The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  Smith said things like ‘feller’ and ‘over yonder’ because he was a genuine Deputy US Marshal from the actual fucking 1870s, and he was a little bit lost in twenty-first century downtown Seattle. He was, thought Cady, no less stranded and clueless in a Roman slave revolt or Jack the Ripper’s London which, like an unlubed duckfisting, was just a little bit problematic, because since he’d grabbed her up, they’d had the pleasure of both; the slave riot and the serial killer, that is, not the duckfisting.

  But you never knew what was coming, so best be prepared, Cady thought.

  She had a two-hundred piece medical kit including a box of broad spectrum antibiotics. A tactical flashlight, tactical ops knife, five freeze-dried tactical ops meals, twenty—count ’em, twenty!—packets of emergency water (so much wetter and way more tactical than plain old water), a dozen emergency food bars, two disposable lighters, three packs of storm-proof matches, one packet of fire-starters, a roll of duct tape, ten yards of paracord, a pack of water purification tablets, one LifeStraw water filter, half-a-dozen glow sticks, the same number of heat packs, a pair of work gloves, a fishing kit, one Gerber multitool (there was another in Smith’s back pocket because he quietly loved the multitool with an unnatural physical love that Cady herself quietly loved about him), a bottle of olive oil, which could serve as food, fuel, or a handy lubricant for machines, zippers and tight-assed ducks in need of a good fisting. She had tampons and toilet paper of course, a cooking set, space blanket, work gloves…

  No, wait, that made two pairs of work gloves.

  Cady moved the spare pair over to Smith’s collection.

  … a three-in-one compass, magnifying glass and signal mirror, a pair of swimming goggles, sunscreen, aloe vera, hand sanitizer, toothpaste and brush, dental floss, microfiber towel, a length of saw-chain topped and tailed with a pair of sturdy key-rings and all stowed away in an Altoids tin, that damned hatchet Smith was so fond of, a dozen small silver ingots, another dozen gold, spare socks and underwear, battery packs, a solar charger…

  “Cady,” Smith said, breaking into her inventory.

  “What? You think we need more chocolate?”

  “No, I think we need less. Less chocolate. Less fancy lotions and lady balms and your electronical doodads and so forth. Even less saw-chain, although I will admit to a grudging fondness for the notion of havin’ such a beneficial piece-o-kit in my back pocket. That hand-pulled saw-chain and your shiny hatchet I will credit with utility sufficient to be worth the risk of carryin’ them. But…”

  The marshal was frowning at the neatly arranged collection of prepper porn.

  “Smith,” Cady said, “let’s not. We’ve discussed this already.”

  “Only if a discussion consists of you tellin’ me how it’s gonna be.”

  Cady folded her arms across her chest.

  “That’s exactly what discussion means. We need this stuff. All of it. I’ve already ditched at least half the gear that The Survival Blog and when-shit-hits-the-fan.com say you abso-fucking-lutely straight up have to have when it’s time to go. I didn’t make you buy that assault rifle or the body armor. I’m not taking the Google Translate earbuds because we got our universal translator here—” she held up her own timepiece. “But this…” Cady pointed at the carefully curated selection of survival goodies… “this is my minimum viable loot locker. It’s coming, or I’m not.”

  Smith’s furrowed brow grew even more furrowy.

  “Ms Cady, I have not asked you to accompany me on this journey, and I feel discomforted by the prospect of you hazardin’ yourself on my behalf…”

  Cady stepped on whatever stupidly selfless hero waffle he was about to serve up next.

  “Smith, trust me. I’m doing this for me as much as you.” She held up the pocket watch again. It was similar to the model Smith had checked a minute earlier, but slightly larger, with two crowns and a minute hand, where the marshal’s featured only one winding crown and a single, shorter hour hand. The crowns were each secured with a twist of wire, to stop anybody accidentally pressing down on them.

  Shit went sideways—hard—when you did that.

  “I need to know how these work,” she said. “We’ve got some of it figured out I think, like the whole minute at the top of the hour deal. But there’s a lot more. Could be that when we work it all out you can just zap yourself right back to your daughter, and I could come and go as I pleased. Do you know what that would be like, Smith? We’d be real time travelers. Like Doctor Who or, you know, the Travelers, except without a busted-ass TARDIS or a crazy fucking AI telling us to stay on mission.”

