Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  He must have noticed the sudden panic Margo couldn’t choke down, try as she might, because he said more gently, “Don’t worry about the Ripper Watch tour, kid. You’ll get to London, all right. But the Britannia doesn’t open for almost six and a half hours and right now, we’ve got a murderer loose somewhere in this station. A killer who’s very likely got Ianira Cassondra in his hands.”

  Margo shuddered. It was one thing, studying a serial murderer like Jack the Ripper, whose victims were quite well known. Hunting for a madman loose in TT-86 was another prospect altogether—one that terrified her. “Okay, Kit.” She managed to keep her voice fairly steady. “I’ll find Marcus, get the down-timers organized, try to find out about Skeeter, then meet you at Bull’s office.”

  “Good girl. And for God’s sake, Imp, don’t let those damned newsies follow you!”

  She tried to imagine the kind of story any reporter would take up time about this disaster, tried to imagine the impact that story would have, particularly the disappearance of the inspiration for the fastest-growing cult religion in the world, and nodded, jaw clenched.

  “Right.”

  “Get moving, then. I’ll see you later.”

  Margo turned her back on the chaos of the riot zone and headed for the popular residents’ bar where Marcus worked, wondering how badly Skeeter had been injured and just who had grabbed Ianira—and what they were doing to her, now they had her. Margo bit her lip. What would Marcus do if they couldn’t find her? Or if—she swallowed hard at the thought—if they didn’t find her alive? And their little girls? They weren’t even old enough to understand what had happened . . .

  Margo’s fear edged over into terror, mingled with helpless anger. If those little girls had been left motherless . . . Today’s riot would be small potatoes compared to the explosion yet to come. And violence of that magnitude could get a station closed down, permanently. Even one as famous and profitable as TT-86. After the bombing destruction of TT-66 by whichever group of middle eastern religious fanatics had blown the station sky-high, all it would take was another major station rocked by violence to shut down the whole time-tourism industry. There was already a powerful up-time senator trying to close down the stations. If TT-86 went under because of riots and on-station murders, Kit wouldn’t need to kick her out of time-scout training to wreck her dreams.

  Up-time politics would wreck them for her.

  Chapter Three

  Marcus had not known such fear since his one-time master had tricked him through the station’s Roman gate and sold him back into a slavery from which Skeeter Jackson had rescued him. Abandoning the Down Time’s bar without a backward glance, he bolted into the chaos loose on Commons, hard on the heels of Robert Li, the antiquarian who’d burst into the bar with the white-faced news: “Marcus! Someone’s shot at Skeeter and Ianira!”

  Ianira! Fear for her robbed breath he needed for running. Everything that was good and beautiful in his life had come through her, through the miracle of a highly-born woman who had been treated cruelly by her first husband, who had still managed, somehow, to love Marcus enough to want his touch, to want the love he had offered as very nearly the only thing in his power to give her. He had been a slave and although Marcus was free now in a way he had never dreamed possible, he would never be a wealthy man, could never give Ianira the kind of life she deserved.

  If anything had happened to her, anything . . . He could not conceive of a life without her. And their children, how could he tell their beautiful little girls they would never see their mother again? Please, he prayed to the gods of his Gallic childhood, to the Roman gods of his one-time masters, but especially to the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, the Great Mother of all living creatures, whose temple Ianira had served as a child in that ancient goddess’ holy city, please let her be unharmed and safe . . .

  Marcus was struggling to thrust himself through a packed crowd at the edge of Urbs Romae when a hand closed around his arm. A voice he didn’t recognize said, “As you value your children’s lives, come with me.”

  Shocked, he turned—and found himself staring into haunted grey eyes.

  He could not have said if the person watching him so narrowly was male or female. But there was pain in those grey eyes, desperate pain and fear and something else, something dark and deadly that made his pulse shudder.

  “Who—?”

  “Your wife is safe. For the moment. But I can’t keep her safe forever, not from the people who want her dead. And your children are in terrible danger. Please. I can’t tell you why, not here. But I swear to you, if you’ll just come with me and bring your little girls, I’ll do everything in my power to keep all of you alive.”

