transformed into a man-shaped blazing white sun. Men yelled as the white light showed red through his eyelids, and when he opened them again it was to see the guards staggering back, hands covering their faces.
And Alan, looking at him. Either the former correspondent had also obeyed Rico’s command or his enhanced eyes had been able to cope with the light, but the effect was the same.
A dropped stunner lay between them.
Rico met Alan’s direct, calculating gaze.
A pause.
‘There’s no need…’ he said and Alan moved — fast, a blur, towards the stunner. Rico was too slow to get there first but not to get there before Alan could raise it. He leaped at the correspondent’s gun arm; Alan swatted him casually off and sent him flying across the room.
Rico landed in a crouch and raised an arm at Alan. His fieldsuit let loose a full stun charge, and the correspondent’s body absorbed it without effort. Rico sprang forward and caught Alan in a tackle around the waist, bringing him to the floor by sheer momentum. Rico sat on top of his prone rival and used the moment of shock to grab both his opponent’s wrists and pull them behind his back, before Alan could use his correspondent’s strength to pull them apart again. He locked his hands over the crossed wrists and told the fieldsuit to freeze itself in that position. Alan lay face down, not even breathing heavily but straining at his bonds.
‘Listen,’ Rico said urgently, ‘you’ve got to—’
‘Over here,’ Alan called. His face was pressed into the floor but he could see across the room with one eye. Rico turned his head to follow the line of sight. A guard — still blinking, tears still streaming down his face — had retrieved his stunner and was waving it about uncertainly.
‘More to the right — that’s it! — down a bit…’
The stunner was pointing directly at them.
‘… And
And as his body twisted under the stun charges for the second time that day, Rico felt the recall field take hold of him, and this time his closing thoughts were of satisfaction.
But when he awoke some hours later, he was still in the twenty-first century.
TWENTY-TWO
Hossein Asaldra looked up when the door opened, and he knew the time had come. Two guards with stunners levelled, and a third with a pair of cuffs.
This was where his Field Op’s training should have come flooding back. A couple of swipes and kicks to render the guards unconscious and with one bound he would have been free. But he hadn’t trained for a long time, he wasn’t wearing a fieldsuit — he wasn’t even wearing his gelfabric day-to-day clothes, which had been taken away from him and replaced with a simple one-piece boiler suit — and so all he could do was stand up slowly.
The chief guard nodded approvingly. ‘That’s right, don’t make a fuss, sir. We just want to ask you some questions. Unless you’re going to try and bribe us… ?’ He actually sounded hopeful.
‘Bribe you?’ Asaldra said in disbelief.
‘It’s just that if someone tries to bribe us, Mr Carradine routinely offers us the same bribe plus ten per cent,’ the guard said. ‘That’s how he deals with all the industrial spies we get sent.’
‘Nice Christmas bonus,’ one of the others agreed.
Asaldra snorted. ‘You’ve really no idea who or what I am, have you?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the chief said casually, but there was unyielding steel behind the cheerful mask. ‘Mr Carradine wants you questioned. Are you coming, or do we drag you?’
‘I’m coming,’ Asaldra muttered, and stepped forward.
They hustled him along narrow corridors and down deep, tight staircases. They were taking him via the servant’s route, the network of passages designed to keep the staff invisible in the days when Carradine’s home had been the dwelling place of aristocracy. They still served their purpose: as well as his private army, Matthew Carradine no doubt employed perfectly ordinary, decent people who would raise at least an eyebrow when they saw someone clearly being held prisoner.
Asaldra wasn’t sure what to expect at the end of their journey, but he knew it wouldn’t match with what his imagination told him it should be, because nothing else had either. He
But they were heading for the basement, so maybe the dungeon scenario wasn’t too far out.
The room they showed him into was just like any well-maintained, antiseptic, brightly-lit surgery, with a barrel roof that showed its origins as a wine vault. Bottles and various medical instruments were neatly stored in racks along one wall and a reclining, three-part chair sat in the middle. Various hypodermics and small ampoules of different coloured liquids were laid out on a tray next to it. In one corner, a man with a video camera was busy taking light readings.
A woman in a white coat stood next to the chair and beside her stood the little man Asaldra had seen back at the hotel. Carradine’s assistant.
‘Good,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘Let’s begin.’
‘What…’ Asaldra swallowed. He had been going to say, ‘What are you going to do?’ but his mouth was dry and the first word came out as a squeak. He tried again and this time got the question out.
‘We’re going to ask you some questions,’ the woman said.
‘We’re going to ask you a lot of questions,’ the man said. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t hurt and you’ll make a full recovery. Interrogation techniques are pretty sophisticated in 2022, even for we bygoners.’
‘I…’ Asaldra couldn’t take his eyes off the chair.
On one level, yes, he knew it probably wouldn’t hurt. And they probably weren’t going to torture him or harm him — they had no need to do so, when the right concoction of pharmaceuticals could get everything they wanted straight out of him. But he was going to be strapped to a chair in a distant, underground room and interrogated, and that resonated with enough images in his mind to terrify him. He so, so badly did not want to go through with this.
‘I’m not sure there’s so much I can tell you,’ he said.
‘Let us be the judge of that,’ Alan said, and he nodded at the guards. They seized Asaldra by the arms and frog-marched him towards the chair. He was trying hard to remember what Field Ops were told to do in the event of their ever being captured by bygoners. They had mental blocks installed that prevented them from revealing the existence of the Home Time under interrogation… but he was going to be asked questions by people who already knew that the Home Time existed and he suspected the blocks weren’t going to work.
His training wasn’t going to be any help. He was going to spill secrets to bygoners with who knew what effect on the timestreams, and the Specifics didn’t know where he was, and there was no chance of doing what he had originally planned when he contacted Carradine, which was to blank his memory once their business had been completed…
‘Oh God, help me,’ he prayed silently, as the hypo touched his skin and the chemicals flooded in.
This time Rico came awake with a splitting headache, which immediately told him he wasn’t in the Home Time. It took a further half a second to work out he wasn’t wearing his fieldsuit any more.
‘Oh, God,’ he muttered, and let his head sink back onto the pillow.
Pillow?
He forced his eyes open and looked around as best he could without dislocating his head. He took in the marbled walls; the pearly, indirect lighting; the silk sheets he lay in, smooth against his skin.
‘Swish,’ he muttered.
‘It’s one of the hall’s executive guest apartments,’ said a familiar voice. Alan moved into his field of vision. ‘Try this.’
He put one hand behind Rico’s head and helped him drink from a plastic cup. The stuff was sickly sweet but it
