Primeval Fic: Something Like Claudia Brown 3/5
Title: Something Like Claudia Brown 3/5
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Still owning nothing of Primeval.
Rating: PG-13 at the outset, I may change it later.
Summary: Abby's going to get married. Then she goes through an anomaly, comes back out, and finds out just how upsetting the Claudia Brown phenomenon can be.
A/N: You know, I had this whole chapter outlined in my head. I was going to skim through this stuff, shunt some things to later instalments and then . . . it just refused to cooperate.
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After blowing up at Danny, Abby wasn't entirely sure what her welcome would be, and now that she was standing on Jenny's front doorstep, she couldn't quite bring herself to actually press on the doorbell. Cutter had had to make himself a new life in the new timeline, maybe she should stop trying to force this one into line with her own.
Of course, how could she not try to work with Connor, knowing as she did that he was brilliant, and still in some important ways the man she knew? She'd call him again about his database, she knew that much.
But still, the open hostility they all held for the her that had been there previously in this timeline . . . she must have been awful, and hearing Connor call her Maitland, like they were barely acquaintances, maybe even enemies, that hurt so much. Maybe she should just try to leave them alone for the most part, just quietly coordinate instead of pushing herself and her ARC on them.
But there was Ben and Taylor, her former zoo coworkers and all the people they hadn't saved because they didn't have someone getting there fast and stopping things.
On the other hand . . .
"Are you going to stand at my door all evening? Because at this rate the neighbours will call the police," Jenny said from where she'd opened the door.
Abby flushed. "Sorry, it's just . . . I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing the right thing, and then I start wondering if I have any right to interfere, and . . . this is all just so confusing."
Jenny seemed to soften a little. "Well, come in, and we'll see what we can work out, one way or the other."
Taking a steadying breath, Abby walked in, seeing all those familiar faces again. In a way, it really was worse than Cutter, Stephen and Ryan, because they'd been dead, so anything was an improvement. But to have Becker, Danny, Jenny and Emily all looking at her with open suspicion like that . . . it made her heart hurt. And the sight of the impassive, still Connor, who stood leaning against the mantle, his eyes ticking over her the way they'd looked at the first raptor they'd had to kill in the Cretaceous for survival and food, that made her feel nearly as alone as she had seeing Connor take the hit from the walrus-creature and fall into the water. Then the stony look on his face cracked and he smiled, the dimple on his cheek coming into play, and the sense of loss faded a little.
"Welcome to our humble headquarters," he said. "First of all, we've talked, and while I think you're tilting at windmills, we are willing to give you enough rope to hang yourself with."
"Meaning?" Abby asked him.
Jenny sighed. "Meaning that we're all tired of having someone here, watching the detector, then phoning in tips into places that will hopefully get noticed by their media watchers during the daytime."
Abby frowned. "What do you mean? You're not trying to get there first?"
Connor gave a bitter bark of laughter, one echoed in Becker's sardonic smile and Danny and Tom's grimaces. "Unlike you people, with your government paycheques, we have to have real jobs." Abby winced. She recalled that stretch where she'd been working at both the zoo and the Home Office. Finally getting to quit shovelling elephant dung had been incredible, and while the pay scale wasn't all that good at first, at least she hadn't needed to hold down two jobs anymore.
"Is that why Cutter and the others think they're beating you to the anomalies? You can't make it, so you're letting them have them?"
Jenny sighed. "As much as I think we'd all like to be there, to be sure people are protected, we can't. Not and continue to get by."
"I'm sorry," Abby said, feeling awkward. "I mean, I remember when we first started and I was still working at the zoo. It was tough trying to have two jobs, and I didn't even have to deal with people saying I wasn't able to do the job." She shook her head. "But that's neither here nor there. What were you thinking?" she asked Connor.
"Mostly," he said, "That we'd call you, and you'd head out to any anomalies, or at least make sure they get out to them before someone gets hurt."
She frowned. "I think I can do you one better. When I was at the office building today, one of the SFs caught me texting you. He said he'd be interested in working with you all. I might be able to feel them out, see if there are any more who might be willing to go along with things."
"Really?" Connor looked sceptical. "I'll believe that when I see it."
Danny sighed heavily. "I'll try to be ready if there's any more arrests." He looked a lot more exhausted than Abby was used to, more, the cheeky amusement that had been so very . . . Danny, was missing.
"I have every faith in you, Danny," Emily said with a warm smile at the detective.
"Why would you need to be ready for arrests?" Abby asked, bewildered.
