Chapter 71

Time flies when you’re busy, and my tribe was definitely busy. We celebrated the fall festival. It was a well needed respite. Six men took mates, including Bogdi, Dunbar, Rugar; and, surprisingly, Tikal. He took Gada as his second wife. We then harvested our crops and got ready for winter.

Winter actually came late, and to our pleasant surprise it wasn’t as bad as the winter the year before. It meant that people could get out from time to time to enjoy the weather and to do something other than sitting about playing checkers or backgammon, a game I’d introduced to our people that year. We celebrated our winter festival with a naming day, and a couple of more men taking an extra mate. With the aid of the Gateway, my hunters ranged far in their effort to keep our huge population fed. It made life a little easier for us and it ensured that we weren’t over hunting the game that lived in the immediate vicinity of our community. Before we knew it spring was upon us again.

With spring came work. I’d spent the winter reflecting on our current set up in our settlement, and I had spent time reviewing what had been accomplished in the south. I realized that we’d outgrown some of our existing facilities. There really was no way to feed the entire community from our existing kitchen, and even with new latrines and a second bathhouse, we were hard pressed in ensuring the basics of hygiene in the community. Clara had seen a rise in sanitary related illnesses over the winter, particularly amongst the newest members of our community, and while we hadn’t lost anyone, it had become serious enough that Clara had been forced to break into her limited supply of uptime medicine for at least a couple of her patients. What this meant to me was that I had a long spring and summer ahead of me, working to rectify the problems.

The plus in all of this was the fact that we had lots of willing hands available to us, and even though many of my people had lived well for the last few years in the longhouses that I’d built for them, they could still rough it if need be. It made it easy when I told everyone what was going to happen.

With the coming of spring came the thought of other things, besides planting and renovating our settlement. Some people thought about Sygor. They wondered openly whether the young hunter would return. I tried to avoid those conversations. After all I had other matters to worry about.

A year had gone by since I’d led my expedition south to confront Winslow and his thugs, and to defeat them, and it was almost a year since I’d headed north to hunt the bastard down and see to it that he died; and still, I hadn’t sent the drone through the Gateway, as everyone who was in the know expected me to do. Not doing so had raised a lot of questions; many of which I really had no answer for. Fortunately, I had one answer in the can that they couldn’t challenge and that was the cryptic note that I’d received when the drone had originally appeared. It had plainly stated that I would use the drone when I thought the time was right. I just told them, those who were in the know, that the time just wasn’t right.

It was a lie though. I’d wanted to send the drone through the Gateway and move on with my life months ago, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Every time I did think about it, I would travel south to the old base, and I would spend a week there reviewing everything that Kim and I had put together in the way of evidence against Winslow and Quantum, and against those who’d supported him, including the now long dead senator who’d had presidential aspirations. I would read through everything, and update it if it was needed, and then I would pack it all away once again, informing everyone that on reflection the time just wasn’t right. I did it for one reason, and one reason only: Guilt.

In one way or another I’d felt guilt ever since Kim had ended up with me in the here and now, and she’d explained to me the facts of life. At the time, when I had started putting two and two together and I’d reasoned out that I had been an instrumental part in everything up to that point, both good and bad, and that I had played a significant role in briefing General Ridgeway about what Winslow had been up to on our Earth and here on the Earth that was now my home, I’d started to feel guilty.

I’d spoken to Clara and Gabby about it. Both women had been supportive and understanding. In fact Gabby had been very understanding when I had confessed that in a manner of speaking, I had been responsible for setting Winslow’s goons after her. To them it was all water under the bridge, but to me it was stuff that I had done, that I hadn’t done yet. It was the old time paradox situation.

My guilt told me that I should change the story I was sending through the Gateway to Ridgeway. At the very least I could ensure that Katherine was more forthcoming about things when she arrived. It would keep me from trekking north, and it would keep Gort, Geeta, and Bogdi from being captured and abused by the assholes manning the southern compound. Of course, that would mean that I would never have met Marta and the other women in her group, nor would I have met Nola. I certainly wouldn’t have run into Mondo’s pet shaman and I wouldn’t have been there to rescue Wodon, Sooka, and the others who’d been with them that day near the mouth of the mountain pass. A lot would certainly have changed if Katherine had told me she’d been sent back by Kim and that a second compound had been set up south of our location. In the end, I don’t think it would have mattered much on the strategic level, but it would have meant that people now living in my tribe, and whom I consider my friends, would most likely have died. Those thoughts fuelled my feeling of guilt and they kept me from sending the drone.

