by Gene P. Abel
Claire’s face bloomed like a dawning sunrise as, with shaking hand, she timidly took the folder, the gratitude welling up in her eyes, to which the general immediately raised a hand before her.
“No hugs. I’ll take that look as thanks enough.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” Claire replied.
“Just memorize everything as soon as you can, Miss Hill.”
“I will. Oh, I . . . But if I may ask . . . What’s a Social Security card?”
The question took everyone off guard and had Samantha breaking out into a grin.
“I’ll explain it to her,” Ben offered.
“You do that,” the general said a little gruffly. “Now, I believe everyone has some place to be.”
“Miss Weiss . . . ,” Agent Hessman began.
“Just call me Samantha.”
“Samantha, if you will allow me to escort you to your lab, then.”
“General, sir.” It was a technician at one of the stations immediately behind the general; he was sporting an earpiece, and the monitor before him was displaying a fresh message. “We just got word from Medical. Agent Harris is awake.”
“Sue!” Claire exclaimed.
She was the first to hurry out, with Ben fast on her heels along with Captain Beck, and Sam hobbling along behind them.
“Hey, wait up. I’m a cripple, remember.”
Agent Hessman turned quickly to Samantha, but before he could say anything, she spoke first.
“I can find my way to my lab; you go see your friend.”
A quick nod of gratitude and Agent Hessman was off to join the others. General Karlson would soon follow at a far more dignified pace.
5
Harris Awakens
The little room adjoining the nurses’ station was soon packed with a small crowd of people rushing to get in. Claire and Ben arrived in the lead to see a nurse tending to a groggy Agent Harris, while behind them came Agent Hessman, Captain Beck, then Dr. Weiss using his cane to clear himself a way through. All of them wanted to crowd in around the bed, but the nursing staff had other ideas. Even when General Karlson himself finally came up, they would allow no more than Claire and Ben to enter; the rest would have to wait just outside, though with a clear view as the attending nurse worked the controls of the bed to move Agent Harris up into a close approximation of a sitting position.
“Sue, you’re back with us!” Claire exclaimed.
Claire looked as if she were ready to crush Agent Harris beneath the weight of her eager welcome, but a look from the attending nurse and she relented with a light touch to her shoulders, to which Agent Harris replied with a very slow nod and weak smile.
“First question: What century is this?” Agent Harris asked slowly between breaths.
The others out in the hallway broke into relieved chuckles, though Agent Hessman kept a steady eye on every detail of Sue’s appearance and apparent health.
“We’re back in the present,” Ben assured her. “The mission was a complete success, though we lost Phelps.”
Sue bowed her head briefly at mention of Phelps, then looked back up to Claire. “I’m glad the mission worked out. But if I may ask, and don’t take this the wrong way,” she said slowly, “but what are you doing here?”
More smirks circulated the small crowd, not the least of which was from Claire as she answered the question.
“Ben brought me forward, then had the doctors fix me of my pneumonia. He saved my life.”
Agent Harris noted how Claire looked up with such loving eyes to Ben by her side, and managed a weak chuckle.
“That’s what I get for being unconscious for . . . How long have I been out, anyway?”
Before anyone could say anything, Claire simply brought up her hand with the ring and showed it to Sue with a wide grin on her face.
“That long,” Sue replied. “Well, that’s all I need to know for now. Congratulations.”
“I want you to be my maid of honor,” Claire announced. “Would you please?”
“I’d have drop-kicked anyone else that you would have asked.” Sue weakly grinned. “Just as soon as I can hobble out of here.”
“Hey,” Dr. Weiss called in, “maybe we can have matching canes.”
“Sam?” Sue said, looking up. “How’d you get up and around before me?”
“I didn’t come riding in attached to a bomb.” Dr. Weiss grinned.
“Oh yeah, I knew there was something unpleasant I’d been through. Looks like the rest of you made it. Sorry about Phelps, though.”
“I’m glad you pulled through, Sue,” Claire said. “I don’t have too many friends in this century, after all.”
To Ben’s exaggerated throat-clearing, Claire glared in his direction. “You’re my lover and betrothed, so that doesn’t count,” she said.
Sue chuckled at the remark, or rather tried to and ended up wincing briefly. That was when the attending nurse intervened.
“Okay, everybody out; generals too. Agent Harris needs to rest now.”
“Some of us have some duties to get to anyway,” Agent Hessman put in. “Welcome back, Agent Harris.”
A chorus of well-wishes hit Agent Harris as the nurse shooed everyone away from the small room, then drew the partition across into place, cutting off view from the others.
Claire sighed. “Well, at least I can sleep better knowing she’s going to be okay.”
“I thought there was another reason why we weren’t sleeping much,” Ben quipped—a comment which earned him a light punch in the arm by Claire, while General Karlson called everyone back to order.
“Okay, everyone, back to your duty stations. Hessman, I want more on those Russians as soon as you can.”
