For King and Country

He grabbed up his field kit, carefully prepared before leaving London, and ran, lurching on his bad knee. He snatched open the driver's side door. "Move. I'll drive."

Bad knee or not, he could outdrive any graduate student on the planet, and Miss Dearborne was shaking violently behind the wheel. She slid frantically into the other seat. Stirling gu

He tried to recall who'd left the pub and in what order—and when. Significantly, Bre

He took the turning onto the access road on two wheels, drawing a sharp gasp from Miss Dearborne. They thumped back down and sent gravel flying. Lights blazed in most of the on-site cottages. Beckett's windows were a notable exception, dark as the night itself. Poor bastard won't be needing them ever again, will he?

He skidded to a halt in front of the door, having made the drive in three minutes flat. The main lab door stood open, held by an ashen Blundell. The man gestured frantically. A sharp babble of voices greeted Stirling. The senior scientists were clumped together, faces shocky and pale, voices shrill. Several of the grad students were crying. So was Indrani Bhaskar. Bre

"Where?" Stirling asked tersely.

Blundell pointed, hand shaking violently, toward Beckett's office.

The death inside that room was nearly too terrible for such a small space to contain. Terrance Beckett had died hard. His equipment lay in smashed profusion, his files scattered across the floor where violent struggles had swept them off his desk. Blood had pooled beneath the body, with splashes across the files, the front of the desk, the broken document trays. Given the placement of the wreckage, Beckett had been tempted out from behind his desk before the attack was launched, taking him by surprise in the middle of a conversation. He'd been knifed repeatedly and his skull crushed for good measure. Stirling didn't have to use guesswork on the type of knife. It lay on the floor beside its victim, all twenty-two wicked centimeters of it. Commando fighting knife, he catalogued the weapon automatically. American-made, high quality, and even easier to smuggle than firearms.

Not a woman's choice of weapon.

Or was it? It wouldn't take much strength to inflict fatal damage with a knife like that, and a woman attacker might explain the prolonged struggle. Beckett could easily have fought his way from one side of his office to the other, if his attacker were female. Less upper-body strength, weaker grip, and the women members of the research group were decidedly petite, compared with Beckett. Might explain the crushed skull, afterwards, as well. Hell hath no fury...

"You said there was worse," he turned abruptly, nearly ru

"Yes." The project liaison had to swallow twice before his voice would hold steady. "There's—that is—"

Fairfax Dempsey, Beckett's grad student, snarled, "It's Bre

Oh, dear God...

"Show me."

They led him into the transfer room, as they'd dubbed it. A row of padded tables, looking much like ordinary medical examination benches, lined one wall. Two of the five were occupied. Two? Bre

"Ba

Stirling smoothed it out, frowning over the hasty scrawl.

McEgan's done it, the bloody bitch, the note read, Ba

Stirling lifted his gaze to find himself at the still-point center of an invisible, all-too-real sphere of terror. It radiated like a living heat source in the confines of the lab, pushing him up against invisible walls. With creditable calm, he asked, "Why don't we just pull the ruddy plug?"

"You can't!" Mylonas cried, pupils dilating in naked shock.

"Why not?"

"You'd kill them both instantly! Systemic shock, disrupted energy transfer lines, and God knows what the resulting flux in power would do to the fractural planes involved; the system's set on a timer, you see, to taper the power levels off gradually, so there's no possibility of an energy embolism! She's set the bloody timer for a year, and if we try to override it, I can't answer for the consequences! We can plug someone else into the system, send another traveler at the power level she's set, which is what poor Dr. Ba

"All right, I get the bleeding picture," Stirling muttered, mopping his face with one hand. Christ, he'd needed more sleep before facing this. Cuma