7

Vanished

The clocks read 8:30 p.m. when the alarm went off across the base. Soldiers hurried to their duty stations. Ben and Claire looked briefly confused before Ben decided to lead the way quickly back to the command center, passing up a hobbling Dr. Weiss along the way, while Agent Hessman was already running down the final stretch into the command center, an earpiece in his ear via which he was calling out orders to other personnel.

“Sam,” Ben asked as they approached, “what’s going on?”

“I have no idea,” the man replied. “Go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”

“Here, allow me.”

Hurrying up behind them came Captain Beck. He took Dr. Weiss by one arm and nodded to the other pair. “I’m old and slow anyway,” he remarked. “You two see what’s going on.”

So, while Ben and Claire hurried on, Captain Beck did his best to bring up Dr. Weiss’s pace.

When the first pair burst into the command center, they saw Agent Hessman directing something from one of the terminals on the central command platform, while General Karlson was issuing his own orders.

“Lock down the entire base,” the general was saying as they came in. “Not so much as a mouse gets in or out.”

As Ben and Claire approached, still confused, they could hear Agent Hessman’s commands to his security teams via his terminal and earpiece.

“Last known location was her lab. I want it searched, as well as all adjoining corridors. Call up security footage from both the lab and attached halls. Heck, call it up for any adjacent areas whether they have access into that lab or not. I’m not discounting the possibility that these people can burrow through walls at this point.”

Claire was first to voice the question as their steps brought her and Ben to a stop at the edge of the platform: “What’s going on?”

Agent Hessman spun up to his feet; then seeing Captain Beck and Dr. Weiss just entering at the back, he gave a look to the general. General Karlson replied with a nod, to which Agent Hessman began his brief report.

“Samantha’s location chip just went off-line. No sign of it anywhere.”

“My niece,” Dr. Weiss gasped, his hobble increasing in pace, “what’s happened to her? Has she been hurt? Oh my God.”

“Samantha,” Claire gasped.

“As close as I can figure, she hasn’t died,” Agent Hessman reported. “The chips are designed to give off a different signal if the person has died. And if the chip itself were somehow damaged, there would have been a sign of impending failure in the signal, however brief that might’ve been. For both cases we have nothing.”

“Nothing?” Dr. Weiss said as he stumbled onto the command platform with Captain Beck’s help. “But how can you have nothing?”

“I’m saying that there is no trace of it anywhere. The signal simply stopped. Her lab and room are being searched, but so far we have— Hold on.”

He tapped a finger to his earpiece to listen, while even the general waited to hear the result.

“Okay,” Agent Hessman said into the air, “keep up the search and lock everything down. Guards at every intersection.”

Removing his finger from his earpiece, he turned to face the general. Dr. Weiss of course displayed the worried concern of a doting uncle, but behind Agent Hessman’s professional exterior Claire could see another concerned look, though not because of any familial relationship.

“Well?” the general snapped. “Who was it, and how’d they get into my base?”

“Samantha’s two techs were found unconscious in their lab break-room,” Agent Hessman reported. “There are signs of a struggle, in which my team also found two bullets.”

“Sam!” Dr. Weiss gasped.

“The same odd electrified bullets we found at the Los Alamos conference incident.”

General Karlson nodded. “Those Russians again. But how did they get in here?”

“The lab security footage may give us a clue. I have it ready to play.”

“I thought the security cams were only in the corridors,” Ben said.

“The ones you’ll find on record,” Agent Hessman admitted. “Because of what we do here, every bit of lab space is monitored by one or more security cameras about the size of your fingertip. Even the placement of the cameras is encrypted.”

“Sounds a bit paranoid,” Claire remarked.

“Just be glad that I am.”

“Play the footage up on the big screen, Hessman,” the general ordered.

To the general’s command, Agent Hessman reached to his terminal, hit a few keys, and then faced the large screen on the front wall along with everyone else.

The footage first showed the two techs suddenly dropping to the ground, their bodies then being dragged into the break room by unseen means. After a pause it showed Samantha walking in. They watched as she walked across the room, bent down to pick up the mug, and then started running after eyeing the break room. They watched as the mug bounced off the air, and saw Samantha leap over one of the workbenches, use her keyboard to deflect one of the strange electrified bullets, and finally rip something off to reveal the head of a man afloat in the air.

“He’s a ghost,” Claire gasped.

“More likely some manner of adaptive camouflage cloth,” Dr. Weiss remarked. “I’ve read of some experiments to develop this sort of technology, but nothing even close to this sort of sophistication.”

The scene then came to when Samantha collapsed, then the disembodied hand reaching out to place the disk on her unconscious form. That’s when Agent Hessman’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and when Dr. Weiss went from concerned uncle to investigative research scientist. A moment later Samantha’s body vanished in a prismatic twinkle, soon followed by three more such flashes.

“Stop the tape right there,” Dr. Weiss called out. “I need a terminal and a copy of the last few seconds of Samantha’s location signal to analyze.”

“A suspicion, Doctor?” the general asked.

“More than mere suspicion,” he replied. “I think everyone on the team knows what that disk and flash of lights are reminiscent of.”

Agent Hessman nodded, and said, “Agreed. General, I’d like to scan for any TDWs in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Do it,” the general ordered the nearest tech.

While Dr. Weiss sat down to work at one of the terminals, and Agent Hessman watched as the security footage was replaced by the readout from the TDW scanners, Captain Beck gently pulled Ben and Claire back a little from the center of activity.

