by Glover, Nhys
She slipped out from under him and crawled toward the bathroom in a hurry. Laughing, he jumped off the bed, scooped her up into his arms, and carried her into the shower cubicle.
‘Waterfall,’ Faith ordered, and leaned out to press the right sequence of buttons to get her desired flow. Then, as the water pounded down on them from above, very much like a fast flowing waterfall, Luke dropped her to her feet, so they could both make the most of the heavy pressure cascading over their bodies.
‘I love these showers! Why did it take them three or four centuries to come up with them!’ Luke said, swallowing a large mouthful of water as his face turned up into the falling water.
Faith felt so alive and happy, she wanted this moment to go on forever. The last week felt like a fading nightmare, now that the reality of Lukas was back in her life, energising and vitalizing it. Even the problems with her mission no longer seemed insurmountable, now Luke was going to be involved. If anyone could work out how this mission could go down, he could. She leaned in to feel his warm, hard body against her own, as the cool water pummelled them.
Life was wonderful!
Chapter Fourteen
Luke held Faith’s hand as they moved through the dark train station. No one paid them any attention, even though they wore the outlandish, classical tunics of New Atlantis. The station was small – just two platforms, one on either side of the two sets of tracks that ran north and south through the town. The peeling sign that showed them they were at Jozefow was lit by a weak lamp from above.
Luke could almost feel the planks of the platform beneath his sandalled feet. The air smelled off, like something was dead and rotting nearby. As he watched, uniformed soldiers moved up and down the platform, checking for unauthorised people in and around the station. One German trooper stopped in front of them, and demanded their papers. Shocked and horrified, Luke started to step away, bracing himself for a fight. But as he watched, a disembodied hand came out and handed over paperwork. It looked like Faith’s hand, but hers was safely holding his, and her other hand was at her side.
‘It is all right. They cannot see you. This is my memory of the events that took place about an hour before you came upon me. He sees Zygmunt and me as we were then.’ Faith smiled her encouragement at him. She could see that the VR world was seriously disturbing him, and she wasn’t wrong.
He turned his attention to their surroundings again. There were shelters on either side of the tracks that were little more than waiting rooms. The side he was on had a ticket office, but it was closed for the night. The big-faced railway clock said the time was half past nine.
He heard the train first. And then he felt the vibration under his feet. How did they do this? It felt so real. He reached out to tentatively touch the soldier who had demanded their paperwork. He still stood at their side, but was distracted by the sound of the approaching steam train.
Luke’s hand passed right through the soldier, and he drew back with a gasp. It was as if the guy was a ghost. He looked at Faith, trying to check that this was normal. She smiled her encouragement. It was.
Then the train began to pull slowly into the station. The smell was what hit him first. It was like a livestock transport, but off somehow. There was a strong smell of chlorine. The passenger carriages had barbed wire across the windows. Inside, it was dark, but he could see faces – thin, gaunt, terrified faces pressed against the glass. It was like a nightmare.
The passenger carriages passed by, and then the livestock cars slowly came to a standstill in front of him. He could hear people inside the cars. Lots of people. They were crying and moaning, calling out for help. He moved toward the closest one, and reached out. But his hand went through the wall. In frustration, he swore.
Then he walked slowly along to check out the coupling of the carriages. It looked fairly standard. He could see the chains that would need to be removed when the coupling was released. That would be a straight forward matter. He’d done training like that in the past. Disrupting supply lines was his speciality. Uncouple a carriage or two in the wrong place, when another train is due through shortly after, and you had a perfect opportunity for derailment.
He looked up at the roof of the carriages. On top of each sat a machine gun with Nazi gunner, who was checking the station for runaways. As he watched, a ragged skeleton, pale in the gathering gloom, made a run for it from under one of the carriages. His eyes caught a glimpse of the man. He swung his panicked gaze back to the machine gunner, hoping the man hadn’t seen what he had seen. His hopes were dashed as he watched the Nazi’s blank face, as he pulled the trigger, letting loose a deafening rattatat of gunfire in the direction of the escaping man.
Luke swung back to see the escapee fall forward, his back covered with blossoming bullet holes. Shocked and horrified, he heard the screams of the people inside the carriages. He looked at the soldier at their side, and Zygmunt, who stood at Luke’s left hand. One looked interested by the sudden increase in activity; the other just shuddered in disgust.
Luke tried to see some sign of compassion on the gangling man’s face. There was none. He seemed more concerned by the smell, as he covered his nose with his handkerchief.
‘This guy was on our side?’ Luke questioned her, keeping his voice low, despite the fact that he knew he couldn’t be heard. That he actually wasn’t there.
‘Yes. Zygmunt was not happy to be involved in this mission. He believed that, having been through it all before, he should not be forced to go through it again. He was in Warsaw at this time. A professor at the University. He published the free paper there, so he insisted on telling us often. But, although he may have ideologically been opposed to what the Germans were doing, he showed no empathy for the plight of those poor souls on that train. Or the dead on the side of the tracks we passed.
