The Empire of Time

by Crawford Kilian

  Twenty meters across the lot from the bus’s rear, two dumpsters stood open, awaiting more garbage. They were the only effective cover nearby, but Pierce had little chance of reaching them. If Philon did—and he would—he would be able to spray flechettes under the bus.

  The underside of the bus was filthy, caked with an oily mixture of mud, grease, and rust. When he reached the gas tank, Pierce scraped off some of the crust: the metal was rotten-orange with corrosion. He fired one shot into the tank at maximum impact; it punched through almost soundlessly. Gasoline squirted out, pooling aromatically between the rear wheels. Philon was almost to the dumpsters now.

  Pierce crawled backward, groping for a wire. He found it, pulled, felt the insulation crumble, saw the bare wire spark.

  The gasoline vapor ignited softly but emphatically into a little fiery puddle that spread and brightened. Pierce pushed himself backward, eyes stinging, out from under the front bumper.

  The bus blew up, sheltering Pierce with its own bulk. Flames lashed out like tentacles through a cloud of greasy smoke; the bus settled as its rear tires exploded. Pierce sprang onto the hood, onto the cab; the rear of the bus was a curtain of fire. Crouching a little, Pierce climbed onto the roof of the bus and sprinted into the flames.

  Philon was sprawled behind the left-hand dumpster, watching to see from which side of the bus Pierce would emerge. He glanced up, startled, to see a blazing figure standing in the black smoke that boiled around the roof of the bus. Pierce put three flechettes into Philon’s face. Then he leaped from the bus and rolled across the asphalt until his burning clothes only smoldered. He smelled the stink of his singed hair, felt the skin tighten on his burned hands.

  “I chose, you lucky bastard,” Pierce panted. “I chose! Low impact, and I could’ve blown you to bits. I chose!”

  Coughing, he lifted Philon in a fireman’s carry, turned, and headed for the entrance to the factory. He saw Dallow and Tim Klein carrying Anita inside. They left an erratic trail of bright blood that glittered in the light of the flames.

  “Oh—oh, Anita—”

  The weight of the poor, stupid boy on his shoulders was almost unendurable. He staggered down the corridor, his feet slipping in Anita’s blood.

  They took her into the I-Screen room, and lowered her gently onto the couch where Mrs. Curtice had slept. The indents pressed curiously around her.

  “Get away!” He dumped Philon to the floor and slashed through the clustered bodies, while one quiet part of his mind asked: What’s the hurry? She’s dead, she’s dead.

  She was dead, her body ripped open by the fusillade meant for him. Her golden skin was already dull, her blood already dark; her open eyes gazed thoughtfully on nothingness. She was dead for no reason but chance timing, because she stood next to Pierce at the moment when Philon, reflexes hyped at least as high as Pierce’s, came through the Screen knowing only that Pierce was nearby, and then saw his quarry directly in front of him.

  His mother sprawled on the sidewalk, Carmody dying on the sand, the burning girl—he could not protect them, he could not save them, they were swept away from him out of space, out of time, leaving only memories that blurred and faded and cruelly sharpened. He could not save them, he was the agent of their destruction, and he was mad enough to try to save the world.

  With difficulty, he made himself stop gasping for breath. Sirens were sounding outside.

  “Everybody out!” Klein bellowed. “This way!”

  The indents followed him without confusion; an Algerian woman helped Mrs. Curtice, who limped past Pierce without a glance. Nor did Pierce waste time on her; he turned, stopped, and rifled Philon’s pockets.

  Good: credit cards, passport, other documents, all in the name of J. Nathan Swift—one of Wigner’s little jokes, no doubt. The photos of Philon did not at all resemble Pierce, but no one looked closely at IDs.

  He also found a little locket on a fine gold chain. Pierce recognized it: the locket he had given Judy a few days ago, the locket he had brought back from the Philadelphia goldsmith on Beulah.

  Unhurriedly, despite the stink of smoke and the approaching sirens, Pierce pulled off his blackened clothes and dressed himself in Philon’s embroidered denims. They were not to his taste, but they would do. He rubbed a hand over his head: his hair had not been too badly singed.

