Roland Green: Great King_s war

"In a rush, Inspector? What's the emergency? I don't see any Code Yellow or Red signal?"

"No emergency. I was just in to ask Verkan for a budget increase, and he turned me down flat! With all the credits flying down the exhaust hole with his Kalvan Project, I'm forced to make appropriation cutbacks in other Sectors. It's not fair!"

Fair, thought Tortha, now there's a novel view of the world. He'd stopped believing in fair about the time he passed his sixth birthday, when his father had given his younger sister his favorite stuffed animal because she could wail louder than him. In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson: there was nothing fair about the universe; indifferent and inexorable certainly, but fair-never!

Maybe he'd made a mistake in not dealing with Barton a long time ago, but as Chief in charge of a hundred thousand Paracops, it was tough to get to know even the men you depended upon.

Barton's face tightened up as if he realized he'd said too much. He gave Tortha a sticky sweet smile and said, "How's life on your plantation? Enjoying your own time-line?"

That was another thing Tortha hadn't liked about Barton; he was an inveterate rump sniffer. He also spent a lot of his time in the company of politicians. "It's been different."

Barton stiffened at the rebuke, spun on his heels and left the room.

Same old Barton, he thought. He'd fawn over you at the drop of a hat, but if you didn't preen he took it personally. I really should have fired him a long time ago; saved Verkan the trouble!

As he entered the room, the secretary was already on the screen, informing Chief Verkan Vall about his visitor. A familiar but slightly distracted voice replied, but there was no picture with it. "Tell the ex-Chief to come in, if he can entertain himself for a minute or two."

The secretary was red in the face as he turned to face his former Chief, but Tortha only chuckled. "Sounds as if the Chief has the right spirit. Finish the job, even if the world's about to fall down on your head."

The office hadn't changed much since Tortha Karf last saw it, a ten-day after leaving it to Verkan Vall. Most of the movable furniture had been his private property and had gone with him; most of the fixed furniture, except for the horseshoe-shaped desk, was data-processing equipment intended to resist any effort to move it without using chemical explosives.

Verkan Vall was seated at the Chief's desk, apparently watching a visiscreen with one eye and a keyboard with the other. Both arms of the desk had acquired the inevitable litter of papers, photographs, discs, data wafers, charts and filmspools. Without raising his eyes from his work, Verkan waved him to a chair that gave him a clear view of the whole office and one of the transparent walls.

A luxurious couch squatted by the rear wall; it was made from carved dark wood with leather upholstery and had a Fourth Level Europo-American look to it. It was hidden from the outside by an obviously Indo-Turanian ornamental screen of ivory plaques set in lacquered bronze frames.

Another artificial alcove held several overstuffed reclining chairs, probably from Fourth Level Julian-Roman or Macedonian Empire Sector. They looked comfortable, although Tortha Karf wasn't prepared to be as charitable about the colors. Above the chairs several elaborately woven decorative hangings draped a carved wooden screen. He recognized the work of Vall's adopted sister-in-law Zinganna, who'd been raised from prole to citizen because of her help in breaking up the Wizard Traders. (Or at least in breaking it up as much as it had been broken up, Tortha added by way of a mental footnote.) She now had a happy marriage to Paratime Police Inspector Kostran Galth and a growing reputation as an artist.

At one end of the screen was a wooden liquor cabinet of the sort that seemed to be universal in every civilization that reached the level of inventing distilling. At the other end was a long case with transparent sides and several glass shelves. He walked over to it and studied the contents, then began to laugh softly.

The rest of the decorating showed the firm hand of Verkan Vall's wife Hadron Dalla. This case was Vall's, the souvenirs from some of his most important outtime cases.

There was the.357 magnum revolver from Fourth Level Europo-American, Hispano-Columbian he'd used to kill an escaped Venusian night-hound. One the second shelf were two thumbscrews from Fourth Level Spanish-Imperial, where Verkan had once rescued a missing Paratime damsel from the Holy Office of the Inquisition. To the right was an ugly jade idol of a crocodile with wings like a bat and knife blades for a tail from the Crocodile-God Case. On the next shelf were a knife and a more sophisticated solid-projectile pistol Vall had used on a Second Level Akor-Neb time-line when Dalla (then between marriages to Verkan) got herself into trouble over a reincarnation fracas.

Trouble was one of Dalla's natural habitats, of course, but that batch was worse than usual.

There were half a dozen models of Paratime Police-issue weapons, needlers and slug throwers-even a beam weapon, two or three swords, depending upon whether one of them was considered a long knife, an ivory harpoon and a flintlock pistol from Kalvan's time-line.

There was also a lady's handbag, and Tortha remembered rather too well how it had earned its place in the case. Dalla had used it to disarm a would-be assassin from the Wizard Traders, or Organization as they called themselves, saving Vall's life and proving she had the makings of a good policeman. She'd done well, but she shouldn't have had to do it at all. Now, he was inclined to believe the Paratime Police had been too restrained in their dealings with the Wizard Traders; politicians, trade magnates, industrialists and stranger bedfellows were involved. He'd never gotten to the bottom of it. Even now, after ten years of hard work, mostly Vall's, Tortha still wasn't sure if the Organization was dead or just lying quiet until trouble elsewhere diverted the Paratime Police attention.

A polite cough drew his attention toward the desk and the man now rising from behind a darkened visiscreen. "Welcome home, sir. How are the rabbits in Sicily?"

"Breeding like rabbits, as usual. I've tried everything short of importing cobras, but I can't do that because they have no natural enemies on the island. So I suppose I'll just have to be content with exporting what vegetables the rabbits are gracious enough to leave for me." He gestured toward the screen. "What had you by the leg there?"

"Somebody on a Fourth Level Alexandrian-Roman time-line has reinvented the steam engine and one of the local kings has decided to conquer the world with a fleet of steamships. He has a nasty habit of burning cities to the ground, and he's on his way toward the island of Crete. Exotic Food and Beverages has a central conveyer-head there, for their wine imports. It's also a major tourist trap; Dalla spent a ten-day there as a girl. I was trying to get a computer evaluation of the risks of teaching some of our pearl divers from Fourth Level Sino-Polynesia to attach limpet mines to the king's ships. The time-line has gunpowder, so it's only a minor secondary contamination at worst."

"What did the computer say?"

"That it wasn't going to say anything for several hours. I was going to have dinner sent up, and Dalla can join us when she gets back from the Bureau of Archives. She wanted to check their artifact collection on limpet mines so that if we decide in favor of training the divers we can produce a mine that looks as right for that time-line as possible."

"Any other problems?"

"Yes, more trouble on Europo-American."

"I'm not surprised," Tortha said. Europo-American, Hispano-Columbian Subsector, was an area of about ten thousand parayears' depth in which the major civilization had developed on the Major Land Mass and from there spread to the Minor Land Mass, Northern Continent. The Hispano-Columbian Subsector had been very volatile since the Big War had concluded there twenty years ago, when it fractured into half a dozen new subsectors and belts. Ever since, the major power (usually two, sometimes three or four) had been acting like participants in a mutual suicide pact. Since they had nuclear weapons, the subsector had been under observation by a Paratime Policy study-team. The same political polarization had happened all over most of Third Level, where only a few time-lines had escaped nuclear destruction.