A Time-Traveller's Best Friend: Volume One

by A Time-Traveller's Best Friend- Volume One (epub)

  For the first time, the Someone looked startled. To Marx’s secret joy, this made his gun drop a fraction: Someone was used to directing, not pointing guns at people.

  “Off you go, kid,” he said, and threw the spanner at the other man. It was a dead accurate throw, to Marx’s fleeting satisfaction: it hit the Someone’s face with a sickening crack, jerking his hand up as he fell backwards, and something loud and hot stabbed Marx through the shoulder. He ignored the pain, because the Someone was grimly reaching for his gun again, face bloody and terrifying in its expressionlessness, and because Kez hadn’t run in the direction he expected. Instead, she’d run forward for the plasma bolt gun, and now she had it trained on the Someone, her hands visibly shaking.

  “Stop,” she said, in her small, scratched voice; and the Someone did stop. Maybe he saw the look in her eyes.

  Marx did, and it was that look that made him gently take the gun away from her and say: “Go check the entrance, kid. I’ll handle this.”

  To his surprise, she obeyed him. He and the Someone watched her walk away before the Someone said: “You think I don’t have backup?”

  Marx grinned. “I know you don’t. Your type doesn’t take to the field until there’s no other choice. If you had backup they’d be here between you and me.”

  “I’ve done my research on you, too, Mr. Marx. You pilot a stolen time-craft, and trouble seems to follow wherever you go: do you really think you can keep her safe? First World is running out of patience: they’ve given the word to nuke the planet. The whole planet, Marx! For one little girl!”

  Marx shrugged. “I can keep her safe from you.”

  The Someone knew what he meant: he saw it flash across the man’s face along with something like respect in the brief moment before the Someone reached for his gun.

  “Might as well die trying,” he said as Marx shot him.

  Kez was hugging herself and bouncing on her toes by the time he’d cleaned up. Fortunately there wasn’t much left of the Someone after a plasma burst at close range, and the bullet hole in his arm was a through and through, so that was reasonably easy to clean up as well.

  “What did you do?” she asked him anxiously. “You can’t just tie him up: he keeps comin’ back in time again and again, and he’s gonna get me next time!”

  “He won’t come back this time,” said Marx, a hard edge to his voice. Kez looked at him for a moment with glittering black eyes, then threw her arms around him with sudden ferocity, hiccoughing– or was that a sob? She pushed him away just as suddenly, careless of his arm, and wiped her nose inelegantly on the back of her hand. Her sharp little face denied that she’d given way to the weakness of either crying or hugging Marx.

  Marx found himself saying amiably: “Have some respect for me injuries, kid! C’mmon, let’s get this ship up and running.”

  And Kez said: “’A’right,” and trotted after him, so perhaps some progress had been made, after all.

  They sat on the hull while they waited for the Pauli Driver to repair itself. Two lemons were dangling from an open port nearby with copper rods thrust into them, and Marx had just watched the hours-younger versions of himself and Kez leave the roof with a perplexed kind of wonder.

  “You know the planet’s gonna get nuked, don’t you?” he asked her, absently prodding his shoulder to see if it still hurt. It did.

  Kez nodded. “Thought I might be able to convince them I died. ’Sides, I can only do the shifts when I’m scared. Thought that’d scare me enough.”

  “You’re telling me! How many other wars have you started, by the way?”

  Kez gave a humourless grin, but didn’t reply. Below them, the hull creaked and separated from the roof, propelling them a few feet higher with a heart-stopping bounce.

  “Well, that’s it,” said Marx, disposing of the lemons casually by dropping them to the pavement far below. “C’mon, kid: you can’t stay here. You’ll be safe with me.”

  “No I won’t,” Kez said. “I’ll just feel safe. Feeling safe makes you forget to look out.”

  “Don’t make me pick you up and drop you in headfirst.”

  Kez waggled the plasma gun at him and dropped back down to the roof. How she’d gotten it back, he had no idea; but there it was, pointed at him again.

  “I’m having a strange feeling of deja vu,” Marx sighed. “You’re not going to get in, are you?”

