The past sucks, p.12
The Past Sucks, page 12
She watched us as we dressed, making no complaint as we took coats and tried on shoes. I think we’d paid her a small fortune.
“You should hurry,” she told us. “Dawn is in three hours. Brussels will wake in one. I assume that’s where you’re headed.”
“Maybe we’re just old soldiers,” said Rose. “Wanting to visit the battlefield we fought over thirty years ago.”
“You’re far too young,” she snapped. “Shame on you. Benoit fought in that terrible battle, and it has never left him. Don’t speak of it again.”
Talking of Benoit, I could hear him through the door. Coming closer. He sounded as if he’d sobered up.
We fled into the night, hurrying north before the dawn caught us.
Chapter 24
While Yanto took LaFratta and Rose to book rooms at a tavern in the city’s central square, DeSalle and I were dispatched to scout the area and soak up the atmosphere of the world in which we must briefly become a part.
My feet being shod only in cold and mud probably had something to do with Yanto selecting me for this keep-out-of-the-way mission. As for DeSalle, as I might already have established, she was the kind of woman that people noticed. And Yanto wanted our presence in the tavern to be discreet.
So we shuffled around the Grand-Place, a large plaza in the center of Brussels. Ornate buildings towered along its perimeter, flags and flowers festooning their elaborate façades.
And shuffle we did, because there hadn’t been enough boots to go around and I was left barefoot, the cold of the stone cobbles numbing away the pain in my foot. I wasn’t happy, but considering I’d been shot in that foot less than two days earlier, I was holding up well.
DeSalle’s feet had been too large to fit the boots of the farmer’s wife and too small for the farmer’s. She’d thought herself lucky when we found one pair of intermediate size, but after walking the ten miles from Mont-Saint-Jean farm, she was limping. Blood oozed from the backs of her heels.
Given how fancy the Grand-Place buildings were — Odense had nothing remotely like this, not even Saint Alban’s Church — I worried we would stand out as feral peasants with no rightful place here. As it turned out, we fitted in almost too well.
Many of the men in the square wore peasant smocks and clogs, the women white aprons and lace-edged caps. There were few women of higher status, but rather more men in dark tailcoats that showed off waistcoat finery. Their trousers and gloves were white, their top hats black. Many carried canes as a fashion accessory and backup weapon. I decided I would look cannon good dressed like that.
Most of the citizens of Brussels were here for market day. Flowers brightened the sight and smell of the place, sold by women from carts on the edge of the market sprawl. Plants weren’t my thing, but even I was impressed to see such an abundance of these floral splendors on a late January day in northern Europe.
Food was plentiful too, with traders selling parsnips, cabbages, apples, breads both fancy and plain, and jars of pickled onions and cucumbers.
The market traders must have had their own unique brain augments because they knew instantly that neither DeSalle nor I had money. They shooed us away or kept us under wary surveillance.
And that’s why I say we fitted in well. As we tramped through the narrow lanes between the market stalls, we saw other desperate faces, pinched with hunger.
One young woman with her hair tied by a shiny blue ribbon grabbed a pair of parsnips, hitched up her skirts, and ran for it.
A hue and cry ensued as the traders tried to cut off her escape route. The girl threw herself beneath a flower cart, rolled underneath, and sprinted safely away to the cheers of many bystanders.
DeSalle and I exchanged a knowing look. Times must be hard indeed if people were willing to risk arrest for the sake of a brace of tubers.
After the case of the stolen parsnips, the dirty looks we were getting from the traders grew more vengeful and we decided to retreat to the fringes of the plaza.
Using our enhanced hearing, we listened in on conversations. We heard plenty of banter, but it was mixed with sullen despair. I had the sense of a society on the edge.
The most talkative were well-to-do men who tapped their canes on the cobbles to emphasize the importance of their erudite pronouncements on the parlous state of Belgium today.