  Smith’s expression did not lighten, but when he spoke he did so gently.

  “I know exactly what it is to be a time traveler, Ms Cady,” he reminded her. “I have been at it for a little while longer than you. Most often it compels a feller to run for his life or to hide from black-hearted varmints with designs on ending it for him. You met one of them, ol’ Chumley, back in London and again at the gladiator school them Roman fellers was running. I done for him, but only after he killed our friends Grace and Bertie. Gutted them like hogs, as you will recall.”

  Cady blanched. She preferred not to recall, if that was all right.

  “We made that good,” she said quietly. “You… did for Chumley… and we went back and made sure Grace and Bertie never met him.”

  “And Miss Georgia?” Smith asked in a quiet rumble.

  Cady waved a hand at the window. It was early afternoon, but this late in the year the light and warmth was fast leaking out of the day. They had adjoining rooms in the Marriott, high above the Sound, and she could see a ferry beating slowly across to Bainbridge Island through the wind-chopped waters. So weird to think they would soon be thousands of miles and hundreds of years away.

  “Georgia’s cool,” Cady said, hearing the defensive tone in her voice and trying too hard to hide it as she hurried on. “I had coffee with her this morning, and sushi last night, and I told her I’d got a loan against my first royalty payment from Apple, and I was going away for a holiday, and…”

  “Last time I saw Miss Georgia,” Smith said slowly, ignoring Cady’s accelerating babble, “she was bled out and cold, dead on a stone slab under a sheet, a couple of thousand years from here.”

  “But we fixed that!” Cady protested. “I had coffee with her this morning. Coffee! With pastries. She’s alive. Even though she ate my danish.”

  “But she was killed, wasn’t she.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “She’s alive,” Cady said. “We replayed that level, Smith. Rebooted her. Whatever. She’s good. And she has no idea what’s happening, and that’s how it’s going to stay.”

  He showed her his open hands. Nothing to hide here.

  “No argument from me on that score, Ms Cady. But the reason Chumley found us was because we stirred things up. That’s what them fellers do. They got themselves a wholly unnatural facility for sensing when the pot’s been stirred at some time and place, and then, afore y’know it, you got some murderous Chumley comin’ at you with axes in his eyes, lookin’ to put you under.”

  “And that’s why we need all this stuff, Smith,” Cady said. “If we can camp out, stay under the radar, avoid making waves or ripples or whatever it is that attracts their attention, we can totally do this. We can get you home. I can figure out the control scheme for the watch… for both of them,” she added. “And we can get ahead of these guys. Right now we have nothing to trade. Zero leverage. They don’t just want the watches. They want us dead. Gone from history. Erased. They want their secret made secret again.”

  “I’ll grant you’re not wrong, not about that,” Smith conceded. “But I would be happier if’n we was travelin’ somewhat lighter and more inconspicual than this.”

  He nodded at all the kit on the hotel room carpet between them.

  “This is light,” Cady assured him. “And we’ll be inconspicuous. You’ll be glad of it when we get there. New England in lat
e autumn? Come on. We need these Arctic-rated sleeping bags. And a whole heap of Netflix.”

  “We’re stayin’ in a tavern in Boston,” Smith reminded her. “The Red Lion. It has clean beds and hot boiled water.”

  “It’ll be 1692, Smith. We’re gonna need some Netflix… and more chocolate.”

  2

  They jumped from an empty piece of ground near Elliot Bay. A single cruise ship was berthed at the terminal, which was busy with service vehicles and port workers, but not many passengers at this late hour. The liner, probably headed up to Alaska to cruise the fjords, was being stocked for the voyage. Cady bet the captain didn’t have to put up with anyone like Deputy Buzzkill complaining they didn’t need all the champagne and caviar when there was so much yummy raw seal meat to be had and a tin cup of his own healthful urine to wash it down with. She hefted her pack, which at just over thirty pounds had the potential to get heavy after a while, and lengthened her stride to keep up with the lawman.

