(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 38

The booming pop of entering time again made everything ring. This was normal. What was less normal was the heavy mist, the dense mass of warm water vapors that followed. It was everywhere, burning eyes, nose and mouth and hiding the world from view. It smelled thick and tangy, like a poorly kept beach in summer's heat.
Then the actual water struck. Unlike the by now familiar feeling of arriving at the bank of the river near Benny's farm in the late 1950s, this was ocean. Salty, it cleared the painful heat from nose and mouth, but left another sting entirely. The impenetrable, deep blue was everywhere, up and down hard to discern, especially with throbbing eyes that, out of their naturalinstincts, struggled against any effort to open them. Glimpses of light and dark in the water hinted at a surface nearby, at air, but it took several seconds for the water to slow down the tumbling enough to even make some use of that.
And finally, there was silence. A weightless silence as the body began to rise in the heavier saltwater, floating upwards without needing to actually see what was up and what was down. There was a time to struggle, but this seemed like the perfect time to let the basic forces of nature sort the situation out on their own.
Shouts came through, muffled at first. Male voices, one slightly old, the others definitively not. Everything tasted like salt, like a lot of salt, even after spitting the bulk of the water out and, with some discomfort, cleaning saltwater from the nostrils. The taste filled up everything. The smell tried, but the aroma of wet dirt and seaweed in the sun fought the smell of salt for control of that one sense. Like a thousand beaches, inhaled all at once.
As the voices came close, it became clear that they made no immediate sense. The language was chunky and cumbersome to listen to, like loud mumbling, with thick and gutteral vowels strung together by quick, weak consonants. It had traces of Danish to it, but Danish as filtered through a poetry reading after the poet had eaten too much. It sounded like the equivalent of a language stumbling to bed after a night of heavy drinking.
One voice, the older one, broke the pattern. It said a single sentence, cycling it through many accents and even a few audibly different languages, before it became something intelligible.
“Who are you and where are you from?” it asked, still with some hints of accent in there somewhere.
“I'm Marie. Marie from Nakskov.”
The answer caused a brief hush, before the sound of heavy boots splashing through water could be heard.
“I can't, I can't see.”
The sensation of someone pulling, mainly around the arms, seemed to come out of nowhere, and while the proper reaction might not have been to lash out with flailing punches, it seemed the most natural thing to do at the time. One punch awkwardly connected to a thigh, another seemed to hit a forearm, but the exact events were covered in splashes of more saltwater.
“Marie, you're safe. It's Klaus, Copenhagen 1992, remember?”
“What? No, it's 1701! The destination was...”
“Yes, this is 1701,” the voice interrupted. “You recruited me. You recruited me from the central hospital, remember?”
Everything was still a blur, but the invisible arms helped get onto more or less dry land. The ground felt rough, like gravel, to the touch. Not a beach in the vacation sense, but a shore, and enough to stay out of the ocean.
“Klaus?”
“Yes, that's right,” the voice commented while things came into some semblance of focus.
“I recruited you?”
“You did. I had a potent strain of MRSA, and you had a cure from some future lab.”
The landscape finally became less of a blur, land and sky dividing into separate things. Rocky banks rose along a bleak coast, crowned with short trees. The rocks were dark and slick, feeling smooth to the touch, like expensive artisan stones.
“Sorry, I can't remember any of that.”
“You do look a bit older than I remember you, maybe it is lost in your other memories,” the voice said, sounding like it held back a chuckle. “And I was more than twenty years younger, too.”
Vague memories surfaced, a garbled mess of shifting clarity. The Embassy had regular death marches, as they were unflatteringly called, where those that history had marked as dead were visited with future remedies. Those that could be saved were replaced with fake corpses, keeping history intact in all but the technical details, and the real version was swept away to some other time and place. It was one of the more hotly debated, morally ambiguous types of mission.
“Here,” said the voice, and for a brief moment, the sky seemed to darken. Light came back quickly, though, as it became clear he had simply provided a blanket. “We need to get you back to the fort, or you'll die from the cold, or worse.”
He followed that remark with a few quick, chunky words to the figures that were still vague. The saltwater still had a hold on vision, not to mention smell, and the world seemed a bit difficult to navigate. The arms that reached out to help with that felt smaller, weaker, than the arms that had apparently belonged to this Klaus. Young arms.
The trip back to the fort mentioned was on horseback. Under normal circumstances, that would not have been a problem, but this time, it meant being laid along a horse's back and the horse pulled slowly and carefully. The world was becoming clearer by the second, but not yet entirely clear.
