Borrowed Time (10 page)

I shook my head, feeling sick inside. As I noted earlier, part of a T.I. knows the people he or she is seeing died a long time ago. Maybe so long ago that even memory of what they believed worth dying for had gone to dust along with their bodies. But another part of a T.I. sees living humans who aren’t fundamentally different from those of us uptime from them and hates to actually see them die in the Here and Now. “World War One hasn’t happened, yet. They still think war’s a grand and glorious game. They haven’t seen tens of thousands die on barbed wire while struggling through Belgian mud, or watched battlecruisers exploding, or seen poison gas drifting across the landscape.”

“Fools. They’re throwing away our only chance to get to that building.”

“No, they’re not. They’re providing a diversion and absorbing shots that psycho-blond could be aiming at us. Come on. Let’s take advantage of it.”

As Pam and I raced up the slope at an angle shots started booming from the observatory and gaps began appearing in the ranks of the soldiers. The officers didn’t hesitate as their companions fell, stubbornly, valiantly and brainlessly continuing their attack. I was off to one side and just coming even with the forwardmost Brit, the most senior of the officers, still plodding forward with head held high, when his forward progress jerked to an abrupt halt as a large hole appeared in his chest. The officer, his face seeming to reflect just a small degree of surprise and puzzlement, toppled backward slowly, his body hitting the grass and rolling a few times down the slope.

And I was still too far from the building.

I dodged and ran and heard the boom of a shot and prayed. Then I realized the shot I’d heard had come from the side, not ahead, and that Pam had snapped off a round to keep psycho-blond’s head down so she couldn’t nail me. I was rapidly falling in love with Pam. I gained the side of the observatory building just as psycho-blond’s next shot cracked by perilously close behind me.

Pam was a few meters down, flattened like me against the side of the building, and like me gasping for breath after our dash. I eased her way as Pam checked her weapon with a grim expression, then looked at me. “You do realize that if she’d taken time to shoot us first she could’ve still nailed all those Brits before their frontal attack reached her.”

“Yes. I hoped she wouldn’t be able to resist going first for the easy targets and sure kills. It seemed to match what I knew of her.”

“The more I learn about her the more I can’t wait to meet this woman.”

“I can wait. She’s really dangerous, Pam.”

“So am I when I want to be.” Pam held her weapon ready as she eased inside. No shots went off, so I followed. We crept through the dimly lit rooms, heading for stairs leading up.

It was night, this was an observatory, but there seemed to be a disturbing lack of astronomers. Then we spotted the first body.

Pam covered me while I crouched down to check. “He’s not dead.”

“He’s not?” Pam seemed to be as surprised as I was.

“No. It seems like some sort of heavy sedation. I don’t see any signs of a struggle, though.”

Pam nodded. “An area incapacitating weapon. Gas, or maybe a short-ranged neural suppressor. Something to get these people out of the way for a few hours without raising any alarm outside or creating too many risks for that blond to be able to operate here right afterwards.”

That made sense, though I could imagine psycho-blond had been disappointed at not being able to engage in mass murder. “I guess once she spotted us she stopped worrying about keeping things quiet.”

We reached the stairs and stopped. Pam waved me forward again while she kept her weapon at ready. I knelt near the stairs, wondering if Pam’s reflexes were faster than psycho-blond’s. “Jeannie, can you detect anything here?”

“There is a sensor of some sort placed nearby. It appears to be focused on the first few stairs.”

I informed Pam, who nodded. “My assistant says she can jam the sensor for about four seconds. Do you think you can cover those stairs that fast without making a lot of noise?”

“I can try.”

We both made it without setting off the alarm, then we crept upward as silently as possible. We made our way past some more sleeping astronomers, assistants and others who’d been unfortunate enough to be in the observatory tonight.

The door into the big domed area holding the telescope was closed and locked. I pantomimed slapping my head in exasperation and Pam grinned tensely. Then she brought out a small gadget and rested it against the lock. After a moment I heard a very faint click. Pam winced at the tiny noise, then pocketed the device. She held her weapon up, gesturing me to the right. I nodded.

