The Past Sucks, page 2
Born and raised in the gutter, my life had never shown much promise, but it couldn’t end with my shredded corpse hanging from a bush.
Could it?
In my final moment, I realized that this was precisely what was about to happen.
With that cheerful thought echoing in my stupid head, I died.
Chapter 03
I coughed.
Weirdly.
It sounded all wrong. More like a child’s first lesson on a wind instrument than a manly clearing of the air tubes.
Tubes…
There was one stuck down my throat.
I gagged and refused to open my eyes. Sticking things down my throat is a pet hate of mine.
My fingers clawed into the ground, digging through loose leaflitter and dirt.
That was unexpected.
I’d presumed I was either in hospital or the afterlife, and I imagined both being cleaner than this.
“Let’s have this out,” said a woman’s voice.
I liked her sound. The words felt strong, sensuous, and, well, kind of hot. Women’s voices often do when I have my eyes shut. And this binta had an exotic accent I couldn’t place.
I opened my eyes. And instantly wished I hadn’t.
Waves of panic washed through me when I saw her pronounced cheekbones and eyes that yelled Chinese at me. Most of the enemy infantry assaults we had faced had been pressed by troops from the Chinese Triple Republic.
I’d been captured by WorldSoc.
Technically, the Chinese Triple Republic and many of its neighbors were independent nations that were proud allies in a WorldSoc-led coalition. But maps generally colored the Triple Republic a hatched blue with a key that said something like ‘Under WorldSoc influence’.
Chinese troops had been first into the assault. Cannon fodder. I think that said all we needed to know about the independence of the Triple Republic.
I looked into her face and found no compassion there. She wore a strange uniform. She was a medic, I supposed, rather than a frontline shock trooper. Even so, the absence of any emblems on her uniform was peculiar.
My surroundings were no more reassuring. They’d taken me out of the gorse bush to patch me up under the trees, but I guessed that was to use me in one of their sickening propaganda productions. When they’d finished with me, it would be a bullet to the back of the neck painted over in blue.
Or worse, I could spend a decade in a WorldSoc education facility followed by a lifetime as a slave laborer.
Something didn’t sit quite right with that picture, though.
To start with, the woman’s hair was green, and while that was very WorldSoc, it didn’t fit with what I knew of the Chinese military.
Her accent didn’t match either.
Just maybe, she was something else. Finnish perhaps?
“What’s going on?” I asked her, cheered to find that blood wasn’t bubbling out with my words.
“You’re being—”
She was interrupted by a rumble of falling artillery shells. The battle had moved on since I’d blacked out, but only by a few miles. I guessed they were hitting central Essen.
“I’m recruiting you,” she said when the shelling paused. “For the Time Dogz. Do you want to sign up?”
“Who the Devil are the Time Dogz?”
“We’re the people who stopped you being dead. I’ve pulled you back to the brink of death and you’re stable for now. How would you like to be restored to full health?”
“What’s the catch?”
“I told you. You join the Time Dogz.”
“Which side are you on?” She raised an eyebrow at that. “Not that it matters,” I said quickly because I decided I liked being not dead. “But just so we’re clear. You’re playing for WorldSoc, right?”
“Oh, we’re long past WorldSoc.” She sounded dismissive. Not to mention mysterious.
Time Dogz. The first word worried at me. I get called a dog from dawn to dusk, no problem. But time dog…
It wasn’t the sort of word I expected for a military unit.
She ran a medical scanner over my chest.
The obvious question came to my lips, but I felt too stupid to ask it.
Since when had I been scared to say stupid things in front of a beautiful woman?
“What’s your name?” I asked instead.
She didn’t look up from the device. “They call me the Ox.”
Okay. That was weird. “Hi, the Ox. I’m Stiletto Caldwell. When are you from?”
Now she looked at me. “Stiletto? I thought you were Steven Zygmunt Caldwell.”
I winced at the embarrassing middle name, though it was far from the only burden my mother had placed on me. “That’s me,” I admitted. “But I’m generally called Stiletto. Close friends call me Stillo.”
For the first time, the Ox softened her full lips into a smile. “Oh, I understand now. The tattoo on your chest. I like it.”
It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Which part? The ink or the chest?”
Her lips twisted wickedly. “Both. As for when I’m from, I was born far away from the unpleasantness of this era.”
