by Trisha Telep
“Get down!” The noah shoved Eve and the girls to the floor just as a second blast took out the spot where they’d been standing. The noah hit the ground in a roll and came up firing. His laser enveloped the last Ghost, vaporized it in an instant.
The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of sparking wires and Misha’s muffled weeping. The noah stood up and began a final sweep of the room. Eve and the girls started to follow, but when Eve caught sight of a bloody femur stripped of flesh lying on the floor where the Ghosts had been congregated, she gasped and grabbed the girls, holding them against her body so they could not see.
“Noah . . . is that . . . is it . . . ?”
He rounded the corner. She heard him take a deep breath, and knew what he’d found.
“No.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, no. No.”
“I’m sorry, Eve.” He pointed his weapon and fired one last time, vaporizing the remains of her oldest sisters. Then he returned to gather them all into his arms. “I’m so sorry.” And he held them all until their tears were spent, then gently guided them out of the ruins of their home into the rover, and drove them back to his ship.
Once he closed the door and re-established a breathable atmosphere inside the vessel, Eve helped the girls out of their biosuits and tucked them into the noah’s berth, staying with them until their tears ran dry and exhaustion dragged them into sleep.
She walked back to the front of the ship. The noah had tidied the worst of the mess and was standing with his palms flat against the walls of the ship. Glowing light flowed from his palms and tracked along the walls, and as she watched, the damaged surfaces began to repair themselves.
He took his hands from the wall and turned to hold out his arms. She went to him without hesitation, surrendered herself to his embrace, and let her tears flow.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered when the storm of grief finally passed. “Homebase is destroyed, and without it, we can’t stay here.”
“No, we can’t stay here, but I know a place where we can go.” He stroked her hair, kissed her tear-dampened face, and held her tight. “If you are willing, Eve, I will be a noah – your noah – one last time.”
“The girls and I have decided on a name for you.” Eve cast a teasing smile at the beautiful, golden-haired man sitting in the pilot seat of the noah’s spacecraft. The wide vidscreen before them showed the video feed from the ship’s cameras as they descended to the lush, green-and-blue planet the noah had said would suit them as their new home.
Two weeks had passed since the destruction of Homebase and the deaths of Nonna and Dre. Although sadness for their lost loved ones still frequently overwhelmed Eve and her sisters by surprise, resulting in sudden bouts of weeping, they were finally beginning to laugh again. The resilience of the human spirit was fighting back against despair.
“Oh?” the noah asked. He arched a brow, magnificent blue eyes twinkling. “I thought you’d already settled on Euphie.”
“That was just for fun, silly,” Misha chided, her grin so wide Eve wondered why it didn’t split her cheeks.
“We chose an Old Tongue name for you,” Eve said.
“Yeah, you’re always saying how you’re done being a noah and are ready to be just a man,” Shar added. “So that’s the named we picked for you.”
“Adam,” Eve said. “It’s the Old Tongue word for man.”
“Adam.” He rolled it around experimentally on his tongue, then nodded. “I like it. Very well, Adam it is.” He leaned over to plant a lingering kiss on Eve’s lips.
With a quiet hiss, the landing gear deployed and the spacecraft lowered itself gently to the ground. Adam punched a few lights on the command console, and the side door opened with a slow whoosh.
“Eve, Shar, Misha, welcome to your new home.” Adam held out an arm, escorting the three out of the ship and onto the sweetly fragrant grass that grew in abundance beneath the magnificent branches of the forest trees. “I call it Eden.”
Written in Ink
Susan Sizemore
“I wasn’t in a post-apocalyptic mood when I got up this morning.”
“Too bad, cause that’s where you’re going today.”
“I knew that when I was issued this charming outfit of jeans and hoodie as my ensemble.” Frannie settled into the TC and got comfortable before she looked back at her controller. “Why the Ruin Times?”
“You’re supposed to ask ‘where’, which often gives a clue to ‘why’. Even better, you’re supposed to sink into the mission file.”
“If I do the homework all by myself there’ll be no reason for you to have a job.”
“You are not as amusing as you think you are, Lady of the Elite.”
Frannie frowned at the use of the title, as the controller knew she would. She might be an Elite, but she worked for a living. She could see her reflection in one of the TC’s blank screens and knew she certainly didn’t look like an Elite. Physical perfection attracted too much attention in the places where she spent most of her time. She had brown hair and brown eyes and skin tone, and features that were altered slightly depending on where and when she went. Today she just looked like herself.
She didn’t need physical disguises for a visit to the grungy, grubby, post-apocalyptic past where nobody wanted to live, let alone go.
Frannie sighed. She punched the file into her wrist implant, closed her eyes and got on with finding out the specs of the mission.
Oh, Lordy, it looked like the Starshine Group was at it again. Someone was supposed to get killed. It had to happen. She needed to stop an attempt to stop the death while at the same time observing – the records didn’t really say much more than that this death ended the beginnings of a proscribed movement. Proscribed meant that the scholars had decided that this was one of the points in time that absolutely couldn’t be fiddled with.
So, she was off to save the future of the present.
