Chapter 1

Benjamin Hart sat in the Irish Rose and waited. He was waiting for a woman to show up and join him. Her name was Maria Cortez and at best Ben could only call her an acquaintance. She certainly wasn’t a friend, and while they’d had sex together – more than once – they weren’t lovers. In truth, Ben barely knew Maria. They had met roughly a month ago under unusual circumstances. They’d come together for a brief time and then they’d gone their separate ways. Ben hadn’t expected to hear from the woman ever again. When she had called, asking for this meeting, Ben had been taken by surprise. He had agreed to the meeting out of curiosity and he’d suggested his favourite drinking spot as the venue of choice, so he’d be on familiar ground. Now that he was sitting there and waiting, Ben wondered whether the woman would show up. According to his wrist chronometer she was late. While Ben waited he had a drink.

Ben’s drink was a nice, ice-cold pint of synthetic ale. It was called a ‘Roan Hart’ and it was one of the pub’s ‘house’ specials. It was also Ben’s favourite drink. The ale had great colour and it didn’t weigh on you if you had more than one, plus it had a nice clean after taste that left Ben satisfied and refreshed after imbibing one. It also gave him a nice little buzz, which in the year 2345 was something you couldn’t say about most drinks. Getting drunk was against the law.

Thinking about the law forced Ben to reflect upon Maria and his relationship with her. Technically, Maria was an officer of the law. She worked for the Court of Community Service at their New York detention centre. In reality, she was merely a technician whose primary job was to prepare detainees of the Court for their periods of service; but she did wear a badge and she did carry a stun baton with her when she was on duty. To Ben that made her a cop. Of course, thinking about Maria the cop made Ben remember just how they had met, that very first time.

Ben had gotten himself arrested. It wasn’t something that you wanted to do in 2345. The law was not very forgiving, even at the best of times. A minor infraction could see a person spending a large part of their life serving out their time in jail as an indentured slave. It wasn’t something to look forward to at all. In fact, all felony charges carried a minimum two year period of indentured servitude and for those charged with a felony offence, that servitude was usually served working for one of the major off world mining corporations. If a person was found guilty of a felony offence they’d be packed up and shipped out to the asteroid belt to work. Normally such a sentence amounted to little more than a death sentence which meant that in 2345 any sane person did their best not to get arrested. However, Ben hadn’t been most people. He’d gotten himself arrested on purpose.

That had been the scariest thing that Ben had ever done in his life. Normally he avoided trouble if he could help it. In fact Ben was a model citizen. He got up in the morning and went to work. He did his job without griping, and he attended all the expected extracurricular activities that society expected of him. He’d been a good boy for all of his short twenty-five years of life, and he’d have kept being a good boy if it hadn’t been for Aaron.

Aaron Szule was Ben’s best friend. They’d met back when Ben had been eighteen and he was doing his two years of compulsory military service. Aaron had been in Ben’s training troop, and they had gone through basic training and advance training together. Afterwards they had both served together in the same National Guard detachment and when their period of service had been up, they had both enrolled in the same technical trade school. In a manner of speaking, the two young men had become inseparable. They’d even ended up getting hired by the same corporation after trade school. Aaron had become a shipping clerk in the corporation’s distribution centre, while Ben had become a systems monitor in the manufacturing division. That meant that Ben stood around all day watching robotic assembly units manufacturing washing machines for sale overseas. It wasn’t exciting work, but it did keep Ben off the streets.

What changed, and in a manner of speaking, what put Ben on a road that would eventually see him breaking the law and getting himself arrested and charged, was the fact that his friend, Aaron, had disappeared one day, which in 2345 was something that just didn’t happen; not unless that person had either died or they’d been arrested.

Ben had done his best to find out what had happened to Aaron, which in truth had been an unexpected move on Ben’s part. As with people staying clear of the law if they could help it, people also avoided asking unnecessary questions. His inquiries had resulted in people looking at him strangely, and more importantly, people waning him off. Ben had asked questions at Aaron’s apartment building and he’d called a couple of Aaron’s relatives, whom Ben had met once or twice before. He’d even made enquires at work, through Aaron’s supervisor. The message he was given in reply had been blunt. Stop asking questions and forget about your friend.

In the end Ben had done that. There hadn’t been anything else for him to do. He’d even started not thinking about Aaron as often as he had in the beginning, as the weeks had turned into months, and as Ben had continued with his life. Then it had happened. Aaron had returned and after that Ben’s life was never the same again.

“Would you like another drink, sir,” the robot waiter asked courteously of Ben, rousing him from his thoughts and memories, “or perhaps you would like to order something to eat.”

