Are you sitting comfortably?

As promised. Jay was telling Cass his story. He sat atop a cargo container in a secluded storage room away from everyone else.

*flashback*

The hatch of the crimson-red spacecraft ‘Hindsight’ slid back, and a battered and bloodied Jay Chrysler clambered out. He unclipped the weapons belt from his waist and handed it to a technician who approached him and he continued walking to his superior officer.
“Welcome back to base Enforcer” the woman said “Another successful mission..”
“I need a shower” was all that Jay could muster.
“Freshen up. Then report to control”
Jay nodded and headed off to his room in the barracks.
He didn’t get many chances to take a break. He’d been doing this already for over 5 centuries, as much as he loved adventure, once in a while a guy needed a break. His last mission had been especially trying. An agent working for a terrorist group had travelled back to the 1940’s and provided the Third Reich with advanced technology which could have won them the war. Jay had succeeded in preventing this, but only barely, and more than a couple of V1 and V2 rockets were still fired. Fresh after his shower, he pulled on his nano-suit and headed for control.
“Mr Chrysler!” said his superior as he entered the room. “I’d like you to meet you’re new support agent…”
“great…” Jay murmered. Support agents worked in the control room, providing intelligence and monitoring the time line for changes. They were field agents like Jay’s link to the present, and generally, weren’t well liked. Field agents felt they got in the way, always trying to tell them how to do their job, insisting on everything being done by the book and often providing shoddy intelligence.
However, when Jay saw his new support colleague, he knew that this was going to be different.
“YOU?!” he said in surprise.

*present*

“Who was it?” Cass asked
“This guy was notorious!” he said “He was the biggest menace known to the STCP. We’d all been warned about him, and he was number 1 on the top ten most wanted. They’d been trying to apprehend him for millennia. No-one expected him to end up working for the STCP – but, we probably shouldn’t have been surprised.”
“Why?”
“Well, that’s the thing. Despite his notoriety, the STCP needed him. This guy was largely considered the father of human time-travel. Most of the STCP’s operations were based on his theories. He was a genius – and the STCP wanted to use him. Despite being thousands of years more advanced since this guys first experiments, he still knew more about temporal physics than anyone, and they could use him…”
“Sounds risky…”
“Yeah, but think about it, back in the 21st century big corporations would hire notorious computer hackers to build security systems. Same thing.”
“Anyway….he and I got to talking….”

*flashback*

Jay and his support colleague were talking over a table in the STCP bar in hushed tones.
“So you think you can break the time lock?” Jay asked
“I’ve already done it…” the man replied “Though you may not like what I found…”
“what?”
“Well..the Blue Dwarf only has a recorded history for the next six months after you died, records show a super-wormhole being generated that pulled her through. The official report after that says that she was lost with all hands…”
“So…I go back in time to before that, and stop it happening..”
“It won’t be that easy, hacking the time-lock wasn’t easy. I can’t punch through enough of it to plant you at any specific point…I can just set a window…we have to put you in after you died, but before the ships last know appearance, that gives us a six month slot where you could wind up anywhere…”
The two men changed the subject quickly as someone passed close to their table.
“And what about you?”
“I need to do some work on the computers here…the minute you try to change history, they’ll be onto you, I need to delete your records from the system, do some work to hide you from them”
“You can do that?”
“Hey, I managed to keep myself hidden from them for centuries…but you’ll need to get rid of that the minute you arrive.”
He was pointed at Jay’s wrist mounted computer. “As long as it’s active they can pull you out whether they can see you or not…of course, the stasis field won’t be active any more and you’ll start ageing as normal..”
“Who wants to live forever eh?” Jay replied.

*present*

“The STCP were wrong to trust him. Which worked out beautifully for me. He’d managed to hack the time-lock that was keeping me from travelling to, or even observing m own timeline.…”
“How do you mean?”
“He’d reprogrammed the Hindsight’s onboard computer to allow me travel to the 6 month period between my death and the Dwarf’s disappearance. But as he’d explained, he couldn’t pinpoint a specific time. I had no idea when I’d end up. Anyway, I engaged the drive, and found myself at the very second the ship was dragged into the wormhole! I was pulled in with it, and the interference from such a powerful wormhole fried my guidance systems. Worse still, the time drive was overloaded. But it didn’t matter, I’d found you.
It took me an hour to get sensors back online, and then I did a scan of the ship, and found the Cadmium II….and that most of you were in stasis. I couldn’t board the ship, it would be suicide….and what would I have done if I could? I couldn’t let any of you out of stasis!”
He continued “I tried to fiddle with the time drive, hoping to be able to go back to stop the leak…but it was shot. I could one more jump out of it….forward.”
“I programmed the drive to calculate the estimated half-life of the radiation….and set it to jump to when Holly would most likely let you out. Got it more or less right too…”
“So that’s when you found us” Cass said.
“Yeah, more or less.”
“What about your friend? Would he have been caught.”
“Not likely.” Jay said “He knew what he was doing…but, just to be sure, I promised him when I got here, I’d set a beacon that only he could track and he’d follow me….see that?”
He pointed to a large white device on the cargo floor of the room.
“See that? I’ve set it to emit a signal to him..”
“Wait…you’ve told a time-terrorist to come here?”
“Relax” Jay said “He’s harmless….oh, here he is now…”
The air shimmered in front of the device, and a man stepped out of the warp.
He kicked the white device with his foot. “Got the time fridge working again then?” he said to Jay.
“Cassandra Jones” he said “Meet, Phil FeBuggure….”

<Yep, he’s back – and will be posting his first post very soon WON’T YOU CHRISTOPHER! (you can find his profile in the usual place!>