Time's Chariot Read online

  But it could wound her. It might not get her sent to Reconditioning or the correspondent's programme, but it would be the end to her career.

  And then there was the last line:

  'This need not happen.'

  Murder? Marje had forgotten Rico Garron's strange theories. She had certainly never believed them. But was Li Daiho's death connected with whatever Hossein Asaldra was mixed up in? Surely not!

  And again, surely Ario wouldn't be party to any murder . . .

  But if something was going on that could conceivably make it look like murder, however circumstantially . . .

  Not only embarrassing and annoying for the rest of us but actively counter-productive, he had said. Marje didn't need it spelled out. Ario had presented the carrot, this was the stick, and the end of both was the same: drop the investigation.

  'Erase it,' she said, and slowly made her way to the recall area.

  She thought hard as she waited for the next scheduled recall field, and then as she took the carryfield back to her office. She wanted to get this exactly right. She wanted to reassure Ario (that smug bastard with his smooth talk . . .), let him know everything was OK . . . and at the same time, make it clear there were some things she just would not tolerate.

  She symbed Ario back in her office and he appeared before her in full image. He was affable as ever, as if he hadn't just dropped a hint that could ruin her life if she didn't take it.

  'How can I help you, Marje?'

  'I've been thinking over our conversation,' she said slowly. 'I just want to let you know that I'm examining all my projects, as you suggested, and if I find anything that matches your description, I'll certainly cancel it at once.'

  See? I can talk patrician just like you.

  'Wonderful!' Ario beamed. 'That's a good idea, Marje. Welcome on board.'

  'But there is something that might upset you, personally, and I have to say it.'

  Ario's smile suddenly turned into a good humoured mask over a very wary face.

  'Yes?'

  'It's my assistant, Hossein Asaldra. I know you're his sponsor and all that . . .'

  'Yes?' Now Ario sounded both wary and dangerous.

  'I'm sorry to say his performance has been far from satisfactory. I have reason to believe he has kept things from me, deceived me, misled me. I can't have him working for me any longer and I can't endorse his record for further promotion.'

  'He might,' Ario said very mildly, 'have been following orders.'

  'As my assistant, his first duty was to me,' Marje said. 'And this only reinforces my point. Perhaps he was working for some greater good. Perhaps it was one of those things you told me about that nonpatricians simply can't understand, in which case, he should have done it a lot better. He acted in such an unbelievably sloppy manner that I actually suspected, for a while, that he might be involved in something illegal. If he's that sloppy working for others, I don't want him for myself.'

  Ario's eyes were cold. 'I can see your point. And meanwhile . . .'

  'Meanwhile,' Marje said, 'I will continue to act in the best possible interest of the Patrician's Guild.'

  'Thank you for that assurance, Marje. Goodbye.'

  One small victory, Marje thought. One very small victory. Not in the least looking forward to it, Marje symbed Field Op Rico Garron.

  'Op Garron is not in the Home Time,' was the automatic response.

  'What?' Marje actually spoke out loud. Garron had gone already? She propped her elbows on her desk and massaged the bridge of her nose with her index fingers. Damn, damn, damn. When you had just mustered all your courage to sell out, it was extremely annoying to be thwarted.

  She symbed Op Zo.

  'Su, I gather your partner left sooner than I expected.'

  'Yes, a vacant slot came up in the transference schedules. I've just seen him off.' Su sounded pleased with herself. 'Is there a problem?'

  'There—' Marje stopped. If this was as sensitive as she suspected, it probably shouldn't be talked about on the networks. 'Can you come to my office, please?'

  Besides, she owed it to Su not to shelter behind a symb but to deliver this face to face.

  Su's face when she heard what Marje wanted was expressionless.

  'This comes as a surprise,' she said.

  'I have my reasons,' said Marje, hating herself but finding patrician confidentiality a surprisingly easy thing to slip into.

  'Can I ask why?'

  Marje ignored the question. 'I know you're not trained for Specific Operations,' she said. 'All you need to do is go to the arrival point, stay there and symb Op Garron to return for recall immediately.'

  'I won't be able to get there for at least an hour after he arrived,' Su said. 'That's how long he's been gone.' The Register would insist on an hour's interval.

  'I know, I know. We'll have to hope he stays out of trouble,' Marje agreed.

  'And he might have done everything he needs to do in that hour. He might recall as I transfer.'

  'In which case, just come back,' Marje said. 'The point is, can you do it?'

  'I can do it,' Su agreed, 'but he won't be happy. He was enjoying this.'

  'Do the job, Su,' Marje said, 'and let me worry about your partner's feelings.'

  'Whatever you say,' Su said without expression. She stood to go. 'I'll be off, Commissioner.'

  If Su could play formal, so could Marje: she kept her professional, patrician face on as Su left the office. Then she winced.

  Scratch one friendship? she thought. God, being a patrician had better be worth it.

  Eighteen

  The waves rippled a hundred feet below Rico. The cliffs were a dark outline ahead of him and the white shape of the hotel was striking in the moonlight.

  He was grinning with the sheer joy of it. This was more like it. Now to see if his guess was right.

