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

Chapter 4

For a highly modified off-the-shelf gadget, Ray Wayfinder's backstepper was well designed and constructed.

This was true for most cult technology, as it tended to be the end result of generations of members customising equipment and sharing notes and experience, which might - I realised as I thought about it - be how the retreat had first started. The backstepper had more than enough power and range to take me, and a passenger, to any time or place in the solar system.

I set it for a backstep as I waited in my room for Kairos, pre-programming it to return us to the present four seconds after we had left. Neither the JI detectives nor Mirabi and Jake had ordered us to stay in one place and everyone was moving freely around the hotel, so there was a good chance a very short absence would not be noticed.

Someone tapped twice on my door. I held the backstepper behind my back just in case and opened it. Kairos slipped in and waited for the door to close before he spoke.

"We're OK. I didn't see anyone," he said. "Are you ready?"

"Yes. Are you?"

"I just needed this." He showed me a palmcom covered with add-ons I did not recognise, though one of them was clearly a scanner lens.

"This is what I've been putting together to try to detect and track the disappearances," said Kairos, as he typed on the screen. "I haven't had a chance to test it, but it should be able to detect CGAs. The professor mentioned that he'd been studying them to build the backstepper. Something about the opposite properties to the interference."

"Could it include one?" My hopes dropped at the thought we might find the backstepper only discover that a vital part had already disappeared from existence.

"Maybe. He didn't go into detail."

"Fine. Do we need local clothes?"

"No. The lab is on Earth in the early Cretaceous," said Kairos, smiling for a moment. "The locals are dinosaurs. May I?"

I handed him Wayfinder's backstepper and he entered the coordinates.

"Thank you for this," he said. "I know it's a bigger risk for you than it is for me."

"I'm prepared," I said. I dipped into the ChronOps file on the Infinite Paths again. "It's a great loss the professor's current journey ended where it did. And I don't want to see that happen to any - everyone - else's."

"I'll do everything I can to prevent it," said Kairos.

He pressed transmit and light shimmered around us as we dematerialised.

* * *

We arrived in the middle of a forest, sending several small rodents with bushy tails scurrying for cover.

Lots of thin, very tall trees were growing all around us. Their leaves and branches meshed high above into a fractured green canopy. The midmorning sun was trickling through it, casting mottled shadows on an ankle-deep undergrowth of shrubs and ferns. The air was warm and smelt like a North American forest in summer in the present. I glanced at the screen of Wayfinder's backstepper. We were 130 million years in the past. A long, groaning animal call came from the distance.

"Welcome to Dorset in southern England. Eventually," said Kairos. "That's an iguanadon. There's a herd that drinks at the lake... Dax."

"What?"

"No. We're OK," said Kairos, turning in a circle. "I'm sorry. I thought I'd remembered the coordinates, but I must have been slightly off. But I do recognise this area. It's this way."