Time Salvager (7 page)
“Fuck the F
ü
hrer,” one of the guards in the back grumbled. “He brought this down upon us.”
His comrade looked wide-eyed at James’s SS uniform. “I’m sorry, sir. He does not mean it. We haven’t slept in days. The city has been under constant bombardment.”
“I mean every word of it,” the other guard yelled, and then he hiccupped. He brought out a flask and offered it to James. “To the fucking F
ü
hrer then, you stick-in-the-ass.”
James wasn’t sure if he should shoot this guy or not. If he were a true SS officer, that might be the right thing to do. However, he wasn’t sure if the guard was supposed to survive the war. While most time lines self-healed, it was better not to take chances. He did the next best thing.
With one hand, he knocked the flask out of the guard’s hand. With the other, he powered the exo just a tad and threw a right cross at the soldier’s chin. It was just hard enough to knock him unconscious without breaking his jaw, though this wasn’t an exact science. The soldier’s knees went noodly and he collapsed into a heap.
James looked at the other two guards. “Anyone else want to speak ill of the F
ü
hrer?” Both of them shook their heads and stood at attention. “Good,” said James. “Where are they? Take me to the panels before this place burns down around us!” His words were accentuated by another explosion.
“James, hurry up. We don’t have data on when the castle burns down but we do know both the Allies and Soviets stop their offensive at roughly seventeen hundred hours, which is twenty minutes from now. Get a move on.”
One of the guards gestured down the hallway. “It’s in the north wing, first floor, northwest corner. I will take you there.”
The other hesitated. “Can I see your papers, sir?” he said.
Another explosion, this time closer, rocked the castle. In the distance, he heard dozens of windows shatter.
James pushed past the man demanding the papers. “Lead on.”
He was three steps past the guard when he heard the click of the MP40. “Halt!” the guard barked. James wouldn’t be able to talk his way through this. He turned around slowly and stared the guard down, ignoring the gun pointed at his chest. “Your papers, sir,” the guard said with a harder edge to his voice as he aimed his gun at James’s chest. To James’s left, the other guard took a step backward, looking unsure.
“He wants to see my papers,” James thought.
“Well, we don’t have any. Try not to kill them.”
The exo sprang to life, creating a hardened kinetic shell around James’s body. To the guards, it would look like his body suddenly shimmered and took on a translucent blocky yellow shape. He sped forward before the guard could pull the trigger, slipped past the barrel and gripped the man’s wrist. He squeezed until he heard bone crack. Then he swung left, tossing the screaming Nazi like a rag doll at the remaining guard, who was still frozen in shock. The two collided, the impact slamming them against the wall. James walked up to them and checked their vitals. The one with the broken wrist was unconscious. The other was groaning softly. A downward punch to the temple silenced him.
James looked up just in time to see the east wing of the castle explode in a plume of smoke. The window shattered into his face and the shock wave knocked him off his feet. He quickly picked himself up and took off running, speeding through the hallways past panicked groups of huddled soldiers and civilians. He paid them no attention. In a matter of minutes, this castle was going to burn to the ground.
He burst into the Amber Room and startled three plain-dressed workers dismantling the gold and amber panels on the walls. The room was covered in a layer of dust, but James could see the beauty underneath the grime. The workers were less than halfway done taking the room apart. In the center were two crates filled with large blocks of panels.
They withered under his gaze as he pointed at the door and barked, “The three of you. Out. Now!”
The three civilians weren’t about to argue with an SS officer and scampered out of the room. He closed the door behind them and activated several coils, kinetically tearing the panels out one by one and floating them into a neat bunch. When he had six floating, he stacked them and activated his netherstore container, expanding the ring until it was large enough for all six panels to slide through.
His power levels dipped. Netherstore containers used a tremendous amount of energy, and his power levels were already down from absorbing the impact of the airdrop. In the distance, more explosions rocked the castle; debris and dust showered from the ceiling. He could hear panicked soldiers running down the hallway on the other side of the door, shouting, “Fire!” K
ö
nigsberg Castle groaned and his atmos blipped, indicating environmental dangers from the increased heat.
