Portugal

"Portugal!" Doc yells, the glare of the computer monitor lighting his eyes with a gleeful glow.

The Younger Brother Pear hangs quietly in the night sky 15 days from Earth, their progress halted. Veronica had picked up transmissions from German satellites apparently directing orbital traffic. It's only 1941 and the Germans have an operational space program geared for warfare.

If the Nazi propaganda broadcasts are to be believed, the war is all but over. London and Paris have long since fallen, while the Nordic Alliance barely continue to fend off the looming German invasion of North America. Meanwhile, the Japanese have already landed in California and the Russian population is eating a million tons of high explosives every day from both sides.

Even though the Maria Bochkareva outclasses the German orbital bombers in every conceivable fashion, and not mentioning their total lack of escorts, Veronica has stopped the Pear from heading into the firefight. One stray surface-to-orbit missile could easily rupture the Pear's hull if struck, and even Veronica can't shoot down everything the Germans could potentially throw at them.

Weeks have gone by. The situation on Earth gets worse every day. The crew of the Pear studies and analyzes the war, looking for weak spots in any front, trying to find a source of tungsten readily available and easily retrievable. Every significant supply is being used in the war effort, and every industrial city is well protected by armored patrols and anti-aircraft weapons.

So they've waited and thought and considered and planned and argued and drank and forgiven. Until now.

"Portugal," Doc repeats.

He places an empty wine bottle on the bar before his crew-mates. Wrapped in half-rotted wickerwork, the green glass is labeled "Henriques Alantejo Burgundy" in fluid white script nearly chipped off.

"Yes, yes, I think this will do," Steve says, examining the bottle.

"What's so special about Portugal?" asks Mark.

"Wolframite. It's got tungsten in it, and Portugal has lots of it. Steve, can you refine it?"

"Yes, I think so. However, to get the amount of refined tungsten we require we'll need about 400 tons of wolframite."

"I think that's a bit more than the Jeep can haul," Doc remarks.

"No problem. We can open a wormhole into the Pear's cargo bay and you can just toss the ore back up here once you mine it."

"Yet another problem. Does anyone here know anything about mining?"

Mark speaks up. "Jes' so happens I might know a thing 'er two 'bout it. My ol' grandad used to mine iron way back in Michigan. I may'a picked a bit of it from listnen' to his stories."

"Beautiful. You're our foreman. What will we need?"

"Shovels, pickaxes, horses, wagons, explosives, timbers and rope for tresses and pulverizers. Maybe a canary 'er two."

Steve replies. "The replicator is still broken so we'll have to get what we need there. I do have a chem-sniffer so you don't need any canaries. Explosives may be more difficult to arrange depending on the era."

"When exactly does that bottle lead, Doc" Veronica asks. "What kind of fights will we be getting into?"

"Well, Afonso Henriques was the first King of Portugal, I think, so it seems only right to name a wine after him, especially if its from his home town of Alantejo. I carbon dated the wicker on the bottle and at best guess I would put its origin in the 1530s, a relatively quiet time of exploration for Portugal."

Steve chimes in. "Sounds good. If I set the timed charge on it for eight hours after you go in, you should arrive on some Renaissance glassblower's cooling rack in the middle of the night, assuming they only work in the day. You guys take off for the mountains and start throwing rocks back to the ship."

"How long is this going to take?" Doc asks.

Mark answers, "Well, that's hard t' say. Without a lot of explosives, an' three men workin' like all hell-"

"And a woman who can do as much work as ten of you," Veronica reminds him.

"Right. With all'a us workin' like hell we can pull maybe thirty or forty tons a day. That's if we got a rich vein of the stuff starin' us in the face and all we gotta do is pick it up an' pocket it."

"So, two weeks if we're lucky?" Doc asks.

"Sounds 'bout right. Hell, my pa-paw's gang could do that overnight, but we ain't got forty people. On the other hand, we do got a few a them nukular bombs what we used to dig through that asteroid left. I say we use them to tear the mountain down then pick up the pieces wearin' them EVA suits. Veronica said they protect us from solar radination. We'd be done in no time."

"That sounds ludicrously dangerous not only to ourselves but to Earth's timeline. But maybe we could hire a team," Steve says. "The ARSE isn't damaged, so we can pull some gold out of it, at least enough to get this enterprise started. What do you think, Doc?"

BATTLE

The starship Younger Brother Pear limps across the Solar System towards an alternate World War 2 era Earth. Thunderhorse the Viking and Cpt. Daniels the 1800's American militiaman dangle from umbilical cords outside the hull, spraying thermal-reflective paint on the ship as it draws slowly nearer to the sun.

Meanwhile "Doc" Shaw stands in the cargo hold face to face with a half-dozen grave robbers from ancient Imperial China.

