Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  So I looked over the array of armaments and just didn’t feel as secure as I was probably supposed to.

  After a few long breaths, I heard the beat of the rotor and saw the flash of the chopper rising over the trees. The pilot was pretty good in a flashy kind of way; he bounced down, then up, coming in over the department store, and made a rapid descent to the parking lot, stopping the rotor almost as soon as he touched down. The door opened and Porter ran out toward us.

  She was most of the way to us when I saw a gray shimmer forming behind the helicopter, and, without stopping to think, I shouted, “Down, Porter, down!”

  I always give my ward a lot of credit for alertness and common sense, and once again she was on top of matters—she hit the dirt right away. There was a roar as something shot out of the emerging gate and hit the chopper. The fuel tank blew, enveloping the helicopter in dense orange flames and black smoke. The pilot staggered out, his clothes on fire, and was shot in the back.

  From behind the New Jerseys around the edge of the lot, the ATs opened up on whatever was coming through the now-open gate. I tore my coat down the back drawing the SHAKK from between my shoulder blades, and to my right Chrysamen yanked hers out; we each took three quick sidesteps and hit the ground.

  The burning remains of the helicopter flew into pieces as another explosive round hit. Blazing wreckage and chunks of iron rained down on the lot. I could hear the steady rattle of automatic-weapons fire from the ditch, the New Jerseys, and the store windows.

  But I could see it wouldn’t be enough. The first Closers to charge through the gate had fallen, but there was already a ring of them surrounding their gate, setting up bulletproof barriers, getting return fire aimed back at us. I’d seen no superweapons yet, but it wasn’t atypical of the Closers to push sacrificial lambs through first.

  I ripped a SHAKK burst across the barriers; they fell over and shattered, and several of the bodies twitched and fell. The rest, exposed to the fire of the German commandos, were hit almost immediately. Chrysamen’s burst into the gate would have slowed them further—if there had been troops in there.

  Instead, what was crawling out of the gate was a silver dome floating just off the ground. I had seen those before, and I knew what this one was. Under the gleaming surface there were a dozen hypersonic homing-projectile guns, each delivering enough force to take down a house on every shot.

  It was the Closer equivalent of a tank, rolling out into an ordinary department-store parking lot in our century. It must have cost them more electric power than the USA produces in a year to get that thing back here.

  Chrys’s rounds rang off its surface repeatedly, bouncing and then turning around to try again until they were out of energy. She might as well have been firing puffed rice. I fired, too, but more from a need to do something than from any belief that it would succeed.

  The Closer “tanks” never appear to pivot; either their surfaces are so smooth we can’t see them turn, or they can fire from any point on their surfaces. There was a deep, rumbling roar, and the row of New Jerseys on one end of the parking lot flew into gravel—mixed with flesh, blood, and bone—that sprayed across the empty field behind.

  Chrys hurled a PRAMIAC through the Closer gate, and a moment later the red glow was followed by the gate switching off. But she had been able to set the PRAMIAC all the way up to ten megatons because the explosion would happen on the other side of the gate—in our timeline, it didn’t actually “exist” at all.

  The Closer tank was already here, and anything that would take it out would take out half of Weimar with it.

  5

  When there’s no hope you do what you can think of. I emptied the SHAKK at the thing. We knew they never appeared to be harmed, but maybe I was giving everyone inside a terrible headache, maybe I was blinding the defense system, and just possibly there was actually a vulnerable spot, and one of the rounds would find it by accident.

  None of the above happened. They screamed off it as uselessly as the much slower, unguided bullets from the AT forces, and just as Chrys’s rounds had, they rattled against it repeatedly with no discernible effect. The tank drifted outward, as if looking around.

  Porter, staying low to the ground, crawled slowly toward us.

  At least the tank no longer had its infantry cover. They’re supposed to be vulnerable when that happens, but of course that’s one of our tanks, from our timeline. If this thing was vulnerable, it wasn’t vulnerable to anything much we had on hand.

