Monday Morning

 Kevin stubbed his toe on the way into the lab.

 "Bugger! Big buggery bollocks with an extra dose of bugger."

 Cam looked up from the terminal, his disapproval clear.

 "Kevin," he said, "I thought I told you not to swear in here. Do you have no fucking manners?"

 "Sorry."

 It was one of those mornings. One of those bloody awful Monday mornings after one of those bloody awful weekends where the world seems to be going just right up until about two in the morning, when there is the polite rebuttal, the inevitable kebab and the long slow descent into the depression that will ultimately become Monday morning. 1998 had seen forty weekends like that already, and Cam Stewart wanted a holiday.

 London was pretty cool, he reckoned, and Kevin was okay as a partner, but he missed Paisley. Pie and chips, done the proper way.

 It was one of those depressing mornings when the last thing you needed were a couple of time travellers turning up and begging you for help.

 Typically, three turned up. They fell out of space-time about twelve inches above the floor, and landed awkwardly. A middle aged couple and a very familiar woman, stumbling as they emerged into reality once more. Clearly they'd been running before they arrived.

 "Layra!" Kevin rushed forward to help her to her feet.

 That was typical of Kevin. Always thinking with his genitalia, desperately hoping that some day he'd win Layra back. Didn't he realise that the only reason she'd let him in on her big bad secret was that she was trying to warn him off?

 Cam checked out the other two. Both in their fifties. The man had dark brown hair, greying at the temples in a way that could pass for distinguished. He was getting fat, middle-aged spreading and it showed on his jowls and the beginnings of a paunch. He had a short rifle in a holster under his jacket. The woman was wiry, still kept herself in shape obviously. Shoulder length hair -- pure white --pulled back into a pony tail, and piercing blue eyes.

 "Cam, Kevin," said Layra. "I'd like you to meet my parents -- Joe and Angie Morris. Mum, Dad -- these are my friends."

 "Pleased to meet you."

 "That's a pretty crazy story, Layra," said Kevin, downing the last of his beer and eyeing the leftover spaghetti on Angie's plate. "Futursitic superweapons that you're not certain of the purpose of, insane artificial intelligences that want to fire your mum into the sun and psionic implants that let you come and go pretty much unseen. It's a bit far fetched."

 Cam leaned forward to talk to Joe and Angie. "Kevin didn't believe that Layra was a time traveller till she showed him the Cretaceous. I thought he 'd got over that by now."

 "Have you ever travelled yourself, Cam?" asked Joe.

 "Just the once. Layra took me to the Kennedy assassination. It was bloody weird, and I felt sick. Dunno if that was the time travel or the brains splattering everywhere. I just felt so fucking impotent, know what I mean?"

 "Every time you travel in time, you make a difference, son. Sometimes it's only a small difference -- you squash a bug, you cause a slightly different current of air to flow. Sometimes you make a big difference. Fact is, it all sorts itself out. Time continues. So I gave up worrying."

 "Very philosophical."

 "Yeah -- I need more beer."

 Angie was just sitting there, very quiet, pushing spaghetti round her plate with her fork. She was obviously ill -- her face was pale, and had almost a yellow tone to it. Her skin seemed almost translucent enough to see bones through, and her eyes -- were dead.

 "So," said Cam after a pause that seemed to last forever. "What do you need a couple of medical technology postgrads for?"

 Cam woke up with a pounding in his head that turned out to be Kevin hammering on his door. He struggled into some boxers and opened the door. Kevin burst in, in shorts and a tee shirt, with Layra close behind, tucking her blouse into her jeans.

 "What sort of time do you call this?" asked Cam, trying to find his watch in the mess of papers on his desk.

 "I call it about seven thirty. We should be thinking about heading off."

 Cam groaned.

 "I'll make you a coffee," said Kevin, and headed off to the kitchen.

 "I'm sorry about this," said Layra. "But we need to head off at the right time. The window of opportunity is pretty small, especially if we're going to do a precision jump."

