Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  Jenna kept shooting, trying to hit the other one. The second shooter had danced into the corridor again, cursing hideously. Smoke from her pistol hung like fog, obscuring her view of the doorway. The wounded driver, gasping with the effort, managed to grab the leg of a nearby washstand. He brought the whole thing crashing down across the wounded gunman’s head. The crockery basin shattered, leaving a spreading pool of blood in its wake. Then bullets slammed into the wallpaper beside Jenna’s head. She ducked, doing some swearing of her own, wet and shaky with raw terror. Jenna fired and the pistol merely clicked. Hands trembling, she fumbled for her other pre-loaded revolver.

  The driver, grey-faced and grunting with the effort, was dragging himself across the floor. He left a sickening trail of blood, as though a mortally wounded garden snail had crawled across the carpets. Jenna fired above the man’s head, driving the gunman in the doorway back into the corridor again, away from the open door. Then the driver was close enough. He kicked the door shut with his feet, hooked an ankle around a chair and gave a grunting heave, dragged it in front of the door. Then collapsed with a desperate groan.

  Jenna lunged over the top of the bed, scrambled across the floor on hands and knees to avoid the bullets punching through the wooden door at head height, and managed to snap shut the lock. Then she grunted and heaved and shoved an entire bureau across the door, toppling it to form a makeshift barricade. The door secured, Jenna dragged the driver’s coat aside. What she found left her shaking and swearing under her breath. She didn’t have time, dammit . . . but she couldn’t just let the man lie there and bleed to death, could she? It was all Jenna’s fault the man had been shot at all. She stripped a coverlet off the bed, managed to tear it into enough strips and pieces to form a tight compress. She had to yank off her gentleman’s gloves to tie knots in the makeshift bandages.

  “What in hell’s going on, Catlin?” the driver gasped out, breathing shallowly against the pain.

  “Long story,” Jenna gasped. “And I’m really sorry you got dragged into it.” She ran a distracted hand through her cropped and Macassar-oiled hair, felt the blood on her hands, wiped them on the remnants of the coverlet. A pause in the shooting outside indicated the gunman’s need to change magazines or maybe even guns, temporarily stopping him from turning the solid wooden door into a block of swiss cheese. Jenna bit one lip, then scrambled across the floor on hands and knees. “Look, I can’t do much for you. I’ve got to get the hell out of here. I’m really sorry.” She handed the driver a pistol scavenged from the dead gunman. Then Jenna retrieved the Remington she’d emptied at their attackers and wished there was time to reload it, but the gun was so slow and difficult to load, she just shoved it into the waistband of her trousers beside the partially loaded one.

  Then she wrenched up the nearest window sash and let in a flood of relatively fresh, wet air. It stank, but coal smoke smelled better than the coppery stench of blood and burnt gunpowder in the room’s close confines. Jenna glanced down, judged the drop. Even with Ianira, she ought to be able to manage it without injury. Maybe ten feet. She opened the trunk, barely able to control her fingers. Holding the trunk lid open with one hand, she dragged Ianira up out of the protected cocoon in which she’d traveled. The Prophetess was fumbling with the oxygen mask and bottle, clumsy and slow from the cramped confines of the trunk. Jenna tore them loose and dropped them back in. “Trouble,” she said tersely. “They hit us faster than I expected.”

  Ianira was taking in the blood, the corpse on the carpet, the wounded driver. Her eyes had gone wide, dark and terrified. She had to lean against Jenna just to remain on her feet, which terrified Jenna.

  “What the hell—?” The driver was staring. “Who’s that?”

  Jenna gave him a sharp stare. “You don’t know?”

  “Should I? Been living in London for the past eight years. Haven’t been back on the station in at least seven . . .”

  If this guy didn’t know who Ianira Cassondra was, Jenna wasn’t about to tell him.

  “I’m going to lower you out the window,” Jenna whispered tersely, so her voice wouldn’t carry beyond the door. “Hold onto my wrists tight.” Ianira climbed over the sill and held onto Jenna’s wrists with enough force to leave bruises. Jenna grunted and shifted her weight, swinging Ianira out, lowering her as far down along the wall as she could reach. “Now! Jump!”

