Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

what he would say to his mentor if he were ever sitting across from him again, but, just now, he found his mind completely blank.

No, that wasn’t quite true. His mind wasn’t blank—it was too full. It felt like that static he saw on old television sets when he couldn’t quite find a station. That was his brain right now: white fuzz and, every few seconds, a word, the beginning of a question, gone before he had a chance to ask it out loud.

He was happy to see the Professor again. Of course he was happy.

But he was angry, too.

This man let him think he was dead. He let his own daughter think he was dead.

And not just for a few days—for over a year. He vanished in the middle of the night and left them behind to clean up the mess he’d made of their city.

Why? That was the question that finally appeared in the static of Ash’s brain. Ash took a deep, steadying breath and looked up to see that the Professor was staring back at him, a sort of sad smile on his face.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I left,” he said apologetically.

“Among other things,” Ash muttered.

The Professor shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, I’m afraid that’s quite a long story.”

“We got a hundred years or so to kill.”

“Ha, that’s funny.” The corner of the Professor’s mouth curled. “You told a little joke.”

Ash didn’t laugh. He found himself wishing he had a drink in his hands, just to give them something to do. With nothing else to focus on, they’d clenched together, fingers practically white, the skin at his knuckles pulled tight.

He spread them out wide, clenched them again, trying to get his muscles to relax. When the Professor didn’t say anything, Ash lifted his eyes. “The earthquakes. Start there.”

“I see you’ve done your homework.” The Professor leaned forward, propping his arms on his knees. He took off his glasses and began cleaning the lenses with the hem of his T-shirt. “The earthquakes. This all started because I wanted to find some way to avoid them. After Natasha . . .”

His voice cracked. He closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to need to regain his composure. A beat later, he continued, “After Natasha, it seemed important to figure out why they were happening, maybe even find some way of predicting them in the future. Years ago, Roman had been looking into that sort of thing, studying tectonic-plate and fault-line activity. He’d even built some computer program that was supposed to predict how the earth’s crust might move in the future, but he’d given all that up when I recruited him to our team. I went back in time and borrowed his research, to see whether he’d been onto anything.”

“And he was,” Ash guessed.

“Oh, yes.” The Professor lifted his eyes. “I’m not sure Roman himself was fully aware of what he’d discovered. There were patterns, you see, numbers that proved there was some correlation between time travel and the earth’s movement. It was all very fuzzy science, of course. Nothing conclusive. But it was a start.

“Once I saw the trends, I couldn’t just look the other way. I had to know more. But the city was still recovering from the flood. I needed resources, a clean place to work, a lab, books . . . I tried to get in touch with the few allies I still had in the Center, but they weren’t interested in helping. The earthquakes weren’t affecting them. And WCAAT, well, all the research we’d spent years developing, everything, it was all gone.”

“So, you went to Fort Hunter,” Ash said.

The Professor nodded. “Once I realized I needed to travel back in time to gain access to the sort of resources I needed, the entirety of human history was open to me. It made the most sense to go back to a time when they were investing in the exact type of science I was looking into. In the 1980s, Fort Hunter spent an enormous amount of time and money delving into the world of environmental modification. The plan was to attempt to weaponize it, I believe, but the program was shut down later that decade after some political pressure. I thought it seemed worth a look, so I went back.

“I only spent a day there, but it was enough. More than enough. Within hours, I was able to verify my theory that the continued use of the Puget Sound anil would only lead to larger and more devastating earthquakes in the future.”

Ash thought of the scrawled notes he’d found on the windshield of the Dark Star, each a date and a magnitude number, the promise of more devastating earthquakes to come.

“So why didn’t you come back then?” he asked, his throat closing up. “You could have helped us. You could have warned us.”

“I wanted to.” The Professor frowned, deep lines appearing around his mouth. “Jonathan, you have to believe that all I wanted to do was go back to New Seattle and save you from that future. But there was more work to be done. Now that I knew what caused the earthquakes, I couldn’t use time travel any longer, not until I’d figured out how to mitigate the damage I was doing every time I went through the anil. I was able to pinpoint that the size of the earthquake correlated directly to the amount of disruption the anil experienced at the time of travel.”

Ash frowned, the Professor’s words spinning around in his head. “Sir? I don’t think that I understand. . . .”

“To put it in layman’s terms, a larger ship created a great deal of disruption, while a smaller ship created less.” The Professor held open his hands. “And no ship . . .”

“Means . . . no disruption?” Ash guessed.

“Exactly.” The Professor clapped his hands together, the sudden sound making Ash jump. “I got the idea from my research with Nikola Tesla. Tesla, you see, had long theorized that time travel without a vessel was possible. And not just without a vessel, but without