Ben looked up at the robot for a moment, startled for a second or two, and then looked down at the glass that he was holding in his cupped hands. The glass was empty which disturbed Ben. Frowning Ben glanced at his chronometer and noted the time. Maria was definitely late. Silently he wondered where she was, and reflexively he glanced towards the entrance to the pub, staring at it for another second or two before he turned his gaze back towards the waiting robot.

“Yes,” Ben muttered in acknowledgement, “I’ll have another of the same.”

Ben sat there while the robot waiter rolled off to fetch his order. He watched the machine go and then he turned his mind back to Aaron and his reappearance. It had happened here in this very same pub, a couple of months ago.

Ben had been at the Irish Rose having a drink and eating some finger foods. He’d just gotten out of work and was getting ready to head out for the evening to spend it at the local ‘virtual reality’ complex. Ben had been planning to play his favourite game, Gunslinger, and he’d simply stopped in to fuel up before heading out. He’d never gotten there that night.

That night, over several drinks, Aaron had spun Ben a tale that marvelled him, and that had left Ben with questions that just couldn’t be answered. At first Aaron had just told Ben that he’d been out of town, on an impromptu vacation, but Ben knew that was a lie and he’d told Aaron so, straight to his face. He’d ended up telling Aaron that he’d asked about him, and what Aaron’s supervisor had said to him. Ben had demanded the truth, and eventually Aaron had told Ben, warning him before proceeding that Ben would never believe a word of it. Aaron had been wrong about that.

Aaron admitted to Ben that he’d been arrested. Aaron had known a guy upstate who produced moonshine. He’d visited him from time to time over the years to sample his goods. It was a weakness and Aaron knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. On the last occasion that he’d visited his buddy, the man’s place had been raided by the law. Once the dust had settled, Aaron had found himself arrested and charged with felony possession of an illegal substance, felony intoxication, and disturbing the peace while under the influence of an illegal substance. According to his court appointed lawyer at the time, Aaron was facing a minimum of two years of hard labour as an indentured slave to some mining corporation based on Ceres. It hadn’t been good news and for a moment Aaron had actually contemplated killing himself. Fortunately for Aaron, his court appointed lawyer hadn’t been a dickhead. Instead of saying ‘next’ and moving on to the next client on his list of people he had to help process through the system, the lawyer had offered Aaron a deal.

The deal was to plead guilty to all charges and for Aaron to then place himself at the mercy of the court, offering to do service with the Court of Community Service in lieu of serving hard time. Aaron had willingly accepted the deal. He’d never heard of the Court of Community Service before and at that moment, it hadn’t mattered to him. After all, as far as Aaron was concerned, spending two years scrubbing toilets and handing out food at soup kitchens was better than spending two years in space mining ore from an asteroid, and a hell of a lot safer.

What Aaron hadn’t known at the time was that the Court of Community Service didn’t handle the poor slobs who ended up cleaning toilets for months at a time, or the people who stood handing out food at soup kitchens about the nation. The Court of Community Service was actually an obscure branch of the federal Department of Justice, and they were responsible for sending felons back in time, to help people out in the past.

While Aaron’s story was astonishing and in many ways unbelievable, Ben had to acknowledge that some of it could easily be true. In 2345 everyone knew that the government had access to time travel technology, so the thought of a government bureau or agency making use of it wasn’t that incredible. The technology had actually been around for at least a hundred years if not more. What was incredible was the suggestion that a government agency had sent people back in time. It just wasn’t done. What was done, or so everyone had been told over the years, was that drones and robots were sent back in time to observe and record and definitely not to interact. Humans just didn’t go back in time. It was too dangerous to allow; yet Aaron swore it had happened to him.

For whatever reason, Ben had believed his friend. In fact, Ben had plied Aaron with synthetic ale over the course of the evening in the hopes of learning everything Aaron had to say about what had happened to him. While the synthetic ale didn’t get Aaron drunk, it did loosen his lips.

Aaron told Ben that once processed through the judicial system and sentenced to community service, that he’d been transferred to the Court of Community Services detention centre in New York. There he’d been prepared for his trip. It had taken him a week to get ready. He’d been put into an educator system that had implanted skills into his mind that he’d need to survive in the past, and then he’d been tested by the technical support staff of the facility, within a ‘virtual reality’ complex, to see if he could recall what he had been taught. Aaron had stated that the week had been tough, but enjoyable. On the last day he’d been kitted out in the attire of the era he was going to visit, and he’d been issued with a horse. After that he’d been sent back in time.

Aaron had told his tale of how he’d spent most of his period of service helping out a family in what he’d learned was pre-Civil War Kansas. He’d come upon the family by accident. The family had been ambushed by bushwhackers, who at the time Aaron had shown up, had been in the process of raping the women folk. Aaron had killed the men, and he’d saved not only the women folk but the rest of the family. After that brief piece of excitement, Aaron had travelled with them to their homestead where he ended up staying for three weeks, helping with the farm work, while the father of the family recovered from the injuries that he’d sustained in the attack.

