by John Barnes
They didn’t stop their nasty little game until he finally gave up in despair. When he just stood there hanging his head and neither their whips nor threatening him with the little flames was doing anything to him anymore, they set him on fire.
It’s amazing how long a human being can scream after you’d think he’d have nothing to scream with.
Vengeful satisfaction and nausea were fighting it out in me; I knew in a deep sense that this was the end of my fight with Blade of the Most Merciful, not just because they were all going to be dead, but because they were going to die in ways that I would have wished on them in my darkest fury, and because so many of them had died by my hand, and more because I’d helped to foil them.
Still, he was human. The screams tore at my heart, and however much my head might say he had it coming, I couldn’t entirely feel that anything or anyone deserved this. And the smell—surprisingly like a barbecue—was making a lot of the men vomit. I felt a little like it myself.
All the while this was going on, the unconcerned workmen were passing by with their loads of loot. I saw crate after crate of stuff, some of it perhaps bought with stolen funds, other parts of it taken outright …
They will strip-mine your timeline, Harry Skena had told me, and now I knew what he meant.
The burning man had died, I think; the nervous system no longer held him locked upright, and he fell in a heap. They brought out a little contraption that was obviously a refuse-sweeper of some kind, swept him in, and took him away, without bothering to extinguish him.
Just after a large load of material went by, there was a change in the tone behind me; something was different about the machinery. They were just coming around to whip and beat us back into the position of kneeling with our faces on the floor, when quite suddenly I heard the machinery stop. They must be closing the gate.
Whatever a PRAMIAC was, it was sensing my presence through that gate, and not going off—until the gate started to close. That’s what I think happened, and I’ve been told since it almost certainly is what happened.
I also didn’t know at the time that a setting of “6”—what Harry had set his PRAMIACs to—is equivalent, roughly, to a World War II blockbuster, a one-ton TNT bomb. And the scale on it is base-10 logarithmic—going up by 2 means going up 100 x—so what blew up next to the base of the column was equivalent to 100 tons of TNT.
The gate was partly closed, but what that did was cause the force to take on strange properties as it moved through warped space and time. The shock wave that swept through the huge room in which we knelt twisted and broke everything more than a yard or so off the floor, and sheared the pieces off in a dozen directions. The guards were torn apart.
But we prisoners, kneeling on the floor, felt nothing, except the warm splashes of the guards’ blood.
The blast had one other beneficent effect—for a long two minutes, it knocked out all the lights.
I crawled away in that time, looking for anything large enough to hide behind, getting the noise of the now-babbling Bladers on the other side of me, away from them, figuring that before they got it together they would again be targets. If I could put some room between them and me …
On the way I had a nasty turn as I realized I had put my hand down on a severed human hand. I gasped and moaned but kept crawling … too important to keep moving, and besides any noise I made was being drowned out in the general babble. It sounded, from the way they were calling to each other, as if they were trying to form up into their cadres, perhaps with the idea of going down fighting.
I finally got myself behind the remnants of what had obviously been a big crate, big enough to hold a full-sized car at least, and severed at about four feet off the floor in a mass of splinters and torn wire. They were still hollering at each other out there, and the racket was considerable.
It occurred to me to wonder how the homing system on the SHAKK ammunition worked, exactly. If it was entirely visible-light, it probably wouldn’t do much, here in the dark, but if it was infrared, or radar—and my guess was it was, several different things …
Only one way to find out. I moved the switch to full auto and stood up in the pitch-blackness, then sprayed in the direction of Blade of the Most Merciful. The deep whoosh boomed through the huge room, and then there was a wonderful silence.
I had quite possibly bagged the lot of them, and if not, the survivors were probably good and scared. I crept along the wall, creeping from behind one wheeled cart and crate to another, until finally I found I was at a doorway, where a cart had become wedged, with the dilating door partly closed around it.
Just then the emergency lights—at least that’s what I figured dim lights in such a situation had to be—came on, and I ducked, then peeked out. The heap of sprawled bodies told me that I had gotten the rest of Blade of the Most Merciful … my revenge, and Dad and Carrie’s, and Porter’s, too. It didn’t bring anyone back, but it sure as hell made me feel better. I just wished there was a way for the folks back home to know what had become of Blade. I thought it might be a salutary example for a lot of terrorist groups.
Come to think of it … about “back home” … there was an obvious problem here. The gate was wrecked, and I had less ability to work any of the cross-timeline technology than a Stone Age tribesman in New Guinea had to fly a 747. A lot less—he’d probably at least figure out what the controls were, if not what they did. I hadn’t seen anyone pull a lever or turn a wheel to do all this.
Well, now that I could see, I could also see that the door the carts had been going out through was bent and broken, and there was a hole I could squeeze through. I was just debating it when I heard the voices and saw the guards bursting into the place. It didn’t seem like it would be wise to be there to discuss it with them, so I slipped into that hole and was into the space beyond before I had time to think about frying pans, fires, and all that.
