“Yes? Who is it?” Bartholomew Quicksilver asked, his tone suspicious.
“Barty,” Ulysses began, his voice cracking as tears coursed down the left-hand side of his face and into his beard. “It’s me, Ulysses.”
“Ully?” his brother said, surprise apparent in his voice. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you not to come after me.”
“And it’s nice to hear your voice too. Look, I’d rather we continued this conversation face to face. Can you buzz me in?”
“All right,” his brother conceded, sounding like a petulant teenager.
The buzzer sounded and, with a click, the gate swung open.
He darted through it as soon as he was able, slamming the gate shut behind him in the vain hope that it might stop, or at least slow down, anyone with the same intention of meeting with his brother.
He took the stairs three at a time and, in no time at all, he was rapping on the door to his brother’s apartment with the bloodstone tip of his cane, his pistol ready in his other hand.
The door opened and Ulysses found himself staring into the face of his younger brother, still very much alive and, as far as he could tell, well to boot.
“Are you alone?” Ulysses demanded, trying to peer past him into the flat beyond.
Barty stared at his brother, his mouth open in surprise, and then, slowly, his gaze was drawn to the pistol which also happened to be pointed directly at him.
“Nice to see you too.” Barty said, taking in the state of Ulysses’ suit, his gaze lingering on his eye-patch. “What the hell happened to you?”
Without answering, Ulysses pushed past him into the apartment. “You’re sure you’re alone?” he said, making his way through to the lounge.
“Yes, more’s the pity.”
“Then lock the door.”
“Look, what’s going on?” Barty demanded, doing as his older brother had commanded, before following Ulysses into the living room. “And what happened to your eye?”
“Oh, I lost that a long time ago.”
“Really?”
“During the war.”
“Which war?”
Ulysses shooed away further questions with a sweep of his hand. He looked his brother in the eye.
“There’s no easy way to put this, your life is in danger.”
Barty’s face suddenly fell, annoyance replaced by red-faced embarrassment; as if he believed he had let his older sibling down.
“You found out then.”
Found out what? Ulysses wondered.
“Come on,” he said, holstering his gun, “you might as well tell me your side of the story now I’m here.”
“Very well. To be honest, it’ll be good to share the burden with someone who understands what it’s like. There’ve been enough secrets between us.”
“Yes, there have. But that’s all behind us now. Come on, sit down and tell me what they’ve got over you.”
“All right, but if we’re going to do this I’m going to need a drink,” Barty said. “And you too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“No! I don’t want a drink.”
“That’s not what it sounds like to me,” Barty said, pouring two large measures of cognac from a decanter. “I mean just look at you, man.” He thrust a full glass towards Ulysses. “If anybody needs a drink, it’s you.”
“I don’t want a drink!” Ulysses snapped, snatching the glass from Barty and slamming it down on the coffee table.
“All right, Ully, take it easy,” Barty said. “Is Nimrod with you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Ulysses suddenly froze, staring at the full glass in front of him. He then looked at the glass in Barty’s hand and watched, the horror of cold realisation writ large in his eyes, as Barty knocked back half of his drink in one go. Fate was playing its hand. Time was running out.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said with forced calm. “You were saying.”
Barty crossed the room to the only armchair, picked up the copy of The Times (Late Lunar Edition) that lay folded upon it and tossed it onto the coffee table before sitting down. “Right, well, as I was saying... You know I got into some difficulties – shall we say – back home?”
“Yes,” Ulysses sighed. He knew of his brother’s disastrous dalliances with Lady Luck all too well.
“Well it turned out your friend Lord Octavius de Wynter knew about them too.”
“De Wynter?” Of all the names he had expected to hear in conjunction with this whole sorry mess he hadn’t once thought it would be the spymaster de Wynter’s.
But then a memory popped into his head; something his brother’s girlfriend Selene had told him. That Barty had been working for the British Government.
“You’re not serious.”
Barty fixed him with a steely gaze. “Never been more so. Turns out the great and the good aren’t averse to a little blackmail if it gets the job done.”
“And what job would that be exactly?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.
Barty hesitated and then gestured at a pile of cut-card folders on the table between them.
Ulysses stared at the folders still as much in shock as before. Everything was falling into place. The drinks, the files on the three industrialists, even the newspaper strewn across them. He hadn’t managed to change a thing.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Ulysses growled.
“What, and tell you that your boss was blackmailing me to work for him?”
“I could have helped you!”
“You’re sure about that, are you? You know, you’re not as powerful or as influential as you like to think.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Barty’s scowl quickly softened into an expression of remorseful shame. “Nothing.”
Putting his glass down on the table beside Ulysses’, rising, he stepped out through the open French doors and onto the balcony.
“Tell me!” Ulysses pressed, jumping to his feet and following his brother.
For a moment he caught himself, as his eyes followed the drop to the empty concourse below, suddenly very aware of where he was.
