TimeSplash (2 page)

“Ten! Nine! Eight!” The crowd was counting along with the big timer on the display. In a breathless panic, she heaved at her buckles. “Seven! Six! Five!” Electricity arced across the mesh of the cage—all for show, like the dry-ice “smoke” falling from the cables. Sniper grabbed her wrist, wrenching her hand away from the harness. He pushed her helmet down onto her head. “Stupid little…” he bellowed. She staggered as the helmet slammed down. Its thick padding was all that saved her face from being mashed.

“Three! Two!” the crowd screamed as she stepped back from Sniper in shock and pain.

“Oh shit,” was all she had time to say before the displacement field grabbed everyone inside the cage and flung them out of the spacetime she knew, lobbed them, in the jargon of timesplashing, out of the way of time’s normal flow, threw them back, back into the past.

* * * *

Out in the crowd, some minutes earlier, Luke and his companion had just arrived.

“Yeah! Wild!” Spock shouted. He grinned manically, bobbing his head in time to the music. Spock was Luke’s best friend but sometimes he was a complete pain in the arse. Tall, olive-skinned and long-haired, Spock lived to get wasted. His first act on arriving at the splashparty had been to drop two tabs of tempus and it was already beginning to show. On top of the half-bottle of vodka he’d drunk on the long drive over, it was likely he’d be totally incoherent in another ten minutes.

“We should have got here an hour ago,” Luke grumbled, “instead of driving round and round the Netherlands in the dark ’cause you’re too smashed to read the nav.”

Splashparties were always held in obscure, out-of-the-way locations. In this case it was in the grounds of an ancient Dutch castle—Castle Eerde—near the town of Ommen. They’d found Ommen easily enough, driving east from the Channel Tunnel depot, but Eerde had been altogether more difficult. If they hadn’t ended up close enough to hear the music, they could have driven around the dark country roads all night.

Spock dismissed his friend’s complaints with a wave and continued pushing his way toward the front, whooping from the sheer excitement of it. Luke had to smile despite himself. Being out with Spock was sometimes like being out with a very large puppy—and that wasn’t so bad. He’d probably do a tab of tempus himself later, get in the mood, but first he wanted to take in the atmosphere for a while, scope out the chicks, and enjoy the music. The countdown was showing a few minutes to the lob. He tapped Spock on the shoulder and pointed it out. “Far out!” Spock shouted back, his eyes widening into the familiar tempus-induced glaze. All through their increasingly stressful drive, Luke had been worrying that they wouldn’t make it in time. If you missed the lob and the backwash, you’d missed the best part of the night. A couple of girls dancing topless in flashing, animated body-paint grabbed at him as he moved past them. They were cute and stoned and very tempting. He turned to grin at them but kept moving. Plenty of time for that later. When he turned back to face front, he saw the cage for the first time.

He’d seen Sniper splashing before, at a splashparty in Ireland last year, but even if he hadn’t, he would have recognised him instantly. There wasn’t a kid worth knowing on the planet who didn’t hero-worship the most famous brick of them all. There wasn’t a chick he knew who didn’t have a Sniper poster on her bedroom wall. The lean, muscular body, the almost-white blond hair, the piercing grey eyes and cocksure grin, were part of an image as well-known as any soccer player’s or rock diva’s. The guy was a megastar.

“Hey, it’s fucking Sniper, man!” Spock yelled, slapping Luke on the chest and bouncing to the thumping music with the endless energy of the seriously wired. But Luke paid him little attention. He had just spotted the girl at Sniper’s side. She was stunning, tall and long-limbed, filling her jumpgear like it was sprayed onto her, with long black hair and the full lips of a Spanish princess.

That a big-name brick had a beautiful woman with him was hardly a surprise—even when she was as beautiful as this one. Guys like Sniper had their pick of women, although Luke had never heard of a brick taking his bitch on a splash. Even more peculiar, in the big-screen closeup, despite the heavy makeup, he could see she was just a young girl—younger than he was, and Luke was only seventeen. And he saw something else, too, something he had never seen in a brick. Ever. He saw fear in the girl’s eyes.