"[We've been tricked!]" yells one of them.

"[It was a trap!]" yells another.

"[What is this place?]" asks a third.

"[I don't know!]" replies the fourth.

"[Are we dead?]" the fifth asks.

"[I don't know!]" replies the fourth again.

"[I think we're inside the vase!]" observes the sixth.

"[I think we are in hell!]" answers the first.

They turn to Doc, his face obscured by his HUD glasses and the bandanna. His hair is mussed from sweat and dust. He's holding a crowbar in his left hand.

"[Demon!]" yells the fourth thief.

The slight delay in the glasses' translation leaves Doc off guard when the thieves turn on him, despite the combat danger alarms going off. Three of them with old, rusty iron short swords charge straight for him. They all swing at him, only one catching him in the shoulder while the others trip over each other to get to him. From behind them, the other three thieves poke at him with bamboo spears, one of which has a sword tied to it like an early version of a Japanese naginata. One of the spears catches him in the side while the naginata falls on his collarbone.

"HELP!" Doc yells as he swings his crowbar at the first thief who struck him. Unfortunately, the bamboo pole poking his ribcage caused his first swing to miss, but barely. He catches him on the backhand, though, knocking the swordsman unconscious. His body limps over and disturbs his partner's swing and the jab of a spear. Without this second swordsman crowding him for space, the third gets in a good jab at Doc's arm, and the other spear gets him in the opposite side of his ribcage. The naginata takes a glancing blow off Doc's already bruised right shoulder.

One of the security drones arrives from a small panel in the central elevator shaft. "Over here!" shouts Doc as he misses a swing at the sword-wielding thief that just hit him. After a brief analysis of the situation, it fires a tranquilizing dart at the closest target, one of the spear wielders. The dart finds its target with precision, sending a sleeping agent coursing through the thief's veins. It takes effect immediately, sending the spear and its owner clamouring onto the floor.

The arrival of the strange humming machine distracts all but one of Doc's assailants; the middle swordsman who strikes him another glancing blow. The other swordsman doesn't follow through with his blow, leaving his sword to only make contact with Doc's marine jacket. The remaining spearman doesn't even jab in the right direction as he watches his partner mysteriously fall to the ground.

The leader thief with the naginata reacts, however, and slams his blade against the hovering sentry, sending it careening frictionlessly through the air to only be stopped by the wall.

Doc takes advantage of the distraction to catch one of the swordsman in the jaw with the crowbar. The thief retaliates directly and cuts him badly across the chest. The other swordsman is too busy watching the hover sentry to even swing his sword the right direction. The spearman manages only to catch the edge of Doc's jacket.

The leader thief approaches the hover sentry to finish it off. He lands another solid blow down on it's translucent domed camera-shield. But it does not go down. Instead it blasts the thief in the eyes with mace. The thief drops his weapon and covers his eyes, screaming with pain.

The second sentry bot emerges from the elevator shaft. It has already been monitoring the situation via the other bot's shared camera feeds. It fires a dart into the other spear-wielding thief as soon as it arrives. The dart hits true. His eyes roll and he sinks slowly sideways onto the hard deck plating. The first sentry attempts to fire it's dart guns, but finds the system damaged from its impact with the wall. The hypodermic dart fractures in the barrel and the liquid within spits weakly onto the floor.

The two swordsman recognize the bots as the serious threat and disengage from attacking Doc. Doc takes a parting swing at one of them, but weakened from the last blow the crowbar slips from his hand and clatters across the floor. The two swordsman jump and swing their blades at the flying robot, but the thing is too nimble for them. It slides easily through the air and out of the way.

Doc quickly fishes the switchblade from his pocket. He stands where he is, taking the opportunity to catch his shallowing breath. He instead finds himself surging with adrenaline. His brain is drowining in pain, but his army instincts take over. He steps up behind the thief that cut his chest and slips the knife between his ribs and into his kidney. The thief drops his sword and stands frozen, looking death in the face.

Meanwhile the sentries power up their cattle prods. The damaged sentry swings down on the lead thief and catches him in the back of the neck. The man screams in pain but does not fall to his knees. The second sentry, having just dodged a sword swing, extends the prod right into the face of its attacker and gives him a full dose of electricity. There is hardly a yelp as the man clenches up tight and then drops to the floor.

Meanwhile Doc's brain recovers from blackout-killer mode and finds himself holding a dying man. He quickly rips the mans ragged shirt off and starts to plug up the bleeding with it.

The final thief, tears carrying the last ounce of fear out of his body and streaming down his face, draws an elegant jade dagger from within his baggy sleeves. In a swift motion he jams the sharp blade into a seam in the hover sentry's hull. Sparks fly and smoke pours as a capacitor that controls the bot's cattle prod explodes inside the composite body. It still floats on, however, determined to stop it's target. The second sentry fires a dart at the thief, but it misses as the man moves to destroy the flying plastic demon. He stabs at it again, this time shattering the domed camera-shield.

