Tom Fleet was a bit of a misfit as the second son of a minor English noble in the 1880s. Once he finished his schooling he had little to do. His grandfathers had left him adequate finances for his needs and with his elder brother set to take the title, he gave in to his fascination with gadgets and began to tinker and invent. His goal was to create a sky craft to go to the moon. Surely if Jules Verne’s characters could go there and many other places, he could do as well.<br><br>Rowan Farrell followed in his Uncle Gordon’s footsteps, joining the UniFleet, but went a step farther and became an officer. Assigned to his first command level post, he takes a small patrol ship out to scout a region of interest to the Council and report if any signs of the enemy Angevirian Empire in the area. When one of his crew spots a strange, tiny craft, he decides to capture and study it. After all it could be an Angevirian Trojan horse. But the odd cylindrical vessel holds only one man, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia and lack of oxygen. When the man comes to, he claims to come from the earth ... five centuries in the past!

Tom Fleet’s Machine

The craft itself still looked like a tin can, sheets of metal curved and riveted together to shape a cylinder about four meters long with a diameter of about a meter-and-a-half, Rowan guessed. What he took to be the nose had been shaped to a fine point. A few small round windows ranged along each side. Where was the door, or was there one?


He tried to peer through one window, but the glass seemed smudged or perhaps steamed up. He could barely see a glimmer of light through the window opposite the one he looked into. Then a faint sound snagged his attention. It sounded like a very human moan of distress from within the craft.


Damn it, I’ve got to figure how to get into this fucker!


Every cell in Tom’s body hurt. He felt as if he’d been run over by a team of draft horses and the laden farm wagon they were pulling. Disoriented, he tried to untangle himself from a confused mass of lines and levers, and fetched up hard against a curving wall, cold to his touch.


Chapter 5