Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  Naturally the NIF in my coat pocket and the SHAKK in its special holster between my shoulder blades didn’t require a permit—or rather they would have if anyone had known what they were, but since they wouldn’t be invented for centuries in my home timeline, they weren’t exactly against the rules. Not exactly within them, either.

  Oddly enough, as part of my cover, I had to go to the bother of having a permit to carry my old Colt Model 1911A1, the basic “Army .45 automatic” you see in too many old movies. Sure enough, both the pistol and the permit were there in my bags, the pistol carefully disassembled and labeled in six different ways to get it through European customs. I carefully reassembled it, checked it out, and slipped it into my shoulder holster.

  “Pretty silly,” I grumbled, “when I’m better armed by far with stuff they wouldn’t even notice, to have to call attention to myself with this.”

  “You’re a bodyguard,” Chrys pointed out, being practical. “And someone took a shot at your ward. It’s what people will expect.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Actually it felt good to have the old overweight piece of iron back on, and at least in my home timeline it does have an advantage that the NIF and SHAKK don’t. If you look at a NIF, you think, “cordless drill” or maybe “kid’s ray gun”; if you look at a SHAKK you think, “super squirt gun sprayed with aluminum paint.” Never mind that the former can knock out an infantry platoon with a burst and the latter, in a pinch, can blast its way into a bank vault or bring down a bomber. (I know, I’ve done both with it.) They don’t look like real weapons, and you have to use them to convince people, and a lot of times you don’t want to use it, you just want to convince them.

  If you look at a Colt .45, however, you think, “This will blow big holes in people.” Which can mean you don’t have to pull the trigger.

  There was a knock at the door. I moved to one side of it and asked, “Who is it?” in English.

  “A friend from Athens.”

  That wasn’t the password. It also wasn’t not the password; it was the kind of thing a field agent might improvise, and also the kind of thing that a Closer agent might try.

  Chrys drew her NIF and covered the door. I gingerly reached out and flipped the dead bolt.

  “Come in very slowly,” I said, holding the .45 level at head height.

  Something was wrong the instant the door opened. Just what was wrong didn’t register, but it was enough to know we were in a fight, and I pulled the trigger.

  A .45 makes a deafening roar in an enclosed space like a hotel room, and that added to the confusion. The door swung wide, and I saw that the body falling onto the carpet was in a short black dress; Chrys’s NIF whined, and something fell backward in the hall. She fired twice more, hitting nothing, though I could hear her rounds wailing off like tiny bees down the halls, looking for other targets. I hoped they were set on stun, so she wouldn’t kill—

  Oh, hell, a maid. Whoever was barging in had pushed a maid in front of him, and I had shot her—

  There was no sound from the hall, and I crept forward to look at the body of the maid. She was middle-aged, gray hair dyed blond, face blue-black, the garrote still embedded in her neck—she had been dead before he ever knocked, before I fired—

  “Mark! That package!”

  I turned and saw that, beside the unconscious man, there was a small cardboard box that could be a shirt, or some pastry, or—

  There was a great flash and roar, and the world got very dark and quiet.

  I woke up very slowly. As I did, I began to take stock … my nightmares begin with the idea of being captured by the Closers and waking up in one of their hospitals. They wouldn’t save my life because they liked me or out of any humanitarian purpose, and I know too well what advanced technology can do to the nervous system. If I was waking up slowly, and in Closer hands, it just might be possible I wasn’t in restraints, and in that case I could kill one or more of them—or kill myself before they got to work on me. The kind of torture they can do, no one stands up to for even a moment; it’s not so much pain that you can’t bear, but the fact that they just strip-mine your mind till there’s nothing left, and you can feel the whole process. Your consent doesn’t really matter.

  Nightmare number two is waking up in a modern twentieth-century hospital. They mean well, but the buildings themselves are nests of germs, most of the available drugs are poisons—and, most of all, our doctors can’t really heal, that is, they can’t make things grow back good as new. And it could be a long time before I got a replacement eye or leg, and if I lost a limb and had to maintain a cover, I’d have to live without the arm or leg until the cover wasn’t needed anymore … bad news, too, but not as bad as being captured by the Closers.

