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The Dark Horse and her crew avail themselves of an opportunity to visit Earth. Surely, nothing can go wrong!

Well, it was going to happen eventually: I have a list of stock plots that I intend to write the Dark Horse into, and here's this one. It's a pretty clean chapter, but you know that's gonna change :P Thanks as always to Spudz for his help, and to Golden Fox for... consultation on certain topics.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

_Tales of the Dark Horse _by ** Rob Baird** S4E1, "Homecoming, Part 1" Stardate 67947.2

---

Captain's log, stardate 67947.2

It's been a busy three days since our unexpected discovery of another Terran in this sector. Mr. Stowell Temple's research in long-range communication could give us a real-time, high-bandwidth link to Earth. I've agreed to his request for help with his next experiment. We've brought his ship, the Eldridge_, aboard to make collaboration easier. With luck, we'll have results today._

Personal log, addendum

I'm conflicted. I don't miss Earth as much as some of the crew, and I don't want the Admiralty meddling in our deep-space mission. It's a promising technology this Stowell Temple character has, I guess, but nobody here seems to understand it. I wish Dave had agreed with my skepticism, but he's right: my desire to keep us on our own is probably clouding my thoughts.

"Are we ready?" Captain May prompted. The work required to adjust the transmitter had taken six hours, and the Akita was impatient to see some results and get closure on the experiment.

In general, Mitch Alexander took the same dim view of delay--and caution--as her commander. Spaceman Alexander brought up the ship's diagnostics, to see if she could tell how far along they'd gotten. "I think so, ma'am."

Stowell Temple, a middle-aged lion with a frizzy mane and a genial grin to go along with it, perked up. "You should go ahead and try, then. I'm ready here."

Maddy nodded her assent. "Spaceman Alexander, proceed."

The Abyssinian prepared the commands that energized the Low-Power Repulsor Unit. The experiment required exceeding its rated power by a factor of five. Mitch knew old electronics well enough to think the LRU would take it without any problem, though.

So did their chief engineer--Mitch trusted that she'd hear from the raccoon if anything looked amiss. And, receiving no warning, she transmitted the signal that Stowell had designed for them.

They saw a brief flash on the forward viewscreen. Stowell, who stayed motionless, didn't seem to think anything was out of the ordinary. The sensor readings Mitch was getting back were all within the projections she'd been given; interpreting them would be up to the science officer. "I think it's stable. Doc?"

The flash had dimmed into a small, glowing sphere--two meters wide, but glowing star-bright. Dr. Schatz filtered out what he could, trying to get anything reliable from the oversaturated sensors. "I am picking up signals. They're a little difficult to read."

"Try narrowing the scan," Stowell said. "Take it within half the radius of the aperture."

This pushed their equipment to the very limits of its precision, but with some effort Barry managed it. The information stream cleared up. Now it was a very narrow spyglass. "Increasing the magnification," the Border Collie said. "And... here we go."

The image shimmered, to be sure, and occasionally interference from the aperture crackled in at the edges. But the result was unmistakably a planet. One with clouds, and oceans, and obvious lush vegetation.

"The diagnostics suggest--"

David Bradley held up his paw. "Forget the diagnostics," he told the collie. "The sun's coming up over Hawaii. I'd recognize that anywhere."

"Yes, sir." But the Border Collie wouldn't have been doing his job without thoroughness. "The computer agrees. It's a one hundred percent match. Our position appears to be slightly changing, however--the distance is decreasing."

"Yeah. We're getting closer," Mitch agreed. "The anticyclic coefficient is positive .66 nanosahar--I don't think I can do better at damping that. We're approaching the planet at about six kilometers a second."

"Current altitude?"

"Five hundred kilometers, commander."

"Take the second step, now," Stowell suggested. "While we have time."

When Maddy gave the word, Spaceman Alexander sent the next set of commands. These, according to Stowell, would slightly vary the configuration of the gateway. The Abyssinian couldn't tell a difference.

At the science station, though, Barry could. The Border Collie's ears splayed. "There are now particles emerging from the aperture. Spectral analysis indicates a clear match to Terran composition. Captain May... we're collecting Earth's atmosphere. We've done it."

"For now," Mitch interrupted his enthusiasm. "The density is causing a positive feedback loop. It's getting faster."

"The gateway temperature is increasing, too," Barry agreed. "Fifty thousand kelvin. Sixty... eighty... we need to shut--"

There was another, brighter flash, compounded by an abrupt dimming of the bridge lights. Too good to be true, May thought. "Damage report?"

"We lost main power for a moment. It's coming back online now. The aperture has collapsed, captain. And the LRU appears to be inoperative." It had shut itself down protectively, and would need to be manually restarted. But that, so far as she could tell, was it. "The displacement generator on the Eldridge appears to be undamaged."

"A qualified success," Maddy declared. "Congratulations, Mr. Temple."

"I'll see if I can figure out what went wrong," the lion offered. "With Shannon's help, I'm sure we can find out how to keep the field stable."

***

"You don't trust him."

Ayenni smiled. "And you don't read minds, David."

"I can read yours well enough," the retriever countered. Ayenni had been unnaturally subdued. He'd learned that this was often a consequence of an attempt to keep her emotions in check: ordinarily, she wore them on her sleeve. "Are you concerned?"

Ayenni closed her eyes and allowed herself to wander through her recollections of the previous few days. The emotions of the crew surrounded her, drifting like dim clouds.

She did not pry into their thoughts deliberately, of course. That much was common courtesy. And her increasing familiarity with the crew meant she'd gotten better at filtering out their psychic presence. It no longer registered as anything but indistinct hints.

Stowell Temple's thoughts were cloudier, still, but unsettling. "May I?" she asked. Keeping her eyes closed, she held out a paw in the retriever's direction. He took it.

The darkness vanished: they were in one of the ship's meeting rooms, watching it as if they'd been peering in from the ceiling. David was there, and Ayenni. And Captain May, and Lieutenant Hazelton, and Dr. Schatz, and Stowell Temple.

"Mr. Temple says he can do magic," May said.

David remembered the meeting; it was only three days ago. They'd met Stowell at a trading station and, after getting over their shock at finding another Terran so far from the Confederation, David and Maddy had spent a good few hours talking to him.

Stowell Temple said that he was a researcher--admittedly, an eccentric one. His ship, the Eldridge, was a prototype of his own design. He was testing a special kind of interstellar drive, one that could create a stable wormhole to any point in the galaxy.

"He's offered to show us," May explained to the others in the room. "Neither Commander Bradley nor I understand the theory involved. I'm hoping you can help. Mr. Temple, this is Dr. Schatz, our science officer. I think his research was in hyperspace design."

"Technically, theoretical modeling. Using low-dimension analogs to examine collapse probabilities at k-factors above the Atias limit," the Border Collie explained.

"Right," May said. But Stowell had nodded, so he must've understood. "Lieutenant Hazelton is my chief engineer. She's a bit of an... iconoclast herself. She'll help you work with the ship's systems in testing your theory."

"And I'm very much looking forward to it." The raccoon grinned; her smile was never less than a warning. "If I follow a quarter of what you're saying, this'll be a hell of a ride."

"And one that will keep us in one piece," Captain May added hastily. "Finally, Ayenni is our medical expert. We want to make sure that there are no adverse effects on the crew."

"She's not Terran," Stowell said.

"No. I'm Yara; my species is native to this general area."

"But she's part of my crew. They're practically born doctors--Ayenni knows our physiology as well as any Terran specialist. I'm sure the telepathy helps."

"Telepathy?" Stowell asked.

The memory slowed. And now, David saw the lion as Ayenni had. He tensed, and whatever jarring thought had occurred to Stowell, Ayenni perceived his fur as suddenly bristling into razor sharpness. Don't worry, May's voice ran like thick syrup through the back of Dave's mind. She doesn't do it without asking.

"Maybe he was startled."

"Many people are," Ayenni agreed. "But most of them don't quite panic like that. And I know that he has kept his distance from me. It is as though he has something to hide."

"Should I tell the captain?"

***

"I don't know!"

"Can you shut it down?" 'It' was a launch sequence, directed by the ship's shuttlebay. Even as he asked the question, Jack Ford triggered the alarm that brought the Dark Horse to its highest alert state.