“You come from time machine?” asked a young voice, seemingly from the young man, or grown boy, steadying the horse as it strolled along a poorly made strip of narrow dirt road.
“Yeah, I came here through a time machine.”
“Why in the water? Why not in the room?”
The question had been screaming to be answered. The last memories before the jump were of Dieter frantically making people power up the machine in the Prussian bunker. There had still been a panic, even though the worst was near the entrance to the bunker and not by the machine. Or rather, there had been a rush. The Prussians had performed remarkably, all things considered. And yet...
“We were in a hurry. Someone must have made a bad calculation.”
Things were fairly visible now. The boy looked perhaps 15, although different ages had people look, well, different ages. He could be a tall ten year old, or a poorly fed man of 18. What was very visible, though, was how he turned his head to the man that had to be Klaus, causing him to say a few things in their language. Listening closer, it seemed to be, not surprisingly, an old Danish dialect.
“One bad number and you can die?” he asked, sounding horrified. “One bad number and you can drown?”
“Yes. One bad number and...”
It was becoming clear how far away from this fort the group actually was! The shore seemed to go on forever, and unless it was completely invisible, the fort was still some distance away. Looking at Klaus and the bunch of what seemed like nothing more than boys armed with a few muskets and flintlock pistols, they had walked quite a bit, their boots and pants being fairly dirty.
“Why did you find me out here, come to think of it? You weren't expecting me, so...”
Several of the boys said a word that was hard to clearly hear, but was clearly the same from all of them. Klaus hushed them with a few words of his own.
“We were not looking for you,” he said, a grim tone in his voice. “We have several patrols out. Things have been landing in the water, some even coming from the forest,” he said, pointing at woods not far away.
“Iron fox,” the boy steadying the horse said, sounding none too pleased with the word.
“Iron fox?”
Klaus nodded. “They began coming three days ago. As I said, some landed in the water, some came out of the forest.”
“What's an iron fox?”
He hesitated, not enjoying the thought.
“Not a fox,” the boy said, getting ahead of him.
“No, not a fox,” Klaus backed him up. “We don't know. Some twisted animals, scales so hard even bullets do nothing. They are small, but they have picked at us around dusk, cutting down those who walk outside carelessly. We're trying to set traps or find a burrow or nest.”
In the state of half-drowned daze, it felt perfectly natural to suddenly start scouring the treeline for lurking predators. The sun was still out, which might have been why there were none, but everything suddenly looked a little more threatening, a little less safe and tranquil. And the quick scan was not entirely without results...
“Is that the fort?”
Klaus nodded, with a confirming grunt. A bit farther down the shore, the lumpy piece of architecture stuck out like a sore thumb. Literally, in the sense that it had the rough shape of a giant thumb and was an unhealthy shade of red. Like the shallow cliffs, the fort seemed to be pushed out of the ground, its foundation still hidden beneath the gravel and the waves crashing at its foot.
“Does your time machine work?”
Klaus grunted again, proving to be a man of fewer words than he initially hinted at. He seemed to read the silence quite well, though.
“We got your travel plans. The machine went into use a month ago, and we have tested it thoroughly. Of course...” He paused, his voice dropping a bit in strength and, more importantly, confidence. “Of course, you have a lot of ambition, and dare I say, a lot of faith in us. We only ever sent someone a few decades into the past. What you're asking is quite the jump!”
“Do you have the energy?”
It was instantly apparent how ironic that question was, common from someone only still half awake, soaking wet, sprawled out on the back of a slow-moving horse.
“We have the enerhgy banks,” he answered. “Give us a day or two, and they will be charged.” He turned his head, his eyes sending a friendly, almost fatherly gaze. “I have a feeling the same could be said for you.”

A pale white covered the very sparse medical quarters, its stones a very different kind from the ones outside. The outer fort had the dark, red color from the old bricks that it was built from, brought in from surrounding towns in small loads, one load never connected to any other. The waters were shallow and treacherous around it, making it a poor place for boats. Combined with the forest and the brush that grhew over the top of the fort as it stuck out of the ground, the place would be hard to come upon by coincidence. It had been hard to see before getting fairly close, and that was from the one side of it that had no mounds of rocks and gravel heaped against it to obscure it even more. It was no futuristic distortion field to turn the place invisible, but they had put good thought into it, and that showed.
“What did you hit on arrival?”
The physician, the only one other than Klaus who looked fitting to be called something other than a boy, had a strong hint of worry in his voice. That worry was somehow not very comforting.
“Nothing. Water, nothing else.”
He drew a deep and slow breath, sounding very much like that did not explain what he saw.
“You have several cuts and bruises along your ribs,” he grunted, as if the cuts and bruises were somehow badmouthing him.
