Чарли Андерс: Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

These Obfuscators hesitated—long enough for Jemima to pull out the thumb-sized gun hidden in her coat’s braid and shoot them all with it. There was a bright pink flash in front of each of them, just before they all fell face down on the ground.

“Stunned,” she said. “They’ll be fine.”

Then she lifted one arm, so that a bit of lace cuff flopped out of her velvet sleeve, and aimed at the top of the ceremonial gate between the courtyard and the Vice Emperor’s dais. A tiny hook shot out of her lace cuff, with a steel cord attached to it, and it latched on to the apex of the gate’s arch, right on top of the symbol for Dja-Thun, or the unbroken chain of thousands from Emperor to gutterslave. “Hang on tight,” Jemima said, right before she grabbed Ythna’s waist and pressed a button, sending them sailing through the smoky bright air over the men shooting valence guns at them. The sun lit up Ythna’s face in mid swing, the same way it once had from the Beldame’s window.

By the time they reached the dais, dismounting with only a slight stumble, the assassin had killed the last Obfuscator, and was advancing on the Vice Emperor, who cowered on his massive gray-gold throne.

“Listen to me,” Jemima shouted at the man. “You don’t want to do this. You really, really do not. Time-travel via murder is a dead end. Literally. You’ll tear the map apart, and none of the major deaths of history will happen on schedule. You’ll be every bit as lost as I will.”

The man turned to salute Jemima. “Professor Brookwater,” he said in a low voice, only slightly muffled by his milky helmet. “You are one of my all-time heroes. But you don’t know the full potential of what you discovered. I sincerely hope you do get home some day.”

Jemima shot at him and missed. He spun, low to the ground, and then pivoted and took the Vice Emperor’s head clean off. Almost at once, Ythna could see an indistinct doorway appear on the elaborately carved side of the gray dais: like a pinwheel with too many spokes to count, opening outwards and showing a secret pathway through death and time. Somehow, Ythna couldn’t see these doors, until she had already passed through one.

The assassin ran into the pinwheel and vanished. The remaining Obfuscators and retainers were crying out from the courtyard below, and a hundred valence guns went off all at once. The dais was collapsing into rubble. Ythna was paralyzed for a moment, until Jemima grabbed her and threw her into the doorway the assassin had created.

The next thing Ythna knew, she landed facedown on a hard cement surface, outdoors, under a nearly cloudless sky. In front of her was a big chain-link fence, with men in unfamiliar uniforms walking past it holding big bulky metal guns. She heard a voice saying indistinct words over a loudspeaker. She turned and saw a row of giant rocket ships looming in the distance, with a flaming circle painted on each gunmetal shell and a mesh of bright scaffolding clinging to their sides.

She couldn’t see the assassin with the sword, but Jemima was crouched next to her, looking pissed off and maybe a little weepy.

“It just gets better and better,” Jemima said. “This is—”

“I know where we are, this time,” Ythna said. “The Beldame showed me pictures. This was the last great assault on the Martian Colony. The Emperor Dickon’s great and glorious campaign to bring the principle of Dja-Thun to the unruly people on Mars. This happened decades before I was born.”

“It’s happening right now,” Jemima said, looking in all directions for the man they’d been chasing. “I wonder who just died here.”

“What did you mean, about the map?” Ythna said. “You said he was tearing the map apart.”

“I’ve got a history book,” Jemima said without pausing her search. “I know the major deaths, down to the exact place and time. Every time I travel, I chart where each death leads. I’m deciphering the map slowly, but this cad will render that impossible. I’ve done twenty-eight trips so far, including today.”

“How many people have you helped?” Ythna said. “Twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-five,” Jemima said.

“And how did that turn out for them?”

“No idea. People like you don’t get mentioned in the history books, even if I found an updated version. No offense. But if I ever get home, I can try to look up some detailed records, and try to find out what happened to all of you.”

Jemima cursed again in her own language: “fth’nak.” An old-fashioned wheeled vehicle was rolling toward them, with figures in bulky black armor, holding big oily guns. The jeep rumbled, a cloud of dust in its wake, as it grew bigger until it was right in front of them. On the side of the jeep was the round, fiery insignia of the Age of Advancement, the Emperor Dickon’s era. The men in the front of the truck wore the same image on their helmets.

Jemima started to try and explain their presence to these men, but they cut her off.

“Desertion is a capital crime, as you are no doubt aware,” the man in the truck’s passenger seat said. “But you’re lucky. The Dauntless is short-crewed and ammunition is precious. So I’m going to pretend you didn’t just try to run away. That’s a one-time offer, good only if you come with me right now. Your new home lifts off tomorrow morning at oh-five hundred hours.”

And that’s how Jemima and Ythna found themselves in a bare gray cage with a tiny window that gave them a partial view of the nearest rocket, a snub-nosed, squat monstrosity with nine thrusters arrayed like petals. Ythna rubbed the bruises she’d gotten from the guards’ rifle butts and rough hands.

“At least they don’t think we’re spies,” said Ythna. “Or they’d have just executed us.”

“They assume that nobody could ever get this far inside their security perimeter undetected,” said Jemima. “So they reached for the next logical explanation: we must be members of the galley crew, who tried to make a break for it. Instead of executing us, they’ll just send us up in one of those ships, probably in irons in case we actually are saboteurs.”

“The Beldame told me that this campaign was a terrible waste. The whole assault force died without ever reaching Mars, because the colonists had superior weapons. They used technology that the Empire had rejected as impure,” said Ythna. “It was one of the Beldame’s lessons that she liked to tell: A just cause becomes unjust when it costs too much human life.”

“The Beldame sounds like she was a wise woman,” said Jemima.

Ythna was sure she was going to look up and see a sarcastic leer on Jemima’s sharp face, but there was none. Instead, Jemima just nodded, then walked to the window and studied the rocket they were soon going to be chained up in the belly of.

“I don’t want to die in a pointless war that was lost before I was born,” Ythna said.

“Really? I thought you didn’t want anything, one way or the other,” Jemima said, still facing the window. “Isn’t that what you said? And how is this different from what would have happened to you if we had never met? You would have been sent to work for some new master, who might have worked you to death in a year or two. Or you could have been marked for Obsolescence, and died sooner. This is the same.”

“It’s not the same at all,” Ythna said. Just when she had thought Jemima was starting to treat her like an adult.

“Isn’t it?”

Ythna changed the subject. “So if everybody on board the rocket ship dies, can we use that to escape?”

“No,” said Jemima. “Their deaths won’t be significant. Or terribly unexpected. I can only use a single sudden death that changes lots of other people’s fates.”