Free Steamrolled by Pauline Baird Jones Page B

no question passed her lips.
    “There’s the way in,” Carey pointed out, again not necessary, though it did break up the uneasy silence a bit. A very small bit. That too was as described. Seven locks, six that looked and acted like combination locks. The seventh needed a key.
    “You knew.” Emily looked at Robert, her expression stuck somewhere between two emotions.
    He could make a reasonable guess which two.
    “No.” It hadn’t even occurred to him the machine would come here. “I think the Emergency Ab—the EAD summoned it.” He felt sure she’d start asking questions now. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t normal not to ask questions. Not that he knew that much about natural or normal. But he did know about questions. “I suspect it acts like a homing beacon for the machine.”
    First reports from the nanites were troubling. They dealt in technology, primarily computer driven technology. This machine was from the 1890’s. No computers. Not their kind of technology, though they’d found much that made no sense to them. Not that he or they could think of anything that would make sense to them in a transmogrification machine from the 1890’s that had just traveled through time…again. Rather than engage in fruitless speculation, Robert asked, can you find out what’s wrong with the transmogrification drive?
    The what?
    He ignored the mild attempt at sarcasm. Or perhaps humor. Hard to know when neither they nor he was good at it. Look for something that doesn’t fit with basic steam engine design , he suggested, though he wasn’t sure that would work. A lot could be not standard in a steam engine designed in the 1890’s by an eccentric genius.
    Emily reached for one of the locks.
    “Don’t—” Robert caught her hand. “There’s a sequence to opening them.”
    “That only we, well, he knows,” Ric pointed out.
    “And it will disappear again if we don’t get in there and stop it,” Carey tossed in.
    Robert didn’t correct him, because he was no longer sure he, with or without the nanites, could get control in time to stop the drive from kicking on again if it were malfunctioning. His only hope was that the EAD would anchor it in this time and place.
    Her lips formed a suspicious pout, her gaze shifting between Robert and Carey several times. What was she thinking? How could she not ask the obvious? Instead, she nodded and gave him a couple of inches of room to work in. The scent he’d thought was hers drifted around him, confirming his hypothesis. He lacked the necessary data to break down the notes into flowers or girl, but it was pleasing. He had to force himself to focus on the locks and shunt her scent to a side thought track. In this case it was a positive to be able to focus on more than one thing, so he enjoyed the girl smells while he studied the locks.
    Twitchet had adapted each lock himself. All seven were different and required special handling. The order they were manipulated mattered, too. One had letters, two used numbers—natural and Roman—and the others used a variety of themed symbols. The sequence began with the hieroglyphics lock. Robert handed Emily the EAD. She gave it a doubtful look, shook it, held it up to her ear, then shrugged and tucked it in one of her many pockets.
    Robert worked the first lock before moving to the second lock from the top. He wouldn’t know if he’d done it right until it opened. Or didn’t.
    “No rush, Professor,” Ric said, looking over his shoulder like he expected to get jumped.
    “I could shoot them,” Fyn offered.
    Emily’s eyes narrowed when Robert shook his head. Four locks out of way. He did the last two, then extracted the key Olivia had entrusted to him with an understandable reluctance. She’d wanted to come with them, but no one else thought it was a good idea to have a woman from 1894 walking around 2011 Wyoming. The general didn’t like her walking around in the present on the Kikk Outpost. Carey liked her walking anywhere