He grabbed Spock by the shoulder and turned him to face the girl—Patty, the tag said on her jumpgear.

“Wassup, man?” Then his friend saw Patty too. “All right! Fuckin’ A, man!”

Spock began whooping and shouting toward Patty as he danced, but Luke grabbed him again and shook him.

“There’s something wrong, man. Look, she’s really freaked.” He looked over at the control booth but could see nothing through its tinted windows.

“Looks real fine to me, mate,” Spock yelled, grinning suggestively. Frustrated, Luke let go of him and turned back to the girl. Why was nobody doing anything?

“Two minutes to lob.” The announcement boomed over the music and the dancing crowd waved and yelled in response. They started to chant Sniper’s name over and over. Seeing the girl looking around in what seemed to be mounting panic, Luke grabbed Spock again and shouted in his ear. “I’m going to the booth. I don’t think they’ve noticed.” Without waiting for a response, he began to push and shove his way through the sea of bouncing people toward the mobile control centre.

For a while he lost sight of the girl in the cage, but when he saw her again, he was shocked to see her standing there with no helmet on while the others were fully suited-up. He didn’t have much of a technical grasp of timesplashing, but he knew it was a rough ride for the brick. The jump back in time put the brick in a medium that wasn’t quite spacetime and certainly had no air in it. The brick’s jumpgear provided pressure and the helmet provided oxygen. People had died trying to lob without the right gear. He paused to look at the girl’s beautiful, desperate face, willing her to get her helmet on.

“One minute to lob.”

There was no way he could make it. The booth seemed as far away as ever and the crowd this close to the cage was too dense for him to make much headway. Luke looked around wildly for some other way of stopping the lob. Control cables would run between the booth and the cage. Computing would all be in the booth. Power would come from a bunch of F2 devices in trucks parked behind the cage. The displacement field generators and the gigantic capacitor arrays would be in the platform under the cage. He knew the standard layout. He’d read the zines and wandered around at splashparties admiring the tech. But none of that helped him. The crowd began chanting the last ten seconds of the countdown. He couldn’t reach anything in time. A gasp erupted from the crowd. He looked up at the screens in time to see Sniper ramming a helmet onto the girl’s head. She struggled in his grip, still trying to get out of there, but at least now she wouldn’t die. Whatever was going on with the girl, Sniper had saved her. The countdown hit zero, and a brilliant flash of blue light blinded them all. The bricks had been lobbed back into the timestream. The girl was gone. The cage was empty.

“Jesus,” he said aloud, still panting from the effort of trying to get to the booth, still tense from the fear he’d felt for Patty’s safety. “Jesus.” He kept staring at the empty cage, telling himself to calm down, the only still figure in that ocean of dancing, screaming people. It would be a while—an hour maybe—before the yankback happened and the bricks reappeared in the cage. A long time to wait to see if she would be all right.

He pushed his way back through the dancers to where he’d left Spock. He didn’t feel like getting high now. He didn’t feel like being at a party. He just wanted to be somewhere quiet where he could wait for the girl to get back.

There was a commotion ahead of him, a dense knot in the crowd where people had stopped dancing and were pressed together to see something. He supposed it was someone splashdancing or maybe an impromptu sex act. There was always something going on at these parties. Some kids made quite a name for themselves by putting on shows like that. He tried to push past whatever it was, but got pulled in as more people came crowding in to see what was going on. The quietness at the centre of the group gave him a bad feeling and, reluctantly, he let himself be pressed forward toward whatever it was. Soon he could hear shouting from the centre, people crying, calling for help. If this was an accident, everyone was so stoned they were unlikely to be of much use to the victim. He pushed forward roughly, hoping it wasn’t anything gruesome.

When he finally broke through the crowd, he found himself in a small clearing. In front of him, Spock lay on his back on the ground, twitching violently. People were fussing around him, shouting for doctors and help. Some of them were just shouting. Froth was coming out from between Spock’s clenched jaws. His eyes were wide open, staring up at the sky and at all the faces staring down at him.

