"Let's go see if they need help," she suggested.
"Right."
Their progress was slow, until they found a relatively undisturbed stretch of pathway. But then that, too, ended abruptly at another great landslide. They picked their way over carefully, forced to test every step, lest they be carried downhill with another slide, some two hundred yards.
But just before dawn eased the darkness to a faint, orange-tinged smear, they found the others, all except Kosta.
Ross said, "Scavengers are roaming around in a gang."
Ashe nodded. "They clearly think this city is their territory. We had to fight them off twice. Kosta went chasing after them," he added. "I searched a little more, until a landslide forced me back."
"Any sign of the Baldies?"
"Nothing found, though I thought at one point that I saw an artificial light."
"Was it just a lamp?" Ross asked.
Ashe shrugged, a gesture that looked to Eveleen almost Gallic. For some reason it made her smile. "Landslide, and then a fight, prevented us from going up there. Maybe it's nothing."
"Nothing on our end, either," Eveleen said. "Except a crabby goat."
Ashe breathed a short laugh, and then the swift crunch of footsteps brought all them alert and ready.
They relaxed when the strengthening light shone on Kosta's tired face, his stubble pronounced. He grinned.
"Find the Baldy hideout?" Ross asked.
"No. These scavengers—" Kosta shook his head, muttered in Greek, then forced himself to say in English, "After they tangled with us, several of them retreated in one direction."
Ashe rasped his hand over his chin. "So you followed them?"
Kosta's white teeth gleamed in the morning light. "Yes. And I discovered they have a ship."
CHAPTER 24
"THREE JOURNEYS OF the sun."
Linnea sighed, trying to rest her aching head. There was no rest, not in a chamber made of stone, with only a thin blanket of some synthetic material for cushion.
How absurd, she thought restlessly. As if the seer could distinguish such irrelevant matters as day and night. "The battle will begin in three journeys of the sun." That's what she'd said, and that's what the priestesses believed.
They also apparently believed that the priests kept them here for some grand purpose, because in their culture, no one maltreated the oracle or her Sisters of the Serpent. And Linnea could not bring herself to shake the old woman and scream, "Wake up! These are aliens who hate human beings, and you're just mouthing out a lot of superstitious nonsense that will be nothing but matters for scholars of antiquity and children's comic books in my time!"
But she couldn't. She could see herself doing it—felt the words forming behind her lips, her hands aching to grab and shake, and then she could envision the result: hurt, anger perhaps, but above all, flat disbelief.
They were sure the priests were kindly people, if strange, because so far, none of the women had been hurt.
The first one had returned after an immeasurable time, to speak of being given a beautiful cloth woven of wondrous stuff that had moon- and starlight threaded through.
And when she wore the priestly garment, why, she could hear the inner voices of the priests, just as if she were a seer!
The others had listened in fascination as the priestess described how the "priests" invited her to talk about her life, and about what the seer saw and when she saw it, and how the people responded. At first it was difficult to shape the words in her head, but she learned to do it, and finally they took away the priestly cloth, and she no longer heard the spirit voices, and they brought her back.
Linnea, feeling sicker by the moment, translated that into real terms: the Baldies had thrown one of their shimmery blue cloths over her, which enabled them to hear the thoughts of the wearer, and the wearer to hear theirs. One of those blue suits had nearly cost Ross Murdock his life, when he first became a Time Agent.
Another woman had been taken, this one gone a much shorter time. Then another, but after her, they had not taken a fourth for a very long time.
The fourth had just disappeared; the women, unafraid, now had chosen among themselves who would go next to visit the spirit voices.
Linnea could not tell them why she would resist as long as possible. She would not tell the priestesses who she was because they wouldn't believe her. But revealing her real identity to the Baldies, who would believe her, would put not just her in danger, but also the priestesses and the Time Agents.
She glanced at the women now. The one with the broken arm was asleep but moaning softly. The seer was also asleep, a faint snore escaping her open mouth. The others sat, either meditating or talking in low voices so as not to disturb the sleepers.
