Authors: S D Taylor
Doug looked at him and saw the cold intensity on his face. "I’m very sorry, Peter. There was nothing we could have done differently.”
“I don’t blame you, Doug. Let’s just look forward and try to work together to get out of this mess.”
“Fine. You’re right that we need to bury your body and all the others. We should go over to the camp and see if there are any shovels there." Doug paused. "But before we go, can you introduce us to the two women over there that we have all been ignoring?"
Peter looked up, slightly surprised since he had all but forgotten them with the viewing of his own corpse and hearing the news about John. "Yes, of course. Follow me, please. You should meet the prisoners." Doug looked at him with surprise since he hadn’t realized they were prisoners until that moment. Given their outfits and apparent association with the people they had been fighting, he wasn’t sure why it took him that long to put two and two together. Peter must have captured them.
Doug and Peter walked over to the two women while the rest of the party trailed behind. As they got closer, Doug could see that each of them had their hands tied together with a thin white cord. One of the women was tall and blond, probably in her early thirties and dressed in black pants and a grey sweatshirt with a hood. He assumed she was Russian since in his mind he placed her with the Rasputin crew. She had long, silky blond hair that reached past her shoulders and it appeared to have been washed recently. Doug thought she would be considered attractive if she ever smiled, but for now she had the look of a soldier about to go into combat. The other woman was dressed in the blue camouflage uniform of the pirates whose sub had just recently been destroyed. She was Oriental and had long black hair pulled back in a pony tail. She wore a blue baseball-style cap. She was younger and shorter than the woman next to her but she didn’t look any happier. He walked up to her and extended his hand. “My name is Doug Cameron. What may I call you?”
She looked at him for a moment and then took his hand as best she could with her hands bound and shook it with surprising firmness. “I am Ying Chen. I am a scientist. A physicist is what you would call it in English.” She held Doug’s stare without blinking.
“And I am Gabrielle Schoenmaker,” the tall blond woman said quietly, extending her hands to Doug who was surprised by her firm grip as well. “You met my father, Oskar Schoenmaker, the Captain of the Rasputin. Both versions of him, I assume. And if you are here and the Rasputin is destroyed, I must assume you killed them both as well.” German, thought Doug. Mr. Alpha’s daughter. She smiled slightly and said, “You might remember me from Hamburg ten years ago when I gave you the note outside the U.S. Consulate.”
Doug felt a chill go down his spine. Of course, Mr. Alpha must have asked his daughter to pose as a college student and pass Doug the note on that afternoon in September, 2001. He would not have recognized her, but with a careful look he could see that it was indeed the girl he met ten years earlier. The struggle and tension of those years had slightly dimming the bright eyes of the girl he remembered from that day. “Of course, I recognize you now.”
Doug looked from one woman to the other and back twice. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Ying and a pleasure to see you again, Gabrielle. I hope that all of us can work together to survive this adventure and find our way home, wherever that may be. Gabrielle, I am sorry about your father. I never knew his name.” Doug was searching for the right words to say to someone who was clearly his enemy. But somehow, looking at her standing there with her hands tied and the sad look on her face, he had a hard time feeling any animosity. He had just killed her father. And even though it was completely justified, Doug felt a sense of guilt for his actions, knowing that she would not have considered Mr. Alpha as some evil part of a terrorist organization. To her, he was just her father. And now his bullet riddled body was floating offshore, drifting with the tide and sparking the interest of any number of ocean creatures who would treat it as a meal of opportunity.
Her face showed no emotion, but she nodded. “Thank you for your concern, but it is unnecessary. We are at war and I don’t expect comfort from my enemy. And you and your friends may call me Gaby as long as we are here together, pretending to be civil to each other.”
Chapter 2
Tom looked around the area of the camp where the battle had taken place. “There are more trees on the island than there were yesterday. I am sure of it. And I have never seen so many salmon as I saw this morning when I was fishing.” Tom, Doug and Peter were finishing the unpleasant task of burying the dead who remained at the camp and littered the area around it where the fighting had taken place. It was clear to them that they had shifted in time during the firing of the pulse vortex weapon when they used it to destroy the pirate submarine. It was close enough to the island that the time fracture surrounded all of them and apparently merged them with some other time. Tom was just stating the obvious.
“We saw two native canoes go by the Rasputin and they appeared to be from at least a hundred years ago. Nothing modern about them and it didn’t look like a recreational costume outing. Their chief stared us down and gave all the impression of being a man to be reckoned with.” Doug patted the dirt on the final grave. Peter had located several shovels left by the crew of the Rasputin after their construction work to set up the fake vortex weapon behind the camp.
Peter tried to summarize what Doug and Tom had told him. “So it appears we are in an earlier time on the island. There are more trees and more wildlife, and we saw some ancient residents from the area go by. I guess we could have assumed the salmon and the trees were the result of conservation, but the people from the past seem to seal the deal.”
Doug laughed at the conservation comment. “Even if there was conservation, I doubt the trees we see here could have grown that tall in less than a few hundred years. If this is a new, improved greener future, we must have jumped ahead a long time from where we started.”
