So, she was off to save the future of the present.
She liked the jobs where she just went back into the past and observed. Bringing back accurate data was a proper job for a historian such as herself. She liked keeping her scholar happy enough to keep getting her choice assignments. She didn’t think of herself as an actionwoman sort of special agent to the ages. But the Starshine hippie idiots had infiltrated the Historical Search Project a few years back, stolen highly classified technology and were now making sporadic and totally stupid idealistic efforts to change the past in order to make the present into the world they wanted to live in.
Frannie was of the opinion that attempting to save the world was a fine ambition, but – it was all so much more complicated than that. And ethically and morally really weird. She herself had actually saved Hitler’s life on one of her assignments to stop the Starshiners, and she still felt like a traitor to all humanity for making that necessary choice. Saving the world was a dirty job. She hated it when her bosses picked her out of the time-travelers pool to do it.
“It’s not right to try to change history,” she said after she’d finished absorbing the assignment. Unless history was coming at you with a big ole sword.
“That’s easy for an Elite to believe,” her controller answered.
Frannie glared at the cyborg she’d worked with for years. “Are you developing Starshiner sympathies?”
“Going to turn me in if I am?”
“Turn you in to who?” she asked. “We live in a perfect world, where all opinions are respected, if not sanctioned.”
The controller snorted, which was an odd sound coming from a voice synthesizer. “Ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“Comfortable?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t be for long.”
How well she knew that. “Make it a go,” she said.
Riding time was not a pleasant way to spend the morning. Or any other increment of one’s lifespan. But if you wanted to go from now to then you learned to put up with the suffering. No one said you had to suffer in silence, though.
Frannie screamed the whole ride down the timestream. She was still screaming when the bright blinding lights faded back down to normal. She began swearing as soon as she was finished screaming.
She didn’t open her eyes until the flow of words ran out. She wondered if her reaction to the wrench of the change was as professional as her HRP colleagues’ as she looked around. She suspected she was more ladylike.
She was not surprised to find she was sitting on a filthy mattress in a filthy room where a filthy rat sat in a corner boldly looking back at her. Then again, perhaps the rat wasn’t filthy. Its dark fur looked rather shiny and healthy. That couldn’t be said for the watery gray light outside the dirty window. At least there was glass in the window to be dirty. Bullets, rocks, bodies, all sorts of things destroyed the most fragile signs of civilization in this corner of time. She could hear gunfire in the distance. And close by. Firefights were a fact of life back here.
She got up to see how far her grungy arrival point was above the city street, careful not to stand directly in front of the window as she looked out upon the blasted world her ancestors roamed in well-armed bands. Well, not her ancestors. Hers had managed to save themselves from all the dystopic anarchy going on below. At least eight floors below, where she had a bird’s-eye view of two groups of ragged people firing guns at each other from the flimsy cover of rusted cars and piles of garbage. There was no mistaking the rattling fire or banana-shaped bullet clips of the Kalashnikovs most of the fighters were using. Typical for the time.
She didn’t give the skirmish below much thought, because after a moment a metal structure in the distance caught her attention. The sight caught her like a blow to the gut.
“Oh, no. This is not good.”
She knew when she was, but this wasn’t the right where.
The Eiffel Tower was so not in New York. It had been in Las Vegas at one point in the past, but that had been a much smaller replica of the one she could see outside the unbroken window. Her internal sensors hadn’t completely adjusted yet, or alarms would be going off. She clicked all her orientation implants but the chrono to neutral to avoid the coming hysterical buzzing in her head. She could manage to be hysterical all on her own, but she only allowed herself a few seconds to pound through that reaction.
Her clock told her she’d arrived four days ahead of schedule. The time differential was within the mission window and perfectly normal. Precise downtime landings were something that happened in ficvids. Reality was so much messier and harder to predict; a little wiggle room was actually a good thing.
She immediately had suspicions about what had gone wrong, but the important thing wasn’t to place blame but to correct the huge mistake that had left her in the wrong town.
“I’m under a bit of a time constraint here, so how do I get out of here without getting shot?”
The rat tilted its head, as if it were actually considering her question, then it jumped up on the windowsill. Frannie took a cautious look outside, and as she did the rattling firing of the AK-47s abruptly halted.
It took her a moment to spot the lone man standing in the no-man’s-land between the warring groups. He was dressed in a long black leather drovers’ coat, and thick hair as black as the leather hung in a braid down his back. He was imposingly tall and broad-shouldered, but didn’t appear to be armed. She couldn’t understand why no one was trying to kill him, or why both armed groups dispersed at his gesture, but Frannie was delighted that she seemed suddenly to have a chance at safe passage. At least out of this Paris neighborhood.
“Paris,” she grumbled as she moved to check the contents of the pack of equipment that had arrived down the timestream a few seconds after her.
The silence in the street continued, so Frannie took the time to make a thorough check of her supplies.
She had a long way to go and wasn’t sure how she was going to get there. She considered activating the recall implant, but that would be wimpy. Time agents who ran home to hide in under three days on a tough assignment were mercilessly teased by their peers, and could look forward to a future of being given the most boring trips into the past. She might be in dangerous territory, but she was giving herself the traditional seventy-two hours to make things right.
She was more interested in the defense cache she found than the packets of food and survival gear. She had her own implants for any computer assistance she might need. Her weapons consisted of the standard-
issue stun gun with extra charges, and other small, non-lethal defenses she was glad to find. She was downright delighted to discover that her controller had thoughtfully added her own non-standard-issue, completely contraband and potentially lethal 9mm Glock handgun, ammo and knife to her supplies. These were ever so much more helpful accessories in the sorts of situations her journeys threw her into.
The first rule of time-traveling was that YOU DON’T KILL ANYONE down the timestream. You were allowed to defend yourself, but had to be willing to die to preserve the past. It was a fine, idealistic rule, and every time-agent obeyed it for at least the first few years on the job. After watching a colleague get torn to shreds in a Roman arena or being the only member of a team to escape a medieval mob, or appearing in the middle of a battle instead of an observable distance away, your attitude changed. You tried hard not to do any harm, but when it came down to killing your potential grandpa or letting the smelly barbarian that might be important to history take your head off with his axe, you made sure to be the one to shoot or stab first – to do whatever you had to do to stay alive. Travelers and controllers didn’t discuss unauthorized additions to packs, but the travelers’ “personal property” tended mysteriously to come along for the ride. And most of the scholars just wanted the data, no questions asked.