He rubbed a hand over his face, sighing. "Your precious Lester is so busy defending the government's interests that he keeps trying to throw us in prison."
Jenny nodded, making her way to Danny. "Danny makes sure that the paperwork is fouled up enough that no one can actually arrest us for anything. At least, not without having to tell people too much of the truth."
"Don't sell yourself short, Jenny," Connor told her. "You do just as much, you know."
"Not to mention Becker might well have ended up being forced into an unwanted military position without your intervention," Emily added.
"Enough with the mutual admiration society stuff," Tom said impatiently. "I thought we were going to bring Maitland into things?"
Connor nodded sharply. "Right. Would you come with?" he asked Abby. She nodded and followed him and Tom down into Jenny's basement. There were banks of computers there, and a system that looked quite familiar.
She grinned. "I knew you had an ADD!"
They turned to her. "What?" Connor asked.
"It's one of the things that just proved how different things were between my timeline and this one," Abby explained as she closed in on it, taking a closer look at the screens tracking anomalous readings in the UK. "In mine, you built the ADD in the ARC's second year, after Cutter noticed the radio interference the anomalies put out. Leek and Jenny got kind of nasty at first, but you were able to track an anomaly whenever it showed up, which shut them both up about that." She shook her head. "Here, Cutter's let it slide to the backburner and he's got a whole team working on it now, while they use that old internet keyword search system."
"Radio interference?" Tom and Connor chorused.
Abby turned, frowning in confusion. "Yeah, anomalies cause a regular interference pattern on 87.6," she said. "So Connor set up a system to track when interference like that showed up, and would narrow it down." She looked at their confused faces. "If this doesn't use that, what does it use?"
Tom and Connor shared a look. "It was Duncan's idea," Connor said. "I'd been trying to finesse the 'bot for weeks. He came in one day with the solution. It was just what he did. He'd muck about, half useless, and then come up with some idea that was completely perfect and you'd feel a right idiot for not thinking of it first."
"He suggested we hack into the Geographical Survey's magnetic field research," Tom explained. "The satellites and observatories they use to track changes in the Earth's magnetic field lets us track where major fluctuations are, and over time we've put in a network of trackers all over London. It lets us narrow things down to a small area, and then close in fast."
"That's . . . really brilliant," Abby said admiringly. "I mean, I knew he was pretty good when he figured out that there was a boar croc loose in the city, but we couldn't have brought him in then, anyhow." She grimaced in remembered annoyance. "Bloody Burton with his no civilian policy."
"Burton?" Tom and Connor chorused. "Like Philip Burton?" Tom added.
Abby growled. "Don't even talk about that berk, he nearly tricked Connor into destroying the bloody world."
It nicely cut off their eager looks of hero worship and brought them back to the point of the visit. "Okay . . ." Connor said, looking at her dubiously. "You come from a very weird timeline, Maitlaind." They were interrupted by a familiar squeaking sound. Hardly daring to believe it, Abby turned to see a hole punched through what seemed to be a false wall. "Oh, no," Connor said.
It was. "Sid! Nancy!" Abby exclaimed. She ran to the familiar little diictodons, scooping up Nancy and cuddling her. "Oh, I wondered what happened to you two."
"You . . . you're okay with them being pets?" Tom asked her, sounding sceptical.
She ignored him, asking Connor, "Oh! Can you bring them by my flat? Rex always liked Nancy. He sort of tolerated Sid, but I'm pretty sure he missed him when I booted you out to give my brother a place to stay."
From behind her, Danny said, "As I understand it, their names are Fred and Wilma."
"Who picked those?" Abby asked, baffled. Connor had wanted to name them Rose and John, she'd wanted Charles and Carrie, they'd only wound up with Sid and Nancy in honour of Cutter. It had seemed a fitting memorial for him, just individual and weird enough to represent Cutter.
"Jenny," they all chorused.
Abby blinked. "Oh. So, they don't live with you, then?" she asked Connor.
"What? Fred and Wilma? No," he said, shaking his head. "My flat's no good for animals, and even worse for these two," he leaned over and scooped up Sid -- Fred, and crooned to him, "Because you burrow through everything, now don't you."
Tom piped up, "I'm still stuck on, 'booted you out,' which suggests there was a time before booting, when Connor was in a state of being able to be booted."
"He blackmailed his way into my flat," Abby said, keeping her face straight with difficulty. "He was trying to impress you and Duncan with a 'hot blonde girlfriend'."
