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  Turncoat

  Time Trap: Book Five

  Deborah Chester

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1994 by Deborah Chester

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition January 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-584-1

  More from Deborah Chester

  Time Trap Series

  Time Trap

  Showdown

  Pieces of Eight

  Restoration

  Turncoat

  Termination

  Ruby Throne Series

  Reign of Shadows

  Shadow War

  Realm of Light

  Anthi Series

  The Children of Anthi

  Requiem for Anthi

  The Omcri Matrix

  The Goda War

  Chapter 1

  Noel Kedran ran for his life down a sloping hill, his feet sinking ankle-deep in snow, his coattails flying behind him. Around him came the furious rattle of musket fire, sounding like hailstones on a sheet of tin.

  As he ran, his feet slipping and sliding on the icy ground, he was filled with fury and bewilderment. What was he doing here? He’d accomplished his mission in seventeenth-century England. He thought he’d done everything right. Recall through the time stream should have returned him to the Time Institute. Instead he was in the wrong century and the wrong location, running like a scared rabbit in the middle of a pitched battle.

  So what had gone wrong?

  There was no time to wonder, no time to go through the routine self-check following travel. He’d scarcely materialized and reoriented himself in the reality of this dimension before the battle that was raging on these hillsides came his way.

  A lead musket ball whined past his head, and Noel ducked lower. His feet slipped out from under him. Arms windmilling, he fell with enough force to numb his backside forever, and slid down a ditch into a thicket of briars and bushes.

  Scrambling desperately for cover beneath a thorny bush that lacked a single concealing leaf, Noel flattened himself to the ground behind a fallen log and tried to catch his breath. Beneath the snow, the ground was a sodden layer of rotted leaf mulch. Some kind of small animal had made a den for itself in the end of the old log. Noel could smell the pungent odors. Briars had caught in the back of his coat. Each time he shifted a fraction, he could hear tiny rips in the cloth. He felt exposed and vulnerable in this all but useless hiding place. Anyone on the hill above him could probably see him if they bothered to look.

  Only there, in that moment of hiding, did he have his first chance to take stock of the situation.

  Something was wrong.

  Even as the thought crossed his mind, he dismissed it impatiently. Of course something was wrong. He’d landed in the wrong century again.

  But it was more than that. He stared up the hill, his breath fogging from his nostrils, and found the perspective slightly off-kilter. It was like looking at a picture shot through an elongated lens. The sky seemed to curve too sharply toward the earth.

  Distortion, he thought in dismay and realized the time stream’s anomaly had not been corrected.

  As long as he moved quickly and did not look at any object too long, all appeared normal enough. But stop and remain motionless, as he was doing now in his hiding place, and the shapes around him began to take on a surreal quality. It was Kroginer’s Effect, which said that an object displaced to an alternate dimension must travel roughly forty-seven times cubed the velocity of objects within said dimension in order to intercept the discontinuity curve for positive entry. Failure to achieve this velocity would result in a distortion curve at exponential rates, nullifying entry or generating an anomaly proportionate to—

  To the thunderous pounding of drums, a contingent of soldiers in scarlet coats appeared over the crest of the hill he’d just come down. Marching in a precise line, they looked grim indeed in their bright uniforms and tall, peaked hats. They carried Brown Betsy muskets with bayonets affixed, deadly weapons for the day. At the bawled command of an officer, the men knelt, aimed their muskets, and fired.

  Musket balls whizzed over the thicket where Noel was hiding. While he knew he wasn’t their target, he still pressed his face to the ground and prayed for accurate shooting. Caught in the crossfire wasn’t the kind of epithet he wanted. Especially since he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century.

  It had to be another closed time loop, another trap. Once before he’d been caught in a time stream from which there was no return. Escaping that had nearly killed him and he’d sworn never to return to the past. At least until circumstances had dragged him back. Now, he closed his fists on the snow until they shook and ice melted against his palms. His sacrifice, risking a dangerous return to the past to close the anomaly, had been for nothing.

  But right now wasn’t a good time to rage against the malfunction that had brought him here. Noel figured he’d better save his skin first and worry about the future later. He’d inadvertently materialized in the middle of a battlefield, and all he wanted to do was scramble clear before someone shot him by mistake.

  The British were still firing in wonderful precision, the front line kneeling to reload while the second line fired, then all advancing a few feet, only to start the entire process again. From the American side came a return volley of fire, ragged and random. Men screamed in death, and the acrid smoke of burnt gunpowder boiled across the frozen land.

  In the distance Noel could hear screams and battle cries mingled with the terrifying whistle of cannonballs and the steady beat of drums. He’d managed to skirt the main battlefield, only to run into this smaller skirmish between the redcoats and the patriots. The latter took cover guerrilla style and confined themselves to potshots. The soldiers in scarlet kept to formation despite the appalling cost of lives. It seemed to Noel, caught in the crossfire, that the colonials were retreating because they constantly shifted their position. But whether they were actually trying to flee or were leading the British soldiers into a trap, he didn’t know.

