Do I really want to do this? Fear made her heart pound and left the palms of her hands cold and wet with sweat. But if she didn't try now, when would she have a better chance? And if she didn't try, what did she have to look forward to? Life? the scared part of her suggested. The rest of her shouted it down. Life as a slave on a low-tech manor in some unregistered alternate wasn't worth living.
The breakfast mush sat like a boulder in her stomach as she went out to morning roll call. Emishtar said something. Annette answered her. She hardly noticed what the older woman said, let alone what she said herself. It must have been all right, because Emishtar nodded.
They lined up in rows of ten, to make them easier for the guards to count. When a man in camouflage gear walked by, Annette took a couple of steps toward him. He frowned. "What do you want?" he asked in Arabic. He didn't sound angry or suspicious, the way he would have with Birigida. But he didn't sound what you'd call friendly, either.
Here we go. All or nothing. Annette answered him in English, with the same words Birigida had used: "My stretch is up. Time for me to go back to the home timeline."
His eyes widened. He wasn't bad-looking, which made Annette sorry to despise him. "You?" he said, also in English.
"Yes, me," he said. She didn't want him thinking she'd memorized the one phrase.
"How about that?" He shook his head. "I tell you, I wouldn't have guessed. Most of the the visitors"—a nice, bloodless name— "you have an idea who they are, even if you can't be sure. They're—goofy is the nicest thing I can say. But I have to hand it to you. You fit right in, didn't get in trouble, didn't make trouble or anything. My hat's off to you." He really did tip his splotched cap.
"Thanks." Annette had never got a compliment she wanted less. You made a good slave. Oh, boy! "How do I leave? They didn't talk a whole lot about that."
Whatever she said could get her in trouble. To her relief, the guard answered, "Yeah, they never do." He made a sour face. "Some of those people don't have it all in one bag, you know?" He pointed to the guard in front of the doorway that led down to the transposition chamber. "Go talk to Paul over there. He'll call your cab."
Annette smiled to let him think she liked the joke. She walked over to Paul. With that name, he could have grown up speaking English or French or German. With the implant you'd never know, not by listening to him. "What is it?" he asked, also in Arabic. That was the language everybody here thought she spoke.
"A transposition chamber back to the home timeline," she said in crisp English.
"You?" Paul said, as the first guard had. "Son of a gun!" There was that same unwanted compliment again. "Okay. I'll fix you up." He took from his belt what looked like an ordinary cell phone and thumbed a few buttons. After waiting for a moment looking at the gadget's little screen, he nodded. "Chamber's on its way."
"Thanks. Um, if I'm going to get aboard, you'll have to let me go down the stairs," Annette said.
"Coming up." Paul used the card on the lock, as he had for Bi-rigida. He even opened the door for Annette. "Maybe we'll see you again one of these days." He meant doing another turn as a slave.
"Maybe you will." Annette meant coming along with Crosstime Traffic people and as many policemen or soldiers as they needed to put this place out of business for good. She had to fight to keep anticipation out of her voice.
Down the stairs she went, before Paul could find anything else awkward to say—and before he could start wondering if the manor really had a paying slave scheduled to go home right then.
The transposition chamber was already waiting in the sub-basement. Traveling from the home timeline to an alternate or from one alternate to another didn't take any time. You felt time when you traveled inside it, depending on how far apart two alternates were. But that wasn't really time—it was only duration. That was how they explained it in training, anyhow. The math of going crosstime made quantum mechanics and genetic physics seem simple by comparison. Without massive computing power, it never could have happened.
All Annette cared about was that the chamber was there. The door sensed her and opened. She jumped in—literally. The door closed behind her. "Please take your seat and fasten your safety belt," a recorded voice said. "Transposition is about to begin."
Annette clicked the belt shut. She'd never figured out what good it would do in case of trouble, but habit died hard. She couldn't tell just when the chamber left the room under the manor, but she knew she'd got away. She let out a fierce, exultant whoop that would have made Jacques wonder which of them was the warrior.
She felt like a warrior. She'd escaped the enemy—well, at least some of the enemy. After doing that, she at least had a chance of getting away from the others. And then . . . she'd be back. With reinforcements.
Jacques watched Khadija vanish down the guarded stairway just before the roadbuilding gang left the manor. She really could talk to the guards, then. And she really did know some of the things they knew. It wasn't that he hadn't believed her. She'd sounded so sure of herself in the transposition chamber—and afterwards, too.
But there was a difference between sounding sure and knowing what you were talking about. Since Jacques didn't know what Khadija was talking about, he couldn't be sure she did. She must have, though, or the guard wouldn't have let her by.
"Your friend, she goes the same way Birigida went," Dumnorix said as they tramped along the already-paved part of the road.
"Yes," Jacques said—he could hardly say no.
"I hope it will be well for her," the redhead said.
"So do I," Jacques agreed.
"Birigida was no loss to anyone," Dumnorix said. "But losing a friend is hard."
'That's true." The more Jacques thought about it, the truer it felt—and the more painful. Khadija was the one person here with whom he could talk freely. And she was a pretty girl, or maybe a more than pretty girl. And he liked her, or maybe more than liked her. He thought she liked him back, too. More than liked him back? He didn't know about that. He wanted the chance to find out, though.
All the guards carried talking boxes on their belts. All those little boxes started chirping and chiming at the same time. Jacques had never seen that happen before. As if in one motion, all the guards grabbed the boxes and brought them up to their ears.
If the slaves had been waiting for that moment, they might have jumped the guards and wrestled their muskets away from them. But they weren't. The men in the mottled clothes quickly grew alert again. A few of them swung their muskets to cover the roadbuilders even as they listened and talked. And with those amazing weapons, they needed only a few.
By the way they shouted at the talking boxes, they didn't like what they were hearing. One of them took Jesus' name in vain. Jacques could recognize it even in another tongue. It was a funny way to swear. Jacques would have used Henri's name instead. God's Second Son, after all, was more important than His First. The Final Testament said so.
Another guard said, "Jesus!" and then several things that didn't sound holy at all. They might never have heard of Henri, or of the Final Testament. To Jacques, that made them strange, halfhearted Christians.
After a few more hot phrases, that guard held up a hand.
"Everybody stop!" he yelled in the several different languages the slaves spoke. He sounded disgusted in every one of them. "We've got to go back to the manor," he went on. "All the savages hereabouts are rising up. They need another lesson. We'll give it to them, too—will we ever. But till we do, maybe they can cause a little trouble. So you get the day off. You ought to thank them. They'll pay for it, though. Oh, yes. They'll pay."
Jacques had heard soldiers use that tone of voice before. He wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of it. He especially wouldn't have wanted to be there if he had only a bow to use against weapons like the ones the guards carried.