“Where are we going?” I asked, sprawling out in one of the departure lounge’s couches.

The couch was analog, solid, covered with animal leather. Maybe it was supposed to impress visiting principals, or accustom us to stiff, non-ergonomic steel springs. It even smelled like curing oil. Either way, it was wasted. If you were in the departure lounge, you were too keyed up to enjoy it, and if you came back, you got stuck in quarantine. And then you wanted to escape the entire dispatch center and forget it existed.

Besides, retrieval specialists were picked for low mass and high endurance. Rough sitting didn’t matter to us. Me sprawling out was mostly for show.

“Ya, where are we going?” said Ross. He was a weasel of a man, all snap and speed. I liked Ross, he had a sense of humor even stranger than mine.

“Twentieth century,” said Davos, and I whistled, long, and low, and falling. “Special assignment,” he said, and I whistled again. I’d never heard of anyone going that far back.

“Someone’s rolling in cred,” I said. I wondered what it was like, living in ancient times. Even the historical records were sketchy. Not that we’d get a chance to find out. Retrievals were short, or they were lethal.

“Cred and then some,” Davos said. I didn’t know him well, only having worked with him twice, but he came across as competent, a gray type of man, with a face that could look anything between fifteen and fifty. Not that many people would look at him twice. Forgettable, good for retrievals from populated areas.

“Two hundred kilos pay-weight, in addition to us,” said Ross, holding the mission protocol.

This time I didn’t whistle. The hairs on the backs of my arms were rising.

“All three of us?” I said.

“Ya,” said Ross. “And equipment.”

A quick calculation gave me a four hundred kilos retrieval weight.

“That’s insane,” I said. “Nobody’s got that kind of energy. To the twentieth century? The path will go unstable in seconds.”

“Hours,” rasped a new voice. It belonged to a middle-aged woman, maybe in her seventies. Round, but not fat. Muscular. I pegged her as a hobbyist weightlifter, or a gourmand with a serious outdoor lifestyle. Not much past her first longevity treatment, her hair still retaining streaks of black among the white, cobalt-highlighted strands. She was dressed in rather drab and gray clothes of poor cut, a gray, ankle-length skirt of some heavy, organic-looking fabric with a brown jacket of the same fabric on top. Solid boots, though. Score one for the outdoor lifestyle part.

“Gentlemen,” said Gungat, our mission director, walking in behind her, “our principal, the honorable Professor Rothman.”

“You will have hours,” said Rothman. She didn’t give her first name, and didn’t seem like the type to go with the M honorific, ungendered or not. “Days, if you are lucky.”

“Impossible,” I said, forgetting myself. Gungat gave me a look. Never argue with the principal, that was the Path Conglomerate’s rule.

Except when your life is on the line. That was my rule.

“Possible,” said Rothman. “Likely even.”

Throwing caution to the wind, I snorted. To hell with Gungat and the conglomerate. After all, dead men don’t collect pay vouchers.

“Who are we retrieving?” Ross asked, interrupting. We’d worked together enough for him to recognize my tells. I have a short temper. It’s one of my specialties. Going rage-freak works in some situations.

Not in negotiations with a principal, though.

I gave Ross a grateful nod. I’m not too proud to recognize when my nuts have been pulled from the metaphorical fire.

“Retrieval is five people,” Gungat said. “Ages ranging from–“

“Who?” I interrupted. Retrieving people meant trouble.

“My mother,” Rothman said. “My brother. My three sisters.”

I shut up. That’s not something that happens often.

Retrieving is a straightforward proposition. Create a path to somewhere in history. Pump in enough energy to split off a separate time line. Retrieve whatever you need, then get the hell back before it collapses.

Bye-bye paradoxes. You can kill the branch ghost of your great-great-grandfather to the Nth power however much you want; in the canonical time line he’s still alive.

