Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2) Page 5

  Chrysamen nodded, and asked, “How did you end up getting recruited? You said you went crosstime accidentally … ?”

  “It’s a very long story,” I said. “I can abbreviate. Back in my own timeline, I had been an art historian. It happened my father was a Middle East affairs specialist. He was investigating a new terrorist group … which we didn’t know was a front for the Closers.”

  “What’s a terrorist?” Chrysamen asked.

  God, there were times I wished that I, too, had grown up in a pacifist timeline. “Uh, military forces or guerillas that attack civilians. In order to scare the hell out of people, which gets them attention and also pressures the authorities.”

  “Doesn’t it also make them angry?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s certainly how it worked out for my family.” I took a long, slow drink of my coffee, reached for the pot, and poured myself more. “Anyway, they set off a bomb that killed my mother, brother, and wife and left my sister with just her right arm. Happened right in front of my father and me, at a family celebration.”

  “Oh, god, Mark—” Those huge dark eyes looked a little damp, and she reached out and took my hand.

  The trouble with sympathy is that if you’re not careful you get to enjoy it, and before you know it you spend all your time getting it, so I said, “It was nine years ago, at least as I’ve experienced the time. You never get over it, but you do go on. And anyway, if we’re going to be … uh, friends, then you had to know sometime.”

  She started a little at “friends.” I mentally marked that for future reference, and went on, “So, anyway, I sort of found something else I could do for a while that made me feel better—I became a licensed private bodyguard.”

  Chrys sat back a moment. “Your timeline must be terribly violent if people can make a living at that.”

  “I’m a rich kid—I could run the business as a hobby. But yeah, it’s a terribly violent timeline. If you’re good at hurting people and not letting them hurt you, you can always make a living.” I had some more coffee; this was probably shocking her, and I already had a feeling she thought I was a barbarian. “Well, to make it really short … I had two cases that turned out to be related. One was a little girl I was guarding for another reason, who turned out to be important in … well, at the time they said fifty timelines, now they say more than two hundred. I don’t know much about all that, by choice, because I don’t want to put any load of pressure on her, and from my viewpoint she’s just a nice kid. She’s my ward, back in my own timeline.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Oh, yeah. When I return she’ll be about fifteen, which is kind of a difficult age, or so I’m told. Fortunately she’s got my father and sister on one side of things—and two of the best bodyguards in the business as well, my assistants Robbie and Paula. So no doubt she’s just fine, but I really miss her anyway.

  “Well, the other case turned out to be a Special Agent who was supposed to be keeping an eye on me and on that girl, and who got into a messy situation with the Closers. There was a lot of shooting, and a lot of people died, including the Special Agent, and I sort of kept falling through things. Finally I ended up—just improvising, mind you, because ATN barely knew I existed and had no idea where I was—stowing away through a Closer gate into a world where the Nazis won World War II. Since you didn’t have either Nazis or World War II in your timeline, that probably doesn’t mean much to you …”

  “Not a lot. The Nazis sound a lot like what the followers of Suleiman the Butcher could have turned into, if he hadn’t dropped dead of a stroke in a very embarrassing situation. One of those timelines where there’s a tiny little group of masters and everyone else is a different degree of slave?”

  “Right. Anyway, I was there for two and a half years till they found me again, and I just kind of improvised, and, uh, things broke right. That whole timeline was turned to ATN—and now it’s an important new ally, I understand.

  “But I have to admit all that does something to you. I’m afraid I’m pretty cold-blooded … well. No, not really. Actually, I enjoy killing Closers. I got to see enough of them and their stand-ins to feel about the same way I would killing a nest of copperheads under my house.”

  She nodded. “I can see how you could get to be that way. Er … there’s something, too, that I want you to know. You know that I’d never killed anyone before, uh—”

  “You didn’t kill very many,” I pointed out. “You set it for stun. Just the few who died of cold and the ones we got with the SHAKK died.”

