Time Salvager a fast-paced time travel adventure from Wesley Chu, the
award-winning author of The Lives of Tao.
Convicted criminal James Griffin-Mars is no one's hero. In his time,
Earth is a toxic, abandoned world, and humans have fled into the outer
solar system to survive, eking out a fragile, doomed existence among the
other planets and their moons. Those responsible for delaying humanity's
demise believe time travel holds the key, and they have identified
James, troubled though he is, as one of a select and expendable few
ideally suited for the most dangerous job in history.
James is a chronman, undertaking missions into Earth's past to recover
resources and treasure without altering the timeline. The laws governing
use of time travel are absolute; break any one of them and, one way or
another, your life is over. Most chronmen never reach old age; the
stress of each jump through time, compounded by the risk to themselves
and to the future, means that many chronmen rapidly reach their breaking
points, and James Griffin-Mars is nearing his.
On a final mission that is to secure his retirement, James meets Elise
Kim, an intriguing scientist from a previous century who is fated to die
during the destruction of an oceanic rig. Against his training and his
common sense, and in violation of the chronmen's highest law, James
brings Elise back to the future with him, saving her life but turning
them both into fugitives. Remaining free means losing themselves in the
wild and poisonous wastes of Earth, somehow finding allies, and perhaps
discovering what hope may yet remain for humanity's home world.
