It was not like Mick to be late. In fact, Sam knew it was damn near impossible. If he had not been at his favorite corner table in the back of Mick's bar, O'Shanley's, in the middle of the afternoon in west Pittsburgh, he might have worried a bit more. He took pleasure in his now limited time at O'Shanley's as he had come to miss the regulars he had grown to know over the decades of the bars existence. Home life in Texas was not too stressful but with a savant four-year old, it just seemed more complicated than necessary. A brief stopover at the bar between missions was welcome and always reasonably therapeutic.
"Sam!" the bar's relic of a piano player and skinny drink of water patrons knew as Blisterin' Benny Powel, said as he strode through the place's open door. "Long time no see. You around long?"
Benny was still sharp as Sam usually could sit at the back table unnoticed.
"Probably not," Sam replied. "Still jamin' on Sundays?" he asked hopefully.
"Don’t miss many in jazzy June. The guys and I are workin' on a new arrangement of Birdland," he said while taking a cloth from within the bar's piano bench to dust off the old upright. "But man, we've gotta practice."
"You see Mick lately?"
"Last night, right up to closin'. And thanks for openin'."
"No problem. The key was in its usual place- as usual," Sam said before taking a sip of beer that he had pulled himself earlier.
He wondered which local, icy draft would be his next victim as one of his sisters ran into O'Shanley's. She glanced behind the bar, then seeing Benny, rushed to him.
Sam smiled at his concealment.
"Tye Brasca!" Benny said taken by surprise. "How's my fav-o-rite niece? And congrats on the new Family name."
"I'm good and thank you. It took long enough," she said giving Benny a kiss on the cheek.
"Things take time, you know," he said with a chuckle.
"Have you seen Uncle Mick?" she asked
"Get in line," he said with a nod to Sam.
"I see another troglodyte is restless," Sam said as she joined him. He had guessed she had just translated upline from the Pruchlais, a Family subterranean sanctuary under Oklahoma, rather than their main base of operations on the temporally shielded planet Trua.
The Pruchlais existed downline in an adjacent universe or fractime, just one in an infinite string of fractimes composing their sector within the fractal multiverse. The fractime was the Family's universe of origin they called the Reference Plane or just RP.
Basic translation technologies developed by the Family allowed travel between fractimes but had a temporal limit. Travel to one of the two adjacent universes were always either in the relative past or future, downline or upline, respectively. However, advanced temporal technology, such as the translation device or TD Sam had in his cargo shorts pocket, made travel between fractimes largely time independent.
"How's similarity duty going?" Sam added with a smirk.
"It is the archives that are backlogged," she said holding her dreads off the back of her neck to ease the affect of Pittsburgh's summer humidity. "We could use some help," she added with a sigh.
"Be careful what you ask for," he said still studying the bar's beer engines.
"Have you seen the last in-house, back-change report for the RP?"
she asked.
Sam groaned. He had given up reading the reports dealing with changes in the past or future even though a huge analysis effort went in to processing comparisons between RP data sets to detect timeline meddling.
Strict family canon forbade the flow of information into the past but the rule did not apply to the Family's first generation and only for the RP
for second generation like Tye and he. Nevertheless, he still knew a sketchy near-future account of the RP but with enemy infiltration from future, upline fractimes now confirmed, such meddling made any model fallible.
Even so, the reports represented a rare glimpse of one possible future for the RP but topics in the reports were usually irrelevant to the Family much less him personally. Nevertheless, there were often notable exceptions.
"The Challenger is not blowing up at launch in four days like it will here," she whispered. "It survives until STS-51L, eighteen months from now, Breeze time."
"The shuttle." Sam said shaking his head while remembering the coming disaster. "Thanks for the info, but that still sucks big time," he added with a scowl.
"There is no idea as to the origin of the similarity departure," she said. "You think that is suspicious?" she asked.
"You know how much I hate those reports," he said trying to ignore her question as well as the pain of the coming loss. "And I'm sure one of our brilliant siblings will figure it out. It's probably just another glitch in the local anomaly," he added flatly.