Doug thought to himself that it didn’t much matter where they were. Without the pulse vortex and the weapon’s ability to fracture time, it was unlikely that any of them would ever be going anywhere you couldn’t reach by boat. And since there was limited amount of gas for the outboard motors, they would have to row the boat at that. While the firings of the weapon produced the strange time effects, Doug kept hoping that the people that were reality shifting would be coming from elsewhere or elsewhen to join his and Erin’s reality. He tried to stay away from the implications of all of them ending up in Viking times. Or worse. And to complete the picture, he was worried about their collective ability to survive in a world where you caught your own fish, made your own clothes and had to fight with swords once your ammo ran out. It would be important for them to determine a game plan that would focus on security, shelter, water and food. Once they had “staying alive” covered, they could consider what else they would like to try. There were limited options, but Doug guessed that this group that fate had assembled would be able to have a lively discussion on the topic.
The blond woman, Mr. Alpha’s daughter, was going to be a challenge for them to deal with. Doug understood now why the Rasputin’s captain had asked about the prisoners being executed by the pirates and why he seemed so upset. He assumed his daughter, Gaby, had been executed. Fortunately she had escaped when the pirates had attacked the camp. She told Doug that she remained hidden until after the series of explosions that she heard offshore. At that point, she assumed the Rasputin had been destroyed, and she cared little about what happened to her after that. She and Ying had to be considered prisoners until Doug and the rest decided what to do with them. They were tied up and secured back at the tents while Erin and Megan kept watch over them in between scouring the camp for anything food, ammunition or other useful items.
Megan focused on food while Erin collected weapons and ammunition. The original inhabitants of the camp had only planned to stay for a few days, so there was not a lot of food to be found. Both the Rasputin team and the pirates after them had come to the island on vessels that were well stocked and waiting safely offshore. At least until the vessels were both destroyed. The only modern people who had enough food for more than a few days were John and Peter. The two British commandos had a large cache of food at their secret camp where they kept watch over the proceedings on the island. They could go there eventually, but for the moment, Megan only found some plastic containers with packed meals and a few days’ supply of hard sausage, rice, oatmeal and bread. She was taking inventory when Erin walked up carrying an AK-47, an ax and a handful of swords.
“That looks like a pretty heavy load. At least you found some weapons to use after the ammunition runs out.”
Erin laughed. “I don’t know if I am strong enough to swing one of these swords. They are pretty heavy. I guess it is something you get used to with practice. The Vikings must be extremely strong to fight with these the way they do. I would think that after a couple of swings of the sword they would be so tired they would have to quit. But I imagine the guys that are not strong enough to endure a long fight are the ones who end up dead”
Megan couldn’t argue with that. “We better check on the prisoners. I haven’t heard much from them lately.”
Gaby and Ying were tied up in separate tents since it seemed like they would have reason to go after each other if they got the chance. Erin didn’t like keeping them like caged animals, but after her experiences of the past few days, she was not in a trusting mood. With all the weapons around the camp, if either of the prisoners decided to escape or take revenge it would be a disaster and somebody would be killed. There were six tents in the camp, one of which had bullet holes that Erin had shot through it the day before. She went to the second tent from the end where Gaby was waiting and pulled back the flap.
“Are you ok?” Erin saw that the blond woman was sitting up very straight against the pole in the center of the tent and glaring at her.
“Is it really necessary for you to ask me that question every thirty minutes or so? Is it to somehow reduce the guilt you feel for treating me like a dog? I gave your boyfriend my assurances that I bore none of you any ill will and I would be a good girl if you just let me out of my cell.”
Erin went into the tent and sat down across from her, at a safe distance. She could not be sure her hands were still tied behind her back. “I’m sorry you feel bad about all this, but frankly you are far better off with us than you would have been if the pirates had captured you. We don’t plan to shoot you and we are doing our best to keep you from doing something that would cause us to change our minds.”
“You are going to shoot me eventually, so I would prefer it was sooner rather than later. I realize the kind of person my father was and you are all from his world. Had he captured a woman like me from the other side, someone like you, he would have just shot her.”
“But your father did capture me. Twice. And he didn’t shoot me either time. So I guess you didn’t know him as well as you thought.”
Gaby laughed derisively at that. “He hadn’t shot you yet, but he would have gotten around to it eventually. You aren’t so special. You are just another American spy trying to catch up with a world that is rapidly leaving you and your stupid country behind.”
“But I am not a spy. I was never involved with anything to do with spies or terrorists until you and your associates shot down my plane. Your father knew that after I had time to chat with him. I even tried to treat his wounds until he shot himself.”
“He shot himself? When? I thought he blew up the boat.”
“Well, it’s complicated. The first version of your father had been badly injured in the pirate attack on the Rasputin. He was near a fragmentation grenade when it went off and he had lots of shrapnel wounds. I was working on cleaning his wounds when he got the drop on me, told me about the weapon and then shot himself. Doug said it was so the information in his head didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
Gaby looked reflective for the first time.”Did he say anything about the crew on the island?”
“Yes. When we told him that the pirates had been executing people, he was very upset. He wanted to be sure that we had killed the people responsible for shooting his crew. I realize now that he was so upset because he thought you had been shot.”
The tough blond woman had a few tears escape her eyes when she heard that. Not loud, dramatic crying, but she had tears running down her cheeks. In another place and time, Erin would have hugged her, but she thought better of it. Gaby looked up at her through her tears. “What happened after that?”
“Your father told us about the vortex weapon and how we could use it to destroy the sub. He had rigged the boat with explosives, but we activated the weapon from one of the zodiacs so we were not on board when the Rasputin blew up for the first time.”
“It blew up more than once? How did that happen?”
“After it blew up, it reappeared. It was the time fracture effect that merges two time/space locations. We went back on board and a different version of your father was there. An uninjured version that tried to take us prisoner. He got distracted by some native people in a canoe and we had a shootout with him. He died.”
“Did you shoot him?”