Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  The suspicion in the other man’s brown eyes melted away while something else coalesced in its place. It took a moment to recognize it. When he did, it shook Jenna badly. Pity. This ex-slave, this man whose family was targeted for slaughter, pitied her. Jenna turned roughly aside, shoved her pistol through her belt and her hands into her pockets, and clenched her teeth over a flood of nausea and anger and fright that left her shaking. A moment later, Noah settled a hand on her shoulder.

  “You never killed a man before.” It wasn’t a question, didn’t have to be a question, because it was perfectly obvious. Jenna shook her head anyway. “No.” Noah sighed, tightened fingers against her shoulder for a moment. “They say it’s never easy, kid. I hadn’t either, you know, until that hit in New York.” Jenna glanced up, found deep pain in Noah’s enigmatic eyes. “But I always knew I might have to, doing the job I chose. It’s worse for you, probably. When a kid comes to the Temple young as you are, she’s hurting inside already. You got more reason than most. And Cassie told me you cried when you accidentally ran over a mongrel dog on the road out to the ranch.”

  She clenched her teeth tighter and tried to hold back tears she did not want the detective to witness. Noah didn’t say anything else. Just dropped the hand from Jenna’s shoulder and turned away, moving briskly around the confined space Jenna had chosen to defend, making up a better bed for Ianira. That it was necessary only upset Jenna more, because she hadn’t done a good enough job of it, herself. The Latin-speaking teenager returned a few silent minutes later, bringing a first aid kit, a heavy satchel that wafted the scent of food when he lifted the flap, blankets piled over one shoulder, and a couple of stuffed toys, which he gave to Ianira’s daughters. The children grabbed hold of the shaggy, obviously home-made bears, and hugged them with all their little-girl strength. Jenna’s eyes stung, watching it. No child only three years old should ever look at the world through eyes that looked like that. And Artemisia’s sister was even younger, barely a year old. Barely walking, yet.

  “We can’t stay here long,” Noah was saying, voice low. “They’ll be searching for her. We’ll have to smuggle her up into the hotel room Jenna’s reserved. We can hide there until the Britannia Gate opens.” The detective checked a wristwatch. “We won’t need to hide long. But we’ve got to outfit for the gate between now and then. And find a way to smuggle Ianira through.”

  “Us,” Marcus said sharply. “We all go through.”

  But Noah was shaking a head that ought to’ve gone grey by now, if the detective’s private life was anything like what they’d already lived through. “No. They’re going to send a death squad after us, Marcus. They’ll send somebody through every gate that opens during the next week, trying to get her. I won’t risk all of you anywhere in one group. Just in case the worst happens and the bastards who follow her through the gate do catch up.”

  “Not the Britannia,” Marcus insisted stubbornly. “They cannot get through the Britannia. It is Ripper Season. There have been no tickets for today’s gate for over a year. I could get through working as a porter hauling baggage, because I am a station resident, but no one else.”

  “Don’t underestimate these people, Marcus. If necessary, they’ll kill one of the baggage handlers, take his place, and get through that way, using their victim’s ID and timecard.”

  Marcus’ already pale cheeks ran dead white. “Yes,” he whispered. “It would be easy. Too easy.”

  “So.” Noah’s voice, so difficult to pin down as either a man’s light voice or a woman’s deep one, was cold and precise. “We put Ianira in a steamer trunk. Same thing for the girls. You,” the detective nodded at Marcus, “go through one of the other gates with your children. And we’ll disguise you as a baggage handler, since they’re almost invisible. The problem is, which gate?”

  The teenager spoke up at once. “The Wild West Gate opens tomorrow.”

  Jenna and Noah exchanged glances. It was perfect. Too perfect. The Ansar Majlis would track Marcus and the girls straight through that gate, figuring it would be the one gate Jenna was likeliest to choose. The tour gate into Denver of 1885 was the only gate besides the sold-out Britannia where the natives spoke English. And Carl had been such a nut about that period of American history, the killers tracking them would doubtless figure Jenna had cut and run through the gate she and Carl would’ve known the most about, the only one she could get tickets for, not knowing, thank the Lady, that Jenna had secretly bought tickets through the Britannia in another name more than a year ago.