“Let them do their work,” he quietly told them. “Sam is more worried than you are about his niece, but he’s focused now on locating her.”

“I know,” Ben replied, “but I feel so frustrated.”

“And unexpectedly vulnerable,” Claire added. “I thought this base was impregnable.”

Captain Beck left the question unanswered as they turned their attention to the results now displayed across the main screen.

“Nothing on the blip board,” a tech finally called out. “No TDWs going to or from the past.”

“I didn’t expect there would be,” Agent Hessman said thoughtfully. “Sam?”

“In just a second . . .”

Dr. Weiss’s fingers raced across his keyboard as he worked. On the screen before him was a waveform pattern displayed as a function of time codes, but under his swift work it zoomed into the last fractions of a second and expanded. Now the steady waveform was disrupted by a completely different pattern.

“We got a time traveler, all right,” he announced. “See that disruptive pattern in the last instant of the signal? That’s the locator signal being distorted by a time travel event. Look for a blip again, but this time from the future.”

“Uh, Doctor?” the same tech who had reported the lack of TDWs asked. “But . . . how?”

Dr. Weiss started typing again as he spoke. “A little something that Sam and I have been working on. I’m feeding you the new parameters now. You just have to make a few adjustments.”

While Dr. Weiss was sending the new information and the tech was making his adjustments, General Karlson stepped in next to Agent Hessman for a few quiet words.

“Russians from the future? Any idea why?”

“That attack at the Los Alamos conference must have been aimed for Samantha Weiss. She has something they need, though what I can’t yet imagine. We won’t know more until we’re able to tell just how far into the future they come from.”

“It would explain the odd tech they’ve displayed‍—electrified bullets, something that makes them invisible.”

“Explains a lot,” Agent Hessman agreed, “though not their motive.”

Their short conference was interrupted by the tech calling out, “General, activity on the blip board. We have a TDW, and it’s from the future, all right.”

“Display it,” the general snapped. “I want location and time.”

“Yes, sir.”

The large screen before them displayed first a black background, then a single large dot at one end accompanied by a time stamp. From there a line began drawing itself toward the other side of the screen, passing up briefly displayed date codes along the way. A short distance from the first dot, a second one appeared; from there the line started stretching all the way across the screen.

“From the looks of it,” Dr. Weiss announced as he struggled to get up from his seat, “their first portal opened up this morning, in the vicinity of Los Alamos.”

“Makes sense,” the general remarked. “And do we have to guess the time of the second?”

“Right when my niece’s locator chip went off-line. Right when that flash in the security footage showed her disappearing.”

“Then, if I may,” Ben said, stepping forward, “how far into the future are they from?”

“We’ll know in a few moments,” Dr. Weiss replied, “but judging on the tech they’ve displayed so far and the apparent ease with which they snuck in, I’d say nothing less than about fifty years, maybe more. It wouldn’t have been from too far into the future, though, or they probably would have just teleported her out or something.”

A glance up showed the line was already passing up the fifty-year mark.

“Well,” Dr. Weiss said, a little nervously, “any bets as to exactly how far?”

“Lou,” General Karlson said, “the second we have a date and location, I want you to assemble a team. No one kidnaps one of our people no matter how far in the future they come from.”

“Yes, General.”

“Sir,” Dr. Weiss broke in, “I’d like to—”

“Sam, until you no longer need that cane, you’re grounded,” the general told him. “You’ll be a liability in the field. I know she’s your niece and you love her, but that’s the way it has to be.”

“I understand, sir. But can I at least run tech support from this end? I’ve got to do something.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve much more than you sitting in place and some light walking,” the general agreed.

Dr. Weiss replied with a sigh of some little relief before the discussion was cut off by an announcement from the same tech as before.

“Sir, we have a date and location.”

All eyes looked up at the blip board to see that a third dot had resolved at the far end of the screen, one displaying some text, which the tech now read off from his terminal.

“We pin it at one hundred years in the future. Location: London, England.”

“England?” the general puzzled. “I would have expected Russians to be from Russia. And what’s England doing with a time machine?”

“It could be like the nuclear bomb, sir,” Ben put in. “It started out with just us and the Russians; then all the major powers started getting it.”

“Quick aside,” Claire said, “but what’s a ‘nuclear bomb’?”

“Oh yeah,” Ben replied in a subdued tone, “I’ve been avoiding telling you about those. The first one erased an entire city.”

“An entire city?” Claire gasped. “One bomb? What sort of warmongering madness are you people into, anyway?”

“Long story for another time, Miss Hill,” Agent Hessman interjected. “Right now, we have Samantha to rescue.”

“Right,” she agreed. “Priorities.”

“Now, we’ll need someone to replace Agent Harris and Lieutenant Phelps,” Agent Hessman began as he turned away, thinking. “There’s a couple of people that I think might do the job . . .”

While Agent Hessman thought over the composition of the team, Claire pulled Ben away for a quiet word between them alone.

“He really likes her a lot.”

“What, Sam’s niece? She seems very personable, but—”

“No, I mean he likes her.” She grinned.

“What? Oh. But what makes you think that?”

“Simple,” she said with a shrug. “He keeps referring to her as ‘Samantha’ instead of ‘Miss Weiss.’ He’s known me longer and I’m still ‘Miss Hill’ most of the time. Yep, he’s got it bad.”

Ben puzzled over this for a few moments, and as he watched Agent Hessman work quickly at getting his team together, he could not help but wonder if that was from his usual efficiency or some new urgency that arose from a completely different reason.

Temporal Chamber Control Room

Temporal Chamber