Time's Chariot

The cliffs were ahead. He set the agrav to a mild descent and forward thrust, and began to move towards the hotel on the cliff top. Primitive flying machines were cruising the area slowly but even in the unlikely event of one of them shining a spotlight directly at him, they probably wouldn’t see him, black against the night sky. Invisible electromagnetic pulses were sweeping periodically over him and his surroundings, but the suit’s camo took care of them and made sure no incriminating echoes bounced back to their source.

The hotel was swarming with bygoners. Armed bygoners: the sensors were picking up clear indications of weapons. But then, he had guessed that from the presence of the helicopters and the other security precautions.

‘Attempting contact.’

What the… ? There had been no mistaking that mental brush against his awareness, though it was something he hadn’t expected to encounter in the field. His computer was networking.

‘We are receiving a signal on the wavelength assigned to correspondents,’ the suit symbed at him. ‘Should this unit respond?’

‘Negative! On no account,’ Rico said immediately, though his heart sang: right guess! Asaldra was here all right. Then: ‘There’s a correspondent down there?’

‘Incorrect inference. The signal comes from a symb junction in the vicinity that is routinely attempting to make contact.’

‘Scan area for this unit,’ Rico ordered.

‘Unit is located in the building immediately ahead.’

One corner of Rico’s vision expanded, showing an infra-red view of one of the larger rooms in the hotel on the ground floor. There was a whole jumble of equipment there and the symb junction was outlined while a crowd of people were gathered about it. It was an innocent item of Home Time equipment, doing what it had no doubt been doing since it got here, which was vainly reaching out to connect with the rest of the world-wide symb network that wouldn’t exist for centuries.

‘Identify the rest of that,’ Rico said, feeling suddenly cold.

‘Unable to determine function of items indicated at this time.’

‘Can you tell where it all comes from?’

‘Provenance of the items indicated is the Home Time.’

‘What is the man doing?’ Rico murmured. He drew up a mental list of Hossein Asaldra’s misdemeanours. Item: abused correspondent-derived information. Item: possibly (still circumstantial, he reminded himself, and Orendal was having none of it) been somehow involved in the murder of the late Commissioner Daiho. Item: made contact with a correspondent. Item: engaged in unauthorized transferences. And now, item: runs guns to the natives. Dangerous, stupid and very illegal.

‘He’s not in this alone,’ he muttered with a sudden realization. Any one of the above, an aberrant individual of the Home Time might get up to… but all of it? There was just too much happening. And that probably meant there were more Home Timers down there too. Maybe they were those people he could see around the equipment. God, he hoped they were Home Timers: the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

Rico scowled and set the agrav to descend.

He touched down gently in the hotel garden, with the trip wires and security beams clearly outlined in his enhanced vision, and moved silently towards the back door. It was wired, too.

‘Get me in,’ he symbed.

‘Please place your hands accordingly,’ symbed the computer. Outlines of his hands appeared in his vision — one over the door lock, the other at the jamb where the alarm sensor was located. Rico did as he was told and felt power tingle in his finger tips for a moment.

‘You have ten seconds to enter the building.’ Rico did so without fuss or delay.

He was in the staff area of the hotel — a narrow passage, plain white walls — and the lights were on, which for the first time meant the fieldsuit’s camo would be compromised. Machines wouldn’t be worried that nothing was reflecting back at them; human eyes would. He would be a black, man-shaped hole in their vision and he needed a more visible disguise.

From the first room on his left he heard happy shouts, just beating the roar of ten thousand voices and a bygoner apparently on the verge of a heart attack.

‘Go-al! And what a triumph that was for this young striker in his first league match, with five minutes to go…’

A sporting event being reported on; and that meant bygoners watching it. He peered slowly round the door. Four cheering men, each with an open can in one hand and the other hand waving or pounding a comrade on the back, never moving their eyes more than a couple of degrees from the screen mounted on the wall. Much more of interest to Rico was their dress: white jackets, dark trousers. Hotel staff.

‘Match that,’ he symbed to the fieldsuit.

‘This unit requires a three hundred and sixty degree view of the clothing in question.’

‘I thought you might.’ He tensed his fingers and a synjammer slid down his sleeve and into his hand. He stepped into the room, brought the crystal sphere up and beamed it in one smooth movement.

The four men froze in mid action, then slowly straightened up and sat still in their chairs. Rico grabbed the nearest one and pulled him to his feet.

‘Do you have a good enough view now?’

‘Affirmative. This unit is complying with previous instruction.’

Rico put the bygoner back in his chair and looked down at himself. The suit’s hood retracted into its collar as his body seemed to ripple for a moment, and then he was wearing dark trousers and a white jacket identical to those of the other men. Nor was it just an optical illusion: anyone who handled him would have the feel of the bygoner material transmitted into the nerves of their fingertips.

The computer showed him a route through the building, based on his previous scans. He quickly searched the nearest frozen bygoner for some kind of identification and came across a primitive smartcard in the breast pocket. He took it, grabbed hold of a silver tray and stepped briskly out of the pantry. He set the synjammer to revive, held it around the door and discharged it, then walked quickly away as the conversations started in mid-sentence again. Why the sports programme had suddenly skipped thirty seconds, he left to them to work out.

He met his first guards immediately he stepped into the guest area: two of them, either side of the door that led to the staff quarters. His sensors had already told him they were there and he didn’t even spare them a look as he walked past. He was in uniform, in a secure area where everyone had been thoroughly vetted already, and the only thing to do was look confident.

The guards wore no attributable uniform, just black jumpsuits that could have belonged anywhere.

Rico suspected they were BioCarr’s private army, which was actually a slight relief. Officialdom in this era hadn’t been alerted as to the Home Time’s existence.

Two more guards came down the short passageway that led to the lounge. There wasn’t enough room for them all, so he courteously stepped aside.

‘Ta, mate.’

Even guards could be human, Rico reflected as he pushed open the door to the lounge.

‘You! What do you want?’

Rico put on his best wounded face at the bygoner gorilla approaching. He brandished the tray.

‘Just clearing up,’ he said, careful to match the accents of the four sports fans. He had spent leave in the best hotels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He knew how good service was done, and that included clearing up at regular intervals.

‘It’s all cleared up. This is a secure area.’

‘Blimey! What’s all that?’ Rico said, peering past the bygoner. It was what he had come to see: an array of equipment, nothing whose function he recognized but whose design was unmistakable. And the jumble of people was still there — bygoner civilians, whose poking and prodding of the Home Time tech made Rico’s heart jump into his mouth.

‘Never mind. Now push off.’