Memento Mori Read online

  A Time Traveller’s Best Friend

  Volume Two

  Memento Mori

  W.R. Gingell

  For Steven Brust.

  It was through reading his Vlad books out of order—and thoroughly enjoying the intricate story structures therein—that I came to realise how much I enjoy reading stories told in a non-linear fashion.

  In my Time Traveller’s Best Friend series, I am forcing my readers to share that particular pleasure.

  So, if you’re confused with Kez and Marx’s adventures and frustrated by the lack of a linear storyline—

  Please feel free to blame Steven Brust.

  Keep up with W.R. Gingell (The WR(ite) Blog, Twitter, Facebook), get a free book by signing up to her author newsletter, or just get news of new releases.

  Memento Mori is Copyright W.R. Gingell 2017

  Cover by Seedlings Design Studio

  Contents

  First World Problems

  Death Notice: Worlds Wide Press

  A Stitch(up) in Time

  Shipboard News, TCC Umber

  The Box that Travels Through Time and Space

  Absent for Duty List, Fourth World Orbiting WAOF Station

  By the Sea

  Notice of Enrolment: Group 23, Time Corp Ensigns

  Nine Tenths

  Core Memo: Breach Investigation, Final Notes

  Encounters of the Explosive Kind

  Local News

  Produced to Infinity (and Beyond)

  External Communications: Holstrom Institute

  Time Out

  Internal Communications: Murpak City Zoo

  Here Be Monsters

  Worlds Wide News Article

  Memento Mori

  Newlands Box Alternate Transcript

  Memento Mori

  First World Problems

  VLADIVOSTOK WAS NOT HAVING a good day. He had already lost two of his favourite throwing knives with very little to show for it, two other Hunter packs were on the trail of his particular prey—had been, at least, until the loss of his knives and a few particularly well-placed explosions from their quarry—and it was now beginning to rain.

  Worst of all, his principal was still alive.

  Vladivostok wasn’t like other Hunters. He was First World stock, of course; long-limbed, double-jointed, and four-fingered; but the hunt, for him, wasn’t The Hunt. He’d been raised offworld as soon as his fifth cycle began, and while other First Worlders his age were hunting small animals in howling, maddened packs, he was being taught to sit, and wait, and think. Not for him the camaraderie and religious fervour of The Hunt. No, Vladivostok stalked and planned solitarily, without the howls of his companions.

  That was why the other Hunters were dead, and Vladivostok was still alive.

  Rain dribbled through his battle-bound hair and down the back of his neck. Vladivostok sighed and tried not to wriggle his shoulders. His principal was bare metres away, warm and dry behind the front viewscreen of the Upsydaisy. He could see her through the open cockpit door, lazily swinging in a hammock and occasionally kicking her foot against an unseen something to make it move. A few threads of red wool dangled over the edge of the hammock where some kind of floral material showed through a hole at the elbow of her jumper. Vladivostok wondered if it was his imagination that made her so look smug. In the cockpit itself was a small, unshaven man with wiry muscles and hard eyes: one of the reasons Vladivostok’s principal was still alive. Vladivostok didn’t trust the casual way the human was cleaning his boots, nor did he think the man glanced out the viewscreen of his craft every so often without reason. No, he knew someone was still tracking them. Therefore, Vladivostok would remain shivering in a tree, while his limbs grew stiff and rivulets of rain ran down his neck.

  Vladivostok drew in a deep breath through his flat nose, and settled in for the night. It took longer than usual to modulate his breathing—longer to slow his heartbeat—unease sitting heavily in his stomach like a bad meal. In spite of that, he soon felt the lengthening of time between heartbeats as time stretched out and became mellow. Vladivostok, floating in a peaceful nothingness, occasionally heard the boom of his heart as it double-beat into the silence. His limbs twitched once, twice; then grew heavy and unresponsive. Rain ran down the channels of his battle-bound hair and trickled down his back, but Vladivostok no longer felt it. The hunt could wait until the morrow.

  Vladivostok slept. He dreamed.

