If the countryside had really risen . . . How many hundreds, how many thousands, of archers were moving against the manor? Couldn't even a squad of men with these repeating muskets get rid of all of them? The locals were brave to try to fight back. Weren't they also crazy?
"They'll feed me, and I don't have to break my back today," Dumnorix said as they turned around. "I don't mind that."
"Can anyone fight these people?" Jacques asked.
The redheaded man shrugged broad shoulders. "I wouldn't want to try, not unless I had one of those sticks that go boom myself."
A stick that went boom was one thing. A stick that went boomboomboomboomboom was something else again. These muskets would slaughter any force the Kingdom of Versailles could raise. Jacques didn't like to think that, but he couldn't doubt it, either.
Back inside the manor, the guards had to stay in the courtyard. The guards got up on the walls. Jacques heard yelling outside, but it was off in the distance. The locals knew better than to charge the place. They would be asking to get killed in gruesome numbers. The guards took a few shots, but only a few. Their muskets couldn't shoot out as far as the eye could see, then. That was good to know.
The guards yelled back and forth to one another. They sounded furious. Jacques knew what he would have done if he were a local and the dangerous strangers withdrew to their fortress. He would have torn up everything he could that was out of range of their muskets. By the noises the guards were making, that was just what the people who lived here were doing.
But the locals had underestimated the guards and masters. One of the men in mottled clothes carried a long tube up onto the wall. He aimed it out where the noise was loudest. Something shot from it, leaving a trail of fire behind. An explosion followed a few heartbeats later. The shouts outside the walls changed pitch.
Two more guards set up a shorter tube on the ground down in the courtyard. A pair of metal legs supported it. The guards fiddled with screws. Then one of them dropped a pointed metal object with fins on the other end down the tube. An instant later, after a surprisingly soft bang!, the metal object shot out of the mouth of the tube again, ever so much faster than it had gone in. Another one of the finned things went in and went out, and another, and another.
Only after Jacques heard more booms outside did he realize what was going on. Its a mortar, he realized. It was much lighter and less clumsy than the ones his people and the Muslims used to shoot at enemies inside forts, but it couldn't be anything else.
One of the guards looked up and saw him watching what they were doing. Maybe Jacques' face showed he admired the gadget, if not the people using it. The guard grinned at him and spoke in Arabic: "They don't know everything we can do. Now they'll find out, the unclean sons of dogs."
More fire-spurting weapons—they looked something like long, fat arrows—shot from the tube on the wall. The guards up there started laughing and cheering. They yelled something. "What do they say?" Jacques asked the mortar crew.
"The savages are running," answered the man who'd spoken before. He got to his feet. "Now we chase them. Now we really punish them." He sounded as if he looked forward to it.
"Arriving soon," the recorded voice said.
You could never tell when a transposition chamber got where it was going. Annette always tried. She always failed. She knew plenty of other people who tried, too. Knowing where across the timestream you were took instruments subtler than mere human senses.
"We are here," the voice said, and the door slid open.
Annette left the chamber. Now for the other hard part. If somebody here had a list of who was supposed to come back from the manor and when . . . That would be very bad. She glanced around. She was in what looked like an underground parking garage. As far as she could tell, she was the only person in it.
There'd be stairs somewhere, or an elevator, or an escalator. Somewhere—there, in fact. She followed the arrows and the signs under them in the six languages of the European Union: French, Spanish, German, Italian, English, and Polish. They took her to a stairway. Up she went, and up, and up. At last, the multilingual signs announced the ground floor. She opened the door.
There ahead was the door to the street. One more hurdle to leap: a man at a desk. He nodded to her and said something in Spanish. She gulped. "I'm sorry," she said in English. "I haven't had an implant for your language. Do you speak mine?"
"Yes, I do," he said in perfect British English, the kind the EU used. "I asked if you enjoyed yourself on your, ah, holiday."
While you were a slave, he meant. Annette made herself nod and started for the door. "Got to get back to the real world," she said. She was even with the desk . . . past it. She could run now and have a chance—or she could fling this guy into the middle of next week if she had to.
And she might. He rose, a frown on his face. "Won't you get your everyday clothes from the storage locker?" he asked.
She looked down at herself. Her blouse and long skirt were the only clothes she had. They weren't impossible to wear out on the street, not when the slavers had brought them to the manor from the home timeline. But they were kilometers away from the height of fashion. Well, too bad.
She had to answer him. "At the hotel," she said, and walked faster. Let him worry about what she meant.
His frown got deeper. He glanced toward the monitor on his desk. "What is your name?" he asked, holding up a hand. "When did you begin your holiday?"
"Gwyneth Paltrow," she said—the first old-time actress whose name popped into her head. "I began my vacation tomorrow." If she could just keep him confused until. . . the door slid open for her. She hurried out onto the sidewalk.
And then she realized she had a problem she hadn't counted on. Without even a dollar or a euro to her name, without a credit card in her pocket (she didn't even have a purse), she couldn't take the subway or a bus. But she could flag a cab. There was one, a little gold Honda. She waved frantically.
The driver cut across two lanes of traffic to get to the curb. Angry horns blared. Traffic here seemed as berserk as it was in Rome. She didn't know anything worse to say about it. "You speak English?" she asked the cabby.
"You bet, lady," he answered—his implanted language was pure American, or maybe he was. "Hop in. Where to?"
"Crosstime Traffic main offices," Annette said as she jumped into the back seat.
"You got it." The driver zoomed away while she was still fastening her seat belt.
Just in time, too. She looked back over her shoulder to see the man behind the desk come running out onto the sidewalk. He stared at the taxi, clapped a hand to his forehead, and dashed back into the building.
"That guy bothering you?" The driver must have seen him through the rear-view mirror.
"Not now," Annette said. Then she found something brand new to worry about. The slave ring had to be full of Crosstime Traffic people. How did she know she wouldn't run into one here? How did she know the local office wasn't full of slavers? She didn't know, and that was all there was to it. But she had to start somewhere, and that seemed a better place than the police. The police would need too many explanations.
She didn't even know where in Madrid the Crosstime Traffic offices were. They turned out to be near the train station, and near the memorial to the people killed in the terrorist bombings of 2004. That was a long time ago now—back when Gwyneth Paltrow was acting, in fact—and a lot of even worse things had happened since. Pigeons perched on the monument. People walked past without looking at the inscription. Like any old memorial, it was just part of the landscape.