True Path

by Graham Storrs

  He turned away quickly and made it to his office before anyone could accost him. Jesus Christ, Jay! When did you start talking like that? Maybe the Super was right and this was a chance for Jay to re-evaluate his life. And the first thing he felt he needed was to re-connect with the real world and stop talking like a corporate drone. He felt soiled by the hypocrisy of sounding so positive when the reality for everyone in the unit was that this was a complete and utter disaster.

  Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to him. Maybe most of his staff would be glad of the chance to move on. Almost all of them were police officers from around Europe. Maybe they’d be glad to go back to their own cities and their families. The thought gave Jay pause. The idea of going back to London didn’t fill him with any kind of pleasure. Sixteen years after the Big Splash the reconstruction was finally complete. A memorial park ran from the rebuilt British Museum to Charring Cross Station, a broad green scar that marked the site of so many deaths. The rail link from Charring Cross to Deptford crossed the delicate new Memorial Bridge and wound its way through a thousand acres of new development. London had bounced back, as it always did, but there was too much there to remind Jay of that dreadful day.

  He also doubted that he would be welcomed back by any police or security force in the UK. MI5 had sacked him in a frenzy of finger pointing after Sniper’s attack. The fact that—largely due to Jay and Sandra—the death toll had been thousands and not millions, cut no ice at all. The security services had failed to protect London from its worst disaster since the Blitz and heads had to roll.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he told Anna, the section admin officer, as he grabbed his coat and strode past her desk. “If anyone wants me, tell them I’ve gone out to reflect on the meaning of life.” He stopped and went back. “That was a joke, of course. Tell them I’m in a meeting.” Anna was a good administrator, but she had a tendency to take things literally.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, big eyes full of sympathy. She was an attractive woman, a tall Nordic type in her early twenties. She had drunkenly confessed to him at the last Christmas party that she had a crush on him and he’d been terrified of showing her any kind of encouragement since then.

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  She pulled a sad but brave face.

  “You’ll be all right,” he told her. “You can count on a very good testimonial. Everyone can.” She looked eager to talk about it but he drew back. “I’ll be back in half an hour, probably.”

  The streets were as cold and miserable as they looked and a light drizzle began as he stepped out from under the massive entrance awning of the Berlymont Building. He had no destination in mind and didn’t care where he went. Motion was what he needed, the illusion of doing something, of getting somewhere. Sitting in his office felt too much like his wheels were spinning while his spring wound down.

  He had seen it coming, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. The unit had slowly been losing budget and shrinking in size as it mopped up the last of the old bricks. But he had assumed the TCU would simply refocus, find a new mission, take on new enemies, and continue to fight the menace that time travel technology presented. He realized now what a pipe dream that had been. Hard times always saw governments pull in their horns, focus on domestic matters, become more myopic just when they needed to expand their vision. The world was in just as much danger from temporal crime as it had always been—perhaps more—and Jay could not see himself abandoning his life’s work just because some idiot in Berlin had added the TCU as a line item in a budget balancing spreadsheet.

  He caught the reflection of a young woman in a shop window, half a block behind him. Hadn’t he seen the same woman a few minutes ago? He took the next left and walked a little faster. His MI5 training had saved his life several times in the years of his tenure at the TCU. However, it looked now as if a university degree or some other qualification might be more use in helping him find a new job. How did he get to be the world’s leading expert on a bunch of aging bricks and now facing redundancy? Maybe the truth was he deserved to be on the scrap-heap, even at thirty-five. He’d become as obsolete as the people he had hunted to extinction.

  He turned into a quiet alley and ducked into a doorway. Reaching into his shoulder holster, he drew his police issue stunner and waited. After a few seconds, he heard footsteps—a light step—hurrying to catch up. A moment later, a woman sped past without seeing him. Not a woman, he realized, but a girl. A teenage girl, tall and slender, her long legs in drainpipe jeans, her thick, black hair bouncing on her narrow shoulders. She stopped and looked side to side, realizing she had lost her quarry.

  He stepped out behind her and raised his gun, placing the dot of the targeting laser in the center of her back. When she turned, the dot ran across her back, round her arm and over her right breast to dance in the center of her chest. He caught his breath. It wasn’t that the girl was younger than he had supposed—no more than fifteen, he now saw—nor that she was a beauty—which she was, the kind to make older men act and feel foolish and ashamed—but because of the impossibility of what he was seeing.

  His heart stopped. Time stopped. He let the hand holding the stunner fall to his side.

  “Sandra?” he said, stupidly.

  Wild surmises clamored in his brain. She had found a way to come forward in time. She had come back from a future where she had been restored to the way she looked on the day he had first seen her. Time itself had fractured and fragmented. Past and present were mashed together. Ghosts walked the Earth.

  She stared back at him, her initial alarm giving way to something like curiosity, an intense, questioning scrutiny. His heart beat again. He could see now that it wasn’t her. This girl was similar, freakishly so, but there were differences. She was not quite so tall, not quite so beautiful. The hardness and strength that were always just below the surface in Sandra Malone were missing in this child. This girl had had an easy life, no old-before-her-time bitterness. She had been loved and cared for. She had grown up innocent and undamaged. And yet the resemblance was so strong.

