Free Time Past by Maxine McArthur

thing I could do about it. I didn’t enjoy that, I can tell you. Sitting there sucking my rations and doing my exercises, waiting for whatever An Serat—or whoever—had decided for me.”
    “I know the feeling.”
    “The life-pod worked fine and I ended up in the sea. Just off the coast, with a little raft to paddle in. Thoughtful, the Invidi. Bloke in a fishing boat picked me up. He was suspicious at first but I sounded enough like a local to pass. Said I’d got lost and spent the night drifting. Mist as thick as Jupiter. He wasn’t going to make any trouble, the engines on that boat were too damn quiet for plain fishing. No lights or anything. He let me come inshore with him as a family member to get past the harbor checks. He didn’t want anything to do with Customs.
    “Then I tried to follow your signal... Good job that transponder is standard equipment now.”
    I twisted and felt under my shoulder blade. “That’s what I wanted to say. It must be a different signal. I took the transponder out.”
    “Look for yourself.” He passed me the locator, a flat square you could fit in your palm. The smooth syntal molded itself to my hand with heaviness out of proportion to its real weight. Its signal confirmation winked at full strength. I looked at the small thing, solid proof that there was a future and it wasn’t all in my imagination. Then I looked up at Murdoch and smiled—he was even more solid proof.
    He half-smiled back, mystified. “Are you sure you got the transponder out?”
    I remembered a tiny, bloody splinter on Grace’s finger. “Yes. Unless they put a backup in without telling me.”
    “Must be.”
    “That would explain why I still couldn’t get past the alarms.” I saw his expression of confusion. “When I tried to go into a shop in the city, something set off an alarm. That’s why I asked Grace to take out the transponder.”
    He snorted. “How did you explain it?”
    “I said it was a kind of microchip. They put them into dangerous criminals in this country, but I said in my country political prisoners get tagged too.”
    “Jeez, what a century.”
    “But listen, even after that, I couldn’t get through. I thought it was the Seouras implant, so I just kept away from wired places after that. Maybe it was a backup transponder.”
    “So if you want to go through any security barriers, we’ll have to take out the backup too.”
    I wriggled my shoulders. “Ouch. I suppose so.” It still might be the Seouras implant which was setting off the alarms, but if so we could do nothing. The implant was a neural connection originally installed in my neck by the Seouras at the time of the Abelar Treaty. I’d agreed to it, so that I could understand what the Seouras were saying and communicate this to the others.
    Murdoch stretched, his shoulders making a faint popping sound. “Halley, why did An Serat send me after you?”
    “I’m surprised he ‘sent’ you anywhere,” I said.
    I couldn’t reconcile the idea of an Invidi and concrete action. Not that Invidi aren’t good at getting people to do things, but they do it by maneuvering people into situations where we do what we want to do, only it ends up being what the Invidi want. Like An Barik exploited my friend Quartermaine’s desire to know more about the Invidi and asked him to retrieve a device from
Calypso.
Like An Barik used my desire to protect the station from the Seouras to keep himself safe while he waited for
Calypso
to arrive. Or like An Serat used my desire to find out how
Calypso
worked to get me here in the past—although this one was guesswork on my part. Even like how the Invidi had used the Bendarl desire for expansion and the militaristic structure of their society to create ConFleet to keep order in the Confederacy.
    There seemed no logical reason for An Serat to want me or Murdoch in the past, yet he obviously did. Unless it was something on
Calypso II
that he wanted. Which didn’t make sense either, because the