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

He turned to Tom, who had been tagging at his heels through the whole process. Although some of the crew still looked askance at the stranger in their midst, no one seemed really hostile to him.


“Do you have any experience with sobering up a drunk?”


Tom shook his head, then seemed to reconsider. “A bit. I had a chum at school who could always sneak about and find a flask somewhere. There were times we had to get him sober and presentable for a function, lest he be expelled. He was probably safe, being a duke’s eldest son, but we lower form lads were intimidated by the schoolmaster and most of our instructors. We suspected we’d all be punished if anyone found Rudolph in his cups.”


“Threw cold water on him until he began to wake up, plied him with coffee or the strongest tea we could brew and sometimes sang bawdy songs almost into his ears.”


Chapter 13