True Path Page 3

  “There are no terrorists on my ship, Agent Cartwell.”

  “Nevertheless—”

  Lee raised his voice. “I said …” But, seeing the Fed wasn’t speaking any more, he let the point go. “I saw the fighting over there.” The captain looked off towards the fires that were still smoldering. “My men and I have been armed and on alert since it started. No-one got aboard who shouldn’t have. You can take my word for it.”

  Cartwell’s sneer showed what he thought of the captain’s word. “If you would just permit a quick search, I can assure my superiors that there is no need to hold your ship in dock until a more thorough investigation can be made.”

  It was an empty threat and the captain knew it. “Good luck with that, mate. Here’s what I reckon you should do. Take your pack of God-botherers and stick them back in that antiquated APC of yours, then drive into town and have a good night of burning gays and torturing old women and all the other fun things you get off on in the name of your fucking god, because I’d sooner send the lot of you to Hell this night than let any one of you set foot on my ship.”

  Cartwell was practically foaming at the mouth. Even Polanski was shocked at the Australian’s blasphemous outburst.

  “Atheist!” one of the militiamen said and spat into the black waters below him.

  “Foreigner,” grumbled another.

  Polanski heard a quiet scrape beside him and turned to find Peter crossing the roof to join him. The young man scowled an accusation at him as he settled into the shadows. In the lad’s hand, the blade of a hunting knife glistened.

  Polanski looked back towards the drama unfolding on the gangplank. There was no way the Feds could storm the ship without being cut down by the captain and his men. All that Cartwell could do was to retreat and call for backup. Despite Cartwell’s fury, he was unlikely to do anything of the kind. He’d tried bullying his way onto the ship. Beyond that there was nothing he could do apart from escalate the matter to levels so high he would need absolute certainty that Polanski was aboard even to contemplate it. Even so, there was always the possibility that Cartwell was a fool, or that Captain Lee would goad him into starting a firefight.

  The silence dragged out until Cartwell turned abruptly and shouted at his men to get back to the transport. With muttered complaints, they obeyed him. Before Cartwell joined them, he turned again to Lee and said, “I’ll be praying that we meet again, Captain.” He stalked down the gangplank and then posted the militiamen to guard the dock before driving away with the other Fed.

  Polanski watched in silence for a while to make sure the SOBs were going to obey their orders, then tapped Peter on the shoulder and led him off the roof and back to their cabin.

  “You won’t need that,” he told the young man, nodding towards the hunting knife still in his hand. “The Feds are more scared of disturbing their bosses than they are of letting us get past them. We’re safe now.”

  Peter nodded and sheathed the knife. He looked into Polanski’s eyes and said, “I’d die before I let them take you, Zak.”

  Polanski brushed his declaration aside with a laugh. “Save your passion for the girls in Liverpool.” And pray to God I never put you to the test.

  Later, he left the cabin again and found the captain on the bridge.

  “That was a brave thing you did,” he told the Aussie.

  “I hate those bastards,” Lee said.

  “All the same …”

  “My mother always told me the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to him. Reckon she was right. Anyway, I know who you are. Anything I can do to help, you just name it.”

  Polanski said, “You could give me my diamonds back.”

  “Fuck off, mate!” The captain laughed loudly. “Now get back below decks like I told you, or I’ll fucking shoot you myself.”

  Chapter 3: Sandra

  The drone delivery vehicle sat on its four spindly legs on a raised platform about three meters square. Black and yellow stripes marked the edges of the platform. The words, “Danger. Authorized persons only beyond this line,” were stenciled on its sides. Thick cables snaked away to banks of capacitors, humming softly in gray steel cabinets. Behind a Perspex wall, two women watched the readouts projected in their virtual displays. Their hands moved confidently within the sensor fields. Their focus on the task was absolute.

  “DDV power-up,” one of them said. The rotors on the little quadcopter drone began to whine.