Spaceman Ahmed was the junior sensor operator, at the console that was normally Mitch Alexander's home. He'd joined the Dark Horse at the same time as Jack Ford, doing so despite a warning from his previous CO: you'll be getting in over your head.

Siraj Ahmed didn't feel like he was in over his head, though. On the contrary, it was all so damn exciting--exploring new regions of space, meeting new aliens, and solving new problems.

New problems like trying to figure out why the launch authorization was being overridden, and why nothing he did was restoring control. "No, sir."

The bridge door slid open; Dave Bradley was still buttoning his jacket. "What's going on?"

"Someone's launching a ship. I mean..." Jack shook his head. "Why kid ourselves? Stowell's launching the Eldridge. We don't know why."

Until one of the tactical officers arrived, Dave gave himself control over the starship's weapons. "Shields up. The point-defense grid is ready. If he does launch, we can shoot him down."

Siraj, only half paying attention, heard 'shut him down,' instead. The Ethiopian wolf rolled his eyes with the sudden realization it sparked. Launch control was its own system, with its own computer. The power grid, though, was shared throughout the ship and therefore obeyed him: "Captain Ford, I've shut down power to the shuttlebay. The doors are locked."

"Good work. Commander Bradley, can you manage security?"

"Sure." The retriever didn't know how, exactly, that had become his responsibility; he was a decent marksman, but not especially aggressive. Maybe it's just my willingness to follow orders. "Sabel Thorsen and Petty Officer Smith, please meet me in the armory."

As he approached the bridge door, it opened; Captain May and Leon Bader stepped through. "Dave," May began. "We're at action stations, and you're..."

"Going to shoot someone."

To the extent that she was surprised, the Akita figured her questions could be answered later. "Good luck. Is it Mr. Temple, Jack?"

"The reason for action stations, or the reason Dave's going to shoot someone?"

"Both?"

The coyote snorted. "Yeah. Both. We had an unauthorized launch detected. Spaceman Ahmed shut it down. I don't know what he's--"

Spaceman Ahmed had new concerns. "Captain. Uh. Something's happening?"

"What?" Jack and Maddy asked it at the same time. The coyote coughed. "Sorry. Your bridge, captain." And he switched chairs to Bradley's station, to emphasize the point.

"What something, spaceman?"

"Someone's powering up the LRU. I'm locked out of the controls." Ahmed hadn't served on a ship with a repulsor unit before, he didn't know what its function was, and he hadn't followed the details of Temple's experiment. All he knew was that alarms were beginning to go off, and the numbers attached to them were huge. "The power safeties have been bypassed--it's starting to overheat."

Captain Ford reviewed the information in increasingly worried parallel. "Captain, every power relay forward of frame thirty is reaching its thermal limits."

"Some kind of... aperture... is forming..." Ahmed reported, providing the most accurate summary he was capable of.

May wasn't particularly satisfied with it, and felt the crew needed to be taught a lesson in avoiding the passive voice--but that could come later. "Back us off. Maximum impulse."

"It looks like main reactor output is being diverted to the LRU. The engines aren't responding." Or, strictly speaking, they were--it was just that the response was 'no,' and Jack was familiar enough with Maddy to know she didn't want to hear that. "Trying emergency power..."

"We're being pulled in!"

***

Dave switched off his rifle's safety. Following his example, so did Sabel and Val Smith. The three of them were right outside the shuttle bay. "We're in position," he told whoever was listening on the bridge.

"Make it quick," Maddy answered.

"Sabel: the door?"

Sabel Thorsen wedged his paws in and pulled. The artificial muscles of his exosuit made short work of the resistance they offered, letting him pry the entry hatch open. Dave and Valerie had their rifles trained through the widening opening.

There was a gap in the bay doors, too; they'd been partway open when Ahmed managed to kill the power. Through that gap, the three saw a bright flash. Then, in silhouette, a flickering shape making its exit.

Then more darkness and, after a moment, the sound of alarms.

***

"Our backup power is coming online... slowly." Spaceman Ahmed had to wait for the sensors to start working again. "There was some kind of launch. An escape pod, I think."

"Can you track it?"

That was a question for Ensign Bader to field. "Yes, ma'am. But our targeting sensors are apparently miscalibrated--they're registering some kind of massive gravitational anomaly off our port beam."

"How massive?" Maddy asked.

Dr. Schatz, who had reached the bridge in the middle of all the excitement, saw the same information at his science station--it wasn't just coming from the targeting array. "Big. It's reading like a planet, captain."

"On screen."

"Visual only," Ahmed warned. "The main reactor is still down." But he was able to turn the cameras on, and put the image on the forward viewer.

The anomaly was 'reading like a planet' because it was, in fact, a planet. Convenient, Captain May thought: she was an inveterate optimist. The planet was in shadow, but lights on the surface picked out the shape of the North American coast quite clearly. "Do we have long-range comms?"

"Yes, ma'am. I think so."

"Hail the Admiralty. As long as we're here, we might as well take advantage of some help." And perhaps, despite historically showing better judgment, they'd consider the Dark Horse's abrupt reappearance from 600 parsecs distant a pleasant surprise instead of a troubling one.

"No response, ma'am."

May frowned, feeling the opportunity for a dramatic entrance slipping away. In what she assumed to be the worst-case scenario, they'd arrived damaged and in need of repairs. As it happened, this was not in the fact the worst-case scenario--but it would be a little bit before anyone figured that out. "Switch to the guard channel and try again."

"Nothing on guard either, ma'am."

"Scan for the nearest Star Patrol ship and contact them via short-range radio."

Next to Maddy in the first officer's chair, Jack was already getting the feeling that this wouldn't work, either. He'd managed to log in to the control system of one of their scout ships: the radio functioned, but wasn't picking up any transmissions. "I think we're being jammed."

The Akita growled. "Fine. What is the nearest Star Patrol ship? Are we close enough to get one of your scouts over to Ride Station?"

"Probably. But I'm not finding it."

Every attempt Barry Schatz made to figure out what was going on only deepened his sense of alarm. Jack wasn't finding Fleet Station Sally Ride because it didn't exist. Next he tried scanning for debris, but there didn't seem to be much of it--whatever had destroyed the massive station had done so cleanly, without leaving a trace.

And taken out the Star Patrol, obviously, just as surgically. Had the Pictor finally attacked? They were the most likely threat... but they'd always used physical weapons, so there should've been plenty of wreckage for him to find. There was nothing. The wide-spectrum EM scanners showed nothing in orbit. And on the surface, only...

"Oh, God!"

Every head on the bridge turned to the Border Collie, because he'd sounded panicked. His eyes were wide, and his muzzle was open: he looked panicked, too. May had never seen him so shocked. "Doctor..."

"Captain, there's been some kind of..." He swallowed, and tried to be impassive. "There's been some kind of catastrophe. The atmosphere is saturated with heavy metals and radioactivity. Radionuclide levels are consistent with multiple detonations with a total yield in the hundreds of megatons."

Maddy didn't even bother trying to keep herself in check. "Fuck. An attack?"

"Yes, ma'am. That must be why Star Patrol isn't answering."

The bridge intercom chirped. "Main engineering. Mads, what are you doing to me? Half the power safeties just tripped."

Hazelton's irritation gave the Akita something to focus on. She shook her head fiercely to clear it of any self-doubt. "I need main power, lieutenant. We need to be ready for recovery operations and prepared for a possible attack."

The raccoon hesitated. "You've got power back already. What do you mean, 'attack'?"

"Mr. Temple's gateway has brought us back to Earth. But there's been an attack. We have to assume the worst. Have a status report for me as soon as possible, Shannon. Bridge out." She took a deep breath. "Tactical, do we see any hostiles?"

"Ma'am, we don't see anything. There's a few tons of debris in orbit. Spectral analysis doesn't say much. I'm sorry," Leon added; he was trying to be business-like, too.

"Scan for any transmissions. And make sure you're monitoring the emergency band."

Mitch Alexander, who specialized in old hardware, had joined Spaceman Ahmed. The Abyssinian was looking over his shoulder at what they were picking up from the surface. "Plenty of point sources. Extremely low-power signals, though."

"I can't decode them. They're too weak, or they're attenuating, somehow..."

