version 2 of "Lines" (less OCs)
I edited this as a challenge to myself - to see if I could accomplish it. (and I lost the bet - I hadn't thought I could do it)
Title: Lines, version 2. (warning: deathfic)
Author: Keenir.
Recipient: Chibi-Kaz (and thank you for the writing suggestions - they helped a lot)
Prompt(s): Beginning of Series 3: Sarah is the new girl in town, and she notices Connor's better qualities right away.
Becker appreciates Sarah's more disciplined approach to science... and other things.
(and Lacey ribs him for it - thought that wasn't part of the prompt)
note: the early drafts were more Sarah-centric…Connor took over in the rewrites.
Universe created for this fic: Tremayne
(mostly a Universe in the sense that I'm gathering up all my fics with her in them)
Pairing/Characters: Connor Temple, Mary Tremayne, Sarah Page, Ditzy, Lacey, Mitts, O’Keefe, Cutter, Abraham Farr.
faint Connor/Sarah. Mentions of possible Connor/Mary in the past.
Rating/Category: Mature,
Spoilers: 3.01, 3.10, and gleanings of series 2.
Summary: Connor and Mary part company with Abby and Danny...and Connor ends up, sans Mary, in the British Museum in a world where Helen Cutter had never existed.
Notes: Timeline 1 - series 1. Timeline 2 - series 2 & 3. Timeline 3 - branching off from the s3 finale.
Creatures: Incognitum (Proboscidae), Pristichampsus (Crocodilia), Raptor (?).
Warnings: use of sharp prickly plants as weapons.
Disclaimer: I own none of the canon characters. I have asked permission of the OFCs’ owners to place the OFCs in this fic. I own my own OFCs, but am willing to share them.
the OFCs: Ditzy, Mary Tremayne, Mitts.
the canon characters: Connor Temple, Sarah Page, Tom, Duncan, Becker, Abby, Danny.
Quotes:
'That difference not only indicated that Siberian mammoths and the incognitum were separate species, it also led some anatomists to regard the latter as a flesh-eating monster.’ -April 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine.
‘The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.’ --from ‘The Wealth of Nations’ by Adam Smith, 1776.
Warning: I’m writing this with the implicit assumption that the Canopic Statues - er, the Sun Cage - are being kept opposite the Museum’s entrance. My reason: in 3.01, Sarah walks past a statue of Khepera (the Scarab on the circular stone) to the stairway, and from there into the room. Based on the map provided at the Official Site for the British Museum, the hall of Ancient Egypt only has direct access to one stairway.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PROLOGUE: Timeline One & Timeline Two:
Era: The Late Miocene:
Doggish and wagging, the outliers of the pack sniffed at the remains of the footprints in the Devonian-era sandstone.
A Pristichampsus print.
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Timeline Two: during series 2:
Era: Present Day:
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Mary asked, stopping in her tracks. She had been on her way to grab a quick lunch before heading down to the firing range downstairs - until Leek had shown up.
“Why else would I be standing in your way, lieutenant?” Leek asked rhetorically.
To remind me you have my Abraham - that you’re holding my grandfather captive, Mary thought to herself. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“Good. Keep it that way,” Leek said. “As it happens, my plan has changed.”
“It has, sir?” Mary asked, trying to keep the hope from her voice. So you let him go home?
Leek gave a curt nod. ‘No,’ Helen had told him. ‘Do not use her. Find someone not associated with the ARC.’ It had been an inconvenience, but Oliver had been able to find someone else to handle Connor and keep him distracted. You’re my ace in the hole, Lieutenant. “The plans have changed once,” Leek said. “There’s no reason why they wouldn’t change again.” He turned back to Mary. “Do whatever Sir James Lester tells you to, until I tell you otherwise. And it shouldn’t matter when I tell you what to do, where you are, or who you’re with. Am I understood?”
Lt. Tremayne nodded. You still have him. Damn. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Go,” he said, dismissing her.
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Episode 3.10:
Timeline Two:
Location: Racetrack facility:
Mary’s POV:
“Sarah, you stay here with Lacey, Tremayne, Ditzy, and Becker,” Quinn says.
“No,” Hillary says. “Mary goes with you.”
“This is no time for arguments.”
“Then don’t.”
More than a few of us chuckle at that. Then Dr Page says she wants to go with Quinn - bugger if I know why. And he replies that, “Nobody’s saying goodbye.” Not deliberately, anyway.
“Connor, here,” Hillary says, handing Connor a rucksack.
I step over to Hillary and nod. Family doesn’t need to thank family, particularly when doing so would reveal we’re family.
“Actually I do need a word with you, Mary,” Hilary says.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Do the job first. Don’t go running off to look for Abraham the first chance you get. These three, they’re your responsibility.”
“You may not care that our family is dying,” I tell him, “but I do. And I know my duty.”
“Which is?”
“Keep things from killing Connor,” I answer bluntly.
He nods. “And you’re wrong. I do care - I’m telling you what I hope you would have told me if I were going instead of you.”
~~~~~~~~
Era: The Cretaceous:
Connor’s POV:
‘Just hurry up!’ Danny had told me.
‘Uh, I’m not very good with pressure,’ I said to nobody in particular.
‘You’ve never died on my watch, and you won’t start now,’ Mary told me.
Once Abby and Danny had gone through the anomaly, Lt Tremayne had grabbed a fistful of the back of my shirt and, facing the Future Predators behind me, shot at them while shoving me into the anomaly.
Abby’s shouting at me “Shut it!” Yeah, while I’m the one up next to the anomaly closing it. Had to turn around to do it, though, which wasn’t easy since Mary had walked backwards the whole way through.
Once the anomaly’s sealed, Danny tells me, “Never doubted you for a second.” Sure mate, right. Whatever you say.
I look around and wonder where we are. And when, which Einstein proved are well’n’truly connected.
“More importantly,” Danny says, “where is Helen?” I’m sorry, but were you not with us a minute ago, when me an’ Abby were being surrounded by Future Predators? Looked like you.
But I don’t say that either. For one thing, Abby’s talking to Danny about boot prints.
Okay, we’re surrounded by pines. The sort that grew in the Late Jurassic, maybe the Cretaceous. I say as much -
“Big difference there,” Lt Tremayne says. Yeah, that’s true. Didn’t think anyone would comment on it, though.
I don’t even think Abby or Danny even heard a word I said.
- all while I’m trying to think about how far we have to go to catch up with Helen before she can kill -
I stop where I am, right while Danny’s asking me about the local dangers. Helen went to kill at 333. In the Rift Valley. Where only a dozen early homonids died of mysterious causes.
Paleontologists found that, and then Helen left for that point in time. Just like how Captain Ryan’s skeleton was unearthed months before he died. And Helen’s smart enough to check and see if there are any other anomalies slightly before 333 we could use to ambush her or undo anything she does.
“Connor?” Danny asks.
“We don’t have to go,” I say.
“Connor,” Abby says.
“We have to stop Helen,” Danny says.
“No, that’s just it. We don’t,” I say, and open another anomaly, right here.
Mary tilts her head, but doesn’t say a word. Probably chalking this up to more Temple eccentricity.
There’s the loud hiss-and-roar of raptors, and I say, “We should go.”
“You go,” Danny says. “Me, I’ll be following Helen. I’m not about to let her succeed.” She’s not going to. I know it.