  It was a beautiful morning, for a dream. The rain had stopped and the air was crystal clear. Vladivostok could smell his principal on the light touch of breeze that was teasing his drying hair, and the dusty, dangerous smell that was her protector. They had left their craft!

  His eyes flicked open and his heart beat again, fast and strong, forcing him to inhale powerfully. He felt right, and strong, and ready. It didn’t occur to him even for a moment that he was dreaming.

  He left his nest of branches with a silent, powerful leap, eager to be out and doing; willing to spill warm blood to the cool grass. His long fingers lightly touched the hilt of each of his hunting knives as he fell to the scent, feeling a sense of loss when they passed over the gaping space left by the two missing ones.

  He moved silently through the thin, corkscrewing trees. This portion of Third World was subject to great, swirling windstorms that coiled through the valleys and turned the poor, unprotected young growth into curling monstrosities. The bushes, such as they were, grew in curving waves of leaf that were more delicately tapered and moulded than the most well maintained topiary. Vladivostok didn’t care about that. What he did care about was the cover they provided.

  He heard the humans before he saw them.

  His principal said, “I don’t wanna, Marx!”

  There was the sound of something metal slicing through something soft, then a flat male voice said, “You’ll have to explode then, won’t you?”

  She said, this time with interest: “Reckon I would?”

  “Yeah. Dig the hole.”

  “Dunno why you can’t just fix the loo. I ain’t supposed to be diggin’ potty holes.”

  “Is that a fact? What are you meant to be doing?”

  “Leadin’ to the fall of civ’lisation, apparently. And goin’ to the loo like an ordinary mucker! Wot’s wrong wiv it anyway?”

  “It hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “Wot d’you mean, ain’t arrived yet?”

  “That time dilator we used on the Chaebol—”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yeah, that. Some of the inside parts of the Upsydaisy are still back there.”

  “Includin’ the loo?”

  “Including the loo.”

  “Flaming ’eck!” said Vladivostok’s principal. She sounded impressed. “Better wanna hope the loo gets here before the contents, eh?”

  The flat voice sounded pained. “I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks, kid.”

  “Oi. You don’t reckon something else’ll come with it?”

  Vladivostok was close enough now to see the pinch to Kez’s mouth. She looked both cross and frightened.

  “No,” said Marx, and if Vladivostok heard the certainty in his voice, he also saw the flicker of the man’s eyes. “Different bits of it are in different times and places, and all of those times and places are slightly dilated around the edges. It’s a bit hard to live through that.”

  “Orright,” said Kez; and added with only slightly less grotesque enthusiasm than before, “If the loo comes back a mess, I ain’t cleanin’ it.”

  Vladivostok stalked them silently. He could see Marx’s eyes flicking back and forth, and was annoyed but unsurprised to note that no matter where he moved, Kez was out of his throwing lines.

  “Thought you didn’t like digging latrines,” said the man
. He had her digging where she was protected by a curve of tree trunks that would be all but impossible to sight through, and covered the rest himself. That decided the matter. Vladivostok preferred to keep collateral damage to a minimum, but if a mark’s companion was determined to die, Vladivostok felt honour bound to oblige him.

  His fingers loosened one of his knives in its sheath, then drew it, swift and silent. It balanced there for a moment while Vladivostok considered the kill.

  “Reckon we killed all them Hunters?” asked Kez.

  “No,” said Marx, as Vladivostok threw the knife, straight and true.

  There was a soft thunk as it found its mark in the back of the human’s neck, and a single trickle of blood drew a crimson line into Marx’s collar as he sank to his knees. Vladivostok was already flicking another knife when Marx’s head cleared his throwing line. This knife sank into the tree behind Kez, but Kez wasn’t there and there was no time to feel surprised, because Vladivostok wasn’t there, either.

  Vladivostok woke; and waking, continued to dream. His heart kick-started with an unpleasant lurch that didn’t leave him feeling as refreshed as it ought to have done. There was a feeling of discomfort that he didn’t know quite what to do with, so he left it alone and rose cautiously. He could hear voices; that must be why he had woken slightly early. One of them was the voice of his principal, the other that of her companion.

