A/N: grumble, grumble, bloody term papers... Wanna know about China's Warring States Period? Didn't think so. Don't worry, I won't be sending any Roses back there.

Now then, where were we?

First Intermission

After going over the details once more to make sure Rhosyn understood, Jared double-checked that the time and place of her kidnapping were pre-programmed into the memory circuits of the corresponding Time Jumper correctly, then carefully punched in her next destination: Northhampton, 61 AD, and finally buckled the Jumper around Rhosyn's wrist.

"Ready?" he queried in her native Gaelic, and she nodded back, taking a deep breath and squaring her back in such a Rose-like gesture that he grinned involuntarily. His own Rose stepped up beside him and smiled at her doppelganger, wishing her good luck – and a chorus of them came from the rest of the "bouquet" of Roses standing around in a circle. That brought an answering sunrise smile from Rhosyn, then she pressed a carefully determined finger down on the button and disappeared into the past in a dazzling flare.

"How long till..." Jack queried, even as Jared and Rose whirled back to the Cannon console.

Jared shook his head, pointing wordlessly toward the large display. Alpha timeline showed clearly, the current personal timelines of the billions of extant lives forming a tangled web in one quadrant of the display. Then, even as they watched, another web alongside and behind the first began to flicker into life, its greenish hues contrasting with the white Alpha threads. Every watcher held their breath, the other Roses and Joel, the tech, crowding around behind the trio in charge. And then...

...with a final flicker, the green web surged into glowing, solid permanence.

"She's done it!" crowed Jared, and he turned and scooped his fiancée into his arms in joy.

"Did you have any doubt?" she laughed, impishly.

"Not for a moment, love," he smiled back.

"But how did she do it so quickly?" another Rose asked, happy but puzzled. "I mean, she only just left a second ago!"

Jack took over, reminding her that the mission was two thousand years in the past. "No matter how long it actually took Rhosyn to do what she had to – days, months, years – the effect rippled through time and showed up almost immediately to us up here in the future."

"Years?" gasped another woman, one who had held back slightly all this time, a little shyer and more reserved than the rest of her mirror images. "I can't be gone that long!"

Jack moved to her side, then, talking smoothly and soothingly. "But you'll return to the exact moment you were kidnapped, sweetheart. You won't be gone from your life that long – not to anyone else there. They won't even notice you were gone."

Rose found she was watching Jack out of the corner of her eyes, wondering what was going through the rogue's mind, surrounded by other versions of herself to impress. Nightmare or dream date? she wondered, then shook her head ruefully. Catching Jared's quizzical glance, she laughed and stuck her tongue out at him. Then, "so who's next?"

"Let's keep it in chronological order of the splits," he replied. Calling the very-long-term display of all the parallels out of the Cannon's memory banks, he picked out the next split point and read the alternate's base harmonic frequencies, then ran his sonic over the line of Time Jumpers, picking out from the resonances the one which showed it had operated in those frequencies. Then he turned and ran the sonic over the outstretched hands of the "bouquet" to pick out the right Rose to match. "And that's you!" he grinned, taking her hand to pull her out of line.

Rose noted that she was the one Reich Rose had identified earlier in the cell as "her English is strange, but still English." That makes sense, she thought, since her timeline was split off so much earlier than the rest. The next time traveller was dressed casually, in jeans and a sweater, with a backpack slung over one shoulder.

"So where am I going?" she asked nervously.

"How good are you on English history?" Jared asked curiously.

"Well, I'm studying it, as a matter of fact," she began to reply, swinging her backpack down before she stopped abruptly. "No, that class wasn't today. I don't have my textbook." She shrugged. "Pretty good?" She made it a question.

"Norman invasion?" Jared prompted.

The traveller thought, then shrugged. "There were a bunch of attempted invasions, but none succeeded. Oh! You mean the one in... erm... ten-sixty-six? That King Harold the Second fought off?"

"That's the one. In our timeline, he didn't fight it off. He died, and the Norman William came in and took over. Now, unfortunately, I don't know precisely what happened or when that made the difference. All I can tell you is that in our world, Harold's personal timeline ends, and William's goes on. In yours, all I could see from our Cannon was the reverse: William's ended but Harold's continued. Do you remember any details from your history book?"

She struggled a bit, then regretfully shrugged. "Not really. It wasn't covered in any detail."

Jared smiled kindly. "That's all right. It might not matter, anyway. Time will be in flux – which means the details could be different – and history books don't always tell the truth, anyway. Now, your best bet would be to convince Harold not to go north to York to counter the other invasion – his brother, I think it was, and the King of Norway – but to stay with his ships in the south and wait for the Normans. They won't make it across the Channel until September. But even if you can't do that, then listen..." and he outlined the problems with the Battle of Hastings, and how Harold might have won if only he'd kept his troops together, all the while programming her Time Jumper as he had Rhosyn's, and fastening it around her wrist. Then he motioned to her backpack. "You won't want to take that with you; it could get you into real trouble."

"But how will I get it back? These books are bloody expensive, I can't afford to replace them!"

Rose grinned at her. "Don't worry. We'll get it to you, once all the dust settles. We'll still have Time Jumpers and two Dimension Cannons to play with." And so the student reluctantly shrugged out of the pack and set it on a chair.

Standing back at the edge of the circle, Jack's mind began wandering. He couldn't fight the feeling that it was all going too easily...

… when suddenly a loud report, amplified off the concrete walls, rang through the Hub. Jack felt the bullet hit his back and sighed. "I knew we were forgetting something..." And his vision dimmed for the 2,348th time.

As he collapsed to the floor, the others gaped at the scene revealed behind him. Corvantes smiled coldly, the .38 pistol he kept in an ankle holster pointed now at Jared's head, the only one his misogyny would allow him to believe was a threat. "After all the trouble I've gone to to set this up, I'm not about to let you waltz in and destroy it," slid silkily across the room.

He stalked the three steps across to the would-be time traveller and grabbed her upper arm. "Take that device off and give it to me."

His victim was heartily tired of being pawed. She touched the Jumper on her arm – and then, on an insane impulse, without giving herself a moment to think, instead of undoing the buckle, she stabbed the transport button.

And both she and Corvantes disappeared, back into the past.