“Old injuries.”
“These,” he said, touching two points along the left ribs, causing them to send out a flood of pain, “look no more than a day old.”
“Recent old injuries.”
Maybe something had left its mark in Prussia. Maybe injuries from the last few days had been torn up during the jump. There were too many possible reasons.
“I can clean and suture the wounds, but both they and the bruises will need rest to heal.”
Without much ceremony,  he grabbed some boiled rags and dipped them into something poured from a glass bottle into a pan. The moment the rags touched the cuts, it felt like they burned!
“Alcohol,” the man said very calmly. “It cleans the worst, preventing infection. Also...”
“... it's easy to make locally. You can get it nearly anywhere, in any age. Unlike antobiotics.”
He was quiet for a moment, the rag pressed against the wound.
“Yes, unlike antibiotics,” he finally said. As he spoke the words, a melancholy seemed to creep over him.”
“I guess you're not local either, huh, doc?”
At the question, his hands became a bit less gentle. The first wound had received  a soft dap of the rag, but the second simply got the entire rag laid over it.
“No, I'm not. Marie, was it?”
He spoke the name with a heavy undertone of spite, either as if he didn't like the name or he already knew and didn't like knowing it. He looked older than Klaus, but he was very thin, something that often made people look everywhere from a few years to a decade or two older than they really were. He was bald, but clearly because his head was willingly shaved, a good way to keep unsanitary bugs from clinging to it, in a time when the methods to keep sterile were a little less advanced.
“Yes, it's Marie. And if you don't mind, you sound like you're not a fan of being here.”
“Oh, I'm a fan, I'm a fan,” he remarked very quickly, almost interrupting. “I like my job. I would love to do more of it. Plenty of people around these parts could...”
“Stop.”
He stopped at the request, not a question asked or any protest given. He clearly knew that what he was saying, what he was thinking, was not unique to him.
“I get it... What was your name?”
“Sigurd. Sigurd Leisner.”
“Great, thanks. I get the whole thing, Sigurd. But introducing new technologies broadly is not as simple as it seems.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, crudely replacing the rag with another, this one more soaked in the foulsmelling, nearly pure alcohol he used. “I also know how to watch young women die in childbirth and see frown men die from their limbs rotting because of infections we...”
“Please, just stop.”
Sitting up was painful, whether that was in spite or because of the alcohol-soaked rag. But the tone in his voice was nothing new, and it was the kind of tone that never went away. Arguing was fruitless, and more than that, a headache. And there was more than enough headache already there!
“We're trying, Sigurd. We evacuate thousands that history would have let die. We receive hundreds every month that need to be relocated from a war we're not even a part of.”
The table, little more than a raised stone slab, was just tall enough to require a small hop to get down from. The quick motion sent stings of pain through the freshly cleaned wounds. Whatever had made them, they had already been dulled until picked at, even by his trained hands.
“We're doing what we can. We'll try to do more, but we're doing what we can.”
The room felt chill. Not like a wind, but like a vault, perhaps because it in many ways was. The floor alone felt like walking on a late autumn sidewalk, barefoot.
“Where are my clothes?”
The doctor first said nothing, perhaps wanting to make walking around in a thin cotton blanket some kind of punishment. In the end, he caved all on his own, though.
“That ripped jumpsuit thing? On the chair, behind the door.”
He wasn't lying. Not just about the jumpsuit being behind the door, but also about its condition. It hadn't been in mint condition for a very long time, but at this point, it barely resembled clothing. There were long, thin gaps that were cut into it on purpose and then sewn at the edges to make them strong. Those were there to vent heat, something that was easily lethal during all but the shortest of trips. But seams had split and the gaps had become gashes over time, and the fabric was worn so thin  in places that similar rips had appeared there. It remained functional, but that fact was becoming more and more impressive.
“Uhm, would you like some privacy?” he asked, his voice admitting that he was feeling a bit uncomfortable.
“You're a doctor, and you've already seen most of me. You can look away, I won't mind.”
He said nothing else, and the was no sense in being insensitive about it. In many ways, he was right. Right about everything. From his polite offer of privacy to his frustration at seeing people not being given lifesaving help in a world that sorely needed it. It wasn't the fact that he complained that was so bothersome. It was that he was, at least morally, right.
Outside the door, a lone hallway ran at a slight incline, upwards to where the entrance, and the sea outside, were. There was very little else there, but in the other direction there was nothing but the unknown, another set of winding passages to god knew where, who and what. The known path seemed a better bet, for the time being.