  I couldn’t feel sheets or anything around me, but I could feel considerable pain. So I wasn’t under a twenty-ninth-century pain block, which meant I wasn’t back in the hospital at Hyper Athens. Bad news … that left the more nightmarish possibilities …

  I opened my eyes slowly and blinked twice. It made no difference. I was either blind or in total darkness. I tried to grope toward my face, and my right arm wouldn’t move. Broken? It didn’t feel like it. Pinned against my side somehow.

  My left arm would move but only in a small space next to my body. I was getting the pain localized to the middle of my back, the back of my legs, and a little bit on my head. I was also trying to figure out whether I had been out at all … I could smell cordite, and some other explosive.

  My right hand groped again and found the butt of the .45 under me, dragged it around, confirmed the barrel was warm. If I’d been unconscious, it had been for less than a minute. I knew the worst, anyway. I was buried in rubble.

  I tried shouting, then, and heard nothing right away, but of course all that means is the pile was thick. Besides, from the way my ears felt, I had probably been deafened by the blast.

  When you’re buried in rubble, the big danger is that you’ll make it collapse around your air-space, or make it shift and bend some part of yourself in a direction it shouldn’t go. I shouted for help a couple more times, and then decided I’d work on getting out, in between shouting.

  A lot of slow, careful groping determined that I was in a narrow space with something heavy and soft digging into my back. I was in pain from what felt like bad bruises, but I wasn’t burned anywhere except a bit on my face, and I didn’t seem to be leaking blood. “Help! Help! I’m in here!” I yelled again, waited for an answer, and went back to groping around me.

  It didn’t take much more to determine that my head was in the biggest space I had available. It was hard work feeling around behind me, but what was pushing down on me directly seemed to be a mass of cloth, hair, and wires. I tried raising my head and bumped it on the hard surface above me; a flat stick was pressing across my shoulders, not painfully, but annoying me all the same.

  I yelled again, and heard nothing again. For good measure I yelled for Chrys a couple of times. The bomb blast had had a much straighter shot at her than at me, but she’d been aware it was a bomb sooner … and she’d been by a window. Maybe she was able to duck and cover and then get out?

  At least I hadn’t smelled smoke, and there was air in here, so probably the building was not burning over my head.

  I yelled again, and no one answered. I decided, very, very tentatively, to try to push the “roof” upward on my little safety space. Maybe I wasn’t buried by much, and even if I was, maybe I could get to a better space. And why hadn’t I heard any of the search parties?

  The little space I was in wasn’t much bigger than a coffin, and it took a while just to get my hands under my shoulders to try this extradifficult push-up. By the time I did, I could feel sweat pouring down my back. There seemed to be air but not much.

  I pushed hard, and something gave above me. Dirty, dusty, but open air hit my lungs at exactly the same instant that I realized that there was light, and I could see.

  Forgetting the possible danger, I pushed hard a
nd suddenly everything broke loose, but in eerie silence. I sat up to see Chrys, still clutching her NIF, standing in the wrecked hotel room. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out, and then I reached up, touched my ears, and found blood running out.

  I staggered to my feet. I had been under an armoire which had fallen, open, over me while I lay beside the maid’s body; the “wires, hair, and cloth” had been hangers, coats, and clothes, the “stick” in my back the clothes rod. The great pile of weight had been the shattered plaster wall that lay on top of the armoire.

  And Chrysamen was up and moving. “I can’t hear,” I cried. “My eardrums are ruptured.”

  She nodded and appeared to motion to me, but before I could read any of her signals, she stepped back and gestured.

  A gate was opening in front of us, the gray void forming there. The two couriers who had passed through the airliner bathroom to ATN before—the woman, this time, tanned darker, and with her hair done like Chrysamen’s—stepped out and gestured for us to get in. We did, and it became deep gray, then there was nothing at all, and after a while it all came swimming back in a way not too different from some old television sets—a glow, a sound, black-and-white, color.

