It’s 2066…
and the most wanted man in America is about to destroy the entire nation…or save it.In this thrilling continuation of his popular TimeSplash series, Graham Storrs delivers “a fantastic speculative thriller” about what it would mean to actually change history…in a fast-paced action-packed novel filled with great characters, a sprinkling of romance, and a new and intriguing take on time travel.
True Path: A Timesplash Novel
by Graham Storrs
4.5 stars – 4 Reviews
Kindle Price: $4.99
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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Here’s the set-up:
The most wanted man in America is about to destroy the entire nation… or save it.
It’s 2066 and Sandra has kept a low profile for 16 years, working as a tech in a quiet British university, hoping her past would never catch up with her. But it has.
When Jay hears Sandra has been kidnapped, he drops everything and goes to the U.S. to find her. But Sandra’s kidnapper is not an ordinary criminal. He’s America’s most-wanted terrorist – a man driven to to free his country from religious oppression at any cost. Sandra, still suffering from the fallout of earlier timesplashes, refuses to help create the biggest timesplash ever, which would unleash a wave of destruction that the rebels hope will kickstart a new American revolution.
When Cara, Sandra’s teenage daughter, is taken by one of the many factions on the ground in Washington D.C., Sandra’s resolve is shaken, and Jay is forced into a race against time to stop the deaths of millions or save Sandra and her daughter.
Sandra and Jay must ultimately decide between what is right for them and what is right for all in this thrilling continuation of the Timesplash series.
Praise for True Path:
Playing with history
“…a fantastic speculative thriller that continues a great story. The author asks big questions about what it would actually mean to change history, and not just from the perspective of physics, but from the perspective of the rights and wrongs. His take on how time travel works…is really quite unique.”
Sci fi thriller
…”Loved the idea of a fundamentalist takeover. Very scary. …An excellent exploration of intolerance.”
an excerpt from
True Path
by Graham Storrs
Chapter 1: Splashfail
“Three, two, one …”
The big capacitor banks discharged with a bang, pouring their pent up energy into the coils. Within femtoseconds, the temporal displacement field bloomed around the three men on the platform, flinging them out of the spacetime we know and into the void beyond. To Isaac Callendro, team leader of this makeshift bunch of heroes, all he knew was that the lights went out.
The ruins of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center disappeared in a blink. He was in total darkness and silence, weightless and disoriented. In the void, he knew, there was no up or down, no light at the end of the tunnel. There was nothing but himself, the whole of Creation shrunk to the space within his own skull. Yet he also knew that, out there, beyond the stiff, inflated skin of his renovated shuttle-era space suit, his two companions were also with him, traveling in lonely isolation into the past. They had all been lobbed from the present, through the void, to splash down in the timestream forty-one years earlier, a time before dreams of space and exploration had died forever, before the certainties of religion had ripped apart the fragile network of science and reason upon which the greatest superpower the world had ever known had been built.
Just a single minute. That’s all the lob would take. Callendro just needed to hold on to his sanity for one minute and not let the awful blackness suck it out of him. He worried about the others, though. Jacob was so young and brash. Callendro would need the young man’s aggression and callousness at the other end of the lob, but he feared the boy was too unstable. Even if they pulled off the timesplash, it could unhinge a mind like Jacob’s. If that happened, what kind of person would be returning with them to 2066? And Rebekka, with her poise and her old money manners, how would she respond when the madness began?
And yet, after six failed attempts—three crews fried at the lob site, two spat out of the field generator dead on their return, and another that had simply disappeared into the void—the project was running out of suitable volunteers. Callendro knew this would be their last attempt. They must succeed. Everything depended on it.
He tensed his body as they burst into light and weight and noise. Into a room full of shouting, frightened people. Callendro stumbled to his feet and quickly observed his surroundings. They had interrupted some kind of briefing. There was a big image projected on one wall, where a terrified-looking man was huddling, his features blurring as his face vibrated. Other people in the room were cowering in fear, backing up against the walls of the room. Callendro saw Jacob and Rebekka among the upended chairs and dropped tablets. Jacob wasn’t moving. Not moving at all. He had somehow died in the void. Perhaps a leak had sprung in his ancient space suit. Rebekka climbed to her knees and pushed up her visor. She was clumsy in the fat white gauntlets and seemed stunned but OK. Beside her, a chair was bouncing against the floor, hitting the ground and springing back onto its legs, over and over, like a film repeatedly running forwards then backwards. Tiles fell from the ceiling as a crack ripped through the building. The men and women in the room cried out in fear. Callendro winced as the wailing sound shifted up into painfully high registers before grinding down into a deep bass growl.