"Suit yourself," she said narrowing her eyes to a squint. "Now, I do not suppose you know where Mick is?" she asked while glaring at him with hands on hips.
"I've been waiting for him myself," he said and then smiled at the touch of an Irish brogue in his sister's question.
The first generation fled to the Pruchlais from the Western Isles in the third century BC during the Celtic exodus from Europe. It amused him that some remnants of that distant past still surfaced even though Confederation basic had eventually weaned out nearly all of any inherited first generation family accent.
It also pleased him to believe Tye's subtle Irish brogue seemed reserved just for him during stressful occasions.
"Waiting?" she asked.
"Now, don’t go getting worried," Sam reassured her.
She leaned close to him. "You have new orders?"
"Now Sis," Sam said sitting back in his chair. "If I answered that I'd be in breach. But I'd be more inclined to spill my guts if you tell me everything you know."
She shook her head while glaring at him again.
He knew he would tell her what he knew. He just did not like giving in without at least a token effort. "How about you buy me a beer then? I'll have an Iron City."
"I don't understand how Sara puts up with you," she said pushing her chair back with a clatter against the bar's uneven wooden floor before heading to the long row of beer engines.
Sam glanced at Benny, who mockingly shook his finger at him. Sam just shrugged his shoulders in reply.
Tye returned and then with a smirk she placed a glass full of Iron City foam in front of him.
Sam watched beer displace the foam ever so slowly from the bottom of his glass. "Ces misses you," he said feeling a familiar twinge of brotherly guilt when the teasing goes a bit too far.
After a rare Family bio-birth of his daughter, Ces, four years ago, the Family council gave his life-partner, Sara, and he an alternative from frontline duty. He was still getting used to it but running an alternate,
RP+1 command post and another bar, The Gulf Breeze in South Padre Island, was more than a decent compensation but supposedly temporary.
But, there was a backlog of investigations about missing antiquities or important relics, past and future, the queen had personally asked he investigate. Such tracking could take months or years and mean a significant duration commitment but he could usually return to the Breeze and his family only a few minutes after leaving. He was thankful for the often interesting, but usually unglamorous work.
"Sorry I missed her birthday," Tye said. "How is she?"
"She understands," he said looking into her violet eyes guessing the coming upline war would take a huge toll on her. "And she's good but generally freaking Sara and me out on a regular basis," he added.
"Still thinking the outposts med-AI is somehow responsible?" Tye asked referring to Ces' rapidly advancing intelligence.
"Figures, but there's no real proof," he said with an affirmative nod,
"We're still wondering how she got Dotty to activate the system."
"She is a blessing," Tye said touching her brother's hand gently.
"Ces not the cat," she added with a smirk.
Sam shook his head at her mention of the Family's cat, Dotty.
"Anyways, there are no new orders," he said, "but, I got a message about a downline lead on the missing Great Phosphophyllite."
"The big blue crystal whose twinning inspired a revolution in twenty-second century pharmaceuticals?" Tye asked.
"That's the one and it's gone missing two fractimes downline," Sam said. "Mick is supposed to coordinate an information exchange with a downline contact tonight. I would've thought the message would have been routed through the Pruchlais."
"I never saw it," she said, "and I have just come from there."
"What have you got?" Sam asked with a sigh.
"Temporal glitches. The Pruchlais' translation monitors have recorded a number of echoes in and out of O'Shanley's. Obviously Uncle Mick needs to know."
"Echoes?"
"They are like someone is piggy backing on a translation," Tye said looking around the bar, "but there is no corresponding event from either fractimes upline or downline. Luc only picked them up during system maintenance of the temporal monitor's history bank."
"Strange," Sam said thinking Luc, the oldest of the Family's key AIs, should have had a more detailed analysis. He took a slow sip of beer while wondering how an echo could form within the linearity of separate fractimes given the fractal geometry of the whole multiverse. "How long?" he asked, refusing to do the math in his head.
"Variable. A few to over a dozen a year for the last six years, possibly longer. Luc thinks there is a high probability that it represents another translation technology."