 Cam groaned again. He'd let Layra talk him into jumping two thousand years into the future, using stolen technology that she -- by her own admission -- didn't fully understand. To be more precise, actually, it had been Angie that had talked him into it, just by looking at him, wordlessly with those sad grey eyes. He knew that he wanted to help her. Layra had known that he would -- of course. Just as she knew that she'd be able to get Kevin to help by smiling sweetly and wiggling her hips at him.

 He didn't quite believe her story.

 There was no denying that Angie was ill, though, and the twentieth century wasn't the place to help her. She needed medical attention in specialist facilities.

 Only the facilities were only available in the offices of this Planetary Hazard Assault Squad, and only in this one time period. And those offices would be swarming with people who would like to take Angie apart, dismantle her. So they needed someone they could trust. And, thought Cam, someone they could manipulate.

 Cam hadn't been surprised to find out that Angie was a cyborg. Nothing about Layra and her family surprised him any more.

 "Layra," he said. "About Kevin..."

 She looked down at the floor, chewed her lip.

 "Yeah," she said. "I'll be careful."

 "Try not to hurt him -- he's been through a lot lately. The last thing he needs is for you to show up and turn his life upside down again."

 "Believe me," she said. "If there was any other way..."

 Then Kevin came back with the coffee, and Cam set about trying to find his jeans.

 It had always seemed to Cam Stewart that the best way to serve mankind was to save lives, in whatever way possible. When he realised that he'd never make it as a doctor, he thought briefly about dentistry before settling for medical technology. Building tools to help the doctors of tomorrow save lives more efficiently. He had never imagined that before he turned twenty-five he would be pointing a gun at one of the doctors of the future, his finger flicking nervously against the trigger. He was sweating, and probably more scared than the man he was about to...

 "I can't do this," he said, to nobody in particular. "I can't fucking do this."

 He didn't have to. Joe brought his gun down on the back of the doctor's neck, knocking him unconscious.

 Cam dropped the gun as though it was on fire.

 "I have no idea how you do that, man," he said.

 "Practice," replied Joe, grinning.

 Kevin came into the operating theatre, holding Angie. The jump had taken a lot out of her, and her condition had worsened considerably. She looked a lot older that she had yesterday, but that could have been a trick of the light.

 Layra brought up the rear, holding a gun with casual familiarity. Cam wondered if she'd used it.

 "We made it," she said. "The entrances are secured and we didn't trigger any security systems. I reckon we've got about two hours to open Mum up, stabilise her, and close her up again."

 It sounded simple, the way she said it. Cam had been awake half the night worrying about it.

 Angie had -- in a very real sense -- two hearts. One was the usual flesh and blood run of the mill type heart that most normal humans had, and the other was a heart of stone. Mildly radioactive. Highly unstable. Charged with artron energy apparently, from too much time travel.

 Angie had explained the dangers over dinner, her breath laboured, and her hands wringing her napkin with fierce intensity.

 "Twenty five years ago," she said, "we used to travel around a lot with an expert on these things. He explained the dangers to us. It seems..." She paused to choke on her food at this point. "It seems that I am little more dangerous than I thought. Expose my heart to extreme heat and you can tear space-time. Control that tear, and you have a significantly powerful weapon -- one powerful enough to erase the history of an entire race."

 Chilling words, delivered evenly, in a tone that left Cam in no doubt as to their sincerity.

 Kevin helped Angie up on to the operating table and started hunting for something that looked like anaesthetic.

 "I've got a question," said Cam, once he was sure that Angie was fully under. "Angie's heart is dangerous, yes? So what happens if it falls into the wrong hands?"

 "It's never happened, son," said Joe. "See, she's a slicer, hacks into systems, finds out the threats, neutralises them. She can look after herself."

 "I don't doubt that. But what do we do with her heart once we've replaced it? Surely it will be just as dangerous."

 Joe thought about it for a moment. "We... We put it somewhere safe."

 And Cam let the subject drop.

 Joe was slumped in the corner, polishing his gun. Layra was patrolling the entrances to the surgical wing. Kevin was resting while Cam worked on...

