TimeSplash (7 page)

“Now here’s my problem, bitch,” Sniper said, kneeling down beside her and putting the barrel of his pistol against her ribs. “I can’t shoot you with all those police around, and you and me up on the silver screen like this.” She glanced up at the screens. The gigantic images showed what could easily have been Sniper compassionately checking that she was okay after her ordeal. “And I can’t trust you to keep your story straight. So I’ll make it easy for you. You weren’t there when Hal had his terrible accident. You didn’t see what happened. We got separated. You say anything other than that, and I will give you the longest, slowest, most horrible death you can possibly imagine.”

He smiled as if pleased to see she was all right. “Got that, bitch?”

Not daring to speak, she nodded mutely.

The music stopped mid-beat, leaving her ears ringing. The police had reached the control booth. The crowd groaned in protest.

“This is the police.” Howls of feedback from the PA system almost drowned out the speaker’s voice. “Nobody leaves here without our permission. We believe there are prohibited drugs being sold in this area. And we have a warrant to stop and search anyone we choose.”

More police had reached the platform and were clambering up toward the cage.

“We also believe there has been an unauthorised time jump in contravention of the European Temporal Displacement Regulation Act of 2045. Please remain where you are and we will process you as quickly as possible. Thank you.”

The message began to repeat itself in Dutch.

Patty could see only half a dozen police cars on the grounds of Eerde Castle. Perhaps there were more at the gates. Even so, there were nowhere near enough police to contain a crowd this big. Realising this, people started to run for the darkness beyond the lights of the party. She saw the crowd streaming away in all directions, flowing away into the night. The police had obviously acted too soon. More police cars were arriving from the direction of the big house, called in from more distant towns, no doubt, but there would never be enough of them. The police gave chase to anyone within reach and several were caught and dragged over to the waiting vans. Out of all those hundreds, only the three young people in the cage were absolutely guaranteed to be arrested.

* * * *

It took Jay several anxious minutes to locate the ICU and his friend. Throughout the hospital, people were being helped from under wreckage and treated for cuts and broken bones. Nurses and doctors had suffered along with the patients.

The young policeman caught up with him just as he entered the room where Spock was being treated. The place was a wreck. Medical equipment was strewn on the floor and a tall steel locker had toppled over and crashed through some monitoring equipment. Jay recognised the doctor standing beside Spock. She had a cut on her forehead and, he noticed, her hands were trembling. She looked up as he and the policeman came toward her.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news about your friend.”

Even before she said it, Jay had known from the look on her face.

“Mr. Lyle passed away without regaining consciousness. He did not suffer, I think. I am sorry.” She looked around the room, helplessly. “He was on life support. He should have been all right but…”

Jay’s legs quivered and he sat down abruptly in a tubular-steel chair. “I should call his family,” he said, vaguely.

“Mr. Lyle,” the doctor had called him. Jay barely recognised his friend’s real name. It was as if in death he had become someone else, had joined a new crowd, had lost all his personality, his quirkiness and excitement, and was now someone more ordinary and mundane. In death, his thoughts echoed. No longer in life but elsewhere, in another place, among strangers. Tears rolled down his cheeks, surprising him. The nurse touched his shoulder tenderly from behind, having followed him and his escort in from the waiting room. Jay ignored her.

The doctor said something to the nurse in Dutch. “I must go and see who I may help,” she told the policeman, in English, for Jay’s benefit.

Jay reached out a hand and laid it on Spock’s, wishing the doctor would remove all the tubes and wires from his friend’s face and hands.

The nurse took the policeman aside and they talked together quickly in quiet voices. Making arrangements perhaps, working out what to do about it, where to send the body, who would do what and when. Jay felt resentment that these people should take it on themselves to look after Spock’s body. Spock was Jay’s friend. Jay should decide what was best for him, should have the responsibility of looking after him.

But the reality of Spock lying there, cold, on a hospital bed, heavy and lifeless, made him quail. What would he do, put the body in his car and drive him home to England? He thought about going through customs at the tunnel with a dead body in his car and then saw how Spock himself would see it. It made him smile. Spock would think it was an enormous joke, a great caper. Jay almost thought it would be worth doing as a final tribute to his crazy friend. He chortled to himself, imagining it, and the nurse and policeman turned to look at him. Not long after that, the policeman told Jay he was taking him to the Ommen police station. They left the hospital in the middle of the night. There was chaos in the streets, traffic accidents, cracked roads, tumbled buildings. It looked as if an earthquake had hit the town. But they reached the station without too much trouble, and the police let him make whatever calls he wanted to. When he called, his parents were angry, appalled, and concerned in equal measures. Spock’s father sounded stunned and said almost nothing. They were all coming to Ommen as fast as they could get there.

He was formally charged with being in possession of banned drugs. They put him in a comfortable cell. It was a smart, new police station and had survived the backwash almost unscathed. Jay didn’t want to think about what tomorrow might be like. He curled up into a tight ball on his cot and cried himself to sleep.

The storm rattled against the windows and buffeted the car. It was a black sedan, Paris registration, hunkered down in the quiet side street with its lights out. Jacques Bauchet sat behind the wheel, holding a cup of coffee in his large hands, staring intently at the rain-lashed windscreen. His hawk-like profile was almost invisible in the dark. By the clock on his compatch it was already two in the morning.

A lone street lamp stood in a bubble of whirling orange flecks, throwing little illumination on the doorway Bauchet was studying. But sensors mounted on the car watched the alley through infrared eyes and the inside of the windscreen displayed a clear image of the wet road and the old brick buildings, superimposed perfectly on the murky scene outside and adjusted and filtered to remove the driving rain.

