Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2)

by Craig W. Turner

  WILTON’S GOLD

  BOOK 2: FULFILLMENT

  by Craig W. Turner

  Edited, Produced, and Published by Writer’s Edge Publishing 2014

  All rights reserved.

  © 2014 Craig Turner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Other Books by Craig Turner

  Fortune

  Fulfillment

  Fate

  For Karissa, Joel, Sarafina and Mariella

  CHAPTER ONE

  December 9, 2018

  Dr. Ekaterina Batrudinov glanced back at the lab’s clock on the wall one more time. She hoped she wasn’t being obvious about it, but her colleagues were lagging longer than they usually did. Of course, none of them were going to leave until Podpolkovnik Dmitriyev left first, and unfortunately he wasn’t making any move to do so. Instead, he stood, just standing and watching. If he wasn’t leaving, they weren’t leaving – and she needed them to leave. But when a government official was sent to oversee you, you were stuck to his whim.

  She looked at the members of her team and couldn’t help but sense they were merely trying their best to look busy. It had already been 16 straight hours of work, and no one was going to begin any new project when they would be ending their day shortly. There wasn’t much to do, anyway. They were as prepared as they could be. The Podpolkovnik wouldn’t be attuned to this, though. He was strictly a military liaison to the project, and had no technical knowledge of their business. As long as the scientists had spreadsheets on their computer screens instead of Solitaire, he would think nothing of it.

  Finally, after a half-hour of wasted time, Ekaterina heard hard footsteps coming toward her from behind. They stopped at her side, so she turned in her chair to face Dmitriyev. He was an imposing figure, and it wasn’t just the sharp dark teal uniform of a Soviet Lieutenant-Colonel or the chestful of accolades. Dmitriyev was at least six-foot-four and led by a chiseled chin covered with a thin beard. He had a deep, booming voice that quite literally resonated through her bones when he talked. She hated when he was around. As the project leader, she was the only one who had the misfortune of having to interact with him.

  “Насколько дольше Вы будете?” he asked.

  How much longer? She tried not to look at him like he was crazy. She’d been waiting for him, not the other way around. “Это был долгий день. Мы должны позволить команде идти домой и отдыхать.” It’s been a long day. We should let them go home and rest.

  Dmitriyev stood tall and peered around the lab, then looked down at her and nodded. “Я услышу ваше сообщение утром.” His acquiescence meant that he himself had grown tired of waiting, as well. She could give her report in the morning.

  The Podpolkovnik turned and walked across and out of the lab, leaving the team behind. Ekaterina looked at the clock again – 7:30 p.m. By the time everyone got home, it would almost be time for them to turn around and come back. She noticed everyone had stopped working and was looking at her. “Пойти домой,” she said. “Каждый доброго вечера.” Go home and have a nice evening. She tried to wish them a nice evening every night, something she imagined most bosses didn’t do. They were high-quality workers in a demanding field. She believed she could get the best out of them by treating them well. Little things like a wish goodnight could make a big difference in morale and, as a result, productivity. That’s how she saw it, at least.

  Quickly, her four teammates exited, leaving spinning swivel chairs behind them. Only one was going home to family, Maxim, who was probably the most eager to leave, having a new baby boy at home. The others would retire to their apartments, most likely eat, do some reading and go to bed. In the final weeks of the project, there hadn’t been much free time for any of them. The General Secretary would be coming in the morning, which had been bumped up from his originally-scheduled appointment three weeks on. Schedule changes were a normal thing, however, which Ekaterina knew, so she’d steered her team to get everything done well in advance. They’d done their job as asked, and if the powers-that-be dropped in that very moment, they could do the presentation without hesitation.

  Ekaterina had an ulterior motive, of course, that drove her to hasten their efforts. She had no intention of the first demonstration of their new technology happening in front of the General Secretary. She would be using it tonight. And hopefully that would be enough.

  Knowing there was a real possibility that someone might raise an eyebrow when she failed to leave the lab immediately, as the building’s security was as tight as any in the Republic, she sprang into action the moment she was left alone, locking the main door. She then dashed between each of her colleagues’ computers, her fingers dancing across the keyboards to set the appropriate coordinates before returning to her own to do the same. Then she stood and looked at the hulking device they’d constructed, standing in the corner of the lab.

  The time machine.

  She sighed deeply. It was the final result of her life’s pursuit, an octagonal pad from which extended upwards eight spider-like limbs forming a cocoon large enough for a person. The tips of the eight legs were particle accelerators, which, when their combined power was focused on the subject inside, would speed up its atoms to the speed of light. When those atoms slowed, there would be time displacement and the subject would “travel” time. The creation of this device was what she’d been educated and trained to do. She’d done it, taking astrophysics to a place the field had only dreamed it would go. She’d pleased her government sponsors by bringing the concept of time travel to technological fruition.

  And now, hopefully, she would destroy it.

