The Empire of Time (The Chronoplane Wars Book 1) Read online

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.

  “What about Gordon?” Pierce asked, almost breathless.

  “He’s still encoding the message,” she responded.

  “Well, he’d better hurry. We’re getting out of here.”

  With no real destination yet in mind, Pierce drove to the next intersection and turned left. The jeep’s windows were made of one-way glass; they passed several Copos on foot, who waved casually as the jeep rolled on by. A small dog chased them, barking furiously.

  “They’re in the house,” Anita suddenly announced.

  “Who?”

  “The Copos. Gordon can hear them—pounding on the door, the study door. The cassette’s not ready, the Screen isn’t on . . . Oh. OH!”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s dead. Just like Shih. They must’ve gotten into the room—Gordon knew he was caught—then a horrible pain in his chest, and nothing. He had a self-destruct.”

  She began to cry, like a frightened child. Pierce kept driving. He was scared and upset, but also somewhat amused at himself. The most alarming aspect of this business was the report he would have to write when it was all over.

  They reached the road out to Oppenheimer Field, and Pierce swerved the jeep onto it. He switched on the radio and listened for a minute to the chatter of messages back and forth, about them. To add to the Copos’ confusion, he contributed a few false reports of his own. He was a good mimic, and each report was relayed in a different voice. Then, to avoid being spotted by RDF, he switched off.

  “We’ve got to get word back to Earth,” Anita said unsteadily.

  “All the I-Screens will be guarded. Gersen might even shut down all traffic, just to make sure we don’t send someone else through.” He smiled wryly. “Not that we have much to tell. Wigner will want some hard facts before he sends in the Gurkhas.”

  “Perhaps we can get something at Mojave Verde. Some of my colleagues are still working on Sherlock—”

  “No. We’re going to Farallon City.”

  “What? But there’s no time—”

  “We just have to. I’ve got to get to Gersen.” He knew for sure now that he had to kill Gersen; whatever Sherlock might turn out to be, Gersen’s death would stall it. “Trust me, ma’am. I know what I’m doing.”

  He turned on the radio again, this time to a regular broadcast wavelength.

  “—repeat, Dr. Eugene Younger, Director of the Weapons Development Site, was murdered early this morning by an employee of the Agency for Intertemporal Development named Gerald Pierce. Colonial Police spokespersons say they have no motive for the brutal slaying, but expect to arrest Pierce at any moment. He is believed to be somewhere in Los Alamitos and should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Police describe him as a white male, mid-thirties, height about one hundred eighty centimeters, weight seventy-five to eighty kilos, short brown hair, cleanshaven, last seen wearing a brown duffel coat. Anyone seeing a man meeting this description is urged to contact Colonial Police headquarters. We repeat—”

  They were nearly at the airfield, driving fast on the deserted road. As they rounded a curve, Pierce saw a black Ford sedan parked on the opposite shoulder, facing them. A man, obviously a plainclothes Copo, stepped out of the sedan, raised an old-fashioned bullet-firing .45. Steadying himself against the car door and holding the pistol in both big hands, the Copo fired. The windshield cracked loudly, but held. Pierce steered straight for the man, accelerating.

  “Don’t kill him!”

  “I won’t.” But even as the Copo dived over the hood of the sedan, and the jeep skidded back into its own lane, Pierce realized he could not—after that command—have killed the man. He glanced at Anita, and met her gaze. There was an excruciating pain in her eyes, and grief; but there was also a power in them to which only an idiot would not defer.

  The gateway to Oppenheimer Field had been shut. As they approached, three Copos fired on them through the gate’s wire mesh, to no effect.

  “Hang on,” Pierce ordered, and they crashed through the gate. Flechettes spattered on the windows like bugs. A field attendant, with more courage than brains, drove a baggage train across the jeep’s path, and Pierce narrowly missed him. Then they were out on the main runway, racing for a row of hangars.