  Philon was coming to as his hyped metabolism burned away the drug. Pierce turned the Dorian onto his belly, planted a knee between Philon’s shoulder blades, and twisted his fingers into the cord of the bolo tie. Philon gasped. His limbs were still to numb to move.

  “What did you do to Judy?”

  “She—she was a stooge for the separatists. Fed ’em information. Wigner realized it after the cat’s-paw nearly got you.”

  “Gersen wanted me to come to Orc—why would he try to kill me?”

  “Wasn’t Gersen. A cell of Trainables on Earth, friends of Judy’s. They didn’t know anything—thought they were doing Gersen a favor if they could get rid of you.”

  “So you executed her.”

  “I was ordered to.”

  “And what brings you after me, old friend?”

  Philon said nothing. Pierce twisted the bolo cord hard, then loosened it.

  “You went rogue. That’s all I was Briefed on. Go to Orc, nail you, go south to Mojave Verde.”

  “Ahh. How?”

  “Agency safe house on Chavez Street—160. A car to Farallon airport and a jet from there.”

  “Gee, I could listen to you for hours.”

  “I’m talking for my life, Mr. Pierce.”

  “You’re lucky to have the chance. Wigner built a bomb into me.” He pulled Philon’s head up so the Dorian could see the body on the couch. “Know who that is, Philon? Know who you zapped?”

  “I can’t see her face.”

  “Anita !Kosi, Philon. Anita !Kosi.”

  “Oh no, oh—Mr. Pierce, what the hell was she doing here?”

  Pierce curled his fingers around Philon’s throat, feeling the hard, fragile lump of his larynx, the vulnerable vertebrae. Philon’s face grew pale except for the three little red wounds where the flechettes had hit.

  Reluctantly, Pierce loosened his grip. Once he would have performed an execution like this quickly, efficiently, with a mild pleasure and no reflection. Now he had to choose; he was a free man. But he had not expected freedom to mean suppressing his desire for Philon’s death. No wonder the indents feared freedom, if it meant a constant battle between mind and reflex.

  He gripped the Dorian by his hair and slammed his head against the linoleum floor. Philon’s eyes rolled up. Pierce tucked the Mallory, its clip still half full, into his shirt. He walked slowly out the door that the others had fled through.

  He did not look back at Anita’s body on the couch. He could not bear to.

  Chapter Eleven

  The corridor from the I-Screen room led eventually to an empty, unpaved alley on the far side of the building from the burning bus. The indents and the knotholers had vanished. He was alone.

  For a moment Pierce felt a kind of serene detachment. No one owned him; no one had any claims upon him; he was obliged to no one but himself. If he chose, he could walk into the nearest bar and drink himself stupid, or rent a cubicle in a pornotheque, or go for a long walk out into the Alcatraz Valley—anything. The Sherlock missile might go up, or it might not; the Gurkhas might arrive in time, or they might not. He could try to interfere, but he did not need to.

  —An illusion, of course; the illusion of stillness at the peak of a trajectory. He walked out of the alley, into a street full of mid-morning traffic. Many people seemed to be hurrying toward the fire behind him; others stood in quiet, intimate groups, talking softly. Pierce remembered some crisis of his childhood (Panama? Caracas? Zimbabwe?) when people had behaved like this, fearing the bombs as they hadn’t feared them in twenty years. He had removed a phantom threat, only to replace it with a real one.

  Chavez Street was a wooded cul-de-sac in
a prosperous neighborhood; the Agency safe house was near the end, a large, low home with curtained windows. A safe house, for God’s sake, in a Colony town. He rapped on the front door. A taped voice crooned: “Welcome to 160 Chavez. Please insert your ID in the slot and stand in front of the camera lens. Thank you.”

  Pierce complied. Philon’s ID card vanished, then popped out again. The door opened: a broad-shouldered blonde in a blue leotard smiled impersonally at him.

  “So you’re Philon—” Her face hardened as she compared his face with the indistinct image on the video monitor. Pierce stepped forward and clipped her on the chin, caught her as she fell, and carried her into the living room.

  The house was silent, even to his ears. He slapped her smartly, rousing her, and pressed the Mallory against her belly.

  “It’s set on ten. No bullshit. I want Philon’s car and the keys to the jet.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t waste my time, or you’ll be the Agency’s very last martyr.”