Several of the carts in this hallway had also been wrecked by the whatever-it-was that had rolled out of the blown-up, collapsing gate. It looked like it was some kind of fold in space that just twisted everything as it passed; a picture in my mind developed of one guard whose skull had been wrenched into a bent oblong. I shuddered a little; whatever such things might be I would have to stay out of the way of them.
I wasn’t sure whether I wished I knew some physics, so I could figure out what it had done, or was glad I didn’t, so that I wasn’t totally mystified.
As I went farther down the long cargo corridor, the carts grew less and less distorted and damaged, and the occasional body less horribly mangled though just as dead. I suppose it doesn’t take much of a twist in the heart to make it nonfunctional.
Finally, when I had walked more than half a mile along the corridor with no sign of life other than a certain amount of shouting back behind me in the big room, I came to a cart that seemed to be undamaged, just abandoned, and a place where the scratching and scarring on the wall converged down to a triangular point. Within a few yards, the regular lights instead of the dim emergencies were on.
This meant a chance of running into living people; I went back to skulking along, hoping that anything that popped up would either not see me or not have time to sound the alarm.
I was in luck, for once, and when the corridor finally ended in what looked like a giant warehouse, I had still seen no one. I crept among the immense racks and the many crates, looking for anything at all to give me an idea on what I should do next. I was getting hungry, and I would be tired soon; there didn’t seem to be much of anything I could do about the hunger, and I had no idea where I could safely sleep—I snore, for one thing.
Finally I just made my way out of the place, figuring that it might be a safe place to hide, but it could do me no good otherwise. I followed any corridor till it crossed a larger one, then followed the larger one, and sure enough in about twenty minutes I was facing a door with a sign over it in characters I’d never seen before, and that the translator implanted in my head was not equipp
ed to deal with. I hoped they said “Exit”—there were just six of them, but for all I knew they were ideograms like Chinese, in which case they might well say “Door is alarmed,” “Warning, hard vacuum on other side,” or “Police Station.”
No way to know unless I opened it, so I did. No alarm sounded where I could hear it, and I slipped out into a bigger space.
A cart rolled by, and the women running it appeared to have escaped from a dirty magazine, wearing high heels, bathing suit bottoms, and no tops. They looked bored to tears.
A moment later a cart going the other way was staffed by two guys with beards down to their waists.
Well, if I’d understood Harry Skena right, maybe the Closers didn’t worry much about what their slaves looked like, or maybe there was a dress code for slaves. This would be one great time for me to discover that a tough “police sport coat” (it only looks like a sport jacket if you do all of your shopping at Kmart; what it is, really, is just a heavy vest made out of polyester, as padding and protection in the event of rough stuff) was perfect inconspicuous slave gear …
I walked farther up the corridor, and thought about it. This place seemed to be huge, and so far everyone I’d seen had been moving a cargo of one kind or another. My guess was that I’d found a major base here, probably a sort of Grand Central for shipping supplies to all their different wars.
Something big was coming up behind me. I looked for somewhere to hide, and there was nowhere. Then a bunch of men in guard uniforms came up behind me.
I had no idea whether it would work, but I just didn’t think I could shoot my way out and run successfully, so instead I dropped into the bowed-over position on the floor, on my knees with my face near the floor and my hands over my butt. They ran by me without paying any attention, except that one of them sort of patted my head as he went by.
Another half hour of walking, and I’d seen another patrol go by and the same thing had happened; moreover, another group of slaves had been visible at the time, and they’d gotten into the same position. I must have guessed right.
It was clear that all I’d found was a bigger traffic corridor. I’d been passing doors and had slowly learned that there were about four different sets of characters that appeared on them; one was the set that had appeared on the warehouse door, which didn’t seem promising, and the other three could mean anything from “Ladies” to “Darkroom—No Light!” to “Large Room” for all I knew.
If you’re trying to be inconspicuous, unfortunately, you don’t have many options in the way of nosing around. A slave opening doors at random would be pretty conspicuous; walking rapidly and firmly in one direction, just as if I knew where I was going, seemed to be the only hope until I decided to open one door, just as if I belonged there.
Something caught my eye—on a cart rolling by, crewed by three brown-skinned men who were all wearing what looked like short skirts, vests without shirts, and gigantic lace neckties. They were interesting enough, but what caught my eye was the eagle-and-swastika on every crate on the cart.
I’m not sure what made it add up for me. Maybe it was just that it was the first familiar symbol I’d seen in hours, even if it was that one; maybe I was remembering that Harry Skena had been pretty sure Blade’s supplies were coming from a world where Hider won. Anyway, I trotted up and jumped on the back of the cart.
They not only didn’t seem to mind, they didn’t seem to notice. I suppose it wasn’t their cart or their crate, and there wasn’t a lot of point in investigating. Whatever the case, they ignored me, and I rode on with them. We were clipping along at about five miles per hour, I estimated, and it was twenty minutes or so before they turned off, through a giant double door that had a set of symbols I hadn’t seen before on it.
After some more rolling along, we came to a bend in the corridor, then into a wide area. There was a familiar blue glow, and when we came around the corner I saw that it was coming from a column that stretched several stories up into a covered space, like a missile in a silo; this was clearly a gate.