"Stop now or you die!" Doc yells at the man, pointing his bloody switchblade at him. Unfortunately, in his excitement Doc forgot to try and translate it into Chinese. The thief ignores him completely.

The embattled sentries press the attack. All other systems damaged, the first sentry sprays mace again. This time the thief is ready for it and escapes the stream. The second sentry closes and engages with its zap prod while it primes another tranquilizer dart. The thief is too fast, though, and the attack misses.

Doc flips his switchblade up between his thumb and forefinger. Drawing his arm back, he flings the blade with practiced skill. The knife spins through the air. The thief brings his dagger back down into the sentry bot's exposed vitals, breaking open the casing and allowing the contained smoke to pour out in a burst, choking the room. Almost simultaneously the flying blade sinks into the thief's gut, missing vital organs. Caught by surprise, the thief looks towards Doc and is caught in the back of the head by the other sentry's cattle prod. He cries in pain just before he passes out onto the deck.

Steve and Jazelle emerge from the elevator just in time to witness the coup de grace. Steve looks around, observing the unconscious bodies on the floor.

"What the fuck happened here?" Steve asks, stunned.

Doc lifts his HUD glasses up and pulls the bandanna from his face, panting. "Just another day for us archeologists."

Space is Big

Really big. Doc didn't quite realize how mind bogglingly big it is. He has traveled to Saturn in hours, halfway to Alpha Centuari in days, and he once went to Miranda for a weekend alchoholiday with some mining surveyors he met after he left the service. It took the Younger Brother Pear mere minutes to reach the asteroid belt, but now, unable to use it's XD drive, it has to limp back across half the solar system.

They're still traveling faster than any man-made object for years, but it's still a three month trip. Early on it's not so bad, but with the TV busted and the holobooths inoperative boredom quickly sets in. Many hours are spent sitting on the observation deck, staring at the stars. It's surprising how little they actually move.

Their route is direct to Earth. Since the Pear holds a moon's worth of exhaust mass in an extra-dimensional pocket, the ship has nearly unlimited fuel. So there's no dicking around with transfer orbits or anything like that.

"Just turn up the juice until you're halfway there, then turn around and slow down," Veronica had explained. "Artificial gravity means we can accelerate at maximum Gs and not have our brains seep out our ears. It's just too bad we just doesn't have the power to get us there faster. If we didn't have so many problems, we could get there in 26 hours."

Mark and Thunderhorse spend most of their days floating around the ship in space suits spraying on the new thermal coating. It took a while to convince them that they wouldn't be left behind if they stepped outside the ship while it was moving. Veronica taught them how to use the spray guns and goes out every once in a while to smack them around and keep them on track.

Steve and Veronica spend their time wiring and re-wiring, building complicated electronic systems, reprogramming interfaces, and generally cleaning up the mess. The Cook's head is permanently detached, since there is one microscopic and vital component missing that no one can find a replacement for. It's okay, though, since Jazelle too can cook. She has a much more limited repertoire, but she cooks with passion.

And such passion she has. Her gazes towards Doc intensify with passing days, but she conceals it with vitrol towards everyone and everything. Doc is careful not to allow her to corner him for fear she might simply mutilate him with lust. Everyone but Thunderhorse, who is blindly in love, is irritated with her if not somewhat frightened. But she cooks a hell of a meal.

Veronica and she nearly came to blows one day. A snide remark about the lack of work ethic on the ship quickly devolved into rude comments on personal hygiene, which then spiraled further into derogatory accusations concerning breeding, in both the familial and habitual senses. Jazelle became frustrated by her inability to use her extrovertant willpower on the android, and Veronica was similarly frustrated by her moral inability to squish the human's skull with her bare hands. Thus Veronica permanently excused herself from the dinner table, and Jazelle permanently excused herself from happy hour.

Since Thunderhorse was practically chained to Jazelle by his own member, he too was absent from happy hour, which made the occasion much more quiet, sullen, and slightly dull. But such is life on a space ship. Mark, having no one to compete with at his usual level of drinking, began to curb his appetite for hard liquor in order to keep up in conversation with Veronica, Doc, and Steve.

"So, those guys who chased us into the asteroid field? They were time cops, weren't they?" Doc asks Steve pointedly.

"What makes you say that?"

"Veronica showed me the message they were trying to implant in our computers. It said, 'Halt immediately. We are the Time Police.'"

"It was dangerous to watch that. It could've melted your brain."

"Veronica saw it first. Then she showed it to me when she knew it was safe. But you knew what was going on the whole time, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Have they come after you before?"

"Yes."

"What will they do if they catch us?"

