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Authors: Pauline Baird Jones
Tags: sci fi romance
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what they “knew” wasn’t actual knowledge. It fell more into the range of “we hope we know this.”
Carig cleared his throat. “We’re going to have a practice emergency drill. Protocol twenty-five. You’ll deploy in teams of two to your assigned grids and check in at the time stations, collect data, attempt to locate a ‘missing’ tracker,” he flexed two fingers on each hand to make sure they knew is a drill and not real, even though it was, “and report. You will follow procedure and endeavor not to actually get lost.”
If they’d had Control do the brief, and you weren’t you, it wouldn’t be a bad cover story for the fubar.
Ashe gave an internal twitch. Fubar?
Lurch twitched this time and felt almost embarrassed. It’s an Earth term, a somewhat crude acronym for seriously messed up .
She tried to figure out how the letters indicated messed up, crude or otherwise, and couldn’t. Perhaps it was an Earth dialect she hadn’t experienced yet. Odd. She refocused on their fearless leader. He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Or they don’t know the truth.
He could be worried about your safety. He paused, probably for effect. But Carig has always had trust issues.
Why do I get the feeling you’ve run into him in an alternate reality, too?
Ashe hid a smug smile at his surprised jerk. Wasn’t easy to get the drop on Lurch. She was so busy being smug she almost missed her team assignment. Fubar. Selnick was a jerk among a wide cast of jerks infesting the service. He wasn’t a top tracker, though he was high level. Interesting that he was the only high-level tracker not missing. Suspiciously interesting. What’s his nanite like? Hard to imagine any nanite living comfortably in that jerk.
His nanites aren’t sentient.
That wasn’t a shock, but then he showed her the stats on sentient/non-sentient. Does the Service have an issue with sentient nanites, too?
Lurch may have shrugged. She wanted to protest the pairing but on its face it made sense. She was the least experienced. He was, on data screen, the most experienced, though she wouldn’t put it past him to try and lose her in the stream and then blame it on her.
Let’s hope he does.
Lurch had a point. If he lost her, then she could go do what the Council should be asking them to do: find the source of the time instability. If she could get to the time station ahead of Selnick, she could check the data—
Ashe felt her insides jerk. If I was going to remove a tracker—
—a station is the only place someone would know for sure where they would be.
It was standard procedure to check in at the nearest station upon arrival in a zone. It was the fastest way to get updated time data, not available when one was in the stream.
Lurch managed to sound both pleased at her insight and grim at what it meant if someone was deliberately targeting trackers and using these safe stations to do it.
It was close to impossible to find a place or a time, to locate a specific person, in the morass that was the time stream. Trackers followed disruptions, unnatural eddies, they followed wrong time and tried to fix it without triggering a reset. A tracker could know a name, a history, and the time they lived in, but it was still close to impossible to make a pinpoint arrival without a beacon already in place to ride in, or a time disruption to follow—which still had a plus or minus factor that varied with the expertise of the tracker. Even the original Garradians had worked in plus or minus one-to-one-hundred year increments. Sometimes observers, sometimes time pins, were inserted into a trouble spot. They might wait years in place before being able to enact their “fix.”
The outpost used special beacons that sent out a dedicated signal for trackers and wardens to use to get back to the right time and place, but even with beacons, it was challenging to arrive on square. As far as Ashe knew, she was the only tracker who could come in hot and then do a
Carig cleared his throat. “We’re going to have a practice emergency drill. Protocol twenty-five. You’ll deploy in teams of two to your assigned grids and check in at the time stations, collect data, attempt to locate a ‘missing’ tracker,” he flexed two fingers on each hand to make sure they knew is a drill and not real, even though it was, “and report. You will follow procedure and endeavor not to actually get lost.”
If they’d had Control do the brief, and you weren’t you, it wouldn’t be a bad cover story for the fubar.
Ashe gave an internal twitch. Fubar?
Lurch twitched this time and felt almost embarrassed. It’s an Earth term, a somewhat crude acronym for seriously messed up .
She tried to figure out how the letters indicated messed up, crude or otherwise, and couldn’t. Perhaps it was an Earth dialect she hadn’t experienced yet. Odd. She refocused on their fearless leader. He doesn’t trust us with the truth. Or they don’t know the truth.
He could be worried about your safety. He paused, probably for effect. But Carig has always had trust issues.
Why do I get the feeling you’ve run into him in an alternate reality, too?
Ashe hid a smug smile at his surprised jerk. Wasn’t easy to get the drop on Lurch. She was so busy being smug she almost missed her team assignment. Fubar. Selnick was a jerk among a wide cast of jerks infesting the service. He wasn’t a top tracker, though he was high level. Interesting that he was the only high-level tracker not missing. Suspiciously interesting. What’s his nanite like? Hard to imagine any nanite living comfortably in that jerk.
His nanites aren’t sentient.
That wasn’t a shock, but then he showed her the stats on sentient/non-sentient. Does the Service have an issue with sentient nanites, too?
Lurch may have shrugged. She wanted to protest the pairing but on its face it made sense. She was the least experienced. He was, on data screen, the most experienced, though she wouldn’t put it past him to try and lose her in the stream and then blame it on her.
Let’s hope he does.
Lurch had a point. If he lost her, then she could go do what the Council should be asking them to do: find the source of the time instability. If she could get to the time station ahead of Selnick, she could check the data—
Ashe felt her insides jerk. If I was going to remove a tracker—
—a station is the only place someone would know for sure where they would be.
It was standard procedure to check in at the nearest station upon arrival in a zone. It was the fastest way to get updated time data, not available when one was in the stream.
Lurch managed to sound both pleased at her insight and grim at what it meant if someone was deliberately targeting trackers and using these safe stations to do it.
It was close to impossible to find a place or a time, to locate a specific person, in the morass that was the time stream. Trackers followed disruptions, unnatural eddies, they followed wrong time and tried to fix it without triggering a reset. A tracker could know a name, a history, and the time they lived in, but it was still close to impossible to make a pinpoint arrival without a beacon already in place to ride in, or a time disruption to follow—which still had a plus or minus factor that varied with the expertise of the tracker. Even the original Garradians had worked in plus or minus one-to-one-hundred year increments. Sometimes observers, sometimes time pins, were inserted into a trouble spot. They might wait years in place before being able to enact their “fix.”
The outpost used special beacons that sent out a dedicated signal for trackers and wardens to use to get back to the right time and place, but even with beacons, it was challenging to arrive on square. As far as Ashe knew, she was the only tracker who could come in hot and then do a
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