"Somehow I don't find that very reassuring," said Delaney. He glanced back at Steiger and Andre.
"Nowhere to go," said Steiger. "Someone's coming up toward us with plasma weapons and Drakov's behind us with a plasma pistol of his own. We're caught between a rock and a hard place." He glanced over the side. "And it's a long way down."
The running footsteps came closer, followed by the sounds of others pursuing from below. There were no more plasma blasts. Whoever was coming toward them wasn't wasting any time stopping to fire at those below.
"They're coming fast," Delaney said, tensely.
A figure came running up onto the landing just below them. Drakov fired over their heads and the heat of the plasma blast singed their hair as it passed above them and slammed into the inside wall of the robot, just ahead of the running man below them. He jerked back from the wash of flame as melted bronze dripped down the wall and the superheated guardrail just ahead of him started to sag.
"Drop your weapon!" Drakov shouted.
The man started to raise his pistol, then saw Delaney standing just above him and he froze.
"My God, "he said.
"Drop it, I said!" Drakov repeated.
The pistol clattered to the metal floor of the landing, bounced, and skittered over the side to fall to the bottom of the robot's leg. Drakov kept his pistol pointed at the man, but it was Delaney that the soldier stared at.
"Jesus Christ," said Delaney, softly, staring at the man's face.
Andre didn't say a thing. She stood frozen to the spot, speechless, staring at the face of a man who couldn't possibly be alive, the face of Lt. Reese Hunter.
"The sight of you took about ten years off my life," said Hunter. "I saw you killed, torn to pieces, then some thirty seconds later, there you were standing right in front of me."
They were locked in a room in the cellar of Drakov's palace on the island of Rhodes. They were in almost total darkness, with the only light coming from a small barred window high above them, level with the ground outside. The window was out of their reach and too small to squeeze through, even if they could have reached it and defeated the iron bars.
The man who spoke, addressing his comments to Delaney, was Reese Hunter, and yet he wasn't Hunter. The Reese Hunter Finn and Andre knew had been killed in 17th century Paris, assassinated by the Timekeepers. This was his doppelganger, his twin from the future of the congruent universe. The face, the name, everything about him was the same, except that he was a captain in the S.O.G., the Special Operations Group of the Temporal Army of the congruent universe, their elite commando force assigned to deal with temporal disruptions, specifically to conduct the war against the universe from which the temporal agents came. They knew him, and yet they didn't know him. And he "knew" them, as well.
Finn Delaney's twin had been a member of the adjustment team, along with Captain Hunter, commanded by Major Kennedy, the man the temporal agents had known as Kovalos. They had been attempting to adjust the temporal disruption, thinking that the temporal agents were responsible, never suspecting that Drakov was behind it all. They had clocked several teams back and now only Hunter was left.
"Kennedy was going to signal the assault the moment the Infiltrators we had buried on the beach engaged the Argonauts," said Hunter. "We were goin
g to hit from both sides. We were waiting for his signal when all hell broke loose. That damn giant robot clocked in right on top of us." He took a ragged breath. "The poor bastards were crushed. Finn and I were the only ones who got away. We tried to get back to Kennedy, up on the crest, and clocked in just in time to see him buy it. We couldn't see your faces from where we were. We didn't know what the hell was happening. We had no idea what Drakov was doing here. He was supposed to be working for us. Last time I saw him, he was updating the C.I.S. archives."
"C.I.S.?" asked Steiger.
"Counter-Insurgency Section," Hunter said. "New branch of our Intelligence service."
"The ones in charge of intelligence concerning us," said Andre.
Hunter nodded. "Anyway, we were trying to figure our next move when Drakov herded you three inside the robot. The minute I saw that, I knew he was the one responsible for hitting us, not you people. And we still didn't know who you were. Delaney decided to make a try for the door before it closed. Worst damn decision that fool ever made." He glanced at Finn. "Nothing personal."
Delaney smiled wryly. "Yeah, right."
Hunter leaned back against the wall and gave out a small groan. "Damn. Everything went wrong. We were going to jump you people as you came back down. We thought there was a chance we might have been spotted, but we figured what the hell, you had to get by us anyway, so it was worth a shot. We never put it together that Drakov was the one who stole the Infiltrator Project. The next thing we knew, that door was sliding open and they were coming in behind us, rushing up the stairs like an army of ants. We fired and fired and they just kept on coming. Delaney ran out of plasma charges and they got him. Tore him apart with their bare hands. I never saw anything like it."
Delaney shuddered at the thought of his twin from the congruent universe being slaughtered while he was standing on the stairs just overhead.
"I would've burned him to save him from that agony," Hunter went on, "only I had run out of charges, too. There was only one way left to go and that was up. I had an empty gun, but I thought maybe I'd have a chance to bluff you and get those horrors called off. And then I ran smack dab into you. I thought I was hallucinating. Christ, you're his spitting image. And Andre. Jesus, you were dead as well, and there you were."
"What happened to 'me' in this universe?" Andre asked, hesitantly.
"You bought it on an adjustment mission," Hunted said. "Priest never got over it."
"Lucas?" Andre said, feeling as if a cold hand were closing around her insides.
"Your husband," Hunter said. "Or rather, her husband. Our Andre Cross, that is. Only she wasn't Andre Cross in our timeline. Her name was Andre de la Croix."