“Hello,” said the boy that had walked the horse to the fort not long ago. He seemed in his late teens, but again, with how people looked through history, it was hard to say. Short hair, no doubt cut on the doctor's orders to prevent lice and other pests from spreading. Cheap, brown clothes, of local make from the looks of it. A shirt and a vest, with pants that were at least one size too big.
“Hi again. I never got your name?”
“Harald,” he said, smiling as he reached out a hand, looking a bit nervous in the act.
“Harald, nice to meet you.”
“Nice, as well,” he countered, having trouble making steady eye contact.
“Am I... Am I the only woman here?”
The boy laughed slightly, still an undertone of nervous in his voice.
“The only one we've seen in a while,” he answered, looking adorably shy about it. He was fidgety, seeming a bit unsure of himself, something that hadn't been all that obvious earlier on.
“How old are you, Harald?”
The question made his smile disappear. He showd no anger or even annoyance at the question, more a hint of sadness.
“Not sure,” he answered. “I never knew my family, so nobody told me my birthday.”
“Orphan?”
He nodded, folding his arms to put his hands underneath the shoulders, as if to warm himself. There was a bit of a breeze, but it was fairly warm. That likely wasn't his reason.
“The doctor helped us, but my parents were too sick.” He sent a look down the hallway behind the still open door in the face of the fort. “He said that one day later, I would have been dead, too.”
“We? Who were we?”
He looked over, the expression in his eyes a bit painful, or even haunted.
“I have a sister,” he said, pausing as he looked away, gazing out to sea. “She now cares for the children that the doctor and Klaus have helped elsewhere.”
“You haven't seen her in a long time, have you?”
It beamed from him, the uneasy movement, the strain in his voice when he mentioned her. A child not knowing its birthday seemed to mean it had happened when he was very young. Who knew how old the sister had been, and when they had last met.
“A year ago. She is happy, that's all that matters.”
A kind of disciplined rigor, a pride, came back into his voice.
“We help others who have even less. God's work, you might say.”
A wave crashed rather loudly against the rocks meant to obscure the face of the red brick fort, sending a spray of salty foam flying everywhere. The rocks were looking more and more slippery, but near the entrance, they were at least rather flat and level.
“The doctor said something when I was a child,” he said, almost sounding like he was thinking out loud. “Long before the fort was built, back when we, they, worked out of the old, burned church by the beach. He said that history wasn't going to take me. Whenever I asked what that meant, he changed the subject.” Harald turned, a more confident look in his eyes. “What did he mean by that, Marie?”
The answer to that question was easy. Ironically, answering it was far harder than that. Harald instantly noticed that, from the look in his eyes.
“I thikn he should...”
“He never will,” Harald interrupted. “I know that you and Klaus and the doctor come from another time, and I will never demand to know how that even works,” he chuckled, “but I have decided to devote my life to helping them, and I need to know what he meant.”
Far, far away, a small light was blinking, a lighthouse guiding ships through the fog that seemed to be rolling in there. By the fort, the air was crisp, nothing filling  it but the smell of salt and wet dirt.
“We cannot change history. There are powerful people who will use violence you couldn't understand to prevent that.”
Harald looked like he was struggling a bit, but still understanding the essence of what he was hearing.
“So we study the past, our past, to find those who would have... been lost.”
“Lost?” he asked, his voice  revealing that he had guessed what was really meant.
“We recruit those who would have died. Those who would not be missed by history. The ones who never got a chance to matter.”
It was a lot to digest. To his credit, Harald took it with little more than a deep sigh and a shiver. But he broke eye contact and looked out over the shifting sea as he spoke again.
“So in your time, I was just another dead child.”
The nod was not needed, he clearly wasn't asking it as a question. Silence took overafter that, at least for a little while, as he clearly absorbed the new knowledge. In the end, he turned around and walked to the mouth of the entrance to the fort. There, he stopped.
“Would you like to see an iron fox?”

There was no ceremony as Harald pulled the thick blanket off the dead animal. It was put in a small room, deep inside the fort. Different stones lined the walls, old and worn ones, and there was a smell that matched nothing elsewhere in or outside the fort.
“It washed up,” he said, with no great drama. “They seem to fall from the sky, and most of us assume the ones in the forest simply survived landing on land.”
It had been hard to know what to expect, from the vague descriptions given by Harald and Klaus. But what lay on the rocky floor on the room would have matched nothing expected, anyway. It had four legs and a slightly pointy body, complete with a long tail, but beyond that, the likeness to a fox ended. Thick scales ran from the bridge of its nose to the tip of its tail, covering the body and legs almost completely. The head looked like an armadillo, or a small horse in armor, the eyes nothing but little, black dots inside holes in the faceplate. The armor looked natural, in that it had grown on the animal without human hands to place it. But the animal overall was an abomination. The only question was, what kind of abomination was it?