But Connor didn't pale, didn't wibble, didn't look remotely frightened. He laughed, then turned a smile on her that was so like his normal happy grin, but with a strange, sexy confidence that made her knees wobble. "A 'hot blonde'?" he asked. "That does sound appealing." Her whole attempt to pull Connor back onto familiar ground had failed, because this more confident version of her Connor couldn't be intimidated.
She clung to her composure and replied, "Well, when we got back from the Cretaceous, that's what Duncan called me, according to you, 'the hot blonde'." Then, reaching for a change of topics, she put Wilma back on the floor. "It just occurred to me to wonder, though," she said. "When Connor and I were coming out of the anomaly when everything changed, I came back fine, but he just . . . evaporated as we came through." She felt sick, wondering a little if he was somehow trapped back there, alone without her. "So, what happened, do you think? Shouldn't there be two Connors?"
That got contemplative looks from Connor and Tom, who both frowned. "You said before that people coming back to a changed timeline clearly didn't change with it, right?" Tom asked, as they started back up the stairs.
Abby nodded. "Cutter came back, and he always maintained that Claudia Brown was real, even though she never existed. He mentioned to Connor that Helen was the only person who remembered Claudia-"
"That bloody bitch," said Becker.
It was so unlike him that Abby stared. "Becker?" she asked, feeling as wrong-footed by that as by anything she'd seen of Connor thus far.
Danny, coming up behind her, growled. "That damned woman murdered his sister. On my watch."
"She stampeded those indricotheriums that killed Duncan," Tom snapped. "I just hope that the next time we see her we have a chance to do something fatal to her."
"God," Abby dropped into a chair. "I'd didn't even think . . . Connor and I were in the Cretaceous, but Danny killed her in the Pliocene. If everything changed from the Cretaceous on, then what Danny did won't necessarily have taken. Hell, I'd just got used to her being dead."
"Helen's dead?" Connor asked her, eyes wide.
She shrugged. "Maybe? I mean, Stephen and Cutter and Ryan were all dead, now they're not. So maybe she's not anymore. I don't know."
"We can hope," Becker said dryly.
"Cheers to that," Danny said. "I got to kill her? Brilliant."
"Connor and I were stuck in a tree with raptors trying to kill us and Connor too hurt to follow," Abby said. "So, all I know is when you made it back and Lester asked, you said she'd died before she succeeded at wiping out the human race in prehistory."
Jenny snorted. "That does sound just like her. Really, why couldn't she be satisfied making herself a tin pot dictator and leave everyone else alone?"
"Why'd she work with Oliver Leek to create some crazy menagerie of predators and toss, me, Connor, you and that bitch Caroline in with a smilodon?" Abby retorted. "The woman's completely crazy."
For the rest of the evening, they traded tales of Helen, and Abby found that the reason Cutter and Stephen and all hadn't dealt with Helen was because she'd been more interested in harassing Connor's people. Which just went to show there was no accounting for what Helen was up to. By the end of the evening, Abby felt like she might have found the respect she wanted from Connor's team, and bid them all goodnight, with Danny no longer looking suspiciously at her, and Becker relaxed enough not to be all weird and militarily stiff at her. It wasn't quite as good as before, but it was better than it had been.
She waltzed into her flat, cheerfully telling Rex, "So, they've got diictodons, Rex. I bet you'll like having friends again,won't you? You always liked Sid and Nancy." She went to bed, feeling more positive about everything than she had since she'd first crossed into this mad little world.
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After the heartening news that Connor and friends would give herself enough rope to hang with, and the disheartening news that Helen could be alive all over again, Abby went to work with a will, feeling out who among the SFs were willing to work with her on things. The numbers were about half and half, some of them impressed with how well the others were doing, interested by Becker and Danny in particular, as those two were professionals they could respect, and intrigued by the notion of having a better idea of where they were going at any given time for the sake of tactical purposes. The other half were caught up in irritation over amateurs trying to do the work of the professionals.
Her menagerie workers were, in the end, happy enough to help as well, and it was Lieutenant Jacobson who'd come up with the notion of pretending to get panicked calls from family members or friends, complaining of floating glass or animals.
It worked, and within a few weeks, the now-familiar routine of being called out to anomalies and dealing with the animals from them was a comfortable routine for Abby. Less so for Cutter, Stephen and Sarah.
"Damned things are increasing in frequency," muttered Cutter as they left behind the cleanup from an invasion of microceratuses, which had decided to mutilate all the flower beds in the Royal Botanical Gardens, and had been an epic pain to track down and shove back through the anomaly.
