Sibyl shivered.
Across the table, Dan Collins' eyes darkened. "I don't know," he answered quietly. He glanced at Sibyl, at Francisco Valdez and Janet Firelli. "Probably. Maybe. The problem we're facing is called slippage. The more holes get punched through time, the more cracks radiate out around them. The more cracks, the more likely any given jump will slip into the wrong time or place. Or both. We know about one such crack. It dumped McKee five years into his future, from Florida onto my base. Another one allowed us to rescue Charlie, instead of taking us to Krakatoa to dispose of Carreras' goons."
He glanced at Sibyl. "You're here, Ms. Johnson, because of another one that diverted you into Alaska's remote past instead of the present where Tony was doubtless headed. What will happen when we try the next jump..." He lifted his hands, palms up. "I suspect a great deal will depend on what Carreras has running simultaneously when we try it. I know he's got something big planned. It's supposed to begin soon. At least the first phase of it, anyway. I don't know what it is."
He paused, lost in thought for a moment. Then he said, "Multiple jumps are always dangerous, whether they're the Firellian kind—like the one we made, McKee—or whether they're separate but simultaneous." A grimace tugged his mouth askew. "Firellian Jumps are worse, of course, because they're not simply straight-line progressions. They have sideways, nonlinear hops thrown in. Up until we jumped," he rubbed the back of his neck, "they were only theoretically possible."
McKee snorted. "Still a goddamned guinea pig."
Collins ignored him. "That's why I had no idea what to expect when we activated the second leg of our triple to jump here. Our jump may have been what messed up yours, Ms. Johnson, and vice versa. Or it could have been the slippage effect. I just don't know. I'm not even certain the physicists will know.
"When we do activate our recall, we'll be activating the third leg of a Firellian triple link that has already proven faulty once. Frankly, I don't know what will happen. I only partly understand what Sue and Zac and their teams are doing. I do know the whole fabric of what we conventionally think of as time is weakened every time a new hole is punched in it. Jumping out of here could kill us."
For a long, long moment, nobody said a word. Sibyl was scared all the way to her toenails, in a far quieter fashion than she had been on the beach at Herculaneum. Marooned in a Pleistocene winter?
Danny said, "So, like, we could be stuck here, hunh, Dad?"
Sibyl read signs of too much strain and sleeplessness in the man's face as he rumpled his son's hair. "Yeah, son. We could be. Either we stay here/now, or we try the jump out and potentially end up someplace worse."
"Like beyond Antares," McKee put in.
Francisco started to sit forward, grunted once, and sat abruptly back. "If it's all the same to you," he said stiffly, in obvious pain, "I'd just as soon try it. I think we all have a few scores to settle."
"Let me get the Demerol—" Janet began.
"No." He shook his head. "I'll be fine. Others need it worse than I do. And God knows, we might need it even more later."
The breakfast in Sibyl's stomach turned leaden. Charlie tightened his hand around hers.
"How shall we do this?" Sibyl asked quietly into the silence. "Vote? Or follow military command? Do lifeboat rules apply, or do we get to choose?"
McKee shook his head. "What's to choose? If we stay here, too chicken to try it, eventually we'll run out of food and diesel. And I don't think any of us could survive a winter in this place. Maybe not even a summer. I'm betting there's more than wooly mammoths out there."
Danny nodded. "There is. Zac, he's a nut on the stuff. There's saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, cave lions..."
Dan Collins smiled at his son. "Yes, we get the point. The Ice Ages weren't very friendly to humanity and we have too many wounded as it is to survive here."
McKee glanced at Collins. "How about it, Colonel? When do we leave?"
Dan Collins glanced toward the infirmary. "Not until Frank says it's safe to move Lucille and Zac."
They looked as one toward Francisco Valdez.
"Give them another couple of weeks, Lucille especially. Kids heal faster than adults. If she makes it that long, she has a good chance."
"Janet?"
She laughed harshly. "Do you have any idea how much I miss salad bars? Doors that actually have doors? My mother..." Her voice wavered. "Hell, yes, I'll risk it."
McKee turned his cool appraisal on Sibyl and Charlie.
"That leaves you."
"You already know how I feel," Charlie said gruffly. "I'll kill Jésus Carreras with my bare hands, if I have to." He curled a hand protectively around Lucania's head. "I can't do that sitting on my butt in this icebox."
"I want the hell out of here," Sibyl said harshly. "No way we can survive here for any length of time. Diesel and supplies'll run out eventually. So I vote we cut our losses and get away from this place. Soon."
"Well," McKee said briskly, "that leaves us with the question of how to deal with Carreras once we get there."
Collins swore softly. "Yeah. Except none of us knows a thing about him."
Sibyl heard Charlie draw breath. Felt him gather himself through the tightening of his hand on hers. He spoke like a man chopping through thick ice.
"I do."
He was instantly the focal point of their undivided attention. He kept his gaze on the table and seemed to have difficulty speaking. The hand that wasn't clasped in hers was clenched in a white-knuckled fist.
"A lot of this..." He paused. "I've never told anyone most of this." He glanced up, met Collins' gaze squarely. "I first tangled with the Carreras family a long time ago. I wasn't much older than your boy is now, Collins."
The colonel put an arm around his son.
"I don't kid myself about what I was back then. If you weren't in a gang, you were everybody's target. And the Carrerases of this world use gangs." He shook his head. "Most of it doesn't matter anymore. When I was seventeen, they shot my grandfather. They didn't know he was my grandfather and didn't care, either. He was just a witness that had to be silenced. After it happened..."
Nobody moved. Sibyl could hear the snow blowing against the concrete walls outside.
"I quit. Got a high school diploma so I could apply to the police academy. Worked my ass off, finally made detective. Found out which Carreras had given the order. Finagled a transfer from New York to Miami. For the first two years I couldn't get close. My captain had me working other cases hard as I could go. But we made busts, dug out more information. And then, when I was this close"—he held up thumb and forefinger almost touching—"I stumbled across this time-travel thing. Next thing I knew, Carreras was bending over me, laughing, while they pumped me full of drugs. I figured they'd make it look like an OD and dump my body in Biscayne Bay."
He paused. Nobody spoke. His eyes were haunted. His fingers trembled slightly in Sibyl's grasp. She pressed them and earned a slight squeeze back.
"Anyway, I woke up in chains, with Richie or Ricky or whatever his name was standing in front of me, explaining to some guy in a dress how I'd murdered some important friend of a Roman senator's. At least, that's what Richie told me he'd said. A couple of minutes later, he let me know they'd sentenced me to die in the arena."
His laughter was harsh. Across the table, Dan Collins actually flinched.
"A couple of days later, he came to visit me. I was in this hellhole of a prison, built out of solid rock underneath another prison."
Sibyl caught her breath. "The Tullianum..."
He glanced up. "Yeah. You know it?"