“You can touch it,” Harald added. “The doctor says it's quite dead, and that nothing lives on or in it. Whatever that means.”
The last sentence brought a disgusted look to his face, his eyes studying the thing by instinct as if expecting something to burst out of its chest. Nothing did, of course, and the feel of the scales was like running fingers over leather stretched over wood.
“And bullets do nothing?”
Harald shook his head.
“We've fired muskets and pistols at it, and they have hardly even been bothered.”
Muskets and pistols. Guns of the age. A sniper rifle or submachine gun would never make it through the time machine, nor would any futuristic laser or the like. It was impossible to know if the weapons they had were simply too weak, or if the others like the animal on the floor were truly impenetrable.
“Do you have a knife?”
A little surprised by the question, Harald pulled out a long, thin knife. It looked made for skinning deer and rabbits, a small hunting knife. In combat with a large animal or an armed person, it might be a lost cause, but it fit the task at hand perfectly.
With a slight twist, the larger scales revealed a narrow gap between them. The knife, although its blade was not very even and could do with a sharpening, slit between the scales with relative ease. They stuck together with a slimey goo, like one poorly made pizza pressed on top of another, and it took some sleight of hand to wrestle them apart. In the end, even beneath the scales, they were an integral part of the animal.
“Did you find what you sought?” asked the boy, sounding honestly curious.
“Yes and no. They are animals, through and through. I had hoped they...”
Harald looked a bit uncomfortable when the sticky knife was handed back to him. Giving it a moment's thought, he handed it right back, nodding to say that it was a present.
“You had hoped they what?”
How could anyone explain advanced manipulation of living bodies to a boy that had probably never heard even of vaccines.
“I'm hungry!”
That answer, quite clearly, was not the one he was looking for.

Eating was in a very narrow hall. The ceiling curved, like a tunnel, and there were no pillars. In fact, a tunnel was a pretty close description. A long table, made from unevenly matched wooden planks that made it twist and bend slightly, stood in the middle, following the tunnel's direction. The stone in the walls were much like the pale ones in the doctor's quarters, but more worn and in places damaged.
“It's an old pirate fort,” said Harald, noting the attention to the walls. “Piracy basically got crushed fifty years ago, and the ones trying to make this place left it half done. We just finished the job.”
It made sense. The old and new parts had completely different designs to them. Being made by two different groups, ones that never even met, felt like a reasonable explanation.
“Do you know all of it, then?”
“Most,” he answered, wrinkling his nose as he did, which meant that there were parts enough to explore, still.
The plates were in a stack on the table, a few knives in a tall, wooden mug. Other than that, there was bread under a cloth, and a wooden box with something in it that was hard to determine.
“Fat. To put on bread,” Harald said, again noticing what was attracting attention. “We still have limited resources, but some of the less fine fats are sold cheap by local farmers. It tastes just fine. And it makes good lamp fat, too.”
Along with the last sentence, he pointed at the small candles burning along the walls. Small wooden cups were fastened with iron spikes forced between the stones, and candles looking like small, melted piles burned and sputtered in them.
“You eat candle fuel?”
“I'd feed them gasoline if it gave them energy,” Klaus said, passing by on his way to the table. He cracked a smile as he did, but Harald just looked at him, puzzled by what he was saying.
“You look in a good mood?”
Klaus nodded, sitting down and grabbing a loaf of bread from beneath the cloth.
“We just killed two iron foxes,” he said as his own knife dug into the bread, carving a piece for him. “Took a fight, but we got them in a net and, well...”
He made a series of gestures that seemed to mean he and several others had killed the animals with spears of some sort. He did add a bit of drama to it with what sounds he could mimic.
The long bench was uncomfortable to sit on. It had been sanded down enough to be rid of splinters, but it was very uneven, with dents and bulges that felt like sitting on a piece of cardboard on loose rocks.
“They are becoming more,” Harald remarked, and Klaus' smile dimished a bit, his boisterous tone becoming more subdued.
“Yes. Yes, they are,” he replied, clearly as worried about it as Harald. Perhaps more. “They are hitting the water more. More survive that than hitting the ground.”
“Where do they come from?”
The man and the boy both stopped both talking and preparing their food, looking over for a moment.
“The sky,” Klaus answered in a bitter voice.
“God is angry,” Harald added. But Klaus looked up at him with a stern glare.
“God has no part in this, young man,” he commented. Harald said nothing, instead turning his attention to his bread and fat.
