“This is Librarian Stesynd,”
Tervisan said into his watch. “I’ve
arrived in 1564. Let me see if I can
find the target.”
“Careful, Stesynd,” Fate
replied as Tervisan surveyed his surroundings.
“You’re dangerously close to crossing your own timeline.”
Tervisan chuckled
confidently.
“Don’t you worry, sir. I’m about an hour before I arrived last time,
and it shouldn’t take that long for me to find this woman and bring her
in.”
“All the same, watch
yourself,” Fate instructed him. “We
haven’t the resources to deal with another paradox. And that means the baby still dies, you hear
me? I don’t want your sentimentality
buggering up the timeline by saving the baby your past self will resurrect in
an hour – get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
Tervisan clicked a button on
the side of his watch, calibrating it to temporal disturbances in the immediate
area. Time travel left a lingering
smell, as it were – a multi-dimensional stink that hung in the air both before and
after the event, and that could be tracked, even by a device as small as
Tervisan’s watch.
The woman, whoever she was,
was due to arrive in around a minute’s time.
Tervisan couldn’t get too
close before then – because he hadn’t shown up on the satellite feed when they
watched it back in Imidar’s Archive. If
he entered the shot now, he’d be changing his own past, which would of course
be a bad thing.
Time travel was irritatingly complicated.
He’d arrived in a small cluster
of trees which, judging by his GPS, was a little West of where the woman would
arrive. So he flexed his shoulders and
set off at a jog, quickly leaving the cover of the woods and stepping out into
a large, otherwise empty field of wheat, similar to but not quite the same as
the one on the satellite feed.
As it had been on his first
visit, the sky was an overcast grey, hovering on but not quite crossing the
precipice of rain. Very English,
Tervisan observed. He came to a low
stone wall that marked the edge of the field, running down the side of the
valley and stopping at the river below.
On the other side of the wall
was the field he wanted. With around ten
seconds to go, he crouched down, peeping through a gap in the stone, and
waited.
Whoomph.
The fireball was spectacular,
a spherical blast of light and flame at least fifteen feet wide in diameter,
though the wave of heat and sound shot out far further than that in all
directions, rustling the leaves of the trees in the copse Tervisan had arrived
in.
He was fairly certain he
could smell his eyebrows burning.
When the flames faded, the
silver capsule was settled neatly in the centre of the circle of singed
wheat. The door slid to the side, and
the woman stepped out, placing her fedora on her head.
Though it hadn’t been
apparent on the feed, she was whistling to herself – the theme from an old film
series, he realised. Indiana Jones.
In his mind’s eye, he
pictured the bounds of the satellite feed, knowing that as soon as she reached
his wall, they were in the clear. Any moment now…
The woman swung herself up
and over the wall, not spotting Tervisan as she landed neatly on the other
side. She took one sauntering step, and
the Librarian slipped in behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Hello there,” he started to
say, but suddenly he found himself being yanked by his arm up and over her shoulder
and coming down hard on the ground. Not wasting
a moment, he rolled to one side, just as the woman ignited some kind of short
energy blade in her right hand and lunged down at him.
The laser knife stabbed into
the damp earth with a hissing sound, followed by a cloud of steam and burning
wheat. Tervisan bounced up out of his
roll to his feet, striking at the exposed back of her head with his right
fist. The strike sent her reeling, the
blade still stuck in the ground, and Tervisan followed through with a kick to
her ribs and another strike to her right arm, targeting a specific pressure
point that would leave it totally useless.
Sure enough, the arm fell to
her side, but when she turned to face him again, she was grinning madly.
“You’re a tricky one, whoever
you are,” she said. Her accent was
northern English – Yorkshire, probably.
“I could say the same of you,”
Tervisan replied, but suddenly the woman’s left arm shot out, launching something
small and silvery through the air towards him.
He tried to duck, but wasn’t quite fast enough, and was punished by a
sharp jab in the neck.
He raised a hand to where he’d
been hit, and found a tiny feathered dart stuck firmly in his flesh.
He sighed.
“Tranquiliser?” he asked,
raising an eyebrow.
“Bingo,” the woman
nodded.
“Nicely done,” Tervisan
mumbled, and everything went black.