I got off and walked casually past. No one looked at me.
Then I crept quietly back and watched. The gate glowed red; out of it came many large, swastika-marked boxes, to be loaded on carts and driven swiftly away. Then a couple of small boxes of stuff were sent through the other way, and they powered it down and left it glowing blue.
Interesting. And to judge from the casual way of handling freight, with not all the outbound boxes thrown in this time and with many of the inbound sitting around until a cart came for them, it seemed a safe enough bet that this was always the gate to Nazi-land. It wasn’t exactly where I’d have picked to go, but it beat staying here and starving, or getting caught in the open by a big gang of these bozos.
If nothing happened, I’d be caught and either dead or enslaved sooner or later. And nothing was just what was going to happen unless I made something happen.
All of which was the rationale I was mumbling into my own mind’s ear as I crept forward, got in among the crates that seemed to be outbound, and saw if there were any I could lift the lid on.
Sure enough, there was one, and what was inside it looked like—it was. Small transistor television sets. At least that was what the picture on the box showed. All the way up to the top … but plenty of room for me if I could find somewhere to hide the top layer.
I sneaked over to the “inbound” group and discovered that two of the open crates were only about half-full, with all kinds of junk that looked a lot like stray merchandise, some of it obviously broken …
Aha. Got it. Luxury goods they were either selling to the Nazis or maybe distributing to the Closers over there. Which meant the crate I had opened first was probably going to a civilian warehouse. Perfect!
I hastily stripped off the top layer of TVs, still wishing I could read Closer characters—but what else was a cardboard box with a picture of a box with an oval screen and knobs likely to be? And if I was wrong, I was sure I’d know soon enough.
Anyway, with eight perfectly good sets going back to the factory (some poor slave would probably have to spend hours figuring out what was not wrong with them), there was now lots of room for me in the outbound crate.
I took a moment to quietly take a leak into the inbound crate—I had to go, I needed somewhere to hide it, and besides I had no desire to make life among the Closers any more pleasant—and then got into the outbound. Not having anything else to do, I tried to take a nap.
I must have dozed a little, because I only woke when the crate started to move. They were jacking the pallet up with a little gadget I had seen that was a bit like a hand-operated forklift, and then there was a thud as they slid me and the TVs onto a powered cart. After a moment or two, the cart started to roll forward, and feetfirst and flat on my back, I entered another world.
Going through a gate is not nearly as nice as blinking in and out; I discovered why ATN used blink transmitters rather than gates. My first time, jumping through, I hadn’t had time to notice the hard lurch in my stomach or the disorienting dizziness, let alone the strange, enervating tingle that ran up my body in a long slow wave. It felt like my leg going to sleep and the sensation spreading all over my body, and it seemed to last for hours, though really I think it was only seconds.
There was a series of hard bumps that I realized must be the crate being off-loaded. I suddenly had a terrible fear that every other crate would end up stacked on top, and that this crate wouldn’t be needed for weeks, but no such thing happened. There were more thuds and crashes all around as other crates were laid in beside mine, then the sound of electric motors whirring, and a truck engine started somewhere and drove away.
After that it was silent for a long while. I figured my resting heart rate was around eighty; it had been the last time I gave blood, so I started counting beats … twelve hundred beats should be about fifteen minutes. I wanted to pop out when there was nobody there, but I also wanted to give myself as much time as possible before anybody ca
me back.
Finally, I cautiously raised the lid and sat up. I was tired, hungry, and getting pretty discouraged; from what the ATN people had told me, there wasn’t much chance of getting a ride home from here.
The warehouse, if that’s what it was, was still brightly lit, but there was nothing moving around in it. I jumped down from the crate to get moving.
I suppose I could have died right there. I don’t know what told me to look up, or how exactly I managed to point the SHAKK and pull the trigger before I knew what I was dealing with—
But the Doberman went to pieces as the round zinged around inside him, and fell to the floor in front of me, a bag of smashed protoplasm. I got the Dobe behind him, too.
There were shouts inside the warehouse—somebody yelling for Sieg and Frieda, which I suspected were the two Dobermans. I ran like hell from the direction of the voice, weaving in and out among the crates, hoping for a little bit of luck.
At first I seemed to be having it—it sounded like there was just one guy, who had noticed the dogs going into “attack” mode, coming in to make sure they were just after a rat or something. Probably I could get around behind him and find an exit.
I was thinking that right at the moment when I rounded a corridor turn and suddenly instead of dividers and shelves, I was looking out into an open space. The first thought I had was that this sure as hell wasn’t the civilian warehouse I had hoped it would be, because the gadget in front of me was unquestionably a tank, and a pretty high-tech one at that.
It looked sort of like your basic idea of a flying saucer, silvery and clam-shaped, except that it had a long, slim gun sticking out of the side near the top; a crack below that showed where the gun rotated. There were many treads, on short little posts underneath the thing, some up and some down; I suspect it had something like ground-following radar and extended three legs at any one time so that it was always stable and at the same time able to move in any direction quickly.