Chapter 1

“Look Ryerson, you’re not in charge here, I am,” Dr. Henry Jenkins barked angrily across the table at Jake. “The only thing you are is a hired gun. Now shut up, and stop interfering with my briefing.”

Dr. Henry Jenkins was a dickhead. He was a medium tall, slightly overweight academic who didn’t deal well with other people. Unfortunately, Dr. Jenkins was a world renowned anthropologist and, as he’d just pointed out so bluntly, he was the boss. He was still wrong, but who was I to contradict him, especially when the people with the money were listening to him. I decided to shut up for the time being, and let him pontificate for the powers that be. I’d get my way in the end.

My name is Jacob Ryerson, and I’m thirty years old. I’m a big lad by most people’s standards. I’m six-foot-three and a healthy two-hundred and twenty pounds of muscle. I keep myself fit. At eighteen I joined the Army and I became an infantryman. After one tour overseas, and a box full of medals including a purple heart, I got offered my dream assignment: Special Forces. Two tours later, and a couple more Purple Hearts, and I was medically retired as a Staff Sergeant. After a very brief period of kicking back and visiting family and friends, I found a new home that was looking for a man of my unique qualifications. That place was Quantum Industries.

Quantum Industries was the front for a number of global corporations that delved into advanced science and technology. Technically I worked for them as a security expert. In reality, I was a very highly qualified bodyguard. On my next mission my job would be keeping Dr. Jenkins and the rest of his team alive. Unfortunately, Dr. Jenkins was making it hard for me to do my job.

I spent the rest of the meeting ignoring Jenkins, and focusing my attention on the other members of Jenkins team. There were only two of them, and both of them were women. They were Dr. Clara Beaufort, and Miss Gabrielle Ayoub.

Dr. Clara Beaufort was a French citizen. She’d come to Quantum Industries from the World Health Organization. Like Jenkins, she was renowned in her specific field, which was medicine. Dr. Beaufort was a real doctor. She was only twenty-eight years old, but that hadn’t kept her from making a name for herself out there in the world. Mostly she’d worked with the organization “Doctors Without Borders.” People respected her. Amazingly she was just a tiny woman, who stood five-foot-three and she weighed in at just over one hundred pounds. Still, I’d learned the hard way not to underestimate the good doctor. We’d sparred against each other a couple of times since Dr. Beaufort had joined the team, and she definitely knew how to defend herself.

Gabrielle Ayoub was a different kind of person all together. Gabby, as she called herself, was technically the team’s linguist. She could speak a dozen languages, including some very obscure ones. According to what I had read in her personnel file, Gabby could pick up a new language within a day or two. That was a very handy skill to have given the mission we were about to embark on. She was Christian Lebanese by birth, although she’d lived most of her life in Canada. She was medium tall, physically fit, attractive, and sensual. She was also a friend of Dr. Beaufort’s. That had been the method by which Gabby had joined Jenkins’ team. Dr. Beaufort had insisted that Gabby be included. According to both of their personnel files, they’d worked together a number of times over the years. Gabby had been Dr. Beaufort’s translator on at least five of Dr. Beaufort’s missions with Doctors Without Borders, and the WHO. She’d also been the doctor’s driver and pilot. Gabby was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I’d learned that she was pretty good with a handgun, as well.

The meeting we were in was the pre-deployment brief for Project Gateway. Project Gateway was a top-secret mission initiated by Quantum Industries, and financed by the United States government. In particular, the project was being financed by the Department of Defence Research and Development.

In a nutshell, the project involved time-travel. Quantum Industries had punched a hole through the fourth dimension, and big brother wanted to exploit that hole. To make certain everything was going according to what the government wanted done, the DDRD had sent their top man to the meeting to hear our plans, and to voice their opinion. That person was Lieutenant-General Milton Ridgeway. I knew him as Uncle Milty. He wasn’t really my Uncle. I’d run into him while serving with the Special Forces. He’d been Chief of Operations for two years while I was serving there. He was a career officer, but a good one. With him he’d brought a US Senator and Dwight Winslow, the CEO of Quantum Industries. The US Senator was Senator Caroline Perkins (R-Texas) who headed up the Congressional Committee on DoD’s Research and Development. They were all listening intently to Dr. Jenkins little presentation.

