by Simon Hawke
“But so long as I’m alive and playing the king…” said Finn.
“Exactly.”
“Which means that Michael would have to dispose of me, first,” Finn said.
Sapt looked grim. “I will not try to deceive you, Rassendyll. There will be great risk, even greater than before. But without your help-”
“We’d best get going, then,” said Finn.”l saw fresh horses in the paddock. If we ride hard, we can still get to Strelsau well ahead of them. I just hope that Michael’s thought the whole thing out as well as you have and keeps from murdering the king.”
Sapt looked at him with the wild exuberance of a man embarking on a desperate venture. “If he does,” he said, “then, by Heaven, you’re as good an Elphberg as Black Michael and you shall reign in Ruritania!”
5
Forrester knew he had to move fast. Lucas and Andre would have seen the beam flashes, and with no reason to expect anyone except the Timekeepers, they would fire on sight. It would be embarrassing, to say the least, to be burned by his own people. He turned the Observer’s body over and quickly started searching it.
Christ, he thought, they’re sending children now. He recognized the boy. Bobby Derringer. Mensinger’s grandson. He remembered him from RCS, when he had lectured there on temporal adjustments, part of his regular duties in Plus Time. That had only been last year. What the hell was he doing on Observer duty in the field already? He recalled that the kid had an amazing mind. He must have breezed through RCS in record time. Now he was dead. When were those people going to learn that it took more than classroom instruction to prepare people for active duty in Minus Time? As he stared down at the dead boy’s face, his feelings were a volatile mixture of sorrow, anger, outrage and self-recrimination. If he had fired just one moment sooner-
His searching hands found what they were looking for. Derringer’s chronoplate remote. For a brief moment, he hesitated. The most important thing now was to safeguard the Observer’s chronoplate. He had to get to it at once, but he had no idea what would happen if he activated the remote. The remote would instantly transport him to the location of the chronoplate, but there was no way of knowing what he would be clocking into. On the other hand, if he stayed where he was, he would be in danger from his own people. He knew only too well how they would react. He had trained them himself. That decided him. He hit the button on the small remote, launching himself into a diving forward roll even as he did so.
He disappeared in midair and an instant later, completed the forward roll upon a wooden floor, coming up with his laser held ready in his hand. Before he could even realize where it was he found himself, before he could recover from the dizzying effects of the transition, his ears picked up a soft, chuffing sound and a faint mechanical whirring noise. Instinctively, he fired in the direction of the sound.
The tracking system he had incapacitated had just been zeroing in on him, reacting to his body temperature. It was a small, portable unit that had been set up on a tripod. The chuffing noise had been the sound of its twin turrets firing. In the opposite wall, at the level where his chest would have been had he clocked in standing up, two small needle darts were imbedded in the plaster. He went over to the wall and pulled one out. An M-90 Stinger. Clever. If anyone broke into the safe-house who had no business being there or if someone managed to get hold of his remote and clock in without knowing how to deactivate the tracking system, the M-90s would knock him out for a period of at least 48 hours. You can teach them to be clever, he thought, but you can’t teach them the instincts they need in order to survive. They have to pick those up themselves and no one had given Derringer that chance.
He took stock of his surroundings. It was a small room with a well-worn bare wooden floor and white plaster walls grown dingy with age and neglect. The beamed ceiling was low and there was only one tiny window that looked out on a narrow alley with nothing opposite it except the wall of the adjoining building. A ramshackle bed covered with a heavy woolen blanket stood in one corner of the room. A crude table made of old, scarred oak, heavy and blocky, was stood up against the bare wall to his right. Two wooden chairs were pushed in to the table. There was a large porcelain bathtub, a chamberpot, a sofa with faded and torn upholstery, a throw rug before the sofa, a battered reading chair and an old lamp. A wooden chest of drawers with discolored brass handles and a large traveling chest completed the furnishings. With the exception of the damaged tracking system on its tripod, there was nothing to distinguish the shabby room from any other shabby room in the low-rent district of Strelsau’s old quarter, except for the ring of border circuits on the floor where he had clocked in. The room was on the top floor of an old four-story building. The window had heavy wooden shutters and the door had a decent bolt. Forrester stood still by the door and listened for a moment, then he unbolted it and opened it a crack. He heard footsteps on the stairs close by and a moment later, two people walked past him down the hall, a man and a young woman. The man was stumbling slightly and mumbling to the woman, leaning on her heavily. She laughed in a sultry way and rubbed his crotch with her right hand. Meanwhile, her left hand reached into his pocket and removed his wallet. Derringer had done well in his selection of a safehouse. No one would notice the coming and goings here.
He closed the door and bolted it again, then turned to face the squalid little room. He spied a bottle on the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full, a bottle of Glenlivet unblended Scotch, very nonregulation. Damn kid, he thought, and suddenly tears came to his eyes.
