Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  The last one was never voiced aloud, but Imogen knew it for what it was. They’d been to third-century BC Egypt three times, and it wasn’t a coincidence that was the last date and location stamped into the Ab Aeterno’s official Corps logs.

  “Somewhere nice,” she went on. “Somewhere fun.”

  Gram looked over his shoulder. His dark eyes widened, urging her on. She was hardly the only crew member who wanted a vacation. It was easy to get cabin fever in a ship as small as the Invictus.

  What looked like some hulking, iridescent snow dragon from the outside was actually… not as big on the inside. Their TM was stuffed to the brim with stuff. The bow held workstations: Imogen’s database and the blank-faced dummy she coordinated Farway’s mission outfits on; Gram’s U-shaped console, where the Engineer ran numbers and systems checks before weaving them through the Grid; Farway’s captain’s chair—facing his wall of accomplishments, the vistaport above—though he hardly ever used it. Priya’s infirmary was port side, attached to the engine room. Her time there was spent patching up Farway’s scrapes, keeping the Invictus’s fuel rods from turning them all into radiated fritters, and creating playlists for “team morale.”

  The TM’s starboard was a washroom—smeared with the fluorescent remains of Imogen’s former hair colors—and a small kitchenette, where rations were stored. Most of the cabinets were filled with recycled nutrient meal blocks, which tasted like plastic foam and lasted just as long. Usually the stock stayed untouched, for EMERGENCY—if you’re on your last HANGRY legs and anything within arm’s reach is edible—situations. Nicking fresh ingredients from days-past was a much more popular option.

  The central common area was where they ate meals, sipped tea, watched datastreams, and plotted their next vacation. The space also doubled as a wardrobe. Clothes from all eras hung from the ceiling pipes, long enough to brush the crew’s heads every time they moved from one end of the Invictus to the other. It wasn’t rare to spot Saffron’s tail hanging in the mix. The rest of them bunked at the stern of the ship. Their cabins were stacked in a honeycomb formation, each large enough for a bed and half a crouch. Too tiny to do anything except sleep and snag some alone time.

  There wasn’t much solitude among four souls, one mannequin, and a red attack panda. Something was always happening. A heist, or dinner, or a clandestine snogging session between Farway and Priya, or Gram hitting Tetris’s highest score in record time, or Saffron getting into Imogen’s hair chalks thinking they were treats and staining the floors and pipes with pastel-yellow paw prints for days afterward.

  The Invictus was family, life, home, and despite its cramped quarters Imogen wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unless anything happened to be a nice vacation.

  “We could go mingle with artists in Belle Époque Paris. Or go diving in the Great Barrier Reef.” Imogen realized she was still staring into the Engineer’s eyes. Their darkness had a mesmerizing quality—much like a sustained cello note— flowing into his hair, his skin. Too many beats she’d held his gaze, and now her face was aflame. Such snitches, her cheeks! Blushing at every inopportune moment… “Or Las Vegas before the great drought?”

  “Vegas?” Priya’s voice drifted from the infirmary, along with the syncopated beats of her playlist. “I second Vegas! Poolsides, parties…”

  “Motion denied. For now,” Farway said, loud enough for the whole crew to hear. “We can start thinking about vacations once this job is out of the way.”

  Imogen swiveled her chair 180 degrees in the opposite direction, where Bartleby the mannequin stood, fully clad and faceless. At least she could blush in front of him. Being eyeless and unjudgy and all.

  “You’ve got two outfits. The Invictus will drop you off on the smokestack closest to the first-class promenade, so you’ve got to be a bit snazzed up.” Imogen pointed to the swallowtail coat with a top hat, white waistcoat, and cane, before she unbuttoned the dress shirt. “You’ll be wearing worker clothes underneath, so you can strip down once you leave the first-class section of the ship. Trousers, suspenders, and a button-down I greased up in the Invictus’s engine room. It should get you easy access to the cargo bay.”

  “That’s where the Rubaiyat is being held?” Farway asked.

