The STAR appeared in a flat area at the foot of a mountain range. Cordelia checked the outside view out of habit, then asked David to do the same.
"So you know there is no danger," she explained, showing him how he could cycle through the images of the various cameras outside for 360 degree security. There was no visible danger. There were no people either. "Welcome to 772 BCE, David."
"BCE?"
"Before Common Era. It is what many people in the nineteenth century would call BC. This is where we have to find our package. First shut down the systems to standby, to preserve energy."
They opened the hatch and got out, finding themselves on a high plateau among the mountains, while below them a wide river rushed by.
"This is the Tibetan plateau," Cordelia explained, "the most northern location of one of China's four big rivers, the Yangtze River."
"We are in China." David spoke so quietly that she could barely understand him over the rushing of the water. "And we travelled 2500 years back in time?"
"Near enough," Cordelia said. "Now let's see where I put that thing..." Her note-keeping style had improved over the years that she had been in this trade. The note she had to interpret now was from the early days when she'd been quite sloppy, feeling certain she could memorise all the locations where she had put something. "Okay, do you see something that strikes you as a big rock? It's in a cavity beneath it."
"I'm sorry, Cordelia, but almost everything here strikes me as big rocks."
She had feared that. She was having the same issue. "We're looking for a small package, wrapped in red cloth." Cordelia was glad she had written that down at least. "It's about this big." She indicated the size with her hands. "And it's beneath a big rock."
"We should go round in circles then, checking each big rock for a red package." David hugged her. "Don't worry. We'll find it." After that he walked to the nearest rock and walked around it, looking at the base of it. Cordelia walked to the next rock and started searching there. David passed her on the way to the next one, and so they kept going round and round for almost half an hour.
"This is impossible," Cordelia said as she looked at where the STAR stood. "I'm not crazy. I wouldn't have put something like that so far away. This is impossible."
"Could it be that I made a mistake, copying the coordinates? This was my first time, remember?" Cordelia shook her head. "I saw how you read it from the piece of paper and entered it into the system. I checked it. It all was correct. Unless..." A thought popped into her head. "Unless..." She didn't explain to David what she had thought of. Quickly she walked back to the STAR, looked for the piece of paper and grabbed the notebook. "Damn! Damn!"
"Cordelia, what's the matter?" David asked as he came in as well.
"I'm stupid, David. Sorry." Cordelia held up the notebook. "The coordinates in here are different. I made a mistake, copying the info onto the paper." A huge flood of relief washed through her, and she was grateful she kept these notes for herself as well. Using only the paper Brown had had, the red package would have been lost in time forever, because this plateau was enormous.
She made David take the pilot's seat again and this time he copied the coordinates from her notebook. They both noticed that they were four months too early and also about thirty miles away from their real destination.
The journey went fast as usual and this time the area was much different. As they left the time-machine, David pointed at a striking rock that dominated the scene.
"I would be surprised if that isn't the one we are looking for." Together they walked to the slab of stone that seemed to mock gravity and almost immediately they saw the red fabric.
Cordelia bent down and picked it up. "Yes. This is it. Which is a stupid thing to say because there probably aren't many stones with red packages beneath them."
David said there was nothing stupid about it and how glad he was they had located the item. He looked out over the area. "The river is much further away from here," he noticed.
"We can walk over and have a look," Cordelia offered.
Hand in hand they walked to the river and watched the water flow by much calmer than it had done at their first landing site. For a while they watched the water move along into the distance. Cordelia took David's hand. She was so happy to be able to share this moment with him. It was nothing special, standing next to a river, be it that it was in a faraway land in an even further away time. It was only when a raw voice reached their ears that their moment was interrupted.
The voice spoke in a language they didn't understand and it belonged to a man in a small boat that came floating down the river. The man steered his boat towards the rocky shoreline where the time-travellers stood and talked to them loudly.
"Shit." Cordelia could kick herself. This should not have happened. Now someone from this place and time had seen them; two people who shouldn't and officially couldn't be here. "Come. Run." She started walking towards the STAR, dragging David along. He however made that hard as he was very interested in the Chinese man who had reached the shoreline. The man tossed a big rock overboard, to which a rope was tied. It was his anchor. Then the Chinese man stepped out of his boat and started walking towards David and Cordelia.
