The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (28 page)

“Damn fool,” the Beauchamps captain said, and that came through clearly. “You. Are. In. Danger.” He grabbed Merritt’s arm, his bloody fingers leaving prints. “Jumped by raiders, and disabled. But they hit the D-space navigator.” He stopped, gulped a lot of air. “We’ve been cycling in and out of space-time, each time it’s getting worse. We’re due for another cycle any second, and if you don’t get out of here, you’re dead too.”

Merritt’s status sensors told him what he already suspected – respiration, heart rate, adrenal glands: all pouring forth accelerated data. He holstered his gun again and knelt, trying to lift the Beauchamps captain. He grunted under the effort; his suit didn’t make things easy. “Then I guess we better be going.”

Beauchamps cried out in agony. “No time. I’m cycling too.”

Merritt looked down and almost dropped him. Beauchamps was
fading.
D-space was happening all around them. Great for getting from place to place without having to take, say, 100 years to make the next star; not so great when a wormhole opened up inside you. Beauchamps got a lot heavier and Merritt saw that he was dead. He set the man down and backed away, then ran for the ladder. He slid rather than climbed down.

The ship shook all around him, coming in and out of reality. The central corridor seemed longer this time, even though he was sprinting. His heads-up display flared and shook, transmitting streams of unintelligible data. Merritt kept running, hit the controls for the airlock, and froze. The door had
changed
. It was now made of wood and iron and had an old-fashioned doorknob. Tentative, he touched the knob and the door whooshed open, an airlock once again. He stepped in and reflexively slapped at the side of the door to close it.

His glove hit wood and something fell to the floor. An old-fashioned key – an iron skeleton key – lay at his feet. It’s not really there, he told himself. It was a ghost of the D-space nav malfunction. His brain was making sense of what it couldn’t understand, creating familiar images out of multispace. The ship was coming apart at the subatomic level, and so would he. He saw the great gathering darkness rushing towards him, pulling him into the wormhole that gathered at the bow of the ship. Breathing hard, Merritt pulled the door closed.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered, sweat slicking down his back. Would the airlock work, or would he be trapped inside the wormhole for ever? With agonizing slowness the rising whine indicated that the airlock had began to pressurize. Merritt heard a noise and looked out of the tiny window in the wooden door.

A face filled it, a face contorted in hatred and fear.

“Shit!” Merritt flung himself backwards, fumbling to pull up his weapon. The man was snarling, his teeth showing like spikes through his beard. That’s not the captain, he thought crazily. What the hell was going on?

The power whine stopped and the airlock stopped pressurizing. The man continued to snarl like an animal, and he was trying to pull the door open.
Shit shit shit.
Merritt knelt and scrabbled for the key, fumbling in his panic and haste. He held the door closed, desperation giving him strength, and pushed the key in the lock, then turned it. The door locked with a click. Again the slow rising whine, again the long wait as the airlock pressurized. The face dropped away and Merritt allowed himself a slow breath.

Then with a shuddering crash the man threw himself against the door, teeth bared, eyes bulging. The small compartment was rocked again and again as the creature threw itself at him. Merritt drew his gun, faced the door, and waited for the moment when the creature burst through. If the explosive decompression didn’t get him, he might survive.

A polite chime sounded, signalling the atmosphere had stabilized. The airlock opened behind him.

Billy’s was crowded that night, the little roadhouse bar spilling music and laughter out into the parking lot. Edith parked her battered old work truck, with ‘Crane Farrier and Blacksmithing’ stencilled on the side, at the end of the parking lot, got out and stretched. It had been a long day. She had shoed five horses that day. Her business was picking up, but it meant that she had spent a lot of time bent over double, and some horses were lazy about supporting their own weight.

“Edith Crane!” shouted Melissa Andrews from over by the front deck with a bunch of friends. “’Bout time you got here!”

Edith made her way over to the group and slid into an empty space on the bench. Melissa poured her a beer from the pitcher and Edith sipped and relaxed.