“But why do animals fall from the sky? Is that common here?!”
Klaus was trying to act as if there was nothing about it that bothered him. With another knife that he had taken from the table, one that was more fitted for spreading than cutting, he put some of the fat from the nearest box on his crudely cut piece of bread. But his motions were slow and indecisive. His mind was elsewhere.
“Have you...”
“We don't know,” he answered, cutting off the next question. “We're here, they come from up there. We have no way of finding out. With luck, they will stop as quickly as they started.”
As if to close off that part of the conversation, he said a few words to Harald in the old dialect that was nearly impossible to comprehend. Harald looked over with an apologetic glance, then answered the man in the same dialect.
The fat and bread meal tasted odd, like some  poorly made pastry. There were herbs to sprinkle it with, and a few added something to the taste, but the cheap butter flavor of the fat was very powerful. As the meal progressed and more young men joined the long tables, Klaus insisted on using the local dialect to keep the conversation going. Harald seemed to want to be more hospitable, but the man was an imposing presence, and Harald clearly respected him, and his unspoken wishes.
It lasted a bit, but before finishing his second piece of bread, Klaus suddenly froze. His eyes became vacant as he tilted his head in an odd way. At first it seemed a little disturbing, but the truth quickly became apparent. He was listening.
Without warning, he rose quickly to his feet, pushing the heavy bench back enough to make room for his legs! With a deep, penetrating voice, he bellowed out a single word, or perhaps even just a single sound, and everyone fell quiet. The two dozen or so young men around the table sat, immobile, and stared at him as he tried to hear something that was clearly quite faint. Then he shouted a command and ran for the door!
“Harald, what...”
“Screams down deep,” he said in a hushed voice, not because he wanted to be quiet, but because he needed his breath. Then he, too, bolted for whatever Klaus had heard.
Every last man emptied out of the dining hall in what looked like chaos, but not one ever bumped into another. In mere seconds, there was no one else there. Then, and only then, it felt safe to leave and follow them.
The flames from the fat candles that were also mounted along the walls outside the dining hall was enough to find your way, but little more than that. Flickering shadows far down hallways was all that was visible of the ones that had run that way, and it was hard to find the right way to go whenever the corridors branched out in any sort of odd way. But one thing above all was there to lead the way: Someone was screaming. Screams down deep.
And then, the hallway was no longer a hallway. It snuck up, but suddenly, there were no bricks or stones to form a wall, no vaulted ceiling above. The place was open, but the walls were rounded and uneven, candles placed on little flat spots wherever they appeared. Since they appeared with no discernable pattern, the light was not just flickering and faint, it was very irregular. Shadows began to appear, only to be gone a few steps deeper inside. Natural caverns. Deep, labyrinthic natural caverns.
The screams were impossible to place! The moment they rang out, they echoed from everywhere. A musket shot rang out, the echo bouncing like a thungerclap cutting through the caverns. Then another scream. In the distance, something ran by, claws across wet stone, only reflecting a sliver of light for a split second, and then it was gone.
“Fall back!” hissed Klaus as he appeared out of the dimness. It was impossible not to scream at that sudden voice, but the scream drowned in the screams of others.
“What the #*@! is it?! What is happening, Klaus?”
The man's eyes had a panicked focus to them, the eyes of someone keeping himself together in spite of being terrified. In his right hand was a flintlock pistol. It smelled of gunpowder and smoke. His left hand had small cuts on it, looking like it was scraped hard against the cavern wall.
“Iron foxes. Many. They're inside.”
“How?!”
The cavern suddenly seemed to shrink, to squeeze and constrain every moment. It seemed small. None of it had changed, but there suddenly wasn't enough room, and it was starting to feel like not enough room to even breathe right.
“Nothing came through. They never entered the fort. They're just here.”
“How?! That makes no...”
“Sense??” he interrupted. “Marie, they are armored animals that fall from the sky, how would you expect them to suddenly make sense?!”
He had a very good point.
“This can't be just an accident.”
“What can't?” he asked, slowly catching his breath as he looked around. At the sound of another scream, he instantly swung his pistol around and over the rock he hid behind, in spite of knowing it would likely do nothing to whatever was out there.
“I arrive in Prussia, lunatics attack the place. I arrive here, unnatural beasts attack the place.”
Klaus leaned back, taking slow and stady steps away from the deeper parts of the cave. He held the pistol at the ready, never moving his eyes from its sights.
“You think they're after you? They came...”
“... days before me, I know. Time travel will trick you like that.”
“So they want you?”
“No, I think they want everyone. I'm just the thing that pulled them here.”
