At the Narrow Passage Page 8

  Tracy opened the hatch, jumped to the ground. Starne followed him, and they waited while Kearns and I maneuvered the unconscious Imperial count into position and then took his weight between them as we passed him down. Then we followed.

  "Tracy," I said, "you and Starne help Sir Gerald and go on. Kearns and I will bring these two."

  Kearns hefted the count onto his shoulder, while the others, supporting the British general between them, started toward the hut.

  They didn't get halfway.

  Suddenly the whole area was illuminated.

  "Son of a . . ."

  A voice said very loudly in English, "Hold it where you are!'~

  I shoved Countess von Heinen back toward the skudder with a savage gesture, grabbed for the pistol on my hip, switched into combat augmentation. Kearns unceremoniously dumped the count, unslung his tommy gun. Starne broke into an augmented run toward the hut, and Tracy lowered Sir Gerald to the ground before going into augmentation.

  Rifles chattered from behind the lights. Starne fell in mid-stride, clawing at his chest. Tracy staggered, cursed in Shangalis, jerked up his own pistol, fired, staggered toward the hut, and then fell in his own blood.

  Whoever was firing at us had reactions just as fast as ours and that was a little frightening.

  The whole night was ablaze with gunfire. We aimed for their spotlights. They, whoever they were, aimed for us.

  Sir Gerald, perhaps unnoticed by our attackers, rolled over in slow motion, languidly pulled his pistol free, and fired off two shots as quickly as a nonaugmented man could -- one put out one of the lights and the other brought an agonized yell -- and then took a bullet between his eyes. He'd died in the old tradition. I wonder if he went to school at Eton -- "The battles of Britain . . ." or however that goes.

  Then a barrage of automatic-weapons fire splattered against the dome of the skudder behind me, some ricocheting away, some penetrating. Though the bullets seemed slow to my accelerated senses, they weren't, but I didn't stop to think about the damage done. There was no time.

  I grabbed Sally von Heinen, momentarily cut out my augmentation. "Get him in the skudder!" I pointed toward her husband.

  She looked at me defiantly.

  "Get him in the skudder, or I'll kill you both."

  Most of the gunfire from the ring of lights was now aimed at Tracy and Kearns, who had crawled toward the meager cover of a bush a few feet away. Tracy was trying to pull himself up against the hut, very weakly, and he seemed to be on the verge of losing consciousness. But none of the bullets was coming in my direction now. They seemed afraid of hitting Von Heinen or Sally, or both -- whoever the hell they were.

  I was back into combat augmentation and yelling, "Hold your fire or I'll shoot Count von Heinen," and wondering if they could understand my accelerated voice. I put my Harling to his head so they'd know I meant business. It may have been a poor maneuver, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time. And it worked.

  They stopped firing.

  "Kearns, get Tracy."

  Kearns got up warily, looked around, then walked out into the lighted area, his tommy gun held at the ready.

  He stopped for a moment where Sir Gerald lay, then rose, shook his head. He repeated the same action above the unmoving form of Starne and then went on to Tracy. In a few moments he had Tracy on his feet, half carrying him, and together they staggered back to the skudder.

  "Get him in," I said, then, with exaggerated slowness, gestured for Countess von Heinen to follow. A moment later I jerked the still-unconscious count up and somehow threw him into the craft.

  "Don't any of you try anything," I yelled, "or they'll pay for it."

  I slammed the hatch shut and told Kearns: "Get our asses out of herel"

  "Where?"

  "Back to where we came from, I guess," I said, suddenly at a loss. "Maybe the airship's still there."

  "Okay," Kearns said, dropping into the pilot's seat, snapping switches.

  Then we flickered out of that universe, the inside of the skudder smelling of ozone and burning insulation.

  I cut out my augmentation and fell back, gasping for breath. I was totally drained of energy.

  9

  Pursuit

  The airship was gone.

  Up in the villa and the outbuildings the same lights still burned, and all was silent. There was no movement. In the short time that we had been gone there had been no change, save that the airship was gone. But it would be dawn soon, and someone would come. Imperials, of course. And we couldn't be there when they arrived.

  I turned back to Kearns who still sat in the pilot's seat, cursing savagely.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "This goddamned thing," he said, gesturing toward the skudder's controls. "It's just about had it."

  "We've got to get out of here."

  "Not in this skudder we won't."

  I'd been afraid of that, afraid that each time we flickered from one Timeline to the next we might not make it, that the skudder's drive would break down. I suppose we'd been lucky to get as far as we had.

  "It won't move?" I asked without hope.

  "Not one more jump," Kearns said.

  "Up in the stables," Tracy said weakly. "There're supposed to be motorcars."

  "Kearns, go see," I said quickly.

  "What's wrong with the one sitting in the front of the villa?"

