by Chuck Dixon
Dwayne met him on the drive to pay the cab driver a fistful of Euros. He caught his brother-in-law up in a bear-hug. Caroline had a lunch of cold prosciutto and salad waiting on a veranda from which they could look at the sea visible over hills dotted green and white.
“Is my brother somewhere in there?” she said, touching the bush of his new beard and recoiling in exaggerated surprise as though a bird had flown out of it.
“I’m keeping it,” he said with defiance.
“Well, as long as it doesn’t scare the baby,” Dwayne said. Morris wasn’t terribly shocked to find that his nephew, born less than a month before in relative time, was sitting up and making noises that almost sounded like words. His experience with infants was limited, to say the least. He wasn’t at all sure what babies were supposed to do or when. Stephen seemed alert enough for his age certainly but was fixated on sticking his own fingers in his mouth more than anything else. Perhaps he favored his father over his mother, Morris suspected. He kept that thought to himself.
More surprising to Dr. Morris Tauber were the reams of spiral bound volumes his sister had waiting for him on a table in a library room.
“What are these?” He riffled pages to see rows of complex formulas and columns of dense text.
“The materials I promised you,” Caroline said.
“In print? On paper?” He picked up one thin volume entitled Mica Prima by Kosimo Trivenchy.
“You expected it on a flash drive? Believe it or not, there are compatibility issues with a parallel universe. Their ‘windows’ are still something you look out of when you’re inside. Besides, Samuel was concerned with having these books in any kind of medium that could be duplicated and disseminated easily.”
“So, I can take these back to the Raj and read them?
“No, you can’t, Mo. Samuel trusted me with these, and I promised they wouldn’t leave my sight.”
“I have to stay here?” Morris said with dismay.
“Yes, bro. You have to stay in a six-bedroom Italian villa, enjoying the sun and the breeze off the Adriatic in the company of your brand-new nephew and getting to read the most mind-blowing scientific treatises you will ever see in your lifetime. Poor baby.” She tsked.
“If I have to, I suppose,” Morris said with a sigh.
“I see I forgot to turn on the sarcasm indicator,” Caroline said and left him with the books.
The baby was asleep for the night. Mom and dad were drinking glasses of Chianti on the balcony, enjoying the moonlight over the harbor below when Morris burst upon them.
“Have you read this stuff?” he said breathlessly. He was waving a spiral-bound folder.
“Morris, you need to do something about the beard,” Caroline said with a wry smile.
“Yes. I’ll trim it in the morning. Have you read this material?”
“Not as fast as you, apparently. There’s a lot to digest there, and the language is—”
“To hell with the language. The ideas are so clearly put forward in the numbers. The applications of our theories take the technology in so many different directions. The ramifications are limitless.” Morris sounded almost giddy. He even accepted a glass of Chianti from Dwayne which he chugged down like a frat boy.
Caroline shrugged. “You were always the numbers guy, bro.”
“We have to get back to the Raj. There are changes to be made. So many adjustments and alterations, and I’ll need some new hardware.”
“We’ll talk about that en route,” Caroline said. “En route? En route to where?”
“Well, as close as we can get the Ocean Raj to Las Vegas,” Caroline said.
Morris looked to Dwayne for help with this riddle. “We’re going back to get Rick Renzi,” his brother-in-law said, and held out a second glass of the rich red vintage.
3
The Ocean Raj
“Does the eye hurt?” Dr. Paphos asked.
“The one that’s gone?” Jimmy Smalls asked.
“Yes.”
“How can an eye that’s gone hurt?”
“You are a soldier. That much I learn from your et wasz—your tattoos. You must know soldiers who have lost a limb, an arm or leg, who still have sensation in the ackrodees-ti—the amputated member.”
“Yeah. I know a couple guys. One guy lost both legs in Iraq and swears he still has athlete’s foot. But I don’t feel anything except some pain around the socket,” Jimbo said.
