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“You wish.”
Salley swept into the room. She wore a red silk evening gown, and her hair was piled up elaborately on her head. Silver raptor teeth dangled from her earlobes.
“I have to be in Xanadu Station for a fund-raiser,” she said, handing him a transit form. “Fire up your machine and send me forward.”
His heart was still pounding like a jackhammer. But Robo Boy put on his pig face and went over the form slowly and carefully. Everything was in order.
Best to play it bland.
“I thought you were supposed to be on the Baseline Project expedition,” he said.
“Yeah, well, plans change,” Salley said carelessly. She stepped into the cage. The gate slammed shut. Automatically, he double-checked the authorization codes, did a visual confirmation of Salley’s identity, and pulled the switch.
She was gone.
Thirty seconds later, Salley walked into the room again. She was a good twenty years older than the Gertrude Salley who had just left, and there was a small, moon-shaped scar by the corner of her mouth.
“Hey!” he said, genuinely shocked. “You can’t be here! That’s against the rules!”
“And you care about the rules one fuck of a lot, don’t you, Robo Boy?” the woman said. Her eyes burned with wrath.
He shrank away from her. He couldn’t help it.
“Two decades ago, when I was young and i
“I—I know all this.”
“I’m sure you do. But something happened. There was an explosive device among our supplies. People died. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
She curled her lip scornfully. “Yeah, I didn’t think you did.”
Then she spun on her heel and strode to the time fu
“You’re not going anywhere! I’m calling Griffin. You’re in big trouble now.”
The woman took a plastic card from her purse and touched it to an inside wall. “Good-bye, Robo Boy,” she said, “you little shit.”
The car went away, and with it Salley.
The very first thing he had been told, when they trained him to operate the time fu
Evidently they had.
For a long time he stood perfectly motionless. Thinking.
But finding no answers.
The important thing was to remain scientific. He must assume the language, behavior, and even the thought-patterns of his enemy. He must never let down his guard. He was a warrior. He was Thrice-Born. He was being tested.
His name was Raymond Bois. The girls all called him Robo Boy. He never could figure out why.
8. Hell Creek
Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.
They tumbled out of a hole in time into a bright, blue-skyed day, whooping with excitement. The team had been deposited on a gentle rise above a small, meandering stream, which the students inevitably decided to name Hell Creek, after the famous fossil-bearing formation.
Leyster consulted with Lydia Pell, and they agreed to let the group skylark for a bit before putting them to work. It was their first time in the Maastrichtian, after all. It was their first time in the field and on their own. They needed to gape and stare, to point wonderingly at the distant herd of titanosaurs that was browsing its way across the valley, to breathe deep of the fragrant air and do handstands and peer under logs and flip over rocks just to see what was underneath.
Then, when Pell judged they’d let off enough steam, Leyster said, “Okay, let’s get these things unpacked and sorted out.” He waved an arm toward a stony bluff above Hell Creek. “We’ll pitch our tents over there.”
Everybody leapt to work. Jamal pulled the Ptolemy rocket launcher from the first pallet. “When do we send up the surveyor satellite?”
“No time like the present,” Leyster said. He ran a thumb down his mental list of who’d had what training. “You and Lai-tsz take it off a safe distance. Nils can carry the tripod.”
“Who gets to push the button?”
Leyster gri
Twenty minutes later, the surveyor went up. Everybody stopped whatever they were doing to gawk as the dazzling pinprick of light curved up into the sky, tracing a thin line of smoke behind it.
“You have just launched the missile,” a priggish voice said, a little too loudly. “Its electromagnetic signature has been picked up by a detector wired to this recording.”
Leyster turned, puzzled. “What?”
“In sixty seconds, an explosive charge will destroy the time beacon. Please stand clear so you won’t be hurt.”
It was Robo Boy’s voice.
The surreal intrusion of someone he knew to be millions of years distant bewildered Leyster for an instant. He watched, uncomprehending, as Lydia Pell tore at one of the pallets like a terrier, wildly throwing packs and boxes aside. She emerged with the time beacon.
“You have fifty seconds.”
The voice came from the beacon itself.
There was a Swiss Army knife in Pell’s hand. She shoved a blade into the seam of the beacon’s casing and twisted, breaking it open.
“You have forty seconds.”
The top half of the beacon went flying away. She reached down into the bottom half.
To Leyster’s eye, there was nothing to differentiate one part of the beacon’s i
“You have thirty seconds. Please take this warning seriously.”
She wrenched something free. The bottom half of the beacon fell to the ground.
Lydia Pell turned away from the others, and shouted over her shoulder, “Everybody get down! I’m going to throw—”
“You have twenty seconds,” the device said.
Then it went off in her hands.
Gillian was saying something, but Leyster couldn’t tell what. His ears rang terribly from the explosion. He couldn’t hear a thing.
He was the first to reach Lydia Pell’s body.
The terrible thing was that she wasn’t dead. Her face was gray and streaked with blood. One hand had been almost blown away, and the other was hanging by a shred of flesh. What remained of her blouse was darkening to crimson. But she wasn’t dead.
Leyster whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Lydia’s wrist, above the exposed bone. I’m going to have nightmares about this, he thought as he pulled it tight. I’ll never be able to get these images out of my mind. To the far side of the body, Gillian was making a tourniquet for the other arm.
Small fragments of the bomb specked Lydia Pell’s face. One larger shard had torn quite a gouge in her cheek. A little higher and she would have lost an eye. Daljit knelt by her head and, bending low, began daintily extracting the fragments with a pair of tweezers.
Keep calm, Leyster thought. There would be trauma. There might be concussion. There was always shock. Keep her warm. Elevate the feet. Check for other wounds. Don’t panic.