Causality: Part One

by Alicia McKenzie

Picture a river. Water, rock, dirt, plants, fish--I could go on, but I hope you've all got the idea. There are countless different elements in a river, all interacting with one another, all shaping the river's course.

Now change something. Take a drink of water. Kill a fish. Does it change the course of the river? No, of course it doesn't. Skipping a stone and building a dam are two very different things.

The timestream isn't a river. We talk about 'the force of history', how the timestream doesn't want to be changed. What is, is. What happened, happened. But it doesn't always take drastic action to make time flow in a different direction. Sometimes you don't need the dam.

Sometimes, all you need to do is throw one stone at the right place and the right time. And the world changes.

2041

/...with an NABC special report. At approximately 3:30 Eastern time this afternoon, the New York headquarters of DaCosta International was seized by the XSE. Reports are coming in that similar action has been taken against other facilities belonging to the corporation. As of yet, the XSE has released no reason for this latest police action, but a press conference is expected within the hour. Let's go now to our own Adrienne Pierce in New York. Adrienne, have you.../

*

"Okay, get them out of here," Lieutenant Commander Nathan Guthrie ordered, managing to hold back another fit of coughing until the order was given. The smoke was making his eyes water, too. It would be good to get off this floor--well, it would be good to get out of this building, period, but he wasn't holding his breath on that score. Still too much work to be done.

Watching as two of his troopers hustled the group of terrified office workers down the hall to the stairs, Nate hoped fiercely this was just an isolated instance. They still had ten floors of the building to secure, and he really didn't want to see any more noncombatants being used as human shields. Tactics like that were beneath contempt.

The rest of his team was getting their latest batch of prisoners disarmed and on their feet. There'd been no injuries on either side in this latest firefight - for which Nate was sincerely grateful - but even his patience was beginning to wear thin. He knelt down and picked up one of the DaCosta guards' discarded helmets, speculating for about the fiftieth time today on whether or not there was some way to disable the built-in psi-bafflers. In his not-so-humble opinion, the damned things were becoming far too popular an accessory among corporate security thugs these days. Not an encouraging development.

Then again, there were always people trying to make their fortunes by finding a way around a given tactical advantage. Shaking his head, Nate dropped the helmet and reached out telepathically to report to his commanding officer.

#The fortieth floor is secure,# he sent, hoping he wasn't leaking anything. He was very good at keeping the professional mask on when the conversation was face-to-face, but mind-to-mind was another matter entirely. #Any arrangements for the prisoners yet?#

#Transports just arrived at ground level, Nate.# Clare Summers responded, her ice-and-steel telepathic 'voice' fuzzy around the edges, a clear sign that she was distracted. She was somewhere in the research complex underneath the office building, with the bulk of their troops. It made good tactical sense, even if it left him short-handed, with only four teams to cover fifty floors. After all, the research labs were where the serious problem was liable to be--if there was one. He hoped not. #Send them down to the lobby and keep moving upwards.#

#All right.# That simplified things. He could send two troopers down with the prisoners and then have them catch up to the rest of the team, thus avoiding leaving himself any more short-handed than he already was. #Everything okay down there?#

#Someone let DaCosta's experimental subjects out of their cages. I didn't think he'd field-test them on us. I should have,# Clare sent back bleakly, cold--no, killing fury edging her words. Nate shivered inwardly, then stiffened as she reached out and drew the link tighter, sending a cascade of images at him, flashes of clearly mutated figures screaming, fighting--bleeding. #One way or the other, Nate, I'm going to gut Stefano when I get my hands on him.#

Nate winced. #Figuratively?#

#I'm not making any promises.# With that, she cut contact abruptly, and Nate shook his head, wishing he could believe that she'd been joking--or at least mostly joking. But he knew better.

Anyway, if Clare and her troops had wound up fighting the very mutates they'd come to take into protective custody, part of Nate couldn't really blame her for being in a rage. He took a deep breath, pushing the stricken, conflicted anxiety he'd been fighting since this operation had been ordered back into the corner of his mind, where it belonged.

He had to put this into perspective. Counterrorism had always been the XSE's busiest division, and nothing had changed in the five years since Clare had taken over as divisional commander and he'd been assigned as her second in command. If anything, 'business' had picked up alarmingly. There'd been so many police actions, too many of which had ended messily. This wasn't anything new.