  BioCarr played such an important part in twenty-first century history that as many of its records as possible were archived. A study of the database had turned up a cryptic mention of a senior BioCarr executive and his family having their reservation at the company hotel abruptly cancelled, on their boss's own orders, for some mystery VIP guests who were there for an indefinite stay. The exec had fired off an angry memo to complain. Matthew Carradine had answered personally that this was need-to-know, the guests came first and if this man wanted to keep his pension and position, there was a good way to go about it.

  It was a good clue: Rico just hoped it was the one he needed. He had the date of the exec's intended holiday. He had the co-ordinates of the hotel, and while he didn't have records of the building that had stood at that point, he did have records of the local geography. So, he had chosen a new set of coordinates, half a mile to the west of the original, and thus he appeared clad in a fieldsuit set to full camouflage and wearing an agrav that held him safely in mid-air above the sea.

  The lenses he wore gave him night vision, the sensors in his suit took a 3D reading of the area, and the data from both of them were fed into his fieldsuit's computer and thence directly into his brain. In two seconds, Rico was in complete command of the situation.

  The cliffs were ahead. He set the agrav to a mild descent and forward thrust, and began to move towards the hotel on the cliff top. Primitive flying machines were cruising the area slowly but even in the unlikely event of one of them shining a spotlight directly at him, they probably wouldn't see him, black against the night sky. Invisible electromagnetic pulses were sweeping periodically over him and his surroundings, but the suit's camo took care of them and made sure no incriminating echoes bounced back to their source.

  The hotel was swarming with bygoners. Armed bygoners: the sensors were picking up clear indications of weapons. But then, he had guessed that from the presence of the helicopters and the other security precautions.

  'Attempting contact.'

  What the . . . ? There had been no mistaking that mental brush against his awareness, though it was something he hadn't expected to encounter i
n the field. His computer was networking.

  'We are receiving a signal on the wavelength assigned to correspondents,' the suit symbed at him. 'Should this unit respond?'

  'Negative! On no account,' Rico said immediately, though his heart sang: right guess! Asaldra was here all right. Then: 'There's a correspondent down there?'

  'Incorrect inference. The signal comes from a symb junction in the vicinity that is routinely attempting to make contact.'

  'Scan area for this unit,' Rico ordered.

  'Unit is located in the building immediately ahead.'

  One corner of Rico's vision expanded, showing an infra-red view of one of the larger rooms in the hotel on the ground floor. There was a whole jumble of equipment there and the symb junction was outlined while a crowd of people were gathered about it. It was an innocent item of Home Time equipment, doing what it had no doubt been doing since it got here, which was vainly reaching out to connect with the rest of the world-wide symb network that wouldn't exist for centuries.

  'Identify the rest of that,' Rico said, feeling suddenly cold.

  'Unable to determine function of items indicated at this time.'

  'Can you tell where it all comes from?'

  'Provenance of the items indicated is the Home Time.'

  'What is the man doing?' Rico murmured. He drew up a mental list of Hossein Asaldra's misdemeanours. Item: abused correspondent-derived information. Item: possibly (still circumstantial, he reminded himself, and Orendal was having none of it) been somehow involved in the murder of the late Commissioner Daiho. Item: made contact with a correspondent. Item: engaged in unauthorized transferences. And now, item: runs guns to the natives. Dangerous, stupid and very illegal.

  'He's not in this alone,' he muttered with a sudden realization. Any one of the above, an aberrant individual of the Home Time might get up to . . . but all of it? There was just too much happening. And that probably meant there were more Home Timers down there too. Maybe they were those people he could see around the equipment. God, he hoped they were Home Timers: the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

  Rico scowled and set the agrav to descend.

  He touched down gently in the hotel garden, with the trip wires and security beams clearly outlined in his enhanced vision, and moved silently towards the back door. It was wired, too.

  'Get me in,' he symbed.

  'Please place your hands accordingly,' symbed the computer. Outlines of his hands appeared in his vision – one over the door lock, the other at the jamb where the alarm sensor was located. Rico did as he was told and felt power tingle in his finger tips for a moment.

  'You have ten seconds to enter the building.' Rico did so without fuss or delay.

  He was in the staff area of the hotel – a narrow passage, plain white walls – and the lights were on, which for the first time meant the fieldsuit's camo would be compromised. Machines wouldn't be worried that nothing was reflecting back at them; human eyes would. He would be a black, man-shaped hole in their vision and he needed a more visible disguise.

  From the first room on his left he heard happy shouts, just beating the roar of ten thousand voices and a bygoner apparently on the verge of a heart attack.

  'Go-al! And what a triumph that was for this young striker in his first league match, with five minutes to go . . .'

  A sporting event being reported on; and that meant bygoners watching it. He peered slowly round the door. Four cheering men, each with an open can in one hand and the other hand waving or pounding a comrade on the back, never moving their eyes more than a couple of degrees from the screen mounted on the wall. Much more of interest to Rico was their dress: white jackets, dark trousers. Hotel staff.

  'Match that,' he symbed to the fieldsuit.

  'This unit requires a three hundred and sixty degree view of the clothing in question.'