"David, damn it, come with me. He shouldn't have seen us!" Her cursing seemed to snap David out of his fascination for the strange little man who was approaching while constantly talking.
David started running too now, and together they made it to the STAR very fast. Cordelia slammed the hatch shut and almost jumped to the pilot's seat. She quickly worked to get the STAR ready to jump but before everything was ready, they heard the Chinese man bang on the STAR's hull.
"Oh, no..." She explained to David that she couldn't initiate the jump with the man touching the STAR. "If I do, it will kill him, shattering his atoms through the fabric of time."
"But it is only one man, Cordelia," David said as they watched the monitor that showed the Chinaman who kept banging on the hull.
"That is the wrong mindset, David. What if this man has to do something with upcoming events in China? What if we kill him, his son or daughter isn't born and history changes because of that? We can't take that risk. We have to scare him off without hurting him."
David nodded. "I think I understand. Originally we shouldn't be here so he would never have seen us in the first place."
"Indeed. That is why I always kept the drop-offs and pick-ups as short as possible. And no, I am not blaming you for this." Cordelia felt sick to her stomach over the situation.
"Cordelia. Give me the Skreller-gun," David said, surprising her. "If I can scare him off long enough, we're free to leave, right?"
"True... but then he sees a weapon from the far future." "So did the Duke and his family, dear," he reminded her. "And you can set it to stun so he won't get hurt." Cordelia didn't feel good about the idea, even when this option was the least damaging for their outside guest. "Or I could go outside and knock him out," David suggested as a last alternative.
"No. I don't want violence unless it is unavoidable." Cordelia worried more and more as time passed. Time that this man should have been underway. "I have an idea. Norbert, do you have Chinese vocabulary?"
"Affirmative. There are some words in the database but it won't be sufficient to tell the gentleman outside to step away."
"Can't you simply say 'go away' through a speaker? Or just throw everything at him that you have in Chinese?"
"Everything would result in a rather incomprehensible collection of words," Norbert said but Cordelia didn't care about that. As long as it got the man to step away, she was willing to curse at him in twenty-second century American.
The outside speaker spouted a stream of Chinese words. The banging on the wall had stopped as the Chinese man stepped away from the STAR and looked utterly confused. Cordelia didn't need more and hit "Go".
~
"That went well," Cordelia said as the familiar, dark contours of her own cellar appeared on the monitor. "Well done, Norbert. I was ready to shout at the man myself."
"That would have surprised him at least as much," David said as he got up. "But in the end we found the package and your friend can come and pick it up."
"That Mr Brown is not my friend, David. He's bad news but he makes it possible for me to live here." Cordelia shut down the STAR and led the way up the stairs where she hid the package in her bedroom, beneath the two robot-arms in her wardrobe. "And now I hope he comes soon so the thing isn't in my house any longer."
David asked if she knew the thing was in any way dangerous. She shook her head.
"It won't contain a bomb or something like that. The STAR would have detected that and I would have gotten rid of the package one way or another, and my clients know I don't handle dangerous goods. But still, having stolen wares in my house is dangerous. If Brown is caught by the police and he tells them about me, they will search the house. And then they will find more than just the package." That was something Cordelia constantly feared, which often made for a lot of unease.
"I suggest you sit down while I make, ehm, tea." David escorted her down the stairs and made her sit on the settee in her living room. From the kitchen he suggested they should, at some point, visit Lexington in his time again and get their hands on proper coffee, because he severely missed it.
"Already? Imagine what I went through the first year," Cordelia said as she laughed. "And are you sure you just want to go to Lexington to get coffee?" He was silent for a while before he affirmed that he would also want to see his family again.
"And to hear what happened after the fight at the picnic. Maybe someone there is able to tell us what those two men, those agents, said. They can write nice letters and tell us they are on your side, but hearing it from others might help." As he spoke, he came from the kitchen with the tea.
Cordelia agreed that he had a point. She tried to think of a moment where they could show up in Lexington without raising too many alarms.
"Evening time," David knew as she voiced her thoughts to him. "Evenings are quiet and not many people are out. We can go to the barn and walk to my family's house to talk with them."