Retrieving people is a different proposition. People don’t want to abandon their lives. People struggle, oppose you. Their friends and neighbors oppose you. Retrieve them, and they collapse at seeing the future. Without heavy medication, they eventually become irrational. Kill themselves, mostly. Worse, sometimes. Maybe it is because they can’t handle the input, the discrepancies of our world. Maybe it’s because they are alone, without anyone from their time. Something like that could turn you irrational fast. There are guidelines against retrieving live persons.

That Rothman stood before us told me something. A lot of somethings.

Like someone having thought her valuable enough to bend regulations to bring her forward. Like she being able to acclimatize to our time, and be productive enough to save up for four hundred kilos to the twentieth century.

Which, by rights, was where Rothman had been born.

“Professor Rothman,” Davos said. “How are we to accomplish a retrieval that far back?”

“Who are you?” I said.

Rothman gave me another glare.

“There is a vortex,” she said. “You will hook onto it, and emerge near a train. You’re to enter the train and extract my family, then return them safely here. There might be opposition, more than usual. You are allowed to terminate it as you see fit, regardless of the presence of the principals.”

Now she was saying she didn’t mind if we shot someone right in front of her family.

She kept glaring at me. I kept glaring back.

“Simeon,” Gungat said, “Professor Rothman is a probabilist.”

“The probabilist,” Rothman said.

“The probabilist,” Gungat agreed.

Which explained the cred issue. Split-branch probability theory had quadrupled the number of successful retrievals. I likely owed Rothman my life twice over.

“But you’re from the twentieth,” I said. “How can you be a probabilist?”

Rothman sighed.

“Quantum physics was discovered years before I was born,” she said. “Everything else is naught but mathematics.”

“Professor Rothman predicted split-branch theory,” said Gungat. “At a time when the multiverse was still a radical new thing. Two of her unpublished articles survived in the archives. The decision was made to retrieve her.”

“And I have paid you for your efforts,” Rothman said. “Now it is your time to pay.”

Diving a path is like walking through a waterfall backwards. You enter the white light, pressure on your skin, blue lightning soundlessly striking all around you. I began to think we’d missed, that the path had collapsed with us inside. Another flash passed us, and another, the pressure on my skin crawling in slithering waves, like being dipped in splashing, cold oil. I wondered if I’d know when I’d die, or if it would simply end.

Instead, I exited into a grey dawn, crashing through the cold, wet branches of an old pine tree. The forest smelled of damp leaves and something else. Char, or burnt fat. Oil, maybe.

In history, people burn everything. It will make you nauseous if you let it. I scrunched my nose, keying up the chem-filters to a higher level. My right-hand filter fell out, followed by a stream of dark red blood.

I wiped at it with the back of my hand. To my right, Ross coughed, gulping deep breaths, supporting himself against a tree. Rothman was throwing up on the wet pine needles, splashes of half-digested bread and orange juice.

Only Davos seemed to have made it out clean. He was kneeling behind a dead pine, its bare branches dripping, his auto-gun half-raised, pointing forward. The auto-guns were done up in period disguise, long iron pipes with wooden stocks. Looked ridiculous.

There were no train tracks.

“We have to move,” Rothman croaked, her voice hoarse and stubborn. She was consulting a magnetic micro-compass.

“I don’t hear a train,” I said.

“You won’t,” Rothman said.

“But the plan,” I said.

“Is history,” she replied. “A fiction for the conglomerate. The trains don’t stop. There is only a single station.”

“Where?” Ross said, his voice as hoarse as hers.

Rothman’s eyes twitched as she consulted her map overlay, pointed to our left.

“There,” she said. “Less than two kilometers.”

I tried not to think what that meant in terms of time, in terms of the path’s stability. The path had shrunk to the size of a small, glowing grapefruit. Rothman caught it with the stabilizer, locking it into the round, shielded, aluminum ball. No low-tech branch ghost would be able to open the stabilizer. The path would be safe there until we needed to go back.

Unless it collapsed before then. I tried not to think about that, either, whether I’d know, or if the split time branch would collapse at the same time, wiping me out of existence. Branch ghosts had to be happy, not knowing the immediacy of their mortality.

“Let’s move,” I said.

I became aware of the sound before the smell, the clash of steel on steel, the barking of dogs, the crack of guns.

