Steamrolled (11 page)

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.

Everything would be. He mentally followed their line of research. He’d received a lot of information from the Garradian databases during the download from Delilah. This was part of it.

Constilinium is a substance somewhat like your uranium
, Nod told him.
But it is more.

Based on the data they were presenting more was a massive understatement.

And it is not natural to your galaxy but it is natural to Keltinar
, Blynken chimed in.
Current assessment is that it is too unstable for commercial use. Or any use.

If it is Constilinium
, Wynken finished.

Keltinar? Robert frowned but before dots could connect, Emily’s voice broke into the nanite consultation.

“Um, I think I found the problem.”

With an exchange of wary glances, the two men edged into the small space where Emily crouched next to the engine.

With a careful movement, she indicated a junction of cast iron pipes. What—then he saw it. The cast iron sections…rippled as if it were fabric touched by a breeze.

We were about to mention it. There is much to process here.

They sounded a bit sheepish. Could it have been caused by the impact with Carey’s wormhole? It seemed a reasonable hypothesis. This anomaly joined with the nanites thought train on Constilinium and Keltinar. How could a guy in the 1890’s get his hands on a substance from Keltinar—Robert’s thoughts cut off as he heard his sister’s voice inside his head.

Freaking lying time creeps.

His voice echoed around the room, but he still had a small hope he hadn’t said it out loud, a hope that died when he saw both their faces.

* * * *

He
wasn’t a fan of vids that weren’t real, but watching his stream collections was reality television on steroids. The cameras were all old school and so was the machine he used to play the films. In the dark, the only light from the machine, with the flickering images on the screen, it was almost as good as studying the time stream itself.

The train of snares moved like a circus train through the stream. It was hard to count them in the uncertain light from the old camera, but it looked to be a rich harvest. The figures appeared frozen, most unconscious but occasionally the camera caught eye movement from one as the train drifted past the automaton’s position. If a specimen managed to have an expression, it was always fear.

Fear made for better theater.

TEN

The eddies near the fractures curled around her like incoming waves on a distant Earth shore. She knew the stream, knew how it should feel. This wasn’t it. Fissures in time sent shocks through the stream, the disturbances getting worse as Ashe turned right into the worst of it, setting course for the epicenter, kicking against the current, intent on reaching the place where time was wrong. It made transit rough.
Can you barf in here?

If Lurch had eyes, they would have twitched at that question. No one knew quite what the body became in the stream, just that you felt like you, saw some objects in their proper form—though how it all worked was still something Ashe didn’t understand. One couldn’t look out over the expanse of time and see people moving through it, so she kind of assumed that to anyone at any distance from her, she lacked form. Which didn’t wholly explain how she’d been able to follow Selnick. Did she see him because she knew he was there? Or because they both had Time Service tech? It was one of those thoughts patterns that could cause a time spiral, so she didn’t dwell on it.

Like the ocean, the stream had cold and hot spots, eddies and cross currents that tried to throw her off course. Sights, sounds and smells. At first the trail was easy to follow, but then she hit the fracture zone, when time became less like an ocean and more like multiple, nasty, geologic events. Numerous fissures branched like jagged lightning strikes above a flat plain. This is where instinct took over, where transit slowed as she studied the branches, feeling her way through it as the turbulence, as time itself, tried to push her back along the fault line.

Some of the fissures felt and looked connected to the main trail, but some—Ashe slowed to study one—looked and felt, and yes, smelled like diversions. She smelled other things and filed them away. If the trail became too obscured, sometimes all that was left was to smell her way, though she also didn’t know if that’s what really happened, or it just felt like that’s how it was. In a strange way, it felt like someone or something sensed her pursuit and threw obstacles in her path. It was bad for time, but if she found the source and healed time, it would be like it never happened. At least, that was the theory. Even the Time Service didn’t know how deep time could be healed or if it could be pushed past a point of no return—or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. There were theories, of course, lots of them, from past and the future—something that still made her time senses flinch when she thought about it.

