I didn't reply. I had other problems to deal with. When someone teaches you the purely theoretical baby steps of a skill, whatever that skill is, they try to make the first time you have to do it for real as easy as they can.

I felt sure that Kee wouldn't have dropped me into a time gate with no guidance as my first experience doing it alone. The good news was that she'd explained it to me and given me exercises to practice—almost the same ones as for interstellar flight.

So, I knew how to do it—theoretically.

First off, I needed to draw energy from around me and convert it into a protective bubble, or risk aging so much I turned into dust. The good news? There was no shortage of energy to grab. The bad was that the roiling mass of it was exactly what I had to protect myself from.

The loose energy buffeted me, throwing me one direction and then another.

That led to the second major task, controlling the energy and using it to point myself in the right direction.

The flow from behind me made the best choice--flying out--impossible. The next best choice was to catch the wave and let the flow carry me.

Sure, I'd be in the wrong time, but it would be better than staying where I was and tumbling until I could no longer keep the protective bubble intact.

As crazy as it sounded, I might even have a route back. Assuming I was near Earth, I knew where Infinity City was. All I had to do was get there, and I'd be able to find a time machine in some alternate reality. Plus, I'd heard that some of the city's distant suburbs existed on Mars and other future human settlements. There was a way to do this.

I took a breath and guided the Rocket suit toward the strongest flow of energy I could sense while simultaneously pulling in as much as I could.

From what Kee had said, I was supposed to be able to direct myself through it without physical assistance eventually, but I wasn't there yet. I shouldn't develop the ability to control enough energy for a few hundred years.

Knowing that, I had to ask myself realistically how much of a chance I had to pull this off to begin with. The protective bubble was hard enough.

Bolts of energy exploded out of the ripples, spreading and extending jagged fingers across the pulsing masses.

I controlled my breathing, kept my eyes on the overall flow, and tried not to let fear derail my thoughts.

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Every nearby energy pulse meant that I had to work to keep the bubble from shattering. Especially for the first few, it felt as though the bubble was about to fall apart. After that, I found a kind of rhythm. I'd grit my teeth and try to keep the bubble together, and when the moment of danger passed, I'd pull in as much energy as I could, giving the bubble stability and myself a reserve.

I reminded myself that Kee had said that I was ahead of where she'd thought I should be. Plus, wasn't it interesting that she'd made a point of teaching me how to do exactly this when my first real need to know it would be hundreds of years from now?

I might have been deluding myself, but it wasn't impossible that a being that existed in multiple universes, possibly an infinite number, might have a little insight, enough to know what she'd need to pass on for me to survive now.

Almost as I thought those words, I moved into the main energy flow, and it wasn't hard anymore. The random eruptions of power happened on either side of me, but not close, and much like a river, the current pushed me forward.

Ahead of me, I could see Mars through the ripples, but not as I knew it. This Mars still had vast expanses of red sand and desert, but now in the mountains and spots in the middle of green that I could only assume meant plants.

Spaceships hung in space around it, some under power, flying downward or away. Others clustered around space stations. I saw at least two, both of them sphere-shaped with spokes extending outward, spaceships docked next to them.

The voice that I'd heard before, its words louder than I wanted in my head, said, "You have training. Who was it?"

I didn't reply. Kee seemed to think Govan was okay, but this might not be Govan for all I knew. Plus, I didn't dare lose control of the bubble.

"Never mind," the voice continued. "I understand that you might not trust me, but I will find you, and then we will talk. Because you interfered, it's going to be more complicated than I wanted. I set up a simple transfer. All you had to do was leave it alone… It's been too long since I last talked to children. So irrational."

The connection ended—which might have been good because Govan, or whoever was on the other end, had turned condescending. Of course, bearing in mind that he'd started by calling me a fool, you could argue that he was at least being consistent.

Either way, it felt like the "transfer" was coming to an end. While it wasn't as bad as it had been, I'd begun to feel bumps not unlike turbulence in a plane, possibly because my speed seemed to be increasing.

Ahead of me, the vision of future Mars wobbled, the green areas and red desert growing and shrinking, spaceship styles and numbers changing, cities spreading and contracting.

Without warning, the turbulence increased and then stopped.

I hung in space above Mars, but this wasn't the green Mars I'd seen before.

Green still existed and a lot of it, but bits of darkness scarred the green as if it had been burned. Some spots still appeared to be burning around the edges. Spaceships orbited the world, but what appeared to have been a massive, crescent-shaped space station tumbled slowly through space in at least four pieces.

From the spaceships keeping pace with the wreckage, I guessed that they might be trying to salvage or at least control it.

How far in the future was I? I checked my comm. I'd built in Grandpa's technology for detecting location relative to time and parallel universes.

It showed the year as 10,461 A.D., give or take a century or two, but good news? This was definitely our timeline's future, provided I didn't change anything when or if I returned.

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