Voices, hundreds and hundreds of them, some yelling.

We slowed to a walk, moving to the last line of trees, birches interspersed among the pines. A thin rain had begun to sprinkle from low, gray clouds. Ahead of us was the train.

It was nothing like in the simulations. A monstrous engine, black, with a long, tubular boiler on top. A row of carriages, many of them. The carriages had flat, wooden walls. Only a single opening, small, high up on the side, covered in bars and barbed wire. More air vent than window.

The smell had worsened, a mixture of burnt carbon, scorched hair, and bad cooking. I wondered if all of ancient history smelled this way. I hadn’t smelled anything like it since doing a retrieval from the Age of Desolation, and that was years in the future. I hoped the air here wasn’t too poisonous.

A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier. The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.

“Not my specialty,” he said.

Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond.

These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.

“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.

“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.”

“What camps?” I said, but she didn’t answer, which annoyed me. I looked to Ross, but he merely shrugged, nodding in the direction of a clump of wooden, one-story buildings behind the train tracks. The roofs were wood-shingled, the windows gaping empty. The wood was raw, unpainted, gray from sunlight and water damage.

A pair of barbed-wire fences, reinforced by squat, wooden guard towers, protected the camp from the outside, and other fences divided it into protected zones, one guarding a set of nicer buildings with white-washed sides at the opposite end, another protecting a small factory of some kind, its short chimney spewing thick, black smoke into the gray sky. The line of people disembarking the train stretched toward it.

By the train, a dog strained at its leash. The dog was a big one, of a breed I didn’t recognize. Short-haired, brown with black patches, deep bark. The further back you went, the uglier the dogs became.

Its handler let it loose and the dog savaged the closest non-soldier, biting him again and again. The man fell over, and the handler pulled back on the leash. The handler’s partner pulled a clumsy black pistol from a side holster. It barked once, at close range, splattering the fallen man’s blood, bone, and brain matter on the ground.

“We need to hurry,” I said, and Davos grunted. If the locals killed the principals, the retrieval would be a failure.

“Honorable Rothman,” he said, “can you mark the principals?”

“Soon,” Rothman said, still staring.

It should have worried me, except that Rothman was both our principal and mission coordinator. First principle of retrieval. You don’t question your mission coordinator.

The front of the throng of branch ghosts started moving, beaten and driven forward by the soldiers and their dogs. Rifle butts and truncheons slammed into bodies. Occasionally a shot rang out.

“Some kind of prison?” I asked Ross.

“Likely,” he said.

“Not much care for the prisoners,” Davos added. “We’ll need to move fast.”

Rothman started twitching her fingers, manipulating her visual overlay. It looked strange, obscene, as if observing someone defecating in public. I realized that she hadn’t grown up with submuscular commands, but learned them as an adult. It fascinated me, watching someone visibly twitch as they did basic tasks. How did she manipulate her math interface when she did her probabilistic calculations? Pulling on levers and sticks?

Orange circles started appearing in my vision, most clustered toward the right of the throng, the persons exiting from the ninth and tenth wagons, around the middle of the train. I brought up the probabilities. None of them were higher than thirty. Rothman wasn’t sure of whom we should pull out. She was designating targets almost at random.

“We need to move up,” I said. “Give her a better view.”

Ross agreed, Davos gave a short nod.

“No,” said Rothman. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I hissed. “The path could go unstable at any minute. What are we waiting for?”

That was the standard mode of operations, fast. Get in, retrieve, get out before the path collapsed. Speed. And now Rothman wanted to wait. As if sensing my impatience, she said:

“This isn’t the moment.”

“The path” I began.

“Will hold,” she said, utterly sure, utterly focused. It was as if she’d turned into the bird of prey on our caps. Still, I wouldn’t surrender.

“It didn’t terminate on target,” I said.

“It terminated exactly where I intended it to,” Rothman said.

“That is not what the overlay says,” I said.

Rothman was silent. Then she grimaced and spit on the ground.

“I forged the path calculations,” she said. “Forged the probabilities. The vortex is stable. It will exist for days, months, maybe longer.”

