Yesterday's Cat: Episode 1: Before the Storm

Episode 1: Before the Storm
by Naomi Kramer

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Naomi Kramer. All rights reserved.

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If you've read my
Bad Fuck
collections, you'll
note that the start of this episode comes from one of those short stories. See, I
got to wondering
why
a naked redhead was snogging Wayne and telling him to
hang around for seven years. This serial is the answer.

Wayne browsed the science fiction shelves of the library,
sighing.

“Read it, read it, hate that author, Star Wars crap, read
that whole bloody shelf. Why, Lord? Why is the best stuff always in short
supply?” he muttered.

He sighed, pulled out a Heinlein hardback he'd read at
least a dozen times before, and made his way to a small, secluded reading area
near one of the few windows. It was on the far side of the non-fiction from the
fiction and children's area, so was usually sparsely populated and free of
drooling, snotty brats.

Today, though, a naked woman sat on one of the low vinyl
single-person lounges, legs crossed, seeming deeply engrossed in a Stephen
Hawking tome. Luxurious red hair cascaded over her shoulders and completely
failed to hide anything of interest.

Wayne dropped his book on his foot and yelped.

“Shhhh!” said the woman without looking up, “this is a
library, not a pleasure dome.”

She turned a page. The tortoiseshell cat sitting on the
floor next to her lounge shot him a dirty look and contorted to lick its side.

Wayne bent to pick up his book, fumbled it, but caught it
just in time to avoid another assault on his foot – and the naked woman's ears.

“Oh, a second,” said the woman, looking up, “What year is
this?”

Wayne's brain sent his mouth into an open-close idle cycle
while it attempted to wrest a train of thought away from his hormones.

“I love you,” he blurted.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Uhhh… 2011,” he said slowly.

“Damn, I'm early,” she said, tapping what looked like a
wristwatch and looking annoyed.

She shrugged, stood up, walked over to him and slid her
arms around his neck. She slowly kissed his still-hanging-open mouth, pressed
against him like jelly against its mould.

“Keep coming here,” she said, “I'll be back to fuck you in
a few years.”

Then she disappeared.

****

The naked redhead stepped out of the liftwell and paused,
looking left and right with a slightly furrowed brow.

“May I help you, Citizen?” a passing brunette enquired.

“The time department – has it moved?” she asked.

The brunette chuckled.

“They're always doing that. Something about the river of
time overflowing its banks and cutting a new bed. Then they start spouting
equations and I'm lost.”

“Er – do you know where they went?”

“Three floors up, on your right as you leave the lift.
Somewhere up there. I'm not sure where.”

“Thank you!” the redhead said, and walked back into the
waiting liftwell, wafting silently upwards out of sight.

“Was that Angie Chau?” a man asked, walking out of an
office.

The brunette shrugged.

“Wow,” he whispered, and reversed into his office.

****

“Geek, we have a big problem!” the redhead yelled as she
stomped into the Time Department.

“Angie!” someone called from a back room. “Whatever it is,
sweetie, I'll be right with you!”

She rolled her eyes and sat in an uncomfortable metal
chair, tapping her foot and looking at her watch, then away, with a scowl.

A young-looking man hurried from a back room, threading his
way through lab benches.

“Angie! What's up?”

“This farkling watch! I got there seven years too early!
Seven years! He was all fat and immature!” she said, shoving the watch in his
face.

“Oh. That's not good, that's not good at all!”

“Damn straight!”

He unbuckled the watch from her wrist and took it away to a
lab bench, clucking in concern. An hour later, to the tune of Angie's teeth
grinding, Geek came back with a meek look and the watch.

“Our fault, sorry - the calibration was off. Enough to make
a big difference, travelling back that distance. I'm so sorry, Angie, I don't
know how it slipped through our quality checks.”

“It's not good enough, Geek. That could've landed me in the
middle of some war.”

Geek nodded, looking sober.

“Yes. I'll find out what happened - and I'll check every
single watch myself and place it in the operative's hands until I do.”

“OK. Thanks, Geek.”

“Live long, Ange.”

****

Angie took a slide to her apartment downtown, logged in at
the doorbot and entered.

“Random, I'm home!” she yelled.

A tortoiseshell cat leapt onto the table near the front
door and launched itself at her throat, but found itself caught to her chest and
hugged.

“Beast,” Angie said with affection, and put her back on the
floor. “I wish I knew how you manage to get back before me.”

She opened a packet of cat food, and poured it into a bowl.
Random approached, sniffed, and meowed querulously.

“Yes, I know, the cat food's better in the past,” she said,
shrugging. “We'll be back soon, puss. Until then, eat the fardling food,
kapische?”

Random glared, then ate. Slowly, so Angie knew she was
unimpressed.

****

Angie’s comm jingled. She opened her eyes and sighed. Why
did the thing only go off in the middle of a sleep cycle? She shook herself
awake, jumped out of bed, and stood.

“Answer call,” she said to the air.

Geek appeared in the air in front of her.

“Don’t you ever dress?” he asked, in a tone of curiosity,
rather than judgment.

“Skin saves time in emergencies,” she said, and shrugged.
“What’s up, buster? You woke me.”

“I need you to come into the lab right away. No excuses.
There are some tests I forgot to run,” he said, and disappeared.

Angie frowned. Geek was the chatty type, and he was rarely
rude. Which meant he was probably worried about spilling something on a
non-secure channel. A call from the Time Department to her apartment should be
triple-encrypted and, as the tech guys put it, ‘safe as pi’.