  “Why are you following me?” he asked in French, breaking the long silence.

  “I …” she said, speaking English. “You’re Jay Kennedy.”

  He switched to English. “Who are you?”

  She seemed hesitant, nervous. He wondered if she might have information. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been approached by a stranger like this.

  “Are you Jay Kennedy?” she asked. “I need to know.”

  He holstered his gun and stepped towards her. He was fairly sure she was not armed. “Yes, I’m Jay Kennedy. Why were you following me?”

  “I need …” The girl was breathing hard, as if strong emotions were seething inside her.

  “Why don’t you just calm down and say what you wanted to say?”

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  He studied her again for a moment. “I must say, you remind me of someone I knew once, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

  “Who? Who do I remind you of?”

  There was vehemence in her voice, a kind of pleading. It made Jay wary. Mentally, he took a step back. “Look, why don’t we just stop pissing about? Who are you and what is it you want?”

  The girl looked hurt. The open vulnerability that had been in her eyes disappeared, like a wild creature drawing back into its burrow. She took a breath and held herself upright. Jay could see she was preparing herself for some kind of pain but until she spoke, he had no idea what it might be she feared from him.

  “My name is Cara,” she said. “Cara Malone. I’m your daughter.”

  Chapter 5: Prisoner

  Sandra woke to find two small children staring at her. As her eyes opened, their eyes widened. She squinted at them, trying to decide if they were a dream and they ran off, slamming a door behind them.

  She was on a wooden-framed bed, on a mattress that felt like a bag of loose springs. Her hands and feet were tied with plastic straps and
her head felt like it contained a large burrowing animal trying to dig its way out through her temples. She closed her eyes against the harsh, strange light. It was hot. Her clothes were damp with sweat. The room smelled of fried food and unusual spices. Not in Kansas anymore, she told herself. Yet, for all she knew, that’s exactly where she was.

  How long she had been unconscious, she could not tell. Polanski and the other guy, Peter, had bundled her into a van and driven for what seemed like ages. When they finally took her out, she was inside a hangar at a small airfield.

  “We need you to be quiet for awhile now,” Polanski had said. He’d held a small disc in his fingers and reached out to press it against her head. She recognized it as a neural damper. Its carefully shaped magnetic fields would keep her unconscious for as long as it was near her skull. She began to protest and the next thing she knew she was airborne, curled up inside some kind of packing case, listening to the drone of a twin prop aircraft, flying straight and level.

  When they opened the packing case, it was night time and she found herself inside another van. Polanski cursed the failed neural damper and apologized to her. “Tech’s hard to come by,” he said. “We take whatever rubbish we can.” The boy, Peter, handed him a syringe. “This isn’t so nice for you, but it’s a lot more reliable.” They both had to hold her down before Polanski could get the needle into her.

  Now she was … where?

  A small bedroom. Plastered walls. A single window with cheap curtains and faded wooden shutters. A dresser, with no personal effects and no mirror. A door. Closed. Bare wooden floorboards. It could have been a room anywhere, but it felt foreign. The smells, the heat, even the light, left her convinced she had been taken out of the UK, out of Europe too, unless she was in some sultry Mediterranean country. From the light, she suspected it was either just after dawn or just before sunset. From the heat, she guessed the latter.

  She checked her commplant. She wanted to call Cara. Then she would call the police. But the commplant told her there was no service available. That wasn’t too big a surprise if she had been taken out of the country. What was a surprise was that the device didn’t offer her any alternatives. Where in the world could she be where there were no telecoms services at all? She’d just have to hope that Cara got her message and had gone to Jay.

  She sat up and looked around for a way to remove her ties. The bed springs clanked and groaned and her head swam. Whatever they had injected her with was not a modern, high-tech anesthetic, but something crude and simple. Who the hell were these people?

  She was grateful they’d tied her hands in front rather than behind her. It gave her a better chance of freeing herself. There was nothing sharp or obviously useful for cutting the ties, so she set that on the back burner and bunny-hopped to the window. The ties cut into her ankles and the wooden floorboards thudded with each hop, but finding out where they were holding her was high on her list of things she would really like to know. Besides, if she could climb out the window, maybe there would be something outside to cut her bindings with.

  The window was on the ground floor, which was a good thing, but the view robbed the fact of any pleasure it might have given her. She seemed to be on a farm, a dirt-poor collection of single-story buildings. The ground was sandy and an ancient flatbed truck without tires was rusting in a clearing. A scrawny goat was tied to the truck’s rear end. Beyond the fields the ground was dry and barren, broken and rough, rising gradually to distant hills with mountains far beyond. It could be the Middle East, she supposed, simultaneously praying that it wasn’t. Since the Adjustment, the Kingdoms of Islam were no place for an infidel white woman.

