The Cultist's Retreat (The Erik Midgard Case Files Volume 4)

Chapter 13

I materialised under the largest atmosphere dome I had ever seen.

The roof was at least two miles overhead. It was so vast that I could only just see the curve, and I wondered at first if that was an optical illusion, caused by my eyes trying to take it in. The support structure running through it looked as thin and faint as spider webs. I was far enough back in time that experience had not yet taught humanity to accurately calculate how fast settler populations on other planets would grow, when they had built the domes as large as possible. The dome was translucent and above it, filling most of the sky, even larger and harder to comprehend, was the sphere of the sun. The dome was heavily tinted, so you could look directly at the rolling gold surface, as it filled the dome with yellow twilight.

I remembered why I was here and looked around at ground level. I was standing in the middle of an oil seeding base. Most of the buildings around me, spread out over a vast expanse of tarmac, were recognisable as they were in the same layout that you would find on an oil seeding base in the present. An early version of UEO's logo - echoing the WAI logo the security team had worn - was fixed above the entrances. The area around me was deserted and an alarm was blaring.

"Hey! Who the hax are you?"

I looked around as a man in a beige uniform ran towards me, one hand on his holstered unigun.

"Show me your ID. What are you doing here...?"

My wristcom hummed. I glanced down as a different logo appeared on its screen. My future self had planned for this. I held my wristcom up where he could see it and pressed the button to open my helmet visor, letting him see my face.

"Agent Erik Midgard. OPNA Temporal Division," I said. "Sorry I wasn't here sooner. I was about to go off duty when the call came in."

"What call?" said the security guard. He tempered his tone as he scanned my wristcom with his watchcom - at this point in their history, UEO was having to be very careful to appear to be cooperating with the OPNA - but his stress did not go away. "We didn't call. We've got a hostage situation, not a temporal..."

He stopped and stared at the screen of his watch as it gave two loud beeps. I could guess what it was reading; technology more sophisticated, and with different universal date signatures, than itself. Ones from the future.

"It's going to become a temporal situation," I said, as he looked up. "I've come back to help. Where is he?"

"In the labs," said the guard, pointing to a small collection of buildings to our right, looking like a university campus. It would be where they genetically engineered the plants that could grow on Mercury millions of years in the past, and where they would keep plenty of temporal equipment for test runs.

"Good. Get clear. There could still be some damage," I said.

The guard nodded and ran away. I cursed inwardly and forced myself to watch him go. The disaster had destroyed 13% of the planet. There had been no survivors. I could not try to change that. Changing the past to save lives was exactly what the man who was about to cause it had been trying to do. All I could do was stop Kairos from using it.

I pulled out Thor's line tracer and switched it on again. The area around me filled with multicoloured trails. Unlike in the hotel, most of them were in straight lines, probably left by UEO staff evacuating as fast as possible. My timeline led three feet back to where I had arrived. Nearby, Kairos's red-and-gold-flecked one led away, towards the main buildings. That was one piece of good news. For all his planning, one problem Kairos could not have solved before he had Okuninushi's backstepper was that there were no detailed records of the disaster. He did not know exactly where he needed to be. I dashed along his timeline after him, between the two nearest buildings and through a parking area for small ground cars for use inside the dome.