At the Narrow Passage (14 page)

"Thanks," Sally answered. "I'm starving."
The sky above the flying skudder was growing darker by the minute,
turning from red to purple, and it looked as if stars would begin to
appear soon. I wondered where we were and where we were going.
None of it made any sense yet. Sally and the man seemed to know all
about the Kriths and Timeliners. But who were they, Sally and the man?
Timeliners themselves? Of a sort, I gathered. But who? And why? And what
were they doing here? And where did this machine come from? And why did
th'ey call me a traitor? Didn't they know what the Kriths were doing --
trying to save humanity, a hell of a lot of humanities on various Earths,
from an invasion in the future?
They must have known, I told myself. The man had spoken of encountering
others like me, of trying to convince them of something. Surely they
would have told them why the Kriths were spreading across the Lines,
why we Timeliners fought for them.
But, since they must have been told, they apparently hadn't believed it.
And what could I be able to say or do to convince them? Nothing, probably.
So, when the time came, I'd put up a few feeble arguments to whatever
it was that they were going to try to sell me, then pretend to go along
with them. That might give me a chance to stay alive a while, learn
something and then maybe get back to Kar-hinter with what I had learned.
If it worked out -- which seemed sort of unlikely at the moment, what
with my lying trussed up on the floor of some alien kind of skudder --
if it worked out, it would prove to be a lot more than Kar-hinter had
ever bargained for when he sent us out to kidnap the count and his wife.
Just what had I stumbled into?
I figured that was enough thinking for the moment. My head still hurt
like hell, and my empty stomach was more than a bit uneasy, and I was
exhausted. The only logical thing to do was get a little sleep.
So I did.
When I awoke, rain was splattering against the dome above me at a high
velocity. I couldn't really see it or hear it well, but I knew it was
rain. The dome was pitch dark, and I could see nothing beyond it.
In the front of the craft faint panel lights glowed, reflecting from the
dome. The craft was quiet except for the hum of whatever propulsion it
used and it was something I couldn't identify. It seemed to be nothing I
had ever encountered before -- and I had driven or ridden in just about
everything from goat carts to grav cars to spaceships.
I heard a feminine sigh from the front and then the sound of motion,
a body rising, straightening itself.
"I guess I fell asleep," Sally said.
"You needed it," the man answered. "You should have slept longer."
"How long has it been?"
"Oh, a couple of hours, I guess."
"Where are we?"
"Mid-Atlantic. We ought to be in Staunton by midnight."
"We've run into a storm," Sally commented.
"Not a bad one. Radar says we ought to clear it in ten minutes or so.
I think your friend back there is awake."
"Mathers?"
"Yes, you want to go check on him?"
"Okay."
Again the sound of movement, then a flashlight bobbing as Sally walked the
few feet back to where I lay. For an instant I could see her silhouetted
against the panel lights, dressed now in what looked like a form-fitting
flight suit. I hoped that I would be able to see it in better light.
Then the beam of the flashlight was in my eyes, and I had to blink.
"How are you?" Sally asked, kneeling beside me.
"I'd be okay if I could find the rest of my head," I said.
"Scoti," she said, calling back over her shoulder.
"Yes?" the man replied.
"I'm going to untie him and bring him up front. Is that okay?"
"Do you have a gun?"
"The one you gave."
"Make sure he knows it and that you'll use it."
"I know," I said.
"Okay, Mathers, but watch your step. Sally's a good shot. And if that
isn't enough, you can remind yourself that I'm just as fast as you are,
maybe faster. Augmentation, you people call it."
"Yeah," I said.
Sally knelt, placed the light on the deck beside the ring around which
my ropes were tied, and quickly loosened them. She ihen slipped the
flashlight into a pocket, but I could see her silhouette as she rose,
pulled a small pistol from another pocket, and said, "Get up slowly.
Do exactly what I say."
"Yes, ma'am," I said, awkwardly stumbling to my feet, then biting my lip
against the pain that throbbed in the back of my head. The way I felt
I doubted that I could have gone into augmentation even if I'd wanted to.
"That way," Sally said, gesturing toward the front of the craft with
her pistol. "Take the seat behind Scoti."