Basically he was telling them what we were going to do. For the past two years Quantum Industries had been studying a period of time using drones. That period of time was approximately twenty-five thousand years ago. The drones had mapped out a region, and it had accumulated a mass of data that both the DDRD and Quantum had analyzed. They hadn’t sent any humans back as of yet. That was the purpose of this final briefing. Jenkins was hoping that Ridgeway would give us the green light.

The reason no humans had been sent back in time as of yet, was the fear that those humans would accidently change the history of mankind. It was the last thing that anyone on the project team wanted to do, although I was pretty certain that Ridgeway and the government were one hundred percent against it. To them it was a matter of controlling events.

In my time at Quantum Industries, I’d heard all the theories about how people could accidently alter history and what the impact might be for those we’d left behind. I’d heard about the ‘Butterfly Effect, ‘ where all it took was the killing of one butterfly that wasn’t destine to die at that moment to irrevocably change events in the future, usually for the worse. I had also learned about the ‘Ripple Effect, ‘ where most of the impact is felt in the immediate, with the effects dissipating the further away they got from the epicentre. Most of the people at Quantum supported this theory, including Dr. Jenkins. There was one other theory expounded by some of the brighter kids at Quantum and that was the ‘Rope Theory’. This theory suggested that time and history was like a well woven rope, with events in time representing individual strands within the rope. You could cut a strand, such as killing off all black sheep at a particular point in history, but it wouldn’t change history. The belief was that all the surviving white sheep carried the DNA to make a black sheep; and somewhere up time from the point that you killed them all, the black sheep would reappear, thus correcting history. It meant that you could technically go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler in the hopes of stopping World War Two, but the seeds of the conflict would still exist in the political timeline that dominated Europe through the twenties, thirties, and forties. The chance was that someone else would have started the war. It might not have been as bloody, but it would have happened. Personally, I was betting on that scenario, given the fact that I knew deep in my heart that if we did get the green light to travel back in time, shit was going to happen, and something would get changed that shouldn’t have happened. My theory protected my future. Theirs didn’t.

On the other side of the table from me, also listening to Jenkins drone on, were the two top technical experts on the project. The first was Dr. Horst von Stubbing. Dr. Stubbing had been the man who’d done the mathematics needed to make the time machine work. He was seventy-two years old. He had been awarded the Noble Prize twice in his life. One time had been for physics, and the other time had been for economics. He was a very smart man.

The other person across the table from me was also a very smart person, but she certainly wasn’t as famous as Dr. Stubbing, and she certainly wasn’t as old. That person was Kimberly Woo. Kimberly was the project’s head data analyst. She also had a degree in robotics that allowed her to manage the team’s drones. She was Chinese-American, only twenty-six years old, and she and I had become close during our time together at Quantum Industries. I’d be seeing her after the meeting.

The meeting had ended just the way that Dr. Jenkins had wanted it to end. Ridgeway and Winslow had given him the green light. According to the proposed mission schedule we’d be leaving in seventy-two hours. For me that meant I needed to get busy.

“You should be more careful dealing with Jenkins,” Kim told me much later. It was night time, and we were sharing her bed once again. Both of us were covered in perspiration, and both of us were lying there enjoying the afterglow of our recent coupling. It had been nice. Then Kim had brought up Jenkins’ name, and the mood had shifted in a different direction. “You’re not the only bodyguard that the company has on staff. He could replace you.”

“No, he couldn’t,” I told her firmly and with confidence. “It’s too late for him to do it, and besides, I have friends in high places that would step in and make sure he didn’t get his way.”

