Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(12)
The edge of the cleaver struck his shield, sparking orange stars into the air around him. In a second, Levin had grabbed his assailant by the armpit and hurtled him toward two more of the thugs. The crowd descended on him, swinging bats and blades as Levin joined the fray, using his natural skills as well as his exo to slice through them, seeming to move just out of their reach, dodging their swing as he mowed down three to four at a time.
Cole joined in the melee, powering his exo to full and launching himself at Levin. The Tier-4 had only four kinetic coils active. Levin doubted he could produce any more than that at his capabilities. In this situation, Levin made sure to fight down to Cole’s level in order to keep up the pretense of an actual hand-to-hand fight. He sprouted four of his own coils to lock down Cole’s and proceeded to beat him down with his exo-powered fists.
Cole struggled to break free even as more of his gang joined in the fight, adding to the chaos. Every time their weapons struck his exo, small sparks glimmered into the air. Levin scolded himself for being so obvious. He continued to fight by hand, kicking any thugs in reach and battering at Cole’s shield.
The number of bodies became overwhelming as a surge of the gang distracted Levin long enough for Cole to shake free. The fugitive chronman jumped out of the window overlooking the main room and landed on one of the long tables below, shattering it and scattering the patrons.
Levin gritted his teeth. There went any hope of doing this quietly. He followed suit and jumped out the window as Cole ran from the building. Levin landed with a thud on top of the shattered remains of the table and sprinted after the fugitive. Hopefully, the damn guy had enough common sense not to exercise his exo to its full extent.
Levin ran outside just in time to see Cole leap atop a tile roof and sprint down its length. Well, so much for that. The sooner he got Cole out of this time, the better, regardless of the consequences. He followed suit, shooting up to the roof, to the gasps of the crowds nearby, and gave chase, using his superior bands to catch up.
The game of rooftop cat-and-mouse continued for nearly a minute as the two bounded across the city’s skyline. This was the opposite of keeping things low-key, but the trap has been sprung. One way or another, Levin was going to haul Cole in.
He was making ground step by step until they were only half a building length apart. He was just within reach of Cole’s coils when he struck, shooting out with two of his own coils, one that tied down the coil Cole used to push off, and the other to grab Cole around the waist. Cole’s momentum tripped him midair as Levin reeled him in. The fugitive chronman sliced off the coil around his waist, only to have six more of Levin’s wrap around his body until he could no longer move. He struggled and jerked back and forth against the invisible bonds as Levin floated him closer. As a final precaution, Levin slipped two small coils down the length of Cole’s arms and snapped all eight of the fugitive’s bands.
“It’s over. We’re going home,” he said.
“Just kill me then, Auditor,” Cole begged. “I can’t go back.”
“You need to be brought to justice for violating the fifth Time Law.”
“Please,” tears poured down Cole’s face, “you can’t take me back. My uncle is an auditor. I can’t shame him like this.”
Levin dropped the paint image and stared stone-faced at his prisoner, ignoring the look of shock on Cole’s face. “The only additional shame that could have been heaped on me is if I didn’t bring you back. Come, your mother will want to say good-bye.” A second later, there was a flash of orange light, and the two figures that moments before were dancing on the rooftops of Luoyang were gone.
Gossip of the two mysterious masters spread over the years, with witnesses swearing they had seen the two fly through the air. Gossip became stories; stories became facts; facts became lore. Eventually, the tales grew and the actions more fantastic until it became part of the region’s martial arts legend, which to this day could be found in ChronoCom’s databases.
It was the worst blemish on Levin Javier-Oberon’s career up until the day James Griffin-Mars walked into his office.
FIVE
1944
A week later, after hitching his collie to the transport JE Pheelrite from Himalia Station to Earth via Mars, James could just make out the circular brown outline of his species’s birthworld. Almost every chronman at one point or another had had to run jobs on Earth. Like the majority of people with means, James avoided the planet as much as possible. Luckily for him, most of the times he spent on the planet were in the past, during better days when it wasn’t such a toxic mess.
No government or corporation claimed dominion over Earth anymore. Why bother? There were few resources left to exploit, and parts of the atmosphere were so poisonous that it might as well have been Uranus. That left each of the hundred or so remaining large cities to form their own states alongside the few thousand scattered remnants of the population that now lived in the wastelands or deep underground. There hadn’t been a census taken of Earth for over a hundred years, but ChronoCom estimated there were now fewer than a hundred million people living on the planet of their origin.
Without a megacorporation based here, the only global entity with any semblance of power was ChronoCom, which acted as a policing force when the situation warranted. Earth Central, their base in Chicago on the Northern America continent, was the largest of all the ChronoCom facilities, because the planet still held the richest quarry of time salvaging in the solar system. Otherwise, much of the agency’s administration would have moved off the mud ball to Europa or Callisto years ago.