by Wesley Chu
Mong stuck his chin out defiantly. “Just get it over with and kill us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gouti grumbled.
“If we had wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” said James.
Roman looked over at the rest of his squad. He hadn’t realized this at first, but it was true. All of them were alive, and it probably wasn’t a coincidence. In fact, these savages took extra precautions, at the risk of their own lives, not to kill any of them. Why?
The traitor motioned to a group of savages standing nearby. “You have seven minutes. Get to work.”
Roman watched open-mouthed as two dozen savages swarmed the collie, like burn ants over a corpse, and began to strip it bare. To his shock, they moved efficiently, as if they knew what they were doing. These were primitive savages. How could this be possible? However, within minutes, many of the collie’s modules were dismantled. All that remained was its frame, engine, and structural components.
“Wrap it up,” James said. “Co-op forces will be here any minute.”
Just as quickly as they appeared, the savages disappeared back into the ruined city. The only one left was the traitor. He surveyed the sky and then the squad. “Your people will be here soon.”
Mong looked confused. “Why not just kill us and be done with it?”
“Shut up before he changes his mind,” Roman hissed.
The traitor studied Mong’s face. “How many years out of the Academy, chronman?”
Mong hesitated before answering. “Five months.”
The traitor nodded. “You use the exo well for a Tier-5. You’ll make a fine chronman one day. Just make sure you live long enough to make a difference.”
“Why are you letting us go?” asked Mong.
James sighed. “Because at the end of the day, you’re just trying to do the right thing, and so am I.” Then he shot into the air in a streak of yellow and was gone.
Five minutes later, a Valta Valkyrie appeared, followed by three collies. The area was soon flooded by monitors. Roman looked in the direction he had last seen the traitor as he and the rest of his squad were led to safety. This was the first time he had seen the traitor, this James Griffin-Mars. He had to admit he was surprised. All the intel had described the man as an unstable, greedy, self-serving lunatic. This man seemed anything but that. He glanced over at Mong, whose troubled face spoke volumes as well.
Roman crawled into the medical collie and was soon in the air. His last thought before he passed out was that now that he was injured, did he still have to wait two days to shower?
TWO
THE SITUATION
James watched from the mid-level of a nearby building as a small fleet of collies and Valta ships swarmed the battlefield where the Elfreth had just ambushed a squad of monitors. He took a quick inventory of the number of ships and personnel, the time it had taken them to arrive after the first shots were fired, and how large of a perimeter they maintained while executing the retrieval. The Co-op’s response times were improving, though still not quick enough to catch the tribe during a raid.
Once he had finished gathering the necessary data, James headed to their temporary home, choosing to go on foot instead of risking being seen flying through New London at this hour. There was already a lot of heat in this region, and his exo would shine like a beacon in the black of night. With few tall buildings in this area still standing to provide cover, the less he used his exo, the better.
The Co-op was not proficient at guerrilla warfare, not like the wasteland tribes who had had centuries of experience executing hit-and-run raids. They had other overwhelming advantages, though, possessing vastly superior firepower and nearly infinite resources, while the Elfreth’s already meager stock was fast withering away. Without Smitt’s access to the chron database to calculate jumps, James was unable to jump to the past to resupply the tribe as he had done previously.
Not that he could jump right now anyway, even if they did have access. Grace Priestly, the Mother of Time, was adamant that his next one or two jumps would kill him. He had made too many jaunts to the past without taking the miasma regimens, the medical treatments necessary to combat lag sickness, the long-term degenerative illness caused by time travel. His body was too permanently damaged to risk another jump. This was a serious problem, because the Elfreth had depended on his salvaging for food, medicine, and equipment, especially now while on the run with the tribe unable to farm.
James stayed moving on foot, sipping the energy levels of his bands sparingly to avoid detection, using his exo in short bursts to leap through the streets and between the buildings. He circled west in a roundabout path in case he was being followed, until he eventually reached the ruins of Groton Space Port.
The space port, already half-submerged in the encroaching brown ocean, had been a major hub in the early days of interplanetary freight. When the Core Conflicts broke out at the turn of the twenty-fourth century, Groton Space Port was converted to a military installation and was one of the last surviving ports when the megacorporations from the Outer Rim planets arrived and laid siege to the planet. All that remained now were blown-out buildings and skeletons of ships from previous centuries. It was also the perfect hiding spot for the Elfreth’s current project and their last hope for survival.
James landed on the wing of an old Publicae drone ship and hopped over onto the back of a Venetian heat absorber, then onto an old Earthbound civilian carrier. The history of humanity’s aviation continued to unfold as he crisscrossed the watery graveyard. The brown ocean currents had invaded the airstrip long ago, and now some of the crafts were uprooted from their final resting places and being carried away by the dense, heavy waves of the polluted ocean. They banged against other crafts, rocking back and forth as the slow-moving tide flooded and ebbed.
He reached one of the few still-intact construction hangars built on a hill and entered, promptly coming face-to-face with three guardians wielding high-powered blaster rifles. He nodded as the lead lookout, Mhairi, waved him through. He was getting better at remembering their names; it was something Elise had stressed he should do, claiming it made him a more integral part of the tribe.
