Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2)

by John Barnes

  I moved my trunk to a better location and began to get things into some kind of order. It was midafternoon when I arrived, and I figured the first day would be a matter of looking for anything big and obviously wrong, but I wasn’t expecting to find anything like that. Usually, at least according to the training, it took a while to see what wasn’t the way it should be.

  Of course in my own experience, I had just lunged out into Nazi-occupied San Francisco, and been attacked by crazed Boy Scouts, but then what did I know? The odds of anything big happening the first time I walked out the door were practically zero.

  I made sure everything was in good order, and all the stuff that was supposed to be concealed was well concealed. Then I sat down on the bed to think for a moment.

  There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” I said.

  The woman who came in looked strangely like a high-school pageant version of a colonial woman, because though the clothing style was not much different in general line from what I remembered of fashion history, some of the materials were obviously synthetic, and the dress itself hung a little strangely—I suspected that undergarments had changed and perhaps were not as voluminous.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Strang, I didn’t see you come in,” she said. “I was coming up to ask if you’d be with us long?”

  “Well, I have business in the city,” I said, “and so I might be here some months.”

  She giggled; now that I looked more closely I saw that she was about seventeen or eighteen at oldest. “Business in the city? And so you do. I was wondering, sir, if perhaps your quarters at Province House were in need of repair or some such, and as I’d heard nothing from tradesmen about that, I thought perhaps you might know how long you’d need this room.”

  “Oh,” I said, completely baffled. There had been a message to Rey Luc but he hadn’t acknowledged it; had he perhaps set me up with a room elsewhere in the city and then for some reason not told anyone else? But then why would anyone else know I might have been there? And anyway, the translator chip behind my right ear had just supplied the information that Province House, in Marlborough Street, was where the Royal Governor’s residence was.

  It was a bit like checking into a Motel Six in Washington, D.C., and having them assume you normally stayed at the White House.

  All that took just a moment to think. “I suppose then that you hadn’t heard. Well, I was hoping to keep the matter quiet—a little disagreement, you know, one of those things where it just seemed best—”

  “You can count on me,” she said, and winked broadly. She set down a large pitcher of water, which the thing in my ear told me was for washing and drinking, and then went out. From the way she had smiled and the interest she took in my business, I concluded that whatever it was that she thought was going on would be all over town before I ever got downstairs onto the street.

  Well, there was clearly no reason to delay and a lot of reasons to get moving. I tucked my .45 into my shoulder holster, concealed the SHAKK in a special pocket inside the coat between my shoulder blades, and tucked the NIF into a special slot in my left boot. I was ready for a lot.

  Then I pulled out my transponder tracker. All Special Agents, Time Scouts, and Crux Ops have a surgically implanted radio transmitter that charges up off your body heat and runs for ten years after you’re dead. It’s a low-powered weak affair, and it only transmits in the event of a coded signal, to prevent the enemy getting any use out of it, but if you’re within about two miles, you’re wearing a transponder, and a tracker switches on, it should be able to get at least a direction and an estimate of distance on you.

  There was nothing. This didn’t necessarily mean anything—he could be back in London, or over in New York, or anywhere else. His last three messages had said he was making Boston his headquarters, but that had been four years ago. For all I knew he’d decided to take some time off and go find himself with a guru in Tibet.

  There were voices on the stairs. “Well, gentlemen, if you have business with him, you can ask him yourself.” It was the voice of the girl who had come in to check the room.

  A soft voice said something I couldn’t hear, and then a louder one added, “How the deuce did he get all the way here so quickly anyway? Unless perhaps his engagement up in the Mill Pond went faster than he imagined it would. And thank God we ran into your father, Sally, or we’d have gone over to Province House instead—”

  Three possibilities. Mark Strang is a common name; maybe they just had the wrong one. Rey Luc was doing fine but for some reason couldn’t even manage to leave a note in an emergency drop box; thus these were men to take me to him.

  Or they were Closer agents, and I was totally blown—my mission and I were hopelessly un-secret to the enemy.

  If there was another Mark Strang, and he was an important guy in the town, the odds that nobody had talked to him about this room reservation were zip. And I could think of no way that a man could pick up signals from base, arrange meetings and deliveries, and yet be unable to put a note inside any of a dozen locking boxes, for ATN to retrieve.

  So it was probably Possibility Three: the Closers were here already.

  All that I had in that room was a change of clothes, all the weapons were already on me, so I checked the view out the window. By now their footsteps were reaching the top of the stairs.

  There was a large overhang under my window, and it seemed to reach a third of the way into the street. I rolled out my window, slid down the roof of the overhang, clutched the wooden-trough rain gutter, let myself drop into the street, and walked away in a hurry. Whenever you do something weird, get away from the witnesses as fast as you can.

  People seemed very surprised, but I avoided making eye contact and hurried through an alley that wound about as it led away.

  The alley made two more bends and came into a small dark courtyard. It was what you expect in a preindustrial, or just barely industrial, city—a muddy, filthy space ringed by two- and three-story buildings in bad repair, in which wash was hung out to dry and into which garbage pails and chamber pots were emptied. Fortunately someone had laid a board sidewalk around it to where another alley led away.