Except that this was the first time they'd had to move against one of their own. Nathan grimaced, giving the necessary orders as he gathered the rest of his team. "All right, people," he said quietly, "let's stay focused." As they headed for the stairs, he sent a telepathic order to the team on the other side of the building, telling them to move upwards as well.

One of their own. Despite what Stefano DaCosta had done, the description still applied as far as Nate was concerned. Others - especially Clare - would disagree with him, he knew. But Stef had been his friend since infancy--almost a brother, Nate thought bleakly, fighting with memories. Their fathers had been as close, right up to the day Roberto DaCosta had died. There was so much history, so much tying them together. Nate just wished he knew how things had gone so wrong.

The stairwell, when they got to it, was still filled with the camoflauging smoke they'd used to facilitate getting up to this floor in the first place. Moving up to take point, Nate ignored the disapproving look Pastorelli, his lieutenant, directed at him. Subordinates were such a pain in the ass when they turned into mother-hens. He was the only one with the ability to shield the whole team, and he was NOT going to see any more of his people hurt today.

As if summoned by that thought, plasma fire suddenly bit into the wall above his head. Cursing under his breath, Nate reinforced the shield around his team and then levitated himself rapidly up the next flight of stairs, charging his psimitar as he flew. He wound up face to face with a surprising-looking security guard struggling to reload his weapon.

"Drop it," Nate said grimly, holding his glowing psimitar a couple of centimetres away from the visor of the man's helmet. "Now." The gun clattered on the floor. "Now take your helmet off." The man hesitated, and Nate pushed the psimitar a little closer. "Do I need to repeat myself?"

Once the psi-bafflers were out of the way, Nate swiftly implanted a suggestion in the man's mind to walk down to the first floor and into the prisoner transport with his hands up. Pastorelli appeared beside him, grimacing as the blank-faced security officer marched obediently down the stairs, apparently completely unaware of the nasty looks he was getting from the other members of Nate's team.

"I wish you wouldn't do that, sir," he muttered. "Hard on my blood pressure."

Nate raised an eyebrow at him. "And I wish that you wouldn't nag like an old woman, Ben, but we don't always get what we want." He didn't take stupid chances, but when he was the best person to take a risk, he wasn't about to let the fact that he had a couple of extra stars on his uniform stop him.

Pastorelli nodded with a sigh, and lowered his helmet's visor. "How many more floors to this place, again?"

"Just ten."

"Oh, great. Maybe you can--"

#Nate, I need you down here,# Clare's voice echoed sharply in his mind. #Right now!#

She cut contact again almost immediately, but she'd 'shouted' loud enough that it left the telepathic equivalent of ringing in his ears. Nate grimaced, and shook his head at the questioning look Pastorelli gave him.

"Problems in the basement," he muttered. "Keep moving upwards."

With that, he grabbed the psychic tether Clare had thrown him, and teleported.

*

Reemerging into normal space, Nate pulled a TK shield around himself instinctively, but saw almost instantly that it wasn't necessary. Medics were busy tending to the fallen--a mixture of XSE troopers, DaCosta security guards, and far too many of the mutates they'd come here to free. Nate felt his jaw clench, and it took a real effort to keep his expression neutral as he moved through the laboratory.

The mutates who weren't wounded were being sedated and put in restraints. It was the only safe way to transport them. Every single one of them screamed and fought until the drugs took hold. Reaching out tentatively, he sensed nothing resembling conscious, self-directed thought in any of them. They'd been made into weapons, aimed and released.

His stomach churned as he took a closer look, and saw how young most of them were. Volunteers, most of them, according to XSE intelligence. Young men and women barely out of their teens who'd been lured into this with promises of lucrative careers in 'black' agencies--but they couldn't have expected it to be like this. Nate really doubted that they'd known anything about the psychological side of the process when they'd signed on the dotted line. Sane people didn't volunteer to have their minds wiped.

This wasn't just criminal, it was obscene.

"Sir?" Melanie Parrish, Clare's lieutenant, was at his side almost immediately as he moved out of one laboratory into another.

"Hell of a day, Mel," he said hoarsely.

"You can say that again," she said with a sigh, real sadness in those striking green eyes as she watched the medics loading the mutates onto anti-grav stretchers. "The commander's waiting for you through there," she said, pointing at what looked like an airlock door.

