The Empire of Time Read online

  Another wave broke over Younger. With terrible slowness, he was rolled over again, his face resting underwater. Spray blew in Pierce’s eyes, but he could not feel it.

  After what seemed like a long time, two men in jeans and windbreakers trotted past him and out into the surf. They pulled Younger out of the water and dragged him up the beach. Pierce glimpsed their faces and recognized them as Special Reserve officers who had been part of the Secessionist group.

  “Shit. He’s dead.”

  “I was afraid of that. The old man’s gonna freak. How ’bout the other one?”

  One of them dug a toe under Pierce and flipped him onto his back. Pierce stared helplessly into the clear blue sky of a beautiful spring morning. He felt a few cramps in his hands and feet. The drug was wearing off.

  The two men looked down at him. One of them, Pierce knew, was a man named Javier Ochoa; the other was Pablo Dietrich.

  “Hello, Mr. Pierce,” Ochoa said.

  “Shoot him again—twice,” Dietrich ordered. Ochoa, carrying a long-barreled Smith & Wesson .18, pointed it at Pierce’s thigh. The rifle made two little puffing sounds, and Pierce’s cramps vanished.

  “Oughta hold him till next week,” Ochoa grunted.

  “No chance. See the way he started to duck? Fast. He’s been hyped. In half an hour he’ll be good as new.”

  Suddenly Pierce was sitting up and watching the tracks his heels made in the sand as the two men dragged him along the beach. Getting back up the trail to Younger’s house was slow work, and Pierce was almost glad he couldn’t feel anything.

  Ochoa and Dietrich dumped Pierce into an armchair in the living room, and left. Sitting on a couch in front of him, smoking a cigarette was Colonel Shih. He looked at Pierce dispassionately.

  Time passed. Pierce heard a dragging noise: they were bringing Younger in. The two men reentered the living room and stood behind Pierce’s chair, facing Shih.

  “Cuff him.” Shih’s voice was a soft, unresonant tenor, but the men obeyed instantly and cuffed Pierce’s wrists to the arms of his chair.

  Shih focused at last on Pierce’s eyes.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Fair.” His response came out as a spastic’s croak, but at least his vocal cords were working again. His hands and feet hurt.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you understand what we have done?”

  Pierce nodded.

  “Can you tell me your understanding? I will correct you if necessary. But this is a time for frankness.”

  His mouth still felt thick and clumsy, but he could speak. “You ha’ pa’bolic mikes on us—onna beash.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Di’creetly done.”

  “Thank you.” A faint smile.

  “You figured I’d seen th’oo sabotage sto’y, and wanted to check. When I said B’own had to be ar—arrested, you shot us.”

  “Why?”

  “Sherlock—Sherlock is the gimmick. Or else the cover for the gimmick. I was supposed to clump around and get in people’s hair for a few days. Till you were ready. But I twigged too soon.” Pierce fell silent, starting breath exercises to dull the growing pain in his limbs.

  “Much, much too soon. Now, tell me about your mission.”

  Pierce did so, including the fact that he had been blocked. Shih nodded and lit another cigarette, then whispered into his ringmike.

  “Your block is alarming. It implies Dr. Wigner did not believe our story, and the implications of that are very serious.” Shih smoked thoughtfully for a long minute. “You realize we shall have to Clear you. We must find out what went into your Briefing.”

  Pierce laughed. “Clear me? What’s the point? You’d need Trainable technicians to monitor the Clearing, and it would take days—longer than you can afford.”

  Ochoa could not suppress a snort. Shih looked pained.

  “Don’t underestimate our resources, Mr. Pierce. We have Trainables who can accomplish it. In fact, they’re preparing to do so up at our headquarters in Farallon City. Of course, they’ll have to rush. I’m sorry, truly sorry. We wouldn’t even consider such a step unless it were absolutely necessary.”

  “And it is.”

  “It is.”

  He was well and truly trapped. Short of some gross error by one or more of them, Pierce could see no way out. They would fly him back to Farallon City and unreel his mind like a ball of kite string in ten or twelve hours. Pierce almost looked forward to the exercise, for Training gave one a taste for strange and dangerous experiences. What would it be like to have his mind dissolved away, like a stain out of fabric? If he survived—was allowed to survive—he would have to learn absolutely everything all over again—how to suck, how to focus his eyes, how to repeat sounds and associate them with things and actions. Pierce had seen new minds grown on Cleared psychopaths; the new mind took longer to develop than the first and was rarely as good.