One other thing kept me from sending the drone, although the reason was related to feeling guilty, as well. That reason was the uptime people now living with me and in the other two communities. Most of them had adapted well to life in the here and now, but some hadn’t, and I knew that; knowing it made me feel guilty again.

I spoke to Clara and Gabby about it, once spring was upon us and we were beginning a new season of activity designed to improve our existence in this world we were living in. Both reminded me that I’d given those uptime people the chance to go home and that they had chosen to stay. It didn’t matter to Clara and Gabby that the likelihood was that those that had gone home had probably ended up in prison, or worse, depending on who met them on the other side. To them, all that mattered was that I’d given the other people a choice, and they had made it. As such, they should live with it and I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. The thing was that I did feel guilty, and I felt that if I did open the Gateway once again, if only for a brief moment to send the probe through to our old Earth, I should allow those people who were unhappy to go as well. Clara and Gabby disagreed. So did Kim.

I went and spoke to Kim right after the spring festival and before any renovations started at the northern settlement. She had spent the winter in the south keeping Koo company and acting as my eyes and ears amongst the southern settlements. She was happy to see me, but she wasn’t very sympathetic.

“You’ve got to stop feeling guilty and move on,” Kim told me bluntly. “It’s time to send the drone through and you know it.”

We were sitting in the Gateway building. Koo, Monty, and Hendrick were with us. The four of them had been manning the Gateway all winter, spelling each other off, and working at keeping it running. It was a very valuable asset and it needed constant care. I appreciated the work that they had done.

“I should at least tell people that we’re opening the Gateway back to Earth again,” I told Kim in a weak protest. “It’s the only fair thing to do.”

“I don’t agree,” Hendrick interjected. “You gave us all a choice a year ago and we made it. We chose to stay and regardless of how things have turned out for some of us, we should live with that fact and accept it. I, for one, am happy to be living here.”

I smiled at that piece of information. Hendrick had fitted into life here easily. He’d taken up boat building both for our community and for the communities that lay about our settlements. His abilities had made us friends and his success had made him an important member of our tribe. He’d even taken a couple of local women as his mates, and from what Alexa had told me he would soon be a father. The man certainly didn’t have much to complain about.

My problem was that others did, and more importantly, I heard about it all the time. Helen wasn’t happy here in the south. For the most part she kept her mouth shut and she toed the line, but from time to time she grumbled, particularly whenever she had something to drink. With no fuel for the helicopters, and none likely to be available for some time, Helen was out of a job, and to be blunt about it, she wasn’t suited for much else. She worked to keep busy in Burton’s settlement, but she only did what she had to do to keep other people from griping. The same story applied to Gus. Even though the man had found a niche in our community, and love; he wasn’t happy. Gus had taken up the job as my brew master. He actually was pretty good at it. He’d assembled a team of helpers, and he’d tripled what wines and spirits I’d put down the year before. He’d established a relationship with Carlos, once he was certain that nobody cared. Still he griped all the time, declaring openly that he wished he could go home.

Surprisingly, the two people I’d been the most concerned about had actually settled in, and they were both happy living in the here and now, or at least they said they were. Those two were Carmen and Gloria. Carmen had transitioned from medic to child care giver and teacher over the winter, taking up the challenge that I had presented to her. She’d established a permanent relationship with Lottie, and a friend with benefits relationship with Ruba. She was actually looking forward to the day Ruba gave birth to my child. In a way I got the impression that Carmen thought of the child as her own. I was happy that she did. My family was large and I didn’t mind at all that Carmen wanted to be part of it, if only at the periphery. I could live with it, as could she.

Gloria had settled in as well. Clara had taken her under her wing and Gloria had responded well. Gabby had also helped her out which I was pleased with. I think part of what had helped Gloria was the cultural similarities that the three women shared. Both Clara and Gloria were native Europeans, both coming from Latin countries, and while Gabby had been a Lebanese-Canadian, she’d spent years in Europe working with Clara. The three of them shared a common background. Another thing they shared was a common faith. Both women were Catholic by birth and by upbringing. While Clara was for the most part non-practising, that shared faith gave them something to bond over. It helped that a few others in our community were also Catholics. It meant that Gloria had people she could reach out to, and identify with, during her struggle to recover from the abuse that she’d suffered at the hands of Winslow’s thugs. I actually encouraged it, even though I was the tribe’s chief shaman. While I might openly promote the tribe’s shamanistic beliefs and customs, in truth I wasn’t a hardcore zealot. It helped a lot that our customs were an amalgamation of several cultures practices. It allowed me the liberty to permit spiritual freedom, and that in turn gave Gloria the support she needed.

