Steamrolled Page 18

  “Is there a problem, gentlemen?”

  “Other than your crimes against the time line?”

  “We’ve suspected you for some time.” Carig let more than a hint of triumph color his voice.

  He’d always been the weak link in any situation. Not that Glarmere was a tower of strength. It was tempting to toy with them, tempt them with power they’d never get, but there were more amusing ways to neutralize them.

  Glarmere—who was venal but not stupid—noted the change in his expression and fired. The blast tracked toward him, almost in slow motion thanks to the slow time on the base, and then passed through him, hitting but not harming the stone walls. There was only one place he felt it safe to be physically present and this wasn’t it. It wasn’t his fault his virtual presence looked more real than theirs. Before they could recover from the shock, he dropped the snare, trapping them both.

  It was risky to send them off the base, but he should be able to have them modified and back before they were missed if he timed it right. The others he’d replaced with versions from other realities, but these two had proved challenging to replicate that way. There were too many variations in their choices from reality to reality. Still, no one here would miss them. No, the more likely reaction from their absence would be relief.

  Their eyes glared at him from the snare. They didn’t know enough to be afraid. Yet. He triggered the command to start their journey to the laboratory and a session with the Doctor where their education and the realignment of their loyalty would happen. When they’d flashed out, he turned back to his data. It took him a few seconds to find the area of concern.

  The instabilities appearing on the real tracking data—data he’d diverted from the tracking screens in Time Control Central—were new, even in his experience. What puzzled and almost troubled him, there was a fluidity he could see spreading into the future. Even now it lapped against the edges of this base. If the base sensors hadn’t been altered, there would be alarms going off all over. As it was, everyone was focused on the missing trackers and—a bonus—they still believed the data being fed them. With all the trackers secured, or close to it, and existing outside the time line, they had no idea how isolated they were. Their only remaining lines of defense were the nanites and the fail safe, but in time—he smiled again—the nanites would blink out of existence, too, taking the fail safe with them, and there’d be nothing and no one left to stop him.

  The change was small, so small he almost missed it. In the past, it was the small changes that had tripped him up. Did he have a past? Here on the base there was no past or future, just the present. It was designed that way to keep them from trying to change time’s course, had been imposed by the Oversight Council after “someone” almost wiped them all out. Someone? He lacked proof, but felt in his heart he knew the name. Chameleon.

  So far the Chameleon had eluded him. A most worthy opponent, though a trap once more inched toward this Chameleon. Did he feel it closing in on him? He had remarkable instincts and he’d muddied his footprints in time, but he could not erase the memories protected by the base. He would find this final piece to his symphony and neutralize the threat there, too.

  The small change pulsed and grew. He zoomed in on it, thanking—who did one thank when they didn’t believe in a power higher than themselves? He smiled. He thanked himself. He was the one who had noticed how useful, how trackable Constilinium was in the stream. He was the one who had seeded critical time streams with it, giving him a way to track changes and respond to threats.

  He studied the change. What the Constilinium couldn’t tell him was who or what had made the change. Was it Time—or someone in time—pushing back? Had he missed something? Someone? No, he’d missed nothing, planned for everything. If it was someone, they weren’t fighting very hard. Unless it was Tobias. No, it couldn’t be. This time Tobias couldn’t, wouldn’t dare fail. He sighed. Tobias was a challenging specimen. Not even the sight of an excruciating deletion, or the pain administered through the control device, provided sufficient motivation, it seemed. He showed signs of fighting him, even managing to fight the control device in some small ways. Enough to sabotage his operations? He was a soldier, trained to suffer and fight through great odds. Perhaps a more subtle approach was required. He would give it some thought—

  The alert came from his laboratory, yanking his thoughts back to what passed for the present. He pulled up the notification, a frown forming between his brows. His laboratory was shrinking? That shouldn’t be possible. It was as small as it could be and remain stable. He looked at the time change, then at the lab alert. Which was the more urgent problem to fix? Unless they were related…

  EIGHTEEN

  One weapon was one too many when it was pointed at your heart, even with defensive shields at max. Not moving seemed indicated, but difficult. Paradoxes, for whatever reason, went right to the knees. Then they hit the stomach. Nausea. Light-headedness. And, in a wrong blink of the eye, when coupled with a wrong move, the paradox erased your past and present and future.

  In inappropriate contrast, Lurch felt like he was doing the nanite version of the jig of joy.

  “I don’t care for time wardens,” the woman with the two weapons said, her voice colder than the coldest time current.

  If she’d run into time wardens, she wasn’t supposed to remember them. Silence, Ashe decided, might be golden in this case. Let this woman, who must be important to Ashe’s past, do the talking. Only she didn’t continue. Her aim wasn’t wobbling and her gaze stayed as cold as her voice. Why isn’t she affected by the paradox tremors? Then answered her question: the future was at risk, not the present or the past. Great.

  I’m going to take down your shields and holo-camo. Try not to make an unwise move.

  What? Define unwise. If she passed out from the tremor would that get her shot, too?