They talked of metalworkers and linen workers being laid off in great numbers. This was compounded by the nefarious Dutch imposing ruinous tariffs on their former provinces, Belgium having been created eighteen years earlier when the Catholic regions of the Netherlands won their independence. Something must be done, the gentlemen would declare, but the government was a disgrace and only the king was keeping things together.
The people of Brussels were worried.
About which I couldn’t care less.
But the king part was cool. Did he have a crown?
“I thought kings were a medieval thing.” I mused aloud. I regarded DeSalle, who was dirtier than a whole sack of parsnips but considerably prettier. “Don’t you think it’s weird that this country’s just won its independence, and they choose to have a freaking king. And they think he’s totally cannon!”
“Cannon? Oh, you mean awesome. Don’t carry the vernacular from your own era.” She gave me a false smile for the benefit of onlookers. “As for the strangeness of monarchy, I’m from further in the future than you, Stiletto. This is 1848. From my perspective, the Middle Ages have only just finished.”
“Don’t be a buttneck, DeSalle. I did listen to parts of the briefing. Belgium’s the second-most industrialized country in the world. It has comprehensive railroad and canal networks, and its liberal constitution is one of the most progressive the world has yet seen. That doesn’t sound Medieval to me.”
She placed her hands on her hips. “Progressive liberal constitution. How many of those words do you actually understand?”
“None. And I don’t need any of them to realize that they add up to mean modern. Hence the kingly bit seems off. Did we wind up in the wrong version of history?”
“Would it matter if we had?”
“You’re hard work, DeSalle. I’m just trying to make conversation to keep our minds off the cold. Maybe it’s living in space that made you so icy. Say, you never told me where they salvaged you from. Was it a space wreck?”
“None of your business.”
I shrugged. “Fair point.”
I was about to continue with a detailed explanation of just how little I cared about DeSalle’s history, but I shut up because I was sensing an uptick in hostility and not just from DeSalle. My super hearing warned me of people nearby talking about the strange man and woman hanging around with obvious ill intent. They were debating whether to call the police or the gendarmes, which seemed to be two rival organizations, both of whom should apparently take us somewhere out of sight and beat the crap out of us.
We hastily shifted location to the far side of the Grand-Place, sheltering in the cloisters of the town hall, a building that had me blinking back the glare as the early morning sun reflected off the gilded façade. A policeman standing by the entrance immediately glowered at us. I estimated we had about two minutes before he came over and moved us on.
“I nearly died,” I whispered to DeSalle. “In Düsseldorf, back in 1932. It was a close-run thing.”
“Remind me why I should care.”
“Poisonous little binta, ain’t ya? If I’d known you’d be so unpleasant, I’d have…” I took a deep breath and kept my thoughts to myself.
DeSalle did the opposite. Her eyes blazed with fury. “You’d have what? Grabbed an eyeful last night when you had the chance?”
I crossed my arms and looked her up and down in a way that those gents with their polished canes would probably describe as indelicate. “Yeah, well, next time I will.”
She shuddered and for some stupid reason I felt guilty and had to look away. I don’t normally do empathy, but I could see that the whole stupid naked thing might have bothered her far more than it had me. “It was dark,” I muttered. “So I couldn’t have seen anything if I tried.”
That was a lie on multiple levels, but it seemed to take a little of the spikiness from her. I might have imagined that, of course. After all, as I’ve established, I don’t do empathy, and why should I?
The only time anyone had ever watched out for me was during the war. Everyone in the squad had looked out for everyone else. I missed that. Maybe I should go find an army to join.
No one else had ever cared about me. I owed nobody. Not even the Ox, who’d only recruited me for her own selfish purposes.
It’s not as if I like hurting people, or something gozo psycho like that. It’s just that there’s only room in my life to care about one person, because there’s only one person cares about me. Right now, that person was worried.