Davos half turned toward her.

“You found a stable vortex to the twentieth century?” he said.

“On target,” I said, sending a vector to his overlay. He turned back, his rifle held low by his side but ready, his palm on the connector plate enabling him to send firing commands to it.

“I created it,” Rothman said. “This is the closest moment. Be alert.”

“For what?” I said.

“That.”

Her finger twitched, once, and scores of targeting data appeared on my overlay, orange circles around uniformed bodies. She’d prepared everything to be sent with a single command.

She knew we’d exit in the woods. Knew where the soldiers would stand, where the dangers would be. I had to admit that I was becoming impressed. The memory and single-minded dedication needed to pull something like that off was staggering.

The soldiers had danger probabilities already assigned, in the five-to-ten percent range for the men with pistols and dogs, somewhat higher for the ones with rifles. There even were probabilities for the soldiers in the rickety wooden towers surrounding the camp.

Only one was unassigned, an orange circle with a hundred percent danger probability.

A hundred, that was a kill on sight. Shooting, even with a sub-sonic flechette, would trigger the other soldiers. It would escalate, a major battle.

“You want us to start a war,” I said. “That’s irrational.”

“It isn’t,” Rothman said.

“It will be suicide,” I said.

“It won’t be,” Rothman said. “Not if you pick the right moment.”

“Which moment?” Davos said. He seemed more interested than concerned, but then, reading Davos’s face had always been difficult.

Rothman kept staring at the train, the soldiers, the gaunt people shuffling forward in that long, desolate column.

“There will be a rebellion,” Rothman said. “The key inmates have already gotten hold of weapons. Knives, axes, some guns. They will try to break out. We will help them.”

There was a moment of silence. The birch branches above our heads struck against each other in the wind.

“Why?” I asked. “They will die soon enough anyway.”

Rothman’s still ruddy face went pale, her lips tightening into white lines. I felt like I was standing before a terawatt microtransmitter station ready to broil me alive.

“They. Will. Not. Die,” Rothman said, jerking slightly with every word.

“The branch will collapse,” I said, slowly, reasonably, forcing myself past my confusion, my own burgeoning anger. “Everyone will die. Including us.”

I could see the artery in Rothman’s neck beating like a twisting snake. Whoom, whoom, whoom, each heartbeat an avalanche of blood.

“The branch won’t collapse,” she said. “It won’t. Not for years.”

“Crocshit,” said Ross. “No such thing has ever happened.”

“That we know about,” said Rothman. “How could we? It would create a new canonical time line. To us, everything would be gone, to them, nothing.”

Davos turned, abandoning his post at point.

“Professor Rothman,” he said using his most anonymous, grey, bureaucratic voice, “I feel that this discussion has taken a turn for the irrational.”

“Are you a probabilist?” Rothman hissed, taking a step toward him. “Can you calculate this place, this moment?” She towered over him, half a head taller and at least twenty kilos heavier. Davos shifted his rifle, grabbing it with both hands.

Readying to clobber our principal. It sent a chill through my gut.

We hadn’t loaded for stealth. No tox-rounds, no gas. Davos was ready to subdue our principal by force. Then we’d have to drag her back to the gate.

Bad move. We’d fail the retrieval, maybe get stuck here while the branch collapsed.

I stepped between them. “We are all passably familiar with the theories,” I said. “That does not help us at this moment. Right now, you are the only one who can mark the principals. I am willing to concede that this branch might, by some trick of chance, survive for years to come. I apologize for doubting you. Are you willing to accept that and advance on the retrieval?”

For ten beats, I watched her artery press and squirm. Then she lowered her shoulders. Likely forced them down by will alone. Her face was still pale as unrefined fat. I rubbed my nose. The smell was affecting my thoughts. The woods stank of burnt fat.

“Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Who is the hundred percent?”

Rothman looked confused. I sent a highlight command for the empty danger circle to her overlay. She bared her teeth like a wild animal.