  The woman’s eyes narrowed a tiny bit. Had Lurch opened a dialog with her, and if he had, how—

  She had nanites. It was the only possible conclusion. He was an Older, so Ashe understood Lurch knew a lot of humans prior to integration with her. She just hadn’t expected to meet one. Expect the unexpected. Like that was possible. Just as humans who knew about the Time Service protected their personal information, so had the nanites protected themselves by obscuring their origins. So knowing the woman had nanites didn’t help fix Ashe in the time line, other than to tell her she was in the past—something she already knew. The presence of nanites might explain why this woman hadn’t forgotten her encounter with time wardens, though Ashe wasn’t sure how. Time resets were time resets, weren’t they? Nanites would be reset, too, wouldn’t they? He’d shut her out. The thought hit her, a new low blow, just in case the paradox wasn’t enough of a hit. She didn’t expect to know his every thought, just like he respected her privacy, but this—

  Try trusting me.

  She means something to you.

  You have no need to be jealous.

  I’m not. She wasn’t jealous, just…worried about his loyalty. He couldn’t afford to be totally loyal to his host. She got that. His loyalty, like hers, had to be to his people but, her mind formed the question with extreme reluctance, did he like this woman better? He’d never felt this happy before. And he’d better not be listening in to her thoughts when he’d shut Ashe out of his.

  The woman appeared to hesitate, then she lowered both weapons with a reluctance that annoyed. One she returned to what Ashe assumed was a hiding place, the movement so fast she missed where that place was. The other she held with a loose, but still threatening grip. Where did she fit into Ashe’s history? Or was it Lurch’s history causing the paradox tremor?

  You have her nose.

  His delight breached the shut out, oozing through her insides like disgustingly sweet, and very thick, goo. She couldn’t see what the attraction was. Okay, so the shared nose was okay, but the woman was a bit creepy. Dark-haired, with eyes a darker shade of the color of Ashe’s skin, and cold of aspect, she
wore ominous with the same ease as she held her weapon. Ashe considered her attire. Since Ashe’s genealogy straddled many worlds, two galaxies, she’d studied Earth history even before her Service data download. It was a great way to annoy her father. She matched the uniform to early twenty-something century Earth. The military didn’t update their uniforms that often. Ashe knew the weapons without assistance. The handgun was Earth origin and the other pure Gadi, pre-reunification—which seemed to support her sense the woman was from twentieth-something century Earth.

  Ashe, unlike her contemporaries, was comfortable with her mongrel heritage. It didn’t matter if they called themselves Gadi or Garradians, they still thought they were the cream of any crop and that purity of heritage trumped all. Not that the citizens of Earth were humble about their heritage. That said, if Ashe had this woman’s nose, shouldn’t Ashe recognize her face? Knowing your family line was Garradian 101 for a people who trotted those ancestors out whenever they could. One started studying it when one started one’s education. Family was everything—though sometimes a pain in the posterior region. Of course, since the woman had nanites she could have muddied the trail a bit in self-protection after her encounter with the wardens. Ashe might have done a bit of muddying herself along the way.

  “I’d start talking if I were you.” The woman broke the silence—and into Ashe’s thoughts. “All this time crap makes me cranky and when I get cranky, I start shooting.” A long, menacing pause, then she added, “I’d have already shot you if I didn’t recognize your eyes.”

  My eyes? Ashe blinked them. What did the woman want her to say?

  The woman’s head tilted off true, her gaze narrowing.

  “You have my nose.” This fact did not appear to thrill the woman that much. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Really?” Ashe felt like a misbehaving teen, despite the advantage being from the future should have given her with this great-grand-whatever. “I shouldn’t be here getting knocked around by paradox tremors and risking my own future—”

  Name dropping might help.

  “—tracking Tobias Smith.” Ashe dropped the name with reluctant caution, relieved the tremors didn’t get worse. They might have gotten better. That was good. Better was always, well, better.

  Her brows arched with disdain. “I thought you time creeps caught him?”

  We did? Ashe hadn’t gotten a memo on that, but she wasn’t on the memo getting list. Now what?

  A time reset undid it.

  With some relish, Ashe shared that tidbit of information and got a thoughtful, somewhat scary nod in return. Why do I get the feeling she knows all about time resets?

  “How far into the future is he causing problems this time?”

  Ashe hesitated, but Lurch didn’t try to stop her, so she gave her the bad news in Earth time. “Five hundred years, give or take a few.”

  She opened her mouth, but apparently failed to find an expletive explicative enough.

  The second weapon disappeared from sight. “Smith.”

  The way she said his name made Ashe glad she wasn’t Smith.

  “I believed I was following his transport trail here.” Ashe didn’t make it a question, but that didn’t stop her hoping for an answer.

  The woman’s headshake was firm. “No. That was…my brother. His beacon. But he didn’t arrive. There was a malfunction of some kind.” Danger did a comeback. “If Smith messed with him—”

  Ashe found time to be glad once again that the tone—and menace—wasn’t directed at her. Have you looked at the data from the malfunction?

  I am studying it. It appears the transport was intercepted.

  One of those time traps? The question was rhetorical, since they couldn’t know.

  “Does he carry nanites, too?”

