Valentines Day Read online

  Moms walked to the stairwell and went to check the room above the main computer lab. A great place to emplace a shaped charge designed to explode downward, taking out whoever was in the room and the equipment.

  She pushed open a door, entering a room with the same dimensions as the lab below. It was full of discarded tables, desks, chairs, filing cabinets and other school debris. It was dim, just a few naked light bulbs casting shadows among the furniture. Moms wove her way through, checking left and right.

  She wasn’t overly surprised when she saw the bomb, a large steel cylinder, emplaced between two desks.

  What was most worrisome was the red digital countdown.

  It read :30 and as she watched, flickered to :29.

  “There sat a queen who was more lovely by far than any other creature, just as the summer sun outshines the stars. This noble goddess Nature sat enthroned in a pavilion she had wrought of branches upon a flowered hill atop a meadow. And there was not any bird born of love that was not ready in her presence to hear her and receive her judgment. For this was Saint Valentine’s Day, when all the birds of every kind that men can imagine come to choose their mates.” Chaucer: Parliament of Fowls

  Italy, 14 February 278 A.D.

  Scout recognized the voice behind her. “What do you want?”

  “Is that any way to say hello to an old friend?” Pandora asked. “We last met, let me think, ah yes, in Greece. I forget the year.”

  “I doubt that,” Scout said, turning away from the Tiber River to face the ‘goddess’.

  “Three-sixty-two BC,” Pandora said, “or the more politically correct BCE.”

  Scout took a step toward her. “See? Why try to BS me?”

  Pandora laughed. “Touché. Nice. But the important question isn’t what I want, it’s why are you here? Now? That’s what I meant when I said that you’re early. This place isn’t important for another thirty-four years and in October.”

  Edith’s download supplied the answer: The Battle of Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312.

  “This is where and when the bubble is,” Scout said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to understand what is going on,” Pandora said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

  “Saint Valentine,” Scout said.

  “You shouldn’t be here and now,” Pandora said.

  It is 278 A.D. The world’s population is 300 million people; life expectancy is under 30 years; Emperor Probus resettles Germanic tribes in provinces of the Roman Empire to repopulate them which is rather short-sighted given what will eventually happen; Yang Hu, general of Jin Dynasty, dies; Christianity is still being persecuted in the Roman Empire and elsewhere, although the battle that would occur here in several decades would help change that.

  Scout hated circular logic. “It’s a Shadow bubble. It’s opening bubbles on other Fourteen Februaries. This is mine.”

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Scout began to walk by Pandora to scramble up to the roadway to see what was happening on the bridge above them, but Pandora put a hand out.

  “This is wrong. You being here. Now. That’s why I’m here. Saint Valentine? How could that cause a ripple, never mind a Cascade? There were several Valentines; even the Church named four. The date is a myth coalesced through literature a millennium later.”

  Scout had begun to push against Pandora’s arm, but she stopped. “So why am I here?”

  “I can only deduce it’s because the Shadow wants you here.”

  But Before Valentines Day, and After They Came Back From Nine Eleven

  The Possibility Palace

  Where? Can’t tell you. When? Can’t tell you.

  LARA: I’m in a dream, but the problem is my dreams are not much different than my reality. I can get hurt in them. I can get killed.

  At least I think so. On that dead thing, since I’m not dead yet.

  Not Dead Yet. Monty Python.

  Where did that come from? Who is Monty Python?

  But I have been hurt in my dreams. That I am certain of. As far as dead, there’s a first for everything.

  And a last.

  I’m in the same kitchen. The one I thought I’d left behind. The one I never like visiting.

  But there is no man in here this time. No knife dripping blood. No blood trail leading through the door to a slaughtered family in the next room.

  This seems to be an improvement.

  But I still don’t want to go through that door. Because while I know there is no dead family on the other side, there is something much worse than a slaughtered younger sister, a younger brother, a mother and a father.

  I know that as much as I know anything, which means a lot and also not much. I know that to see what is really there, in my own past before that which I can remember, is so much worse than the nightmare.

  I don’t want to see.

  But something is pushing me to see. Something I can’t fight.

  I take a step I can’t control toward the door.

  I’d really like to wake up. That’s always the weird thing about my dreams, especially the nightmares. I know sometimes that I’m asleep. Really know it. Seems like if you know that, are conscious of it, then you should be able to reach consciousness, right?

  But I can’t.

  Isn’t that the worst feeling in the world?

  I take another step.

  I really don’t want to see what’s on the other side of that door. Because worse than dead family?

  Really?

  I’m aware that in reality I’m lying on a decent mattress covered by a cheap sheet. Not as bad as the one in the Fifth Floor cell, but still not a high thread count. Not bad, just not good. Something acquired in bulk with lots of other sheets and washed in large machines.

  I focus on that. A big washing machine spinning, spinning.

  A big pit. I can see it. Massive. That orients me to where my body is.

  I’m in the Possibility Palace. Close to the Pit. I can sense the presence of that massive spiral of history not far away.

  I’m in the team bunkroom.

  That’s good.

  But I still take another step in the dream.

  That’s bad.

  I hear a door open. Outside of the dream. In the reality I can’t get to.