At first, he resisted. A short memory was useful for a chronman. After all, while salvaging, he interacted with thousands of people who were already dead. Remembering their names meant they would linger with him even after the salvage was completed. Even while at the agency, he rarely bothered remembering names outside of auditors and administrators. Chronmen and monitors came and went. What was the point of getting to know anyone?
In many ways, it was the same with the Elfreth. There were so many in the tribe, and he had little confidence that any of them would survive this war with the Co-op, so why remember names? Why give them this power over him?
For Elise, though, he made an effort. Every time he met someone he did not recognize, especially the guardians and the food staff, he took a few extra seconds to recite their names into memory. At first, he thought it a waste of time. Slowly, those names and faces began to connect. Every subsequent time he would see someone whose name he remembered, he found himself waving at them and inquiring about their day. Bit by bit, he learned more, until he actually considered a few of them acquaintances. This, in turn, made them less wary of him. When Pon, one of the first guardians he had befriended, died at the hands of the Co-op, he felt an immediate sadness and pain. These were something he rarely allowed himself to feel. They also reminded him why he didn’t like remembering names.
James glanced to the side, and saw the group of hallucinations that always seemed close by. They had been less vocal as of late. The ghosts of Grace and the Nazi soldier still hung around, though they mostly stayed in the background and argued with each other. Sometimes, he would catch them shooting angry accusatory glances his way. In the Nazi soldier’s case, James wished he knew the boy’s name; calling him “Nazi soldier” or “fucking fascist” was getting old. He almost had to concentrate to notice them anymore.
/> The ghost of Sasha was different. She usually kept to herself, but was always watching him, as if judging his every move. Sometimes, he would wake in the middle of the night and find her standing in the corner, just staring at him. It was unnerving. The few times he tried to engage her, she just shook her head sadly, or disapprovingly—he couldn’t quite tell which. He waved at her as he passed; something he couldn’t help but do when he was alone. She never waved back.
James didn’t understand why she was there at all. The real Sasha was alive again. He had risked his life making one last jump to retrieve his dead sister from the Mnemosyne Station, the refugee camp she had gone missing from twenty years ago. Grace had warned him back then against jumping, but as far as he was concerned, it was the best thing he had ever done in his miserable life.
He reached an elevated platform in the hangar where Chawr and his friends were busy working on their latest creation. When James and Elise had first joined the Elfreth, an argument had precipitated Chawr and his friends wanting to break from the tribe. They were young, strong, and felt they could do better on their own than burdened with the many elderly and weak. James had convinced the young man to stay, and Chawr and his crew had asked James to teach them how to work on his collie.
He had agreed to mentor them, and now he couldn’t be prouder. Over the months, the crew, now calling themselves the flyguards, had become indispensable to the tribe. They looked his way as his boots clanged on the metal steps up to the platform. They waved enthusiastically and joked among themselves as they dug through their latest haul from the collie they had stripped earlier today.
“Did we get what we need?” he asked.
Hory held up part of a cockpit console. Bria did the same with a cooling coil, but it was Chawr who picked up the crown jewel of their loot: the stealth module. ChronoCom collies were the most advanced stealth ships in the solar system. Since the agency wasn’t military, they relied on this advanced technology, developed during the Publicae Age, to avoid getting into battles.
James shot Chawr a thumbs-up and looked at the metal monstrosity to his right. Ever since his own collie had been shot out of the sky during the attack on Boston, the tribe had been busy trying to get him spaceborne again. They had been unsuccessful at stealing existing Co-op ships—they were too heavily guarded and secured—so instead, the Elfreth did what they did best: stole what they could and salvaged from wreckages.
The end result was a mutant insect-like collie assembled from the bodies of five separate ships destroyed in battle. It was four times the size of a standard collie, had three cockpits, and had to be powered by six separate engines. The dozens of window panels on the starboard side made it look like it had spider eyes. The center piloting cockpit jutted out near the top in an odd off-angled direction. The port side was just two standard collie bodies welded together.
When Elise first saw the thing, she couldn’t stop laughing and named the ship Drunk Engineering, saying it was a veritable Frankenstein. Drunk Engineering hit a little too close to home, but the name Frankenstein took. Now, the Elfreth’s new flagship Frankenstein was ready for its maiden voyage into space as soon as they installed the stealth module.
James would be lying if he said he wasn’t worried about the Frankenstein’s space-worthiness. The ship had only logged fifteen hours over the Atlantic Ocean, and the modified shield arm was fairly new, so he had minimal confidence in the ship’s structural integrity. He would also be the first to admit his technical knowledge of ships was poor. Thank the abyss they had Grace Priestly to help with his deficiencies.
He looked over at the flyguards monkeying around with the parts. The kids who had assembled and welded her together weren’t exactly trained engineers. Still, it should work. Collies were legendary in their sturdiness and ease of maintenance, their modular nature allowing their parts to be easily assembled and replaced. What’s the worst that could go wrong? James chose not to answer that question.