  Noah, however, was frowning in concentration, studying Marcus closely. “It could work. Put you and the girls down Denver’s Wild West Gate, with me as guard, send Jenna and Ianira through to London.”

  “But—“ Jenna opened her mouth to protest, terrified at the prospect of Noah abandoning her.

  A dark glance from steel-cold grey eyes shut her up. “There are two of us. And two groups of them.” The detective nodded at Marcus and Ianira, who still lay unmoving except to breathe. Fright tightened down another notch, leaving Jenna to wonder if she’d ever be hungry again, her gut hurt so much. Noah said more gently, “We have to split up, kid. If we send Marcus and the girls through without a guard . . . hell, kid, we might as well shoot them through the head ourselves. No, we know they’re going to follow whoever goes through the Wild West Gate. So I’ll go with them, pose as somebody they’re likely to think is you, use a name they’ll think is something you’d come up with, something you’d think is clever—“

  The teenager interrupted. “You don’t look like her. Not anything like her. Nobody would believe you were her. You are too tall.”

  For the first time, Jenna Nicole Caddrick saw Noah Armstrong completely flummoxed. The detective’s mouth opened onto shocked silence. But the kid who spoke Latin—which probably meant he was a down-timer, too, same as Marcus—wasn’t finished. “I look more like her than any of us. I’ll go in her place. If I dress up like a rich tourist, wear a wig the color of her hair, pretend to be rude and obnoxious, wear a bonnet low over my eyes and swear a lot, the people hunting her,” the kid nodded toward Jenna, “will think she’s me. Or I’m her. It will work,” he insisted. “There is a tour leaving tomorrow that plans to shoot in a special competition, men and women both. I have watched every John Wayne movie ever made, twice, and I have seen thousands of tourists. I can pretend to be a woman cowboy shooter with no trouble at all.”

  The very fact that he’d come up with the idea in the first place told Jenna a great deal about how much the residents of this time station loathed tourists. Obnoxious and rude . . . It probably would work beautifully, given half a chance. “You realize you’re risking your life?” she asked quietly.

  The teenager stared her down. “Yes. They have tried to murder Ianira.”

  It was all that needed to be said.

  “Julius—“ Marcus started to protest.

  “No,” Julius swung that determined gaze toward his older friend. “If I die, then I will die with honor, protecting people I love. What more can any man ask?”

  How did a kid that young end up that wise? Jenna thought about ancient Rome and what men did to other men there and shuddered inside. The fact that she, herself, had done exactly what this boy was volunteering to do didn’t even occur to her. Jenna, too, was risking her own life to save Ianira’s.

  “That’s settled, then,” Noah said briskly. “Julius, I don’t have words to thank you. Right now, I’d better go up to Commons, check into the hotel under the name on my station pass, find an outfitter. You, too, Jenna. I’ll need help getting those steamer trunks back to the hotel, and all the gear we’ve got to buy along with it.” The detective glanced at Marcus and Julius. “We’ll bring the steamer trunks back right away, get Ianira and the rest of you into a hotel room until the gate goes. We’re going to hide you right in the open, in a perfectly ordinary hotel room, and let them tear the basement and the rest of the station apart, looking for you. Then I’m going to establish my Denver
persona with a vengeance, draw the attention of the bastards after us, so they’ll concentrate on Denver, rather than London. There’s going to be one more rude and obnoxious cowboy added to the station’s population, today, I believe, the sooner the better. With a name that ought to grab somebody’s attention.”

  The purloined letter . . . Jenna grimaced. She sure as hell didn’t have any better ideas. Noah had gotten her out of New York alive. She was pretty sure Noah could get them all out of the station alive, too. Whether or not she and Ianira stayed that way in London was up to Jenna. She prayed she was up to the job. Because there just wasn’t anybody else around to do it. Thoughts of her father brought her teeth together, hard and brutal. You’re gonna pay for this, you son-of-a-bitch. You’ll pay, if it’s the last thing I ever do on this earth!

  Then she headed up to Commons on Noah Armstrong’s heels to fetch a steamer trunk.