I don’t know why Lt Tremayne joined me by the anomaly. Maybe because I have the anomaly-opener, maybe because she and Danny never get along, maybe…
Nah.
“I’m not going with you, Connor,” Abby tells me, and her eyes are accusing. Again.
One more piece of evidence adding itself to the tally that I don’t like to think about…the possibility that Abby never really liked me.
Exhibit A - Abby asked me ‘you did it for me, didn’t you?’ when Jack at last came clean about gambling away Rex. And I couldn’t tell her I’d never blown a whistle in my life; that would’ve hurt her too much.
Exibit B - how much Abby seems to enjoy volunteering me for things that’ll probably end with me dying in some spectacularly horrible way. I don’t mind volunteering, but I like doing it myself.
Exhibit C -
“I’ll leave it open as long as I can,” I promise them as I back up into this anomaly, as I watch them run off in the direction those tracks run. They never wanted to hear me explain. Even Cutter and Stephen, even when they were cross with me, they’d still listen to what I had to say.
Timeline Three
When I’m on the other side, I look around, see that it’s clear, and I plunk myself down on the painfully bare ground to watch this anomaly… and based on the device, Helen’s Anomaly doesn’t close.
Night falls and the Anomaly closes. By the light of the insanely enormous Moon overhead, I check the device. Nothing - the Anomaly’s gone, and its taken the strand with it.
Now what?
Now… I don’t know. Wander history for eight years? Try and find a path to 333 regardless of how useless it’d be to do?
Nah, there’s a Devonian anomaly back to when we’re from, and it will be opening soon or soonish…so its probably best I stay here a while longer, see what I can learn from -
*
Mary’s POV:
I grab Connor by his shirt again, this time to keep him from running off into the abysmal surroundings we have now. Abysmal surroundings? My god, I’ve become my mother. “Is this the Hadean?” I ask him to keep him from getting lost. “Or the K-T?” Either way, right now, we’re standing near the summit of an all-black hill on what looks like either a small peninsula or an island of equal size. No other land in sight.
And the ocean is frozen. Pack ice thick.
“Not sure,” he says. “Though, if this’ the Hadean, how’re we breathing?”
Nice play on pronounciation there. “The door may swing both ways,” I say, quoting one of the Babylon Five movies. I’m not totally helpless.
“The anomaly, right? Genius!”
“Eh.”
Connor grins, though bugger me if I know what amuses him so. “And what was so important that you were willing to asphyxiate?” I ask him.
“Huh?”
I give a light tug on his shirt, then let go.
“Oh, that, right,” Connor says.
I swore I’d keep him safe even if it killed me, but I’m still amazed he hasn’t driven me prematurely grey before history erases me.
“I was going to go through the anomaly to the Devonian. Back when we first met Dr. Sarah Page, there were Devonian-specific spores in the lungs of both the Pristicampsus and the dead man. Professor Cutter thought it was just pollution of one era by a breeze through an Anomaly, but I never really thought that was right.” You weren’t in perfect agreement with the Professor, Connor?
“Then you should have said so,” I tell him. “Where is it?”
“Uh, it hasn’t opened yet,” Connor says.
Great. Just great. “That’s not snow,” I say, looking out at the sparkling motes falling from the sky. They’re falling too hard and fast for me to say they’re drifting, and it’s not any water-based precipitation; that much I know.
Connor looks too. “Well, if this is the K-T, then that should be ash…but it doesn’t look like ash, at least none I’ve seen before. It’s more likely this is the Hadean, so that would make this…silicates. Like glass.”
“Lovely,” I mutter.
“Yeah, it is,” Connor says. He waits a while before adding, “Is it all right if I ask you a question?”
“It depends upon the question,” I say, measured.
“Last time we were in the Museum - I say ‘last time’ because we’ll probably end up there again - you exploded at everyone.” I shouted at everyone, even Tanya and Hillary; that’s right, Connor. “Can I ask why?”
“Because of who had fallen through the anomaly,” I tell him. Surely even Cutter could not have forgotten about the human corpse who came through the same anomaly as the Pristichampsus. I forget myself: Cutter most certainly could have. But you wouldn’t, Connor. Because your brain isn’t wired that way.
Connor just stands there, as though he is content to wait however long he has to. Two can play that game…but I won’t. Not today.
“You know my family moved here from overseas, do you not?”
Connor nods. “Late 1700s, right?”
I nod. Good, you were paying attention. Not sure I was talking to you at the time, however. “Yes. The man who came through into the Museum… He was Abraham Farr, the first of that side of my family to be born in England - he changed the family name -”
“To Tremayne?”
“No. We married into the Tremayne family later - end of World War Two, in fact. Abraham changed the family name to Farr.” Ah, “The silica-fall is lightening.”
“Mary, c-”
“Ask,” I interrupt.
“Why was ‘Farr’ chosen to be your new family name?”
“One, it’s English. Two, is there some reason you’re asking right this momen-” I say, stopping as an obnoxious-looking cloud passes in front of the sun.
With luck, my present expression is enough to keep him from asking what I suspect he is about to ask.
“And the anomaly just opened,” Connor says. It seems so. “Right over…there,” pointing to a spot on the coast, obscured by the boulders washed up by past tsunamis, I’d estimate.
“Deep breath, deep breath,” Connor says, no doubt as much to himself as to me.
We run for the anomaly, down the hill, our eyes shadowed by one hand to keep the silic- hell, keep the grit out of our eyes - and around a few boulders bigger than Cutter’s van, and we will no doubt collapse through the anomaly. But we don’t make it - I don’t make it.
I’m on the ground, my hands holding nothing.
* *
CONNOR’S POV:
I stop just short of the anomaly, and I don’t feel anybody holding my hand. I turn around and see Mary collapsed on the ground and a shard of fallen silicate embedded in her - oh no.
I run over to her and use everything I can ever remember her and Captain Ryan and Stephen telling me about how to help people. Under the arms. Lift with the knees. Try not to run backwards into things.
“Go,” she gasps at me. As on ‘go on without me’ or ‘let go’ or…? “Go!”
“You know how well I listen,” I say, trying to kid with her, remind her of one of her commoner complaints against me. And we’re at the anomaly and I let gravity take us through, falling all the way.
Under the Devonian sun, water and particulate mud getting in our pants, Mary says, “Time caught up.”
And she falls quiet. She’s quiet a lot, always has been, but this’ different.
Maybe it’s the job. Maybe it’s the time travel. Maybe it’s something else. But I know Mary’s dead now.
And I do what I always do when this sort of shit comes my way. I roll the other way and don’t say anything.
And I roll back to make sure nothing eats her.
We lay there, on the mud flat…with me opening and half-closing and opening my mouth for fresh clean oxygen-laden air, and to be able to do something, gasping like the first tetrapod to ever stick its ugly mug above the water.
The sun’s warmer than it was last time I was out in the daylight, but that’s not saying much. Warmer than the Cretaceous, too. Sky’s not terribly blue, but that’s probably on account of the clouds scattering the purple and pink and orange across them.
I have no idea how long we didn’t move from where we were, because it took a long while for me to catch a breath and feel like my legs won’t give out from under me. Well, reasonably sure they won’t give out. And it probably feels like longer than it really was.