"Another traveler stopping in at O'Shanley's? Now that is unusual,"
Sam said sarcastically with a glance at the small sign hung in supposed jest on the mirror behind the bar that read 'Time traveler's first drink free'.
"It is the possibility of an alternative translation tech that is unusual,"
Tye said with evident frustration.
The clientele at O'Shanley's could be extraordinary to say the least especially with all the Family and Time Corps activity surrounding the war still accelerating towards them from upline. This universe, RP+1, containing O'Shanley's was to be the last barrier against the enemy invading their home universe and preparations were ever increasing even with invasion estimated still over a century distant.
"It's probably a thirsty Laith slipping away from Ghost Town," he added hopefully.
"You know the containment is continually monitored and there is no correlation to these echoes," she said.
Sam was not sure they could ever contain much less monitor the actions of the family afflicted with a usually permanent change that saw a minority turn into demons or monsters.
"So what do you think?" she asked. "And you owe the box," she added reminding him he had not paid for his last foamy beer.
"I am going to set up a plus-five-minute monitor with the old TV in the storeroom. I don't like Mick being late," he said looking at his remaining flat beer that somehow added to a growing ominous feeling giving him goose bumps in the summer heat.
Sam pulled a fin from his wallet and handed it to her, but she refused. "And I can watch the replay of tonight's game," he added trying again.
"Your beer," she said staunchly with a nod to an honesty box on the bar.
"I still want to know what you're thinking on these echoes," he said standing up to stretch before treading the familiar path from the table to the bar's gents.
On his way back by the bar, he flipped the box's lid open to drop in the fin when he saw a sharpie next to a folded piece of paper with reverse handwriting bleeding through.
"Mystery solved," he said as he returned to the table and handed the note, unread, to Tye.
"I am not so sure," she said after unfolding the note. "It seems Uncle Mick has gone to hell."
RefPlane, Planet TarTarus
Mick took a deep breath as he rubbed his cigar dead against a nearby stalagmite before dropping the rank butt. The slightly cooler air at the cave's entrance contrasted the rest of the planet, searing from its nearness to the orbital limit for human survival to its red dwarf star.
He still shivered despite the heat and the dark-green cloak that had delivered him to the cave's entrance. The cloak, the Turas Luath, was a living, temporal entity. The Family's first queen, Zuinall bestowed it and its mate, the Amhrán, to her descendants soon after her mysterious death.
Both entities could perform complex and precise space-time translations as well as extra-universe displacements by interfacing with the thoughts of the wearer.
Blinking against the harsh, red daylight cast into the cave's opening, Mick plucked a torch from the cave's wall and it whooshed into bright flames. It had been centuries since his last visit to the hellish planet. His thoughts turned to his foolish oath never to return as he took the first familiar steps down a vast spiral staircase towards the darkness below from which the last Watcher had summoned him.
The torch flickered as he finally reached the base of the stairs to face an oval, stone portal. Delicately chiseled tree branches filled the top of the slab; its roots, intertwined, filled the bottom. He pressed his right hand with fingers opened slightly into a matching recess in the tree's trunk just below a concave, hemispheric recess. As he removed his hand, the door vibrated slightly as it floated to his left revealing the blackness of the Mandorla and spilling out a wretched stench.
Dropping the torch, he leapt through the portal without hesitation.
Null Space
"Armaros?" Mick called out while covering his nose from the stink.
A weak moan was the only reply.
He crouched on the white marble floor beyond the blackness of the portal to scan quickly the brightly lit chamber. In front of him, a lone leather chair sat atop a heap of hundreds of dusty books, scrolls and storage devices dumped from their places on shelves lining the surrounding walls.
Another moan originated underneath the mound. Tossing some of the rarest and most valuable manuscripts and books of the multiverse aside without reservation, he finally uncovered a frail, wrinkled face.
Pulling the rag of a man into his arms, Mick whispered gently into the monk's ear, "Armaros, can you hear me? I'm here. It's Michael."
Eyes, mere slits, lost in timeless lines of age fluttered then opened.
The corners of his mouth rose slightly at the glimpse of his former apprentice.
"I knew you would come," he said weakly, his white robe shimmering erratically.
