The Leapgate Chronicles #2:

Voyagers!/Quantum Leap:

Jeffrey's Leap

by

Jake Crepeau

Prologue

Voyager Headquarters, a week prior to Bogg's trial:

Fourteen-year-old Ray Swirski had been counting the days until he completed his rotation through the Legal Department since the day he'd started working there; now, as he looked through the virtual card file to locate a reference for Voyager Jim Billings, he was counting the minutes—ninety to go—until he could kiss the department goodbye. The work held absolutely no interest for him, and the Code Violations Prosecutor gave him the creeps.

None of the lawyers or paralegals seemed to like him much either, though there were some who shared his opinion on things. Fortunately for Ray and his fellow pages, the Voyager didn't have much use for them; in fact, he didn't seem to have much use for anybody below his "exalted" station. He even referred to the field workers, the very core of the Voyagers' function, in a tone of voice that made them sound like something to be wiped off his shoe after a walk in a pasture—as if he'd be caught dead in such a place.

So why was he looking through the page files now, Ray wondered when he spotted the name on the file the prosecutor was currently perusing in the archives, and those on the other files scattered on the table where he was working. Like most of those from pre-computer time zones, Drake didn't like to work with computers, though Ray was certain he'd been trained in their use; everybody else was. While most others called on the secretaries, the paralegals, or even a computer-literate page when such work was required, Drake avoided electronics altogether, preferring to work with hardcopy.

The man had no situational awareness, Ray smirked to himself as he continued on his errand. He'd been standing behind the jerk, looking over his shoulder, for a full thirty seconds, more than enough time for anyone else to realize he was being watched, but Drake had never even paused in his work. There was a persistent rumor that the man had cheated his way through Voyager school; it had probably been the only way he'd been able to make it through the practical training. How had he survived his final exam, Ray wondered, that first assignment into which a student Voyager was thrown to sink or swim? It wasn't as if one could cheat in the field, but somehow, the rumors said, he had managed it.

He shrugged off the thoughts as he continued on his way. It didn't do to ponder Voyager Drake's activities too closely, or you'd start living with one eye over your shoulder, wondering who he'd go after once he ran out of field workers to prosecute. He'd already had thirty of them banished; Professor Parker was even holding the wagers in a pool on who was going to be next.

Not long after Ray returned to the Legal Department, Drake came into the pages' area and scanned the suddenly nervous occupants. "Come with me, Mr. Swirski," he said, his voice as oily as ever. "I have need of your…special talents."

The color drained from Ray's face. Back home, in the early twenty-first century, his "hobby," though illegal, had provided a valuable service, so instead of being prosecuted, he'd been paid for it by the businesses for whom he'd done it. When he'd first come here a year ago, however, he'd been warned in no uncertain terms that it would not be tolerated, and threatened with severe penalties if he were caught engaging in it. That Drake had called on him right after looking through page records boded ill. What could he possibly want with a hacker?

The answer wasn't long in coming. Drake led the apprehensive boy to his office and shut the door, then invited him to have a seat as he settled behind his desk. "I understand you've been assigned to TE for the next few weeks."

"Yes, sir," Ray answered cautiously. He'd already listed Temporal Engineering as his first choice of career track, so Drake had to know of his interest in that field, but you didn't show any kind of major enthusiasm about your dreams to people like him, not if you didn't want your plans short-circuited.

"Good; there's something you can do for me while you're there." He handed Ray a slip of paper with a file location on it. "I need you to delete this file."

At the sight of the drive designator, Ray blanched. "How'd you get this path? The TE computers are a completely separate network!"

"That's none of your affair, though I'm surprised that Crash Override needs to ask that question."

He actually flinched at the mention of the handle he had once used, adopted from the 1995 movie Hackers, but then his features grew hard. "Crash Override is dead," he said stonily.

"Is he?" Drake asked. "What do you suppose the Council would have to say about this?" He handed Ray a stack of photos.

The young teen flipped through them, then dropped them on the desk dismissively. "They already know about it; that's why I left Crash behind in that rubble I got yanked out of."

Picking them up, Drake handed them to Ray once more. "Look again. Carefully."

The pictures showed him working on a computer, the angle carefully crafted so that both the monitor screen and his face were clearly visible. His features in the photo were set in determined concentration; the screen showed indisputable evidence of hacking activity to anyone who knew what he was looking at. The operating system used at VHQ differed little from the various versions of Windows that had been around in the early twenty-first century; there were subtle differences, however, and Ray's stomach tied itself into knots as he recognized those points. "This is baloney!" he protested. "These have to be manips; I don't do this stuff anymore!"