  “Um, yes …” She was quiet for a long time, looking into her coffee and stirring it slowly. “Anyway, what I was going to say … well. I had kind of thought that tonight we might … uh, that is, I might drop by your room and we could be …”

  The word didn’t translate. Damn this not knowing each other’s language.

  “Uh, maybe the closest thing would be ‘bed-friends’? It’s not like it’s marriage or anything but …”

  “I’d be honored,” I said.

  “The problem is, religiously, I can’t do that unless I er, well, I guess purify myself. I’ve taken human life. The prayer and ritual take about an hour or so. If that’s, um, getting too late—”

  “I can wait,” I said. “Do I need to be purified as well?”

  “No, it’s just for … people of the Faith. Or at least for our version of the Faith. Er, maybe I should … go get started with it? We want some time to sleep tonight, too.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” I said, and we headed back to our rooms, enjoying the walk through one of the many little parks in the Hyper Athens station. Chrys went off to her room to meditate and pray and do whatever else was involved in getting purified, and I stretched out for a quick catnap. I was excited about the fact that a beautiful girl was coming to share the bed with me, but I’d learned from bitter experience never to pass up a chance to sleep. Or to eat or take a leak for that matter.

  As I drifted off, the one other thought that occurred to me was that this was would be the first time I’d made love—as opposed to getting laid—since my wife Marie had been killed. It seemed like it was about time. I curled up on the bed and let myself relax into a warm, happy state—

  I woke abruptly when I heard a SHARK being fired two doors away. I had left the lights on, and I rolled sideways; it was only a heartbeat before I held my own weapon and was standing upright.

  I’d have had to get up anyway, because at that moment the door blew in with a roar and landed all over the bed. The light in the room went out. Something moved in the doorway, and I popped it with a SHARK shot; I heard the body hit the floor.

  I heard another SHAKR burst; it had to be Chrysamen, and thinking of her reminded me to pop the help button, the little tag we have that calls for a backup. Then I crept closer to the door, SHARK at ready.

  The next guy cleverly tried to just stick a gun in and squeeze off a homing round that would find me; but that meant exposing the muzzle, and a SHARR round, pointed at any tube weapon, is smart enough to go in the open end and look for the round and firing mechanism. It blew apart in his hands, he screamed and fell forward, and a second shot converted his head to an empty bag. I flopped down on the floor and watched for feet; of course, sooner or later one of them would think of firing through the wall—unless the ATN had armored these against—

  There was a clatter of bangs and pings and the wall beside me shook, but it held. Apparently I was in an armored box—

  Something hit the floor and bounced, and I sprayed it with SHARR fire, hoping it was not—

  It was. There was a boom and flash, and I was temporarily blind and deaf; they’d tossed a PRAMIAC, a sort of smart grenade, into the room. The high-tech gadgets, if you get SHARR rounds into them fast enough, will sometimes just fizzle—they don’t work like old-fashioned high explosives. I’d been fast enough, I judged, since if I hadn’t, that wing of the house would likely have been blown right out through the floor into space. In the dark I cou
ldn’t tell if it was an ATN or a Closer model

  I couldn’t see or hear well at the moment, but something was moving, so I fired. An instant later there was a painful jolt in my left hand; someone had gotten a homing round down the muzzle of my SHARK and it had blown to pieces. I couldn’t seem to get my left hand to do anything, but I groped for my shoulder holster with my right, drew out the Colt, swung my head from side to side, and perceived something in my peripheral vision near the door—

  It was fine shot if I say so myself; I knew where I was, where the door was, and sort of where he was relative to the doorway. I pointed the .45, squeezed the trigger gently, and put a round up into his chest. I later found out it went right through his lungs, cut his pulmonary artery, and blew out through the back of his neck, shattering his spine and brain stem. He was dead before he slammed against the doorframe.

  Something shoved in front of him, and I squeezed the trigger again; the Colt roared.

  When the flash, bang, and acrid smoke cleared from my perception, someone was screaming. At least it wasn’t me. I saw no more motion, but that might only mean they were being cautious; then I glanced down at the pistol and gulped.