  The first hangar was empty; the second held a medium-range Mitsubishi M120 with its starboard engine dismantled. In the third hangar stood a Cessna C60. Pierce drove right inside under its wing and jumped out. The smell of jet fuel was pleasantly strong.

  Three men in ground-crew coveralls were standing near the hangar’s rear wall, staring out over their coffee mugs. They were well away from anything that might be a weapon, but Pierce was taking no chances and shot all three at low impact. They cried out, more in fear than in pain, then collapsed.

  “Pull out the chocks,” he called to Anita. As she did so, he sprang up the gangway and into the Cessna’s tiny cabin. A sour-faced technician was rising from the pilot’s seat as Pierce shot her. The seconds ticked away in his mind as he carried her out. It seemed to take a long time before he and Anita were in the cockpit—alone.

  She helped him through a hasty preflight checkout, and he started the engines. The Cessna taxied out into the noon sunshine; Pierce steered for the nearest runway. He glanced over at the terminal building. A small crowd had gathered on the observation deck. No doubt quite an uproar was taking place behind the green glass of the control-tower windows. But there were no Copos visible. Pierce studied the white bulb of the radome, which gave the control tower an oddly Russian look. Then he pointed the Cessna down the runway and poured on power. They were in the air very quickly.

  “We’ve made it!” Anita sighed, relieved.

  “Not quite. Not yet.” He put them into a steep climb as he mentally reviewed everything he knew about the plane he was flying. It was a tough, reliable subsonic, designed for short-range flights and sensible pilots. He was about to stress it badly.

  They climbed west, out over the coast, until they reached an altitude of two thousand meters and began to circle. Los Alamitos looked very small, a little geometric space carved out of a green-and-beige wilderness. There was considerable traffic below on the road to Oppenheimer Field, and Pierce could see the regular fluttering glint of a helicopter’s rotors as it circled the terminal building. The radome stood out vividly. Pierce tilted the Cessna’s nose down and put on power. Anita seemed nervous.

  “I’ve got to blind them,” he explained.

  Their dive steepened as they accelerated, and the field grew larger again. The helicopter hovered near the terminal, evidently preparing to land. It was a Copo craft.

  Anita understood what he planned, and rested a hand on his arm. “Please—some will be killed.”

  “Stop me, then, and we’ll be killed.”

  She made no response.

  The plane had passed the speed of sound as it swept within two hundred meters of the control tower. The shock wave shattered the radome, blew in the control-tower windows, and knocked the helicopter off balance. It slammed into the asphalt and burst into flame.

  Pierce regained just enough altitude to bring them over the Santa Monica Mountains. The nearest aircraft that could track or catch them were the fighters based at Mojave Verde. By the time they could be alerted, the Cessna would be long gone. He began to relax.

  “In real life I’m a mild-mannered reporter for the New Orc Times.” He grinned and looked over at Anita. Her face was a nightmare mask of agony.

  “Get away, shu
t them out, get away, get away, they’re dying so slowly—”

  Pierce felt his self-congratulation turn sour. He had to protect this woman, but doing so half destroyed her. They flew on in silence for a few minutes, until she gradually relaxed.

  “You’d better tell me more of what’s going on,” he finally said.

  “Oh, shut up.” She reached out blindly and grasped his hand. Her breathing was harsh. “I’m sorry. I feel better now. They’re out of range. Poor people. Poor suffering people!”

  “You seem to be some kind of telepath.”

  “A clumsy word. It’s less than that—and more. I can sense emotions, kinesthesia—especially strong feelings in people I know. And, as you’ve found out, I can influence others.”

  “By some kind of direct stimulation of their nervous systems.”

  “Yes. I did it with Shih and his men. And with the Copos in the forest. But projecting is hard. So hard.” She looked half drugged; her eyes were heavy-lidded, her voice slurred. “I can’t do any more. Not for a day or two. Need rest.”

  “But you can still receive?”

  “Mm. Yes, oh, yes. We never lose that. Sometimes it’s like—like having your eyes taped open in a room full of spotlights.”

