Overtime Tom Holt

by Overtime (lit)

  Silence. Three blank faces. At least nobody said anything about eggs, or custard, or bananas. If ever he saw that sodding Blondel again, he'd give him bananas all right ...

  The bus slowed down, jolted violently, and stopped. After a moment the automatic doors opened, and the crew climbed out. White Herald, whose turn it was to be Sergeant, took Out the sealed envelope and opened it.

  'Orders of the day,' he said. 'Er...'

  'Give it here,' said Clarenceaux testily. 'You got it upside down,' he pointed out.

  'Reading isn't everything,' White Herald replied.

  'Cretin.' Clarenceaux ran his finger along the lines. 'You have arrived at the South-Western Main Archive,' he read. 'Here, what's an Archive?' he asked. Nobody knew. 'Proceed to the oil well which you will find approximately half a mile due east of your arrival point and arrest Jean de Nesle, also known as Blondel. You are authorised to use maximum force if necessary. Then there's a big blob of red wax with a picture on it. Ouch!' The paper had burst into flames, and soon Clarenceaux was holding only the corner. 'PS,' he read, 'this message will self-destruct in thirty (30) seconds.'

  'Nice of him to tell you,' Mordaunt commented. 'Anybody got a compass?'

  It isn't all fun and games commanding an illicit oil rig in the middle of an insubstantial sea, and unauthorised visitors don't help. To make matters worse, Commander Moorhen was only too aware that he was running about a fortnight behind schedule, as a result of the Mistral Chronologique arriving a month earlier than forecast and the diamond-molybdenum drill-bit breaking, and that there were reports of Warden patrols not a million years away. He was not a happy man.

  'Music while you work,' he said, 'I can handle. But aliens breaking in and coshing the staff just so's they can sing to them is another matter. Take him away and chuck him off the derrick.'

  Sergeant Peewit looked at him and didn't move. The prisoner, for his part, smiled.

  'Come on,' Moorhen shouted. 'Jump to it.'

  'No sir,' said Peewit, back straight as the proverbial ramrod.

  'You what?'

  'With respect, sir.'

  Moorhen stared. 'And why the hell not, sergeant?'

  'Because, sir,' Peewit replied, 'with respect, sir, this here is Blondel de Nesle, and the lads won't stand for it.'

  The biro in Moorhen's hands snapped, apparently of its own accord. 'What did you say?'

  'No, sir.'

  Moorhen hesitated for a split second. They'd done mutinies at training school, naturally, but it had clashed with his violin lessons and so he'd pretended to have a cold. To the best of his recollection, you had people shot, but he couldn't swear to it. Besides, there weren't any guns on the rig.

  'Do you know,' he said quietly, 'what happens to NCOs who disobey a direct order?'

  'Yes, sir,' Peewit replied. 'Regulation 46, subsection (b), sir.'

  'Oh. Yes, thank you. Here, stand back, I'll do it myself.'

  Peewit placed a piano-sized fist on Moorhen's chest. 'With respect, sir,' he said, 'Blondel de Nesle is the greatest all-round entertainer the world has ever known, and the lads said to tell you that if you hurt one hair of his head, like, they'll chuck you down the main shaft, sir.'

  Moorhen was about to say something extremely pertinent and germane when the alarms went off. A second bombardier, very much out of breath, came clattering up the stairs to report that four armed intruders had broken in via the main gateway. Then a grenade exploded somewhere below them, and life began to get extremely complicated.

  'Are you trying to say,' said the Chief Warden, 'that you're attempting to bribe me to let you into the Archives?'

  'Yes,' Giovanni said.

  The Chief Warden stroked his beard. 'How much?' he asked.

  'How much do you want?'

  'No.' The Chief Warden smiled. 'I admit I was tempted, but no. And now I think we'd better have a word with Security.'

  Giovanni was about to simper appealingly when he noticed the CD player and the stack of discs in the corner of the office. 'Of course,' he said, 'the bribe wouldn't necessarily have to be money, would it?'

  The Chief Warden paused, his hand over the buzzer. 'I beg your pardon?' he said.

  Giovanni walked over to the CD player. 'You're a Blondel fan, I see,' he said.

  'What's that got to -'

  'Very impressive collection you've got here.'

  'Complete, the Chief Warden said involuntarily. 'Look -'

  'I could get you tickets,' Giovanni said.