Scoti turned out to be a stocky, dark man with almond eyes, apparently
an improbable blending of Italian and Nipponese, but then he could have
been anything from any When for all I knew.
"Remember," Scoti said as I sat down behind him, glancing over his shoulder,
"Sally won't hesitate to put a bullet between your eyes if you do the
slightest thing out of line."
"I'll remember," I said, and I wondered whether she would. She might.
"Are you hungry?" Sally asked, taking a seat opposite me, leveling the
small pistol at me.
In the light of the control panel I could see the cream-colored outfit she
wore a little better. It was some sort of flight suit, as I had thought
earlier, and apparently one made just for her unless the material from
which it was made adjusted itself to whatever body wore the suit. It
fitted her like a second skin, and that certainly wasn't bad on her.
"I think I could eat something," I said.
Sally nodded and, always keeping an eye on me, went forward to a hamper,
extracted a thermal flask, a cup, and a plastic-wrapped sandwich. She
came back to where I sat, loosened the ropes that still held my hands
together, and handed me the sandwich. Sitting down again, she placed
the pistol in her lap and poured me a cup of coffee.
"Thanks," I said.
There was no talking in the craft while I wolfed down the sandwich
and coffee.
When I was finished, feeling more nearly alive, Scoti looked back at me
for a moment, then said, "Let me spell it out, Mathers, so there's no
mistake. We know who you are, what you are and why you're here. Kriths,
skudders, Timeliners, we know it all. So you don't have to play any
silly games about hiding it from us. Okay?"
"Who are you?" I asked coldly, looking across the top of my coffee cup.
"My name is Scoti Hauser Angelus," the craft's pilot said in the same
tone. "I am from what you would probably call a Romano-Albigensian
Timeline a long way to the Parawest of here, and I am here to prevent
you and your masters from accomplishing your ultimate goals."
Well, I thought, he had come straight to the point. From the West,
he had said. That was possible, perhaps even probable and why I hadn't
thought of it before, I didn't know. The Timeline we presently occupied
was about as far West as we and the Kriths had ever come in force. Of
course there had been some explorations farther into the Temporal West,
but not very far to my knowledge -- there were hardly enough Timeliners
and Kriths to do the job now, much less expend manpower exploring. Yes,
for all we knew there could be another civilization with cross-Lining
capabilities farther to the T-West, but why they should feel as they
seemed to feel about Kriths and Timeliners I still had no idea.
I looked over at Sally.
"She's a
local
," Scoti said.
In a way I was relieved.
"Can you explain all this to me?" I asked.
"I think it's better if we don't even try for the time being," Scoti said.
"Just wait until we get to our destination; then you can ask all the
questions you want."
I finished my coffee, sat back in the seat, glanced at the ugly little
pistol in Sally's pretty little hand, then looked up at the dome that
covered the craft and at the stars that were beginning to break through
the layers of cloud and tried to remember what I could of a place called
Staunton.
The name, after I thought about it for a while, seemed to have some
special significance. I was sure that I had heard of it before. It had
been in the training tapes. A tiny, many-legged creature scuttled through
my mind, knocking around pieces and bits of ideas, concepts, memories --
and the proper pieces fell into place.
Staunton: (1) a town in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley or that area, that
had been the rallying point of th& American Republican Army during
the uprising of the 1920's. In '28 or '29, I couldn't remember which,
British regulars surrounded Staunton, boxed in the rebels and held them
under siege for thirty-seven days. Finally the town caught fire; the
rebels, half-dead of starvation, made an attempt to break through the
British lines and were slaughtered. The British kept the town surrounded
until the fire had burned itself out and nearly all the inhabitants had
perished. The cream of the ARA died in Staunton, as did several thousand
innocent civilians who were caught in the town. It was a bitter memory
for the rebels and one that they weren't going to easily forget.
But that wasn't all there was to the name Staunton. There was something
else and I slowly dug it out.
Staunton: (2) rumor had it that somewhere in West Florida the rebels
had begun building a secret city. The stories first began in the late
fifties, as well as I could remember from the training tapes, and were
quite common for a few years. Most of the rumors were something to this
effect: somewhere back in the wilderness of southern West Florida the
ARA and the Mad Anthony Wayne Society were building an underground city
where they would store arms, train troops and in general prepare for the
great uprising that would one day free America from the British Empire.
