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  The grenade exploded, hurling steel fragments in all directions. The Dark Star commandoes, huddled behind columns protruding from the mezzanine walls, were not injured, though smoke filled the mezzanine.

  Two more grenades landed on the mezzanine. The blast concussions rocked Tony’s team. They aimed their rifles’ infrared targeting pointers at the gap in the vault door. The first of General Craig’s commandoes leapt through the gap. Exposed on the mezzanine, they were instantly cut down by Tony’s team.

  In mission control, one more of the tunnel’s vital systems flashed green.

  Colin yelled to the team leaders of the two outstanding systems, “Temporal engine, navigation, what are your ETAs?”

  “Temporal engine, five minutes,” replied a voice.

  “Navigation, ten minutes.”

  Colin looked at the clock. Five minutes had passed since his call with Tony.

  “Damn!” he said.

  Colin weighed his bad and worse options in a split second. He called out to Zhang, “Zhang, can we configure the tunnel to jump without navigation online?”

  “Yes,” replied Zhang, “though there is no point in doing so. Without navigation, the temponauts’ destination would be completely random. They could arrive anywhere at any time.”

  “We’re running out of options,” Colin said. “Configure the tunnel to jump without navigation as a fallback.”

  Zhang nodded and began typing on her keyboard.

  An explosion sounded outside the mission control vault door. The attackers had reached the anteroom. Colin looked at the status board. The temporal engine flashed green.

  Zhang called to Colin, “I’ve enabled you to commit a jump without navigation.”

  Colin looked on his panel and saw the “COMMIT” light was illuminated. He took a key out his pocket and unlocked a plastic housing over another button, marked “DESTRUCT.” DESTRUCT was a system-wide sabotage function that would delete all computer software and damage key Time Tunnel hardware, thoroughly covering Kyle and Padma’s tracks through time.

  “OK everyone, listen up,” Colin shouted. “We’re going to fire up the tunnel, but we’re going to wait to the last possible second to give navigation time to plot the course, understood?”

  “Roger, understood,” replied the mission control team.

  Mission control shook as another blast rocked its vault door. Computer displays distorted momentarily, then returned to normal.

  “Throttle up power to 100 percent,” ordered Colin, skipping the usual plateaus at 30 percent and 60 percent.

  “Reactor output at 100 percent,” replied a voice.

  The vault door blew off its hinges, tumbling down the steps of the mission control amphitheater. Smoke blew through the door opening as the first commando dashed into mission control. Colin turned to look at the commando amidst the screams and shouts of the mission control staff. Colin smacked the COMMIT button as two bullets seared through his shoulder blade, knocking him onto his console before he slid to the floor. There was a blinding flash in the Time Tunnel chamber. Kyle and Padma were gone.

  “Put your hands on your head and kneel on the floor!” yelled the commando to the mission control staff as fellow soldiers rushed in. “I said, put your hands on your fucking head and kneel on the floor!”

  Slouching against his console, Colin reached up from the floor to find the DESTRUCT button. As his fingers fumbled the metal surface of the console, his hand was suddenly smacked away. He was kicked onto the floor. Annika Wise stood over him, her assault rifle trained on Colin’s chest.

  “Medic!” she shouted. She turned to Colin, who was in shock, bleeding on the floor. “We’re definitely going to want you alive.”

  • • •

  Kyle and Padma were blinded by the Time Tunnel flash, accompanied by the teeth-rattling hum of the tunnel effect. As the white light faded out, the faint images of people began to fade in. A warm breeze wafted a chorus of surprised gasps over Kyle and Padma.

  The images sharpened. Kyle and Padma were standing in a grassy field on a sunny afternoon in the center of an enormous circle of people—hundreds of brown faces framed with long black hair—staring back at them. Some wore feathers in their hair. Most wore buckskin pants and shirts—many with a reddish dye in the form of an inverted triangle. The shocked expressions of the Native Americans mirrored Kyle’s and Padma’s own faces.