  We were on a small receiving dock at ATN’s Hyper Athens spaceport—the overhead view is unmistakable once you’ve been there a few times—and a couple of doctors were converging on us. In a minute they’d sprayed something in my ears to make them stop hurting, gotten us both on stretchers, and loaded us into one of the little electric airplanes they use inside the station (when a space station is tens of miles across, and in low gravity it’s easy to fly, air travel makes a lot of sense). My last thought before I passed out on the stretcher was that I wasn’t going to get to hear Porter’s concert after all, and that I had really been looking forward to it.

  The next morning I was ravenously hungry—the “nanos,” the microscopic machines they inject into your bloodstream to repair the damage, live on your blood sugar just as you do, and they eat up a lot of it doing repairs. I now had two good eardrums again, and in the places where I should have had bruises, the nanos had reabsorbed the blood and rebuilt the tissue, so I was fit and healthy, if terribly hungry.

  It turned out that Chrys had been badly shaken, cracked a couple of ribs, and broken one tooth, so all that had to be repaired on her.

  As we sat and gobbled down the local equivalent of pancakes with the local equivalent of jelly, Ariadne Lao filled us in on the situation.

  “As far as we can determine,” she said, “the attack was coordinated with a couple of people who were going to set up to take down Porter Brunreich’s helicopter. They wanted you out of the way so that they could get a clear shot. We’ve captured one of them alive, and we’re trying to find out who he was working for—not ultimately, of course, since we all know it has to be the Closers, but what organization in your timeline, how he’s being controlled. We may have to resort to mind-stripping, which I’m not crazy about, but …” She sighed and shrugged. “This is important, and we can’t trust him to tell the truth. And we can certainly tell that he is lying to us.”

  “Go ahead, if it’s up to me,” Chrys said. She can be kind of vengeful, but then she really hates getting hurt.

  “I’ll weigh your vote in,” Ariadne Lao said, with a faint smile. “At any rate, as soon as we know, we’ll be dropping you back in to finish the mission—about three minutes after your stand-ins get there. Oh, and we’ve surgically altered that corpse so that it won’t be too obvious that she was shot, Mr. Strang. That way you won’t be doing jail time while the authorities back in your own timeline figure it out.”

  “Great with me,” I said. “I don’t relish the idea of a German jail.”

  She looked a little baffled. “In our timeline, the Germans have an image of being rather sweet, gentle, and ineffectual,” she said. “There’s a comedian who does a routine about German jailers who are constantly worrying that the prisoners aren’t happy.”

  “Not exactly the image I grew up with,” I said.

  A few minutes later we were once again headed back to my home timeline—and though we had spent the better part of a day healing back at Hyper Athens, we were only gone from our own timeline for about thirty seconds, just the time needed for safety. We had just traded places with our stand-ins, and the gate had just closed, when we heard screams and running. I holstered my .45.

  A moment later, there were fifty hotel employees standing around, and the hotel detective was making officious noises. I showed him a huge sheaf of official paper, and while he was puzzling and harrumphing his way through that, the regular cops showed up, and right on their heels the antiterror unit out of Dresden, which had taken advantage of a Bundeswehr chopper that was available at that moment.

  We all had a very good time exchanging stories, and fortunately although the Germans are the people who lead the world in bureaucracy (Bismarck invented it and Weber named it), that does mean that they’ve had a lot of practice and are pretty good at doing bureaucratic things quickly. Also, even though there was a lot to do, the computers were doing most of it, and they move pretty fast—in very little time it had been established that we were both licensed bodyguards, married, legally armed, and here to guard someone’s body.

  A few more checks turned up the important information that we were there to meet Porter Brunreich, and identified both my personal connection to her and the fact that she had already been attacked in Norway. All of a sudden we had crack German antiterror forces surrounding the helicopter landing area, and some serious VIP treatment for Porter.

  In the middle of all the crashing, bustling arrangements, someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned around to see—“Paula!”

