by John Barnes
I considered whacking her with the NIF, too, just for tidiness and that aesthetically important sense of completion, but I figured it was too amusing to see what she’d do now.
The NIF is almost silent—it makes a noise like an electric drill, but just for the instant that the tiny fléchette it fires is going out the barrel, and only about half the volume. Since we’d fired just three single shots, very fast, and gotten them back under cover, no one had noticed the three brief squeaks, or even the three men going over.
“Miss, you’re, uh, going to have to leave the bank,” the manager said, still unaware of the man, collapsed and motionless, on the floor behind her, a gun still held in his limp fingers.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Chrys said to me. “We could go up the street to a bank-card machine. Might be a lot faster than hanging around here—there are going to be cops all over the place soon.”
“Yep,” I said. We turned and went, doing our best to look like any middle-class couple whose day has been mildly disrupted by something that they will talk about for weeks afterward—but that fundamentally doesn’t matter.
Just as our cash came out of the automatic teller machine, the screen began to flash at us. Abruptly, it glowed with three words of Attikan that were the current password, and a PRESS ENTER in English below that. With a sigh, I did.
The screen lit up like a full-fledged video screen, and a grainy image of Ariadne Lao said, “Please acknowledge. Report to the mid-Manhattan gateway immediately. Please acknowledge.”
There wasn’t any microphone on the automatic teller machine, so I figured she couldn’t hear us; I nodded my head at the security camera and pressed the ENTER/YES button.
“She doesn’t look happy,” I said.
“We aren’t supposed to use ATN ordnance on local events,” Chrys pointed out. “So I guess we compromised security. Probably we’re just going to get chewed out.”
“Very likely.” It was the kind of thing that could spoil a day but not more than that; and at least we would be returned to the same time and place we had departed from. That was in our contract.
We were almost there when my beeper went off. “Damn. Just a minute, Chrys, it’s probably nothing much—”
I found a working public phone—always a small miracle in Manhattan, and it took me about five minutes—dialed the private line to my bodyguard agency, and waited a long second for the connection to Pittsburgh.
Mark Strang Bodyguards is a real agency—it was my real business before I started working for ATN, even if it was never a particularly lucrative one. Nowadays it was actually making much more money than it used to, but I didn’t do much work in it; it served as a cover for the large payments that came in from my real employers, and, to maintain the fiction, my two assistants, Robbie and Paula, now ran the place. They’d built the above-ground part into quite a respectable business. It helps to be obviously affluent and have a reputation for being exclusive. People think you must be guarding a lot of celebrities, and they’re willing to pay accordingly.
Paula answered the phone, as I expected. “Boss, it’s Porter. She was attacked after her Oslo concert. She wasn’t hurt, but Robbie was—it wasn’t serious, but they’ve got her in the hospital for observation, in case it’s a concussion. I’ve made sure your Dad and Carrie are covered, and I’m going over there as soon as I can.”
My gut sank like I’d swallowed a frozen brick. “Right,” I said. “What’s the situation on coverage for Porter?”
“Three reliable backups are on it, and as soon as she’s over into Germany we have full police security. She got on the chartered plane because Robbie insisted, so she’s in the air right now.”
Not great but better than nothing. “Okay,” I said, thinking furiously. “Tell Robbie to get better fast, or she’ll have to answer to me. Do you know what the injuries were?”
“Just a bad beating, it sounded like. No kidney damage, one cracked rib for sure. They want to hold her for observation. I think she’ll be okay.” Paula and Robbie have been the closest of partners since I’ve known them, and that’s some years now. Paula must have been frantic, but she didn’t let it show in her voice.
“Well, get over there and make sure,” I said, completely unnecessarily. “And you be careful, too, you hear? I want both of you up and well.”
“Probably you should know, too, boss,” she said, very slowly and carefully, “that Porter is why Robbie is alive. She, uh, made use of that .38 you trained her with. Took down two of them while they were busy beating Robbie.”
“Is Porter okay?” I asked.
“As okay as you can be, I guess.” I could hear the resignation in Paula’s voice. “She’s not one of those people that enjoys killing, boss, I suppose you’d say. And she didn’t damage her hand either. She’s planning to play tonight. If I can get Robbie transferred or released, I’ll cover Porter at that concert myself.”
“Don’t hesitate to wave agency money around if it helps,” I told Paula, “but it’s a shame we’re dealing with this in Norway—too many honest civil servants, and they’re too well paid.”
“Yeah, one more complication. I’ve got to get on a flight, boss, I’m most of the way out the Parkway West to the airport right now, and if I get the commuter flight to Kennedy, I can make a Concorde if that’s okay.”
“Of course it is! Use whatever money you have to. We can always get more.”
That was one difference between them; Robbie is a small woman, very strong for her size but mostly just fast as a whip, and when there’s action of any kind, she moves too fast to worry about what the rules are. Paula’s nearly my size and probably stronger, and if it were up to her, we’d have a manual of procedures for everything. (“Terrorist attack: 1. Agency personnel are to avoid getting shot …”)
“Thanks, boss. We’ll get it under control.” It was more from the gratitude in Paula’s voice than from anything else that I understood how worried she was. “Got to run—just turning off the Parkway now.”
