by Ben Jeapes
'Stay right there,' said a woman's voice.
'Hi, Su,' Rico called. 'What kept you?'
'Rico!' A grinning Su came forward out of the darkness, tucking her synjammer into her belt. A man followed close behind. 'Well, you truly buggered up, didn't you?' He held his arms out and she fell into a hug.
'At last,' Asaldra said. His strength seemed to be returning. 'What kept you?'
'Shut up, you're being rescued,' Rico said. 'This is Mr Asaldra, if you hadn't gathered.'
'I'll just deal with the other one,' said the man, and he took a step forward. Alan moved in a blur, and then the synjammer was lying in the grass ten feet away and the man was on his front, hands pinned behind him and face pushed into the ground by Alan crouching on top of him.
'No one,' Alan said, 'deals with me.'
'You understood me?' the man wheezed. 'But how . . .'
Rico and Su stood watching the little tableau, Rico with his arm round Su's waist. 'Brains are still a priority in recruiting Specifics, I see,' Rico said cheerfully
'He's the correspondent you were briefed on,' Su said, and it was obvious she was trying not to laugh. 'You are RC/1029, I take it?'
'At your service.' Alan stood up and let the Specific pick himself up in his own time.
'Op Bera was about to do a quick edit on you.'
'That's happened once too often for my liking,' said Alan.
'Correspondent?' Asaldra said. Alan gave him a look of pity and contempt.
'You still don't get it, do you, Herbert?'
'Who?' said Rico.
It took a moment to sink in. 'You?' Asaldra said. The sheer horror in his tone suggested he had gone pale in the moonlight.
'Don't worry, I think I've had my revenge.'
'Can I interrupt?' Bera was climbing to his feet. He glowered at Alan, but when he picked up the synjammer he simply put it away in his fieldsuit. 'Op Garron, Mr Asaldra, you've been identified and now we have to get to the recall field. As for you . . . our orders don't cover you.' Rico stepped in front of Alan, just in case Bera still intended to take the initiative in dealing with a rogue correspondent. Bera snorted. 'But there's no way you come with us,' he said.
Alan shrugged. 'As I understand it, if I go back with you, I'm still a criminal or a misfit. If I go back on Recall Day I've done my sentence. I'll hang around a bit longer.'
'Well . . .' said Rico, and stopped. He and Alan hadn't had the best of relationships but he had found himself liking the correspondent, and if they ever saw each other again, to Rico it would be twenty-seven years in the future. 'Goodbye, then. Some of it was a pleasure.' They reached out to shake hands.
A thin, high-pitched gnat's whine drifted through the quiet night air from the direction of the hall. Rico recognized the noise – a helicopter's engine starting up.
Alan was glancing back at the hall. 'No one was scheduled . . .'
Another whine, and another. Rico remembered the three helicopters parked on the lawn outside the hall.
'There's an alarm going!' Alan exclaimed.
'I don't hear anything,' Bera said, straining his ears.
'Of course you don't, but trust me.' He swung on Rico. 'I thought you said your people would fix everything!'
'They'll have left everything as it was, minus the Home Time element,' Bera said.
'Everything?'
The whine turned into a throaty mechanical roar as the first helicopter lifted off and its searchlight impaled the darkness.
'Well, yes.'
'Including Matthew Carradine lying unconscious in his study,' Alan snapped. 'Brilliant work!'
'But they won't be looking for us,' said Su.
'No, they'll be looking for Matthew's PA who drugged him.'
The Home Timers turned for a final look back at the hall. The three helicopters were in the air, each spiralling out from the hall in a different direction. One of them was turning towards them.
'Then let's get to the recall field now,' Bera said. He set off into the trees at a light trot. Rico, Su and Asaldra turned to follow him.
As did Alan.
'I said you couldn't come!' Bera snapped as the leaf canopy blocked out the sky.
'I won't get out of the estate in my car,' said Alan. 'I'm taking the long way. And by the way, those choppers all have infra-red detection equipment.'
'We've got fieldsuits. We can block that out,' Bera said.
Su nodded at Rico and Asaldra. 'These two can't.'