  “Counting down,” said the other, and a clock, projected so that they both could see it, began running backward in hundredths of a second. “Power at ten percent. All nominal.”

  “DDV to operating height.” The little quadcopter rose into the air and climbed to one meter where it hovered, rock steady.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “DDV to automatic.” The quadcopter went through a rapid series of maneuvers, ending up exactly where it started. “Test cycle complete. All nominal.”

  “Twenty seconds. Field at fifty percent.”

  The two women exchanged glances. It was all going exactly as planned. They had worked for six months on the DDV and its precious cargo and in a few seconds, their baby would be on its way.

  Sandra allowed herself a moment of triumph. Her friend and colleague, Dr. Olivia Bradley, turned back to the displays and said, “Field at eighty-five percent. Ten seconds.”

  Sandra checked her readouts. Everything had a green light. “All systems nominal.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “DDV main engines online.”

  They both shifted their gaze to the quadcopter. Rocket engines mounted in its stubby wings would eventually explode into life, but not for a few minutes yet.

  The clock’s digits raced down to a row of zeros and the DDV popped out of existence. The clock immediately reset for a one hour and twenty-seven minute countdown.

  With a whoop, Sandra leapt into the air, skipped over to Olivia and high-fived her. For a while they danced and hugged among the desks and cables, Sandra did most of the leading while Olivia, looking bemused but happy, let herself be pulled about.

  “Time to grab lunch before The Little Pig comes home,” Sandra said, dragging Olivia to the door.

  Olivia laughed at Sandra’s pet name for the DDV.

  “How can you think of eating while the DDV is out there on its first mission?”

  “Oh, Piggy’s OK, and there’s not a thing we can do about it if it isn’t.”

  “All the same,” Olivia said, insisting, causing Sandra to halt. “There’s a lot to do.”

  “All the more reason to grab lunch while we can. Once all that data gets back, neither of us is going to get a break for the next few weeks.” Sandra let go of Olivia’s arm and stepped back. She could see her friend would only fret the whole time they were away from the lab if she made her leave. “OK. I’ll go and get lunch. I’m going to have something really nice to celebrate, and I’ll bring you back a cheese sandwich, or something else horrible, because you’re such a miserable old bugger.” She headed for the door again.

  “Don’t be too long,” Olivia called after her. Sandra grinned and gave her friend the finger over her shoulder on the way out.

  Outside it was a bright autumn day. Sandra was almost skipping, so pleased that the DDV had launched successfully. She checked the time on her commplant. Right now The Little Pig would be hurtling back through time through the pseudospatial void. She had done the trip twice herself—the last time, sixteen years ago in London—so she could visualize the DDV tumbling through the icy blackness with nothing but its accelerometers to tell it that it wasn’t perfectly still. Her own trips had been short, a couple of minutes each time, but the DDV was going much farther back in time than she ever had. Its flight-time was thirty-six minutes each way. Thirty-six minutes in that awful nothingness. It made Sandra shudder every time she thought about it. It made her remember that first time—with her boyfriend, Sniper—sucking on an empty air tank on the return trip, so scared she could barely thi
nk, and Sniper tearing off her helmet, pushing his snarling face against hers.

  Sandra stopped, looking around at the bright sunshine, the brick buildings and the little groups of students on the lawns. Her breathing was labored and her heart was thumping. Even after all those years, the memory of that timesplash could still do that to her. She closed her eyes, then opened them again after a moment and continued walking.

  Sniper is dead, she told herself. He died sixteen years ago in a backwash in Deptford, his body torn to pieces by machine-gun bullets, his creepy little teknik also dead. The police had no idea who had killed them, but Sandra always supposed it had been Sniper’s colleague, Camilla Vergara. She seemed the sort who would get her revenge.

