A knock awakens me. Gallie walks in, pinching two foam coffee cups with one hand and holding a bottle of liquor in the other. I sit up and come to, squinting in the light. She fills the cups and invites me to take one. I take a swig of Scotch and cough. She sits on my single chair. “You’re not the only one who can break the rules,” she says. I raise my cup to that. “How you doing soldier?”
“Oh, about how you’d expect.” Now, Foxy Brown is inviting me to touch her, tease her, and I turn down the radio.
“What do you want to know?” Gallie asks.
“I want to know everything, Gallie. Everything.” She nods.
“Yeah.” She sips her whisky. “Of course.” She’s pondering something. Is it where to start. Is it if to start?
“How about, why did Prasad call me ‘the awaited one.’? Let’s start there.”
“Because we knew you were coming. Well, we knew someone was coming.”
“How?”
“Detected.” Detected? “The Detection Array can detect arrivals as well as departures. You probably didn’t know that.”
“This is part of the inner-sanctum technology?” Gallie nods.
“When you accelerate, there’s a whole bow wave of tachyons. They disperse over the timeline so we can guess when you’ll be arriving–give or take a month.” I’m impressed and I say it. “Same on the departure side. Enough of the tachyon burst goes up the timeline that we can detect a future departure. It’s how we know where and to when your team was sent.”
“Centuries away,” I say. Gallie nods. That a guy from the future is learning about new technology is an irony I haven’t missed.
“But that’s small stuff.” Gallie takes a sip. “All that’s just about improved detection algorithms.”
“So what’s the big stuff?” I ask. Gallie takes or dramatic pause, or perhaps she’s just catching her breath after an ambitious swig.
“Boris told you the mission space we’re in. Preventing the one-second-per-second rule being broken is TMA’s job, but our stealth business is remedying the fuck-ups when the rule is broken.”
“Which calls for deliberate acceleration–for time travel,” I say. She jabs her finger at me as confirmation. I pour us a second round. “You really do break the rules, don’t you? I’m in the minor leagues for that, it seems.”
“So, you’ll be impressed by this. The newest accelerators can place you with an accuracy of seven minutes in a century.” A spit take would have been justified but the whisky is too good to waste.
“So, a lot better than the piece of garbage accelerator that flung me back a quarter of a century when I all I was targeting was a couple of days.”
“A lot. And there’s another thing I think’ll impress you,” Gallie says. “An accelerator can now do temporal and spatial displacement.”
I think through the implications through the fog of the whisky. “So you can wind up wherever, as well as whenever you want?”
“Accuracy of an inch in a hundred miles,” Gallie says. I shake my head. “Ram was behind it all, of course,” then adds in a whisper more to herself than to me “incredible man.” I notice that I’m rocking fetally so I stop.
“So where are they? My team?” Gallie is up and raiding my food cupboard. She’s happy with a large bag of potato chips and pops it open, grabbing a handful before throwing the bag at me.
“The silhouette portrait Boris showed you. Do you remember what–”
“I remember, yes.” I posted her a get on with it look through my whisky haze.
“Well, you weren’t the only awaited one. We detected another arrival a few days before you, but all we wound up finding at the arrival site was that portrait. No one with it.”
“So someone’s at large?”
Gallie shakes her head. “Not now.” It takes me a few seconds of liquor-soaked befuddlement to think this through.
“The parking lot assassin.” I say and Gallie nods. “Where was he from?”
“Don’t know, but the portrait frame design turns out to be American, late eighteenth century.” Now I remember his language. Was that late eighteenth century? As if I’d know.
“That’s where they are? My team?” Gallie nods.
“But why? Why eighteenthcentury? Why are they there? Who sent them?”
TWENTY
The whisky is going down too smoothly, too quickly. One pour follows another.
“The picture isn’t clear,” Gallie says. “But if you’re asking for my opinion, your guy Kasper Asmus is a classic time vandal. And he’s in the big leagues. I’ve never seen anyone trying to screw up the timeline on the scale I think he’s going for.” She takes another sip of the single malt. “Time vandals are usually jerks who’ve gotten their hands on the technology and decide to find out what mischief they can do. Go back, warn a friend off a future spouse. Bed a great-great-grandparent.” I grimace. “Yeah, that one’s sick, but common. One woman put a bullet into her husband’s father before his sperm could cause her a problem.” I chuckle. Can’t help it. “A divorce of sorts, I suppose. Guy survived though. But the theory is, the timeline somehow has a way of healing itself, of getting back to the main flow. Perturbations tend to be short-lived. That’s the theory at least.”
“So the butterfly effect doesn’t apply.”
“Exactly. Where that theory