"Maybe whoever attacked us compromised Star Patrol's communications protocols," Leon suggested. "And they're using different systems. Trying other strategies."

May didn't like the way that sounded. "Assuming the worst, eh?"

Spaceman Alexander didn't like the way it sounded, either--and their tactical officer was notoriously paranoid--but the shepherd had a point. "He might be right. Check this out. The data on this alpha-frequency transmission looks completely random, but nobody's gonna be broadcasting junk on purpose..."

Dr. Schatz tried to force thoughts of nuclear annihilation from his mind. "The phase encoding doesn't match anything in our database. It's erratic, but then... if they're using some kind of decryption-resistant scheme, then maybe if we--"

But Mitch was getting a hunch that things had become even more confusing. "No. It's just noise--the carrier is a red herring. They're hiding an amplitude-modulated component in the sidebands."

"Put it through," May ordered. The result was a low hiss, eerie--and, eerier still, occasional hints of not-quite-comprehensible noise. Haunted, broken voices. "Is that--do you hear something?"

"It's screwing with our actual speakers," Mitch said, wonderingly. "That shouldn't be happening, unless... unless... is there some kind of analog signal? Dr. Schatz, can you suppress the phase variance and boost the power?"

"The volume, yes. The phase shift..." The hissing grew louder. He applied a filter, and the speech became clearer, almost understandable, but choppy. Barry tried again. Closer. Maybe if I--his next effort brought a second of unintelligible screaming through the static, and a discordant tone, fading to silence.

The sense of horror on the bridge had become palpable. No one said a word.

Except the radio.

"...And, of course, that was the Big Bopper himself. You really can't help but wonder what might've been, can you? Up next: I think this'll 'go places,' and I'm sure you'll agree: we have Little Eva, and 'the Loco-Motion.'"

Maddy cocked her head. "What?"

"It's not a duress code in any of our signal books." That had, of course, been the first thing Leon Bader checked; he liked to think of himself as diligent. "I'm not... I'm not sure what it... is..."

The Akita strained her ears to listen, echoing the bizarre phrasing aloud to see if she detected some kind of pattern. "Everybody's doing a brand-new... dance now? What is 'it'? What are we supposed to give a chance?"

Leon could only shake his head. "It has to be a classified message, ma'am. Above my clearance level--maybe check in your contingency folder?"

"Or not," Barry murmured, double-checking what his computer was telling him. "The acoustic database is giving us a positive match on the information stream. It's an old Terran song."

"This is music? How 'old' are we talking about, doctor?"

It had taken a few seconds for the main computer to even free up the archival material. "Well... according to our records, it was extremely popular around stardate... uh." He bit his tongue, and tried again: "Its popularity peaked in August, ma'am. Of 1962."

***

Captain's log, stardate negative 550725.2

Well then.

"So." Madison May had written the stardate in big letters on the board. She, and the rest of the senior staff, split their time between scrupulously avoiding the number, and staring at it fixedly.

Barry cleared his throat. "I evaluated three possibilities. The first possibility is that we are the victim of an elaborate hoax. Based on the requirements to provide undetectably fake data to as many systems as are recording it, however, I estimate the probability at around one in seventeen sextillion."

"So, probably not that," May summarized.

"Probably not. It's also possible that some highly-improbable quantum event has created the spontaneous appearance of our arrival at Earth nine centuries ago. I do not know the degree of 'highly-improbable.' Suffice it to say that there may not be enough elementary particles in the observable universe to match the number of zeroes involved."

"Definitely not that, then."

"Indeed. A third possibility is that the appearance of time travel is because we have, in fact, time-traveled. Formally speaking, under the laws of physics as I understand them, such time travel is impossible."

Dave caught the emphasis. "As you understand them..."

"Correct. So the odds are either zero, or something... appreciably close to one."

"Operating under the assumption that we have... God, it sounds ridiculous." But May, no stranger to the absurd, carried on. "Operating under the assumption that we have traveled back in time, what do we do?"

"Ask 'why.'" Felicia Beltran did not often speak up in the staff meetings, unless directly prompted, and the leopardess anticipated the surprised looks she got. "I examined our diplomatic logs from the last update with the Admiralty. We liaise with the customs and border officials of neighboring states for reasons of crime-prevention. Stowell Temple is one of many aliases for the man who escaped from the detention facility on Surzou IX approximately..." She checked her computer. "Eight hundred and forty-one years from now."

It would not have been unreasonable to ask why nobody had checked that earlier; May knew enough not to ask. The answer would turn out to be something infuriating--classification requirements, or an incompatibility in the data formatting--and they'd have to deal with it later. For now, she focused on more immediate concerns. "Surzou is a maximum-security prison. What was he in for?"

"That is complex question, captain, and would require me to breach the confidentiality of the highest security protocols in the Diplomatic Corps. Ayenni, please cover your ears."

Among other things, the alien's sense of telepathy had allowed her privileged access to Dr. Beltran's sense of humor. She put her paws on her ears and remained motionless.

"Officially, Stowell was charged with smuggling weapons to various criminal syndicates. He was also the prime suspect in a break-in at the archives of the Media Research Center in Los Angeles, on Earth. Nobody could tell what had been taken, though, and nobody figured out how he managed to defeat their security. However, when he vanished from his prison cell, a contact in the underworld reported to the Confederation authorities that Stowell Temple had asked him to steal the CSS Admiral Kimbrell from long-term storage and confessed to having stolen something from the archives. Curiously, he also claimed to have access to a ship capable of instantaneous travel."

"A jumpdrive," David said, reading aloud between the lines. "And after the Hano incident, somebody in the government started caring that he might have access to that kind of ancient technology."

"I presume. In the interests of full disclosure: I can only speculate, as that information was not included. Only the note that border stations have been on the lookout since eight hundred and forty-five years from now."

May, unlike Ayenni, had not yet figured out the leopardess. Besides which, time travel hurt her head. "Please stop doing that."

"About fourteen months since what was our 'present-day.'"

Dave had been searching the ship's database, and counting himself fortunate. Their deep-space assignment, where they couldn't count on access to the Terran Confederation's network, meant the records were uniquely complete. "Can I speculate, too? The Admiral Kimbrell is a Thible-_class scout ship, built in 2630. It's one of the three oldest ships in the Star Patrol. The only older ships are the _Thunderchild and, well... us. Though, as Dr. Beltran will point out, I suppose right now we're very new..."

"Not you, too. The Thunderchild is a museum ship. I visited it when I was a girl," May recalled. "What about the Kimbrell?"

"The University of Kifrea used it as a research ship until the project was halted for budgetary reasons. They'd been planning on reactivating it, though; that's why it's still on the registry. I don't know what the research project was--"

"I do," Barry realized, absently. Then he caught up with what he'd done, interrupting a superior officer. "Sorry, sir."

"It's fine. What was the project?"

"Propulsion research. Dr. Cane was investigating the properties of composite solid-state navigational components at translight speeds. You know, there's always been some probabilistic effects in the resistance of Grant units. Dr. Cane theorized that there's a hidden variable caused by Atias particles interfering in higher dimensions, which he said compensating for could increase efficiency by five or ten percent. It's very interesting, and quite in line with the research from the Rukini Institute, which--"

"Interesting and relevant?" Dave asked.

The Border Collie paused to think. "No. Probably not. Except..."

May raised her voice to get his attention. "Make this simple, doctor."

"The LRU. The Kimbrell would have an active, maintained low-power repulsor. With dissipating filters instead of Grant thyristors--that's why they were using it--so if--if he needed access to a ship with an LRU, then there's something special in the way the LRU operates, which means..."

Shannon Hazelton jumped in. "That it was deliberate. He doesn't have a jumpdrive, Mads... he has a time machine. But it needs an LRU to work? Why? The LRU interacts strongly with radioactive particles. But if you didn't have a way to concentrate them, maybe you'd find a place with abundant radionuclides--say, a planet that was experimenting with above-ground atomic weapons testing."

"That's why we're here?" There was a certain logic to it, Dave had to admit, though it seemed like an awful lot of work. "So he can collect some pollution?"

"Perhaps."

Madison wrote FALLOUT POWER SOURCE on the board. "Does that come from your analysis of the ship, Shannon? I guess this is progress. What else do you have for us?"