"Prove it, then," Drake said smugly.

Ray snorted bitterly, but said nothing.

"You can't, can you? Of course not; it's impossible to prove a negative."

Ray shot to his feet. "First of all, even when I was hacking, it was all strictly white-hat.1 And second, if you can get file paths you shouldn't have and do Photoshopping like this, you don't need me to delete the file; you can do it yourself." He turned toward the door, fully intending to head straight to the Council.

"Sit down," Drake snarled. "You're not thinking this through. Do you really want to go up against me before the Council, when my conviction rate is a hundred percent?"

Ray had heard the shocked murmurs after each trial as people found it difficult to believe that any of the defendants would stoop to the things of which they'd been accused. Some of them had even been the recipients of honors in Voyager school. If Drake could succeed in winning cases against people like that, what chance did a page with a checkered past have?

What fools his fellow Voyagers, Drake thought, barely concealing his smug satisfaction as he stood at the reception window in TE, watching Ray at the computer on the other side. The case against his next victim was complete. One particular Voyager, above all others, must not be allowed to continue, for that one was destined to be his downfall. He could not rightly prosecute him directly, however, since he wasn't yet officially a Voyager. No; the way to get him out of the way was to strike at his self-appointed teacher and guardian, and doing so would give him the utmost pleasure. By all indications, the removal of the boy would utterly destroy his rival, and, no matter the verdict against that boastful loudmouth,2that removal was guaranteed. Despite his apparent incompetence, however, Phineas Bogg was nothing if not resourceful, and ditto his young ward; with that in mind, it didn't hurt to hedge his bets, Drake thought as he watched the young hacker do arcane things with a mouse and keyboard to remove his file from the Locator database.

A week later, he had reason to be very glad he had taken that precaution.

Voyager Headquarters, the day of the trial

"This court has no hold on me!" Drake declared, backing away from the bench and reaching for his Omni.

"Bailiff, stop that man!" Garth ordered.

The bailiff, just bringing Jeffrey back into the courtroom, grabbed the now-disgraced Voyager, but Drake pushed him away.

"Hey, wait a minute! You're not going anywhere!" Jeffrey snarled, grabbing the man's arm in a vain attempt to prevent him from triggering the device. In the same instant, Bogg dove across the room in one of his trademark flying leaps, grabbing hold of Drake just as the rogue's fumbling fingers found the bug-out button, and all three of them vanished.3

"Now what?" Kane breathed.

Garth, still leaning forward in his seat, collapsed against the chair-back. "All we can do is recess until they come back," he sighed, then straightened as he went on more briskly, "but we won't be idle." He rose to his feet, with the other two judges following suit. "Susan, take this Omni down to TE and have Will Parker see about restoring the memory unit; no one else. Then locate and retrieve Voyager Bogg and the boy. I'm going to the Archives to see just how badly Drake twisted young Jeffrey's record."

"Is there anything we can do?" Brindle asked after Susan had left.

"Yes. Start compiling a list of the banished Voyagers; their counsels will have to be notified that their cases are being reopened."

A page was working the reception window at Temporal Engineering when Susan arrived. "Ray, is Professor Parker here?"

The boy checked a roster. "Yes, he is, but he's down in the Core; he's left standing instructions never to interrupt him when he's down there."

"Except in emergencies, I hope, because this is definitely an emergency. The Tribunal needs this Omni checked. The case is still in progress."

"I'll call him, then." Ray Swirski picked up the phone; a moment later, he handed it to her.

She took it. "Will? It's Susan."

"What's this about an Omni?"came the irritated voice of Will Parker. "I've got the Core going apeshit down here, and you're talking to me about a single Omni? Get somebody from Repair to take care of it!"

She raised an eyebrow. With the strict prohibitions against swearing they'd been under during their time in Orientation and the Academy, they'd all reverted to childhood substitutes, as well as inventing some new ones; Will had taken to invoking someone named Sam instead of the Christian Savior. For him to resort to an actual oath now meant the situation was serious. "Will, this could be just as urgent as your Core problem. Drake's been tampering with Omni memory units; that's how he's been getting all those convictions. I've got one to be restored, and I've been instructed that you're the only one I'm to give it to." She winced and hastily pulled the receiver away from her ear at the cacophony coming over the line from the ancient mainframe.