A cleanroom? he wondered. "Thanks, Mel," he said. She nodded and went back to her work, which seemed to involve supervising a number of troops dismantling the lab equipment. For evidence, he imagined.

This wasn't going to end here, with the police actions. There were months of further investigation, countless hours of legal wrangling. Eventually, this would all come to trial. He really didn't want to think about that at the moment.

On closer examination, the door was definitely an airlock. Nate pressed the release panel and frowned as it slid open to reveal a nearly barren room. *Definitely not another lab--* There was a circle of strangely rippled metal in the floor, surrounded by small, round openings in the floor itself. A console stood along the far wall, and Nate frowned as he saw Clare bending over it.

"What is it?"

Clare Summers raised her head and looked around at him. Her battle armor, like his, was scorched in a couple of places, and there was a streak of blood on her cheek. She didn't appear hurt, thankfully, although her black hair was coming loose from its braids, and her gray eyes as they met his were full of exhausted anger and a strange tension he didn't understand.

"Seal the door behind you, Nate," she said very quietly, instead of answering his question.

"What have we got?" he asked, doing so and then joining her over at the console, his heart-rate picking up a little as he sensed just how disturbed she wasn't. She seemed--afraid, and Clare didn't frighten easily.

"He knew we were coming," she said in that same subdued voice. She let her head sag backwards, rubbing at the base of her neck almost irritably. "Take a look. You interned in Temporal Division--you should know what this is."

Nate studied the console for a moment, and tried not to let his jaw drop as his mind processed what he was seeing. "Damn," he muttered faintly. The platform, the layout on the console--he knew exactly what this was. He should have known as soon as he'd walked in the door.

It was a Tinex. DNA-coded, he guessed, studying the set-up of the console. State-of-the-art, certainly. This wasn't anything he'd expected to find in the basement of this place. Even having the blueprints for the damned thing was a violation of the Cairo Accords. What the hell was Stefano doing with one? Possibilities, none of them palatable, spun wildly through his mind. He looked back at Clare, speechless, and flinched as she gave him a thin smile.

"What do you think he's doing?" he asked, his throat terribly dry. *Stef--oh, damn, Stef.* This was so much worse than he'd imagined.

"My guess would be 'nothing good'," Clare murmured.

Zara would have smiled right back at her and said something along the lines of 'no shit'. Nick probably would have just sighed. Both of them would have had much more chance of influencing whatever she was planning to do next than he did.

"Have you checked with Temporal Division?" he asked, watching her as she strode over to the platform, kneeling down and laying a hand against it. "Clare?" he persisted when she didn't answer. "Have you?" She nodded, almost absently, and he tried to keep the snarl out of his voice as he went on. His self-control was verging on the frayed, with all of this staring him in the face. "Well, are they tracking him?"

"Trying to," she murmured, not looking at him. "They registered his departure, but it's causing major disruption in the timestream already." She shook her head, and her voice grew colder as she went on. "It's spreading. He can't have been gone for more than five minutes--the fucking platform's still warm, and already there's no useable window backdating for six months."

So there was no easy solution. If they couldn't insert an enforcement team within a six month temporal radius, simply stepping back and stopping Stef from going in the first place wasn't an option . "Six months. I'm assuming that's just going to get worse," Nate said in as neutral a voice as he could manage.

"It is. There's something at work here already," Clare said, drawing away from the platform and steepling her hands, a distant, almost glazed look in her eyes. "I can feel it. New possibilities taking shape."

"Bad ones?"

This time, her smile was twisted, sardonic to the point of being vicious as she rose and walked around the platform, as if pacing off the distance. "Think about it, Guthrie. Even if he manages to create heaven on earth, it'd still be bad."

She had a point, unfortunately. It was one thing if you were chrono-variant. The timestream almost seemed to welcome interference in that case, and there were more than a few theorists in Temporal Division who believed that c-v mutants - psi-based c-v mutants, at least - were, by nature, walking nexus points.

From a practical standpoint, it was pretty simple. Chrono-variants could change things without causing structural damage to the timestream itself. Clare's father was the best example of that; Nathan Summers had reshaped their entire timeline, both before Apocalypse's death and afterwards.

