Ripping Time by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Marcus took one look at the burly construction workers running toward them and swore savagely in the language only he, alone of all residents on TT-86, could understand. His Gaulish tribe was as extinct as the language they’d spoken. But his children were still alive. He intended to keep them that way. “This way,” he snarled, spinning around and plunging toward Residential. “Down-timers know all the secret ways through this station!”

Skeeter had taught Marcus routes he’d never suspected could be used to get from one side of the station to the other. Those escape routes had proven useful when he and Ianira had needed to slip away from the pressing attentions of her adoring acolytes, trying to gain a little privacy for themselves. Marcus had never dreamed he would need them to save his little family from cold-blooded murder. Why anyone would want to kill them, he could not imagine. But he intended to find out.

Marcus might be nothing more than an ex-slave, a down-timer without legal rights. But he was a husband and a father and an “ ‘eighty-sixer,” a member of the insane, fiercely independent, intensely loyal community of residents who called Time Terminal Eighty-Six home. Whoever sought to kill them, they had failed to take that particular fact into account. ‘Eighty-sixers took care of their own.

Even if it meant breaking up-time laws to do so.

* * *

By the time Skeeter arrived at the aerie, Bull Morgan’s glass-walled office was packed, standing room only. And that was without the howling mob of reporters trying to get past security to the elevator and stairs that led up to the station manager’s ceiling-level office. The elevator had been crowded, too, with ‘eighty-sixers responding to the emergency call for search teams. Connie Logan, owl-eyed behind her thick glasses and dressed as outlandishly as ever in bits and pieces of various costumes she’d been testing when the call had gone out, stood crammed into one corner, trying not to jab anybody with the pins sticking out of her clothes. Arley Eisenstein, restauranteur of one of the ten most famous restaurants on the planet and married to the station’s head of medicine, stared at the elevator doors with his jaw muscles clenched so tight, Skeeter wondered why his teeth hadn’t broken yet. Brian Hendrickson, station librarian and a man who hadn’t forgotten the circumstances of Skeeter’s disastrous wager with Goldie, any more than he’d forgotten anything else he’d ever seen, heard, or read, was swearing colorfully in a language Skeeter had never heard in his life. Ann Vinh Mulhaney had come upstairs from the weapons range in company with a woman Skeeter recognized as one of the Ripper Watch Team members. Both women were as silent as ghosts and very nearly as pale.