“I tell you why you should care,” I told DeSalle. “Working for the Time Dogz is dangerous and that will never change because they won’t ever place much value on our lives. We know they can transport equipment, but they didn’t bother with clothing. How much more could that have cost? It isn’t just the embarrassment that caused you. Look at all the hoops we had to jump through to find clothes. And it turned out that Yanto had money all the time.”
“You talk as if you weren’t concerned to arrive naked. Oh…! I get it. You weren’t. You’re an exhibitionist.”
“Hey, there’s nothing to be ashamed of here. I’ll take any chance to show off my awesome ink.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re incorrigible, Stiletto.”
I grinned back. “Probably. I’m not sure what that word means, but it sounds about right.”
She glanced at the unhappy policeman and the good cheer left her face. “Shut up for a moment, Stiletto. Let me save us time and summarize what you’re trying to tell me. Our bosses are cheapskates. Yanto’s in charge but doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. This is not a well-run team and if we stick around, sooner or later, we’ll wind up dead. Probably sooner. And all this for a purpose that we don’t even understand. So you’ve already decided that our best option is to walk into that side alley on the far side of the town hall and merge with the locals.”
I bit my lip. I hated feeling like a dumb fool’s hat, but Monique DeSalle was miles ahead of me.
“Did I miss anything?” she teased.
“Give me a moment,” I growled. “I’ll think of something.”
An idea did come. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about me. “If you’ve already figured this out,” I asked her, “why haven’t you walked already?”
“Because I’m too scared to do it on my own. Especially as a woman.”
I thought about that. DeSalle was used to being a military officer. If she ran, she would be nothing more than an unaccompanied young woman. And a pretty one, too. I didn’t fancy her chances.
“Also,” she said, “I don’t want to leave the others behind.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. How long have you been with Time Dogz now, DeSalle?”
“This is my seventh day on the job.”
“Then you hardly know them. I like most of them. Rose in particular. But I like me a whole lot more.”
My next words froze on my lips. My mind stuttered. Froze. Hesitated. Dilly fucking dallied. I’m not confident of the damned vocabulary because I don’t normally think twice; I just do.
Indecision. I think that’s the right word. It only hit me for a few seconds, the first phase, that is, but it scared the hell out of me.
I didn’t understand why I was dithering, but I knew hesitation could prove fatal.
It got worse. I should have mentally slapped myself back into action. Instead, I compounded my dillydallying by wondering why I had hesitated. And then why I felt the need to wonder about my wondering.
You get the idea. I had sucked myself into a vortex of overthinking.
Thinking is bad. I knew that. Gets you killed. If life throws rocks at you, dodging out the way will save you, not meditating on the problem before drawing up candidate action plans.
I don’t want you to imagine I was sitting down on the cold cobbles, sharing a plate of pastries with my colleague, and sipping a hot coffee while brainstorming what the hell was wrong with me on a whiteboard. The whole process took maybe ten seconds, but that’s ten seconds longer than I’d ever hesitated in my life.
I took a glance at DeSalle. And quickly ruled out that she was the source of my confusion.
Sure, she was a phenomenally hot binta with an overpowered frontage and cute dimples to make the hardest cynic cry into their liquor. I had done some seriously stupid things in the cause of a pretty girl before, and I intended to do plenty more in the future.
However, I’ve a strict priority with my list of needs. Things like safety, food, and not having people with guns chase you come way before doing dumb things for a cute smile.
No, my hesitation was nothing to do with DeSalle.
It was those thoughts I kept having about the army.
I had been conscripted against my will into what pretty much amounted to a suicide squad. I hadn’t even liked many of my comrades, but after weeks of placing my life in their hands, and holding their lives in mine, I found I liked it.
I’d never belonged before. Always been a loner.
Maybe that was why I was so desperate to go now.
If I hung around, I might start to belong. And then I’d be with the Dogz until I died. All in the cause of allowing the rich people of the future to play silly games in the past.
I didn’t want any of that.
Like I said, the whole thing had taken only a matter of seconds.