  It was insane, this impulse to trust. Too many people had betrayed Marcus over the years, and too much that was precious to him, more precious than his own life, depended on his making the right choice. This is Shangri-La Station, he found himself thinking desperately, not Rome. If I am betrayed here, there are people who will move heaven and stars to come to our aid . . .

  In the end, it came down to one simple fact: this person knew where Ianira was. If Marcus wanted to see her, he had to go. And the girls?

  “I will not risk my children until I know Ianira is safe.”

  Impatience flared in those grey eyes. “There’s no time for this! My God, we’ve already killed one of them, before he could shoot her. They’ll murder your little girls, Marcus, in cold blood. I’ve seen how they kill! Cassie Tyrol died right in front of me and there was nothing I could do to save her—“

  Marcus started. “The woman from the movies? Who played the priestess of Artemis, the Temple harlot? She is dead?”

  Pain shone in those grey eyes. “Yes. And the same people who killed her are trying to kill Ianira, her whole family. Please, I’m begging you . . . get your little girls out of danger while there’s still time. I’ll tell you everything, I swear it. But we have to move now.”

  Marcus pressed clenched fists to his temples, tried to think clearly, wishing he possessed even a hundredth the skill Ianira did in reading people’s hearts and intentions. Standing irresolute in the middle of a panic-stricken crowd jammed into Commons, voices echoing off the girders of the ceiling five stories overhead, Marcus had never felt more alone and afraid in his life. Not even as a child, thrust into chains and caged like an animal for sale. Then, the only person at risk had been himself. Now . . .

  “They are at the school and daycare center,” he decided, voice brusque. “This way.”

  He still didn’t know if the grey-eyed person at his side was a man or a woman.

  But when they reached the day-care center and interrupted an ugly, heart-stopping tableau, Marcus discovered that his shaky trust in his new companion was well-founded. They skidded through the day care center’s doors at an all-out run—and found an armed Arabian Nights construction worker holding Harriet Banks at gunpoint. Another armed man was dragging Artemisia and Gelasia away from the other children. Rage and terror scalded Marcus, blinded him, sent him forward with fists clenched, even as the grey-eyed person with him erupted with a violence that would have struck terror, had that violence been aimed at his family.

  Marcus barely had time to see the gun before it discharged. The roar deafened in the confines of little daycare center. His ears rang even as smoke bellied out from the antique gun’s barrel. Children screamed and scattered like frightened ants. The construction worker closest to them, the one holding a gun on Harriet Banks, jerked just once, then fell like a man whose legs have been abruptly jerked out from beneath him. The hole through the back of his skull was far smaller than the one through his face, where the bullet had plowed through on its way out. Shock caught Marcus like a fist against the side of his head—then the black-powder pistol discharged again and the man holding Artemisia’s wrist plowed into the floor, obscenely dead.

  Marcus snapped out of shock with the grotesque thud as the second body landed on the daycare center’s floor. He flung himself tow
ard his screaming children. “Hush . . . it’s all right, Daddy’s here . . .”

  He gathered the girls close, hugged them, wept against their hair.

  “Marcus! Come on, man! More of the bastards are headed this way!”

  Marcus had no time to say anything to Harriet Banks, who was trying to get the other children out through the back door, away from the carnage in the playroom. He simply scooped up his daughters and ran with them, following his unknown benefactor into the chaos on Commons. There were, indeed, more construction workers racing toward them, with weapons clutched in their hands as tourists screamed and scattered.

  His benefactor’s voice cut through shock and terror. “Do you know any better way to reach the Neo Edo Hotel? They’re between us and any safety we’ve got on this station.”

  Marcus took one look at the burly construction workers running toward them and swore savagely in the language only he, alone of all residents on TT-86, could understand. His Gaulish tribe was as extinct as the language they’d spoken. But his children were still alive. He intended to keep them that way. “This way,” he snarled, spinning around and plunging toward Residential. “Down-timers know all the secret ways through this station!”