He had hoped that the room would be empty, that the splash would not begin until they were well clear of the origin. Now they would never make it. The splash would grow around them and they’d have to fight it for every inch of ground. It would be a miracle if they made it out of the building alive.
Callendro lurched toward Rebekka. He noticed everything in the room with a bitter detachment. He had landed badly. His helmet had hit a table corner and now his visor was a web of cracks around a tiny hole. If the whole crew had matching spacesuits, he might have been able to use Jacob’s for the return trip. But their suits didn’t match. Only the first few crews had had that luxury. Since then they’d had to make do and mend, refurbishing any suit from any era that they could get their hands on. He thought about trying to squeeze into Jacob’s suit but the suit was defective. Jacob’s frozen corpse was proof of that. With a sigh, Callendro pulled off his helmet. It would be two hours before the yankback pulled them all back to their own time. He had only two hours to find another suit, or he would die. The primary mission was shot. The operation had failed.
“Rebekka,” he said. The woman looked at him with wild, half-panicked eyes. Whatever she had expected, Callendro could see that this was not it. “Becky!” he shouted. He felt the ground ripple beneath him. They needed to get out of that building at once. “Get to the exit. Get out of here.”
Despite her fear, she understood and began stumbling towards the door, panicking the fleeing people jammed in the room even more.
A timesplash was so unpredictable, Callendro thought as he hurried after Rebekka. Every person in this room might be affected by the sudden appearance of three astronauts. Witnessing the lob could change the rest of their lives. They might make a future decision in one way rather than another. They might fail to do something they should have done. They might drop dead of a heart attack. All of which could cause a temporal anomaly, creating an inconsistency between the future that might unfold and the present that Callendro came from. And if there was one thing the Universe hated, it was a temporal anomaly. As soon as an anomaly arose, massive forces began coercing the timeline back into shape. The bigger the anomaly, the bigger the forces involved. That was a splash: the unraveling of spacetime, the mangling of causality required to put the Universe right, to heal the wound, to return everything to how it was.
Callendro stomped along after Rebekka. The big windows on one wall of the room burst into a million fragments as the building warped. The fragments showered to the ground but stopped in mid-air, trembling. Callendro knew what it meant. Someone among the scattered occupants of this room had been a person who affected the future in important ways. Or perhaps it was the meeting itself. The bigger the effect, the bigger the splash would be. Maybe a space program employing thousands of people would not happen now. Maybe another program just as large would be started. It was impossible to know. But Callendro was sure of one thing: he had to find a suit or he was a dead man.
He saw Rebekka make it out through the door. There were still other people in the room, cowering away from him. Some seemed almost normal, no vibration, no jerky twitching.
“You.” Callendro picked on a woman clutching at a table as if it were a life raft. “I need a spacesuit. Where should I look?”
She stared at him in terror. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not going to kill anyone. I need to replace my suit. Where do you keep them?”
“I—I don’t know. I work in IT. I’ve never …”
“Who are you?” The question came from behind him, from a balding man in a white collared shirt.
“I’m from the future. Look, I don’t mean to scare you, but I really do need to get into a new suit.”
But the man became incoherent, repeating the same syllable over and over, stammering out the beginning of a sentence he would never finish.
“Training,” the woman said. “You should look in the training areas. Try Building 9.”
Callendro nodded his appreciation and left the room. He was keen to get away before he did her and the others any more harm. He knew that everything would soon go back to how it was. After a while, the building would mend, the people would return, and the meeting would resume from the instant Callendro’s crew had arrived. He knew all that, but the sight of the horrified people in that crumbling building still affected him at a level below rationality.
-oOo-
Out in the corridor, Callendro reeled to a stop, unable to understand what he was seeing. Radiating lines seemed to stretch away for miles to a white dot at the center. It was only when the corridor snapped back into shape that he finally realized it had been stretched away from him to a vast distance. The white dot was now Rebekka, standing just a few metres away with her back to him, staring into a gaping crack that ran right across the floor. He hurried over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned towards him, her face white with shock.
“They fell in,” she said, turning back to the crevasse.