“Take care of yourself. Bye.”
I hung up the phone and turned to Chrysamen. “Bad news, and I think we better get to the gate right away.” I summarized it quickly as we rounded two corners and entered one of many midtown office buildings.
“Shit,” Chrys said. “What did Al Capone say? ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence—’”
“‘Three times is enemy action,’” I said. “But I’d bet on it already. Two of those robbers were in great positions to whack us—I think we’d each have taken the round after the guard did.”
“Good thing you’re not the ogling kind,” she said, with a little smile.
“I’m a speed ogler. Got her all ogled before I had to do any shooting. Not that there was much to ogle—all packaging and no product. Anyway, here we are.”
It’s one of those anonymous midtown buildings with offices on the lower floors and apartments above, the kind of place where you always wonder if you saw it in a movie sometime, and you never did. There’s an automatic elevator that goes up a few floors and dumps you into a space where you are facing a glass door with a bunch of names in white on it that looks vaguely like an architect’s partnership, a brokerage, or a law firm. No lights are ever on, so you wonder if it’s closed.
The door unlocks only when an ATN agent, like Chrys or me, or the Special Agent for our timeline, approaches it; just where the gadget that recognizes us is, I’ve never figured out. I never know how any of this stuff works, I just use it. Think of me as a caveman with a VCR; I like the show, but that’s all I can say.
The door clicked open as we stood in front of it, and the lights came on as we opened the door. We closed and locked the door behind us and went down the hallway where, in a normal set of offices, the private offices and the conference room would be. Instead, there was just a blank wall, which turned gray and faded as we approached it, like a perfectly smooth, backlit fog. We walked into it.
It was dark as a deep cave, we were as weightles
s as you are in orbit, and there was no sound at all, not even the ringing of ears or nervous system. For a time I couldn’t define I couldn’t feel that my body was there.
Even, dim gray light came in from all directions, brightening, swimming into focus first as dark patches and then as lines and shadows, color adding suddenly. At the same time a low rumble, an octave below a sixty-cycle hum, swelled in my ears, and then cut off abruptly when the colors came back.
The world around us turned into the early-twenty-ninth-century Athenian timeline, in a perfectly ordinary reception room for a gate.
Ariadne Lao was waiting for us. She looked grim, and worried—and not at all like we were about to get reprimanded.
“We’re under some kind of Closer attack,” she said, “and whatever it is, it’s put all our connections to our own future into flux. I’m getting the senior Crux Ops together to try to formulate a plan of action, and it’s a relief every time any of you comes through the gate. There’ve been attacks on Crux Ops in almost every timeline so far.”
“Ours too,” I said. “We think on us, and for sure on Porter Brunreich.”
She nodded grimly. “We’ve lost nineteen Crux Ops that I know of, dead, injured, or seized. Six critical people have died in timelines we were watching. And we can’t contact our own future much beyond the next few weeks. Whatever it is that’s happening, it’s big.”
2
There were more than a thousand Crux Ops in the auditorium for the meeting, and security around us was amazing. Instead of the usual meeting place, the giant space station Hyper Athens, which hangs over the equator on the same line of longitude as the city of Athens, we were on the back side of the moon at the Earth System Defense base. The whole moon was under guard—heavily armed warships orbited it in a complex dance, every ship on red alert, waiting for trouble. The base itself was ringed with robot and human defenses, and the building the auditorium was in was crawling with crack security forces.
And then again, the strongest security of all was what was in the auditorium itself. Crux Ops are deadly in a fight, and there was no nonsense about checking arms at the door—first of all, most Crux Ops would rather check their pants, or kilts or togas or whatever. Secondly, if we weren’t capable of making faster and more accurate decisions about what to shoot and when than anybody else, we wouldn’t be Crux Ops. So if anyone, particularly any Closers, were stupid enough to come in shooting with ground forces, there was going to be a hell of a fight, and they were going to lose.
On the other hand, if they knew our exact location, a gate might pop open and a tactical nuke might take care of the whole thing. Closers have a horror of nuclear weapons in any system they might occupy, but in purely enemy territory that position tends to be flexible.
A few of the Crux Ops filing in were old comrades, people Chrys and I had worked with on one mission or another, but mostly they were strangers. ATN operates across millions of timelines, and for most of them it can only spare the once-in-a-decade or so visit of a Time Scout; an important one might have a Special Agent assigned to it permanently. Crux Ops normally go in only when the regular forces are put out of action, like when expected transmissions from a Special Agent fail to show up. So the half million Time Scouts and fifty thousand Special Agents are backed up by fewer than ten thousand Crux Ops, and since it’s an occupation in which people tend to die, living long enough to get to be a senior Crux Op is rare.
Generally we operate alone or in pairs—Chrys and I had been lucky enough to be assigned as a permanent pair, partly because it seemed like a good idea to Ariadne Lao and mainly because they had owed us a whole lot of favors, and we’d insisted on it.