The only thing that Gloria actually griped about was the lack of men. It took her a long time for her to bounce back from the violence done to her by Winslow and his goons, but she did heal to some degree, and when she had healed enough, Gloria realized that her options for the future were limited. Almost every male in our tribe, in all three communities, already had a mate. It meant that if Gloria wanted to settle into a long term relationship with anyone she would have to share, and for her that was something that she didn’t want to do. As I’d mentioned, Gloria was a good Catholic girl from the old country and while she wasn’t there any more, she still wanted the same old things. She wanted a husband of her own and a baby. I could give her one of those things but not the other.

My discussion with Kim and the others didn’t last long. Kim and the others were of the opinion that I should keep my mouth shut and simply send the drone through the Gateway. I still didn’t agree with them. People knew about the drone and they knew what I intended to do with it, and in my heart I knew that I should speak to them. In the end I went with my feelings. I decided to do it by community, starting with the settlement in the north.

It turned out that while people liked to gripe, no one and that included Helen and Gus, wanted to risk the trip back home. Even when I explained to people that the drone wasn’t going back to when they left our Earth for here, but that it was going back at least a year in the past and maybe a bit more, no one stood up and asked to go with it. I got the impression, at least from Gus, that the fact that the drone was headed on a one way trip to a military training establishment, that was controlled and filled with special operations types, that they didn’t want to take the risk of being arrested. Even if they only fell into General Ridgeway’s hands, there was a good chance that he’d toss anyone who showed up from here into cells. Just as I had put it bluntly in the documentation that I’d prepared to send back to the man. I knew, and I knew that he knew, that allowing people to run about spreading rumours about the Gateway and Quantum would have been detrimental to the success of the mission I was handing him. In a way I was relieved when everyone turned me down. It relieved my guilty conscience having told them they could do it, but it also relieved the guilt I would have felt if they had taken me up on the offer. Yeah, the situation was very complicated.

Amazingly, even after speaking to everyone about sending the drone back through the Gateway, I still didn’t send it. The reason was that in talking to everyone, I came to the realization that I had one last job to do before I could close the book on Winslow and his goons. There were three compounds out there unaccounted for. For all I knew the men in each of them could be dead, but that really didn’t matter. I still needed to go and check the places out, so that the report I was sending back to the General was complete.

The realization that I still had outstanding jobs to be done led me to have another conversation with Kim and the others, and then with Burton and Dunbar. We had missions to plan and the time was right to get the jobs done.

I put Monty and Hendrick to work doing the math. I wanted to take a four person team, including myself, on this mission. My intention was to travel to the closest compound first and then work my way around the world until all three compounds had been taken out. While the two men did their work, I sat down with Kim, Burton, and Dunbar and the four of us reviewed everything we knew about each of the compounds.

We actually knew a lot. Winslow had backed up reams of data on each facility when he’d made the transition from our Earth to the here and now. He had lists of who was stationed at each compound, how many container units made up each facility, and what kind of gear each facility had. It meant that we knew what kind of threat we’d be facing when we did drop in and pay them a visit.

In truth all of the compounds were top heavy with support personnel. It made sense when you reviewed the facts. The facility in what would one day be Kuwait in our world was set up not only to find and pump crude oil, but it was also to refine and process it into usable fuels and lubricants, and to store it. The compound consisted of a standard eight container set up that provided a command centre, a kitchen unit, a medical unit, a mobile laundry and bath, a workshop, and three stacked barracks. The exploration facility was another matter. It consisted of sixteen containers, of which one was a facility control office, four served as storage units for parts and hardware, two served as storage tanks, and the rest served as pumping units and processing facilities. In total the facility had thirty-six people stationed at it, or at least it had when Quantum had transitioned the facility to this world. Who knew how many would be still alive there, now that two years had passed by since they’d stepped through the Gateway. Fortunately from my perspective, that number only contained six security members. That meant if we were really lucky, once we did make contact we’d only have a few people to kill.

It took twenty-four hours for Monty and Hendrick to come up with the numbers. It turned out that a four man reconnaissance team, on foot and packing their own kit in, would take only thirty-three percent of the energy available to the Gateway to make a transition, at the distance required. If we took horses along with us, those numbers would double at the very least, if not climb even higher. It meant that if we did take horses with us, we’d be stuck for at least twenty-four hours while the battery farm recharged. I decided that walking wasn’t that bad of an idea after all.

I kept matters simple on this trip. I picked Dunbar and Burton to come with me, and after some lengthy conversation with Clara and Alexa, picked Gloria to also join us. I had no idea what we were stepping into, so I wanted a medic with me. Clara and Alexa had given Gloria a clean bill of health, and she wanted to come on the trip. I would have preferred to take Carmen along, but she was spending her time helping Ruba out with my newest son.