  Kez shook her head defiantly. “No. It’s not safe for you.”

  Marx chuckled. “That’s adorable. All right, so long, kid.”

  He saw the flash of relief in her eyes, and maybe even a touch of regret, quickly hidden. All right then, he thought, smiling. He knew what to do.

  She waved at him from the roof-top as he hovered, which made him chuckle again. It took roughly two seconds to separate her signature from that of the plasma gun, then he hit the transfer button on his console and shuttled Kez directly to the padded Safety Room in the centre of the craft. The dampers were still off-line and it was going to be a rough ride all the way back out of the Second World time stream. Marx grinned, braced himself, and pushed all four thruster sliders all the way up.

  Some time later, comfortably in the Other Zone, Marx opened the fat, padded door of the Safety Room. A shivering figure was inside, its face alternately green and white.

  “Out you get.”

  Kez climbed out, still shivering, and threw up on the floor. When she was done, she huddled there miserably and looked up at him with baleful eyes.

  “I hate you.”

  “I hate you too, kid,” he said, hauling her up by one skinny arm. “Funny, I thought you’d have better aim.”

  Kez made a sound like “Blerk!” and threw up on his shoes.

  “Well, it’s an improvement,” said Marx. He jabbed a tiny Steady-Sailing tonic into her arm, which took away the green look almost at once, and tossed her up on the second bunk. “Bottom bunk’s mine. If you snore, I’ll kick you.”

  Kez turned her face to the wall so that he wouldn’t see the grin that was trying to break out, but Marx, taking unfair advantage, added: “And no more of this starting wars and destroying planets. Anyone’d think you’re Helen of Troy.”

  There was a muffled snort from the top bunk.

  Marx added firmly: “I’m a law-abiding, decent citizen. I won’t have you pulling me down.”

  He was half-way back to the cockpit when he realised that she’d picked his pocket again. His voice floated back to Kez, who was trying not to smile at the ceiling.

  It said: “And put me flamin’ spanner back when you’re done with it!”

  ***

  Holstrom Institute

  Logan Holdings Precinct,

  Rumour County, 5th World

  Chairman Holstrom

  Lot 3, Chittow City,

  Watergate County, 5th World

  Dear Sir,

  In the wake of last week’s disturbing events, I have taken it upon myself to contact you personally. I attempted to speak to you face to face at the start of the week, but was unable to establish a link with anyone beyond your undersecretary, who informed me that you were not to be disturbed and that no appointments were available for 3 months.

  I have attached both a police report and a report from Time Corp regarding the disappearance of Director Marcus Solomon, who until a week ago was managing Holstrom Institute. The disappearance of a patient is being investigated at the same time, and while the official report is that the two events are not connected, the traffic here in connection with her disappearance seems disproportionate to the claim. I thought you ought to be made aware that the Time Corp was, and still is, investigating the case.

  Please advise as to what steps you would like me to take in connection with this matter.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Roger Maitland

  Assistant Director

  Holstrom Institute

  Logan Holdings

  The Beginning

  Bright light etched temporary patterns on Ma
rx’s eyelids in a series of repeated flashes.

  He tried to mumble: “Flamin’ Night-Flies!” but his lips were cracked, his voice more so; and all that came out was a prolonged creak. Something pawed at his gummy eyes, and Marx had protested inarticulately several times before he realized it was his own hand, heavy and unfamiliar. It was trying to clear away the gooey rubbish from his eyes, and since it occurred to him that it was a good idea he lay back in an inert, acquiescing manner until the job was done.

  When Marx was finally able to open his eyes, it was to discover that the source of the intermittent light wasn’t, as he’d originally thought, the headlights of the local Night-Fly patrols as they flashed past his outfacing window. There was a lighted vent above him, lazily spinning fan blades quickening and slowing in response to the flow of air, and the pattern that had been repeating on his eyelids must have been the curlicues on the grating.