“You will need reconstructive surgery to the orbital rim if you wish to be fitted with a glass eye,” Dr. Paphos said.
“The patch will do for now.”
“Without the surgery, you may suffer further complications to the sinuses. Infections and such. The fracture was quite severe.”
“The ladies like the patch, doc. But send me some suggestions for good surgeons for when I have some downtime.”
The Cypriot doctor promised to do so and left a supply of primo painkillers and antibiotics. Jimbo paid him with a stack of Euros and saw him down the gangway to the launch that would take the GP back to Lanarca.
A man with a mane of dirty blond hair and the build of a featherweight all-in wrestler waited at the top of the gangway for Jimbo. Byrus was a Macedonian pit-fighter the Rangers had brought back from ancient Judea. He was wearing the same blissed-out smile he’d been sporting ever since the day he arrived in The Now.
“All okay, baas?” Byrus said. He’d picked up the common Ethiopian term for superiors and more rudimentary English in the month since they’d come back from the past.
“Fucking A, Bruce,” Jimbo said.
“Fucking A.” Byrus’ grin broadened, and he fell into step behind his master.
Jimbo admitted that he really hadn’t thought it through when he insisted that Byrus return with them. There was no question that the pint-sized surfer dude had saved his life and kept him alive until they could be extracted. The massive head injury to his face and eye left Jimbo defenseless for almost a week following their run-in with a Roman century. He still had trouble with vertigo, and adjusting to two-dimensional vision was a bitch. He owed the little man, no question of that. But it might have been better if they’d given him a shitload of gold coins and left him in situ.
Only, Byrus was technically a slave and a wanted man. And wanted in Roman Judea meant being nailed to a cross upon capture. The best getaway Jimbo could imagine was putting two thousand years between Byrus and rendering unto Caesar.
And it was all cool at first. Byrus reacted to the world of, to him, the far future like a kid experiencing Christmas every day. So far, he’d been quarantined to the Raj, now anchored out in the Aegean in international waters. But even the old container ship was a world of marvels to him. Microwaves, refrigerators, televisions, sat phones, and all the other everyday miracles that the world took for granted were works of magic to Byrus. The concept of time travel was impossible to get across to him. There was a knowledge and language barrier that nobody on the team knew how to get over. Byrus thought he’d been taken to the home of the gods and they let it go at that. If he wanted to think he was hanging with some of Zeus’ close pals, then so be it.
Jimbo worried about his little displaced buddy’s future. They couldn’t keep him on the boat forever. And if the Raj blew his mind, what would his first glimpse of a big city do to him? Any city for that matter. Detroit would look like Olympus to Byrus. It was all about perspective. Lee Hammond was creating a bulletproof identity for the Macedonian, but where was he going to fit in? And, the bigger problem, how to detach him from Jimbo’s side.
It was reasonable that Byrus would stick close to the most familiar face in this most unfamiliar environment. The little guy was rarely out of sight of his one-eyed Indian brother. Even giving him his own cabin didn’t create separation. Jimbo woke up the first morning to find Byrus asleep on the deck at the foot of his bunk.
“He’s like a pet,” Jimbo said to Chaz Raleigh. They sat fishing off the lower stern deck, sharing a bucket of long necks.
“I don’t own him. I don’t want to own him,” Jimmy said.
“That’s not how he sees it. He’s a slave. Been one all his life. No one’s freed him. He just switched masters.”
“I don’t want a slave.”
“Props to you, bro.”
“I want him to have his own life. I mean, I’ll look after him. I owe him that. He’s my responsibility.”
“Now he is sounding like a pet.”
“So how do I explain that to him that I don’t own him? How do I free him?”
“Has to be a way to get it across to him. I’ll do some Googling,” Chaz said.
Chaz Googled and found a helpful suggestion. He located a member of the Raj’s crew who was a skilled wood carver. Chaz gave him the image printed up from the internet search. The guy went down to the ship’s workshop. He came back in a few hours with a full-scale version in mahogany.