  Kez’s voice said irritably, “I don’t wanna dig a loo, Marx! There’s a flamin’ Hunter out here with too many flamin’ knives!”

  The unpleasant feeling in Vladivostok’s stomach deepened. He’d suspected the two of them knew of his presence; it was another thing to be sure of it.

  “You’re not digging a loo,” said Marx. “You’re pretending. You’re bait.”

  There was a pause.

  Kez said, “That’s a n’orrible plan.”

  “You’re telling me! You’re the scrawniest, ugliest bit of bait I’ve ever had to use. Ow! Gimme that shovel, kid!”

  “No. I’m diggin’ a loo. Where we gonna dig it, anyway?”

  Vladivostok gave a sharp, humourless grin. From the scouting of the previous day, he knew there was a clearing up ahead, surrounded by bushes that were as perfect for screening latrine holes as the clearing itself was for making camp. It was a beautiful space with clear throwing lines almost all around it: the humans would be fools not to make use of it, and Vladivostok would be a fool not to take advantage of that.

  “There’s a clearing up ahead,” said Marx.

  Vladivostok was sliding silently from his nest to circle around and arrive at the clearing before them, when Kez’s voice said with disastrous clarity: “No. We ain’t goin’ there. He’ll be there, waiting. That’s where you get a Hunter knife in the neck.”

  He froze in disbelief, and caught the brief, wry smile on Marx’s lips. They weren’t talking about Hunters in general. They were talking about him in particular. About something that hadn’t yet happened—except perhaps in a dream.

  “Thanks for reminding me, kid. You’ll have to tell me how you managed that without making holes in time and space—or worse, copies of yourself all over Third World.”

  “Ain’t hard,” Kez said, shrugging. She didn’t seem to have taken offence at the suggestion that multiples of herself was a worse outcome than holes in time and space. “Just gotta make sure I come back ’zactly in the right place.”

  “What’s exactly the right place?” Marx’s voice was distinctly concerned.

  “You know. Right on top of meself.”

  “You what?”

  “’S’what you did wiv the ’Daisy that time. Two things occupyin’ the same space an’ time.”

  “That’s a bad thing!”

  “Oh. Well, it ain’t bad for me. Just restarts things, like.”

  Vladivostok frowned. Their conversation made no sense, but a tickle of a half-remembered dream in the back of his mind was trying to make sense of it anyway.

  Kez said, “Can’t go there, anyway. We need to set the trap somewhere wiv cover. Be safer that way.”

  “Safer,” agreed Marx. “But not much of a trap.”

  There was a time for planning and a time for improvisation. Now, Vladivostok knew, was time for improvisation. He leapt through the foliage—not away, but toward his principal and her protector. The human half-turned to meet him in his bound, surprised but unexpectedly fast, and they tumbled into the bushes opposite with a breaking of twigs and a tearing of foliage. Vladivostok clung tight and used his heftier weight to control the roll, pinning the human beneath him when they came to a stop.

  Marx swung with something heavy and metal. Vladivostok dodged but still took a glancing blow that made a numb spot across his left temple and threw him off balance long enough for the human to wrestle something small and deadly from the back of his waistband. Vladivostok felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his stomach, felt the impact as it tore a hole through his lower intestines. The human died at the same time that the bullet tore through Vladivostok’s stomach, and that confused Vladivostok until he saw the knife protruding from Marx’s ear. There were fingers curled around the hilt, and it took Vladivostok far too long to realise that the fingers were his own. He couldn’t feel them.

  The world tilted sideways, or perhaps Vladivostok did. As he slid bonelessly to the grass beside the human a face came into focus above him, small and red and wet. Vladivostok recognised his principal in one blink of his dying eyes, and in the next she was gone.

  Vladivostok woke. The rush of blood as he woke forced a gasp of air into his lungs, and he curled one arm reflexively around a phantom pain in his stomach. Dreams and phantoms clung to the corners of his mind.