  Chrys rolled a PRAMIAC toward it, along the ground; it ran over the tennis ball-sized object.

  There was a sudden red glow over the surface of the tank; just for good measure, I sprayed it some more with the SHAKK.

  The red glow faded, and the tank continued to roll across the pavement as before. Shots were still pinging off it, but there was no effect.

  Meanwhile, Porter was still crawling steadily on her belly toward me. I wriggled forward toward her, still firing at the tank.

  Again it blasted away, this time at the other set of New Jerseys. Whatever it fired, it was hypersonic and came in a broad band rather than as individual shots. The surfaces of the New Jerseys pitted, broke up, and crumbled like a wall of sugar hit by a hot spray of water. The roar of the concrete being ground to bits was deafening.

  The tops of the New Jerseys crumbled, and they began to break into large pieces. The spray of invisible hypersonic particles was hitting with such force that the remaining pieces—the size of grapefruits and softballs—flew backward like cannonballs, killing the men behind them.

  An instant later, the deadly wash of hypersonic particles had sanded the rest from existence; what was left of the men was a reddish tinge in the smear that stretched into the shattered forest beyond.

  The tank advanced slowly toward us.

  Porter was squirming forward for all she was worth now, the black sweatshirt and jeans she usually wore getting smeared with mud and gravel, her blond hair shining in the autumn sun. (Abstractly I hoped the Closers wouldn’t be able to use that to spot her; at least we were in a country with a lot of blond people.) I saw that she had managed to get the .38 I’d given her out, but she wasn’t trying to get it into play—another sign of her common sense, for at that range she couldn’t have hit a thing, and if the SHAKK wasn’t denting that monster, and a PRAMIAC was barely warming it up, they’d never even notice .38 snakeshot.

  I crawled forward toward her, not because I could do anything effective, but just to be with her. We were nearly touching when the tank suddenly zagged toward us.

  Chrys fed it another PRAMIAC, and this time it glowed a much brighter red—she must have notched the power setting on the PRAMIAC up a little—and actually sat still for a moment before it again began to move toward us. Probably she’d made everyone inside feel like they’d gotten a bad sunburn. Certainly she couldn’t have safely gone any higher on the PRAMIAC setting, as it was a hard gust of wind that blew out from under the tank and I felt tremendous heat on my face.

  The Closer tank drew nearer; Porter was now so close that I reached out and squeezed her free hand in front of me.

  “Doesn’t look good at all, kid,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she replied.

  The tank was looming large as it bore down on us; I was practically out of SHAKK ammunition anyway, and it seemed futile to try firing any more.

  The light shifted and changed somehow, a flickering grayish glow on the other side of us from the tank. I looked over, and then up, to see a circle of colorless gray appear in the blue autumn sky; I couldn’t tell how far away as there were no reference points.

  It was another gate, but was it ours or theirs?

  The question was answered in a flash—literally. A straight black line emerged from the center of the gate, and touched the Closer tank. The tank changed color, first from silver to gold, and then from gold to dull red.

  Then it flew into pieces—big, hot glowing pieces that blew over our heads and c
rashed to the ground all around us. That settled the question as far as I was concerned—whoever it was on the other side of that gate were the good guys.

  But as I was raising my head cautiously, I saw something that both startled me and explained a lot. We knew that Closer tanks were hard to knock out and that they seemed to fight as if in perfect condition right up till the moment when they were knocked out. They also never seemed to run out of fuel or ammo.

  Now I saw why. Where the tank had stood, there was now a naked, gray gate.

  The tanks had never been anything more than tough, mirrored armor over a gate; the power sources, ammunition, even parts of the weapons and crew themselves had been on the other side.

  And now that the gate was exposed, they were still not giving up. Before I had time to react, twenty of them had raced through the gate. I gave them a quick blast with the SHAKK, and several fell dead, in that characteristic collapsing-bag way. Beside me, Porter’s .38 barked, and then I heard the whiz of Chrysamen’s NIF. We were back to an old-fashioned firefight around the mouth of a gate.