  Shih snuffed out his cigarette and stood up. He was a slim man who carried himself with an aristocrat’s easy erectness. “We’ll have to carry you out in that chair, Mr. Pierce. I don’t want you loose, but I don’t want you drugged, either.”

  Ochoa spoke up with a total non sequitur: “Unlock his cuffs, sir? But—”

  “Are you mad?” Shih interrupted. “I said no such thing.”

  “Well, okay, sir—if you’ve got him covered,” Ochoa said. Then, before Dietrich could stop him, he freed Pierce’s left hand and was moving behind the chair to unlock the other cuff.

  “Stop him, Dietrich!”

  Dietrich, standing on Pierce’s left, drew a Mallory .15 and made the mistake of shooting Ochoa rather than Pierce. Pierce jumped up and swung the chair over his head, knocking Dietrich into the far wall. As the gun dropped, Pierce swept it up and fired once at Shih. Then he swung around to get Dietrich before the man could recover.

  It was suddenly very quiet in Younger’s house. Pierce found Ochoa’s keys and unlocked the other cuff. Terribly tired, he collapsed back into the armchair facing Shih, who remained upright on the couch, mouth open, eyes blank. His chest rose and fell as slowly as Younger’s had.

  “I don’t know how that happened,” Pierce said hoarsely, “but I’m not sorry. You must be terribly disappointed.”

  He stood up and left the living room for a quick check of the house. As he had expected, Younger’s Chloe lay dead in one of the bedrooms. She had been beaten and strangled. Pierce returned to the living room. He no longer felt tired; he felt very good.

  “Colonel Shih, you’re in trouble. You of all people ought to know how many capital offenses you’ve committed in the last hour. I think you’ll talk to save yourself, though. So I’m taking you—” A name floated unbidden into his mind: Gordon Cole. “I’m taking you to a place where you can get an antidote for this nasty drug you use, and then we’ll talk.”

  Shih stared past him, blankly. Pierce bent over Ochoa and broke the man’s neck with a single sharp blow. Then he did the same to Dietrich.

  “I’m sure you wish I’d call in Younger’s Security people,” Pierce said. “Then I might bog down in a homicide investigation while you told lies and stalled for time. Well, they’ll learn of it, in a while. But first I’m going to peel you like an onion.”

  He carried Shih out to the Toyota and threw him into the back seat. Then he started back into town. An address, 127 Landau Street, occurred to him, and he realized it had to be Gordon Cole’s. Pierce suddenly felt professional respect for Wigner’s thoroughness.

  A blue Datsun station wagon passed him, going the other way, but when Pierce checked the rearview mirror, he saw the car turning to follow him.

  “Guess your reinforcements recognized me,” he snapped at his passenger. “I’ll have to lose them.”

  He did so most adroitly. But he knew that within minutes, Copo helicopters would be scanning every street in the city, despite the objections of Site Security. There was no way to ditch the car and procee
d to Cole’s on foot, not with a paralyzed man slung over his shoulder. There was nothing to do but barge in on Cole and hope that the man had the proper drugs with which to rouse and interrogate Shih. If the Copos moved in, Pierce would try to bring in Site Security; failing that, he would use Shih as a hostage. Failing that—he wished he knew more about Cole. Presumably he was an Agency stringer, supplying information to AID without actually being on the payroll.

  In evading the Datsun, Pierce had spent fifteen minutes dodging up and down strange streets and back alleys. Now he headed straight for the East Side, a residential area. Most of the traffic was headed downtown at this time of day; even Trainable scientists kept peasants’ hours.

  Landau Street was lined with rambling white prefabs set on endless, identical lawns. Except for a few toddlers on trikes, the area was deserted. Number 127 seemed undistinguished: a broad, empty front lawn, the backyard screened by dense, high hedges, a strip of forest behind. The house itself was a low, sprawling box with curtained windows.

  Pierce listened for helicopters, scanned the street, then slid smoothly out of the car. He pulled Shih out and carried him at a trot down to the front door.

