Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  “Get that outbound baggage moving!”

  Skeeter lunged to the task, along with a dozen other porters. He staggered through the open gate and emerged into a rain-lashed garden. It was nearly dark. Worse, the ground was cut up from all the foot traffic across it, muddy and treacherous with slick leaves. There was a flagstone path, but that was crowded with tourists and guides and gatehouse staff holding umbrellas. The porters didn’t have time to wait for them to clear out of the way. Following the lead of more experienced baggage handlers in front of him, Skeeter plunged into the muddy grass and slogged his way toward the gatehouse. The rain was icy, slashing against his clothing and soaking him to the skin. He dumped his first load at the back door of the three-story gatehouse and pelted back through the open gate to grab another load. The sensation was dizzying, disorienting.

  Then he was through and staggering a little, himself, across the platform. His muddy shoes slipped on wet metal. Skeeter windmilled and lurched against a stack of luggage waiting to be ferried through. The topmost steamer trunk, a massive thing, slid sideways and started to topple toward the edge of the platform. The corner of the trunk was well out beyond the periphery of the open Britannia gate, teetering out where it would plunge the full hundred feet to the Commons floor. As Skeeter went to one bruised knee, furious shouts and blistering curses erupted. Then somebody lunged past him to grab the steamer trunk by the handle before it could fall.

  “Don’t just sit there, goddamn you!” A short, skinny tourist stood glaring murderously down at him, arms straining to keep the trunk from falling. The young man’s whiskered face had gone ashen under the lights overhead. “Grab this trunk! I can’t hold the weight!” The kid’s voice was light, breathless, furious.

  His whole knee ached where he’d landed on it, but Skeeter staggered back his feet and leaned over the piles of trunks and cases to secure a wet-handed grip on the corner that had already gone over the end of the platform. Hauling together, Skeeter and the tourist pulled the heavy trunk back onto the platform. The tourist was actually shaking, whether with fright or rage, Skeeter wasn’t certain.

  But he wasn’t so shaken he didn’t blow up in Skeeter’s face. “What the hell did you think you were doing? Were you trying to shove that trunk over the edge? Goddammit, do you have any idea what would’ve happened if that trunk had gone over? If you’ve been drinking, I’ll make sure you never work on this station again!” The young man’s face was deathly pale, eyes blazing against the unnatural pallor of his skin and the dark, heavy whiskers of his mutton-chop sideburns and mustache, which he must’ve acquired from Paula Booker’s cosmetology salon, because up-time men didn’t grow facial hair in that quantity or shape any more. The furious tourist, fists balled up and white-knuckled, shrilled out, “My God, do you realize what you almost caused?”

  “Well, it didn’t fall, did it?” Skeeter snapped, halting the tirade mid-stream. “And if you stand there cursing much longer, you’re gonna miss your stinking gate!” Skeeter shouldered the trunk himself, having to carry it across his back, the thing was so heavy. The short and brutish little tourist, white-lipped and silent now, stalked through the open gate on Skeeter’s heels, evidently intent on following to make sure Skeeter didn’t drop it again. So much for my new job. After this guy gets done complaining, I’ll be lucky if I still have the job scrubbing toilets.

  It was, of course, still raining furiously in the Spaldergate House garden. Skeeter did slip again, the muddy ground was so churned up beside the crowded flagstone walkway. The furious man on his heels grabbed at the trunk again as Skeeter lurched and slid sideways. “Listen, you drunken idiot!” he shouted above steady pouring of the rain. “Lay off the booze or the pills before you show up for work!”

  “Stuff it,” Skeeter said crudely. He regained his feet and finally gained the house, where he gratefully lowered his burden to the floor.

  “Where are you going?” the irate young man demanded when Skeeter headed back into the downpour.

  He flung the answer over one aching shoulder. “Back to the station!”

  “But who’s going to cart this out to the carriage? Take it to the hotel?”

  “Carry it yourself!”