  The Soviet Union had first made time travel a priority in the late 1980s, following the threat of worldwide nuclear war in 1988. At the time, Ekaterina was a child. She’d tested exceptionally high in math and science, and was taken by the government from her family to be put onto a scientific learning track. By 15, she’d graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, achieving her doctorate by age 19. All of her training from the day she was discovered had led to this one specific project, deemed the nation’s top scientific priority by the Council of Ministers. Since her 19th birthday, the Soviet government had spent over 1.8 billion RUB on the effort to make time travel a reality.

  Ekaterina realized that her heart was pounding. The device in front of her had not yet been tested on a human. They’d experimented with a number of inanimate objects – such as a cinder block, a tomato and a bicycle – sending each forward for different increments of time. One minute. Ten minutes. A month. Each test was successful. Sending objects backwards in time, however, proved to be a more difficult examination, as there was no clear way to judge the success of the experiment, as least not beyond only the most recent past. If a cinder block appeared ten years ago in the open field that existed before the facility was built, no one could’ve understood why it was out-of-place.

  So it was science strictly on paper that she was trusting to get her from one time to another. She wished that there was more certainty that the outcome would be what she hoped, but with the impending deadline she was out of time. While she’d learned to some degree on her own, she’d not been directly told the reason the government wanted the time travel technology in place. She’d just been instructed to make it happen. That they kept their plans from her, and that she’d had to stumble on the tru
th, gave her great fear. Enough to do something about it.

  She reached down to her keyboard and hit a key, which ignited a whirring sound in the time machine. She listened for a moment, following along with the system engagements in her mind – each piece of the process she’d meticulously designed coming to life. She waited for the triggering of a key sensor, which would indicate that the time portal was initiating. When she heard it engage, she took a quick glance at the screen to make sure the coordinates were lined up appropriately, then sped across the room to the machine. She jumped into the chamber created by the eight particle accelerators. Immediately, she noticed that the energy emitting from the machine’s tentacles caused the hair on her arms to stand on-end. With each second, the accelerators brightened until she was forced to close her eyes, and a pressure as one might feel during an airplane take-off began to push on her from all sides.

  The entire process took approximately 120 seconds, which was now too short a time for anyone to infiltrate the room and interrupt her. The machine was loud, and certainly someone would have heard by now – if they were within shouting distance. Sure enough, over the din of the machine she heard a sharp pounding on the door. While the pressure and the noise made it difficult for her to focus, she sensed someone was trying to break through the locked door.

  The choking force was creeping up her body and to her head now, and Ekaterina had the perception of a migraine, exacerbated by the noise of the machine getting louder with each passing second. She’d lost track of the time, and while she knew that the countdown clock was almost to zero, it also occurred to her that if anything went sour, her apparent treason would be met with swift reprimand.

  She heard an enormous crash and risked opening her eyes, catching a glimpse of the lab’s door hanging off of its hinges as two Russian soldiers burst into the room with their weapons drawn. She caught a glimpse of Dmitryev’s teal uniform and was surprised to also see a flash of red attached to another familiar face. The General Secretary was in the building early. Which confirmed for her that she’d taken the right action.

  Suddenly she was falling.

  The fall was only a foot or so, but she landed hard on her feet onto grass. Her unanticipated fall was awkward, and immediate pain shot through her leg. She tumbled to the right, toppling onto the grass, her outstretched arms not able to stop the fall.

  The ground was wet. The grass dewy. And she could see her breath in the dark of night. She tried to stand, but vertigo forced her back to the ground. She turned her head to the side and vomited.

  After lying motionless on the ground for several minutes, her right ankle throbbing, she opened her eyes and took stock of her surroundings. It was a beautiful, starry night. The sky was perfectly clear. She felt as though she could see millions of stars. She had no idea if the experiment had worked, and as a result, where or when she was. But she couldn’t imagine any setting more serene and inviting.

  Finally, she rolled over and stood. She diagnosed her ankle as sprained, but not so badly that she couldn’t walk on it. To her right was the edge of a forest. To her left was a line of trees silhouetted by flood lights behind them. A distant memory enveloped her, and instilled confidence that her invention had worked as intended. It was on this very plot of land that she’d orchestrated the siting and construction of the lab. Even under this cover of night she knew that.

  She limped about 500 meters toward the floodlights until she came to a wooden outhouse, which confirmed for her that, even if she couldn’t tell what time she was in, she’d found the right place. From behind the trees, she could hear a familiar thumping sound – one that she’d heard many times in her youth. She opened the outhouse door and stepped inside, quietly closing it behind her.

  The seemingly misplaced outhouse was not one that was used as normally expected. It was, in fact, the outer end of an escape tunnel from the compound where she’d lived as a child. In place of the usual repository was a wooden trap door and a dusty set of stairs leading underground. Ekaterina lifted the door and a thousand memories of “drills” on how to escape the compound engulfed her. Under consistent threat of an attack that never seemed to come, she’d been well-trained in how to flee.