  “We? Others can do this as well?”

  “All of us. Everyone in the family.”

  “The psychologists must know.”

  “No. We agreed at the very beginning to keep that much secret.”

  Pierce laughed without amusement. “Concealing anything from them is a better trick than reading minds. You realize such a talent can’t be kept secret any longer? I’ll have to inform the Agency. It’s too important.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Pierce had an unpleasant suspicion: she might be able to erase his knowledge of her abilities, and might well do so if she could work out a plausible cover story. Well, he had enough to worry about.

  “You really are the people of the future, aren’t you?”

  “Oh my. We’ve tried so hard to live that down.” Pierce recalled that when the !Kosis had first been discovered in South Africa on Luvah, they had been identified as Boskopoids, ancestors of the modern Bushmen. Someone had remembered an old essay by an American anthropologist named Eiseley, who had pointed out how closely the Boskopoids had resembled the stereotype of future mankind: big-brained, small-bodied, baby-faced people. The !Kosis’ talents had strengthened the idea. Their IQs were unmeasurably high; they were all Trainables, even the adults. Pierce was beginning to suspect that the Testing teams had probably been manipulated by the !Kosis, since adults were normally never even considered for Testing. For a year or two the popular media had been full of articles about the Boskopoids as Homo superior, despite the unarguable fact that they had died out as a distinct group on all chronoplanes uptime from Luvah.

  “No it’s true,” Pierce insisted. “You’re the next step up from us. Your brains, your talents—”

  “If you were an educated man, and not merely a Trained one, you wouldn’t say that. There’s no progress in evolution, only response to change. We’re just a mutant strain, and our mutations lead nowhere.”

  Pierce looked confused.

  “Our talents, as you call them, are a curse. You’ve seen what it does to me to be near a wounded or dying person. It’s almost more than one can bear. We can even share the feelings of animals—that’s why we were grubbers of roots when your people found us. For us, even birth is terrible. The whole family shares the mother’s pain—mother and baby share each other’s pain. We share our joys, too, and they’re very great, but our sorrows . . .”

  They flew in silence for a time, north on an irregular zigzag course into San Joaquin Valley.

  “So you knew all about us, right from the first contact with the Testing and Recruiting teams.”

  “Sooner. We were aware of them a few days before that first visit. In fact, we followed the team. We shared their feelings, looked at our world through their eyes. It’s hard to describe. But we knew them, we knew what they were looking for, and we knew somehow that we had what they wanted. Then we went away from them, to decide what to do. We went to one of our holy places, a little lake by the Orange River. We thought our gods would tell us what to do. Instead, the holy place seemed just a deserted little lake, and nothing more. The rock paintings we had made there seemed stupid and childish, not sacred.”

  She paused for a moment. “We were so wretched. Our world didn’t mean anything to us, any more, so we had to come to yours.” Her voice turned cold and bitter. “And among the many things we’ve learned since then, we’ve learned that our sensitivity will vanish in the end and that our descendants will be the luckier for it.”

  “Not now. The Boskopoids on the other chronoplanes died out, but you and your family have managed to escape.”

  “The same thing will happen to us, in a century or two. There’s too much pain and death, Jerry; we can’t escape it. We can only conceal its effects on us by deluding others or robbing them of their memories. You’re not the first person to learn our secrets.”

  Pierce’s earlier suspicion was confirmed. Now he might as well learn as much as he can. “How far can you send and receive?”

  “The distance varies. Perhaps ten kilometers, with someone I know. Two or three with someone I don’t.”

  “How did you get into contact with Shih and his men? Did you know them?”

  No, but I knew Chloe and Eugene. I felt her death, like hearing a scream, and then his.”

  “You were staying with Gordon Cole?”

  “Since yesterday. I knew he was working for the Agency, and he seemed to expect something important to happen. When he invited me to stay with him, I knew he was afraid I might be hurt if I didn’t.”