“Oh my, that’s good.” Edith looked around at all of her friends. There was Melissa and her boyfriend Brian, and a half-dozen people her age, all young, all making their way in the little Tennessee town of Pilot’s Forge.

Melissa leaned across the table towards Edith and spoke low. “Listen, Edith, have you heard from Sam Grenady?”

Edith felt a shiver of unease. She and Sam had dated briefly when she came to town. She was drawn by his rough good looks and a kindred liking for physical labour. He was a carpenter and jack-of-all-trades, and had an easy smile that, she realized after about a month, he could put on and take off as easy as a jacket. The smile and the charm hid a sizeable chip on his shoulder that came out when he drank, and he drank a lot. He had lots of plans for her, he told her. Big plans that she had no say in. After three dates she made sure they were at Billy’s when she told him she wasn’t the girl for him. The expression he gave her was cold and empty. And then he smiled, gave her a kiss on the cheek, paid for their beer, and walked away. She hadn’t talked to him since.

“Why, what’s up?” She asked it carefully.

Melissa said, “He’s been heard making noise about you. Says you lamed Cindy Dupre’s warmblood with lousy shoeing.”

Edith’s heart sank. Pilot’s Forge was a small town and Sam was an old-timer. He could sink her business in no time. “That son of a bitch.”

Melissa snorted. “Don’t I know it. He sweet-talks plenty, but the minute he doesn’t get his way, he goes ballistic. He was always like that, even when we were in high school.”

Edith was reminded again that she was the newcomer. It didn’t matter that her grandparents farmed here eighty years ago. If Sam Grenady wanted her out of Pilot’s Forge, all he had to do was spread a few rumours. Well, she wasn’t going to go without a fight. She’d call Cindy Dupre and all of her clients and let them know that Sam was full of it.

She looked straight at Melissa. “If you hear anything else, you let me know.”

“You know it, California girl. I’ve been telling everyone that this town has always needed someone to put it on the map, and that’s going to have to be you.”

Edith laughed. “Melissa, I shoe horses. That’s not glamorous,”

“Oh, honey, in small towns you have to make your own fun.”

It was late when Edith drove up the mountain road to her old farmhouse, her pickup growling in low gear as it rounded the turns towards home. Trees massed around her, and now and again her headlights reflected on the eyes of animals in the dark. A whitetail bounded on stick-thin legs across the road in front of her, its twin fawns leaping behind it. She was glad to be heading home but Sam’s lies made her uneasy. She remembered his expression when she broke up with him. Should have known it wouldn’t be that easy, she thought. She would have to look out for him.

Her porch light was a welcoming sight as she pulled in to her driveway. She got out, locked her truck, and the cool summer air swept over her. Overhead the stars glittered between the trees. She hadn’t even seen the Milky Way before she moved out here from smog-filled Los Angeles. The swath of stars filled her with peace and awe.

Edith yawned. Straight to bed for me, she thought, but she needed to check on her horses. She let herself in, turned on lights, and went through her kitchen, with its jumble of mismatched crockery, Formica table and chairs, and old stove that came with the house when it was remodelled in the 1950s. Out back was the barn, well over 100 years old and still sound.

The only light came from the dusty night light by the door. Katahdin, her big seventeen-hand retired show horse nickered, but Cowboy and Blackjack both slept – Cowboy curled up like a foal. Edith made sure he wasn’t cast in his stall; a cast horse could break a leg trying to get to his feet. But Cowboy had plenty of room. Edith was about to leave when she heard the noise.

She turned towards her tack-room door. It sounded like there was a machine in there. She could feel the thrumming of an engine deep in her bones. Edith backed away, fumbling for the iron crowbar she left in the corner of the barn. Behind her Blackjack snorted and whinnied, and Cowboy lunged to his feet.

Katahdin kicked at the back of his stall, shaking the wall of the barn. Edith jumped. The tack-room door jerked open and someone stumbled out.

She had little time to register before whoever it was, in a streamlined G-suit, collapsed in front of her.

