Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(85)

“How goes the cure? Is it almost ready?” he asked offhandedly.

“It hasn’t started yet,” she snapped, more sharply than she intended. His constant asking was starting to get under her skin.

James looked surprised. “I don’t understand. You have everything you asked for. What’s the problem?” He leaned in. “Elise, we made promises to these people.”

Elise felt her ears turn red as she put her arm around his elbow and tugged him along until they were out of earshot of some of the younger Elfreth helping out in the garage. They wandered down to the river so she could speak with him in private. Sure, she could talk to him with a comm band, but it still felt awkward to chat with someone in her head.

“I’m having issues,” she said after she was sure they were alone.

He looked confused, worry straining his face. “What issues? You said you could cure the plague.”

“First of all, I said I thought I could,” she said. “And I still know how to cure it. At least … well, I might have been a little optimistic.” Elise let her frustration show. Even working long days, she knew she had bitten off more than she could chew. She was flailing. After all, she had had an entire team back on Nutris, not to mention a veritable army of engineers, scientists, advanced systems, and robots.

Now she had a fifth-grade chemistry set and a teenager who couldn’t count past nine because she had lost her little finger to an infection when she was young. Elise never realized how much of her supposed science genius was dependent on the tools of her time. This week, it had taken her four days to establish some baselines that she could have calculated in thirty minutes back on Nutris. At this rate, it would take a lifetime before she rediscovered the cure. Some scientist she had turned out to be.

“I need help,” she said. “Half of the equipment I have is too old to use, and I can’t understand the other half…”

He looked confused.

“I’m saying I need equipment from my time.” She said with exasperation. “You need to go back in time and pick them up for me.” She handed him a piece of paper. “I made a new list.”

James looked at it and shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” She threw up her hands. “It’s the tools I’m familiar with.”

James shook his head. “I can’t just go back in time and retrieve items from the past on a whim. Each jump has to be carefully mapped to a dead-end time line. I can’t afford to have time ripples that could change history.”

“You brought me back,” she said.

“I’m a little surprised you’re still alive,” he admitted.

That took her aback. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ve been taught since the very first days of the Academy that bringing living things from the past to the present causes catastrophic tears in the present time line and cellular instability in organic matter. It doesn’t seem to be happening with you for some reason.”

“So go get the stuff I need then.”

He shook his head again. “If we hit a dead-end time line, I’ll try. Otherwise, it’s too risky. Smitt’s been secretly helping me pinpoint supplies for the village. I’ll see what he can dig up.”

“There’s one more thing,” Elise said. “I need more help.”

“I already told you I will have Smitt—”

“I mean I need more people to help me. It’s too much work to do by myself.”

“What about Rima?”

“Someone with more than a second-grade education, James!”

He shook his head. “I won’t be able to help you. Everyone with any modicum of scientific training in the present is indentured to the corporations already. It’s unlikely I can recruit someone, short of kidnapping them. People with scientific minds are valuable in the present. Right now, we’re just a loose end they have to tie. If we cross that line and steal resources, the corporations will rain hell down on us.”

Elise thought about her alternatives. “Can you go back to the Nutris Platform then? Get some of the other scientists?”

James shook his head. “No one will ever be able to jump into that chronological location again within approximately sixteen hundred kilometers and nine days from the point of the tear. Other planets and celestial bodies will have different limiting parameters.”

“James, I don’t care who, how, when, or what you find,” she grumbled. “Just get me someone. I might be able to make do with some of the tools I have, but I need brain power to cure this plague. That’s even more important than the tools. Hey, are you listening to me?”

He had stopped and was staring up at the sky. He had a strange look on his face. “Yes. I was just thinking. Actually, I might know just the person. Let me see if it’s possible.”





THIRTY-THREE

NOT QUITE END TIMES

Grace Priestly took a few steps back and studied the canvas from the opposite end of her quarters. The tints were off—the whites a bit too dull, the hues in the sky a bit too plain—but then, she hadn’t packed that many colors. Maybe it was just because her childhood memories of home were much more vibrant, or maybe it was that her old mind finally was failing her.