A Blink of the Screen

up equipment. Then she went
movin
’. I followed her up here until I caught your beacon.’
    Linsay regarded him for some time.
    ‘I go back to Base once in a while,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you before. Didn’t even know they had security men.’
    ‘I only came up three weeks ago.’
    ‘I see you’ve been doing a great job,’ said Linsay.
    ‘Look, she’s
here
. Somewhere. And if we stand here all day then she’ll be at the other end of a trajectory.’
    The chase had taken four days, nearly. The murderer had used the Base’s generator to give an initial boost, but the guard had been bright enough to scavenge for spare charged batteries. They meant a weight penalty, but not for long. There was a trail of burnt-out cells across three thousand alternate Earths, discarded after a series of mind-punishing
moves
that drained the power and sent the guard pinwheeling across unsuspecting landscapes. Pity about the belt. There had been time either to take one of the more rugged models that were specifically designed for the high meggas, or to find extra batteries and a knapsack to carry them. There hadn’t been time for both.
    There ought to have been time to do something about the bodies. It hadn’t been a subtle poison, just a slow-acting one. There would have to be time later.
    The guard wasn’t very experienced at tacking on the
move
, but he knew one thing: never flip across alternate worlds without also moving laterally. It’s too easy for the quarry to wait for you right in the place you started from, and then he needn’t even shoot. A heavy stone would be sufficient.
    So the trick was to duck, flip and run, and take the occasional risk by jumping two or three worlds at once. They had both slept sporadically, in odd corners of the landscape. Meat was easy to come by, hard to cook. Once, they had arrived back to back, a few feet from each other. They both fired and flipped, so that two bullets sped away from each other over a deserted landscape, maybe the only artefacts that world would ever see.
    You don’t have to do this, the guard’s conscience kept repeating. No one expects you to do this, you’re not paid for it. Why play Mounties? Even if you win, how will you get back? It’ll take years, if you get back at all. And conscience was pushed against a metaphorical wall and told: because there were five children on the base, the youngest was three, and the poison attacked the nerves and they weren’t quite dead when I got there.
    And so they dodged and tracked across worlds as the microscopic changes began to multiply. Into the high meggas.
    There had been two blips on Linsay’s detector. The second one was lying in a crater, semi-conscious. From here he could see she too was wearing a basic belt, with limited detectors. It must have been like stepping into a well.
    Her gun was lying a few feet away. Linsay scooped it up and shoved it into a pocket, then turned his attention to the woman herself. She was wearing a red jumpsuit, ugly with pockets but highly practical for
movin’
, where what you couldn’t carry you didn’t take. A lightly built person could tote about sixty pounds of gear before battery drain began to soar. Most of the pockets were empty, but there were still a few unspent batteries. Linsay undid the belt and slung it over one shoulder. He picked up the woman and slung her over the other. Wrong, but there didn’t seem to be any obviously broken bones. If there were, then tough.
    A quarter of a mile away Valienté was tied to a tree and watching a pack of superbaboons. Judging by the sticks they carried they had already mastered the principle of the club and the hammer, and looked about ready to go on to trepanning and disembowelling. There was one that particularly concerned him, a big rangy brute with torn ears and yellow eyes as narrow and vindictive as the bridges of hell. It sat on a rock like a living gargoyle, just watching.
    A bullet kicked up dust at the foot of the rock. The superbaboon turned its muzzle eastwards and snarled soundlessly, bared teeth a row of yellow knives. Then it was gone, scampering ungracefully into the scrub with the rest of the troupe following it.
    Linsay appeared with the woman’s body over one shoulder. By some juggling, as Valienté couldn’t help noticing, the man contrived to untie his ropes without ever quite failing to point the rifle at him.
    ‘They could have killed me.’
    Linsay stepped back. ‘Quite probably,’ he said.