‘Colonel Westinghouse, and this is Jones.’ The colonel waved a thumb absent-mindedly in Josh’s direction. ‘He’s going to be our nautonnier. This mission falls under the offices of the founder himself.’ He showed them the signed orders from Lord Dee. ‘It’s a level five incident. We’re going after an deviation back in 11.066.’
Johansson’s breath hissed through his teeth. ‘Man, that’s a lot of sixes — hate going back to the eleventh — they didn’t call it the Dark Ages for nothing.’
The captain ignored her junior officer. ‘How many are going in with us?’
The colonel took a deep breath. ‘We’re the entire company. It’s a risky venture, but the founder estimates we have over an eighty-percent chance of success.’
‘Plus he couldn’t spare any of the A-team. Too busy fighting the Spanish, eh?’ joked Johansson.
The captain turned on Johansson and punched him square in the jaw.
‘Enough! I swear one of these days I’m going to string you up instead of the goat and let the damn birds peck out your eyes.’
Josh and the colonel exchanged glances, both sharing similar suspicions about why the founder could afford to spare these two particular officers. Josh also thought that the odds that Dee had quoted them probably weren’t quite as realistic as he’d made out.
‘So,’ the colonel continued, ‘do you have any relevant questions before we begin?’
‘No sir,’ Johansson replied, rubbing his jaw as he got back to his feet.
‘Are the tachyons operational?’ asked Sohguerin.
‘No. I’m afraid there’ll be no safety net on this mission.’
17
1066
[Telham Hill, Hastings. Date: 14th October, 11.066]
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was already beginning to wane. They stood in silence at the top of Telham hill looking down onto the battlefield. Carrion rows picked at the bodies of English soldiers who lay dead or dying, scattered across the ground and half-buried in the cloying mud.
It was a massacre, the English infantry wiped out by the superior firepower of the French carabiniers . Their primitive axes and wooden shields were no protection from their musket balls.
The colonel stood up in his stirrups to get a better view. ‘How long does it take?’ he muttered anxiously.
He was wearing the ill-fitting uniform of a dead French commander and it was irritating him. Being made to sit still like a petulant child at pony club was not making things any better. The long velvet cape kept catching on the hilt of his sword, and he was continually adjusting the dented iron breastplate that Sohguerin had insisted he put on.
‘You’ll get your head shot off if you keep doing that!’ growled the captain, stroking the head of the colonel’s horse — the gunfire was making it skittish.
‘He should have found it by now!’ The colonel sat down heavily into the saddle, causing the horse to whinny. ‘This is worse than watching a Copernican decide what he’s having for lunch.’
‘He’s an engineer, not a soldier. I’m assuming he’s not taking any unnecessary risks,’ she replied, more to the horse than its rider.
They were waiting for Johansson, who’d volunteered to go in search of the French armourer. They needed a vestige, an artefact that could be directly linked to the alchemist and the making of the gunpowder, like a page from his journal or one of his tools that made the ammunition — which the Normans seemed to be getting through at an alarming rate.
The route back to 11.066 hadn’t been the easiest. The Antiquarians were incredibly protective of their meagre collection of historical artefacts, and even the signed orders from the founder was treated with derision and superstition. Josh was shocked when he saw exactly how small their stores were: pieces had been piled into storerooms like the back room of a charity shop and it took the curator of the eleventh century over an hour to find the item the colonel had requested.
He was a like a grumpy shopkeeper when he finally shuffled out, carrying a small roll of material.
‘Bayeux Tapestry,’ he grumbled, hefting it off his shoulder and onto the counter.
The colonel unrolled it carefully, and Josh recognised the embroidered knights and horses from primary school, although it was odd to see the men carrying muskets instead of bows, and the slaughter of the English was no less horrific when woven.
‘Where’s the rest of it?’ asked the colonel.
The Antiquarian shrugged. ‘Lost. The fire in the cathedral took the rest.’