Ashe kicked back into the current, pushing back against the obstructions. The suit helped reduce friction as she slid around small eddies and currents that tried to pull her off true, it protected somewhat against time shocks, but the occasional zing got through. Time stream travel would be too painful to endure without nanites—sentient or not. She closed on the breach—the stream exploded in her face, or maybe it turned into a vortex, a whirlpool. She wasn’t sure. On an Earth Richter magnitude scale it would be at least a nine. Whether she had a physical body or not became moot because it felt like she went top over tail—

ELEVEN

The need to ask almost choked Emily, but if ever there was a time to be careful what you ask, this had to be it. She couldn’t think of any answer that would be good when trying to understand the amazing appearance of the 1890’s transmogrification machine, fluid cast iron, a big red energy ball, and
freaking lying time creeps
.

They’d retreated back to the “parlor” of the machine to discuss options—like they had any. The Emergency Absquatulation Device buzzed in her pocket, so she took it out, set it on the tea table, and then wished she hadn’t, because if it was what brought the machine, then it was the key to keeping what was hers. She sat down, a bit primly because the chair and the parlor demanded prim, and it helped her feel more in control, an illusion she was happy to promote as long as it worked for her, despite the EAD vibrating against the tea tray.

“Is there a way to bypass the affected sections and cut off the flow of energy?” Ric not-Jones asked the question, his gaze hitting Robert, then passing to her with enough reluctance to be obvious.

Robert ruffled his hair in a nervous gesture that was new. He’d been so contained, so careful up to this point, as if he knew every move he made said something about who and what he was. This movement seemed more natural and upped the whole geek vibe he had going. Upping the geek vibe upped the hot factor by some number or other. Like a big one.

Freaking lying time creeps.
Ric not-Jones knew what it meant. He’d been horrified but not surprised. Figured that the cutest guy to walk into her life in forever would be crazier than she was unless—could crazy be drawn to crazy? For a guy that geeky-cool, a girl could overlook a lot, especially when she had more than a few crazy skeletons in her closet. She didn’t want to think it, but sometimes a girl had to think what a girl had to think.

Oh my darling.

It seemed it took more than twice to get that out of the system.

Robert looked at her. “What do you think? Can it be bypassed?”

He thought she could fix it? Or help?
Oh my darling.
Maybe she didn’t want to get that out of her system.
Okay, he’s not yours, so focus on the question
.

She frowned, considering what she’d seen in her external survey. “None of the specs for the machine were found after Uncle E’s disappearance. Still, on the surface it’s a fairly standard steam engine, a miniature cross-drum type of water-tube boiler. I can fix it, but the red ball, and the…”

“The spatial anomaly.”

“Yeah, that.” How had that happened? Did she want to know? Jury still out. She fingered a few of the dyed strands of hair. She needed to see more of the machine’s innards before she started cutting off power. “I don’t do anomalies.”

“The location has to be the key to the way the gauges are behaving,” Robert agreed, as if she’d been wise and possibly wonderful. And his eyes hadn’t glazed over yet.

He might be the perfect guy—for her. Maybe two times crazy would be zero? If crazy was the same as zero. She thought for a minute and ended up not sure.

“Or misbehaving,” Emily tacked on with a grin, hoping he’d smile again. He released them like a miser, but they were worth the wait. She stood up, partly because the chair was freaking uncomfortable, and so she could take a gander at the gauges again. The variations were getting smaller, which could mean it would sync and activate again. She propped a shoulder against the hatch opening. “I think we’re running out of time. We might have to work this out where you found it before.”

It wasn’t a question, though there might have been a query at its heart.

Ric not-Jones jerked.

Carey, still on the museum floor, but participating by leaning into the opening, frowned. “There should be at least twelve hours before it does anything.”

That guy knew a lot he was leaking out in dribs and drabs. Ric not-Jones didn’t leak, though he did look a lot, which added up to leaking of a sort. And he jerked more than he should if he wanted to keep secrets. Fyn still seemed unimpressed by any of it. It did make a girl wonder, but not enough to ask, not until she could be sure it was an answer she wanted to hear. That hadn’t happened for years.