The research team was jogging toward the craft when a hatch above one of the flanges irised open. Metz appeared as a silhouette at the top of the ladder. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “We gotta get out of here! Go, go, go!”
Franc was the first to reach the ladder. “Not so fast,” he said, hoisting the uplink case above his head. “We need to see what’s been done here. There might be something we don’t…”
“What, you mean you’re not through yet?” Metz reached down, grabbed the case’s handle, and snatched it out of Franc’s hand. “Maybe we should drop by Washington on the way up, let you assassinate Teddy Roosevelt…”
“It’s Franklin, not…”
“Who cares? You’re done.” Metz deposited the case behind him. “I just hope you haven’t screwed things up so much that we can’t get out of here.”
“Dammit, Vasili, it’s not our fault!” Lea’s voice was outraged. “We don’t know what happened, but it’s… we didn’t…”
“Save it for the commissioner, Oschner. We’re on our way up.” Metz disappeared from the hatch. “Get aboard or stay behind. We’re out of here in sixty.”
“Vasili, wait!” Franc scrambled up the ladder and pulled himself up through the hatch into Oberon’a airlock. Coming in from the cool New Jersey night, the wedge-shaped compartment was uncomfortably warm. The helmet of the EVA hardsuit lashed against the bulkhead reflected his face like a funhouse mirror. Franc took a moment to pull Lea the rest of the way up the ladder, then he darted through the inner hatch and followed the pilot down the narrow midships passageway to the control room. “Calm down. We’ve got to talk about…”
“There’s nothing to discuss, Doctor.” Metz entered the compartment, dropped in his seat and ran his palms across the console, clearing the timeship’s system for new programming. “And don’t tell me to calm down. Not after this. Now get your people strapped down. We’re lifting.”
“Okay, all right.” Franc raised his hands. “Get us out of here. Take us to orbit. But don’t open a bridge until we’ve assessed the situation and at least tried to determine what caused this in the…”
Metz swung around in his chair to jab a finger at Franc. “Look, Dr. Lu, don’t make me give you a remedial lecture in chronospace theory. Causality. Inconsistency paradoxes. The care and feeding of Morris-Thorne bridges. Remember?”
“All I’m saying is, we need to slow down, try to study what…”
“Study my ass. I’m making a hole while I can still can.” Metz swung back around, began stabbing at the console. Lights flashed orange, green, blue, and red; screens arrayed around the horseshoe displayed ship status, local topography, orbital maps, projected spacetime vectors. Metz glanced over his shoulder as he pulled on his headset. “Sorry, Franc, but you’re overruled. I’m the pilot, so what I say goes. I say we make an emergency launch, so we’re going. Now get your team in their seats, because it’s going to be a fast ride to Chronos.”
There was no point in arguing. CRC protocols were strict on this point. Franc was in charge of the expedition’s research team, but timeship pilots had final say over what happened once its members were back aboard ship. And Metz was playing the situation by the book.
Franc turned and stalked out of the control room. When the hatch slid shut behind him, he slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Jerk!” he yelled.
Then he stepped across the passageway to the passenger compartment. Hoffman was already strapped into one of the three acceleration couches. “She’s in the monitor room,” he said before Franc could ask. “I think she’s…”
“I’ll get her. Stay put. Vasili wants to get us out of here.” Franc retreated from the hatch and turned toward the last of the timeship’s major compartments, located at the opposite end of the passageway from the ready-room. “Lea! Vasili’s…!”
“I know. I heard.” Lea had already discarded her costume and had put on a skinsuit. Franc regretted the change; until Lea shed her nanoskin, the form-fitting bodysuit didn’t flatter her middle-aged appearance. He couldn’t blame her, though; once they got a chance, he would do the same. Sweat made these period clothes feel sticky. She stood at the pedestal in the middle of the compartment, her fingers dashing across its panel as she opened the library subsystem. “Just give me a minute. I want to see if I can access something from the mission recorders.”
“We don’t have a minute. Vasili’s going for an emergency launch.”
“Shut up and give me your cigarette case.” Lea had already hardwired her makeup compact to the pedestal; she held out her palm without looking at him. “Hurry.”
“We don’t have time for this,” he repeated, but he dug into his jacket and pulled out the cigarette case. Lea snatched it from his hand, impatiently shook out the unsmoked cigarettes, and ran a cord from the pedestal to the tiny dataport concealed in the bottom of the case. She tapped her fingers at the pedestal, then glanced up at the wallscreen. A red bar crept across the screen; the library subsystem was downloading everything the divots had collected aboard the Hindenberg.
“All right, we’ve got everything,” she murmured. “Now let’s see what happened in Cell Four just before…”
“Never mind that now. We’ve got to get strapped down.” Franc grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her away from the pedestal; she managed to grab the recorders before he propelled her through the hatch toward the passenger compartment. He got her inside just before the hatch sphinctered shut.
They were barely in their couches when the timeship begin to rise. Franc glanced at the status panel, and saw that Metz had switched off Oberon’s chameleon and gravity screen in order to divert power to the negmass drive. His lips tightened as he silently swore at the pilot. They were in for a rough ride…
Then they were shoved back in their seats as the timeship shot upward into the night. A wallscreen displayed a departure-angle view from beneath the saucer; the lights of the Jersey shore and New York City briefly appeared below them before they were obscured by high cloudbanks, then the Oberon punched through the clouds as it headed for space.
Too much, too fast. Franc clenched the armrests as pressure mounted on his chest. They shouldn’t be doing it this way. His vision was blurred, but he could make out Lea from the corner of his eye; she looked just as angry as he felt. Damn it, she was right. They still didn’t understand what had happened down there. He started to raise a leaden hand, then remembered that he had neglected to put on a headset. He couldn’t talk to Metz.
Earth’s horizon appeared on the wallscreen as a vast dark curve, highlighted by a thin luminescent band of blue. Stars appeared above the blue line at the same instant he felt his body begin to rise from the seat cushion. They had achieved escape velocity; Metz was throttling back the negmass drive. But they had to stop. They had to abort to low-orbit. They needed time to study what had happened aboard the Hindenberg before…
And then the timeship’s wormhole generators went online.