happens—in the spring of twenty-one fifty-five. I integrated myself into the scientific community exactly as planned, but the embryos I brought back with me did not survive passage through the Portal. To this very day I don’t know what caused their premature mortality, but I suspect it had something to do with the inherent fragility of stage-one clones. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to look into it as deeply as I would like to. As deeply as I need to.”
“Haven’t yet had an opportunity?” Dylan asked. “You’ve been here for thirteen years.”
“And I’ve been racing the clock the entire time,” Royer emphasized, sounding perhaps just a little bit defensive. “I still had my technical schematics, but I had to start the whole batch cloning process over again. You need to understand, Mister Graves, age acceleration technology didn’t exist in fifty-five and still doesn’t now, here in sixty-eight. At least, not officially. I had to recreate it from scratch, in secret, and then I had to reformulate this era’s cloning procedures to make the new embryos compatible before I could even begin the actual process.”
“I apologize, Doctor,” Dylan said, backing off. “I didn’t mean to sound accusatory. You don’t owe me any explanations.”
“Strangely enough, Mister Graves, I kind of feel like I do,” Royer disagreed. “After all, you’re here working for same the people who sent me back here. The same people I failed.”
“The fact that you were willing to come back at all puts you above reproach as far as I’m concerned, sir. You gave up more for your mission than anyone should ever have to.”
“As did you no doubt, Mister Graves,” Royer pointed out in return.
Dylan bowed in humble acknowledgement, then prompted Royer to continue by asking, “So what happened once you were finally able to get started?”
“Well, due to extremely limited resources, it took me a few years to start making any real progress, which of course made my race against the clock that much more urgent. By the time I was finally ready to start cloning the new cell donors, which was a whole other nightmare in and of itself, by the way, passage of the Brix-Cyberclone Cessation Act of sixty-two was less than two years away. In the end we didn’t make it. Congress passed the B-C-C-A right on schedule and the government promptly moved in, shut us down, and confiscated all of my cloned cultures and embryos.”
“Do you know what happened to them?” Dylan asked. “Those cultures and embryos?”
Royer cleared his throat. “Well... Officially, all the pre-S-C-N-T cultures were destroyed, while all the embryos were...”
“Wait a second,” Dylan interrupted, raising a hand to stop Royer in mid-sentence. “The pre what cultures?”
“The pre-S-C-N-T cultures,” Royer repeated. Then, seeing that Dylan didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about, he explained, “S-C-N-T stands for somatic cell nuclear transfer. It’s the process where genetic material from the nucleus of an adult cell is transferred to an egg that’s had its own nucleus, and therefore its own D-N-A, removed in favor of that of the donor cell. Once that’s done, cell division must be artificially stimulated, either through...”
“That’s quite all right, Doctor,” Dylan interrupted, raising the hand once more as soon as it dawned on him that as a scientist Royer was probably used to going on and on at length when he explained such things to his students and/or his funding providers. “One off-the-wall scientific concept at a time is more than enough for me, and I’m already dealing with a doozy with this whole time-traveling thing. You were about to tell me what happened to the embryos?”
“Right,” Royer affirmed, abandoning his ad hoc lecture. “Well, as I was saying, officially they were transferred to a government lab for gestation and eventual adoption.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially...” He cleared his throat again. “Well... let’s just say that there were certain individuals, some in the Earth Security Council and some in the military, who preferred that my work continue with minimum interruption. I’ve been right here, hiding in plain sight so to speak, ever since those certain individuals made their preferences known to me. Close enough to Earth to be able to take advantage of her resources, while at the same time just far enough away from the center of everything to avoid attracting too much attention and scrutiny.”
“So you are continuing your work,” Dylan concluded as he started stabbing at his French toast again. He’d gotten so caught up in their conversation that he’d forgotten to eat. “You’re still carrying out your mission.”
“As best I can, yes,” Royer confirmed as he resumed eating as well. Then he asked, “And what about your mission, Mister Graves? If I’m your secondary objective, then what’s your first? What’s your primary mission?”
“I probably shouldn’t talk about that,” Dylan told him. “I mean, I realize we both came back to change things, but the risk of accidental contamination...”
“Of course,” Royer acquiesced immediately. “You’re absolutely right.” He glanced down at his plate and at his handcomp, and then continued, “And I’m absolutely ready to go to work, if you’ll excuse me.” He stood up. “I’ll take care of the bill on my way out. Thank you again for saving my life this morning.”
“Just doing my... my other job, sir.”
Royer smiled and nodded slightly, then walked away.
Accidental contamination, Dylan reflected as he sat there eating his breakfast, all alone in more ways than one, despite Doctor Günter Royer’s presence. Where the hell had that idea come from? Could it be that he’d given so much thought to all the theories and nuances involved in his mission that he was actually starting to understand them? What if he had told Doctor Royer what his mission was? Would it really have mattered? What could the doctor have done? Armed with the knowledge of what path the future he’d left behind had taken, would he really have been able to do any harm, intentionally or otherwise?
Come to think of it, given his actions on the job, chances were he’d already contaminated the timeline himself, and in more ways than one.
First, what might have happened, he wondered as he slowly chewed his food, if he hadn’t been ther
e to assist in the early morning manhunt? PFC Gillis was alive and well, thank God, but had he not been there to shoot the suspect in the head at that very last moment, the suspect might have shot her. He’d certainly gotten the drop on her, no doubt about that. She might have been killed in the line of duty and the suspect might have escaped from the facility with that data-chip in his pocket, and with Doctor Royer as his hostage.
Was that what had happened to Doctor Royer originally? Was his being taken hostage the reason why nothing in the future had changed? Was that why he’d never returned home? Had the suspect killed him after making his escape, perhaps after torturing him to gain all of his scientific knowledge first?
Could his having prevented all of that from happening perhaps be another way in which his own presence had altered the timeline?
And what about that data-chip they’d recovered from the body? According to his mission briefing, all available information indicated that in as little as three years after the Excalibur was destroyed, all personnel who’d been assigned to or employed by the Mars Orbital Shipyards at that time—at this time, he reminded himself—and who might have had some knowledge as to whether or not the starcruiser Albion was taken out of the shipyards, had died. The information on that chip might have been what those responsible for those deaths had used to track them all down. If so, then they weren’t going to have what they needed this time around. Dylan had likely just saved all those lives—yet another way in which his presence had potentially changed things.
He had probably saved Gillis’ life. He might also have saved Doctor Royer’s life. And he’d just as likely saved the lives of everyone else in the facility. As he pondered the possible consequences of his actions, he began to wonder if pursuing his original mission might no longer be necessary. Maybe he didn’t need to save the Excalibur anymore.
