Chapter 1: Collapsing and falling
The air in the coordination hub tasted of ozone and stale caffeine. Banks of holographic displays cast a sickly blue glow over the cramped, wire-laden space, the only light in the outer west system base. It was a tomb of concrete and hope, buried under the desolate rock of a forgotten moon. Haeli Strange’s fingers flew across the tactile interface, a blur against the steady pulse of data streaming before her eyes.
It was already getting late, but their work had only just begun. New events in the world had brought this on, and time was running out.
A klaxon, low and sonorous, began to pulse through the subterranean layers. One beat. Then another. Not the drill signal. The real one.
“Strange, talk to me.” Sam Thomas’s voice cut through the sudden stillness that had gripped the room. He stood near the reinforced blast door, a mountain of coiled tension. His military past was etched into his posture, into the grim set of his jaw.
“The spike is earlier than projected,” Haeli said, her voice remarkably steady. She didn’t look up. Her focus was on the final calibration sequence. “They’ve triangulated the chronometric emissions. We have minutes, not hours.”
“Shit.” This from Brian Howardson, his soft voice a rough whisper. The huge analyst loomed by the secondary console, his bearded face pale in the screen light. His eyes, wide and frightened, kept darting to Haeli. To the curve of her shoulder where her tank top strap had slipped. To the desperate concentration on her face.
“Howardson, arm the corridor charges,” Sam barked. “Thomas protocol. Now.”
Brian jolted into motion, his large hands suddenly clumsy on the weapons locker. Haeli heard the heavy clunk of plasma rifles being distributed, the panicked whispers of the other researchers—Gina, Paul, Andrew—as they scrambled for positions they’d rehearsed but never believed they’d use.
Haeli was typing quickly new commands while readjusting her neural link to the system, uploading her consciousness in form of a backup. A thin filament wire, cold and invasive, snaked from the console into a port at the base of her skull. Her vision doubled for a second—the concrete room overlain with streaming ribbons of raw temporal data. She wasn’t sure how these next few minutes are going to play out, but she had to get one last packet of information into the timeline in hopes it can change the world.
The packet was a ghost. A splice of corrected fossil records, genetic markers, a single catalytic event she’d calculated could butterfly into a resistance. A needle she had to thread into the fabric of the deep past.
“Haeli.” Sam was beside her now. The heat of him, the smell of old sweat and grim determination, cut through the electronic sterility. His hand gripped her forearm, hard. “It’s time to go. The vault.”
She shook her head, a sharp, final motion. “The send-window is in ninety seconds. If I don’t anchor it personally, the dispersion will be too wide. It’ll be noise. Useless.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“That,” she said, finally meeting his eyes, “was always the most probable outcome.”
His gaze held hers, a silent, furious conversation. It was all there—the storage closet encounters, the frantic, wordless sex against cold metal walls, a stress valve for two pressurized people. His marriage. Her guilt. The raw, physical truth of it was a knot in her stomach. There was no tenderness in his grip now, only a desperate, animal urge to preserve a resource.
A thunderous boom rocked the chamber. Dust rained from the ceiling. The primary blast door, a foot of reinforced alloy, shrieked in protest.
But before it was done, the raid started.
Chaos broke out.
“They’re through the outer layer!” Paul shouted from his post at the sensor relay, his voice cracking.
“Seal the inner hub!” Andrew yelled back, fumbling with a rifle.
Her colleagues fled from their stations, diving for cover behind overturned tables and server stacks. Gina, her friend, started screaming, a high, thin sound of pure terror that was abruptly cut off by a wet, choking gurgle. Haeli’s head snapped toward the sound just in time to see Gina slump against her console, a dark bloom spreading across her chest.
And she heard shots down the hall as Paul and Andrew started aggressively shouting and running back for support. Plasma fire sizzled and popped, painting the corridor in strobing flashes of angry orange. The acrid scent of burnt insulation and something coppery filled the air.
Some of her colleagues started arming themselves. Brian Howardson stood near the weapons locker, holding a rifle that looked too small in his massive hands, his face a mask of paralyzed fear. He wasn’t looking at the door. He was looking at her.
“Brian, move!” Sam roared, leveling his own weapon at the buckling blast door.
Haeli’s hands were a blur. The final sequence. She initiated the physical transport. A low hum built in the room, vibrating up from the floor plates. In the center of the hub, the air began to shimmer, to tear. A portal, no larger than a manhole cover, spitting static and fragments of impossible light.
She started preparing the next cycle, her fingers inputting the override codes that would strip the safety protocols. The system asked for confirmation. This action will cause catastrophic feedback in the origin cradle.
She confirmed.
A private channel flickered open on her console. Brian’s ID. She opened it.
I’m sorry, his message read. I never said. I should have.
She didn’t have time. She didn’t have words. Another impact shook the door, buckling it inward. A focused plasma torch began slicing through the alloy, molten droplets hissing on the floor.
Giving them a heads up that she’s going to have to… see them. Never again, maybe in another life. Her lips moved, forming silent words to the room, to Sam’s broad back, to Brian’s terrified face. I’m sorry.
But she didn’t know that yet, so she had no way of telling anybody.
The inner door exploded inward. Figures clad in sleek black tactical armor framed in the smoke, their faceplates reflecting the chaos of the room. Sam opened fire, the roar of his weapon deafening. One of the figures spun and fell. Another returned fire. Sam grunted, a sound like a punched sack of grain, and went down, clutching his side.
“Haeli, now!” Brian screamed, finding his voice at last. He stepped forward, firing wildly, a massive, clumsy shield between her and the breach.