  “Please, dear God, tell me this is Frontierland,” said Padma.

  Time Tunnel Complex

  Area 51, NV

  December 5, 2008

  00:40 hours

  Timeline 002

  General Craig, Annika Wise, and a platoon of the general’s Special Forces soldiers navigated through dead men and debris on the level 1 mezzanine as they made their way to the remnants of the vault door. Flickering lights strobed across the bodies of both Army and Dark Star soldiers as they lay on the ground, along with the rubble blown out of the mezzanine by gunfire and grenades.

  When the platoon arrived at the place where the giant vault door once stood, they examined the entrance. Standing outside on the smoking wreckage of the freight elevator pad with their backs to the platoon were Jonah and Joshua Jones. General Craig could see that the Joneses were staring at something laying on the far edge of the elevator pad. The general looked closer. The object on the pad was the torso of a Praetorian guardsman. He had been sliced in two by the Time Tunnel’s temporal bubble—the cutting edge of oblivion. Beyond the torso was nothing. Smoke from the ruin of the elevator pad rose into blackness and disappeared into infinity.

  “Everything I told you was true,” said General Craig.

  Startled, the Joneses spun to face the general and his troops.

  “But I left out one important detail.”

  “I am the consul of America,” attempted Jones in a hollow voice, shocked by the vision of the vivisected soldier.

  “That’s true, Consul,” replied the general. “But, you see, we’re not in America anymore.”

  The general pulled his pistol from its holster and shot Joshua between his eyes. Jonah Jones screamed.

  “Nice shot,” noted Annika.

  The general aimed his gun at Jonah Jones.

  “No! No! No!” screamed Jones. He turned and ran from the general, vanishing as he passed through the temporal edge.

  “I wonder what’s out there,” mused Annika.

  “There’s exactly one fat man out there,” replied the general as he holstered his weapon.

  Place: unknown

  Date: unknown

  Time: unknown

  Kyle looked around—they had landed in the precise center of a ring of some 200 Native Americans. Some wore fringed deerskin, with beaded belts and feathers. Some wore store-bought clothes—the men in faded cotton shirts and pants, women in prairie dresses. Many wore deerskin shirts with a crimson inverted pyramid stained on the chest.

  In the distance, a river flowed. Patches of cottonwood trees bordered the river. While the natives were startled by the sudden appearance of the strange couple, they did not seem fearful. It was as though they had expected the supernatural event.

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed Kyle. “I know this! Holy shit!”

  Padma went silent as the fantastic enormity of their time travel began to overwhelm her.

  “This is a Ghost Dance! Shit! I can’t believe it!” Kyle said.

  Kyle looked at Padma. Her face was pale. A bolt of fear fired through Kyle as he remembered how the Time Tunnel had taken Annika from him.

  “Padma?” he asked, taking her arm. “Are you OK?”

  Padma stared forward, motionless. She blinked and shook her head.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “This is a Ghost Dance. I recognize this from my West Point studi
es,” Kyle said. “We’re in South Dakota.”

  “When are we?” she asked, fearing Kyle’s answer.

  “1890.”

  Padma brought her hands to her face as she began to feel the tremendous weight of her crushed dream of life in 1960s San Francisco.

  “And why would you know this from West Point?” she asked.

  Kyle took a breath.

  “Because we studied the Massacre of Wounded Knee,” he said, nodding.

  Padma shook her head slowly. “Kyle, I love you,” she began, “I do. But I gotta tell you, sometimes life with you is no picnic.”

  Kyle’s guilt for bringing Padma into this mess was cut with a boyish excitement over witnessing a moment in history that he had studied in school. He was smack in the middle of an actual Ghost Dance, a seminal event in the run-up to one of the most disastrous chapters in American history.