Abby laughed. "Really, Cutter? You didn't think you were finding them all before, did you? You're not going to catch them all opening until your people finish your detector."
Stephen and Sarah turned to stare at her. "What do you mean?" Sarah asked.
"I mean, you haven't been getting to more than half the anomalies," Abby explained patiently. "Goodness knows they're not in our old files, and changing the course of evolution won't do a thing to change the Earth's magnetic variations."
They all blanched. "More Valeries," Stephen said.
"I was going to go looking for the kaprosuchus this weekend," Abby admitted.
"The what?" Sarah asked.
"The boar croc," Abby told her. "Back home it was eating homeless people. From what we could tell, it had pretty much grown up in the here-and-now, so I'll take a look about for it."
Stephen glared. "Not alone you won't," he snapped. "And if you think I'm going to let you sneak off, you've got another thing coming."
Cutter just shook his head. "Christ," he said. "I hadn't even thought of that since that mess with Valerie, and I should have."
As plans were made to look, Abby scolded herself. She'd been hoping to check in with Connor, maybe see how finding the thing went with them, and one moment of loose lips and that plan was sunk.
She'd been dividing her time between the two anomaly groups, using the loss of her fiance as an excuse for the privacy. Cutter had been very sympathetic, talking about losing Helen, and Abby had spent that whole evening trying not to scream.
It took all afternoon after her revelations to escape, Lester demanding that she write reports to fill in the blanks on everything that had happened in her reality, and Abby had finally fled the building because if she had to write one more report she was going to go completely barmy and start beating Lester about the head and neck with one of Sarah's Egyptian god statues.
When she got to her flat, she found Connor, Danny, Becker and Emily there. Rex was dive-bombing Danny while Emily laughed at him, and Connor was fiddling with her EMD. "Connor, don't touch that, Becker and Danny didn't like it when Matt shot them and I doubt they'll be any happier if you do. Danny, whatever you were doing to Rex, stop it. Rex!" she finished, as she scooped his food out of the fridge, "Dinner!"
Rex promptly came to his bowl and started munching his lettuce and veggies, while Danny looked irritated and Connor ooohed over the EMD still. "If you electrocute yourself with that, I'm not doing CPR," she told him.
"What is it?" he asked. "I mean, I get it's a sort of fancy tazer thing, but," he held out his hands pleadingly.
"It's an EMD, Electro-Muscular Disruptor. Matt once took down a T-Rex with one, but it took a few shots to do."
Connor's eyes sparkled with geeker joy and he went back to cooing at it.
"You keep referencing this Matt," Emily said, "While I do think it very unlikely that all the members of this ARC of yours would still manage to collect together in this new timeline, given the people thus far, I must wonder if we should be prepared for him to be here."
Abby shook her head. "I hope he isn't. I like Matt well enough, but if he shows up, that means something's really really wrong, and things are bad enough normally without including that kind of bad."
Becker's eyebrow was nearly at his hairline as he asked, "What kind of bad?"
"The apocalypse bad," Abby said.
They all stopped whatever they were doing to stare at her. "Apocalypse?" Danny asked. "That doesn't sound good."
"We stopped it," she told him. Then realised something that had been bothering her for a while. "But I think I have a question, actually," she said. "I can see how Danny might have got involved, and Emily was probably mostly the same as back . . . home," she settled on a word to describe her native timeline. "But Becker, you only joined the ARC because after Captain Ryan died we needed someone new to head security and the soldiers for the ARC. How'd you get involved with this at all?"
"That was a bit of crazy," Connor admitted. "It was actually pretty early on for us," he said. "The anomaly opened up at the underground car park for a block of flats out in Uxbridge."
The newly created Anomaly Detection Device was wailing away, and Tom, Connor and Duncan just drove into the car park after a minute of fiddling with the various radios and frequency-producing devices they had with them to make the door open up. They parked the car close to the exit, not wanting to run the risk of the whatever might come out bashing the car. It was really old, but the only thing the three of them could afford on their budgets, and they needed the car to lug all their stuff with them.
They raced through the building, anxious to reach the anomaly before someone was hurt
"The three idiots nearly killed themselves, running in front of my car as I tried to leave," Becker said idly. "I was a little irritated."
"You know," Connor said, "I was telling the story. If you want to tell it, go ahead."
The three imbeciles who had seemed not to notice the vehicle that nearly killed them ran toward the back of the car park where the ramp to the lower level was, all three of them juggling electrical equipment that could have been anything. Concerned, Becker parked immediately, forgetting about his interview, and went after them.
