“But won’t the sudden onset of mass vertigo cause problems? Like for people driving cars, or performing surgery?” It would be rush hour somewhere in the modern world when the tide struck. Thousands of people could die because of Mike’s actions to rescue her.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I helped save billions before I saved you. I think God will consider it a fair trade.”
That was all well and good for Mike, but she hadn’t saved anyone. The only notable actions of her life were to first spy on the Americans, and then betray her Stasi colleagues, which had resulted in the imprisonment of dozens of her fellow East Germans. How will I balance the books on my life?
Another even more depressing thought occurred to her. “Won’t there be two of these temporal tides, one from your travel to rescue me in 1988, and another from our trip here to 1832?”
“Yes, but I’m only responsible for the one emanating from 1988. Other time travelers preceded us here, specifically to December 11, 1832. I’ve seen the data logs from those trips. They’re responsible for the second tide’s effects.”
“There are other time travelers here?” she asked, while wondering how they would react to Mike’s trip through time to save her.
“There’s at least a dozen that I know of. Plus there were several trips where things were left for the benefit of the other travelers, probably live seeds and other things you can’t get from an artifact, like frozen livestock sperm. That’s why we have all those seeds in our luggage, by the way. Anyway, hopefully we won’t ever meet the other travelers. They won’t be very happy with me. Starting an unauthorized new temporal tide is a capital offense.”
Anna digested that worrisome bit of information. “But why December 11, 1832?” she asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Mike replied. “It’s the day after the recently reelected President Andrew Jackson issues the Nullification Proclamation. The Belgian Revolution is drawing to a close and Antwerp is about to fall to the French. Charles Darwin is sailing around the southern tip of South America on his historic voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. There are only a few days left in 1832, so something happening in 1833 may be the key. Russia will ban the sale of serfs, Great Britain will abolish slavery, and antislavery societies will be established in New York and Philadelphia, joining one already established in Boston. Russia and Turkey will sign an important mutual defense treaty next year, and Britain will re-establish control of the Falkland Islands. The Nullification Proclamation, British abolition, and the growing anti-slavery movement in the U.S. were some of the earliest forerunners of the American Civil War, so I’m guessing the date has something to do with that war.”
“How do you feel about that?” she asked.
“Doesn’t really matter much. I’ll probably be dead by the time it starts twenty-eight years from now, and I’ll certainly be too old to fight. It could affect your children, though,” he said softly.
My children? Our children? She hadn’t thought about children at all. They’d grow up on a farm in Virginia, safe from the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon, with almost thirty years of peace on the horizon. She could keep them out of the Civil War. Anna smiled to herself. It sounded wonderful.
9 - ANNA & MIKE
Portal Generator: a communications device used to provide the spatial and temporal coordinates of a desired portal location to a time machine. Glossary, An Illustrated History of the Republic, Helen O’Shea, Ed.
Robert’s Farm, Springfield, Virginia, USA, 6:00 pm Thursday, July 24, 1834
The thunderstorm rolling in over the top of the low mountains to the west caught Anna completely by surprise. First she checked to be sure little Jake was safe in his playpen in the trailer’s back bedroom, then she dashed outside into the pouring rain to help Mike. He was already gathering up the livestock and shooing them safely into their various coops and stables. Betty was being particularly ornery, so Anna headed down the hill to help lead the mare into the large barn. She was soaked to the skin within seconds.
Suddenly, all the hairs stood up on her arms, and her hair frizzed out around her head. A moment later came a brilliant flash, followed by a loud bang and a shock wave that knocked Anna off her feet.
Bewildered, she sat up and looked around. Mike was running in her direction from the far side of the corral, pointing wildly at something behind her. She turned and saw the trailer’s front section engulfed in flame.
She jumped up and sprinted uphill toward the trailer, screaming Jake’s name over and over. The trailer had only one door, located about a third of the way back from the front end. The flames were just beginning to lick at the edges of the door. The trailer also had windows in both bedrooms, but those were designed to be operated by someone inside, not someone standing outside.
Ignoring the flames, Anna reached for the door handle. She screamed as she pulled back her scorched hands. Using her apron to shield her hands, she desperately tried the handle again. It wouldn’t budge. Either the force of the blast had somehow thrown the lock, or the heat of the fire had already destroyed the mechanism. Anna kept trying to turn it but her efforts were futile.
Mike arrived and pushed her away, then tried the door himself with gloved hands. He didn’t fare any better than Anna. He looked wildly around and spotted a hoe leaning against a nearby tree. Mike sprinted over to the tree and grabbed the hoe, then ran to the largest window and smashed it. There was a brief intake of air when the window smashed, then a sudden burst of flame that ignited Mike’s clothing. He dropped to the ground. Anna rushed over and rolled him along the muddy ground until the flames were extinguished.
Mike got back to his feet and ran back to the trailer, Anna at his heels. He grabbed the bottom sill of the smashed window and began to hoist himself up. There was a tremendous roar from the front of the trailer, followed by another gout of flame from the window, causing Mike to drop to the ground once again.