‘I do not know if his humanity had been burned out of him by the time we Retrieved him from the Russian old people’s home, or whether he never truly had any. To be honest, I do not know why the Jumper, who was sent for him, Retrieved him at all. He was not New Atlantis material, for all his accomplishments indicated he was.’
As they waited, another train whooshed past on the other track. When it had passed, the train in front of them started to move off slowly. Luke checked the time. It had been just ten minutes since the train had pulled in.
‘That was quite a fast stop. The last recon mission I took, the train I watched sat in the station for an hour. It seems their timetable is irregular, and that causes all sorts of delays. It would be an issue, except that I was able to talk to one of the station guards the day after the carriage went missing. I asked him about anything odd – like was the train delayed, were any strangers seen around the carriage, that sort of thing. He was quite helpful, considering. He said the trains were on time that night. The transport heading for Belzac pulled in at 9.30 pm and pulled out, ten minutes later. No suspicious characters were seen around the station.’
Luke stared at her in amazement. To be able to know what happened, before it actually happened, was mindboggling. It took the unpredictable factors off the table. All they had to do was fit in with the events as they were described. Like Fate.
As the scene around them froze, Luke understood that they had reached the end of the sequence as Faith had experienced it. He started to pace the scene, inspecting the rooftops of the buildings more closely.
‘What are your plans to get rid of the machine gunners?’
Faith frowned. ‘We weren’t sure. It was going to be on dusk by the time the train reached the spot where we’d disconnect the carriage. We hoped the gunners wouldn’t look back. The one on top, we hoped to take out with a silencer, once the carriage slowed.’
‘Silencer?’
‘A gun with a silencer. It cuts the noise out, so it wouldn’t alert the other gunners.’
‘So you need a sniper positioned in the trees somewhere before the target point.’
‘I guess so. But we can’t take out all the gunners,
as there is no report that any died. That was what made it so much of a mystery. No one reported seeing anything unusual. Only the gunner on the last carriage went missing, along with his carload of one hundred and fifty women and children.’
‘I don’t like the idea of leaving those gunners. Particularly those on the last few carriages. Can we anaesthetise them? Drug them somehow?’
‘We could tranq them.’
‘Huh?’ Luke was getting used to all the words he didn’t know. It was like learning a foreign language. Once he had heard the word, and its meaning, he remembered it.
‘Tranq. Tranquilizer shot. A special gun that was invented to administer sedation, usually to animals.’
‘Perfect. How is it administered?’
‘A dart that injects into the soft tissue on impact.’
‘So there would be evidence after the fact? That won’t work… I heard the Amazon natives could shoot tiny darts that could kill.’
‘Coated with poison. Yes. But a blow gun would be short range.’
‘If we could get snipers, with small blow gun type weapons, onto the top of these buildings…’ He pointed to the points next to the eves. ‘The shot would be twenty feet, max.’
Faith studied the distance, her face a picture of concentration. ‘We’d have to get people up on the roof, and in place, before the train came in. No guns. They’d be searched. I wonder if some of the warfare research might be useful. No one has accessed that data in the last two hundred years, but it would still be there. What would we need?’
‘A small projectile that administers a fast-acting, short term sedative, but leaves no residue. It would need to be administered by a small, easily hidden gun, short range.’
‘Okay, I will look into it.’ She pulled out the little tablet she carried with her everywhere. Luke understood, now, that as she stared at it, her thoughts were picked up by the machine and translated into action. It seemed impossible. But then, everything about this world seemed impossible.
‘I would want to get up on the top of that carriage shortly after it left the platform, while its still moving slow enough. If the gunners are taken out, there should be no problem, as it looks like the track curves shortly after it leaves the station.’ He looked into the darkness where the train had disappeared.
‘Let us see.’ She looked at the tablet again and, within seconds, the scene blinked out around them, and then blinked on again. It was disconcerting to see a train standing at the platform where seconds before the platform had been empty. Then the train started its slow chug-chug-chug out of the station, the air heavy with coal smoke, as they replayed the last section of the scenario again.
Shaking the dissociation out of his head, he studied the retreating train. Sure enough, it disappeared from sight long before the darkness would have claimed it.
‘If the gunner is out, I can walk along the top of the train, and drop down between the carriages. It would take me about two minutes to unhook the coupling. We’d need to do some calculations: speed of the train, how far the forward motion would take the carriage once it was uncoupled, that sort of thing.’
‘We can run simulations. Zygmunt and I walked the full length of that track, almost to the extraction point. It was just around the bend from where we were attacked. The computers will create extrapolated images based on what we saw, and on what the rest of the research on file can provide. We can time it all exactly!’
‘Man, I wish we’d had all this ‘technology’ in my time.’
‘If you had, you’d have just brought the Dark Ages forward a hundred years.’ Her flat look froze him. He realised how it would seem to her, him getting juiced up over fancy ways to kill. It wasn’t like that. Not really. It was about achieving outcomes, reaching targets. If that meant causalities, so be it. But it wasn’t about the death.
‘But we can use it for our mission?’ he checked with her, wondering suddenly if there might be a rule or a ‘Protocol’ that limited the use of weapons ‘in-situ’.
