Allen Steele by ChronoSpace (epub)

Author:ChronoSpace (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Time unknown

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.

He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon’s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.

“Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”

Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.

“Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”

Just outside Oberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.

“I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until…”

“I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”

Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer…”

He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.

At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.

They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”

“Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake.

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