  All he was sure of was that he didn’t want to remain caught between the two forces.

  Without warning the world went black and soundless for at least eight seconds. It was as though the entire universe had suddenly paused.

  I’m hit, thought Noel in a fleeting moment of panic.

  But he was not injured. He was in the nowhere of between, that eerie, formless place of no dimension. What had suddenly swept him here, he could not determine.

  Light returned, blinding him at first, then reality resumed. Only, what had happened to the hillside, the snow, the ditch where he’d been hiding? Too astonished to comprehend what had happened, Noel turned around in a small circle.

  He stood on flat ground, the grass brown under his feet, autumn leaves in bright hues of scarlet and gold fluttering in the wind. Dense fog surrounded him, so gray and impenetrable that it looked like cotton wool. The sounds of battle crashed on nearby—muffled by the fog. Noel heard hoofbeats approaching and ran awkwardly toward the dimly seen trees. The ground was soft from rain. The air smelled of smoke and damp. Musket fire rattled away, then a contingent of horsemen gallop
ed by like ghosts in the enveloping mists. Noel heard the wail of a bugle and the answering shouts of men.

  He reached the woods, blundering against the wet, reassuring roughness of a tree trunk. His palm scraped over the bark…and the world shifted and went black again.

  This shift was not as long as the previous one—a split second in duration, no longer than a blink. Yet it took Noel some time to assimilate it.

  Back in the ditch in the snow beneath the bush. The fog was gone. Sunshine glittered coldly off the snow. Shouts and the sound of running feet gave him little warning before a small squadron of redcoats came trampling through the ditch where he was hiding. Noel tensed in wild alarm. Where had they come from?

  He had no time to run, no time to think. Weaponless, he hadn’t a prayer of protecting himself.

  Noel popped up like a rabbit and held his hands high in surrender.

  He found himself face-to-face with a man in a white wig and pointed hat. The soldier’s face was bloodstained and twisted in a violent grimace. His eyes were wild with battle madness. At the sight of Noel, he didn’t check but came on with a vicious thrust of his bayonet.

  “Hey!” said Noel but there was no time to protest. He dodged to one side, and felt the bayonet slice through the side of his coat, close enough for him to feel cold metal. Noel’s heart jumped, and he thought he would be sick. This was no distortion shift; this was reality.

  “Wait!” he said. “I’m a civilian. I’m not a part of this—”

  “Damned colonial traitors!” shouted another soldier. “Stick ’im quick, Polk, before ’e shoots you in the back.”

  The bayonet came at Noel again, aiming at his midsection. Noel jumped back, stumbled, and nearly fell against another soldier. They were all around him now. Gore dripped from the tips of their bayonets. The stench of blood, sweat, and gunsmoke reeked in their uniforms. He had nothing with which to defend himself, not a dagger, not a pistol—all his weapons had vanished during his journey through the time stream.

  God help me, Noel thought. What am I doing here?

  “I surrender!” he said in open desperation. “I’m your prisoner.”

  They grinned like wolves. And more redcoats were coming over the hill.

  “I surrender,” he said, gulping for breath. “I claim clemency under the rules of civilized warfare.”

  The soldier holding him at bay laughed. Noel looked into his blue eyes and saw only contempt and no mercy at all. It made his blood run cold.

  Just before the soldier struck at him, Noel twisted and grabbed at another man’s arm, seeking to wrest away the pistol tucked in his belt. He was shook off and went sprawling on the slippery ground. A bayonet plunged into the mud a scant inch from his face. Noel rolled frantically and scrambled to his feet, despite a shove that nearly knocked him down again.

  Shift! he prayed desperately. If time was not stable, then let it yank him out of here.

  The soldiers circled him like wolves. How they could take the time to play this deadly cat-and-mouse game in the middle of an attack was beyond him. All he knew was he had to defend himself somehow until the next shift or die. Yet what if one of them tired of the game and simply shot him?

  He faced his principal attacker again, breathing hard. His only advantage lay in the narrowness of the ditch. There was little room to maneuver, and the soldiers had to be careful not to impale each other. One man feinted at Noel, and when he tried to elude it, another stabbed at him. Noel dropped to the ground between the men, and once again both blades missed him.

  “Devil take the bloke!” shouted one in exasperation.

  “Men, forward!” came a shout.

  Still panting on the ground, Noel thought the command was his salvation. They had to keep advancing. No more time for games. Noel lifted his head and looked into the soldier’s eyes.

  The man simply raised his musket and fired.

  A belch of white smoke, deafening noise, and the ball crashed into Noel’s temple. For an instant he saw nothing but blinding white light. Then all was a gummy, swimming darkness while their feet trampled over him to the next fray.

  Chapter 2

  Reality shift:

  DATA…Subject One undergoing altered dimensional state. Molecular shift. No directional path on time stream. Intrusion likely.