‘As long as we do not change anything, we can do what we like.’
‘I’d want a team at the extraction point. If there are a lot of traumatised women and children in that carriage, we’ll need people who can calm ‘em down, and get ‘em moving toward the light. It’ll crack ‘em up, seeing that light. Some’ll want to run. What do we do about those that don’t do as we direct?’
‘I’ve thought that one through. Myself and a few other female volunteers will get onto that carriage. We will talk to the captives while the train is moving.’
‘No. Absolutely no! Do you have any idea how hard it would be to get you onto that specific carriage? There are what, ten, twenty carriages? You couldn’t be sure you’d get on to that last one. And if you didn’t, you’d end up…’ He shuddered at the thought of where she might end up. ‘No. We’ll find another way.’
His heart felt weak just imaging Faith in one of those carriages. It would be bad enough being in the end one, for the hours it would take before they could get them out. But if there was a mistake, if there was one misstep – certain death awaited, at the end of the line.
‘They only picked up five hundred from Zamosc. Working on the hundred and fifty we know went missing, we can assume they packed them all into the last three carriages.’
‘So you have a 66.6% chance of getting it wrong. And think about it, Faith. Every space you take up in that last carriage, is one less person you can save.’
That took the stubborn gleam out of her eye. She hadn’t considered that. Her shoulders slumped as she looked at the station standing frozen around them. She glanced down at the tablet, and in a blink of an eye, the scene was gone. They stood once more in an empty room lit only by glowing down lights.
Luke shook his head at the visual shift. It gave him vertigo, those fast changes of scene.
‘If two of us got on the train, one could get to a window and talk to those inside. They could pass the word around that they were to be rescued, and that they would be taken through a light-filled tunnel to safety. The Portal would have to go up as soon as the train was out of sight, and before the carriage door was opened. They would have to believe it was there all along, not just something that blinked on before their eyes.’
‘It doesn’t look like a tunnel though. It looks like a shower of fireworks.’ Faith interjected as they started to leave the room.
‘People see what they expect to see. The first group are going to have to see people walk out of the Portal, so it seems like a tunnel. They are less likely to balk, if they see people passing backward and forward through it. Once you get the first ones through, the rest will follow.’
‘We have sound waves that act on the fear receptor of the brain. It can calm them, make them more malleable.’
‘How long have we got to get them all though? Two at a time, maybe three if they’re small enough.’
‘We have done the calculations on that. We estimate we can get them all through in about five minutes. The hard part will be at the other end. Coming out in the Start Point cavern to all the technology… it is terrifying, even for someone who knows what to expect.’
‘So you darken the cavern, for the time they’re coming through, and have people ready to talk to them as they wait to be transferred to the surface. It’s a reassuring sight, once they’re on the surface, classical buildings, flowers and trees.’
‘Moving pathways…’
‘Hmmm, yeah, well, if we can make sure no one is using them when we first get them up there, they won’t notice. Maybe have a large tent set up on the lawn outside the cavern. Food, drink, some mild sedatives to ease them through it all. Do we know their language?’
‘Records say Germans and Czechs were the last left in the Ghettos by this stage. Maybe a few Poles might have managed to survive this long.’
‘So we have people speaking their native tongues moving through the crowd. Doctors. You’ll need doctors to check them out. They are going to be in a bad way, if what I saw i
nside that carriage at the platform is any indication.’
‘Doctors may frighten them. This is a massive task. I had known it before, but just discussing the logistics once we have them here… what is it going to be like for them? This world, after what they have known? They are going to be suffering PTSD. The risk of crash and burn is going to be significant.’
‘PT what?’ he asked again. It was habitual now, to ask when he heard something new.
‘PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You would have known it as shell shock or combat fatigue. It is when trauma is so extreme that the individual just shuts down. They cannot function.’
Luke remembered Cara mentioning something like that about this society being in a permanent state of shell shock. He shuddered. He had seen plenty of men displaying the symptoms of shell shock. Good soldiers, strong men and tough fighters, could suddenly zone out, be unable to think, unable to act, even to save their own lives.
It had crossed his mind several times, in the weeks since his arrival in New Atlantis, that he might very well be suffering from shell shock after shooting the three Gestapo. It was possible that everything that had happened since then had all taken place in his mind. Somewhere in that Polish forest, in 1942, he was sitting under a tree, staring out into nothing, drool dripping down his chin.
He dismissed the thought hurriedly. That wasn’t what had happened. The longer he became used to this world, the more it made sense. Why couldn’t man have invented a time machine, given enough time and incentive? And if the threat of extinction wasn’t a powerful enough incentive to focus manpower and resources into its discovery, he didn’t know what was.
‘Are you hungry? I am. I would like to have a meal in the social precinct. I know a lovely little place that overlooks the canal.’ Faith seemed to be trying to distract him from his uncomfortable thoughts. She succeeded.
‘What about my martial arts program?’
She smiled in relief. ‘I forgot. Come on, I will take you to one of the download points.’