“Frenzel,” she said. “An officer. He will stand at the door to the armory, firing at the prisoners. Without him, they have a chance. With him, all but a handful will die.”

“And the principals?”

“They, too.”

“Then we have a plan of action,” I said. A danger to the principals is a retrieval failure point. If Rothman was unable to mark the principals, we’d need to remove the Frenzel ghost. “Are you able to mark the armory and set the time?”

“Yes,” said Rothman. Her fingers started twitching. My own shoulders lowered somewhat. We were moving again, getting closer to a successful retrieval.

Ross scuffed his shoe against the gravel, gave me a short nod when I looked at him. Good work. I nodded back. Thanks.

I hoped he’d survive.

A timer appeared in my vision, counting down. Less than seven minutes.

“When did you acquire mission command rights?” I said, confused again.

“When I agreed to work for the Path Conglomerate,” Rothman said. “It was my one requirement.”

My heart did a double beat. I forced myself to breathe calmly. More things that hadn’t been in the mission briefing. The entire thing was a setup, everything given over to random chance.

In retrieval, you don’t leave anything to chance. Every random element is a potential point of failure. Minimize the risks. Get in, retrieve, get out. We hadn’t even finished the quick-sims, not letting the likely scenarios become ingrained.

The fake scenarios. Rothman had shut the training down before we could habituate to it. Enough to give us an idea what to expect, not enough to let us react without thought.

“You planned this,” I said. “All of it, without telling the board.”

“Yes,” she said. No defensiveness, no denial. Not even turning to acknowledge my presence. Focused on the train. On where the principals would be.

I wondered what she was expecting, how they would react to seeing her. Retrieving your own family, people you had grown up and trained beside, people who knew all your habits, all your ticks and weaknesses.

And then grab them and run. I wondered if this was what had kept her rational after being retrieved, what had helped her stay productive and valuable, to save up the cred needed for four hundred kilograms to the twentieth century. The idea that she could retrieve the people she had lost.

“Simeon,” Ross said, “we’re moving.”

I started walking, focusing on the present. Five minutes.

Slowly, we passed the train cars. The soldiers waved at us from a distance, bringing their hands up to their caps. We waved back the same way, relaxed, giving the impression that everything was normal, that we belonged here, in the distant past, in a world that smelled of sulfur and burnt fat.

We crossed the tracks, two massive iron beams connected by wooden shingles thick as both my arms. No rust on the beams. Lots of traffic here.

Ahead, the steel strings of the camp fence stretched, an outer, barbed layer strung on broken-off pine logs, and inner layer on concrete posts. My overlay painted the inner layer in pale blue, a weak electromagnetic force. The cables were electrified.

Before us lay a concrete mound, a low building with an iron door.

One minute on the timer.

Shots rang out, bursts of automatic fire.

My overlay exploded with targeting data. The soldiers were moving. The gaunt people were huddling in piles, clutching at those around them like drowning men clutching life preservers.

Four men and a woman, dressed in thin shirts, striped blue-and-white, fired in our direction, a pistol and a rifle. They were wildly inaccurate. I flicked the selector switch on my auto-rifle, raising it to my shoulder.

“No!” yelled Rothman. The blue-and-whites were marked purple, for friendly.

Rothman held a pistol in her hand, a slim-barreled silver flechette launcher barely longer than her hand. The magazine couldn’t hold many darts. That hadn’t been in the mission specifications either. She must have smuggled it in.

“Stay back,” I told her. “We will take care of this.”

She glared at me with such hate and fury that I recoiled, thinking that she would trigger her pistol and cut me down.

Instead she turned her back on me and twitched her fingers. Her gun coughed, twice. A moment later, the two closest soldiers fell, their ears pierced and blood trickling from their noses. Guided munitions, intra-cranial explosions.

It was a slaughter. We had all the targets marked. They didn’t know we were hostile. Our guns made little noise, while theirs banged and clanged, discarding brass shells the size of my thumb every time they fired.

At one point, the train engine started moving, and an orange targeting circle appeared around it. I put two AP-sabots into it, blowing off a massive rod powering the wheels. Davos penetrated the main tube with a series of explosives, cracking it. The train shrieked scalding steam into the sky, sending the already panicked non-soldiers flat to the ground.