"I will get you to Trua," Mick said, his eyes teary.
"There is no time," the monk said as he grasped Mick's arm causing the Turas Luath's sleeve to glow a deep emerald beneath his frail fingertips. "The three will save all that is and ever was," he whispered hoarsely.
"How did the vault become breached?" Mick asked ignoring the old man's riddle.
"No time." Armaros coughed weakly while pulling Mick closer and raising a frail finger toward a solitary book left upright on a shelf.
"Who did this to you?" Mick asked after quickly rescanning the monk's sanctuary.
"You," Armaros said weakly with his last breath before his robe consumed him in a brilliant white flash just and the portal's carved, oval slab slammed shut.
Tears flowing down his cheeks, Mick slumped into the pile of books; he had just witnessed his ancient friend's final translation.
RefPlane +1: 14 June 1984
"Is that all it says?" Sam asked nervously while looking at the handwritten note in his sister's hand.
Tye nodded and handed him the paper. She was right. Mick in the best times could be excessively cryptic but this note was one for the record books. He reread it, 'Gone to Hell. Hope to be back soon. Mick'.
"Where the fuck is hell," he said staring at Tye.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe the citadel's history archives might give us a clue?"
Sam pulled the note back out of his pocket. "Maybe you've got a good idea there Sis," he said while reading the note a third time.
"What do we do now?" Tye said.
"We wait," he said as Benny began a familiar warm-up piece and three more musicians, instrument cases in hand, entered the joint, "but first, I need to install that temporal cam. It might not be a bad idea."
"Those are illegal and banned," Tye said while looking at the tiny device that Sam pulled from his shirt pocket. "Just how do you have one?"
"I get around," he mused looking around the bar and trying to figure out the best place to position the device. "I even recovered a future-memory coin last trip upline," he added with a wink.
"Another accord breach? After four years and with the war coming, you are just asking the queen to send you back to the archives." Tye said referring to Sam's last assignment and her unspectacular current job analyzing similarity between fractimes.
In his present role, he often dealt with parts of humanity that mostly ignored the Time Corps and their accords. The worst were Outer Lár freelancers, often paid by rogue, fringe cartels that had a set wish list of objects of interest from the outer spirals' past.
Freelancers hunted not just a wide array of antiquities, but also biological specimens. There was no shortage of these unscrupulous collectors throughout fractime. Sam knew the odds were against the TC
to make a dent in the illicit trade. TC agents had too many self-imposed controls not to mention a bureaucratic behemoth to juggle. Therefore,
Sam had become an expert on covertly bending or rarely, even breaching the Time Accords to suit his mission.
His first-generation Family mentor in traveler craft, Flint, considered accord breaches were like a pendulum's over-swing trying to find its null point and some reverberations were simply unavoidable.
Sam shuddered at the thought of returning to the similarity archives.
Fucking war, he thought gently rubbing the coin in his pocket.
Sundays were usually busy at O'Shanley's but during summer, it could be hit or miss. Tonight was a miss and even Benny and the other jazz junkies had packed it in by ten. An hour later, just two regulars remained to hold the bar up as Tye pulled another round of beers as Sam fiddled with the rabbit ears on a small black and white TV.
He sighed and switched the set back to its previous channel with disgust. The old set now monitored the bar from five minutes in the future and from a vantage point above the bar's thick, oak front door.
"The Pirates?" one of the regulars asked as Sam slid a beer to him across the bar. Reaching for the pint glass, the patron revealed an unusual tattoo, a delicate red swirl on his left forearm.
"Did you get to Port of Spain for Carnival this year?" Sam asked, nodding in reply.
"Didn't make it," Lars replied wearily.
"First time in a while, but there's always next year. Right Miri?"
"Yup next year," Miri said. "And I heard the score earlier," he added giving a thumb up to Sam.
"Miracles never cease," Sam said before taking a gulp of an icy Iron City lager.
"What was the score?" Tye asked.
"Three-two, Bucs," Sam said.
If there was a diversion from the boredom of his light duty, it was baseball. Although Sam liked the Pirates, he could not care less about
World Series results or regional pennant winners. He just liked the sport and had secretly had attended game seven of the 1960 World Series three times.