Realizing that Jake was lost, they stood together in the rain and watched the trailer burn, weeping. This is our punishment. Our fault. Not Jake’s, ours. This is the devil’s due for starting a new temporal tide. She concluded it was lightning that started the fire, proof enough of a malevolent hand.
Twenty minutes later, the storm had nearly smothered the trailer fire. Mike had sustained superficial burns, but otherwise escaped any serious injury. He’d been dripping wet when the fire started.
“Anna, I need to go get a crowbar from the barn. Promise me you won’t try to go into the trailer until I get back.”
“Ja, okay,” she mumbled over her sobs. Mike came back a few minutes later with the crowbar and a couple of blankets. She barely noticed as he wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, her eyes firmly fixed on the trailer.
Mike took the crowbar and pried the trailer door open, then disappeared inside.
* * *
Mike desperately searched the burned out trailer for Jake, knowing he would find nothing but a charred corpse. After what seemed like hours, but was only minutes, he found the lifeless body under a collapsed ceiling panel. The little boy was burned beyond recognition. Please God, let him have died quickly, he prayed. Knowing that he couldn’t let his mother see him like this, he wrapped the child tightly in a blanket. He hugged the child to his chest and brought him to Anna. Still sobbing, Anna clutched the awful bundle in her arms as he led her into the shelter of the barn. They would have to wait for the storm to pass before burying the little boy.
“Sit down and let me take a look at your hands,” he said gently. She sat, but held tightly onto her dead child. Mike pulled the first aid kit from its niche near the door and opened the lid. Noticing the ash on his hands for the first time, he began to brush it off on his pants. Then he realized that part of the ash was his dead son. And he lost it, collapsing in grief on the dirt floor.
He came back to himself a few minutes later. Anna was still sitting on a hay bale, rocking the child in her arms. He went to the nearest water trough and washed his hands before returning to her side.
>
“Anna, I need to treat your hands.” She wasn’t listening, so he gently pried one hand away from the blanket that concealed Jake’s body, treated it with ointment and wrapped it in a gauze bandage, then repeated the process with the other hand. He gave her a Vicoprofen to ease the pain and calm her down.
They spent the stormy night in the barn, her body curled around her son’s still form, Mike curled around her, like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls. He fell into a troubled sleep, nightmarish images of Jake burning alive filling his dreams.
* * *
Anna tossed and turned, unable to sleep despite the painkiller. Throughout the long night, a plan began to form in her mind. Born of a mother’s desperation, it would break every rule Mike had taught her.
Very early in the morning, she rose to a sitting position and took her beloved child’s body into her arms. She rocked Jake slowly for several minutes, recalling the agony and the exhilaration of his birth, the first time he rolled over on his own, his first words. Then she kissed the top of his head and laid him in the straw next to Mike. She could save him. She would pay any price to do so.
Anna leaned over and gently removed the portal generator from the pocket of Mike’s cargo pants. She quietly descended to the floor of the barn and activated the generator. It took her a few minutes to find the setting she needed, then she pressed a button and a portal opened before her. She stepped through into the past, and the portal snapped shut behind her. It was exactly five-twenty in the morning on Friday, July 25th, 1834, and the world was about to twist off its axis.
* * *
Robert’s Farm, Springfield, Virginia, USA, 7:48 pm, Thursday, July 24, 1834
Overcome by vertigo accompanied by the onset of a pounding headache, Anna staggered around the barn, then sat heavily on the floor. The baby in her lap started screaming. Anna looked down at Jake, momentarily confused.
“Shush, mein Lieber, Mommy’s here.” She pulled the boy against her shoulder, rubbed his back with her heavily bandaged hands.
Mike had gone to see what could be salvaged from the burned trailer. He staggered back down the hill. The baby was still crying softly when Mike reached Anna and Jake.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I just suddenly had the weirdest feeling, and lost my balance. It was probably the Vicoprofen you gave me for my hands.”
“That wasn’t from the drugs. It was a temporal shock. Everyone in the world just felt the same thing. I experienced it once before, when the time travelers from the 22nd Century first came to the year 2020. Someone has jumped back in time again.
“Anna, when you came out to help me when the storm hit, did you leave the bedroom window open and close the bedroom door?”
“I don’t think so. We were running the AC, so I wouldn’t have had the window open, and Jake wasn’t sleeping so I wouldn’t have closed the door. Why?”
Wordlessly, Mike turned and trudged up the hill.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer. Anna watched him go, then turned back into the barn to get some Tylenol for the headache.
Mike returned a half-hour later, looking like he’d seen a ghost.
“What’s wrong,” she asked.
“There’s a body in the trailer.”
“What?” Jake had been the only one in the trailer when she’d left to help Mike with the animals. “Who’s body?”
“Yours,” he said flatly. “Anna, what did you do?”
“How can it possibly be my body? I’m right here!”
“It’s you, alright. Badly burned, but wearing the same clothes. The remains of a portal generator are in one of your pockets.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“It does if you consider the portal generator I found. I think a future version of yourself, an Anna from the future, travelled back in time to close the door and open the window. You wouldn’t have any memory of doing it, just as I didn’t know a future version of myself had saved you in 1988 until I actually did it in 2028.”
