Ben Jeapes - Time's Chariot

‘You’ve had your training.’ Professor Onskiro took charge and she sounded irritated at students who obviously hadn’t listened to their briefing. ‘Thank you, Field Ops. When do you want us back?’

‘We’ll be recalled twelve hours from now,’ Su said.

‘Then we return to this location no later than eleven hours from now,’ Onskiro said. ‘Give us time for a debrief. Activate your beacons now, get into your teams…’

The students huddled round their leader and, apart from seeing that no one interfered with the ecosystem, or wandered off into the jungle and got lost, or removed anything other than the plant specimens they were authorized to collect, Su and Rico were suddenly redundant. Assuming no emergency in the next twelve hours, their next job would be tagging the specimens that were to be taken back to the Home Time, sensitizing them to the probability frequency of the recall field.

Rico tilted his head back again to admire the leaf canopy. He lived in a community module which had no natural views at all — he remembered with envy the view from Daiho’s place — in a block with five million other people, and he had grown up in a crèche, an orphan taken in and raised by the College. Here it was hot and sticky, despite the cooling action of his fieldsuit, but he loved it. This wasn’t the regulated and balanced ecology of an ecopolis — this was real. Once it had been the artificial world of the future that had been real to him — it was where he had grown up — but then he had gone on his first trip upstream and become a convert to the joys of nature.

Su swung the pack off her back. ‘Drink, Rico?’

‘Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.’

They sat cross-legged on the mulch and Su poured out two cups. She handed one over. ‘Brazilian coffee.’

‘Appropriate.’ They sipped their drinks. ‘Su?’ Rico said.

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me about your friend Marje.’

‘Why do you care? I thought you loathed her on principle.’

‘Humour me.’

Su shrugged. ‘We don’t see much of each other and I wouldn’t say she’s my friend. We just joined the College at the same time.’

‘She looks older than you.’

‘She is. She’s a psychologist and she was a partner in a practice, but as I recall she felt she wasn’t contributing enough to… I don’t know, the common good. She wanted to contribute more, and what organization contributes the most? The College. So, she joined, and by all appearances hasn’t done too badly for herself.’ Su pierced Rico with a look. ‘Now, why do you want to know?’

Rico grinned. ‘It’s just that she’s high up. Higher up than that prick who was with her, and I wouldn’t ask him anyway.’

‘Higher up for what?’ Su said cautiously.

Rico put his cup down and lay back, propping himself on one elbow. ‘Why would a Commissioner want a field computer?’ he said.

‘Did it ever occur to you it might not be any of your business? Perhaps he wanted to show it to one of his grandchildren.’

‘And then there’s the agravs. They should have stopped him falling…’

‘Here we go again…’

‘It’s my old-fashioned scientific mind,’ Rico said, and Su almost choked on her coffee. ‘One tiny little fact which doesn’t fit the theory, and I dismiss the theory rather than the facts.’

‘So what does this have to do with Marje?’ Su said.

‘She has authority we could never get even if we asked,’ Rico said. ‘If we could raise her suspicions and get her to do some investigating of her own, she could find out more than we ever will.’

‘We?’ Su said.

‘Aren’t you even remotely curious?’

‘No.’ Su took another swig of her coffee and put the cup down. ‘Look. Ever since you got bust down, you’ve made a point of not caring about anything. Why are you so worked up now?’

Rico narrowed his eyes. Su was one of the few people — correct that, the only person — in the whole of the Home Time whom he would allow to refer so casually to his being busted. But she had a point. Why was he so fixated?

‘It just bugs me,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

A scream echoed through the jungle, inspiring a responding chorus from the bird life, and immediately Rico and Su were on their feet and running towards its source. They knew the difference between animal noises and terrified humans, and they knew which sort that scream had been.

‘ Go to agrav ,’ Rico symbed at Su. Their fieldsuits had in-built symb units and they could communicate as easily here as in the Home Time. The agrav harnesses beneath their fieldsuits came on and the two Field Ops leaped through the undergrowth, covering ten or twenty feet with a bound.

‘ Stay low. You’ll just get tangled if you get into the tree tops ,’ Rico added. He could have flown with the agrav but there just wasn’t room.

‘ How lucky I am to have you ,’ Su symbed back, not breaking her step. The irony was just strong enough to remind Rico that she was the senior, not he. But he had been trained for harder and dirtier missions than this, and old habits died hard, and she knew he was better than she was at this sort of thing.

They were near their target and the symb display in Rico’s vision indicated three Home Timers surrounded by a large group of smaller primates. And then he was through the leaves and in sight of the scene, and he saw the mistake the sensors had made. It was three Home Timers and a small group of larger primates: human beings, to be precise. One student writhed on the ground with an arrow sticking from his shoulder and the other two cowered under the spears of the natives. They were small men, barely coming up to the shoulders of the Home Timers; naked but for loincloths; nut brown skin decorated with paint; dark knots of jet black hair.

Rico let out a wild whoop at the top of his voice and symbed the command ‘ full radiance ’ at his fieldsuit so that it immediately blazed with white light. Su followed his example. It was stage one of the standard operating procedure for frightening bygoners from primitive cultures, and the sight of two whooping, yelling, shining beings leaping and bounding through the trees towards them made most of the natives turn and flee.

Three of them, visibly terrified, still stood their ground and brought their weapons up. For stage two, Rico raised his right hand and sparks flew from his fingertips, stinging two of them painfully. They yelped, dropped their spears and followed their friends.

The last man was made of the sternest stuff of all, which perversely made Rico take an immediate liking to him. He was pale beneath his naturally dark skin, but he shifted his feet into a slightly firmer position, braced himself, looked Rico in the eyes and brought his spear to bear as the Field Op touched down in front of him. Rico cancelled the blazing light and smiled, holding his hands out: look, no harm . The man feinted, then lunged at him. Rico didn’t even need the fieldsuit: he twisted to one side, caught the man as he ran past and rendered him unconscious with a simple jab at the right spot on the neck. The man crumpled, face down, next to the student.

Sorry , thought Rico.

Su was already tending to the stricken, groaning Home Timer so Rico turned the native over, checking him for damage. He would live.

‘Kill him!’

Rico looked up in surprise at one of the other students. A young woman, late teens or early twenties. ‘Kill him!’ she spat. She could have looked attractive if her face hadn’t been twisted with hate. ‘He’s an animal!’

Rico stood up slowly to face her, then, more quickly than she could react, tapped her lightly on the cheek. ‘He’s as human as you are, and he’s probably an ancestor, so show a bit of respect.’