At the end of it, I didn’t get the psychotherapy report with extensive footnotes. I just knew with frantic certainty that I had to get out of there. Now!
I closed my eyes and pretended my mental breakdown had never happened. “Fuck the Time Dogz,” I said. “Let’s start afresh. Just you and me.”
I opened my eyes upon the filthiest look she’d ever shot at me. Honestly, if I’d called her mother a whore, I think it would have gone down better.
I think I knew why. DeSalle had been a naval officer, meaning her life would have been discipline, orders, and rules. I’d just asked her to desert her unit.
“Trust me, Monique, I have more experience than you in acting on impulse.”
“Really? And how is that working out for you so far, bypassing whatever passes for intelligence in your head?”
I returned a savage grin. “All my friends are dead but my heart’s still pumping.”
I offered her my arm like I’d seen the Belgian gents do with their ladies.
A snippy remark was on the tip of her tongue, but I held her gaze and shook my head.
She bit her lower lip, which looked incredibly cute on her. She linked her arm with mine and together we walked into the side alley, all smiles and whispers like a courting couple.
We’d only gotten a hundred yards when DeSalle grabbed my shoulders and looked up at me with big caramel eyes. I think she was seeking reassurance in my face, but there was none to offer. On the contrary, the panic just behind her eyes stripped away my own thin shield of courage.
My heart pounded until my pulse throbbed. The two of us were standing in this distant city like idiotic statues, marooned in the wrong millennium. And with no idea what we were doing.
We ran for it.
Chapter 25
You heard it right. I abandoned my fellow Dogz to their inevitable, eventual doom.
What? You thought I was a hero?
I never told you that. Pay closer attention and keep up.
Which was something DeSalle was struggling to do. I picked her up in my arms and jogged along the cobbles.
We needed to get out of Brussels. Out of Belgium too. Germany was a big and complicated place that I’d seen in several eras. I’d been to Düsseldorf and Essen, so why not go there?
I wished I’d paid more attention to the briefing notes. Before time jumping, we’d been given digi-sheets to read and a quick talk from Yanto in the briefing room. Neither had gone in.
At the last moment, we’d been given an injection into our neck lumps, but if that had contained any background intelligence on 1848 Belgium, it hadn’t come through yet.
What I had picked up was the constant reference to 1848 being the year of revolution in Europe, but I hadn’t read the bits that said where these revolutions had taken place.
Raw names and dates suddenly vomited out of my souped-up mind. Palermo, January 12th. Paris, February 22nd. Munich, March 3rd. Buda. Milan. Bucharest. Prague. Vienna. Venice.
During the surgery of my first week with the Dogz, my memory recall had been enhanced. I couldn’t tell whether I’d just remembered the written notes, or this knowledge had gone in via my neck.
I didn’t notice Brussels in the list, so perhaps it would be safest to stick to Belgium.
A whistle cut through the noise of the city. Alerted by the sound, my ears tuned into the metal clattering of a train approaching a station.
A train. Perfect! I considered the girl in my arms stuffed into stale clothes that didn’t remotely fit her. Then I looked down at myself, barefoot and mud soaked.
“How do we get money?” she asked.
“I bet you had an education,” I said. “Colleges and exams. Officer academy.”
“What’s your point?”
“I had an education too. The main lesson was very simple. The strong and the smart take from the weak and the unwise. If you didn’t learn that, you didn’t survive. So here’s what we do. We walk out of town, come back this evening and rob the drunks. Then we catch the next train out of town.”
She gave me a searching look. “All right.”
DeSalle trusted me. This beautiful and smart officer believed in me. I had to admit that felt good. So why did I feel this sudden pang of regret?
She saw it in my eyes. “What is it?”
I gave her the first explanation that came to my lips. Whether it was true or not, I wasn’t sure. “The Ox promised to play hunt the tattoo when I got back. Missing out on that experience would be a tragedy for both of us.”