  Smith was walking slowly across the cracked concrete of the big vacant lot. It looked from the tire track marks and the small scattered jewels of broken taillight glass that it was sometimes used for overflow parking when the cruise terminal was busy. Coming up on ten past one in the morning, however, it was deserted.

  “Three minutes, Smith,” Cady reminded him. He seemed unsure of exactly where they should stand.

  “Don’t rush me,” he said. “You’re the one says it’s needful we get this just so. And I know I came into town around hereabouts, because I recall a big iron ship under replenishment, just like that one.” He pointed to the cruise liner, strung from bow to stern with colorful party lights.

  “But…” His eyebrows knitted together as he concentrated fiercely on trying to recall as much detail as he could of his arrival in Seattle. Cady chewed on her frustration but said nothing. Smith had not known to mark the exact time and place he stepped into her world; that was a UI detail of the watch that she’d figured out for him. They’d spent many long and difficult hours in the Marriott piecing together his previous wanderings up and down the millennia; an arduous walk to fucking Mordor that was nonetheless unavoidable. Cady now had a small notebook in a ziplock bag with a list of nearly thirty destinations, each tagged with Smith’s best memory or guesstimate of his arrival time, and as precise a description of the locale as possible. The further back he went, the more the guesstimates became pull-it-out-of-your-asstimates, but they’d just have to blow up that bridge when they came to it.

  For the moment, the watch was ticking down to what Chumley had called the ‘golden minute’, or to be massively gross about it, what Chumley had gargled out with an ugly blood clot and his dying breath; the golden minute, sixty seconds on either side of the exact time the watch and its bearer arrived at any given time and place. Click the crown twice in the minute before, and you looped back, revisiting your last play-through of the previous level.

  That’s what they were trying to do now, step back through each of Smith’s previous jumps. And if they clicked the crown twice in the minute after?

  You went the other way, Cady knew.

  Or, you know, was almost certain that…

  She shook her head out of the Fibonacci spiral it’d been about to go swirling down. Now was not the time to solve X when X had a value of what the fuck does this thing even do?

  They knew enough, for now. They had to settle on a jump site, and it had to be as close as possible to the point of Smith’s touchdown in Cady’s little patch of the Twenty-First. Another feature of the watch she’d worked out? This time without even killing Chumley? It would displace you through space as well as time if you didn’t keep your shit together. Keep it tight, drop a pin, and jump from that exact same spot, and you should have a nice predictable respawn point. The further away you got from your pin, the more likely you were to find yourself flipping assburgers with Elvis in Area 51 or Moonbase Alpha or something.

  Smith stood on a broken-backed concrete slab, his jaw working as though he was thinking of eating the prickly weeds and scrub grass pushing up through the cracks. A cold wind knifed in off the water, bringing tears to Cady’s eyes, numbing the tip of her nose. She was dressed for winter on the Atlantic coast, so she was warm, but she shivered anyway, suddenly unable to ignore what they were about to do. Where and when they were headed.

  “Smith, you want to leave it until tomorrow night? It’s no biggie. We can just get another room and come check this place out in the morning. Zero in then.”

  He held up one gloved hand.

  “You got one a them torches to hand?”

  Cady pulled a flashlight from her jacket pocket. The coat was fashioned from cowhide and sheep’s wool. It would fit in most places at most times. She flicked on the light.

  “Over here,” Smith said.

  The small, bright circle of LED light followed his pointing finger. He stared at the ground, looked up at the cruise liner, turned a slow circle.

  “Hereabouts,” he pronounced. “Fer sure.”

  “Hereabouts and fer sure don’t really go together, buddy. I think we should skip it tonight and come back in daylight.”

  “Pshaw,” the cowboy scoffed. “This place is lit up like a N’Orleans bordello on the first night o’ Mardi Gras. It’s here,” he said, pointing at a spot on the ground that looked pretty much like anywhere else in this huge, open lot. “This is where I came in and…” he checked the wristwatch she had bought him and synced with her dad’s old Timex, “We got another minute until the window opens.”

  The alarm on the iPhone in her jeans went off.