The timer ticked upward. The orange, hundred-percent circle still remained unfilled. At T plus four minutes the soldiers were dead, dead on the wet, sandy ground, dead hanging from the rickety wooden towers, contorted dead next to their dead dogs. I’d killed time branch ghosts before during retrievals but this made me sick. My target counter said seventy-eight.

I lay on my stomach on the cold sand, keeping a low profile. Branch ghosts could kill you just as easily as you could them. Easier, sometimes, when they lived in times of violence.

Bullets kept flying in our direction.

“Take off your jackets,” Rothman said, writhing on the ground as she removed her own. Beneath, she had a blue-and-white striped shirt, just like the people in the camp. Prisoners. We were wearing prison grab beneath our uniforms. I hastily removed my jacket, discarding the cap along with it but keeping my ammunition bag. I hadn’t needed to switch magazines yet, but the auto-rifle was less than half-full.

We rose, four prisoners in prisoner grab, as others ran by us. The guards were dead, the dogs were dead, only the unfilled danger circle remained.

Rothman led, walking among the new arrivals. Some of them shouted, my voice-over struggling to make sense of the words. Those had started peeling away, running into the forest together with the escaping camp prisoners. I ignored them. None of them had a retrieval marker.

Suddenly, Rothman stopped, bent on one knee, spoke.

“Foter,” it sounded like. “Muter.” A harsh, guttural language, not unlike the snippets of commands the soldiers had shouted.

“Father,” my voice-over cut in, translating. “Mother.”

The clump of branch ghosts stared at her. I counted nine. We were supposed to extract five. Still, there were no retrieval markers on these people.

“Rothman,” Ross said, “what are you doing?”

She rose, looked down. “Eliza,” she said. “Stay here. For Jakub, for Julietta, stay here.”

“Ver zent ir?” the girl she was talking to said. “Who are you?” my voice-over translated. Rothman ignored her, just threw a wait point onto our overlays with her fingers, and started walking into the camp.

Her steps were regular, measured. You could have played an ode timed to them. She still held her gun in her hand.

“Rothman,” I said. “Where are you going? The mission brief is mother, brother, three sisters.” I pointed toward the huddle. Older man, older woman, younger man, four younger women, two small children.

“Honorable Rothman,” Davos said, hurrying forward. Rothman ignored him, ignored us all. I waved Davos back, toward the huddling people, and sent a request for a copy of Rothman’s overlay. Surprisingly, it was granted.

Magnified vision, jumping from place to place. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. Rothman was searching.

No, not searching, hunting.

“Rothman,” I said, unhooking from her overlay before I stumbled over something. “Stop.”

She ignored me, walking deeper into the camp.

A shot rang out. Davos replied with a single dart from his gun.

I spied motion to my right, by one of the wooden sheds. A man in gray, a short, all-iron gun at the ready. I threw a danger tag at him, setting it to fifty percent. The man raised his gun, aiming off to the side, at the crowd of running prisoners.

The empty hundred percent marker jumped in my overlay, locking onto the man. Frenzel.

Rothman fired. Her flechette hit the man through the knee, blowing his leg half-apart, felling him to the sandy ground. She turned, walked toward him. The man tried to rise his gun, and she shot him again, in the shoulder.

I grabbed her shoulder.

“He’s down,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“No,” she said, through clenched teeth. The man was less than ten meters away. He tried bringing his gun to bear one-handed. I twisted, setting my aim on him, but Rothman pushed me aside, spoiling my targeting data.

“No,” she said again, moving closer. The man wouldn’t be able to miss. He’d cut us both down.

“Rothman,” I screamed, pulling at her. It was like pulling on a rock. She was massive, double my muscle mass or more. I’d never felt weak before.

“What is he to you?” I said, stalling for time. The man was fumbling with the gun, weak from pain and blood loss.

“Murderer,” Rothman said, in the soldiers’ ancient, grating language. “You killed my children.”