  She surrendered, led him to a safe in the hallway, opened it, and gave him a set of keys and a passcard.

  “The jet’s in Hangar J at Farallon. Fuelled and ready.”

  He looked at the passcard. “Modified Lear 200?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ.” The modifications included four air-to-air missiles and two .75-millimeter cannons. “Car in the garage? Good.”

  He took her into the nearest bedroom and knocked her out with two flechettes, then locked the door. If Philon got away from the authorities and tried to follow him, he would find little help here.

  There was no trouble at the airport. His passcard showed him to be Robert R. Schneider, the registered owner of the Lear 200, which had been waiting in Hangar J for a week. After a quick checkout, he filed a flight plan to Hawaiki and took off. Twenty minutes on a south-southwest course put him out of range of Farallon’s radar; he descended almost to the waves and turned southeast. Automatically, he checked out the Lear’s armaments: all functioning. The plane was intended for surveillance and interdiction, usually against endos, so its firepower was not great. But it would serve Pierce’s purposes, as it had been intended to serve Wigner’s.

  The ocean was empty, a chaos of blue and white that mirrored the sky. Here and there, the rotting corpse of an iceberg wallowed in the current, bound for extinction somewhere far to the south. Once Pierce saw a pod of blue whales, also bound south, to breed in the warm lagoons of Baja. Their great flanks gleamed in the sun; they were proud and remote, their concerns far removed from humanity’s. Pierce felt a stab of envy as he passed over them, envy for their clean and simple life. Then they were gone, and he turned his attention to the coast looming ahead.

  He crossed the coast not far north of Los Alamitos, and tilted the Lear into a steep climb. They would pick him up on radar, of course, but not in time to do much about it. In ten minutes he was forty kilometers above the WDS and beginning the long plunge to Mojave Verde. The Missile Facility was a small gray-brown patch of geometry against the green of the hills; from the hills to the north, smoke from fires set by Klasayat’s endo hunters drifted toward the gantries.

  Two fighters were climbing fast to intercept, their paths like pincers closing to crush him. Pierce got a radar lock on the northern fighter and launched one of his four missiles. Three seconds later the fighter vanished, exploded into a ball of smoke that elongated toward him like a cheated ghost.

  The other pilot was more adept at evasion; he escaped two missiles and launched one of his own. Pierce forced the Lear down and away, but he was still too close when the missile detonated. The concussion flipped the Lear over; metal fragments ripped through it, and Pierce felt the controls go dead. He was falling, not diving, and the fighter pursued him like a stooping falcon.

  —A ferocious jolt as Pierce ejected, and a lesser one as his parachute deployed. The fighter snarled past, began a long braking curve that would bring it back to finish Pierce off as he dropped, defenseless, to the smoke-shrouded ground.

  Watching that distant, glinting dart as it arced across the sky, Pierce felt again the serenity he had known in the alley behind Klein’s. He was troubled by nothing but the increasing pressure on his eardrums and the sharp stink of burning chaparral. He had tried and failed. Briefed, he had failed; Cleared, he had failed disastrously.

  But there was still one chance.

  The smoke thickened with a shift in the wind, and he dropped the last twenty meters through acrid grayness. The fighter pilot, losing his visual fix and overestimating Pierce’s height above the ground, fired wildly and missed. The jet thundered past as Pierce hit the ground and rolled down a steep slope into the floor of a gully. Shaken, he lay unmoving for a few minutes, face pressed to the earth. The fighter’s roar receded and vanished.

  Slowly Pierce stood up and disentangled himself from the chute. Gathering it into a bundle, he buried it under the rocks and mud where he had fallen. But he kept the survival pack attached to the chute, and with its compass got his bearings. He had come down northwest of the Missile Facility, probably no more than twenty kilometers from Mojave Verde, and much closer than that to the endos. The wind was blowing toward the Facility; he should be able to cover much of the distance camouflaged by the smoke. Coughing, he scrambled out of the gully and began to walk.

  For an hour or so the going was fairly easy, though visibility was bad; he was moving downslope through open country dotted with clumps of oak and occasional patches of pine woods.