  Smokestack jam.

  Every so often a spent casing doesn’t clear, but ends up jammed by the slide, sticking out of the top of the weapon like a smokestack. When that happens, you’ve got to pull it back to clear it, which normally takes a second.

  If you don’t have that second, you’re in a bad way. If you don’t have that second, and you don’t have your left hand in working order to do the job, you’re dead.

  I was trying to work it with my teeth—and noticing how badly my left hand hurt where it was getting squashed under me—when hands came down on my shoulder, something stung my thigh, and I slipped into unconsciousness.

  A moment later the world was turning gray around me, and then shapes were forming. My left hand hurt like it was on fire, and my head seemed to have the Mother of All Hangovers, whereas my stomach wanted to eat without stopping for a week. I was in a set of restraints; had I been taken prisoner or—

  “Some men will do anything to find a polite way out of a social engagement,” Chrysamen said, standing over me. I looked up and saw that she had a bandage over one eye, her hair looked strangely mauled to one side, and there were several plasters and bandages visible on her bare arms. She was wearing a hospital gown. “Here, drink this,” she added, bringing a glass to my lips.

  It was strong, sweet, orange-and-strawberry, and I gulped it down. That told me once and for all that I was still in the ATN timeline and hadn’t been taken prisoner; it’s one of the favorite flavors there. Closers would never stoop to doing anything decent for a prisoner.

  I finished the drink, and said, “You can release the restraints now—I know where I am and I won’t come up swinging.”

  “Good,” she said, letting me loose. “I’m afraid they put these on you because of what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Punched out the doctor when I woke up. It was their silly fault anyway; they knocked me out right at the end of a fight and then expected me to wake up realizing I was among friends.”

  I sat up and looked at my left arm. It was practically all pink, and when I touched it gingerly I found the skin was still a bit sensitive. “That must have been almost gone. My SHARK blew up in my left hand,” I said. “No wonder I’m starving. The nanos must be running on overdrive. How long have I been under?”

  Chrys nodded sympathetically. “They said it was pretty bad; I know they had to give you a lot of IV to keep the nanos supplied. It’s been about two days since the attack. They say we each have about a day to go. In another few hours I get to try out my new eye.”

  “Just so it matches your old one,” I said. Nanos are tiny machines—small enough to pass through your capillaries—that work like little robots. They put a few million into you, the little rascals read your genetic code, and they start fixing things to fit the code, kind of like building supers for the body, except I’ve never seen a building supervisor get anything up to code. It has its weird effects; typically they get rid of scars, tattoos, trick hips and shoulders, old injuries of any kind. The first time I got treated at Hyper Athens they not only repaired bullet holes, and got rid of an old football injury, they also gave me my appendix and my tonsils back. “Were you hit badly?” I asked Chrys.

  “Oh, if we hadn’t been at Hyper Athens, we would probably both have died,” she said, and sat down in a chair close to the bed. “They were wearing our uniforms and carrying SHAKKs, so the rounds homed on my weapon, not my head, and I got these holes in me from when my SHARK blew up. I lost the eye to shrapnel. But my score was pretty good, too—I had to do another purification—I got six of them.”

  “Ahead of me,” I said. “I only recall getting four.”

  “They told me five—you must have been too busy to count accurately,” she said. “Malecela seems to be very pleased, to judge by the letter he sent. Eleven of them dead and both of us alive, or at least salvageable. Not bad for a couple of trainees, especially since this was one of their assassination squads.”

  “What the hell were Closers doing at Hyper Athens, anyway?” I asked. “And those assassination squads are supposed to be suicide missions, and eleven is a lot—that’s two assassination squads.”

  “Exactly what we’re trying to figure out,” Ariadne Lao said, coming in through a door that had just formed in the wall. “We wish we knew why they’re so determined to kill both of you, but now at least we can be pretty sure it’s both of you.” She nodded at Chrysamen, and said, “Friend-daughter ja N’wook, clearly you’re feeling better.”