"And take away all their coffee," Cordelia laughed. "In the evenings the shops will be closed, David." As she already expected, he said they could ask his sister to get some coffee for them and they could then visit again to pick it up.
It didn't even sound like a bad plan. It would mean, though, that his family had to learn a bit about her real background and she wondered if they could be trusted with such knowledge. David was convinced his parents wouldn't say a word about it. He wasn't entirely certain about his sister, as she was a very talkative person. Cordelia had noticed that on several occasions already.
"I do want to know what happened there, before we go to that mountain top and meet those two men," she said. "Having some knowledge in advance is never a bad thing."
"We can go there this evening," David suggested. "We'll be here this afternoon and wait for that Mr Brown."
"He'll probably come tomorrow," Cordelia said, knowing the man from previous business encounters, "but spending some time here with you sounds like a nice plan."
~
The afternoon passed without Mr Brown. Both Cordelia and David didn't mind that one bit. They had better things to do than wait for someone whose business was at least slightly outside the law.
They also went out for dinner. Not in a big, fancy way, but Cordelia wanted to be out with her amazing partner, as if she wanted to show him off to the world. Over dinner they talked about the plan to visit his family, which sounded more and more like the smart thing to do. Cordelia really wanted to know what had happened in Lexington after David and she ran off and left the crime-scene.
On the way home, they agreed to make the trip as quickly as possible.
"I think we should aim for going this evening," Cordelia said. "We haven't been gone that long yet, and the sooner we are there, the clearer they will remember what went on. It's also smarter to go there in the 'now', because who knows when we will go there again."
"What would be the problem if we go to, let's say, next week?" David asked. She explained that living in one present was the best thing to do.
"Human minds aren't engineered to cope with too much jumping through time, even when it feels just fine. Also, if we go there next week and in the real next week we find a reason to go there again, as close to that actual day as possible, we'd have to keep notes on when we've been there next week."
David was silent for a moment. "Does that actually make sense to you? I think I will never understand the implications of everything you do."
Cordelia grinned and told him not to worry about it. "I'll keep track of this for now. You'll grow into it." And if he didn't, so she thought, that wouldn't be a problem since the idea was that they would stay together anyway. That thought made her happy. "You are doing what you can to understand all this, my dear, which is wonderful. This is all stuff from the future. I don't expect you to pick that up just like that."
Once they got home, the STAR was activated and David set the coordinates.
"We need to be careful for now, David," Cordelia said. "We don't know what happened there since we left, so we should be prepared to jump back home if anything seems off." He understood that. He also left the piloting to Cordelia. His turn to make jumps would come again when they went to pick-ups or drop-offs. She pressed "Go" and off they went.
~
The barn was dark and silent as it should be. David offered to go outside and have a look so Cordelia could sit and be ready to take them back at the slightest sign of problems, or things being off. It only took him a few minutes to make sure that everything was fine.
"That's good." Cordelia hadn't expected anything else but it always paid to be careful. She secured the STAR and they walked off, towards the outskirts of Lexington. Hand in hand.
"It's so beautiful and quiet here," Cordelia said. "I remember this from the many times I came here in the evenings." How different things had been then. She would come here and visit unsuspecting people, have a wonderful evening and then she'd go home again. Now she had caused havoc in this little town and dragged a man away from his family. When she asked how he felt about that, David just smiled and said that he was fine with how things were now.
"I was looking at finding a place of my own anyway, Cordelia," he said. "The only problem was the money, because I didn't really earn enough for that at the farm where I worked."
"And now you earn even less." She laughed at that, and promised him that money would not be an issue in their life. She had done very well in these past few years. "And now you are with me, so we can do these things together."
"Hmm. Yes."
His hmm made her frown. David picked up her inner change and stopped walking. "I dearly love you, Cordelia," he said, "but the things you do in regard to these unlawful people..."
"Yeah, I know," she sighed, "but they pay well. I'd rather have more Royal customers, but considering what they made us go through, the unlawful people present less danger to us." The events with the Duke and his family had put her through more trouble and stress than the three years before today.
"Of course. Come. The coffee is waiting." David's words made her smile. She took his hand again and they continued their walk.