I pick Lt Tremayne up and start walking. I’ve been hauled away enough times to know pretty well how it’s done. She’s saved my ass so many times doing this.
The ground’s more lightly-angled than sloping, so there’s a lot more shallow mud to walk through - and plants armed with knitting-needles to walk around, and other plants that look like popcorn and hay underfoot - before we come into sight of Mr. Farr.
When we get there, I’m lookin’ down a little escarpment - fifteen feet above a savanna where the trees’re poles and there’s a man clinging to the top of one of ‘em. If that’s not Mr. Farr, I’re in trouble. With two Pristichampsuses - Pristichampsi? - circling his spot, no doubt growling up a storm and getting hungry.
The Anomaly swells up and settles back, which pisses off the nearer Pristichampsus, who sticks his head through - long enough to roar, I reckon, based on what was on the security footage - and is wholly here again.
Right. I’ve got a time limit, then.
So what do I do? I ask myself, looking closely and carefully at my surroundings. Don’t run into trouble, I tell myself sternly; nobody here to come save me. Except the guy I’m trying to save.
So, setting Mary down and making her comfy, I make a slingshot out of the plants around me. Some of them are certainly long-thorned enough to suffice as weapons. Once it’s ready, I fire my makeshift slingshot at the smaller of the two. Proof of concept and all that.
Bull’s-eye! Uh-oh, now he’s looking at me. And roaring. He’s looking and he’s roaring. Reload, reload!
Ow, right in the roof of his mouth. Bet that hurts more than if the rancor’d eaten Hans Solo. Or forgetting to spit out the bone in a jellied eel; not that I’ve ever done that.
Did I hit his tongue or some sort of a rete mirabelum? Because that’s *a lot* of blood.
The other Pristichampsus, she half-rises to upright and lets loose with a heavy, prolonged **hooooot**, and then bolts into the Anomaly as her boyfriend collapses. I’m not bitter, not in the slightest, just like I don’t feel like that’s what’s been happening to me. The pain and collapsing, not the running.
Uh, didn’t Becker say he saw a herd of Pristichampsus sitting on this side of the Anomaly? So…that was a call for reinforcements? We’d better get moving, so I grab Mary and do so.
Shortest way down’s a skid down the bare hillface dirt. From there to the veggie tower the living dead guy’s still holding on to.
The Pristchampsus’ definitely dead, not to mention it’s really quite sincerely dead.
“You can come down now,” I tell him.
He comes sliding down, bringing a cloud of pollen in the process. Once that’s pretty much outta the way, he tells me, “That was impressive targeting. Royal Army?” he asks me.
“Uh, no, not really. Home Office,” extending a hand ‘cause I imagine standing’s not easy after being up a tree for so long.
“Brazen fool,” he admonishes me, and I pull back my hand. You related to Mary Tremayne? Just a hunch.
“Take me home,” he tells me.
“Sure,” I say. “I’m Connor, by the way. Connor Temple.”
“Abraham Farr,” he says. Well, it was a thought...and half a second later, I wonder how I forgot they're related?
We go through the Anomaly, and “Don’t shoot!” I shout. Some things never change.
.* * *.
The future predators1 no longer existed. The future predators2 still exist. The other predators now exist.
1 were gaunts, chittering acrobats.
2 are blubberies, bellowing swimmers.
It is not from the future that the others come, but from the Nearly. They did not exist, first by the narrowest of margins, then because Helen Cutter ensured they would not arise.
And now Helen Cutter does not exist. Now her influence is vanishing, unleashing the things she had worked to stop.
The other predators venture through the anomaly, trunks questing in a constant search for food.
For meat, on foot.
.* * *.
“Actually, I got a question,” Connor said after he is asked ‘more than a few things’ in his opinion…and seeing a few soldiers he doesn’t recognize. “Doctor Page?” Connor asks, recognizing his old friends Tom and Duncan, though not sure why they’re here.
“Yes?” she asks.
“Why’d you say it looked like Ammut? Why not like Tawaret or like Sobek?”
Sarah was about to answer, when a new sound erupted through the halls and pipes of the Museum.
Sarah Page looked in the direction of the noise. “Was that an elephant?” she asked.
“Sounded like one,” Becker said. “Lacey, Finn, you two go check it out.” They nodded and complied.
“There weren’t elephants,” Connor said.
“Where’s that then ?” Ditzy asked.
“Here,” Connor said. “The last time - the first time this happened. There was just a Pristichampsus.”
“Just a Pristichampsus,” Becker repeated.
“Maybe this is level two, then, Temple,” Ditzy suggested.
“Maybe,” Connor said, finding that as good a theory as any so far. “Speaking of, I… wait. Where’s Lt Tremayne? She should be one right here.” Though there should also be one of me here too.
“Like you don’t know,” Ditzy said. I don’t like what she did, not one bit, Temple, but comments like that’re salt in it.
“I don’t,” Connor said. “Honest.”
Adding up that and the comment about the last time and first time, Tom said, “So, not so much Groundhog Day as Phillidelphia Experiment II?”
Connor nodded. This isn’t the reality I came from. A neighbor, maybe.
“Like what Dr Cutter said he experienced,” Duncan said.
Ditzy groaned. This means Connor’s going to be calling someone for months by the wrong name?
“You’re questioning her,” O’Keefe told Connor. “Right now, in one of Sir James’ queerer ideas of drama.”
“I told you no good could come of American telly crossing over,” Duncan said.
“Aye, you did.” To Connor, he asked, “So how’d you get here?”
“The ARC’s probably got a spare anomaly,” Ditzy said, hoping that that was the case, as the alternative seemed to be that they would have two Connors on their hands.
“It doesn’t,” Connor said. “Christine Johnson’s got one, though.” Seeing how the SFs were looking at him, “I didn’t use hers.” Not entirely, (anyway).
“Johnson?” Becker asked. “Ministry of Defense Johnson?”
Before Connor could do more than nod, Finn said over the radio, “They found us. Channel elephants, by the look of them.”
Pony-sized, Ditzy reckoned. “A herd?” he asked.
“Three adult males and - a baby?”
“Males? You sure?”
Lacey answered: “They’re leaking.”
“Out the foreheads and eyes,” Finn clarified.
“Musth,” Sarah said. “It makes them more aggressive.”
“That explains they’re charging now!” Lacey declared. “We’ll keep’em off your backsides til you’re ready.”
“Appreciate it,” Ditzy said.
Connor said, “Um, before I say anything else that’ll make everyone look at me funny, I have a question for Dr. Page.”
“Okay,” Sarah said cautiously, not sure what he was going to ask her.
“How do I get rid of a curse?” Connor asked.
“What sort of curse?” Sarah asked.
“Well, you told me that anybody who touches the Sun Cage is cursed.”
Everyone looked at O’Keefe, who snorted at the idea of curses.
“Oh…that,” Sarah said. I never told him that. “It’s not easy, but -”
“It’ll have to wait,” Becker said. “At least until we have the situation under control.”
“Can we go see the elephant now?” Duncan asked.
Ditzy chuckled. “I’ll keep an eye on him,” he told Becker, referring to Connor.
Becker nodded, grateful - and glad that at least Ditzy didn’t think he was replacing the recently departed Captain Ryan.
~~
Standing right outside the east bathrooms, “Nice of you to join us,” Lacey said to Becker, O’Keefe, Page, and Duncan.
