Sandra’s head was spinning. She couldn’t just abandon Cara in the past. And yet Cara was right there. “What about Lee and Hamiye and HiQua?” she said, stalling. “Did you stop them?”
Jay hesitated. “There was more to it than we knew. It was complicated.”
“You mean they got away?” It was so unexpected that indignation briefly overcame the distress she was feeling. “A corrupt businessman and a few hired thugs? What kind of outfit do you run in Berlin?”
And you let me die?
“How?” she asked.
“What?”
“How did I die? Please tell me I at least took that bastard Lee with me.”
“No!” Cara shouted over Jay’s reply. “We’re not talking about that. None of that matters any more. You’re here and you can stay here. Can’t she, Dad? And it’s just like you went missing for a couple of weeks. That’s all. Please, Mum.”
“She’s right, Sandra.”
Yes, she’s right, but somewhere here there’s a grave with my body in it. And somewhere else, there’s another Cara who still believes her mother will come home to her. She felt a sob catch in her throat.
Jay looked like he might cry too. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “That you’ll go back and make things work out differently. The indomitable will of Sandra Malone against the force of Time itself. But what if it doesn’t work? What if you die in every probable future? Will you just consider that? Will you just think about what an incredible second chance you’ve been given, that we’ve all been given?”
“What’s the date?” she asked. Jay was right. She knew he was right. She checked her commplant without waiting for his answer. Hong had done it. Two weeks exactly.
“Sandra, please.”
She looked at Cara. There were tears running down her daughter’s face. “Cara, darling …” Her throat closed and wouldn’t let her go on. She clenched her jaw against it, forced herself to speak. “I can’t imagine how hard it’s been for you.” Her daughter wailed, already seeing where this was going. Her pain tore something inside Sandra. “But for me, there’s another Cara, waiting for me, searching for me I’m sure, trusting me to come home. Do you want me to leave her there and just disappear?” She drew an arm across her face to clear away the tears. “I’m guessing I didn’t get to say goodbye to you, to tell you how much I … Oh God!” It felt as if there were a rock filling up her chest, crushing her heart. She struggled for breath before she could go on. “So let me tell you now. I love you with all my heart and soul. And that’s why … That’s why I can’t abandon that other Cara. The one who’s still waiting for me. I wish … I wish I could stay for you but I have to go back. I have to change this. Make it right.”
Cara had collapsed into a huddled ball of misery. Maybe she wasn’t listening any more, but Sandra said, “Cara, my darling baby girl, it’s because I love you so much that I have to go back for you.”
She was spent, wrung out and exhausted. Jay stared at her as if she were dying again right in front of him. “I love you too, Jay.”
“Wait!” he cried, but there was nothing else for her to say. She cut the call as Jay said, “Hong had a—”
She stumbled as she took the few steps back to the sphere and fell against its wall, clinging to its rough exterior. She gave way to the howling grief that filled her, lost in a storm of wracking sobs. Her legs gave way and she fell to the filthy wet ground, burying her face and crying for her poor, shattered family.
***
Later, she pulled herself up and stood beside the sphere, shivering from the cold, numbed by her encounter with Cara and Jay. She climbed back into the padded seat and struggled to fasten the harness with frozen fingers. When she finally managed and the hatch was closed, she found the button marked “Return”. She stared at it, mesmerised by the thought of how easy it would be to press it, how one finger could do it, change her life, change her daughter’s life, here and back there. One touch, one tiny movement, to make the future fork one way or the other.
As if she had no control over it, her arm reached out and her finger pressed the button. She felt a thud as a circuit closed and power surged through the sphere. The return trip was a kind of lob, Dr Hong had told her. The sphere generated its own displacement field and threw itself back along the path it had previously made, but it didn’t go into the past—not her own past—it fetched up at the advancing wavefront that was the present and could go no farther.
It took just a few seconds to make the journey back, just enough time to wonder what became of the future she had just seen. Would it vanish without her, somehow crumble back to the shapeless void it had once been? Or would it still be there when the present caught up with it, seamlessly integrated into her own world, with Cara and Jay grieving still, and herself dead and gone? She had never wondered about the future. She’d simply accepted what she’d learned at uni: that the future could never be visited because it did not exist until the march of time built it from the pattern of the present. But she did now. She had been there, touched it and felt it. Jay had said she could stay there and he sounded as if he knew.
The opening hatch took her by surprise. A group of tekniks came to look inside with Hong, Hamiye and Lee behind them. Something about her appearance made them all stare at her. She didn’t feel like speaking, or getting out. Eventually, Lee broke the spell.
“Well?” he demanded.
She looked at him, despising him for what he’d just put her through. Then turned to Hong. “The date was correct.”
“Get her out of there,” Hamiye said and two of the super-soldiers appeared. She let them unfasten her and lift her out by her arms. They led her away from the sphere, towards the storerooms and offices.
“Wait,” Lee called after them and the giants stopped and turned her. “What the hell did you see out there?”
She gave him a long, hate-filled look and then smiled. “I saw you—all of you—scattered across the ground, everyone dead. It was a massacre. I can’t wait for it to happen.”