  Ianira plunged downward, staggered, landed. “Hurry!” the prophetess called up.

  Jenna climbed cautiously across the windowsill, carefully balancing herself, and inched around until she was facing the hotel room. Bullets had started punching through the stout wooden door again. The gunman was shoving at it, too, trying to break it down or splinter the lock out of the doorframe. Thank God for solid Victorian construction, plaster and lathe walls and genuine wooden doors, not that hollow-core modern crap.

  “Sorry, really,” Jenna gasped, meeting the driver’s bewildered, grey-faced gaze. “If he gets through that door, shoot him, will you? If you don’t, he’ll kill you.” Then she scraped her way down until she was just hanging by her fingertips and let go her hold on the window. Jenna shoved outward slightly to keep her face from bashing against the wall on the way down. The drop was longer than she expected, but she landed well. Only went to one knee, jarring the soles of her feet up through her ankles. When she straightened with a pained gasp, her legs even condescended to work. Ianira grabbed her hand and they stumbled toward the carriage.

  And the gunman charged out of the hotel’s entryway. Gun in hand, he was heading for the window they’d just jumped from. But he hadn’t seen them yet . . . Jenna dragged her loaded gun out of her waistband again, cursing herself for not holding onto it, and shoved Ianira behind her. The gunman saw them just as Jenna fired. She managed to loose off a couple of shots that drove their pursuer back into the hotel while smoke bellied up from her pistol and hung in the air like wet fog.

  Jenna didn’t wait for a second opportunity. She turned and ran, dragging Ianira with her, unable to reach the carriage without exposing them both to fatal fire. Ianira couldn’t run very fast at first, but found her stride as they whipped through an alleyway, dodged into the street beyond, and gained speed. “Is he still back there?” Jenna gasped, not wanting to risk a wrenched ankle despite a driving terror that she would feel a bullet through her back at any second.

  “Yes . . . I cannot see him . . . but he still comes, not far behind . . .”

  Jenna decided she didn’t want to know how Ianira knew that. She cut down side streets, running flat out, then heard a bullet ricochet off the wall beside her. Jenna shoved Ianira ahead, whirled and snapped off a couple of wild shots, then ducked down another street with one hand around Ianira’s wrist. They wove in and out between horse-drawn phaetons and heavier carriages, running flat out. Drivers and passengers shouted after them, stared open-mouthed and hurled curses as horses reared in surprised protest. Then they were running down yet another street, dodging past the biggest greenhouse Jenna had ever seen.

  They were nearly to a columned portico beyond, which offered better cover, when something slammed against her hips. Jenna screamed in pain and fright. She crashed to the ground, trying to roll onto her back. Jenna jerked the gun around, fired point-blank into the gunman’s belly—

  And the pistol clicked over an empty chamber.

  She’d shot it dry.

  “Run!” Jenna kicked and punched whatever she could reach, scrambled to hands and knees, saw Ianira racing for the shelter of the portico. Shadowy movement behind the columns suggested someone watching. Please God, let it be someone who can help. Jenna gained her feet, staggered forward a single stride. A hand around her ankle brought her down again. The glint of a knife caught her peripheral vision. Jenna kicked hard, felt bone crunch under the toe of her boot. The gunman screamed. Jenna rolled frantically, tried to free herself as the bastard swung the knife in a smashing blow toward her unprotected belly—

  A gunshot exploded right above Jenna. She
screamed, convinced she’d just been shot. Then she realized she wasn’t hit. A stranger had appeared from the darkness. The newcomer had fired that shot, not the man trying to murder her. The bullet had plowed straight through the back of the paid assassin’s head. The hit-man who’d hunted them through the Britannia was dead. Messily dead. The explosive aftermath left Jenna shuddering, eyes clenched shut. Blood and bits of human brain had spattered across her face and neck and coat. She lay on her side, panting and shaking and fighting back nausea. Then she looked up, so slowly it might’ve taken a week just to lift her gaze from the wet street to the stranger’s face. She expected to find a constable, recalled a snatch of memory that suggested London constables had not carried firearms in 1888, and found herself looking up into the face of a man in a dark evening coat and silk top hat.

