Time's Eye (4 page)

Alone on this huge plain.

Somewhere an animal roared. It was a low growl, like some immense piece of machinery. Whimpering, shocked, Moallim clambered back into his hole in the ground.

The turn was too much for the damaged rotor. The airframe vibrated around Bisesa, and there was a high-pitched whine as the dry gear shafts started to seize up.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute since the RPG had hit, she thought.

“You’ll have to put her down,” Abdikadir said urgently.

“Sure,” said Casey. “Like where? Abdi, out here even the sweet little old ladies carry big knives to cut off your balls.”

Bisesa pointed over their shoulders. “What’s that?” There was a structure of stone and beaten earth, no more than a couple of kilometers ahead. It was hard to make out in the glare of that anomalous sun. “It looks like a fortress.”

“Not one of ours,” Abdikadir said.

Now the chopper was passing over people—scattered, running people, some in bright red coats. Bisesa was close enough to see their mouths were round with shock.

“You’re the intel expert,” Casey snapped at Bisesa. “Who the hell?”

“I truly have no idea,” Bisesa murmured.

There was a stunningly loud bang. The Bird pitched forward and began to spin. The tail rotor assembly had disintegrated. With the rotor’s weight vanished from its rear, the airframe tipped forward, and with the tail rotor gone there was nothing to stop the aircraft spinning around its main rotor spindle. Though Casey jammed his pedals to the floor, the spinning continued—and accelerated—and kept on, until Bisesa was braced against the wall of the cockpit, and yellow earth and blue-white sky whirled past the bubble windows, blurring.

Something came rising up over a low hillock. Josh saw whirling metal, blades like swords wielded by an invisible dervish. Beneath it was a bubble of glass, and rails of some kind below that. It was a machine, a whirling, clattering, dust-raising machine, of a kind he had never seen before. And it
continued to rise
, lifting into the air until its lower rails were far above the ground, ten or twenty feet. Its tail trailed black smoke
.

“My giddy aunt,” breathed Ruddy. “I was right—the Russians—the blessed Russians! . . .”

The flying machine suddenly plummeted toward the ground.

“Let’s go,” called Josh, already running.

Casey and Abdikadir worked the main engine’s power levers, struggling to raise their arms against the spin’s centrifugal force. They got the engine shut down and the chopper’s spin abruptly slowed. But without power the chopper fell freely.

The ground exploded at Bisesa, bits of rock and scrubby vegetation expanding in unwelcome detail, casting long shadows in the light of that too-low sun. She wondered which bit of unprepossessing dirt was to be her grave. But the pilots did something right. In the last instant the bubble tipped up, and came almost level. Bisesa knew how important that was; it meant they might walk away from this.

The last thing she saw was a man running toward the stricken Bird, aiming some kind of rifle.

The chopper slammed into the ground.

5: SOYUZ

For Kolya the Discontinuity was subtle. It began with a lost signal, uncertain sightings, a silent stranding.

The time for the
Soyuz
ferry ship to detach from the Space Station had arrived. The last handshakes were exchanged, the heavy double hatches were closed, and though
Soyuz
remained physically attached to the Station, Kolya had already left the orbiting shack where he had spent another three months of his life. Now there was only the short journey home, a mere four hundred kilometers down through the air to the surface of the Earth, where he would be reunited with his young family.

Kolya’s full name was Anatole Konstantinovich Krivalapov. He was forty-one years old, and this tour of duty on the International Space Station had been his fourth.

Kolya, Musa and Sable, the crew of the ferry, clambered down through the living compartment of the
Soyuz
, making for the descent module. They were clumsy in their thick orange spacesuits, their pockets crammed with the souvenirs they intended to keep from the ground crews. The living compartment was to be jettisoned during reentry and would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and so was full of junk to be removed from the ISS. This included such items as medical waste and worn-out underwear. Sable Jones, the one American in the crew of three, led the way, and complained loudly in her coarse southern-USA English. “Jeez, what’s in here, Cossack jockstraps?”

Musa, the
Soyuz
commander, gave Kolya a silent look.

The descent compartment was a cramped little hut, filled by their three couches. Sable had been trained up on the ship’s systems, but she was the nearest thing to a passenger on this hop back to Earth. So she was first into the cabin, where she scrambled into the right-hand couch. Kolya followed, clambering down into the left-hand couch. During this descent he would serve as the spacecraft’s engineer, hence his allocation of seat. The compartment was so small that even as he headed for the furthest point of the cabin he brushed past Sable’s legs, and she glared at him.

