Frankly, he wasn’t all that comfortable with a scientific/military Project that used psychics, despite the fact that he was a bit of a psychic himself. He was a soldier first, and the mission certainly needed soldiers. But the nature of time travel had required psychics for the Project to be successful. No matter how much data time travelers collected on jaunts into the past, it was only the travelers with psychic gifts who were able to remember their actual experiences from the journey. So, Project teams took back all sorts of recording equipment. But they also took along a psychic to serve as a living, subjective memory of the events from their voyages into the past.
Psychics also came along to study the energy nexuses, the doors, as it were, where time travelers could enter and leave the eras they were visiting. The scientists in charge of the TTP didn’t always feel comfortable with all this use of psychic talent, it just wasn’t scientific enough for them, but the people in charge of funding the project insisted on using every available research tool. Besides, as far as anyone could explain the process of time travel, it still seemed a hell of a lot more like magic than it did science.
“We ought to put on our game faces and get down to business,” he said. He got up and adjusted his tunic, then helped Ginger to her feet. The woman looked good naked.
“Sorry about soaking your dress.” He reached down, grabbed, and offered her the mass of wet wool.
“It needed a spring wash anyway,” she answered. She picked up the sodden lump of cloth and began wringing it out into the bath water. “Give me a hand,” she said, and together they managed to wind the dress tight enough to squeeze out most of the water. The whole time they worked Bern tried to keep his eyes off her. He couldn’t.
“You’ve got great tits,” he told her. They were large and round and just as pale as the rest of her, but for the lovely dark circles of her nipples. Nipples that grew peaked and hard when she noticed him looking at her. He grinned as a flush spread across her chest and throat. It wasn’t only a smile that rose as he watched her.
“Ginger White, you may be the death of me,” he said.
She snatched her dress out of his hands. “I think maybe you better help me on with this.”
“Pity. I like this view so much better.” He stepped close and ran his hands over her in the pretext of helping her maneuver the wet dress. She was cool to the touch, but she went warm where he touched.
“You feel like satin,” he told her.
“Back off, soldier,” she said. He did.
When she was finally dressed, she seemed to remember what was at stake here. She had more questions for him than he could answer. “Is your name really Bern? When are you from? Do you know what happened to the rest of my team? How did you find me? Where’s the nexus? When can we go home?”
Bern held up his hands to halt her rush of words. “I’ll answer yours if you’ll answer mine.” He spotted a stone bench against the wall and led her over to it.
They sat together in the warm air of the bath, and he tried to sum up what he knew. “My team was sent out six months after yours. Our mission was specifically to search for your team—not a single member made it back. When we came in through the Tintagel nexus, it crashed behind us. We couldn’t get back.”
“So now your team is missing as well?”
He nodded. “At least my team all came through together. It didn’t look like your team made it here intact. The theory is that some kind of hiccup in the time/dimensional energy field scattered your team in transit—”
“I noticed. So we all came through at different nexus points?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I’m no physicist, but I managed to figure that out on my own.” She gave his hands a sympathetic squeeze. “So your team’s as lost here as we are.”
“Yeah. But we still had our mission. Along with hunting for you people we’ve been searching for a working exit point. No luck yet with that. It hasn’t been easy, since the energy hiccup shorted out most of your team’s ID transponders. So far you’re only the second team member we’ve found alive.”
“Who else have you found?”
“Sergeant Kaye.”
“Thank goodness! I’ve been so worried about him.” Then she blanched. “You’ve found others—dead?”
“Yeah. Sorry. We found Dr. Bohrs’s grave outside a village near Aqua Sulus. Gwayne had been enslaved on a Saxon farmstead on the coast. We got him out of the place alive, but he caught an arrow in the throat when we ran into a raiding party the next day.”