“We were held up,” Becker said. Connor started to ramble about time loops and a sky raining glass. And after a call to the ARC, Becker had learned that Temple and Tremayne were still there. Lester wants answers. And so do I. “Where are the creatures?”
“Are they really elephants?” Dr Page asks.
“Why, is there an elephant god too?” O’Keefe asks.
“In Ancient Egypt, no.”
“They’re definitely elephants,” Lacey said. “With stumpy, pointy tusks, and an unusual end of the trunk, but definitely elephants.”
“We locked them in the Reading Room,” Finn said, pointing a thumb at the circular room in the center of the Museum. The circle that Becker had walked around to go from the Ancient Egyptian hall, to this bathroom entrance.
“That sounds foreboding,” Duncan said.
“So it’s not just me who thinks so?” Sarah asked.
“The situation is completely,” Lacey said, pointedly ignoring Duncan saying it with her. Unfortunately, before she could say ‘under control,’ the Reading Room door was torn asunder, a few bits of splinters even reaching them.
“See how expensive the good conspiracies are?” Duncan jokingly asked.
“Stuff it,” O’Keefe told him. To his fellow soldiers, “Does he ever shut up?”
“No,” Lacey said.
“Sure he does,” Finn said.
“When Duncan’s gone quiet, you know you’re in deep shite.”
~~
While all that was happening; in the room with the Sun Cage, Connor was telling Ditzy all he, Connor Temple, knew. Everything about when he had first met Sarah and Abraham, the whole mess with Caroline and Leek and Helen - And how can they not know who Helen is? - and Eve and, yes, Christine of the MOD.
“It’s a nice story,” said the one Ditzy called ‘Mitts.’ “But how can we be sure you’re telling the whole truth?”
“Didn’t Becker already say I’m at the ARC right this very instant?” Connor asked. Though there was only one Cutter. Maybe the other me vanished, and I’m all there is now?
“We’ve seen Leek double back in time.”
“I’m positive you’re you,” Tom said.
“Thanks, mate,” Connor said.
“What do you know that our Connor doesn’t?” Ditzy asked.
“I can shut down an anomaly,” Connor volunteered.
“This true?” Ditzy asked.
Connor nodded.
“Well go on.”
“Right,” Connor said to himself, standing up and looking around for the lamp he’d used last time around. Lifting it up, he asked, “Can you shoot it? Nonono!” Connor said, one hand out. “Not yet. Just a minute,” as he brought it to the Sun Cage and stuck the torch end in the anomaly. “Now,” he asked Ditzy. “Aim for the glass.”
Ditzy fired.
Electricity arced through - in - about the anomaly.
The anomaly snapped shut.
“That’s familiar,” Connor said, looking at the pruned pole. Looking at Ditzy, “Do you believe me now?”
“Let’s say you bought yourself some credibility,” Ditzy said. “Anything else?”
Meanwhile,
“Not bad, Doctor,” Becker aid, looking at the now-dead incognitum before them.
“Thanks,” Sarah said. “It was nothing, really. You just have to know how elephants are put together.” Though she didn’t want to know how much it would cost to repair this audio station.
“Nothing? You’re definitely modest. That was quick thinking, very clever.”
You’re about to start tripping over yourself, Captain, Lacey thought.
Just then, Becker’s walkie-talkie went off. “Captain Becker?” Cutter said.
“Here, over,” Becker said.
“The Pristichampsus is on its way back to the Museum. Let it leave through the anomaly.”
Its coming back? Becker thought. This keeps getting better and better.
~~
Ditzy returned to the end of the Sun Cage’s room where his fellow soldiers - and Duncan - were keeping an eye on the dead body of Mary Tremayne. “After all the weirdness we’ve seen thus far,” Ditzy said. “This is right up there.”
Duncan and the others nodded. “At least now we know why she was doing Leek’s bidding,” Duncan said.
“Family,” Ditzy said with a nod. Always was important to her, he thought with approval.
And on the other side of the room…
“I’ve got a question,” Connor said.
“Sure,” Mitts said.
“What do you think of Doctor Page?”
“Clever, wholesome, good diction, likes you, and has a steady job.”
“But doesn’t have the best of luck,” Tom said.
How did I not remember that? Connor wondered as he remembered him and Tom and Duncan reading about an archeological team - Dr Page among them - being banned from a country…that’d been four months before the gorgonopsid in the paper. I could’ve said something to her.
“Like you,” Mitts added.
‘Likes you’ Connor remembered from moments ago. Really? he asked himself. Then again, I wouldn’t have noticed it the last time around anyway. After the fiasco with Caroline, Connor had resolved not to be pulled in two directions ever again - so he had thereafter focused his attentions and efforts at Abby. “You think she’s seeing anyone?” Connor asked.
“Go for it,” Tom said, encouraging his mate.
“What about you and Tremayne?” Mitts asked. “Not the other you and the other her - the you and her here, I mean. Before she died?”
“What’re you talking about?” Connor asked. “Her job’s to keep things from eating me. She doesn’t even like me.”
Tom was trying to work in his head how this mysterious ‘Helen’ person Connor kept talking about, was responsible for keeping Connor and Lt Tremayne from having a relationship - even a faux one. “Then go talk to Dr. Page. Maybe don’t ask for an autograph on the first date?”
“That sounds about right,” Connor agreed.
~~~~~
By the time Cutter and Abby returned to the British Museum, the littlest of the predatory pachyderms had died in a fall down the stairwell when it had tried to head up to the Human Origins exhibit.
But when those trunks caught a whiff of the returning crocodile, they focused their attentions on killing it.
The crocodilian flexibility of the Pristichampsus was working against the best efforts of the two remaining incognitums’ hunting strategies. One would distract it while the other would try to stamp the reptile - a strategy which likely worked better with more participants on the trampling side. Given how the Pristichampsus keeps curling and lashing out, it’s just as well the incognitums don’t stab with their tusks - they’d get snapped off like a sabertoothed cat who bit wrong.
In the end, the incognitums had won. The Pristichampsus lay dead and vanquished.
Mitts and Becker raised their rifles to finish what the Eocene croc had started: to kill the bleeding, crippled pachyderms.
“No!” Cutter said.
“Where do you suggest we send them, Professor?” Mitts asked.
“They belong in the…” trailing off when he realized the incognitums were feasting upon the Pristichampsus. “I don’t understand.”
“Wait til we tell you about your wife,” Mitts said, right before firing the few shots needed to end the trunked beasts.
My what? Cutter thought.
~~
After they finished searching for the second anomaly…and never found where the incognitums had come through - and after Connor had told Cutter about how the Sun Cage could contain anomalies, they headed for the vans which would take them all back to the ARC.
“Just a moment,” Connor said to Duncan and the others, and walked over to where Sarah was looking at the van she was being asked to board. ‘Dr Page?”
Abby didn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Please, call me Sarah,” Sarah asked Connor.
“Right. Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“After they have you sign the Official Secrets Act,” Connor said, “would you like to… I can answer any questions you might have about all of this. If you’d like, I mean.”
“I’d like that,” Sarah said. Though I was starting to think you’d never ask. Thank you for proving me wrong.
Connor grinned happily, something Sarah joined him in.
“Oi, you lot, in the car,” Mitts barked at the two of them.