  All right. They were gonna do this. Cady silenced the alarm, stepped toward Smith, and held out her hand. Smith took it gently in his giant paw. She could feel the great reserves of strength in his grip, the latent potential for terrible violence if he made a fist of that hand.

  But of course he did not. Not with her.

  “Thank you… Cady,” Smith said. “I know what this means, what you’re doing for me and my little Elspeth. I do not imagine I could hope to see her again without your help.”

  This was the first time she would venture outside the small, familiar circle of times and places she had journeyed with Smith since they had met.

  She squeezed his fingers. Each one felt as though it was bigger than her wrist.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Let’s get you home to your kid, and both of us free of the fucking magic watch Nazis.”

  She took a last breath in the Twenty-First, but not too deep, because the cold air burned in her nose and watered her eyes.

  Smith pressed the crown on his timepiece twice.

  They jumped.

  “Well this don’t look like Boston,” Smith said.

  “No shit, Captain Obvious. It’s a cow field,” Cady said. She’d prepared herself to behold the colonial era township of wooden shacks and muddy, unpaved streets. “You know how I figured that out? Because I’m standing in a field, in a steaming pile of cow poop, and that fucking cow over there is laughing at me.”

  Cady pulled her boots, her beloved Doc Martens, out of the freshly laid cow pat. The nasty-ass country pancake was steaming. Her boots were steaming. And ever the girl with the short-burning fuse, Cady was getting hot under all of her layers, too. Wherever they’d jumped, it was even colder than the waterfront back up in Seattle, and there was no sign of a major settlement anywhere nearby. Just a line of wooden fence posts in the distance and that smart-ass cow totally fucking rinsing her. She grimaced and rubbed off as much of the cow pat as she could.

  “Whoa there,” Smith said. “You hear that?”

  “What? The bustle and hubbub of a thriving colonial port town? The merry clink of tankards down at the Boston waterfront alehouses of which you spoke so fondly, Marshal? Why no. I hear cows mooing. And not much else.”

  “Hush up and attend,” he muttered.

  They were out in the open, standing in a grassy field at the base of a hill that climbed away to… What? The n
orth? Cady slipped one of the backpack straps off her shoulder, meaning to fetch her compass from the front pocket where she’d stashed it, following the instructions on The Survival Blog or The Lone Wolf or somewhere to ‘pack for urgency and frequency of use’. Before she could open the leather tie-downs—they’d had to avoid packs with zippers in case some asshole in the Dark Ages decided zippers were Satan’s baby teeth or something—Smith laid a hand on her arm.

  He had his pistol drawn and raised one finger to his lips.

  Cady’s heart leaped in her chest and she forgot about the smirking cow and the steaming poop. All of a sudden she seemed to drop into the world, into this world, for real. A data dump rushed in through her senses, a broadband tsunami of images, smells and sounds. She noticed the quality of the daylight, gray, weak, and fading it seemed toward dusk. She felt the chill of the air pinching at her exposed skin, and beyond the stink of manure she could smell the freshness of pasture, and a faint pine scent on the breeze. Birds flocked in thick, black clouds of impossible size and density, swooping and turning with a collective will. She spotted a column of woodsmoke; first one, and then another and another and soon she could no more unsee the evidence of so many small, discrete fires, almost certainly set in the hidden hearths of nearby cottages, than she could unhear the faint cries and shouts on which Smith had cautioned her to attend.

  It was hard to get a fix on the direction. The voices, indistinct but excited, rolled in on them from every direction, flowing through the channels and gullies of the undulating countryside like water seeking a path to follow. Smith’s face was dark, his forehead deeply mapped by worry lines.

  He put one finger to his lips and passed her his Colt, before easing the Winchester rifle to his shoulder. The pistol was heavy and Cady did not like touching it.

  She’d playfully dissed him about the rifle back in Seattle. He’d got his panties into a bunch over all the travel tech she was taking, but her stuff was stowed away in a hand-stitched leather backpack that wouldn’t draw the eye in any of the outer provinces of Skyrim, let alone the early American colonies. Smith’s beloved old rifle had a soft hide cover, but he’d refused to sheath it for the jump, insisting that the extra second or two needed to unwrap the weapon might mean the difference between living and dying.