  It was all another world, another life. Sandra had been just fifteen when it started and only seventeen when Sniper died. She’d called herself “Patty” back then. All timesplashers had tags. It had all seemed so cool. Now it just seemed silly. Even Olivia had once had a tag. She’d been “Nahrees.” When Sandra met her she was working as a teknik for MI5, helping them create their own timesplashing capability so they could fight Sniper and his kind.

  Thinking of Olivia made Sandra smile. Olivia had never been cool by any stretch of the imagination. She was pure geek to the very core. Being Dr. Olivia Bradley, a lecturer in the Temporal Sciences Department of the University of East Anglia was much more her style.

  A young man caught Sandra’s eye. He was tall, well-built, fresh-faced. The right age to be a student—a freshman, anyway—but he didn’t look right. His clothes were wrong. Was that all? She studied him. He stood outside the cafeteria building, now intently reading the menu, but when she first spotted him, he’d been staring straight at her.

  Which wasn’t so unusual. Sandra knew she was a beautiful woman. The kind of beautiful that made her stand out like a swan in a flock of geese. Tall, athletic, with a natural grace and elegance that made Siamese cats look gauche, she could easily have made a living as a model, except that she had not wanted her picture flashed around. As a teenager she had caught the eye of Sniper, the most famous brick in the world, and had been photographed on his arm at every fashionable party in Europe. At thirty-three, her beauty had deepened and matured and supposedly half the boys—and faculty—on campus were secretly in love with her. Some not so secretly. But everyone knew to keep their distance. She would let no-one near her and had a well-honed repertoire of stinging rejections. Besides, she had a black belt in karate—she was on the university team—and there were rumors that she secretly worked for the security services and that she had killed people. The rumors weren’t quite true. She did not work for the security services. She wanted nothing to do with that life at all. She had once killed a man, though.

  The young man was still reading the menu. Sandra suspected he was watching her reflection in the cafeteria windows. Just a lust-struck teenager? Or something more sinister?

  She went inside and bought the first two sandwiches she could grab, snatched a couple of random drinks from the cabinet, and a couple of chocolate bars from the display next to the checkout, bundled them all into a bag, the cafeteria automatically deducting the cost from her commplant. She hurried back to the lab. She walked fast, waiting until she’d traveled fifty meters on a straight stretch of footpath before stopping suddenly and turning round.

  The path behind her was clear. No-one took a sharp turn into the shrubbery. The young man was nowhere to be seen.

  Stupid, she told herself. Paranoid. She carried on to the lab. It was all this reminiscing about the past. She thought she was over all that. She’d spent weeks in a loony bin—the Porringer Institute for Mental Well-Being, to give it its proper title—and ten years in therapy after the events of 2050. She bloody well should be over it.

  But, of course, hunting down Sniper—with a little help from MI5 and Europol—and facing him in London in 1902, were not what her problems had been about. The real issues had been to do with why she’d become involved with a bastard like Sniper in the first place. Getting to the root of that had been why her therapy had been such a long and painful road.

  Yet she’d made it. Sorted herself out. Made up for all the school she’d missed, gone to university, discovered an aptitude for engineering and maths, and been one of the first graduates of Exeter University’s brand new Master of Science degrees in Temporal Engineering. Her therapist had worried about her attraction to the mechanics of time travel, but Sandra thought it only natural that she’d be fascinated by something that had so dramatically affected her life. And, when she started applying for teknik jobs, she found Nahrees, running her own Direct History team there at UEA.

  “You were quick,” Olivia said, looking up from her work.

  “Was I? I suppose I just wanted to get back to stop you messing up all my calibrations.”

  Olivia pulled a tight smile. “Once. Once I turned the wrong knob.” She sighed. “What did you get me?”

  Sandra glanced at the flight time display and saw the DDV had been falling through the pseudospatial medium for over twenty-five minutes. She hoped it would come out the other end still functioning. They had tested The Little Pig in zero pressure at almost zero Kelvin for much longer periods. It would be OK.