The man was too far into shock to notice. He was still trying to bring his gun up.

“I’m thirsty,” he said, slurring the words.

Rothman shot him. In the hip, the gut, both lungs. The flechettes made soft thumps as they exploded in the man’s flesh.

I turned away from the barbarism.

“This is irrational,” I said. Behind me, Rothman’s gun kept thumping. “I will report you to the board,” I said.

“Do so,” she said, and started walking, away from the dead man still leaking blood onto the sand. I was amazed that my threat had reached her. Either that, or her gun had run empty.

“How do you feel?” I said, surprising myself. She stopped, looked at the grey clouds.

“Empty,” she said. “I’ve thought about this moment for a long time.”

“Vengeance seldom works,” I said. Standard psych-detail training. What followed wasn’t. “Everything has a price. Moving forward is better. Retrieving something worth saving.”

She nodded, her fingers jerking, and my overlay filled with green retrieval markers. One hundred percent. Certain identification, on the group we’d left behind.

That Rothman had left behind. Left to come here, and kill a man thousands of years dead. She’d gone on a retrieval to hunt a branch ghost.

We started walking again, the sand shifting beneath our feet. Irrational didn’t begin to describe it.

We returned to where Davos and Ross stood guard around the principals. Three retrievers, against five, possibly nine principals. I had done one live retrieval before, together with Ross. It hadn’t been easy. The key was to get the principal moving, not questioning.

“Let’s go,” I said, my voice-over catching the words and overlaying the local language. It came out harsh, to my ears. Good. A short command is better than trying to explain. Keep them unbalanced, and they are likely to obey. The old man, the father, looked at me with big, empty eyes. It was as if he was hollow, void of will.

I could work with that.

“We need to move,” I told him. “Now.”

I held out my hand to him, a very human gesture. Appear friendly, look like you know what you’re doing. Humans will grab at any straws.

The father grabbed.

He took my hand, and I leveraged him to his feet, where he swayed, his long, black coat hiding a frame starved to the bones. The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“We–” I began. Rothman cut me off.

“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”

I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.

The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.

Instead, they smiled.

“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.

“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”

The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves.

“Seraphim,” they kept saying.

Even I recognized the reference. We had become angels.

The forest dripped, fresh rain drizzling down from gray clouds. Branches slapped at us, slowing us down.

“This is irrational,” I said. “Beyond irrational.”

Rothman didn’t answer, merely plodded forward, carrying the two children. She had reclaimed her jacket, turning it inside out to display plain-brown, organic material. The children nested into her, had fallen asleep in her warmth. She was struggling, her breath coming fast and deep, but she refused to yield them.

“Rothman,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“I hear you,” she said.

“The board won’t allow it,” I said, pushing aside a pine branch, the wet needles scratching my hand. “It’s not a rule, it’s consensus law. You can’t have two copies of the same person, ever.”

“I’ve read about Mad Yuri and his Army of Self,” Rothman said.

“You knew they would be here when you set up the retrieval,” I said.

She didn’t reply, merely hugged the children closer.

“They’re not on the principals list,” I said. “You’ll have to leave them.”

She shook her head. Her mother stumbled and grabbed onto Rothman’s arm. All nine of them wanted to be as close to her as possible. Even Davos and Ross kept close, covering our rear against pursuit. None had materialized, except for a long row of worn-out stragglers, people from the train, or the camp.

“The board will execute you both,” I tried. “You, and your branch ghost. It’s the law.”

Again, she shook her head.

“There will only be one of us,” she said. “Will you give me this moment with my children?”

I shut up, relieved. She was going to leave them behind. Not irrational, after all. And if she wanted to gain comfort from her branch ghost offspring, who was I to argue?

In the end, everything would be fine.

We reached the path, and I uncapped it, letting the glow expand. The family fell to their knees, bathed in the path’s white light. Behind us, the scores of stragglers did the same.

Rothman handed the children to Eliza. When they were in their mother’s arms, she gave each a kiss on their brow, a slow, intimate, infinitely cautious gesture, as if she was afraid they would melt at her touch.