Pam’s hand on the door knob moved smoothly and quickly, then she was pushing the door open and dodging inside and to the left. I was right behind her, catching only a quick impression of the big telescope and the Victorian-vintage architecture around it as I searched for danger.

And there she was, her blond hair standing out like a beacon in the dim light. The barrel of her gun was already swinging my way. A big piece of girder nearby rang with the impact of a shot aimed at me as I dove for cover. Pam hit the deck, too, as psycho-blond snapped a second shot her way. I couldn’t see Pam where she’d dropped, and hoped she hadn’t been hit.

This was bad. Very bad. Even if Pam was still in good shape the best we could do was to try rushing psycho-blond and hope she only dropped one of us before the other one reached her. Given what I’d seen of psycho-blond’s aim and reflexes, I wasn’t at all sure even one of us would make it. “Jeannie, can you contact Pam’s Assistant?”

“Yes.”

“Is Pam okay?”

“Pam is uninjured except for a bruise developing on her -.”

“Does she have any ideas?”

There was a brief pause before Jeannie answered this time. “She wants you to distract your opponent for a few seconds.”

"Does she have any helpful suggestions for how I should do that?"

Another pause as Jeannie relayed the question and response. “She suggests you give your opponent something to shoot at.”

“Great suggestion.” I didn't have any personal appendages to spare, nor did I see any lifelike mannequins lying nearby. I had one tranquilizer crystal shooter imbedded in my right forefinger, but that was a point-blank weapon with little accuracy beyond a meter or so. Even if I fired my single crystal, it’d only distract psycho-blond for a second. I shifted position slightly, wincing as psycho-blond snapped off a shot toward the sound I made and then wincing again as a new blister rubbed against the heavy, uncomfortable shoe on my left foot.

Maybe I did have some more weapons handy. I reached back cautiously, working both shoes loose, then braced myself, one shoe in each hand. “Jeannie, tell Pam I’m preparing the diversion.”

“She is awaiting your action.”

“Pass her this countdown. Three, two, one, now!”

I rose up at a slight angle to hopefully complicate psycho-blond’s aim and hurled one shoe without bothering to aim. The big object flying her way must have worried her (for all she knew it contained a grenade) because she caught it with a direct hit that blew leather in all directions. The second shoe, better aimed, met a similar fate well short of psycho-blond, then I started to bring my forefinger to bear, realizing as I did so that she was going to be able to hit me with a third shot before I could duck back down.

Fortunately, Pam was better armed than I and also a good shot. Psycho-blond’s wrist snapped back at an odd angle and her weapon flew away as Pam’s shot hit. I jumped up to run forward as Pam pumped out a couple of more shots, but psycho-blond evaded both by a stunning display of speed as she leaped at Pam. Pam’s gun also flew away as the two women grappled. Despite psycho-blond’s bleeding and apparently broken wrist, Pam barely held her own while I watched for an opening.

Pam finally got in a good slam at psycho-blond’s wrist, generating pain even the Aryan berserker couldn’t shake off. In the momentary lull I shoved my finger against psycho-blond’s back and fired the tranq crystal into her.

After that it was only a matter of keeping her from killing Pam and I until the tranq knocked her out. That was easier said than done, but eventually we found ourselves looking down at our unconscious foe, breathing heavily and trying to ignore all the places where we’d been battered. “Based on how she killed all those soldiers,” Pam gasped, “I guessed she’d be so focused on killing you that she’d ignore me for long enough.”

“You don’t know how glad I am that you were right,” I wheezed back.

“Why don’t you carry a more effective tranq weapon?”

“It’s effective enough to drop a mammoth within seconds!”

Pam shook her head, looking down at the blond. “But it took a few minutes to take
her
down. I wonder what her genetic profile looks like.”

“I don’t want to know.” Nazis and genetic engineering wasn’t a scenario I liked contemplating.

“We need rope in case she comes to.”

“Rope, hell. There’s some chain back where I was hiding.”

The chain wouldn’t have sufficed to hold a battleship at anchor, but we wrapped it around psycho-blond as many times as we could, interweaving the wraps so she wouldn’t be able to just shrug it off.

Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to find the device psycho-blond had been guarding. Outside, it looked like a small Here and Now trunk. But the energy it was giving off led our assistants to it easily. We checked for booby-traps, then cautiously opened the lid and saw a control panel far too sophisticated to be local work. “Jeannie, what is this thing?”

“The device before you is transmitting a continuous encrypted signal.”

“Can you break the encryption?”

“No. Not with available resources.”

I turned to Pam. “My assistant can’t break the signal.”

Pam nodded and smiled. “Mine can.”

So Pam’s Assistant was more capable than mine. I hadn’t really had time to think about When she was from, but it was now apparent she lived uptime from me. Not too far uptime, I hoped. “Should we shut it off?” I asked.

“No. If we just did that, the asteroid would probably continue on its last heading and still cause a lot of damage even it didn’t hit the city. My Assistant thinks she can alter the homing signal parameters, though, and . . . ah! She’s found the atmospheric entry command sequence.”

“Has it activated?”

“Not yet.”

“If we can cancel the maneuver -.”

“No! The rock will still reenter and we’ll have no idea where it’d impact.” Pam stared at me. “Trust me.”

“But -. Okay.” It sounded like Pam was going to try to make the object enter earlier than planned. It’d come from the east, Pam had told me, so that meant the new trajectory would bring it down somewhere east of England. What was east of London in 1908? Europe. Heavily populated even then. Then Russia. Or the Russian Empire, rather, in 1908 CE.

Pam seemed to be sweating as her assistant worked silently to alter the space object’s destination. Jeannie and I waited. I watched Pam’s face for any sign of how her attempt to alter the asteroid’s path was working, but couldn’t see any clues there. I found myself looking outward, wondering if I’d see the incandescent path of the space object heading for London.

A light blinked off on the device. Then another. Pam drew a long, deep breath. “It’s coming down early.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere in a region called Siberia.” She shot me an aggrieved look even though I hadn’t said anything. “I couldn’t stop it and I can’t achieve a precise target area without a homing device like this there, so I aimed it for emptiest place I could. Siberia seems the best chance we have to minimize the death and destruction this intervention will cause.”

I nodded, realized it’d been a while since I’d breathed, and inhaled deeply. “Siberia is one of the least populated regions on Earth right Now.”

“Yes.” Pam sagged with reaction as the tension fell out of her. “When we get back to our own Here and Now’s, there’ll no doubt be mention of a big explosion in Siberia on,” she paused to check the date, “30 June, 1908 CE. Hopefully in the middle of nowhere.”

I grinned. “I wonder to what they’ll attribute the good fortune of it hitting in the middle of nowhere?”

“The usual, I’m sure. Accident or chance or luck. The standard way of explaining something when they don’t really know the answer.”

“If they didn’t explain things away like that, your and my jobs would be a lot harder.”

“True.” We heard a strangled sound, and both looked toward where we’d left psycho-blond. The killer was snarling soundlessly at us, having recovered from the tranq with amazing speed. “What should we do with her?” Pam wondered.

“If they don’t manage another counter-intervention, she should loop out any time now when the future that created her ceases to exist.”

“Yeah, but how long will that take?” Metal clanked on the heels of Pam’s question, and as we watched the loops of chain which had been wrapped about psycho-blond collapsed into the vacant space she’d once occupied. “I think the fat lady just sang. How’s it feel to know you’ve saved London?”

“Right now it still hurts. Too bad the bruises that woman inflicted didn’t vanish along with her.” I stared at the pile of chain. “I wonder what kind of person she’ll be with a different history? Maybe not too bad.”

“Are you planning on looking her up?”

“No way. I think I’m going to be a little wary of blonds for a while.” I suddenly noticed shouting outside. “I think all the gunplay has attracted too much attention.” I went to what must have been the same point where psycho-blond had been firing from and looked downward. People who’d had cause to be about in the very early hours of the morning were gathering around the bodies of the dead soldiers, examining them and speaking in indistinct but clearly excited voices. “We’d better get out of here.”

“Not without this.” Pam indicated the now-silent device. Unlike psycho-blond, it’d been put here by a history that still existed. “I hope it’s not too heavy.” She tried to raise it, then grinned with relief as it came up easily. “Not bad at all. I can handle it alone. Let’s go before anyone realizes the shots came from here.”