by Dan Abnett
She stepped into the lab.
“Try,” she said.
He sighed.
“You think I was off with you earlier. You think I didn’t care if you got hurt. You and Lester and a whole bunch of others can’t understand why I try so hard to keep these creatures alive.”
“You have a natural respect for living creatures,” she offered.
“Yes, but it’s not that.” He picked up a piece of graph paper, looked at it, and tossed it back onto the bench. “I don’t know what happens every time we kill one. I don’t know what effect that has on history. One little change could mean everything.”
“We’ve all read Ray Bradbury, Nick,” Jenny said.
“Well, I’ve lived it. I saw things change, Jenny.”
“Like me, you mean? Like Claudia?”
He nodded ruefully, knowing they’d gone over this before.
“I didn’t dream a different world, I woke up in one. I don’t want it to happen again. I don’t want it to be worse next time.”
“Worse?”
He subtly changed the subject.
“The anomalies seem to be following some kind of pattern, though I can’t figure out what it might be. I’ve got a nasty feeling that, before long, catching some prehistoric monster that’s popped through a hole in time is going to be the least of our problems.”
“So what do you suggest?” she asked.
“I don’t know. That little jaunt we took to Peru, that proved this isn’t a local phenomenon; it’s global. Who knows what other people in other countries are finding out. We should be pooling our knowledge, especially about the anomalies.”
Jenny smiled.
“Well, if there are any other operations like ours out there, I don’t know about them.” She paused. “Of course, I wouldn’t, though, would I?”
“What?”
“Well, it’s very likely they’d have someone like me — that they’d be keeping their work secret, too, isn’t it?”
SIX
“Okay,” Connor said, “what was that?”
“What was what?” Abby asked.
“It went under there.” Connor pointed at a row of cheap, do-it-yourself shelves stacked with catering drums of cooking oil.
“What did it look like?”
“It was smallish, and it was moving,” he said.
Abby glanced at him doubtfully.
Connor shrugged. “That’s all I’ve got.”
She knelt down and peered under the shelves, then jerked back slightly. There was something under there all right. She could see movement in the shadows, and she could hear a sort of soft, chittering noise.
“It sounds a bit like Rex,” she said.
“So, lizard, then,” Connor said, slightly reassured. “For a moment there, I thought something, you know, creepy and/or crawly.”
Abby pulled on a long-cuffed handler’s gauntlet and reached under the shelf. “I think it’s definitely a lizard. I —
“Ow!”
The creature, a small, slender reptile with a beautiful colouration like old laburnum leaves, shot out from under the shelving. It came out on all fours, but as it cleared the shelves, it raised its narrow body up on its hind legs and accelerated across the floor.
“Door! Connor, the door!” Abby yelled.
Connor made a dive for the storeroom door, but he was too slow. The sprinting reptile shot between his feet and out into the corridor.
“Sorry.”
Abby examined her gauntlet. The tip of the index finger had been ripped through.
“It’s got some teeth on it,” she said.
“And some legs,” Connor agreed. “Any idea what it was?”
“I didn’t get a good enough look at it,” Abby said, checking for blood. There wasn’t any.
“It’s a primitive Archosaur,” Cutter said from the doorway behind them. “Maybe something like Euparkeria.”
“An Early Triassic reptile?” Abby queried.
Cutter nodded.
“You got a look at it?” Connor asked.
“It passed me in the hall, and I spotted another couple of them in the restaurant.”
“We’re going to need box-traps,” Abby said, heading for the door.
“I think so,” Cutter agreed.
“What about the anomaly?” Connor asked. “There has to be one around here.”
Cutter handed him the detector.
“It’s in the carwash next door,” he said. “Can you take some readings and keep an eye on it?”
They went outside, and Cutter helped Abby unload four box-traps from the back of the truck. Connor made a few delicate adjustments to the detector, and began to wander in the direction of the automated carwash that stood on the other side of the service station concourse.
It was mid-morning, and the summer sun was hot. The site — a petrol station, a couple of shops and a cafeteria — served a busy dual carriageway. Hemple and a couple of his men, dressed in black fatigues but with their weapons discretely locked up in their Land Rovers, were gently moving onlookers back and coning off the station forecourt. Traffic had backed up along the slip road, and there was some irritated honking.
“Something up with the pumps,” Mason told a lorry driver as Connor walked past, “we can’t let anybody in.”
“How long?” the driver asked, squinting down from his cab.
However long it takes to round up God knows how many fast-moving, sharp-toothed Basal Archosaurs, mate, Connor thought.
Most of the traffic seemed content to pull around and head off up the slip road and back to the main carriageway. Some lingered, rubbernecking, curious to know what was going on. As he strolled along, Connor saw a mum with four young kids in a red car, all watching him like prairie dogs. The members of a university rugby team waved noisily from their minibus. Two men in a blue SUV stared at him, and glanced away when he looked back.
