Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(27)
James quickly learned that this Sector Two research chief was a talkative one. As they walked, she became his personal tour guide. She swelled with pride as she chattered on about Nutris as if she had built it with her own two hands. Several times, she stopped to point down at some of the structures, detailing many of the facilities, including central operations, the science lab, the filtration plant, the cafeteria, and most important, the bar.
She also asked him a lot of questions, which made James profoundly uncomfortable. The woman was far too helpful and way too friendly. His alibi and alias would crumble if she spent more than a few minutes poking at them. The more he talked about himself, the more likely it would be for him to make a misstep. So he did his best to divert their discussion back to her, which Elise was happy to do.
Elise delved into detail about her training at some education center called Berkeley and how she joined the Nutris Initiative after the Third Central Oil Environmental Debacle, which eventually led to her running this sector’s biological research division. It took only a few minutes for her to lose him with her jargon.
James caught himself studying Elise, fascinated. There was something very different about her. For one thing, she was so animated and alive, a far cry from the miners, prostitutes, and sad husks barely living in the present. The other thing he realized that drew him to her was her optimism. She practically glowed at every topic they talked about.
This sort of optimism had long been squelched in the twenty-sixth century. He had to remind himself that the tragedies of humanity had not quite affected this time period yet, though it would happen soon. This year was the Cliffside of Humanity, after all.
He took the time to further examine his perplexing guide. Her tan face was weathered from time under the sun, not from age, and there was a twinkle in her eyes that James rarely saw back home. And now that the conversation had veered away from him, James didn’t mind her chattiness. There was something about the sound of her voice. It didn’t sound tired. He also decided that he liked her bright smile. It was a good one as far as those went.
James held his disappointment in check when they reached the transport hub where everyone else was being processed. He had hardly spoken five words to her and hoped to find a reason to delay parting ways.
“So, this is it,” he said. “Thanks for leading me back out to civilization. I might have starved out there in the iron jungle.”
She grinned. “Plenty of fish if you needed.” There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. “Well, I need to get back to work. See you around the sector?”
“Maybe grab a drink at the bar later?” he blurted before he realized what he was saying.
Elise winked at him. “Maybe another day. I’ve got five more hours in Charlotte before I can call it a night. No biggie. We have two more years to get to know each other.”
He waved at her as she disappeared around the corner. Then his hands fell to his sides and tightened into fists. “Two days, you mean,” he muttered.
When those two days were up, she and everyone else here would be dead. With a grimace, James walked to the end of one of the lines and waited to be processed.
“Hey, James, is everything all right?” Smitt asked.
“Everything is fine,” James said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because your heart rate is a hundred forty beats a minute.”
TEN
ELISE KIM
Elise had just finished a fourteen-hour shift on the ocean floor and was now slowly heading back up to Nutris Platform for her weekly senior staff meeting. It was a long time sitting in one place but she didn’t mind. She had taken a nap inside Charlotte while the mechanoid was processing floor samples around midnight. Charlotte was like her second bedroom. Elise looked out at the clear waters and marveled as Charlotte’s high beams pierced the darkness, exposing the beauty of the sea.
It had been a long night, and chances were, it’d be another long day as well. The newest batch of victims, as she liked to call them, had just flown to the platform by transport in threes and fours. By the end of the week, Nutris would be at 80 percent capacity and fully operational. There would be many more sleepless, deep-underwater nights for the next couple of years. Elise wouldn’t have it any other way. It actually made her sort of giddy; she was living her lifelong dream, exploring the most remote crevices of the world and healing Gaia from the many previous centuries of abuse.
“Barn Spider, what is your ETA topside?” a voice crackled, almost mumbling, through the radio.
Charlotte’s AI, predicting her request, pulled up the depth reading and flashed it in front of her left eye. She radioed back, “Morning, Hank. I’m three kilometers down and rising. I’m going to take a pause at a hundred meters and see if I can say hi to that herd of blue whales lurking in the neighborhood. I want to make sure the foundation cables aren’t going to be a problem for them. At the very least, I’d like to snap some photos to send back to my folks.”
“So, in fifteen then?”
“Make that thirty.”
“You got it, Barn Spider. I’ll allocate Bay Two.”
“Much obliged.”
An hour later, Charlotte crawled into Bay 2 of the mechanoid hanger and Elise stepped out, stretching upward on her tippy toes and reaching for the ceiling with her fingers. Her mechanoid was custom-built for her, so technically, she could stretch while inside, but fourteen hours was fourteen hours, and even someone like Elise, who lived to pilot mechanoids, could get a little claustrophobic. She never did find the blue whales, but got distracted by a family of belugas enjoying the warm morning sun.