  After Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s scouting party confirmed a gold strike in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874, whites swarmed the Lakota territory, reigniting perennial hostilities between whites and natives. When Custer was eventually killed in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, congress reacted harshly, passing the “Sell or Starve” Act of 1877, forcing the Lakota people off their verdant land in the Black Hills and onto a reservation in the Dakotas—a place guaranteed to be worthless to human beings of any color.

  Now vanquished of all hope of the physical earth, the Lakota people looked to the heavens through the lens of the Ghost Dance to rid them of the white menace and return their lands and buffalo to them. The shirts with the inverted crimson pyramids, part of the ritual, were promised to be imbued with supernatural powers, even possessing the ability to shield their wearers from the white’s gunfire.

  The ghost dancers had begun the dance that summoned the strange couple in the usual way—they began shuffling side to side to a drumbeat. Their pace was slow, and their feet were heavy, as though their ankles were shackled to the worthless dirt they moved upon. As the drum tempo quickened, their feet were lighter. Their bodies were released from the hunger and depression that encumbered them. Their fever rose. Dancers began to leap and spin as the dance crescendoed, building energy into a tempest.

  At the dance’s zenith, a brilliant light had blinded the dancers, leaving Kyle and Padma in its wake.

  The Lakota talked excitedly amongst themselves, pointing at the strange pair that had appeared from lightning. Though the Ghost Dance ritual did not foretell the coming of a mixed race couple, it did appear to be working nonetheless. One man, more ornately attired than his companions, was prodded to investigate the couple. He did so reluctantly.

  The man wore fringed pants. A breastplate, assembled of four columns of hair-pipe bones, covered his chest. A matching bone choker wrapped around his neck. Three eagle feathers protruded from a knot of hair at the back of his head. His long hair was tied into two braids that fell on his chest. He wore leather bands on both arms, each adorned with a white feather. He held an ornamental painted leather shield in one hand and an eagle feather in the other.

  “Medicine man,” Kyle said, watching the man approach. Padma said nothing.

  The medicine man began to speak to Kyle in the Lakota language.

  “We don’t speak your language,” Kyle replied.

  The medicine man was surprised. Though Kyle was white, he had been conjured by the Ghost Dance and had arrived with what appeared to be a beautiful native woman. The medicine man was disappointed that Kyle did not speak Lakota.

  “Takoda!” the medicine man shouted to the crowd.

  A young man wearing a ghost shirt with a crimson triangle and buckskin pants ran to join them. He wore an eagle feather in his long braided hair. The medicine man spoke to the younger man while gesturing toward Kyle and Padma.

  “My name is Takoda,” the young man said. “This is Yellow Bird, our medicine man. He wants to know if you are the Messiah.”

  Kyle realized that the ghost dancers had confused the time travelers’ miraculous entrance with the prophesized summoning of the Messiah.

  Kyle began to shake his head. Before he could speak, Padma cut him off.

  “Yes. I am the Messiah,” she announced.

  Kyle looked at Padma, thunderstruck. The medicine man and Takoda looked confused. Though the prophecy did not specify the Messiah’s gender, it had been assumed it would come in the form of a man.

  “There is a great battle that will happen with the whites in the winter. We are here to defeat the whites. We have brought powerful weapons with us,” she said. She turned to Kyle. “Show them, love.”

  “May I speak with you?” Kyle asked Padma.

  “Of course,” Padma replied, smiling to the medicine man and Takoda. The two men returned the smile of the gorgeous goddess.

  Kyle took Padma gently by the arm and guided her a few feet away.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Kyle asked.

  “I’m trying to make the best of a truly shitty situation,” Padma replied. “It’s not my fault we landed in a western. If we’re not going to be rich hippies in San Francisco tripping on acid, we might as well do some fucking good!”

  “This is the deal,” Kyle said. “Four days after Christmas, 500 US soldiers with repeating rifles and artillery are going to slaughter 300 Lakota men, women, and children.”

  “I understand there may be challenges,” Padma replied.