  “Probably. Problem is there’s no record of where the book was actually stored. All we know is that it’s on the ship.” Imogen brought up the Titanic’s layout on her screen. It reminded her of Gram’s everlasting Tetris game: stacks and stacks of cabins, forced to fit together in block formation. She pointed at the highlighted areas. “The only thing documented in the specie room is opium, so you shouldn’t bother with that. The cargo bay is down here, by the post office. I’ll guide you through the comms. We’ll drop you off at six PM April fourteenth, 1912. Everyone will be preoccupied with dinner and you’ll have hours to look.”

  “Before it sinks.”

  “Yep.”

  Farway sighed. They both knew an earlier landing time wasn’t an option. The entire point of collecting history’s lost treasures was to let history believe they really had been lost. Not stolen.

  “You’ve survived worse,” Imogen reminded him. The wardrobe above the common area was testament to that. Sleeves edged with singe marks, a tricorne sporting a musket-ball-sized hole through one corner, pants pocked with blood from Blard’s cutass. War, pirates, burning buildings, disgruntled gangsters… Farway had faced all these and more with minimal damage. He was pretty hashing lucky for a person who swore off the concept of luck altogether.

  “Any Recorders?” her cousin asked.

  “None that we know of.” Which meant none sent before or during 2371 AD. Future missions might well have landed there. Imogen wouldn’t have been surprised. The sinking of the Titanic was tragic in the most magnetic of ways. A serialized datastream of the event would make billions.

  But it was also a landmark moment, prone to all sorts of interference. Lots of deaths. Lots of lives saved. Lots of press. It was the kind of event the Corps tended to shy away from for fear of altering the future. Lux hurled them into such scenarios without hesitation. It always came down to the same two things: money or fear. Which one was stronger?

  Farway was fearless in a way Imogen simply could not grasp. If she were the one who had to put on that suit and descend into that soon-to-be watery grave, she—she just couldn’t. She was comfortable being a Historian, guiding Farway through the comm, dealing with danger sans bullets and adrenaline.

  Her cousin watched this screen, which would soon be linked to his corneal implant, showing Imogen history through his eye.

  “How close are we to the landing coordinates?” he called out to Gram.

  “Autopilot’s got us ten minutes out. We’ll be ready to jump in fifteen.” Sonatas and cedarwood. That was what Gram’s voice reminded her of.

  Oh hash it all. Her cheeks were going red again. Imogen buried her face into Saffron’s fur to hide it. The red panda chirruped and, instead of being a cooperative muff, hooked around her neck like an old woman’s stole. Gram hadn’t even looked up from the numbers he was running. Imogen didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Maybe both?

  SUCCESSES IN IMOGEN’S LOVE LIFE: 0. BLARGH.

  “Right, then.” Farway grabbed Bartleby by the waist and started dragging the mannequin toward the washroom. “I better get suited up.”

  7

  WHOOPS

  GRAM WRIGHT’S STATION WAS MORE OF a shrine than a console. An homage to blocks and order. There were the usual buttons and screens, the navigation systems vital to any TM worth its stock. And the numbers… there were always the numbers, streaming through his brain at a rate that’d break a lesser genius. Gram’s own gray matter had bandwidth to spare. School was so easy he’d done it twice, cycling through the Academy first as an Engineer, then doubling back for Recorder training. Why contain knowledge to a single degree? Why trap yourself in a tiny box?

  Maybe that was what made Gram so fond of Rubik’s Cubes. Yes, they were boxes—
squares within squares within squares—but they held over forty-three quintillion color combinations. He was the proud owner of six of these toys, all vintage 1980, fresh off the assembly line. They lined his console in solid colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white—the promise of a solution always within reach. A few twists + abstract thoughts = disorder reversed.

  There was nothing Gram loved more than wrapping his mind around chaos, solving it. This was why he’d joined the Invictus. Piloting ships through time was a demanding job, but it was also short-lived. Engineers on a normal CTM often kicked back their feet and watched datastreams during the meat of the mission. Life aboard an illegal time machine was much more free-flowing. Dull moments need not apply. Gram could fire at all cylinders here: helping Priya tweak the engines, running heat scans for Imogen, and, every once in a while, getting off the ship to rescue Far’s tail.