That night they had dinner in the galley presided over by Boats, the Raj skipper. The former SEAL was still favoring the leg that had been pierced through-and-through by an arrow on their latest trip to the past. He took the head of the table and sat with his healing leg propped up.
Lee Hammond, Bat Jaffe, Raj’s first officer, Geteye, Jimbo, Chaz, and Byrus sat around the table, digging in. After a meal of salad, pasta with shrimp, and lots of wine, the ship’s cook carried in a cake decorated with Roman columns of white icing and Byrus’ name spelled out in chocolate. The cook set it down in front of the Macedonian who looked perplexed at the smiling faces around the table all turned his way.
Jimbo reached under the table and brought out a wooden sword, a replica of a Roman gladius. He held it out to Byrus, who stared at it with wide eyes. His perpetual smile faded away. Tears welled in his eyes as he took the sword in his hands. He wrapped arms around Jimbo’s chest and lifted the larger man off the deck with a roar of triumph.
“Shit. The little man sure likes that sword,” Boats said.
“It’s a symbol of his freedom. It was given to gladiators in the arena to take away their slave status,” Chaz said.
“So Bruce is a free man for the first time in his life,” Bat said.
“Yeah, but I don’t think Jimmy’s free of him,” Lee said, looking at the Macedonian clinging to the Pima in a serious man-hug.
Eventually, Byrus recovered from his bromantic moment long enough to cut messy slices from his cake with the wooden sword. Then they finished the wine, switched to tequila and all got very, very drunk.
4
Travel West
The Ocean Raj rolled on gentle waters twenty miles west of San Clemente. California “sunshine” was pouring down in buckets on the decks from lowering skies.
The trip through the Panama Canal went smoothly. Ships in transit don’t get as much scrutiny as those stopping at Atlantic or Pacific ports. Boats still had his papers from the company he leased the ship from. The last time they were in any port was the year before in Alexandria. The manifest was unchanged and contained no call for suspicion.
The pilot crew boarded to see them through the locks. Panamanian customs did a cursory check that missed the Conex containers of firearms and explosives. They also missed the mini-nuclear reactor humming away deep in the hold. Radiation screening was done by Servicio Marítimo Nacional at the container port. Since the Raj wasn’t picking up or dropping off any cargo, they got a pass on the rad check.
The real trick to smuggling was never putting into port.
Quebat and Parviz stayed drunk the rest of the ten-hour trip through the canal.
Their course registration was for the Pacific off the California coast. The cover story was that they were doing some bullshit tectonic study of the Mendocino fracture zone paid for by a bullshit non-profit foundation funded by the secret sale of prehistoric gold made to Russian mobsters.
Pirates once stood at the wheel of a three-master. These days they served as chairmen for charities and sat at the end of boardroom tables.
Boats let many of his Ethiopian crew go with a hefty cash bonus in Euros in their bags. He kept on his first mate Geteye and four other crewmen. As big as the Raj was, she required only a few able hands to get her from A to B. Jimbo, Byrus and the two Iranians stayed on board as well. The Iranians kept watch on the reactor. Jimbo and his sidekick cooked meals for everyone when they weren’t fishing or running laps around the deck.
The rest flew to L.A. and would rejoin them when the weather cleared.
“This Renzi guy must mean a lot to you and your team,” Boats said to Jimbo. They shared a leisurely watch on the bridge. Boats, smoking a Cuban, sat in a command chair with his feet up on a control console.
“He’s a brother. A pain in the ass but a brother,” Jimbo said, his eyes on the water streaming down the viewports at the front of the bridge.
“How’d you come to leave him behind?”
“The field was closing, and we had bad guys on our asses. He stayed back to cover our exfil.”
“These bad guys. Some kind of monkey-men, right?”
“Badass, man-eating motherfuckers. Shorter than Bruce but mean as hell. And there was a shitload of them.”
“But Renzi survived. How’d that happen?” Boats took a long drag.