  Vladivostok’s eyes darted around, sharp and suspicious, but his nest was still hidden and despite the fading pain in his stomach he was not injured. He stretched for a long time, thoughtfully, his eyes on the Upsydaisy through the screen of foliage, then checked his weapons. They were all there but for the two he had used yesterday.

  His principal and her protector weren’t within earshot of his nest. Nor were they in sight through the viewscreen of the craft, though the adjoining door between cockpit and inner chamber was unlatched and swinging freely. Through that crack he occasionally saw a brief flash of movement that could have been anything but was probably his prey. Did they intend to spend the day inside the craft, or were they preparing to leave? It would be annoying if they were on the point of leaving. They were an extraordinarily difficult pair to trace, and Vladivostok had followed the rumour of them across almost all the twelve Worlds. His employer had at last given him the solid intelligence that led him to the right place at the right time, and he would hate to lose his advantage. He had made arrangements, of course, but he would much rather not have to test their use.

  Vladivostok descended from his vantage point in a shower of bark, punching lightly through the grass with his feet, and slipped through the trees toward the shelter of the Upsydaisy’s hull. There was a hatch there, but Vladivostok wasn’t interested in that. Even if he could get it open, the hatch would most likely bring him too close to the central cabin for comfort. Vladivostok, with discomforting dreams of things that hadn’t happened in his mind, valued stealth more than usual. On his first survey of the craft he had seen a venting chute that might, with some contrivance and wriggling, both open and provide him with viable entry to the Upsydaisy. He climbed the support struts with quick, silent movements, and launched himself at the rungs that ran partway across the Upsydaisy’s hull. He caught one rung with two fingers and used the momentum to fling his other hand around another. When he was perfectly perpendicular, Vladivostok brought his feet up to slot into the two rungs and curled back down, battle-bound hair pulling against his nape to align with gravity. Gently, he swayed. His feet stayed firm, toes tightly wedged and the soles of his boots flat against the hull. Vladivostok edged himself into a more robust swing, testing his limits until he was able to brush the hull with his fingers with e
ach swing.

  When he was at the zenith of his swing, Vladivostok caught the venting chute’s pump connector. His first attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful: his balance was off, and he couldn’t keep hold of the connector. When he lost grip, the resulting wild arc downward was enough to jerk his left foot from the rung he’d shoved it through, and for a perilous few moments Vladivostok dangled from the underside of the Upsydaisy by one leg. When the worst of the swinging stopped, he slotted the foot back through, this time one rung ahead so that he could wedge the heel of it against the toe of his other boot.

  It took Vladivostok three more attempts before he caught the connector with enough strength to keep himself, taut and straining, against the hull. Even then, he had to release his grip and regain it once more in the process of jiggling open the venting chute. Luckily, it was one of the older chutes that could be jimmied through the pump connecter, and the inside of the chute had a lip just wide enough to give him purchase for the scramble inside. He closed it behind him and rested for a fraction of a moment before he began to scale the chute, palms flat against the metal. It was surprisingly easy going: he had been prepared for the stench of human waste and scraps—the slickness of it against the wall—but the chute was entirely, unbelievably clean.

  Vladivostok paused, his thoughts buzzing busily while his eyes roamed the shaft, then continued to climb, this time more carefully. In a few moments he was glad for his caution; if the chute was surprisingly clean, it was also surprisingly short. This was not because it met with the lavatory or the galley—it was because it simply ran out of being. The metal chute disappeared just beyond its first bend, and Vladivostok found himself looking into the shadowed bowels of the Upsydaisy. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that the entire lavatory was missing as well. There was a sizeable emptiness above him that should have been filled with something. He pulled himself from the waste chute by a support strut that was still in existence though without a structure to support, and delicately spread his weight over various protuberances. He could see a way upward, so he took it, passing lightly over the more delicate of the Upsydaisy’s inner workings. A slight filtering of light made a patterned rectangle above him, and as Vladivostok climbed, he thought he began to hear voices. By the time he reached the rectangle, the light had grown stronger and the voices louder, and it was apparent to Vladivostok that he had found an access grating. He wriggled between it and the workings it gave access to, and silently pushed it up and out.