“I was starting to think they’d never get together,” Lacey remarked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The End
Title: Lines, version 2. (warning: deathfic)
Author: Keenir.
Recipient: Chibi-Kaz (and thank you for the writing suggestions - they helped a lot)
Prompt(s): Beginning of Series 3: Sarah is the new girl in town, and she notices Connor's better qualities right away.
Becker appreciates Sarah's more disciplined approach to science... and other things.
(and Lacey ribs him for it - thought that wasn't part of the prompt)
note: the early drafts were more Sarah-centric…Connor took over in the rewrites.
Universe created for this fic: Tremayne
(mostly a Universe in the sense that I'm gathering up all my fics with her in them)
Pairing/Characters: Connor Temple, Mary Tremayne, Sarah Page, Ditzy, Lacey, Mitts, O’Keefe, Cutter, Abraham Farr.
faint Connor/Sarah. Mentions of possible Connor/Mary in the past.
Rating/Category: Mature,
Spoilers: 3.01, 3.10, and gleanings of series 2.
Summary: Connor and Mary part company with Abby and Danny...and Connor ends up, sans Mary, in the British Museum in a world where Helen Cutter had never existed.
Notes: Timeline 1 - series 1. Timeline 2 - series 2 & 3. Timeline 3 - branching off from the s3 finale.
Creatures: Incognitum (Proboscidae), Pristichampsus (Crocodilia), Raptor (?).
Warnings: use of sharp prickly plants as weapons.
Disclaimer: I own none of the canon characters. I have asked permission of the OFCs’ owners to place the OFCs in this fic. I own my own OFCs, but am willing to share them.
the OFCs: Ditzy, Mary Tremayne, Mitts.
the canon characters: Connor Temple, Sarah Page, Tom, Duncan, Becker, Abby, Danny.
Quotes:
'That difference not only indicated that Siberian mammoths and the incognitum were separate species, it also led some anatomists to regard the latter as a flesh-eating monster.’ -April 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine.
‘The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.’ --from ‘The Wealth of Nations’ by Adam Smith, 1776.
Warning: I’m writing this with the implicit assumption that the Canopic Statues - er, the Sun Cage - are being kept opposite the Museum’s entrance. My reason: in 3.01, Sarah walks past a statue of Khepera (the Scarab on the circular stone) to the stairway, and from there into the room. Based on the map provided at the Official Site for the British Museum, the hall of Ancient Egypt only has direct access to one stairway.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PROLOGUE: Timeline One & Timeline Two:
Era: The Late Miocene:
Doggish and wagging, the outliers of the pack sniffed at the remains of the footprints in the Devonian-era sandstone.
A Pristichampsus print.
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Timeline Two: during series 2:
Era: Present Day:
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Mary asked, stopping in her tracks. She had been on her way to grab a quick lunch before heading down to the firing range downstairs - until Leek had shown up.
“Why else would I be standing in your way, lieutenant?” Leek asked rhetorically.
To remind me you have my Abraham - that you’re holding my grandfather captive, Mary thought to herself. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“Good. Keep it that way,” Leek said. “As it happens, my plan has changed.”
“It has, sir?” Mary asked, trying to keep the hope from her voice. So you let him go home?
Leek gave a curt nod. ‘No,’ Helen had told him. ‘Do not use her. Find someone not associated with the ARC.’ It had been an inconvenience, but Oliver had been able to find someone else to handle Connor and keep him distracted. You’re my ace in the hole, Lieutenant. “The plans have changed once,” Leek said. “There’s no reason why they wouldn’t change again.” He turned back to Mary. “Do whatever Sir James Lester tells you to, until I tell you otherwise. And it shouldn’t matter when I tell you what to do, where you are, or who you’re with. Am I understood?”
Lt. Tremayne nodded. You still have him. Damn. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Go,” he said, dismissing her.
.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Episode 3.10:
Timeline Two:
Location: Racetrack facility:
Mary’s POV:
“Sarah, you stay here with Lacey, Tremayne, Ditzy, and Becker,” Quinn says.
“No,” Hillary says. “Mary goes with you.”
“This is no time for arguments.”
“Then don’t.”
More than a few of us chuckle at that. Then Dr Page says she wants to go with Quinn - bugger if I know why. And he replies that, “Nobody’s saying goodbye.” Not deliberately, anyway.
“Connor, here,” Hillary says, handing Connor a rucksack.
I step over to Hillary and nod. Family doesn’t need to thank family, particularly when doing so would reveal we’re family.
“Actually I do need a word with you, Mary,” Hilary says.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Do the job first. Don’t go running off to look for Abraham the first chance you get. These three, they’re your responsibility.”
“You may not care that our family is dying,” I tell him, “but I do. And I know my duty.”
“Which is?”
“Keep things from killing Connor,” I answer bluntly.
He nods. “And you’re wrong. I do care - I’m telling you what I hope you would have told me if I were going instead of you.”
~~~~~~~~
Era: The Cretaceous:
Connor’s POV:
‘Just hurry up!’ Danny had told me.
‘Uh, I’m not very good with pressure,’ I said to nobody in particular.
‘You’ve never died on my watch, and you won’t start now,’ Mary told me.
Once Abby and Danny had gone through the anomaly, Lt Tremayne had grabbed a fistful of the back of my shirt and, facing the Future Predators behind me, shot at them while shoving me into the anomaly.
Abby’s shouting at me “Shut it!” Yeah, while I’m the one up next to the anomaly closing it. Had to turn around to do it, though, which wasn’t easy since Mary had walked backwards the whole way through.
Once the anomaly’s sealed, Danny tells me, “Never doubted you for a second.” Sure mate, right. Whatever you say.
I look around and wonder where we are. And when, which Einstein proved are well’n’truly connected.
“More importantly,” Danny says, “where is Helen?” I’m sorry, but were you not with us a minute ago, when me an’ Abby were being surrounded by Future Predators? Looked like you.
But I don’t say that either. For one thing, Abby’s talking to Danny about boot prints.
Okay, we’re surrounded by pines. The sort that grew in the Late Jurassic, maybe the Cretaceous. I say as much -
“Big difference there,” Lt Tremayne says. Yeah, that’s true. Didn’t think anyone would comment on it, though.
I don’t even think Abby or Danny even heard a word I said.
- all while I’m trying to think about how far we have to go to catch up with Helen before she can kill -
I stop where I am, right while Danny’s asking me about the local dangers. Helen went to kill at 333. In the Rift Valley. Where only a dozen early homonids died of mysterious causes.
Paleontologists found that, and then Helen left for that point in time. Just like how Captain Ryan’s skeleton was unearthed months before he died. And Helen’s smart enough to check and see if there are any other anomalies slightly before 333 we could use to ambush her or undo anything she does.
“Connor?” Danny asks.
“We don’t have to go,” I say.
“Connor,” Abby says.
“We have to stop Helen,” Danny says.
“No, that’s just it. We don’t,” I say, and open another anomaly, right here.
Mary tilts her head, but doesn’t say a word. Probably chalking this up to more Temple eccentricity.
There’s the loud hiss-and-roar of raptors, and I say, “We should go.”
“You go,” Danny says. “Me, I’ll be following Helen. I’m not about to let her succeed.” She’s not going to. I know it.