In the dark, something ran by, jumping over one of the fat candles and knocking it and its metal cup on the floor. It sputtered and slowly died, leaving the place that little bit dimmer.
“They like the dark,” Klaus whispered, more like he was just realizing it than informing anyone. Another scream rang out, and three of the young men ran by in the dark, heading away from the fight. Two were half carrying the last.
“Then maybe we should give them a light?”
For once, Klaus actually moved his eyes from the aiming sights on the pistol and looked over.
“If you have an idea, Marie...” he said, letting his voice trail rather than waste time on the obvious.
The moist cavern echoed with splashes from running through the little puddles everywhere. It was a byzantine maze, a nightmare for anyone without a perfect sense of direction. But the two men dragging their comrade were easily visible, and they seemed to know the way.
“Where is your armory?!”
The men flinched at being suddenly passed by, but they managed not to drop the wounded one. He was dangling, a nasty gash across his abdomen and right leg, bleeding badly but still alive.
“Armory? Where is it?”
“Beyond eat place,” one said, thick accent and stuttering all telling that perhaps his earlier pause was as much about language as surprise.
“Perfect!”
They were well trained and fast, but burdened by their wounded comrade, they quickly fell behind. The puddles started disappearing and stone walls appeared, the old pirate fort blending into the caverns almost as if they had grown together organically. Hallways and corridors began to spread out, but at least the route back to the dining hall was easy to remember.
It was a mess. Passing by the doctor's room, it became clear that many had been dragged back for their wounds. It also became clear that the narrow corridors were no hospital ward, with little room to house the overflow of injured men. So most were kept in the dining hall, both those waiting to be helped and those now hoping to recover. But there were also a handful of able men there, ones that had likely brought fallen ones back and were now planning to return to the fight.
“You, you and you!”
It was impossible to tell who would understand the language, but they understood the pointing. The three men immediately followed, though they had a confused look on their faces.
“You understand me?”
The three had come in close and looked like they awaited orders. One nodded, and the others looked at him, clearly knowing that he would be the translator for this task.
“The fat, find a barrel.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, but a gesture of spreading fat on bread made the pieces connect.
“Barrel,” he said, an accent thicker than even the two dragging their friend in the cavern. “Barrel fat, here?”
The nod made him give quick orders to the two other, but he stopped when he felt the tug on his shoulder.
“Gunpowder. For pistols?”
He turned and looked at the armory, then at the lock on the door.
“#*@!, who has a key? Key, to open?”
He stared in bewilderment for a moment. Then he pulled out an old single-barrel pistol. He gave that and only that warning before he pulled out a gunpowder pouch and lit the fuse before even jamming it in the lock. It was only through quick reflexes that nobody got hurt as the lock blew apart!
It took a few rough knocks with the pistol itself before the heavy padlock fell apart enough to pry it off, but that opened the door. And inside, heavy caskets of gunpowder, each covered from the next by thick blocks of wood, stood on several shelves. The young man quickly grabbed one, opening it to show little packets of paper, each one likely with a shot's load of gunpowder inside. At the same moment, the other two arrived with the barrel of fat.
“Mix. Mix gunpowder in fat.”
Along with the hand gestures, he understood immediately. The lid of the barrel was popped, and while he explained to the two others, they began to rip open the paper packets and mix the gunpowder into the soft, almost liquid fat. One finally grabbed what looked like a large, wooden spatula, and the mixing began in earnest.

The cavern was quiet, so much so that it seemed unnatural and frightening! Klaus and a few others were positioned by the mouth of the stone corridor, their pistols and two with muskets pointing into the caves.
“We need to start a bunch of small fires.”
Klaus flinched at the sudden instructions, staring baffled at the three young men carrying large, open wooden containers with fat and gunpowder mix in them.
“We need to keep away from the...”
“Not here, nearby. We need to lure them in.”
“Are you ins...”
He never got around to finishing the sentence before one of the three men said something in the local dialect. Klaus looked at the containers, then at the men, and then at the cave. He then gave the order.
Within minutes, patches of little candles burned in three different spots near the point that Klaus and the others were guarding. Then, everyone waited.
The cavern was very still now. Klaus didn't even have to say that anyone still alive was either guarding the point, or in the hands of the doctor. It had barely even been clear in the dining hall, but there had to be at least a hundred wounded or dead.