  Skeeter had taught Marcus routes he’d never suspected could be used to get from one side of the station to the other. Those escape routes had proven useful when he and Ianira had needed to slip away from the pressing attentions of her adoring acolytes, trying to gain a little privacy for themselves. Marcus had never dreamed he would need them to save his little family from cold-blooded murder. Why anyone would want to kill them, he could not imagine. But he intended to find out.

  Marcus might be nothing more than an ex-slave, a down-timer without legal rights. But he was a husband and a father and an “ ‘eighty-sixer,” a member of the insane, fiercely independent, intensely loyal community of residents who called Time Terminal Eighty-Six home. Whoever sought to kill them, they had failed to take that particular fact into account. ‘Eighty-sixers took care of their own.

  Even if it meant breaking up-time laws to do so.

  * * *

  By the time Skeeter arrived at the aerie, Bull Morgan’s glass-walled office was packed, standing room only. And that was without the howling mob of reporters trying to get past security to the elevator and stairs that led up to the station manager’s ceiling-level office. The elevator had been crowded, too, with ‘eighty-sixers responding to the emergency call for search teams. Connie Logan, owl-eyed behind her thick glasses and dressed as outlandishly as ever in bits and pieces of various costumes she’d been testing when the call had gone out, stood crammed into one corner, trying not to jab anybody with the pins sticking out of her clothes. Arley Eisenstein, restauranteur of one of the ten most famous restaurants on the planet and married to the station’s head of medicine, stared at the elevator doors with his jaw muscles clenched so tight, Skeeter wondered why his teeth hadn’t broken yet. Brian Hendrickson, station librarian and a man who hadn’t forgotten the circumstances of Skeeter’s disastrous wager with Goldie, any more than he’d forgotten anything else he’d ever seen, heard, or read, was swearing colorfully in a language Skeeter had never heard in his life. Ann Vinh Mulhaney had come upstairs from the weapons range in company with a woman Skeeter recognized as one of the Ripper Watch Team members. Both women were as silent as ghosts and very nearly as pale.

  Dr. Shahdi Feroz, Skeeter knew, was not just a world-renowned Ripperologist, she was also the team’s cult-phenomena expert. She had made a life’s study of criminal cults and intended to research first-hand Victorian London’s teeming subculture of spiritualists, occult worshipers, Celtic-revivalists, magic practitioners, and the city’s numerous flourishing, quasi-religious cult groups. It had led her to support some rather unusual ideas about the Ripper murders. What she knew about down-time occult groups made for a terrifying parallel to what Skeeter knew of up-time cults. He’d seen his share of them in New York. And over the past few years, the new ones popping up like malignant mushrooms made those older ones look positively apple-pie ordinary. Which was doubtless why Bull Morgan had personally requested her presence at this meeting. Shahdi Feroz, as elegant and composed as a Persian queen, dark hair upswept in a mass of thick, raven’s-wing waves, glanced at Skeeter, evidently aware of his intent scrutiny, and started to speak—

  And the elevator doors slid open onto pandemonium.

  Shahdi Feroz turned aside at once, stepping out of the elevator to make room for the others. She glanced over at Ann through dark, worried eyes as they all crowded off the elevator and tried, somewhat vainly, to find space in Bull’s packed office.

  “I didn’t expect quite so many people to be here.” Her speech was rich and fluid. Skeeter, fascinated by the rising and falling inflections of her exotic voice, managed to locate a space that hid him from most people’s view.

  Ann answered in a strained undertone. “I did. In fact, I’m betting we won’t be the last to arrive.”

  When the weapons instructor glanced around, her gaze paused on Skeeter. The look in Ann’s eyes caused him to stiffen. Skeeter clenched his jaw and looked away first, unsure which was worse: the pity or the deep, lingering suspicion that Skeeter had only been using Ianira, the way most ‘eighty-sixers thought he used everyone he came into contact with. There was nothing he could say, no explanation he could—or cared to—offer that anyone in this room would believe. With the down-timers on station, it was different. But in a room crammed shoulder-to-jowl with up-time ‘eighty-sixers, Skeeter felt as alone and isolated as he’d felt in Yesukai’s felt tent, a lost little boy of eight without the ability to understand a word spoken around him or to go home again to a family that didn’t want him, anyway.

