(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 4

The flash was brief. The pain was less brief. The room filled with a loud thud as skin struck the padded wall.
"Arrival!" yelled someone, somewhere. The pain was from the trip, not from hitting the wall. The place was designed for the safest arrival possible. But nothing in it could soften the trip itself.
"Marie, are you okay?"
The concerned voice was a regular part of this time and place. Aldric, an older man. Native to this time, like Ruben was native to that dark future.
Embassy personnel rushed in, without warning. The room was circular, not that big, and the sound was deafening. Perhaps not to them, but everything was more intensive after you arrived. Time travel was brutal on the body, and brutal things charged the senses.
"I'll survive."
The answer was, to be honest, less than convincing. Part of that was no doubt the rough coughing that followed it, or the slight spray of blood that followed the coughing.
The arrival personnel rushed in. Two humans, and a swarm of drones. The warmth from the flimsy lights that shot from their various gear felt soothing as it triggered coagulation and activated immune responses. It was a catch-all remedy, a bit primitive for the era, but it did its job. The human body was built to heal, but it helped to give it a solid kick to get started.
"Solid response. All signals stabilizing."
The voice was human. Or at the very least, it sounded human. There was no real way to tell. But the words were comforting.
"Marie, can you move?"
Nerve by nerve, movement came back, slowly. Everything seemed to run at a wrong pace, shifting from too slow to too fast in a heartbeat.
"Yes. I just... have problems focusing. My eyes feel..."
"Strained," the voice interrupted. "The trip hit you harder than usual. Fluid pressure in your eyes has stretched every part of the eyeball. One second..."
The voice still seemed to come out of nowhere, but as it trailed off, everything became more clear. The fluid, or whatever, seemed to cool, cooling the eyes, making the fuzziness disappear.
"That's it. I'm good now."
There was a brief buzz as drones and humans all seemed to verify it, but eventually, they backed off.
"That was rougher than usual," Aldric commented. It was clearly not just a comment, though. The tone of his voice strongly suggested he was asking a question.
"Yeah, well, we had to skip a few steps."
Aldric slowed his movements, clearly thinking. He was standing by a set of small holographic screens, which seemed to be reporting the conditions of everything after the time jump. It was rare for local time to be greatly affected by an arrival. Rare, but not impossible.
"What steps?" he asked, sounding a bit worried, but at the same time commanding, like a father asking a child who had stolen the cookies.
"Just a few midway jumps. Two, to be exact."
The place filled with a strange quiet. Aldric was sending stiff looks, very displeased by the new information. Everyone else seemed to be either waiting for his response, or quietly hurrying away.
"You skipped two midway jumps?" he asked in a stern voice. "How long was your..."
"About four centuries."
For seconds that seemed like an eternity, Aldric fell completely silent.
"You jumped four centuries in one jump?" he asked, knowing full well the answer. All he got was a casual nod.
"Why would you o that, Marie?! I thought I instructed you very clearly that you ca..."
"I had to."
Aldric was not a man who liked being interrupted, but this once, he fell quiet.
"They are catching on."
Again, Aldric was silent. His demand for an explanation, however, managed to be louder than any shouting.
"They are catching on, Aldric. They know that I'm hunting her. They know we're putting together the pieces. And they don't like it, not at all."

The station floated in the black, much like the station where Ruben had been. It seemed only days ago, and in a way, it was even less. But in another, it was more than half a millenium in the future.
One difference was that the black was not black here. Oh, space around the station was black, but in the distance, the brilliant light from a yellow star shone, sending warm light through the transparent walls. The sun. If one looked down, through the equally transparent floor, the Earth would be there. It looke peaceful from that height, lush forests and wide rivers giving way to mountains and deserts. But it was brutal. Brutal by design, in fact, a reservation for an accelerated evolution that had trouble taking hold anywhere else. The few cities were enclosed monoliths, entirely self-contained, to ward off the effects of the outside. Otherwise, those inside might evolve dangerously fast, too. Dangerous beauty.
"Sleep well?"
Aldric's question was meant as a joke. He had a very dry humor.
"Would I remember if I did?"
He chuckled slightly at the answer. A smedical tasis chamber was not exactly sleep, but more like a dreamless coma. It repaired the body, down to the individual cell, but it was nothing like sleep.
"Marie, what you told me before you went into stasis, about them knowing we were chasing them. What exactly do they know?"
It was odd to hear the man sound tired, and even weirder to hear a hint of nervous in the voice. He was a big man, both physically and mentally, not one to be easily rocked. He had watched this small branch of the Embassy for most of his long life, close to two centuries. He knew more than anyone about the bigger picture. If he worried, there was reason to worry.