  But the numbers were Gram’s task and Gram’s alone. These tangled equations kept the Invictus on course through the Grid, providing specific landing points down to the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, millisecond. It was a bit like doing a Rubik’s Cube backward—twisting out of the present into a specific pattern of time. The astrophysics was so complicated Gram had to put his Tetris game on pause.

  His score was frozen at 360,000. The Invictus spun through the nothingness that was the Grid. Gram ran through the numbers. Wrenching, twisting, solving, trying to land them on April 14, 1912 AD, 6:00 PM.

  Wrenching, twisting, not-quite-solving, not-quite-solving…

  Though timelessness was all around them, a tangible lack of passage that felt akin to an astronaut’s lack of gravity, Gram had the cutthroat sensation this was taking too long. He stared at the screen, reviewing the equations until their white pixel forms burned into his vision.

  Not-quite-solving…

  An eternity passed, crammed inside a nanosecond, until Gram knew for certain that something was wrong. He couldn’t make the numbers click and fit. Not the way he normally did.

  It didn’t fit. It didn’t fit.

  Why didn’t it fit?

  The equation was unsolvable. Impossibly impossible.

  They couldn’t land.

  Gram tore his eyes from the screen and looked around the Invictus’s console room. It was oddly peaceful. Priya was helping Far smooth out the lapels of his new costume. Imogen was engrossed in her Historian screen. Saffron was draped over her shoulders, his striped tail twitching like an old clock pendulum: tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Except there was nothing to keep time to. Nothing. Nothing. It didn’t fit. They couldn’t land. Couldn’t—

  It was only when Imogen looked up—a burst of green eyes, and then blush—and frowned that Gram tried to silence these thoughts. If he wasn’t careful, the panic would stack on top of itself, block after misplaced block, until it choked him.

  He looked back at the screen’s pale numbers, took a deep breath, and ran through them again. Wrenching, twisting, not-quite-solving…

  One of the numbers changed.

  If Gram hadn’t seen it happen with his own two eyes, he’d never have believed such a thing could occur. Though the physics of time travel was a twisty, turny business, there were rules to it. Sixes didn’t just turn into eights. Numbers in equations couldn’t change, according to the laws of the universe.

  They couldn’t, but they had.

  “Everything okay, Gram?” Imogen asked.

  “Everything’s fine.” It was only when Gram ran through the equations again that he realized he wasn’t lying. The numbers worked! He could thread them through the Invictus’s landing gear, out of the Grid, and straight into April 14, 1912 AD, 6:00 PM. First he had to check that the TM’s holo-shield was on, autoset to mimic the surrounding environment. If it did, anyone looking up at the sky would see exactly that: stars, blue, perhaps a cloud. If not—well, there goes history.

  The shield was in tip-top shape. Gram typed his solution to the equation into the navigation system and pressed Enter. The landing was so seamless that he started wondering if the panic he’d felt in the Grid was somehow a side effect from traveling through an eternal void. Integers didn’t change. They just didn’t.

  Live footage from the Invictus’s hull began streaming through Imogen’s screen. Her frown changed every angle of her face. “Um…”

  “What is it?” Far gripped his cane.

  Imogen looked at Gram instead. “What’s the clock say?”

  “April fourteenth, 1912…” If he were a real Tetris game, he’d be stacked up too high: GAME OVER. As he was, he just sat there, staring at the last few numbers on the clock. The numbers…

  “Why’s it dark out?” Far’s stare bounced from the vistaport to his cousin’s screen. “Where is the hashing Titanic?”

  “Gram,” Imogen said softly, “what’s the rest of the time stamp?”

  The numbers had changed and they’d landed wrong. Off not just by a few seconds or minutes, which would’ve been bad enough, but by hours. Four whole hours.

  “Ten o’clock in the evening,” Gram heard himself say.

  Priya made a small in-the-throat sound. Far straightened, fists choking his gentleman’s cane. Gram couldn’t tell if the O of his friend’s lips meant shock or anger. Probably both. In nearly a year of flights and heists, Gram hadn’t screwed up once. He was convinced he still hadn’t.