But anyone else who timeripped back into a nexus window to force a new branch point was quite literally flirting with disaster. Since the Merge, their timeline had resisted manipulation by those who weren't attuned to it. No one was sure whether it was something Clare's father had done, or an entirely natural phenomenon. All they knew was that new branch points could still be forced into existence, but doing so created severe cross-time disruption, distortion that tore at the fabric of the multiverse--and opened doors. Dangerous doors. The cross-time barriers were there for a reason. You didn't start poking holes in them if you wanted to avoid trouble. It wasn't that the XSE opposed time-travel - Temporal Division certainly didn't limit its activities to enforcement - but the risk of abuse was just too great to allow anyone who could build a Tinex to run amuck in the timestream.

"So we wait for Temporal Division to pinpoint him and send a team back," Nate said, trying for a reasonable tone. "He can't have gone back any farther than the Merge, after all. That's only thirty-six years they need to scan--" No time travel to points before the Merge was possible any longer. As a branch point, it had been unimaginably huge. The TD theorists called it the Akkaban Breakwater.

Clare shook her head. "There's no time."

He frowned at her. "Clare, we've got plenty of time at this end of history," he pointed out, knowing it was a platitude. It didn't make it any less true. But she was getting that look that meant she was lusting after the idea of a preemptive strike, and he knew from long experience that it was best to head her off at the pass at moments like this.

Clare raised an eyebrow at him. "I forget sometimes that you're as chronopathic as a stump," she said calmly. Nettled by her choice of words, Nate opened his mouth to point out that it wouldn't kill her to use a little tact sometimes, but she continued in a harsher voice. "If we don't stop him, we're screwed. I'm not my father; I can't snap my fingers and fix a branch point with a few minutes of concentration like he could."

He could see where this was going. "Clare, you can't act on your own, not if he's timeripped--"

"Watch me," Clare growled, her eyes flashing almost silver as they strayed back to the platform. "Besides, I can sense where he is." A humorless smile pulled at her lips for a moment. "I think I even know what he's trying to do."

Nate hesitated, flustered a little by how calmly she'd thrown that into the conversation. "What?" he finally asked when she didn't elaborate. She stayed silent, and he folded his arms across his chest with a heavy sigh. "Clare, come on."

Clare actually rolled her eyes at him. "I think he's finally going to try and put all that anti-XSE rhetoric of his into practice," she said, as if informing him that Stef had traveled back to get more time to catch up on his reading.

Nate frowned. "Are you sure?" he said, seriously rattled by the thought. Stef had always ranted and raved about how 'stifling' an influence the XSE was on society, but Nate had always assumed that was just hot air. *Mostly because I never thought he'd come up with a way to do anything about it,* Nate admitted to himself bleakly. He supposed that having the XSE seize all his assets must have been enough of a provocation for Stef to take matters into his own hands--but he had to have been planning this for a while, too, to have built the Tinex.

*Damn it.* Nate swallowed, remembering the last time he'd seen Stef. It had been a business lunch for senior officers to mingle with defense contractors, and they hadn't gotten much of a chance to talk. Stef had been--very stiff. *I should have tried harder to get him to talk to me.* Maybe if he had--

"Stop beating yourself up," Clare advised, her voice softening. Nate shrugged irritably, and she came over, slipping her hand into his and squeezing tightly. For a moment her gray eyes were gentle, understanding, and he clung to the soothing emotions she was projecting. Her next words shattered the spell of the moment, though. "It's done. Now let's do something about it."

Nate squeezed back and then let go of her hand. "Let's not and say we did. Chain of command, Clare--remember that concept?" A little more sarcasm slipped into the words than he'd really intended to put there. "Besides, I've got no intention of letting you timerip without at least having the jaunt authorized." He forced himself to smile. "I'll sit on you if I have to. You know I will." He fully expected to get a glare in response, but she merely narrowed her eyes and gave him one of those disturbing, speculative looks that had meant trouble since childhood. "What?" he asked suspiciously.

Clare folded her arms across her chest. "Firstly," she said crisply, an edge of irritation in her voice, "I happen to be a fully trained chrono-variant with command authority. If I think the need to act is there, rules and regs say I have the right. Secondly, I'm not going back to stop DaCosta. You are."

Oh--shit.

Nate stared at her for a full ten seconds before he found the words. "Clare, you can't be serious," he said hoarsely, managing by an act of sheer will to keep his voice from breaking entirely.

