Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(39)
“Smitt!” James screamed out loud.
“Working on it!” Smitt answered. “There’s electrical interference.”
Elise gasped and pointed behind them. James turned and froze. A massive wave was rolling toward them. It climbed higher and higher until all he could see was an entire wall of brown. The impact of the wave would kill them before they drowned.
The collie’s door opened with a hiss.
“Get in! I’m putting in Collie’s route now. She’ll shoot once the door closes.”
James could hardly hear Smitt’s voice in his head over the low rumbling thunder of the oncoming wave. Fortunately, Elise still seemed to have her head about her. She squirmed out of his grasp, grabbed him by the neck, and heaved them both inside. They tumbled onto the floor as the door shut. A wave struck the starboard wing, tilting the collie and bouncing them against the side wall.
“Get us out of here!” James yelled. A steady stream of brown water battered against the cockpit windows. The two bounced around like balls inside a container before the violent rocking finally stopped and everything grew dead calm.
Elise groaned as she turned from her side and lay on her back. James pushed himself from his belly up to his knees. There was a nasty gash across Elise’s cheek and blood was pouring down from the crown of her head. He wasn’t in much better shape.
All his bands had powered down except for his comm band and the netherstore, which was barely holding on with its embedded auxiliary power. James unhooked his netherstore band and transferred the link to Collie.
This was the first time since he had joined ChronoCom that he didn’t have any bands running. Right now would be a terrible time for the cabin pressure of the collie to drop. He had never felt so naked before in his life.
Speaking of naked …
Elise was pointing at him. “What happened to your clothes?” His paint had slipped off and he was wearing only a pair of undergarments. “And what happened to your face? It’s all white, like an albino’s!”
He ignored her questions. “Anything broken?”
Elise groaned. “My head, my sanity, my…” She wrinkled her face. “My nose. I smell like I just took a bath in the sewers.” She sat up. “But no, nothing seems broken.” She paused. “What about you? You don’t look so hot, and your face is turning paler, if that’s even possible.”
For the first time, James realized the full extent of the crime he had just committed. He had broken the first and most important Time Law. Since ChronoCom’s birth in 2363, no chronman had ever dared to bring someone back from the past before. It was one of the primary laws ingrained into every initiate early on at the Academy. As far as the agency was concerned, they were both as good as dead. Not only was it a capital offense, he could have weakened and endangered the chronostream. Furthermore, the Vallis Bouvard Disaster hung heavy in his thoughts.
James clenched his fists as he frantically tried to figure out how to get out of this mess in a way that wouldn’t involve their execution. The monitors might not know about her yet. Maybe he could hide her. Stash her in one of the distant outposts. Keep her away from the monitors. The solar system was vast enough that maybe this one accident might slip ChronoCom’s notice. After all, this had never happened before, as far as he knew. They wouldn’t be expecting it.
The collie made a sharp turn toward Central. He leaped toward the cockpit and punched in several new commands.
“Why did you put Collie on manual?” Smitt asked. “Your AI band is offline. I can’t get a read on your life signs. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he thought back. “Will report in soon. Just, um … need to check on something.”
“All right, my friend. Whatever you say.” Smitt sounded anything but all right. “Listen, about that strange signature—”
“The comm band is out of levels as well,” James cut him off. “Going dark for a bit. Will report in soon.” It was a flimsy excuse. The comm band used so little levels he could have kept the link open. It was against protocol for any chronman to disengage from his handler while on assignment without extraordinary cause. Well, James had extraordinary cause, all right.
The collie had reached the eastern seaboard of the Northern American continent. Brown sloping oceans gave way to a gray barren landscape dotted by the devastation of centuries of war, waste, and environmental degradation. They were currently flying over a large radiation field of a wrecked city that had been razed by one of the dozen conflicts.
Elise’s eyes had widened like full moons as she stared at the devastation below with a hand over her mouth. She looked at him and pointed out the window. “Is that the Washington Monument we just passed? What happened?”
That name sounded familiar. James had taken extensive history courses while training to be an operative, but he had always been a mediocre student. It took him a few moments to recall his history and geography.
“Razed in the middle of the Third World War,” he said. “Both the Democratic Union and the Confederate United States surrendered the next year to the Tri-Axis Alliance of China, Pakistan, and Russia.”
“When did this war happen?” she asked.
James kept his face neutral as he spoke. “Two thousand ninety-eight, the year following the destruction of the Nutris Platform. It lasted nineteen years and cost over forty-three million lives. Global GDP—”