Abominator Moonbase, Present

“I don’t know what happened after that,” I said.

We all stood in the lab next to the Starplate. Jaclyn had placed Victor’s body there. It hadn’t seemed right to leave it out on the surface. It didn’t feel more right to bring him back here, but there were things I could do here that I couldn’t do there.

“I mean, I know loosely, but not in detail. They scared the Soviets into leaving—not that it was too hard. Abominator booby traps killed a few of their men. The crazy thing is that Grandpa did say he fought a time traveler once, but he didn’t say anything that made me think of Victor. At least, not until now.”

I checked Victor’s body with the suit’s sensors. He was still at room temperature, and there were no signs of movement inside his body other than pooling blood and other fluids.

Jaclyn shook her head, “We all should have listened a little more closely. I wonder how many hints they dropped?”

Sitting on the ground, his arms wrapped around his legs, Marcus looked up, “Not a lot, I bet. They were all pretty careful. Our Grandpa’s still careful.”

Jaclyn nodded, “He sticks to the plan if he thinks it’s good.”

Cassie scanned the room around us, gun in hand, eyes on lab machines, storage containers, and mystery artifacts. We’d gathered up all the monkey boxes, put them in a pile, and then she’d burned them to what we all hoped were their component molecules.

Still, you never knew if we’d missed one or if they could reform from even that level of damage.

“Hey,” she said, “if you’re ready, I’m ready to see if I can overcome Victor’s hold on this place. Otherwise, Shift can try again.”

Marcus shook his head, “If you don’t get through, I’ll try it, but right now I need a second. My brain is still kind of scattered. If I close my eyes, I can see the inside of Victor’s skull as I chop up his… Anyway, I need a second.”

Rachel lay back against a lopsided polygon that was almost a cube. My implant labeled it a storage container even though it had no seams or doors. Leaning forward to sit up straight, she gritted her teeth, “I can help too. The Ghosts taught me a little about Artificer and Abominator technology. I can help avoid or maybe even disable some traps, but if Cassie can do it, I’d prefer not to move.”

“Are you okay?” The sensors in her suit had reported damage when she got hit but within normal human tolerances. I wasn’t a doctor though. I’d designed the suits to measure vitals, detect blood, and identify broken bones, but not everything.

As I asked the question, Jaclyn watched Rachel, saying, “I’m not seeing anything that worries me in your vitals, but how are you feeling?”

Rachel held up her hands, “Not good, but no major pain. I can still walk, but I feel sore all over.”

Jaclyn nodded, “Tell me if anything changes. We’ve got first aid plus a little in the jet. I’d like to look at you there. After that, we can land in L.A. so Paladin or his dad can heal you.”

“I’m fine with that,” I said. “Cap, how long do you think it will take to get in?”

Glancing over at me, Cassie said, “No idea. It might be easy. It might be hard.”

I’d spent too much time answering questions I didn’t know enough details to answer to give her a hard time and only said, “Got it. I’m going to check something while you dive in.”

I stepped up to the Starplate’s controls. Even though my Xiniti implant labeled them, I didn’t need the help. I had one at home. The controls weren’t meant for human hands. I had to extend the armor at the end of my fingers into a hole to activate it, but I still managed to start the temporal analysis of Victor’s body.

Between that and checking the logs, it appeared that Victor arrived in the 1950s, got trapped by the Starplate, accidentally released in the late 1970s when the Russians arrived, and then retrapped by Grandpa only minutes later. Checking the data from Victor’s arrival showed that he’d arrived from a time within two or three weeks of the present day. It couldn’t get more exact than that.

I turned away from the controls to face everyone else, “Hey, it looks like Victor either left within the last few days or at most a couple weeks or… he’s just about to leave.”

Marcus straightened up to look at me, “Seriously? So if we go find him, we could change the past?”

I thought about it, paused, and said, “It depends on your time travel system. If we’ve got a fixed past, then no effect. Everything continues as it has to no matter what. If the past is fluid, then maybe everything falls apart unless another time traveler fixes it.

“If we assume quantum mechanics and that every change spins off a new universe, Victor’s leaving creates a universe where he went back in time and another one where he chose not to. Weirder, by arriving he spins off a new universe where he arrives from one where he didn’t. So, it’s possible that if we run into him and he doesn’t leave because of that, we’ve spun off a new universe where he doesn’t leave, but he still arrived and the universe where he left still exists.”

“You know,” Marcus stood up, “I feel like my head should be spinning, but that kind of makes sense.”

Jaclyn walked up and stood next to me, looking over the Starplate’s controls, “I’ve spent too much time with both of you because that made sense to me too.”

As she finished her sentence, the ominous dark hallway we walked through to get to the lab brightened, changing to the warm lighting of your average suburban living room.

“Got it,” Cassie said, “I’m in. Let’s see if we have anything that can find Lee’s device.”