“Does WorldSoc win?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s bad. What happens to them, eventually? A rebellion overthrows them?”
“No. Don’t worry about that. WorldSoc, as you know it, is long dead by my time.”
“What exactly is the job you want me to do, Ox?”
“Whatever I say it is. Do you want to join or not?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ve just given legal consent. Now, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on. I just need to check a few more details. If you pass, we’ll be underway.”
“And if I don’t?”
She looked at me with chilling coldness. “Then you go back to being dead.” The device in her hand sprouted metal fingers. She passed it again over my body.
I tried tilting my head to assess my chances of an independent exit.
I couldn’t. Something was gripping the back of my neck. I attempted to rock my whole body to one side but failed again. As I did, I thought I felt that same gripping sensation running all the way down my spine, though I couldn’t be sure what was going on.
My eyes, at least, could move. On the dirt beneath the woman scanning me, was a device with a pump ticking away. A fat tube arced over from this box and disappeared inside my chest. The tube was opaque. Call me Stillo the Squeamish if you must, but I was grateful not to see inside.
Once more, my eyes fixed upon the Ox, and I was acutely aware that I was totally reliant on this strange woman.
Her device beeped. Its fingers retracted and she stuffed it inside a pouch on her hip.
My heart felt weird, as if pumping warm acid. Maybe it was. Maybe it was nerves. But I was certain that my continued existence depended upon whatever that machine had just reported.
Let me tell you, I hate my life being in the hands of machines.
The Ox planted her feet either side of my shoulders and looked directly down at my face. “Lucky for you, scanner says your historical significance is three.”
“Out of how many? Three?” I tried laughing, but I couldn’t do that, either. “Who am I kidding? It’s not out of three, is it?”
She jiggled her head to the left. What the hell did that mean?
“Well?” I demanded. “Are you going to tell me?”
The woman smirked. It was a foxy look. As in, she was a fox, and I was a chicken she was about to gobble up. Point of clarification: this was not a remotely pleasant prospect, even if she was easy on the eye. She was a predator, and I did not like to be helpless prey.
“The reading is in micro eves.”
“Speak GenEng.”
She frowned and looked away for a second. “Generic English. Northern European Variant, circa 2300. Confirmed.” Irritation gathered at the edge of her eyes. “I am talking GenEng. It’s your vocabulary that’s lacking. An eve is a unit of historical significance. An eve of one would be highly significant. That’s your Julius Caesars and Lenins. Probably Mao Zedong, and General Mansour too. You scored three millionths of an eve.”
“That’s bad.”
She laughed. “Why? Because it makes you feel insignificant? Wait till I explain what a logarithmic scale means.”
I twitched. It was the closest I could get to a shrug. “I’m a worthless piece of sputum. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Worthless? That depends on your perspective. I would have needed a license signed by a magistrate to bring back anyone over a thousand micro eves. You’re fair game. I can do whatever I want with you.”
Again, that wasn’t nearly as good as it might have sounded in better circumstances. “I’m dying,” I pointed out. As much as anything as a justification to myself for being so supine.
“That’s true.”
“Which explains my pitifully low eve count.”
“No. If I had taken a reading a decade ago, you might have read a little more, but only a fraction of a micro eve. You’ve always been irrelevant, Caldwell. By waiting for you to die on a battlefield, I’m simply taking precautions that people who do have some slight significance won’t notice you disappear.”
“And there are more of you… recruiters?”
She ignored me and placed two disks on my forehead.
“You’re ghouls,” I said, though taking care not to disturb the disks. “You stalk disasters, the aftermath of battles, cholera outbreaks, Spanish Flu, the Sr-Mond-33 pandemic. I can’t believe it.”
“Then you’re a moron. Those examples you gave are all good sources of cheap recruits.” Still standing over me, the Ox brought out, of all things, a pair of blue dowsing rods.
“That’s not what I meant,” I protested. “Look around. With so many to choose from, why pick me?”
“Who’s to say you’re the only one we’re picking from this little battle, Caldwell?” She looked down and winked. “Maybe I picked you for your cute face and pretty chest. Since I’m the one bringing you back to life, perhaps I’m assuming you will show your gratitude to my personal satisfaction.”
The rods jerked in her hands.
Energy washed around the disks on my head.
My universe blurred.