“You really want to know?” Barty shouted. “You really want to know what de Wynter’s not been telling you?”
“Yes. Tell me!”
“I told you not to follow me here,” Barty snarled, his hands gripping the balustrade, knuckles whitening as his face turned purple with pent-up rage. “I know I’ve been a fool and that I’ve made mistakes throughout my life. I know I’ve hardly been the brother you would’ve preferred me to be – that business with Screwtape and all.”
“But that’s all water under the bridge,” Ulysses protested, moving towards his brother, his hands held out in an effort to pacify him.
“And then when I try to get myself out of the mess I’ve got myself into – and try my damnedest to keep you out of it – you have to go and follow me here! Just when I was starting to get my life together you have to come and interfere!”
Ulysses had never seen his brother like this. “Look, Barty, whatever it is you can tell me. Come on, we’re brothers. You can tell me anything.”
“Can I?” Barty suddenly hissed.
“Of course you can. You know you can.”
Barty suddenly put a hand inside his trouser pocket and took out a data storage locket. Ulysses stared at it in astonishment, his mind working nineteen to the dozen.
“It’s all on here, you know?” he said, his voice on the verge of mania now. “It’s all here. Every sordid little secret, every inconvenient little truth.”
“Does de Wynter know you’ve got this?” Ulysses asked, edging towards his brother.
“Do you know what he said he’d do, if I didn’t complete my mission?” Barty said, with a manic giggle.
“Barty, give it to me,” Ulysses said, clearly and slowly, not once taking his eyes off the locket his brother was holding.
“
Do you know what the price for my silence was?”
“Barty, just give me that locket.”
“Your life.”
Ulysses froze. His one good eye locked with his brother’s steely gaze. There were tears there now.
“What?” he said, in a voice barely more than a whisper.
“And now you’ve gone and ruined it all by coming here. I should kill you myself!”
With a scream, Barty sprang at his brother. Ulysses might not have been in the state of peak physical fitness he had once enjoyed, after all he had gone through in the last few months, but his reactions were still far faster than his brother’s. He ducked the clumsy punch and Barty’s fist sailed through empty air.
But Barty had put all of his strength into that one violent action, lashing out in fury and frustration. Without anything to block the punch, the momentum of it carried him forward.
“No!” Ulysses shouted as he rose from his crouch, reaching for his brother with both hands.
But Barty was already at the edge of the balcony, his feet tripping from under him as he lost his balance.
Ulysses’ fingertips brushed the cloth of his brother’s shirt and then he was gone.
His hands grabbing hold of the rail, he almost followed his brother over the edge as he desperately fought against fate, futilely trying to alter events that had already occurred – events that he now realised he couldn’t change.
His eye met his brother’s terrified gaze one last time as Barty plummeted towards the ground, and then he struck the flagstones below, his body bouncing once before landing, lying like a marionette with all its strings cut, never to move again, the locket falling from his fingers.
EMILIA STARED INTO the face of the man before her, into his one remaining eye, and saw nothing but the reflection of a traumatised soul.
She had been wrong. This wasn’t the man she had once known and loved. The Ulysses that stood before her now was broken, the indefatigable confidence and bravura gone, to be replaced by doubt and despair.
“I had gone to see Barty straight away, with the express intention of challenging fate, of changing destiny by saving his life, catching his killer – or so I thought. And yet, by that very deed I condemned him to death.”
He sounded hollow, as if something had died in him, when Barty had.
“I know he could be a bastard at times, wasteful and obnoxious to boot, but he was still my brother – my younger brother – and when I was thirteen I promised to protect him, no matter what. And yet, as it turns out, the one person I couldn’t protect him from was me.”
Slowly Emilia lowered the gun in her hands.
He needed her, she saw that now. And the Ulysses Quicksilver who needed her was the Ulysses Quicksilver she had fallen in love with.
“It was then that I realised that everything that had happened was already pre-determined. I lost myself in a bottle of brandy after that, and a whole day in the gutter with it. Whatever I did would make no difference so I decided to do nothing. It had already happened and so it would happen again. All I could do was let events follow their pre-destined path. But then, when the brandy was gone, I realised at last that I still had a part to play – the part that fate had always had in mind for me. I could be Time’s Arrow.”
“It was you,” Emilia said, with sudden realisation. “You stopped the bulkhead from closing when we were trying to escape from the restaurant on the flight here.”
“That’s right.”
“And those alien things. They’re here because of you!”
“I sought audience with their Empress and was able to persuade her that the only way to protect her hive was to stop the Dashwood’s evil scheme. I even gave my younger self a helping hand along the way, making sure that the girl and her droid were on hand when a certain gladiator-bot went on the rampage.”
“But what about saving yourself now?” Emilia said, grabbing Ulysses’ hands and squeezing them tight.
Ulysses looked down.
“If this enterprise has shown me anything it’s that you can’t cheat destiny. What is about to happen still has to happen for me to be here now, for us to be here now – in order that I might save you and your father.”
