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  “Is that doing what I think it is doing?” Robert asked, tapping the gauges with a well-shaped finger.

  The bridge, or whatever it was, was on the cozy side. The captain’s chair at her back, and the appendages poking down from the ceiling, kept her close enough to brush against him—or so she told herself. A slight turn of her head and she was inches from his yummy profile. Then he matched her move and they were an inch or two shy of nose-to-nose. It was a nice nose, but the eyes held her attention. They were deep, sad in places, but not in others. It felt like diving into a lake, with sun-warmed places and fresh-off-the-mountain cold spots. It was a bad moment to wonder what it would be like to kiss him. She had a feeling it was an answer she’d like. She wanted, she needed to blink. Her eyes dried out, but it felt like blinking would cut something off, something that felt important. His hand lifted into her peripheral vision. She hoped, she so hoped he intended touching her—

  “How’s it going in there?” Ric not-Jones’s voice cut the something with the finality of a knife.

  “When I know, you’ll know.” He raised his voice just enough to be heard outside the chamber, the tone careful and polite, his accent still deep in the yummy zone.

  He hadn’t moved away from her, but she felt distance. She also felt his reluctance with it. Or she was delusional. Probably that, she thought with a mental sigh.

  “You know engines, Emily, steam engines. I don’t. What do these tell you?”

  His finger touched one of the gauges, not her. Probably where he’d been reaching the first time. He wasn’t afraid to ask questions, but he was a geek. Geeks loved questions. And answers. It should be an irreconcilable difference, but she wasn’t feeling it.

  “Despite the twitching up and down, it looks like the two processes could sync at some point.” She looked at the set of gauges above those. Was there a buffer of some kind? Did the power gradually build up or did it surge at the moment of syncing? It seemed like it would need a sustained output to traverse—whatever it had traversed.

  “If you looked at the engine, could you tell what’s wrong with it?”

  “You’re sure something is wrong with it.” She didn’t have to make it a question. The obvious didn’t need asking. He didn’t need to answer her not-question, just as she hadn’t needed to ask it, so after a pause she shrugged. “Maybe.”

  That was the other thing she’d learned at her mom’s knee—don’t make promises you’re not sure you can keep.

  EIGHT

  Selnick shot away from Ashe as soon as they were clear of the base, though he couldn’t lose her since she knew his destination. As soon as she was out of recall range, she shut down her beacon. With the station beacon pulsing softly inside her head, she was content to idle along behind him. If there was a problem around the station, he could find it first, since he was the lead tracker and the man.

  He cut across the stream, a risky move—one risked leaving a body part in a different time if one moved injudiciously at the wrong moment—for someone with his skill set. He managed it with all visible parts intact—Ashe had a feeling he’d left part of his brain behind—then hooked into a fast moving vein. Show off.

  Ashe chose a slower moving vein, letting her time senses filter data as she assessed the stream, sifting what she saw, heard and smelled into slots for further study. Experts called it a stream, but wrong time sometimes resembled earthquake damage, with fractures and fissures going off in jagged directions. Eddies, currents, even waves—some of them tidal in character—fanned out in more directions than the wrong time, making her bounce in the current as she drifted along. At a safe distance from the fractures, the effect was mild, but it would be worse when she got close.

  Wrong time also smelled and sounded different and required care not to miss the subtle nuances. She couldn’t have done it without a nanite, even with her heightened time senses.

  The phosphorescence of Selnick’s passage lingered in the vein he’d used, which also happened to be the most direct route to the station. Ashe hated direct routes and didn’t trust this one, so kept her pace cautious, and when she could, she shifted into a different time vein at random intervals. Though time passed differently in the stream, it still surprised her how fast she caught up with Selnick.

  He’s not moving.

  She slowed, alerts firing on all her senses, and eased in, searching for the outer edges of—got it. It had the form and feel of a station, but one that blended into the stream. Stations were little islands for trackers. They monitored time, but also provided rest—traveling in the stream was exhausting, particularly if turbulence was present—and information and they could be used as holding areas for time violators. The station’s shields funneled time around them, though time passed through the sensors. Ashe had seen the science behind them and didn’t ever want to do that again. This looked a bit like a station, but not enough.

  It’s a time trap.

  You’ve seen this before?

  It is very like the holding space inside the station.

  Just past him, the station beacon placidly called all trackers to what used to be safety. Ashe took her time, studying the veins of time around the trap. She didn’t want to get caught, too. It appeared to be active across both the approach veins and cross-stream. She drifted closer, careful not to get so close to the barrier that an unsteady eddy pushed her into it. Up close, it was more defined, but it would be all but invisible to someone not looking for it. A fast moving time tracker wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d probably been in it before he knew it was there. This type of trap would only work near a station. Too many approach vectors for random time stream travel. Good thing she’d already killed her beacon.

