Out of Phase: A Time Traveler's Chronicle

Desperate people sacrifice almost everything that is dear to them and travel over 800 years into the past, to seventeenth-century France, in hopes of saving the future. They had what they thought was a great plan, but it failed. And now, someone else has to pick up the pieces. Take a peek at a scene from the book as Laurel and the musketeers prepare to travel to the future:

The trees, tall and majestic, stood as silent watchers. Seeing all that passed beneath their limbs as they had for countless centuries. Again, in this crisp, cool dawn they resumed their sentinel duty as a small party wove beneath their bows and came to stand in an equally small clearing. Four men and one woman. All mute as the first rays of light played across the skin of their faces and the backs of their hands.

In his hand the tallest of the group held a thermoTriresin, metallic plastic the size of a paperback book. Branches rustled as if whispering to each other. The woman glanced around, on guard. Seeing nothing, she dropped back into a state of deliberately-relaxed attention. Zut she was jumpy. Felt like her first solo spy mission all over again. Or was it more like the trepidation she had felt the day before her wedding?

Laurel took herself to task for being so ill at ease. Soon she’d be joining her husband. The rest she would not think about right now. Her eyes stayed focused on Jean-Pierre as he intensely regarded the comstat. Watched as he set the device by hand and by mind command. Then double-checked the settings. At the same time the duchesse noted the musketeers were doing the same as she was.

Jean-Pierre looked up from the readings, and a luminescent, scant blue portal with silver glimmerings opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum. Nothing could be seen on the other side of the portal-like bubble.

“After you,” the young man managed to say despite the tightness of the muscles in his throat. One by one, Laurel and the musketeers stepped into the hazy light and disappeared, waiting in nether-space for Jean-Pierre to enter and close their route, sending them to the 26th century.

A moment longer the large man paused. He knew once he stepped through that portal it would be a very long time, if ever, before he knew peace again. Young. He was too young and unprepared for this. Consciously he shut out the rest of his thoughts and strode through the shimmering opening. If Guillaume could face this thing, then so could he.

Onto themselves the globes of light collapsed, and a little blond-haired figure sprinted forward. Paused not even a second before she dove through the fading color spray. At the last possible instant another large, masculine form darted from behind the tree, thrusting his body into the very last quivers of warped energy field of space and time. He too disappeared. And in the clearing the trees continued to whisper. The sun rose. Another typical day.