"Plenty. So! Let's have some bad news."

"Can we not be so pessimistic?"

Shannon gave the darkest grin she could muster. "Sure, Mads. Let's have some good news. For pessimists. Anyway, Stowell's ship is going to explode. There's a regulating system in the temporal core that is slowly decaying. I could probably fix it at any starbase in 2809, but... not now."

"Will it explode with... planet-destroying vigor?"

"No. If we kick the ship out, our shields can handle it with no problem. Which of the many problems would you like to hear next? Us being stuck? The world ending? Our FTL collapsing?"

Captain May started to write on the board, and gave up. "Let's go in order. Stuck?"

"Sure. At the heart of the Eldridge is some kind of mysterious engine--what I called the 'temporal core,'" she clarified. She had called it that because it sounded sufficiently alluring, and hoped the others would understand. "I'm pretty sure that it's required for time travel. I don't trust my ability to reverse-engineer it in the next two days--I'm not that cocky. If we lose it..."

The Akita settled for writing SHIP IS TICKET HOME. "World-ending?"

"When the core explodes, we'll survive. But the Earth's ionosphere will definitely take a beating, and while their primitive telescopes no doubt struggle to discern the canals of Mars at the moment, they're going to notice an eighty-gigaton detonation in low orbit. I imagine the consequences for the timeline will be... interesting."

May tapped her finger on the board, thinking. MIGHT DAMAGE HISTORY. "And the FTL? Wait, do you have any good news?"

"Yes--in a bit," Shannon said. "Last bad news first. I don't know how that gateway works, but it's still technically open, and there's Atias radiation, so it stands to reason it extends into hyperspace as well. An explosion of that magnitude is likely to disrupt our ability to generate a stable FTL field."

MIGHT DAMAGE SPACE TRAVEL ALSO. "Good news, now. You promised, Shannon."

"I said I don't know how the gateway works. At a theoretical level, I don't--but I think I can get it working enough to return us to our own time. It'll take some experimentation, that's all."

"Non-explosive experimentation?"

"No guarantees, Mads, but I think so."

"Then get to work."

***

While Hazelton 'got to work,' the rest of the crew settled into routine. Not all of them were equally dismayed by the turn of events. Lieutenant Eli Parnell, for instance--partial to the time period's culture--was rather taken by the opportunity to immerse themselves that it offered.

And Leon Bader was not. "We're in practically unfamiliar territory, with no allies and no idea of what it might take to get us back home."

"Sure, all of those things. But it's still kind of cool. This was the dawn of crewed spaceflight on our planet, ensign," Parnell insisted. "We're here with Gagarin and Grissom and Armstrong and all of them. This was a momentous time in Earth's history. Plus, the music--the Beatles will be showing up in a few months! Motown has just been founded, synthesizers are being developed--history is being made! If you cared about anything other than particle weapons..."

"I'm familiar with the music of this time period," Bader muttered. "We learned 'Sandstorm' in the school band."

Parnell snickered. "Of course you did. But that's not the same. That was the 90s, ensign!"

"It's 20th century music--which is what I said."

"That covers a huge range of time! Do you really think the 20th century is just one huge, monolithic block? Just... just music--just considering music--this time period saw incredible diversity. David Bowie's big break was in 1969, the Moog came out in 1965, and of course--I mean, socially--socially, folk musicians like Phil Ochs were integral to the civil rights movement of this period. That's not even considering the cross-cultural impact of figures like Ravi Shankar, which I shouldn't even have to explain."

"You sound like Lieutenant Schatz," Jack Ford said. He had recognized nothing in her impassioned explanation, although he liked the wolf, and the teasing was meant fondly. "Why are you an expert on one single decade, on one single planet, eight centuries before your birth, anyway? It's not like it's not helpful, considering our circumstances, but... why?"

Eli Parnell shrugged. "I don't know, actually. It just appeals to me, I guess."

It still did not appeal to Leon. "It's so primitive, though. No artificial gravity, no neural interlinks--no hyperdrives, for that matter? Medicine and computers that were hardly worth the name? Dr. Schatz said they were even testing nuclear explosions aboveground, filling the atmosphere with fallout."

She tried to defend the planet's legacy. "It was new, ensign. We were just realizing how destructive it was. Popular culture was beginning to warn about the threat of apocalypse--it was on everyone's mind. It should've been. If you're interested in conflict, Leon, the geopolitical situation was extremely tense. Two great powers with huge arsenals, almost ready to push the button--in just a few months, the Cuban Missile Crisis will push the world to the brink of nuclear war."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "How close?"

"Extremely, sir. But we'll recover before that happens. The first nuclear arms control treaty is only a year away."

"When would the great powers gain the ability to cause actual devastation? 2000? 2100?"

Eli was surprised at how little the others really knew about their heritage. "Already, sir. Don't think of these Terrans as primitive. Fusion weapons have already been deployed. So have intercontinental rockets. Their strategists are talking about something they call 'mutually assured destruction.' They mean it."

***

First officer's log, July 7th, 1962

The chief engineer's current working hypothesis is that the temporal engine used by Mr. Temple requires a supply of radioactive particles. Unfortunately, we might know where they'd be coming from.

"Lieutenant Parnell believes that a sectarian dispute over defensive aid to an island province in the Caribbean almost provoked a nuclear war between the Americas and Eurasia. Correct, lieutenant?"

"Sort of. Yes. The United States of America and the Soviet Union. Cuba is an independent country, very close geographically to the United States of America."

"It is America." May blinked, puzzled; she hadn't yet decided what needed to be written down. "Right? It's in the Americas."

"Yes. Right. When people say 'United States of America' in this century, they're referring to a specific country on the supercontinent."

"Which country?"

"That's its name. Look, it's confusing, ma'am--they did things oddly--just take it from me that there is a country called the United States of America, and a country called the Soviet Union."

"Like the museum in Brussels," David explained to the Akita.

"No, sir, that's the European Union. Completely different. In any case, the two countries have been escalating in tension for over a decade. They're in an arms race, as well as an influence race. Most of the actual fighting is done through proxies."

"Like Cuba."

"Yes. Now, in our timeline, this was just about the closest that they came to open warfare. If they'd started shooting, the results would be disastrous... both countries have huge nuclear arsenals, including thermonuclear weapons, and very itchy trigger fingers."

"They could be pushed over the edge, lieutenant?" Madison asked.

The certainty in Parnell's response was profoundly disheartening. Worse, she listed a dozen scenarios that might provoke them, from sinking a warship in the Caribbean to a misinterpreted rocket launch in Kazakhstan to a well-timed assassination in London.

"Does that mean we have to intervene? Dr. Beltran?"

The leopardess fixed Captain May in a stare. "Our diplomatic codices contain many different protocols, captain. None of them are designed for purely speculative scenarios. I cannot say that we have ever considered the principle of non-interference in the historical development of one's own civilization."

In that case, May concluded an executive decision was required. They needed to apprehend Stowell Temple, and to recover his escape pod. And they needed to do both without being detected, which was liable to be a tall order.

The Tempest, their embarked spy ship, would come in handy. Her cloaking technology would be sufficient to keep the ship hidden from 20th-century surveillance. Ayenni thought that, if she was close enough, she could zero them in on Temple's location by listening for his thoughts. Leon Bader agreed to provide cover.

Given the possibility that they might have to blend in, and given Lieutenant Parnell's knowledge of the time period in question, May assigned her to that away team, too. Eli tried not to sound too excited, though the wolf quickly excused herself to being preparing the accessories that would be needed to keep them from arousing suspicion.

Actually recovering the escape pod lay beyond the Tempest, because the spy ship was designed for speed and had no means of hoisting another vessel. Their Vostok-class shuttlepod came with grappling hooks, though. "Think Sabel will be up to it, Dave?" May asked.

"Probably. He likes challenges."

"Good. You go with him. Take Chief Smith, in case of trouble."

Valerie Smith--she'd given up on using her real surname, 'La Liberté de Lille-Vieux'--was the most logical crewman to have fit in that sentence. Their junior tactical officer was smart and pragmatic; when May said 'in case of trouble,' she was indicating a choice intended to keep them out of it.