I don’t know why Lt Tremayne joined me by the anomaly. Maybe because I have the anomaly-opener, maybe because she and Danny never get along, maybe…
Nah.
“I’m not going with you, Connor,” Abby tells me, and her eyes are accusing. Again.
One more piece of evidence adding itself to the tally that I don’t like to think about…the possibility that Abby never really liked me.
Exhibit A - Abby asked me ‘you did it for me, didn’t you?’ when Jack at last came clean about gambling away Rex. And I couldn’t tell her I’d never blown a whistle in my life; that would’ve hurt her too much.
Exibit B - how much Abby seems to enjoy volunteering me for things that’ll probably end with me dying in some spectacularly horrible way. I don’t mind volunteering, but I like doing it myself.
Exhibit C -
“I’ll leave it open as long as I can,” I promise them as I back up into this anomaly, as I watch them run off in the direction those tracks run. They never wanted to hear me explain. Even Cutter and Stephen, even when they were cross with me, they’d still listen to what I had to say.
Timeline Three
When I’m on the other side, I look around, see that it’s clear, and I plunk myself down on the painfully bare ground to watch this anomaly… and based on the device, Helen’s Anomaly doesn’t close.
Night falls and the Anomaly closes. By the light of the insanely enormous Moon overhead, I check the device. Nothing - the Anomaly’s gone, and its taken the strand with it.
Now what?
Now… I don’t know. Wander history for eight years? Try and find a path to 333 regardless of how useless it’d be to do?
Nah, there’s a Devonian anomaly back to when we’re from, and it will be opening soon or soonish…so its probably best I stay here a while longer, see what I can learn from -
*
Mary’s POV:
I grab Connor by his shirt again, this time to keep him from running off into the abysmal surroundings we have now. Abysmal surroundings? My god, I’ve become my mother. “Is this the Hadean?” I ask him to keep him from getting lost. “Or the K-T?” Either way, right now, we’re standing near the summit of an all-black hill on what looks like either a small peninsula or an island of equal size. No other land in sight.
And the ocean is frozen. Pack ice thick.
“Not sure,” he says. “Though, if this’ the Hadean, how’re we breathing?”
Nice play on pronounciation there. “The door may swing both ways,” I say, quoting one of the Babylon Five movies. I’m not totally helpless.
“The anomaly, right? Genius!”
“Eh.”
Connor grins, though bugger me if I know what amuses him so. “And what was so important that you were willing to asphyxiate?” I ask him.
“Huh?”
I give a light tug on his shirt, then let go.
“Oh, that, right,” Connor says.
I swore I’d keep him safe even if it killed me, but I’m still amazed he hasn’t driven me prematurely grey before history erases me.
“I was going to go through the anomaly to the Devonian. Back when we first met Dr. Sarah Page, there were Devonian-specific spores in the lungs of both the Pristicampsus and the dead man. Professor Cutter thought it was just pollution of one era by a breeze through an Anomaly, but I never really thought that was right.” You weren’t in perfect agreement with the Professor, Connor?
“Then you should have said so,” I tell him. “Where is it?”
“Uh, it hasn’t opened yet,” Connor says.
Great. Just great. “That’s not snow,” I say, looking out at the sparkling motes falling from the sky. They’re falling too hard and fast for me to say they’re drifting, and it’s not any water-based precipitation; that much I know.
Connor looks too. “Well, if this is the K-T, then that should be ash…but it doesn’t look like ash, at least none I’ve seen before. It’s more likely this is the Hadean, so that would make this…silicates. Like glass.”
“Lovely,” I mutter.
“Yeah, it is,” Connor says. He waits a while before adding, “Is it all right if I ask you a question?”
“It depends upon the question,” I say, measured.
“Last time we were in the Museum - I say ‘last time’ because we’ll probably end up there again - you exploded at everyone.” I shouted at everyone, even Tanya and Hillary; that’s right, Connor. “Can I ask why?”
“Because of who had fallen through the anomaly,” I tell him. Surely even Cutter could not have forgotten about the human corpse who came through the same anomaly as the Pristichampsus. I forget myself: Cutter most certainly could have. But you wouldn’t, Connor. Because your brain isn’t wired that way.
Connor just stands there, as though he is content to wait however long he has to. Two can play that game…but I won’t. Not today.
“You know my family moved here from overseas, do you not?”
Connor nods. “Late 1700s, right?”
I nod. Good, you were paying attention. Not sure I was talking to you at the time, however. “Yes. The man who came through into the Museum… He was Abraham Farr, the first of that side of my family to be born in England - he changed the family name -”
“To Tremayne?”
“No. We married into the Tremayne family later - end of World War Two, in fact. Abraham changed the family name to Farr.” Ah, “The silica-fall is lightening.”
“Mary, c-”
“Ask,” I interrupt.
“Why was ‘Farr’ chosen to be your new family name?”
“One, it’s English. Two, is there some reason you’re asking right this momen-” I say, stopping as an obnoxious-looking cloud passes in front of the sun.
With luck, my present expression is enough to keep him from asking what I suspect he is about to ask.
“And the anomaly just opened,” Connor says. It seems so. “Right over…there,” pointing to a spot on the coast, obscured by the boulders washed up by past tsunamis, I’d estimate.
“Deep breath, deep breath,” Connor says, no doubt as much to himself as to me.
We run for the anomaly, down the hill, our eyes shadowed by one hand to keep the silic- hell, keep the grit out of our eyes - and around a few boulders bigger than Cutter’s van, and we will no doubt collapse through the anomaly. But we don’t make it - I don’t make it.
I’m on the ground, my hands holding nothing.
* *
CONNOR’S POV:
I stop just short of the anomaly, and I don’t feel anybody holding my hand. I turn around and see Mary collapsed on the ground and a shard of fallen silicate embedded in her - oh no.
I run over to her and use everything I can ever remember her and Captain Ryan and Stephen telling me about how to help people. Under the arms. Lift with the knees. Try not to run backwards into things.
“Go,” she gasps at me. As on ‘go on without me’ or ‘let go’ or…? “Go!”
“You know how well I listen,” I say, trying to kid with her, remind her of one of her commoner complaints against me. And we’re at the anomaly and I let gravity take us through, falling all the way.
Under the Devonian sun, water and particulate mud getting in our pants, Mary says, “Time caught up.”
And she falls quiet. She’s quiet a lot, always has been, but this’ different.
Maybe it’s the job. Maybe it’s the time travel. Maybe it’s something else. But I know Mary’s dead now.
And I do what I always do when this sort of shit comes my way. I roll the other way and don’t say anything.
And I roll back to make sure nothing eats her.
We lay there, on the mud flat…with me opening and half-closing and opening my mouth for fresh clean oxygen-laden air, and to be able to do something, gasping like the first tetrapod to ever stick its ugly mug above the water.
The sun’s warmer than it was last time I was out in the daylight, but that’s not saying much. Warmer than the Cretaceous, too. Sky’s not terribly blue, but that’s probably on account of the clouds scattering the purple and pink and orange across them.
I have no idea how long we didn’t move from where we were, because it took a long while for me to catch a breath and feel like my legs won’t give out from under me. Well, reasonably sure they won’t give out. And it probably feels like longer than it really was.
I pick Lt Tremayne up and start walking. I’ve been hauled away enough times to know pretty well how it’s done. She’s saved my ass so many times doing this.
