Timeliner Omnibus, page 35
On the other side of the border that separated New East Anglia from the Imperial Colony, of Sclavania, south and west of us, was a military installation that the Anglianer high command was convinced was the Krithian headquarters in the Timeline, the place from which they initiated their efforts to aid the Sclavanians and their Neustrian allies in their war against New East Anglia. Our present destination was a rendezvous for the personnel who would comprise one of the three elements of the force that would attempt to capture that headquarters. The attack itself, or more properly raid, was to be a sudden, swift surprise effort by small, highly mobile units rather than a massive frontal attack and was planned for three nights hence.
Even then I had no real plans of my own. For the time being I was going along with Von Heinen. Right then his plans suited me. He wanted to get his hands on Krithian transtemporal equipment, not for the benefit of his Para- timer employers, but for his own purposes. I suspected that he had in mind doing a little theivery here and there once he had the equipment for flickering from Line to Line, stealing wealth and materiel, and then finally settling down in some backwater Timeline where he could be cock of the roost with Outtime wealth and technology to help establish and maintain whatever kind of empire he wanted. He wouldn’t be the first to try that. The idea even appealed to me. Maybe I was a fool for not doing it.
But then I had other plans, vague as they were, and maybe they were even more grandiose than Von Heinen’s, but going along with him just might enable me to get my hands on a skudder. That’s what I wanted. And preferably one of the newer ones outfitted for spatial locomotion like the ‘sautierboats” of the Paratimers—Von Heinen had informed me that he’d already seen one such Timeliner craft in Operation.
Some time had gone by when Von Heinen signaled for us to slow. I didn’t know how he knew it in the darkness, but the Sclavanian border was now only some few hundreds yards ahead of us, beyond a rise in the land that swelled and crested like an ocean wave.
We came forward to a clearing in the forest and then he commanded the group to stop, giving the order as if he were the chief Anglianer officer.
During the three nights of the march Ufan Aelfric Dagrefson had shown deference to Von Heinen, though grudgingly. Apparently someone farther up in the chain of command had given him orders to let the Outtimer run this particular show—orders that must have been inspired by the Anglianers’ Paratimer allies.
When the march halted Von Heinen took the officers and myself to one side.
“Mathers, Ufan Dagrefson, and I will go ahead and scout things out,” he told us in a whisper. “We’ll see just what the border’s like here and what it’ll take to get us across. The border’s bound to be guarded, but I doubt heavily. The Sclavanians haven’t the manpower to guard every mile of it and most of their men should be farther east since that’s where the fighting is. Acceptable, Ufan Dagrefson?”
“Acceptable,” Aelfric muttered. He didn’t seem to be taking his inferior position to Von Heinen with very good grace.
“I didn’t know for a fact where An Mona Steorra was at that moment, but I assumed that Aelfric, to whom alone he seemed loyal, had sent him ahead scouting.
“Let’s go then,” Von Heinen said, rose from his crouching position and turned toward the rise that separated us from the border.
The clouds were darker and heavier now and the stars were gone, though there was a moonglow creeping up from the horizon through the overcast. There was a heaviness and an invisible gloom in the air, growing stronger, and I was certain it would begin to rain before another hour had gone by. Maybe some rain would be in our favor. Anything that would help conceal us would help.
We reached the crest’s top, crossed it, and then as we slowly crept down the southward side of the slope, aware that the trees and brush, all the larger stands of vegetation had been cleared, we saw headlights approaching from the west, bouncing up and down as the vehicle on which they were mounted rumbled across the rough terrain.
“Motorized patrol,” Von Heinen whispered.
As the headlights grew nearer they revealed a strip of land maybe a hundred and fifty to two hundred yards wide that had been cleared; we were on the northern edge. Down its middle was a twisted, tangled mass of coiled barbed wire, ugly and glittering in the headlights, freshly galvanized metal, the wire newly laid down. They’d learned the barbed wire trick here too and had put it to good use.
As the vehicle grew closer—though at its closest it was still on the other side of the wire, some distance away —I could make out some of the details in the light reflected back from the ground. It was a terribly ordinary- type military vehicle, a common design on a lot of worlds at this technological level: rectangular of shape, boxy and unesthetic, with four wheels, two seats in front and two in back, two headlights with yellowish auxiliary lights below them, a spare tire and a spare petrol tank mounted on the vehicle’s rear, a heavy weapon that looked like a machine gun, and three occupants—the driver, the gunner, and a man with a rifle in the back seat. He was probably the officer in charge.
The vehicle—I want to call it a “jeep”—was doing something like twenty miles an hour, and that was probably fast enough considering the ground. The headlights were covering a large area, throwing everything into sharp relief, though in this case “everything” consisted of nothing more than the rough ground and the barbed wire. I noticed that there was a spotlight mounted near where the officer sat, but he wasn’t using it.
We hugged the ground as the car came as close to us as it would and then roared on, though we were far outside the range of its lights.
“About what I expected,” Von Heinen said softly as the car swept away, its headlights dwindling. ‘They’re not too concerned with this area and haven’t the manpower to patrol it well. They don’t figure we’ll try anything here.”