James kept working, slicing and ripping a dozen of the amber panels at once, floating them into neat stacks, and moving them into his netherstore. He moved as quickly as he safely could, but it was a slow process; several of the panels were very delicate. While not a surgeon or a craftsman, he had plenty of experience dealing with Titan generators, which were infinitely more delicate than these indulgent trinkets.
He was almost done when the door burst open and a scared Nazi ran in. The soldier, barely old enough to shave, gaped at the nine panels floating in the air above his head. Then his eyes moved down to the figure at the center of the strange scene. James’s exo made the air near his skin shimmer with a yellow hue. He walked toward the boy, his energy still focused on hovering the panels.
The young Nazi’s voice broke as he raised his rifle. “It’s the work of the devil.”
James lashed out with a kinetic swing and knocked the rifle out of the soldier’s hands. When he reached the boy, he grabbed him by the collar and, with exo-enhanced strength, threw him across the room. The boy hit the wall awkwardly and collapsed to the ground with a bone protruding out of his leg. He howled and tried to crawl away.
“Damn it, James, hurry up,” Smitt urgently crackled in his head.
James turned from the boy and finished his work. He had just completed storing the last panel when he noticed tongues of flames coming from underneath the door to the adjacent room. He glanced back at the boy still huddled in the far corner and saw the stark terror in his eyes, either from the fire or from James. James gritted his teeth, closed the band on the netherstore, and turned to leave.
“Lord save me,” the boy soldier cried over and over again. “I don’t want to die. I am a good person. I don’t want to die.”
With a kinetic hammer, James punched a hole into the wall.
“Please, help me!” the boy screamed. “You must be sent from God, an angel. I’m a Christian! Save me! Please deliver me!”
James stopped again. The fire was threatening to consume the room at any moment. That boy wasn’t getting out alive unless he did something about it. Well, if that was the case, then that boy was as good as dead. James turned and approached the terrified Nazi. “Your time on this world is over. Make peace with your life. It’ll make your final moments easier.”
The boy, probably not even sixteen, face shiny with tears, reached out and clutched James’s ankles. “Mercy! I follow the F
ü
hrer. I’m a good person. I’m a good person!”
James stared at the terrified youth and was brought back to his own childhood, when he had lived in constant fear. He shook his head sadly. “You’re not, but I’m sorry anyway.”
As a final mercy, he brought his fist down upon the boy’s skull, crushing it. Then he turned and left the Amber Room as K
ö
nigsberg Castle burned to the ground. A few minutes later, there was a bright yellow flash, and James disappeared from April 10, 1944.
James pulled his head out of the glass of whiskey and glanced around the Never Late bar at Earth Central. The Never Late was twice as big as the Tilted Orbit but had only a third of the patrons, and every single one of them—all chronmen, for sure—was drinking alone. At least there were more women here. He counted twenty, which made this joint the best odds he’d seen in the past six months.
Another good thing was that the whiskey was cheaper, not that price ever mattered to him. The swill here was just as bad as the swill in space, but really, everything in the present tasted like crap compared to the stuff from the past. James downed his drink and poured himself another from the bottle.
He never thought he’d feel bad for a Nazi, even if it was just a kid. He had a little Jewish blood in him, though that meant a lot less now than it did five hundred years ago. These days, everyone had a little of everyone else’s blood.
Born on Mars colony Brukhim Ha’baim in the Hellas Planitia basin, the old Israel’s only colony in the solar system, he had more Jewish in him than most. Still, that Nazi kid was just that, a dumb kid. James raised his glass in salute and then downed it. At least they didn’t serve drinks in tin cups here.
He thought of his mother and little sister, Sasha. Mother had died during the Mars Plague Bomb of—James pulled up the date—2490. He couldn’t remember when he lost Sasha. They had been in Mnemosyne Station, a refugee camp high up in the orbit of Mars. Barely fifteen at the time, he had kept them both alive for almost a year. James’s eyes moistened and turned the same tint as his red drunken face. He had tried to hold her close every night. He gave her whatever scraps he had, and fought off all the adults who tried to steal their meager belongings or lay a hand on them. Then one day, he woke up and found her missing. He never saw her again. She was nine or ten; he hated himself for not remembering.