  The Chief Warden's hand moved away from the buzzer. 'Tickets?' he asked.

  'Tickets,' Giovanni repeated. 'St Peter's Square, 1173.'

  'Out of the question. I -'

  'Constantinople, 1201.'

  'You don't seem to realise that -'

  Giovanni shrugged his shoulders. 'Whatever you say,' he replied. 'Of course, if two tickets for the Piazza San Marco gig of '98 made any difference...'

  There was a very long pause.

  'Near the band?'

  'You could reach out,' Giovanni said, 'and pinch the second flautist.'

  'If anybody found out ...

  Giovanni shrugged again. 'You're right,' he said. 'If I were you I'd call Security and have us thrown in jail.' He picked up a framed photograph of a very pretty girl in an official Blondel European Tour wimple from the Warden's desk. 'Your wife?' he asked.

  'No,' said the Chief Warden. 'My, er, niece.' He leaned forward conspiratorially. 'There wouldn't be any chance,' he whispered, 'of, well, going backstage after the show...?'

  Having been blown to smithereens by the explosion of the oil storage tanks (caused by one of their own ineptly-placed grenades) the identifiable fragments of Clarenceaux, Mordaunt, Pursuivant and White Herald were collected by a relief team sent from the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes, packed in dry ice and taken directly to the central works depot, where a team of highly qualified and extremely resentful mechanics were ready to begin work.

  'I mean,' said the Chief Footwright, taking a handful of toes from a cardboard box and sorting through them for a reasonable match, 'what the hell is the point of it all? You spend half an hour getting the right and left legs all nicely balanced, the cornering and the foot wear all sorted out, and then a few days later back it comes, all mangled to cock and fit for nothing but the breakers.'

  'Hoy!' said Pursuivant. The Lead Vocalist, who had just reconnected his vocal chords, disconnected them again.

  The Master Armerer frowned savagely. 'You think you got problems,' he replied, 'you want to try it from this end.' He looked at the mess on the bench in front of him and shook his head sadly. 'The really daft thing about it is the way they try and patch 'em up themselves in the field units.' He placed a spatula under a limp forearm and pointed to it with disgust. 'Just look at that, will you?' he said. 'Talk about a Friday afternoon job. Dunno who fitted that, but he didn't know his elbow from -'

  'You can talk,' broke in the Head Technician. 'All you've got to do is get the bits out of a box and bolt them on. Me, I've got to wire the whole lot in. Look at that, for Christ's sake.' He pointed at Clarenceaux's trepanned skull, which lifted its eyes and scowled at him. 'You don't want a nerve specialist for that lot, you want a bleeding plumber. I ask you! Great big lumps of loose solder everywhere, bits held on with crocodile clips, contacts twisted round rusty old nails - it's a wonder the whole lot didn't short out. And they expect the perishing things to be able to read.' He sighed, adjusted his torque wrench, and went to work on the cervical joint.

  'Right,' he continued after a while, 'that'll have to do for now. So long as they don't use it for competition stuff or expect it to win any Nobel prizes, should be OK for another fifty thousand. Expect it'll get blown up before then, anyway. Close it up, George.'

  Fully restored and operational, Clarenceaux had his permitted cup of tea - more to test the hydraulic lines than to restore him after his ordeal; at any rate, they never put sugar in it - donned his regulation fatigues and went to report to his superior.

/>   'Well?' Mountjoy said.

  'Well ...' Clarenceaux reported. Mountjoy invited him to expand on that. 'Well, sir,' Clarenceaux continued, choosing his words with care, and (bearing in mind that the portion of his brain that handled such matters had been in a cardboard box in the stockroom half an hour ago) doing better than he expected, 'you could say it was a qualified success. On balance, like.'

  'Oh yes?' replied Mountjoy ominously. 'Go on.'

  'Well,' Clarenceaux said - his new sweat glands were working fine, he noticed - 'we got there all right -'

  'Hardly surprising, considering you had nothing to do with it.'

  Since his self-respect had not been replaced (shortage at the supply depot), Clarenceaux ignored that. 'And then,' he went on, 'we found the oil rig, no trouble at all. There was a guard on the gate so we had to use all reasonable and necessary force to get in, and then some other guards came up and tried to grab us, so we, er...'

  'Yes?'