  The skinny, whiskered little tourist was still sputtering at the back door when Skeeter re-entered the now-visibly shrunken Britannia Gate. He passed several other porters bent double under heavy loads, trying to get the last of the pile through, then was back on the metal gridwork platform. All that remained of the departing tour was a harried Time Tours guide who plunged through as Skeeter reappeared. Then he was alone with the mud and a single uniformed Time Tours employee who swung shut the big metal safety gate as the Britannia shrank rapidly back in on itself and vanished for another eight days.

  Skeeter—wet, shivering, exhausted—slowly descended the stairs once again and slid his timecard through the reader at the bottom, “clocking out” so his brief stay in the London timestream would be recorded properly. The baggage manager was waiting, predictably irate. Skeeter listened in total, sodden silence, taking the upbraiding he’d expected. This evidently puzzled the furious Enyo, because she finally snapped, “Well? Aren’t you going to protest your innocence?”

  “Why bother?” Skeeter said tiredly. “You’ve already decided I’m guilty. So just fire me and get it over with so I can put on some dry clothes and start looking for my friends again.”

  Thirty seconds later, he was on his way, metaphoric pink slip in hand. Well, that was probably the shortest job on record. Sixty-nine minutes from hired to fired. He never had liked the idea of hauling luggage for a bunch of jackass tourists, anyway. Scrubbing toilets was dirtier, but at least more dignified than bowing and scraping and apologizing for being alive. And when the job was over, something, at least, was clean.

  Which was more than he could say of himself at the moment. Mud covered his trousers, squelched from his wet shoes, and dripped with the trickling rainwater down one whole sleeve where he’d caught himself from a nasty fall, that last time through. Wonder what was in that lousy trunk, anyway? The way he acted, you’d’ve thought it was his heirloom china. God, tourists!

  Maybe that idiot would do them all a favor and get himself nice and permanently lost in London? But that thought only brought the pain surging back. Skeeter blinked away wetness that had nothing to do with the rainwater dripping out of his hair, then speeded up. He had to get out of these wet, filthy clothes and hook up with the search teams again. Very few people knew this station the way Skeeter did. If he couldn’t find her . . .

  He clenched his jaw muscles.

  He had to find her.

  Nothing else mattered at all.

  Chapter Seven

  Rain had stopped falling over the slate rooftops and crockery chimney pots of London by the time the arriving tour sorted itself out at the Time Tours Gatehouse and departed via carriages to hotels, boarding houses, and rented flats—a British word for apartment that one of the guides had needed to explain to her. Jenna Nicole Caddrick sat hunched now in a rattling carriage, listening to the sharp clop as the horses, a teamed pair of them in harness, struck the cobblestoned street with iron-shod hooves in a steady rhythm.

  She shivered and hugged her gentleman’s frock coat more tightly around her, grateful for the first time that she was less well endowed than she’d have liked through the chest, and grateful, too, for the simple bulkiness of Victorian men’s clothing, which helped disguise bulges that shouldn’t have been there. Jenna huddled into her coat, miserable and scared and wishing like anything that Noah had come through with her. She hadn’t expected London to be so cold or so wet. It was only the end of August here, after all; but the guides back at the gatehouse had told them London’s entire summer had been cold and wet, so there wasn’t any use complaining to them about the miserable weather.

  Miserable was right. The ride jounced her sufficiently to shake her teeth loose, if she hadn’t been clenching them so tightly. The air stank, not like New York, which smel
t of car exhaust fumes and smog, but rather a dank, bleak sort of stench compounded of whatever was rotting in the River Thames and coal smoke from hundreds of thousands of chimneys and horse dung scattered like shapeless anthills across the streets and a miasma of other stinks she couldn’t identify and wasn’t sure she wanted to, either. Everything was strange, even the lights. Gaslight didn’t look like electric light, which was a phenomenon all those period-piece movies hadn’t been able to capture on film. It was softer and yellower, adding a warm and yet alien color to everything where it spilled out across window sills or past half-closed shutters.