They glanced back. Like a squadron of metallic valkyries, the three helicopters were now flying towards them in line abreast, searchlights like lances through the dark.
'Oh, shit !' Bera said. 'Run. And you –' he pointed at Alan – 'go somewhere else or I use the synjammer.'
They ran, pounding through the undergrowth. Branches slashed at Rico's face, brambles reached out to trip him. Bera and Su were drawing ahead.
'Come on!' Su urged from up front.
'You can see! I can't!' Rico shouted. Just behind him he could hear Asaldra, similarly unequipped and crashing through the undergrowth. He ducked to avoid a particularly large branch and ran into a trunk. He fell back onto the ground, dazed.
A pair of strong hands grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet.
'You go on,' Alan called. 'I'll bring him. Come on, Mr Garron.'
'I've got you,' Su said behind them. She was talking to Asaldra, not Rico. 'Just follow me.'
For just a few moments, Su and Alan used their enhanced vision to guide Rico and Asaldra through the dark, but then light burst onto the scene as the three helicopters finally reached them and bright white light blazed down through the canopy. The downdraft of the rotors picked up the mulching leaves and swirled them about in the roar of the three engines. Branches and shadows whipped about in a crazed dance that made the going even more hazardous.
'Remain where you are.' An amplified voice echoed over the engine noise. 'We have picked you up and you can't escape. The estate is sealed off and armed guards are on their way.'
'Yeah, yeah,' Rico muttered. The three machines were directly overhead, all jostling for position and the glory of catching the fugitives, and the noise was deafening. Helicopters weren't that useful when it came to apprehending people in forests, Rico thought, as he summoned the energy for one final sprint, with Alan still at his side. There was the problem of getting through the branches.
Up ahead, maybe fifty yards off, he could see Bera. The Specific had stopped running and was looking back at them, waving, urging them on. So, that must be the recall point. Bera finally twigged that the people he was meant to be rescuing weren't doing very well and he took a step towards them.
The voice was at it again. 'I said, stay where you are. You can't get away and you're only making things worse. You— look out, you idiot !'
And then there was a crash, and a screech of metal tearing into metal, and the frantic whip whip whip of spinning metal suddenly liberated from its mounting and slicing through the air . . .
. . . And a bright orange whoomph as a fuel tank exploded, and the two helicopters that had collided tumbled down into the trees. The blast knocked Rico to the ground and he instinctively curled into a tight ball as bits of red hot wreckage and razor sharp, twisted steel hurtled through the air in all directions.
He picked himself up gingerly. Ahead, the forest was ablaze, an inferno that he could never get through. The flames lay between him and the recall point.
'Close one,' he commented, looking over at Alan. 'That was . . .'
He stopped. Alan was lying still. Rico reached over and prodded the man's shoulder. Still nothing.
With his heart in his mouth, Rico turned Alan over. The correspondent's chest was one large hole, gouged out by a piece of wreckage. Alan's eyes were open and blank.
Rico's world went cold and empty.
'Oh no,' he breathed. 'Oh, no. Please. No.' He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms round them, and he sat and looked at Alan.
'Ric
o?' A gentle hand on his shoulder. He took it and squeezed it, without looking up.
A thousand years, almost. War, plague, famine and Europe's Middle Ages – this man had come through them all. Convicted by the Home Time for who knew what misdemeanour, sent back to serve his sentence, innocently trusting his far-future masters, used and abused by them right from the start . . .
And it ended in a forest, with a lump of helicopter wreckage in his chest.
'Rico, I'm sorry,' Su said. He gave the hand another squeeze, then darted a venomous glare at Asaldra. The other Home Timer was picking himself up from the forest floor, brushing himself down, and he couldn't tear his gaze from the body. He had the sense to keep quiet.
Voices were shouting through the trees. Rico didn't move.
'I don't know what you did in the Home Time,' he said, his voice shuddering in his throat, 'but you didn't deserve this.'
'Rico, we've missed the recall,' Su said.
