Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(97)
“Well, resources and better equipment I’m working on. What else?” James asked.
Elise thought about it for a second and decided to go for the big issue that had been plaguing her for the past several days. “The biggest hurdle is that the virus mutates constantly like most ribonucleic acid viruses but is also highly resistant to our environment yet. It mutates at an alarming rate. That’s why we need to devise a cure that can adapt constantly with the hundreds of strains that the Earth Plague comes in.”
“How did you resolve it back then?” he asked.
“It wasn’t an issue back then,” she said. “We had a bacterial sequencer that could track and adapt to progressive mutations on the fly. We just don’t have that technology anymore. Without it, we’re pretty much screwed.”
James’s face scrunched up. Elise had learned to recognize that look on him when he was speaking with someone on his comm band or was deep in thought. “Back up for a second,” he said. “That sequencer. What does it look like and where can I find one?”
Elise shook her head. “Only three prototypes existed. One went down with Nutris, and the second one, the original, was destroyed after it caused a flu-variant outbreak in Poland. The third I have no idea.”
James put a finger to his chin and rubbed his now-hairless face, compliments of her nagging. Elise wasn’t a fan of sandpaper beards. “This sequencer,” he asked. “Was there a crystal with a bunch of sharp needles pointing at it?”
Elise frowned. “How do you know what it looks like?”
He shrugged apologetically. “Um, well, I stole it.”
“You did what?” Her eyes widened.
“I’m sorry…,” he said.
“No.” She laughed. “You being a time-traveling klepto is a good thing. If there’s a working sequencer here, we might actually have a chance to cure Earth Plague.”
James hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“I believe it’s in Valta Corporation’s possession. It will be nearly impossible to retrieve.”
Elise held James’s hands and moved into his embrace. “Can you at least look into it? Please? It’s very important.”
“I’ll ask Smitt to dig up what he can find on the Nutris items,” James said. “No promises. There’s a good chance they could already be out of our reach.”
“Thanks, James, you time-traveling klepto liar.” She stood on her tippy-toes and pecked him on the cheek.
“The other reason why I came to see you,” he said, sporting a funny look on his face, “is because I need to leave again in four days. This time, I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Where are you going? Back into space?”
He shook his head. “I have an upcoming jump to the Arabian Sea. ChronoCom’s been tightening their surveillance grid. Smitt believes they’ve isolated our whereabouts to within this hemisphere. High-altitude travel is now too risky. I’m taking the collie underwater through the Atlantic.”
“Is it dangerous?” she asked.
“Just promise me you won’t leave Boston until I return.”
“I promise,” she lied. Elise knew how stressful these jobs were for him and didn’t want to worry James. That, and she knew he’d fly off the handle if he found out. However, she had already reserved the ground transport to make a field trip with Rima to Mount Greylock in five days, and she had no intention of canceling. Sure, there were risks involved, but no more than what James did going back in time. Both had their wars to fight, and Elise had no intention of not doing her job because her self-declared protector was too busy risking his life doing something else.
THIRTY-EIGHT
WINGMAN
Smitt David-Proteus massaged his temples and resisted the urge to bang his forehead against the console at Hops in Earth Central. He had never realized how spoiled he was handling a Tier-1 like James. The handler captains, in all their shallow wisdom, had determined that they would chastise him for his recent transgressions by busting him down to babysit crappy low-tier chronmen doing coal runs and solar farming in the medieval ages.
It was beneath him, insulting, and more than a little depressing. He had gone from managing a single Tier-1 chronman to an entire gaggle of wide-eyed fresh Academy fodder filled with big egos, small brains, and even less common sense. He didn’t expect any of these idiots would survive their first year.
“No, no, Hurls,” he said into the console, his voice resigned. “You have to cut the branches off before you put the tree trunks into the netherstore. Look, the fire starts in nine minutes and needs to burn across the full acreage. The way fire works, it needs something to burn, to fuel it. If you don’t leave enough materials for the flames to jump from tree to tree, you’re going to leave time ripples.”
For a second, Smitt daydreamed about disabling Hurls’s jump band and stranding the abyss-plagued moron in 1894 Hinckley, Minnesota. This was definitely one chronman who was going to drive down the tenure averages. He had to babysit for another forty minutes, pulling Hurls out right before the out-of-control forest fire overran his position. The guy had to unload his entire container, strip out all the branches from the trunks—leaves and all—and spread them across the areas he had already cut to make sure the fire still spread like it was supposed to before loading the trunks back into the netherstore. It was a lot of wasted time and, at the end of the day, the jump recovered only 60 percent of the units earmarked for that job.