“Maybe we got it wrong,” Colbert said.

“Meaning, maybe I got it wrong, eh?” Bauchet regretted saying it immediately; he wasn’t usually so touchy.

Colbert looked at his boss. “I just meant…”

“They’ll be here. Don’t be so impatient, Sergeant.” A bright light appeared in the main street beyond, grew and stopped just out of sight around the corner. “Speak of the devil,” said Bauchet, softly.

“It’s them,” a voice from Bauchet’s compatch said. There were other watchers across the street.

“You’ve confirmed that?” he asked.

“Sending,” said the compatch, and a moment later a still image of three men emerging from a car appeared in a viewer in the windscreen. The faces were indistinct and grainy, but the captions beside them gave their names and other personal details. The software analysis that had provided the facial recognition would be admissible as evidence in any court in the Union. Bauchet allowed himself to relax just a little.

“Give them a minute to get inside and meet up with the others,” he said. Beside him, Detective Sergeant Colbert drew his stunner and flicked off the safety. Bauchet turned and looked at him. “The sweepers are pretty good, you know.”

“Not against these guys.”

Colbert’s expression was unreadable in the dark. Bauchet looked away with a small nod of agreement.

They waited.

“Okay,” Bauchet said to his compatch. “Send in the sweepers.”

There was a flurry of activity out on the main road. Bauchet could just make out several grey shapes moving through the rain toward the corner building. There was noise from behind him, and two sweepers rushed past the car from the van in which they had been waiting. The armoured combat robots went straight to the door Bauchet had watched for so long. Without pause, they blew it to pieces with a small canon and raced into the building.

“Give me telemetry,” he said into his compatch and the lower half of the windscreen became a row of viewers, showing what each of the half-dozen armoured robots saw. The sweepers were converging on infrared images of five men in a room two storeys up. “This is Chief Inspector Bauchet,” he said through the compatch to his waiting team. “Go, go, go!”

“Wish me luck.” Colbert opened the door and got out, cold air and rain rushing in until he slammed it behind him. Bauchet heard running feet and saw several armed police officers in body armour trot past him toward the shattered doorway. He kept his eyes on what the sweepers were seeing.

The men in the upstairs room had begun to move about agitatedly. He watched their little red-and-yellow heat signatures shifting around in the room. Suddenly, there were ten figures, then fifty. Bauchet frowned at the viewers. His quarry had deployed electronic countermeasures to confuse the sweepers’ sensors. He wondered where they had got such good tech. The sweepers would be shooting at shadows now, with a one-in-ten chance of hitting anything. Colbert was right. This wasn’t the kind of job the bots could handle. He broadcast the bad news through his compatch, then got out of the car.

The cold rain slapped his face and the wind tore at his coat as he struggled to fasten it. A rattle of shots could be heard from inside the building, and flashes lit the blinds of an upstairs window. A couple of shotguns, he guessed from the noise, and a machine gun. He felt a shiver of fear when he heard a buzz-gun’s vicious squeal. Buzz-guns spat out thousands of tiny iron pellets at hypersonic speeds. They could cut through body armour as if it were wet paper. By contrast, the sweepers’ stunners were silent and non-lethal. It was impossible to tell without the telemetry whether they were returning fire or not.

He walked to the door, pulling out his own stunner. One of his men waited there, covering the exit, looking bulky and large in his armour. Bauchet leaned his back against the wall and listened to the calm commentary from the mobile control unit on the compatch.

“Sweeper three inactive.”

“Sweeper two inactive.”

The robots were going down like tenpins.

At this rate, Bauchet realised, the sweepers would all be taken out before his officers arrived.

“Sweeper four, confirmed kill.”

Of course, a “kill” by the sweepers meant they had stunned one of the targets. Kills by the enemy would be the real thing.

“Unit two in position at stage one.” Not the calm detachment of the control unit, but one of the people inside the building. The speaker’s breathing could be heard as she climbed the staircase.

“No visual. Advancing to target.”

A buzz-gun screamed again.

“Sweeper four inactive.”

The shooting was almost continuous. One by one, the control unit ticked off the disabled sweepers. “Unit one, report.”

“Unit one, in position, ready to engage.”

“Unit two?”

“Taking fire. Repeat, taking fire. Two men down. Moving to…”

The voice went silent, but the roar and screech of the gun battle continued. Bauchet clenched his teeth and glowered back at the c-and-c van, willing them to give the order.

“Unit one engage. Unit three, advance to relieve unit two. Unit one, confirm you’re engaged.”

“Shit!”

“Unit one…”

“Yes! We’re engaged dammit!”

“Sweeper five, confirmed kill.”

The armoured officer at the doorway looked agitated. He was listening too and clearly wanted to get inside to help his comrades. Perhaps Bauchet’s presence was all that held him back.

“Unit one, two confirmed kills. We have a runner, heading for the back stairs. In pursuit.”

“All ground units converge on exit B.”

Bauchet pressed himself back against the wall. The officer nearby looked at him nervously. Exit B was the doorway he was standing in. Bauchet signalled the man to step back against the wall on the other side of the door but, before he could obey, the escapee appeared in the hallway. It took the fugitive just half a second to spot the cop blocking his exit and to start firing with his buzzgun. The high-pitched scream of the weapon cut through the wind and rain as a line of destruction tore through the plaster of the hallway wall, ripped the door frame to matchwood and arced into the street where the unlucky officer was diving for cover.