“It doesn’t matter, Bec. Nothing that happens here matters—except to us. It’s the past. We’ve stirred it up a bit but it will settle back into place. No harm has been done.”
Her expression was ragged. “I … I know. It’s just …”
“Rebekka, I’m canceling the primary mission.” They were supposed to steal a car and drive ten miles to where Jacob’s grandfather had once lived, but now Callendro had other priorities. “We’ll never make it.” He considered asking her to pursue the secondary mission—to reach the Director’s office and shoot the man—while he went off on his quest for a new space suit. But the idea was ridiculous. Rebekka was barely functioning now. She wouldn’t last five minutes on her own. “Come with me.” He took her hand, leading her away from the hole in the floor.
“Jacob’s dead,” she said.
“I think he had a leak. We’ll be fine.” She looked quickly at his face, where his helmet should have been. He could almost hear her thinking that he wouldn’t be fine, but she didn’t say anything.
He saw an exit sign and followed it. He had studied maps of the building, walked around the future remains of it until he knew it well. Yet now he was disoriented and did not recognize that particular corridor. He tried not to panic. He kept reassuring himself that he was in a space center at the dawn of the Orion Mars Mission—the ill-fated manned mission to Mars. If there was anywhere on Earth he could find a spacesuit, it was here.
They crashed through a fire exit and into the bright light of a Houston morning, frantically scanning the surrounding buildings for any that they recognized.
“There,” Rebekka said, pointing. “That’s Building 31. Building 9 is just beyond it on Avenue C.”
Callendro wasn’t sure. What if they made a mistake, wasted time going all that way? “We need to ask someone.” There were people about but nobody close. The building they’d just left was shaking itself apart, yet no-one else seemed to notice. They would start to notice, eventually, if the splash spread to the adjacent buildings but, until then, the effect was localized, contained.
Callendro saw a van parked just a dozen meters ahead of them and he made for it. There was no way he or Rebekka could fit in the driver’s seat wearing their space suits—the bulky environment packs they each wore made that impossible. But Callendro’s suit was useless anyway and he could bundle Rebekka into the back.
“Help me out of this thing,” he said when they reached the vehicle. He disconnected his gauntlets and Rebekka pulled them off. Tearing at the seal at his waist, he tried to remember what he could about internal combustion engines. He’s seen them in old vids, and knew there would be a key somewhere to start the engine.
It took an age to get out of the bulky, cumbersome suit. He knew it would take even longer to get into a new one, but if they could get the car working, they could cover so much more ground in the time that remained. Helping with the suit had seemed to calm Rebekka, restoring some of her usual poise. Yet, when a scream came from the building behind her, she flinched. He tried to comfort her but felt ridiculous trying to hug her in his underwear while she was in the bulky suit.
He went to the back of the van and pulled the door open. Inside there was painting equipment—cans, rollers, dust sheets. He pulled everything out and dumped it on the road before helping Rebekka climb inside. He slammed the doors after her and ran for the driver’s seat.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Callendro turned toward the shouting. Two men in overalls were approaching from across the road. Callendro quickly opened the driver’s side door and looked inside. He could jump in now, but the chances of starting the vehicle in a hurry were zero. In frustration, he stepped away to face the men.
“I need to borrow your van,” he said. “Just for a short while.”
“Beat it, creep. And get some pants on.”
The other man was staring at the road behind the van. “Hey! He pulled all our gear out. Look.”
Callendro clenched his jaw hard in frustration. Couldn’t anything go right? “I’ll put it all back,” he lied, edging around the front of the van towards his discarded suit. “I just need it for an hour. It’s a matter of life and death.”
But the two men were watching him with a mixture of aggression and wariness. “Call the cops, Al,” the first one said to his friend. “This guy’s a freakin’ whack job.”
Callendro ran to his spacesuit. It’s all right, he told himself. Everything will put itself back the way it was. He fumbled with the stiff white fabric, turning one legpiece until he found the pocket.
“What the hell is he doing?” Al asked.
“Just call the cops, OK?” The man hurried around the van to get a good look at Callendro and stopped dead. “Oh Jesus.”