  “He knew about your abilities?”

  “I told him a little, when I had to.”

  Pierce found a chocolate bar in his coat pocket, and shared it with her. “You complicate matters very interestingly.” He smiled. “Gersen has a program; Wigner has a program. But neither program takes you into account. That makes it all more fun.”

  “Fun! You see me as a means of helping you kill Gersen, and you call that fun.”

  Damn the woman, and damn himself for his schoolboy’s veneration of her! She was not yet twenty-two, but she somehow mantled herself in a queen’s reserve. Well, he would have to serve her, even if it meant bullying her.

  “Of course it’s fun. It might as well be, since I’ve got to kill him in any case, and enjoying the deed will help me succeed.”

  “You’ve got to do it?”

  He explained his blocked Briefing, his desire to kill Gersen, Shih, and McGowan at the Farallon City airport. “Wigner knows enough about Project Sherlock to want it stopped. I’m just executing his orders.”

  “Whatever they may be.”

  “Whatever they may be.”

  Anita became silent. Five kilometers below, the brown fields of spring rolled by under broken clouds. On the eastern horizon, the white teeth of the Sierra Madre glittered against the sky.

  “But the project is impossible.”

  Pierce looked at her.

  “The technology is beyond us. To create a usable magnetic lens, the generators must be perfectly aligned—perfectly. A discrepancy of twenty-five meters—between generators millions of kilometers apart—would mean the mother ship, the receiver, would get a hopeless mess. We’re nowhere near that sort of precision.”

  “Yet you kept pushing the project.”

  “Until I saw how serious the problems were. I wouldn’t have let Seamus Brown take me off Sherlock if I’d felt we were close to a solution. But I missed something,” she went on, “something about it that makes it a weapon.” She shrugged. “I feel worse about being stupid than about being chased by the Copos.”

  “Well. Whatever Sherlock may be, neutralizing Gersen should stop it.”

  “You’re very confident.”

  “Of course.”

  “An
d how will you . . . neutralize him?”

  “That will be determined by circumstances, and my Briefing.”

  Anita looked over at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes. She embarrassed him, made him feel like a teenager caught playing cops-and-robbers when he should have outgrown such games. Under this embarrassment he resented her. Who was she to question his mission? She was a kind of superhuman, but she might also become a hindrance.

  If that chain of thought had additional links, he was unaware of them. He began the descent to Nuevo Sacramento.

  Chapter Seven

  Pierce gave Nuevo Sacramento’s Air Traffic Control a false identification and received permission to land. He taxied the Cessna right to the terminal building. They jumped out and walked quickly inside. At this latitude, away from the coast, winters were long, so even on this sunny April afternoon there was a chill in the air.

  The terminal was not very crowded, and no one took much notice of them as they walked on through. A young Copo stood by the doors to the road, watching them approach. He moved to intercept them, but his relaxed expression indicated that this was only a routine check.

  “Excuse me, sir—ma’am. May I see your IDs, if you don’t mind?”

  “Of course.” Pierce showed his intertemporal passport. The Copo’s eyebrows lifted a little, but his manner did not warm from civility to courtesy. He did not seem to recognize in Pierce anything but a senior bureaucrat from Earth.

  “Welcome to Nuevo, Mr. Pierce. Hope you have a nice visit. Sure picked a good day. And your ID, ma’am?”

  “I haven’t any. It’s really annoying. All my cards were lost this morning, and I can’t think where I left them.”

  The Copo looked concerned. “Sorry to hear that, ma’am. If you can’t produce your ID, I’ll have to ask you to come in to our office for fingerprinting. Just a formality, you understand. Then we can issue you a temporary ID for your visit here.”

  A cab pulled up outside, and a frumpy young couple shuffled in. The cab stayed at the curb, its driver immersed in a carno comic.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pierce, “but we’re really pressed for time. We’ll be here just for a couple of hours—then we’re off again back to Little St. Louis.”