“I have an idea,” Lincoln finally said. “We can send you back to your homeland. You know how to survive there. It wasn’t fair for me to bring you here.”
She stopped walking and grabbed his arm. “What is fair?”
Lincoln knew she was asking about the literal meaning. “Fair is when you choose to do something that is the best thing for everyone involved. When I brought you to this place, it was definitely not the best thing for you. I thought it was at the time, but now I know it wasn’t fair to you. We can send you back to your homeland.”
She squeezed his arm with her powerful fingers. “I cannot go back to Una-Loto tribe. They will kill me like Gelrut killed Veenah. I cannot live in my homeland without a tribe. Bolups would take me or predators would kill me. Do you think it is fair to send me back to my homeland alone?”
“No, I didn’t really mean that. I just… I don’t know. I just feel bad for bringing you here, only to find that we’re in the middle of a brutal war.”
She finally released his arm. “I go where you go, Lincoln Woodhouse.”
He smiled in spite of the circumstances. “Actually, I find that comforting.”
They made their way back to the T3 without further incident. Lincoln was relieved to see Jazzlyn, Virgil, and Derek safely back from their own scouting excursion. Waiting dutifully beside the T3 was Ripple, the mysterious autonomous drone Lincoln himself had supposedly designed, coded, and built fourteen years in his future.
“We may have made a big-ass mistake jumping here,” Derek said as Lincoln and Skyra approached. “We only went out a mile or so before we found about a dozen human bodies. Someone had piled them up and left them there to rot. Considering that, and the awful smell in the air, this place gives me the flippin’ creeps.”
Derek Dagger was Lincoln’s all-around assistant, competent at just about any task Lincoln needed done.
“Please tell us you found at least something to give us hope,” Jazzlyn added.
Lincoln had hired several paleontologists when he’d started sending research drones into the past to gather data, but Jazzlyn Shields had proven herself not only brilliant but also unwavering in her commitment to the program. This was why Lincoln had asked her to come on this now disastrous mission.
“Well…” Lincoln said. He exchanged a glance with Skyra, but she didn’t say anything. “We found a few more than a dozen bodies.”
All three of them frowned.
“What do you mean?” Derek asked.
“I mean we’ve jumped into the middle of an all-out war of unimaginable brutality. From what we saw, I’m pretty sure it’s a war between bolups and nandups.”
He got three incredulous looks.
Virgil said, “Wait, Nandups? You’re talking about Neanderthals? Here? Now?”
Virgil Brodigan was Lincoln’s top physicist and had been immensely helpful in the rush to develop the T3 to meet the deadline. As with the other two, Lincoln now wished he hadn’t asked Virgil to give up his life for an endeavor that would probably have no benefit to their own original civilization.
“They looked like Neanderthals to me,” Lincoln replied. “Skyra agrees, and she would know.”
“Neanderthals aren’t extinct in this timeline?” Jazzlyn asked.
“Technically, we’re in the same timeline we jumped forward from,” Virgil said. “We’re just not in the same timeline we originally jumped back in time from four days ago.”
“Who gives a flying frazzle-monkey about technicalities!” Derek said in his booming voice. “We jumped into the middle of a freakin’ war. Between hominid species, no less. We can’t stay here.”
“No, you should not stay here, and we should not have come here,” Ripple said, stepping away from the T3 upon its four jointed legs. The drone’s voice was neutral, neither male nor female. Apparently, at some point in the next fourteen years, Lincoln had decided his time-jumping drones would be less likely to alienate past humans if they sounded distinctly non-human. Ripple came to a stop beside Lincoln. “You must jump back 47,659 years, back to Skyra’s time, to her original geographic region.”
Lincoln sighed. “This isn’t the time to promulgate your absurd scheme, Ripple. You need to forget about it.” The damn drone was the reason Lincoln and his team had been forced to jump back in time in the first place, leaving their own world forever.
“My scheme happens to be the culmination of thousands of calculations and—”
“Not now!” Lincoln ordered.
This time the drone remained silent, but it flashed the circle of red lights that surrounded its vision lens, perhaps in frustration or in protest.
“We will leave this place,” Skyra said.
Derek tilted his head toward Skyra. “I’m with her. We gotta go. I don’t know where, but we gotta go.”
“We all agree this place isn’t ideal,” Lincoln said, “but we have to be realistic. We have ten body bags left. We managed to jump here using only five bags, so it’s possible we can make two more jumps. That’s assuming the T3 can even continue functioning.”
“Which is not a given,” Virgil added. “We’re already well into uncharted territory with its capabilities.”
“Listen, you guys,” Jazzlyn said. “We have three choices—stay where we are, jump into the past, or jump into the future. We already know we don’t want to stay here, right?”
Derek nodded vigorously. “Damn right. We don’t want to jump into the past either. We just left Skyra’s time, and that place was a goddamn land of claws, teeth, and skull smashing. Any time before that was probably even worse. The thing is, in the 47,000 years following that, things obviously didn’t get any better. Neanderthals didn’t go extinct, and now they’re at war with humans. For all we know, the two species have been at war the entire 47,000 years! I don’t see any reason whatsoever why we would consider going back in time to any point at all in this wretched timeline.”
“What is extinct?” Skyra asked.
Lincoln and the others eyed her silently. Lincoln still hadn’t told Skyra that her species had gone extinct several thousand years after her lifetime. Of course, that had been in his own original timeline. In this new timeline, Neanderthals were apparently alive and well, possibly because of the actions of Lincoln and his team during the four days they had been in Skyra’s time 47,000 years ago. Perhaps, because Lincoln had shown Skyra’s tribe how to use a bow and arrow, that one simple act had given Neanderthals the competitive edge they needed, thus changing all of history. Or maybe it had simply been caused by a multitude of random events occurring in the new timeline created by the jump.
“You wanna tell her what we’re talking about, Lincoln?” Jazzlyn asked.
Lincoln turned to Skyra. How could he tell her without first trying to explain about jumping through time? “Extinct means all of some kind of living thing have died. In the place where I’m really from, nandups no longer exist. They went extinct. Here in this place, though, nandups did not go extinct. Here they are still alive.”
She gazed at him, her disarmingly large, penetrating eyes so intense that he found it difficult to look away. “Did you and the other bolups kill all the nandups in the place you are from?”