Chapter 10
Seb woke to a soft buzz, almost inaudible but he’d gotten used to feeling the alert more than listening to it. His eyes opened and he flicked them around, taking a moment to recognize his bedroom.
Not a dream.
That was becoming a habitual way to wake up, he was finding. He still expected it all to be a dream and that he would, one of these times, awaken back at Cheyenne Mountain… or just not awaken at all.
For now, though, he turned toward the source of the alarm.
“What is it, Al?” He asked softly.
“Apologies, Mein Herr, one of the alerts has been triggered.”
That was a good enough reason to get up in the middle of the night, Seb decided.
“Which one?” He asked softly, grabbing the wireless earpiece so Al’s voice wouldn’t carry in the old home and wake his mother.
“US Army. Transmissions indicate a mission near an active numbers station.”
Seb frowned, “So? They’ve had dozens in the last couple months. The enemy has consistently shut down and moved before they got there.”
“Indeed, however this one is unusual.”
“Stop teasing me, I’m not convinced I’m fully awake yet, just get to it, Al.”
“Jawoll mein Herr,” Al responded, “The unit in question has been identified. US Special Forces, travelling under falsified identities as a Mercenary group.”
“Hmm,” Seb said, pulling up what he could remember from his perusal of classified files back in the day. “Not common, but not unknown. What’s your source?”
“1st Special Operations Command. Their encryption is known to me.”
Of course it was, Seb sighed. “Ok, so a fake Merc group, heading close to a numbers station. What’s the op?”
“Officially? Weapons smuggling to the Mujahadeen.”
Seb blinked, racking his memories.
“Oh right, the Soviets are still in Afghanistan, aren’t they?” He asked, though he mostly remembered the basics. “I was a kid then… and now, I guess, but I remember watching Rambo 3. What makes this one different?”
“The unit is a Special Forces group, with a single new member on the roster. Sergeant Rico Lopez. Delta Force.”
Seb stiffened, his tiredness washing away.
“Delta doesn’t embed a single soldier with other groups.” He said with certainty. One thing he did know was a lot about how special operations units worked.
They all had their way of doing things, specialties and the like. Delta was a Tier One intervention unit, if you had a problem you wanted to make past tense but not destroy the local region at the same time, you sent Delta. Special Forces was Tier 2, long duration missions, asymmetric specialties.
“Was Lopez sent back to the Green Berets?” He asked, assuming that the soldier in question was originally Special Forces. Not all Delta was composed of green berets, but a lot wore the hat.
“I cannot be entirely certain, mein Herr,” Al admitted. “However, that is not the detail of interest.”
Seb took a breath, “Alright. Hit me with it then?”
“Sergeant Lopez’ last mission of record, that we are aware of, was in Libya.”
Seb felt a chill.
“The Numbers station.”
It wasn’t a question, he knew.
"Yes, mein Herr.”
Seb was silent for a time, considering the information.
Could be a coincidence, he thought, though he didn’t believe it.
Someone had pulled a Delta Operator from his team and embedded him with a Green Berets A-Team on a mission that was taking him next to an alien position.
That would be weird enough, but for the man in question to be one of the survivors of a previous mission of similar type… that was too much for Seb to wave off.
The usual rule is once is chance, twice is happenstance… three times is enemy action…. But you don’t get to three without passing through one and two.
“Their mission isn’t the Numbers station?” He asked, just to be sure.
“Not officially.”
“Anything unofficial that you’ve detected?” Seb pushed.
“No, Mein Herr,” Al admitted.
It doesn’t matter. It’s too coincidental, Seb thought.
“Someone in 1st SOCOM knows they’ve been infiltrated,” He said, it was becoming clear in a flash. “They’ve been trying to hit the stations all summer, but kept coming up empty. It was inevitable someone would work it out.”
He lay back in his bed, eyes open in the dark as he considered the options. There weren’t a lot of them.
“Monitor the mission transmissions,” Seb ordered. “I doubt we can do much, but I want to know everything that happens.”
“As you say, mein herr.”
Seb reached up and pulled the bud from his ear, setting it on his nightstand as he continued to think about the situation.
Do I try to help them? I don’t know if I can do much, regardless, but…
It felt wrong to leave people to the mercy of the aliens and history, but every move he made would make his chances of being caught all the higher.
One slip. That’s all it’ll take.
He’d worked with SOCOM units enough in the past… future… whichever… The point was, Seb understood what they were going up against and just how unprepared they really were.
He also knew that they weren’t going to stop.
Well, neither am I.
That said, he was going to need better means of hiding his origin point. Seb knew that if he transmitted enough from one location, compressed pulses or not, he would be located.
Whether it was the Americans, CSIS, or the Aliens… it really didn’t matter.
If he was found now, before he had any assets of his own, any one of the major or minor players would crush him just on general principles. If he were lucky he’d spend the rest of his life in a cell, at least until the aliens got to him.
There’s got to be a way… but how?
Seb abruptly sat up, tossing the blankets off as he reached for some clothing to put on.
He had work to do.
*****
The town was empty this early in the morning, dawn being a couple hours away when Seb stepped out of the rift and into the alley behind the Radio Shack.
He looked around briefly to ensure no one was watching, though he doubted anyone would believe stories of a kid stepping out of a portal at the best of times. Anyone calling it in at this time of night was near certain to be viewed as a drunk and entirely ignored.
The airport is a ways off… at least an hour walk, but it’s doable.
He started walking, picking back paths where possible since a kid walking the streets this time of night was near certain to get some kind of attention, particularly from the police if he was seen. He checked his watch, a Casio his mother had bought him for his birthday a couple years back.
