Borrowed Time by Jack Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

gunpowder-and-burning-ship-smoke-filtered blaze of glory as I walked, wondering how well-lighted the streets here were at night.
    The answer was not very well, not that it mattered for long. While walking through a particularly dark patch on the street I heard a stealthy sound behind me, followed an instant later by the impact of a stun charge punching into my back. After that, it really got dark.
    I awoke with an aching head and a queasy stomach. The reason for the painful head was obvious, and once I pried open my eyes so was the reason for the upset stomach. I lay in the bottom of some kind of small wooden watercraft, bobbing erratically in the choppy waters. Except for the moving water, everything else was silent and still in that curious way things always get between midnight and dawn. My first attempt to move revealed that my hands were bound together at the wrists behind me.
    "Good morning, Citizen," a now very familiar voice snarled.
    "Hi, Harry."
    He knelt in the bottom of the boat, angry face centimeters from mine. "Real good trick you’re going to pull, Citizen. But not good enough. Maybe you stopped us tomorrow, but it won't happen that way."
    I took a moment to sort the jump-tangled tenses through my aching brain. Apparently, this Harry had come from an even later jump, after tomorrow's events were decided. "Criminey, Harry. How many jumps can your client afford?"
    "Enough," he spat back.
    "Well, you should lay off them. They're making you real anti-social."
    Instead of getting madder, Harry just smiled. "Talk all you want. Your ace is about to get trumped." With a dramatic flourish he whipped a piece of canvas off an object lying near me, revealing a cylindrical shape that glinted metallically in the moonlight.
    A mini-torpedo. Not the things they called torpedoes here-and-now, which were just tethered mines, but a real self-propelled fish as long as my leg and equipped with a high-explosive warhead. Four holes in the top and sides of the back marked the outlets for the pressure-jet impellers. No primitive screw propellers for Harry's guys. Technology that flashy and anachronistic was risky as all get out, not even counting the cost of bringing it on a jump, which meant my opponents were desperate. That was good. Unfortunately, I was tied up in their boat and the ugly little weapon they'd brought Downtime had a very good chance of doing its job, all of which was bad.
    "You can't be serious," I suggested. "What kind of Temporal Intervention footprints are you planning on leaving behind here?"
    Harry's smile didn't waver. "None that matter. Your ship is sitting at anchor nearby. This jewel will cruise under its keel and blow a hole in the bottom. It won't sail out to fight tomorrow. End of Michael Holmes' little toy, and none of the locals will ever guess what really happened. For that matter, maybe the end of Michael Holmes, period. Like I told you earlier, Mikey, there's a war on, and people get hurt all the time."
    "That's not very nice, Harry." A glimmer of an idea came to me, but if I was going to execute it I needed a good bit of distraction. Well, there was Harry leaning over me and my feet were free...
    The sole of my foot caught him in the solar plexus. Harry went back and over with a tremendous splash. While his two pals dropped their oars and lunged to get him, I brought my knees up and hands forward until they cleared my feet, then dug frantically in my coat pocket, fumbling with my bound hands to seize and pull out the ancient writing implement I’d lifted off the Pinkerton ferret. I rolled toward the torpedo as my hands surfaced with the pencil, and jammed it as hard as I could into the right-hand impeller hole. It stuck solid halfway in, so I swung my clenched hands viciously, breaking off the protruding portion. By the time Harry, dripping wet and mad as a French Revolutionary circa 1800, saw me again I was lying back in place, smiling apologetically. "How's the water, Citizen?"
    His fist came