Connor reached the carwash. He could feel the static charge in the air, the ant-scurry tingle on his skin. He could smell damp concrete and spilled detergent as he ducked in under one of the rollers of green plastic fronds and entered the main wash area. A couple of Archosaurs were skittering between the raised wheel triggers on the floor.
The anomaly, a comparatively small one, crackled and writhed in the air at the far end of the bay. Pearlescent colours flickered across the ripples of its aperture, and he could feel its magnetic pull. His hair stood up a little. Fronds of thin, blue electricity crackled around the edges of the phenomenon, clambering along the spars and roof struts of the carwash like the creepers of a trailing plant.
He adjusted the detector and began the data record.
It was the third anomaly they’d encountered in the two weeks since the incident on Oxford Street. Like all the others, it wasn’t conforming to the energetic patterns they had become used to.
“It’s like the others, isn’t it?”
Connor glanced over his shoulder and saw Cutter looking at it.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“I wonder what’s doing that,” Cutter murmured. “I wonder what it means.”
“It’s definitely an electromagnetic variance,” Connor said. “Oh, by the way, there are a couple more of those little dudes loose in here.”
“I saw them.” Cutter continued to stare at the anomaly, as if he expected it to suddenly crack and give up its secrets.
“See what your analysis picks up,” he said to Connor. “We can only hope.”
“Okay.”
***
“When we’re done here, I want to swing by the university,” Cutter said, turning to leave.
“You haven’t been back there in ages,” Connor said, looking surprised.
“No, I haven’t,” Cutter said. “I left a lot of stuff there in storage, so I want to check through it. There might be something we can use. Maybe some notes I took in the early days that I haven’t looked back at. And it’s just down the road, so we may as well.”
Connor nodded. Of a
ll the team members, he was most aware of the professor’s claim that time had been revised, but even he didn’t realise how deep that unease went. Cutter didn’t want to alarm him by explaining that he had no idea what he might have left at his old rooms in the Central Metropolitan University, or even who’d packed his stuff up and moved it to the lab at the ARC.
He certainly didn’t want to alarm Connor by telling him his most fervent wish: that there might be notes or files at the university of genuine value of which he had no memory — because they had been written by a different Nick Cutter.
The service station anomaly closed just after two in the afternoon, about half an hour after Abby and Cutter had released the last of the trapped Euparkeria back through it into their own world. The blister of light crackled, flickered and died away, taking the static tang out of the air and letting tension out of all the metal objects in the vicinity.
“Do you want us to come with you?” Hemple asked as they loaded up the trucks.
“No need,” Cutter replied, and he gestured to Connor and Abby. “I’ll take these two with me in case there’s any heavy lifting to do. We’ll see you back at the ARC tonight.”
Fifteen minutes later, his truck pulled away from the forecourt. Traffic was already being allowed back into the service station.
A woman, sitting in a car parked on the hard shoulder of the slip road, watched him drive away. She had been following him for a few days, watching him, torn between the desire to warn him and the realisation that even if she did, there was nothing he could do.
Her name was Helen Cutter.
SEVEN
The porter remembered Professor Cutter, and asked how he’d been keeping. Cutter kept his answer brief but polite, and when the porter raised the barrier he drove into the campus.
It had turned into a fine afternoon. The red-brick, modern research faculty was flanked by plane and beech trees and framed by lawns, perfect as an architect’s model. Students lounged about on the grass, talking, reading, and playing frisbee, or hid from the sun in the shade of the trees.
Connor and Abby were chatting away in the back of the truck. As he drove up to the herringbone parking, Cutter felt an odd sense of nostalgia he hadn’t anticipated. The university felt so familiar. It reminded him of simpler times and less demanding work, but it also seemed peculiarly distant, as if it lay in some distant era, millions of years away.
He wondered if that was just his imagination, or if something in his mind had altered, and changed his memories with it.
A young woman in the bursar’s office informed him that per his instructions, his rooms had not been assigned to another academic, and were still locked up pretty much as he’d left them. It seemed the fellows were hoping that Professor Cutter might return to his tenure as soon as his secondment to the government was done.
“Some of your things have been boxed up and put in store six,” the young woman said, checking the manifest. She fetched him the keys. “Fossils, mostly. Can you sign the keys back in before you leave?”
He promised to do so.
His name plate had been slid out of the frame on the door. Nevertheless, Cutter found it immediately. He unlocked his office and went in, with Connor and Abby close behind him.
There was a slight but not unpleasant smell of unused air. No one had been in the room for some time, and the windows had been kept closed. Most of the furniture had been covered in dust-sheets, and books had been taken off some of the shelves and loaded into boxes.
Abby opened the windows that looked out over the lawns.
“Where do we start?” Connor asked.
“Why don’t you take Abby down to store six and see what they’ve put in there,” Cutter said, tossing the storeroom keys to Connor. “Then swing by the canteen and get us three big coffees, eh?”
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Abby inquired.
Cutter shrugged. “I’ll know it if I see it,” he said, but then he saw the panicked look on Connor’s face. “For the moment, look for anything that relates to the phenomena we’ve encountered most recently, however distant the relationship might be.”