And it was a choice David Bradley appreciated, even if he was not quite naïve enough to think the akita's intent mattered one damn bit.

***

"It looks so... hazy." Ciara hadn't spent much time on Earth. She was from an agricultural planet, and one that knew how to take care of its atmosphere. The vixen cycled through a few different spectra on the Tempest's scanners. "Oh, wow. It is hazy."

"They were burning a lot of hydrocarbons at the time," Eli tried to explain as empathetically as she could. "It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, either. Atomic power was already understood."

Leon had been trying to catch up on his Terran history. He'd already gotten to the important part, so far as the shepherd was concerned: not only had they discovered atomic power, they'd already made use of atomic weaponry. "It's a dangerous planet, too. Not just environmentally backwards."

"We all had to start somewhere, ensign."

Lieutenant Munro double-checked the Tempest's course. Irrespective of where they'd started, the two shuttles were ending in the same place: San Francisco, a city on the anti-spinward coast of the American continent. It was still below the horizon, but approaching quickly. "How long do you think it'll take, again?"

"Twelve hours, hopefully. That won't cause any problems, right?"

The only problem it was likely to cause was boredom: Ciara would stay with the Tempest to monitor the ship's systems. The cloaking device would take care of everything else, and the vixen definitely had no reason to believe that anyone would be able to defeat the cloak in only twelve hours.

"Hey," Leon spoke up. "Tactical sensors are picking up something."

Ciara glanced over. Her first--and eminently reasonable--thought was to ask Leon why he'd powered up the tactical sensors. But if he was detecting something, his sense of caution had served them well... "What?"

"It's a rocket being fired. I'm trying to resolve the course plot now..." The Tempest was designed with a full suite of powerful sensors--it was, after all, a spy ship--but most of them were beyond Leon's ability to decipher easily.

Lieutenant Munro had more experience. "Surface-to-space launch. It's still accelerating--whatever it is, that rocket has orbital capability. This wasn't in the tactical brief, Parnell."

Elissa felt a slight moment of panic. Nothing like this is supposed to be happening--are we already having effects on the timeline? "It wasn't supposed to be in the tactical brief!"

"Well, it's setting off the radiological detectors," Leon announced. "I'm bringing the shields online."

"Yeah, good thinking. Vostok, this is Tempest. We've got a nuclear-tipped missile inbound. We must've been detected." Ciara looked at the track extrapolation, tilting her head. "I think it'll miss us, but I'm not sure by how much."

"Nuclear weapons of this time period were--"

Before Eli could finish explaining, the warhead detonated. Screens in the Tempest went dark, and came on fitfully, one at a time. Ciara focused on the most important ones, as far as she was concerned. "My flight controls are compromised. The engine is going into a protective shutdown."

"No further launches detected." Leon, of course, had been focusing on the most important screens for him. There, at least, he found better news for the hapless away team. "They must've figured one was enough. That was a five thousand terajoule yield, though... not too shabby."

Ciara knew that she should've been grateful. She would be, eventually; for the moment she was focused on the engines. Having decided that something was self-evidently going wrong, they'd shut down: the spy ship was only a prototype, and had spent most of its life close to friendly supporting vessels where prompt rescue could be anticipated.

Lieutenant Parnell wasn't familiar with the Tempest's systems, but she knew its era of technology from similarly outdated systems on the Dark Horse. The wolf promptly set about bringing up the diagnostics. "Do what you can to keep flying on emergency power. I'll see if I can skip the restart sequence."

They were at two hundred kilometers of altitude, but losing it quickly--the ship was, by that point, much too slow to maintain orbital velocity. "The emergency power only gives me about two percent throttle. Not good enough for atmospheric flying."

"If I bypass the reactor safety..." Eli trailed off. She blinked at the computer screen. "The first one, I mean. There's... what, six? There are six safeties?"

Ciara didn't take her eyes away from the viewscreen, which currently showed them headed for an unceremonious impact in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. "The engines are too powerful for this ship. She can break her own back if the pilot's not careful. They wanted to make sure it was as foolproof as possible."

This left open the question of who counted as a 'fool.' "Well, the diagnostics are going to take five minutes. Do we have five minutes?"

"No. We'll crash before then. Don't worry, we'll survive... probably. The inertial compensators will handle it." The Tempest had 'wings,' technically speaking, but they hadn't been designed to generate lift and they weren't going to be much help.

"If we dump the drive plasma straight into the thrust channels we can get some power," Eli walked through her thought process aloud. "On the other hand, we'd be calling attention to ourselves... giving them plenty of room for a second shot."

"I don't know how they even found us the first time." Ciara gritted her teeth. "The cloaking device is still running."

"So are the shields," Leon pointed out. "Can you transfer power from the deflectors to the engines?"

"Yes. Yes." Ciara did it without a second thought. "That buys us landfall, at least. It won't be much of a controlled landing, but..."

***

"Mayday, mayday, mayday. Dark Horse, this is Vostok-1. I'm declaring an emergency." The Dark Horse wasn't answering David's hails. "That weapon seems to have caused severe atmospheric disruptions. I can't raise them."

"The other ship is also disabled," Sabel reported. Vostok-class shuttles were old, and radiation-hardened: they'd need to put down for repairs, but the Tempest was obviously in worse shape. "Their engines are down. I predict an impact right along the coastline. What are your orders, David?"

"Take us as close as you can. There's a major city there..." At least it was nighttime; they wouldn't necessarily attract attention. "Follow them in."

"Sir?" Valerie spoke up.

"Yeah?"

"If we're trying to avoid detection, we're probably still radiologically tagged. We don't have a cloaking device like Lieutenant Munro does."

Fuck, David thought. Leave it to the tactical specialist to think of a point like that one. "Well, everybody's having a grand time, aren't they? How far above background radiation do you suppose we are?"

"In their landing area? Substantially." Val had been making what she could of the obsolete systems on the shuttlepod--which, at least, were rugged enough to have survived the attack. "There's an area to the east with much higher background. We'd probably blend right in."

"The Tempest is down," Sabel said. The energy of the impact is well within tolerances and they are unlikely to have sustained injury--the kind of clinical analysis that he was trying to evolve beyond. "I'm sure they're having a good time, though, yes. It must be exciting."

***

"Report, damn it! Tell me something, spaceman."

Spaceman Alexander understood why May sounded so upset. She wanted to give her captain some good news, but atmospheric conditions strongly limited what the Dark Horse could manage. Particularly since they'd moved further off, to ensure they weren't visible to any prying eyes on the surface.

Between the cruiser's sensors and a half-dozen probes, the best she could determine was that both shuttlecraft had landed, and that neither had been seriously damaged in the crash. There was nothing to be gleaned about their current condition, though, or about why they'd been fired upon.

Barry Schatz was working on that problem, using what he could find in the historical databanks. "It might have been a coincidence. There was a high-altitude nuclear test around this time period."

Captain May looked over her shoulder, expecting the Border Collie to be making some kind of joke. "High-altitude?"

"Yes, ma'am. They detonated a boosted warhead at approximately four hundred kilometers above the surface. The data are not entirely clear as to what they hoped to accomplish. However, the dates line up."

"When you say 'not entirely clear,' I guess you mean 'they were doing it for the hell of it'?"

There were stranger things that civilizations had chosen to do, although not many. Barry thought, for example, of the inhabitants of Toshkamin--their tribes had been given to building monumental pyramids and, accordingly, the first action of their unified government had been to construct an artificial mountain forty kilometers high.

When Toshkamin joined the Terran Confederation, the mountain had another four kilometers to go--they'd been at work for six hundred years. That, of course, was merely quirky. Setting off thermonuclear weapons just to see what would happen...

Barry turned up his paws. "I don't know, ma'am. The relevant conclusion, though, is that they might not necessarily have been targeting the shuttles. In other words, we might not have been discovered."

"I suppose that's good news." As she thought over it, May realized it also meant they could still launch a rescue mission, if it came down to that. The Dark Horse had other shuttles, and the Type 7 scout ships. Maybe those wouldn't be so unlucky. "Can you raise the away teams?"

Mitch Alexander was having trouble. Not only was she unable to reach either of the shuttles, the sensor data itself looked scrambled. For a minute, she chalked that up to setting off a goddamned nuke just to see what might happen to the ionosphere. That didn't explain it.