“You do, do you?” Kim muttered back, her voice filled with doubt. “Who might that be?”

“General Ridgeway for one,” I pointed out without any doubt in my voice that the man would stand by me if I asked him. “While we weren’t the best of friends back in the day’s when I wore a Green Beret and he did as well, I know what kind of soldier he is, and I know for certain that he hates idiots that don’t listen to sound advice. He wasn’t overly impressed when Jenkins’ shut me up, today.”

“Okay,” Kim murmured thoughtfully, “that’s one. Who else do you have in your corner?”

“Well there is a certain NSA Captain that I know of, although I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know that I know her secret,” I replied slowly, not wanting to startle Kim. “I’ve got the feeling that she’d help me out if I asked her. Of course, that might blow her cover and that would be the last thing that I would want to do. I really like this woman.”

Kim tensed up beside me as I told her this. As she did, I tightened my grip on her shoulder, hoping to control what she did next. Thankfully, Kim chose to talk instead of run, or any other action that might have proved counter productive.

“What NSA Captain are you talking about?” Kim asked hesitantly, her voice filled with concern.

“Relax,” I told Kim in turn, trying to reassure her. “Who she is isn’t important, and like I told you, I have no desire to blow her cover. Still, I do wonder if she’d do me a favour if I asked her to do it.”

“What kind of favour,” Kim inquired her voice still tight and edged with a hint of concern. “What if she can’t do it? Would you threaten her cover to get your way?’

“Never,” I told Kim firmly. “I’d never do such a thing, regardless of what the person could do for me or not. I’ve been undercover myself, and I know how tricky it is at times. You never know who to trust. Well that woman can trust me. I’ll keep her secret to my grave.”

Kim fell silent at that. She thought about it for a moment or two. I kept my mouth shut while she was doing it. I was however thinking back to a time and a place that was only two years ago in both our history. I’d just led an A-Team into a terrorist base in some god awful backwater country where we really weren’t supposed to be. The operation had been successful, and we’d captured a ton of intelligence, both physical and electronic. The people at the top had sent an analyst to pick up the stuff and to cart it back home to be looked at in more detail. That analyst had been Kim. While my people and I had been brushed aside by the intelligence boys who’d followed us in after the bullets had stopped flying, I’d seen her and I had pegged her name, just in case I needed it later on. It was a habit that I’d acquired during my days working ‘black ops’.

“What kind of favour are you looking for from this woman?” Kim finally asked, her words coming out slowly.

“I’d like what I had asked Jenkins for,” I told Kim bluntly. “I know that the ‘powers that be’ have ordained that we don’t take in any advanced technology with us during this trip down into the good old days, however I don’t agree. I’d put in my request for specific supplies and items to be cached near our drop point, just in case something goes wrong while we’re there. Naturally, Jenkins is of the opinion that nothing will go wrong. Again, I don’t agree. I’ve had too many missions that went off track seconds after it had started, to think otherwise. I want those supplies shipped in, and left where I can find them, just in case. If nothing does go wrong, then they can be hauled out and there will be no harm, no foul.”

Again, Kim didn’t answer immediately. She did however start to relax again in my arms. I took that as a good sign. In return, I loosened my grip on her shoulder.

“You asked for horses as well,” Kim murmured thoughtfully a few seconds later. “I doubt that the woman would be able to provide you with those. Horses would certainly cause people to sit up and look at what was going on about them.”

“I’d understand that,” I reassured Kim, my voice lightening up a bit as I replied. “In any case, the woman couldn’t cache the horses for use and still guarantee that they would be alive if and when I went for them. In any case, the cave that I’ve identified as being the best place to put the cache of gear is too small to use as a stable. It just wouldn’t work.”

“I agree,” Kim stated firmly in a low voice. “However the other stuff that you’re asked for is possible, although there is still a risk involved. I’m certain the women wouldn’t do anything to compromise her cover. Her mission would definitely come before doing a favour for you.”