I had a fleeting memory of lying beneath a red arch. Of green tiles and scented steam. But that was more likely a memory of a disreputable massage joint I know, one with a hot Finnish girl.
The next thing I knew for certain, I was waking up in a little room containing a bed, no visible exits, and a bedside clock I couldn’t figure how to switch on.
A few hours later, an annoying droid showed up and told me to get dressed.
I got a little mad at the tin tosser and…
And I think we’re all caught up now.
So that’s my account of how I woke up dead.
But don’t worry. The real story’s only just beginning.
Chapter 04
If war does strange things to your mind, it’s nothing compared to the effects of dying.
To be more accurate, the effects of not quite dying, of being brought back to life.
The little room the droid had escorted me to — the one with the bored man in the blue coveralls — turned out to be my entry point to a sequence of medical procedures that lasted a week.
I wasn’t properly conscious through most of it, but it wasn’t all the darkness of oblivion either. My last days in the Rhine-Ruhr fortress kept replaying. The encounter with the Ox even more.
Admittedly – as I might have mentioned – this Karmela Oxala was pretty hot, but it was her bringing me back to life that my mind kept trying to process.
I finally awoke back in my cell – sorry, quarters – to find a man standing over me. He wore the usual coveralls, this time in gray. He also carried a tablet.
The man’s gaze moved from my face to the tablet and back. I didn’t understand what tech these people used, but I knew a checklist when I saw one.
Although his clothing was clean, he was dressed like a mechanic. Which made me a reconditioned truck about to undergo a 30-point inspection before either being driven out the garage or sent for scrap.
I caught a momentary flicker of deviousness on my mechanic’s face. Hah! I knew he was up to something.
“Comment vous sentez-vous?” he asked.
I gave a dismissive shrug. “Bof, ça pourrait être pire.”
I blinked. Like most people of my social class, the occasional attempts by the Odense authorities to make me attend school had ceased altogether when I left aged eleven. After that my education had not been formal, but I knew enough to recognize the words he’d spoken were French.
The words we’d spoken.
He’d asked me how I was feeling to which I’d given a typically unhelpful answer.
What the hell? I asked myself. In GenEng English.
I was being a dumb fool’s hat again and I hate that. When I make the effort, I’m a damned sight smarter than I make out. I was asking the right question but of the wrong person.
“Putain de bordel de merde,” I told him.
I’d meant to say ‘what the hell?’ The French words that emerged weren’t a literal translation, but they conveyed my feelings even better.
We ping-ponged questions and answers in a variety of languages that I also didn’t know. Except, clearly, I now did.
Then he said something that I didn’t immediately understand. I got the gist of it. He was asking whether my steed was saddled up and ready for the battle.
That was my first guess. Though as I mused on the phrase, I wondered whether he was giving me a sexual come on.
I couldn’t see a saucy glint in his eye, so I went for the warhorse translation.
“I didn’t get that one,” I said in GenEng. “Sounded like some bastard offshoot of French.”
“Anglo-Norman French. 13th century. The details of actual language use are sketchy, which is why you’re struggling.”
“Do many people speak Anglo-Norman these days?”
“They do in 13th-century England.”
“Oh! Is that what you recruited me for? To go back to the 13th century to play knights in tights?”
“What I want is to complete your checklist. I’ve got plans for lunch.”
I grinned. Checklist. There. You see? I knew it. This, at least, I could understand.
“Your linguistic augmentations are fine,” said my brain mechanic. “Now we’ll test your enhanced memory function.”
I sat up in bed. I was sore all over, but there was a particular itch on my neck, just below my left ear. I gave it a rub.
Horror shot through me. I felt a lump there.
I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there before.
“That’s your activation stud. Also, your briefing port.”
I scrunched up my face in the universal gesture for what the fuck?
“It’s a switch, basically. Activates your new functions.”
“What new functions?”
“I don’t know. They will be mission specific.”
“Oh, so we’re doing missions now, are we?”
He shook his head, genuinely confused. “No, Caldwell. You’re doing missions.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I’d already been dead once, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience anytime soon. I knew the Ox hadn’t brought me back simply to admire my chest ink, but we hadn’t exactly gone through a detailed job description.
“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves,” my service mechanic reassured me. “Let’s worry about signing off this checklist first.”