“Because Rick Renzi is the most stubborn son of a bitch who ever lived. Couldn’t even die when he was supposed to. We were all sure he bought it.”
“But his bones say different.”
“Caroline Tauber says the remains we found are Renzi’s, but he was at least sixty years old when he died back in The Then. That gives us a second chance to go after him.”
“That Caroline is some kind of woman,” Boats said, releasing a stream of creamy smoke to billow against the port glass.
“She’s also married to Roenbach, sailor.”
“Oh, I was just admiring her mind, brother.”
“Really?” Jimbo said.
“Sure. Sure. You may not think it to look at me, but I’m an intellectual,” Boats said, grinning teeth visible through a thick of shrubbery of beard from which emerged a rich fog of Havana smoke.
5
Anomalies
“Morris isn’t going to like this,” Caroline said.
“That’s why Morris isn’t here, honey,” Dwayne said. “Your brother is a worrier.”
The team was meeting in a chartroom of the Ocean Raj. Most of it anyway. Chaz Raleigh had arrived with Dwayne Roenbach, the Tauber siblings and little Stephen by shuttle out of Catalina earlier that day. Lee Hammond and Bat Jaffe were staying behind a few days to see the sights in Southern Cali. They kept Dr. Morris Tauber from the meeting by assigning him babysitting duties in order to “bond with his nephew.”
On the broad chart table before them was a drone Jimbo had ordered over the net. An Avi-Dex 5000s, a high-end model with all the candy. Chinese manufacture with full HD video capability, sixty-minute battery life, and an airspeed of sixty knots. The squat barrel-shaped body was suspended from four powerful rotors. Tiny and fast and light, with a diameter of under a half meter, and portable. The heaviest portion would be the two batteries. The drone set them back fifty thousand. Jimbo was studying the thick manual that came along with it. Chaz was booting up the controller.
“It’s all high-grade plastic and steel,” Caroline said, shaking her head.
“Yeah, an anachronism of mass destruction,” Jimbo said.
“A chronal catastrophe,” Chaz parroted.
“You forgot, ‘an anomaly that would change history as we know it,’” Jimbo said.
“Funny,” Caroline said. “But this stuff my brother warns you about is very real.”
“I think they were quoting you, honey,” Dwayne said. “Fine. But you lose one of these in some prehistoric valley ten millennia ago, and we’ll all be reading about it on Facebook tomorrow.”
“It’s a three hundred mile plus hike from the nearest landfall we can make to the area of Nevada where Rick Renzi’s bones
were laid down,” Dwayne said. “The terrain between here and there is nothing like it is today. We need to find the best, straightest path for getting in and getting out,” Jimbo said, “We could waste weeks going around water or marshlands that aren’t there now. Or even longer following dead-end passes through the San Gabriels. The drones will show us the way ahead.”
“There’s no other way?” Caroline said.
“This has the least impact of all the other options we talked about,” Chaz put in.
“What options?” she asked.
“Dwayne suggested using ultra-lite aircraft.”
“Cochise here wanted us to bring along horses. Of course,” Dwayne said.
“I still say a dirigible would be kick ass. We’d get there in a day. No chronal footprint.” Chaz shrugged.
“You tell my brother any of those ideas, and he’ll have three kinds of kittens,” Caroline said.
And kittens there were when Morris popped into the chartroom with a bawling, squirming Stephen in his arms. The baby had handfuls of Mo’s beard in his fists and was pulling hard. Morris arrived in time to see the bright yellow drone hovering a foot off the surface of the chart room table, and Jimbo and Chaz fighting over who’d get to fly her next. “What in God’s name is that?” He shouted over the whirr of the motors and pointed an accusing finger at the offending machine.
Stephen stopped crying to reach his fingers out for the remote in Chaz’s hands.
“We’re going in heavy, Mo. You know that, right?” Dwayne and Caroline had Morris sat down with a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“I didn’t think about it. I sure as hell didn’t think you’d be taking your own unmanned aircraft,” Morris said with a glum expression.