“But why would I do that,” she asked.
“Probably for the same reason I snatched you from 1988. To save a life, Jake’s life. I’ll bet that in the original history, before the Anna from the future changed things, Jake died in the fire.”
“Mein Gott. I nearly lost my mind when Jake almost died. Now you’re telling me that he actually did die.” She hugged Jake close and started crying.
“And we have another problem,” Mike continued. “Remember that starting an unauthorized new temporal tide is a capital offense. Who knows how many people died, or will die when the temporal tide passes, because they’re caught unaware by the vertigo? Back in 2020 thousands of people died in traffic accidents alone. I put all that out of my mind when I rescued you from that cell in 1988, and I certainly don’t blame you for doing the same to save Jake. But the temporal shock will have gotten the attention of the other time travelers up in the Republic of Indian Stream. Assuming that is, in fact, where they are.” Newspaper reports of the strange doings in the Republic had convinced Mike that the other time travelers had indeed settled in the tiny nation.
“And in their eyes, what the Anna from the future did was much worse, since you actually interacted with yourself, changing your own reality, which I didn’t do in 1988. That could have more dramatic consequences.” Anna could see the worry in his eyes.
“What do you think they’ll do?” she asked fearfully.
“They can’t ignore this. They’ll come looking for us. They probably know exactly where we are. You need to take Jake,” Mike’s voice broke, “and get as far away from here as you can.”
“You’re coming too,” she exclaimed. “I’m not leaving without you!”
“Yes, you are. They’ll never stop looking for me. If I go with you, they’ll find you and Jake too. I’m an old man. You and Jake have your whole lives ahead of you. If I stay and tell them I made the jump but I was unable to save you from the fire, they’ll believe me. I have a body to show them. And I’ll make sure they never know about Jake.” Mike’s face bore an expression of grim determination.
Anna protested, denied, cried, and finally accepted Mike’s decision. As soon as the storm lifted she would take Jake, as many supplies as their small fishing boat could carry, including the Glock and Uzi, an electric generator salvaged from the trailer, and their remaining gold, and head down the Potomac River. Mike would keep the badly burned portal generator from the future Anna’s body to show the people from the Republic, and Anna would take the functional one that had been in Mike’s pocket. Mike sternly warned her to only use it in a life or death situation.
While Jake slept in a makeshift crib, they made love one last time, more from desperation than passion. Anna wanted to cling to him forever.
“Anna, you can’t wait any longer. They have aircraft in the Republic. You have to go now,” he pleaded. Anna reluctantly rose and got dressed as he did the same. They were both crying.
Mike carried his son down to the river. He waited while Anna climbed into the boat. Once she got the battery-powered electric motor started, he knelt down, placed the child into her waiting arms, and kissed first his son and then his wife for the last time. He undid the boat’s mooring lines while Anna strapped little Jake into a lifejacket and settled him into a little nest she had created in the pile of supplies.
Her eyes filled with tears, and her throat constricted as she turned and waved goodbye. Then she focused on the task at hand and headed the boat out into the dark and turbulent water. She turned back once, but Mike was lost in the darkness.
10 - CORCORAN
Gecko: a JEPS-powered, three-passenger, ten-ton, armored, amphibious combat vehicle. Each Gecko is equipped with an array of reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) gear, including mast-mounted visible and thermal cameras, highly sensitive direction-finding microphones and ground surveillance radar; and communications gear, including AM, FM, and HF radios, and a W
arfighter Information Network (WIN) terminal. The vehicles are armed for self-defense, or conducting raids, with an M-47 programmable 40mm automatic grenade launcher mounted in a Common Remotely Operated Weapon System (CROWS) turret, and a M249 5.56mm squad automatic weapon (SAW) mounted on a pedestal at the commander’s hatch. The vehicle is an up-gunned version of the German-Dutch Fennek RSTA vehicle, adopted by the ISRM. Glossary, An Illustrated History of the Republic, Helen O’Shea, Ed.
Republic of Indian Stream, 7:48 pm, Thursday, July 24, 1834
Corcoran was sitting at the desk in his office at Fort Evergreen when the temporal tide passed. When the severe vertigo was followed by the onset of a pounding headache, he knew immediately that it was a temporal shock, even though he had never experienced one before. His phone buzzed.
“Corcoran, this is Barbara. Did you authorize anyone to make a time jump to the living universe?” Panic filled her voice.
“Damnú,” Corcoran swore in Gaelic. “Can we account for all the portal generators?”
“They’re all here, except yours. I assume you have it there?”
“Give me a minute.” Corcoran was sure it was in the safe but did a quick double-check anyway while she waited on the line. “Yeah, mine is present and accounted for. Initiate a systems check, please.” He was trying to quell his own growing anxiety. Which only got worse when he turned on the device and the display read No Signal.
While Corcoran was searching for a Tylenol, Liam burst into his office without bothering to knock.
“That bastard Wilcox did it again!” Liam paced in front of Corcoran’s cluttered desk. His strides were short, since the room was less than eight feet wide. “I knew we should have gone after that asshole right away.”
The Legend of Indian Stream Page 6