“Easy for you to say. What happens after you sign me off?”
“Then I go for lunch. I have plans, remember?”
“I mean, what happens next for me?”
He regarded me with pity in his eyes. “A shakedown test. They will probably call it a probationary assessment or some such.”
“I get it. So the Time Dogz boot camp ends with a do-or-die mission?”
“No. There’s no boot camp. You’ll be carrying out your mission before I finish my starter. And you’ll be back before I’ve eaten dessert.”
He looked away and added in a small voice. “Or not.”
Chapter 05
I remember little about my first jump through time, the one from the battle at Essen. I was almost dead, don’t forget, so I had put the absence of fancy light effects or tripping through complex geometries of four dimensional something-or-others down to my lack of situational awareness at the time.
As it turned out, I hadn’t missed much.
Jumping through time is like tripping on an uneven sidewalk. Even though I was expecting it, there was still the shock of an unexpected lurch as the universe lost its balance. Almost as soon as I registered the transition, I found myself at our destination, a boarding house in Düsseldorf, the industrial heartland of Weimar Germany in January 1932.
However anticlimactic the journey, by the gods, it was more than made up for by the destination!
The Ox and I had arrived in a modest bedroom. Except there was no bed and two large mattresses were beneath our feet, presumably to cushion us in case we fell. With the curtains drawn, the light came from electric lamps along a wall decorated in green flocked wallpaper.
The slightly yellowish lamplight cast a mesmerizing blend of contour-enhancing shadows and smoothing highlights over Karmela Oxala’s nude form.
When we set off from the Time Dogz base (in what I had learned was AD 3343 in old money) we hadn’t been naked. I would definitely have remembered that. We had been wearing the ubiquitous Time Dogz coveralls.
The merest hint of a breeze wafted between my thighs, and I registered that I too was naked.
But I wasn’t the main event, so I got back to looking at the Ox looking at me looking at her.
She seemed amused at something. Probably my elongated eyeballs pulling themselves out of their sockets, straining at their optic nerve tethers.
The Ox. How could I describe her?
I could use a phrase that contains the words ‘feminine curves’, but I don’t want to. It would be such a cliché, and it would be a travesty to use clichés to describe such a wonderfully unique person as the Ox.
Could it?
In my final moment, I realized that this was precisely what was about to happen.
With that cheerful thought echoing in my stupid head, I died.
Chapter 03
I coughed.
Weirdly.
It sounded all wrong. More like a child’s first lesson on a wind instrument than a manly clearing of the air tubes.
Tubes…
There was one stuck down my throat.
I gagged and refused to open my eyes. Sticking things down my throat is a pet hate of mine.
My fingers clawed into the ground, digging through loose leaflitter and dirt.
That was unexpected.
I’d presumed I was either in hospital or the afterlife, and I imagined both being cleaner than this.
“Let’s have this out,” said a woman’s voice.
I liked her sound. The words felt strong, sensuous, and, well, kind of hot. Women’s voices often do when I have my eyes shut. And this binta had an exotic accent I couldn’t place.
I opened my eyes. And instantly wished I hadn’t.
Waves of panic washed through me when I saw her pronounced cheekbones and eyes that yelled Chinese at me. Most of the enemy infantry assaults we had faced had been pressed by troops from the Chinese Triple Republic.
I’d been captured by WorldSoc.
Technically, the Chinese Triple Republic and many of its neighbors were independent nations that were proud allies in a WorldSoc-led coalition. But maps generally colored the Triple Republic a hatched blue with a key that said something like ‘Under WorldSoc influence’.
Chinese troops had been first into the assault. Cannon fodder. I think that said all we needed to know about the independence of the Triple Republic.
I looked into her face and found no compassion there. She wore a strange uniform. She was a medic, I supposed, rather than a frontline shock trooper. Even so, the absence of any emblems on her uniform was peculiar.
My surroundings were no more reassuring. They’d taken me out of the gorse bush to patch me up under the trees, but I guessed that was to use me in one of their sickening propaganda productions. When they’d finished with me, it would be a bullet to the back of the neck painted over in blue.
Or worse, I could spend a decade in a WorldSoc education facility followed by a lifetime as a slave laborer.
Something didn’t sit quite right with that picture, though.
To start with, the woman’s hair was green, and while that was very WorldSoc, it didn’t fit with what I knew of the Chinese military.
