“Doesn’t pay to think about it,” Bohrs said.
“The hell it doesn’t,” Caroline said. “Localized anomalies, my ass. You just haven’t screwed with something significant enough.”
“And you two have been so goddamned careful?” Bohrs said, catching the pack of smokes tossed to him by Ray-Bans.
Caroline had no answer for that.
They waited in the shade of the palms throughout the afternoon. The three Gallant mercenaries talked among themselves, and Dwayne and Caroline sat silent. Both were aware that Dwayne was only still alive to keep Caroline cooperative.
The sun neared the horizon, turning the water to burnt orange dappled with brightest gold. The temperature dropped too suddenly to be caused by the approach of dusk.
Caroline could see her own breath. She nudged Dwayne and rose to her feet. A cloud of mist was drifting over the sand toward them. The air turned frigid before it. The other men stood and turned to the growing cloud.
Ray-Bans had a handheld radio of some type in his fist and spoke into it. Only static returned through the receiving speaker. He walked into the mist, speaking into the transmitter with growing impatience.
Bohrs gave Caroline a gentle nudge toward the edge of the fog.
“Wait till you see this.” He laughed.
56
Everyone Knows This is Nowhere
In their weakened state, Dwayne and Caroline were stricken worse by the manifestation effect than ever before. They exited the mist guided by Bohrs and the hanged man to fall to their knees. They vomited up a mix of the noxious gruel and Evian water.
The other two were gasping with hands on knees but remained standing. Caroline looked up to see the mist falling away. Further down the steel platform, she could see Ray-Bans lying still on the deck. The radio squawked in his lifeless fingers.
She dropped prone, propelled there by a shove from Dwayne, as gunfire exploded from somewhere outside the mist. Green fingers of tracers stirred circles in the dissipating fog.
Behind them, Bohrs and the hanged man were flung back to fall hard on the broad walkway that ran into an array of black steel ovoid rings arching high over their heads. When the staccato beat of the automatic weapon died away, one of the men lay keening and kicking his sandaled feet.
Boots moved past Caroline and Dwayne. “Stay down,” a voice cautioned them.
The man who moved past them stood over the twitching form of Bohrs and pumped three more rounds into him from a stubby MP-5. Bohrs lay still.
Dwayne was the first on his feet, wobbly but defiant. The man with the smoking weapon turned to him.
“Stand down, Roenbach,” the man said evenly and lowered his weapon.
“Who the hell—” Dwayne began.
“A friend. One you haven’t met yet,” the man said without a trace of humor.
Caroline rose, shivering, a hand on an ice-rimed railing. She looked at the man in dark clothing and leather gloves. He appeared calm amidst this chaos. Though he was a total stranger, his presence was as reassuring to her as it was mysterious. He returned her gaze with the most astonishing green eyes she had ever seen.
“I’ve been looking for you two a long time,” the man with the green eyes said.
“How long?” Caroline said, hugging her arms about her.
“Well, that’s rather relative, isn’t it?” He rewarded her with a smile that Caroline sensed was a rare thing indeed.
The chamber they were in was officially a Gallant Temporal Transference Field Generator, but it was, despite a few design elements, a Tauber Tube. Only this version was much larger than even the super-sized Mark 2 onboard the Ocean Raj. Instead of circular rings, the array was made up of ovals of metal sheathed in black ceramic of some kind. The platform was broad enough and the passage tall enough to allow passage of a large truck.
It was all housed in a high-ceilinged, black-walled chamber that owed more to NASA than to Home Depot as the work of the Taubers did. The upgraded Tube sat in a kind of well, surrounded, on all sides by ranks of consoles and work-stations. It was far more upscale and expensive than anything Caroline and Morris had worked up. Someone had spent some cash.
The chamber was entirely unoccupied except for the lethal green-eyed stranger who led them up out of the well to an encircling mezzanine. He offered them chairs, real chairs, to sit in and placed hot mugs of coffee in their hands. Their first instinct was to hug the warming cups to them to shake off the chill of their journey. He unwrapped protein bars for them, and cautioned both of them, to eat slowly.
“You don’t have a lot of time,” he said and walked to a control console. “We’re not going to be alone for long.”
Caroline’s mind was locked in option paralysis. There were too many questions in her mind jostling to be the first one out of her mouth. She popped out with perhaps the most irrelevant.
“What’s your name?”
“Samuel,” he said. He did not spare her a glance as his hands worked swiftly over what Caroline recognized as an upright holographic display. His fingers touched virtual controls that changed in size as he brushed them. Columns of numbers were changing on a monitor that hung above the frosted ovals of the manifestation array. It was all far more advanced than anything she or her brother worked with. Sir Neal had poured a fortune into this facility and all this tech.
“I’m sending you both back to a time where you’ll be safe,” Samuel said preempting Caroline’s follow-up. “I can’t do more than that right now. You’ll find yourself on the coast of Lebanon near a town called Jounieh as close to the date of your initial departure as I can dial in.”
“Wait! When are we now?” Caroline said.
“Five years approximately from when you manifested off Nisos Anaxos the first time,” Samuel said, stepping from the virtual console, which collapsed as he moved away from it.
“Five years. In the