‘Wasn’t this made in France?’ asked Josh.
‘No,’ said the colonel, shaking his head. ‘I think you’ll find it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William’s brother — it was rediscovered in Bayeux in 11.729.’
‘By the Terminists,’ said the curator, scowling. ‘It will get you back to 11.070, but from there you’re on your own.’
When they first arrived, Josh had wondered why they didn’t just pick up the first weapon they found and work back through the timeline, but the captain and the colonel shook their heads as if he’d made some kind of rookie mistake and went back to their argument about the colonel wearing a breastplate.
‘Too many variables,’ explained Johansson. ‘There’s a high probability that the French have been planning this for years. We have no idea how many blacksmiths were conscripted to help make their weapons. We need to find something out on the field that comes from the source.’
Johansson was dressed in the uniform of a Gard du Corps, a French foot soldier. His bloodstained blue tabard hid the ringed leather jerkin that he’d stolen off a dead English archer. It would provide little protection from a stray bullet, but he said he preferred it. He was lighter and quicker than the heavy armour-plated Knights, who looked like mediaeval Robocops as they stomped around the battlegrounds with ‘hand cannons’ strapped to each arm, blasting away at the retreating English forces. Josh could still hear the screams of the men as they fell, their bodies ripped open by the crude spray of grapeshot.
‘So, what exactly does an artificer do?’ Josh asked, helping to strap a shield onto Johansson’s back.
‘I’m a specialist — an engineer. Since we can’t bring anything back with us, I’m trained to fashion tools from the local era, adapt technology — make useful stuff.’
Johansson picked up a small musket and shook the barrel until a small round ball rolled out. He kept the ball and threw away the gun. ‘Not that she would agree,’ he added, nodding in the captain’s general direction.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Not a people person, my captain. Been thrown out of every squad she’s ever been assigned to.’ Johansson inspected the smooth round ball closely. ‘Smooth bore, lead shot. Deadly at 50 metres. Should do nicely.’
‘Then how did you end up with her?’
‘That, my friend, is another story entirely,’ Johansson replied, shifting the shoulder straps to make the shield more comfortable. ‘Right now I have to go find me an armourer.’ He held up the lead shot and winked out of existence.
When Johansson reappeared, he’d taken a bullet in the shoulder. His breathing was laboured and his legs buckled under him — the captain caught him before he hit the floor.
The colonel quickly dismounted and Josh had to grab the horse’s bridle to stop it from trampling the sergeant. The wounded man took out a small book from inside his jacket, wincing at the pain it caused his injured shoulder.
‘Damned gunsmith had a gun, who’d have thought it?’ he said, panting through the pain. ‘Not that it did him much good in the end.’
Johansson began to laugh, but it quickly turned into a rattling cough.
‘Rest easy soldier,’ ordered the colonel, relieving him of the book.
The captain searched through her bag until she found a small vial of white powder. She cut the straps on Johansson’s armour to expose the wound, then pulled the stopper out with her teeth.
‘I need some help?’ she pleaded to Josh. ‘Let the da
mn horse go and come and hold him down!’
Josh did as he was told and the horse bolted off towards the trees.
Johansson screamed as Sohguerin poured the medicine into the bubbling hole, fizzing as it mixed with the dark red blood.
Josh found himself staring in awe as the musket ball surfaced through the pink froth. The captain picked it out carefully and inspected it.
‘No fragmentation. You’re a lucky fool.’ She kissed the now comatose artificer, confirming what Josh had begun to suspect.
‘He’s a bloody hero,’ added the colonel and holding the book up. ‘I shall see he gets a commendation for this!’
‘Is it what we need?’ asked Josh, impatiently snatching the book from the colonel. It was covered in Johansson’s blood, but the inner pages were untainted and full of handwritten archaic chemical symbols and diagrams of guns.