  “Are you unharmed, sir? And the lady?”

  Ianira had fallen to her knees beside Jenna, weeping and touching her shoulder, her arm, her blood-smeared face. “I . . .” Jenna had to gulp back nausea. “I think I’m okay.”

  The stranger offered a hand, calmly putting away his pistol in a capacious coat pocket. Jenna levered herself up with help. Once on her feet, she gently lifted Ianira and checked her pulse. Jenna didn’t like the look of shock in the Cassondra’s eyes or the desperate pallor of her skin, which was clammy and cold under her touch.

  The stranger’s brows rose. “Are you a doctor, sir?”

  Jenna shook her head. “No. But I know enough to test a pulse point.”

  “Ah . . . As it happens, I am a medical doctor. Allow me.”

  The down-timer physician took Ianira’s wrist to test her pulse, himself. And the Prophetess snapped rigid, eyes wide with shock. The Cassondra of Ephesus uttered a single choked sound that defied interpretation. She lifted both hands—gasped out something in Greek. The doctor stared sharply at Ianira and spoke even more sharply—also in Greek. While Jenna was struggling to recall a snatch of history lesson, that wealthy men of society had learned Greek and Latin as part of a gentleman’s education, the physician snarled out something that sounded ugly. Naked shock had detonated through his eyes and twisted his face.

  The next moment, Jenna found herself staring down the wrong end of his gun barrel. “Sorry, old chap. Nothing personal, you know.”

  He’s going to kill me!

  Jenna flung herself sideways just as the gun discharged. Pain caught her head brutally and slammed her to the street. As the world went dark, she heard shouts and running footsteps, saw Ianira’s knees buckle in a dead faint, saw the stranger simply scoop her up and walk off with her, disappearing into the yellow drizzle.

  Then darkness crashed down with a fist of brutal, black terror.

  Chapter Eight

  Malcolm Moore had done a great deal of hard work during his career as freelance time guide. But nothing had come even remotely close to the bruising hours he’d put in setting up a base camp in a rented hovel in Whitechapel Road, guiding scholars and criminologists through the East End from well before sunup until the early morning hours, sleeping in two and three-hour snatches, assisting them in the task of learning everything the scholars and Scotland Yard Inspectors wanted to know before the terror broke wide open on the final day of August.

  The last thing Malcolm expected when the Britannia cycled near dusk, just nine hours before the first Ripper murder was what he found in the Spaldergate parlour. Having rushed upstairs from his work with the scholars ensconced in the cellar, he stood blinking in stupid shock at the sight of her. “Margo?”

  “Malcolm!” His fiancée flung herself toward him, arms outstretched, eyes sparkling. “Oh, Malcolm! I missed you!”

  The kiss left his head spinning. Giddy as a schoolboy and grinning like a fool, Malcolm drew back at last, reluctant to break away from the vibrant warmth of her, and stared, amazed, into her eyes. “But Margo, whatever are you doing here?”

  “Reporting for duty, sir!” she laughed, giving him a mock salute. “Kit worked it out with Bax,” she said in a rush, eyes sparkling. “I’ll be guiding for the rest of the Ripper Watch tour, whatever you think I can handle, and Doug Tanglewood came through to help out, too, your message asking for assistance came through loud and clear!”

  Malcolm grinned. “Bloody marvelous! It’s about time those dratted johnnies at Time Tours listened to me. How many additions to the Team did you bring through?”

  Margo grimaced expressively.

  “Oh, dear God,” he muttered, “that many?”

  “Well, it’s not too bad,” Margo said guardedly. “Dr. Shahdi Feroz finally made it in. Mostly, it’s those reporters. Guy Pendergast and Dominica Nosette. I don’t know which is worse, honestly, the scholars or the newsies. Or the tourists,” she added, rolling her eyes at the flood of Ripperoons crowding into Spaldergate’s parlour.