"Do I look like I'm joking?" she asked levelly. She didn't. She looked all too serious. "I have to stay here. I can't fix the disruption if I'm inside it. Tracking him and timeripping you there while I'm doing temporal repair will be difficult, but it's the better choice."

"I don't believe you," Nate said unsteadily. #Why me?# he asked, deliberately switching to telepathy. It was harder for her to obscure the truth that way. Clare didn't precisely lie - at least not very often - but she had a very bad habit of leaving things out. #That can't be it, really.# He couldn't believe she was suggesting this--he had no experience with actual time-travel, just a head full of theory he'd never put into practice. This was insane.

#Believe it or not,# Clare sent back coldly, her gaze never wavering, #that's the truth. But I also want you back there because you're you, and DaCosta still has a soft spot in his heart for you.#

She didn't even look away as she said it. There was no hesitancy, no compassion, not even a shred of shame in her steely gaze. For a heartbeat, Nate could have throttled her.

But self-control and bleak understanding won out. Again, she had a point. The simple truth was that he was one of the few members of their extended 'family' that Stef would even speak to anymore. Nate grimaced. They'd all tried to reach out to him, but it was like he'd changed somehow, when his father had died. There was a bitterness in him now, a restless anger that Nate had never been able to understand. Their friendship had been so strained that he was wary of relying on it for an advantage, but at least there wasn't the same animosity between him and Stef as there was between--

#Myself and the sick bastard?# Clare sent icily. Nate glared at her, and she glared right back. "Don't give me that look," she said harshly.

"Which look would that be?"

"The 'oh, woe is me, my ruthless bitch of a cousin is manipulating me again' look. Pardon me if I don't have time to waste trying to make you feel good about this." Clare's eyes bored into him; her gaze was intense, demanding, as if willing him to understand. "If there's one thing my father taught me, it was to trust my instincts when it came to situations like this. We don't have time to wait."

Nate took a deep breath, willing himself to loosen the death-grip on his psimitar. He had to take her seriously. Because of her peculiar combination of gifts and the catalytic effects of the Merge, Clare was attuned to things that the rest of them could only grasp on the most basic of levels--which included fluctuations in the timestream. She might not understand half of what she sensed, but she was right, she had been taught to act on her instincts. They'd saved the day far too often for Nate to discount them now.

And the fact was that he did trust her. She was very often the ruthless bitch she'd named herself, but she was never willfully cruel. Nor had he ever known her to delegate a task simply because it was unpleasant. If she said this was the best way, the way that was most likely to achieve a satisfactory conclusion, he did believe her.

But the idea of hunting Stef down--

"Are you sure?" he asked finally, the question coming out soft, less urgent than it should have been.

There was real pain in her eyes as she nodded. It was all directed at him, and he knew that she was actually paying him a very high compliment. He was one of the few people for whom she would ever let the mask slip, even a little. "I can feel the ripples already," Clare said, biting her lip. "I don't want to send you, Nate, but I think I have to."

Nate nodded. "Okay," he said, and forced himself to smile. It wasn't very convincing, he knew, but he didn't want her dwelling on her decision, now that she'd made it. Clare had a very bad habit of making the tough choices, carrying them out with scrupulous competence, and then tearing herself apart over them later.

#Speaking of fathers, you're going to get a lecture from mine for putting me in this position, you know,# he sent, only half-jokingly, and flinched at the remembered image of his father's face as he'd ordered this operation against his own godson.

"I'll deserve every word," she murmured.

A sigh escaped him before he could stop it. "You've pinpointed him?" She nodded, and Nate shrugged irritably, trying to ignore the way his insides were attempting to tie themselves in knots. "I'll do my best, Clare," he went on as she looked back at him.

"I know," she said, her gray eyes darkening. "Just--stop him, Nate." A small, sad smile flickered across her face as the air between them started to crackle with emerald fire, temporal energy building to rip a passage through the years for him. "And don't get yourself killed, or I'll have your ass on a plate."

The word dissolved around him, and he didn't get the chance to answer.

*

Clare took a deep breath, trying very hard to push the momentary dizziness to arm's length. It had been a very long time since she'd timeripped someone 'by remote', or whatever you wanted to call it. It was a strange sort of strain, and she had to work at it to keep the tether between her and Nate intact.