The colonel tapped on a crest at the top of one of the pages. ‘This is the almanac of Guillaume de Belladiere, the Duke’s Armourer! Johansson must have managed to infiltrate the Royal enclosure, the very heart of their battle command.’
Josh felt the timeline begin to unravel from the pages, and saw the moment Johansson surprised the Royal Armourer, sweating over his experiments in a tented workshop. There were glass vials and tubes full of bubbling liquids, candles and braziers boiling off all number of chemical compounds. Josh could smell the acrid fumes that gathered beneath the canvas roof. Guillaume was a small, round man with a bald, cannon-ball head. His book was the first thing he reached for when Johansson jumped him, closely followed by a newly-made gun that was lying on his workbench.
‘You have the line?’ asked the colonel, interrupting Josh.
Josh nodded, weaving further back through the stream of events, following the book as it made its way over the channel and into France. He felt the pen scratch across the paper as Guillaume made notes on his journey. He could smell the ink on the gunsmith’s fingers as he copied out the complex chemical formulae at his desk deep within some dark castle. Someone was talking to the man as he worked, but Josh couldn’t see his face: it was a blur, as though the moment had been edited, redacted somehow.
‘I’ve got the location,’ Josh said, repeating the temporal coordinates.
‘Gisors. Interesting — Templar territory,’ noted the colonel. ‘Wake him up, we have to leave.’
The captain dumped a canteen of water over Johansson’s face, and he woke with a start. The wound was nothing more than a pink bruise on his shoulder and healing quickly.
‘The curative powers of time, eh?’ he spluttered, wiping the water from his face.
They all placed their hands on the book — the captain trying her hardest not to touch anyone else — and the battlefield twisted away.
18
Alchemist
[Château de Gisors. Date: 11.060]
They appeared in one of the lower levels of the castle: a storage space full of rusting armour, broken equipment and discarded furniture. Josh had let the colonel navigate through the timeline, as he had a knack for finding safe, out of the way places to land — ‘minimum risk vectors,’ or MRVs as he called them.
Sohguerin was wandering around looking at various parts of the room through a glass ball, while Johansson was inspecting random pieces of junk as if browsing for treasure at some crazy medieval jumble sale.
‘Strange to think that in just over two-hundred years this castle will become the prison of Jacques De Molay, Grandmaster of the Templars,’ observed the colonel, lighting a torch with a flint. ‘They held him here for years before burning him at the stake. Legend says that he cursed the Pope and the King with his last breath — both were dead within a year.’
‘The Templars? The Crusader Knights? Weren’t they the ones protecting the Holy Grail?’ asked Josh, thinking about the pictures he used to draw in his diary.
‘There were a few myths about the Grail,’ the colonel corrected him. ‘But many of them were spread by Philip IV of France, who happened to owe them a few million francs at the time. He had hundreds of them arrested or shot on Friday the 13th October, 11.307. The navy escaped with the majority of their treasure, but their leaders remained behind. The interrogations were brutal, according to the Vatican records.’
Josh was still finding it difficult to imagine the Templars with machine guns instead of swords.
‘The aperture is close,’ the captain reported, holding up the glass sphere. It was more intricately designed than the one Josh had seen Caitlin use: made out of miniature mirrored panes, each separate face catching the light and splitting it into the most unusual range of colours. It was nothing like the prisms they had used at school — light seemed to slow and dissolve as it passed through it.
‘Show me,’ instructed the colonel, taking the lens and wandering off with the captain in tow.
Johansson returned from his own treasure hunt and emptied a sack full of parts onto a table.
‘There should be enough here to make a few diversions for our friends upstairs.’ He began to sort through the assortment of glass vials and copper tubes.
The captain and the colonel walked around the room, checking the readings at various points as if trying to triangulate the location of the aperture.
‘So what exactly is an aperture?’ Josh asked Johansson once they were out of earshot.
Johansson looked concerned. ‘You haven’t had the training?’
Josh shrugged. ‘Must have missed that one.’