Lobspace was dark and cold, so dark that Patty could see nothing at all, so cold that the unsealed gap between her helmet and her jumpgear stung like a band of fire. All she could hear was her own rapid breathing and the steady hiss of air escaping from her helmet. Frantically, with clumsy, gloved fingers, she scrabbled at the seal until she had it closed right around her neck. Only then did she really begin to take in her situation. She was weightless, but seemed to be moving forward. Or falling forward. Her heart leapt into her throat at the possibility, and she had to force herself to dismiss the idea. The black airless void around her gave her no sense of direction or speed. Her sense of movement, she realised, was due to a steady, even pull from her harness, as though someone was dragging her along by the tether. She felt for the thick cord that bound her to Sniper and found it pulled taut, disappearing into the blackness. At first she thought Sniper must somehow be reeling her in, but that didn’t make any sense. She called out to him but there was no reply. Was she alone? If she was, who was pulling her along?

Minutes, they had said. It would take a couple of minutes of “flight” before the lob was over, and they landed. Some kind of free fall, she remembered them saying. No gravity. No stars. Like being in space, only worse. And then she realised why the tether was pulling her. She and Sniper must be rotating, orbiting one another about their common centre of gravity, held together by the tether. That’s what the tether was for, of course, to stop them being separated during the lob. But the idea that she was spinning in empty space didn’t help calm her at all. Instead it filled her with the dread that the tether might break, sending her hurtling off into the void, away from the others, helpless and alone.

They’d gone on at her about it, what to do, how to survive, but she could hardly remember a thing. At the time, she’d just let it wash over her, thinking, I’ll be all right as long as Sniper’s with me. But Sniper had been such a bastard in the cage. He could see how scared she was and he’d just ignored her. He’d wanted his stupid splash to go on, no matter what. She had seen it in his eyes. He thought she was a stupid, whining child and he was damned if he was going to let her spoil his fun. It made her angry to think about how much she had trusted him, and how much he had let her down. More than that, it humiliated her when she thought of how she had adored him, and of all the things she had done for him.

And where did it leave her. She had been Sniper’s bitch. God! She’d been proud to be called that! But without that, what was she? What was there for her now? It was almost a full year since she’d run away from that shitty care centre in Bristol and, by sheer luck, fallen in with a bunch of bricks. She’d found the head guy and become his bitch. When her group met Sniper’s, she traded up. She’d thought she was doing well for herself.

The light, when it came, blasted away her thoughts. Light and sound, gravity and pressure, rushed in on her. Something enormous smashed into her from the side, crushing her shoulder, her hip, slamming into her head. If it hadn’t been for the helmet…

Gasping, winded, she gaped at the great slab of green that had hit her, and her mind wheeled and lurched. It was the ground. It hadn’t hit her, she had hit it. She had fallen—not very far, thank goodness!—onto a huge empty pasture. Sniper was there, close by, already bounding to his feet and looking around. Patty pushed herself up, shakily, looking for the others. They were there too, about twenty metres away, also getting to their feet. Sniper took off his helmet and surveyed the area. Then with a few deft flicks of the catches, he threw off his harness and strode across the field to where Hal and T-800 were unfastening themselves.

Miserably, Patty struggled to her knees, bruised and shaken, and took off her helmet. Sniper hadn’t even glanced her way. She might have been dead for all he cared. They were in a large field. It had a rough, agricultural look about it. Could it be the same manicured and planned parkland Patty had seen earlier in the day? There were no people about, but the big house, Eerde Castle, was clearly visible, just about where it ought to be. There was the sound of traffic somewhere—not the whine and rattle of normal traffic but the growl and roar of old-fashioned petrol engines. Even in the middle of a field, she could smell exhaust gasses.

She was back in the 1980s! For a moment the fact drove all resentment and misery from her mind. If the lob had gone as planned, they would be spatially close to where they had been lobbed from, but temporally shifted sixty-five years into the past. She tried to get a better look at the far-off mansion, but she couldn’t see anything different about it.