It was like having your consciousness divided, almost. She couldn't sense Nate's thoughts, not when years divided them. All she could see was the ebb and flow of the timestream, the shape and complexity of the nexus point into which she'd just dropped him.

The nexus point which had already begun to change in her mind's eye, to glow and shudder and warp as it bled cross-time distortion. Ripples emanated from it, tugging dangerously at the fabric of the timestream.

And it was only the beginning.

"Damn you, DaCosta," Clare muttered, tottering towards the nearest wall and using it as support as she slid to the floor and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

The ripples hurt, as if someone was flaying her mind. DaCosta hadn't even done what he'd traveled to that nexus to do. When--if he did, the ripples would turn into a tsunami. Nate had to stop him before that happened.

She worked as quickly as she could to undo the ripples as they appeared, and clung to the tether linking her and Nate. Wishing that there was some way to talk to him, to tell him that he wasn't alone back there.

If only there'd been a way to go herself. This wasn't fair to Nate--then again, life wasn't fair in general, Clare thought bleakly. Necessity ruled, as always.

Recognizing that didn't make her feel any better.

2005

It was well past one in the morning, according to the clock on the wall. Careful timing was everything, Stefano DaCosta thought with a tight smile. If he'd programmed the Tinex to place him here an hour earlier, there would almost certainly have been someone sitting beside the bed, keeping vigil. But he'd heard enough stories from his father to know that Hank McCoy and Cecilia Reyes had always, without fail, kicked everyone out of the mansion's infirmary by one in the morning. It had been an iron-clad rule.

After one in the morning, the X-Men's doctors made rounds every half-hour. Which meant he had just over ten minutes to kill the man lying in the bed in front of him.

Plenty of time.

Nathan Summers moaned softly in his sleep, his battered, bandage-swathed body twitching weakly. Almost as if he'd sensed something--but no, that wasn't possible, Stefano reminded himself harshly. Nathan's telepathy had shut down for months after the Merge. Everyone knew that. Here and now, he was defenseless.

It was an opportunity. Stefano reached out and took the IV tube, sliding it between his fingers for a moment as he tried to banish the host of memories that had chosen this particularly inopportune moment to come flooding back. It was ridiculous, but he couldn't help reliving it all.

He couldn't blame Nathan for his current situation--not directly, at least. There were other considerations, too. Nathan had never shut him out, never treated him with contempt for his lack of mutant abilities. He'd even tried, not long before his death, to mend things between Stef and the rest of the 'family'. It hadn't worked, but--

Somehow Stef had thought this would be a lot easier. He gritted his teeth, furious at his own hesitation. This wasn't personal. It was just the most efficient way to do what needed doing. He'd picked this nexus window for his first attempt for a very good reason. If Nathan had succumbed to the injuries he'd suffered fighting Apocalypse at Akkaba - and he very nearly had, according to 'family' legend - the world would have been a very different place. Without him as the driving force, there would have been no Cairo Conference.

No Cairo Accords, no XSE. It was that simple. All he had to do was add the drug to the IV line, and it would be done. "Damn it," Stef muttered under his breath as his mind presented him with the memory of being tossed up into the air telekinetically and laughing with glee at each repetition while his mother fluttered anxiously off to the side, tremulously pointing out 'he's a growing boy, Nathan, getting heavier--are you sure you can manage to catch him?'

This was ridiculous. An attack of conscience, at this point? All he had to do was take the syringe out of the case in his pack and use it. Spawn a new future, right from the beginning--or as close to the beginning as he could get, given the absolute wall that was the Merge.

So easy.

"Who are you trying to convince?" a low voice said tightly from the corner.

Stef whirled, and stared in shock as a familiar tall figure in XSE battle armor stepped out of the shadows. "Nate," he breathed as Nate Guthrie stopped and glared at him. "No."

Nate's cropped black hair was spiky and sweat-damp and he looked pale, almost ill. Stef remembered how much of a jolt the temporal transition had been. Nate must have just arrived. There'd been no flash, though.

"That's all you have to say? Step away, Stef," Nate growled, his blue eyes blazing as he raised his psimitar and started to charge it.

Stef grabbed at his composure with both hands and held on tight. He hadn't expected this. He hadn't--not Nate, damn it! Shock crystallized into anger as he realized what must have happened, whose idea this had to have been.