Forrester didn’t know why he was crying. He didn’t know if it was from anger or sorrow or frustration. His emotions, which he had steadfastly held in check for more years than he could count and which had been under an extremely great strain ever since he had received that letter, suddenly let go, like a cable snapping, and he lost all control of them. They came over him in waves-unutterable grief at the death he might have, should have prevented; frustration at his inability to change what he had done; fury directed at himself and at the woman he once loved. Like some manic depressive run amok, his mood shifted with lightning speed; one moment he wanted to collapse onto the bed and sob his heart out, the next he felt charged up with a trembling fury that made him want to batter down the heavy plaster walls with his bare fists. He had Drakov in his sights and he had hesitated. And Derringer had died. Even when he fired, he could not be sure if it was Drakov’s swift reaction or some unconscious impulse that had made him miss the killing shot. He seemed to remember crying out. Had he done that on purpose? In either case, the responsibility was his. He had not been able to kill his own son.
He should have told them. He should have told them at the briefing. He wanted to, but he had not been able to bring himself to do it. He had rationalized. They were the three finest soldiers under his command. They had never failed before. They would not fail now, he told himself. They will neutralize the threat, effect the adjustment, and correct the mistake I made many years ago. Why burden them with the knowledge of who it was I’m sending them to kill? But when they had left, the sour taste of guilt had filled him with immense self-loathing. He had given Drakov life. It was on him to take it away. Elaine-or Falcon-knew that, which was why she had written him that letter. She had known that he would come. It was all there, all the details, she knew it all, even more than he did. And to prove it, she had recounted the whole story for him.
It happened many years ago. The year was 1812 and the place was Russia just prior to the French invasion. He was a young man on his first mission to Minus Time, a newly indoctrinated recruit assigned to the Airborne Pathfinders, as green as a granny apple. The refs had selected that scenario for a campaign, and his unit was floater-clocked into the period for the purpose of scouting out the territory in order to facilitate the temporal conflict. They were to make maps and compile logistics reports. It was supposed to have been a routine mission.
The transition was a complete disaster. Half of his unit was lost in the dead zone c
oming through. Many came in too low and splattered before they could recover from the effects of the transition and activate their floater-paks. The survivors were widely scattered and, eventually, they managed to get back, but it was one hell of a mess. He came through alone.
He had never made transition before and there he was, on his first hitch, in free fall with a malfunctioning floater-pak. He came in way too low and way too fast. He barely had enough time to realize that he would splatter unless he gained some altitude in one heck of a hurry, so he kicked in his jets and that lousy, misbegotten piece of army ordnance shot him right at the ground instead of boosting him higher. It was all he could do to reduce his speed and try to alter his flightpath so that he didn’t corkscrew into the Russian countryside.
He was over a field, traveling at a high rate of speed with a floater-pak that was virtually out of control. He resigned himself to death. He saw the old wooden barn looming up before him and, helpless to alter his direction, he plowed right into it. The barn was old, abandoned. It had seen a great deal of weathering and neglect. Sections of its roof were missing. He went through an exposed latticework of beams and cross-members, managing somehow to turn as he hit so that the pak absorbed most of the impact. It was torn right off him, damaged beyond all hope of repair. He sustained several broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, a broken arm, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, numerous lacerations, and a concussion. Considering the circumstances, it was a miracle he wasn’t killed.
He came to in a hayloft. He could still recall the smell. The hay was old and decomposing. It had rained recently and, with the gaping holes in the roof, much of it was wet. A young woman was kneeling over him, a beautiful young woman with green eyes and long, wavy black hair. She was using a kerchief to wipe the blood away from his face. Her hair was brushing his cheeks.
She spoke to him in Russian. He may have mumbled something back, he did not recall. She remained with him, caring for him as best she could, trying to set his bones and ease his pain. Her name was Vanna Drakova and she was a nineteen-year-old gypsy, a runaway serf. They were both very young, both lost, both scared.
It took Search amp; Retrieve a long time to sort the whole mess out. When no one came after him, he concluded that his implant must have been damaged in the crash through the barn roof. He assumed that he was stranded, marooned in the 19th century.
As the days dragged into weeks and weeks turned into months, he recovered slowly. His bones began to knit, but without proper medical attention, they did not heal properly. Thanks to the drug treatments he had received in the 27th century, he healed with astonishing rapidity, but he would be a cripple-functional, but twisted out of shape. There would be no going back or, in his case, forward to the time from which he came. In his despair, he told Vanna everything.
At first, she did not believe him. Eventually, however, he was able to convince her and more was the pity. He should have kept his mouth shut, but he believed that he would never get back to his own time, much less have his deformity corrected. It seemed important to him that she should know the truth, because by then she was pregnant with their child.
It never should have happened. Strict precautions were observed to prevent just such an occurrence, but Forrester did not react well to the pills they issued in those days. Rather than take the trouble of getting a temporary sterilization, he simply hadn’t bothered taking them. It would have taken a mere couple of days of medical leave, but it would have caused him to miss out on his first mission, and he had been too eager to go out to wait until the next one. He had not counted on being intimate with anyone in Minus Time. The possibility had simply not occurred to him. He had not counted on being separated, thinking he was stranded, or falling in love. When S amp; R finally tracked him down, he didn’t tell them that Vanna was pregnant. They would have aborted the fetus. It would have been the best thing all around, but he could not bring himself to go along with it. Leaving her would be hard enough.