The lower level was, unusually, more populated with cars than the upper, and between the walls and vehicles, he couldn't spot them. He could hear them, however.
"Where did you get that?"
"How did you get that?"
"I talked to Mick Green-"
"You talked to him!? What's wrong with you? Do you even know how to use it?"
"Do you want to not have one anymore? I mean, with everything? We'll just have to figure it out."
"You mean, hope we figure it out."
"You heard that, huh?" Connor said, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment.
"Yes," Becker told him.
Danny snickered. "You never mentioned that before. You just said that Tom had got it illegally."
"What were you arguing about?" Emily asked curiously. "I must admit, none of you has ever thought to tell me this story."
As they set up beside the anomaly, hoping that nothing was creeping up behind them, Connor was shocked to see Tom produce an honest-to-God gun from his bag. "Where did you get that?" he demanded.
Duncan's head whipped up and he stared at the third member of their trio, asking, "How did you get that?"
Tom looked defiant and shamefaced at the same time as he admitted, "I talked to Mick Green-"
Appalled that Tom would have gone to the crazy kid with real IRA connections for a weapon, Connor flipped out, "You talked to him!? What's wrong with you? Do you even know how to use it?"
The defiance and fear won out in Tom as he snapped back, "Do you want to not have one anymore? I mean, with everything? We'll just have to figure it out."
Duncan looked dubious, even as Connor conceded the point that they needed better weapons to push the dangerous creatures back. Not everything was going to be baby pachycephalosauruses, they'd already seen that.
Abby's eyes were wide. "That must have been early because I know I never saw them. Baby pachycephalosauruses? They must be so cute!"
"Which ones are those?" Emily asked.
Connor answered absently, even as he blinked at Abby in bemusement. "Bipedal herbivores, they've got skulls that have a sort of helmeted appearance with spikes around the edges, until recently believed to have used them for head-butting, but it's since been proven they're too weak to hold up to that sort of activity and may have had more of a purpose of display."
"Ah! Those!" Emily said with a satisfied nod.
Connor was still staring at Abby. "What?" she asked.
"You were so . . . girly," he said, sounding confused.
Repeating the words she'd said years before, she told him, "I can do the girl thing."
He smiled. "I can see that."
Bored now, Becker took up the thread of the narrative.
There was the sudden sound of a car alarm, and a sort of squawking roar somewhere else in the space. The hidden weirdos, with whatever it was they had with them suddenly hushed. "Oh no, it's already through."
"I'm going to pull the fire alarm," one of them said.
"But that'll get the fire department here, and the police!" protested one of the others.
The first voice snapped, "First, we have to make sure to keep people out, and second, the noise of the alarm should cover up any noise we make in here enough that we can figure out a decent excuse for it." There was a pause. "I hope."
"Maybe we should call Professor Cutter at the Home Office again," one suggested nervously. "That Stephen person you said was a bit of an action hero. Maybe we should-"
A bitter laugh answered, "Did they listen the last two times we tried to tell them?"
Silence met that statement, and Becker was about to demand to know what they were doing, faking the authority he no longer had as a member of Her Majesty's Armed Forces, when two of the young men came around one of the walls that divided up the space and froze, staring at him. The fire alarm went off, and the shorter one nudged the redhead, who continued to stare, gormlessly. The shorter one snatched up the gun, a beretta 9mm he noted absently --
"You noticed what kind of gun it was? Right then?" Connor asked disbelieving. "You and your guns."
"I'm quite certain Danny would have noticed," Becker said loftily.
Danny raised an eyebrow, "I don't know. If some kid had been aiming a gun at me, I probably would have been more worried about his shooting me at that particular moment than identifying exactly what it was." He nodded seriously at Becker. "I think you may have a bit of a problem, mate."
The soldier shot the policeman a betrayed look. "I still remember the time Emily saw you with Baby and thought it was a real baby," Abby commented.
"Baby?" Connor and Emily chorused. Danny just snickered to himself. Becker frowned.
"His favourite shotgun," she clarified. "I know we were all shocked when you handed her over to Danny to go chasing after Helen."
Becker's eyes were wide. "I let Danny run off with Priscilla?"
That set Abby off laughing. "You named it Priscilla? And I thought Baby was bad!"
He glared at them all impartially until they stopped laughing. "Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?"