  She tensed on a sudden thought, but Lurch said it first.

  This type of trap would also be effective around the base.

  She suppressed the urge to let loose with another round of alien swear words.

  If we can’t go back—

  —we’re on our own out here.

  It was a good thing Lurch had jacked into the upper level Service databases when they were inducted into the Service. At least they had that to help them.

  This couldn’t be naturally occurring, could it?

  Lurch seemed intrigued by the idea, though doubtful.

  Can you get within a meter of the barrier? I’ll send in a drone.

  Ashe closed the gap some more, then reached out her hand. A tiny spark of light left her middle finger, shooting toward the barrier. It hit it, sparked once, and went out. Ashe pulled back, emotionally and physically. Drone scouts weren’t sentient, but it was still creepy. Did that thing just delete your drone?

  His grim assent wasn’t verbal. Can we tell how deep and wide it is?

  Ashe mapped the boundaries for him. When she drifted around to the backside, Selnick’s eye lids flickered, almost in slow motion. He’s still alive. She signed a question—since deleted nanites couldn’t connect—but all he managed was a twitch of one finger. It’s got him immobilized and I can’t release him without more information. Information wasn’t available if drones couldn’t assess. Likely his distress beacon wasn’t active. She couldn’t pick up anything from inside the trap. Is the trap giving off any signals?

  Not on any frequencies we use. It could send out a ping when activated.

  A one-time signal would be safer for whoever set the trap. Wouldn’t want to leave a signal a tracker could follow to the source.

  Lurch was still deep in grim as they backed off the trap. Ashe didn’t grudge him his grim. Someone was targeting trackers, but they were killing nanites. It didn’t matter that Selnick’s had been non-sentient. If the missing trackers had been snagged in these traps, then some sentient nanites were dying, too.

  Past the trap, Ashe didn’t rush the station. It seemed unlikely there would be another trap in such close proximity to the station, but she didn’t assume anything. A less wary tracker might see a team member in trouble and head for the station, falling into a second trap
either outside or inside the station. Lurch sent a drone in. It didn’t make it. The barriers were smaller versions of the shields that kept the outpost out of time, and transparent, so it was easy to tell there was no one trapped there. Someone comes and collects them. It was the only conclusion.

  They could wait and see who came—while time disintegrated back along that fracture.

  We can leave observers. A tiny bundle of nanites emerged from her arm, bright for a few seconds before they blended into their surroundings. We can pick them up after.

  If there was an after.

  NINE

  Robert knew how to access the steam/transmogrification machine engine room, where the nanites still scurried through metal, valves and pipe. He—and they—knew the basics of steam generation, had studied its history prior to deployment on this operation. And he was a certified genius, despite his time in crazy. It all should work for him, or at least become clear, but the data coming from the nanites made him wonder if he was back in crazy. None of it made sense, to him or the nanites. And there was so much of it, even with the nanites controlling the data flow. It was another bump into impossible, though this one felt more like a face plant than a bump. He had a feeling his sister would have done better in this situation, but he couldn’t be sorry he was here. He’d never been this close to a woman not his mother or his sister. There was enough guy in him to like it without over thinking why he liked it. And, he had to admit, it was easier to think about Emily than sort strange data.

  That she was a woman well suited to this place, this time, and this machine was a bonus. That she was lovely to look at was the cherry on the whipped cream of that bonus. She smelled better than the engine room, too. He shifted marginally closer, wondering if she’d notice. All her attention appeared to be focused on the machine. She hadn’t moved since they’d stepped over the rise, but her stillness indicated hyper attention, not indifference. That stillness intrigued him almost as much as the curve of her mouth. It was warm this close to the steam engine, but he’d have been warm regardless. He accepted this as the price of discovering his guy zone. Another bonus, the nanites were so distracted by the problems of the machine they hadn’t noticed. He was still connected to them, felt their frustration and curiosity in the stream of data they sent back, but the data stream was one-way. He couldn’t help them any more than they could help themselves.

  Without warning Emily shifted to the right, dropping into a crouch. Robert followed her move, still surprised when his body reflected a physical flexibility not present before the introduction of the nanites. They had done a good job of healing the years of physical inertia. Delilah’s memory transfer also helped his physical response time. His muscles now had memories not their own, could do things he couldn’t even before the break. He could jog the perimeter of the Kikk Outpost without breaking a sweat, which was gratifying, but begged the question, why he sweated now?

  He should quit staring, but it was difficult. Her head had tilted to the mathematically correct angle for kissing—how did he know that? He’d never calculated that angle. It wasn’t a difficult calculation, even for someone kissing challenged, but he’d had no contact with kissable girls before he went crazy. He realized Wynken, Blynken and Nod had ringed him, as if he was the center of a stadium and they were the audience. He also sensed cheerleaders urging him to go for it. Where had they learned about cheerleaders? There were no cheerleaders in his memories.