“I
knew
those
secure channels were a load of hooey,” she muttered.

She buckled on a knife-and-tool belt, then pushed a bottle
of water, a food-bar, and her tablet into a backpack. She held it open while
calling Random, and the cat meowed and jumped in. No better security for one’s
belongings, in Angie’s opinion, than a grumpy cat. They meowed louder than your
average siren, could take the skin off someone’s face faster than you could say,
“OW ow ow get it off me I’m dying here!” and had judgment, besides. Random could
pick a dishonest person at a hundred metres.

Doorbot locked, Angie took a slide back toward the time
department. This particular location was handy – only a single slide from her
place, no transfers. Some of the others had been way out in the burbs. Not that
transfers were difficult, mind – but it required a touch of agility, and on
three hours sleep, she was feeling just a little bit fuzzed out.

“Bring on technology that doesn’t rely on sitting on top of
a time-stream,” she muttered.

She reached the building, logged in to the doorbot, and
lifted up to the Time Department on the seventh floor. Then thanked the gods of
technology for silent liftwells… because she could see through the open lab
door, leaning against lab benches, four men dressed in black, wearing
balaclavas.

“Shit,” she murmured, and ducked out of their line of
sight. “Shit, shit, shit!”

There was a locked door behind her – the only option to get
out while staying out of their line of sight, apart from the antiquated ‘fire
exit’ door that led to stairs which wound up and down for the entire height of
the building. No one used them any more. Antigrav units were failsafe these
days. If your antigrav failed, you were about to have far more serious troubles
than getting smushed into a pile of bloody tissue at the bottom of a liftwell.
Besides, all liftwells had mandatory mesh installed, so you could always just
climb down if the unthinkable happened. But building regulations still mandated
fire stairs. Bloody bureaucracy.

The sign on the fire exit explained that an alarm would
automatically be sounded if the door were opened. The locked door behind her
would warble a greeting if she logged in to open it. Either way, she’d be
alerting the goons that something was going on. They clearly had access to
secure areas, so she wouldn’t be safe in a locked room. However, there was the
smallest chance that the ‘automatic alarm’ on the fire exit had been
disconnected – or never connected in the first place. And if it did go off, it
would cause a building-wide alarm, and the goons wouldn’t know for sure where it
came from. Or probably even what caused it.

Maybe they were friendlies. No, not likely. Who dressed in
balaclavas to go visiting?

She could try taking them out – if time agents were issued
anything more than a knife to protect themselves with. Which they weren’t, of
course, because otherwise they’d be causing paradoxes all over the place.

So, running it was. Of course, she could just try sneaking
out of the liftwell… but the ‘down’ liftwell was right in their line of sight.
She’d been damn lucky just to get in without being seen. Or she could… shit, sit
here all day debating while her chances of being discovered rose ever higher!
She slid over to the fire exit door and examined the sign. Screws held it onto
the door. Hrmm… if the sign wasn’t there, maybe they wouldn’t even realise what
it was. She swung her backpack onto the ground and pulled out the toolkit,
patting Random in passing. She stayed still and quiet, ears flattened. The cat
had better instincts than Angie did. As quickly as she could, she unscrewed the
fire exit sign and stuffed it in her bag, along with the toolkit. Random shifted
and shot her a dirty look. She put a finger to her lips, and received a dirtier
look in response.
I know what I’m doing
,
she seemed to be thinking,
so just focus
on your part, eh?

Angie slid the backpack onto her back.

“Showtime,” she whispered to Random, and opened the door.

Silence.

She slipped through the gap and closed the door behind her.
Wow. She’d been right, they’d disconnected the thing. What a relief.

Then the wailing of a fire alarm started.

Claws pricked her neck.

“Mrrrrow!” said Random.

“Yeah yeah, I know,” Angie said.

She ran up two flights of stairs, and paused on the ninth
level. That should give her enough leeway if they decided to use the fire stairs
– as they technically should. And hopefully she’d hear them coming if they
decided to come up and check for snoopers. Hopefully. The alarm was so loud and
obtrusive that she wasn’t sure she’d hear a T. Rex thumping toward her.

A couple of minutes later, nothing at all had happened. The
alarm was still blaring. No one had come anywhere near her.

“Random, would you go scout for me?” she asked.

Random grumbled and jumped out of the backpack, padding
downstairs. She returned, ears pricked forward, tail high, and jumped back into
the backpack.

“Mrrrow!”

Angie took that as a ‘coast clear’ and headed back
downstairs to the seventh floor. She pulled it open very slowly and peered out.
No one in sight. The lab door was closed, as it should have been earlier. Trap,
or had they just cleaned up after themselves? Only one way to find out. She
slipped over to the door, logged in, and it chirped and opened for her. She
flattened herself against the other side of the wall. No one fired. She looked
in – empty. Phew.

Random jumped over her shoulder to the floor, and ran in a
low crouch toward the nearest lab bench. Angie stifled a laugh. She’d never get
delusions of being in charge of the operation while Random was around. She
returned at a run, leapt into her arms, and purred. Well, that was an
adrenaline-inducing way to tell her they’d gone, but at least they should be
safe to check things out for a minute or two before the fire brigade got here.
If they got here, of course. They might not bother, what with the lack of
buildings surrounding this one, and the fact that none of the smoke detectors
had reported any trouble.

Someone groaned.