  Marx sat up, ducking his head too late as usual: but this time his head didn’t connect with the indent above his bunk for the very good reason that he wasn’t in his bunk. The headache hit when he sat up, which made things feel quite normal again, and for the next few minutes he was too busy cradling his head to pay attention to his surroundings. Gradually the headache subsided, taking with it the blurred sight and slight ringing of the ears, and before long Marx was able to feel that he might possibly be human again.

  The smell of hot chips was in the air, salty and strong. Sharper acidy tones informed his knowledgeable nose that Third World food was not the only sustenance available. What was that, First World makka? The floor beneath him was buzzing in a sustained, mechanical way, and far overhead was the heavy shudder of twin Paxton 5 engines slowly winding down. Each a half-mile in diameter, the Paxton 5s took two hours to fire up and half a day to cool down. Marx heaved a painful sigh, and roused himself to wonder what he was doing on someone’s intergalactic flight deck.

  The deck itself was maxi-plex and see-through, which was distinctly uncomfortable on a queasy stomach: below him, Marx could see orange-suited mechs striding through the crowd, deceptively close. There were a lot of them, which meant that it was a commercial flight deck, catering to more than one or two private high-flyers. In fact, there was even a salesman checking his watch to Marx’s left, his hair spiked and confusingly see-through due to a liberal application of transgel. He seemed to be attempting to sell an ancient intergalactic craft that looked to be on the point of falling apart and had the dubious distinction of being named the Upsydaisy.

  “Now that’s funny,” said Marx, eyeing the salesman’s expensive watch with a knowledgeable eye. “What’s a half-toff johnny doing selling a beater? Or is it a beater?”

  It looked like a beater, though, and since his scrutiny was making the salesman nervous, Marx wandered off to see what there was to eat that he could afford.

  The question of how he’d gotten onto someone’s intergalactic flight deck didn’t assume its proper importance until Marx was standing in line for a bowl of kaffar, and found that he didn’t have a single line of credit to his currency-card.

  He groaned and dropped out of line. How had that happened? Yesterday there had been ten and a half lines on his credcard. Mind you, yesterday he’d been on board the commercial liner Doubtless, trying to catch the eye of the only female mech in the boiler-room and keep an incompetent head-mech from scuppering the aft-port engines. Yesterday night, now: that was where things got fuzzy. He’d been having a quick meal off-board, two-veg and meat in a small café that supposedly cooked ‘the way mother does’. Fortunately it’d been better than that, and had still been cheap enough to leave him with ten and a half credit lines: enough to see him through until next payday. He’d had a drink, too; something cool and refreshing that washed the meal down nicely. After that, it was anyone’s guess.

  Wait now. He did remember someone being in his room. He was only half in the bed, and everything was slightly unreal around the edges, as if he’d drunk bad wine. Someone small with sharp elbows and a sharp voice was tugging him out of bed, and then Marx must have fallen asleep, because he could’ve sworn he was in the Other Zone. Dangerously, impossibly, bodily in the Other Zone, with possibilities flowing past in an incomprehensible stream and fingers digging into his arm.

  That part could only have been a dream. Space-travel without a craft was inadvisable bordering on impossible: time-travel without one was not only impossible but horrendous to contemplate. With an aerator and propulsion pack, an unwary traveller might survive open space long enough to be picked up, but without a computer to run the equations and isolate the correct re-entry point, anyone lost in the Other Zone was more than likely to find themselves occupying three different times, an impossibility that could only be achieved by dismemberment. Marx made an involuntary grimace that frightened one trimly dressed woman into a wide berth around him, and grinned at her just to make her scuttle a little faster.

  No money for breakfast. Well, it wasn’t the first time he’d gone without breakfast. Ten years campaigning with the Fourth World Flyboys where a meal a day was a luxury, and five years after that fighting in the trenches through a bitter, losing war with limited ammunition and no rations but what there was to scavenge, had taught him to work through his hunger.

  Well, though Marx, his grin becoming leaner and grimmer; he wasn’t on Fourth World now. He wasn’t sleeping in a crust of mud and manure to keep hidden from World Alliance sensors. There would be no devastating hail of fire that consumed half of the platoon in a single, molten torrent, and there was no need to cook rats over small, smoky camp-cookers. He didn’t have to work through his hunger. Where was that overdressed young salesman?