  Except that the Closer tank had managed to wipe out most of our allies. I heard Paula’s 9 mm also, and saw that the Closer troopers were now down flat. You could hardly ask for a more dangerous situation—there were superweapons around, and everyone could see everyone else.

  Four of them convulsed and died from the fléchettes of Chrys’s NIF, but they were working on getting an angle on us—

  A curtain of fire ripped over our heads, sounding like outsize SHAKK rounds. All of the people facing us twitched once, a bouncing motion that might have been the last gasp of the nervous system, or might only have been the physical shock from the momentum of the projectiles.

  Once again, the straight black line stabbed out, this time into the gate itself, which abruptly glowed deep red, and then white—and then went out, a lot faster than any candle ever had.

  We all took a long breath, and then I slowly rose to my feet. There were fewer than a dozen German commandos still alive, and none of them was an officer. Paula, Chrys, Porter, and I were all still fine.

  There was an immense number of dead Closers around where the two gates had been; most of the bodies had been hit multiple times.

  I had a feeling that this was not going to be easy to explain to the German authorities.

  A dark shadow fell across the parking lot, and I turned to see that the gate had widened till it took up a big part of the sky immediately above us—and through it, there emerged the great, dark bulk of a dirigible.

  The airship slid neatly out of the gate, which closed in a blink behind it, and descended slowly to the pavement; long, spidery legs telescoped out of it.

  Though it flew and maneuvered like a dirigible, it didn’t land like one; it came down quickly and precisely, like a helicopter, and it didn’t bounce in the breeze.

  A ramp descended, and out came a circus ringmaster, flanked by two extras from Ben-Hur. At least that was my first thought. The top hat and the tux were sort of flashy and bright-colored, and something about the centurion outfits (which really did look a lot like the Roman Meal Bread version) suggested that they weren’t well cared for.

  But a closer look revealed that the reason the Roman armor, helmet, and leggings looked so casually treated was because those guys were wearing them like clothes; I suddenly realized that, just possibly, this was what they always wore. Moreover, though they had scabbards with short swords, they were holding big, blocky objects that looked a lot like flattened overhead projectors—but were probably weapons, and I would guess of neither the neural-induction nor the hypersonic-projectile types that we and the Closers had been fighting with for so long.

  Something about those objects told me that the SHAKK in my hand was about as up-to-date, as of that moment, as a Pilgrim musket.

  The guy in the top hat and tails, on the other hand, did not look the least bit comfortable. The outfit’s basic color seemed to be mauve, though it was fighting it out with enough reds and purples in the pattern to not be the clear winner. The shirt had too much lace and too many ruffles for a production of The Three Musketeers, and the cummerbund clashed with everything else in a way that I’d never quite seen colors do before.

  He wore a waxed mustache and an enormous white tie that added to the ringmaster effect—though now that I thought about it, he might also have passed for a stage magician, or possibly for the groom at the tackiest formal wedding you ever attended.

  He glanced from side to side, looked at each of us in turn, and then walked slowly in my direction. The two guys in the Roman outfits moved a little to the side and followed; that easy, practiced motion told me that I shared an occupation with them. They were his bodyguards.

  I was already carefully slipping my SHAKK back into its sheath between my shoulders, under my ripped coat. I knew in my bones these guys were friendly, and, anyway, if they hadn’t been, I might as well have had a kid’s popgun or a fistful of soggy noodles to throw at them.

  Beside me, Porter was returning her .38 to its shoulder holster, and everyone else seemed to have reached the same conclusion I had, and decided that there was no point in being ready for a fight we would be sure to lose, even if these guys didn’t show every sign of being our friends.

  The ringmaster was very tall and slim, and I realized now that either his blond hair or his black mustache must be a dye job. He had approached close enough to touch me, and as he did, Porter and Chrys closed in around me.

