Lost in Time

Volume 7 Part 1: Tide Travelers

Volume 7 Part 1: Tide Travelers

Amid waters that billow and sway,

Tide travelers must find their way...

Up until a certain point in human history, they wouldn't begin to put together what the hell a star was. That it was a blob of ineffably insurmountable proportions bristling with gas that interacted at the subatomic level under immense gravitation to birth pulsing plumes of energy was unfathomable. Modern knowledge of science would have been a higher dimension plane to the 2-dimensional ants that were medieval humans, swimming in the primordial goo of their own primitivism.

And so goes every scientific espial.

It sounds like a fairytale until it goes down in the annals of science.

Nia thought of how mad it would seem to spill it to these wildly atavistic people that she and Walter were travelers from the future, surfers of the tide of time, hurtled through three thousand temporal pages into the past to stop the end of civilization-somehow. That she was an enhanced human with a symbiotic life form taking residence rent-free in her head would speed up their efforts to erect that pyre so they can set her ablaze for either witchcraft or blasphemy-or whichever other silly excuse ancient humans had to kill each other.

Even just the fact that she was second in command on a patrol ship of the Sagittarius Sect of the Cosmic Battalion, the defense arm of the Federation of Planets, would sound ridiculous. These people were so far behind on the Kardashev scale they probably weren't on the scale at all, like side-whiskers on the edge of a shaving blade, barely hanging on, hardly of consequence.

She could see why.

They were a bunch of religious fanatics with a toxic phobia of technology.

She was at odds with their Type V mystery masters, Nia. She couldn't fathom how in their immense wisdom they cast them into the abyss where technology went to die. How the hell were they supposed to save these people! Primitive did not begin to describe the lot of them. They were uncivilized, uneducated, basic-minded, aggravatingly naive sons of...

"Um, miss, would you agree with that?" A baritone, flat and immature, knocked on her eardrums, reaching her like a sonic boom from a klick away.

"Um, what...what was that?" She climbed out of her thoughts and noticed a dozen eyeballs fixated on her. She cleared her throat uneasily, glancing around rapidly to familiarize herself with her surroundings.

Goddamn!

The chief's parlor.

They were seated on some sturdy three-legged stools; Walter beside her and Phil a little way off between them and the chief's entourage. The chief and his wife, the high priestess, were seated on what appeared to be thrones, raised above the rest of them mortals, bedecked with rolling vines, twirling tulips and other floral families Nia couldn't begin to name. A chief's staff was held steadfast in his hand, as though ready to strike the bejesus out of them if they misspoke.

Hera, the Pitkern High Priestess, was clad in regal robes of royal touch, tangerine bird-feather earrings dangling down her earlobes. Her neck was covered in half a dozen neck-rings, spangled and shimmery like spinel rubies in the natural light of the room. She jingled like a fat bunch of keys with every shift and stir.

Damn, no wonder she loathed women wearing jewelry. Nia fancied a thought.

She just hated competition. Pious little bitch!

Nia's glare on the over-embellished priestess was cut short by Walter's warm voice flooding the space like a gust of wind.

"Forgive her Chief, she's just still in recovery. The beast of the forest ran through her pretty bad." He said, his half-smile mocking her in silence. She understood what he meant. By not speaking she was making them look mighty suspicious. And for a bunch of strangers that dropped in on a remote island in the frigging middle of the Pacific without a boat, they were plenty suspicious.