6
Kidnapping
While everyone else was visiting a recovering Agent Harris, Samantha was tracking down her new lab. She walked down the nearest corridor and found a terminal mounted on the wall. No keyboard, just a simple touchscreen displaying a map of the base.
“Hmm,” she muttered to herself, “I wonder if this thing is voice activated. Uh, Dr. Samantha Weiss. I’m looking for my lab and how to get there.”
Immediately the map changed, first indicating her current location with a large red dot, then expanding while a red line ran through the maze of displayed hallways until it reached a destination and another dot lit up. Everything else on the map then grayed out save the suggested route to her lab.
“Nice.”
She studied the map for a few moments, then tapped the screen, with a quick “Thank you,” whereupon the display returned to the general map display it had been before.
Samantha started walking again, this time making a right at the first intersection of corridors she came to, per the instructions from the display. Along the way she passed two lab-coated scientists engaged in their own discussion, one soldier who gave her a polite nod in passing, and a confused-looking technician reading the labels of the doors he passed, hoping to find the right one.
When the hallway ended at another hall perpendicular to hers, one wall of which sported an elevator, she went straight to the elevator, took out her ID card, and flashed it before the sensor. A moment later the doors opened and she was inside looking at a short panel of buttons. She pressed one of them, the doors closed, and she began to descend.
“I’ll admit, Lou’s kinda cute,” she said to herself. “And smart. I like a man with a brain. I wonder if he likes women with IQs of one hundred fifty.”
One level down the elevator came to a stop, the doors opened, and she was once again out in a fresh intersection. A glance up at the hallway labels to be certain and she took the direction ahead of her. The sign read, “L4.” A short walk later she was standing before a sliding security door with a sensor next to it. A sign above the door simply read, “Temporal Physics–4.
”
“This must be the place.”
A flash of her badge across the sensor opened the door. She then stepped inside for a look at the new lab, the door easing shut behind her.
The room was festooned with lab benches and computer stations. The far right wall supported a couple of man-sized pieces of experimental equipment whose function might be known solely to herself and the other lab techs, while the left wall was adorned with a thick glass window that looked out over a large testing chamber. Fifty feet across to the other side of the room was an open passage into what she assumed to be the break room. The room was silent, the only sound being the occasional beep from one of the terminals.
She walked in, looking around for any sign of life, and called out, “Hello? I’m doctor Samantha Weiss, but you can call me Sam.” They must be in the break room.
She crossed the room, passing by one of the benches along the way, on which one of the terminals was blinking “Password Correct, Press to Continue.”
“That’s odd,” she muttered. “That could be a security breach, just walking away from an open terminal like that.”
For the moment she shrugged it off and kept walking, but once past the bench she saw something on the floor that caught her more suspicious glare: a spilled mug of juice, its contents pooling on the floor.
She immediately cast her gaze about, knees bending in a slight crouch. Carefully bending down, she picked up the mug. Then, holding it like a weapon, she rose back up and more carefully approached the break room, this time not saying a word, her steps silent.
The break room had no door, just an open partition in which she paused. She didn’t go in, but rather stepped first to the left side for a better angle, then the right. From the right she could see a couple of chairs, part of a table with a microwave and coffeemaker, and two sets of legs lying on the floor.
She backed one slow step away, turned very deliberately, then, eyeing her course, bolted into a run. She was halfway across the lab when she saw what looked like a roughly man-sized shimmering appear before the door. She immediately stopped.
“I think I’ve seen this movie.”
Taking the mug, she hurled it as hard as she could at the shimmering outline as she broke again into a run. The mug bounced off the air a couple of feet from the door, accompanied by a curse in a deep male voice, but the shimmering outline remained in place.
A few yards away from the door and the suspicious glimmering, and without warning, Samantha suddenly dropped to the floor on all fours, her back arched. Just as expected, she felt a moving weight slam into her side, letting out another male cry, as the invisible figure launched over her and into the one by the door, where it, too, briefly glimmered as the pair made contact.
“That’s what I thought,” she muttered as she leaped back up to her feet.
Wasting not a second, she swung around, grabbed the keyboard before the screen with the blinking cursor, then nearly pole-vaulted over to the other side, spilling papers and equipment along the way. Landing on her feet, she immediately began swinging the keyboard around like a weapon.
“I can’t see you, but I’m guessing you’re the same bunch that attacked us at Los Alamos. They had a way of vanishing before our eyes too.”
A slight noise directed her attention, and spinning around, she swung the keyboard hard just in time to intercept something whizzing through the air. Something like a bullet hit the keyboard, projecting an electric charge into it that earned a burnt electric odor from within it.
She couldn’t see where it had come from, but she could judge trajectories pretty well and immediately hurled the keyboard straight ahead of her. A few feet away it bounced off the air, earning a glittering display of light around a man-shaped figure. Samantha immediately charged forward, one fist flying, her other hand clawing across what she judged to be about head level. Her fist met hard flesh, while her open hand caught on to cloth, then yanked.
