Time Loves a Hero by Allen Steele

it,” Franc added. “So long as you keep a low profile, nobody’ll notice. Is Vasili in the control room?”
    â€œHe’s waiting for you.” Then he dropped his voice. “What’s going on? I hear you and Lea had a meeting with Sanchez.”
    â€œJust the usual. Nothing to be concerned about.” Franc didn’t like lying to a member of his team, but he didn’t want to make Hoffman any more nervous than he already was. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a library fiche. “Here,” he said, handing the wafer to the mission specialist, “do me a favor and load this into the pedestal. Historical appendices for the twentieth century.”
    â€œNo problem.” Pulling himself along a rope, Hoffman floated through the open hatch into the narrow passageway. Franc fell in behind him and waited until Hoffman entered the monitor room at the far end of the corridor before he entered the open hatch on the right.
    Oberon ’s control room was a wedge-shaped compartment, its longest wall dominated by a horseshoe-shaped console. Some of the screens displayed diagrams and rapidly changing text, while others showed only test patterns. Service panels gaped open on the floor and ceiling, exposing densely packed nanocircuitry and bundled wiring. Through the single rectangular porthole above the console, he saw a space worker hovering just outside.
    Vasili Metz was seated in the pilot’s seat, his head and shoulders thrust beneath the console. “Hello, Dr. Lu,” he said, not looking up. “You’ve seen Sanchez, I take it.”
    â€œWe met with him a couple of hours ago.” Pushing himself over to the chair, Franc grasped the seatback and let his feet dangle in the air. “He told us about the Miranda . They say they spotted an angel.”
    â€œYep. That’s what I’ve heard from Brech.” Beneath the console, Metz’s penlight moved back and forth. “It was only for a couple of seconds, but Hans mentioned it in his reports, and I’ve spoken with him about it. Did Paolo give you my recommendation?”
    â€œYes, he did. We discussed it for a while, and decided to proceed with the C120-37.”
    Metz said nothing. Franc waited patiently until the pilot finally backed out from beneath the console and sat up straight in his chair. “You know,” he said at last, “I should be surprised, but I’m not. Figures you’d ignore this.”
    â€œI’m not ignoring anything. I’m just refusing to be deterred by something we can’t explain.”
    â€œI can’t explain them either.” Metz clicked off the penlight, shoved it in the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. “I just know that they show up when something’s about to go wrong.”
    Franc knew all about angels. They had been spotted during two previous CRC expeditions: luminescent, vaguely man-shaped apparitions that suddenly appeared in the close vicinity of timeships, then winked out of sight just as quickly as they had appeared. Each time, only CRC historians or pilots had seen them; they never appeared when locals were present. Although no one knew what they were, several theories had been advanced to explain the sightings, the most popular being that they themselves were chrononauts, yet from farther up the timestream. They had never directly interfered with an expedition or caused any historical disturbances, but timeship pilots in particular regarded them as harbingers of misfortune. This fear wasn’t entirely unwarranted; the first time an angel had been spotted, it was during the C119-64, when a historian had been lost during the Battle of Gettysburg, and the second sighting was during the C220-63, when two researchers had been inadvertently photographed by contemporary bystanders in Dealy Plaza during the Kennedy assassination.
    â€œBut nothing went wrong during the C314-65, did it?” Franc asked. “The Miranda