  'White Herald,' said Clarenceaux - peer-group loyalty is an optional extra on the Popular range - 'had got hold of this hand grenade thing from somewhere, and he chucked it at them.

  'Really.'

  'Oh yes,' Clarenceaux confirmed. 'Worked a treat so far as reasonable and necessary force was concerned. Trouble was, it blew the rig up. and that's where we, sort of...'

  'Yes,' said Mountjoy, 'I think I get the picture. Do you think there were any survivors?'

  Clarenceaux thought for a moment. 'Well, not us, for a start,' he said firmly. 'We copped it. Hell of a bang) it was.'

  'So I gathered,' Mountjoy replied. 'But do you think it likely that de Nesle could have survived the explosion? If he was on the rig, I mean?'

  Clarenceaux shook his head, an unwise move considering that the bearings were still stiff. 'Can't see how he could have, sir,' he said. 'Like, we'd heard him singing, right, over the tannoy, when we were approaching the rig?'

  'So?'

  'So,' Clarenceaux continued, 'stands to reason that if he was singing into the tannoy, he must have been in the office building, or near it. And the office building was next to the storage tank. In fact, I seem to remember it was a bloody great chunk of the office building took my head off. Don't see how anyone could have survived in there when the tank went up.

  'I see.' Mountjoy nodded. 'That's pretty good deduction, Clarenceaux. You thought that up all by yourself, did you?'

  Praise was something that Clarenceaux had heard about, even vaguely believed in, like telepathy, but had never previously experienced in the flesh. He glowed slightly. 'Yes, sir,' he replied.

  'Thought so,' said Mountjoy. 'That fool of an engineer's gone and fitted you with a Mark IVb instead of a Mark III. Go back to the sick bay and tell him to take it out again at once. Hasn't he heard about the cut-backs?'

  As Clarenceaux wandered sadly away, Mountjoy turned himself back up to full illumination and considered the position. If Blondel really had been blown to bits ... But that was a very big if. The wretched man seemed to have the knack of getting out of certain death, the way a really dedicated twelve-year-old always gets out of Sports Day. Personally, he wasn't going to believe it until they brought him Blondel's head on a dish; and even then he'd want indemnity insurance. In short, he wasn't sure, and would institute further enquiries. He reached across and switched on the intercom.

  'Get me Intelligence,' he said.

  A luminous white Land Rover was bumping across the insubstantial waves of the Great North Archive. The passengers were not enjoying the experience much.

  'If,' grumbled the Chief Warden, 'after all this, he doesn't sing Ma Joie Me Semont, I'll have your guts for braces.'

  'He'll sing it,' Giovanni assured him, taking his hand briefly away from in front of his mouth. 'I was there, I know.'

  'He'd better, that's all,' the Warden snarled. 'All right, we're here. Now, what exactly are you looking for?'

  'Well,' Giovanni said. 'Actually, we aren't quite sure.'

  The Warden stared at him. 'You commit the biggest crime in the Universe, corrupting a Time Warden, and you aren't sure what you're looking for. What are you, tourists?'

  'We're looking for someone,' Marco started to say, but Giovanni trod on his foot. Too late.

  'Oh yes?' asked the Warden suspiciously. 'Who?'

  'Oh, nobody you know,' Giovanni said. 'What's that over there?'

  The Warden raised his field glasses. 'Looks like a column of smoke,' he said. 'That's odd, this is all water.'

  'Water?' Marco looked out of the window nervously. 'Then why aren't we ...

  'Deactivated water,' the Warden told him. 'It's got all the hydrogen and oxygen taken out. Keeps better,' he explained. 'If you gentlemen wouldn't mind, I think I'd better take a look.'

  'That's fine,' Giovanni said.

  They drove on until they came to the ruins of a stockade.

  The surface of the immaterial sea was littered with mangled scraps of iron; the place looked like a battlefield, or the Hayward Gallery. Here and there lay yellow plastic helmets, boots, fragments of office furniture. No corpses, needless to say; anyone who dies in the Archives was never born in the first place.

  'It's one of those pirate rigs I was telling you about,' the Warden said. 'Looks like someone got careless.'

  'There's somebody over there, look,' Iachimo said, pointing. 'In that rowing boat.'

  They drove over, climbed out and stopped the boat with their hands. Inside was a very frightened-looking man in the remains of a pair of overalls. After a while, they were able to get some sense out of him.

