Eric Flint - Time spike

Ignorance was the greatest enemy of all. It had taken more lives than disease, war and weather combined. The sun was down and the fires were lit. Watkins looked at the flickering flames, hoping they would be enough to keep the new animals at bay. "Chief." Geoffrey didn't turn around to look at Susan Fisher, one of the Cherokee healers. She was good at what she did, but she didn't perform miracles. And without food, water and medicines, a miracle would have been needed. He knew what she had to tell him. He had been listening to the sound of his wife's ragged breathing for hours, holding his breath each time she grew silent. Breathing a sigh of relief when he heard the gurgling sound of air being dragged into lungs laden with water. The mother of his children-three sons and two daughters-was gone. He had known the second she passed. The death rattle was something no man could mistake for anything else, once he'd heard it. And he had heard it many times over the years. "I'm sorry," the small woman whispered. Chief Geoffrey Watkins nodded. Hard times, bad luck. They seemed to be his fate these days. And the fate of his people. Hernando de Soto, Pedro Moreno, and Hernando de Silvera spent the morning looking for the missing river. The huge watercourse had disappeared the night the demons broke free of hell and carried them from North America to this accursed land. The fertile soil that had stretched for seventy miles north to south, and ran twelve miles east to west, had also disappeared. In its place was a conifer forest, and soil so thin that it would do poorly for growing the corn and other food the conquistadors and their men needed. Worst of all, most of the natives who would have provided that food for their new masters had vanished also. Some remained, but not the great numbers they needed. As the sun rose to its zenith, de Soto's second in command, Luis de Moscoso, was sixlegua comuns south of the main camp. He was dealing with one of the devil-worshippers who had cursed the expedition, thus causing God to abandon them and giving the devil the power to torment the Spaniards in this evil land. He sat on his horse staring at the native. The heathen was one of six such men found over the last few days. The slaves-taken before the spawns of Satan were loosed upon the Spaniards-had not recognized the tribe these men were from. This newest one was dressed like the others. He wore nothing more than a loincloth. He carried no weapon and had no food on him. He was obviously a fool, or took the Spaniards for such.

Each of the interpreters had tried to talk to him. And each time the captive indicated he could not understand what was being said.

Disgusted, Moscoso gave his orders. If the savage continued to pretend not to understand what he heard, chop his ears off and feed them to the pigs. If that didn't make the man talk, cut his tongue out and force it down the fool's own throat. The Spanish soldiers holding the Indian by his arms shoved him to his knees. In the Year of the Lord 1541, if you were part of Hernando de Soto's expedition to North America, it was unwise to hesitate when a direct order was given. The Indian, a member of a nascent Mississippian chiefdom from the year 637 A.D., struggled to get away as the men dressed in elaborate body armor advanced with steel knives drawn.

Chapter 9 It wasn't until Wednesday that Richard and Margo were able to learn anything. Nicholas Brisebois, Richard's friend at the air force base had been quite friendly and willing to cooperate without pressing for any serious explanations. The problem was simply that he didn't know anything himself. Neither did anyone, it seemed.

"It's weird," he told them over dinner that night. "Even my buddy in the state police is in the dark. All he knows is that the area surrounding the prison is crawling with people from a branch of FEMA he never heard of." "Feema?" asked Morgan-Ash. "You have to make allowances, Nick," Margo explained. "Richard didn't move to the U.S. until six months after Katrina. So the acronym doesn't come tripping off his tongue the way it does for most people." "Ah. An acronym. God, you Yanks dote on the wretched things. And it stands for…?"

"Federal Emergency Management Agency," Brisebois supplied. "But according to my friend Tim, these aren't regular FEMA types. They're from something called the Special Investigations Bureau. Annoying bastards, from what he says. It didn't take the E.M.T.'s on the scene more than an hour to start calling them the 'siblings.'They were annoyed because the siblings wouldn't let them through to do their job. Said there were no injuries, as if anybody in their right mind is going to believe that." Brisebois took another bit of his steak, chewed, swallowed, and then shrugged. "But the truth is that Tim just doesn't know much. He got assigned to help coordinate the search for any missing inmates, and didn't spend much time near the site itself.

He says he never even got a glimpse of the prison, so he doesn't know what sort of accident might have happened." Margo had ordered the only fish course on the diner's menu, for health reasons. Now, she was regretting the decision. Whatever it might do to your arteries, the air transport specialist's steak looked good, damnation. Whereas her so-called perch looked as if it had been dredged from a canal somewhere. Tasted like it, too. She pushed what was left, which was most of it, off to the side with her fork. She wasn't really that hungry anyway. " 'Special Investigations Bureau'? I never heard of it, either. Of course, that's hardly surprising. There must be eight thousand federal agencies I never heard of"-she gave Brisebois a smile-"including yours. When Richard told me you worked at the air force base, I assumed you were in the military." Nick worked through another large bite of his steak. "Was," he half-mumbled, before finishing his swallow. He wasn't a sloppy eater, but he didn't waste any time, either. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. "I was in the Air Force for over twenty years. Trash-hauler. Flew a C-141 cargo plane. Then I wound up in the Pentagon coordinating air transport for the first Gulf war. I guess that got me labeled as an expert, so I wound up finishing my career in the Air Force here at Scott. When I retired four years ago, I pretty much just swapped my uniform for a suit and started doing the same job for the Defense Department working in an office across the hall from the one I used to have." He was a rather attractive man, she decided, in a stocky sort of way. Not all that much older than she was, either. But he was also quite obviously someone who came from a very different world than her own. Quite well-educated, but somehow very blue-collar. She wondered if that was a common combination among military officers. She'd ask Richard. He'd know, unless British customs were wildly different. She wasn't sure if she found that attractive or repellent. Both, probably, although she had a dark suspicion the attraction was winning out. How else explain the fact that she'd had to suppress-twice, in fact-the completely inappropriate urge to mention that the "Lewis" part of her last name was of purely historical significance. The only reason she'd kept the name was because, by the time of her divorce, that was the name she was known by professionally. Not to mention that she'd had to suppress-twice, again-the urge to ask Richard if his friend was single or married. It was all a bit ridiculous, really. She was a scientist here on serious business, not a middle-aged woman on a singles' cruise. She suddenly realized that Richard was looking a bit grim. "I have heard of the agency, as it happens," he half-muttered. "They're quite secretive, apparently." Brisebois frowned. "Secretive? What the hell is there to be secretive about, if you're with FEMA? It's not as if natural disasters are exactly covert." His easy grin came again, this time with a slightly sardonic twist. "I grant you, the current administration is obsessed with secrecy. Still, even for them, that seems over the top." Richard seemed on the verge of saying something, but only shook his head. The gesture was so minimal that Margo barely spotted it at all. But she saw that Brisebois hadn't missed it either.