  "Nothing, unless you put a bullet through the block."

  "I didn't," Kearns said coldly. "I was shooting at men, not motorcar engines."

  "Then get it."

  Kearns nodded agreement, climbed out of the seat, opened the hatch and jumped to the ground.

  I glanced at Von Heinen, his wife and then at Tracy, who lay back on the seat, blood flowing down his left leg from a wound above the knee.

  "How bad is it, old man?" I asked in English.

  "Bloody painful, old top," Tracy said, trying to force a smile onto his face.

  I knelt in front of him, felt the leg. The bone was broken and jagged.

  "I could have told you that," Tracy said.

  I pulled a knife from my pocket, snapped open the blade, cut a slit up Tracy's trouser leg, and then cut away the cloth above the wound.

  "I'm going to put a tourniquet on it," I said. "Think you can manage with that?"

  "I'd bloody well better."

  "We'll bandage it and put a splint on it as soon as we can."

  When I was finished, I turned back to Von Heinen, who was making the sounds of a man returning to painful consciousness. Opening his shirt, I checked the compress that Kearns had applied to the stomach wound. It was soaked with blood, but the blood was beginning to dry. Externally, at least, the count had stopped bleeding.

  "He's not going to do us much good dead, old boy," Tracy said.

  "He's not going to do us any mucking good at all unless we get him back behind British lines."

  "How do you suggest we do that?"

  "I don't know," I answered slowly. "We'll take the motorcar and see if maybe we can get back down into Beaugency. It may be that the attack has broken up the German lines enough for us to get through."

  I stopped for a moment and listened. The staff car that sat in front of the villa coughed to life, sputtered, then began to run smoothly. From a great distance, to the south, I could bear the infrequent boom of a howitzer, occasional small-arms fire, but from the sounds the real battle was over. Exactly what the British had accomplished, I couldn't even begin to guess, other than get us through the Imperial lines. But unless we could get back through, even that wasn't going to do us much good.

  I tuned back to Sally von Heinen.

  "Who were those men?" I asked her slowly, coldly.

  "What men?" she asked, her face showing nothing but hatred for me.

  "Those men who tried to rescue you and the count."

  "How should I know?" she asked. "I don't even know where we were."

  "Shit!"

  "What do you mean,
Eric?" Tracy asked.

  "There shouldn't have been anybody there but our people," I said, "in that Line. According to Kar-hinter, there wasn't supposed to be another human being alive within a hundred miles -- and the surviving natives of the Line don't have spotlights, rifles, and combat augmentation."

  "Then you mean they were Timeliners?"

  "You got any other ideas?"

  "No, but -- Timeliners, Eric?"

  "It has to be. I don't know who or why, but -- hell, you've heard stories of renegades who steal skudders and go off plundering backward Lines. Maybe it was some of them."

  "I've only heard stories."

  "I know, but who else could it have been?"

  Sally might have had something like a smug expression on her face. I couldn't be sure, but before I could question her, Kearns pulled the staff car up next to the skudder and jumped out, leaving the motor running, but without headlamps burning.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  "Get out," I said to Countess von Heinen.

  She did, but carefully, facing the deadly little Imperial pistol that Kearns now carried, the same gun she had tried to kill him with back in her husband's bedroom.

  I helped Tracy over the hatch and lowered him down to Kearns. Holding Tracy with one arm, the other leveling the pistol at Sally, Kearns helped the injured man into the back seat of the car.

  "You wait there, ma'am," Kearns said, then turned to assist me with the groaning count.

  We would have got him out of the skudder -- but we ran out of time.

  A dozen yards up the slope toward the villa the air shimmered for a moment, sparkling like arcing electricity; then a shape formed out of the shimmering, a flattened egg of metal and glass -- a skudder that didn't look like any skudder I had ever seen before.

  I thought about going into augmentation, but didn't know whether my body could take it again just yet. I'd wait and see.

  Pushing the count's wife back toward our skudder, Kearns jerked up his diminutive pistol and fired into the developing shape.

  "Get back in there," I yelled to the woman, crouching in the open hatch, leveling my Harling at the new craft.

  Our bullets, roaring loudly in the predawn stillness, ricocheted off the flattened egg. A hatch opened and first one, then two weapons began to answer ours.

  "Get Tracy," I yelled to Kearns, who stood midway between our skudder and the motorcar.

  "I'll never get him back in," Kearns gasped.

  "Get in the car then," I yelled suddenly. "Get out of here."

  "You're mad."

  A bullet rang shrilly as it struck the metal base of our skudder. I thought about the energy pistol that ought to be stashed inside our craft and wondered if I could get it.

  "Do it," I yelled back to Kearns at the same time. "Turn on your lights, make all the noise you can. Maybe they'll follow you."