  Chapter Four

  Shangri-La Station was an Escheresque blend of major airport terminal, world-class shopping mall, and miniature city, all tucked away safely inside a massive cavern in the heart of the uplifted limestone massifs of the Himalayan mountains, a cavern which had been gradually enlarged and remolded into one of the busiest terminals in the entire time-touring industry. Portions of the station emerged into the open sunshine on the mountain’s flank, or would have, if Shangri-La’s engineers hadn’t artificially extended that rocky flank to cover the station’s outer walls in natural-looking concrete “rock” faces. Because the terminal’s main structure followed the maze of the cave system’s inner caverns, TT-86 was a haphazard affair that sprawled in unexpected directions, with tunnels occasionally boring their way through solid rock to connect one section of the station with another.

  The major time-touring gates all lay in the Commons, of course, a vast area of twisting balconies, insane staircases and ramps, and all the glitter of high-class shops and restaurants that even the most discriminating of billionaires could wish to find themselves surrounded with. But because Commons followed the twists and turns of the immense cavern, there was no straight shot or even line-of-sight view from one end to the other. And station Residential snaked back into even more remote corners and crannies, with apartments tucked in like cells in a beehive designed by LSD-doped honeybees.

  The underpinnings of the station descended multiple stories into the mountain’s rocky heart, where the nitty-gritty, daily business of keeping a small city operational was carried out. Machinery driven by a miniature atomic pile hummed in the rocky silence. The trickle and rush of running water from natural underground streams and waterfalls could be heard in the sepulchral darkness beyond the station’s heating, cooling, and waste-disposal plants. Down here, anybody could hide anything for a period of many months, if not years.

  Margo had realized long ago that Shangri-La Station was immense. She just hadn’t realized how big it really was. Not until Skeeter Jackson led them down circuitous, narrow tunnels into a maze he clearly knew as well as Margo knew the route from Kit’s palatial apartment to her library cubicle. Equally clearly, Skeeter had taken full advantage of this rat’s maze to pull swift disappearing acts from station security and irate tourists he’d fleeced, conned, or just plain robbed.

  Probably what saved his life when that enraged gladiator was trying to skewer him with a sword, she thought silently. Under Skeeter’s direction, their search party broke apart at intervals, combing the corridors and tunnels individually, only to rejoin one another further on. She could hear the footsteps and voices of other search parties off in the distance. The echoes, eerie and distorted, left Margo shivering in the slight underground chill that no amount of central heating could dispel. Occasional screams and girder-bending shrieks drifted down from the enormous pteranodon sternbergi which had entered the station through an unstable gate into the era of dinosaurs.

  The size of a small aircraft, the enormous flying reptile lived in an immense hydraulic cage that could be hoisted up from the sub-basements right through the floor to the Commons level for “feeding demonstrations.” The pterodactyl ate several mountains of fish a day, far more than they could keep stocked through the gates. So the head of pest control, Sue Fritchey, had hatched an ambitious project to keep the big sternbergi fed: breeding her own subterranean food supply from an up-time hatchery and any down-time fingerlings they could bring in. The sub-basement corridors were lined with rows and high-stacked tiers of empty aquariums, waiting to be filled with the next batch of live fingerlings. Piles and dusty stacks of the empty glass boxes left the tunnels under Little Agora and Frontier Town looking like the ghost of a pet shop long since bankrupt, its fish sold below cost or dumped down the nearest toilet.

  It was a lonely, eerie place to have to search for a missing friend.

  Margo glanced at her watch. How long had they been searching, now? Four hours, twenty minutes. Time was running out, at least for her and anyone else heading down the Britannia Gate. She bit one lip as she glanced at Shahdi Feroz, who represented in one package very nearly everything Margo wanted to be: poised, beautiful, a respected professional, experienced with temporal gates, clocking in nearly as much down time as some Time Tours guides. Time Tours had actually approached Dr. Feroz several times with offers to guide “seance and spiritualist tours” down the Britiannia. She’d turned them down flat, each and every time they’d offered. Margo admired her for sticking by her principles, when she could’ve been making pots and kettles full of money. Enough to fund her down-time research for the next century or two.

