Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(14)
James fell to one knee and took a few moments to regain his bearings. He pulled up his criticals on his AI band. Nothing broken, no internal bleeding. Life signs and health still optimal. Exo at 67 percent. The high-altitude drop had taken a lot out of it. Even with the exo at two-thirds levels, he was still practically a god and could conquer half the continent if he wanted to.
Paint image 1944 officer: Third Reich SS Hauptsturmführer, he thought, pulling up all the prearranged tacticals that Smitt had planned the day before. The uniform had to be painstakingly detailed for the paint band to draw accurately.
His appearance shifted as his disguise layered itself onto him, each line and shade drawn one by one, changing his facial features and covering his tight bodysuit with the black uniform of a Nazi. Now he looked like a portly midlevel officer of the Third Reich.
James climbed out of the crater and walked down a deserted street in downtown K?nigsberg, or what was left of it. There wasn’t anyone in sight. He scanned the area and saw cratered cobbled streets and houses set on fire. Many of the buildings had only two or three outer walls. Piles of rubble littered the landscape. He could hear the low rumble of more planes passing overhead, punctuated by additional bombs exploding in rapid succession, shaking the ground. One of these blasts was going to hit the castle soon.
“Smitt, you there?” he thought.
“Coming in a little fuzzy, James. Remote link is weak; must be the interference. Damn area is coated with ions. Probably from the AI war; we’re basking in the center of where all that went down. Listen up, I barely got you in and we’re still off the mark. Get moving. You don’t have a lot of time. Remember, you’re deep in time so tread extra carefully.”
Smitt was right. Most time lines healed over ripples, but messing around certain sensitive periods of time could have catastrophic effects that the main chronostream couldn’t heal over. That’s why ChronoCom kept such tight regulations over which chronmen were allowed to jump to which tier of salvage. The Second World War was one of those sensitive points in history where only Tier-1 chronmen were allowed to operate, because even small ripples here could cause serious consequences.
James moved at a brisk jog, making sure not to run faster than humanly possible, since he could exceed that by quite a bit with the exo. He left the main road and made his way through narrow back alleys, hugging the walls when explosions shook the ground. He passed through the shell of a bombed-out building, climbed over a hill of rubble, and jumped the fence into a park where the tops of trees were on fire.
He scanned the small park and saw a young boy burrowed in the sands of a playground staring up at him. The boy was either terrified or in shock. James looked up at the sky. The sands here were as good as anything else. He wanted to help the boy, but such altruism was forbidden. What could he do anyway? The boy was hundreds of years dead back in the present. He probably wouldn’t survive the week. After all, the Russians and the British blew this damned city to the black abyss before this war ended. Still, James couldn’t help but stare back.
He forced himself to look away and continue on. Right as he jumped the fence out of the park, an explosion knocked him onto his chest. He scrambled up onto his knees and stumbled into an alley as bricks and sand rained. James looked back at the park. The playground was now a crater. He clenched his fist.
“You’ve veered off route,” said Smitt. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a lot of bad shit dropping on my head,” James said.
“What, you think one of those medieval arrows is going to pierce your exo? Come on, hurry up!”
“Hardly arrows,” said James as another massive explosion knocked him off balance. Armored or not, these primitives knew how to war. Even at full power, he didn’t think the exo could take the brunt of one of those bombs. It was no surprise mankind got so good at killing once they were in space. They had gotten a lot of practice on Earth. Maybe calling himself a god here was a bit premature.
It took much longer to cover the three kilometers to the castle than he had anticipated. By the time he stood on the edge of the castle grounds, one of the bombs had already struck the courtyard. Checking the paint of his disguise one last time, James pretended to clutch his helmet and ran across the open field, hurdling over the mounds of upturned dirt and stone. As soon as he got through the side entrance, he was met with three hostile and terrified guards.
“I hope this translator is accurate,” he thought to Smitt through his comm band.
“Not like these primates can ding you,” said Smitt.
“I’m here to oversee the transport of the Amber Room panels,” he said in flawless twentieth-century German.
One of the guards gave him a funny look. “The city is falling all around us and all you care about is the stupid Russian relic?”
James feigned irritation. “Orders from the Führer. Take me there at once.”
“Fuck the Führer,” one of the guards in the back grumbled. “He brought this down upon us.”
His comrade looked wide-eyed at James’s SS uniform. “I’m sorry, sir. He does not mean it. We haven’t slept in days. The city has been under constant bombardment.”
“I mean every word of it,” the other guard yelled, and then he hiccupped. He brought out a flask and offered it to James. “To the f*cking Führer then, you stick-in-the-ass.”