Second Intermission
Jared saw Saxon Rose's finger stab the transport button on her time jumper, far too quickly for even his reflexes to stop them, and the group watched, horrified, as she and Corvantes disappeared into the past. Tock ran growling to the spot, a second too late as well, and stopped, bewildered again, sniffing the floor as if trying to track them through time, before slinking back to Rose's side in a whimper.
Rose and Jared whirled back around to the cannon's screens, and (almost) all held their breath, staring hard, willing the ghostly blue traces of Saxon Rose's world to strengthen and hold. No such luck. The tangled skeins of the lifelines in her parallel flickered feebly, once, twice... and faded away to nothing. Still they stared, as seconds ticked by, but the traces did not return. Finally, Jared let out his breath in a long, sobbing sigh, closed his eyes, and slumped over his fists on the console.
"Jared?" breathed Rose, horrified, not wanting to believe it, needing the confirmation.
He shook his head. "She didn't make it. She didn't succeed. Her world is gone."
"Is she still with us? Can we bring her back?"
Jared fiddled with the cannon's controls, bringing 1066 into focus, then at last shook his head again. "I don't see any sign of her there. It's as if she never was."
Rose turned away in sorrow, and caught another sight, touching Jared's arm to get his attention and nodding at it. The chair Saxon Rose had left her backpack on was empty, and the visible proof hit all of them again.
"She failed? She's gone? So we can fail, can't we?" Reich Rose, harsh and skeptical again, didn't wait for an answer, but turned and walked across the Hub, sitting on a platform edge with her back to the others, arms crossed in angry denial.
"What about Corvantes?" asked another flower.
Jared shook his head again. "I don't see him there, either. I don't know what happened."
Rose was thoughtful. "If he got the time jumper, he could go anywhere, anywhen, couldn't he?"
"If he knows how to use it." Jared turned to the tech, Joel. "Did he?"
Joel nodded miserably.
"So he might show up to screw up our missions, too?" asked the same parallel Rose.
"Did he ever search back to the split points?" Jared asked Joel again.
"No... no. He never spent much time on the cannon. And we never searched back, either – we never realized they had split off from our universe. We thought they had always existed."
Satisfied, Jared turned back to the worried, watching Roses. "Then no. He has no idea where to go or when, probably doesn't even know what we're doing. The most that might happen is he'll return here and now, but if he hasn't yet, then he probably won't get here in time to mess this up. We're going very quickly here and now. We'll have the rest of you back home before he can interfere again. And we'll be waiting, and we'll prevent him from reaching out to you again in your own futures."
While they were absorbing that, Rose stepped over to where Jack had been lying motionless all this time. One of her twins, who'd been standing next to him when he was shot, had clutched wildly at him as he fell, and had been kneeling beside him, weeping for the supposedly fallen hero, ignoring the rest of the goings-on. Rose took in her attire in a flash: a fairly conservative long-sleeved white button-up blouse decorated with tiny seed pearls and silvery threads woven throughout, tucked into a calf-length plain ungathered blue skirt and old-fashioned lace-up knee-length leather boots. Her blonde hair, longer than Rose's own, was gathered in an attractive, loopy knot on the back of her head. Not my usual style, but that outfit looks terrific. Wonder where she got it? Rose thought irreverently, then dismissed it to lay a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder. "It's OK," she told her. "He'll be fine."
The other girl turned red-rimmed eyes on her in disbelief. "Fine?" she croaked. "He's dead!"
Rose shook her head. "No, he's no-" she started to say, when Jack proved it himself, as he always did; sudden violently-tensing muscles wrenching his torso up off the floor as he took a huge gasp of air, his eyes flaring wide open and staring. His mourner echoed the gasp, falling away onto her hands, her eyes huge in mute disbelief.
Rose ignored her, reaching both hands for Jack's shoulders as he did a lightning-quick mental inventory and caught his breath, then smiled broadly at her. "Hello!" She laughed at him for the reminder of her first-ever words to his face, then stood, grabbing his hands and pulling him to his feet. Then, with a return "Hello!", she flung her arms around him for a hug, the first time she'd managed to actually greet him since this adventure had begun.
Laughing again, he hugged her back, then "What did I miss?"
She gave him a quick run-down of the events in the preceding two-and-a-half minutes, watching his face fall as he absorbed the news of the failure and the escape of their enemy. He looked over at Jared. "They need help," he said, his voice brooking no opposition.
Jared nodded. "Well, the next one is certainly going to get it." He'd skipped ahead, already picking out the next timeline and its associated jumper, and quickly ran the sonic over the waiting hands again of the two left standing. Neither of them matched, and he knew Reich Rose and his own weren't the ones, so it had to be Jack's beskirted mourner, still gaping from the floor. He reached a long arm to help her up, and she slowly climbed to her feet, gulping, before he verified it was her with the sonic.
"So who's going with her?" asked Jack.
"You are. This one has you written all over it."
"Why me?"
Jared grinned. "You know where you can get your hands on a pile of gold?"
"Of course!" came the matter-of-fact reply.
A beat. "You're not keeping it, you know!" Jared warned wryly.
Jack's grin widened. "Of course!" he replied with even more exaggerated matter-of-factness. "So who are we giving it to?" He turned a bit sideways and shot his new companion a look to include her in the process, then whirled back to Jared as another thought struck him. "Wait a second. If I go back with her and make the changes, I'll be in the parallel world. How will I get back here?"
"Still got your superphone?" Jared asked, pulling his own out of his pocket.
"Of course!" came the reply and mirror action.
"Then simple. After you're done, take her back to the day of her kidnapping," Jared explained, matching actions to words by programming the date in question into the jumper, "then come back to this time – mark it now! – and call us on the superphone. We'll bring you back with the cannon here!"
"Roger that!" Jack quickly marked the time plus five minutes on his own jumper. Then he backtracked to his earlier question. "So who are we giving the gold to, then?"
"Emperor Constantine the Eleventh, last ruler of the Byzantine Empire – in our history, that is. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed the Second laid siege to the city of Constantinople, all that was left of the empire, and conquered it, sacking the city and renaming it Istanbul. Constantine might have been able to hold them off if he'd been able to retain the services of one Orban, the man who went over to the Turks and built for them the largest cannon ever designed, that they then used to batter down Constantinople's walls. Unfortunately, Constantine's treasury was completely empty. So your gold... will be to keep Urban in the city to defend it." Jared paused in his recital, looking over at the (newly silently christened in everyone's mind) Byzantine Rose's face, which had been growing steadily more astonished. "I take it you know the story?"
"Of course I do?" she shot back sarcastically. When her listeners obviously didn't make the connection she'd lived with her whole life, she went on, "I'm named for Saint Rose!"
Jack and Jared glanced at each other, amused, then Jack dared to ask, "Saint Rose?"
She rolled her eyes at his ignorance. "One of the two saints who saved the Holy City of Constantinople from the Turks! Everyone knows that story!"
Jack fought to keep his grin off his face. "And what was the other saint's name?"
"Jac-" she managed to get out before it hit her, bursting though the French pronunciation she'd been giving it: Jacques.
His grin slipped out. "I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you weren't named for Saint Rose, you are Saint Rose!"