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June 9, 1981 19.56 hoursEd Straker, sitting at his desk pouring over the detail in reports on the recent alien activity, or lack thereof, looked up to find he was not alone. The door to his office, with its distinctive sound as it slid open and closed, had not opened. The intruder was about five feet seven inches tall wearing a non-descript t-shirt, worn denims belted at her waist with studded leather and jet black hair that hung in a silken curtain to her waist. He noticed all of this while she stood there facing the door with her back to him. He cleared his throat. Whatever he expected, it wasn’t the cat jumping out of its skin reaction before she spun to face him. Ice blue eyes in a heart shaped face stared at him for a moment before she frowned and consulted her watch. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said accusingly. Instead of sensibly drawing his gun, he stared back, eyebrows raised in inquiry. “I’m not?”“No. It’s 8:56. You’re supposed to be half-way home.” She sounded annoyed that he wasn’t on the road headed home. She looked annoyed, too.“It’s 19:56 hundred hours,” he corrected her.“What?” She looked at her watch for a moment before her eyes and mouth rounded into O’s of horror. “Fuckpissshithelldamn,” she ran through under her breath, then looked embarrassed that someone had heard her. “Uhm … Daylight Savings Time?”He nodded.“Oh.” She looked around for inspiration. “Uhm … well. Then, I guess I’ll just … wait.” She stepped into the empty corner at the end of the leather couch he sometimes used to catnap on, and settled down to wait. He could still see her hair and the profile of her face. It was a lovely profile that reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t recall who. It apparently was not occurring to her that entering a secret organization’s headquarters, underground headquarters at that, could get her into trouble. “What’s your name?”“I can’t tell you. Just keep on doing whatever you’re doing and ignore me.” Her words sounded like an order. “Oh, and you have to leave no later than 8:30. OK?”“And why should I do that?”The very blue eyes nailed him with a nonplussed stare. “Because … you have to. You have to leave before you’re too tired to drive.” Her insistence mirrored Alec’s occasional dogged desire to have his commander get some rest. “Why?”“What are you, a two year old?” she shot back, irritated. “No. You do know who I am …?” he asked finally.She closed her eyes. “Commander Ed Straker, Col. USAF, Commander in Chief Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization,” she recited before glaring at him again. “Just one of the most important people on the planet. Yeah. I know. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. ““To do what?” Straker’s voice was silky as he tried to surprise more information out of her.She snorted. “I’m not stupid. I can’t tell you that. It’d be like you advertising that aliens come here and harvest organs all the time. Duh!” She seemed to think that ended the conversation as she leaned back against the wall and studied the wall opposite her. “Would you quit staring at me? Just read you’re reports. Pretend I’m not here.” He didn’t quite catch the next couple of sentences as she started to fidget.Realizing he was still watching her, she looked up to meet his gaze and stilled. “And I’ll sit here and not mutter and not fidget. Sorry.” Straker got the idea that sitting still was not something she did a lot as she let her gaze rove over the room, but kept from wiggling anything else. There was no way he could let this drop so he came around the desk and squatted in front of her, searching for some indication of what exactly was going on here. “Don’t do that,” she admonished him, meeting his gaze, one foot picking up a twitch and bobbling her other leg because of it. “You invade my office in some unexplained fashion, you know who I am and what I do, and you expect me to calmly accept your presence until you send me home at an appointed time?”“Uhm … yes?” she answered hopefully.“No.”“Fuck.”“I don’t think so.”She snorted again. “Wasn’t an invitation. And you can keep that up and down catalog look to yourself, Col. Straker. Conduct unbecoming,” she ended, sounding much like she’d used the phrase before. Or heard it a lot. “I could shoot you, no questions asked. You’re an invader,” he pointed out.“Do I look like I drive a spinner? “ That was true scorn in her voice.“You could be a human traitor,” he answered.“I could be a kangaroo that’s been genetically modified.” Sarcasm with a capital S. “But I’m not. I’m as human as you are … “ She paused and looked at him, a giggle surfacing. “OK, so there are people who think you’re not quite, but that doesn’t make you an alien. And it doesn’t make me an alien, or a … a … shoot, what’s the word? Oh, yeah, collaborator. Not me. I’m here … Oh, you are annoying!” She caught herself before spilling whatever beans there were to be dumped. “I want answers.” He was aware that the aliens in the spinners had a lot of technology that SHADO did not understand. He was fairly certain that whatever brought his nameless visitor here was not among the technologies their opponents wielded. If it was, he’d be dead, not talking to a bright young thing with more tech than brains.“I can’t. Kinda like you can’t let people remember aliens, I can’t tell you why I’m here or how I got here or what. First, you aren’t supposed to be here. Second, I haven’t got an amnesia drug to give you … for one thing; it probably wouldn’t work with your blood chemistry and second thing it’s not a good idea to play with people’s memories. Gives them glitches and no way to solve them. Not good.” “I am here.”