'Uh-huh.' Rico reached out for Alan's left wrist, lifted it up, glanced at the watch there. It was just past midnight. He angled the display so that Su could see it.
'Ah, well,' he said.
'Oh, God,' she said.
A light pierced the dark and picked him out.
'Don't move!' shouted a voice.
'We're not going anywhere,' Rico said calmly. Guards pounded through the bushes, wincing at the heat of the still blazing fire. They surrounded the Home Timers, guns raised, and Su and Rico just looked at them. Asaldra put his hands up and Rico at last felt the familiar feel of a recall field enveloping him.
'Hello, boys,' he said, and all three Home Timers vanished.
It was just after midnight on Saturday 21st May, 2022.
Recall Day.
Twenty-five
Rico came abruptly out of the post-transference daze when someone tripped over him. He was sitting on the floor of the transference chamber, still in the hugged-up position in which he had left the twenty-first century. It was darker for him than it usually was in a chamber because he was surrounded by people who were standing. The man who had almost fallen over him found his balance again and stumbled back into the man behind him, who stepped to one side and bumped into the woman next to him, who . . .
'Hey, hey, careful! I'm down here!'
The person next to him reached down and helped him up. Rico realized it was Su. He pulled himself to his feet, fighting the mass of people around him. The chamber was packed: men and women of all colours, shapes and sizes. There was little talking, not even murmuring. These were correspondents, conditioned to keep themselves to themselves, and not even the fulfilled promise of Recall Day was going to break them out of their usual reserve.
Asaldra was there too and his face was split by an enormous smile.
'Recall Day!' He seemed genuinely happy. 'Well, well. I'm sorry this spoils all those plans you had for me, Op Garron.'
'What do you mean? We're back in the College,' Rico said.
The old smugness was back. 'Recall Day is twenty-seven years after our own time. Assuming they haven't abolished the statute of limitations, anything I ever did wrong is long forgiven.'
'Rico,' Su whispered, and that brought Rico's mind neatly back to a far more important point than the possibility that Asaldra was going to get away with everything. Her face was ashen. Su had left a husband and child back in the old Home Time. Tong would now be almost due for retirement, her kid would be an adult, and to them, Su's non-return twenty-seven years ago would have been as good as bereavement.
Rico wormed one arm round her in the press of people and held her tight. 'Oh, Su, I'm sorry,' he said quietly. She rested her head on his shoulder and trembled.
The doors to the chamber swung open and a voice spoke. It was friendly and resonant with welcome and love.
'Correspondents, welcome back to the Home Time! Please follow the red lights.' A stream of lights appeared in the air above them, flowing from the centre of the chamber and out of the doors. The correspondents waited a moment longer, then obediently began to shuffle forward.
One of them stumbled and caught herself; then another, and another. Rico glanced down. Oh, yes.
'Make way, people,' he called out, jabbing a finger down at the floor. 'Dead person.'
A few curious glances down at Alan's body, but not many.
'Yes, that's right, keep going,' Rico said. 'Follow the light. Just keep moving . . .'
Five minutes later the chamber was empty except for Rico, Su, Asaldra and the body. Rico looked down at Alan.
You're back where you wanted to be, he thought. At least one of us made it.
'Can I have your designations?' said a bright voice. A man and a woman in College yellow stood in the entrance, wreathed in amiable smiles.
'Sorry?' said Rico.
'Your designation?' the woman repeated. 'Is your conditioning at fault, maybe? You didn't follow the lights, you see . . .'
'Don't worry about him,' said the man, following Rico's gaze down to the body. 'We'll get a clean-up squad to take care of him.'
Rico bristled. 'He will be buried with full College honours,' he snapped. The two stewards took a step back, presumably not expecting that sort of tone from a returning correspondent, let alone a correspondent who knew what the College was. 'He will not be cleaned up. Got that?'
'I, um . . .'
'Please excuse my colleague, he's prone to overexcitement.' Asaldra stepped forward. 'My name is Hossein Asaldra; these two individuals and I were accidentally caught up by the general recall. Do you have any instructions concerning us?'
