Harry Turtledove - In High Places

"No," Jacques said, and let it go at that. Khadija really did like him? This older woman was her friend. She would know if anybody did. Jacques felt like grinning like a fool.

Emishtar smiled at him. "You are a good boy," she said, and walked away.

Jacques was happy and angry at the same time. A boy? He wasn't a boy! He was about to turn eighteen. If that didn't make him a man, what would?

Back in Madrid. This time, Annette came by hypersonic shuttle, not by scamming her way aboard a transposition chamber. She went through customs instead of escaping from a man who might have stopped her if he'd thought a little faster. And the reporters in Spain were just as annoying as the ones in the United States. She couldn't even tell them she didn't speak Spanish, because they all spoke English.

She'd had to make a fuss to get back to Spain. Higher-ups in Crosstime Traffic didn't care that she'd promised some of the slaves at the manor she'd come back. Several higher-ups were under arrest as the scandal widened. Others plainly wished it was never uncovered. They would rather have gone on doing business as usual. Slaves? As long as nobody knew about them, they might as well not have existed.

But Crosstime Traffic couldn't afford any more bad publicity. The company would have got it by the carload lot after trying to keep Annette from returning to where she'd been enslaved. No matter what the higher-ups might have been thinking to themselves, they weren't dumb. They could see that. And so here she was, at Crosstime Traffic's expense.

CT technicians were setting up an enormous transposition chamber in a park several kilometers from the building that was in the same spot here as the manor was in that other alternate. Next to the cost of doing that, flying Annette over from the USA was small change. Thanks to endless computer work, the techs sounded sure they could find that other alternate. Annette hoped they were right.

One of the things that moved into the transposition chamber under cover of darkness was an armored car. A couple of squads of Spanish soldiers boarded the chamber, too. So did a man who looked like a lawyer. "You say they're loaded for bear," he told Annette. "Are they loaded for dinosaur?"

"I hope not," was all Annette said, because she wasn't sure. Her helmet and body armor were made to fit women in the Spanish Army. The releases she'd signed were made to fit the toughest court of law. Without signing them, she wouldn't have been able to get into the chamber.

Her parents had made it very plain they wished she were staying home. If it were up to them, they never would have signed the releases. But she was over eighteen, so they couldn't stop her. Her father's comment was, "Yes, you're of legal age. You know what that means? It means you're old enough to be stupid all by yourself."

"Instead of someone else being stupid for me?" Annette had thought that was the perfect comeback. Her father just rolled his eyes, so he must have been less impressed than she was.

"Are you ready, Miss Klein?" asked the man who looked like a lawyer. He was a lawyer, and worked for Crosstime Traffic. Even if she'd signed his releases, he didn't look happy to have her along. He went on, "Remember, you've agreed to follow the military commander's orders. If you become a casualty"—a nice, polite way to say get killed or maimed—"the publicity would be very bad." That mattered to him. Her health? She wouldn't have bet a dollar on it. But he was coming along, too. Whatever risks she took, he took them with her.

That made her answer him politely: "I remember, Mr. Guerrero. I'll play by the rules." Unless things go really wrong. But if they do, nobody else will be playing by the rules, either.

Somebody closed the door, sealing the transposition chamber off from the outside world. Like most chambers, it had a human along to back up the computer. Most of the time, the human couldn't do much if the electronics went haywire. From what Annette had heard, it wasn't like that here. They were feeling for the alternate that held the manor. They had a good notion of where it lay among so many others. Its world sprang from one where Rome lost the Samnite Wars in the fourth century BCE. No one dominated the Mediterranean in that sheaf of alternates. Spain was split between people like Basques and the descendants of colonists from Carthage. Just where in the sheaf the right alternate lay ... the human operator would, with luck, be able to tell.

The operator looked up from the monitor she'd plugged into the chamber's electronics. "We're on the way," she said in English, after what was probably the same thing in Spanish.

If she hadn't said so, Annette wouldn't have known. The transposition chamber didn't feel as if it was going anywhere. It was, but you couldn't tell till you got there.

The Spanish lieutenant colonel in charge of things military came over to remind Annette of what she'd promised. She promised all over again. Why not? It took up some duration—time didn't really exist while the chamber was traveling, but it felt as if it did.

As they got close, the operator used the manual controls. Except in training videos, Annette had never seen anybody do that. She wondered if anybody else had who'd lived through it. Not many people had—she was sure of that.

Frowning, the operator twisted a knob ever so slightly. "We're just about there," she said. "I'm going to drop us into reality. If it's the wrong alternate, we'll try again."

"If it's the right one, they're liable to start shooting at us," the Spanish officer said. On that cheerful note, the chamber returned to the timelines.

One of the soldiers wore headphones along with the rest of his gear. He said something excited in Spanish. I should have got a course through the implant, Annette thought. Then I'd know what was going on. But she hadn't had time. Since escaping, she'd barely had time to breathe. The lieutenant colonel translated for her: "He says he is picking up wireless phone signals."

'This is the right alternate, then." Excitement of her own tingled through Annette. "In this sheaf, they wouldn't have invented them on their own."

"Si, " the Spanish officer said. He called orders in his own language. The transposition chamber's door slid open. Soldiers scrambled out and . . . what was the military word? They deployed, that was what they did. The armored car rolled out. The lieutenant colonel gave Annette what was almost a bow. "If you will be so kind as to come with me, Miss Klein . . ."

Stay with me. I'll make sure you don't get into mischief. That was what he meant. Annette didn't know what she could do about it, though. She nodded to him. "Let's go."

Her body armor made her top-heavy. She almost fell when she went down the ramp. The officer steadied her. He had to be used to wearing the stuff. The soldiers and the armored car were already heading toward where the manor would be. The distant skyline looked the same as it did when she set out from the home timeline. Someone had taken Madrid away, though.

Someone took away my freedom, she thought angrily. Now she had the chance to help make sure that wouldn't happen to anybody else. She hurried along with the lieutenant colonel.

Jacques was digging out the roadbed when one of the men who spoke Dumnorix's language screamed. He hadn't hurt himself—it wasn't that kind of scream. He stared off to the east, his blue eyes open wider than any eyes Jacques had ever seen. "A monster!" he shrieked, and ran back towards the manor.

He wasn't the only one who ran. Jacques felt like running himself. The monster looked something like what he imagined an elephant would look like. At least, that long snout reminded him of an elephant's trunk, even if it was at the top middle of the thing and not at the front. But shouldn't a trunk be wiggly? This was stiff and still, almost like . . . the barrel of a cannon?