“I wonder how often it comes by,” Aelfric pondered aloud.
“Hard to say,” Von Heinen replied. “It must be pretty often or it’d have no effectiveness at all.”
‘Then we can assume the car doesn’t have a large area to cover,” Aelfric said.
“I think that’s right,” the German Outtimer said. “A ten-mile stretch, not much more than that. Of course, that would make it a twenty-mile round trip.”
“Then it could take as much as an hour to make that round trip,” Aelfric said in a whisper.
“It could take that long, but it might not,” Von Heinen replied.
“I’ll get the others,” the Anglianer officer said. “Time is of the essence.” And without another word he slipped off into the darkness, hardly making a sound.
“If we were all augmented like you, I wouldn’t worry,” Von Heinen whispered in Outtime English. “We could just go augie and cut through the wire and slip across in no time.”
“It’s not really that simple.”
“I know.” But he didn’t explain what he meant by that remark.
Very little time had gone by when Aelfric and the others returned. The party was together again—except for An Mona Steorra who hadn’t rejoined us. And right then I wished the Skralang was with us. I didn’t like him, but I thought it would be good to have him on your side in a situation like this. If I’d judged right.
“We’re going to have to move fast,” Von Heinen said after Aelfric told two troopers to get their wire cutters out. “We can’t be certain how long it’ll be before the patrol comes back, but we’d better be across before it does.”
Nods and grunts of affirmation.
“Then let’s get moving,” Aelfric said quickly as if to get it out before Von Heinen did.
As we moved down the slope I became more aware of the faint moonlight that seeped through the clouds, the nakedness of the slope, and I felt terribly exposed. It would have taken very little light to reveal us there.
The two enlisted men with wire cutters had started ahead of us, accompanied by Wexstan and a noncommissioned officer named Efor, both of whom now carried hand torches they covered with their palms until they reached the tangle of wire. The rest of us stopped a few paces from the barbed coils, knelt on the cold ground, peered off into the darkness and hoped that there’d be no sign of headlights until we’d all gotten through the wire.
For a while the only sounds were those of the cutters’ snick! as they cut through the thick, twisted strands of galvanized metal. Gloved hands, those of Wexstan and Efor, pulled away the severed sections and the two men with cutters inched forward again. It was slow going; the wire was terribly thick and tangled, rising half again as high as a standing man, and if that machine-gun carrying car came back before we got through, our damage to the barbed coils would be obvious. We’d be the proverbial sitting ducks for the Sclavanians’ spotlights and bullets if we weren’t able to get out of there in time. I didn’t like it, but then nobody’d asked my opinion.
The feel of the rain had grown stronger and a chill had entered the air, a breeze carrying more dampness, and after a while Von Heinen came creeping back through the darkness to where I knelt.
“Mathers?” he whispered loudly.
“Here,” I answered in the same sort of voice.
At a crouch, as if ducking under low-hanging branches or to avoid gunfire, he came to where I was, stopped, peered at his luminous wrist watch dial. “They’re better than halfway through, but it’s been almost fifteen minutes since they started. I’m worried about the time.”
I grunted an affirmation, anticipating his next words.
“I want you to finish the cutting.”
I nodded to myself. “In augmentation,” I said aloud. It wasn’t a question.
“In augmentation,” he echoed. “I think I’ve got an idea of how that drains a man, but even that’s better than being dead.”
“There’ve been times when I’ve wondered.”
“Come on.” He made a motion to rise.
With a sigh I didn’t have the will to resist, I slung my carbine back across my shoulder and rose to follow him.
When we got to the maze of wire Wexstan called for those with the cutters to pull back. One of them gave me his gloves and his heavy wire cutters and I handed my carbine to the German; it would only get in my way as I crawled through the wire, but I’d still have that big revolver. I hoped I wouldn’t need it on that particular night. Another time perhaps.
True to what the Count had said, Wexstan’s men had cut something slightly better than halfway through the wire, but that had also taken them something close to seventeen minutes. Von Heinen was expecting me to better than double their combined rate. At X5 augmentation I thought I could do it, though I didn’t like the idea of staying under that long. However, Von Heinen was right. I didn’t want to be there when that “jeep” came back.
I crawled and willed the electrobiological controls into operation. There was a momentary sense of disorientation as the world around me slowed, but not as much as usual since there wasn’t a great deal of sensory data coming to me right then anyway.
I glanced down at the dial of the watch given me before leaving Scragheafod and saw the terribly slow creep of its second hand, moving more like a minute hand now.
I started cutting.
Snick! Snick! Snick!
Three minutes times five is the equivalent of fifteen minutes and that’s about how long I’d been at it when I thought I caught a glimpse of light. When I turned to look there was nothing there and I supposed that I’d just imagined it or that it’d - been some random “noise” of retinal nerves giving my brain the impression of light.
But then I saw it again, bouncing above the earth, oddly slow, and saw that it was a pair of headlights, a long way off, coming toward me at one fifth of its twenty miles per hour.
I hadn’t many more strands of wire to cut and figured I could make it before the “jeep” reached me, but I doubted that any of the others could. Without cutting out my augmentation, I made an effort to speak as slowly as possible, calling back to the others. “Cooomeee oon.” I kept on cutting.