And now Musa came plummeting down, a bright orange missile, helmet in hand. He was a bulky man anyhow, made more so by the layers of his suit. The couches were so crammed together that when the three of them were at rest their lower legs would be pressed against one another’s, and as Musa awkwardly tried to strap himself in, he shoved Kolya and Sable this way and that.

Sable’s reactions were predictable. “Where did they make this thing, a tractor factory? . . .”

It was a moment Musa had been waiting for. “Sable, I have listened to your mouth flapping for the last three months, and as you were commander there I could do nothing about it. But on this
Soyuz
, I, Musa Khiromanovich Ivanov, am commander. And until the hatch breaks open and we are hauled out by the ground crew, you, madam, will—what is the English phrase?
Shut the fuck up.
”

Sable’s face was like stone. Musa was a tough veteran of fifty who had served as Station commander himself, and had even been to the Moon, though not to command the multinational base there. They all knew that his admonishment of Sable would have been listened to by their comrades on the Station and, crucially, by the ground controllers.

Sable said through gritted teeth, “You’ll pay for that, Musa.”

Musa just grinned and turned away.

The descent compartment was cluttered. It contained the spacecraft’s main controls, as well as all the equipment that would be needed during the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation bags, survival gear, emergency rations. Its walls were lined with elasticized tags and Velcro patches, and were covered by material to be returned from the Station, including blood and stool samples from the biomed program, and cuttings Kolya himself had made from the pea plants and fruit trees he had been attempting to grow. All this stuff crowded in from the hull, reducing the space available for human beings even further.

But amid the clutter there was a window, to Kolya’s left-hand side. Through it he glimpsed the blackness of space, a slice of sky-bright Earth, and the struts and micrometeorite-dinged walls of the Station itself, shining brightly in the raw sunlight. The
Soyuz
, still docked to the Station, was carried by the bigger craft’s ponderous rotation, and shadows slid across Kolya’s view.

Musa worked them through the preseparation checklist, talking to the ground and to the crew in the Station. Kolya had little to do: his most important item was a pressure test of his spacesuit. This was a Russian ship, and unlike the pilot-oriented American engineering tradition, most of the systems were automated. Sable continued to grumble as she reached for various controls, which were situated around the capsule at all positions and angles. Some of them were so awkward to reach, veteran cosmonauts learned, it was better to poke at them with a wooden stick. But Kolya took a perverse pride in the ship’s low-tech, utilitarian design.

The
Soyuz
was like a green pepperpot, with lacy solar-cell wings stuck on the side of its cylindrical body. Seen from the windows of the Space Station the
Soyuz
, bathed in the brilliant sunlight of space, had looked like an ungainly insect: compared to the new American spaceplanes it was a clumsy old bird indeed. But the
Soyuz
was a venerable craft. It had been born in the Cold War age of
Apollo
, and had actually been intended to make journeys to the Moon. Remarkably,
Soyuz
craft had been flying twice as long as Kolya himself had been alive. Now, of course, in 2037, people had returned to the Moon—Russians among them this time! But there was no room on such exotic journeys for the
Soyuz
; for these faithful workhorses there was only the plod to and from the battered ISS, whose few scientific purposes had long been superseded by the lunar projects, and whose glamor had been stolen by the Mars missions—and yet which remained in orbit, kept aloft by political inertia and pride.

The moment came for the
Soyuz
at last to undock from the Station. Kolya heard a few subtle bumps and bangs, and the faintest of nudges, and a small sadness burst in his heart. But as an independent spacecraft the
Soyuz
’s call sign that day was Stereo, and Kolya was comforted by Musa’s patient calls to the ground: “Stereo One, this is Stereo One . . .”

There were still three hours to go before the descent was scheduled to begin, and the crew were now set to inspect the exterior of the Station. Musa activated a program in the ship’s computer, and the
Soyuz
, firing its thrusters, began a series of straight-line jaunts around the Station. Each thruster burst sounded as if somebody had slammed a sledgehammer against the hull, and Kolya could see exhaust products jetting away from the little nozzles, fountains of crystals flying off in geometrically perfect straight lines. Earth and Station wheeled around him in a slow ballet. But Kolya had little time to admire the view; he and Sable, sitting by the windows, photographed the station manually, as a backup to the automated pods mounted on the
Soyuz
’s exterior. It was an awkward job as each of them wore heavy spacesuit gloves.