Callendro pointed the gun at his chest and squeezed the trigger. He missed. He fired again and missed again. The man turned and ran. Callendro fired again and this time blood splashed from the man’s back and a red bloom colored his white painter’s overalls. The man stumbled one last pace, fell to his knees and then toppled forward to lie still. His companion, Al, didn’t move. He just gaped at his friend with wide eyes. Then he looked at Callendro. The sight of a strange man in his underwear turning to face him, gun raised, seemed to snap him out of the trance he’d fallen into. He threw up his arms and said, “Take the van, all right? Take it. It’s yours.”
Callendro fired again, hitting Al in the shoulder. Then again. A miss. Then again and again until the clip was empty and Al was dead. The man’s body did not lie still but twitched and shook on the ground, reliving its last few moments, over and over. From the body, small ripples fanned outward across the concrete.
Bile rose in Callendro’s throat. He threw away the gun and climbed into the van. In the back, Rebekka was sobbing. He wanted to shout at her to shut her up, but he didn’t have the energy. Even without the suit, every movement he made was a struggle against the weight of his limbs. He looked for where the ignition should be but could find nothing. There were displays set into the dashboard but nothing that looked like a key or even a starter button. He looked around in desperation. Maybe there was an instruction manual.
“Isaac!”
He pulled his head up from under the dash at Rebekka’s frightened call. She was staring through the back windows at a police cruiser that was pulling up behind them.
Callendro took a deep breath. “Stay quiet and keep out of sight,” he told her. “You’ve still got your gun?” She looked horrified but pulled the weapon out of her suit and showed it to him.
He climbed out of the van and walked back towards the police car, acutely aware that he had no clothes on. The two policemen threw open their car doors and jumped out, crouching behind them with guns drawn. Callendro raised his arms and stopped walking. The bodies of the two painters were clearly visible on the ground.
“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your head.”
“Officer, I can explain everything.”
“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your head.”
Emboldened by his obvious lack of any weapons, one of the cops came round the door and edged towards him.
Frustration welled up inside Callendro. He didn’t have time for this. The minutes were ticking away on his life and these two fat cops were going to get him killed. With a jolt, he realized that everyone he had seen since arriving in 2025 was fat. Everybody. Living high on the hog, spending the energy from all that oil on making food to stuff their faces with, while just forty years into the future . . . And then he noticed that the police car’s engine was still running. They had not turned it off. The incredible profligacy of burning petrol like that, without a thought, just because it might be a tiny bit inconvenient to stop the engine, hit him like a blow to the chest. This greedy world had destroyed his own, stolen his future, taken a world of peace and plenty and squandered it on fast food and air conditioning, cars and shrink wrap.
“Down on the floor. Now!”
He looked into the man’s eyes. “All I want is to get a spacesuit and go away.”
The cop blinked and, apparently reassessing the situation, frowned. “Chuck, it looks like we’ve got ourselves some kind of crazy guy.”
“No kidding?” said the other cop. “From the way he’s dressed I thought he might be one of those NASA eggheads.”
“Says he wants a spacesuit.”
The other cop came out from behind the door and joined his partner. “We got great spacesuits back at the station, buddy. They got arms that tie up at the back and everything. Now get down on the floor like the man told you.”
“I‘m going to die if I don’t get a spacesuit,” he said, kneeling on the hard concrete, still managing to keep his anger under control. “I‘m here from the future.”
“Yeah? And there’s me thinking you was an extraterrestrial.” The cop stepped forward to cuff him but looked up sharply at the van.
The rear doors burst open and Rebekka began firing from inside. Callendro threw himself to the ground while the cops ducked and ran, returning fire as they went. The one called Chuck fell, dead or wounded, Callendro didn’t care because the man had dropped his weapon.
Callendro got his legs under him and ran towards the gun, with Rebekka and the other cop still exchanging shots. He scooped up the gun and dropped behind Chuck’s body. Taking careful aim, he fired maybe a dozen shots before the other cop fell down dead.
But the body didn’t stay down. It bounced back up, sucking sprays of blood out of the air back into itself and then spurted them out again as it fell. Then it did it again, and again.
Callendro cursed and ran. Another splash had begun. A crack tore through the pavement and tripped him, sending him rolling across the ground towards the van, so close he could smell the oil and metal of its underside. The twitching body of the painter was nearby, the ground still rippling in concentric circles all around him. As Callendro scrabbled to get up, he saw one of the rear wheels. It had sunk to its axle in the concrete. He reached out a hand and touched the ground around the wheel. For all that it was rippling, the concrete felt completely solid. There was no way they could drive away the van now.