And it didn't explain another anomaly. "You know what's weird? We're moving too fast." Mitch sent the engine output figures to Barry's console for the science officer to fret over. "This is twice the thrust we should need to hold a geostationary orbit. Unless I'm mistaken."

The ship was operating on automatic navigation--Parnell having joined the away team, and their junior helmsman being off shift. Without piloting experience, the Border Collie thought in terms of pure physics. And in terms of pure physics, Spaceman Alexander was right. "Some kind of subspace drag? Maybe there's a malfunction in the engines."

"The diagnostics look fine, though," she countered. "If the engines have a problem, it's an extremely minor one. What if there was a temporal component, doc?"

What if there was? Dr. Schatz considered the hypotheticals. The longer that took, the more Mitch started scanning his face, instead of the sensor readouts from her console. She was heartened to see his ears finally perk. Barry hadn't done it on purpose; all he had was the ghost of an idea. "Let's try scanning for omicron particles."

***

Finally their computer lit up with an 'incoming transmission' signal. "This is the Tempest," Ciara answered. "It's good to hear you, Dark Horse."

"Same, lieutenant," May's voice came in, crackly but comprehensible. "Are you alright?"

"We're in good shape. The ship seems to be working, too, now that we've been able to restart the engines and clear the biggest errors. I've maneuvered us to a secluded position near a waterfront park. There isn't any traffic close enough to notice us. All of our camouflage is operational."

"Good. Let me try to summarize. Something about our proximity to the gateway we traveled through means time is moving differently than it should. The difference is diminishing, but for now it's still strong. Mr. Temple effectively landed four months before you did. And as far as I'm concerned, you only crashed forty minutes ago."

It had, in fact, been almost twelve hours, during which they'd been sitting in complete silence waiting to hear from anyone. "What does that mean for us?"

"Well. His ship's escape pod has a device that is supposed to protect against those temporal... thingies. Fluctuations. Was 'fluctuation' the right word? Barry is shaking his head. Is it close enough? It's close enough. That device overloaded. The escape pod is disabled. Its reset sequence will finish in about five of your days, when the speed of time passing zeroes out."

"Alright." Ciara glanced at the other three. They all recognized her do-you-get-this? expression, just like the vixen recognized their blank lack of comprehension. "So..."

"Coincidentally, that's when our ship will explode. Your mission is the same as before. We don't know where Mr. Temple is right now, but we're picking up omicron radiation within a ten kilometer radius of your current position. That's our best lead. I'm going to instruct Commander Bradley to recover the escape pod--you need to find Stowell Temple. Understood?"

"Understood." The link went dead. Lieutenant Munro frowned. "She kinda... she kind of breezed over the 'ship will explode' part, didn't she?"

"That happens with relative frequency," Leon explained. "I suppose it wasn't her primary concern. Our tactical scanners can be adapted to detect omicron particles. I should get to work."

Modifying the scanners didn't take very long. Half an hour later, Leon announced that he'd localized the source of the radiation to a building in the downtown area.

"It's in a densely populated neighborhood. I can't tell much more about it."

"Time for a real away mission," Eli Parnell said, quite a bit more eager than her comrades. "I'll get our clothes and the American currency we synthesized. Who's coming with me?"

Protocol dictated that a qualified pilot remain with the ship if at all possible; even had Eli's excitement not been palpable, the most qualified pilot was Ciara Munro and the vixen wasn't looking forward to the prospect of leaving, anyway. Ayenni was more curious, but she was also sanguine about the difficulty of staying concealed in unfamiliar territory.

That left Leon and Eli Parnell standing, two hours later, at the entrance to what identified itself as a bar. Leon wasn't convinced: the data from his scanner was more ambiguous. "It might be a trap. The interior is toxic. Elevated levels of carbon monoxide, heavy metals... aerosolized aldehydes and aromatic hydrocarbons. We shouldn't go in without respiratory gear."

The bear walking up to the door, however, was wearing a casual shirt and no such safety equipment. "Can I help you?"

Eli put on a friendly smile. The wolf had decided she intended to act the part of a tourist. "Trying to decide if we want to stop in."

"Well, they make a good Manhattan." He paused, fingers on the handle. "Tell you what, pup... why don't I buy you one?"

"It might be a trap," Leon muttered.

"Or not," Eli told him under her breath. "Come along."

It was early enough in the evening that they found plenty of space at the bar, which Elissa recognized as typical of the era. Neon lights added splashes of color to air thick with carbon monoxide, heavy metals, and aerosolized aldehydes and aromatic hydrocarbons.

The bear ordered a Manhattan before looking expectantly at Eli and Leon. The wolf nodded; Leon held up his paw and shook his head. "Two Manhattans, then. Your friend's kinda, uh. Square."

Eight and a half centuries, the wolf thought, and it was still easy to place Leon's personality type. Eli grinned; she might've said the same thing. "Well, cut him some slack. We're new here."

"I can tell from your accent. Where are ya from, pup?"

Eli briefly froze: she'd figured her accent was entirely passable. It must be the universal translator. She brushed her paw over her ear subtly, turning it off. Suddenly the conversations around her sounded quite different, indeed. Oops. "Uh. Sweden, Europe."

"I know where Sweden is! Explains it, I guess." The bear's eyes wandered, not completely subtly, and Eli wondered if there might not have been a stereotype about Swedish desirability that she was unfamiliar with. "Both of you?"

"No. Leon's from..." She brushed her paw back again, hoping Leon would catch the gesture and the intent. Their companion was looking at the German Shepherd; she mouthed translator as subtly as she could. "Germany. Uh, well, West Germany."

Leon saw 'translator,' and managed to guess there was a problem with it. That didn't tell him anything about how he was supposed to respond. They were in a tactically challenging environment with extremely poor intelligence, and he did the best he could under the circumstances. "It is really more Northern Germany, actually."

The big man laughed, and patted Leon's shoulder with a solid thump. "That German sense of humor, huh? Cool. Welcome to America, man. So he's Leon, I got that. What about you?"

"Eli."

"Roger." He shook her hand; a few seconds later, when Leon understood what was happening, he held his paw out as well. "What brings you to San Francisco?"

"I wanted to see the bridge. And the cable cars. It's living up to our expectations. Wouldn't you say, Leon?"

Leon had been trying to keep his investigation of the bar subtle, and hadn't bothered to concoct a cover story. "Ah. Yes. Very. May I speak to you outside?"

"Right now?" The shepherd nodded. Eli tried to think of the best way she might be able to convince him to at least try not drawing attention to himself--ordering him to enjoy the experience would be tough. "Fine, fine. Sorry, Roger--I'll be right back."

"You better," Roger said. It felt more like teasing than a proper direct order.

Outside, Leon turned the screen of his scanner where she could see it. "The source of the omicron radiation is in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is. I have to reconfigure the scanner to increase the resolution somehow."

Eli nodded. "Try calibrating it against the interior geometry of the building. If you can get a precise enough density map, you can compare against the reflected radiation, right?"

"Yes. But that will take time."

"I'll keep Roger busy. You do what you need to."

Her tone made Leon suspect that the wolfess wasn't acting entirely out of self-sacrifice. But, even still, he appreciated the distraction and followed her inside, hanging back while Parnell joined Roger at the bar again.

"Everything's cool?"

"It's cool," Eli agreed. "Leon just wanted some fresh air."

"How did you two meet? No offense, but he doesn't exactly seem like your type."

She had to laugh at that. "He's not. He's a good traveling companion, though. We met at the airport in London, and happened to be going in the same direction."

"Oh." Roger was plainly re-evaluating the situation; he turned to face her more closely. And as long as he was re-evaluating, she decided it was only tactically appropriate to do the same. The bear looked to be in his 30s, perhaps; the blond fur of his face had yet to whiten, and the expression that danced behind his glasses was still youthfully warm. "How long are you out here for?"

"Just a few days, and then I have to head back."

Parnell had hoped that 'Sweden' would seem exotic enough for her vague answers about it not to arouse any suspicion. She needn't have worried: Roger's mind was elsewhere. He asked what Stockholm was like; she said it was pleasant, but chilly, and he proved to be satisfied.

