“Fair enough.” A beat. “Is now an appropriate time to remind you how much I enjoy spankings?”
It’s meant as a joke—kinda—but Nico maintains a steadfast seriousness. “You won’t be crazy about this spanking.”
From ground-level, it’s impossible to see over the wall of people in front of us—we’re enveloped so quickly by the crowd it’s claustrophobic. Even Nico—all six feet, two inches of him—has trouble seeing over some of the taller members of the mob.
“We can’t wade through all these people fast enough to catch up with whoever you think you saw.” He nods toward another narrow alley, identical to the one we’d emerged from twenty minutes prior. “This way.”
“We have to figure out a way past the guards,” I say, noting that each exit toward the center of town has soldiers posted to ensure no one leaves the party early.
“We’ll think of a distraction. Just keep moving.”
Before I learn what Nico has in mind to divert the soldiers’ attention, the wind changes, shifting the billowing smoke toward shore. The crowd shuffles toward the alleys to escape the noxious fumes; their hive mind apparently wagers the authorities will also be concerned about avoiding the acrid cloud as it rolls in.
Seems the crowd won their bet: The guards, recognizing the crowd’s mood turning anxious, abandon any attempts to stop the townsfolk from dispersing.
Nico pulls me closer and we melt into the crowd as it funnels into the choked artery leading to the next street. Though the air is frigid with ice particles, the cramped space turns into a slow heating oven with the body heat of several hundred bodies crammed into it.
Nico positions me in front of him. His hands go to my waist and he steers me like a rudder on a ship as we push our way to the right side of the crowd. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he says. “In this crowd, it would be a miracle if we catch up with him.”
We exit onto the next street and nudge through several clusters of people trying to maneuver around us. We settle on the long porch of a mercantile store shaded by a balcony and watch the throng pass. There are droves of raven-haired, athletic men who look like they could have sired me.
What did Papa look like?
None of the women look like my mother.
Ten minutes more pass before Nico ventures a question.
“Anything?”
I shake my head; tears sting my eyes. Nothing feels like home.
I knew this was a long shot. I didn’t expect the search to feel so...
Hopeless.
Nico puts his arm around my waist and we stand in silence watching the towns’ people slide back into their daily lives.
Betty’s voice buzzes through our CommLinks. “Intruder alert, Commander Garcia, darling. Security system breach is imminent. Unknown entities attempting to access transporter system.”
“Fuck.” Nico says. “Betty, divert power from non-essential programs to the security system. Lock everyone out of the transporter system except me. Authentication: Garcia 022358.”
We pick our way through the crowd, but it hasn’t thinned enough to make getting out of town a speedy process. The snow that sat on the horizon as we entered town arrives in a flurry of fat flakes that will lay a thick blanket of white over the town within the hour.
Betty broadcasts another alert: “Security system breach in progress. Intruders have boarded the vessel.”
Nico said very little as we raced—as much as anyone can race in a burgeoning snowstorm—back to where we’d left the ship. We maintained radio silence since the last of Betty’s transmissions; further transmissions would help whoever broke into the ship to trace the signal to our coordinates.
For all we know, they’ve already tagged our location as we sit, shivering, in the stone barn less than a football field’s distance from the ship. While the barn offers protection enough from the wind, it’s almost as freezing inside as it is out. The storm creeps closer to blizzard conditions, and our options for finding another sanctuary are few.
“The ship is still here.” Nico stares down at the micro-control panel in his hand. “We’re locked out.”
Nico alternates between burying his nose in the data streaming from the ship’s computer into his Comm Panel and peering out the narrow barn window at the field where the cloaked ship is parked.
“Did you think it wouldn’t be?” I stamp my feet on the straw, more to generate some heat than from impatience to know what’s going on.
“Why are they still allowing access to the ship’s systems?” he says, muttering more to himself than to me.
“I think the answer to that depends on who broke into our ship. What are the odds of our visitors being anyone other than Carter and his goons?”
“Fifty-fifty. If it’s not him, the Benefactors could have sent another recovery team to clean up this mess. If we’re seriously unlucky, our guests are government agents and we can expect to either be marooned in this time or taken back to a prison planet.”
“Would they do that? Strand us here, I mean.”
“Let’s assume that both the government and the Benefactors are capable of doing whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want,” Nico says. “Just in case the intent of our guests is to make us permanent residents in 1755, we need to find out who has taken control of our ship and what their game is. I’m trying to hack into Betty’s internal video feeds without being detected. If we can get a remote look inside, we may at least have the element of surprise on our side.”
Having witnessed executions in two separate centuries, I’m not keen to attend a third any time soon, especially if it means I’m on the chopping block. I’m not crazy about the possibility of a memory wipe and a prison sentence, either.
How hard would it be to melt into 1755 again?
“Any way we can hack the transporter system to sneak back on the ship?” I say, pacing the floor.
Nico rolls his eyes and shoots me a pointed