The shorter one aimed the gun at him, Becker suddenly imagining an ignominious end to a solid career, not dying on his tour of Afghanistan, no, dying in a bloody London car park, shot by some kid in a bobble hat. "Duck!" the kid shouted at him, and he did, hearing the gun go off, and the kid shouting in pain. No doubt as the recoil took him by surprise. As he rolled to his back, he felt himself begin to panic, even as years of training kept him rolling until he was under a car and away from something that looked frighteningly like one of the raptors in Jurassic Park.
"You know," Connor said conversationally, "I really don't know how anyone can confuse a saurornithoides with a deinonychus. They're really not that much alike."
"Except for the speed and sharp teeth," Abby replied conversationally.
"And the claws and tails," Danny added.
"The noises they make," Becker put in.
"Not to mention, Connor, not all of us cut our eyeteeth on the differences between various ancient reptiles," Emily told him.
He grumbled, sinking into his chair, muttering about long necks and arms, and the differences in the toes of troodontids and raptorial therapods. Abby poked him. "I want to hear this." Instead of letting Becker continue, Connor took up the thread of the story.
Connor got back from pulling the alarm, running in response to the sound of gunfire. He saw the gun on the floor and the saurornithoides snapping at something under a car. He raced over, and putting the one lesson in shooting he'd got from an old neighbour who owned a farm and still had an old rifle he used to scare foxes away, braced himself really well and fired the gun at the predator. He didn't hit it squarely on, but it shrilled and backed away, racing off and around, and leaving them all panting, wondering where it would come from next, or if they would be lucky enough it would go back through the anomaly.
The man came crawling out from under the car, looking shaken. "What the hell is going on?" he demanded.
"Escaped cassowary," Connor replied glibly.
"Glibly? You were not glib in the slightest, Temple," Becker told him.
Connor tried to ignore him, choosing to talk over him.
"That was no cassowary," replied the man. "What-"
"Listen," Connor snapped. "We don't have time for this. This is dangerous and you need to get out of here."
He was interrupted by Tom saying, "Conn . . . it looks like there's a pack."
"Oh, hell," Connor said. The other two pulled out their amped up tasers as the snarling dinosaurs began to close in. Tom got off a good shot, knocking out one, but the others seemed to take that as a signal to close faster. "Run!" he said to the man. "We'll keep them here!" He added at a mutter, "Somehow."
"Your confidence was inspiring," Becker told him dryly.
Whatever was going on, Becker could appreciate these men were trying to protect people, and the bobble-topped one had saved his life with that first terrible shot, the dark-haired one had done it with the second. Snatching the gun out of the dark-haired one's hands, ignoring his protest (which, thankfully, seemed to be more worry that someone even less able than he might have got his hands on a gun), and began shooting. He wasn't the best marksman at Sandhurst, but there were certain minimum requirements, and he managed to get solid kill shots on half of them, causing the others to pause, then whip around and sprint in the direction of an odd yellow glow towards the back of the space.
The three other men stared at him, somewhat gormlessly --
"Oy!"
-- and a few minutes later he found himself recruited to heading up to their car and collecting a folding trolley, loading the dead dinosaurs onto it, and shoving it back through the anomaly. He'd insisted on going through with Connor, wanting to see this time travel phenomenon for himself, then helped them push and pull things from all over the car park until the anomaly was blocked off enough that nothing would come through.
"I insisted they explain everything," Becker said. "Afterward, I made Connor give me the contact information for Captain Ryan. I tried to convince him to let Connor, Duncan and Tom work with them. The tracking they'd set up by then already was impressive. Nothing but student budget and wits, and they had some fairly impressive hardware and techniques to herd the animals. He wouldn't hear of it and threatened to have me recalled to active duty somewhere else very unpleasant." He sighed, tiredly. "I tried for weeks until I was forced to resign my commission or lose the chance to help Duncan, Connor and Tom at all." He made a face. "And now I teach people to shoot at a local gun range." He gestured at Connor. "Including this one."
Abby felt her face set. "I'm going to get through to them," she told her guests. "I know you don't think I can, and I'm not asking you to believe it, but I'm going to."
They just smiled at her sadly, clearly seeing their own previous experience in her determination. The thing is, they didn't have what she had, and that was both the knowledge of what could be, and the in with both teams to make it happen.
************************
The hunt for the kaprosuchus was a success, not least because Abby found herself doing the sorts of crazy gymnastic moves that at one time had been Stephen's bailiwick alone, getting her impressed looks from everyone else, and Stephen having some sort of minor aneurysm over it.
