“They get hurt too?”
“A few broken fingers each. Apparently some queer-looking swifter knocked the guns right out of their hands.”
“Queer-looking how?”
“She moved too fast to get a full eyeball, but the men say her speedsuit was torked to look like normal clothes.”
Cahill stoked his jaw. “Huh. That is strange. What prompted the chase in the first place?”
“My men noticed a bloodstain on the driver’s side of the vehicle. They attempted—”
“Sir, I apologize for cutting you off,” said the female Dep, “but it takes time to set up our drills. If you could point us to the location of the tempic attack, that would facilitate our work here.”
The chief blinked at her, befuddled. The woman spoke with a scholarly foreign accent, a quasi-British twang he’d never heard before. Hell and wonders. She’s not even American.
Cahill smirked. “This is Melissa Masaad. Don’t let the skirt fool you. She’s smarter than us.”
Offering the friendliest smile she could muster, Melissa gave the chief a handshake that rivaled Cahill’s in pure ferocity. It was one of the first customs she learned here.
“Masaad,” said the chief, as if her name were all asterisks and ampersands. “That’s quite unique. What part of the world—”
“I’m sorry, sir. Where did you say this attack occurred?”
Melissa was born in British North Sudan. At seventeen, she moved to the motherland to attend Oxford, where she earned advanced degrees in mechanical science and criminology. She spent the next six years in London as an analyst for Military Intelligence, specializing in the study of temporal weaponry. Ten months into her tenure, she received a Royal Commendation for tracking the perpetrators of a deadly rift attack at a Cambridge aerport.
Two years ago, at age thirty, she was offered one of the four hundred immigration slots that the United States extended annually to exceptional applicants. She didn’t hesitate to renounce her British and Sudanese citizenship, one of the chief requirements of naturalization. America demanded sole allegiance from its adopted children. Melissa was prepared to give it.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Sir Edgar Ballott had warned her. He was an old British manatee, an Assistant Director-General of the Security Service. More than her mentor, he considered himself her father figure, albeit one who often imagined her naked.
“The United States may be a peaceful nation, my dear, but it’s teeming with racists, isolationists, and every other breed of regressive bigot. If you believe they’ll embrace a foreigner and a negress as their equal, then I fear you’re in for an abrupt education.”
Melissa had kept silent at the time. She saw no purpose in drawing out a futile conversation.
“I don’t care what the documents say,” Sir Edgar insisted. “England will always be your home.”
England had stopped being her home a long time ago, since the military began using her research to improve their temporic arsenal. She feared it’d be a matter of years, not decades, before His Majesty’s Armed Forces managed to squeeze an entire Cataclysm into the nose of a long-range missile. God help their enemies then. God damn her if she ever played a part in that.
The policemen watched the Deps assemble their devices on the highway—four black obelisks, each eight feet tall and covered in glass lenses. They were placed forty feet apart in a perfect square. Thick cables connected them to a portable computer.
As Melissa helped prep the towers, two state patrolmen eyed her through slitted eyes.
“Huh. I didn’t even know they had duskers in England.”
“Yeah. The limers set their flag in a bunch of savage countries. Guess they brought a few back.”
Melissa ignored them. In her thoughts, Sir Edgar Ballott raised a smug eyebrow.
A half hour later, the ghost drills were ready. Each system cost two million dollars and required five technicians to operate, at a taxpayer cost of seventeen thousand dollars per hour. All that expense and effort to achieve what David Dormer could do with a wave of his hand.
Inside the perimeter of the towers, the recent past came to light. The dilapidated Salgado van reappeared in front of a disembodied strip of white tempic barrier. The projections were as brown and grainy as a Civil War photograph until the technicians made their adjustments. Soon the van could almost pass as the real thing.
Cahill pointed at the ethereal vehicle. “Why are the back doors transparent?”
Melissa squinted at them. “I’ve only seen that effect during a double-echo, when you view the ghost of a ghosted image.”