  “I’m one guy with a submachine gun with 1,000 rounds. Those 500 soldiers have nearby reinforcements of nearly 5,000 men. It’s the largest single concentration of soldiers since the Civil War. If I hit one soldier with every bullet, that still leaves 4,000 soldiers.”

  “A thousand rounds? We were supposed to go to Haight-Ashbury, not Vietnam.”

  “I come prepared,” said Kyle, “because you just never know when you’re going to be in a gunfight with the fucking US cavalry! The bottom line is this: We’re going to die.”

  Padma went silent for a moment.

  “Do you have a better way to die?” she asked.

  “Yeah, actually, I thought I’d die of natural causes after growing old with my wife.”

  “You seem to forget—I’m not your wife. Your wife is dead.”

  Kyle looked at Padma, astonished. Her words had wounded him with a sucker punch. He collected himself and fired back.

  “Fine,” said Kyle, “I thought I’d grow old with the other guy’s wife.”

  Padma slapped Kyle’s face hard. Kyle glared at her, his eyes wide. He didn’t know this woman.

  The Lakota gasped. In their patriarchal culture, a wife slapping her husband was almost as shocking as two people appearing out of thin air.

  “Fuck you! I loved that ‘other guy!’ You’re not that ‘other guy.’ My Kyle was brave and heroic, and he would have helped these people!”

  Kyle looked away from Padma and into the puzzled eyes of the people who formed the ring around them. Some faces were old and wrinkled. Even the young faces showed age well beyond their years. All the faces expressed despair, tinged with the longing hope that these two strange people might actually be the answer to their prayers.

  Kyle shot Padma a hard look, then angrily took off his backpack and unzipped it, retrieving an MP7 submachine gun. He walked back to the medicine man and Takoda, clicked on the gun’s laser target pointer and aimed it at his hand. The two Lakota men pointed at the brilliant red star in the palm of Kyle’s hand.

  “Oyuspe sa wichahpi luta mahel nape!” exclaimed the medicine man. Takoda nodded. He turned to Kyle.

  “Our medicine man calls you ‘Holds Red Star in Hand,’” Takoda said.

  Detention center

  Time Tunnel Complex

  Area 51, NV

  December 10, 2008

  09:15 hours

  Timelin
e 002

  Colin James stood naked in a 30-by-30 foot gray cement room. His arms were shackled above his head. The room was brightly lit. Hellvetica’s teeth-rattling “New Hate” shrieked from a boom box on the floor. Two freshly sutured red scars from excised bullets branded his left shoulder blade.

  Colin alternated between standing and resting his weight on his wrist shackles. He had vacillated between standing and hanging for 48 hours, since he was transferred from the Time Tunnel’s hospital to the interrogation cell. The 48-hour period was interrupted by a single water-boarding session.

  The room had a two-way mirror along one wall. Two Steelcase chairs were parked next to a locked door. The door opened. Annika Wise entered.

  “Good morning!” she shouted over the death metal.

  She wore black combat pants, black lace boots, and a black tank top. She carried a paper bag, setting it next to the boom box. She turned off the boom box and walked to Colin. She noted that the man was standing in his own waste.

  “Yuck,” she said. “You’re a mess.”

  She stood close to Colin and looked up at his face. “Shall we continue?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you want to know,” cried Colin. “I would tell you if I knew!”

  Annika appeared compassionate, touching Colin softly on his sweaty chest. “I don’t want to hurt you. You believe that, don’t you Colin?”

  Colin nodded his head desperately. “Yes, yes, I believe you.”

  “That’s good, Colin,” Annika replied, “because it’s very important that you and I are able to trust each other.”

  Annika paused, walking a slow circle around Colin. “I only have one question for you, Colin. Answer my question correctly, and you can go to your apartment. You can sleep in your bed. You can eat. You can drink. You can have a hot bath. Doesn’t that sound good, Colin?”

  “Yes,” Colin replied.

  “This is my question: Where did Kyle and Padma go?”

  Colin began to cry.