When she disappeared, he went crazy, killing two of the men who had constantly harassed them and beating to unconsciousness another who had always leered at her. That got him tossed into the refugee prison, which caught the attention of a ChronoCom recruiter. The man pulled James out of certain labor camp slavery and enrolled him in the Academy. Through her death, he owed Sasha his life.
Smitt joined him at the bar two hours later. By this time, James had lost his usual stoic demeanor and was belligerently yelling at the bartender and everyone else around him. The other patrons ignored him. While that was usually fine by him, this was one of those rare instances where he wanted everyone’s attention. James bellowed and raged at anyone within earshot.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Smitt said, pulling James’s arms down and leading him back to his seat. “You’re yelling at other chronmen here, not rucks. These guys wouldn’t hesitate to throw down with you.”
“Good,” said James, reaching for his glass and nearly tipping it over. “I’m tired of people treating me like a leper.”
“Hardly that.” Smitt signaled to the barkeep for a glass of water. “A dick, maybe. A leper, never.”
James buried his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair, anguish twisting his expression. “He was a little fascist, ya know. Little fucking Nazi, and I smashed his skull in with this.” James held up his right hand and powered on the exo. “Like a sledgehammer on a melon. And that’s being merciful.”
Smitt wasn’t very good at being a comforting ear. “Look, James, kid was a goner anyway. You know that. I’m sure in that moment, you wish you could have done something, but that’s not possible. You’re from their future. You can’t change the past. The time line self-heals.”
This was all Time Law 101. Smitt and James had attended the Academy together. Smitt had failed to make the jump to full-tiered status, and like many who washed out of training, he stayed on to become a handler, while James had become a chronman.
Every chronman at one point thought about changing the past. The allure of rewriting what had already happened was so great that ChronoCom created a separate division, the auditors, just to guard against chronmen making that mistake.
James lifted his head and stared blurry-eyed at Smitt. “So, let’s have our stupid meeting. Any ripples from my Nazi foray?”
Smitt shook his head. “A few small ones. One of the guards that died actually survived the war and had a son in 1952. However, the family line died by 1961 in a boating accident. The time line effectively healed by 1978.”
“Great, prevented a kid from being born. Same as killing him,” James muttered, throwing another glass of whiskey back. This time, instead of putting the glass down on the counter, it slipped out of his fingers and shattered on the floor. The bartender shook his head and signaled to Smitt by pointing at the exit.
James stood up abruptly and nearly fell, knocking his stool over. He pointed back at the bartender and raged, “I leave whenever the abyss I please, you fucking ruck.”
“That’s our cue.” Smitt wrapped his arms around James’s shoulder and led him out of the bar. “Let’s get you to bed. We’ll be at Central for a few months; try not to pick too many fights with the locals. They could make life uncomfortable for us.”
A few minutes later, an exhausted James lay in bed squinting at Smitt leaving the room. He was so drunk he couldn’t see straight. He saw a silhouette of a nine-year-old girl standing by the door.
“Sasha,” he called out, reaching for her.
The figure turned around and spoke in a familiar voice. “Sorry, James, what did you say?”
“I didn’t mean to let you go. I tried to hold on to you,” James mumbled, before collapsing back into bed. “I’m sorry.”
Then darkness swept over him.
* * *
James woke up in a storage container filled with racks of dehydrated provisions. It took him a moment to remember why this placed looked familiar. Grace Priestly. This was the container he had stowed away on to sneak aboard the
High Marker
. He had first jumped back into 2212 on Eris hours before the ship had taken off on its ill-fated journey toward Earth. He had hidden in here as the supplies for the ship were being loaded. Was he on the
High Marker
or on Eris? He couldn’t tell.
James felt along the ridged edge of the container until he found the hatch to the opening. He put his ear to the wall and listened. Dead silence. He was about to pull the lever down when he noticed his uncovered arms. His bands were gone!