  The compound was owned, of course, by the Soviet government, but it was the residence of General-Polkovnik Alexandr Belochkin. During Ekaterina’s youth, Belochkin had been a rising star in the Soviet military, and when she herself was at the Institute, Belochkin had become Chief Marshal of Engineer Troops of the Soviet Union. It was Belochkin that had overseen her entire career, from her math and science assessments to her removal from her family to her positioning in the Soviet time travel program. It was also Belochkin, who over time became the chief architect and chief advocate of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program, that wrought worldwide havoc via nuclear scares in 1988, 1993 and 2002, culminating in the detonation of a “test” nuclear warhead in barren land in the northeastern USSR, only about 80 kilometers from Alaska. Belochkin had been nicknamed “более аккуратный палец” – the “Trigger Finger” – for his propensity to make nuclear war his primary option for maintaining the strength of the Soviet Union. He was revered in his own nation and hated by others. In 2006, Belochkin elevated to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. For Ekaterina, her mentor’s rise meant opportunity that she otherwise could not have had, but it also meant great uncertainty. Only recently had she learned what he was ultimately capable of.

  Ekaterina made her way down the steps into the dark tunnel, dragging her fingers along the dirt wall for guidance. At the bottom, as she remembered, she found a flashlight. She switched it on, though she almost felt as though she didn’t need it, remembering every step along the way. It was a different perspective than what she’d had as a child, but while it may have been taking her fewer steps, it was the same walk.

  After about five minutes, she reached another set of stairs and climbed them, opening a storm shelter door at the top and emerging into a line of trees at the end of the compound furthest from the house. She remembered her instructions verbatim – she could almost hear Belochkin’s voice: if there was ever trouble, she was to enter this door, come out through the outhouse, and run as fast as she could to the forest where there was a small shed with heat and food supplies to last her until she was rescued. Smiling at the memory, she gently shut the door behind her and turned to face the compound.

  From her vantage point among the trees, the view of the compound was an enormous backyard, with the rear of Belochkin’s mansion across the way. This was the General’s getaway, 100 kilometers away from the Kremlin. Far enough away to relax; close enough to return quickly if necessary. She could see familiar sights – the glass sunroom on the back of the house, the large patio where Belochkin would entertain heads of state with lavish parties, and a hammock hanging between two trees where he would relax and read Dostoyevsky.

  Ekaterina had spent nearly every weekend, from the time she was a young child until she graduated from the Institute, here at the compound. She spent her time reading and learning, studying and training to be the nation’s greatest scientific asset. Belochkin had been good to her – at least as good as a captor could be, though she’d never actually seen him in that light until only recently – and she’d benefited from his leadership. Strangely, his training had led her to exactly where she was at this moment. She liked to think that her inspiration was not only the scientific education, but the sense of moral character he’d instilled in her as a child, even though he seemed to have lost his own along the way. Unless, of course, everything had simply been a means to an end for him, which was sadly more than possible.

  Movement caught her eye and she looked off to her left. There he was. The General-Polkovnik himself, playing basketball alone on his private court under the bright lights. He was in the distance, but immediately she could tell that this was a much younger version of the man who had just moments before burst into the lab to stop her. It was the same face, tho
ugh this one did not appear to have been burdened yet by an unforgiving world – one that had driven him to such violent and aggressive lengths. She watched as he took shots and then retrieved the ball. She remembered trying to fall asleep with the late-night bouncing in the background.

  If the time machine had functioned correctly, this would be a Saturday evening – April 9, 1983 – so she, as a young girl, would be on the premises, tucked into bed for the night. Aside from her, Belochkin and three or four servants would be the only others on-site. She was the favorite student and the General-Polkovnik didn’t want her distracted from her learning by other children who were less... driven.

  Taking advantage of the solitude, she stood and sidled along the perimeter of the compound unseen until she was close enough to the side of the house to use it to hide from sight. The bouncing of the ball continued as she peered around the house to see Belochkin. While the compound was a secure facility, motion sensor technology had not yet been invented. She would never have gotten close enough in 2018.

  She remembered that Belochkin generally played basketball each night at the compound for about an hour before relaxing with a drink – usually his favorite American drink, called a “Manhattan.” As a child, she was always confused about how he’d engage in Western activities when away from his peers, but never had the courage to ask him why. Despite the prominence of the Soviet Union in her present time, there had become a much more tolerable free-flow of culture between her country and its biggest rival, but she always remembered what she thought were his traitorous guilty pleasures.

  The bouncing ceased. Ekaterina looked around the corner of the house again to see that he’d rolled the ball onto the lawn and was toweling off his face. He walked slowly to the patio area and, as she remembered, sat down at the glass table where his drink awaited him. He was now about 30 meters from her, facing the other direction. The time was now.