He got up and looked into the back of the van. “Come on. We need to get you into the police car, somehow.” Maybe she could take off the suit while they drove around looking for Building 9. On the other hand, maybe he should just leave her here. “Rebekka.” She was leaning against the wall, staring at the ceiling of the van. God damn the woman! This was not a good time to be having a breakdown. “Rebekka, we need to get moving.” He reached in and shook her. She toppled over and lay still on the floor of the van.
His heart thumped. Thumped again. Then he climbed into the van and lifted her head. She was big and awkward in the spacesuit, almost impossible to manoeuvre. He pushed her back up against the van wall and felt her neck for a pulse. Her skin was clammy and cold but she was still alive.
His relief lasted only a second or two before the realization struck him. Frantically, he felt around on her suit until he found it. The bullet hole. It had gone through the front at about waist height. He heaved her forward. The life support pack was positioned near where the bullet might have come out. The chances of it working properly with a bullet lodged in it were slim. And, even if he could mend the hole at the front somehow, the suit was almost certainly compromised at the back too.
Now both of them were without a suit. Not that Rebekka would need one if he didn’t find her medical care very soon. He could still use the police car. Its engine was running and it looked OK, even though mayhem was breaking out around the cop who was still flipping up and down. If Callendro was quick, he might get the cop car away from there before it too sank into the pavement, or a street light fell on it or whatever.
He lay Rebekka down as gently as he could and then sprinted for the cruiser. The ground was shaking as if gigantic animals were burrowing just below the surface. He leaped into the driver’s seat and looked at the displays, all lit up to display an array of dials and buttons. There should have been pedals on the floor. He was pretty sure he’d heard about that. A gas pedal and a brake. But there were none. He scanned the displays again. He had never seen technology like this. It was far more advanced than what he was used to in 2066. The cop car might as well have been an alien spaceship for all the sense its controls made.
He pushed some buttons at random and the car spoke to him.
“Only authorized drivers may operate this vehicle. Please identify yourself and speak your security code.”
He almost screamed in anger and frustration. “This is a medical emergency. A matter of life and death. Just give me control of the car.”
“Only authorized drivers may operate this vehicle,” the car repeated, without rancor. “Please identify yourself and speak your security code. Failure to comply will mean all systems will be locked down in twenty seconds and the authorities informed. You are advised that attempting to operate a police vehicle without permission is a crime punishable by up to three years imprisonment.”
Callendro jumped out of the car. He was scared that a lock down might involve closing the doors too. After a few seconds the engine stopped. He walked back to the van over ground that was cracked and distorted, past the flapping cop and the twitching painter. He didn’t go inside to sit with his dying companion but went to find his discarded spacesuit. In one of the document pockets was a small notebook and pencil. He moved away from the van, away from the shifting ground and the spreading splash. He found a shaded spot in a doorway at the other side of the street. Then he took the pencil and paper and wrote:
Tell him the mission was not a complete failure. We got back to 2025 and we started a splash. Just not the one we planned for. Tell him not to waste any more lives on trying to get this right. Tell him to go to Plan B. I don’t know if he has a Plan B, or what it might be. All I know is that anything has to be better than this.
Tell him goodbye from someone who never even met him but who would do it all again if he thought there was the slightest chance of it helping him get the job done.
Isaac Callendro
In the strange calm he now felt, an astonishing thought occurred to him. Even if he’d found a new space suit, it wouldn’t have done him any good at all. He’d have left it behind like the rest of 2025 when the yankback pulled him home. He’d felt so rational and purposeful and yet he’d been in the grip of some kind of mind-numbing panic all along. For a while, he sat there laughing at his own stupidity. He laughed so much he ended up crying.
It was just fifteen minutes now until the yankback. No time to do much at all except wait. There was only one thing he needed to do, though. He got up and walked back towards the cop called Chuck. He didn’t want to find himself in the void, almost naked, with no air and no heat. He picked up the gun he’d dropped earlier and checked the clip. There were three bullets left.
One would be enough.
Chapter 2: Embarkation
Leaving Boston in the summer of 2067 without the proper papers was no easy matter, but Zadrach Polanski had many friends who would give their lives to help him. One of his friends had introduced him to Captain Lee Xiangpo. Captain Lee—“Wayne” to his friends half a world away in Sydney—was Master of the handymax bulk carrier Lucky Country. And the Lucky Country was due to depart soon. With a Filipino crew and a cargo of fifty thousand tons of Montana corn bound for Liverpool, England, the Lucky Country was sailing with the morning tide. Meanwhile, she waited heavy and low in the Port of Boston’s Black Falcon Terminal while the Massachusetts rain scrabbled against her superstructure and along her decks.