  "Crap!"

  "Go on!"

  Cursing again, Kearns jumped into the car, snapped on the electric headlamps, and finally, firing across the hood as he did, he started the motorcar into motion.

  "Stay right where you are," I said to Sally.

  Turning back to the count, I saw that his eyes were open at last. "Sprechen Sie -- Hell, do you speak English?"

  He nodded weakly.

  "Then listen very carefully. I will kill you and your wife on the spot unless you both do exactly as I say."

  "Very well," he gasped.

  "Can you sit up?"

  He struggled awkwardly, but finally was able to pull himself up into a half-sitting position.

  I turned to look out the hatch. The woman was still standing where I had told her to, perhaps fearful of the pistol I carried, but more likely just wary of the rifle fire from the strange skudder that was aimed at the dwindling taillights of the German staff car.

  Then something happened that I couldn't quite believe at first. The thing that I knew to be a skudder, knew to carry the men who had attacked us on that Timeline a dozen universes away, rose slowly from the ground, turned in the direction of the staff car, and began flying a few feet above the ground.

  A skudder that flew? I had always been told that it was impossible. I don't really know why a jet engine or an antigrav couldn't be used in conjunction with a skudder, but that was supposed to be one of the laws of the energies that allow passage across the Lines. Something about the nature of a probability field and its interaction with other forms of energy. It just wasn't supposed to be possible for a skudder to do anything but skud. But apparently what I had been told was wrong. I was seeing a skudder fly, though I couldn't determine what kind of propulsion it was using.

  You know, I think that was the first time I had ever really had a doubt about the omniscience of the Kriths. But just the first.

  Once I got over my astonishment I felt relief. It was a weak ruse -- the staff car -- but it seemed to be working. The men in the alien skudder must have assumed that we had all been able to get into the motorcar and they were going after it. I hadn't expected it to work at all, much less this well -- the whole skudder chasing down the dirt road after the car.

  "Stay where you are, Countess," I said, then gestured for the count to come after me.

  "I don't know that I can do it, old boy," he said in excellent, British-accented, if gasping, English.

  "You'd better, mein Herr, or I'll blow the top of your head off."

  Before leaving the skudder, I went to its controls, opened an obscure panel and adjusted a dial and pushed a red button. You don't just leave inoperative Outtime devices lying around in a world where your presence is supposed to be unknown. We had about five minutes to get out of range before the skudder destroyed itself.

  I reached under the control panel, pulled out the energy pistol that was hidden there and shoved it into my belt; then I clambered out of the hatch, dropped to the ground beside the woman, said, "Help me. Both your lives depend on our getting away before your friends come back. If they come back, I'll kill you both before they get me. I promise."

  I don't know whether I really meant it. I'm not very good at killing in cold blood, but I suppose I thought I would do it at the time. Maybe I would have. But they believed me and that was the important thing.

  The woman seemed to feel some repugnance at touching the man who was, technically at least, her husband, but she did, struggling with his weakened body to the best of her ability. We finally got him to the ground, where he stood, leaning against the side of the skudder, gasping for breath.

  "That wound's going to start bleeding again," I said, "but I don't suppose we can do much about that." I paused. "We're going to the stables up there." I pointed with my Harling. "There'd better be motorcars in there."

  "I don't think he can make it," the woman said.

  "He will if he wants to see the sun rise," I said, noticing the beginning of a glow along the horizon in the east. It was going to~ be daylight in a few minutes. Again time was running out. That seemed to be a habit of mine.

  "Let's go," I said, supporting one side of the wounded man, while his wife supported the other. Together we staggered toward the stables, our feet slipping in the mud.

  The destruction of the skudder, which took place before we were halfway to the stables, was unspectacular, even in early dawn. There was a flash of light and a subdued roar as the metal base and probability generator it housed were consumed. The paraglas dome crystalized and shattered and fell in tiny fragments onto the slag. There wasn't enough left for anyone ever to be able to tell what it had been, no one from this Line at least.

  We went on, the three of us, toward the stables.

  I had had little time to think of my own wound, but I became increasingly aware of it and of the exhaustion of my body from running under augmentation as we carried the man between us. With probing fingers of my free hand I found the flayed flesh, raw and burning when I touched it, the dried, crusted blood under the sodden fabric of my shirt. As I had thought, it was only a superficial wound and though it might h
urt me some, unless it got infected, it wasn't going to be any real trouble. I'd worry about infection later. Once I was sure I was going to live long enough to have an infection.

  It was halfway to broad daylight when we finally reached the stables. Von Heinen had lost consciousness again and the last few yards I had, somehow carried him alone, keeping both my eyes on his young wife, suspecting that she would take the first opportunity I gave her to run like hell. I didn't give her the opportunity, so she didn't.