Nico smiles and commands the replicator again. “Six beignets. Extra powdered sugar.”
Memories are weird, imperfect things; the oldest recollections—the fossils buried deep in the sub-conscious—are the weirdest and most imperfect of all. Colored by the passing of years, all it takes to unearth unexpected relics, sometimes at the most inopportune moment, is a trigger. Like the sight of something familiar, or a word or situation that conjures powerful feelings, frozen in time. A song that throws you backward and slams you heart-first into a long-forgotten moment.
Smell is a powerful trigger. The smell of sweet fried dough takes me back to a Louisiana plantation and Marie-Thérèse, the Acadian cook who found my starved, half-clothed body cowering behind the hydrangeas in the garden.
She hid me, fed and clothed me for a month. She tucked me into bed with her own children. I was ten years old and had been an orphan since I was eight. It was the first time in two years I had felt any sense of safety or security. The aroma and taste of the light-as-air pastry reminds me of her; it feels like she’s standing beside me.
Nico is talking, but I only know this because his lips are moving. His voice is muffled by the thoughts racing through my head. I catch his last few words. “Well, are you?”
“Huh?” I ask, forcing myself fully back to the present.
“I asked if you’re happy. You were smiling, but I couldn’t tell if it was a happy smile or something else.”
Pushing the last wisps of Marie-Thérèse away, I put on a sarcastic mask to hide behind. “Even with coffee, it’s too damn early to be chipper. Whoever scheduled departure for this ungodly hour should be drawn and quartered, then boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
“Bitching already? Not a very auspicious beginning to the journey, Clémence.” Fagin stands on the threshold, a small leather backpack slung across her shoulder. A frown crinkles the skin between her eyes. She drops the backpack onto the floor next to one of the leather crew seats. Then she says to Nico, her voice sharp as a blade, “Get moving on pre-flight. And turn the heat up in here. It’s freezing.”
“On it,” he says.
Nico and I exchange looks. He orders a Cafe au Lait for Fagin, too, which she accepts without comment. Maybe the caffeine will help dislodge the stick up her ass.
Nico and the ground crew work through pre-departure checklists with surgical precision. Given the consequences of miscalculating time jump coordinates—no one wants to wind up in the wrong place or time or inside a stone wall—attention to detail is required. Nico sits at the pilot’s console working through his checklist; a symphony of colors light up the cockpit in oranges, yellows, greens, and blues. They pulse and glow with each rhythmic move of his hands across the Betty’s virtual reality screens.
On Nico’s left, laminated printouts of the pre-flight checklists and pilot’s manual—holdovers from Nico’s Spanish Air Force pilot days that he insists on keeping in paper form—are attached to the bottom of the command console by a metal ring. “Belt and suspenders,” he had said to me, when I questioned him about it on our first mission together. “Never know when you might need to bypass computer gadgetry and fly by the seat of your pants.”
I’m not sure these Timeships can be manually flown. The printouts are likely a security blanket for him. Most time transplants—those of us plucked from other times to live and work in the twenty-sixth century—have a touchstone of some sort. Something that grounds us and helps with homesickness because integration as a time traveler is a one-way deal. Once you join the team, you can’t go home unless your memories are wiped.
A female voice comes over the intercom, the Time Jump Ground Control Director—T-Jump, for short—runs down the steps of her checklist with Nico. “Commence final pre-flight check,” she says, her tone all business. “Flight crew affirm mission with go or no-go confirmation.”
“Roger, T-Jump. Commencing final pre-flight check,” Nico says. “Begin navigation systems checks.”
“Launch sequence trajectory data confirmed loaded to command module,” she says, “Three cycle flight load: mission base launch, navigation to portal entry, and time vortex jump. Navigation aligned with current enviro conditions and portal threshold magnetic energy data signature.”
“Launch trajectory data locked in, T-Jump,” he says, his fingers dancing across the screens. “Navigation controls are go.”
Fagin frowns at her data pad while nursing her coffee; she doesn’t look at me as she reads, and after receiving the second grunt as an answer to a question, I abandon all communication attempts until she’s in a better mood which, I hope, will happen sometime before the end of the century.
Burying myself in my own mission prep—reviewing historical and mission plan briefs using portable holo-programs—doesn’t distract me from the ships’ final systems checks. I’m not interested in hearing the never-ending recitation of technical jargon, but time travel quality control requires checklists to be broadcast over the ship’s intercom system so the crew hears the process.
All systems are functioning as expected. Replicators and emergency dehydrated meals, enough to sustain a crew of four people for ninety days, are loaded. Medical supplies including computer-guided medical and surgical operation procedure controls are operational. Emergency egress plans, in the event a launch or landing is aborted, are a go.
One by one, every system gets a thorough check. The pre-flight checklists usually take an hour, about the time required to calm my pre-flight nerves. With Nico at the helm, I find myself more relaxed than usual. I’m beginning to settle in, get my head in the game. Though this is his first official mission as the primary pilot, hearing Nico’s calm, steady tone over the speakers is reassuring.
“Last two systems on the checklist, T-Jump, let’s finish this up so we can get on our way,” Nico says.
“Roger,” T-Jump says, “Initiating check of ship’s exterior camouflage program.”
Watching an