“I understand,” I told Kim without hesitation. “For now, let’s leave it at that. Jenkins wants to go over everything again in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.”

Kim agreed with me on that. She rolled over and turned her back to me as she settled down to go to sleep. Instinctively, I spooned in behind her, wrapping my body about hers. As I did I planted a kiss on the back of her neck.

“I’ll miss you while I’m gone,” I told Kim softly, whispering it into her ear.

“I’ll miss you as well,” Kim replied after a moment, her words coming tentatively as she said it. I let it go at that. We both had things to think about, and we both needed our sleep.

The next two days went by in a flash even with Dr. Jenkins being a micromanaging prick. In no time, it seemed, it was time to go.

We were all dressed basically the same. From the video data accumulated by the drones sent back in time Quantum Industries had come up with what they felt was the best mix of clothing and equipment to help us on our mission back in time. Just like my issue with Jenkins about bringing a few pieces of modern equipment along with us on the off chance of needing it, Quantum Industries had felt the same way about clothing and kit. Thus everything we had was organic in nature, except for our flint tools and weapons.

Our basic outfit was made entirely of buckskin. It consisted of a pair of buckskin trousers that tied at the waist with a rawhide drawstring, and a buckskin shirt that came with a hood. We were also wearing buckskin knee-high moccasins. It actually felt very comfortable once you got used to the feel of the material. In addition to the top, the pants, and the moccasins, I was wearing a buckskin loincloth. That was it. The women didn’t get a bra or loincloth. We also each had a broad sash of cowhide about our waists that served as a belt. Into the belt were thrust tools and items that we needed. These items included a fire starting kit, wrapped up in a small pouch made of deer skin, a set of flint tools wrapped up in a pouch made out of cowhide, and a bone handled flint knife. As the warrior / hunter of the group I had a couple of extra items, including a wooden handled stone axe, and a thrusting spear fitted with a shaped flint point. The point was razor sharp.

On top of the clothing and weapons, each of us were carrying a bedroll that consisted of a bear fur and three large deer skins. It was tied up with rawhide thongs and a sling was fastened to it so it could be slung over a shoulder and carried. With the bedroll we were each carrying a spare set of clothing rolled up inside it, and a rain cape. Finally, each of us was carrying a day pack. It was a skin bag that was also fitted with a sling. In the bag we each had some wooden containers that held foodstuff such as nuts, dried fruit, and smoked meats. The containers could be used to drink from, or to eat from.

The only person who had anything different was Dr. Beaufort. The good doctor had a waterproof pouch tied to her belt that contained what Quantum Industries were willing to let her take with her, as medical supplies. There wasn’t much and almost everything was homeopathic in nature. Still, it was something.

The transition from our time to the other was almost instantaneous. One moment we were in a ‘white room’ sealed in and watching a digital clock count down through a clear glass partition, and the next instance we were standing in an open field at the top of a rise over looking a broad grassland. All I remembered about the trip was blinking my eyes a couple of times in surprise. That was it.

At first there was only silence. There wasn’t a sound of any kind. Then Jenkins opened his mouth and started to talk.

“We’re here,” Jenkins declared loudly and enthusiastically, voicing the obvious although no one could really fault him for it. We were, after all, the first to travel in time. No one knew with any certainty, whether it would work or not. Still hearing the idiot as chipper as a schoolboy was sort of annoying. I tried to ignore him for a moment or two, while I got my bearings.

My job was to keep these people alive until we got back to our own time, and that was a job that I took very seriously. On realizing where we were, I hefted my spear and I took a look about us. I wanted to make certain that nothing big and mean was heading towards us. I’d seen the fauna data accumulated by Kim’s drones, and I knew that there were all kinds of nasty threats waiting for us in this time and place. That was why I’d asked for a gun. I hadn’t been given a gun. Still, I meant to do my job and to do it properly. Jenkins had a different idea.