She liked the jobs where she just went back into the past and observed. Bringing back accurate data was a proper job for a historian such as herself. She liked keeping her scholar happy enough to keep getting her choice assignments. She didn’t think of herself as an actionwoman sort of special agent to the ages. But the Starshine hippie idiots had infiltrated the Historical Search Project a few years back, stolen highly classified technology and were now making sporadic and totally stupid idealistic efforts to change the past in order to make the present into the world they wanted to live in.
Frannie was of the opinion that attempting to save the world was a fine ambition, but – it was all so much more complicated than that. And ethically and morally really weird. She herself had actually saved Hitler’s life on one of her assignments to stop the Starshiners, and she still felt like a traitor to all humanity for making that necessary choice. Saving the world was a dirty job. She hated it when her bosses picked her out of the time-travelers pool to do it.
“It’s not right to try to change history,” she said after she’d finished absorbing the assignment. Unless history was coming at you with a big ole sword.
“That’s easy for an Elite to believe,” her controller answered.
Frannie glared at the cyborg she’d worked with for years. “Are you developing Starshiner sympathies?”
“Going to turn me in if I am?”
“Turn you in to who?” she asked. “We live in a perfect world, where all opinions are respected, if not sanctioned.”
The controller snorted, which was an odd sound coming from a voice synthesizer. “Ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“Comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t be for long.”
How well she knew that. “Make it a go,” she said.
Riding time was not a pleasant way to spend the morning. Or any other increment of one’s lifespan. But if you wanted to go from now to then you learned to put up with the suffering. No one said you had to suffer in silence, though.
Frannie screamed t
he whole ride down the timestream. She was still screaming when the bright blinding lights faded back down to normal. She began swearing as soon as she was finished screaming. She didn’t open her eyes until the flow of words ran out. She wondered if her reaction to the wrench of the change was as professional as her HRP colleagues’ as she looked around. She suspected she was more ladylike.
She was not surprised to find she was sitting on a filthy mattress in a filthy room where a filthy rat sat in a corner boldly looking back at her. Then again, perhaps the rat wasn’t filthy. Its dark fur looked rather shiny and healthy. That couldn’t be said for the watery gray light outside the dirty window. At least there was glass in the window to be dirty. Bullets, rocks, bodies, all sorts of things destroyed the most fragile signs of civilization in this corner of time. She could hear gunfire in the distance. And close by. Firefights were a fact of life back here.
She got up to see how far her grungy arrival point was above the city street, careful not to stand directly in front of the window as she looked out upon the blasted world her ancestors roamed in well-armed bands. Well, not her ancestors. Hers had managed to save themselves from all the dystopic anarchy going on below. At least eight floors below, where she had a bird’s-eye view of two groups of ragged people firing guns at each other from the flimsy cover of rusted cars and piles of garbage. There was no mistaking the rattling fire or banana-shaped bullet clips of the Kalashnikovs most of the fighters were using. Typical for the time.
She didn’t give the skirmish below much thought, because after a moment a metal structure in the distance caught her attention. The sight caught her like a blow to the gut.
“Oh, no. This is not good.”
She knew when she was, but this wasn’t the right where.
The Eiffel Tower was so not in New York. It had been in Las Vegas at one point in the past, but that had been a much smaller replica of the one she could see outside the unbroken window. Her internal sensors hadn’t completely adjusted yet, or alarms would be going off. She clicked all her orientation implants but the chrono to neutral to avoid the coming hysterical buzzing in her head. She could manage to be hysterical all on her own, but she only allowed herself a few seconds to pound through that reaction. Her clock told her she’d arrived four days ahead of schedule. The time differential was within the mission window and perfectly normal. Precise downtime landings were something that happened in ficvids. Reality was so much messier and harder to predict; a little wiggle room was actually a good thing.
She immediately had suspicions about what had gone wrong, but the important thing wasn’t to place blame but to correct the huge mistake that had left her in the wrong town.
“I’m under a bit of a time constraint here, so how do I get out of here without getting shot?”
The rat tilted its head, as if it were actually considering her question, then it jumped up on the windowsill. Frannie took a cautious look outside, and as she did the rattling firing of the AK-47s abruptly halted.
It took her a moment to spot the lone man standing in the no-man’s-land between the warring groups. He was dressed in a long black leather drovers’ coat, and thick hair as black as the leather hung in a braid down his back. He was imposingly tall and broad-shouldered, but didn’t appear to be armed. She couldn’t understand why no one was trying to kill him, or why both armed groups dispersed at his gesture, but Frannie was delighted that she seemed suddenly to have a chance at safe passage. At least out of this Paris neighborhood.
“Paris,” she grumbled as she moved to check the contents of the pack of equipment that had arrived down the timestream a few seconds after her.
The silence in the street continued, so Frannie took the time to make a thorough check of her supplies. She had a long way to go and wasn’t sure how she was going to get there. She considered activating the recall implant, but that would be wimpy. Time agents who ran home to hide in under three days on a tough assignment were mercilessly teased by their peers, and could look forward to a future of being given the most boring trips into the past. She might be in dangerous territory, but she was giving herself the traditional seventy-two hours to make things right.