"Nice to see you, Guthrie," he said, willing his voice to stay steady. "I have to admit, I didn't think they'd send you. I figured the Iron Bitch of the XSE would insist on coming herself." Damn her. Damn her to hell for doing this.

"Clare's busy cleaning up the mess you made," Nate snapped. For someone so generally pleasant, Nate could manage a perfectly credible menacing look, Stef thought faintly. "Now step away."

"If I don't?" Stef said.

"I'll move you."

Same old Nate, Stefano thought, anger swelling inside him as it sank in that this wasn't going to change anything. Nate wasn't going to cut him any slack, wasn't going to listen to his side.

"You were never much for unnecessary conversation," he murmured, suddenly and overwhelmingly reminded of the last conversation he'd had with Nate's father. Uncle Sam had been glaring at him in much the same way then, too.

His beloved godfather. Samuel Guthrie, who looked a good fifteen years younger than Nate, these days. Uncle Sam, who was still running XSE Operations, and probably would continue to do so, right up until the day he moved into Bishop's job and gave his to Clare.

Nepotism. A laugh escaped Stefano before he could help himself. Wasn't that just a shining example of what bothered him so much? The fact that the XSE, a closed society with a ready-made aristocracy, had a stranglehold on the world that seemed impossible to break--

To hell with them. HE was the aristocrat. Stefano straightened, letting go of the IV and smiling coldly. He was a DaCosta. He was NOT going to let them destroy him.

The best defense was a good offense. They'd excluded him, thwarted him, and finally attacked him. They hadn't been satisfied with simply pushing him out of their world; they'd had to threaten him in his, too.

"So what now?" Stef asked, wondering how much Nate knew, whether Clare had had a chance to figure everything out before sending him back. If she hadn't, he still had a chance here, if he could keep Nate talking for a few more minutes. "I let you take me back and lead me off to prison?"

"You're an idiot," Nate said very quietly, not lowering the psimitar. "Unauthorized time travel is a capital offense, Stef. What were you thinking?"

The party line. Nothing more than he'd expected, but from Nate--from Nate of ALL people--it stung more than it should. "Give me some credit, Nate," Stef said with a tight smile. "I know what I'm doing."

"That's what I'm afraid of." Nate's eyes narrowed, and Stef forced himself not to stiffen as he felt something--pluck at his mind, almost hesitantly. The sensation came again, and this time Nate's eyes widened in shock that he made no attempt to hide. "Stef! What did you--"

"Find something you didn't expect?" Stef forced himself to smile again. "Like I said," he continued as smoothly as he could, "I was expecting Clare to come after me." Expecting that, he'd known he had to take some sort of measures to protect himself mentally, as well as physically. "You'd be surprised," he went on, "how many telepaths out there have found freelancing more to their taste than government service."

One of them, for a staggering fee, had spent the better part of a week crafting self-sustaining psionic shields, building them right into the fabric of Stef's mind. It hadn't been a pleasant process - damned painful, as a matter of fact - but the telepath had guaranteed they'd hold against a concerted attack from another alpha telepath.

They wouldn't have held long against Clare, of course. Just enough to gain him a little time, and he'd bargained that it would be the few minutes he would have needed to let his program take him to his next temporal destination.

Against Nate, though, things were a little different. Nate wasn't as strong--wasn't as much of a threat. Wouldn't that make Clare furious? To know she gave me an edge by sending him instead of coming herself-- "Maybe you should try again," Stef suggested, and his smile grew, despite the circumstances. He'd always liked to tweak Nate. "Come on, Guthrie, give it another shot. You might get it yet."

"Or maybe I shouldn't bother," Nate snapped, the blade of his psimitar glowing star-bright. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Stef could almost see the telekinetic 'hand' that reached out to grab him.

He flinched, despite his best effort to stay still, but he needn't have worried. Heat flared outwards from his belt as his body-shield kicked in, and the shield crackled, repelling the telekinetic attack. Stumbling backwards, Nate managed to keep to his feet, but was clearly dazed by the feedback.

Stef watched with grim satisfaction. As he'd told Nate, he did know precisely what he was doing. The body-shield was state-of-the-art. It did everything that a device of its type should.

It also disrupted telekinesis.

"Give me some credit," Stef repeated softly as Nate shook his head doggedly, as if trying to clear it. "You don't think I staked everything on one roll of the dice, do you?"