  And speaking of down-time research . . .

  “Kit,” Margo said quietly, “we’re running short of time.”

  Her grandfather glanced around, checked his own watch, frowned. “Yes. Skeeter, I’m sorry, but Margo and Dr. Feroz have a gate to make.”

  Skeeter turned his head slightly, lips compressed. “I’m supposed to work that gate, too, you know. We’re almost directly under Frontier Town now. We finish this section of tunnels, then they can run along and play detective down the Britannia as much as they want.”

  Margo held her breath as Kit bristled silently; but her grandfather held his temper. Maybe because he, too, could see the agony in Skeeter’s eyes. Kit said only, “All right, why don’t you take that tunnel?” and nodded toward a corridor that branched off to the left. “Dr. Feroz, perhaps you’d go with Margo? You can discuss last-minute plans for the tour while you search.”

  Margo squirmed inwardly, but she couldn’t very well protest. She was going to spend the next three months of her life in this woman’s company. She’d have to face her sooner or later and it might as well be sooner.

  Kit pointed down one of the sinuous, winding tunnels. “Take that fork off to the right. I’ll go straight ahead. We’ll meet you—how much farther?” he asked Skeeter.

  “Fifty yards. Then we’ll take the stairs up to Frontier Town.”

  They split up. Margo glanced at Shahdi Feroz and felt her face redden. Margo barely had a high school diploma and one semester of college. She had learned more in Shangri-La’s library than she had in that stuffy, impossible up-time school. And she had learned, enormously. But after that mortifying mistake, with Shahdi Feroz correcting her misapprehension about Nichol gangs’ weapons of choice, it wouldn’t matter that Margo had logged nearly two-hundred hours through the Britannia or that she spoke fluent Cockney. Kit had drilled her until she could not only make sense of the gibberish that passed for Cockney dialect, but could produce original conversations in it, too. Without giving herself too savage a headache, remembering all the half-rhymes and word-replacement games the dialect required. None of that would matter, not when she’d goofed on the very first day, not when Margo’s lack of a diploma left her vulnerable and scared.

  Shahdi Feroz, however, surprised Margo with an attempted first gesture at friendliness. The scholar smiled hesitantly, one corner of her lips twisting in chagrin. “I did not mean to embarrass you, Miss Smith. If you are to guide the Ripper Watch Tour, then you
clearly have the experience to do so.”

  Margo almost let it go. She wanted badly to have this woman think she really did know what she was doing. But that wasn’t honest and might actually be dangerous, if they got into a tight spot and the scholar thought she knew more than she did. She cleared her throat, aware that her face had turned scarlet. “Thanks, but I’m not, really.” The startled glance Dr. Feroz gave her prompted Margo to finish before she lost her nerve. “It’s just that I’m in training to be a time scout, you see, and Kit wants me to get some experience doing fieldwork.”

  “Kit?” the other woman echoed. “You know Kit Carson that well, then, to use his first name? I wish I did.”

  Some of Margo’s nervousness drained away. If Dr. Shahdi Feroz could look and sound that wistful and uncertain, then maybe there was hope for Margo, after all. She grinned, relief momentarily transcending worry and fear for Ianira’s family. “Well, yeah, I guess you could say so. He’s my grandfather.”

  “Oh!” Then, startling Margo considerably, “That must be very difficult for you, Miss Smith. You have my sympathy. And respect. It is never easy, to live up to greatness in one’s ancestors.”

  Strangely, Margo received the impression that Shahdi Feroz wasn’t speaking entirely of Margo. “No,” she said quietly, “it isn’t.” Shahdi Feroz remained silent, respecting Margo’s privacy, for which she was grateful. She and the older woman began testing doors they came to and jotting down the numbers painted on them, so maintenance could check the rooms later, since neither of them had keys. Margo did rattle the knobs and knock, calling out, “Hello? Ianira? Marcus? It’s Margo Smith . . .” Nobody answered, however, and the echoes that skittered away down the tunnel mocked her efforts. She bit her lower lip. How many rooms to check, just like these, and how many miles of tunnels? God, they could be anywhere.