The ground’s more lightly-angled than sloping, so there’s a lot more shallow mud to walk through - and plants armed with knitting-needles to walk around, and other plants that look like popcorn and hay underfoot - before we come into sight of Mr. Farr.
When we get there, I’m lookin’ down a little escarpment - fifteen feet above a savanna where the trees’re poles and there’s a man clinging to the top of one of ‘em. If that’s not Mr. Farr, I’re in trouble. With two Pristichampsuses - Pristichampsi? - circling his spot, no doubt growling up a storm and getting hungry.
The Anomaly swells up and settles back, which pisses off the nearer Pristichampsus, who sticks his head through - long enough to roar, I reckon, based on what was on the security footage - and is wholly here again.
Right. I’ve got a time limit, then.
So what do I do? I ask myself, looking closely and carefully at my surroundings. Don’t run into trouble, I tell myself sternly; nobody here to come save me. Except the guy I’m trying to save.
So, setting Mary down and making her comfy, I make a slingshot out of the plants around me. Some of them are certainly long-thorned enough to suffice as weapons. Once it’s ready, I fire my makeshift slingshot at the smaller of the two. Proof of concept and all that.
Bull’s-eye! Uh-oh, now he’s looking at me. And roaring. He’s looking and he’s roaring. Reload, reload!
Ow, right in the roof of his mouth. Bet that hurts more than if the rancor’d eaten Hans Solo. Or forgetting to spit out the bone in a jellied eel; not that I’ve ever done that.
Did I hit his tongue or some sort of a rete mirabelum? Because that’s *a lot* of blood.
The other Pristichampsus, she half-rises to upright and lets loose with a heavy, prolonged **hooooot**, and then bolts into the Anomaly as her boyfriend collapses. I’m not bitter, not in the slightest, just like I don’t feel like that’s what’s been happening to me. The pain and collapsing, not the running.
Uh, didn’t Becker say he saw a herd of Pristichampsus sitting on this side of the Anomaly? So…that was a call for reinforcements? We’d better get moving, so I grab Mary and do so.
Shortest way down’s a skid down the bare hillface dirt. From there to the veggie tower the living dead guy’s still holding on to.
The Pristchampsus’ definitely dead, not to mention it’s really quite sincerely dead.
“You can come down now,” I tell him.
He comes sliding down, bringing a cloud of pollen in the process. Once that’s pretty much outta the way, he tells me, “That was impressive targeting. Royal Army?” he asks me.
“Uh, no, not really. Home Office,” extending a hand ‘cause I imagine standing’s not easy after being up a tree for so long.
“Brazen fool,” he admonishes me, and I pull back my hand. You related to Mary Tremayne? Just a hunch.
“Take me home,” he tells me.
“Sure,” I say. “I’m Connor, by the way. Connor Temple.”
“Abraham Farr,” he says. Well, it was a thought...and half a second later, I wonder how I forgot they're related?
We go through the Anomaly, and “Don’t shoot!” I shout. Some things never change.
.* * *.
The future predators1 no longer existed. The future predators2 still exist. The other predators now exist.
1 were gaunts, chittering acrobats.
2 are blubberies, bellowing swimmers.
It is not from the future that the others come, but from the Nearly. They did not exist, first by the narrowest of margins, then because Helen Cutter ensured they would not arise.
And now Helen Cutter does not exist. Now her influence is vanishing, unleashing the things she had worked to stop.
The other predators venture through the anomaly, trunks questing in a constant search for food.
For meat, on foot.
.* * *.
“Actually, I got a question,” Connor said after he is asked ‘more than a few things’ in his opinion…and seeing a few soldiers he doesn’t recognize. “Doctor Page?” Connor asks, recognizing his old friends Tom and Duncan, though not sure why they’re here.
“Yes?” she asks.
“Why’d you say it looked like Ammut? Why not like Tawaret or like Sobek?”
Sarah was about to answer, when a new sound erupted through the halls and pipes of the Museum.
Sarah Page looked in the direction of the noise. “Was that an elephant?” she asked.
“Sounded like one,” Becker said. “Lacey, Finn, you two go check it out.” They nodded and complied.
“There weren’t elephants,” Connor said.
“Where’s that then ?” Ditzy asked.
“Here,” Connor said. “The last time - the first time this happened. There was just a Pristichampsus.”
“Just a Pristichampsus,” Becker repeated.
“Maybe this is level two, then, Temple,” Ditzy suggested.
“Maybe,” Connor said, finding that as good a theory as any so far. “Speaking of, I… wait. Where’s Lt Tremayne? She should be one right here.” Though there should also be one of me here too.
“Like you don’t know,” Ditzy said. I don’t like what she did, not one bit, Temple, but comments like that’re salt in it.
“I don’t,” Connor said. “Honest.”
Adding up that and the comment about the last time and first time, Tom said, “So, not so much Groundhog Day as Phillidelphia Experiment II?”
Connor nodded. This isn’t the reality I came from. A neighbor, maybe.
“Like what Dr Cutter said he experienced,” Duncan said.
Ditzy groaned. This means Connor’s going to be calling someone for months by the wrong name?
“You’re questioning her,” O’Keefe told Connor. “Right now, in one of Sir James’ queerer ideas of drama.”
“I told you no good could come of American telly crossing over,” Duncan said.
“Aye, you did.” To Connor, he asked, “So how’d you get here?”
“The ARC’s probably got a spare anomaly,” Ditzy said, hoping that that was the case, as the alternative seemed to be that they would have two Connors on their hands.
“It doesn’t,” Connor said. “Christine Johnson’s got one, though.” Seeing how the SFs were looking at him, “I didn’t use hers.” Not entirely, (anyway).
“Johnson?” Becker asked. “Ministry of Defense Johnson?”
Before Connor could do more than nod, Finn said over the radio, “They found us. Channel elephants, by the look of them.”
Pony-sized, Ditzy reckoned. “A herd?” he asked.
“Three adult males and - a baby?”
“Males? You sure?”
Lacey answered: “They’re leaking.”
“Out the foreheads and eyes,” Finn clarified.
“Musth,” Sarah said. “It makes them more aggressive.”
“That explains they’re charging now!” Lacey declared. “We’ll keep’em off your backsides til you’re ready.”
“Appreciate it,” Ditzy said.
Connor said, “Um, before I say anything else that’ll make everyone look at me funny, I have a question for Dr. Page.”
“Okay,” Sarah said cautiously, not sure what he was going to ask her.
“How do I get rid of a curse?” Connor asked.
“What sort of curse?” Sarah asked.
“Well, you told me that anybody who touches the Sun Cage is cursed.”
Everyone looked at O’Keefe, who snorted at the idea of curses.
“Oh…that,” Sarah said. I never told him that. “It’s not easy, but -”
“It’ll have to wait,” Becker said. “At least until we have the situation under control.”
“Can we go see the elephant now?” Duncan asked.
Ditzy chuckled. “I’ll keep an eye on him,” he told Becker, referring to Connor.
Becker nodded, grateful - and glad that at least Ditzy didn’t think he was replacing the recently departed Captain Ryan.
~~
Standing right outside the east bathrooms, “Nice of you to join us,” Lacey said to Becker, O’Keefe, Page, and Duncan.