"Dammit, will you tone it down?" Will complained, his voice muffled as if he'd turned away from his phone; a sultry-sounding feminine voice in the background said something Susan couldn't make out, and Will grumbled, "Oh, now you manage a coherent sent—say what?" Then he was talking to Susan again, urgently now. "Sue, is that Phin's Omni you're talking about?"

"Yes; how did you know?"

"Because that's what the Core's been trying to tell me! I'm on my way!"

"Will, you're white as a sheet," Susan remarked when he came into the room. "What is it?"

"Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to tell you, but I can't; it's classified. How'd Drake get his hands on this to tamper with it?" he asked, taking the battered brass Omni from her.

"I don't know, but Phineas swears the last image isn't right, and I believe him."

"Don't blame you, either. He may have been a pirate, but that guy's got a sense of honor that could put some of my leathernecks to shame. I'll get right on it. You waiting?"

"Yes. Garth wants this back as fast as possible; the tribunal has to review the evidence all over again."

"Yeah, I'll bet. Be right back." With that, he left, and Susan took a seat in the small waiting area. Neither noticed Ray's pallid color as he buried his nose in his schoolbooks.

The words on the page refused to make sense through his distress. People might not actually like Voyager Drake, but many of them had begun to regard the man as some kind of hero, ferreting out crooked Voyagers that no one would have suspected, only now it seemed that Drake himself was the crooked one. Suddenly it was all too clear why he had wanted his Locator file and his Omni serial number deleted. Ray didn't dare come forward, though, not with Drake's threat hanging over his head. Even though the deletions implied that the man might flee VHQ, there was no way of telling how far his reach might extend. After all, Drake had supporters throughout the Voyager hierarchy.

Will had the Omni's memory unit in a sealed "clean box," where he handled it with waldos as he carefully opened it and began the analysis. When it was completed, he connected a small cable to a minuscule output jack; he was still in the process of uploading the contents into a permanent record when Mike Bridges came in. "What're you doing here, Will?" he wanted to know.

"What's it look like I'm doing?" the former marine shot back with a grin.

"Okay, so what's the director of Core Control doing repairing a memory unit?"

"Try restoring instead of repairing."

Mike's eyes widened. "You mean somebody actually altered the data in a memory unit? Who?" he demanded incredulously. A lot of Code Articles had been violated in the course of the Voyagers' long history, but that was one offense that no one had ever committed before.

A soft ping alerted Will that the upload was complete, and he remained silent during the painstaking process of re-sealing the unit. Mike waited quietly through the delicate procedure, admittedly a little envious of the other man's skill with the waldos. He could probably write with the darn things and have it be indistinguishable from his actual handwriting.

Once Will had finished and had removed the unit from the "clean box," Mike pressed, "C'mon, Will, give! Whose Omni is that?"

"Phin Bogg's."

"Unh-uh!" Mike denied. "No way! There's no way he'd tamper with a memory unit; that guy's almost as much of a Boy Scout as the Founder himself!"

"I didn't say he did. I just said it was his Omni," Will teased.

"Will you come on and give me a straight answer already?"

"Okay, okay. Don't have a cow. Phin's on trial; he insists the images from the memory unit were false, so they sent the Omni here for testing."

"You mean he's number thirty-one?"

"Yeah, but Drake still only has thirty convictions." Will's grin now threatened to split his face in two.

"He lost one? Yes!" Mike whooped, jubilantly pumping his fist in the air; then he froze as the full implications of the news hit him. "Wait a minute; are you telling me that Drake's the one who mucked with that Omni?"

"He mucked with something, but not this Omni; everything tests normal."

"Hey, let's see the trial; I want to see the look on that lowlife's face when he's caught out."

Will went to the computer and pulled up the file in question. "There you go; knock yourself out. I have to get this back to Susan; she's waiting for it."

He was nearly at the door when Mike's voice halted him in his tracks. "Hey, Phin's got a kid with him!"

Will darted back and stared at the screen. It all started with this kid, his former employer's voice rang in his ears, and his jaw dropped at what he saw. "Sam on a crutch!" he spat and bolted from the room, clawing for his phone as he went.

"I'm sorry, but Professor Garth is in deliberations and isn't taking calls right now," the voice of a Council Aide informed him.

"Better put this one through; it's directly related to the case. It's about the Omni they sent to have tested."

"Very well; stand by."

Susan stood up as he came into the waiting area; he held up a hand to bid her wait.

"Yes, this is Garth," a voice said in Will's ear. "I presume this is urgent, that you insisted on speaking to me directly."