  A threat?

  A dream-line?

  An enemy?

  The intruder doesn’t say anything. I hate that, but it let’s me know who. One-Eye. The shrink who helps no one.

  “I know there’s more to you than you’re telling us.”

  The words, real words, are a dream-line to reality. I can grab onto it, but do I want to touch it? Coming from this guy? That can’t be good.

  But worse than what’s on the other side of that door?

  “How did you get on that Russian plane?”

  Good question. And the question is strengthening the line from the reality outside of my nightmare and keeps me from taking another dream step. So something.

  “Open your eyes. I know you’re not sleeping. I can see your pulse. Your temperature. You people might have your ‘Sight’ but I’ve got mine.”

  I’d really like to buddy, but I can’t on your dream-line. It stinks. It’s rotten. Fetid, like you are.

  Where the hell did I learn the word ‘fetid’?

  Where is Moms? She’d get him out of here and get me out of this nightmare.

  The door in the dream is beginning to open. But I’m not touching it. Who is opening it?

  I really don’t want to know.

  I don’t want to see beyond.

  “What the frak?”

  Scout. I grab for her voice, her dream-line.

  “What are you doing in here?” Scout demanded.

  “My job,” Frasier replied.

  “Are you some kind of creep? Watching a sleeping girl?”

  “She’s not asleep.”

  “Lara.”

  I work my eyelids, but they’re so heavy. Made of steel, welded s
hut.

  A hand on my shoulder. Gentle. Powerful. Love. The welding melts.

  “Lara?”

  My eyelids are heavy shutters, slowly rolling open.

  “You okay?” Scout was leaning over Lara, her short, bright red hair a welcome sight.

  “Bad dream,” Lara muttered, blinking, focusing.

  “Nightmare?” Scout asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hate them,” Scout said. She didn’t look away, but addressed Frasier. “You can leave now.”

  “It wasn’t dreaming,” Frasier said. “It was something else. She wasn’t asleep.”

  “You know this how?” Scout asked.

  Frasier pointed to his solid black eyeball. “I see things that others don’t see. Just like you.”

  “Not like me,” Scout said.

  “Her body temperature was below normal,” Frasier said. “Her brain was even colder than her body. At a temperature where she should suffer damage. But she doesn’t. And her pulse was much too fast for sleep. She’s been like that before. It’s not sleep. It’s something else.”

  Scout gave Frasier her full attention, but kept her hand on Lara’s shoulder. “You don’t want to know what I see right now.”

  Lara shivered, feeling something roiling off Scout, dark and foreboding.

  Not love.

  Frasier took two involuntary steps back, his hand fumbling for the door. “I’m here on Dane’s orders.”

  “His specific order?” Scout moved toward him. “He told you to sneak in here? Into our team room?”

  “He ordered me to find out the truth about her.” Frasier pointed toward Lara.

  “She’s part of the Team,” Scout said. “That’s the only truth you need to know. Be gone now.”

  And Frasier did leave, scurrying out the door.

  “Whoa,” Lara said. “You made him do that.”

  “I don’t know if I did,” Scout said. “But I wanted him out of here.”

  “I felt it,” Lara said. “Power.” She got off the bed. “That guy freaks me out.”

  “He freaks everyone out,” Scout said. “Sounds like you and I have a similar problem.”

  “What’s that?” Lara asked as she headed over to the fridge, and retrieved a tub of ice cream. She held it up, eyebrow arcing in question.

  Scout nodded. “Where’d that come from?”

  “I asked for it,” Lara said.

  Scout laughed. “Okay.”

  “So what’s our similar problem?” Lara said.

  “We’re not sure where we come from. I thought I knew who my mother and father were. Turns out they weren’t my parents. Which is actually kind of a relief, since they were sort of losers. Not like they hung me in a closet and beat me with a broomstick, but they were kind of nothings.”

  Lara brought the ice cream over, along with two spoons. “I thought I had a mother and father too. I was wrong about that. Which was a relief in a different way. The father I thought I had was a son-of-a-bitch. My mother I thought I had was weak. Worse than a nothing when you’re with a bad something.”

  Scout went over to her bunk and sat down. Lara settled in next to her. Both were approaching the end of their teen years, although Scout was older. While Scout’s short hair was bright red, Lara had a slight dark fuzz beginning to cover the scars on her scalp.

  They sat in silence for a long time, each occasionally dipping into the melting ice cream.

  *****

  “Where is Dominic?” Ivar demanded.

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” Dane said.

  The two were in Foreman’s office. Square, painted bland off-white, the only furniture an old wooden table with some chairs. There were a couple of folders and several scrolls on the top of the table, within Dane’s reach. Ivar was seated across from him. The rest of the members of the team had scattered after being debriefed from their Nine-Eleven mission, except for Scout and Lara who were in the team room. But Ivar had something important on his mind.

  “I handed him to Foreman in 1973,” Ivar said. “What was Foreman doing in Chile?”

  They were in the Possibility Palace, the headquarters of the Time Patrol. The room was off the spiral ramp that went around the massive Pit that descended into all of recorded history, where Analysts on the ramp worked constantly, tracking history, looking for any aberrations in the timeline.