  'I thought you might.' He tensed his fingers and a synjammer slid down his sleeve and into his hand. He stepped into the room, brought the crystal sphere up and beamed it in one smooth movement.

  The four men froze in mid action, then slowly straightened up and sat still in their chairs. Rico grabbed the nearest one and pulled him to his feet.

  'Do you have a good enough view now?'

  'Affirmative. This unit is complying with previous instruction.'

  Rico put the bygoner back in his chair and looked down at himself. The suit's hood retracted into its collar as his body seemed to ripple for a moment, and then he was wearing dark trousers and a white jacket identical to those of the other men. Nor was it just an optical illusion: anyone who handled him would have the feel of the bygoner material transmitted into the nerves of their fingertips.

  The computer showed him a route through the building, based on his previous scans. He quickly searched the nearest frozen bygoner for some kind of identification and came across a primitive smartcard in the breast pocket. He took it, grabbed hold of a silver tray and stepped briskly out of the pantry. He set the synjammer to revive, held it around the door and discharged it, then walked quickly away as the conversations started in mid-sentence again. Why the sports programme had suddenly skipped thirty seconds, he left to them to work out.

  He met his first guards immediately he stepped into the guest area: two of them, either side of the door that led to the staff quarters. His sensors had already told him they were there and he didn't even spare them a look as he walked past. He was in uniform, in a secure area where everyone had been thoroughly vetted already, and the only thing to do was look confident.

  The guards wore no attributable uniform, just black jumpsuits that could have belonged anywhere.

  Rico suspected they were BioCarr's private army, which was actually a slight relief. Officialdom in this era hadn't been alerted as to the Home Time's existence.

  Two more guards came down the short passageway that led to the lounge. There wasn't enough room for them all, so he courteously stepped aside.

  'Ta, mate.'

  Even guards could be human, Rico reflected as he pushed open the door to the lounge.

  'You! What do you want?'

  Rico put on his best wounded face at the bygoner gorilla approaching. He brandished the tray.

  'Just clearing up,' he said, careful to match the accents of the four sports fans. He had spent leave in the best hotels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He knew how good service was done, and that included clearing up at regular intervals.

  'It's all cleared up. This is a secure area.'

  'Blimey! What's all that?' Rico said, peering past the bygoner. It was what he had come to see: an array of equipment, nothing whose function he recognized but whose design was unmistakable. And the jumble of people was still there – bygoner civilians, whose poking and prodding of the Home Time tech made Rico's heart jump into his mouth.

  'Never mind. Now push off.'

  'All right, all right,' Rico said, still in his best hurt hotel staff tone of voice, and backed out.

  'Identify,' he symbed.

  'One symb junction. One field generator. Four fluid regulators. Seven—'

  'What was the overall purpose of that equipment?' Rico symbed impatiently. He was back in the main hallway and he couldn't afford to linger under the gaze of the guards there, so as if it was the most natural thing in the world he headed for the stairs. 'This unit conjectures that the equipment had a biotechnological function.'

  'Can't you be more specific?' Rico asked as he took the stairs slowly, one at a time: a humble servant, all too aware that those guards were still down there.

  'Not with this level of data.'

  He was halfway up. 'Scan the floors above. Give me layout and personnel deployment.' The computer analysed what lay ahead. Most interesting were the four bedrooms, each with an armed guard outside it. Surely, Rico conjectured, if you wanted to guard important people at a hotel then, OK, you would seal off the area, mount patrols, station sentries, throw up a security blanket . . . everything the bygoners had done
. But individual guards on individual rooms? That didn't connect. You only did that if you wanted to keep certain parties apart . . .

  Rico began to suspect he knew where the Home Timers were.

  Two of the rooms were next door neighbours on the landing, with their sentries in plain view of each other. Rico walked past them without a glance. Beyond them lay a small staircase, up to what had once been the servants' quarters in the hotel's prehistory.

  At the top was a narrow and conveniently dog-legged corridor, giving access to the other two guarded rooms.

  The inhabitant of one of the top rooms was asleep, or at least in bed; the other was still awake, sitting on his or her bed, head in hands. Rico chose that room. At the top of the stairs he turned left and walked quickly round the bend in the passage, synjammer already up and discharging before the sentry could say a word.

  The computer told him of three listening devices and two hidden cameras in the room the other side of the door, and added that it was able to feed them false data. Rico raised the synjammer again and slid past the frozen sentry. He threw the door open and a terrified face looked up at him.

  'This one?' said Alan, looking thoughtfully at one of the Home Time modules.

  'That's it, sir,' said the scientist who had reported the event. He had been put out to find that an incident he had tried to report to Matthew Carradine had only garnered a visit from Matthew Carradine's assistant, but he was getting over it. 'It suddenly started flashing. Well, lights running over it. Then it went dead again.'

  'Did it, now.' Alan looked down at the module, rubbing his chin. 'Right.' He moved suddenly into action, turning quickly to the nearest guard and suddenly sounding far more like someone in authority. 'You. Fetch the two youngsters down, get them to dismantle the equipment and stow it for transport. Give them all the assistance they need and do whatever they say. Don't worry, you'll get Mr Carradine's authority.' He already had his phone out and was jabbing at the buttons.