Quake by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Mountain (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
** (Average). 5,950 words.