  Whatever it was, she didn’t fancy her chances of crossing that endless desert. The temperature must be at least thirty degrees where she stood. Out in there, in that treeless wilderness, the sun would burn her flesh and bake her dry. She hopped back to the bed and sat down. So what’s the plan? she asked herself. Hop across to the truck, get the goat to bite through your ties, and then leg it across fifty kilometers of burning desert?

  She looked at the door. She knew it was unlocked because the kids had run out through it … unless that really had been a dream. Polanski and his sidekick had brought her there in a vehicle of some sort and it was probably parked outside somewhere. She could climb out the window cut her ties on a rock—there seemed to be no shortage of rocks in this place—find the vehicle, steal it and drive off.

  The fact that the vehicle would probably be biometrically keyed to particular drivers, Polanski and the kid, at least, didn’t bother her too much. She had stolen plenty of cars in her misspent youth.

  She was halfway through the window when Polanski walked in.

  “Hi. How’re ya doin’?” he asked.

  She heard him walking across the wooden floor behind her. Then a hand gripped the belt at the back of her jeans and she was yanked back inside and dumped on the bed. She struggled against the clanking mattress until she was sitting up with her back to the wall.

  She snarled at the American, wishing her hands were free so she could beat the grin off his stupid face. “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”

  He went to the dresser and retrieved a tray he must have put there. It had a glass of water and a plate of food on it. Sandra’s stomach reminded her how welcome that would be.

  “If you want this, I’ll untie your hands,” he said. “But you’ve got to promise not to do anything stupid.”

  “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you just take me home and I’ll forget all about breaking your neck?”

  He pursed his lips and returned the tray to the dresser. “I guess you’re just not in the mood. Shame, because the food’s good here.” It certainly smelled good and Sandra was already wishing she had eaten first and threatened later.

  “Can we cut the bullshit and get on with it? If this is a kidnapping for ransom you’re probably the most stupid criminal I’ve ever met. I’m an orphan on a research assistant’s salary.”

  Polanski sat down on the end of the bed, which made Sandra think about kicking him in the face. “I know exactly who you are, Miss Malone. You used to be a timesplasher—a brick. You were part of a splashteam run by a guy named Sniper. You took out a small town in the Netherlands in 2047, but by 2050, you had switched sides and you helped the British cops bring Sniper down in London. Since then, you’ve done a whole load of menial jobs, working your way through college. You picked up a couple of degrees in physics and temporal engineering, and now you work for Dr. Olivia Bradley at the University of East Anglia, building time travel rigs for use in her research. In short, you went from brick to teknik. A very unusual career path.”

  “How do you know all—”

  Without warning, she lashed out with her feet, delivering a fierce kick to the side of his head. Polanski didn’t see it coming. His head snapped sideways and he fell off the bed. Sandra scrabbled after him. Although stunned and groggy, he was starting to lever himself off the floor. She dropped to her knees beside him, grabbed the front of his shirt and delivered the knockout blow by headbutting him on the bridge of his nose. He fell back heavily and Sandra began a rapid search of his pockets.

  She found a bunch of plastic ties in his back pocket and a large penknife in front. With some effort, she dragged the penknife out of his jeans and opened it up. She had made a lot of noise so she kept her eyes fixed on the door as she struggled to cut the plastic strip that bound her wrists. It was awkward, but she managed it. She had just cut her ankles free when Peter came rushing in. He shouted something and charged straight for her. The boy was a fool. She could have ripped his throat open with the knife if she had wanted to. Instead, she nimbly sidestepped the heavy young man and managed to get in a blow to his ribs. By the time he got his balance, she was waiting, delivering two fast punches to his solar plexus and another to his throat. He slid down the wall choking and gasping for air, looking shocked. Stepping back, she raised one leg and shot a kick at his head, knocking it back a
gainst the wall. The young man slumped down, unconscious.

  -oOo-

  By the time Polanski woke up, Sandra had searched the farmhouse, located the vehicle, and discovered a Latina woman, who allegedly spoke no English, and her four children. She had also learned something very interesting: she was in Mexico, near somewhere called Múrquiz Municipality, a couple of hundred kilometers from the Texas border. The woman and children seemed to be no threat, so Sandra went back inside to see her prisoners. She drank the water and ate the food while she waited for them to come round.

  “You fight pretty rough for a girl,” Polanski said once he’d opened his eyes. He massaged the side of his face, pulled at his ties, and then reached across to give his young friend a shake.

  The boy groaned and looked up at her from the floor. Polanski kept his eyes on her while he wriggled himself into a sitting position, his back against the wall. There seemed to be no anger, or even reproach in his tone. It made Sandra wonder if he knew something she didn’t. If she had any sense she’d have been on the road by now, heading for the nearest big town with a police station. Since this was a farm, there was probably a farmer out in the fields, maybe a bunch of farmhands too. Who knew? Hanging around was not a great idea. But she wanted to understand what was going on before she left these two behind.

  “It’s time you told me why you kidnapped me and dragged me halfway around the world.”