True Path Read online

  It was all like a dream to Sandra now. In fact, between her first timesplash in 2047 and her last one in 2050, she had been declared certifiably insane and had spent most of that time locked up by the courts in an institution. In Sandra’s opinion, she had been insane all her life until she got to know Jay. Just a sweet boy of nineteen at the time, he had sparked a tiny flame of self-respect in her that had grown steadily over the years.

  My God, Jay. Where are you now?

  She thought about him every day. Literally, every day. When they parted, with half of London in ruins, Jay heading to a new job in Brussels, and she on her way to the Porringer Institute—voluntarily, this time—she had known they might never meet again. When she decided she needed to keep away from him, to stay out of his world, she had been overcome with guilt. It was only survivable because someone else had come into her life. Someone who needed her more than he did.

  “You’re sure this stuff’s strong enough?” Olivia asked, picking at the netting.

  Sandra snapped out of her reverie. “The Air Force came and fired shotguns at it, remember? Then they blew up a grenade inside a tent made of it. It’ll be fine.”

  “Those drones might be moving at fifty kilometers a second when they get back. That’s a lot of momentum, even for little things.”

  “So you want to worry about this right now, when there’s nothing you can do about it? I did the maths. I did the experiments. It’ll hold.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just never touched the stuff before. It’s so light.”

  “You think I’d let my Little Piglets come to harm?”

  Olivia smiled. “Stupid of me.”

  The DDV was The Little Pig. In its belly were a hundred tiny drones—The Little Piglets. Once the DDV reached its destination time, two thousand years in the past, it would emerge into the empty fields of Iron Age East Anglia and orient itself in mid air with its four rotors. Then it would climb to a hundred meters and fire its rocket engines. Like a bat out of Hell, it would fly at full thrust for twelve seconds on a high, ballistic arc. Its trajectory would bring it down over the coastal town of Camelodenum, previously a Celtic town, then occupied by the invading Romans and renamed as Colchester. As the DDV plummeted to earth, it would open its belly and let the piglets out. A hundred little self-steering ornithopter drones, no bigger than dragonflies and bristling with sensors, would spread wide and start recording, storing away petabytes of data in their pinhead brains.

  And, if the archaeologists and historians were right, they would return with detailed high-quality recordings of the Celtic Queen Boudica leading her Iceni horde to defeat and massacre the Roman occupiers. It would be a triumph for the Direct History group and a record that would set the academic world buzzing for years to come. The DDV would land harmlessly in the sea. The drones would be almost indistinguishable from real insects. The chances of causing an anomaly—even a small splash—were infinitesimal.

  Yet the chance was always there, a fact reflected in the oversight and scrutiny the project had endured over the long years of its inception and development. Olivia had steered it through all of that, spending endless days in committees and hearings. Everyone needed to be convinced that the DDV would not land right on Boudica’s head and create a timesplash big enough to wipe out half of southern England. The only reason they had been allowed to proceed, Olivia had told Sandra in private, was that the military had seen so many interesting applications and wanted the technology.

  Sandra had been shielded from most of the bureaucracy and allowed to work in peace on building the rig—one of the most powerful time displacement field generators in the world—and getting The Little Pig and her piglets ready. Of course, she had agreed to letting RAF flight engineers critique her designs and CERN tekniks check her rig, but that had turned out to be a lot of fun. Waiting for the final sign-off from the MoD and then the Home Office had not been so enjoyable, but that was all over now. The Little Pig was finally flying and nothing could stop it.

  “It’s on its way back,” said Olivia, staring at the clock. Sandra regarded her friend without speaking. Olivia had been a rock throughout the whole project, but even rocks wear away in the end. The stress of this wait seemed like the final straw that might break her.

  “There’s still time for me to get you that sandwich,” Sandra said. The ones she had bought earlier still lay uneaten on the desk. It felt wrong to eat one in front of Olivia, having stuffed up the order.

  “You were right, I should have gone to lunch with you.”

