Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(90)
“I’ll keep that in mind,” James said. “And … thank you, Smitt. You’ve been more than a good friend. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
“You still owe me a retirement to Europa, or a clean Earth to live on. I’ll take either.”
“You got it.”
Smitt left the subchannel and James made his way toward the lab, hoping things between Elise and Grace had warmed a little. He worried about the ninety-three-year-old woman climbing those stairs day in and day out. They would have to figure out an accommodation for her. He reached the camp and spoke with the column guard, who confirmed seeing the two head into Farming Tower One.
He was eleven stories up the stairwell when he saw Grace sitting on the steps braiding someone’s hair. He frowned. It couldn’t be Elise’s. Her hair wasn’t that long, though it had begun to grow out, making her look a little more like the other women of the Elfreth. James thought it looked attractive.
“Grace?” he asked, approaching her.
Grace looked at him and smiled. Then she went back to her braiding.
James walked around her and stumbled when he saw that it was Sasha’s hair Grace was braiding. He backed up against the wall and saw the Nazi soldier lounging farther up the stairs. Grace continued to braid and fuss with Sasha’s hair, humming and complimenting his dead sister about how pretty she was.
“You’re alive now,” he managed to say.
Am I now, pet? she replied, looking up. You think it’s that easy bringing someone back from the dead?
Why haven’t you brought me back then, James? Sasha asked.
“I…” James opened and closed his mouth. He didn’t have a good excuse. Actually, he did. Sasha was useless to Elise and the tribe. She would be just another mouth to feed. That was justification enough, wasn’t it?
Come back for me too, ja? The German soldier grinned, beckoning him closer. Put me to use. I have skills. Bang. Bang. He pretended to shoot at imaginary targets.
James shook his head; they were imaginary people. What was wrong with him? He needed to do something about his miasma treatment sooner rather than later. A mad, raving lunatic would be no good to Elise.
He left the small group and continued up the stairs, fleeing these fragments of his past. Elise and Grace were real, no matter what ChronoCom had taught him about those from the past. They were living, breathing people who could now make new choices, and forge their own futures.
This was the best way for him to contribute to Elise’s cause. All these years he had thought the resources he retrieved from the past, the technologies, power sources, and equipment, the most valuable things in history that could save the present. Now, he realized that he had it all backward. The resources ChronoCom should have been farming all this time were the people, not just the stopgap bandages of power reactors and fuel supplies. After all, hundreds of years of salvaging had not deterred mankind’s decline toward extinction.
James hurried up the stairs. He caught up with them on the forty-second floor of Farming Tower One, where they were resting on the stairs when he came around the corner. Grace was wheezing and sweating. She looked like she was about to faint.
“Do you know how old I am?” Grace snarled when he came around the bend. “I can’t be climbing all these steps.”
“How could you make her climb all these stairs?” Elise said, shaking a finger at him.
“What the hell?” James raised his arms, palms up. “How was I supposed to have planned ahead for this?”
“You should have!” both women snapped.
James tried very hard to keep his eyes from rolling. “I’ll see what I can do. For now, allow me.” He powered on his exo and gently lifted both of them with his kinetic coils, carrying them all the way up to the seventieth floor. The entire time, the two women berated him on his thoughtlessness. Somehow, in the fifteen minutes he had left them alone, they had become friends and decided to combine their powers against him.
When they reached the lab, Grace made one quick circle and came out with a list of demands, most for items which James had never heard of. Still, she had a way of putting words together so that he found himself agreeing to almost everything. Then, she walked over to the ancient elevator bank with one half of the sliding doors torn off. She poked her head down the dark shaft and then signaled to him. “Clear this, and have a fabricator build an elevator. This one isn’t a request.”
“You mean the things you wanted before were optional?”
“No, pet, they weren’t, but this one I need especially. I need a working lift if I’m to work up here. And I’m sure those tribepeople of yours will appreciate it as well.”
“I don’t even know where I can find a fabricator.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “I guess I’ll have to do it myself. Only way I know it’ll be done right. Pay attention. Take notes, pet.”
Suddenly she rattled off a list that was easily fifty items long. James didn’t know how she knew all this off the top of her head, but then again, that was why he had brought her back. He had a sneaking suspicion that life was about to get much more interesting.
THIRTY-FIVE
TURNING UP THE HEAT
Levin and Kuo stood in the town square of the village of Pinto waiting for the ancillaries to report in. In the distance, the cratered city of Madrid stretched out for several kilometers in either direction for as far as the eye could see. Madrid had been one of the first major cities to fall during the AI War, a victim to the surprise attacks of the gigantic Mountain Hulks passing through the Strait of Gibraltar on their way to Germany, similar to the second coming of Hannibal thousands of years earlier. A city of millions was reduced to rubble within hours when the land underneath collapsed from the stress of hundreds of vanguard burrowers cutting through its foundation. Now, all that was left were scores of crevices punctured deep into the earth.