“But what about Nimrod? What happens to him?” Emilia pressed, ready to believe every word he was telling her.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I left. I mean I’m going to leave. And I left without him. He stayed behind to destroy the machine.”
“So you didn’t see what happened to him in the end?”
“No,” Ulysses admitted. “I didn’t.”
“Then how do you know it’s not you that saves him now?”
Slowly Ulysses looked up, meeting her red-eyed gaze at last. And there was something there, in his own one-eyed stare, like a flickering candle-flame at the heart of a cyclopean cave. A flicker of hope in the darkness.
And he turned and looked back the way they had just come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Helter Skelter
T MINUS 2 MINUTES, 11 SECONDS
ULYSSES QUICKSILVER GOT to his feet, the echo of the catastrophic collapse still ringing in his ears. Flicking the hair out of his eyes he quickly scanned the room. The air was filled with dust. Pieces of twisted metalwork littered the fractured floor.
Much of the fighting had abated. Broken bodies of faceless men in dinner jackets lay beneath the fallen ironwork alongside motionless insectoid forms of the Selenite soldiers, a stinking yellow ichor oozing from their cracked carapaces.
The Selenites that remained alive had the last dozen of the warped Dashwoods cornered, offering them no quarter.
Fires had broken out around the chamber and the smoke from these was fogging the air, making it hard for Ulysses to see much at all – least of all where his stricken manservant might be.
And yet, incredibly, the Sphere was still spinning, sick white light shooting beams of radiance through the cloying smoke and dust.
“Nimrod!” he shouted over the throbbing hum of the machine. “Nimrod! Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
“Over here, sir!”
Hearing his aging butler’s voice, he felt his heart leap.
And now he could see Nimrod, beyond the tangle of girders obstructing the centre of the chamber, miraculously alive and still in one piece. He was crouched beside one of the consoles Smythe and Wentworth had been working at.
“Don’t worry, old boy. I’m coming to get you.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ulysses began to scramble over the sundered, vibrating floor towards the knotted web of reinforced steel.
“No you’re not, sir.”
Nimrod’s words stopped him dead.
“What?”
“It’s not your job to save me, sir,” Nimrod called back, shouting to make himself heard over the white noise of the humming machinery and the thunderous roar of the collapsing dome.
“But you’ll be killed!”
“That’s not important, sir. Dashwood’s gone through already. You have to stop him, and that means you have to go after him.”
“No!” Ulysses railed, tears welling up in his eyes.
“Yes, sir! You do. Otherwise all this, everything we’ve done, will have been for naught. You have to go after Dashwood and I have to stay behind to destroy the device, thereby ensuring no one can ever use it again. It’s what your father would have done!”
Nimrod was right. There was no denying it. His oldest, most trusted companion had spoken the truth. If they didn’t go through with this now, who knew what fate awaited the world, in the past or the present?
No matter what his feelings might be for Nimrod, his patriotic duty – the love he bore for his country – had to override all else.
Ulysses returned to the foot of the dais and, once there, started to climb.
The wrought iron staircase was littered with debris and dented where chunks of mooncrete had fallen onto it. Ulysses had to clam
ber over some of the larger lumps that had embedded themselves within the grilled structure.
At the top of the platform, their broken bodies crushed beneath a twisted iron girder, were Dashwood’s assistants. Their master might have escaped, but Smythe and Wentworth were dead. Ulysses barely registered the fact that they lay there, in death, each clasping the other’s hand.
Shielding his eyes against the glare of the light pulsing from the whirling rings, Ulysses tensed. The power of the machine was thrumming through his body now. It felt as if the vibrations might unravel the very fibres of his being.
This was it; there was no escaping it now. He had seen what repeated use of the Sphere had done to Dashwood – in both body and mind – but, as Nimrod had said, they had reached too far to turn back now.
Ulysses glanced back down the buckled staircase, the waves of light rippling throughout the chamber as myriad fractures skittered out across the walls of the dome. There couldn’t be long before the structure gave way altogether.
His eyes found Nimrod standing in front of the Babbage engine control console. And Nimrod’s gaze of steely resolve found his.
“Go, sir!” he yelled, his voice barely audible over the whub-whub-whub of the Sphere.
“I’m coming back for you!” Ulysses shouted, the tears streaming down his face. “I’ll come back, I promise!”
And then through the waves of light, the tears, the smoke and the dust, Ulysses glimpsed movement on the far side of the chamber. There was someone there – a man – standing at the entrance to the chamber, his hand outstretched towards Nimrod.
And then he turned and, with a mumbled “Here goes nothing!” he threw himself into the retina-searing sphere of light.
EPILOGUE
Somewhere in Time
T MINUS 2 MINUTES, 11 SECONDS
THE LIGHT FADED and Ulysses Quicksilver suddenly found himself plunged into darkness. His body felt uncomfortably hot and there was the distinct smell of burnt hair and scorched fabric.
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