They left the room, and he began to look around. Just standing there, he realised that — more than anything else — the place reminded him of Helen. It reminded him of the pain of losing his wife, and the greater pain of discovering that she was still alive and that she’d hidden her existence from him. It was just one of her many betrayals.
Cutter didn’t know her any more, he realised. He didn’t know what she was, and he certainly didn’t know what she might be capable of doing.
He was terribly afraid, however, that, wherever she was, she knew the answers to all the questions he needed to ask. Perhaps it was the thought of her that had brought him back to the university.
Perhaps he was wasting his time.
Connor hurried across the campus parking lot with three large coffees in carry-out cups. There were only a few vehicles parked in the herringbone next to the professor’s truck, but one of them was a blue SUV with two men sitting in it.
Still walking, Connor did a slight double-take, remembering the slip road of the service station that morning, remembering two men in a blue SUV, who’d looked away when he’d glanced at them.
The driver’s door of the SUV opened, and one of them got out.
“Afternoon,” Connor said hesitantly.
Cutter sorted through the contents of the desk drawer, and then shut it again. He turned to the filing cabinets.
There was a noise in the doorway of the office.
“Took your time with that coffee,” he said over his shoulder. He looked up and saw a figure in the doorway.
Only, it wasn’t Connor.
The man was about thirty-five and clean-shaven, with straw-blond hair and very serious eyes. The moment Cutter saw him, he knew the man wasn’t British. There was something Eastern European about his haircut and the style of his jeans and bomber jacket. When he spoke, his slight accent confirmed Cutter’s instincts.
“Professor Nicholas Cutter?”
“Yes,” Cutter replied. He wondered if the man was from HR or the bursary.
“I hope, a moment of your time?” The man stepped into the room. Cutter could smell a cheap cologne that had been rather extravagantly applied.
“Actually, I’m not really here,” Cutter answered with a polite smile and a dismissive gesture. “I’m just stopping by to pick something up.”
“It is important,” the man insisted. Was that hint of accent Polish? Czech? No, Russian.
“I’m sorry,” Cutter said, maintaining his smile but wishing the guy would take the hint. “I’m a bit busy. If you want an appointment, though, you can contact the faculty office and they’ll get in touch with me. I’m sure we can arrange something.”
“That would take a while,” the man said, “and involve official channels.”
“I know, but I’m really pushed for time today.”
“Pushed for time,” the man repeated. He smiled and nodded. “Yes. I am also Nicholas, you know,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nicholas. Or Nikolai, to be correct. My name is Nikolai Medyevin.”
Cutter thought for a moment.
“Medyevin?” he asked. “Wait, did you lead the excavation of the Hadrosaur group in Russia a few years ago?”
“Yes, I did,” the man said, and he nodded. “I am flattered that you know of it.”
“It was a pretty major dig,” Cutter said, “and the results were very impressive. I got to see some of the adult specimens when the preparators were working on them at Imperial.”
“Yeah, there was generally great results,” the man replied. “Strong evidence of family grouping dynamics, and good examples of gender dimorphism. Plus, of course, the quality of preservation.”
“It was really good work,” Cutter said. He stepped towards the man and held out his hand. “I’m sorry if I came over as rude. I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. It
’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor Medyevin.”
Medyevin shook Cutter’s hand.
“And to meet you at last, Professor Cutter.”
“So what can I do for you?” Cutter asked, and then he paused. “Wait a minute,” he said, “how did you know I was here?”
Medyevin shrugged slightly, but didn’t reply.
“I haven’t worked here for months,” Cutter continued. Frowning, he took a step away from his visitor. “I haven’t been here for months, and I only just popped in this afternoon on the off-chance. How could you possibly have known I was here?”
“We perhaps might call it opportunistic, Professor,” Medyevin replied.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that security is a great deal lighter here than it is at the ARC,” Medyevin explained.
He glanced to his left as Connor and Abby came into the room. Both of them looked oddly stiff and awkward. There was a man behind them. Like Medyevin, he was dressed in jeans and a brown leather bomber jacket, but he was considerably bigger than the slim palaeontologist. He had brown hair, cut short, hard eyes and a generous mouth. Curious, deep scars ran down from the corners of his mouth.
Cutter turned to his co-workers.
“What’s going on?” he asked them.
Neither Connor nor Abby replied, but they both stared at him with furious, anxious eyes.
“I said, ‘What’s going on?’”
“They have been instructed not to speak or to make any abrupt movement,” the man standing behind them said. His voice was lower than Medyevin’s, and his accent was a great deal thicker.
Cutter laughed, but there was no humour in it.
“I think that’s up to them, don’t you?”
“Please, Professor,” Medyevin said.
Abby stared at Cutter. There was something imploring about her expression. Very quietly, but very clearly, she said, “He’s got a gun.”
Cutter started as if he’d been slapped. Looking down, he saw the small, black automatic pistol that Medyevin’s companion was holding. It was pointing directly at Abby, level with the small of her back. It was so obvious, so glaring, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it the moment they came into the room.