entry.
Flame roiled outside the tiny porthole. The craft bucked and hummed, every surface shaken to the verge of tearing apart. Then, as quickly as it had started, the flames gave way to blue sky. Clouds whipped past. A jarring lurch almost made him pass out as the landing rockets fired. The craft floated down the last hundred meters toward a blanket of snow.
On the screen in front of him, the IA timer turned yellow and ticked down by one second. Then another. Thirteen days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds.
Caswell started a timer on his wristwatch to match. His gaze lingered on the device. It was sleek, just a thin strip of titanium around his wrist inlaid with a curved, organic screen. A luxury smartwatch, packed with the latest tech. More powerful than all the world’s computers combined a hundred years earlier. What about here? What would happen if someone in England circa 1956 found it lying on the ground?
Not much, he realized. Their biometrics would fail to activate it. To them it would probably resemble a rather modern bit of jewelry.
There seemed no debate. He needed a timer synced to the one Monique had started. On Earth time, not Duplican. Even a small difference in the planet’s rotational speed could shave minutes each day off his window. He would leave it on, he decided. Absolutely worth the risk.
Get in, do the job, get out, forget. Ignorance is bliss; consequences require recollection. If Archon needed him to know anything about this place after the fact, they’d rebrief him.
EVEN A STIFF BREEZE off the ocean could not banish the smell of smoke and burned flesh.
Two state coroners emerged from the façade of the ruined laboratory, a white body bag held between them. The shiny fabric was sealed to hide the charred horror within. Then another pair of coroners came out, followed seconds later by a third.
Melni Tavan watched from the front row of a crowd of onlookers that dwindled rapidly. With the flames extinguished little remained to hold their attention, and anyway people had things to do. Only the youth and the retired stood their ground, huddled in a dozen quiet conversations as the dead were tucked away.
She’d gleaned next to nothing since her arrival. The chin-ups, sonamed from the way their helmet straps compressed and lifted their chins, made no special allowance for her reporter’s credentials. They all recited the same birdshit line. “Accident, officially. All I can tell you, miss.”
Of course the expected rumor of a bombing spread through the crowd. Those damned Southern insurgents, at it again. So easy to tack that card to anything bad. Melni couldn’t really blame them. She would do the same when she wrote her article for the
Weekly.
She must or else risk becoming the target of rumors. Whispers that she sympathized, or worse.
She bit her lip, her eyes never leaving the three white-wrapped corpses now being slid into protective casings for the ride to the city morgue.
Was he among them? She shuddered despite the layers of clothing draped over her body. It had taken her an entire season to turn Onvel. All of her careful plans hinged on him and his position at the laboratory. To lose him now would set her back a year, a year the South didn’t have. Worse, the situation presented immediate and dire risk to her cover. Onvel’s office would be packed, his belongings sifted through. All that research, assigned to someone else. Had he been careful? Had he really taken all the precautions she’d urged, or only said as much?
A knot of fear began to fester within her. She had to know. She had to get to Onvel’s office before anyone else, or at least know that the fire had cleansed it. Melni followed a narrow lane beside the blackened building until she came to an alley that ran along the back. There was a door there, but also a lot of people. Detectives milled about, flanked by representatives from Valix Corporation, the lab’s owner. Some bore smudges of black ash on their
Flame roiled outside the tiny porthole. The craft bucked and hummed, every surface shaken to the verge of tearing apart. Then, as quickly as it had started, the flames gave way to blue sky. Clouds whipped past. A jarring lurch almost made him pass out as the landing rockets fired. The craft floated down the last hundred meters toward a blanket of snow.
On the screen in front of him, the IA timer turned yellow and ticked down by one second. Then another. Thirteen days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds.
Caswell started a timer on his wristwatch to match. His gaze lingered on the device. It was sleek, just a thin strip of titanium around his wrist inlaid with a curved, organic screen. A luxury smartwatch, packed with the latest tech. More powerful than all the world’s computers combined a hundred years earlier. What about here? What would happen if someone in England circa 1956 found it lying on the ground?
Not much, he realized. Their biometrics would fail to activate it. To them it would probably resemble a rather modern bit of jewelry.
There seemed no debate. He needed a timer synced to the one Monique had started. On Earth time, not Duplican. Even a small difference in the planet’s rotational speed could shave minutes each day off his window. He would leave it on, he decided. Absolutely worth the risk.
Get in, do the job, get out, forget. Ignorance is bliss; consequences require recollection. If Archon needed him to know anything about this place after the fact, they’d rebrief him.
EVEN A STIFF BREEZE off the ocean could not banish the smell of smoke and burned flesh.
Two state coroners emerged from the façade of the ruined laboratory, a white body bag held between them. The shiny fabric was sealed to hide the charred horror within. Then another pair of coroners came out, followed seconds later by a third.
Melni Tavan watched from the front row of a crowd of onlookers that dwindled rapidly. With the flames extinguished little remained to hold their attention, and anyway people had things to do. Only the youth and the retired stood their ground, huddled in a dozen quiet conversations as the dead were tucked away.
She’d gleaned next to nothing since her arrival. The chin-ups, sonamed from the way their helmet straps compressed and lifted their chins, made no special allowance for her reporter’s credentials. They all recited the same birdshit line. “Accident, officially. All I can tell you, miss.”
Of course the expected rumor of a bombing spread through the crowd. Those damned Southern insurgents, at it again. So easy to tack that card to anything bad. Melni couldn’t really blame them. She would do the same when she wrote her article for the
Weekly.
She must or else risk becoming the target of rumors. Whispers that she sympathized, or worse.
She bit her lip, her eyes never leaving the three white-wrapped corpses now being slid into protective casings for the ride to the city morgue.
Was he among them? She shuddered despite the layers of clothing draped over her body. It had taken her an entire season to turn Onvel. All of her careful plans hinged on him and his position at the laboratory. To lose him now would set her back a year, a year the South didn’t have. Worse, the situation presented immediate and dire risk to her cover. Onvel’s office would be packed, his belongings sifted through. All that research, assigned to someone else. Had he been careful? Had he really taken all the precautions she’d urged, or only said as much?
A knot of fear began to fester within her. She had to know. She had to get to Onvel’s office before anyone else, or at least know that the fire had cleansed it. Melni followed a narrow lane beside the blackened building until she came to an alley that ran along the back. There was a door there, but also a lot of people. Detectives milled about, flanked by representatives from Valix Corporation, the lab’s owner. Some bore smudges of black ash on their
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