  “Why don’t you go for a walk around the campus? I’m probably capable of staring at the clock all on my own for a while. You should get out. It’s a beautiful day.”

  Olivia fought an internal battle for a moment then nodded to herself. “You’re right. If I stay here, I’ll be a gibbering wreck before the drones get back. A ten minute walk won’t hurt, will it?” She turned to leave but stopped at once. “We should check the cameras,” she said.

  Sandra threw a pencil at her. “Get out. The cameras are fine.” She pointed to a display showing several views of the platform. “Everything’s fine. Bugger off before you make me a gibbering wreck too.”

  Olivia scowled. “Bully.”

  “Out.”

  Sandra watched until Olivia was out the door then turned back to the displays. She settled down to wait the thirty minutes or so until the drones came back. A lob was like dropping something massive but buoyant from a height into deep water. It sank and sank but, eventually, its buoyancy overcame its downward momentum and pushed it back up to the surface. That was the so-called yankback. She had experienced it herself. One moment you’re in the past, coping with the frenzy of a timesplash, the next you’re hurtling back through the nothingness outside of time. If you’re lucky, you have your helmet on, sealed and ready. If not …

  According to the clock, The Little Pig and her piglets had already been yanked out of Boudica’s time and were on their way back. They’d arrive where they stared from, no matter how far they had traveled at the other end. However, quantum uncertainties, and limits on the reversal of entropy, meant there would be slight spatial discrepancies. Nothing would arrive in quite the same place as when it started, nor with quite the same momentum. But the nets would catch the drones—even The Little Pig. The biggest problem would be the rocket exhaust. The rocket fuel burned at the other end would all come back too. It would have cooled, but it would still want to occupy a far greater volume than the original fuel. Their calculations suggested a percussive expansion as the exhaust gases blasted out through the netting and into the surrounding air. That’s why Sandra and Olivia needed to be behind a protective screen, with all the doors and windows open, and industrial-strength extractor fans running at full speed to suck the noxious fumes from the building.

  And that’s why no moron has ever sent a nuke back in time to cause a splash, she thought, with grim satisfaction. This technology was lethal enough without that kind of capability.

  The door opened behind her. “That wasn’t ten minutes,” she chided, swiveling in her chair.

  Olivia walked towards her on unsteady legs. Behind her, a dark, lean man with hard eyes walked close behind. Too close, Sandra realized. Behind him, the fresh-faced youth from the cafeteria came through the door. He looked back the way they had come and then shut the door after him.

  Instinctively, Sandra measured the distances between herself and the men, checked angles and spaces, identified potential weapons, cover, escape routes. She was still numb with shock, but part of her mind remembered how this worked. She was on her feet, weight shifting. She could take these two, she was sure. The boy was big and strong but that wouldn’t help him much. The older man looked tough and fast. He would be more of a problem. But she couldn’t see his right hand, the one behind Olivia’s back. If he had a gun in that hand, all bets were off.

  “Don’t try anything stupid,” the man said. He had an American accent. “Just keep calm. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.”
He stepped back a pace so that Sandra could see the pistol in his hand.

  “Do I know you?” she asked. There might still be a chance to disarm him, if she could just get close enough. An American, though. Some of Sniper’s lunatic, terrorist backers had been American. Was this some kind of payback?

  “We’ll have lots of time to get acquainted,” the man said. “Why don’t you sit down?” Sandra didn’t move. In a flash he had the gun against the back of Olivia’s head, holding the terrified physicist by the back of her collar. “Please, sit down.” Still, Sandra hesitated. The man looked hard and he looked determined, but he didn’t look cruel. She had seen cruel often enough to know it well. On top of that, he seemed completely in control of himself. If this man shot someone, it would be a deliberate, calculated act. It would not be in a passion of hatred or fear.

  “Let her go,” Sandra said. If she could stall this man another twenty minutes, the DDV would arrive with a bang and she might have a chance to overpower him.

  “Sandra,” the man said. “You are number one on a list of five possible targets. If you prove to be too much trouble, I will move on to number two. Do you understand me?”