They must have understood me, for a few moments later I heard a series of bass rumblings that I took to be Von Heinen and/or Aelfric yelling Orders. Some people claim to be able to understand spoken words in X5, but I don’t see how. It all sounds like a Greek chorus of sick frogs.
I “snicked” on at the wire and in a few more moments had cut through the last strands. Dropping my cutters, I forced an opening as wide as I could and pulled myself through. Now I wished I hadn’t left that carbine behind, as awkward as it might have been getting it through. But I had the heavy revolver, .441 caliber and carrying the equivalent of 240 grains, and maybe it would be sufficient. Maybe it would have to be.
As far as I could see the first members of the party were about to enter the tunnel through the wire, but there was a long line behind them and the progress through the tunnel would be slow. There were nearly forty of them and by the time the car got to where its occupants could see us, very few of them would have gotten through.
“Hurry up,” I yelled, knowing full well they could no more understand me than I could them. I pulled the revolver out of its flapped holster, worked the mechanism. The six slugs in its cylinder would have to be put to very good use soon if …
I came fully erect and held the gun before me, left hand steadying right wrist, right arm only slightly crooked. The “jeep” was coming on with agonizing slowness, but the people behind me were moving even more slowly.
I waited. The car drew nearer.
I held my breath, tensed my body into stillness, felt a tremor of nervousness, tasted flat, dry metal in my mouth. It was always like that just before it started.
Then the time was up.
The report of the big pistol going off in my hand really didn’t seem much deeper than usual, but it must have been, and I thought I could see the bullet as it moved toward the car, reflecting the light of its right headlight—until it met the headlight and shattered it.
I fired again as quickly as the mechanism of the single-action Slean would allow and was again amazingly lucky —the other headlight went out. I jumped to one side.
The car wasn’t that near, but the slugs bursting from the machine gun slung over its hood were. The., fellow manning that gun hadn’t been asleep and he had damned good reflexes. I know he couldn’t have seen me yet, but he nearly pegged me.
I rolled, came to my knees, aimed.
The officer in the back seat was awake too. He had the sense to flip on his spotlight as the headlights went out and began to sweep with it as the driver tried to brake the vehicle to a halt.
I fired …
… and hit the officer without hitting the spotlight, though the slumping of his body must have hit the handle, for it flipped skyward, beaming upward at the clouds like a glowing eye. I didn’t waste any more bullets on him.
The flash of my weapon must have given me away to the machine gunner. His chattering weapon began sweeping in my direction again, vomiting light and smoke and bullets. X dived toward the earth again even though his sweep seemed slow, and I fired an awkward shot toward the vehicle. I didn’t think I’d hit anything.
Coming to my knees, no more than a few yards from the slowing car, I could have seen both living men had there been decent light. There wasn’t, so I put my next shot through the door of the car where I thought the driver might be. I didn’t know whether I’d hit him. I didn’t have time to check.
The machine gunner was fast; I’ll give him credit for that. But he wasn’t as fast as a man in X5. He continued to swing his gun toward me, my location again revealed by the Slean’s muzzle-flash, but, coming to my feet and breaking into another run, I outdistanced the sweep of his gun, came up on the other side of the “jeep,” and put a bullet in the back of his head before he knew I was anywhere close to him.
I was about to turn my attention to the vehicle’s driver, but discovered it wasn’t necessary. Out of the darkness came an indistinct figure I was certain was clad in poncho and leather pants, moving with the quick, graceful quiet of a cat; I could doubly appreciate An Mona Steorra’s movements in my augmentation.
The Skralang had leaped into the vehicle’s front seat, landed at a couch beside the driver who fought to bring up a pistol, and deftly slid a knife into his left breast.
Cutting out the augmentation, I felt a wave of fatigue sweep over me and a sharp pain in my right thigh. I’d been in augmentation in excess of eight minutes, I thought. It had taken a lot out of me, how much I wasn’t yet sure.
I noticed that it had started to rain.
An Mona Steorra climbed out of the car, said something to me that I couldn’t understand. I grunted back to him as pleasantly as I could and leaned against the side of the car, and waited for Von Heinen and the others.
The Skralang signaled to them with the vehicle’s spotlight.
It was while we waited that An Mona Steorra and I simultaneously noticed the box slung under the vehicle’s dashboard to the right of the dead driver, a box with a glowing pilot light and a grille from which came words in a guttural language I didn’t recognize—which wasn’t at all unusual of late. But then this was a military patrol car of the Imperial Colony of Sclavania.
What the words meant I didn’t know, but their tone was urgent and I suspected that they were directed at the car’s deceased occupants. Someone on the other end of the live radio may have known about my attack, must have heard the sounds of shooting and death.
We hadn’t time to waste now. Whoever was on the other end would probably very shortly send somebody to find out what was going on, a number of somebodies, armed.
While An Mona Steorra deliberately drew his side arm and put a bullet through the radio’s pilot light, chuckling as he did, I called to Von Heinen, “We’d better get out of here while we can. This car’s equipped with—”