She was more interested in the defense cache she found than the packets of food and survival gear. She had her own implants for any computer assistance she might need. Her weapons consisted of the standard-issue stun gun with extra charges, and other small, non-lethal defenses she was glad to find. She was downright delighted to discover that her controller had thoughtfully added her own non-standard-issue, completely contraband and potentially lethal 9mm Glock handgun, ammo and knife to her supplies. These were ever so much more helpful accessories in the sorts of situations her journeys threw her into.
The first rule of time-traveling was that YOU DON’T KILL ANYONE down the timestream. You were allowed to defend yourself, but had to be willing to die to preserve the past. It was a fine, idealistic rule, and every time-agent obeyed it for at least the first few years on the job. After watching a colleague get torn to shreds in a Roman arena or being the only member of a team to escape a medieval mob, or appearing in the middle of a battle instead of an observable distance away, your attitude changed. You tried hard not to do any harm, but when it came down to killing your potential grandpa or letting the smelly barbarian that might be important to history take your head off with his axe, you made sure to be the one to shoot or stab first – to do whatever you had to do to stay alive. Travelers and controllers didn’t discuss unauthorized additions to packs, but the travelers’ “personal property” tended mysteriously to come along for the ride. And most of the scholars just wanted the data, no questions asked.
Frannie repacked her supplies, and made sure to conceal all of her weapons. Just as she finished, a deep voice spoke behind her.
“How did you get in here?”
As she whirled around to face him her translator told her that the man spoke almost unaccented French, but was not a native speaker, and suggested she reply in the English of the era.
She opened her mouth to answer as she faced him, but ended up staring for a moment. “You’re the one who stopped the battle!” At least the words that burst out of her were the suggested language.
He looked past her shoulder out the window. “Hardly a battle.”
She noted that he had remarkably blue eyes. A long scar marked his left cheek, but it didn’t mar his striking good looks.
“But how’d you do it? Why didn’t they kill you?”
“If they kill me who will they have to read for them? Who’d write their letters for them, and make sure they get delivered?”
“You’re a mailman?”
He nodded. “Archivist. Librarian. Living memory. Who the hell are you?” he added.
But before she could answer he was across the room. This reminded her that the mailmen had started their lives as a military genetic-engineering experiment. They’d been enhanced super-soldiers who had rebelled against their creators. And won. They were too damn smart to sacrifice their super-bodies and intellects in the endless conflicts of this time. As civilization and communication broke down they found a peaceful and profitable purpose for their exceptional skills.
He grabbed her right arm and pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to examine the inside of her wrist. “Elect,” he said. His tone was scornful, but his touch was surprisingly stimulating as he ran his thumb across the skin surrounding the small implant plug.
“Elite,” she blurted out. “That old Elect term is so—”
“Evil? Selfish? Morally repugnant?” His blue eyes glittered with anger.
She didn’t scare easily, no matter how big and hostile he was.
“I was going to say old-fashioned. We saved civilization,” she added.
“It’s taking you long enough.”
At least he hadn’t picked up on her use of the wrong tense. Even as she justified her ancestors’ actions a sane part of her that was not viscerally reacting to this stranger’s touch wa
s swearing at her for completely forgetting years of training and behavior. Speaking the truth to a downtimer could be more dangerous than killing one.
But this wasn’t any ordinary local, was it?
Frannie calculated her options and came to a decision that wasn’t going to be easy to explain on her report, justifiable though she judged it to be. “I need to get to New York,” she told the mailman. “I want to hire you to get me there.”
“I don’t deliver people,” he answered.
She sensed that this wasn’t an outright refusal, but the opening of a negotiation.
“I’m not interested in working for anyone who broke into my place to get my help,” he went on. “What are you doing out of your hole, anyway?”
“Observing,” she answered.
“You people have your own routes and roads.”
“I don’t. I’m lost.”
She wondered if her controller had dumped her here for that exact reason. Maybe there hadn’t been a glitch in the machinery, but roundabout was the only way to get her to her assignment. Another possibility was that this was somehow part of another Starshiner plot. And maybe she was being paranoid, because why would anyone get her involved in an operation that it would be her duty to stop?
She showed him her implant plug. “You deal in information exchange. I have lots of information to trade.”
His expression remained stony. “Why do you need help to travel?”
She laughed and gestured toward the window. “It’s not like there’s any public transportation available. There are no scheduled flights, no trains running, not a lot of gas for cars.”
“And there are scavengers and wolfsheads every step of the way,” he added. Even a sneer didn’t look bad on his handsome face. “There are guides you can hire. Armed guards are available for rent.”
She laughed again. “You know the safe routes. You’re left alone.” She knew the history of this period as well as anyone could. “Most mercs sell out their clients the second things get dicey on the road. Coyotes treat the refugees they move through borders like animals. Those who try to travel on their own get killed or trafficked. I have no intention of getting killed, squashed into a cargo container without food or water with a thousand other people, or dead. I’m going with you.”