  She hugged me, and it was a good thing I wasn’t still sore from the bomb blast, because Paula, besides being built like a bear, seems to be about as strong as one. And a lot meaner, for that matter, when she needs to be.

  “Boss, I’d ask what you’re doing here, but life is full of surprises enough already. I got out here to meet Porter’s chopper, and I found you’d shown up with the German Army.”

  I grinned back at her. It’s always great to have trusted people around, and though I knew the German forces were a lot more capable than anything my agency could have put on the ground, it felt good to have Paula there as another backup.

  That also reminded me that it had only been a day in that timeline since the first attack on Porter, a day since Chrysamen and I had stopped that bank robbery in New York. Time certainly flew when you were having fun.

  We were set up on a parking lot, not at a regular helipad, with an eye to better security. The German troops, silent and fierce-looking, were scattered around, some visible as a deterrent, some undercover to supply backup. The whole area could be brought under interlocking fields of fire at any instant.

  The major in charge of the AT troopers, a quiet guy named Kurtz, who didn’t smile much and seemed a little bemused by the whole job of landing a child-prodigy pianist safely, came over to talk to me. “Herr Strang?”

  “Yes, Major Kurtz?” The chip behind my ear let me speak and understand German without an accent.

  “As far as I can tell, we have everything secure. I am making sure there is nothing I have overlooked. At the moment, radio contact informs me that the helicopter carrying Fraulein Brunreich is a few kilometers away. They will come in low, hopping and jigging near ground level on an indirect route, hoping to avoid the danger of a shoulder-fired missile.”

  “That seems smart,” I said. “And your men understand that if it looks bizarre, it’s probably the enemy?”

  “Yes, sir. Though next to what has already happened I can’t imagine what it would take to look bizarre.”

  I nodded. “I can understand. Nonetheless, I have good reason to think it can get more bizarre.”

  “That suggests that you know more than you have told us.”

  “I don’t know more, but I suspect more. Don’t forget, you’re dealing wit
h an organization—not just an individual but a group of them—who are interested in killing a child because she plays the piano beautifully. If that doesn’t make you suspect more bizarreness may be in waiting—”

  “I take your point.” Kurtz sighed. “Not like the old days, when it was just some liberation army for people you had never heard of. That was comparatively simple.”

  His cellular phone pinged, and he brought it to his ear. “Yes? Good. All right, we’re ready. Thank you. Good-bye.” He turned back to me, and said, “Well, our ‘delivery’ is under way. The helicopter should arrive at any moment.”

  I looked across the broad parking lot; they had knocked down a dozen light poles and hauled them away to make a clear landing space. There were concrete wedges of “New Jerseys”—the traffic barriers you see on highways all the time—set up in zigzag rows, with troopers crouching behind them, on two sides of the lot. The big department store across the way was empty, commandeered for the time being, and behind its dozens of windows there were crack snipers.

  I didn’t bother to turn and look, but I knew that in the highway ditch behind, there were another thirty ATs, all ready for action.

  I also knew that if Chrys and I were to jump in here with our SHAKKs and NIFs going, we could wipe out every one of them before they had half a chance to shoot back. And I knew that if the Closers had it together enough to jump in here—and knew exactly where and what they were aiming for—they could put anything on top of us, up to and including enough nukes to cut Europe in half from the Baltic to the Med.

  I didn’t like knowing that. I prefer operations somewhere way the hell away from people who aren’t in the war—or at least don’t know they’re in it. I guess if you look at it from a certain point of view, all of the possible histories the world has had are in the war. But nonetheless, I think most of the time you can tell a soldier from a civilian, and most of the time you can tell a soldier with a stake in your war from a soldier on other business, and if it were up to me, we’d be fighting the Closers in the middle of the Sahara in some timeline where life never moved out of the oceans. I don’t like the idea of innocent bystanders getting hurt, and even though these guys were armed to the teeth, and sent to guard Porter, in another sense they truly were innocent bystanders. That is, they didn’t know what the hell was going on or who they might be up against.