  The woman hesitated, but Lurch must have reassured her, because she nodded, though she did it with extreme reluctance. She wanted to ask, but didn’t. Ashe appreciated her restraint since she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell this woman that Smith was targeting nanites. That Selnick had survived was reason to hope, but not proof the missing brother still lived. No reason to deliver bad news to someone who made no effort to hide her lingering longing to shoot someone. Don’t shoot the messenger was an old Earth saying, but that didn’t seem to stop messengers from other galaxies getting shot.

  “Smith,” she said, the loathing more pronounced. Another, longer pause. “I haven’t seen him for awhile, but I have seen his work.”

  “Here?” Be nice if this side trip netted something besides a churning stomach as paradox tremors hit her midsection again. Even Lurch couldn’t completely contain the nausea from a tremor.

  “And there.”

  Something in her expression made Ashe suspect the woman was still in private communication with Lurch. She fought back the urge to jump back into the stream. Past annoyance, despite the threatening paradox, was the sense she’d landed where she needed to be. She examined the instinct, the feeling. Lurch had mentioned parallel time lines. Here and there. Was it possible this woman had been here and there, and remembered them? With some care, Ashe increased her sensory scan. A paradox could occur when relatives met, but only if the past changed in a life threatening direction for the future person—which was easier to do than what one might think. The tremors were an advance warning system of a sort. Ashe was committed to not wiping out her future, but it was already in play. She’d sensed that before she left the base and that sense hadn’t changed.

  The woman showed no signs of Constilinium contaminants, but—Ashe angled her head, trying to understand what her time sense saw—the paradox tremors seemed to bend around the woman, rather than passing through her.

  “Why isn’t she being affected?” Ashe hadn’t meant to speak out loud—had she? There were minute traces of stream travel, like old echoes, but also off—like almost everything in her world right now. Still, Ashe didn’t think the woman had been in the stream recently, at least in the current time line. Sight, sound and smell played a role in tracking through time. She registered off in all three, though not in a bad way, just in an off way.

  Sometimes you make my head hurt.

  You have a head? He ignored that, so Ashe returned to her scrutiny of the woman. The woman’s brows arched into the supercilious range, and then past that as Ashe did a slow circuit around her, mapping the edges of her—Ashe didn’t know what to call it. She’d never seen it’s like, though that wasn’t that unusual, since she was a new tracker. She hadn’t downloaded any data that sounded like this, however. Do you know what it is? It galled her to have to ask Lurch, when he was being so mysterious. The realignment of his attention felt almost as disorienting as the paradox tremors. In an attempt to stay on her feet without losing her dignity, Ashe propped a hip against a console. She resisted the urge to cross her arms. Not good to position her hands that far from her weapons and it appeared defensive rather than confident. A giveaway. The echo of yet another family stricture or Lurch?

  “Affected by what?” the woman asked, her tone still deep in annoyed.

  Would it really change the future if I knew her name?

  It is her choice, not mine.

  What is that old Earth saying? You can pick your friends, but not your relatives.

  Lurch chuckled.

  What?

  She is thinking almost the same thing. Despite the time gap, you are very alike.

  If you’re going to insult me—

  Her thoughts fractured as her thoughts synched with Lurch’s data on what might be causing the time anomaly around his new best girlfriend. Or old best girlfriend.

  Focus please.

  “What?” the woman’s eyes widened as if she got the sense of the data, but not the specifics.

  “Why is Smith after you?” Ashe asked, though she had a bad feeling she knew.

  The woman shrugged. “My charm?”

  Ashe shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

  The woman smiled, one lit with real humo
r. “Cat.”

  “Lurch says I take after you.”

  “Lurch.” Now she laughed with real amusement, the sound echoing softly off the stone walls. It was somewhat pleasing to hear. Took the edge off creepy. For some reason the sound eased the paradox tremors. She’d decided something, Ashe realized, something good for the time line.

  “Smith isn’t after me.” She released the words with a care that told Ashe she parsed the words before letting them out, “He is after the Chameleon.”

  The tremors eased some more. “The…Chameleon.” Ashe knew how hard it was to track anyone through time, and if she didn’t know, this trip had been ripe with that type of lesson.

  “For a time, the Chameleon,” she paused, “fixed things. Solved problems. Made other problems go away. I’m assuming that’s why the Chameleon interested Smith, though I try not to assume. Knowing is better.”

  Was this woman the source of the family strictures? It was not a pleasant thought.

  Tell her. She needs to know so she will tell us the rest.

  Ashe thought about arguing, but so far the information exchange had helped, not hurt. “I’m sure the skills are interesting, but I don’t think that’s why he’s hunting…the Chameleon.” Ashe could pretend, too. “How much do you know about time?”

  She gave a wry grimace. “That it’s persistent.”

  Ashe grinned. “If you pull it too far off true, it will snap back like the wrath of the gods.”

  “I’m sensing a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence.”

  “There’s a very large one. Research has shown that time is pinned in place by certain people doing specific tasks. When they function properly, they pin important events and people in place through the snap back, they can even lessen time’s—”

  “Bitch slap?”

  Ashe nodded, filing the word away for future use.

  “And when they don’t function properly, they ramp it up.”