Tales of the Time Scouts 2 by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Author:Robert Asprin & Linda Evans [Asprin, Robert & Evans, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476781327
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

to be continued in:

The House That Jack Built

THE HOUSE THAT

JACK BUILT

Robert Asprin and

Linda Evans

Chapter 1

Skeeter Jackson wasn’t in jail.

And that was so overwhelming a shock, he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with himself. The one thing he didn’t want to do was hang around the infirmary, where Bergitta lay in the recovery room after emergency surgery and where Senator John Caddrick sat bellowing like a wounded musk-ox, threatening to shut down the station around their ears. So he ducked past crowds of shaken tourists, wounded in the riot at Primary, slithered past news crews and the irate, fuming Senator—who was still taking up a valuable medical technician’s time to wash tear gas out of his eyes—and headed out into the vast crowds thronging the Commons.

He didn’t really know where he was going or what he intended to do, once he got there. He didn’t have a job any longer, and wasn’t likely to find a soul on station to hire him, particularly not with the kind of trouble Time Terminal Eighty-Six had brewing. Skeeter threaded his way through the jostling crowds, ignoring the shocked gossip flying loose through Commons, and wondered for perhaps the fifteen millionth time what had become of his friends, young Julius, who’d been born in ancient Rome, and—far more devastatingly—down-time refugees Ianira and Marcus and both their little girls. Ianira was the leader of the entire community of down-timers stranded on the time terminal, Speaker for the Found Ones’ Council, and the inspiration for the fastest-growing up-time religion in the world.

Not only major VIPs in anybody’s book, but very nearly the only friends Skeeter possessed. They’d all disappeared in the middle of a riot, the first of many to hit Shangri-La Station during the past week, and despite massive searches, not a trace of them had been found. Either they’d managed to escape down one of the open time-touring gates or they’d been kidnapped and smuggled out. Or—and he had to swallow hard at the thought—somebody’d cut them into small pieces and dropped them down an unstable gate. Like the Bermuda Triangle, maybe…

“Skeeter!”

He looked around, startled, and found Kit Carson homing in.

Panic struck.

“Don’t bolt!” The retired time scout held up a hand as he hurried through the crowd. “I just want to talk.”

Skeeter paused, gauging the expression in Kit’s eyes—a surprisingly friendly look—and decided not to run. “Okay,” he shrugged, waiting. After all, Kit had stood up for him in the station manager’s office high above Commons floor, when Security Chief Mike Benson had been chomping at the bit to toss him into the nearest jail cell—or maybe through the aerie’s glass window walls. A long shiver caught Skeeter’s spine at that too-recent memory. Mike Benson had dragged him up from the station’s sub-basement battleground in cuffs, facing murder charges. Neither he nor the station’s down-timer refugees had really had any choice but fight to the death, trying to wrest Bergitta away from her kidnappers, a group of Islamic jihad fighters.

The Ansar Majlis had styled

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