by Dan Abnett
“This is Spaghetti Junction,” she said.
“What?” Helen stared at her.
“That’s what Connor called it,” Jenny replied. “It’s a hub, a nexus where anomalies connect.”
Helen nodded.
“It’s one of them. I’ve seen several.”
“Where is it?” Jenny asked. “When is it?”
“I don’t know.” Helen shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t. I’ve only ever used this nexus to connect one time to another. I’ve never had the opportunity to explore it. For all I know, twenty-first century Kansas City could be just over the horizon. Alternatively —”
“Alternatively what?” Hemple asked, rising to his feet and wiping Jenkins’s blood from his hands.
Helen smiled. Her smile was always disconcerting.
“Alternatively, who knows?”
Redfern snorted.
Jenny stared at her, trying to work out if she’d simply said what she’d said for effect. It was impossible to tell, but she had a gut feeling that Helen was using every psychological weapon in her arsenal to exert dominance over the group. Helen had travelled more than any of them, so she knew more about these places. They were obliged to trust her, and they were being forced to trust the information she gave them.
It was galling, and it was troubling. She was sure Lester had been right. They couldn’t and shouldn’t trust Helen Cutter any more than they absolutely had to.
“So this is the point of connection?” Jenny asked her.
“Yes.”
“You know which one? Which anomaly?”
“Yes,” Helen said.
“And it will take us to Nick? It will take us to this place in Siberia?”
Helen nodded.
“We’ve walked around the world outside of time.” Jenny found the concept mind-bending. “We just come back in at a different place.”
“Yeah, very zen,” Hemple said. He reloaded his MP53 and took a swig of water. Then he turned to Helen. “Show us where to go, please.”
She glanced at Jenkins. He was out of it, virtually unconscious on the grass. Her gaze was hard.
“What?” Hemple demanded.
“Nothing,” Helen replied. “Just... nothing.”
“Helen wants to leave him here,” Jenny said, “but she knows we won’t like the idea.”
“I’m not leaving anyone anywhere,” Hemple stated.
“Of course you’re not,” Helen said. “You believe in loyalty to your men. That’s fine. It’s an ideal that works where you come from.” She began to re-roll the sleeves of her shirt. “However, it would be better for him and for us if you left him here.”
“I am not leaving anyone anywhere,” Hemple repeated, taking a step towards her.
“Fine,” Helen said, raising her hands. “I told you to stay close to me and to do exactly as I told you, or we’d end up in trouble. It seems you don’t intend to take that advice.”
“Tim Jenkins goes with us!” Hemple exclaimed. “We’re going to get him home.”
“Please try to grasp what I’m saying,” Helen said, apparently unfazed by Hemple’s aggressive manner. She went back to re-rolling her sleeves. “The eras we are attempting to traverse are utterly unforgiving. One slip, one mistake, and you’re dead. You have to learn to be ruthless. Completely ruthless.”
“Like you?” Hemple asked.
“Yes, like me. Ruthless. Unsentimental. Pragmatic. That’s the only way to survive. If you attempt to save this man, you will doom us all.”
“But I can’t send him back,” Hemple said.
“No,” Helen agreed, “in which case the kindest thing you could do for him is to inject him with three or four more of those painkiller shots so that he goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up. Failing that, a bullet is quick and clean.”
“You’re unbelievable!” Hemple snapped.
“I am a realist,” she replied. “If you don’t give him a kind death now, he will get us all killed, and he will also suffer a far, far more unpleasant fate later.”
“How?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know. There are so many ways. That’s what I’m telling you. The only sane thing to do is to cut your losses and minimise your risks. When this man dies — not if, when — you will wish you had listened to me and shown him some mercy.”
“So noted,” Hemple said. “The funny thing is, I’m a human being. When did you resign from that club?”
Helen glared at him.
“The only ‘club’ we all belong to is the animal kingdom,” she replied.
Garney and Murdoch carried Jenkins between them. The party walked through the twinkling orchard of anomalies. Jenny noticed that Helen seemed to be counting them off.
