Ceres’s lovely eyes narrowed to blazing green slits. “Don’t make me regret that clemency, Chief Dyami.” Her image vanished, revealing the courier floating serenely on a blue cushion of antigrav energy. “Is there a response?”
“Such as, ‘You’re a gutless political hack, and you’re going to find yourself in a media shit-storm if this gets out?’” Alerio rubbed his aching forehead. He knew from past experience that nothing he could say would move Ceres one millimeter once she’d made up her mind. He looked up at the bot. “No, courier, there is no further message. Return to your charging station.”
As the bot disappeared back into the wall, Alerio stared sightlessly at his desktop. Within the desk’s gleaming dark surface, lists of temporal tour groups rolled like the credits of some ancient movie in glowing greens and blues. Men, women, and children, all targets for Ivar and his vicious ilk.
Alerio’s main priority now was the same as it always had been: the safety of those people. Making sure they all made it home.
According to the Outpost’s main comp, there were a dozen tours scheduled for the next week. Each would require the protection of between three to six agents. Which left him with a serious manpower problem.
To make matters worse, a number of his Enforcers were on leave back home in the twenty-fourth century. He could recall them, of course, but some of those agents really needed the break. Temporal Enforcement tended to extract a heavy toll, particularly on good people who cared about solving cases and protecting the public. Because sometimes you found yourself fighting history’s infinite inertia.
Then you were just fucked.
Which brought him right back to the original problem. How was he supposed to protect all those tourists with the agents he had? Hell with it, Alerio finally decided in disgust. I’m heading to the infirmary. It’s time for Dona to get out of regen.
He wanted to see her, whether it was a wise thing to do or not.
The Outpost occupied the core of Spirit Mountain, a huge high-tech cylinder cut into five levels that were in turn divided into offices, science labs, and sleeping quarters. Then there was the Concourse, a sprawling complex dedicated to serving temporal tourists with hotels, restaurants, bars, and stores selling everything from period clothing to kitschy souvenirs.
Chogan’s infirmary took up the Outpost’s fourth level, its circular central ward surrounded by a ring of medical offices and lab facilities. Normally the ward would be crowded with as many as ten hemispherical sterile fields, each of them sheltering a patient’s bed. At the moment the only patients were Dona and Riane Arvid, both of them still occupying regeneration tubes.
Alerio scanned the med-sensor data that floated, glowing, above the massive cylinders. He saw with relief that both agents were recovering nicely, though neither was conscious yet.
Dammit, he wanted to see Dona. Needed to see her. Professionally, Alerio reminded himself. Just professionally. It couldn’t be anything more than that.
“I wondered when you’d be by.” Dr. Sakari Chogan leaned a hip against a counter by the far wall, sipping one of her habitual cups of stimchai. Soft music played in the gently lit ward, though if it was intended to soothe, it wasn’t doing its job.
At least, not on Alerio. Then again, maybe I’m just wound a little too tight. He gave the doctor a tired smile. “How are your patients, Sakari?”
She grimaced. “Better than the fourteen people whose autopsies I’m currently putting off.” She held up a hand as if to deflect criticism—not that he intended to offer any. “I’ll get to ’em. I just . . . need a little break.”
Alerio gave her a sympathetic smile, knowing the doctor’s work ethic would drive her to start work on the first of them by the time she finished her stimchai. “The crime scene was pretty ugly.” One of the worst he’d ever seen in twenty years as a time cop, in fact.
The bastards had tortured a child.
“Yeah, it was definitely ugly.” Her expression brooding, Chogan took another sip. “I’m just glad we didn’t lose any of the Enforcers. We came damned close, what with the bloody great chunk that priest took out of Riane’s intestines. Thank all seven gods for regen.”
“When are you going to spring her from that tube?”
Chogan shrugged and sipped her stimchai. “Hour or so.”
“What about Astryr?” He glanced at Dona’s tube again and frowned at the floating readout. He didn’t like the looks of that cerebral pressure reading.
“Sorry, I don’t dare release her tonight,” Chogan said, confirming his suspicions. “Neural tissue just doesn’t regenerate as fast as the rest of the body. Her brain needs a little more time to heal from the battering Ivar gave her.” Her voice dropped to a mutter. “The botfucker.”
Alerio curled his upper lip in agreement. “There’s one I’d love to put in a tube. And I’m not talking about a regenerator.”
“And I’d love to watch you put him there.” She gave him a dark smile over the rim of her cup. “You’ll get your chance, Chief. I’ve got confidence in you.”
He snorted. “I’m certainly going to give it my best shot.”
Hearing claws click on the infirmary deck, Alerio looked around just as a pony-sized black wolf trotted into the ward. Beside him strode a tall, dark-haired man. Though handsome, the human’s angular, sculpted features were a bit too broad and starkly cut to be the product of genetic engineering.
And they weren’t; Nick Wyatt had been born in 1977.
“How’s Riane, Dr. Chogan?” he asked, green eyes worried as he dropped one hand to the wolf’s head. “Frieka tells me one of the Xerans tried to gut her.”
“Until I ripped out his throat,” the wolf rumbled, the blue lights of his vocalizer flashing among the thick fur around his throat. Frieka’s toothy wolf muzzle wasn’t structured to produce Galactic Standard, though his powerful neurocomp and genetic engineering made him more than intelligent enough to speak. The vocalizer solved that problem by giving voice to his often snarky thoughts.
“When will I be able to speak to her?” Wyatt demanded. As if reacting to his obvious anxiety, the huge green gem inset in his silver armband flashed with a dull glow.
Chogan moved to give the Guardian’s brawny forearm a pat. “Patience, Nick. Give her another hour in regen and I’ll discharge her.”
“Told you Riane’s going to be fine,” the pretty red-haired woman said, strolling into the ward on the arm of a tall, massively built blond man. She was delicately pretty, particularly compared to her companion.
Like Alerio, Galar was a Warlord, though he was a product of House Arvid, the corporation which had gene-gineered and raised him. Unlike Alerio, Galar had refused to wear the traditional facial tattoo of his House. He’d never really explained why, though Alerio suspected his ugly childhood had something to do with it.
But if his childhood had been unhappy, he was making up for it now. He and Jessica had been married for almost seven months, but they were still surrounded by a happy newlywed glow.
The Master Enforcer was also Alerio’s most trusted officer, a skilled and deadly agent he’d trust with his life. There was no chance whatsoever Alerio would keep Galar in the dark about the danger they were in. Or any of his people, for that matter. “I’m afraid I have some news you’re not going to like,” Alerio told them. “At all.”
Nick straightened. Frieka’s ears flattened, and Galar’s hand went to his hip, as if to draw a weapon he wasn’t wearing. His wife glanced up into his hard face, visibly worried.
In short, stark sentences, Alerio recounted Ivar’s ultimatum and Colonel Ceres’s reaction to it. When he finished, an appalled silence fell.