  “That, I can believe,” Malcolm muttered. “We haven’t much time to get them settled. Polly Nichols is scheduled to die at about five o’clock tomorrow morning, which means we’ll have to put our surveillance gear up sometime after two A.M. or so, when the pubs close and the streets grow a little more quiet. Daren’t put up the equipment sooner, someone might notice it. It’s not likely, since the wireless transmitters and miniaturized cameras and microphones we’ll be setting up are so small. Still and all . . . Let’s get them settled quickly, shall we, and take them downstairs to the vault. We’ve a base camp out in Whitechapel, but the main equipment is here, beneath Spaldergate, where we’ve the power for computers and recording equipment.”

  Margo nodded. “Okay. Let’s get them moving. And the sooner we get those reporters under wraps, the better I’ll feel. They don’t listen at all and don’t follow rules very well, either.”

  Malcolm grunted. “No surprise, there. The tourists the past few weeks have been bad enough, trying to duck out on their tour guides so they can cheat and stay long enough to see one of the murders. I expect the reporters will be even more delightful. Now, let’s find Mrs. Gilbert, shall we, and assign everyone sleeping quarters . . .”

  An hour later, Malcolm and his fiancée escorted the newly arrived team members down into the vault beneath the house, where a perfectly ordinary wooden door halfway across a perfectly standard Victorian cellar opened to reveal a massive steel door that slid open on pneumatics. Beyond this lay a brightly lit computer center and modern infirmary. The scholars greeted one another excitedly, then immediately fell to squabbling over theories as well as practical approaches to research, while the newly arrived reporters busied themselves testing their equipment. Technicians nodded satisfactorily at the quality of the images and sound transmitted by cable from the carefully disguised receiving equipment on the roof of the house above this bubble of ultra-modern technology.

  While the scholars and journalists worked, Margo quietly brought Malcolm up to date about events on the station. The news left Malcolm fretting, not just because the station was in danger if the riots continued, but because there was literally nothing he could do to help search for Ianira or her family while trapped on this side of the Britannia Gate. “I’ve heard about the Ansar Majlis,” Malcolm said tiredly, rubbing his eyes and the bridge of his nose. “Too much, in fact.”

  “You had friends on TT-66, didn’t you?” Margo asked quietly, laying one gentle hand on his sleeve.

  Malcolm sighed. “Yes. I’m afraid I did.”

  “Anyone . . .” she hesitated, looking quite abruptly very young and unsure of herself.

  Malcolm stroked her cheek. “No, Margo. No one like that.” He drew her close for a moment, blessing Kit for sending her here. He’d have to turn around and send her into danger out on the streets, he knew that, it was part of the dream which burned inside her and made her the young woman he loved so much; but for the moment, he was content merely to have her close. “Just very good friends, guides I’d known for years.”

  She nodded, cheek rubbing against the fine lawn of the expensive gentleman’s shirt he’d put on to greet the new team members. �
�I’m sorry, Malcolm.”

  “So,” he sighed, “am I. How much of the station had they managed to search before you had to leave?”

  Margo’s description of search efforts on station was interrupted by the shrill of the telephone on the computer console behind them. Hooked into a much more antique-looking telephone in the house above, it was a direct link between the outside world and the vault. Malcolm pulled reluctantly away and snagged the receiver. “Yes?”

  It was Hetty Gilbert, co-gatekeeper of the Time Tours Gatehouse. The news she had was even worse than Margo’s. All color drained from Malcolm’s cheeks as he listened. “Oh, dear God. Yes, of course. We’ll come up straight away.”

  “What is it?” Margo asked breathlessly as he hung up again.

  “Trouble. Very serious trouble.” He glanced at the monitor where, a few hours from now, they hoped to record the identity of Jack the Ripper. Weeks, he’d put in, preparing for that moment. And now it would have to wait. Reluctantly, Malcolm met Margo’s gaze again.

  “What is it?” Margo demanded, as if half-afraid to hear the answer.

  “We have a tourist missing,” he said quietly. “A male tourist.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yes. His name is Benny Catlin. The Gilberts are asking for our help with the search teams. Evidently, he has already killed someone in a brutal shooting at the Piccadilly Hotel. A Time Tours driver is in critical condition, should be arriving within minutes for surgery. He managed to telephone from the hotel before he collapsed.”