All right, Linnea thought. So that means I have to do something —
A tremor seized them, and the women went silent, looking up. Yes, more silt drifted down, and more cracks appeared overhead, and especially in the walls. Two in the floor. In the far chamber, Linnea heard the water splashing up over the rock, just like her children used to splash water out of the tub when they played, lunging from side to side to make waves.
She frowned at the crack. The quakes were more frequent now, and Linnea thought they were getting steadily more violent, though that might just be her fear, that and the -widening of the cracks.
"Oh, her fever worsens." A voice penetrated Linnea's thoughts.
At once several women crowded around the one with the broken arm. Linnea edged near, glancing down. The others had set the arm, as far as she could tell, well enough, and had wrapped it in strips torn from their robes.
The woman cried, and then turned her head away in shame, biting her lip, as Ela carefully unwrapped the last layer, exposing purple dotted flesh. Linnea's guts churned as she stared at the swollen skin, the greenish tone. Infection. The bone had probably shattered, and there was no way of knowing whether or not the setting had gotten it all back together, or not. But one thing for certain: major infection had set in.
Linnea backed away, moved to the front for one of the empty cups stacked neatly for the next appearance of the Baldies, and took the top cup. Useless worrying about who drank from which: germs were not even remotely in this worldview.
Linnea ran to the far chamber and dipped the cup into the running water. It, too, was running turbid, probably carrying dust and debris from the latest quake. Couldn't be helped.
With her back firmly turned to the crevasse that gave access, Linnea dug under her robe for her pouch. Down at the bottom was the plastic packet of super-powerful antibiotics that the Project doctor had issued each Time Agent. She pulled open the package, pulled out one of her four pills, and crumbled it into the cup, stirring with her finger.
Then she set the cup down to permit the drug to finish dissolving, and stashed the rest of the medicine in her pocket. She straightened her robe, her mind running through explanations: just as she was unwilling to thrust a modern view of hopelessness onto these women, even less was she willing to pose as a miracle worker.
She picked up the cup, stirred it once more with her finger, and then carried it carefully into the other room.
"I have herbs from Kemt," she said.
The others all looked up at her. She realized she had become isolated from them. Not ignored, precisely, but because she did not participate in their rituals, or their conversations, she had closed herself in with her thoughts, and they had slowly closed her out of their awareness.
Now several pairs of dark eyes, all expressive of hope, tracked the cup she carried. Ela helped the sick woman raise her head as Linnea murmured, "It is bitter. But all must be drunk."
The seer, who had woken, smiled very faintly. "Are not all herbs bitter?"
The sick woman sipped, winced, and then, at Ela's soft murmur in the unknown tongue, drank the antibiotic-laced water very quickly, leaving nothing but a trace of powdery, chalky-looking residue at the bottom.
"I shall save it," Ela
murmured, pointing. "Stella can drink it later, if this eases the fire within her."
Linnea nodded, backed away, and then the door opened, and the absent priestess came back in.
She smiled. "It is just as you say! Spirits speak when you wear the priest cloth. They are very powerful priests, and very blessed, it would seem."
The seer turned to face Linnea. "There is only me, and Stella, and she is so ill." The old woman narrowed her eyes. Her expression was impossible to interpret, but it seemed to Linnea that she was doing her best to descry some sign from Linnea. "Shall you go, then?"
Linnea shook her head once. "It is not my time, Maestra," she said, hoping she sounded oracular, and not merely sulky— or sinister.
But the seer only bowed her head in acquiescence, and slowly walked through the open doorway.
Linnea could not see the Baldy outside, but she sensed its presence.
The door closed.
CHAPTER 25
NIGHT AGAIN. Or what seemed to be night.
When Eveleen woke up, her sinuses clogged, her mouth dry, she sat up blearily. The late afternoon light was weird orange. The sky was covered with what looked like gray rubble: a mixture of cloud and smoke that appeared dirty and threatening.