  “I—I’ll go check the engines,” Priya volunteered. “Something must have fritzed.”

  Fritzed, yes. Engines? No. The numbers had failed somehow, but Gram knew how crazy that sounded: Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and blame the laws of the universe for this glitch. Not machines or human error.

  “We don’t have to waste fuel on another jump,” Imogen informed them. “There’s still time. The Titanic has an hour and forty minutes before it hits the iceberg. We just have to fly a few knots west. Should only take ten minutes.”

  Far shut his mouth.

  “You didn’t need all that time anyway,” Imogen told her cousin. “You always work better under pressure. We can get the mechanics of this sorted later, after you snatch up the pretty-pretty.”

  “Later.” Far nodded. “Let’s get hauling.”

  A Rubik’s Cube got caught in Gram’s haste to turn back to the nav systems. Fingers to squares to floor. He let it lie between his feet, channeling every ounce of concentration into guiding the Invictus where it needed to be.

  The Invictus hovered just meters above the Titanic: engines silent, elegant V shape melting into the night. If one looked closely enough, one might see the distortion—patterns of stars where stars had no business being—but the few people smattered on the decks below weren’t watching the sky. Their gazes were turned out to sea, or to the windows inside, or to each other. Even the lookouts in the crow’s nest were too busy wishing they had a pair of binoculars to notice the dark figure appear out of nowhere onto the second smokestack’s top rung, balancing a top hat on his head and a cane in his mouth.

  Far wasted no time descending the smokestack’s ladder, because there was no time to waste. It had taken fifteen minutes, not Imogen’s predicted ten, to catch up to the ocean liner, and now there was only T minus one hour and twenty-five minutes until iceberg, panic, doomsday. He wanted to be far away when that shazm hit the fan.

  The rungs were cold enough to burn. Wind from the Titanic’s forward motion lashed Far’s back as he hurried down. By the time he planted two feet on the deck his teeth were chattering, beaver-fast. It was too hashing cold for just a fancy dinner jacket and a workman’s shirt. Imogen should’ve known better, added in a sweater or something.

  She didn’t usually make mistakes. Neither did Gram.

  “I’m on d-d-deck,” he shivered into his comm.

  “I see that,” Imogen replied. “Kind of. The visual’s shaking a lot.”

  Far sucked in a breath. No point in pointing out her wardrobe oversight now. It’d only distract her from the more important task of giving him directions. “Which way?”
>
  “All the cargo rooms are on the orlop deck, which is the second level from the bottom. You have to go through first class. Find the Grand Staircase…. It should be close.”

  Far looked around. The night was clear and moonless, with stars, stars, stars overhead and glassy water in every direction. The Titanic’s boat deck stretched out, its pitch pine planks littered with chaise lounge chairs, edged with too few lifeboats. Imogen was right. The door to the Grand Staircase was close, literally a hop, a skip, and two short ladders away from the smokestack’s base.

  “Got it.” Far ducked under the railing and down the first ladder.

  “Good, good. Now, when you reach the Grand Staircase, you’re going to go down two floors, to B deck. While looking snazzy and dapper and all that. Don’t rush too much. Gentlemen don’t rush.”

  “Why would I rush when I have so much free time?” he muttered.

  Imogen’s don’t be a jerk, Farway sigh fuzzed through the comms. Far ignored it, pushing through the door into the Grand Staircase.

  It was a nice place, for a ship. White tile floors bloomed with black geometric patterns. A vast dome of iron and frosted glass stretched over the stairs, netting the night’s shadows and pouring them into the halls. There were passengers here, chatting despite the late hour; faint conversations weaving beneath the notes of a pianist in the corner.

  Far didn’t look directly at any of these people. Avoiding eye contact was the best way to go unnoticed. He kept a healthy pace to the first landing, where the stairs spilled into a grandiose show of oak carvings. At the center of these sat a very fancy clock, which caused Imogen to ooooooh through the comms and offer one of her Historian tidbits. “The clock’s famous, you know, called Honor and Glory Crowning Time.”