Each thruster maneuver took the
Soyuz
a little further from the Station. At last the line-of-sight radio contact began to break down, and as a farewell the Station crew played them some music. As the Strauss waltz swirled tinnily under the hiss and pop of static, Kolya indulged in a little more nostalgic sadness. Kolya had grown to love the Station. He had learned to sense the great ark’s subtle rotations, and the vibrations when its big solar arrays realigned, and the rattles and bangs of the complicated ventilation system. After so long aboard, he had more deeply embedded feelings about the Station than any home he’d lived in. After all, what other home actually keeps you alive, minute by minute?

The music cut off.

Musa was frowning. “Stereo one, I am Stereo one. Ground, I am Stereo one. Come in, I am Stereo one . . .”

Sable said, “Hey, Kol. Can you see Station? It should have come back into view on my side by now.”

“No,” said Kolya, looking through his window. There was no sign of the Station.

“Maybe it went into shadow,” Sable said.

“I don’t think so.” The
Soyuz
had actually been leading the Station into Earth’s shadow. “And anyhow, we would see its lights.” He felt oddly uneasy.

Musa snapped, “Will you two be quiet? We lost the uplink from the ground.” He pressed the control pads before him. “I’ve run diagnostic checks, and have tried the backups. Stereo One, Stereo One . . .”

Sable closed her eyes. “Tell me you potato farmers haven’t fouled up again.”

“Shut up,” Musa said menacingly. And he continued to call, over and over, while Sable and Kolya listened in silence.

The ship’s slow rotation was now giving Kolya a direct view of Earth’s immense face. They were flying over India, he saw, and toward a sunset; the shadows from the creases of mountain ranges to the north of the subcontinent were long. But there seemed to be changes on the surface of Earth, dapples, like the play of sunlight on the floor of a turbulent lake.

6: ENCOUNTER

Josh and Ruddy reached the downed machine with the first group of soldiers. The privates had rifles, and they warily circled the machine, mouths open, eyes wide. None of the party had seen anything like it before.

Inside a big blown-glass cabin there were three people: two men in seats in the front, and a woman in the back. They watched, hands held high, as the armed soldiers circled them. They cautiously removed their bright blue helmets. The woman and one of the men appeared to be Indian, and the other man was white. Josh could see how the latter grimaced in pain.

Considering how hard it had landed—and that it was light enough to have flown in the air in the first place—the machine seemed remarkably intact. The big glass shell that dominated the front end was pocked here and there but was unbroken, and the blades were still attached to a rotary hub, not folded or snapped off. But the tail section, an affair of open pipe work and tubing, had been reduced to a stump. There was a hissing noise, as if some gasket had broken, and a pungent oil leaked onto the stony ground. It was evident that this mechanical bird would fly no more.

Josh hissed to Ruddy, “I don’t recognize those blue helmets. What army is this? Russian?”

“Perhaps. But see that the injured one has a Stars and Stripes stenciled on his helmet!”

Suddenly a trigger was cocked.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot . . .” It was the woman. She leaned forward from her perch in the back of the sphere to try to shield the wounded pilot.

A soldier—Josh recognized him as Batson, a Newcastle lad, one of the more levelheaded of the privates—was pointing his rifle at the woman’s head. He called, “You speak English?”

“I am English.”

Batson’s eyebrows raised. But he said carefully, “Then tell your chum to put his hands where I can see them.
Jildi
!
”

The woman urged, “Do it, Casey. That gun might be an antique, but it’s a loaded antique.”

The pilot, “Casey,” reluctantly complied. His left hand came up from under a panel of instruments holding some sort of gadget.

Batson advanced. “Is that a weapon? Give it to me now.”

Casey shifted in his seat, winced, and evidently decided he wasn’t going anywhere. He held out his weapon to Batson, butt first. “Have you rubes ever seen one of these? It’s what we call a skinny-popper. An MP-93, a nine-millimeter submachine gun. German make . . .”

“Germans,” hissed Ruddy. “I knew it.”

“Be careful, or you’ll stitch your own damn head off.” Casey’s accent was undoubtedly American, but it sounded coarse to Josh, like a New York City slum dweller’s, while the woman sounded British, but with a flat, unfamiliar intonation to her voice.

From her seat the woman bent over Casey. “I think your tibia is broken,” she said. “Crushed under the seat . . . I’d sue the manufacturer if I were you.”

“Up your ass, your majesty,” Casey said through gritted teeth.

The woman said now, “Can I get out of here?”

Batson nodded. He set the “submachine gun” on the ground, where it gleamed, fascinating, baffling, and stood back, beckoning her. Batson was doing a good job, Josh thought; he kept the three intruders covered with his own weapon, and continually checked the troops around him to make sure all angles were monitored.