"Where is Mick?" Miri asked.
Tye shrugged her shoulders. "Last call," she said glancing at the clock behind the bar, "You've got fifteen minutes."
"So this is O'Shanley's," a deep voice crackled over the TV's speaker.
"Shit, the cam," Sam said.
The tiny set showed the voice's owner, obscured beneath a shimmering, black cloak, stride into the empty bar through its doorway.
"Who is that?" Lars asked while looking behind him where the figure should have been and Miri rushed to scan the bar's frontage from a front window.
"Creepy," Tye said still staring at the TV, "even for O'Shanley's, and a black cape? That is a bit much."
"It's more like a cloak," Miri said now behind her and studying the small TV's screen. "It's got a hoodie."
"But that’s the bar and we're not there," Lars observed staring at the small screen them turning around to look the bar's doorway.
As the figure raised its arms over its head, thin, ghostly, hands emerged from the cloak's sleeves, long, gnarled fingers interlocked and then the bar began to implode.
Sam watched in horror as the bar's interior distorted and shrank along with everything including the emerald-green labradorite bar, a smoldering TV, tables, chairs and the squeaking ceiling fan. The bar's dartboard swirled in the air accompanied by countless, mostly faded, Polaroid photos of patrons.
All the debris that was once O'Shanley's flew then accreted into a small, shimmering ball between the cloaked figure's outstretched arms.
"How is the cam seeing and illuminating this?" Tye asked looking at the cam over the bar's rickety, front door just as the old TV set popped and sparks flashed from its rear air-vents.
Sam just shrugged his shoulders as he watched the set's image shrink into a bright dot in the screen's center then slowly faded into nothingness.
All that remained was a reflection of fear on Lars' face.
As a regular for decades, and despite the lack of any tangible personal details, Sam trusted him. That was just how it was with O'Shanley's regulars.
"Four minutes," Tye announced. "We need a plan," she added looking at Sam.
"I don’t know who that was," Sam replied. "And by the looks of it the double barrel behind the bar won't do much good," he said feeling for the translation device in his cargo short's pocket.
"That broadcast was from the future," Lars said in amazement.
"Yes," Sam said nodding his head. "I can explain, but we don’t have time just now," he added hastily.
"Try," Miri said firmly grasping Sam by the forearm.
It had taken Sam awhile to accept Miri's full facial ink and still found it could be intimidating.
"We're just a family," Sam said looking at Tye as she rolled her eyes at the serious breach of protocol, "trying to keep things- balanced."
"What can we do?" Lars said with a curt glance at Miri causing him to release his grip on Sam.
"Unless you have some serious weaponry on you," Sam replied, "we don't have much choice."
"We run," Tye added. "But it's too dangerous to leave. The bar will be under surveillance."
"So how do we run if we can't leave?" Lars asked.
"Don't worry we can take care of that," Tye said pulling a quantum pad from her jean's pocket. "I'll need to record events of the next few minutes," she added while making inputs onto the pad.
"We'll join you in a minute," Sam said ushering Lars and Miri into the bar's storeroom before joining Tye back behind the bar.
She shook her head.
"We can’t leave them," he said sternly.
"I know and Uncle Mick is going to be pissed," she said looking around at the bar then stopping with the coffee machine on the bar.
"Time?" Sam asked.
"Two minutes and more than enough time for you to save The Machine," she said. "Take it to The Breeze; it should be safe there."
Sam pulled the translation device from his pocket and made a quick input to its simple controls. "Be right back," he said placing the device on the floor. Then hefting the machine with a grunt, he strode over the TD
and vanished only to reappear nearly instantly empty-handed.
Tye was waiting for him holding a cardboard box that he recognized that held the bar's books and tax records. He saw Tye had stuffed the winter darts and summer washer-toss winner plaques in the box, too. He chuckled at her effort as her name appeared more often than not on the plaques.
"For all the bureaucrats," she lied as Sam recovered his TD from the floor.
"Let's all get out of here," he said opening the storeroom's door for Tye.
