Marooned in Realtime

ocean clouds below. 'We've got about a minute's breather. I regrouped my low forces and nuked into the middle of them. The enemy's breaking through right now.' To the west, point suns flashed brighter and brighter. In the sky below, weirdness: five contrails, a dozen. The clouds grew like quick crystal, around threads of fire. Directed energy weapons? 'We're the king piece; they're trying to force us out of this era.'

Somewhere, Wil found his voice. Even more, it sounded calm. 'No way, Della.'

'Yeah... I didn't come this far to fade.' Pause. 'Okay. There's another way to protect the king piece. A bit risky, but- —'

Wil's chair suddenly came alive. The sides swung inward, bringing his arms across his middle. The footrest moved up, forcing his knees to near chest level. At the same time, the entire assembly rotated sideways, to face a similarly trussed Della Lu. The contraption tightened painfully, squeezing the two of them into a round bundle. And then

TWENTY-FOUR

There was an instant of falling. The acceleration spiked, then stabilized at one g.

The chair relaxed its grip.

The sunlight was gone. The air was hot, dry. They were no longer in the flier! The 'one-g field' was the Earth's. They were sitting on the ground.

Della was already on her feet, dismantling part of her chair. 'Nice sunset, huh?' She nodded toward the horizon.

Sunset or sunrise. He had no sense of direction, but the heat in the air made him guess they were at the end of a day. The sun was squashed and reddish, its light coming sickly across a level plain. He suddenly felt sick himself. Was that disk reddened by its closeness to the horizon, or was the sun itself redder? 'Della, just-just how long did we jump?'

She looked up from her rummaging. 'About forty-five minutes. If we can live another five, we may be okay.' She pulled a meter-long pole from the back of her chair, clipped a strap to it, and slung it over her shoulder. He noticed shiny metal where the bobble had cut the chairs away from Della's flier. That bobble had been scarcely more than a meter wide. No wonder he had been cramped. 'We need to get out of sight. Help me drag this stuff over there.' She pointed at a knoblike hill a hundred meters off.

They were standing in a shallow crater of dirt and freshly cracked rock. Wil took a chair in each hand and pulled; he backed quickly out of the crater, onto grass. Della motioned him to stop. She grabbed one of the chairs and tipped it over. 'Drag it on the smooth side. I don't want them to see a trail.' She leaned back against the load, dragging it quickly away across the short grass. Wil followed, pulling his with a one-handed grasp.

'When you've got a minute, I'd like to know what we're up to.

'Sure. Soon as we get these under cover.' She turned, took the load on her shoulders, and all but trotted toward the stony hill. It took several minutes to reach it; the hill was larger and farther away than he thought. It rose over the grass and scrub like some ominous guardian. Except for the birds that rattled out as they approached, it seemed lifeless.

The ground around it was bare, grooved. The rock bulged over its base, leaving shallow caves along the perimeter. There was a smell of death. He saw bones in the shadows. Della saw them too. She slid her chair in over the bones and waved for Wil to do the same. 'I don't like this, but we've got other hunters to worry about first.' Once the equipment was hidden, she scrambled up the rock face to a small cave about four meters up. Wil followed, more awkwardly.

He looked around before sitting beside her. The indentation barely qualified as a cave. Nothing would surprise them from behind, though something had used it for dining; there were more well-gnawed bones. The cave was hidden from most of the sky, yet they had a good view of the ground, almost to the base of the rock.

He sat down, impatient for explanations-and suddenly was struck by the silence. All day the tension had grown, reaching a crescendo of violence these last few minutes. Now every sign of that struggle was gone. One hundred meters away, birds flocked around a stunted tree, their cries and flapping wings clear and tiny in the larger silence. Only a sliver of the sun's disk still glowed at the horizon. By that light, the prairie was reddish gold, broken here and there by the dark scrub. The breeze was a slow thing, still warm from the day. It brought perfume and putrescence, and left the sweat dry on his face.

He looked at Della Lu. Dark hair had fallen across her cheek. She didn't seem to notice. 'Della?' he said quietly. 'Did we lose?'

'Unh?' She looked at him, awareness coming back to her eyes. 'Not yet. Maybe not at all if this works.... They were concentrating everything on you and me. The only way we could stay in this era and still survive was to disappear. I brought my whole inner guard toward our flier. We exploded almost all our nukes at the same time, and vanished as thousands of meter-sized bobbles. One of those bobbles contained you and me; seventy of them are from the cairn. They're scattered all over now-Earth surface, Earth orbit, solar orbit. Most of the surface ones were timed to burst minutes after impact.'

'So we're lost in the turmoil.'

Her smile was a ghost of earlier enthusiasm. 'Right. They haven't got us yet: I think we brought it off. Given a few hours they could do a thorough search, but I'm not giving them the time. My midguard has come down, and is giving them plenty of other things to worry about.

'We, here, are totally defenseless, Wil. I don't even have a bobbler. The other side could take us out with a five-millimeter pistol — if only they knew where to do the shooting. I had to destroy my inner guard to get away. What's left is outnumbered two to