‘You’re not Draconian — what guild are you from?’
Josh had never really given any thought to the other guilds, as they were all to wrapped up in their own sets of rules to appeal to him. He’d always assumed he was like the colonel, a Watchman — which wasn’t really a guild as such, more a collection of misfits and rejects that had been thrown out of every other department.
‘Scriptorian,’ he lied. It had been Caitlin’s guild, so it was the only other one he knew enough about to blag convincingly — plus no one ever seemed to care what they got up to.
Johansson grunted. ‘Bookworm, not sure how much I can tell you. It’s need-to-know, top-secret kind of shit.’
‘Well, it looks like I’m going to find out soon enough,’ said Josh, watching the captain wave the lens in front of the colonel’s face.
‘Yeah, I guess.’ Johansson picked up a length of twisted copper pipe. ‘It’s a bit difficult to demonstrate in three dimensions. Imagine the air inside this tube is the continuum, that all space time flows through it, and this,’ — he ran his hand along the metal — ‘is the outer chronosphere, a kind of field that shields that flow.’
‘Like a force field?’
‘Yeah, sort of. Anyway, do you know what lies beyond that?’ He waved his hand above and below the pipe.
‘Nope.’
Johansson leaned in close, and his voice dropped to a secretive whisper. ‘Nobody does. We call it the Maelstrom. Sohguerin believes it’s the realm of the elder gods, primeval beings who have existed since time began. Whereas the reavers think that it’s where you go when you die.’
Josh remembered the void that he’d glimpsed at the end of the colonel’s timeline and the feeling that there had been something malevolent waiting in the darkness within.
‘An aperture is a weakness in the wall.’ Johansson tapped the metal with a copper nail. ‘A breach is when something manages to break through.’ He paused, the colour draining from his cheeks. ‘Everything I’ve ever seen come out has looked like it fell out of hell.’
‘Like a monad?’
‘Monad, strzyga, plus a whole bestiary of hairy-arsed monsters that the Order won’t admit to. Before the war, we had a department called Xenobiology — not that you Scriptorians would ever know that it existed.’
But he had. Josh remembered the monad the colonel had used to finish off the strzyga in the temple. Caitlin had been outraged by his misuse of the ‘Xeno’ department property.
‘How do they break through?’
&nb
sp; Johansson shrugged. ‘No one really knows, but by the time we get there it’s usually just a case of damage limitation and closure.’
He flipped the copper tube over and began to bend it carefully around a wire lattice. Josh watched him work, his hands expertly manipulating the metal, re-engineering parts from his collection of scavenged materials. Before long he’d built an unusual array of jam-jar hand grenades, modified a brace of flintlock pistols to be semi-automatic, and created what Josh could only guess was an electric shield.
There was a noise from the far end of the room, and the colonel was waving at them, calling for them to follow.
Johansson gathered up his creations into a bag and nodded to Josh to grab the rest.
‘Whatever happens next, I suggest you keep your head down,’ he warned. ‘This isn’t going to be pretty.’
19
The Breach
They followed the captain and her lens through a labyrinth of damp, stone corridors until they finally arrived at an ornately carved set of wooden doors.
‘The breach is less than a minute away,’ whispered Sohguerin, staring wide-eyed into the iridescent globe of light and glass. ‘Approximately five metres inside that room.’ She pointed at the door.
‘Good,’ declared the colonel, brandishing a sabre that Johansson had modified. ‘Shall we?’ He pushed open the doors and strode in as if he owned the place.
A deep French voice shouted: ‘Va te faire foutre!’ as Josh walked through the door. A minute later the colonel had taken out the only guard and was pinning a flustered Guillaume to the wall with the end of his sword. Johansson was busy drawing a coal dust circle on the floor around himself and the captain, who was counting down as she held the lens up in front of her.
‘Three, two, one!’ She dropped the lens and yanked two of the shrunken head charms off her belt.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 42