From an old customs shed, Polanski and his companions watched the docks through infrared binoculars. It was two in the morning and the wharf was quiet. Much farther away, floodlights lit up the container docks where ships were still being loaded and unloaded despite the late hour.
“I make it two on patrol at this end and two more in the hut.” The speaker behind Polanski was a large and strong young man of eighteen, with fair hair and clear skin. He looked every inch the Kansas farm-boy he was, but his voice had the hard-bitten self-assurance of a man who had been fighting a guerrilla war since the age of twelve.
“Why so few?” Polanski asked, thinking out loud the way he often did. He turned to address a bulky, middle-aged man, crouched beside him in the cold, dark shed. “You did most of the recon work, David. Did you ever see just two SOBs patrolling this wharf?”
The big man shook his head, looking concerned.
Polanski turned back to the glistening wharf and peered again through his binoculars. “Could just be the rain, I suppose.”
They waited in silence as the two Sons of Joshua trudged along the quayside. They hunched against the rain in their brown uniforms, their long cloaks slick and wet. They passed within a hundred meters of the abandoned customs shed, then turned and trudged back the way they had come.
“So it’s a trap then?” the farm-boy asked.
“Looks like,” said Polanski.
“Do we call it off?”
“Nope. We just tread careful, that’s all.” He turned to the young man with a grin. “I promised you the flesh-pots of Europe, Peter, and I aim to make sure they’re yours.”
The young man grinned back. It was a private joke between them. No-one on this mission expected to have any time for pleasure.
“It’s time for that distraction now, David,” Polanski said.
His taciturn companion nodded.
David was part of a local chapter of the sprawling, loose alliance of resistance groups of which Zadrach Polanski was the nominal leader. The reality was that that the local chapters pretty much led themselves. But Polanski was changing that. In the past couple of years, he had coordinated several brilliant attacks on State and Federal Government facilities. He was making their presence felt. People were talking. For the first time in thirty-five years, the idea of taking America back from the Lord’s True Path Party seemed like something more than a crazy pipe dream.
Polanski’s new plan was as daring and original as his others—and every bit as risky. He listened with half an ear as David murmured through a compad to his team, keeping his eyes on the docks. Somewhere out there, Federal agents were in hiding, waiting for Polanski to make his move. He knew with the certainty that only a lifetime of evading the Feds could give a man. Someone had tipped them off. Someone had betrayed him. It had happened so often in his life, it didn’t even hurt anymore. He hoped it hadn’t been David. He liked the big guy. Chances were it was someone in David’s chapter—or maybe a spouse or sibling, even a child. There would be an investigation, and David would have to do whatever needed doing to protect the rest of his team.
“Sixty seconds,” David said.
Polanski and the young man, Peter, put away their binoculars and adjusted their backpacks. They moved to the door. Polanski looked back at David. At the same time, David looked across at him. Even if things went well, Polanski might never see the Bostonian again. They exchanged a small nod, each acknowledging the other.
Then the sky brightened, lighting the side of David’s face. Peering through the door, Polanski saw the patrolling militiamen stop and turn to look just as the thump of a large explosion shook the air. Pulling snub-nosed machine guns from under their cloaks, they began running away from Black Falcon Terminal. They were heading towards the Conley Terminal container facility, where a fireball was rising among the cranes. The two guards in the hut burst out onto the quayside and joined their companions in a dash towards the containers. The rattle of machine-gun fire could be heard in the distance.
Polanski waited, a steadying hand on Peter’s shoulder. Perhaps a full minute passed before David, still at the window with his infrared binoculars, said, “There.”
Following the direction of David’s gaze, Polanski saw a half-dozen black-coated men. They emerged from whatever shadows had held them, cautious as cats on the hunt. They looked all around, but mostly at the container docks. Some of them held handguns in two-handed grips, pointing the muzzles at the ground. FBI for sure. Polanski watched as one of them spoke urgently into his compad. After a moment, he shouted at the others and they all ran off towards the fighting.