There were gasps and exclamations from the tekniks and stony silence from the others. Lee turned to his people and snapped at them in Chinese. Everyone fell quiet. “Take her away,” he said, glowering as she grinned back at him.
***
It was mid-afternoon by the time the big C-130T troop transport lumbered to a halt on the runway at North Weald airbase. The rear ramp lowered itself and as it hit the ground six men appeared, pushing trolleys stacked with equipment. They were laughing and joking, in good spirits, casting expert eyes around the airfield, casually taking in the situation, no doubt seeing Fourget with his convoy of three Range Rovers waiting nearby. One of them snapped out a few orders. The banter quietened but did not stop as the men lined up their trolleys and pushed them over towards Fourget.
“Is that all of them?” Cara asked. “Six men?”
Fourget could understand her disappointment. If you didn’t know how good Alpha Team was, you could be forgiven for thinking a single squad wasn’t much. He saw Jay Kennedy and Gerhard Stoeffel, Alpha Team Commander, walking down the ramp. “I count nine,” he said.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes and said, “Ten.”
He shook his head. The girl had plenty of spirit. The only reason they were there now was that he had discharged two rounds into their car’s dashboard, killing its electronics, to prevent her taking them straight to where her mother was being held. Summoning a car from the local EDF MI pool had wasted two hours and he’d had to tie her up to stop her running off—which had raised a number of eyebrows in the quiet suburb in which it had all taken place. Spirit alone would not be much use against a team of monstrously augmented mercs.
The bindings and the gag had been off since they arrived at North Weald but he had the strong feeling that if the girl ever managed to get a gun in her hands, his life expectancy might be very short indeed.
He cast his eyes over the heaps of equipment Alpha Team had brought with them and ca
ught the eye of Sergeant Connolly as they approached. “Are you planning to start a war, Jock?”
The big Scot grinned back at him. “Someone said there were hamsters about, sir. Nasty buggers, hamsters. Take a lot of exterminating.”
Fourget smiled back at him and nodded towards the cars. The sergeant barked out a few words and the team began loading.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to your lady friend, sir?” one of the men called.
“Looks like you’re dressed for a party, darlin’,” said another. “Need a date? I’ll be free in a bit and happy to show you the town.”
Fourget glanced at Cara to find the familiar scowl firmly in place.
“Gentlemen.” Jay’s voice, as he arrived, made everyone stop and turn to him. “May I introduce my daughter, Cara Malone?”
Her would-be date grimaced and looked sick. “Sir, I was just—” he began but Jay cut him off.
“Best not say anything else, Peel.” He turned to Cara. “Standard punishment for chatting up the Section Head’s daughter is to spend a day in her company. Sound about right, Pierre?”
“It sounds cruel and unusual, sir.”
“OK, Gerhard, finish off. Cara, come with me. Fourget, you too.”
He walked away from the cars to stand alone on the airstrip, Fourget followed him and, after some hesitation, so did Cara.
“What was all that?” she demanded when she arrived. She was angry but Fourget thought she also looked hurt. “Why are you trying to humiliate me?”
Beneath his cool exterior, Jay also seemed ready to explode. “Do you want us to save Sandra or not?” he said.
“Of course I do. What’s that got—?”
“You’re a distraction. That’s what.”
“Just because your disgusting Neanderthals can’t keep their minds out of their—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” From the shock on Cara’s face, Fourget suspected her father rarely, if ever, spoke to her that way. “You’re a civilian and this is a military operation. People could die. And I’m not going to burden any one of my men with the job of trying to keep an eye on a reckless, headstrong child when he should be focusing on staying alive.”
“Child? Most of those guys are barely older than I am.”
“You’re not listening. So pay attention to this. Go back home to your gran’s. I have someone waiting to drive you. Stay there. I’ll bring your mother to you when this is over.”
“You can’t just order me around.”
“You don’t think I have the authority? I can have the base military police arrest you right now and put you in a cell for as long as I please. If you leave the base, I can have MI5 or the Met pick you up and hold you.”
She glared into her father’s face. “You wouldn’t dare!” But Fourget could hear the uncertainty in her voice.
Jay stood his ground. “Try me.”
“I’ll never speak to you again.”
Fourget heard a sharp intake of breath from his boss and, for a moment, thought Jay might back down, but after a while, the tall Englishman raised a hand towards the gate and made a beckoning gesture. A pair of headlights came on and a car drove up to them—an Air Force limo with a uniformed woman inside. The three of them watched it in silence as it crossed the tarmac and pulled up. The airman got out and opened one of the rear doors.
Cara gave her father a final, withering glare. There were tears glittering in her eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried into the waiting car. Jay watched it pull away with a face of stone.
***
“What the hell are you people doing?” Sandra asked.
“Getting rich,” Hamiye said. “You could too, if you were sensible.”
“What?”
“Lee wants you to do the next trip. The final one. Only you need to do more than just find out the date and come home.”
“Tell him to do it himself.”
“Lee doesn’t take personal risks.”
“You do it then. You’re his bitch.”
