Out of Time by Ryan Matthew Harker (ebooks online reader txt) 📕

Sammi is there to catch me before I completely go down. “Whoa, Davey!” she protests as she helps me regain my balance. “maybe you should slow down a little bit.” Working against what might be agoraphobia trying to suffocate me, her laughter is a welcome music in my ears.

I laugh as well. “Maybe you're right,” I admit. That we can still find room for humor during all the crazy adventures we're having is unbelievable, good, but unbelievable.

The climb up the small ridge is arduous, to say the least, my breathing quick and shallow. If not for the constant droning whine filling my ears I'd think my suit's air scrubbers had failed. Maybe they're failing! Oh no lord, I don't want to start thinking like that! Despite the scrubbers the air my suit's producing is stale, sour with the tang of my own sweat. Through the comset I hear Sammi breathing heavily with her own exertions and I know the confines of her suit must be growing equally unbearable. We're almost to the top of the ridge.

At the top I stop and call for a rest. I take a long pull of water from the small tube snaking up the right side in my helmet and just accessible to my lips. I try, unsuccessfully, not to think of the likelihood that, at least in part, I'm probably drinking the urine I excreted an hour ago and now purified by my suit's internal filtration system. It tastes flat on my tongue but it's cool, not cold, but chilled moderately by the suit's condensers, good for more than just air conditioning it seems.

My comset crackles. “There it is.” Sammi's pointing off the side of the ridge opposite the one we just climbed. Predictably, as I know the gold structure (or palace, as DOM was calling it) is on that side. Of course I do, I planned it that way. I peer the direction she's pointing, squinting to span the distance with my human vision alone. In all the sea of black before me there's only one spot vaguely reflecting the shimmer of the stars all around us.

“How'd you even see that?” I ask.

“Good eyesight I guess,” she says and I think she tries to shrug but gives up against the bulk of her suit.

I wager her eyes are better than mine. Fortunately for me my suit comes standard with the technology to compensate for the shortcomings of my sad and organic light to image relay/converter/transmitters. “Suit ID 004697, magnification and enhancement at,” I do some quick mental calculating. “Approximately 4000 yards.”

The lens in my face shield clicks and suddenly the darkness falls away. Now I can see the landscape, and there's the gold palace squatting in the distance like a great, fat, gold frog. The magnification kicks in, zooming my vision about 500 yards at a time.

“Oh yeah!' Crackles excitedly in my comset. “I forgot about that. Suit ID 004698, magnification and enhancement at about 4000 yards.” A couple seconds pass and, “Ooo, ooo, I can see it, Davey. I can see it! And would you look at all that GOLD!”

I can hear the awe in her voice and it matches my own unspoken incredulity. A heap, a pile, a mountain of gold doesn't adequately describe this mass of soft metal ahead of us. The shear weight alone must be unthinkably incredible. It makes me wonder about the scientists, architects, and engineers who painstakenly designed and built Moonport so as not to upset the delicate balance of the Moon, sending it crashing down to Earth or careening out into the far reaches of space. What was the immense weight of all this gold doing to the balance now?

All that gold and not a soul in sight. I survey the structure- solid gold, no windows, doors, smokestacks, chimneys, or vents of any kind. No people, or creatures, or aliens with tentacles, no vehicles, nothing hinting at any kind of life at all. Between us on the ridge and the gold down there was a clean slate, just a wide slab of dusty moon rock, open lunar landscape with nothing but dust and rocks and small to medium meteor impact craters. Again, nothing to suggest there was any sort of civilization inhabiting the darkside of the moon. For all I know the palace is solid and not an entertaining structure after all.

“It looks so empty.” Sammi's observation is an echo of my own thoughts.

I open my mouth to speak when suddenly a ship flickers into existence over the golden palace and disappears behind the tallest of its windowless components.

“DOM, did you see that?” I hiss into my comset.

-Yes-

“And is it what I think it is?”

-An ORion landing craft-

“Son of a...!” I curse myself for a fool. Although logically I know it to have been impossible, instinctively I feel I should've seen this coming.

“Orions?” Sammi seems perplexed. “Living on our moon!”

“Like kings in their golden palace,” I spit. “Or gods.” My choice of words makes me think of DOM's use of the term. I wonder if the sneaky AI had known all along. I'll have to ask him about it later.

Deep down I always knew there was something fishy about Wolfman and his crew, this fishiness is exponentially reflected in what I'm witnessing here. “We've got to get in there.”

“What?”Sammi objects. “But we just got away from them!”

“I know, Sammi, but they're here for a reason. I need to know what it is. Everything's connected: TRU, Adoc, the Wolfmen, Ras, me. I don't know why and I don't know how, but I will!” As I make this vow I raise a fist to the golden palace. “I will!”

I wake up yelling, “I will!” and shaking my fist at my apartment ceiling. “God darn it!” I curse, realizing where I am.

A sleepy Sammi rolls over asking, “What's wrong?” And puts her arm around me.

Ignoring her question I jump out of bed and start dragging on my pants. “get dressed, I tell her. “We're going back!”