And there was reason to worry.
"We caught up to one of their operations in 1209, somewhere near the Andes. Big installations, bigger than usual. We have no idea how they buried them, but there were no signs a decade before or after."
In the distance, far from the station but close to the sun, small dots shaded its light. It was called the Sun Bridge, although it was not one structure. Massive arrays of stations, leading closer to the star, bit by bit, supporting one another against the immense energy that washed over them from it. One large shadow was the reason for it all, and it could be seen on the far right of the round, glowing ball. A single, unidentified object, which everyone was rushing to get to. In their haste, they had forgotten about older stations near Earth. It had been an opportunity for the Embassy, an empty station that could be reached directly through time, without setting foot on the Earth itself, either in the dangerous wilderness or the strictly controlled monolith cities. A crack. A crack that someone could fill.
"We were discovered snooping around, though."
Aldric remained silent, just listening. It was ironic, but even though he only saw time travel from the sidelines, watching over people arriving and leaving, he seemed less worried about time than anyone else. As if he had an endless supply. Under other corcumstances, he could have been an excellent agent.
"It all ties back to Nakskov. It's like a strong of pearls, with Nakskov somewhere in the middle."
Finally, Aldric made a sound. A grunt, more precisely. A skeptical grunt.
"How do you know that, Marie? How many projects have we identified? 21407 has a massive network of agents. They are hunting people up and down the timeline. They are closing down entire colonies, for crying out loud. What makes you think that..."
"She was there."
The interruption seemed to knock Aldric out of his train of thought, taking him a bit by surprise. This time, he seemed less pleased with the experience. But he listened. He always listened.
"I saw her. Again and again. Sometimes it's her before the events in Nakskov, sometimes it's her after. I can see it in her face, in the way she acts. Nakskov changed her."
"Sidney," Aldric mumbled. "Isn't that what you call her?"
"Yeah.... Sidney."
It was just a name picked as a kind of joke, a way to talk about her without knowing her real name. If she even had one. The woman in white. The blonde. A name made her easier to remember. It also made her seem more human, and less like an abstract boogeyman.
"What are they trying to do, though?"
That was the big question. Projects bigger than anything seen before. Past, present, future, they were everywhere. She was everywhere.
"I need to know if sheøs here, too."
The comment didn't answer Aldric's question, and it clearly bothered him. And still, he did not complain. He simply tapped on his wrist, and then made a simple gesture in the air. Glowing symbols appeared in midair. Lines and shapes, swimming in a sea of little icons. With the quick precision of decades of experience, Aldric adjusted them around with a few flicks of his wrist, until they became a partially transparent model of the Earth that floated in space some distance beneath the station.
"See?" he said calmly, waving an open hand at the tiny Earth glowing in the slowly setting sunlight. "Not a sign. Your Sidney either has no operations in this time, or they are so small that their traces are impossible to see."
"What are you looking for?"
Clearly, the question took Aldric by surprise. He stuttered a few low sounds while gazing over the floating Earth, trying to phrase an answer.
"Any signs of time travel. Anything going out or coming in. The Embassy has been pretty good at adapting local technology to our own, and for the last..."
The number of interruptions was getting to him, it showed in his face. This one was polite, though, simply a raised hand. Again, he respected it. His patience was no doubt wearing thin, but for now, at least, he still respected it.
"I don't....."
Aldric listened for a moment, then grew impatient. It flowed through his voice, a subtle annoyance.
"You don't what, Marie?"
The glowing model of the Earth hung silently in the air, like a real planet dangling in empty space. Nothing on it changed. It could have been a still image and it would be impossible to tell the difference.
"There is nothing."
"That is sort of my point," Aldric mumbled, the annoyance starting to peek through in his tone.
"No, I mean, there is nothing at all. There should be something."
The glowing Earth remained silent.
"When I visited the End Age, I found her work on the Moon. But it was just a remnant, left behind."
The glowing Earth did nothing.
"I don't think they are coming."
A sigh escaped Aldric's lips, an uncommonly casual thing for a man like him.
"Well, then we're safe, right?"
The glowing Earth kept spinning, slowly.
"No. I think they are already here."
The annoyed stare in Aldric's eyes vanished into thin air. His arms unfolded, making a mute and indecipherable gesture in the air, a nervous kind of question without words.
"I think they've been here for a long time."
The glowing Earth was still quiet. Now, so was Aldric.
"I think they've been everywhere for a long time."