  DATA…Subject Two exiting from time stream. Directional path on course. No intrusion.

  DATA…Subject One now between dimensions. No directional path on time stream. Intrusion imminent.

  DATA…Subject Two gone from time stream. Entry point two spatial points from Subject One’s initial entry and exit.

  DATA…Subject One intruding. Termination advised.

  INSTRUCTIONS…Qwip activation.

  Chapter 3

  Silence floated over the world, blessed quietness after the raging chaos of the day. In the hedgerow a bird whistled, soft and tentative, as though wondering whether it was safe to return. Noel knelt upon the trampled earth, his heart racing, his nerve endings still tingling from the suddenness of his transference to this place. His wits felt scattered, as though half of them had been left behind on that snowy battlefield, where he should have died.

  The redcoat had shot him point-blank, sending him spinning back into infinity. Now he had materialized here, whole and safe but confused. He staggered to his feet, utterly disoriented, and tried to make sense of what had happened.

  The land around him was sheathed in fog, so thick and white he could almost scoop it into his hand. Overhead, the sky held dirty, gray clouds, and the gloom was so deep he could not judge what hour of day it was. The trees beyond this clearing where he stood had leaves ablaze in autumn glory.

  Noel rubbed the condensing moisture from his face. Moments before he’d been in deep snow. He’d gone from winter to autumn. Was he moving backward through time, or forward? And why was he skipping from materialization to materialization like this?

  “LOC,” he said.

  There came the sound of approaching hoofbeats splashing over the sodden ground.

  “Cancel,” said Noel.

  Glancing around, he ran for cover.

  With the first step he took, however, the world fuzzed and vanished around him into a kaleidoscope of broken shapes and colors. He spun back and tried to retreat, but the fragments twirled around him, cutting him off from reality. Scarlet he saw, and blue. Yellow cut across violet, and multiple hues of green cartwheeled crazily. He flung out his hands in an instinctive effort to hold the shapes away from him.

  “No!” he shouted.

  An invisible force knocked him down. He thought the ground no longer existed and expected to fall through infinity, but instead he hit solid earth with a grunt of pain.

  In a twinkling, the abstract shapes of color disappeared, and a recognizable world surrounded him again. The fog, however, had vanished, to be replaced by indigo twilight stretching forth from the trees. Figures moved here and there in the gloom. Clad in late eighteenth-century uniforms and carrying muskets, they appeared to be searching. The air stank of death, and crows shrieked from the treetops in anticipation of carrion.

  Noel staggered to his feet, feeling shaken and bruised. His head was throbbing, and he felt close to nausea. Nearby lay the mangled body of a man killed by a cannonball. Noel stared a moment, then turned away and was sick.

  Clammy and aching, he straightened and wiped his mouth. He was afraid to move, afraid he would be cast between dimensions again. He hadn’t traveled through the time portal into his own century, but it was becoming obvious that he was out of sync with this era. His Light Operated Computer must be trying to stabilize his coordinates, but he kept fading in and out, kept shifting to various times within this general location grid.

  Something was holding him to the Revolutionary War.

  He didn’t have to guess too hard to know what it was.

  Leon.

  His worst nightmare. His enemy. A piece of himself. He sighed, weary of the struggle that never ended.

&nb
sp; By now the searching soldiers had seen him. They pointed and conferred. Two hurried toward him.

  “You all right?” asked one.

  Noel’s courage returned. If they could see him and he could hear them, then perhaps his position had finally stabilized. He dared to take a step toward them and didn’t dematerialize.

  He grinned to himself in relief and took another step. His knees were wobbly, but that didn’t matter. His headache didn’t matter. Right now all he wanted was for the world to stay solid until he could figure out what to do. Lengthening his stride, he walked toward the men.

  The ground was rough and uneven. Noel stumbled, and one of the soldiers gripped his arm in support.

  “Thanks,” said Noel. “I’m kind of—”

  His voice died in his throat. He stared at the man’s hand on his sleeve. Where there should have been a normal appendage with flesh, skin, and hair, there was only a skeleton. Fingers of polished bone gleamed white in the gathering gloom. They tightened around his biceps, then loosened. Noel tried to swallow and couldn’t. He forced himself to look up into the man’s face. Beneath the tricorne hat and old-fashioned clothes, there was only a skeleton. Empty sockets stared at him from the skull. Bony metacarpals curled around the musket, and a woolen muffler dangled absurdly around the vertebrae of the thing’s neck.

  All the blood seemed to drain from Noel’s head. He felt suddenly dizzy and lost. Animated skeletons? Trying to come to grips with the situation, he stepped back and glanced across the battlefield. Pale forms were rising from the dead bodies, some hovering as though reluctant to leave, others zipping away.

  “No,” said Noel hoarsely. “I do not believe this.”

  “Shocked out of himself,” said the one skeletal soldier to its companion.

  “He’s making no sense to me,” agreed the other. “Better walk him along.”