“This one,” she said finally.
“You’re sure?” Jenny asked.
“I’m fairly certain,” Helen replied.
Hemple and Mason led the way through. Jenny felt herself pass from warm, fresh open space to a much more humid world.
They had arrived in the evening somewhere. The sky was the colour of pink icing, and decorated with little curlicues of white cloud. The pink warmed to an amber glow along one horizon, and darkened to deep plum at the other. A few trembling stars had come out.
They’d come through on an escarpment overlooking green woodlands. Hills — and, beyond them, snow-capped mountains — rose in the middle distance. There was a pungent scent of flowers. Jenny could hear bird calls, and the stray sounds of other, unidentifiable creatures. She could hear the buzz of insects. From far away, briefly, came a hooting racket, like a brass band tuning up.
“This is the place?” Jenny asked.
“Yes,” Helen replied. “This is the connection we needed.” She was staring up at the evening stars, as if anxious about what she might read there.
“So where do we go?” Jenny asked. “Which way is Siberia from here?”
Helen stopped looking at the sky. She turned, took her bearings and pointed.
“That way,” she said. She looked at Hemple, and then at the men supporting Jenkins. “It’s about twenty-five kilometres that way.”
Hemple clenched his jaw. He looked at Garney and Murdoch. Both of them nodded.
“We’ll take it in turns,” he told them.
“Yes, chief,” Garney said.
“We’ll take turns to carry Jenkins,” Hemple said to Helen.
“Of course you will,” she agreed sweetly, “but perhaps you’re beginning to appreciate the tough wisdom of the advice that I offered, and you oh-so-pointedly ignored.”
Helen turned and began to stride away down the slope.
“On the subject of mercy killings,” Redfern said to Hemple, “can I shoot her?”
“Get in line,” Jenny said.
FORTY
“So you know this what’s-his-name Shvachko, then?” Connor asked Antila.
She scowled at him.
“He is FSB. I have no desire to talk about him.” She picked up her coffee and went over to check on Umarov. Connor resumed his work. His arm was killing him. It was cold.
It was just after dawn, and he’d been awake and working most of the night. Medyevin yawned.
“Medical Officer Antila had flick with specialist Shvachko when the Spetsnaz first arrived here at the advance camp,” he explained.
“A what?”
“A flick.”
“A fling?”
“Is what I said.”
“No, you said a flick,” Connor said. “You mean fling. We call it a fling. The word is fling.”
“Fling,” Medyevin said to himself. “Fling, fling, fling,” he repeated. “Anyway, they broke up. It was messy, so I hear.”
“Really?” Connor asked.
“Oh yes.” Medyevin looked thoughtful. “Fling? Really, that is the word?”
“It’s a fling,” Connor insisted.
“What it is,” Antila announced, coming back over to them, “is none of your business! How dare you? I didn’t give
you permission to discuss my private life!”
“Sorry,” Connor said meekly.
Antila slapped Medyevin on the shoulder.
“Ow!” he protested. Then she turned to glare at Connor.
“And a slap for you, too, when your arm is healed better!” Antila told him.
“It’s obviously a sensitive subject, Natacha,” Connor said. “Shvachko clearly didn’t treat you very well.”
“That is understatement,” Antila snapped.
“You don’t like him?”
“He is pig-man,” Antila seethed, “with trotters and snout and small curly tail!”
There was a brief pause. Connor tried to bite his lips together, but the laughter burst out anyway. Medyevin began laughing, too. After a moment, Antila’s ferocious expression melted, and she started to giggle.
“Sorry, sorry,” Connor said. “It’s just that ‘pig-man’ sort of took me by surprise.”
Medyevin said something to Antila in Russian, and she replied, causing them both to laugh even more uncontrollably.
“That was something even worse and much funnier in Russian, wasn’t it?” Connor asked.
“It was,” Antila said.