'Mr Asaldra?' said the woman. The two stared at him as if he had just announced his divinity to a waiting world. Rico had the horrid feeling they were about to fall down at his feet and worship. 'Yes, of course we do! And you two must be Ops Zo and Garron? Do come with us.'
'We'll see your friend is, um, looked after, Op Garron,' the man said. Rico let his gaze hold the man's eyes just long enough to impart an idea of what would happen if his friend was not looked after, and ushered Su after the woman. Asaldra had already stepped boldly forth.
The arrival scene in the chamber had been a microcosm of what was going on out in the main hall. Every chamber on every level was disgorging correspondents. ('If your designation is BC, please follow the blue lights. If your designation is AD, please follow the green lights.') No one seemed to be bothering with decon – Rico imagined this quantity of people would overwhelm the automatic systems and every correspondent would get individual treatment instead. He whistled and it was a strangely loud noise, because despite the quantity of people, the only other sound apart from the background announcements was shuffling feet and jostling bodies.
'Did we leave anyone upstream at all?' he said. The woman didn't catch his meaning.
'Oh no, all our people will have been recalled,' she said. Then, to the air: 'I have Mr Asaldra and his companions here.'
'This is Field Op Garron . . .' Rico symbed to back her up, before realizing he was getting nothing in return. Of course: he had destroyed his symb implants back in the twenty-first century. It was the least of his worries right now. And . . .
What exactly was going on? 'Mr Asaldra and his companions' seemed to imply that some fame had accrued to all of them in the intervening twenty-seven years – but to Asaldra in particular.
'Hossein!' An eidolon appeared in front of them. A woman in late middle-age, red- haired, gazing at Asaldra fondly. 'Oh, how I've missed you.'
'Hello, Ekat, darling.' Asaldra's smile seemed more fixed. 'I'm back.'
'And to a hero's welcome,' the Ekat woman assured him. 'Well done.' She gave Rico and Su a glance that seemed to skim off the top of them, then looked back at Asaldra. 'Hossein, I hope you don't mind, but we arranged a press conference and everyone who's anyone is dying to meet you, or at least symb you. If you're not too tired after your ordeal . . .'
Asaldra might have been born for this moment. He seemed to puff to twice his size and his proud smile could have
illuminated the entire transference hall. 'Not too tired at all, my dear. I'll just need a moment to freshen up and then I'm all yours.'
'Just follow me,' Ekat said, and her eidolon drifted off. Asaldra took a moment to look back at the two Ops.
'What did I tell you?' he said quietly. 'I expect I'll see you around.'
And he was off.
It was all too obvious. Asaldra had powerful friends, and they had been laying the groundwork for his return for the last twenty-seven years. Here, he wasn't the not-especially-bright stooge of Li Daiho; he wasn't the man who had managed to be outsmarted not once but twice by the correspondent he had been so ready to use. Rico didn't know if Daiho's work had borne any fruit, but if Asaldra wasn't now the man who had saved the Home Time then he was at least the one who had busted a gut trying.
'Rico,' Su said, her voice still a whisper.
'I know, Su, I know,' he said gently.
'I can't symb. It's telling me it won't accept my connection. I can't even find out about them.'
'Hello, Mr Garron.' It was a man's voice, and familiar enough to make Rico turn quickly. It came from a ball of marker light, hovering in the air behind him. 'Welcome back to the Home Time. And you, Ms Zo.' Familiar, yes, but Rico couldn't quite place it. 'Will you come this way, please?'
Su only looked at the light blankly. Rico still had one arm round her and he could feel she was still trembling.
'Are you with the College?' he said. 'Op Zo has family . . .'
'I know all about both of you,' the light said. (Whose voice was that? It hovered just the wrong side of recognition . . .) 'Please, come this way – that's all I'm allowed to say.'
'Who . . . ?' Rico said, but the light was already drifting off, so Rico and Su forced their way through the mass of correspondents, who were finally being sorted into more specific groupings ('Sixteenth to twenty-first centuries AD, please follow the yellow lights. Eleventh to fifteenth centuries AD, please follow the blue lights. Sixth to tenth centuries AD . . .'), and followed.