  She tipped the contents of her bag onto the desktop. “Er, ham and cheese, or …” Her heart sank. “Beef and horseradish.” Olivia was a vegetarian.

  “What happened out there?” Olivia asked, suddenly serious.

  “I, em …”

  “A brick?”

  Sandra knew what Olivia was thinking. It was the same thing that had sprung to mind when she saw the young man watching her: old enemies. There were people from the old timesplashing scene who knew Sandra had played a part in taking down Sniper and his team. Most of the old timesplashers—the “bricks” as they were known back then—had moved out of the time travel business and into petty crime. Sometimes, not so petty. A couple of timesplashers were big names in organized crime now. It was always a possibility that one of them would decide it was time to settle an old score.

  “I’m probably just being paranoid,” Sandra said, trying to convince herself.

  “Shit.” Olivia sounded scared.

  “It’s nothing. Probably. Just some kid, ogling me.”

  “Did he follow you?” It struck Sandra that her friend had been employed by MI5, and would have undergone at least basic training, even though she had been on the technical staff. So many years ago. The idea of her slightly plump, rather matronly friend on a firing range, or practicing tradecraft, seemed ludicrous.

  “I don’t think so. Look, it was probably nothing.”

  “Do you want to …? You know.”

  They’d spoken about it just once, on a boozy night out three years ago. Sandra had told Olivia about the bag she kept packed, the secret bank account with her emergency fund, the passports in false names. Yet Olivia had remembered.

  “Are you kidding? With The Little Pig out there on its first mission? No way.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Shocked that this was escalating into the realms of panic so quickly, Sandra decided to quash it, firmly. “I am not disappearing into the night to leave you to take the credit for all my hard work. For all I know, you planted that kid to spook me just so you could get all the glory.”

  Olivia’s worried expression twitched into a smile. “It’s no wonder there are people out there who want to kill you. I feel the urge myself, sometimes.”

  “Come on, let’s get the nets up.”

  Olivia seemed reluctant to let go of her concern, but allowed herself be drawn into the work. They needed to fit fine, strong netting around the platform from which the DDV had been launched.

  “I can’t believe it’s gone back two thousand years,” Sandra said, although that wasn’t strictly true. These days she fully understood the energy fields that would lob an object out of the present and into the past, through the nothingness in between. Even so, the sense of wonder at the achie
vement hadn’t left her.

  “You and Jay did pretty well,” Olivia said, referring to the lob they’d made in London, sixteen years ago.

  “We agreed not to mention that.”

  “Sorry, your stalker friend just stirred it all up again.”

  Sandra felt her stomach flip as she remembered what had happened. It had all started with Sniper. He and two other bricks had gone back 150 years to the British Museum Library to assassinate Pyotr Illyich Lenin, who had been visiting there on the fourth of April, 1902. The idea of a timesplash was to create a paradox, to change as much as possible so that the past became incompatible with the present. That was the essence; lob a brick back into the timestream and make as big a disturbance as possible. For the brick it’s the ride of a lifetime—if you’re of a disposition that likes wild, deadly mayhem. And that was all that Sniper and his kind lived for. And the best part is that whatever damage you do to history sets itself straight. The past reassembles itself. The anomaly is removed. Even the bricks are yanked back to their own time, as if the Universe just spits them out. Yet the splash ripples forward through time, and when those ripples hit the present, the acausal chaos is felt again. Only this time, any destruction is not corrected. Make a big enough splash, far enough back in time, and the backwash hits the present with the force of a nuclear bomb.

  Sandra shuddered. The willingness of crazy psychopaths like Sniper to go back and risk their lives for the thrill of making a bigger, messier splash had soon been exploited by every terrorist group and organized crime gang who could find a splashteam willing to hit the targets of their choice. Beijing had been all but wiped off the map. So had Mexico City. London had been saved from utter destruction only because Sandra Malone and her friend, Jay Kennedy, had persuaded Europol and MI5 to help them go after Sniper.