Time’s Eye

The tube’s sudden heat burned his flesh, and hot smoke billowed around his head, making him choke. But he heard the fizz of the grenade as it looped away through the air. When the grenade exploded, shrapnel and bits of metal sang through the air, and he cowered, hiding his face.

When he looked up he saw that the chopper flew on away from the village, but it was trailing thick black smoke from its tail section.

Moallim stood up and roared, wiping dirt from his face, punching the air with his fist. He turned and looked back toward the east, to the village, for surely the people would have seen his grenade launch, seen the damage to the chopper. Surely they would be running to greet him.

But nobody was coming, not even his mother. He couldn’t even see the village, though he had been not a hundred meters from its western boundary, and he had clearly been able to see its crude rooftops and slanting walls, the children and goats wandering among the houses. Now it was gone, and the rocky plain ran to the horizon, as if the village had been scraped clean off the earth. Moallim was alone, alone with his scratched foxhole, his smoking RPG, and the great smoke column slowly dispersing above his head.

Alone on this huge plain.

Somewhere an animal roared. It was a low growl, like some immense piece of machinery. Whimpering, shocked, Moallim clambered back into his hole in the ground.

***

The turn was too much for the damaged rotor. The airframe vibrated around Bisesa, and there was a high-pitched whine as the dry gear shafts started to seize up.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute since the RPG had hit, she thought.

“You’ll have to put her down,” Abdikadir said urgently.

“Sure,” said Casey. “Like where? Abdi, out here even the sweet little old ladies carry big knives to cut off your balls.”

Bisesa pointed over their shoulders. “What’s that?” There was a structure of stone and beaten earth, no more than a couple of kilometers ahead. It was hard to make out in the glare of that anomalous sun. “It looks like a fortress.”

“Not one of ours,” Abdikadir said.

Now the chopper was passing over people—scattered, running people, some in bright red coats. Bisesa was close enough to see their mouths were round with shock.

“You’re the intel expert,” Casey snapped at Bisesa. “Who the hell?”

“I truly have no idea,” Bisesa murmured.

There was a stunningly loud bang. The Bird pitched forward and began to spin. The tail rotor assembly had disintegrated. With the rotor’s weight vanished from its rear, the airframe tipped forward, and with the tail rotor gone there was nothing to stop the aircraft spinning around its main rotor spindle. Though Casey jammed his pedals to the floor, the spinning continued—and accelerated—and kept on, until Bisesa was braced against the wall of the cockpit, and yellow earth and blue-white sky whirled past the bubble windows, blurring.

***

Something came rising up over a low hillock. Josh saw whirling metal, blades like swords wielded by an invisible dervish. Beneath it was a bubble of glass, and rails of some kind below that. It was a machine, a whirling, clattering, dust-raising machine, of a kind he had never seen before. And it continued to rise, lifting into the air until its lower rails were far above the ground, ten or twenty feet. Its tail trailed black smoke .

“My giddy aunt,” breathed Ruddy. “I was right—the Russians—the blessed Russians! …”

The flying machine suddenly plummeted toward the ground.

“Let’s go,” called Josh, already running.

***

Casey and Abdikadir worked the main engine’s power levers, struggling to raise their arms against the spin’s centrifugal force. They got the engine shut down and the chopper’s spin abruptly slowed. But without power the chopper fell freely.

The ground exploded at Bisesa, bits of rock and scrubby vegetation expanding in unwelcome detail, casting long shadows in the light of that too-low sun. She wondered which bit of unprepossessing dirt was to be her grave. But the pilots did something right. In the last instant the bubble tipped up, and came almost level. Bisesa knew how important that was; it meant they might walk away from this.

The last thing she saw was a man running toward the stricken Bird, aiming some kind of rifle.

The chopper slammed into the ground.

5. Soyuz

For Kolya the Discontinuity was subtle. It began with a lost signal, uncertain sightings, a silent stranding.

The time for the Soyuz ferry ship to detach from the Space Station had arrived. The last handshakes were exchanged, the heavy double hatches were closed, and though Soyuz remained physically attached to the Station, Kolya had already left the orbiting shack where he had spent another three months of his life. Now there was only the short journey home, a mere four hundred kilometers down through the air to the surface of the Earth, where he would be reunited with his young family.