  'These men,' he said, 'soldiers, guards, something like that. I was on sentry duty. They hit me.'

  'Were they Wardens' officers?' the Warden asked.

  'No idea,' the sentry replied.

  The Chief Warden turned to the Galeazzo brothers. 'My men have orders to destroy these places on sight, no questions asked,' he explained. 'I know it seems hard, but you've got no idea the damage they can do.' He turned back to the sentry. 'They knocked you out, did they?'

  The sentry nodded. 'Bloody lucky they did, I guess,' he went on. 'I'd just come round when the whole lot blew up. No survivors, except me. I was lucky; a bit of the fence fell on me and shielded me from the blast, I suppose. About half an hour later a van turned up, more like an ambulance; they took the bodies of the soldiers away. Our blokes just sort of -'

  'Yes,' said the Warden, who wasn't a cruel man. 'Yes, I wouldn't worry about that. No survivors, then?'

  The sentry shook his head. 'None of our lot,' he said. 'No sign of the other one, either.'

  The Warden raised an eyebrow. 'What other one?' he said.

  'Blondel,' said the sentry.

  There was a silence. It probably seemed longer than it actually was.

  'Did you say Blondel?' the Chief Warden asked. 'Blondel the singer?'

  The sentry nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'I recognised the face when he thumped me.

  'He thumped you...'

  'When he broke into the rig,' the sentry explained. 'That was, oh, fifteen minutes before your blokes.'

  Giovanni pushed his way past the Chief Warden. 'You can't be sure it was him,' he said. 'Just a quick glance ...'

  'But I heard him,' replied the sentry. 'He sang, over the tannoy. I'd know that voice anywhere. He sang that big number from the 1189 White Album. You know, goes like -'He hummed a few bars.

  'L'Amours Dont Sui Epris?' the Chief Warden whispered. He had gone very pale all of a sudden.

  'That's it,' the sentry said. 'Dead good, that, especially that bit where...'

  Nobody was listening. The Chief Warden turned to the Galeazzo brothers.

  'Did you know,' he said softly, 'that Blondel was in the Archives?'

  By a feat of great dexterity, Giovanni stood on the toes of both his brothers at once. 'I had no idea,' he said. 'That's awful.'

  The Warden gave him an extremely unpleasant look. 'You're sure, are you?' he said. 'Well, what a coincidence. Because if you'd known he was h
ere, and there had been a chance of saving him ... You realise that now none of his songs were ever written?'

  'Really?' Giovanni raised both eyebrows. 'What a tragedy.'

  'Well ...' The Warden shrugged his shoulders. 'You'd better help me get this man in the car. We'll need him for questioning.'

  Together they lifted the sentry into the Land Rover. It wasn't till he was safely installed on the back seat and propped up on two cushions that the Chief Warden produced a gun and ordered the brothers out of the car. Once they were out of it, but while they were still reacting strongly and making a variety of protests and appeals to his better nature, he slammed the door and told the driver to drive on.

  *

  The choice between being forcibly married to a beautiful but incompatible girl and remaining indefinitely in a coal cellar is not one that many people have to confront. Even Aristotle, whose works cover a wide range of possible moral dilemmas, glosses over it in a very perfunctory manner; and Guy wasn't exactly one of Aristotle's greatest fans in any event. He decided to rely on instinct.

  'If it's all the same to you,' he shouted through the door, 'I'll stay where I am, thanks.'

  'Mr Goodlet...'

  'Thank you,' Guy repeated, politely but firmly. To reinforce the point, he piled coal against the door.

  'You're being rather childish, Mr Goodlet.'

  Maybe, Guy thought. So what's wrong with children all of a sudden? Clever people, children. Don't have to go to work.

  'I'm sure that if we discussed this in a sensible manner,' said La Beale Isoud, 'we could easily sort matters out.'

  'No, really,' Guy said, 'I like it here. So, if it's all the same to you ...'

  'It is not all the same to me,' retorted La Beale Isoud, and there was something in her tone of voice which suggested that her previously inexhaustible-seeming reservoir of ladylike behaviour might be running a trifle low. 'Mr Goodlet,' she went on, 'whether you like it or not - whether either of us likes it or not, come to that - it would seem that at some time in the future we are to become man and wife. I really think that we should be trying to establish the groundwork for a mature and meaningful relationship, and I don't really see how that can be achieved with you in the coal cellar.'