  ***

  It was porridge for breakfast again. Kez grimly applied the salt-shaker to hers, noticing without expression that it was lumpy. That meant there would be another episode. She could already see Darren poking methodically at the lumps from across the table: the muscle beside his right eye was pulsing with a steady rhythm. When it became irregular, Darren would explode, like the cap from a shaken fizz-bottle.

  That would make the fourth time this month, thought Kez, watching the tic as she spooned mouthful after mouthful of porridge into her mouth. Faster and faster, it went. She slid out the pocket watch she’d stolen from Marcus and put it up to her ear to hear the whir and tick of it. It wasn’t the computerized tick of a new-made ‘antique’; it was the heavy double tick of a cog-and-spring driven mechanism solidly counting out the seconds. It counted out the tics as they came and went beside Darren’s eye.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said fretfully.

  Kez slurped another spoonful of porridge and kept counting tics. There. There was the missed pulse. And then the double tic. She grabbed her porridge bowl and slid under the table. Above her, a plastic bowl flew into the wall with a soggy plop and slid to the floor with a lumpy trail of porridge.

  When the screaming began Kez hunched her shoulder into one ear, stuffed her finger into the other, and returned to her porridge. The table rocked, jogging her shoulder, but didn’t overturn: it was bolted to the floor, as were the benches. Darren howled his rage and wrenched at the table again, blue booties slipping against the padded floor. Some of the other residents were getting restless: Kez could see the drumming of heels against the floor, and through her blocked ears she heard the high, keening sound of Maggie wailing. She threw her empty bowl away in disgust and flicked the plastic spoon after it. There went a peaceful day. It was Marcus’ fault, she was certain. Ever since he’d arrived, with his expensive waistcoats and plump, inoffensive face, there had been episode after episode. Kez had started noticing when the pattern repeated: this certain person fresh out of the solitary confinement they called The Well just in time to interact with that person who couldn’t stand the way this person ate, or breathed, or smelled. Controlled bursts of violence that achieved … what? Some of the episodes had resulted in visits to the infirmary, and one had resulted in a death. Kez learned to hide herself away wh
en she saw the pattern beginning. Sometimes it was handy to be the only sane person in a mad-house.

  She had settled herself in for the long haul, hunched against the struts of the table to watch the room descend into chaos, when a pair of legs in blue approached her shelter.

  He knows I’m here, Kez thought, fighting an instinct to kick her pink booties into the trestle and slide out of cover. She could run, then. But cover was cover, and how far could you run in a closed room, after all? Maybe it was one of the harmless loonies.

  The blue legs knelt. A hand slapped softly, palm down, into the padded floor beside the knees. On the other side, a metal knife-point sank through the padding until it was buried an inch deep. Three fingers were curled around the handle, the nub of the fourth jutting awkwardly by itself.

  “Ah heck,” said Kez, in a small, scratchy voice. “Who let you outta the Well, Demon?”

  “Marcus says you shouldn’t call me names, Kezzy,” said the man. He was thin and golden-haired: would have been beautiful, Kez thought, if you couldn’t see the viciousness in those bright blue eyes. “My name is Damon. You’re being rude.”

  “Where’ja get the knife?”

  “It sang to me and I liberated it.”

  “Yeah? Liberated the cook’s ears, too, I s’pose?”

  “He was too caught up with the physical. He needed enlightenment.”

  “Yeah, I reckon that lightened him, all right. ’Zat why you cut your finger off?”

  Damon smiled, beautiful and chilling. “Come out and play, Kezzy.”

  “Reckon I’ll stay here.”

  “You have such pretty fingers and toes,” he crooned. He ducked his head to crawl under the table, and Kez’s breathing hitched once, then grew shallow.

  “Get away from me, Demon!”

  Damon grabbed her hand, his thumb digging painfully into her palm. “Don’t be selfish, Kezzy,” he said. His smile was still there, but it was sharper now. “Marcus wants to keep you to himself, but I’ll have my piece as well.”