The Great Altruist (54 page)

           
“You yourself said we know nothing about her; she has no past. How else did this happen?”

           
“That’s a valid hypothesis,” he said. “But if you’re right - and this chart is accurate - that girl has been jumping through time all the way back to 1907.” He studied the paper further and tried to double-check her conclusion, but he was no engineer. “What do you plan to do with this information? Go after her?”

       
    
“Not her. Where she came from. We have to catch them before they try to interfere in our plan, and we now have a chart of all the times she has visited. It may be the only way we stop them.”

       
    
Without hesitating, Roger replied: “What do you need?”

       
    
“A few of the guards for protection and some wrist transporters.”

       
    
He sat silent, thinking over her plan and making sure there was nothing she missed. A moment later, he replied: “Good. Return as soon as you can. We land in forty-eight hours. I go to see my wife in four.”

       
    
Val bowed her head and then left the room. The security locker contained a cache of future weapons which she promptly gave to the guards. A few moments later, Val and the expendable men she brought along for her own protection were no longer to be found in the present.

       
    
She followed the readings from the computer and pinpointed exactly where the first jump through time originated: in 1942. Fortunately, one function of the
Apocalypse’s
teleporter was to allow the ship to travel great distances through all four dimensions. The engineers enabled her wrist device to do the same thing.

           
When Val and the soldiers emerged from the stream of time, they were in a dark room made of concrete. Parts of a nearby wall were blown out by an explosion, and outside on the ground were German soldiers hustling about as planes soared overhead. The hole was too small for them to escape and none of them were able to find an exit.

           
The lights above flickered on and a door at the far end of the room opened. Most of the soldiers fell to the ground before they turned around, but Val and the others fired toward the door as Nazi soldiers streamed into the room and returned fire. More of Val’s guards tumbled to the floor, but not a single bullet was shot in her direction. Out of ammunition, Val tossed her gun aside and crouched behind the bodies of her men. The Nazis stopped firing and all she heard were footsteps coming toward her. She took a deep breath and jumped to her feet, ready to attack.

           
As she prepared to strike the source of the footsteps, two guards grabbed hold of her and threw her to the ground. Within a matter of seconds, her hands were bound and she was knocked unconscious.

           
Val awoke with a severe headache and was strapped to a gurney in a similarly darkened room; her hands and feet were bound, her mouth gagged. She had been stripped naked and felt the sores on her arms where intravenous needles dug into her. Very little light shined, but she could see common laboratory instruments on the tables nearby.

           
A light fixture snapped on above her and light blinded her eyes. She heard the same footsteps from earlier approach.

           
A woman in a lab coat stepped into the light and shook her head. “This wasn’t completely necessary,” she said with a German accent as she removed the gag from Val’s mouth. “Who could hear your screams down here?” She laughed.

           
“Where am I?”

           
“You’re in an experiment facility a hundred feet below the surface,” she answered in very broken English.

           
“I don’t want any trouble. I’m looking for a girl; she’s very dangerous.”

           
“A girl you say? We have several of them down here.” She walked to the wall and turned the other lights on. Val looked around and saw dozens of other women tied to tables, naked, their arms and legs covered in puncture wounds from needles.

           
“What are you going to do to me?” Val asked with a slight quiver in her voice.

           
“The same thing we are doing to the rest of these women. We are trying to design the perfect soldiers. Once we have,” the woman paused, “we will breed them.”

           
Val looked away from the other women and closed her eyes. The woman turned around to check on one of the girls and Val tested the strength of her bounds. No good.

           
“Before we continue with you,” the woman said, “we have some questions for you.” She held up Val’s gun, then her clothing, and finally Archer’s wrist device. “Would you mind explaining what these are? They do not exist in our time.”

           
“No, they don’t,” Val said. “I’m from the future.”

           
“Most scientists would dismiss your claim outright, but I know you speak the truth.”
         
The woman tossed the clothes and guns into a trash container but kept the wrist device in her hand. “I imagine this device is how you came to be here. I think you can be of help to us.”

           
Val snorted and spit at the woman. “Now why would I do that?”