A faint whiff of civilization resolved into fresh, steaming coffee. A mug pressed into her fingers, and she sipped, her eyes closed.
When she opened them, Ross was hunkered down on the deck next to her hammock, looking like a movie-land wild man with his long, curling hair bound back by a bandana, his fatigues, and his fake-fur pouch still worn around his waist. He had no shirt on. None of the men wore shirts; the weather was oppressively hot and still. Eveleen resolved mentally that, if she couldn't rightly go shirtless, she could at least make her thin robe work for her instead of against: she would soak it thoroughly with water before she did anything else. Her scalp, too.
"When we get done," Ross began, and Eveleen mentally added the "if" that Ross would never say out loud, "they're gonna owe us a paid vacation. A big one. Where do you want to go? Paris? San Francisco, where it's foggy and cool?"
"I want to go to a spa and soak for a week," Eveleen said.
"I want a prime-rib dinner," Ross said, "and all night to eat it."
Eveleen cudgeled her aching brain to top that, but the urge to be silly for a blessed time was all too brief: there was Gordon Ashe, patiently waiting for them to finish. He didn't interrupt, or frown. He simply sat on his hammock, half a sandwich in his hand, his expression blank.
Ross glanced up at his chief, gave a sour smile, and said, "More good news?"
Ashe shook his head. "No news. Kosta took off at about ten this morning. Went down to find that globe ship. Said he thought about it all last night, and insisted he knew just where to look."
Eveleen shook her head. "Isn't he ever going to sleep?"
Ashe quirked his lips in a grim semblance of a smile. "He said he'll either sleep for eternity, if we're caught here, or else he'll sleep for a week when we get safely home, but either way he won't get any rest running around on top of a fifty-thousand-megaton bomb that stinks of burning rotten eggs."
Eveleen laughed, then got to her feet. "Who can resist a call to arms like that?"
As she spoke, she studied Ashe. He'd lost that restless, angry nervousness she'd sensed earlier, and he seemed to have come to some sort of decision. Not that anyone could really read him, of course, but she lingered for a moment or two, waiting to hear how that decision would translate out into a plan.
After a little more chat about the technicalities of the dive, she said, "Well, I'll get cleaned up and ready, if you'll tell us what's next."
"I don't know," Ashe replied. "Depends on what Kosta comes up with—"
"Here he is, if I'm not mistaken," Ross said, poking his head up through the hatchway.
A lot of splashing and some gasped curses in Modern Greek resolved into a dripping Kosta.
Everyone swarmed up on the deck, waiting in silence as he pulled his breathing mask off. He blinked away sweat, then said, "It's gone."
Eveleen, stunned, said, "The globe ship?"
Kosta glanced her way. "I shifted the rest of that debris we found. It's gone."
Ross let out an expletive that seemed to sum up everyone's feelings.
"Gone like taken?" Ashe asked.
Kosta shook his head, dropping down wearily onto a bench. "It's buried, so deep it's impossible to get to." He looked up at Eveleen. "I believe there was not just a massive landslide, but a fissure of some sort opened, the ship fell into it, and a slide occurred. The landscape down there changed, some of it shifting about twenty yards west, and then dropping."
Everyone looked stunned, considering what that meant.
"Well," said Ross, "at least that means the Baldies can't get to it, either. I hope."
"We'll have to make certain," Ashe said. "But not yet. Everyone get ready: we'll meet back here in ten minutes. First we search, and then we'll plan further."
Eveleen went down to the sweatbox. As she untangled the sweaty mass of her hair, she yanked impatiently at one of her earrings, as usual caught in a mat. The other wasn't, for once; she felt, and then jerked her face up to the tiny mirror.
The other earring wasn't caught; it was gone.
She touched the hole, saw a tiny scab, and vaguely remembered a sting there during the fight the night before. So shehad lost an earring in Akrotiri! She'd lost the earring— but was still alive. So far ... She grimaced, knowing that up the line in the future, she and her remaining earring might still be buried elsewhere.