  Where and when the Possibility Palace existed was the most closely guarded secret of the Patrol. The Agents, who faced operatives of the Shadow on their missions, certainly didn’t have a need to know.

  “Obviously, Foreman was there to take Dominic,” Dane said. He was the Administrator of the Patrol, a refugee from an Earth timeline destroyed by the Shadow. In his late seventies, his hair was shorn tight to his skull, getting greyer by the day, and his face lined with worry. He had over fifty years on Ivar, a former graduate student who’d ‘joined’ the Nightstalkers during the Fun in North Carolina, where the team had shut a rift in time-space.

  When the Nightstalkers became the Time Patrol, Ivar had sensed he had little option but to go along, although, like all team members, he’d been given a choice by Dane: move forward or go back to one specific moment in his life and change something.

  After all, one could not be a member of the Time Patrol if one had an inclination to change the past.

  In his darker moments, of which there were many, Ivar wondered if the choice were real or a ruse, where it was actually join or disappear?

  “I mean,” Ivar clarified, “where is Dominic now? Is he still alive? When I was traveling back, I sensed he became one of the Missing in Chile. One of those who simply disappeared after the coup. Did Foreman turn him over to the junta?”

  Dane shook his head. “He didn’t go missing.” They were discussing the young boy Ivar had rescued in the midst of that coup back on 11 September 1973. “Foreman brought him to us not long after that. Here.”

  Ivar was surprised. “Then he’s here now?”

  Ivar was a thin, young man with shaggy dark hair. He’d always appeared nervous, uncertain, but after several Time Patrol missions, especially his first when he’d been dumped into Long Island Sound wearing cement overshoes by Meyer Lansky, he’d begun changing. Maturing? Growing harder; more cynical? It was difficult to tell. There was also the issue of having been replicated by whatever had been on the other side of that Rift in North Carolina several times, to the point where he’d wondered if he were the original Ivar; although a Fate had assured him he was; as if that were assurance to be told by some being whose very essence was a mystery?

  “He’s no longer here.” Dane sighed. “Dominic was here for many years. A most singular young man. But during the Nine-Eleven mission something happened.”

  “’Something’?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “To where?” Ivar demanded.

  “We don’t know.” Dane sighed. “He snapped out of existence. Perhaps the result of a ripple from your mission.”

  “He was fine when I gave him to Foreman,” Ivar said.

  “I’m sure he was. But that was decades ago in real time.”

  “How could my mission have made him disappear when my mission actually got him here in the first place?”

  “We don’t know if it did make him disappear,” Dane answered. “But it might have closed a loop from outside our timeline, since he came from outside of it.”

  “What did Dominic do here?”

  “He tried to see the future,” Dane said.

  Ivar wasn’t surprised given what he’d experienced with Dominic and his mother during the mission to Chile. “Did he?”

  “We look to the past, Ivar. We keep it intact. The future is only possibilities. It doesn’t exist yet. Not like the past. Time travel only works one way. We can’t travel, or see, into a future that hasn’t occurred yet.

  “Dominic had the Sight,” Dane continued. “The most we’d ever seen in a man. He lived here, in his own place. He read reports from the analysts.
Twice he wrote something down on a scroll. A vision of what he believed to be the future. Once in 2001. And once during the Nine Eleven mission. But it appears there was nothing. The most recent scroll was blank when it was opened by Hannah at the Cellar, to whom he insisted it be delivered.”

  “Was that before or after he disappeared?” Ivar asked.

  “We’re not certain,” Dane said.

  “What about the prediction in 2001?”

  Dane shrugged. “We don’t know. The man who opened it is dead.”

  “Odd choice of years to have a vision. Was that before Nine-Eleven?”

  “It was.”

  “Did his vision have something to do with that? With our Nine-Eleven missions?”

  “We don’t know. If there was anything on it, it’s dead with Hannah’s predecessor. The predictions, like Dominic, might have been loops that disappeared when he did.”

  “So what happened to Dominic?” Ivar pressed. “Where did he disappear to?”

  “Where does anyone disappear to?” Dane replied. “He’s gone, as if he were never here.”

  “Did he go through a Gate? To the Space Between?”

  Dane looked down at the table top. “No. He was with Lara. She says he was there, then he wasn’t.”

  “The way we appear in a Shadow bubble,” Ivar said. “We’re not there, then we’re there. Except he was here, then not here.”

  “It appears so,” Dane said. “Lara couldn’t explain it.”

  “So Dominic was an anomaly in time. Just like Rasputin during Doc’s Tsar mission. I’ve been thinking about it. If Rasputin was influenced by Valkyries and acting for the Shadow then he did change our history and we didn’t correct that. There have been other events during our missions where—“

  Dane cut him off. “Hold on. History is what it is. Our mission is to maintain it. Rasputin did live. He did influence the Tsarina. Doc’s job on his Ides mission wasn’t Rasputin. It was to insure Tsar Nicholas abdicated. He stopped the Tsarina’s plan to change her husband’s decision. That’s all there is to that. Don’t overthink this.”

  “Just do as I’m ordered?”

  “You can always resign,” Dane said.