Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(48)
It was too bad James couldn’t procure Tassin’s bands for himself. All bands were designed to link to their user once worn unless actively released. If the user died, the bands were worthless. This safety precaution was initially designed for when chronmen died on jobs. If their futurist technology fell away during a salvage and someone from the past was able to use the bands, it would be disastrous.
James grabbed the young man by the collar and pulled him up. “You’re out of your league. I let you live, boy. Remember this.” Then James leaped up to where his collie was parked and pulled out just in time for Levin and a platoon of monitors see it jet out of the hangar.
EIGHTEEN
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Elise waited for Salman or James or whatever his real name was—time-traveling liar—to leave the room before she let herself succumb to the grief that had been welling up in her since she first came to this horrific future. For some reason, she wasn’t sure why, she didn’t want to cry in front of him. It was all she could do to hold it together until he was gone, and then once she was sure she was alone, she allowed herself to break and grieve properly.
For a while, she stayed huddled in a fetal position on the bed, sobbing, her tears streaming freely down her face. The pent-up horror at what she’d seen in the past day—from the awful last morning on the Nutris Platform to the horrific future in which she was now trapped—were too much for her soul to bear. She wept for the people who had died horribly on the platform. She cried for her parents and the family she would never see again, people she loved that were now hundreds of years dead. She grieved for the Earth and the scarring of this once beautiful planet.
In its place was this worst of nightmares, a poisoned, ugly future that seemed twisted and dark. The beautiful ocean in which she had spent hundreds of hours was now a tainted pool of sickness. Even the sky seemed wrong, at least to her twenty-first-century memory. Something was very sickly about the clouds and the sun. It was all a giant bad dream, one from which she couldn’t awake.
And Elise wept for herself, for all that she had lost in an instant. Yesterday, she had friends and family and a life. Today, it was all gone, and she would have to start over. Oh hell, who was she kidding? There was no way she was going to survive this apocalypse. She might as well have died on Nutris. Except she didn’t, and now survivor’s guilt overwhelmed her.
She cried until her body couldn’t squeeze any more tears out, until she was too exhausted to cry anymore, but her mind was too terrified to sleep. Finally, after an hour, Elise decided that she had had enough of her own stupid little pity party. She sat up on the bed, wiped her face, and took several deep breaths. “Get it together, Elise. You had your cry, now woman up. Crying isn’t going to make anything better. You’ve been in worse spots before.”
Elise couldn’t even lie to herself convincingly. She ignored the space game on the future television and forced herself to crawl out of bed and look out the window. She gazed at the strange yet familiar new world outside. The view from her room was hazy, half-obstructed by a film of oil that gave the outside an almost dreamy, underwater look.
Still, it presented an interesting and frightening picture of this new world. She marveled at some of the fantastic advances, the flying cars that used the sky as a highway and the tall buildings that stacked on top of each other as if they were all made from giant building blocks. She saw an alien-looking structure seemingly floating in the air. Near the lake, a gigantic ship took off and blasted into space. She was disgusted at the visibly brown and gray winds blowing by, and the giant smokestacks dotting the landscape, shooting up humongous plumes of smoke into the clouds. The walls of the buildings looked faded, and everywhere, rust prevailed, as if everything was slowly deteriorating.
An hour of window-watching and pacing later, when her mind had finished running wild and she had no more despair to let loose, Elise finally got bored. And hungry. Mostly just hungry. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, during her date with Salman—no, his name was James—and now her stomach growled. Several times, she looked at the door and considered exploring this new world, but each time, James’s warnings echoed in her head and she decided to wait just a little bit longer.
By the third or so hour, she was downright fidgety and starving. She began to wonder if he had abandoned her. Doubt crept into her mind. What would she do then if he never came back? How would she survive? New fears paralyzed her as she suddenly felt very much alone.
Elise turned her attention to the future television airing the strange sports game. It took her a few minutes to figure out how to change the channels with a series of hand gestures, and even less time to realize that television in the future sucked just as much as it did in her time.
When the vid light on the wall began to flash red, Elise was more than happy to answer it, desperately hoping that James had returned, preferably with food. Instead, the attendant down at the lobby appeared, his image floating in the air three-dimensionally occupying a quarter of the room.
The man said something but she didn’t quite understand. It sounded vaguely like World English from her time, but with the words condensed into one syllable, each punctuated by an exclamation mark, and spoken in a singsong. A very fast singsong.
He repeated his words. He was obviously asking a question. She shook her head again. Then her view pulled back, revealing two menacing-looking uniformed men wearing cone-shaped helmets standing behind him. Then Elise realized that those men wanted to see her. She shook her head more emphatically. James had told her to let no one in. The attendant looked off-screen and said something to them, shaking his head. Then to her horror, one of the uniformed men reached over the counter, punched the attendant in the face, and knocked him off-screen. The other pointed at her and then the connection went dead.