"I don't know, for sure. I think there's a trial by jury where we're instantly convicted retrospectively, and then either executed or exiled."

"Exiled where?"

"When, more likely. The far future, maybe? Somewhere we can't step on any butterflies."

"How can they tell if we're changing the time-line? If we've changed it isn't it a permanent part of history in the future?"

"Remember how the Q-Net articles from the future were fluctuating so wildly because the outcome isn't yet decided for this time-line? Well, the further in the future you go, the more wild those fluctuations swing. By studying the variances, you can calculate how far back and how significant an event a change is. When someone goes back in time, the fluctuations begin to change. If the Time Police think it's a big enough event, they come back and try to stop it. But if they're too late, like they were for us, their past is altered and, yes, it is a permanent part of their history. "

"So they won't be after us again until we start to change something?"

"Yes."

"Do they know about the end of the galaxy and that we're trying to save it?"

"No, they wouldn't listen. I tried to explain it, but they're bent on upholding the law as-is."

"If an alteration in the time-line is really just us traveling through alternate realities, what difference does it make whether we alter it or not? Why do they care where we go or what we do?"

"There's an alternate hypothesis, which much less evidence to support it mind you, that essentially states that there's only so much reality to go around, and that by changing a time-line we're not traveling through alternate realities, but creating new ones and spreading the 'fabric' of reality thinner and thinner. The more drastic the change, the more stretched the fabric becomes. No one has put forth a reputable interpretation of what happens when that fabric tears. In my opinion, no one reputable has contributed to that idea in any way whatsoever.

"But to alleviate fears that the universe will be prematurely ended by rampant time-travel, or probably more-so to give people a more comforting sense of linear time, the government of the future will pass laws limiting intentional time travel, and will create the Time Police to enforce them. I can only imagine the corruption, hypocrisy, and misuse of power that has brought. Will bring. Whatever."

So far the most significant event on the journey was the halfway point on the forty-fifth day. Everybody gathered on the observation deck to watch as the stars turned mechanically halfway around the glass dome and then stopped. The automated process took less than two seconds. Everyone cheered.

Today is the sixty-second day. Less than a month to go. Doc has been continuing the task of monitoring the sensor equipment which is mostly concerned with analyzing broadcasts from Earth. More easily said, he was watching TV. Among the few shows in English is Abbot and Costello doing their famous Who's on First skit in full color with an 8-bit electronic soundtrack. On another channel is the Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts, a live boxing match in Madison Square Garden. There's a German sitcom starring a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed actress being pursued by the affections of a gorgeous-but-shy young blonde, blue-eyed man and a clumsy caricature of a Jew, played by a blue-eyed blonde in a costume. The serial seems to revolve around the Jew trying to win the affections of the woman by use of greed, cowardice, and temptation, while the perfect Aryan specimen either undoes the evil the latter has done, or competes with him using
humility, modesty, and courage. Every day, the serial ends with pretty much the same result: the Jew is humiliated and sulks off to plot and the Aryan just misses kissing the girl by some comedic error.

It makes Doc want to puke, but there is honestly nothing else to do. Except, of course, for going down to the cargo bay and cataloging the artifacts there, which Doc decides to pick up again when Goebles comes on the tube for his daily white-power hour. It's almost as bad as Rush Limbaugh.

Doc makes his way down the elevator. He's been combing through the cargo bay the last week or so, trying to identify what's in the crates and barrels there, and if they've been broken. So far nothing has been damaged, so far as he can tell. There are thousands of artifacts, though, all vessels, spoons, masks, anything concave representing nearly every era in human cultural evolution. He's found that the cargo manifest was not remotely completed. Steve must've abandoned the effort to catalog them years ago.

There are, at least for the most part, rough piles of crates by culture and era. Doc has made his way through to the early Imperial China section. Doc begins the tedious task of separating the Qin artifacts from the Han.

Many of the crates were packed with hay which has long since rotted into dust. Doc wears a bandanna over his mouth and nose to keep the stuff out of his lungs. However, as Doc cracks a rather difficult one open, some of the dust gets up his nose and he sneezes. As he flexes over from the sneeze, he ends up projecting most of the expectoration into a small ceramic urn. He wipes his nose on the hankercheif and catalogs the urn into the late Qin pile, and returns to his task.

A moment later, he is aware of a faint screaming sound. It's growing louder. Doc turns to the Qin pile, which seems to be the source of the noise. It's coming from the urn. It begins to shake.

Out pop six men, all Chinese. They're dirty and dressed mostly in rags and carrying iron short swords. All of them are burdened with gold, jewels, and other trinkets far too extravagant for these men to have come by them honestly.

Surprised and alarmed, they drop their booty and draw their swords, shouting something Doc can't understand.

Political Map of North America, 1940