A hood tore loose, revealing the head of a man now seemingly afloat in the air. Samantha emitted a reflexive gasp and leaped back, her eyes darting from him to where the shimmering outlines by the door might now be.
“I guess that explains how you got in here in the first place, but what are you after? And why did you kill those two techs?”
She backed up against a table, one hand reaching back to brace herself and landing discreetly on a terminal keyboard.
“No one dead,” the one before her said in a thick Russian accent. “We don’t want to harm you.”
Behind her back her fingers started working the keys, but before she could even begin stalling for time, another electrified bullet hit the keyboard, sending sparks flying and a startled Samantha leaping quickly away. This was followed by a third round hitting her in the neck from behind, the bullet, which now looked like a dart, sending her body into brief convulsions before she dropped limply to the floor, the man’s hood dropping from her grip.
One of the shimmering figures that had been behind her now reached out a hand past the cloaking of invisibility and into full view. A hand holding a small round object that the figure reached down to place on the unconscious woman’s chest. It looked like little more than a disk with a single large red button in its center, which the hand now pressed before quickly drawing back.
A shimmering of a different sort now enveloped Samantha’s limp form. Rainbow lights outlined her more brightly by the instant, then were gone in an abrupt flash—along with Samantha herself.
The floating head muttered something in Russian, one of the other unseen figures responding with a chuckle; then he retrieved his hood from where Samantha had dropped it and put it back on, once again becoming for the most part unseen. A moment later the three shimmering figures were surrounded in their own auras of rainbow lights. A flash, then nothing remained behind.
Nothing save a pair of unconscious techs and signs of a struggle, including one fried keyboard with a strange bullet embedded in it.
7
Vanished
The clocks read 8:30 p.m. when the alarm went off across the base. Soldiers hurried to their duty stations. Ben and Claire looked briefly confused before Ben decided to lead the way quickly back to the command center, passing up a hobbling Dr. Weiss along the way, while Agent Hessman was already running down the final stretch into the command center, an earpiece in his ear via which he was calling out orders to other personnel.
“Sam,” Ben asked as they approached, “what’s going on?”
“I have no idea,” the man replied. “Go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”
“Here, allow me.”
Hurrying up behind them came Captain Beck. He took Dr. Weiss by one arm and nodded to the other pair. “I’m old and slow anyway,” he remarked. “You two see what’s going on.”
So, while Ben and Claire hurried on, Captain Beck did his best to bring up Dr. Weiss’s pace.
When the first pair burst into the command center, they saw Agent Hessman directing something from one of the terminals on the central command platform, while General Karlson was issuing his own orders.
“Lock down the entire base,” the general was saying as they came in. “Not so much as a mouse gets in or out.”
As Ben and Claire approached, still confused, they could hear Agent Hessman’s commands to his security teams via his terminal and earpiece.
“Last known location was her lab. I want it searched, as well as all adjoining corridors. Call up security footage from both the lab and attached halls. Heck, call it up for any adjacent areas whether they have access into that lab or not. I’m not discounting the possibility that these people can burrow through walls at this point.”
Claire was first to voice the question as their steps brought her and Ben to a stop at the edge of the platform: “What’s going on?”
Agent Hessman spun up to his feet; then seeing Captain Beck and Dr. Weiss jus
t entering at the back, he gave a look to the general. General Karlson replied with a nod, to which Agent Hessman began his brief report.
“Samantha’s location chip just went off-line. No sign of it anywhere.”
“My niece,” Dr. Weiss gasped, his hobble increasing in pace, “what’s happened to her? Has she been hurt? Oh my God.”
“Samantha,” Claire gasped.
“As close as I can figure, she hasn’t died,” Agent Hessman reported. “The chips are designed to give off a different signal if the person has died. And if the chip itself were somehow damaged, there would have been a sign of impending failure in the signal, however brief that might’ve been. For both cases we have nothing.”
“Nothing?” Dr. Weiss said as he stumbled onto the command platform with Captain Beck’s help. “But how can you have nothing?”
“I’m saying that there is no trace of it anywhere. The signal simply stopped. Her lab and room are being searched, but so far we have— Hold on.”
He tapped a finger to his earpiece to listen, while even the general waited to hear the result.
“Okay,” Agent Hessman said into the air, “keep up the search and lock everything down. Guards at every intersection.”
Removing his finger from his earpiece, he turned to face the general. Dr. Weiss of course displayed the worried concern of a doting uncle, but behind Agent Hessman’s professional exterior Claire could see another concerned look, though not because of any familial relationship.
“Well?” the general snapped. “Who was it, and how’d they get into my base?”
“Samantha’s two techs were found unconscious in their lab break-room,” Agent Hessman reported. “There are signs of a struggle, in which my team also found two bullets.”
“Sam!” Dr. Weiss gasped.