Her accent didn’t match either.
Just maybe, she was something else. Finnish perhaps?
“What’s going on?” I asked her, cheered to find that blood wasn’t bubbling out with my words.
“You’re being—”
She was interrupted by a rumble of falling artillery shells. The battle had moved on since I’d blacked out, but only by a few miles. I guessed they were hitting central Essen.
“I’m recruiting you,” she said when the shelling paused. “For the Time Dogz. Do you want to sign up?”
“Who the Devil are the Time Dogz?”
“We’re the people who stopped you being dead. I’ve pulled you back to the brink of death and you’re stable for now. How would you like to be restored to full health?”
“What’s the catch?”
“I told you. You join the Time Dogz.”
“Which side are you on?” She raised an eyebrow at that. “Not that it matters,” I said quickly because I decided I liked being not dead. “But just so we’re clear. You’re playing for WorldSoc, right?”
“Oh, we’re long past WorldSoc.” She sounded dismissive. Not to mention mysterious.
Time Dogz. The first word worried at me. I get called a dog from dawn to dusk, no problem. But time dog…
It wasn’t the sort of word I expected for a military unit.
She ran a medical scanner over my chest.
The obvious question came to my lips, but I felt too stupid to ask it.
Since when had I been scared to say stupid things in front of a beautiful woman?
“What’s your name?” I asked instead.
She didn’t look up from the device. “They call me the Ox.”
Okay. That was weird. “Hi, the Ox. I’m Stiletto Caldwell. When are you from?”
Now she looked at me. “Stiletto? I thought you were Steven Zygmunt Caldwell.”
I winced at the embarrassing middle name, though it was far from the only burden my mother had placed on me. “That’s me,” I admitted. “But I’m generally called Stiletto. Close friends call me Stillo.”
For the first time, the Ox softened her full lips into a smile. “Oh, I understand now. The tattoo on your chest. I like it.”
It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Which part? The ink or the chest?”
Her lips twisted wickedly. “Both. As for when I’m from, I was born far away from the unpleasantness of this era.”
“Does WorldSoc win?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s bad. What happens to them, eventually? A rebellion overthrows them?”
“No. Don’t worry about that. WorldSoc, as you know it, is long dead by my time.”
“What exactly is the job you want me to do, Ox?”
“Whatever I say it is. Do you want to join or not?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ve just given legal consent. Now, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on. I just need to check a few more details. If you pass, we’ll be underway.”
“And if I don’t?”
She looked at me with chilling coldness. “Then you go back to being dead.” The device in her hand sprouted metal fingers. She passed it again over my body.
I tried tilting my head to assess my chances of an independent exit.
I couldn’t. Something was gripping the back of my neck. I attempted to rock my whole body to one side but failed again. As I did, I thought I felt that same gripping sensation running all the way down my spine, though I couldn’t be sure what was going on.
My eyes, at least, could move. On the dirt beneath the woman scanning me, was a device with a pump ticking away. A fat tube arced over from this box and disappeared inside my chest. The tube was opaque. Call me Stillo the Squeamish if you must, but I was grateful not to see inside.
Once more, my eyes fixed upon the Ox, and I was acutely aware that I was totally reliant on this strange woman.
Her device beeped. Its fingers retracted and she stuffed it inside a pouch on her hip.
My heart felt weird, as if pumping warm acid. Maybe it was. Maybe it was nerves. But I was certain that my continued existence depended upon whatever that machine had just reported.
Let me tell you, I hate my life being in the hands of machines.
The Ox planted her feet either side of my shoulders and looked directly down at my face. “Lucky for you, scanner says your historical significance is three.”
“Out of how many? Three?” I tried laughing, but I couldn’t do that, either. “Who am I kidding? It’s not out of three, is it?”
She jiggled her head to the left. What the hell did that mean?
“Well?” I demanded. “Are you going to tell me?”
The woman smirked. It was a foxy look. As in, she was a fox, and I was a chicken she was about to gobble up. Point of clarification: this was not a remotely pleasant prospect, even if she was easy on the eye. She was a predator, and I did not like to be helpless prey.
“The reading is in micro eves.”
“Speak GenEng.”