  Sandra understood all right. She stepped back to her chair and sat down. Instantly, the tension in the room eased. The man took Olivia to a chair and made her sit down too, his gun still against her head. Without any signal, the young man went over to Sandra and tied her hands behind her. He grabbed her upper arms from behind and lifted her to her feet. The older man put away his gun and tied Olivia to her chair. Olivia was so frightened she gave no resistance at all, for which Sandra was immensely grateful.

  “Where are you taking me?” Sandra asked, since that was obviously the plan.

  The older man gave her a reproachful look. “I could tell you now if you like, but then I’d have to kill your friend.”

  “Olivia?” Sandra had to repeat her name to get her friend’s attention. “I’m going to be OK. You just wait here until someone comes. Mike and Greg will be along at two to help with processing the drones. Remember? Then you should go and see Cara, she needs the first four Fibonacci numbers. You won’t have to wait long. It’s all going to be OK.”

  “That’s enough,” the older man said. The younger one moved her towards the door.

  “No,” she said. “There’s something else. We’re running an experiment here. There will be a release of toxic gasses in sixteen minutes. You need to turn on the fans before we go, or Olivia will be dead before they find her.” He looked skeptical. “It’s the switch on the display there. The one marked ‘extractor fans’. Just flick it and I’ll go with you with no trouble. If you don’t, you’ll have to drag me every inch of the way.”

  He studied her face for a long while, then strode over to the display, found the switch and flicked it. The big fans boomed into life. He looked again at Sandra.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Can we go now?”

  With Olivia watching in wide-eyed horror, the two men took Sandra away.

  Chapter 4: Jay

  “You know damned well the threat hasn’t gone away.”

  Jay Kennedy paced the Superintendent’s office, too agitated to stand still. As a Chief Inspector, he had no business speaking to his superior like that, but the news had rattled him—however much he had been expecting it—and he refused to accept it.

  “Jay,” Superintendent Kappelhoff spoke in a strong, German accent. “We have known each other a long time. You and I were in the original TCU team that Bauchet set up all those years ago.”

  Jay clenched his jaw to stop himself screaming. This was not the end of an era. It was not some fond farewell to a glorious past. This was a stupid, near-sighted bureaucracy shutting down his department to save a few euros, when they should be ramping it up.

  He was high up in the Berlymont Building, Europol’s headquarters in Brussels. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the skies were gray and the city was a dismal mess of tangled highways and aging highrise office blocks. Europe was having another prolonged recession, and Brussels, ever since the center of European Government had switched to Berlin, appeared to be in terminal decline. All the same, Jay had come to love the place in the sixteen years he’d worked there.

  “You’re a victim of your own success, Jay,” the Super went on. “The Temporal Crimes Unit, under Bauchet’s leadership and then under yours, has been incredibly effective against the bricks. So effective that we really don’t need a centralized unit to coordinate their eradication. To all intents and purposes, they’re gone. We beat them. You won. There hasn’t been a major timesplash attempt for five years now. It’s time to wrap it up, Jay.”

  But Jay didn’t see it that way. “The threat has changed, that’s all. The bricks were a bunch of crazies, thrill seekers, psychos. They were born in a world of underground parties and young kids getting their kicks from drugs and weird tech. They just didn’t know when to stop. They let themselves become a weapon for every cashed-up organization on the planet with a grudge. But the bricks were a difficult and dangerous weapon to wield. Even the worst terror groups turned their back on them in the end. The real threat now is government-sponsored temporal crime. Only last month, the Russian Federation took out a Chechen town with a splash.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, we do. And that’s the kind of thing we need to be focusing on now.”

  The Superintendent’s tone hardened. “No, it isn’t. Government-sanctioned attacks are acts of war, or espionage, not criminal matters. Europol is a police organization. It’s the job of the European Secret Services and national counter-espionage units to worry about what governments are doing.”