Countless aerial searches had been made by the British with absolutely
no luck. Soldiers had gone into the West Floridian forests and marched
across hundreds of square miles without finding any trace of this new
Staunton. Finally, in disgust, the British gave up and attributed the
whole thing to gossip, rumor, and just plain American madness.
So there it stood.
But now I was ready to believe that there really was a secret city,
a hidden, unknown Staunton that was a hell of a lot more than the British
had ever imagined, that was a base for Outtimers who were assisting the
American rebels and the Holy Roman Empire.
Okay, I said to myself, we'll find out for sure soon.
Outside the craft the night was as dark as ever with no sign of a moon,
though the stars shone brightly now that we had left the clouds behind us.
Below, the Earth was a mass of unrelieved blackness, a nothingness. Then,
very faintly, off to my left, south of the craft, I saw lights, a city
on the horizon.
While I watched the lights, my mind still turning over all the information
I had gathered since returning to consciousness, Scoti began angling the
craft more to the south, in the direction of the city.
"I was a little off," he said to Sally. "That's Charleston down there."
Sally looked up, startled, as if she had been deep in thought.
"Oh," she said, "I didn't realize we were so close to land."
"It's not as far as it was," Scoti said.
We passed directly over the mass of lights that was the chief harbor
city of southern Virginia, Charleston, and lay near the borders of the
provinces of Virginia and Florida, the way North America was laid out
and subdivided in this Here and Now. Off to the right and left small
masses of light lined the coast, revealing the shape of the shore where
the sea ended and the American land began.
Soon, however, the coastal cities dwindled behind us and the darkness
of the great and mostly undeveloped North American continent lay below
us. We moved south and west, toward the forests of West Florida and the
secret city.
I wondered what I was going to find there. And maybe I was a little bit
frightened.
13
Staunton
I have no idea what time it was when we arrived at our destination.
Earlier I had heard Scoti say something about midnight, but I'm not sure
that's what time it really was when we got there. Whatever time it was,
it was quite dark, though the night was pleasantly warm and crickets,
frogs, things I couldn't identify sounded in the distance as I stepped
down from the craft, Sally and Scoti each holding a pistol on me.
The grass-covered field itself was quite small and irregular in shape,
perhaps a hundred feet long by twenty-five feet wide at its widest,
but then it hadn't been designed for use by any conventional type of
aircraft. One end of the field ended in a clump of trees, some real,
some apparently artificial, that sheltered the hangar. Inside the hangar
were two more craft something like the one in which I had just arrived. It
was then that I realized that the craft I had been riding in was not the
skudder that I had seen before, but a smaller one. The skudder that had
carried the men who had tried to rescue the count and Sally was sitting
inside the hangar, two or three yet unpatched bullet holes in its hull
still revealing the battles of the night before.
I didn't have much time to look around right then. Scoti prodded me
forward as half a dozen men and women, all dressed in the same sort of
cream-colored flying suits that Sally and Scoti wore, came out of the
hangar and toward us, flashlights in their hands.
"I am glad you made it, Scoti," said a tall, cadaverous-looking man when
we were within speaking distance. He nodded to Sally, a strange, proprietary
smile on his face. "I hope your ordeal was not too unpleasant."
"What about Von Heinen?" Scoti asked without waiting for Sally to reply
to the other man.
"He is in the hospital," he answered, then turned to look at me coldly,
clinically as if I were a bug under a microscope.
"How is he, Mica?" Scoti asked.
"Very close to dying. Trebum is standing by with the other sautierboat
in case he doesn't make it. Sol-Jodala will then cold-sleep him and try
to revive him in Altheon."
"Don't you think you should go on and transfer him now if he's that bad?"
Scoti asked.
"Sol-Jodala says to wait," the tall man said, "and in this case I must
defer to them." Then he turned and looked at me again, something that
I interpreted as contempt flickering across his face for a moment. Then
he smiled, but it was a very artificial kind of smile. "Good morning,
Captain Mathers. I trust that you had a pleasant trip."