Cutter had been pinned down in the abandoned building, unable to escape. Abby had taken a shot with the tranq and missed, leaving her gun needing reloading and without a clear shot from her position. No one else had a clear shot either, and she'd snatched Stephen's gun before he could do anything, taken a flying leap from her high up position, landing carefully as she'd had to learn to in getting out of trees in the Cretaceous, and having to take a diving roll to get under the animal and shoot it.
She'd rolled out of the way as it had fallen on top of where she'd been lying before, coming up with the rifle already shifted in her hands to use as a club if the amped up tranquilisers didn't take right away.
"Christ Abby!" Stephen had roared as he hurtled up to her. "What were you thinking?"
"That Cutter was about to get eaten?" Abby asked him. "You'd have done the same thing if I weren't faster."
"That's not . . . it isn't-"
"I'm pretty sure it's completely the same," Ryan told him. "I seem to recall some pretty silly stunts from you, Hart."
The SFs harassed him all the way back to the ARC and Abby groaned as she realised she'd be spending more time writing more reports filling in the blanks on how things were different at her ARC than this Home Office. As much as she wanted the chance to push for them to accept how brilliant Connor could be, how fantastic Becker was, how clever Danny was and how useful Emily and Jenny could be, it was hard going back over everything, hard remembering all the mistakes they made and on top of that, bloody writing reports.
She was a little grateful when Claudia banged her way into Abby's office, slamming the door behind her and saying, "Can I talk? Because everyone else here's heard this, and they're all tired of it, but I just have to . . . say something!"
The woman looked flustered and frustrated, and Abby, nothing loathe to have an excuse to stop writing more bloody reports, told her, "Sure. Have a seat. What's wrong?"
"I'll tell you what," Claudia, normally pretty easygoing seemed on the verge of apoplexy. "My sister's what's wrong. I had to meet her and our mothers for lunch today and she just . . . why won't she listen to reason? She's been hurt working with Temple's little group of madmen. She could have been killed. Why won't she just listen?"
Abby clamped down on her first urge to take Jenny's side. Claudia's anger wasn't motivated more than a little by her government civil service persona. Most of her motivation looked like fear for the sister she claimed to dislike and reminded Abby of nothing so much as her own aggravation with Jack. "What happened?"
"We got to the restaurant and there she was with her cane, leaning on that policeman boyfriend of hers. Of course, it was the first Mum or Aunt Katherine had heard of him, so there I am, having to play nice while Daniel bloody Quinn, DC," her voice turned mocking a moment, "Sits there and makes snide comments about my job." By the time she was finished, her teeth were clenched and her eyes snapping with fury.
"He always was like that," Abby admitted. "Drove Lester mad. But you're not upset about him, really, are you? You're worried Jenny'll be hurt, badly, and that it'll be your fault for it happening."
Claudia sighed. "You're right, of course. It's just that I keep remembering when she got hurt and the way she just . . . picked them instead of me."
Claudia had been clearing up the kitchen after a romantic dinner with Nick when her front door banged violently open, startling the hell out of her and a moment later Jenny was in her kitchen, furious. "What the hell have you been doing that would get a bloody police detective arresting me out of sheer spite, thinking that I'm you?" she demanded.
"What?" Claudia asked, then suddenly recalled one Daniel Quinn, DC, who had found out about the anomalies after Nick's prediction and their subsequent discovery of the chameleon creature in the old house, and had gone to the lengths of breaking into the Home Office in his attempts to get into the action. They'd threatened him with arrest and a variety of other charges along the lines of treason, and eventually he'd faded away. Or so they thought. "Damnit, I thought we'd got him to back off from this."
"From what?" Jenny asked. "Is this about your job?"
Claudia sighed. It probably wouldn't break her word to the government to admit to that. "Yes. It's all classified and he's taken it as some sort of personal insult that we won't let him in."
"He said you had information about where his brother might be," Jenny said. "I assume that's where his sense of personal insult comes in."
She really didn't want to talk about this right now. It had been a wonderful evening and Nick had been sweet and romantic and a brilliant kisser and instead of basking in the glow of that, she was here, talking to her sister she'd never really got along with about Daniel bloody Quinn. "I would assume so, but we really have no more information about his brother's location than he does now after what he's seen of our work. If he wants to make an idiot of himself arresting people for no reason than his own ego, that's his problem," she grumbled. "Honestly, he's getting to be as bad as that Connor Temple."
"Connor Temple?" Jenny had asked.
Carelessly, little realising what a disaster was in the making by saying it, Claudia answered, "Oh, he's just a former student of Nick's. He was there when the project started, but was . . . an inappropriate choice for inclusion. He's been wandering about and harassing us, much the same as Quinn's been."