Need to hurry if I want to be home before Mom wakes up.
That was a strange thought, but more strange was how easily it came to him. He’d been an adult far longer than he’d been a child, and had long since stopped worrying about what most people thought when it came to the majority of his activities.
Now, though, it was like he’d always been a kid again.
Is my head regressing? God I hope not. Being a moody teen would really make this whole situation a hell of a lot riskier.
That was something that he’d begun worrying about.
The longer he was in his younger body, the more the world felt like it did when he was a child. Seb didn’t know if it was just hormones, or maybe a function of his body and mind still being young and flexible… or if it were something else, something more metaphysical in nature.
He could remember things from a year earlier, on both timelines, roughly the same… a little sharper on the childhood side than the adult, actually, even though he knew for certain that his memories of childhood had become fuzzy and indistinct aside from certain exceptions in his older age.
Seb didn’t know what that meant.
It could be a simple physical effect. Stored memories in his young mind were more easily accessible because they’d physically been written a shorter time ago than they had in his older self. That seemed like a good explanation.
But… the science fiction and fantasy side of his mind wondered if it wasn’t some sort of metaphysical joining. Two selves becoming one.
There was no evidence of that, and the physical writing of memories seemed a better explanation… but there were more little details that didn’t quite fall until that explanation.
Seb couldn’t write off the metaphysical either, as much as he might want to. It was unprovable, but time travel wasn’t exactly a normal circumstance.
Hell, if it weren’t for Al being along for the ride and the other physical evidence I have, I’d have believed the whole thing to be a hallucination at worst, a vision of the future at best.
Seb just didn’t know, and that was gnawing at him no matter how many times he shoved the concern away.
He had no time or energy for concerns that couldn’t be resolved, and Seb was very nearly certain that he would never be able to resolve this.
It was being fed by too many variables that were outside his frame of reference, at least for the time being, and that made the whole exercise a pointless dig into futility.
Despite that, however, Seb still thought on it and stewed on the consequences the entire walk he made to the airport.
When he got there it was all but deserted. Not closed, Town was big enough that he didn’t think the airport did close exactly, but only a handful of staff were around and that was just what he needed.
Seb didn’t go in, he stayed to the shadows as he made his way around the buildings and got closer to the tarmac.
He’d have had a much harder time at a larger airport, or even this one in twenty years or so, but at the moment the only real obstacle keeping him off the tarmac was a chain link fence…
and it had gaps that an eleven year old could squeeze through.
Seb ignored the smaller planes parked around, they weren’t what he needed, but there was a larger Air Canada turbo-prop bird sitting at one of the gates, waiting for the morning flight.
Most likely it would be heading to Montreal or Toronto, but Seb didn’t much care. He was good with either, and he could be sure that it would be heading to a larger airport which was what he needed.
Sneaking up to the airliner was far easier than he’d expected, but Seb supposed that his expectations were rooted deeply in the latter periods of his life.
Terror attacks and security overreactions had made air travel annoying and frustrating while the ongoing enshittification of society to squeeze an extra dollar out of everything drove more and more people to avoid things like air travel unless they absolutely had to fly.
For the moment, though, Seb was more pleased and… yes, a little disturbed, by how easy it was to sneak up to the airliner and gain access to the aircraft.
The aircraft was in a well lit area, which was a bit annoying, but he doubted anyone was actually watching it.
Still, Seb waited in the shadows for a while, watching the terminal for any signs of guards or patrols.
It was a good place with decent cover from most angles, so he set a rift point into his system in case he needed to come back later.
After ten minutes he only saw the Janitor, who didn’t even glance out the windows as he worked, but he did have a decent view of the flight schedule through the windows himself. He made some notes, finding that the next morning flight was heading to Toronto and would be leaving a ten to nine.
Perfect.
That checked off the last box, and there was no sign of a patrol yet, so Seb moved.
He ran across the lighted area and got to the mobile stairs still parked by the aircraft. Getting up to the door he found the recessed handle and pulled it out, giving it a twist until the door sunk in a bit. After that he just had to pull it open and slip inside.
No shouting, no alarms. I think I made it.
Inside the aircraft, Seb looked around as he considered his options carefully, grimacing as he wrinkled up his nose at the thick stench of cigarette smoke he could smell of everything.
I forgot how bad that stuff smelled if you weren’t a smoker.
Rift points could be attached to physical things rather than purely be linked to coordinates, but that had issues that he would have preferred to avoid.
Among other things, physical objects like aircraft tended to have people around them nearly all the time…
or, at least, at largely unpredictable times.
Risky or not, I’m doing this.
Seb decided on the bathroom.
A larger aircraft, a jumbo jet or the like, he’d have looked for the way down into the cargo hold.
More room, less likely to run into people, all manner of things made that a better option.
The issue was that he didn’t even know if you could access the cargo hold from the interior of a smaller turbo-prop.
So the bathroom it was.
He got out his equipment, and took some measurements. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally open a rift point through the hull… for some obvious reasons. Once he was done, though, Seb quickly set the point in his system and started packing up.
A flicker of light caught his eye, the sweep of a flashlight. Seb held very still, listening carefully until he heard footsteps.
Guard patrol? Maybe. Time to go.
The rift point opened up on command, and he simply stepped through.
Seb fell onto his own bed as the rift closed up behind him, looking around sharply and breathing a deep breath of relief when he ascertained that his mother wasn’t in the room.
Part one complete. The dangerous stuff comes next.
*****