“Stand here,” she said.

“What are you doing?” Davos objected.

The entire family stood in the path’s retrieval circle.

“Rothman,” I hissed, pointing to Eliza and the two children. “Get them out.”

She took a step forward and grabbed Eliza. They froze. I expected Rothman to hurl her younger self from the circle. She didn’t, and I realized they were hugging.

“Now you are the seraph,” Rothman said. “The distant world is strange. Guide and protect them.”

She started talking and the family wailed, a high-pitched keening. In moments, the other stragglers started in on it, too. I realized they were singing.

“The morningstar will wake you,” they sang. “The rainbow will cover you, yet I can’t ever arrive at any shore.”

Around us, the wind shook droplets from the pines, showering us with cold. Rothman let the young Eliza go, and stepped out of the path’s circle.

“It’s done,” she said. “Give me your gear and go.”

I revised my assessment of her. Irrational as a bucket of cracked bones, and twice as broken. But it was her choice. Maybe she was tired of living in the future. As the mission commander, she had the right to decide who moved forward. Still, I had to try.

“You realize you will die?” I said.

“Everyone dies,” she replied. “Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”

It struck me as something very ancient to do, to live so close, so dependent on one another. They were part of a team, even stronger than ours. Keeping the team together. I could understand that. Again, my view of Rothman shifted.

Her fingers twitched and the path retraction timer started, at ten seconds. The lowest possible, so no one would have time to stop her. Staying behind, bringing her branch ghosts forward.

I triggered an emergency abort, almost surprised when it was granted.

“Do it right,” I said. Then I let my overlay calculate our weight.

We were almost a hundred kilograms over. The path wouldn’t hold us all.

I sent the data to the mission overlays. Rothman reacted instantly.

“Take off your clothes,” she said. “All of you. And give me your gear.”

No hesitation. Short commands. In charge. You can get a lot of people moving that way.

The family complied, shivering down to underclothes. The rest of us stripped all the way. Rothman was a master, as a probabilist and a tactician. If she was irrational, she had found ways to work around it, starting in a jump to her future, and ending back in the wet woods, saving her dead family. She’d calculated it all.

Except this.

“Why didn’t you calculate correctly?” I asked her. “There are templates, body type analysis-“

“Four hundred kilos,” she replied. “All I could afford.”

That, I could understand. Hope. You had to have hope. But the path limitations couldn’t be worked around. We were still over, by almost forty kilos.

Rothman swore, in a language my voice-over didn’t have time to retrieve. The meaning was clear, though.

She looked at her family.

“Father,” she said, but I held up my hand. Then I stepped over the edge of the path circle.

Rothman gaped, blinked, gaped some more.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Keeping your family intact,” I answered. I weighed just over forty kilos. The calculations matched.

“Why?” she said.

“Damned if I know,” I replied, and started the countdown timer. “You sure this branch will last for years?”

“Might last forever,” Rothman replied.

“Let’s find out,” I said.

Before us, the path expanded, gathered blue lightning, and disappeared.

THE END

Historical notes: There was a revolt at the Sobibor extermination camp, on 14 October 1943, although the weather was fine, rather than gray and raining. Neither was there a prisoner transport at the moment of revolt, and there was a fence around the unloading track that I have conveniently omitted, as well as omitting or glossing over numerous details of the Sobibor camp. For an overview of the events, Richard Rashke’s “Escape from Sobibor” is an excellent and engaging source. The book is also the source for the movie of the same name. A more academic discussion of the camp can be found in Marek Bem’s “Sobibor Extermination Camp, 1942 – 1943″.

Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel did exist. By reports, he was one of the most cruel SS-men in Sobibor, and his intervention with a [likely sub-]machine gun did prevent the prisoners from capturing the armory. He was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment, serving 16 years of his punishment before being released on a technicality.

“My Mother’s Grave,” the Yiddish song about loss that the family sings by the path, was composed later, likely in 1945. It can be found on the album “Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II.”

If Eliza Rothman ever existed, we will not find out about it for several hundred years.