He felt a presence behind him, and a pair of arms wrapped around his waist. A soft body pressed against his back, and a head burrowed forward from under his armpit. Elise’s familiar scent filled his nostrils, and the nagging anxiety he always felt when she wasn’t close by faded. He leaned his head down and kissed her.
Grace Priestly, the High Scion of the Technology Isolationists, appeared on the other side of him. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “The scouts said you spared those ChronoCom monitors. Why? They won’t grow a conscience just because you are merciful.”
James grunted. “Mercy has nothing to do with it. I know the agency. They aren’t enthusiastic about wasting resources on this operation. They’re sending their worst units: old and green monitors and low-tiered chronmen. If we start killing them en masse, Director Young will have a change of heart and start sending better-trained troops, then we’ll really have no chance. Remember, winning for the Elfreth isn’t defeating the Co-op. That’s not possible. The only way we’ll all come out of this alive is if we outlast them. They need to tire of searching for us. And we need to do this with as few casualties to the ChronoCom forces as possible.”
“And Valta?” Grace asked.
“To hell with them,” said James. “Those we kill as many as possible.”
There was a loud clatter, and the three of them turned their attention back to the collie, where the flyguards were moving the stolen parts over for assembly to the Frankenstein. Chawr cursed at the crew as they powered up a laser welder to install the final pieces. Grace winced at the sloppy measurements the tribesmen made as they prepared to cut.
“You’re really flying into space in that death trap?” Elise asked.
“Sometimes, pet,” Grace added, “your bravery and stupidity still amaze me.”
James moved his arms around both their shoulders and squeezed. “I’ve done dumber things before. Not much, but dumber.” He turned to his left and looked at Grace. “As soon as we get the module installed and tested out, you’re coming with me.”
“If my life is going to depend on this contraption,” said Grace. “I’d better tell these fools how to do the work properly.” She grumbled something about how the dead and the stupid went hand in hand and hobbled toward the flyguards.
When he had first brought the Mother of Time to the present, she was already one of the greatest physicists to have ever lived. Within the short time she had spent here, she had also become a biologist to match Elise, as well as a master engineer. When Grace found out what he was trying to do, she personally took over construction of the collie and made sure this hodgepodge of dead ship parts would actually get them where they were trying to go. That was the real reason James had some semblance of confidence in the mutant collie. However, it was obvious Grace couldn’t care less about aesthetics. The Frankenstein was downright ugly.
James watched them work for a few minutes longer before he and Elise left for the Elfreth’s main living quarters. The evening meal was just beginning, and the lines for the children and the elderly were forming all the way out of the room and into the hallway. There were several calls of “Oldest” as they passed, and even a few “Elder” for James.
He fought the urge to ask her to skip eating in the public hall and spend some time alone. He was leaving tonight. Who knew when or if he would ever return. However, James also knew better. Elise was taking her new role as Oldest of the Elfreth very seriously, especially now that their numbers had swelled and morale was low.
The tribe needed their leader among them. He stayed silent, but kept at her side as she walked among the people—her people now—stopping by each group to exchange words of encouragement and comfort. He was amazed at how she remembered everyone’s name, and how she was able to relate to each person as if they were close friends. Mostly, she just listened supportively as they voiced their concerns and fears.
That daily routine took up most of the night, and she was always the last to eat and exhausted by the time they had finished making the rounds and sat
down. He held her tightly as she closed her eyes and took a few moments to compose herself.
“I don’t know how long I can keep lying to them,” she said, her voice soft. “I keep telling them everything’s going to be all right, but I know it’s not.”
“It will be,” he said, though he didn’t quite believe it himself. “Look, maybe I shouldn’t go.”
She shook her head. “We’ve gone over this. You know you have to.”
“Maybe I can delay the trip. We’re barely staying one step ahead of the Co-op as it is. If they find you and I’m not here—”
She cut him off. “It won’t make any difference, James. If they find us, we’re all dead anyway, whether you’re here or not.” She caressed his face. “We’ll be fine. Just get what we need and return safely.”
He shook his head. “It’s not a good time.”
“It’ll never be a good time. Besides…” Her voice softened as a small figure ran up to them. “There’s more at stake.”
“James!” Sasha bounced up to them and threw her arms around his neck.
His little sister leaned to the other side and gave Elise a peck on the cheek. She didn’t like kissing him because of his beard. It made her itchy, she said. He was all right with that. Her overly enthusiastic hugs were a fine consolation.
The fact that his sister was alive again was a miracle. She was still a child, ten years old now, but alive. He had stolen her away from Mnemosyne Station after the battle at the Farming Towers. It was the last jump he had made, possibly the last he’d ever make. That was perfectly fine by him. Sasha was the one thing in his life that made him proud to have walked the path of a chronman. However, in saving her from death, he might have subjected her to a worse fate.
Sasha coughed and wiped her mouth. She was getting sicker and sicker. Within days of arriving in Boston, his young and frail sister became ill. Unlike Elise, who had a healthy immune system from a lifetime on Earth, Sasha had spent her entire life in artificial environments, and her body wasn’t prepared for Earth’s toxicity.