  Gordon Cole, a medium-sized man with red hair and green eyes, opened the door and helped Pierce lay Shih out on the floor of the spacious living room. Pierce had held on to the handcuffs and locked them on Shih’s wrists, behind his back.

  “He got a jolt about half an hour ago,” Pierce said. “Got anything to wake him up, get him talking?” Shih lay on his side, gazing blankly at Pierce’s feet.

  “Sure.”

  “We need to work fast.”

  “I know.”

  In less than three minutes, Cole fired a hypospray into Shih’s arm. Thirty seconds passed. Shih rolled onto his back, his eyes full of rage.

  “Hi,” Pierce called. “Now we’re going to find out all about Project Sherlock.”

  Pierce heard a muffled bang under Shih’s jacket. The man convulsed, once, and was dead. Pierce ripped off Shih’s jacket and opened his shirt.

  “Damn! A built-in self-destruct,” he swore. The pseudoderm patch on Shih’s chest had been blown away. Pierce saw a blackened hole between two ribs. As they watched, the hole filled with blood and the blood spread across the golden skin of Shih’s chest. “Damn it. I should have checked.”

  “No reason to suspect anything like that,” Cole replied, a little shakily. “I thought Agency people were the only ones that use ’em.”

  “I needed him very badly.” Pierce grimaced. “The Copos will be here any minute.”

  “What’s going on, anyway? You here to check out my report?”

  “On—?”

  “Gersen’s misappropriation of funds, of course.”

  Pierce was puzzled. “I’ll bite.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Gersen sent us a memo about sabotage. Didn’t you know?”

  Cole laughed, a pleasantly boyish sound. “Bravo for Big Bengt. He must’ve known there was someone like me around, so he decided to muddy the waters.”

  “Your report wasn’t part of my Briefing.” Somehow Pierce was certain of that. “What was Gersen up to?”

  “Creative accounting. He’s switched over a billion dollars from various project budgets into Project Sherlock, all in the past month or so. But he’s cooked the books to make them look as if Sherlock’s budget was cut. Typical Colonial—he’s ripped off most of the Colonial projects to do it. Somewhere in the process, someone has made a couple of hundred million. Really stupid, though—any Trainable could spot the discrepancies, no matter how nicely they’re camouflaged. I notified Wigner a couple of weeks ago, but he didn’t seem to respond. Until you dropped in, that is.”

  “It’s more than that.” Pierce quickly described what he had learned so far. Gordon Cole slouched into a hammock chair, listening so intently he did not notice when Shih’s blood began to stain the carpet.

  “Next move?” he asked.

  “Notify Earth, somehow. McGowan will be guarding the I-Screens.”

  “I have one. A little message drop. Connects with the physics lab at UCLA on Earth. Using it will black out the whole neighborhood, though.”

  “The Copos will find us anyway. You might as well encode the message and pop it through. Then we’ll disappear for a couple of days.”

  Abruptly, Pierce realized someone else was in the house. An instant later he heard a voice behind him, a soft, musical voice that he recognized at once as that of Anita !Kosi:

  “You must hurry, Gordon. The Copos are already closing in.”

  Pierce turned, smiled, and bowed. The woman was standing in a doorway that led to a long hall. She nodded absently. Her face was drawn.

  “You’re sure?” Cole asked.

  “Absolutely. A patrol is coming through the woods behind the house, and a police jeep is down the street.”

  Cole frowned, perplexed. “How do you know?”

  She was a small woman with peppercorn hair, skin the color of ripe apricots, and the face of a beautiful baby, but she lacked the belly and rump of a modern Bushman. Wearing a plain white sweater and faded jeans, she did not look impressive. Yet there was an absolute certainty in her voice, her folded arms, her immense dark eyes.

  “I know.” A glance at Pierce. “You are Jerry Pierce.”

  “Ma’am.” He stood stiffly, feeling awkward as a doltish schoolboy. Holovision had conveyed her beauty, but not her dignity, nor her reserve. Anita !Kosi was not only a superb physicist, she was that twenty-first-century rarity, a great lady.

  “I am here because I know Gordon works for Dr. Wigner.”

  Pierce glanced at Cole, who shrugged.

  “When I became alarmed about Project Sherlock, I felt Wigner should be notified. Now we must act quickly. Gordon—tape a cassette and send it through to Earth at once.”