 Angie was lying open on the operating table looking less than human. Her chest was opened, and several panels had been removed from her substructure. There were several circuit diagrams lying on the floor, sketched quickly by Cam in the hope that they would help when the time came to put her back together again.

 "I'm going for a walk," explained Kevin, peeling off his gloves and striding out of the operating theatre.

 It took him about five minutes to find Layra, for her to realise who he was and not shoot him. She was standing by a set of double doors, wedged shut with a broom handle, looking out of the window at the stars in the sky.

 "A romantic night," he said, praying that he didn't sound corny. "A full moon."

 "You're trying to chat me up when you should be operating on my mum. Is that politically correct these days?" She was licking her lips, and she clearly had no objections to the attention. "And it's not the moon. It's the Earth. We're on the moon."

 "Oh," he replied.

 "Look, Layra, I just wanted to say that when all this is over, I just wanted to... that is, I thought that maybe you and I could... if it's not a stupid suggestion, but you see I kind of hoped that..."

 She kissed him softly on the lips.

 "You're babbling, Kevin."

 "Take me with you."

 There. He'd said it. This is where the world came crashing down on him, where she laughed and told him that there was a time and a place for everyone and that he should stay in his, and she would try to find hers. Or worse, she laughed at him, for his presumption.

 "Okay," she said.

 And he grabbed her and held her close.

 "FUCKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!"

 "Sounds like Cam needs my help," he said, pecking her on the cheek.

 "FUCKING KEVIN GET YOUR FUCKING ARSE IN HERE NOW!"

 "Better go and see what he wants."

 Cam had removed the final plate on his own -- the one covering Angie's artificial heart. Kevin looked into the cavity. Cam and Joe and Layra looked into the cavity. The radioactive heart looked back at them.

 "Fuck," said Kevin.

 "Don't swear," replied Cam.

 Angie's two hearts were entwined -- the stone heart merging with the flesh imperceptibly.

 "We can't operate on that," said Kevin, gently. "It would kill her."

 "Close her up," said Joe, pain in every word. "Close her up and bring her round. We're taking her home." There was a tear in his eye.

 Cam replaced the panel over Angie's heart and started rebuilding connections, while Kevin went to scrub up again.

 It took two hours. Cam and Kevin were working as fast as they could without risking damage, while Layra and Joe paced. Both were clearly upset, and impatient to leave.

 With impeccable timing, the security guards arrived as Cam was applying the derma-seal to close Angela's chest.

 The first blast pierced Kevin's shoulder, the impact sending him across the operating table. There was a swift reply from Layra and Joe, taking out the first four guards in a matter of seconds. But there were more.

 "Layra!" shouted Joe. "Get us out of here!"

 Layra pulled the time vector generator out of her pocket, and edged her way backwards to the operating table.

 "Grab Mum," she said to Kevin. "Grab her and keep in contact with me. We need phsyical contact for this thing to work."

 Cam and Joe joined them as they huddled together in the centre of the room.

 And with a shimmering and a slight wheezing noise, they vanished.

 Almost all of them.

 Kevin looked around the room. Him, and Angie -- now regaining consciousness. The sound of boots in the distance, and no way out.

 "Jadi?" she said, as he struggled to his feet, her deceptively frail body in his arms.

 "No, Angie," he said. "Only Kevin."

 "Kevin?"

 He only had one hope, he realised. Only one place to hide.

 He stumbled into the corridor, and took the twelve painfully deliberate steps to the room next door -- the cryogenic suspension suite.

 Layra arrived back form her third attempt just after eleven, the sad look in her eyes telling Cam and Joe that she hadn't found them this time either. She looked tired.

 "So what happens now?" she asked Joe.

 "Now," he replied, "we go home. We let Cam here get on with his life, and we give up. It's what your mother would want."

 "I don't believe that, Dad, and neither do you."

 "Let it drop, pumpkin. Let your mother rest in peace."

 Layra looked into her father's pleading eyes. He had been through a lot with her mother, she knew. Some things that he wouldn't talk about, some things that he would. He had secrets from her, even now.

 "Okay, Dad. I'll let her rest."

 But she didn't.

 TO BE CONTINUED