  The TCU had always sat uncomfortably within Europol. There had been talk over the years of moving it into Interpol or the ESS, but they had each developed their own capabilities for dealing with timesplashing and no-one wanted it. By the time Jay got his promotion to Chief Inspector, the TCU had shrunk to a size where he could run the whole thing himself. It was a bittersweet moment when he took control of the unit he had devoted his professional life to.

  “So you’re just shutting it down? Just like that?” He realized he had just accepted the inevitable, and now he was merely whining. “What about my team? What about our ongoing operations?”

  “People will be dispersed back to their national police forces. Operations will be passed to Interpol. I’ll expect you to be able to do the handover and brief them in two weeks. The unit will close officially one month from today.”

  Jay sat down, defeated. “Yes, sir.”

  He stared at his feet but could feel the Superintendent watching him. “You haven’t asked about yourself.” Jay looked up at the Super. “If you want to stay in Europol,” he continued, “I’d be glad to fit you in anywhere that takes your fancy. Organized Crime could use somebody with your drive.” Jay said nothing, wondering if there was any drive left in him now. The Super pursed his lips. “You’re still a young man, Jay. What? Thirty-five? Thirty-six? You’ve done incredibly well. If you hadn’t insisted on sticking with the TCU, you might have done even better. Take a few days to think about where you want to go next and call my secretary. We’ll have dinner and talk it over. You should see this as an opportunity. The TCU was a dead end. This could be just what your career needs.”

  -oOo-

  “This could be just what your career needs!” Jay’s snarl surprised one of his sergeants. The woman was sitting in his office, apparently waiting for him, as he stomped inside and slammed the door after himself.

  “Chief?”

  “Never mind. What are you here for?”

  “You asked me to come in and talk about vacation arrears.”

  “Right. Well that doesn’t matter much now. I want you to call all the staff together, out there.” He waved in the direction of the open-plan office. “No exceptions. Big announcement. Anyone who isn’t here, patch them in on their commplants. I’ll be out …” He glanced
at the time. “… at ten past on the dot. Off you go.”

  The sergeant hesitated. “Can I tell them what it’s about?”

  “No, you can’t. Just do it.”

  She hurried off and Jay threw himself into his chair, swiveling round to look out the window at the drab city, trying not to think about leaving it. Already he had begun putting together the phrases he would need in a few minutes time. “I want to personally thank you all for your dedicated service … This is no reflection on the quality of work we’ve done here, in fact … Each of you will be relocated. There will be no redundancies.” Each new reassurance felt as if it stole a piece from his heart. Every last member of the TCU was as dedicated to their mission as Jay himself. He’d have them all in here, one by one over the coming days, each with that same feeling of having had their strings cut. Each looking to Jay to make some sense of it for them. The task of being encouraging and positive seemed overwhelming. He had no idea how he would do it. Even getting through this announcement seemed impossible.

  He asked himself how his former boss, his friend and mentor, Jacques Bauchet, would handle it. And the thought of Bauchet made Jay long to go over to France right that minute to see him. I will, he promised himself. As soon as I’ve got things in order here, I’m going to visit Jacques and Marie. If anyone could advise him as to what to do next, Bauchet was the man.

  The sergeant popped her head round the door and said, “They’re ready for you, Chief.”

  He nodded and took a deep breath.

  -oOo-

  “What will you do, Chief?”

  The question and answer session after the announcement had been difficult and long but that question was the one that decided Jay to call a halt. There was a fine line between being fair to his staff and allowing the team to wallow in self-pity. The fact that he increasingly felt the urge to wallow with them meant his judgment was probably not what it should be.

  “First thing I’m going to do is to make sure we do a proper handover to Interpol. We’re on the trail of some pretty nasty characters right now, and I don’t want any of them getting out from under us just because we’ve moved their case to another department. In the longer term, like everyone else here, I’ll be looking at what opportunities present themselves,” he said, trying to sound buoyant. “I’m used to working with the best, so it’s going to be hard finding somewhere else so good, but we’ve all got a chance now to find new directions, to reinvigorate our careers and re-inspire ourselves to do great things. The TCU was just the beginning. Thank you.”