  “If they’re already coming—?” Cole was agitated.

  “Jerry and I will have to distract them.”

  “You can’t. Too dangerous.”

  “I’ll be in worse danger if they capture me without Wigner’s learning of Sherlock and the putsch. Go on, quickly, and don’t argue.”

  Cole silently obeyed, passing her in the doorway. Anita looked down at Shih’s corpse, then into Pierce’s eyes. He realized that she was under a horrible strain.

  “We’ve had a hard day together, you and I,” she murmured.

  Together? Pierce’s puzzlement showed, but she did not explain.

  “It’s going to be even harder before we’re finished,” she continued. “We’ll have to distract the Copos long enough for Gordon to get his message out. You’re armed.”

  “Badly. This pistol’s almost empty.”

  “We’ll get you a better one. But I hope you won’t have to use it.”

  She led him out of the house into the huge backyard. Some redwood patio furniture stood near a brick barbecue. The uncut grass stretched a hundred meters behind the house, where the woods began abruptly. Pierce could see men in camouflage uniforms moving through the trees with the quiet deliberation of professionals. They were coming toward the house.

  “Let’s sit down for a minute,” Anita said.

  Chapter Six

  The Copos’ approach was hideously loud to Pierce’s heightened hearing. He sat, legs crossed, in an uncomfortable deck chair. The Smith and Wesson’s butt grew warm in his pocket as he held it. It was uncharacteristic of him to let anyone else take the lead in a fight, but Anita !Kosi evidently knew exactly what she was doing.

  It became still. Without looking directly at the woods, Pierce could see the men—probably a full squad of ten—were searching for cover just inside the edge of the woods.

  Suddenly he noticed a small commotion: thumps, cracklings. Pierce saw some of the Copos collapse.

  “They’re all out cold,” Anita told him. “Quick—go grab a rifle from one of them.”

  He sprinted across the yard and into the trees. The nearest Copo was their sergeant,
a huge Black man sprawled on his back. Pierce lifted the KG-15 rifle from the man’s slack hand. The rifle was fully loaded with a clip of drugged flechettes, but the impact setting was a very lethal 10. A half-second burst from it would have blown Pierce and Anita to pieces. Pierce was about to dispatch the entire squad when he heard Anita call out a single word:

  “No.”

  He sighed and ran back across the yard. She was standing up, but seemed exhausted. When she spoke again, her voice was half-slurred.

  “I couldn’t stand ten deaths all at once.”

  “What the hell did you do to them?”

  “Like Shih and his men—induced paralysis. They couldn’t breathe, and passed out. But I can’t . . . keep doing it. Need rest . . .”

  Pierce heard a jeep rolling to a stop out near the front of the house. Dense shrubs stood between Cole’s house and its neighbors. Pierce would have to slip through them in order to ambush the men in the street. He pulled Anita with him, and they crawled through until, by gently parting the branches, they could see out to the street.

  The Toyota still stood at the curb, but its rear tires were flat. Fifty meters down the street, he could see a Copo armored jeep parked. Its windshield was down, and a rifle muzzle jutting over the hood was trained on Cole’s front door. The jeep’s radio buzzed and spluttered. Evidently the jeep’s occupants had found the Toyota, disabled it, and then called for assistance. In moments, the area would be crawling with police.

  “Can you do anything to those guys?”

  She shook her head; her eyes were dull.

  He cursed. “We need that jeep. Be ready to run when I bring it up the street.”

  She did not ask questions or argue. Pierce checked the clip, turned the impact setting to 4, stepped out of the bushes, and opened fire.

  The Copos were much too slow to react. The KG-15 sprayed ten flechettes per second through the jeep’s open windshield. The Copo rifle dropped with a clatter onto the hood.

  Crouching low, Pierce raced across the broad, empty lawns to the jeep. He yanked open the driver’s door. A young Copo toppled out, four flechettes imbedded in his face. His partner, the sniper, was also unconscious. Pierce considered stashing them in the Toyota. No time. Instead, he dragged both of them into the street and left them there, then jumped behind the wheel, lurched up to Cole’s house, and slammed on the brakes. Anita ran out and climbed in. Pierce could hear the sibilant flutter of a helicopter overhead.