"Yes, sir, it is. That kid—"

"Jeffrey Jones, yes. I've sent an Aide to pull his complete record, as the excerpts I was shown during the trial are suspect."

"So you haven't sent him home yet. Good; don't. When you check his file, you'll find out he's supposed to be here."

"And how is it that you know this?"

"I'll tell you when I get there; I'd rather not discuss it on the phone. Classified information, sir."

"What's going on?" Susan asked when he'd hung up.

He shook his head. "I still can't tell you, Sue; I'm really sorry."

"Can't you give me something, Will? Phineas is really attached to that boy; it's killing him that he has to be sent back home."

"No, he doesn't," Will told her. "That much I can tell you."

Garth was alone when Will was admitted to the judges' chamber; on the table before him were two envelopes labeled Jeffrey Jones. One was substantially thicker than the other, and it was the fuller one the Chief Elder was just opening when the engineer came in. He set it aside and gave his full attention to his visitor. "So tell me how it is you know Jeffrey is supposed to be here."

From a hardshell pouch on his belt, Will produced a remote link to the Core. "May I?" he asked, indicating the chair next to Garth. When the old professor nodded, he sat down and entered commands on the calculator-like device, then held it so Garth could see the images on the tiny screen. "When I first started at the project, I asked the observer why they were still keeping it running, since its founder had been missing for more than ten years and was probably dead. In answer, he showed me these slides."

Garth looked at the picture. There was a nervous-looking Jeffrey facing a tall, slender man who was looking pensively at the object, unmistakably an Omni, in his hand. "Is that…him?" he breathed, his tone making it clear that, though he knew who the Founder was, this was the first time he had ever seen a picture of him. Will nodded.

If he had been dumbfounded by some of the things he had seen at the trial, this left him positively poleaxed. His gaze strayed to the open door to the courtroom, where Bogg's Omni once more rested in the memory-reader's receptacle. The holo-frame, visible through the doorway, remained blank.

Now the former Marine shook his head. "It won't be there, because it hasn't happened to them yet."

"Good heavens; you're telling me that Jeffrey is responsible…?"

"Quite possibly. But there's more, sir. This next shot was recorded in the—uh, call it a primitive version of the Omnitron," Will cut himself off, realizing that the actual phrase would be meaningless to Garth. The image showed the Founder standing next to Garth, wearing only what appeared to be longjohns and a very confused expression. Will was holding out his BDU tunic to the man; off to one side stood Phineas and Jeffrey, both looking shaken to their respective cores.

For a long moment, Garth just stared at the picture, the significance of which left him completely numb. "When?" he finally managed.

"That, I don't know," Will said. "Not for certain, but if I use Jeffrey's appearance as a guide, then my best guess is, within the year."

"Thank Heaven Susan found that diary, or we would have made a deadly mistake. And the Omni?"

"There's nothing wrong with it, sir; the problem was with the reader rather than the Omni. If you'll excuse me, I need to get this news back to Ben."

Ben Alvarez, head of Temporal Engineering, gazed at his assembled section heads. "Will here has just advised me that the Founder himself is going to be coming here at some point. We don't know exactly when, or even if it's going to be permanent; only that it's most likely going to be sometime this year, next year at the latest. We need procedures in place to handle it.

"First and foremost, I need someone to cross-train at Orientation; their people just aren't equipped to answer his questions, either from a security standpoint or a technical one. Have the Aides run a Class One-A security clearance check on your candidates, since whoever is chosen is going to have to be told the Founder's actual identity. Will, since our links to the original project are your bailiwick, it'll be up to you to make sure that whoever gets the job is able to answer any questions the Founder may have in regard to those links. And no, I won't even consider you for that job; I need you right where you are, since you're the best qualified to handle the massive quantum effect that's bound to occur when he arrives. Your job in the meantime is going to be to get the Core prepared. Any questions or comments? All right; back to work then. Will, hold on a moment, will you?" When everyone else had left, he grinned, a lopsided grin that made him look like an aging Han Solo. "Okay, so tell me: Who won the pool?"

1 White-hat hackers work free-lance, breaking into corporate systems to discover weaknesses in their security, which they then report to the company so the weaknesses can be corrected. They are paid for this service after the fact; they aren't placed on permanent payrolls because of the legal difficulties involved. Hacking is, after all, illegal. ;D

2 Phineas is an ancient Hebrew name meaning "loudmouth;" Bogg comes from an Old English word meaning "boastful." (.com)

3 Adapted from Voyagers!: "The Trial of Phineas Bogg."