“But you won’t be,” she told him. “At least, you really need to not be here at 9pm. You really need to be headed home.”“Why? Right now, all I have is your word. “Did he have to sound so damn implacable? She thought for a minute about everything she knew about tonight. What could she tell him that wouldn’t have an impact somewhere else? Of course, if he stayed, the impact was horrendous. “I can’t do more than give you my word of honor that you’re not being at SHADO HQ is very, very important. You’ll know by morning why, but if I tell you it could … change things.” She looked very unhappy with that answer. She knew it was only piquing his curiosity and that was really a bad thing.“Look. No one gets hurt. SHADO doesn’t fall apart.”“But it does if I stay?” Ed was trying very hard to envision what could happen if he stayed here and waited for whatever it was this girl was trying to get him to avoid. Her hands spoke for her, clenching and unclenching to make incomprehensible motions signifying a probable outcome he could not understand, yet. Logic told him to take her prisoner and turn her over to security. Logic also pointed out that she had not come carrying a weapon that he could identify and that her arrival could only have inconvenienced someone opening the door to enter his office, not someone already in the office. Straker straightened, still looking down into the girl’s face. Hell, she was only a girl; late teens, not much over that. He looked at his watch. 20:10. If he straightened his desk now, he could be away from the studio parking lot by 20:30, her deadline for him. Her eyes searched his face, trying to read that stone impression. She cocked her head to one side and grinned up at him.“I will find you if it turns out that you’ve lied to me,” he told her softly as he returned to his desk. He settled the Glock firmly in its holster, straightened his desk and stalked out of his office without a backward look. It occurred to him it might have been a sleep deprivation induced hallucination as none of the alarms inside SHADO HQ were going off. As Straker stepped into his car, he realized just how tired he was. Not too tired to drive home, but physically drained feeling. He was pulling into the driveway at his house when the phone in the console at his elbow rang. “Straker.”“Ed! Thank god. Security didn’t have a sign out for you.” Alec Freeman sounded very relieved.“What happened?” Straker demanded, starting to turn around to head back.“An accident. The shaft behind your office collapsed, sent that op art picture of yours exploding into the room. I’d take the day off tomorrow to let us get things cleaned up and start repairing things.”“Is everyone all right?” He tried to keep the sharp edge off his voice.“Yeah. You were gone.” Alec sounded a little puzzled. “The debris missed most of the room but blew your chair over the desk and your files onto the floor. Like I said, it’s a mess right now.”“All right. Give me a report in the morning.” He cut the connection and stared hard into the night. The girl was gone when the accident happened. Had he been sitting there, working his way through the reports, he’d be hurt if not dead. She’d saved him. But why?August 18, 2005 11:16 hours“I’m back!!!” the girl yelled as she dove through an odd looking portal, dust billowing through behind her. A tall, gangly man with unruly dark brown hair and slightly oriental looking grey eyes looked her over and nodded. “It worked!”She stared at him in dismay. “You didn’t know it would?” she demanded.“Well, the calculations …”“Chang!!!!!!” she yelled.“It worked.” He walked over to the nearest window, pulling the heavy drapes back. “See.” It was beautiful daylight outside.“Chang. It was daylight when I left. What does the computer say?”“Oh. That. Bellatrix, what are the probabilities now?” he called out.“Why, Chang, dahling, I thought you’d never ask. Diversion .000003 and closing. Timeline coincidence in 3 … 2 … 1… now. Divergence negated. Do I get a prize?”“uhm … “ Chang blushed. “Later, Bellatrix, later.”“Pout. Shall I return to monitoring activity in quadrant seven?”“Yes. Please. Thank you Bellatrix,” Chang answered his computer distractedly. The girl grinned at him. “You really shouldn’t have built the physical interface unit, Chang. You know you shouldn’t. Where’s mom?”“In the garden.”“Thanks.” She started to bounce off to see her mother, then stopped and turned back to meet Chang’s doe-eyed gaze. “Uhm … maybe we shouldn’t tell mom about the problem. I mean … you know how she is about my helping with experiments.”Chang smiled and the world warmed up around him. “Of course, Ms. Straker. We wouldn’t want your mother to think we … er… staged anything, now would we?”Innocence practically poured off the young lady. “Of course, not. It’s not like we forced them to meet … we just made sure things stayed on course. Didn’t we Bella?”“Precisely, Miss Edie. We would never change things. That would be … illogical,” the computer matrix agreed with her. June 10, 1981 12:00 hours“You found what in the debris?” Straker questioned Alec.“Timer. Looks like the collapse of the shaft was not an accident. Wiped clean. No evidence. Good thing you went home when you did.” Alec frowned at the debris field. “Probably wouldn’t have killed you, but would have put you out of commission for a while.” Alec didn’t probe why his boss left earlier than anticipated; he was just glad the man had done so. Nor did he mention the single small metal stud he’d found with shreds of leather still clinging to it. He just added it to the collection of odd small things out of place he kept.