Free Time Salvager by Wesley Chu

Isolationists’ famed Titan engine was missing.
    “Where are we?” he asked.
    “We’re where you want to be,” she said.
    “I don’t want to be here.”
    Grace looked amused. “You only think that.”
    She led him to the control room of the ship, where the nothingness of space outside the heliosphere of the solar system awaited them on the display. Only a few specks of light pierced the black emptiness.
    She turned to him. “We’re past the point of no return. What are you going to do about it?”
    There was a pause as James glanced up at the screen and then back to her. “There’s nothing I can do.”
    Grace smiled and repeated herself: “You only think that.”
    She took his hand and led him to the exit. He stepped off the command deck and into the Amber Room. Inside, the young Nazi soldier was staring up at the intricate gold and amber carvings on the wall. The room itself looked different. Gone were the cakes of dust that had smothered the luster, as if someone had polished the entire room to a bright sheen. The walls practically glowed like the sun, giving the room a dream-like flare.
    The soldier turned and smiled. Then he pointed toward the shiny wall, which was almost too bright to look at. “Beautiful, no? Now I see why you killed me to get it.”
    “That’s not how it happened,” said James.
    “Yes, yes.” The soldier laughed. “You had no choice. Your Time Laws and everything. More important than my life, ja?”
    Upon closer inspection, James realized that the soldier wasn’t wearing his uniform, just a shirt and a pair of trousers from his era. He looked every bit a boy and not at all like a mass-murdering fascist. The boy pointed up at a small, intricate gold chandelier suspended from the ceiling.
    “You missed that, did you know?” he said. “Forgot to take it with you. Is your rich patron, the one who probably put the Amber Room in his private display, going to mind?”
    James shrugged. “Abyss if I care.”
    The soldier fell in next to them as they left the room and continued down the hallway. “You save the pretty trinkets that you don’t care about, yet kill what weighs heavily on your mind. Mixed priorities, ja?”
    “It’s just my job,” said James as they turned the corner toward where he had first entered the castle.
    The soldier smirked. “I bet your rich patron is sleeping well tonight.”
    They passed the three guards whom he had encountered at the castle. They were standing at the window looking out at the courtyard in the center of the castle, where a massive bonfire burned, blanketing their faces with an angry red glow. They turned to him in unison and waved.
    “It’s all right,” one of them said. “We’re dead anyway. I hope that lets you sleep better at night.”
    “Hey,” one of them remarked angrily. “I was supposed to live and have a son!”
    “Yeah, but you all drowned,” the first said. “Dying here is much less painful than drowning. He did you a favor.”
    “You only think that,” the one who was supposed to live said.
    James and his two escorts stepped out of the castle and entered a dark hallway littered with refuse. A familiar foul stench wafted into James’s nostrils. It was the smell of human misery and death.
    James’s mind froze in recognition; they were on Mnemosyne Station. Panic seized him and he tried to retreat into the castle, but the way back had disappeared, replaced by rusted gray and slimy walls sprouting large iron tubes running across the length of a hallway.
    Grace laughed, ignoring that they were standing ankle-deep in liquid shit. “Oh pet, you can never go back to where we came from. You have to move forward, isn’t that right?”
    “Another Time Law, ja? The present is all that’s important. Fuck the past!” said the soldier.
    They continued on down the hallway and James relived those terrible days all over again. In the distance, he could hear the cruel chatter of the gangs, the screams of victims, and the