Ben had ended up asking why at the end of the tale. It was something that Aaron hadn’t been able to answer. However, Aaron had been able to tell Ben why he’d been picked to go. Ben had found that part of the story very interesting.

Aaron admitted that he’d learned the ‘why him’ from his lawyer. According to the man, the Court of Community Service was always on the lookout for what they called volunteers. As such they had criteria that they used to pick and choose from the thousands of people detained by the authorities every day, throughout the nation. Those criteria consisted of four points. They were physical health, mental health, reason for detention, and personal history. This meant that the Court of Community Service didn’t take just anyone who wanted to get out of spending the rest of their lives in indentured servitude. They were picky. They wanted people who were physically and mentally fit.

The last thing they wanted was to send someone back in time who collapsed because of a heart attack, or who were mentally unstable. History was full of crazy people and the court certainly didn’t want to add to that number. The Court of Community Service wanted people who’d been arrested for disturbing the peace and not someone who’d murdered somebody. There were enough arsonists, rapists, and murderers in the past already. Ben could easily understand their reasoning.

The fourth criterion was the most interesting point from Ben’s perspective. Aaron had told Ben that the court looked at what a person did, outside working hours. They wanted a person who was active and not just some ‘couch potato’. By practice, most corporations in 2345 offered a range of extracurricular activities for their employees, knowing philosophically that a happy body was a productive employee. Most corporations provided their employees with access to a corporate gym and/or dojo. Some even sent their employees off on retreats to the nation’s few surviving national parks so they could commune with nature. Ben’s company did all three things, and both Aaron and Ben had availed themselves of those services routinely. On top of that, both Aaron and Ben had frequented the local ‘virtual reality’ complex where they’d competed in a number of adventures. Aaron had stated that the court had looked at those activities as well.

To put it mildly, Aaron’s story had left Ben with something to think about. It took a few days for the tale to sink in, and for Ben to start tearing it apart, trying to understand what Aaron had told him. With Aaron back to work and life moving on, Ben had ample opportunity to discuss the topic with his friend. The one thing that Ben got out of it was the impression that Aaron wanted to go back and do it all over again. When Ben asked Aaron about that, Aaron had admitted that he was interested. In fact, he’d queried Ben on whether or not he’d do it if he had the chance. Ben had been forced eventually to admit that he would. It was at that point that Ben had made his decision.

He hadn’t shared it with Aaron. He hadn’t wanted to get his friend in trouble, just in case it didn’t work, but one week after that fateful revelation, Benjamin Hart had got himself arrested for disturbing the peace. After that, as they used to say a long time ago, the rest was history.

Benjamin Hart was in heaven. He was mounted upon a big bay mare riding across the open plains of the old west, underneath a clear blue sky, and absolutely alone. It was fantastic and all Ben could do was smile happily about it and enjoy himself, because he knew it wouldn’t last.

For the most part Ben’s adventure so far had been uneventful. He’d popped out of nowhere a few miles back, appearing in the centre of a small wooded lot. He’d followed a game trail out of it; once he’d gotten his bearings, and quickly found himself out on the open plains. Since then he’d been heading towards the northwest, simply riding along and enjoying himself.

What marvelled Ben the most was the openness of the terrain. While Ben had visited a couple of national parks in the course of his life, he really had no experience with the great outdoors, and those parks had been heavily forested. Here and now, out on the plain, where the landscape stretched for miles and all that Ben could see was prairie grass and the occasional clump of scrub brush or trees, it was a different story. In many ways it was overwhelming, especially for someone who had grown up in a city where people lived in tightly packed boroughs, housed one on top of the other.

It was nearing noon when Ben was pulled from his reverie. The sun had been beating down on him for some time now and he’d pulled up to take a swig of water from his canteen, and to glance about him in hopes of spotting a stream where he could water his horse. It was while he sat there taking a second drink that the gunshot reached his ear. What made him start with surprise was the fact that the first shot was followed in quick succession by others.

Ben looked about himself anxiously in response to hearing the shots. He knew that they’d come from somewhere nearby; and he knew, if only instinctively, that several shots going off one after the other boded ill tidings. It was one thing for a man to hear a single shot out here on the frontier and it was another to hear more than one, especially one right after another.

Ben glanced to the north of him and then to the west. He was pretty certain that the shots had come from that direction. The only thing he could see was more open prairie. That didn’t mean too much though. He’d already found out that the land rolled occasionally, and it was easy for a rider not to see that just ahead of him, hidden by the tall prairie grass was a dip in the land or a hidden valley. With this in mind Ben prodded his mount towards the west and in the direction he thought the gunshots had come from.