Oh my God. There’s a dead astronaut in my barn.

Merritt opened his eyes and wondered if he was still cycling in D-space. A woman with dark curly hair, dark eyes – and a long metal bar poised to strike – stood over him. She was good-looking too, he noted; trim figure in a simple shirt and trousers. And scared and determined enough to smash him with the crowbar. She didn’t look like Beauchamps crew – where the hell was he? And where was the man from the freighter?

He stayed as still as he could. Sometimes the best thing to do was play dead and hope for the best. With her free hand the woman fumbled for something in her pocket.

“Don’t move,” she said, her voice coming through his helmet’s comm. “I’m calling the police.”

Crap. That was all he needed. He started to get up.

“I said, don’t move!” Her voice rose.

He didn’t have time for this. He might only have a few minutes before whoever was chasing him on the
Godolphin
came through the airlock after him. He pulled his gun and trained it on her. Her eyes got big and she backed away.

“Lady, the way I see it, you just brought the wrong weapon to a gunfight.” He nodded at the crowbar. “Drop it.” She hesitated and set it down. “Now the comm.”

She frowned in confusion, but he held out his hand for the strange little comm, and she handed it over. He tucked it into his suit pouch.

“What do you want?” she said, swallowing to get her voice going.

“Same thing you do. To get out of your hair.” He gestured with the gun. “Move.”

She didn’t. She stood her ground. “Who are you? Did Sam Grenady put you up to this? What did you put in my tack room?”

What? He followed her gaze, turning his head. There was the door and, behind it, the
Godolphin.
The woman started towards the door, which had fallen ajar. For an instant he was back inside the scuttled freighter, the wormhole chasing him down and drawing him in, towards the crazy screaming man.

“NO!” Merritt shouted, as she pushed it open.

She flicked on the light.

Without thought Merritt plastered himself up against the opposite wall, aiming at the door, his heart hammering, as he registered what he was looking at. There was no D-space, no wormhole, no freighter, no madman: just a tidy room lined with gear, harness and metal grain bins. Stand down, he told himself, just as something big snorted just behind his ear. Merritt whirled around and almost screamed. An enormous quadruped stood there, long-necked and big-headed. It eyed him and snorted again.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“Don’t shoot him!” the woman said, and she threw herself at Merritt, grappling for the gun.

They wrestled. The suit gave him extra weight and boosted his strength and he soon had her pinned to the floor.

“I swear to God, if Sam Grenady is behind this I will kill you both!” she shouted, still trying to squirm free.

“Stop,” he said.
“Stop.
You keep fighting, the suit will keep compensating, and I can sit on you all day, and you’ll never get up.” She listened to him, sullenly, fury still in her eyes. Merritt was suddenly enjoying himself. Finally, something was going his way. And even through the suit, he could get a sense of her beneath him.

“Now, I’m going to get up and I’m going to let you up. You’re not going to try that again, right?”

He waited. She didn’t want to, but she nodded. He got up, and held out his hand to help her up. She ignored it and got to her feet.

“Like I said, I just want out of here. I need to know where the nearest port is. What world is this?”

She looked as if she were trying to come up with the right thing to say, and one of her choices was not going to be complimentary. Finally, she settled on, “Get the hell out of my barn.”

“My pleasure. After you.” He gestured with the gun and she went in front of him. He followed. One of the quadrupeds stuck its long neck out and eyed him with interest. Merritt scraped along the opposite wall, but she reached out and stroked the animal’s neck. A pet? A thing that size was a
pet
?

Outside the barn the skies above the trees were filled with unfamiliar stars. Merritt stopped, enjoying the rush of wind against his face, and wishing he had the
Crane
’s nav service to tell him where he was. There was a swath of galaxy above him, but he couldn’t tell which spiral arm he was marooned on from here.

She led the way through an ornate gate that swung silently on oiled hinges, past a small stone house and pointed down the mountain. In the pale starlight a road shimmered faintly before him. “That road leads to town. I don’t know who you are, or what you are doing here, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t come back.”