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It was a good question. I hated him for asking it. We'd been down to two Orions when Sergei stole all of our modules. We lost one of those two in the alternate universe Rafe and I had been stranded in. We subsequently picked up alternate Bryan's Orion to replace it. It had been a close-run thing, and then when Sergei used our shortfall against us, we almost lost the fight, not to mention the war completely.
Only luck had saved us. Clive certainly hadn't. But then, Anderson arrived at the Academy and Clive suddenly had a battle on his hands, frantically locking Parliament out in any way he could manage. Therehadbeen breadcrumbs for me to follow, so I had to believe Clive wanted me to find his Orion. But if the circumstances had been different, would Clive have revealed his MPCV?
I wasn't sure, and that annoyed me. It annoyed me more that Anderson was pointing that deficiency out.
"I don't know," I said. "Clive kept a lot of secrets."
Anderson looked at me. "Even from you, Dr Evans?"
"From everyone in this time, Mr Anderson. He was a man out of time, remember? The less it was referred to, the more chance of Time not intervening to correct it."
"What do mean, 'Time not intervening to correct it'?"
"Just that," I said, automatically, and then suddenly realised we were discussing dangerous things. Dangerous for Mimi.
He didn't know yet, I was certain. But that could change at any moment and the more he knew about a person being out of time and the consequences for it, the more likely he'd be to act first — as he did with Clive — and think later if he thought about it at all.
But I had to say something. His attention was completely on me and not the Orion. Rafe looked like he was going to do something to draw his attention away from me, but I needed Rafe to be the one flying with me. I couldn't risk him being arrested. And as we all knew, Anderson was arresting people for any small offence. It wouldn't take much to set the man off again.
"Time works within a precise set of rules," I said, trying to be as vague as I could manage. "There are consequences to every single thing we do when surfing its waves. So, in order to protect Time, we must operate within those rules. And one of Time's rules is that people should not be allowed to live out of their own time. Ever.
"Everything has its place, Chief Overseer, even Time itself."
"What would Time do if someonewasleft out of own their time?"
"I'm not sure. It's never been tested. But it's believed Time would retract like a rubber band; spring back into its original dimensions. The reverberations of which could be quite disastrous."
"So, it's all speculation?" Anderson pressed.
Oh, how I wanted to tell him it was. That maybe Clive could stay in our time permanently, that Mimi could, too. So far, Time hadn't corrected Mimi's presence, but Clive had felt Time stir regarding his, and so he returned to his time frequently. Clive, of course, had been out of time a lot longer than Mouse, which only meant that eventually, Time would do something to correct Mimi's error.
You couldn't leave bullets out of time. Wehadseen what Time did about that and it wasn't for the faint of heart. A correction like that was not a smooth return to the status quo. Whatever Time needed to do, it did it violently, as if it was sending a message to us.
Sometimes, it felt like Time was sentient to some degree. It couldn't talk to us, but then, actions often spoke louder than words.
"Not speculation," I finally said. "Years of study, experience, and yes, observation of Time correcting itself. Not people out of time, but bullets, the odd dropped trinket or piece of equipment. Time wastes no time at all correcting those unfortunate yet relatively minor infractions, and it does it in a way that cannot be ignored. If it were to correct a person being out of time, I fear for the backlash such an action would incur."
Anderson looked shocked and about to rampage through RATS searching for out-of-time anomalies. If he found out about Mimi, he wouldn't hesitate to act. I felt sick to my stomach that I'd pointed this out in such detail to the man. Glancing at Rafe, I saw he was pale, his eyes wider than usual. His gaze met mine, and I looked away first. I couldn't stand to see the judgement and condemnation on my friend's face.
As I'd been speaking, I'd told myself that I needed Anderson to believe I was playing on his team, at last; that honesty was the best way to achieve that. That achieving his trust in any measure was the only way to save RATS and Time. I'd felt justified if not a little uneasy as I'd spoken.
After the fact, I simply felt like I might throw up.
"We do get warnings, though," I heard myself say as if from a long distance away. "The larger the transgression, the more warning we get. That's how Clive knew when he had to return to his own time and reset the clock. That's why he had time to do it clandestinely, so no one was any the wiser."
"By pretending he was attending meetings with the Prime Minister," Anderson said. "Did you, as the second in command, not question why Crawford met with the PM more often than any other civil servant?"
"I left that side of running the Academy up to him. I ran the flights through Time."
Anderson studied me for a long moment. I attempted to keep any guilty thoughts from my face.
Finally, he looked away and took in the Orion. "Can we see inside it?" he asked, as if Mimi's existence hadn't just been threatened by the sharing of this dangerous knowledge.
I'd made things worse. Terribly worse. I'd compromised the woman I loved and, as yet, had nothing to show for it. I had no idea what would greet me when I opened the door to the Orion, but I had to hope it was familiar.
Right then, I felt out of sorts.
Thankfully, the Orion was set up exactly the same as our Orions. I couldn't remember if that was the case for the Orions of the late twenty-first century, but at least this one matched the configuration of our ones.
