Robert & Linda Evans - Time Scout

The coastline was a great deal more rugged from the ocean than it had looked from the air. Margo and Kynan took turns at the sail, steering their craft as best they could They hardly moved in relation to the coast. At Margo's best guess, it would take them days to make the gate. Then, icing on a ruined cake, a line of thunderclouds rolled in from the Madagascar Straits, blotting out moon and stars. Lightning flared wildly from clouds to sea and back again.

"oh, God, no, not now..."

The storm swept down on them.

The only silver lining visible in the clouds was their increased speed as the storm drove the little raft southward. Then it began to rain.

"Kynan! Fresh water!"

He'd tilted his head back, letting rain enter his mouth.

"KYNAN!"

He glanced around. Margo tried to explain what she wanted, mimicking the shape of a funnel, then simply tore up part of the flooring and used the plastic to rig a funnel over one of the cans. Kynan did the same, with a bigger sheet of plastic. They filled three cans before the sea grew so rough they had to hang onto the raft to keep from being thrown off the platform. They wallowed and spun around in the swells. Rain pelted down, a wall of solid water that left them blind and drenched. Margo clung to the raft, unable to let go long enough to steer.

Please, let us get out of this alive and I swear I'll do whatever Kit says, study anything Kit tells me ... .

They ran before the storm, helpless in its grip for hours. Margo couldn't get to her chronometer, nestled safely in the ATLS bag looped around her torso, but given the changes in the light she guessed the storm drove them down the curving coast for more than twenty hours. She tried to remember what the curve of the coast looked like, wondered if the storm would slam them into the beach or just sweep them on southward past the Cape of Good Hope several hundred miles farther south.

Cape of Good Hope. Hah! Cape of Disasters is more like it ....

She and Kynan drank water sparingly, giving Koot a little when he roused, but there was still no food. Maybe I could rig something to use for a fishing line and hook? When the storm breaks ....

They ran aground without warning in pitch blackness.

Margo was thrown violently clear of the raft. She screamed and landed in stinging salt water. Breakers slammed her into the beach. The force of her landing knocked her breath away and left her floundering in a savage backwash. She crawled forward like a crab scuttling away from the sea, blinded by rain and deafened by the crash of thunder and maddened surf. She finally collapsed above the high water line, drenched to the skin by pounding rain.

Koot ... Kynan ...

Malcolm ...

The last thing to impinge on her awareness was the knowledge that she was an utter failure.

She woke slowly, in pain. Margo heard male voices she didn't recognize, speaking loudly and angrily somewhere above her. She stirred and moaned. Everything hurt. Someone slapped her, shocking her more fully awake. Margo gasped and focused on dark-haired men with light, olive-toned skin. They were dressed outlandishly in dirty clothes that reminded her of paintings of Christopher Columbus. Many of them wore slashed velvet breeches and leather armor. One wore metal chest and backplates and carried a fancy wheel-lock handgun. Margo's heart began to pound. She'd been found by sixteenth-century Portuguese from that little settlement on Delagoa Bay.

What about Kynan? And Koot? Had they survived the break-up of the raft? Or had Margo alone failed to drown in the stormy surf? One of the Portuguese, the man in the metal armor, spoke roughly to her. Margo had no idea what he'd said. The man stooped over her, spoke again, then backhanded her. She tried to get away and felt a tremendous blow connect. She didn't feel anything at all for a long time after that. When Margo regained her senses, someone had stripped her naked. The traders had clustered around her, leering. They'd started to unfasten their clothes.

Margo whimpered.

When the first one shoved her knees apart, Margo squeezed shut her eyes.

Malcolm ...

It took the bastards a long time to finish.

The withered-sea landscape garden of sand and stones in the corner of Kit's office had lost its ability to soothe. He slumped in his chair and shoved aside the mountain of government forms to be filled out, then stared at the raked sand and dry boulders. Eight weeks. It had felt more like eight years. Kit hadn't believed it possible to miss someone so keenly after such a short time much of it spent arguing, at that. His apartment felt empty. The Down Time had lost its appeal. The Commons would have been utterly dead-flat boring if not for the occasional excitement of a crow-sized pterodactyl raiding lunch from shocked hands or momentarily unguarded plates.

After a while, even the giggle of watching tourists dive under lunch tables had worn off. All that was left was the intolerable weight of government paperwork and the long hours wondering where she'd gone. He'd gone up-time long enough to hire an investigative agency to locate her birthplace in Minnesota and discover her real name, as well as search other time terminals to see if she might have gone scouting at one of them. So far, the agency had drawn an absolute blank. As far as anyone could tell, Margo had dropped off the face of the earth.

Which she might have, for all practical purposes, if she'd gone scouting from another terminal.

Whatever the solution to the mystery of Margo's whereabouts, TT-86 no longer felt quite so much like home.

Kit ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "Maybe I ought to retire up time." To do that, he'd have to close his accounts, find a buyer for the Neo Edo, locate a place to live in the real world, which had changed a lot and not for the better, so far as he could tell during the years he'd been down time.

Kit grunted. "I'm too tired to leave and too bored to stay."

So he picked up a stack of bills and started scanning them for errors, just to avoid government forms. He was halfway through an itemized bill from the library when an entry caught his attention. He hadn't done any research on fuel-consumption and lift-capacity for Floating Wedge ultralight airships.

"What the ..."

He checked the access code assigned to the bill. It was Margo's. He grunted. So she had been using the library, after all. Then he noticed the date. Kit swivelled in his chair, punching up gate departures for the past two months. There was the day Porta Romae had cycled, the day his granddaughter had walked back out of his life. The library entry on the bill was dated seven days afterward.

"Oh, hell, she couldn't even keep her goddamned password a secret. How many other charges did this thief run up against my account?" He found several additional entries, neatly itemized by subject matter and data source as well as computer time logged onto the mainframe. Each one post-dated Margo's precipitous departure through Primary.

Kit slid the bill angrily to one side of his desk. Unless he could locate the access-code pirate, he'd be stuck for one helluva research bill. He switched computer screens, typing out a simple monitoring program to set off an alarm the next time Margo's access code was entered into the system, then e-mailed messages to Brian Hendrickson and Mike Benson, alerting them to the fact that data piracy was occurring.

Then he called Bull Morgan.

"What's up, Kit?"

"We've got a data pirate loose on the station. Someone's used Margo's access code to bill research to my account."

"I'll make a note of it. You're sure it's an account pirate?"

"Margo left a week before the first incident. Went up Primary to God alone knows where. Or when."

Bull sympathized. "I'll do some checking, put Mike Benson on it."