  If she’d been looking at him as hard as he looked at her, he might have gone for it. But she wasn’t. All her attention was on the steam engine.

  “That’s…different.” Emily wagged a finger toward the machine.

  Robert felt obliged to look, though neither he nor his nanites wanted to. The engine looked much like the drawings and old photographs he’d seen of steam engines. To power his machine, Twitchet had chosen—possibly because of space considerations—a small cross-drum type of water-tube boiler, commonly used in ships of the period. He ran the specifications and came up short on energy required to move the machine across a room. No way this engine could displace the machine across space. And time. But it had. How? Why? What had provided the boost? Robert had to get his vision oriented to the adaptations Twitchet had made, before he could follow the machine’s lines down to the heat source required for steam generation.

  Instead of any variation of a furnace, for coal or other heat source, there was a glowing red ball about the size of his fist. She was right. It was different. It appeared to be floating in the space where the furnace should be. That was different as well. He thought about asking the nanites why they hadn’t mentioned it, when he found it in the data stream they’d sent him, but they answered him before the thought fully formed.

  Like you, we sometimes have trouble sorting at what is most relevant. And this machine is particularly anti-technology.

  “I’d blame J.J. Abrams but even he couldn’t make a red ball appear in the 1890’s,” Emily muttered. “Though he’d hate knowing he wasn’t the first. Of course he wins on size.” She grinned.

  He grinned back before he had time to think, finding the movement less clunky than last time. It didn’t matter that he didn’t get the joke when she looked at him like that.

  Can you go in and identify substance?

  We tried a drone and it was incinerated.

  Good thing they were non-sentient, though they also weren’t an unlimited supply. He frowned. So the red ball was incinerator hot, which made sense since it was the heat source, but he felt only a small level of heat emanating from two feet away. That was also different. Despite the various thoughts sifting through his mind, he was unable to halt the question he shouldn’t ask. It was another giveaway. “J.J. Abrams?”

  Question marks popped into her eyes again. What would it take to get her to ask a question?

  “A geek who hasn’t seen Star Trek. I do not know what to say.”

  He knew what he’d like to do. Her brows rose towards her hairline, as if she’d picked up on his longing, but before she could react, Ric interrupted them again.

  “Prof? How’s it going in here?”

  “Professor.” The low beam smile curved her lips and formed attractive lines around her eyes. “Maybe I should reconsider the benefits of a higher education.”

  His thought processes broke into pieces, reforming into new patterns. Was she…could she be…flirting with him? Would someone like her flirt with someone like him? He could be misreading her. Her smile deepened and his thoughts split again. Perhaps it was a combination of her smile and the look in her eyes. Or a dampening effect from the nanites. Or the years in crazy. Had he considered girls before? Pondered their smiles, their lips? Their scents? How had he missed this key part of human existence? He now better understood sirens from the myths. Had the racket in his head been so loud he missed this? If it had, he owed the nanites more than he realized.

  You are welcome.

  Robert sensed amusement from them.

  “A minute, Prof?” Ric sounded amused, too.

  With reluctance he tried to hide, Robert straightened. Emily rose with him, her gaze holding his until he had to turn away. Just outside the engine room, Ric looked at him without enthusiasm.

  “So?”

  “We’re still assessing the problem.” He looked at Ric with assumed calm and dared him to call it a bluff.

  “We?” Ric’s brows rose as close to his hairline as they could. His voice lowered. “There is no we that involves her, Prof. We’re the only we on this op.”

  Robert had read the mission reports about the various alien contacts, both away and here on Earth. They’d all gotten to have a she on their op—even Fyn had a she—so why couldn’t he have a she?

  “She knows engines. And Twitchet’s work. And this is her property.”

  Good save.

  It seemed the nanites wanted a she on the op, too. Or this she. It wasn’t a save. It is the truth.

  Of course. A pause. We like her, too. She is unlike
anyone you have interacted with since we integrated.

  She’s not like anyone I met before our integration. Not that there’d been a lot of non-scientists in his pre-this life.

  We would like to observe how she thinks. She communicates in a manner new to us.

  They were united. Robert couldn’t feel the difference between them, which was also different. This much different, in the past, would have him curled in a ball in a corner. He liked this present better.

  As do we.

  “Right. Just be careful.” Ric looked past Robert and stiffened. “Holy Hannah, is Twitchet related to J.J. Abrams?”

  Emily, who had moved to the other side of the machine, peeked out long enough to chuckle with him. Robert felt a stab of annoyance. Ric had a girl. He didn’t need another one. Not that Robert had Emily in any sense or definition of the word.

  You like her.

  Like seemed inadequate to quantify his reactions to Emily, but he just gave a mental nod.

  Constilinium.

  What?

  We have been searching our databases and yours for the red energy sphere. It is preferable to incineration.