He was also satisfied when she told him she worked as a secretary, which seemed like a safe choice. It was an occupation that she recalled from her exposure to culture of the period as a common one for women of her age and upbringing.

In truth, she did not know what a secretary did. "Know your way around a typewriter, I guess," Roger said.

The word called up images of a mechanical contrivance with letters printed on its levers. On second thought, she remembered similar apparatuses had been used in cryptography. Her ear twitched: it was so obvious that 'secretaries' must have something to do with 'secrets'--that they were a fixture of popular culture because espionage and codebreaking was exciting, not because it was actually common.

"Typewriter," Roger repeated, and pantomimed the act of using one before giving her an apologetic smile. "Sorry, I don't know the word in Swedish."

"Ah. Right. Yes, I suppose I do know my way around one."

"Same. Did a world of good for me in the Army, believe me."

Careful, Eli, the wolf thought. He probably thinks you're a secret agent. "Are you still in the Army?"

"Nah, typing is just a useful skill. I don't do it now, unfortunately. But soon. I'm actually a writer. I mean, right now I'm a taxi driver, but I want to be a writer. I will be. But for television. Somebody I know knows a man who works on Twilight Zone. I've sent in some ideas... no response."

The faint tilt of her head was involuntary; she recognized the name, and it had nothing to do with intelligence or spycraft. Was she safe, after all? Just in case, she steered the discussion away from machinery. "'Sci-fi,' that's what they call it, right?"

The buck nodded. "Yep, that's right. But not the kind with monsters. More about rocket ships and landing on the moon and Forbidden Planet sort of stuff."

"Aliens and flying saucers."

"You got it. I think it's impossible we're alone in the universe. I don't know if they're little bug-eyed, green-furred gremlins, sure, but... I think they're out there. Does that sound weird?"

"Not especially."

"Just look at the stars, right? It's so exciting to think about what we'll find when we get up there. It's a great time to be alive. I really believe we'll walk on the moon by the end of the decade."

"Oh, same. And Mars, after that."

"Mars? Why not Venus?"

Given that he was no longer thinking about typewriters, she relaxed. "Too much trouble, I think, considering the atmosphere. Hundreds of degrees--even probes will just melt... I wouldn't want to walk on it."

Roger sipped at his drink, brow knitted in thought. "Is it that bad? I guess I'm behind on the science. I'll have to rewrite that script. Thank God for correction fluid, right?"

Again she feigned misunderstanding. This time, Leon arrived to rescue her. "I think maybe we should leave, Eli."

"Right." She looked apologetically at Roger. "We have all these tourist plans."

"Sure, I understand." He set his drink down and gestured to the door.

Eli was a little startled by the temperature. Mid-summer or no, San Francisco Bay left the evening chilly. Roger caught her surprise. "Everyone expects it to be tropical. Here." He shrugged his coat off, handing it over to her.

"I can't take this from you..."

"You're sticking around, right, pup? How's this sound: come by my place tomorrow evening. I'm not working--cab's in the shop until Thursday--so I have a couple friends stopping by. Real hip guys... if Leon wants to come, one of 'em's Air Force, they can swap stories about fighting the commies or whatever. And you can tell me more about how hostile Venus is."

"Well..."

He opened the coat, draping it over her shoulders. "What do you say? Just bring it back to be friendly."

"We might not--"

"Sure," Eli decided, pulling rank on the shepherd. "Tomorrow, then."

***

Shannon Hazelton stood with the kind of confident grin the raccoon tended to take as 'pride' and her shipmates tended to take as 'worrying.' "I have good news and weird news."

Maddy had a fair touch of the adventurous about her, but her chief engineer demanded caution even from the Akita. "What's the difference between 'weird' and 'bad'?"

"In this specific case, Mads, I just mean it's weird. I can't tell if it's good or bad yet. Maybe it's one or the other; maybe not."

"Start with that, then, so we can have time to digest it."

"Fine. I know why we can't control Temple's ship. It's missing a piece, a little ring that's supposed to go in the main console so the course can be adjusted. He took it with him. It's probably the source of the omicron radiation we're detecting in San Francisco."

"Meaning Stowell Temple is still there..."

"Maybe. Now, here's the really weird part. When my team looked at the Eldridge, we learned that the reactor is generating a temporal field. But then, we looked at the material in the hull. The omicron emissions are all wrong. As far as we can tell, Mads, that ship is Terran--but it wasn't built until the fifth millennium."

The answer, by itself, hadn't surprised Dr. Schatz when Hazelton first sent the data over to him, but it had added a new wrinkle that took time to puzzle through. "I already considered the possibility that Stowell Temple might not be from our time, but none of his personal effects show any anomalies. Only the ring, assuming he has it with him."

Madison drew the obvious conclusion from what the Border Collie had said: "it's not his ship."

"Indeed. Lieutenant Hazelton also asked me to analyze a sample from the ship's reactor shielding. We were hoping that it would tell us how to manipulate the drive to return to our own time. I found what appears to be a converging series of odd disruptions in the material."

Maddy didn't look completely baffled yet, and if Barry kept talking that was bound to happen, so Hazelton took over. "When he says 'odd,' they could only have come from an energy discharge sufficient to annihilate the ship. It's been destroyed. Over, and over, and over again."

"But not yet--in the future? Because it's unstuck from time somehow?" The Akita was trying as hard as she could to stay on top of the explanation. "When?"

"The signatures converge in 2785--according to our normal frame of reference, about two decades ago. Our hypothesis is that Temple has created a stable time loop. His escape from prison leads to a sequence of events in which he travels back in time to prevent the destruction of his ship at the moment when it is traveling forward in time to break him out of prison."

"And where do we fit in?"

"Who knows, Mads? There's no sign of its destruction in 1962, so we must prevent it from exploding somehow. But there's a catch. Two catches. Barry, you're catch one. Explain the convergence."

Barry was rarely described as a 'catch,' and even more rarely prized for his ability to explain things simply. The Border Collie flattened his ears at the hopeless look his captain had already adopted. "Uh. Well. Lieutenant Hazelton called it a 'stable time loop.' In actuality, however, the radiation patterns converge on 2795, but... they're not identical. Something about the temporal core is decaying. The loop is eventually going to break down. It's possible that Stowell has traveled back now to change the timeline in some fashion, thereby freeing him before the temporal core collapses, trapping him in whatever time he happens to be in."

"That's the first catch," Hazelton said, whether May had really followed along or not. "Here's the second. I have a way to use the ship's self-destruction to reopen the aperture and bring us back to our time by channeling the energy of the detonation. That, conveniently, would also prevent it from being detected on Earth."

"But..." Madison didn't even know where to begin writing things on her board. The Akita gave an exasperated sigh. "Am I right: you can use the core detonation to bring us home, but you know you haven't, because the ship never exploded in 1962? Is that it?"

"Yes."

"And if I were to say, for example, 'maybe you just haven't done it yet, and that's why you don't see any evidence,' I would be hopelessly naive, because that's how time travel works?"

"Yes."

"We have two away teams on the surface. Are you telling me that it's entirely possible that we never escape and we can't retrieve our teams. And Lieutenant Parnell finds some nice man to settle down with, they have kids, and forty generations from now one of those descendants gives birth to a young girl that they name 'Elissa,' just like one of her illustrious ancestors?"

"Yes."

May scowled and wrote: TIME TRAVEL IS HORRIBLE AND NOT GOOD. "Does this about sum it up?"

"Yes," Hazelton said. "More or less."

"What was your good news, Shannon?"

"The bit about being able to use the core to bring us home. Based on some experiments, I'm entirely confident that the method will be able to successfully activate the old gateway."

"Except that you know you didn't."

"Call me an optimist."

Maddy, doing what she could to indulge her own optimism, summarized. RETURN STRATEGY VIABLE. "Then we just need to get Temple and the escape pod back aboard. Right? Is that right?" She avoided dealing with any objections by activating their link to the surface. "Lieutenant Munro, are you there?"

"Yes, captain."

"Status report, please. How's your mission going?"

"We've localized the artifact to a bar in Russian Hill, all systems aboard the Tempest are functional, and we have not been detected. There's still no sign of Stowell Temple. Based on our scouting party, we know the universal translator has problems in this environment, the doctor believes the cellular damage Parnell and Bader have received can be reversed with proper treatment, and Lieutenant Parnell has a second date with a taxi driver."