It only took a few minutes of tense waiting before the scraping of armored claws against the rock could be heard nearby. Slowly, creeping through the dark as if they knew the psychological effect of hearing them in the dark, the iron foxes drew nearer. Then, without warning, one leapt at the small candles, knocking them about and snuffing them out. But as it did, it also knocked over the thin wooden boards that tenderly held the container of gunpowder fat up. The whole container spilled over the beasts, covering it, and for a moment, it screamed. But then, it said nothing, the sound of its feet disappearing into the dark again.
Another threw itself at the second patch, also covering itself in the fat and then disappearing. Then, everything fell silent again.
“Klaus, why are they silent?”
He said nothing, his eyes on the dark cavern, squinting to see anything at all out there. His eyes widened when the sound of heavy claws scraping against the cavern wall began to make themselves heard. A large shadow blocked what little light came from remaining candles in the cave.
“Iron foxes are small, right? Klaus?”
Everyone was frozen in place as the large beast, three times the length of the iron foxes that had run into the cave, came into the light near the defended point. Snarling, its arrow-like jaw quivering unsude its scaly armor, it looked over the men gathered behind the cave's small, natural rock formations. As if to show its disdain, it slammed a foot down on the remaining spot of small candles, then smashed the container, spilling the fat everywhere, from the floor of the cave to its own head to the men hiding nearby. And then, it silently glared at the men.
“Now.”
Klaus reacted instantly to the whisper, standing up in full view of the beast and firing his flintlock at it. The colossal animal never even flinched when the bullet struck, sending a small spark flying. As it took a slow step forward, growling at him, he fired the second shot in the double-barreled gun. The beast again ignored it. This time, however, the spark hit right. With a sputter, the gunpowder in the fat on the animal's face caught fire, igniting more of it and making the fat catch fire. The beast howled and screamed as its face began to burn, and the sound of its smaller companions could be heard rushing in. But at this point, fat along the floor had caught fire, and while the first few iron foxes came through with agile evasion of the flames, the two that had been doused in gunpowder fat immediately burst into living balls of roaring fires! Chaos followed, the iron foxes in a panic.
“If ever a chance,” Klaus whispered, then threw himself out from his cover! Several young men instantly followed, brandishing nothing but long knives! Amongst the flames, howls rang out as those knives were forced between armored scales. Only one was close enough, and large enough, to be seen from the defensive point. With a roar himself, Klaus caught the eye of the large beast, still desperately waving its head to extinguish the flames, and doing so in vain. It howled as it stared at him through the pain, and reached out its giant paw, claws glistening in the fire like silver swords.
Klaus never hesitated. Seeing the paw swinging at him, he pointed the knife and let the animal's raw strength itself push the blade into the meat of the paw, finding one of the few weak points between the joints in it. The beast screamed in even more agony, and he went in for the kill. As he planted the bloodied blade between scales in the animal's jaw, it roared, opening the jaw wide and readying it to bite at him. But it never did. Two young men stepped out, forcing the long barrels of their muskets into the beast's throat, and fired. The roar turned to a gargle, and swaying badly, the animal simply knocked Klaus aside with a tired paw. Then it backed away, growling and making blood bubble from its mouth. Its feet tried to get a grip on the rocky floor, but the legs were faltering. Finally, it let out a whimper, and collapsed.

“Are you sure?”
Klaus, wearing a few bandages and with the doctor still insisting on tending to a gash on his forehead, sat in the one chair that looked even remotely comfortable in the whole fort. It was attached to the machine that was now unfolding its giant fingers, readying itself for ripping through time.
“No. No, not at all.”
Smiling a bit, Klaus quickly winced in pain as the skin on his face reminded him of scrapes and bruises.
“Marie, we are hunting them down. The caverns are being secured, and we will find out how they got in and prevent it in the future. Likely just a double air pocket in the...”
“They were here because of me, Klaus. Others will come.”
One of the young men, himself with a series of shallow cuts on his face and one arm in a crude sling, came up and said something to Klaus in the local dialect.
“Fine,” Klaus sighed. “We can't send you far, though. The machine was set to charge for more than another day. The energy is low.”
“Doesn't matter. I'm breaking the planned route.”
Klaus said nothing, but his eyes were asking questions.
“Someone is following me. Someone knows where I'm going. All I can do is try to confuse them.”
He nodded, fully understanding the concept. He did look uncomfortable at the idea. Maybe breaking protocol was not his thing.
“Is anyone there to get you farther, then? Do we have an embassy office in that time.”
“No office.”
Clearly, the words did not explain the smile that accompanied them to Klaus.
“Not an office, per se. But we do have friends.”
“Friends?” he asked, sounding insultingly skeptical. It just warranted another smile, though. He wasn't entirely wrong to be skeptical.
“Well, people.”
The time machine opened its fingers, the platform inside beckoning.