“Time to get your people out,” Polanski said over his shoulder. Without looking back, he and Peter slipped out of the shed and ran at a crouch through the cold rain towards the Lucky Country.
-oOo-
“That’s far enough, mate.”
Captain Lee was not a big man but the way he blocked the top of the gangplank left no doubt that the only way to get past him would be the hard way. Behind him, two men with machine guns stood ready to back him up.
“Can we come aboard and discuss this?” said Polanski, glancing pointedly at the commotion farther up the wharf.
“Not till I’m happy with your credentials.”
Polanski reached into his jacket, causing the armed sailors beside Captain Lee to stiffen. He pulled out a small black bag, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then handed it to Lee. The captain took a look inside. Polanski watched in silence. The bag held twenty carats of cut diamonds, the price of his and Peter’s passage to Liverpool. Each stone had been donated by a supporter of the resistance, each taken from an engagement ring or brooch, each torn from the heart of someone who had clung to such mementos despite all the privations and necessities of life in modern America. Polanski had written each and every donor a personal IOU. He doubted that Captain Lee had the slightest notion what that bag of gems was really worth.
“Happy now?” he asked.
With a smile, the captain stood back and said, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Smith. These men will show you and your mate to your cabin. I’ll be along in a while to explain the ground rules. Until we’re under way, don’t leave your cabin for any reason. Understood?”
Polanski nodded. “Sure.”
“Not exactly friendly, is he?” Peter said as the Filipino sailors—one in front and one behind—led them into the bowels of the great ship.
“It’s a business transaction, that’s all. He’s taking a big risk,” Polanski said. “So is his crew. I don’t expect any of them to be happy about it.”
They were taken to a small cabin with bunk beds and very little else. They stowed their gear and lay on the hard mattresses. Neither of them were speaking nor sleeping, instead listening to the sound of water slopping against the steel hull, breathing air that smelled of oil.
After a long time, Polanski heard the boy’s breathing deepen into a steady, regular rhythm. He gave it another half hour and then climbed out of his bed and crept out of the room. The ship was large and lightly crewed. Its five massive holds were forward. The bridge, engines, crew quarters, galley, and everything else, were crammed into a relatively small space aft. Polanski made his way up to the deck without challenge and climbed up into the superstructure. There he found a quiet place to hide, a place where he could keep an eye on the docks and the gangplank. He settled down to keep watch. The rain had stopped but the wind was chilly and the painted steel he sat on was wet and cold.
At about four AM, a military vehicle drove down the quayside from the direction of the container docks and pulled up alongside the Lucky Country. A couple of Feds with a squad of Sons of Joshua militiamen at their heels got out of the armored vehicle and marched purposefully to the gangplank. Polanski eased himself into a crouch, ready to do whatever needed doing. Floodlights from the ship snapped on and caught the Feds in the glare about halfway up the gangplank, where their troops were forced into single file with nowhere to run. On the deck, Polanski could just make out the captain and several of his crewmen. He relaxed a little.
For a while, no-one spoke and no-one moved.
“God be with you,” the Fed at the front said. He waited for the reply but none came. He pulled a badge out of his coat pocket and held it up for Captain Lee to see. “I’m Special Agent Cartwell. This is Special Agent Drake.” Drake also held up a badge. In the bright lights, Polanski could see the silver crucifixes on the two agents’ coat lapels. The very sight made his jaw clench.
“And you are?” Cartwell asked and began walking up the gangplank again.
“Stop where you are!” The captain’s command was loud and sharp and was accompanied by the sound of bolts being slid on several firearms. Cartwell obeyed immediately. “No-one comes aboard this ship without my permission, Agent Cartwell. What do you want?”
Polanski couldn’t help but smile. The FBI was used to being met with fear and submission, not open hostility. It was good to see how angry it made them. Let the bastards fume, he thought. Boarding an Australian ship against the captain’s wishes was the kind of thing that sparked international incidents. And, now that Australia was a member of the Chinese Pacific Alliance—effectively a vassal state of the ever-expanding Chinese hegemony—the excrement would come pouring from a great height onto any FBI agent stupid enough to stir up that kind of trouble.
“We believe there are terrorist traitors in the area,” Cartwell said. “We would like your permission to search your ship in case any of them have stowed away with the intention of leaving the country. It’s in your own interest that these dangerous men are captured as quickly as possible.”
“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 think, 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 achievement 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.
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