She frowned and looked away for a second. “Generic English. Northern European Variant, circa 2300. Confirmed.” Irritation gathered at the edge of her eyes. “I am talking GenEng. It’s your vocabulary that’s lacking. An eve is a unit of historical significance. An eve of one would be highly significant. That’s your Julius Caesars and Lenins. Probably Mao Zedong, and General Mansour too. You scored three millionths of an eve.”
“That’s bad.”
She laughed. “Why? Because it makes you feel insignificant? Wait till I explain what a logarithmic scale means.”
I twitched. It was the closest I could get to a shrug. “I’m a worthless piece of sputum. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Worthless? That depends on your perspective. I would have needed a license signed by a magistrate to bring back anyone over a thousand micro eves. You’re fair game. I can do whatever I want with you.”
Again, that wasn’t nearly as good as it might have sounded in better circumstances. “I’m dying,” I pointed out. As much as anything as a justification to myself for being so supine.
“That’s true.”
“Which explains my pitifully low eve count.”
“No. If I had taken a reading a decade ago, you might have read a little more, but only a fraction of a micro eve. You’ve always been irrelevant, Caldwell. By waiting for you to die on a battlefield, I’m simply taking precautions that people who do have some slight significance won’t notice you disappear.”
“And there are more of you… recruiters?”
She ignored me and placed two disks on my forehead.
“You’re ghouls,” I said, though taking care not to disturb the disks. “You stalk disasters, the aftermath of battles, cholera outbreaks, Spanish Flu, the Sr-Mond-33 pandemic. I can’t believe it.”
“Then you’re a moron. Those examples you gave are all good sources of cheap recruits.” Still standing over me, the Ox brought out, of all things, a pair of blue dowsing rods.
“That’s not what I meant,” I protested. “Look around. With so many to choose from, why pick me?”
“Who’s to say you’re the only one we’re picking from this little battle, Caldwell?” She looked down and winked. “Maybe I picked you for your cute face and pretty chest. Since I’m the one bringing you back to life, perhaps I’m assuming you will show your gratitude to my personal satisfaction.”
The rods jerked in her hands.
Energy washed around the disks on my head.
My universe blurred.
I had a fleeting memory of lying beneath a red arch. Of green tiles and scented steam. But that was more likely a memory of a disreputable massage joint I know, one with a hot Finnish girl.
The next thing I knew for certain, I was waking up in a little room containing a bed, no visible exits, and a bedside clock I couldn’t figure how to switch on.
A few hours later, an annoying droid showed up and told me to get dressed.
I got a little mad at the tin tosser and…
And I think we’re all caught up now.
So that’s my account of how I woke up dead.
But don’t worry. The real story’s only just beginning.
Chapter 04
If war does strange things to your mind, it’s nothing compared to the effects of dying.
To be more accurate, the effects of not quite dying, of being brought back to life.
The little room the droid had escorted me to — the one with the bored man in the blue coveralls — turned out to be my entry point to a sequence of medical procedures that lasted a week.
I wasn’t properly conscious through most of it, but it wasn’t all the darkness of oblivion either. My last days in the Rhine-Ruhr fortress kept replaying. The encounter with the Ox even more.
Admittedly – as I might have mentioned – this Karmela Oxala was pretty hot, but it was her bringing me back to life that my mind kept trying to process.
I finally awoke back in my cell – sorry, quarters – to find a man standing over me. He wore the usual coveralls, this time in gray. He also carried a tablet.
The man’s gaze moved from my face to the tablet and back. I didn’t understand what tech these people used, but I knew a checklist when I saw one.
Although his clothing was clean, he was dressed like a mechanic. Which made me a reconditioned truck about to undergo a 30-point inspection before either being driven out the garage or sent for scrap.
I caught a momentary flicker of deviousness on my mechanic’s face. Hah! I knew he was up to something.
“Comment vous sentez-vous?” he asked.
I gave a dismissive shrug. “Bof, ça pourrait être pire.”
I blinked. Like most people of my social class, the occasional attempts by the Odense authorities to make me attend school had ceased altogether when I left aged eleven. After that my education had not been formal, but I knew enough to recognize the words he’d spoken were French.
The words we’d spoken.
He’d asked me how I was feeling to which I’d given a typically unhelpful answer.
What the hell? I asked myself. In GenEng English.
