And Viktor Luchov saw it all even as it happened.
At the very rim, where the plates of the disc were covered in rubber three inches thick, the Projekt Direktor was conversing with a group of scientists; the perimeter had been made safe, roped off with non-conductive, plastic-coated nylon; the disc not only carried a lethal voltage but was now linked to the sprinkler system. Fat white and blue sparks danced as Harry’s huge, powerful machine came roaring off the Möbius strip to erupt into this space-time.
The Screaming Eagle’s Dunlops were wide, heavy and of the very best rubber, but the sudden shock of the bike’s five hundred and seventy-plus pounds jarred fish-scale plates together in a crackle and hum of electrical discharge. Blue energies skittered across the disc like snakes of lightning, adding to the throaty chaos of snarling pistons in the cathedral acoustics of the spherical cavern. And overhead, the acid floodgates were opened!
The Necroscope’s intuitive, Möbius maths was on top form; he had calculated well and, after all, what could possibly go wrong in something slightly less than the space of a single second? Walking round that central cavern with Luchov (in the Direktor’s mind), he’d seen no guns there. The acid sprinkler outlets had been maybe twenty feet above the disc; they’d take a little time to activate and fill before they could commence spraying; he should be into the sphere Gate and gone before the first droplets smoked murderously down onto the steel plates.
And yet even as he’d emerged into the glare of the cavern and his tyres had shrieked on the plates where they tried to find purchase, even then he’d known that something was wrong. Not with his figures but with the plan itself, with what he already knew of that plan, with what he’d already seen of it in action. For he had seen something of it, yes … when he’d visited Faéthor in future time: his scarlet-tinged, neon line of life turning aside from its futureward thrust, shooting off at right-angles and disappearing in a brilliant burst of red and blue fire as it left this dimension of space and time and raced for Starside.
But only as it – that solitary life-line, one life-line -departed. Harry himself, Harry alone . . . without Penny!
Slowing from forty to thirty miles per hour while the bike yawed and his tyres found purchase, Harry remembered a vastly important rule: never try to read the future, for that can be a devious thing. But he had taken even this temporary deceleration into account, and even so the timing was still only a second, one tick of a clock. So what was wrong? The answer was simple: Penny was wrong.
Had she once obeyed him? Had she once obeyed his instructions to the letter? No, never! She might be in thrall to him, in love with him, fascinated by him, but she didn’t go in fear of him. He was her lover, not her master. And in her innocence, Penny had been inquisitive and vulnerable.
‘Don’t open your eyes,’ he’d said, but being Penny she had; opened them as they shot through the Möbius door into Perchorsk, opened them in time to see the glaring Cyclops-eye Gate looming where the bike skidded, fish-tailed and rocketed towards it. And seeing, ‘knowing’, they were going to crash, she’d reacted. Of course they were going to crash – crash right through – which was the whole plan and shouldn’t be her concern. If time wasn’t of the essence, he might have explained all of that to her.
All of which flashed across the Necroscope’s mind in the split second that Penny screamed and let go of his waist to cover her eyes . . . and his rear suspension bucking like a bronco to absorb the shuddering of the steel plates . . . and just exactly like a bronco ass-hooking the gasping girl into an aerial somersault! In the next split second he ruptured the Gate’s skin and shot through . . . but on his own, a thing alone. Or at best, with only Pete the Vampire Biker hanging on behind.
Shit! Pete’s deadspeak howled in Harry’s mind. Necroscope, you’ve lost your Pillion Pussy!