“Could you share it?” Connor asked. “Because he’s going to come back and shoot me any minute now, and I’d like a decent laugh as my last request.”
Before either of them could answer, the door of the medical hut swung open and Shvachko walked in.
“Something is amusing you all this morning?” he asked.
The merriment died away. Antila straightened up and glared at him. Medyevin shrank back nervously. Connor just tried to pretend he wasn’t there.
“How is the device progressing?” Shvachko asked.
“Well, it’s a game of two halves,” Connor said.
“What?”
“It’s swings and roundabouts,” Connor added.
“I don’t understand you,” the FSB specialist said irritably. “Make sense!”
“Uhm, well it’s sort of very good news wrapped up in not quite such good news,” Connor stammered. “It’s getting there, everything’s looking good, we’re well on the way, it’s just not quite... what’s the word?”
“Finished?” Shvachko suggested.
Connor held up an index finger, opened his mouth, paused and then shrugged.
“Yeah. It’s not quite finished yet. But it will be soon.”
Shvachko turned away. He looked out of the hut’s window at the grey morning drizzle.
“There have been reports overnight,” he said, “from the expedition team. The reports have conflicted somewhat.”
He looked over at Connor.
“First report, from Koshkin, announces that work on your device is no longer a priority. He says they have located this anomaly.”
“They’ve found it?” Connor exclaimed, jumping to his feet, jostling his arm. “Ow ow ow! They’ve really found it?”
“This is what first message said,” Shvachko replied. “Second message was sent about half an hour ago, from commander of escort troop. He says that during the night, Koshkin, your two British friends and all other members of the scientific group have vanished.”
FORTY-ONE
“We’re trapped here!” Bulov wailed. “We’re stranded in the past! We’re stranded sixty-five million years in the past!”
“Shut up!” Koshkin snapped. He shoved Bulov so hard that the scientist fell over.
“Hey!” Abby protested.
“That’s not helping,” Cutter said.
“Is he wrong?” Koshkin asked.
Cutter sighed.
“It’s possible that we’re stranded sixty-five million years in the past, yes,” he said.
Koshkin snarled a loud curse. Bulov sat on the ground, whimpering. The two soldiers exchanged uneasy looks that said they didn’t entirely understand what was going on.
“We just have to wait,” Cutter said, “wait and see. There’s really no alternative.”
“These things come and go sometimes,” Abby added.
“Come and go?” Koshkin asked.
“They close, but they open again,” Abby explained. “It’s not always a one-shot deal.”
“Abby’s right,” Cutter said. “And I think it’s especially true of this anomaly. If my ideas are correct, the Tunguskan anomaly has been opening and closing on a regular basis for over a century.”
“But why, Nicky?” Suvova asked.
“Because it’s a damn great hole, Rina,” he replied. “It’s a great big tear in time, a major fault! And I believe it’s a major fault either because of what happened in Tunguska, or what’s happening here.”
“Meteor strikes?” Koshkin asked, looking around at the wounded landscape.
“Impact events,” Cutter nodded. “Extinction events. Heat, shock, pressure, electromagnetics, radiation... huge releases of dynamic forces that tear the Earth apart, and maybe space and time, as well as the physical world. If this is a fault line — a fault line that runs through time between the here and now and Tunguska in our era — maybe impact events have blown it wide open.”
Everyone was looking at him. He shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “But I think we can get back. I think this hole will open again. All of the indications point that way. We just have to watch it, and wait for it. Let’s not go wandering off. We have to stay at this location.”
Another brutally deep and reverberative roar shook the evening.
“Staying here may not be such a good idea,” Abby pointed out. Koshkin and the two soldiers raised their weapons and were scanning the nearby woods for signs of movement. The woods had gone quiet. Birds had stopped singing.
Something was out there, hunting.
“Okay,” Cutter said, taking charge, “we need to move to a more secure location, maybe high ground. Everybody take your bearings. Remember the landmarks, the trees, each outcrop of rock, the direction of the mountains.”