  He set his jaw and wished to hell Bull would get this meeting underway. He needed to be down on Commons, searching. He’d only come to this meeting because he was not, by God, going to let them leave him out of whatever decisions were made on where and how to search for her. A door near the back of Bull’s office opened and Ronisha Azzan, the deputy station manager, appeared, looking worried. She said something to Bull, too low for Skeeter to overhear. Bull ground his teeth over the stubby end of an unlit cigar, then spat debris into an ornate brass spittoon strategically positioned on one corner of his desk. Margo arrived a moment later via the elevator, breathless, her green eyes clouded with fear. She spotted Ann Vinh Mulhaney and Shahdi Feroz and bit her lower lip, then pushed past to Bull’s desk. “I can’t find Marcus,” she said flatly. “He ran out of the Down Time with Robert Li and nobody’s seen him since. Robert said Marcus was behind him one minute and he’d vanished into the crowd the next.” Ronisha Azzan stepped into the office behind Bull’s, swearing under her breath.

  Skeeter knew a moment of fear almost as deep as when Ianira had vanished right in front of him. Then reason reasserted itself, helped by the white-knuckled hands he used to push back heavy locks of hair sticking to his damp brow. Marcus would be with other Found Ones, searching, of course, there was no reason to panic, no up-timer on station knew the back routes the way the down-timers did, somebody had obviously got to him and maybe even told him they’d seen her somewhere . . .

  Station alarms screamed to life again.

  Fear tightened down once more, driving daggers through Skeeter’s nerves. He very nearly pulled out two fistfuls of his own hair. Skeeter clenched his jaw and made himself wait, while sweat prickled out over his entire torso. Bull Morgan snatched the security phone off his desk and shouted, “What the hell is it now?”

  Whatever was said on the other end, Bull’s florid face actually lost color. The unlit cigar he chewed went deathly still. Then he spat out the cigar with a furious curse and snarled, “Turn this station upside down, dammit, but find them! And I want every construction worker in this goddamned station locked up on suspicion of attempted murder, do you hear me, Benson? Do it! Ronisha!” The phone didn’t quite bend when he slammed the receiver back down, but a crack appeared in the plastic ca
sing.

  The deputy station manager, African-patterned silks swirling around her tall figure, reappeared from the back office, talking urgently to someone via squawky. She was snarling, “I don’t care who you have to slap in the brig! Control that mess or find yourself another job! Yes?” she asked, turning her attention to Bull.

  “Get down to the war room! Coordinate the search from down there. Have Benson’s security teams report directly to you there. We’ve got another helluva mess breaking loose.”

  Ronisha fled down the back stairs, squawky in hand. La-La Land’s station manager faced the expectant hush from the crowd in his office. The silence in the glass-walled office was as unbearable as the sound of fingernails on a blackboard.

  Bull said heavily, “There’s been a shooting at the day care center. Two construction workers messily dead, dozens of children in hysterics. Marcus and his little girls vanished in the middle of the shooting.” Nausea bit Skeeter’s throat. He forced himself not to bolt for the elevator, forced himself to wait, to hear the rest of it. “A couple of Scheherazade construction workers were trying to take his daughters out at gunpoint when Marcus showed up with someone Harriet didn’t recognize. Whoever it was, they shot both construction workers dead and took Marcus and the girls out of there.” Bull craned to peer through the crowd of white-faced, furious residents. “Is Dr. Feroz here yet?”

  Shahdi Feroz pushed through the throng to the front of Bull’s office. “Yes, Mr. Morgan, I am here. How may I help?”

  “I want to know what we’re up against. Kit Carson told security the bastards who’ve attacked Ianira and her family are members of the Ansar Majlis Brotherhood. He’s not here yet, or I’d ask him to brief us.”