"It's not a good sign, or a bad," she whispered to the shower. But would anyone else, such as Ross, take it badly?
She hustled through a quick semblance of a cleanup and dressed, her mind racing. When she stepped out, she quietly removed the other earring and stowed it with her gear. There. Either it, and she, made it back, or they . . . didn't.
Then she straightened up, refusing to think about it anymore. But that was no comfort. Her mind promptly reverted to Ashe and that look of resolve, of a decision having been reached. Whatever Ashe's decision had been, he hadn't shared.
Or was she just imagining things?
She got one of the dried-looking sandwiches that Stav had put out and sat down to wait for the others.
——————————
A STRONG QUAKE sent the surf crashing out and then in again in strong waves, nearly sinking their rowboat.
Once again the entire team was there.
No one quite wanted to say it, but this was their last search for Linnea. The silent testimony to the north lit the sky like a vision of hell: the plume of smoke from the pre— Kameni Island had widened gradually into a wide, glowing red. Between wind-torn flaws in the smoke they could see veins of lava shooting up into the sky.
They were far too close to the point of no return, and they still did not know for certain that the main controls to the devices were on the globe ship. Ugly as the sky looked,
the constant quakes might still bleed off just enough energy to prevent the great eruption if the Baldies could reactivate their devices.
One more search for Linnea, then, and after that, they had to put all their effort into finding out if the Baldies' tech was elsewhere besides the missing globe ship.
Meanwhile, their boat floated, unguarded, at anchor, its only protection a crumbling cliff.
They rode a mini-tsunami that deposited their rowboat high on the beach. They landed with a jarring smack. At least it was above the fly-covered sea wrack. Ross could smell the rotting fish and seaweed, and he could hear the buzzing of great clouds of flies, but at least he didn't have to see the revolting mess.
He helped the others drag the rowboat up farther, and then they did their best to camouflage it with a reed mat.
After that came the grueling climb to where Ashe had seen the light. This time, the last time, they would all look.
Ross bided his time as the others began walking.
When his wife fell into low-voiced conversation with Kosta about the scavengers' ship, Ross took a long step and fetched up next to Ashe.
In the dim red glow from the north, Ashe looked grim but amused. "And your objection is ... ?"
"I haven't known you all these years not to smell a dead rat when the stink hits me," Ross said.
Ashe breathed a soft laugh.
"You're going to find those damned Baldies and offer to trade yourself for that woman, aren't you?"
"What makes you think that?"
"The fact that you didn't outline it as a possible plan— one that you know we'd all veto. I'll bet you Linnea Edel would, too, if she were listening in."
Ashe shook his head. "I should not have let her come. This mission was not the right one for a beginner, and—" He paused, looked north, then said only, "I owe it to her children to send their mother back alive."
They're grown up, Ross wanted to say, but he knew it would sound wrong. Just because he'd been abandoned at an early age, had never had a family bond, didn't mean it didn't exist for other people. He'd learned that much from marriage.
So he said, "You don't know that she's alive, or that they have her."
"No. But it makes sense that they'd take hostages, if she were alive. After all, we got their ship—we had it—and time is running out."
"But we still don't really know that the globe ship vanished. They could possibly have gotten it back. We still don't know if there's another ship, or not. Maybe there is, with high-tech recovery equipment. Or maybe they've solved the exclusion principle and can slip back in time, get it, and then move it somehow."
"Or maybe they don't have it," Ashe retorted. "It could be so buried they can't get at it. All I know is, if I find them and we can't break her out any other way, then I have to try."
There's going to be another way, Ross resolved, tightening his hand on his weapon. Watch me find it.
——————————
WHEN AT LAST they came for Linnea, it was almost an anticlimax.
The seer had returned, peaceful in her conviction that she spoke with spirits through the blue priests. They had said that when they finished talking to the women, they would send them on their way.
Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07] Page 17