The transition went without a hitch, which to me was a very good thing. We ended up in a coastal region that certainly didn’t look like anything that I remembered from the time I was stationed in Kuwait. The area reminded me of an African savannah more than anything else. There was a great swath of grassland dotted with clusters of brush and trees. It was hot, but not that hot, and the sky was clear. We secured our landing area first. The last thing I wanted to do was to drop in on the compound unexpectedly, or any locals that might be living around here. Once our landing site was secured, we got to work.

We did have one thing with us that would help us out in finding the compound and learning what the situation was in our immediate vicinity. We had a hand-launched drone. The drone was the small one that we’d made use of before, back at the base. It only had a range of about fifty miles and was radio operated, but it was better than stumbling about trying to pinpoint where we were. I let Dunbar set it up and then we launched it.

It turned out that we weren’t that far away from the compound. Dunbar flew the drone in ever expanding circles from our location and within fifteen minutes he had the drone buzzing the place.

There wasn’t anyway around that point. The drone had a limited altitude as well as range, and while the electric powered motor on the device meant that the drone was essentially silent, there was no way we could keep anyone on the ground from looking up and spotting it if the shadow cast by the drone crossed over them. The drone was bat-winged, and it would have been obvious to any uptime person glancing at it, that it wasn’t a bird. All we could do was cross our fingers and hope that nobody took notice of it. If they did, the drone would definitely advertise our presence in the area which could certainly make life interesting for us.

Fortunately it didn’t happen. It only took a couple of flights over the target to reveal everything that we needed to know about the compound. The video feed sent back images that certainly suggested that the compound was not only abandoned, but it had been that way for a while.

“So what do you want to do now?” Dunbar asked me, once I’d taken a look at the information being sent back to him. “Do you want me to bring the bird back home?”

I shook my head no and pointed to the control unit that Dunbar was using to control the drone. The battery level was still safely in the green and the distance between us and the device was only about five miles. I suggested that Dunbar start searching the area near the compound and the facility, and then when the power level dropped into the yellow, he could turn the drone around and bring it back to us. Once he had, we’d decide what to do next.

It took Dunbar another fifteen minutes of flying circles, around and around the compound and facility to find anything that could prove interesting to us. He stumbled on a broad, shallow river that lay another five miles away and towards the west. At that point the power level dropped into the yellow. Dunbar let me know that he was bringing the drone back.

We talked while we waited for the bird to get back to us. I decided that we’d head for the compound and check it out. It was only five miles away, and from what we’d seen watching the video feed, the terrain wasn’t that rough. We should make it easily at a quick walk.

For the most part our trek to the compound and the facility proved uneventful. I led the way with Burton out on a flank, Gloria trailing behind me, and Dunbar bringing up the rear. We spotted game as we moved along, and sign that there were some big cats in the region, but nothing else, or at least nothing else until we got within the vicinity of the compound.

The first thing we spotted that told us that all hadn’t gone well in the area, was the wreckage of an ATV. We came upon it roughly five hundred yards out from the compound, and the sight of it made us stop and wonder. Someone, and it could have been anyone, had driven the ATV head on into a boulder. What made us stand there and wonder was the fact that the boulder, which was man-sized in height and twice as wide, rested in the middle of an empty field. It didn’t make any sense at all. Even so, we did check it out.

First off, the ATV had a crumpled front end, a broken windscreen and the right front tire had come off due to the impact. More importantly, there were dried blood stains on the driver’s seat and on the crumpled front of the vehicle. There were none on the rock. From the look of it, whoever had crashed had bled out. Interestingly, there were no signs of bones or pieces of clothing in the wreckage which suggested to all of us that whoever had crashed had been moved after their death. Hopefully they’d been given a decent burial.

We didn’t mess around after that. When we got to the compound, I sent Burton in, while the rest of us covered him. He reported back within minutes that the place was clear. Once he had, we moved in.

We didn’t find anything, or to be more precise we didn’t find a slaughter house like the northern compound had been. In fact, we found no remains at all, human or otherwise. We also didn’t find a lot of other stuff, all of which suggested to me that whoever had been here had simply walked away.

Everything spoke to us. Once we’d checked out the compound, we headed over to the facility which was another mile and a half away. We found it shut down and sealed up as if somebody who had known what they’d been doing, had done the job properly. It didn’t look rushed. I’d gotten the same impression looking at the compound. What was there was properly packed away, and what wasn’t had been carefully removed. Most of that stuff appeared to be personal gear, tables and chairs, bedding including mattresses, and all food items. It had been taken away with the minimal of effort, and what had been left behind had been closed up and sealed against the elements.