She saw his mouth tighten in anger and then relax. “I don’t take personal risks either.”
“Really? Gosh, I hope no-one’s found the dead guy in your garden yet, then.”
He’d been sitting astride a wooden chair, now he stood up and hurled it aside. “Why are you so bloody provocative all the time? Can’t you just talk like a normal person? You’re tied to a chair, I have armed guards outside and my boss has already told me I should kill you. Yet you still spend every breath trying to wind me up. Are you completely fucking insane?”
She watched him carefully. She’d love to explain it to him, to say, “Because I’m not your fucking victim and I never will be, because I’ve been held and threatened by people a lot scarier than you, Sunshine, and because keeping you wound up is the only entertainment I’ve got in this craphole.” But she didn’t because her whole strategy of keeping him angry was to stress him out and encourage him to make stupid decisions. It was better that he did think her completely insane. Besides, when she looked into Hamiye’s eyes, she didn’t see a zealot or a psychopath looking back, she saw only a man who was in deeper than he wanted to be. It didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous, but it gave her some hope that, if he did fall apart, he would as likely turn on his own people as on her.
So she said, “All right, let’s hear your offer.” It caught him off guard. “Come on, you obviously came in here to buy my cooperation with some irresistible prize, so let’s hear it.”
“Ten million euros.”
She pulled back in surprise. That really was a very good offer. For a moment, she let herself think what it would mean to have that much money. It was a pleasant daydream.
He smiled. “Well?” he said.
“No.”
“No?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Twenty, then.”
She laughed. The situation had gone from grisly to ridiculous. “Listen, Farid, if I was going to be bought, you could have had me for ten.”
“So why the hell won’t you take it? All you have to do is sit in the damned sphere and go forwards one day. Get us some information and come back. An hour’s work, tops, for twenty million euros. There’s a small risk, of course, but isn’t it worth it?”
“I’m not scared of your hit-and-miss time machine—at least not as much as you are. I just don’t want your money.”
He looked away. “Money is money.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do. Who’s getting hurt, Farid? Who is Lee going to screw over to make you all so rich you can spend twenty million on a bribe?”
“No-one. Listen, it’s a kind of insider-trading scam. You go one day into the future and you bring back the prices of various stocks and derivatives, the outcomes of sporting events, and so on. We’ve done it before. Hong’s first shot was two years ago. The pilot went two years into the future for information and Lee used our backer’s money to buy various financial instruments and place several bets. It was just a trial run but it made a ton of money—even though only sixty percent of the deals paid off. That’s why we needed to get the distance traveled as short as possible. Two years is too uncertain, but one day is ideal. That’s what Hong’s team has been working on all this time. And now we’re ready. The trip you made was a proof of concept for some new tech he’s been building, and he’s ready now to do one day. Lee’s got the money ready. The traders and the bookmakers are all primed and ready. All we need is a pilot to go get the information.”
“Is that what you think? That the only people you’re hurting are some pension funds and bookies?”
Hamiye seemed genuinely confused. “Well, who else?”
She wasn’t certain about it, even now, but she wanted to try it out on Hamiye anyway. “Let me guess when your first shot matured. Was it, say, two days ago?”
Hamiye’s face took on a hunted look. “So what?”
“Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
He was pacing around the room again. “Yes, it was. A complete coinci
dence. Hong’s machine didn’t have anything to do with what happened the other night. How could it? He sent that pilot off two years ago. If there was going to be a backwash from the time travel, it would have happened then. I’m not a scientist but I’ve done my reading. If you make a timesplash, the backwash follows you back right away. It’s there within minutes, or hours, not years.”
“It worries you, though, doesn’t it? What Hong did was no ordinary lob. This has never been done before. What if it is connected? You go forwards two years and create some kind of latent apocalypse. Two years later, you catch up with it and there it is waiting to shake the whole planet. Do you know how many thousands of people died? Do you know how many trillions were wiped off the global economy? How many times do you think that could happen before we don’t have a civilization any more? Is that worth what you’re being paid? I know it’s not worth twenty million lousy euros—or any amount of money—because money’s going to be worthless.” A thought struck her. “The last poor sucker you sent came back stuck full of arrows, remember. Maybe what you’re doing led to that. Maybe we caught a glimpse of what’s in store if we keep on taking trips into the future.”
Hamiye set his face against the idea. “Rubbish. Hong says it’s a coincidence and he’s the one who should know, right?”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
His jaw worked. “All right,” he said, as if it were the conclusion of an internal argument. “So what? We’re only going to do it one more time. And only for one lousy day. Even if a two-year shot did cause the event, a one-day shot would be, what, seven hundred times smaller? You’d never even notice it.”
Sandra agreed he had a point. “We don’t know how it works. Maybe it’s not how far you go or what you do in the future; maybe it’s what you do to the future. Maybe all this gambling changes how things should be and the Universe has to make some kind of correction. I don’t know, but I do know you shouldn’t be messing with this stuff. No-one should be.”
“For a teknik, you certainly talk like a Luddite. No-one is ‘messing around’ with this stuff. Dr Hong is the world’s leading expert on it.”
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