“We were held up,” Becker said. Connor started to ramble about time loops and a sky raining glass. And after a call to the ARC, Becker had learned that Temple and Tremayne were still there. Lester wants answers. And so do I. “Where are the creatures?”
“Are they really elephants?” Dr Page asks.
“Why, is there an elephant god too?” O’Keefe asks.
“In Ancient Egypt, no.”
“They’re definitely elephants,” Lacey said. “With stumpy, pointy tusks, and an unusual end of the trunk, but definitely elephants.”
“We locked them in the Reading Room,” Finn said, pointing a thumb at the circular room in the center of the Museum. The circle that Becker had walked around to go from the Ancient Egyptian hall, to this bathroom entrance.
“That sounds foreboding,” Duncan said.
“So it’s not just me who thinks so?” Sarah asked.
“The situation is completely,” Lacey said, pointedly ignoring Duncan saying it with her. Unfortunately, before she could say ‘under control,’ the Reading Room door was torn asunder, a few bits of splinters even reaching them.
“See how expensive the good conspiracies are?” Duncan jokingly asked.
“Stuff it,” O’Keefe told him. To his fellow soldiers, “Does he ever shut up?”
“No,” Lacey said.
“Sure he does,” Finn said.
“When Duncan’s gone quiet, you know you’re in deep shite.”
~~
While all that was happening; in the room with the Sun Cage, Connor was telling Ditzy all he, Connor Temple, knew. Everything about when he had first met Sarah and Abraham, the whole mess with Caroline and Leek and Helen - And how can they not know who Helen is? - and Eve and, yes, Christine of the MOD.
“It’s a nice story,” said the one Ditzy called ‘Mitts.’ “But how can we be sure you’re telling the whole truth?”
“Didn’t Becker already say I’m at the ARC right this very instant?” Connor asked. Though there was only one Cutter. Maybe the other me vanished, and I’m all there is now?
“We’ve seen Leek double back in time.”
“I’m positive you’re you,” Tom said.
“Thanks, mate,” Connor said.
“What do you know that our Connor doesn’t?” Ditzy asked.
“I can shut down an anomaly,” Connor volunteered.
“This true?” Ditzy asked.
Connor nodded.
“Well go on.”
“Right,” Connor said to himself, standing up and looking around for the lamp he’d used last time around. Lifting it up, he asked, “Can you shoot it? Nonono!” Connor said, one hand out. “Not yet. Just a minute,” as he brought it to the Sun Cage and stuck the torch end in the anomaly. “Now,” he asked Ditzy. “Aim for the glass.”
Ditzy fired.
Electricity arced through - in - about the anomaly.
The anomaly snapped shut.
“That’s familiar,” Connor said, looking at the pruned pole. Looking at Ditzy, “Do you believe me now?”
“Let’s say you bought yourself some credibility,” Ditzy said. “Anything else?”
Meanwhile,
“Not bad, Doctor,” Becker aid, looking at the now-dead incognitum before them.
“Thanks,” Sarah said. “It was nothing, really. You just have to know how elephants are put together.” Though she didn’t want to know how much it would cost to repair this audio station.
“Nothing? You’re definitely modest. That was quick thinking, very clever.”
You’re about to start tripping over yourself, Captain, Lacey thought.
Just then, Becker’s walkie-talkie went off. “Captain Becker?” Cutter said.
“Here, over,” Becker said.
“The Pristichampsus is on its way back to the Museum. Let it leave through the anomaly.”
Its coming back? Becker thought. This keeps getting better and better.
~~
Ditzy returned to the end of the Sun Cage’s room where his fellow soldiers - and Duncan - were keeping an eye on the dead body of Mary Tremayne. “After all the weirdness we’ve seen thus far,” Ditzy said. “This is right up there.”
Duncan and the others nodded. “At least now we know why she was doing Leek’s bidding,” Duncan said.
“Family,” Ditzy said with a nod. Always was important to her, he thought with approval.
And on the other side of the room…
“I’ve got a question,” Connor said.
“Sure,” Mitts said.
“What do you think of Doctor Page?”
“Clever, wholesome, good diction, likes you, and has a steady job.”
“But doesn’t have the best of luck,” Tom said.
How did I not remember that? Connor wondered as he remembered him and Tom and Duncan reading about an archeological team - Dr Page among them - being banned from a country…that’d been four months before the gorgonopsid in the paper. I could’ve said something to her.
“Like you,” Mitts added.
‘Likes you’ Connor remembered from moments ago. Really? he asked himself. Then again, I wouldn’t have noticed it the last time around anyway. After the fiasco with Caroline, Connor had resolved not to be pulled in two directions ever again - so he had thereafter focused his attentions and efforts at Abby. “You think she’s seeing anyone?” Connor asked.
“Go for it,” Tom said, encouraging his mate.
“What about you and Tremayne?” Mitts asked. “Not the other you and the other her - the you and her here, I mean. Before she died?”
“What’re you talking about?” Connor asked. “Her job’s to keep things from eating me. She doesn’t even like me.”
Tom was trying to work in his head how this mysterious ‘Helen’ person Connor kept talking about, was responsible for keeping Connor and Lt Tremayne from having a relationship - even a faux one. “Then go talk to Dr. Page. Maybe don’t ask for an autograph on the first date?”
“That sounds about right,” Connor agreed.
~~~~~
By the time Cutter and Abby returned to the British Museum, the littlest of the predatory pachyderms had died in a fall down the stairwell when it had tried to head up to the Human Origins exhibit.
But when those trunks caught a whiff of the returning crocodile, they focused their attentions on killing it.
The crocodilian flexibility of the Pristichampsus was working against the best efforts of the two remaining incognitums’ hunting strategies. One would distract it while the other would try to stamp the reptile - a strategy which likely worked better with more participants on the trampling side. Given how the Pristichampsus keeps curling and lashing out, it’s just as well the incognitums don’t stab with their tusks - they’d get snapped off like a sabertoothed cat who bit wrong.
In the end, the incognitums had won. The Pristichampsus lay dead and vanquished.
Mitts and Becker raised their rifles to finish what the Eocene croc had started: to kill the bleeding, crippled pachyderms.
“No!” Cutter said.
“Where do you suggest we send them, Professor?” Mitts asked.
“They belong in the…” trailing off when he realized the incognitums were feasting upon the Pristichampsus. “I don’t understand.”
“Wait til we tell you about your wife,” Mitts said, right before firing the few shots needed to end the trunked beasts.
My what? Cutter thought.
~~
After they finished searching for the second anomaly…and never found where the incognitums had come through - and after Connor had told Cutter about how the Sun Cage could contain anomalies, they headed for the vans which would take them all back to the ARC.
“Just a moment,” Connor said to Duncan and the others, and walked over to where Sarah was looking at the van she was being asked to board. ‘Dr Page?”
Abby didn’t believe what she was seeing.
“Please, call me Sarah,” Sarah asked Connor.
“Right. Sarah?”
“Yes?”
“After they have you sign the Official Secrets Act,” Connor said, “would you like to… I can answer any questions you might have about all of this. If you’d like, I mean.”
“I’d like that,” Sarah said. Though I was starting to think you’d never ask. Thank you for proving me wrong.
Connor grinned happily, something Sarah joined him in.
“Oi, you lot, in the car,” Mitts barked at the two of them.
“I was starting to think they’d never get together,” Lacey remarked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The End