"Agrona!" she said stretching to look behind crates of beer, whiskey and cartons of new beer mugs. "Where did they go?" she asked just before Sam activated his TD.
Tye and Sam materialized in front of the Breeze's bar as Sara was fiddling with the Machine.
"I never knew there was no plug," she said ignoring their sudden appearance while carefully inspecting an empty condiment drawer then gently closing it.
"Just pull the start lever. There," Tye said pointing to The Machine's internal nuclear-power activator.
Sam sighed. He knew The Machine's coffee had besotted her for decades. "We've got more to worry about at the moment than The Machine," he said.
Sara gave him one of those looks. He knew it all too well. It was her what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about look.
"Sam's right," Tye said, "O'Shanley's is about to be destroyed," she said while checking the timepiece on her wrist, "in one minute."
"What?" Sara asked shaken.
"We need to go to the Pruchlais to monitor the implosion," Tye said.
"I am guessing it will be a temporal event."
"Ces just went for a nap," Sara said nervously. "You go, I'll be fine."
Sam adjusted his TD, grasped Tye's hand, and blew his concerned partner a kiss before disappearing.
They arrived in the Family's subterranean refuge. A familiar draft cooled Sam's cheeks as they ran from the translation ingress point to the complex's primary laboratory.
Tye got to the lab's entrance first and began to adjust the main temporal monitor as Sam initiated the complex's high-level defense routines on an adjacent workstation.
"Focused on Pittsburg," Tye reported as Sam looked over her shoulder at the monitor. "Just seconds to go."
"Shit," Sam said as the monitor's readings spiked then returned to normal.
"It appears the implosion was restricted to the block around the bar,"
Tye said with a sigh.
"Hold on," Sam said reaching to make inputs on the nearby workstation. "Data indicate a high degree of divergence within the reference plane at the time of the implosion."
"Meddling!" Tye said as she nudged Sam to access the workstation's analogue keyboard. "Let me have a look," she added franticly.
Sam slumped against the station as Tye accessed past and future similarity datum regarding all recorded details of the RP at the instant of O'Shanley's demise. Sam used the same analysis routines on the vast collection to discover lost temporal-critical antiquities.
"Could we have been shielded by the Pruchlais' defense routines?"
he asked while glancing at the complex structure of the strata exposed on the interior of the cavern.
Created by their ancestors in 271 BC, the sanctuary still held many mysteries Sam knew must have rational explanations and now he would have to add one more to the list.
"I can’t believe these readings much less that O'Shanley's is gone,"
Tye said.
Sam saw subtly violet tears welling in her eyes. "We've got to report this to the council," he said as Tye picked up a nearby pad and quickly thumbed a message announcing their imminent arrival at the citadel on planet Trua.
RefPlane -22: 20 March 2304
"They're really time travelers?" Miri asked in disbelief while taking a seat in front of a workstation in Lars' lab.
"It looks like that long running joke at O'Shanley's had some truth to it," Lars replied as he rushed to adjust several apparatus.
"Some?"
"Okay. Lots," Lars said now adjusting inputs on the workstation in front of Miri. "Look, a temporal event at a twenty-three fractime upline departure, 14 June 1984 at quarter past eleven."
"That's it," Miri said as his hands flew over an analogue keyboard lying before the station's display.
Lars stared at the workstation as more graphs depicted overwhelming evidence for the same event in the fractime where they had just escaped.
"You think that was the beast?" Miri asked studying Lars' face. "It spoke," he added with a shudder, "and in English."
"I guess it should be able to speak English," Lars said as he stared out the nearest window at the volcano in the distance.
"We have to go back now and kill it," Miri said opening the nearby weapon cabinet.
"I will not affect our own timelines again," Lars said. "Last time it nearly cost us our lives not to mention untold changes to countless others.
Our enemy surely sees into the future."
Miri sighed subtly.
Lars knew it was a point of debate between them but he would not budge from his conviction.
"The beast is even more powerful than we thought," Miri said selecting a disrupter rifle with several power cartridges.
"No weapons, at least not now" Lars said thoughtfully, "but it is time we got some help."