  As I went around on the boards, which rolled and bounced beneath my feet, I heard odd scurrying noises. It did seem strange that there were no children watching me, or at least none I could see; normally a place like this is full of kids, housewives, goats, and chickens …

  No one spoke to me, but now that I looked around I could see a ball, a hoop, and stick, and something that probably was a hobbyhorse on a stick, much handed down. Moreover, I had to step over smeared areas where a goat had probably been tied. It was as if everyone had left just seconds before I came.

  The next alley wound to the north, and I figured I was probably making toward what’s now Franklin Place. I had been there a few times in my own timeline, but this was going to be different—so much land had been filled in, especially around the Neck, that the peninsula was a completely different shape.

  Sure enough, there was a bigger street there; there were no street signs to identify it, but I doubt that any eighteenth-century cities had street signs anyway. I slipped quietly out of the alley and merged as inconspicuously as possible into the foot traffic.

  Or I tried to, anyway. As I passed two distinguished-looking gentlemen, they tipped their hats and greeted me by name. A woman nodded and wished me, “Good day, Mr. Strang.”

  “Thursday at one o’ the clock, Mr. Strang,” another called out, tapping his forehead with the palm of his hand, clearly reminding himself of an appointment he believed that we had.

  I nodded and waved back; no one seemed to find these things unusual. I let myself slow a bit, took a coin from my pocket, and turned to buy an apple from a street vendor. The apples were small and scrawny by the standards of a twentieth-century supermarket, and had probably spent the winter in a cellar, but good “keeping apples” are usually sweet.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Strang, just take one if you like,”
the vendor said. “Gift for His Majesty’s servant. Always glad to be of help.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to just ask him outright what I was doing for His Majesty these days, but I nodded, took the apple, and thanked him warmly.

  The apple was what I expected—mealy but sweet and with a strong flavor. If someone could persuade this timeline to hang on to its genetic stocks for a century or two, they’d have at least one terrific export ready to go.

  Another advantage of eating an apple: you can keep your hand over your face. Fewer people seemed to recognize me.

  Now to do some thinking. Clearly not only did everyone here think they’d seen Mark Strang before, but they thought they knew Mark Strang well, and they knew him by sight. A common name is one thing, but an identical twin in another timeline … wouldn’t be odd at all. But not in this century, surely?

  All right. Facts I knew. Something was seriously wrong in this timeline. Somebody who was apparently me was already here. He lived at Province House, which was the governor’s mansion.

  That was where I needed to go, then; for what it was worth, I wouldn’t be conspicuous there, or at least not until my doppelgänger turned up. Whatever the answers were, they were more likely to be there than anywhere else.

  I was on the brink of asking someone for directions when I realized that that would really be the height of conspicuousness—a prominent citizen, probably a government official, asking where the governor’s house was? No way.

  It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. After a while I noticed that a few buildings every so often would have a street number plus a street name on their placards, and by dint of a lot of wandering around, and keeping in mind that Marlborough Street was one of the largest in town (it was part of the old High Street that was now known successively as Orange Street along the Neck, Newbury Street as it neared South End, then Marlborough and finally Cornhill), I eventually found, after walking nearly to the Long Wharf, what I hoped was the right direction. It was a good long walk, and my shoes were unfortunately much too authentic—this was a long time before the development of the concept of right and left shoes, and my feet were beginning to kill me.

  I could see, ahead of me, one of the few buildings that the little interpreter in the back corner of my head seemed to recognize. The gadget told me it was the State House, and I realized that, with a modification or two, I was looking at something I had seen in my own time.

  A light went on in my head; Cornhill, Marlborough, and the rest were actually Washington Street. Now that I knew where I was, I could just go there, and I began to walk quickly, even though my feet hurt, and I had been walking for a couple of hours.

  I had expected Boston to look Georgian—it was the Georgian era, and had been for decades, so I was expecting a lot of red brick and tall white columns. Instead it was more like what you would see in a movie set for something in Shakespearean times, lots of lumpy buildings with rough plastering on the outside, mixed with unpainted clapboard. It was one of the biggest English-speaking cities in the 1770s of our timeline, and it was three times bigger here—but it still looked poor, dumpy, and squalid.

  I had just come into Marlborough Street proper when I noticed graffiti on a building—something you didn’t see in Boston at that time. It was just three words: SONS OF LIBERTY.

  There shouldn’t have been any such movement in this timeline. I stood and stared at it. One of the most radical patriot groups from my timeline, a driving force for the revolution … what was it doing here? The British regime was benign and pro-colonial; there wasn’t supposed to be any Revolution at all.

  I was just considering that question when a pistol shot buzzed by my head and sent a shower of brick chips spraying outward, stinging my face. I spun around to find I faced four hooded men, all with muskets.