  “Still itches a little around the eye, Citizen,” Chrys said.

  “And you look like you’re able to be up and around, Mister Strang?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good then. To tell you both the absolute truth, we don’t have much of any idea what’s going on; Closers trying to assassinate trainees like this is way outside of normal behavior. So we’re going to sit down with the intelligence analysts and do our best to figure out just what exactly is going on—as soon as we get enough food poured into you two.”

  Nanos run on your blood sugar, the same as you do, so when you have them in there you’re generally eating for ten million or so; I’ve long figured if I knew enough to know how to make them and patent them in our timeline, I’d sell them as a weight-loss system. It takes a lot of energy to rebuild an arm out of hamburger.

  The meeting room was a short walk away, and when we got there, there was an enormous supply of noodles, bread, rice, and chapatis, and a huge array of sauces to put on them. We didn’t say much as we ate until we were stuffed; as I was having the last of a whole pastry that sort of resembled a football-sized éclair with pumpkin-pie filling, and Chrys was having a last bowl of clear noodles in sweetened cream, the ATN people came in, nodding polite greetings and talking among themselves. With a sigh, Chrys and I poured ourselves huge mugs of the thick coffee, added condensed milk to it, and joined them at the table. After a short spell of everyone telling us how glad they were that we were still alive, we got down to business.

  -4-

  The discussions went on all afternoon, which is what you expect of a committee no matter what timeline you are in. Finally it all boiled down to three facts: One, the Closers knew something or other that made them consider it worthwhile to eliminate Chrys and me no matter what the cost. Two, I had already been assigned a first mission, so it seemed likely that if the Closers were trying now, something about that first mission was more important than anyone on our side had guessed. And finally, we had no idea what was so important.

  The puzzling thing, too, was that Chrys had not yet been assigned a first mission, so whatever important thing she was going to do was much more up in the air than it was for me.

  One puzzle for them was what to do now. Mission assignments certainly were not random—they were made carefully an
d systematically—and now that it was known that Chrys’s mission was important, it was simply not possible to make the decision in the same way it would have been made before. In that sense the Closers had already scored some points—knowing we would do something to damage them, they had forced us to change that decision. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t come up with something else to hurt them, merely that whatever it was we had had before was now lost to us.

  Weighed against that, though, was the fact that Chrysamen and I were still alive; the Closers must be worried pretty badly back at their headquarters, on whatever Earth that might be. Moreover, we had at least the start of a plan—do whatever we had been planning to do before.

  The drawback to that, of course, was that if we stuck with it, clearly they would know what our next move was.

  And yet they might not, for the one thing they could not know was whether we would stay on our original plan or not. …

  The arguments went on and on. They kept circling back—if you ever try to think about time travel for any length of time, you’ll notice that’s what your thoughts do, keep returning to their original point—and finally they settled on the fact that they had a mission already planned for me which they knew was at least potentially going to hurt the Closers, and with a bit of luck what use they were to make of Chrys would soon turn up as well.

  So, finally, after all the discussion, it boiled down to their doing exactly what they would have done anyway—sending me home for some leave, prepping me for the same first mission they’d have sent me on anyway, and putting Chrys into the pool of agents waiting to be assigned missions. It seemed like a lot of discussion to get to that point, but then I’m either a professional esthete or a professional thug, depending on which job you count as primary, not a politician, and maybe a politician would see matters differently.

  One thing I’ll say for ATN, when they make a decision they make it, and they put it into practice, and there’s very little nonsense in between. Of course, from the standpoint of Chrys and me getting some hours together, this was no advantage at all. We had about fifteen minutes to say that we liked each other, we didn’t think we’d see each other again for years, and it sure would have been nice but we’d write when we could. Then Chrysamen ja N’wook was headed to the new ATN training base (in a timeline the Closers hadn’t found yet), and they were getting me dressed in the clothes for my home timeline, handing me all the materials I was supposed to have, and briefing me as quickly as possible about everything that had happened that I needed to know.