The transport portal stabilized. The information packet, a condensed jewel of light, hovered above the tear in reality. It just needed the final push.
There was an error message flashing on her screen. A conflict in the temporal anchor. The receiving matrix in the past was unstable. A prehistoric volcanic event she hadn’t accounted for. The packet would disperse, would be lost.
Her blood went cold.
And she had to correct the machine transporting the information packet.
Her blood went cold.
The error screamed at her from the screen—a temporal anchor conflict. A prehistoric volcanic eruption, right in the delivery window. The packet would hit an ash cloud and scatter like confetti. Useless.
Sam was on the ground, his breathing wet and ragged. Brian was still firing, his massive body shuddering with each plasma burst. Another colleague—David—was trying to drag Sam toward the shimmering portal, his face contorted in a scream lost to the noise.
The correction wasn’t software. It was hardware. A manual recalibration of the targeting array. And that array was in the primary machine room, down the hall, through the heart of the breach.
“Howardson!” she barked, the command cutting through the din.
Brian glanced back, his eyes wide.
“Cover me. I have to get to Machine Room Three.”
“You’ll die!” he roared.
“We all die if I don’t!” She was already moving, yanking the neural link from her skull with a gasp. The sudden loss of the data-stream left her feeling blunt, human, terrified. She shoved the heavy leather-and-aluminum folio under her arm—the physical backup, the waterproof paper with its never-drying ink. It was bulky, absurdly analog, and their only hope.
She didn’t wait for a reply. She ducked under a console as a spray of plasma fire chewed into the wall above her head, and then she ran.
She stepped through the hallway into the corridor, through the crowds, through the chaos, over somebody's body. The floor was slick. She didn’t look down. Shouts and weapons-fire blended into a single, searing roar in her ears. A figure in black armor turned toward her; she dropped and slid, feeling the heat of a blast pass over her, and scrambled up before he could re-aim. Another one appeared from a side passage. She threw a heavy data-slate from a crumpled desk; it connected with his faceplate with a dull crack, buying her a second. She lunged past.
And without being shot or defeated, she reached through all the gates and was able to get into the machine room in time to be able to transport the information, information written on waterproof paper with never-drying, never-fainting ink, completely bound in leather and shiny aluminum and other materials. It was quite a rather large shipping of information, but she was hoping that this could save her now very bleak-looking current future and the world's future.
The machine room was a cathedral of outdated technology—great, humming blocks of crystalline drives and spinning bronze rings suspended in magnetic fields. In the center sat the transport platform, a disc of worn, organic-looking metal. The air buzzed with latent power.
Stepping into the room, she didn't notice, with all the chaos around the additional emergency lights and the off-putting noise the machine was making. A high-pitched whine was building, beyond the normal operating frequency. A cascade failure had already begun. She sprinted to the main console, her fingers stabbing at the physical keys, bypassing the safeties. She entered the volcanic event data, recalibrating the delivery coordinates by a fractional degree in the Mesolithic, a sliver of stable atmosphere between one eruption and the next.
The system accepted the adjustment. The packet was ready. All she had to do was initiate the final sequence and get the hell out.
But before she could react, the machine malfunctioned. A feedback scream tore from the speaker grilles. The crystalline drives flashed from blue to a searing, violent red. A resonant hum shook the very bones of the moon base, and a crack like splitting rock echoed through the chamber.
A bright light filled the entire room. It wasn't light. It was the absence of everything else, a bleaching, consuming whiteness that erased the walls, the machine, her own hand in front of her face. It had no temperature, no sound. It simply was.
And it was taking.
She felt a terrible, unspooling pull in the very center of her being. The leather folio was ripped from her grasp. She saw, in the last fragment of a second, a shape—large, stumbling, familiar—vault over a sparking console toward her. Brian. His mouth was open in a silent shout, his arms reaching.
Then, David, half-turned from the doorway, his expression one of sheer confusion as the white light touched him and sheared through his legs at the thighs. They vanished, disintegrating into motes of light, while the rest of him was yanked forward.
Taking not just the package of information containing information, but also herself and everything in her surrounding area, including her coworker, Brian, and half and more than half of their coworker David. He got transported without most of his legs.
The unspooling sensation became a sickening lurch, a nauseating inversion of gravity and self. There was a sound then, a roar like a thousand storms, and a pressure that flattened her lungs.
And they landed.
Roughly 4000 BC, in a European forest.
The world slammed back in with brutal, noisy clarity. Bird calls. The sigh of wind through leaves. The damp, rich, overwhelmingly green smell of soil and decay and life.
Haeli collapsed onto her hands and knees, vomiting onto a bed of thick moss and last year's leaves. Her head pounded as if split. She gasped, the air shockingly clean, cold, and flavored with pine.
A groan to her left. Brian lay sprawled on his back, his huge frame crushing a fern. He was whole, his clothes singed and smoldering, but whole. He blinked up at a canopy of oak and birch, his face a masterpiece of bewildered horror.
To her right, another sound. A weak, wet choking.
David. He was propped against the bole of a massive tree, his face the color of chalk. Below his waist, where his legs should have been, was a ruin of seared fabric and glistening, shockingly red flesh ending in jagged bone. His eyes found hers, wide with a disbelief so profound it was almost peaceful. He tried to speak, but only a bubble of blood emerged at his lips. Then his head lolled to the side.
The leather-and-aluminum folio lay a few feet away, pristine and absurd against the primitive forest floor. The machine was gone. The base was gone. The war, the future, the noise—all gone.
There was only the whispering trees, the scent of conifers, and the rising, ragged sound of Brian Howardson beginning to sob.