  What the jouncing, jarring ride was doing to Ianira Cassondra, folded up like last week’s laundry and nestled inside an enormous steamer trunk, Jenna didn’t even want to consider. They’d cushioned her with blankets and fitted her with a mask for the oxygen canisters supplied in every hotel room in Shangri-La, in case of a station fire. Every hotel room stocked them, since TT-86 stood high in the Himalayas’ rarified air. Ianira had clung briefly to Marcus, both their faces white with terror, had kissed her little girls and whispered to them in Greek, then she’d climbed into the trunk, folded herself down into the makeshift nest, and slipped on the oxygen mask.

  Noah had been the one to close and latch the lid.

  Jenna couldn’t bring herself to do it, to lock her in, like that.

  She’d wanted to call in a doctor, to look at the nasty bruise and swelling along Ianira’s brow where the Prophetess had struck her head on the concrete floor. But risking even a doctor’s visit, where questions would be asked, meant risking Ianira’s life, as well as risking her whole family. And Noah and Jenna’s lives, too . . . She clenched down her eyelids. Please, Goddess, there’s been enough killing, let it stop. . . .

  Jenna refused to let herself recall too acutely those ghastly seconds on the platform high above the Commons floor, when Ianira’s trunk had teetered and nearly fallen straight off the edge. Jenna’s insides still shook, just remembering. She’d have blamed the baggage handler for being a member of the death squad on their trail if the man hadn’t obviously been a long-time station resident. And the guy had gone back to the station, too, in a state of churlish rage, which he wouldn’t have done, if he’d been sent to murder Jenna and Ianira. No, it’d just been one of those nightmarish, freakish near-accidents that probably happened every time a gate opened and too many people with too much luggage tried to cram themselves through a hole of finite dimensions and duration.

  Don’t think about it, Jenna, she didn’t fall, so don’t think about it. There’s about a million other things to worry about, instead. Like, where to find refuge in this sprawling, sooty, foul-smelling city on the Thames. She was supposed to stay at the Piccadilly Hotel tonight, in her persona as Mr. Benny Catlin, up-time student doing post-doctoral work in sociology. “Benny” was supposed to be filming his graduate work, as part of the plan she and Carl had come up with, a lifetime ago, when the worst terror she’d had to face was having her infamous father find out she planned to go time touring.

  Carl should’ve been the one playing “Benny Catlin,” not Jenna. If Noah’d been able to go with her, the detective would’ve played the role of the non-existent Mr. Catlin. But they had to split up, so Jenna had exchanged identification with Noah. That way, the female “tourist” using the persona she and Carl had bought from that underworld identity seller in New York would cash in her Britannia Gate ticket, then buy one for Denver, instead, leading the Ansar Majlis on a merry chase down the wrong gate from the one Jenna and Ianira had really gone through. With any luck, Jenna and the Prophetess would reach the Picadilly Hotel without incident.

  But they wouldn’t be staying in the Piccadilly Hotel for long, not with the probability that they’d been followed through the Britannia Gate by someone topping out somewhere around a hundred ten percent. Jenna knew she’d have to come up with some other place to stay, to keep them both safe. Maybe she should check into the Piccadilly Hotel as scheduled, then simply leave in the middle of the night? Haul their luggage down the back stairs to the hotel livery stable and take off with a wagon. Maybe vanish into the East End somewhere for a while. It was the least likely place any searchers would think to look for them, not with Jack the Ripper stalking those dismal streets.

  Jenna finally came up out of her dark and miserable thoughts to realize that the carriage driver—a long-term Time Tours employee—was talking steadily to someone who hadn’t been listening. The man was pattering on about the city having taken out a whole triangular-shaped city block three years previously. “Demolished the entire length of Glasshouse Street, to cut Shaftesbury Avenue from Bloomsbury to Piccadilly Circus. Piccadilly hasn’t been a true circus since, y’see, left it mighty ugly, most folks are saying, but that new Shaftesbury Avenue, now, it’s right convenient, so it is . . .”