  -6-

  Only one musket was leveled, and it had just fired. The others waited at ready. One of them started to say “You had better come with—”

  Adrenaline and training cut through the situation. The .45 popped out of my shoulder holster and I braced and fired four times before I drew a breath, some of the fastest shooting I’d ever done. At the range—less than fifteen yards—you’d have to be a lot worse shot than I was to miss. The man who had fired, and had nothing to shoot with, was my fourth target, and he didn’t quite have time to turn around before my shot flung him, turned half-around, facedown onto the muddy brick street.

  There were screams and people running everywhere. I looked at the crowd running toward me from both sides and vaulted the wall.

  “Mr. Strang, I beg your pardon!” a young woman said. I had just managed to miss her as I came down into a secluded back garden.

  I jammed the Colt back into my shoulder holster and did my best to manage a bow. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve been attacked,” I said, “and forced to defend myself. We’d best get away from here before—”

  On the other side of the wall there were screams, groans, and moaning, shouts of “Help! Murder!” and what sounded like fistfights and screaming matches breaking out. It was going to be a full-fledged riot soon, and one concept that the eighteenth-century English-speaking world didn’t have was a police force. I remembered someone, Orwell I think, said there was no level of force possible between closing the shutters and volleys of musket fire.

  Obviously some thought like that had crossed her mind, too, for she hurried up the garden path as I followed. “It was the Sons of Liberty, wasn’t it?” she said. “Of course it was. Papa had just sent for men to scour the brickwork—we’d only just found out that was on our wall—”

  Behind us there was more shouting, the sounds of breaking glass, and cries of “Fire! Fire!” and “The Redcoats!”

  This house obviously belonged to somebody with money, and I was just as obviously known here. I just hoped it wasn’t my brotherin-law or something.

  Even in our hurry, I managed to notice that the small garden was formal in a very English way, that there was glass in the windows, and that the combination of red brick and white woodwork and columns was what I’d have called Georgian. Clearly this was someone who paid attention to English fashions.

  It was just as clear from the look of his daughter; if I remembered right, bustles and low necklines were just coming into fashion in Europe, and she was definitely wearing both.

  We hurried into a high-ceilinged room, and she told a black servant, “Fetch my father at once.” He bowed and hurried away.

  With a loud pop, she shot out a fan and began waving it in front of her face. “Entirely too much excitement,” she said. “The doctor will be very unhappy with me.”

  She looked to be about twenty-two or twenty-three, dark-haired, moon-faced, with a pouty red mourn and not much of a chin, pretty but not exceptional. A quick estimate was that she was probably brainier than she was given credit for, almost certainly didn’t have enough to do, and, if I were any judge, was her father’s pet even though he never listened to her.

  The man who came down the stairs wore a large, old-fashioned full-bottomed wig that made him look more like a British judge than anything else. He was fat by our standards, or healthy-looking by theirs, and his red face looked like it got that way from beer and wine rather than me sun.

  “Mr. Strang leaped our garden wall, Papa, to get away from a mob,” the girl explained.

  “Well … hmmph. It’s certainly better than getting murdered, now isn’t it?” the old guy said. “You honor me with your visit, sir, even if it was no choice of your own. I trust you are aware that the sentiments upon my wall are not my own. Now I suppose I shall have to have a man or two stand with a gun to protect the workmen erasing that mess from my wall. The Sons of Liberty, faugh and damn ’em, are inclined to think every wall is their own.”

  “I shot four of them,” I said, “and I’m not sure what the results were. At least two of them were still making noise as we ran to the house.”

  “Quite good shooting, that, and lucky you
had a second brace about you.”

  Single shot pistols normally come in braces of three, the translator in my head supplied. “Er, yes,” I said. “I’m not sure how much effect I really had on them all—it’s just as likely as not that they’re all alive but frightened.”

  “I should hope so, Mr. Strang” the girl said. “It would be such an inconvenience to you and to the whole colony if you should have to stand trial.”

  “Hah,” her father said. “Inconvenient indeed, sir, but not at all a bad thing. We might establish a precedent that permits the shooting of vermin, and there’s something to be said for that. And I should think, speaking as a judge, that any reasonable judge would see matters the way I do, and if any damned jury doesn’t, well, we’ll see how they like the pillory and the stocks. Now, tell me, were they—”

  There was a crash of breaking glass. Shutters began to slam all over the house, and I heard the servants running frantically; a moment later the butler burst in to announce, “A mob, sir, they say they want—”

  “Me,” I said. “I’d better get out of here and let you show them that I’m not here.”

  “What, and invite a rabble into my house to inspect it? Thank you, sir, but no thank you, I like my silverware where it is, in my possession. My servants are tolerable marksmen, and I think we might have some good shooting from the roof if you like—see if any of those hooded rapscallions has escaped you, eh?”

  “Papa, they might all rush at once. They might set fire to the house.”

  “Honoria, they might also all decorate the end of a rope. I daresay you’ve been right all along, Strang, for all our arguing in the past.”

  “Uh, right about what?” I asked, as I looked around for an escape. Apparently this old judge intended to put up a fight here, and I hadn’t seen any evidence that the house could stand the fight. It seemed a poor way to pay him and his daughter back for taking me in. Presumably if the mob wanted me, they would follow me when I left—