  He found the hunters where he expected to. They had heard him coming, however, and stood in a semicircle across his path. He stopped.

  They were very short, thick-bodied men in shirts and trousers of deerhide. Most carried bows and arrows, a few had pistols, and one was even armed with an archaic AK-47. The rifleman stepped forward as the smoke thinned a bit. He was over a head shorter than Pierce, broad-faced and large-eyed, with geometric black tattoos across his cheeks. His thick, dark hair was tied in many thin braids.

  “Greetings, Klasayat,” Pierce said in the Grasslanders’ purring language. “I come in brotherliness.”

  The rifleman recognized him, and looked surprised. “Then hawks have learned to swim, Jerry-missanan’kaa.” Deathwalker—his old title.

  “Greater wonders have happened, Klasayat Horsehunter.”

  Incongruously, Klasayat pulled a pack of cigarettes—Salems—from a pouch on his belt, and lit one with a Zippo. Pierce smiled and laughed.

  “You burn the hills and still have not enough smoke. Always you were a man of marvels, O Klasayat.”

  “Once I was, Jerry-missanan’kaa. All the families of the Grasslanders had fed from my kills, and many a husband hoped for one of my sons. Then you came, and destroyed us. There are no women in our camp, no children.”

  “You made war on us.”

  “And what else should men do when their land is taken?”

  “I bear no anger for it. You did what men should do.”

  “As we shall do with you.”

  “O Klasayat, this smoke has clouded your wits. I am not some whimpering blue-eyes to be robbed and eaten. I am the Deathwalker.”

  Klasayat came closer, his eyes fixed on him, the rifle pointed at Pierce’s chest. “Are you? Walking alone and dirty across the hills? I have looked in the eyes of the Deathwalker before, but I do not see him now.”

  Pierce laughed until the smoke made him cough. “Old friend, old war-mate, I walk closer to you than you know. Do the horses not think themselves growing safe as they flee your fires and race for the cliffs? When the sloth drinks at the tar pits, does she not see her own reflection and walk gladly to her death? And here you stand, speaking with me, yet seeing nothing.”

  The hunters shifted uncomfortably. Klasayat puffed on his cigarette, his dark eyes moving quickly from Pierce to his companions. Pierce knew it was his attitude more than his words that had kept Klasayat from killing him outright. The little glowing ember of hope began to brighten in h
is mind: what he could not do with all the Agency’s weaponry, he might do with a handful of wretched, homeless hunters. This was the last chance.

  “Yours was the skybird that fell, slain by the other.”

  “It was.”

  “Why does the Deathwalker, defeated, come to us if not to die at my hands?”

  “To give you back your land. All of it.”

  “After destroying us to take it away?”

  “I am the Deathwalker; I do not explain.”

  “And how will you do this thing?” asked one of the other hunters, ignoring Klasayat’s glare.

  “The men who build the firetrees, the rockets, have displeased me. I go to overthrow them. When they are driven from the land, it shall be yours again.”

  Klasayat spat. “What joy would we have of it? We are men alone, half-men.”

  Again Pierce laughed, half contemptuously. “Does Klasayat tell me he can steal a rifle, tobacco, a fire-maker, but not women? Will the mountain people not beg you to accept their loveliest daughters when they see you rulers of the grasslands again?”

  The hunters looked at one another, and Pierce knew he had won them, knew that Klasayat had read the same message in their dark, yearning eyes. The muzzle of the AK-47 lifted; Klasayat slung it over his shoulder.

  “It is well. What shall we do, Jerry-missanan’kaa?”

  “We must go into the town where the rockets nest. Quickly.”

  “This is not easily done. We are great thieves, and we have often stolen from the blue-eyes’ houses, but always at night.”

  “How close can you get in daylight?”

  “Within easy bowshot of the guards, on the north side of the town.”

  On that side of Mojave Verde, Pierce remembered, there was dense undergrowth, some wooded patches, and outcrops of bare rock, all higher than the settlement. The town itself was a compact cluster of apartment buildings, stores, and offices—a typical akademgorodok. The Facility buildings were southeast of the residential area; Mission Control was at the top of a low ridge overlooking the town on one side and the launching pads on the other. The airfield was ten kilometers west of the town.