  Not that Jenna cared a damn what streets were brand new, but she tried to pay more attention, because she was going to have to get used to living here, maybe for a long time. Longer than she wanted to think about, anyway. The carriage with its heavy load of luggage passed through the apparently blighted Piccadilly Circus, which looked perfectly fine to Jenna, then jolted at last to a halt in front of the Piccadilly Hotel, with its ornate wrought-iron dome rising like the bare ribs of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. The whole open-work affair was topped by a rampant team of horses drawing a chariot. Wet streets stood puddled with the recent rain. As Jenna climbed cautiously down, not wanting to fall and break a bone, for God’s sake, thunder rumbled overhead, an ominous warning of more rain squalls to come.

  The driver started hauling trunks and cases off the luggage shelf at the back of the carriage while Jenna trudged into the hotel’s typically fussy Victorian lobby. The room was dark with heavy, ornately carved wood and busy, dark-hued wallpaper, crowded with breakables and ornate ornamentation in wrought iron. Jenna went through the motions of signing the guest register, acquiring her key, and climbing the stairs to her room, all in a daze of exhaustion. She’d been running ever since Luigi’s in New York, didn’t even want to think about how many people had died between then and now. The driver arrived on Jenna’s heels and waited with a heavy load of luggage while Jenna unlocked her stuffy, overly-warm room. A coal fire blazed in a hearth along one wall. The driver, puffing from his exertions, was followed in by a bellman who’d assisted the driver in lugging up the immense trunk where Ianira Cassondra lay safely hidden. At least, Jenna hoped she was safe inside that horrible cocoon of leather and brass fittings. When the bellman nearly dropped one end, Jenna’s ragged temper exploded again.

  “Careful with that!” It came out far more sharply than she’d meant it to, sharp and raggedly frightened. So she gulped and tried to explain her entirely-too-forceful concern. “It has valuable equipment inside. Photographic equipment.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” the uniformed bellman huffed, gingerly setting down his end, “no wonder it’s so heavy, cameras are big things, and all those glass plates and suchlike.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t want anything in that trunk damaged.”

  The Time Tours driver gave Jenna a sour look. Clearly he’d been on the receiving end of too many tourists’ cutting tongues. Driver and bellman vanished downstairs to fetch up the rest of the baggage, making short work of it. Jenna tipped the hotel employee, who left with a polite bow, closing the door after himself. The driver showed her how the gas lights worked, lighting them, then turning one of them out again, the proper way. “If you just blow it out, gas’ll still come flooding out of the open valve. They haven’t started putting in the smelly stuff yet, so you’d never even notice it. Just asphyxiate yourself in your sleep, if you didn’t accidentally strike a spark and blow yourself out of this room.”

  Jenna was too tired for lectures on how the whole Victorian world operated, but she made a valiant effort to pay attention. The Time Tours driver was explaining how to summon a servant and how to find “Benny Catlin’s” rented flat in Cheapside, across the H
olborn Viaduct—whatever that was. Jenna didn’t know enough about London and hadn’t been given a chance to finish her library research for the trip she and Carl had planned to make. “We’ll send an express wagon round in the morning, Mr. Catlin, help you shift to your permanent lodgings. Couldn’t have you arriving at the flat this late in the evening, of course, the landlady would have a cultured fit of apoplexy, having us clatter about and disturb her seances or whatever she’ll have there tonight, it’s always something new . . .”

  A polite tap at the door interrupted. “Mr. Catlin?” a man’s voice inquired.

  “Yes, come in, it isn’t locked.” Yet . . . The moment the driver was gone, Jenna intended locking the door and putting a small army of little up-time burglar alarms she’d brought with her on every windowsill and even under the doorknob. The door swung open and Jenna caught one glimpse of the two men in the hallway. Jenna registered the guns they held faster than with the driver. Jenna dove sideways with a startled scream as the pop and clack of modern, silenced semi-autos brought the driver down with a terrible, choked sound. Jenna sprawled to the floor behind the bed, dragging frantically at the Remington Beale’s revolver concealed in her coat pocket. The driver was screaming in pain on the far side of the bed. Then Jenna was firing back, bracing her wrists on the feather-ticking of the mattress to steady her hands. Recoil kicked her palms, jarred the bones of her wrists. The shattering noise of the report left Jenna’s ears ringing. But one of the bastards went down with a surprised grunt and cry of pain.