           
The woman reached for a needle on a cart near one of the other girls and raised it for Val to see. Val struggled, but it was useless. “We’ve lost something very dear to us,” she said as she injected the serum into Val’s arm. “One of our girls has escaped from us. We believe the scientist in charge of her project gave her abilities the Fuhrer did not approve of. We need her back.” After emptying the needle, she grabbed another one and jabbed it deep into Val’s hip. Val let out a scream, but the woman only jabbed harder, shoving the tip of the needle into the bone. “There,” she said. “You now have no choice but to help us.”

           
“What did you do to me?”

           
“You are now like her. There were a couple of problems with her creator’s formula, but for your purposes it will work fine. You are to retrieve what was lost and bring her back here."

           
"Who?"

           
"Genesis. She should be easy to find - she's the only human to have
travelled
in time."

           
Val felt a sudden surge of energy race through her body as the bonds began to weaken. "And what if I don't return?"

           
"It will be in your best interest to return as soon as possible. You see, there is a very different concoction mixing with your red blood cells which will provoke a very sudden and painful death in the next twenty-four hours if you do not come back. And please, dear, don't think of going back in time to prevent this from happening. The past is already written." The woman turned to leave and heard the bonds keeping Val to the gurney shatter. She heard Val's feet hit the floor and said: "Killing me will not help you. I am the only with the antidote for the poison pumping through your veins." The woman left Val alone in the room with the other test subjects.

           
Val took a quick look around before she realized the truth of the woman's words: she had no choice. Besides, stopping Genesis was exactly what she came here for. Now she had the means to find her. Her plan could not have gone better. Before she left, she saw the wrist device the woman left behind. She smashed it beneath the leg of the gurney and tossed the remains in the trash container. With just the thought of travelling through time, she disappeared.

       
    
James and Genesis were comfortable wandering the jungle naked, but both of them agreed that the threats they faced earlier made it impossible for them to make a life there. Nor did they want to - the future events needed to be stopped.

       
    
“I’m not sure what we should do,” he said.

       
    
“Are we definitely going to intervene and stop Roger or let things play out?”

       
    
“That's the big question, isn't it? I'm sure – given what I know of you – that you would vote against interference.”

       
    
“Yes. Interference has caused me too much pain.” Her mind instantly thought back to Jadzia and the calloused way she tried to stop a World War, only to lose her sister in the process. “And none of these things happen at random, but they are the accumulation of tiny events, many of them seemingly insignificant.”

       
    
“Right. So what do you think it would take to prevent the extinction?”

       
    
She gathered wood for a fire as night came and the air grew colder. Once a sizable pile was built, she raised her hand up until it glowed red. Instantly, fire dripped from her palm and set the wood ablaze. “The first thing we would need to do is trace back all the events and people that contributed to the disaster.”

       
    
“That would definitely include Roger, Archer, and Val,” he said as he approached the fire and began warming himself.

       
    
“Right, Val...” She spoke with just a hint of jealousy in her voice. “But still, how do we know if they were the only persons responsible? What if Archer's first-grade schoolteacher put some radical idea in his head? What if Roger met some guy in college who knew one of Archer's classmates and got the idea from them? What if Val was born evil?”

       
    
He sensed the slight tone of insecurity in her voice when she mentioned Val. “Nothing ever happened, Gen,” he assured her.

       
    
“I know,” she said. “My point is that in order to stop all of this, it may require us to do some equally bad things.”

       
    
“Like what?”

       
    
“Well, suppose someone involved really
was
born wicked. The only way to stop him or her would be to kill them as a baby. So, is the death of one baby worth saving seven billion?”

       
    
“I don't know,” he answered her.

       
    
“Me neither. It's just something we need to think about. And what about the event that leads up to it. We might need to intervene in some innocuous incident that instilled the desire in someone to do bad. Imagine all we'd have to do: prevent wars, riots, protests, elections, and coups all over the world just because they all added up to form this intricate web of events.

       
    
“And what if you got caught? If I get caught, I can free myself. But you depend on me entirely!”
           

           
She drew close to him and kissed him. “We also have to think logistically, James. We might need to make hundreds of jumps through time just to find out where it all stems from, not to mention all the fixing it would require. And it wouldn't be like before; I'm not tiny anymore. Imagine the confusion we would cause having a naked man and woman magically appear all throughout history!”