May furrowed her brow. "Uh, can you say that again?"

They heard the vixen curse under her breath. "Great. The translator's broken completely--they can't understand me. Bader? Parnell? Can somebody give me a hand?"

***

"Hey, you made it."

"Did you think I'd stand you up?" She held out Roger's coat for him to take. "Of course I made it."

"Well, you're the first." Roger hung up his coat and pointed to the open space in his living room. "Have a seat; get comfy. Where's your friend?"

"Joining in a bit, if you don't mind."

"Nah." He mixed two cocktails while Eli found herself a spot on his sofa. The communicator embedded in her ear stayed silent; he was presumably still at work. In any case, the wolf felt she could always find suitable distractions.

The bear, settling next to her on the couch, was one of them. She took the drink he offered with a smile. "Thanks. How was your day?"

"Oh, it was fine. Just walked around... you know..."

"Sounds fun." Roger held her gaze for a long time. He had nice, soft eyes--by the time she felt his paw, it had already been resting on her leg for a good few seconds. Eli had long since decided she was going to take a pragmatic approach to history-making. What were the odds one wolf could really change the past?

The notion of a 'butterfly effect' was not especially compelling. After all, if spending a few minutes alone with the bear was enough to rewrite history, anything was. The area displaced by the Tempest, for example--might as well theorize some bird was supposed to fly through it, but instead it hit the cloaking device and fell to the water to be eaten by a feral sea lion, only that bird was supposed to have hatched a clutch of eggs that were supposed to have...

Done something or other, that was as far as Eli got before Roger closed the rest of the distance between them and their lips met. The first time was experimental, a little hesitant... but she didn't pull away, and so he kissed her again.

The wolf turned to face him, wrapping her arms around the bear's solid body. He was doing the same, his fingers sliding along her sides, leaving a trail of electric heat that melted into the heat of a snug embrace. She heard him whisper her name.

She whispered his right back. Her lips stayed parted as his tongue slipped between them, and she let a quiet moan follow her first taste of the bear. The kiss deepened, and his warm weight built... pressing her back, and down, sinking her inexorably lower...

"Eli..." He felt wonderfully solid atop her, the heat of his body pinning her as he explored her muzzle--it took a second for the sound of her own name to be jarring. But he couldn't have said it; their muzzles were locked, after all.

The communicator. It had come through the communicator. Which meant Leon. Which meant they were running out of time. She stiffened and worked herself free. "Hey--Roger."

"Y-yeah, pup?"

"My friend." She was panting, too. "He'll be here soon, I--I think."

"Oh. Right..."

Now that she wasn't distracted, the voice in her ear was more obviously that of the tactical officer. "Lieutenant Parnell? Well. I'm at the building. I don't know how to... wait out, someone's coming."

Roger was starting to get up, to mutter his excuses for what had happened: she tightened her grip to pull him back down. "Wait. In a moment."

At least a couple minutes of proper, close contact, she judged, would be worth it. The bear groaning quietly into her muzzle when she found his tongue again with her own... his muscles tensing as he fought the urge to thrust against the wolf's hips when she got her leg around him...

He was just losing that particular battle when the buzzer sounded. He pushed himself away from her, adjusted his trousers, took a few deep breaths, and went to answer the door. On the other side was a trim mongrel and Leon Bader; the two were obviously cut from the same cloth.

"Hey, Roger. This guy says he knows you?"

"We met yesterday. This is Eli, Don. Eli, meet Don Russell, he's a friend of mine. Real good cat."

"Pleased to meet you," the wolf said.

Roger clicked the door behind them. "Make yourselves at home. Manhattan, Eli? What about you, Leon? Don'll be having a beer, if I know him--you want one too?"

"No. Thank you."

"You're the weirdest German I ever met." He mixed two cocktails and joined the group, settling next to Eli at a distance that the wolf considered entirely pleasant and Leon considered tactically suspicious. "Well, I haven't met many, okay..."

"But you aren't sticking to good old Americans, either." Don laughed, giving Roger a playful wink as he dipped his head to point at Eli. "What's up, anyway? Is there an exchange program between Portugal and Cali? You're the second I've met in a week."

Eli's ears lifted. "I'm actually from Sweden."

"Really?" The dog paused, beer almost to his muzzle. "Your accent sounds exactly like that Portuguese guy. Remember him from the bar, Roger?"

"Huh, yeah--now that you mention it, it does sound pretty similar. Are you sure you're not from Portugal?" he teased. "Or maybe he's from Sweden. Are there lions in Sweden?"

"Not many," Eli began, carefully. Leon had also started paying close attention to the conversation. "It's so cold, after all."

"True." Don laughed, and finally took his drink. "That would also explain why he was going to Las Vegas. That's what he said when I saw him, day before yesterday. He wanted a lift. Tough luck."

"Did you not have room in your plane?" Don laughed again, leaving Roger to explain: "Major Russell is a test pilot down at Dryden. His leave ends tomorrow."

"He probably wasn't Swedish," Eli mused, and tried to make the segue sound natural: "What was his name?"

"Mr. Temple--don't remember his first name. Something weird." Don shrugged.

"It's not a Swedish name," Eli declared. "Perhaps we just sound similar."

"Probably. Small world." Roger didn't seem all that bothered; as far as the bear was concerned that ended the discussion. "Looking forward to getting back to work, Don?"

"Yeah."

"A test pilot, huh? That sounds really fun. Jets?"

"Jets," the dog confirmed, smiling at Eli's obvious interest. "Not like 707s, either."

"X-15s? Oxcart?"

Don blinked. "Excuse me?"

Eli didn't like the way he'd tensed up, or the way he was eyeing her. "I slipped into Swedish, sorry. What do you fly?"

"Uh. Well. Right now, F-104s. I'm in training, though."

"Don wants to be an astronaut," Roger said. "Best of luck, right?"

***

Tactical officer's log, stardate negative 550717.7

My scans, supplemented with the advanced computers aboard the Tempest_, have allowed me to precisely locate the object we're looking for. It's being stored in the bar where we encountered Lieutenant Parnell's newest contact, a contemporary Terran named Roger Garland. I don't believe he will be helpful in retrieving the control ring. We must take matters into our own hands._

"Who's going? You?" Madison May asked over the radio.

Ensign Bader had proposed an expedient mission to get the artifact they were looking for. His scans were good enough to have placed it within a small box, in one of the back rooms of the bar. They were also good enough to have replicated a metal access token for the locks on the door, which used tiny metal pins to prevent unauthorized entry.

The bar would remain closed for another few hours; orbital imagery from the Dark Horse showed no signs of activity. Their window of opportunity was narrow, and the assignment was technically illegal, but Bader thought it was their best option.

He also had to admit that he, personally, was not. "Lieutenant Parnell is more comfortable with the environment. Hopefully, she can retrieve the artifact without arousing suspicion."

"What's the worst that could happen?"

"If she's discovered, the local authorities might get involved. We'll have to move fast to escape, but the route back to the Tempest is straightforward. Lieutenant Munro confirms that she can monitor the police radio and tell us if anything is amiss."

"Okay. If you think you can do it, consider the mission approved. Do it as soon as you can... we still need to find Temple, remember? Get the ring and report back immediately."

Eli decided she would have to go alone. Having Leon for support was ideal, if they ran into trouble... but if they ran into trouble, the shepherd was one more person who might be captured, or photographed--or shot. And she knew that he'd be watching anyway, monitoring her from within the stealth ship ready to assist however he could.

Simple. The wolf buttoned her jacket, slid the door key and her wrist computer into her pocket for easy access, and stepped out into crisp early-morning air. Just a few blocks to the bar, a few blocks back... and a chance to enjoy the city.

Like it should be enjoyed! Gods_, Eli, you're in San Francisco! There's rock music on the radio, jetliners at the terminal, Andy Warhol in the galleries... the space age is dawning and you get to see it... not like anybody's gonna believe you, not like you'll be a_ part of it but still, Eli, you--

She turned the corner and gasped. Roger was waiting, his arms were crossed over his chest, and his eyes had narrowed.

"What the hell is going on?"