I was being a dumb fool’s hat again and I hate that. When I make the effort, I’m a damned sight smarter than I make out. I was asking the right question but of the wrong person.
“Putain de bordel de merde,” I told him.
I’d meant to say ‘what the hell?’ The French words that emerged weren’t a literal translation, but they conveyed my feelings even better.
We ping-ponged questions and answers in a variety of languages that I also didn’t know. Except, clearly, I now did.
Then he said something that I didn’t immediately understand. I got the gist of it. He was asking whether my steed was saddled up and ready for the battle.
That was my first guess. Though as I mused on the phrase, I wondered whether he was giving me a sexual come on.
I couldn’t see a saucy glint in his eye, so I went for the warhorse translation.
“I didn’t get that one,” I said in GenEng. “Sounded like some bastard offshoot of French.”
“Anglo-Norman French. 13th century. The details of actual language use are sketchy, which is why you’re struggling.”
“Do many people speak Anglo-Norman these days?”
“They do in 13th-century England.”
“Oh! Is that what you recruited me for? To go back to the 13th century to play knights in tights?”
“What I want is to complete your checklist. I’ve got plans for lunch.”
I grinned. Checklist. There. You see? I knew it. This, at least, I could understand.
“Your linguistic augmentations are fine,” said my brain mechanic. “Now we’ll test your enhanced memory function.”
I sat up in bed. I was sore all over, but there was a particular itch on my neck, just below my left ear. I gave it a rub.
Horror shot through me. I felt a lump there.
I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there before.
“That’s your activation stud. Also, your briefing port.”
I scrunched up my face in the universal gesture for what the fuck?
“It’s a switch, basically. Activates your new functions.”
“What new functions?”
“I don’t know. They will be mission specific.”
“Oh, so we’re doing missions now, are we?”
He shook his head, genuinely confused. “No, Caldwell. You’re doing missions.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I’d already been dead once, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience anytime soon. I knew the Ox hadn’t brought me back simply to admire my chest ink, but we hadn’t exactly gone through a detailed job description.
“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves,” my service mechanic reassured me. “Let’s worry about signing off this checklist first.”
“Easy for you to say. What happens after you sign me off?”
“Then I go for lunch. I have plans, remember?”
“I mean, what happens next for me?”
He regarded me with pity in his eyes. “A shakedown test. They will probably call it a probationary assessment or some such.”
“I get it. So the Time Dogz boot camp ends with a do-or-die mission?”
“No. There’s no boot camp. You’ll be carrying out your mission before I finish my starter. And you’ll be back before I’ve eaten dessert.”
He looked away and added in a small voice. “Or not.”
Chapter 05
I remember little about my first jump through time, the one from the battle at Essen. I was almost dead, don’t forget, so I had put the absence of fancy light effects or tripping through complex geometries of four dimensional something-or-others down to my lack of situational awareness at the time.
As it turned out, I hadn’t missed much.
Jumping through time is like tripping on an uneven sidewalk. Even though I was expecting it, there was still the shock of an unexpected lurch as the universe lost its balance. Almost as soon as I registered the transition, I found myself at our destination, a boarding house in Düsseldorf, the industrial heartland of Weimar Germany in January 1932.
However anticlimactic the journey, by the gods, it was more than made up for by the destination!
The Ox and I had arrived in a modest bedroom. Except there was no bed and two large mattresses were beneath our feet, presumably to cushion us in case we fell. With the curtains drawn, the light came from electric lamps along a wall decorated in green flocked wallpaper.
The slightly yellowish lamplight cast a mesmerizing blend of contour-enhancing shadows and smoothing highlights over Karmela Oxala’s nude form.
When we set off from the Time Dogz base (in what I had learned was AD 3343 in old money) we hadn’t been naked. I would definitely have remembered that. We had been wearing the ubiquitous Time Dogz coveralls.
The merest hint of a breeze wafted between my thighs, and I registered that I too was naked.
But I wasn’t the main event, so I got back to looking at the Ox looking at me looking at her.
She seemed amused at something. Probably my elongated eyeballs pulling themselves out of their sockets, straining at their optic nerve tethers.
The Ox. How could I describe her?
I could use a phrase that contains the words ‘feminine curves’, but I don’t want to. It would be such a cliché, and it would be a travesty to use clichés to describe such a wonderfully unique person as the Ox.
