Free For King & Country by Robert Asprin, Linda Evans, James Baen Page A

sharp gasp from Miss Dearborne. They thumped back down and sent gravel flying. Lights blazed in most of the on-site cottages. Beckett's windows were a notable exception, dark as the night itself.
Poor bastard won't be needing them ever again, will he?
    He skidded to a halt in front of the door, having made the drive in three minutes flat. The main lab door stood open, held by an ashen Blundell. The man gestured frantically. A sharp babble of voices greeted Stirling. The senior scientists were clumped together, faces shocky and pale, voices shrill. Several of the grad students were crying. So was Indrani Bhaskar. Brenna McEgan was missing. So was Cedric Banning.
    "Where?" Stirling asked tersely.
    Blundell pointed, hand shaking violently, toward Beckett's office.
    The death inside that room was nearly too terrible for such a small space to contain. Terrance Beckett had died hard. His equipment lay in smashed profusion, his files scattered across the floor where violent struggles had swept them off his desk. Blood had pooled beneath the body, with splashes across the files, the front of the desk, the broken document trays. Given the placement of the wreckage, Beckett had been tempted out from behind his desk before the attack was launched, taking him by surprise in the middle of a conversation. He'd been knifed repeatedly and his skull crushed for good measure. Stirling didn't have to use guesswork on the type of knife. It lay on the floor beside its victim, all twenty-two wicked centimeters of it.
Commando fighting knife,
he catalogued the weapon automatically. American-made, high quality, and even easier to smuggle than firearms.
    Not a woman's choice of weapon.
    Or was it? It wouldn't take much strength to inflict fatal damage with a knife like that, and a woman attacker might explain the prolonged struggle. Beckett could easily have fought his way from one side of his office to the other, if his attacker were female. Less upper-body strength, weaker grip, and the women members of the research group were decidedly petite, compared with Beckett. Might explain the crushed skull, afterwards, as well.
Hell hath no fury...
    "You said there was worse," he turned abruptly, nearly running Blundell over in the process.
    "Yes." The project liaison had to swallow twice before his voice would hold steady. "There's—that is—"
    Fairfax Dempsey, Beckett's grad student, snarled, "It's Brenna bloody
McEgan,
that's what! She's set up the equipment and transferred through time!"
    Oh, dear God...
    "Show me."
    They led him into the transfer room, as they'd dubbed it. A row of padded tables, looking much like ordinary medical examination benches, lined one wall. Two of the five were occupied.
Two?
Brenna McEgan was closest to the far corner, a psychological choice indicating, possibly, subconscious fear of being caught. A bruise discolored her cheek, evidence of the struggle with poor Beckett. The other traveler was Cedric Banning.
His
table was the one closest to the door—the position of pursuer, or perhaps just plain haste. Both of them were soaking wet, from the storm or from attempts to remove blood from clothing or both. McEgan's clothing was badly bloodstained; so was Banning's. He must've come in and discovered Beckett, tried to reach the poor bugger, slipped and fallen in the gore...
    "Banning left a note," Dempsey said, eyes reddened from the attempt to hold back tears. "She'd killed Beckett before he got here, set up the equipment to transfer herself. Banning plugged his headset into her coordinates and went in pursuit, to stop her..." Dempsey was clutching a crumpled sheet of graph paper, torn from a notebook.
    Stirling smoothed it out, frowning over the hasty scrawl.
    McEgan's done it, the bloody bitch, the note read, Banning's handwriting nearly illegible. Must have known I was on to her, and the SAS showing up spooked her into jumping. Found out last week she's Cumann Na Mbann, although I couldn't prove it. Came in here to warn