Time’s Eye

Bisesa remembered what time of day it was; he had been due to try to pick up the cosmonauts’ radio signals. “From Kolya and Sable?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“No, it isn’t. We’ve got a problem.”

31. Ham Radio

In the luggage he had been allowed to bring on the Mongols’ transcontinental trek, Kolya had made sure he packed up the ham radio gear from the Soyuz. Some instinct had always made him keep this secret even from Sable, who had long lost interest in what had once been her project, and he was glad of that now. Once Genghis Khan established his base camp a few tens of kilometers from Babylon, he retrieved the gear and set it up.

Oddly this wasn’t difficult. In the retinue of Yeh-lü, the Mongol guards were watchful, but they had no idea what he was doing with his anonymous boxes and cables and spidery antennae. It was more difficult, in fact—but crucial—to keep what he was doing secret from Sable, at least for a few more hours.

He knew he would get only one chance at this. He prayed for a decent transmission path, and for Casey to be listening. Well, the path was poor—the post-Discontinuity ionosphere seemed to be suffering, and the signal was obscured by static, pops and whoops—but Casey was indeed listening, at the daily times they had agreed when Kolya was still orbiting the world in Soyuz ,in the impossible and lost past. Kolya wasn’t surprised to know that Casey and the others had traveled to Babylon; it was a logical destination, and they’d discussed the possibility before he had left orbit. But he was stunned to learn who Casey had traveled with—stunned, yet hopeful; for perhaps there was after all a force in the world that could resist Genghis Khan.

Kolya longed to prolong the contact, to listen to this man from the twenty-first century, his own time. He felt that Casey, who he had never even met in person, had become his closest friend in the world.

But there was no time for that. There were no choices left, no more luxuries for Kolya. He talked, and talked, describing everything he knew about Genghis Khan, his army, his tactics; and he spoke of Sable, and what she had done—and what he suspected she was capable of.

He talked as long as he could. It turned out to be about half an hour. Then Sable showed up with two burly Mongol guards, who hauled him back from the radio, and briskly smashed up the gear with the butts of their lances.

32. Council of War

Alexander’s scouts brought the news that the vanguard of the Mongol army was only a few days’ ride away. To his advisers’ surprise, the King ordered that a parley should be attempted.

Alexander was horrified by what the moderns had to tell him of the destruction that had been wrought by the Mongol expansion. Alexander might be a blood-stained conqueror himself, but he had ambitions beyond simple conquest: his intent was certainly more sophisticated than Genghis Khan’s, fifteen centuries after his own time. He was determined to oppose the Mongols. But Alexander was of a mind to build something new in this empty world, not to destroy. He said to his advisers, “We, and our red-coated comrades from beyond the ocean, and these horsemen from the wastes of Asia, are all survivors of dislocations in time and space, wonders beyond the anticipation of any man. Do we have no other response to all this than to slaughter each other? Is there nothing for us to learn from each other but weapons and tactics? …”

So he ordered a party of envoys to be sent out, with gifts and tributes, to open a dialogue with the Mongol leaders. It would travel with an impressive force of a thousand men, and was to be under the command of Ptolemy.

Ptolemy was one of the King’s closest companions, a Macedonian and a friend of Alexander from childhood. A hard-faced warrior, he was a dark, silent man, and evidently shrewd. Perhaps he was a good choice for such a delicate mission: Bisesa’s phone told her that in another reality Ptolemy would, in the carve-up of Alexander’s conquests after his death, have become Pharaoh of the ancient kingdom of Egypt. But as he prepared for the mission, Ptolemy stamped around the royal palace looking thunderous. Bisesa wondered if his appointment to this perilous, and highly likely fatal, mission had anything to do with the endless maneuverings and intrigues among Alexander’s inner circle.

At Abdikadir’s suggestion, Captain Grove attached the competent Geordie Corporal Batson and a few British troops to the party. It had been proposed that one of Bisesa’s group should go along, since Sable was believed to be at the heart of the assault they anticipated. But Alexander decreed that his three refugees from the twenty-first century were too few to be risked on such a venture, and that was that. Still, at Eumenes’ suggestion, Bisesa drafted a note for Batson to give to Kolya, in case he encountered the cosmonaut.