A couple hours later we're standing on the cracked and dirty sidewalk outside the gunshop, fully armed and armored. There may be better weapons to be had in the future, more efficient weapons, but that gives me the same sense of comfort and security as I find in my Colt and AR.

Standing next to me, like an angel in the mid-morning sunshine, Sammi places a black leather gloved hand in my. I reach down, grab the newly provisioned dufflebag (which includes some items not officially sold at this particular gunshop), and sling it over my right shoulder. “Are you ready?” I glance sideways. Sammi likewise grabs a duffle of her own and returns my gaze. “As ready as I'll ever be,” she replies with half a smile and a wave of spine tingling Deja Vu washes over me, crawling up the back of my head.

With a half smile of my own and another glimpse of with a half smile of my own and a glimpse of 21st century sun, I adjust the duffle on my shoulder. “Khronos,” I say. “TRAVEL.”

Pop. Stretch. Snap.

We're in the future. Not Sammi's time but another, nearer future. 7677 to be exact. Dropping Sammi's hand I take a quick look around and pull the Colt free of its shoulder holster. “I'd get strapped if I were you.”

“What?”

“This isn't a very friendly time,” I gesture around with the Colt.

“Oh,” Sammi nods and pulls her hand cannon. “I understand.”

Filthy with shadow, refuse and rubble litters these streets. Thick clouds, dark and foreboding, block every trace of sun from winning through to the ground. The temperature is chilly, more so than this time of the year has any right to be.

I'm pretty sure it's about ten thirty in the morning but it feels more like ten thirty at night.

“Why did we come here at night?” Sammi asks as we pass the 77th century version of a Buick up on cinder blocks.

“We didn't.” I scan the street ahead of us for signs of movement.

“Why is it so dark then?”

A scuffle on our left. I swing the Colt in that direction, but it's only a rat, a really big rat, and I lower the barrel a couple of inches. “It because of a war. The last world war,” I smirk at the very idea. “It isn't, of course, but the people of this time think it is, and that's what they call it. The messed up thing is that it isn't even a person who starts it. Man's technology just finally gets away from us. The whole planet looks like this now.”

Lightning flares, streaking through the tumultuous sky, varicose veins of the gods lighting our way for a millisecond of a concept I now believe not to exist materially. Time. The biggest con of all man's perceptions.

“So, people did this? Sammi sounds disbelieving. “But it's not like this when I come from.”

The way she phrases this statement makes me smile. She does have growing up in a Time traversing aware society on her side but still, she's picking up on the vernacular very fast.

“No, it only stays like this for a few hundred years,” I whisper. “just long enough for people to think it'll be like it forever. Then some scientist, Jacques something or other, figures out a way to fix it. I'm not sure how, I sort of skipped that part of the past of future history in my travels.”

“Oh.”

Shadows move ahead, detaching themselves from the dark to block our path. I stop while raising my Colt. Sammi does the same, bringing her hand cannon level beside me.

“And what do we have here?” The shadow sounds menacing, as does the multitudinous snickering surrounding it.

Though my finger's itching on the Colt's hair trigger, this shadow is fortunate I know the name belonging to its voice. “DMT, is that you?”

Again lightning lances the morning sky, briefly illuminating a group of raggedy, spike and chain wearing hooligans as the source of menace. “Oh thank God,” I breath while lowering the Colt.”Well heck, if it ain't Mr. Davey Jones himself,” the menacing shadow chuckles. “To what do we owe the pleasure, blast from the past, man from way back when?”

“A ship, DMT,” I holster the Colt. “I need a ship.”

The air inside the decrepit warehouse smells damp, musty, very much like it did the last time I was here. Strategically placed oil lamps for light, blazing oil lamps of trash for heat, not exactly the place one would think to purchase a star cruiser.

“Why should I help you, Jones?” DMT lounges on an old, mouse chewed, half collapsed recliner. “You didn't 'zactly leave me inna position ta feel sociable, last time you was here!” He drops the word 'time' from his lips as if it were an expletive. His thugs laugh it up from their posts huddling over the burn barrels.

“Ain't youse a tasty morsel.” a goon with a small gold chain hanging from a hoop in his nose to one in his ear sidles up and plants a dirty hand firmly on Sammi's bottom.

Spinning with the grace of a ballet dancer Sammi snatches the man's hand from her butt, bends his arm back behind him, and tweaks his wrist just short of its breaking point.'touch me again,” she breathes into his ear. “And you'll lose more than your hand.” Another twist and I hear bones snap before she pushes him away.

Complimenting the goon's cries of pain are the hoots of his cohorts. Apparently they've no restraint in finding their perverse pleasure in his agony.

DMT arches an eyebrow at the display, obviously impressed. “Well, well, quite the wildcat ya've got there, Jones. Where'd ya pick 'er up at?”

That's my girl. “In a sewer but don't worry about her, DMT. How 'bout the ship?”

“As I said, why should I help you?”

“You know I got the dough, DMT!”

Bald, hardened middle age, wild pirate beard, techno-mod eyes, DMT looks like a predator of the worst sort in his matching leather jacket and