Yue

 "That… That might work, except I trained my people to resist telepathy. He only needs a fraction of a second of mental coherence and he's gone."

Wallace shrugs. "Why don't we just take a hammer to the time sphere? You can fix it afterwards, right? If it isn't working then he can't use it to go back and stop us."

Mister Hunter shakes his head. "The time sphere exists slightly out of synchronicity with normal time. The only way you'd get in was if he opened it for you."

"Could you open it?"

He nods. "Sure, but there's no way I could get close without being detected."

Kaldur thinks for a moment. "Would the time sphere leave this time period at the very moment he entered it?"

"No, it takes a few seconds to start up. But it isn't any less invulnerable when it's preparing to enter the time stream than when it's stationary."

Beryl looks at me, then looks away, then looks back to see whether or not I noticed her looking at me.

"Does its.. lack of synchronicity render it completely invulnerable, or are there things to which it is still vulnerable?"

"Do you have any temporal manipulation-based weapons?"

Beryl sidles up to me. "You sure he's on the up and up?"

"Sureish? I'm not sure I agree with his approach to time travel, and… Intellectually, I appreciate that it's a little odd to worry about one murder when we're perfectly happy to erase an entire future timeline…"

"Because I've never been able to work out how much you actually know about this stuff."

"More than most people, not as much as I'd like. Why?"

"If we were quick, we could probably get away with moving the Greenwich Mean. That-" I suppress my instinctive response to snigger. "-should-. What?"

"We're not moving the Greenwich Mean." Honestly. I very much doubt that moving a time zone around would do much to a time machine. Although it might be possible to create a ritual based… But if Mister Hunter is right about time violently correcting itself, we probably don't have time. But if we're looking for a temporal-.

Truggs never called me back.

Ring, is the communication channel Truggs used to contact me still available?

Confirmed.

Beryl shakes her head disappointedly, then turns away to talk to Mister Hunter.

Use it.

Contacting now.

"…same problem. Anything I could build to prevent him leaving could be detected…"

"Hey Paul. How's it going?"

I raise my left hand to my left ear so that the people around me don't think I'm just staring into space again. "Confusingly. Why did you send me to meet Mister Goldstein?"

Kaldur frowns interrogatively at me while Mister Hunter looks annoyed.

"I didn't know who was coming. Just that someone was."

"And what exactly-?"

"Ah, hey! Saw you on the news again. And I.. ttthink yer standing right next to a time traveller right now. Good goin'!"

"Did you have something to do with the temporal beacon?"

"Ugh, Savage's B plan. All it did was explode. I didn't think it even worked."

"Could you rebuild it?"

"I have already. What, you want it? What's going on?"

"We're playing Back to the Future, and it's annoying."

"The film?"

"No, the card game. I'm having to try and factor in the wellbeing of future people in different timelines-."

"You don't. I lived that life. You let me do that."

"One moment." I hold the ring away from my ear. "Truggs has a temporal beacon. Can it be used to prevent Mister Goldstein escaping?"

Mister Hunter's eyes dart to the side as he thinks about it. "Probably. I'd need to take a look at it, make some modifications."

I bring my ring back to my ear. "Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes you unmitigated, conceited arsehole."

"Hah! Revving my engine there, Paul. But I want something from you."

"What?"

"This guy you're talking to; he active or reactive?"

"Reactive. He seems to think that trying to alter things will only make them worse."

"Okay, so he wants t' just take his machine and go on his way?"

"Yes."

"That's all I ask. I'll give you the pick-up address now."