Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(100)
This had always been his problem, why he had failed to test into the chronman tier: he couldn’t handle stress. If someone walked in right now and just did a surface-level trace on what he was doing, it would be over. Add in his connection to James, and the auditors would have him on a rack in seconds. Right now, it was all he could do to keep from hyperventilating and passing out on the data-housing floor.
Smitt didn’t think he was doing anything that wrong. It wasn’t like he was helping James change the chronostream. Far from it. All he was doing was helping some poor savage tribe acquire some much-needed supplies. He felt justified, even.
Oh, who was he trying to fool? Mining this data for James was outright treason any way he looked at it, and if Smitt was caught, there was nothing anyone could do to prevent him from being sent to Nereid or some other awful penal colony.
In the end, though, the consequences didn’t matter. Smitt’s loyalty to his friend was stronger than it was to ChronoCom. James was the only person in his life who had ever given a damn about him. As far as he was concerned, loyalty was the only real thing Smitt had left in this world.
Luckily, the doors behind him never opened. Smitt finished covering his tracks and unplugged himself from the console, making sure to get his rampaging jitters under control as he walked casually out the door. In a few seconds, he would be out of the tech wing and in the clear. With his heart slamming in his chest, Smitt lurched out of data housing at a consciously slowed pace, waving at the two monitors as he passed them. He gave them a nod and proceeded down the hallway.
“Burke,” the monitor on the left called after him. “Lin over here wants to know if you play Lok Gull. Couple of us night shifts are trying to get some games in. Not quite filling out the roster with enough bodies at the moment. Seeing how we all rise and tuck in at the same time, thinking maybe you play?”
Smitt paused at the outer door right before the stairs and looked back at them. After tailing Burke all this time, he knew that the guy liked Lok Gull, and probably the one thing this ruck could use was some friends instead of his bottle. A social life would do wonders for him. However, that could risk blowing Smitt’s cover.
“Oh hell,” he muttered under his breath. He’d taken enough advantage of this guy. Smitt nodded to the monitors. “Go ahead and sign me up. I might forget so remind me. Can we schedule it for after the fifth shift?”
“Will do, and welcome to the Earth, Burke,” the one named Lin said.
Smitt hid his smile and exited the wing. He’d just have to be a little careful in the future when impersonating the guy. The next task on his plate was going to be a lot more difficult and tricky. James had been asking if there was a way he could obtain some miasma pills. Miasma regimens fell directly under the auditors’ purview, and busting into the miasma lab was about as easy as getting citizenship on Europa.
However, Smitt had already been mulling over the beginnings of a plan. He made a mental list of the things he had to gather and the steps it’d take to break into the high-security medical ward. He hated to admit it, but the thrill was starting to grow on him.
“Maybe I could have been a chronman after all.” He grinned, whistling as he bounded up the stairs.
THIRTY-NINE
CLOSER
Elise turned down the protection of her atmos and inhaled the thinner air on Mt. Greylock in the American Appalachia half a day by ground transport west of Boston. The entire area had another name now, probably having been exchanged by dozens of governments in the four hundred years since her time. It had taken Rima a fair amount of bartering with some of the neighboring tribes to obtain a map of the region from her era that Elise could read. It was much easier for her to work off of that than to relearn the names of this time period.
The air up here at a thousand meters above sea level was much cleaner than at the base of the mountain. Her hand brushed the trunk of a nearby tree and she rubbed her fingers together. The texture of the Earth Plague was different as well. It was less oily and much smoother. She brought her fingers to her nose. The smell of decay was weaker as well, more earthy.
She wiped her hands and moved a little higher up the path, taking out an instrument James had retrieved from a hundred years in her future known as a geotriangular. Fascinating tech, this thing was. She placed it on the ground and turned it on. A few seconds later, a three-dimensional diagram of the mountain flashed in her brain, almost knocking her off her feet.
Elise turned off the band and blinked away some of the stars in her eyes. She was still not used to the AI band. In the two months since her arrival here, she had one by one added more of these metal bands to the collection around her arms. That computer-in-her-head band, as she liked to call it, was her latest piece of jewelry, and it was by far the most difficult one to get used to.
She sat down and rubbed her sore feet. Locating a good pair of size seven shoes was Rima’s next job. Most of the Elfreth had calluses like rhinos. It was times like right now she especially missed some of the luxuries of the twenty-first century. Normally, she’d just be coasting up one of these mountains in Charlotte, her feet completely rested and the air-conditioning turned on full blast.
The memory of her mechanoid made Elise a little melancholy; she missed her robot. Earning her advanced certification on Charlotte while she was still a teenager was one of Elise’s proudest moments. While other children her age learned to drive or hover vehicles, she spent countless hours walking the depths of the ocean floor. Part of her was looking forward to finding and piloting an advanced future version of her beloved Charlotte, but it seemed the present had done away with mechanoids altogether. Pity. A lot of things these days were pretty damn pitiful.