Time's Chariot (22 page)

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
should
have woken up
in a grimy cell somewhere – he had woken up in a
lavishly furnished guest suite. He
should
have been
in some windswept castle, or at the top of a windblown,
creaky tower, or down in a dungeon
somewhere – he was, he knew, in the stately home
that was the headquarters of BioCarr.

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 cleared Rico's head.

'I told them to keep zapping you the moment
you looked like waking up, so you've got a lot to get
out of your system,' said Alan. 'You're probably a lot
more dangerous than Hossein Asaldra.' He looked
thoughtful. 'I imagine it's harder without that
organic box of tricks you were wearing.'

'Slightly.'

'And I don't suppose you'll be surprised to hear
it's almost evaporated. Holes appeared in it the
moment we took it off you and now it's all but
gone.'

'Of course.' Rico did feel better. He struggled
slowly up into a sitting position and leaned back
against the headboard. 'Can't—
aagh!
' A particularly
strong streak of pain jabbed into his brain. 'Can't
let Home Time tech fall into the hands of the
bygoners.'

The agrav and field computer would have gone
the same way, of course, and Rico knew his duty,
painful though it was. He pulsed the mental signal
that destroyed the symb network in his brain,
reducing it to a cocktail of innocuous proteins that
would be flushed out by his body. There was now
nothing that could connect him with the Home
Time: he was on his own in the early twenty-first
century.

Or not entirely. 'Asaldra?' he said.

'Currently spilling his guts into a waiting digital
recorder,' said Alan, 'and very interesting it is too.'
He sat on a bedside chair and looked at Rico. Rico
took exception to the half smile on his face.

'You're being very nice to me, all of a sudden,'
he said.

'I've already established that Asaldra doesn't like
you,' Alan said. 'I don't know about the rest of our
former guests—'

'Where are they?' Rico interrupted.

'They went. You didn't. Is that what Asaldra
called probability masking?'

Rico groaned. 'When they shot me,' he said, 'did
I fall on top of you?'

'That's right.'

'Yeah, that's it,' Rico muttered. The recall field
hadn't known what to make of two different
probability frequencies – his and Alan's – so close
together, and as a result neither of them had been
picked up. Great. Then: 'You were saying? The rest
of your former guests?'

'I don't know what their opinions of you might
be, but any enemy of Asaldra might well be a friend
of mine.'

'It's mutual.'

Alan raised his eyebrows. 'That sounds heartfelt.'
Rico glared up at him.

'Mr Asaldra decided I'd discovered his little
game,' he said, 'so he tried to discourage me, and
everything he did – he got me reprimanded, he got
me beaten up – it all just led me more and more to
the facts. If he'd just left me alone, I'd have gone
away, and I'd never have found out. And I still don't
know exactly what he's up to.'

'Oh, that's easy,' Alan said casually. He crossed
his legs and sat back. 'Asaldra and his friends want
to save the Home Time.'

'From what?' Rico said.

'From the, um, space nations? What are they?'

'Oh, them,' Rico said. 'All the colonies that
declared independence. They're way ahead of us in
space technology and even though Earth's overpopulated
they won't let us out to join them. Yeah,
there's some resentment. And?'

'And they think the technology that made the
Home Time could be used in Earth's favour.'

'They're probably right, if the College would let
them, which it never will.'

'Ah!' Alan looked pleased with himself. 'But
apparently, in your time, the Home Time has only
got twenty-seven years left to run?'

Rico was about to nod, but old habits suddenly
caught up with him. Maybe Asaldra had told Alan
everything, but that would have been under drugs.
He should be more reticent.

'Go on,' he said.

'This man Jean Morbern created a singularity
which acts as a fixed point of reference in time, and
that makes transference possible. But that
singularity will expire due to quantum decay in
twenty-seven years, and no one knows how to make
another.'

Alan looked at him as if to confirm the facts so
far: Rico still said nothing. Alan shrugged.

'So Asaldra – though the Daiho man was actually
in charge – and his colleagues went to where
science began.'

'Huh?' said Rico.

'They sent me back, a correspondent, with a predisposition
to seek out the philosophers. And not
just any philosophers but the ones whose insights,
breadth of mind, lateral viewpoints laid the
foundations of science. I interviewed them, Asaldra
came back to record their memeplexes in crystal,
and they set up a base here in the twenty-first
century so that Daiho, with all his philosophical
training, could recreate the science that had led to
Morbern's experiments.'

Alan finished with a satisfied smile. 'Easy, really.'

'That . . . that's it?' Rico said, astonished. 'That's
it? Why all the cloak-and-dagger? Why didn't they
just say so?'

'Apparently your Register is programmed to
prevent this kind of thing. This Morbern character
wanted the Home Time to end naturally. And they
had other reasons. You don't think they were going
to give the secret to the whole world, do you? Does
Asaldra strike you as an altruist?' Alan's face twisted.
'No. He and his clique were going to monopolize
the knowledge. Make Earth great among the space
nations, yes, but at the same time they were going
to set themselves up as kings.'

Rico snorted. 'That's the one unsurprising thing
you've said. So, now he's told you everything, what
are you going to do with it?'

Alan sighed, paused, sighed again. 'One thing
Mr Asaldra is rather weak on,' he said, 'is the
history of the Home Time. How it all came about. I
don't think he ever really needed to know. You
strike me as the kind of man who likes to find
things out. How are you at Home Time History
101?'

'And what would you do with that knowledge?'
Rico said suspiciously.

'Stop the Home Time from happening.'

Rico felt like laughing, but laughing required
strength he didn't have, so he just shook his head,
very slowly in case it fell off. He did feel strong
enough to get up, so he pushed back the covers and
padded in his shorts to the tall bay windows. He
looked out onto parkland. Tastefully landscaped
gardens lay outside. Beyond them was a field with
three parked helicopters; and beyond them, the
rim of a natural grassy bowl where a herd of deer
grazed. Trees surrounded the lip of the bowl.

'Matthew bought the hall as headquarters for
BioCarr a few years ago,' said Alan behind him.
'I've got out of some prisons in my time, but even I
would find this place a challenge. The grounds
are crawling with guards, the security systems are
absolute state of the art, and if you can't fly or make
yourself invisible . . .'

'I get the idea,' Rico said. He turned back to
Alan. 'Um – this plan of yours . . .'

Alan's expression went cold again. Rico
recognized the look. This was obviously the correspondent's
way of showing strong emotion.

'I don't know much about the Home Time,'
Alan said, 'but I can guess from the clues I've got. I
think the people of the Home Time are the
smuggest, most amoral bunch of hypocrites that
the world will ever see.'

'I'm with you so far,' said Rico, but Alan ignored
him.

'They send us correspondents back, give us
blithe assurances about how easy it will all be with
these organic survival machines that we call bodies,
but do they come themselves? Oh, no! It's far too
dangerous. And, in the meantime they lie to us,
they abuse us, they take advantage of us . . .
and they still expect us to be loyal! I saw the way
Asaldra and his friends acted. They felt so superior
to us thicky bygoners. And I saw the way they treated
those two engineers they brought with them. That
young man and young woman were the only two
among them with any kind of useful skill, anything to
contribute, and they treated them like dirt.'