He tried to explain things to her before they took him back. They were kind enough to give him the time. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He could not take her with him and he had no idea what would become of her and of their child. But there was nothing to be done. There were a lot of tears, both hers and his. She gave him a lock of her hair in remembrance and like a fool, he told her that he would come back for her. He never saw her again.
As if what he had done had not been bad enough, there was yet a further complication, something that never even occurred to him at the time. His family had not been well off and it was always taken for granted that he would go into the service. As a result, they had spared themselves the expense of procuring antiaging treatments for him. As an inducement for recruiting, the Temporal Corps provided antiagathic drug treatments for those unable to afford them during indoctrination processing. The drugs were very volatile. It took a long time for them to stabilize. When Vanna became pregnant, they were still active in his system and were passed on to her in his sperm.
Forrester tipped the unauthorized bottle of Glenlivet back and took a long pull from it. He had a son. Falcon took great pleasure in telling him about him in her letter. His name was Nikolai Drakov and, by now, he’d be 79 years old. She wrote that he appeared to be in his late twenties. She ran into him in London, purely by accident-he thought of Delaney and his fated coincidences. He had made a good life for himself. He was a very rich man, a playboy with a well-known reputation, especially for his astonishingly youthful appearance. She even joked about it. In the circles that he moved in, she wrote, he probably knew Oscar Wilde, which raised the intriguing possibility that he might have been the model for Dorian Grey. The fact that he looked so young had suggested another possibility to her. She thought at first that he was a member of the underground, a deserter from the Temporal Corps. In order to find out the truth, she had seduced him and found out a great deal more than she had bargained for.
He never knew his father, but he knew that his father’s name was Moses Forrester and he knew who and what Moses Forrester was. His mother had told him all about his father before she died. She had been raped and killed when Nikolai was just 15. Falcon took him to Plus Time with her. She obtained an implant for him, educated him up to the standards of the 27th century, and indoctrinated him into the Timekeepers. Now things had come full circle.
He was back in his own time again, with her. It was he who had murdered Rudolf Rassendyll, causing the disruption. Drakov was motivated by a hatred which Falcon had fed-a hatred for his father. Forrester could hardly blame him.
Time had bent back in upon itself like some sort of double helix. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, with the Fate Factor tying the whole thing together. Forrester was sure that Finn Delaney would appreciate this little problem in zen physics. He imagined that Finn would be just thrilled to find out who got him into all of this, as would Andre and Lucas be. What could he tell them, that he was sorry?
Nikolai shouldn’t be alive, he thought. He’s a paradox. At the time he was conceived, I wouldn’t have been born for another six hundred years. He should not exist, but he does. And I have to kill him. Or maybe he’ll kill me. One way or another, it all ends here.
He tipped the bottle back again, wishing that Derringer had brought more than just the one.
The large grandfather clock in the sitting room outside the royal bedchamber chimed twice. It was a soft sound, coming through the closed doors, one that would not have impinged upon the monarch’s sleep, but Finn heard it clearly. He seemed to hear even the slightest sound in his wing of the palace and in the streets outside. He lay on his back, chainsmoking Rudolf’s Turkish cigarettes and wondering when he would finally start feeling the effects of the previous day’s exertions.
He had been up since five o’clock in the morning, rudely awakened with a hangover to be plunged headlong into his impersonation of Rudolf Rassendyll impersonating Rudolf Elphberg. He was hustled at full gallop to the Hofban station, put aboard a t
rain and drilled mercilessly in the requirements of the part he had to play. He was displayed to all of Strelsau in a grand parade, crowned king in an opulent and lengthy ceremony, driven through the city in a coach while improvising his way through his first meeting with Flavia, toasted in a seemingly interminable banquet, hustled once again on horseback at breakneck speed from Strelsau to Zenda and back again and yet still the adrenalin rush would not subside. It felt like being in battle.
He realized that the time had to come when it would hit him all at once, fearing that it would come at the worst possible moment, knowing that when it did come, he would have no choice but to resort to that small but no less potent dose of nitro that he carried. He loathed that horrifying stuff. It made him burn like some apocalyptic roman candle. When it wore off, he had the shakes for hours. The sleep that came thereafter was always filled with hideous nightmares that left him wondering at the sanity of a mind that could manufacture such twisted, tortured visions. He blew a long stream of smoke towards the large canopy above his bed and, for lack of anything better to do on this sleepless night, ran over the events of the last few hours in his mind, trying to get some sort of handle on the role he was assigned, a role in a demented play with only the barest outline of a script.
Poor Fritz von Tarlenheim, his nerves strained to the breaking point by his long vigil, almost had a stroke when he realized that it was not the king who had returned with Colonel Sapt. Finn wondered how he would have taken it if he had known that the man whom he first took to be the king returned from Zenda, but who was actually Rudolf Rassendyll was, in fact, not Rudolf Rassendyll at all, but a soldier from the 27th century named Finn Delaney, who just happened to resemble Rudolf Rassendyll, who just happened to resemble the king. Von Tarlenheim had been badly shaken when Sapt explained to him what had occurred. Finn could only imagine the effect on him if he were to have heard the real story.