Jenny had since simmered down and they'd shared a quiet and (unbeknownst to either of them) last, evening of gossip and friendly chat about things.
It was the last, because Claudia hadn't told anyone at the Home Office, or anywhere else, about her twin sister, so Becker hadn't known it wasn't her when the anomaly with the ceresiosaurus had opened at a beach where Jenny had been spending a weekend in the Brighton. He'd snagged her, telling 'Claudia' to get the holidaymakers off the beach before the whole incident turned into a Jaws film. Jenny had cooperated, if only because Becker's urgency had impressed her, as had the fourteen-foot-long monster which had nearly dragged a child under before Becker was able to shoot it away.
With the fact that the Temple boy's 'team' had beaten them there and saved the child's life, Jenny had questioned the usefulness of the Home Office in dealing with things. She'd lost her temper at her sister, refusing to sign anything and telling Claudia that the only reason she wasn't going to tell anyone was the panic that would ensue from the mess. She'd left with Temple's idiots, and had since spent every lunch meeting with their mothers trying to convince Claudia she should let Temple's people in.
"I actually had considered it," confessed Claudia. "But the way they interfered with the indricotheriums and got that poor Dudley-"
"Duncan," Abby corrected her. "His name is . . . was, Duncan."
Claudia shook her head. "Sorry. I spent all last night reading Harry Potter to my cousin's children." She sighed. "Anyhow, I saw them waving their arms about like idiots, and someone shot the damned bellwether of the group, whatever the technical term is, and . . . it was awful."
Abby, who'd heard the other side of that story, who knew the shot had been fired by Helen as she tried another of her mad schemes, pressed her lips together. What would she tell Claudia? Something that sounded like the worst sort of dog-ate-my-homework excuse? Not to mention that Cutter still probably had a degree of his old, "Helen wouldn't do that," going on. He'd be past her, but he wouldn't believe the worst of what Abby had to say, most likely.
The older woman continued, sounding tired. "She went right to Quinn the next day and told him everything. The next time we ran into Temple's people he'd recruited Quinn to the fold, too."
"And you're not just signing them up?" Abby asked, confused. "It sounds to me like you'd have two complete teams to work with, and I know Becker's the best and Danny was brilliant."
"You can't just . . . let anyone in at any time," Claudia objected. "That's not how things work. Recruiting is to be done carefully and through proper channels."
That was just weird, because the ARC had pretty much never recruited through proper channels. "What about Sarah?"
"Well, Nick insisted on her, and James gave in as a matter of appeasing him," Claudia admitted.
"So how is letting Connor and the others in different?" Abby asked. "Just . . . I need to understand why."
Claudia's breath hissed between her teeth. "Because they're flippant and disrespectful and because the one time Nick tried to work with Temple and his group they just antagonised him constantly. It was unprofessional and unhelpful and the whole thing was a disaster."
"Action Man is coming."
"Matt shot you. He likes to shoot people."
"It's my lifelong dream to hunt dinosaurs."
"What's all this then? A meeting of the Women's Institute?"
"Can you pistol-whip him?"
God knew Connor, Danny and Becker knew how to be obnoxious. When any of them got their backs up, it made fur fly, and drove Lester and Jenny both, completely mad. Duncan had been good at it, no doubt Tom was too. Emily had a sharp tongue when annoyed, and Jenny, well, Abby knew how infuriating Jenny could be when she so chose. Once they'd decided no one would listen to them, they'd probably have made the choice to snipe.
"I can actually see that," Abby admitted.
The other woman heaved another sigh. "At the moment I'm just so aggravated with Jenny, because she's planning to marry that redheaded idiot copper."
"Well, for what it's worth, Danny's a good man and I don't think he'd ever do a thing to hurt her," Abby offered.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry I stormed in here," Claudia told her wryly.
Abby smiled. "Because I didn't even let you vent properly?"
"And because it's not nice of me to do it to you, especially when you're having to hear me say awful things about people that you still think of as friends and colleagues," Claudia told her.
She just shrugged and smiled and Claudia left in a less volatile mood than she'd arrived in. Abby stared at the report in front of her, trying to figure out how best to word her description of the whole Future Predator incident, wondering if they even existed anymore, given that the future that might have spawned the mutation didn't seem to have come about. Wondering what she'd say to both halves of the teams to convince them not to drive each other round the twist just because they could.
Wondering if her Connor was stuck in the distant past, unable to cross into the here-and-now because of how history had changed the present, alone and waiting for her to come back.
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