The room shimmered around him like a desert mirage. Stef smiled again as the nexus window closed and his program kicked in again, automatically pulling him forward to his next destination. His next chance to change his fate.

Be seeing you, Nate, he thought as he disappeared into the timestream.

*

Shaking his head doggedly, Nate hauled himself back to his feet, fighting back the urge to curse as the blinding green flash of temporal energy faded to reveal no Stef. "Damn it!" he growled under his breath. Where could he have gone? Back to 2041?

No. You don't think I staked it all on one roll of the dice, do you? The room had been busy spinning around him at the time, but he'd heard that. Even if he hadn't, he had more than enough information to work with. Simple logic, that was all that was needed. Stef hadn't fought him, hadn't even tried. It didn't make any sense for him to have given up like that, unless this really wasn't over.

Nate rubbed at his eyes, willing the headache trying to form to go away. "He has to be on a specific temporal course," he muttered, and bit back the harsh, slightly wild laugh that bubbled up inside him. Obviously. Slide into a nexus and try to change it, and if you failed, if events took their course despite your efforts, you could use the temporal tidal forces to launch yourself back out as the nexus window closed. It made all too much sense. For all he knew, Stef was planning to tour every nexus in the thirty-six years since the Merge, looking for one he could manipulate to get the future he wanted--

If Clare was tracking him, she'd see that. Presumably, she'd move Nate forward to follow him. He had to trust that she had things in hand at that end of history, and do what he needed to do here. Moving quickly to the bed, he checked the monitors and life-support equipment. Everything seemed all right. He'd figured he'd interrupted Stef before he could do any damage, but still--close, too damned close!

Rage like he'd rarely felt filled him as he looked down at the man he'd been named after, his teacher and surrogate grandfather, and thought about what would have happened if Clare's 'aim' had been any less precise. If he'd gotten here five minutes later, Nathan would be dead, and a future he didn't even want to contemplate would have taken shape.

#He's going to unbind what ties us together,# a voice whispered in his mind. Nate nearly jumped out of his skin. It sounded like Uncle Nathan, but it couldn't be. He was deeply unconscious, semi-comatose--

"Damn it," Nate muttered again, feebly. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with an unsteady hand. Moving forward in time would have to be a little easier, he told himself. Less transition shock--but Stef knew he was coming, too.

He was dazed enough from the timerip and the feedback, and angry enough at the whole miserable situation that he didn't sense the second presence until he heard a soft gasp behind him. Whirling, bringing his psimitar up automatically, he was hit by another wave of dizziness and staggered, grabbing at the wall for support.

The slender, dark-haired young woman in the doorway took a hesitant step into the room, her eyes fixed on him, wide with something more perplexed than alarmed. "Who are you?" Dana Hawkes-Guthrie asked softly. "You--you seem familiar, somehow."

Nate tried to back away, but had nowhere to go. #Clare!# he shouted frantically into the void. #Pulling me out right the hell now would be nice!#

His mother blinked at him, and then her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "You're not here to hurt anyone, I can feel that," Mom said slowly, taking another step towards him, her hand outstretched. Her eyes lingered on the psimitar for a moment, then went back to his face, studying him intently. "But you're upset--are you in trouble? Can I help you somehow?"

"I wish you could," he rasped, and closed his eyes thankfully as an invisible hand reached down and yanked him out of there, back into the timestream.

2041

Clare gasped, shuddering as a new, fierce wave of disruption erupted from the point along the timestream from which she'd just retrieved Nate. What the fuck--? she thought disjointedly, shaking with pain as she tried to undo it at the same moment she kept an 'eye' on Stef's path and moved Nate to follow him.

Stef had already been gone--it had to have been something Nate had done, or let happen. She fought with the distortion, tasting blood at the back of her throat as the strain became almost unendurable.

But under these circumstances, willpower counted for a lot. She had to suceed, because there was no other alternative. No one else to pick up the slack if she failed.

So she wouldn't fail. Concentrating desperately, she wrestled the timeline back within an acceptable variance, barely managing to deposit Nate at the right point before she slumped with exhaustion.

Damn. Nate, you've got to be more careful , she thought, breathing raggedly and trying to gather her strength as she watched the timestream. And waited.

to be continued...

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