Even though few of us knew many of the others, all of us knew a few, and the room was buzzing with conversation and little, happy noises as people greeted each other. There were four people there from our class at COTA, the Crux Op training camp, but they were all talking to other people. Over on one side was Roger Buckley, a guy about my age who happened to be from a timeline descended from the very first timeline in which I had intervened, a guy who had at first approached me about the same way I would approach George Washington.
In fact, George Washington was there, from a timeline where we’d recruited him because there was no United States to need a president, and the Empire was at peace, so King George didn’t need a general. I knew him slightly—I waved to him, and he nodded in his usual formal, correct way. He looked to be a bit past fifty, but with ATN’s advanced medicine, he had all his teeth and was as strong and healthy as anyone. Scuttlebutt among the Crux Ops was that now that he wasn’t the father of his country in his own timeline, he’d been fathering a lot of other countries in other timelines, and from the way Chrys muttered, “God, he looks great,” I was inclined to believe rumor.
Over to one side, unsmiling, grim as death (but that was usual), and looking just a little worried (which was new), was General Malecela, Ariadne Lao’s boss whenever he wasn’t personally supervising training, who most of us held in awe.
There was the usual array of social stuff—several hundred flavors of tea, coffee, chicory, maté, chocolate, and tisane, a dozen different kinds of breads, and, for those who wanted them, more kinds of beers and wines than you’d ever have imagined possible. For Chrys and me it was still early morning—we discovered they had grabbed everyone we talked to from sometime shortly after breakfast—so we weren’t particularly inclined to get alcohol, but I noticed that even people from timelines where booze at breakfast is normal were passing it up. People wanted to be alert; this was an unprecedented event.
We found seats. “It’s been a long while since we’ve been back here,” Chrys said. “At least we know they’re not bringing us in here for a chewing-out.”
Another hour went by as people trickled in, but none of the additions were people we knew. I realized after a while that no one was going to ask anything—“Whatever happened to X” or “Surely Y must be a senior agent by now”—because the likely answer was grim.
That got my mind turning back to the things Chrys had said, either last night or eight hundred plus years ago or however many years that was sideways, depending on how you counted. Look around the room, and you could figure that though there were a few hundred of us here, very few would die peacefully. Most of us would be blown up, burned to death, shot, skewered, poisoned … it was a room full of targets-to-be. Hell, I had killed a version of myself that had gone over to the Closers, stamped on his fingers as he clung to a ladder until the bones broke, and he fell to his death.
Or should I have thought, Until I fell to my death?
It’s the nature of people who face danger regularly that they’re convinced that bad luck is something that always happens to everyone else. They can look at statistics that say that every single person in their line of work dies by violence sooner or later, and shrug and say that after all, I’m still alive, I’m not dead yet, many times I’ve been places where I could have been killed, I could have died a lot of times and I haven’t, and so on and so forth. After all, they’re fighters and adventurers, not insurance actuaries, not statisticians.…
And the thought that came to me then was that I had been thinking “They.” When more accurately it should have been “We.”
I was like that myself, and so was Chrys. If we were rational, we’d have known that the way we lived was more dangerous than skateboarding on freeways. As it was, we both figured that the life-extension drugs would give us our full two hundred-plus years, instead of figuring the obvious thing—that ATN gave us the drugs because that way we could be young, fast, strong, and sharp for as long as we lasted—and that still would be a matter of a decade or two at most.
Most of us senior Crux Ops were like the old people you sometimes run into, heavy smokers and drinkers who are pushing ninety and therefore figure they’re never going to die. The fact is that if you put enough people through a process that only kills most of them, there will be a few that last a long time, just as,
if you roll dice long enough, you will come up with any roll you like as many times in a row as you want. You just can’t say when it will happen or how long it will all take, and you certainly can’t say which it will be. But the lucky dice are not the especially virtuous or smart or strong dice—they’re just lucky.
And the three-pack-a-day man who makes it to ninety-two is just the last one of his group to die, because everyone dies eventually, and his group died early. In a normal group the last guy to die would have been over a hundred.
So a senior Crux Op … I decided I didn’t like the trend of thought, and told myself to give it up.
Now, none of us was a volunteer “for the duration”—at least half the people in the room had enough time in to resign or retire if we wanted to. Chrys and I did, for that matter. But the war with the Closers is a total war, about as total as it gets, and neither side recognizes retirement. You can decide to go off somewhere, even to go across time to some timeline the other side has never discovered—and chances are still pretty good that one day your car blows up, or in your luxury suite on your spaceliner bound for Mars someone barges in and shoots you, or the stirrup cup some groom hands up to you is poisoned.
It doesn’t matter to them that we retire. Why should it? It doesn’t matter to us. If I had known that the other Mark Strang, who worked for the other side, had retired to grow roses and learn the harpsichord, I’d still have been perfectly happy to cut his throat.
The only difference retirement or resignation makes is that nobody is looking out for you. They no longer check to see if you’re okay, and when the inevitable happens there’s no revenge for you, no investigation …
You’re going to die the same way regardless, so you might as well get a few licks in.
Chrys saw an old friend from COTA that I didn’t know very well, and we went over to talk with her. I stood beside them, alone with my thoughts, occasionally distracted by the animated way Chrys was talking and gesturing with Xiao Chu.