  “Do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Mark Strang?” he asked, in perfect English.

  “I’m Mark Strang,” I said. “And you are …?”

  The whole thing was seeming much too real for a hallucination, and besides, I’ve been knocked out, beaten senseless, drugged in various ways, and hit with all kinds of neural induction, and I’ve never had the kind of hallucination they depict in the movies. Not to mention that if you work for ATN, you get used to seeing all sorts of things; I was in a timeline once where the King of Scotland routinely dressed like Carmen Miranda, but that’s another story.

  The man appeared to be disconcerted by the question of who he was, for just a moment; then he swallowed hard and said, “I’m just a minor functionary, sir. My only job here is to bring the ship to you, to Ms. Brunreich, and to Ms. ja N’wook so that we can take you to a meeting with our leaders.”

  I nodded. “Nonetheless, I would prefer to know your name.”

  “My name is Caius Xin Schwarz,” he said. “Now, may I request again, sir, that we be allowed to take you to our timeline for a conversation with people who can actually answer your questions?”

  I checked the weapons, without turning my head. We sure as hell couldn’t draw on them. And god knew what might be trained on us from the airship. They’d done nothing hostile; they were just a little rude, and “rude” is a culturally relative term—this might be the way they all talk to each other. In plenty of nations on Earth, people answer the phone with “Who is this?” and for that matter in California the car-rental people call everyone by first name … possibly he came from an even ruder timeline than our own.

  So there was nothing much to be done, and it might turn out all right. I let my eyes stray sideways to Chrys, and her hand flickered in a “balancing” gesture with the thumb crossed—“better do what he says but I’ll back you if you want to try something else,” at least that’s how I read it. Such codes have to be subtle and all but invisible, so it’s never possible to be sure it isn’t just a case of an itchy thumb.

  “All right,” I said, “we’ll come along, as long as we’re permitted to stick together and to retain our weapons.”

  He nodded. “Of course. Please come with us—er, just the three people named, please.”

  I decided to see how much weight I swung, and said, “Paula is very much a valued assistant, she speaks no German, and I don’t want to leave her here to take the heat for all these corpses.”

  Again he nodded. “We may be gone for a long time, an
d I cannot assure her safe return.”

  “Nonetheless, if she chooses to go, I want her with me.”

  Caius Xin Schwarz nodded, and said, “All right, then. Are there any other people you wish to add to the party?”

  “Not at present.” I looked around at the dazed, baffled German AT troopers, pointed to one of the ones with some stripes on his shoulder, and said, in German, “You.”

  “Sir?” He seemed relieved to have some idea what to do; answering questions must be a lot better than standing there wondering which parts of your world had fallen away into chaos …

  “Please inform the authorities that I will return to this spot within twenty-four hours to offer a full explanation. Don’t worry about further attacks; with myself, my wife, and Fräulein Brunreich removed, there will be no cause for them, and this site will not be attacked again. Please repeat back what you will tell your superiors.”

  “You will return here within twenty-four hours to explain, and there is no reason to fear any further attack.”

  “Good.” I turned to Caius Xin Schwarz, and said, “We are ready to go.”

  The gadget that extended down from the side of the airship, which I had thought was a simple ramp, turned out to be a moving sidewalk of sorts, though I couldn’t see anything actually moving. When we stepped on it, we were carried by something that moved our feet rapidly up the ramp, and we found ourselves standing inside a large lounge or saloon within the airship.

  I suppose waiting rooms are one of the things that are most alike from timeline to timeline and civilization to civilization. What you want the person waiting to do is to sit there and not do anything until he or she is wanted. And the way you achieve that is to make the environment very soothing, supply just enough distractions to keep them from revolting out of sheer boredom, and above all else make remaining seated the easiest possible thing to do. These folks were past masters at it, clearly; Caius Xin Schwarz gestured for us to sit, and we found we were all in the sort of chair that is just low enough and just squashy enough so that there is a little extra effort required to get up.