The woman had a tough time clambering out of the couch behind the two front seats, but at last she stood on the rocky ground. The second pilot, the Indian, climbed out too. He had the complexion of a
sepoy
but pale blue eyes and startling blond hair. All the machine’s crew wore clothing so bulky it masked their forms, making them seem inhuman, and wiry gadgets clung to their faces. “I guess it could have been worse,” the woman said. “I wasn’t expecting to walk away from this crash.”

The other replied, “I guess Casey won’t be, for a time. But these birds are designed for worst-case hard landings. Look—the sensor pod crumpled and absorbed a lot of the shock. The pilot seats are mounted on shock absorbers too, as is your bench. I think the spin sent Casey’s seat tipping to the left, and that was what did his leg in—he was unlucky—”

Batson interrupted. “Enough of your
bukkin’
. Who’s in charge?”

The woman glanced at the others and shrugged. “I’m the ranker. This is Chief Warrant Officer Abdikadir Omar; in the chopper you see Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic. I’m Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt. British Army, on assignment to United Nations special forces operating out of—”

Ruddy laughed. “By Allah. A lieutenant in the British Army! And she’s a
babu
!”

Bisesa Dutt turned and glared at him. To his credit, Josh thought, Ruddy blushed under his Lahore sore. Josh knew that
babu
was a contemptuous Anglo-Indian term for those educated Indians who aspired to senior positions in the dominion’s administration.

Bisesa said, “We need to get Casey out of there. Do you have doctors?” She was putting on a show of strength, Josh thought, admirable given she had just come through an extraordinary crash and was being held at gunpoint. But he sensed a deeper fear.

Batson turned to one of the privates. “McKnight, run and fetch Captain Grove.”

“Right-oh.” The private, short and stocky, turned and ran barefoot over the broken ground.

Ruddy nudged Josh. “Come, Joshua, we need to be involved!” He hurried forward. “Ma’am, please—let us help.”

Bisesa studied Ruddy, his broad forehead crusted with dust, his beetling eyebrows, his defiant mustache. She was taller than he and she looked down on him with contempt, Josh thought—though with an odd puzzlement, a kind of recognition. She said, “You? You’ll come to the aid of a mere
babu
?”

Josh stepped forward, his most charming grin fixed in place. “You mustn’t mind Ruddy, ma’am. These expatriates have their eccentricities, and the soldiers are too busy holding out their guns at you. Come, let’s get on with it.” And he strode toward the “chopper,” rolling up his sleeves.

Abdikadir beckoned to Ruddy and Josh. “Help me lift him out.” With Abdikadir supporting from the far side, Ruddy got hold of Casey’s back, while Josh, cautiously, got his arms under his legs. Another man produced a blanket from somewhere and laid it on the ground. Abdikadir gave them a lead: “One, two, three,
up.
” Casey screamed when they raised him off his seat, and again when Josh allowed his damaged leg to brush the frame of the “chopper.” But in seconds they had Casey out and set on his side on the blanket.

Breathing hard, Josh studied Abdikadir. He was a big man, made bulkier by his uniform, his blue eyes striking. “You’re Indian?”

“Afghan,” Abdikadir said evenly. He watched Josh’s startled reaction. “Actually I’m a Pashtun. I take it you don’t have too many of us in your army.”

“Not exactly,” Josh said. “But then it isn’t my army.” Abdikadir said nothing more, but Josh had the sense that he knew, or had guessed, more about this strange situation than anybody else.

Private McKnight came running back, breathless. He said to Bisesa and Abdikadir, “Captain Grove wants to see the two of you in his office.”

Batson nodded. “Move.”

“No,” Casey grunted from his blanket. “Don’t leave the ship. You know the drill, Abdi. Wipe the damn memory. We don’t know who these people are—”

“These
people
,” Batson said menacingly, “have big guns that are pointing at you.
Choop
and
chel.
”

Bisesa and Abdikadir seemed confused by Batson’s mixture of strong Geordie with bits of Frontier argot, but his meaning was clear enough:
shut up and move
. “I don’t think we have a choice right now, Casey,” Bisesa said.

“And you, chum,” Batson said to Casey, “are heading for the infirmary.” Josh saw Casey was trying to conceal his alarm at this prospect.

Bisesa turned to go with McKnight, escorted by a few more armed privates. “We’ll come find you as soon as we can, Casey.”

“Yes,” Abdikadir called. “Don’t let them saw anything off in the meantime.”

“Ha ha, you prick,” Casey growled.

Ruddy muttered, “It seems that soldiers’ humor is universal, no matter where they come from.”

Josh and Ruddy tried to tag along with Bisesa and Abdikadir, but Batson politely but firmly turned them away.