“But the blast area is huge,” Koshkin said, pointing to the massive patch of scorched landscape where the anomaly had been.
“It may look huge,” Cutter said, “but if we wander away from it, we may not find it again.” He turned. “Rina, give me your kit.”
Suvova handed Cutter her bulky knapsack of equipment. He fished around inside it, and came out with an aerosol can of blue dye.
“I use it for marking erratics in herd situations,” she said.
“It’ll do.” Cutter spray-marked a boulder and two tree trunks.
“Come on,” he told them all.
They hurried after him through the lengthening shadows. It felt as though the night itself was coming in on their heels. As the rose-red dusk faded to a deep maroon, the colour washed out of the flowers, and the woods became gloomy, grey caverns of tree trunks and canopy, lit mainly by their torches. At intervals, Cutter used the spray can to mark tree trunks.
They tried to stay quiet. It felt as if the world was going into hiding. Blooms were closing their petals. The deepest shadows were as black as ink.
As they hurried along, Abby remembered the CO2 pistol she’d confiscated from Bulov and pulled it out of her waistband.
“Give me the bag of darts,” she whispered to the scientist.
He hesitated, his hand on the strap of the small shoulder bag.
“If we run into trouble,” she said, “wouldn’t you like this to be loaded and in the hands of someone who knows how to use it?”
Bulov handed her the bag. Abby pulled out a dart, slung the bag over her shoulder, and loaded the pistol as she hurried after Cutter.
“What are the darts filled with?” she asked Bulov in a low voice.
He answered with the name of a fairly basic barbiturate.
“How strong’s the dosage?” Abby asked.
“Quite strong,” he assured her. “In fact, we had to stop using the capture gun, because we got the sedative balance wrong. It tended to overdose and kill creatures outright with a fatal re
action. Yushenko was intending to adjust the dosage levels and reload the darts.”
Bulov paused.
“He won’t be doing that now,” he added.
Yet again, a penetrating roar throbbed through the closing darkness.
“Look on the bright side,” Abby told him. “The way things are going, we might be glad of something with a lethal kick.”
They covered another half a kilometre or so, marking trees as they went, and came out on the bank of a strong river. Trees overhung the far shore, but on their side, there was a broad curve of shingle beach. Cutter led them along the shoreline. Twilight had settled around them. The sky had turned deep purple, and the stars looked like a scatter of glitter dust. Without competition from artificial light, their glow was surprisingly strong.
Cutter had been moving fast, but now he slowed and held up his hand. They could sense movement, and feel the faint tremble of the ground. Snuffling and grunting sounds came from the vegetation above the river.
“Quiet!” he hissed. “Stay still.”
A huge shape loomed out of the darkness ahead of them, sliding out of the woodland and onto the shingle. It was moving on two legs, its head down and its tail raised out behind it. Another one came into view behind it, silhouetted against the starlight, and then another.
Abby heard Bulov gasp in alarm. She looked behind them.
A dozen more huge creatures had emerged from the trees and onto the shingle behind them.
In the half-light, she recognised them. They were big duck-bills, perhaps some more Anatotitans or a similar genus. The herd was moving down to the water’s edge, quietly and tentatively, as if they were skulking or creeping. They issued the occasional low communicative snuffle or grunt, but it was quite obvious they were trying not to draw attention to themselves. In the starlight, they looked like large shapes carved out of pale marble.
Cutter noted their behaviour too. The herd was travelling quietly, making reduced signals. The creatures were aware that there was danger around, and perhaps they even felt as if they were being stalked.
Their motion became very slow. They kept stopping, freezing like deer, listening for the slightest warning sound, trying to pass unnoticed.
The herd surrounded the stationary humans, ahead of them and behind them on the shingle of the river bend. Others were still emerging from the trees alongside them. One adult appeared from foliage that shivered as it was brushed aside, and crept down the shore less than five metres away. They could smell its coarse vegetable odour, a mix of sap and dung and cellulose. They could hear its slight nervous sniffs and grunts.