by Gary Gibson
Hanover grunted and fought back, but Saul had the advantage now. He hit Hanover hard in the belly, and the Agnessa spun out of his hand. Saul dived for it, landing on the floor and twisting around to aim it up at Hanover – only to find him staring back down at him with an expression of infinite contempt.
In that same moment, Saul heard the sound of the safety being taken off several rifles.
He twisted around to see half a dozen Taiwanese soldiers in fatigues, their weapons levelled at him, the red dots from their laser sights dancing across his chest.
‘If I were you,’ Hanover wheezed from behind him, ‘I’d think really hard before moving so much as a fucking muscle.’
TEN
Secure Military Facility (location unknown), 29 January 2235
‘When I said I didn’t have the time to fuck around any more,’ said Albright, his voice flat and emotionless, ‘I meant I really didn’t have the time to fuck around any more.’
Mitchell spat out a mouthful of blood and used his tongue to feel for the gap where one of his teeth had been until a few moments ago. He leaned forward, grunting as he tested the leather straps securing him to the chair, but there was very little give.
Albright paced in front of him, taking short drags on a cigarette. The stink of the tobacco made Mitchell want to sneeze. The third man in the room – Albright had called him Scott – stepped back, massaging the knuckles of one bruised fist while studying Mitchell with a malevolent expression.
They had come for him that morning, using a gun loaded with tranquillizer darts to knock him out before dragging him down to the garage located in the building’s basement. A truck sat on a raised platform towards the rear of the space, tools mounted on racks lining the nearby walls. Mitchell had also noted a work desk littered with drills and hand-held plasma torches, and fervently hoped Albright wasn’t intending to use any of those on him.
The concrete drain in the centre of the floor was still dark from the freezing water they’d hosed him down with after strapping him into the chair. Not that they’d been able to get him into it without a struggle, given that Mitchell had come to just as they’d hustled him down the steps leading to the garage. He had managed to wriggle out of the grasp of the two guards escorting him, but Scott had slammed him face-first on to a workbench, before delivering a roundhouse kick that dropped him to the ground. The guards had then strapped him in while he was still dazed and half-conscious.
‘There has to be some reason why you survived,’ said Albright, his voice thick with impatience. ‘What kept you alive while the rest of the human race died en masse?’
‘I don’t know.’
Scott glanced over his shoulder at Albright, but Albright merely shook his head. The glowing tip of his cigarette painted patterns of light in the dimly lit space, as he took a draw.
‘You want one?’ Albright asked, raising the cigarette when he noticed Mitchell was looking at it. ‘It’s the healthy kind. Lots of antioxidants and anti-cancer agents. My doctor swears by it.’
‘No thanks,’ Mitchell swallowed, tasting his own blood.
Albright came closer, kneeling before Mitchell and regarding him from just a few centimetres away. ‘Here’s what I don’t get,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you rushing to help us find some way to try and stop this whole terrible tragedy from ever happening?’
Mitchell looked away, his mouth fixed in a tight line, breathing hard in expectation of the next blow. Albright stared at him, waiting for an answer, then straightened up, shaking his head with disgust.
‘There’s something wrong with you – on the inside,’ Albright told him. ‘Did you know that?’
Mitchell looked back at him warily. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘We took you out of your cell, night before last, and ran some deep-tissue scans on you: fMRI, X-ray, the works.’
‘No, you didn’t. I’d have known.’
‘Your evening meal was stuffed with sedatives. Anyway, the results were pretty remarkable. We ran the same tests on the other you, but the physiological changes in your body are significantly more advanced. We also ran a DNA analysis, and found it didn’t quite match the original sample taken when you first started working for the ASI. Not only that, there are structures in your brain we can’t make sense of. Your body temperature is a degree and a half cooler than it should be, and that’s not even mentioning the more extreme physiological changes. I’ve seen surveillance footage of you moving around your cell at a speed no normal human being should be capable of. There’s no conceivable way that even a couple of years in some cryogenics facility could produce changes like that.’
With a sour expression, Albright ground out his cigarette under the heel of one boot. ‘Now, we’ve analysed, frame by frame, the A/V footage from when you and Vogel disappeared into that pit,’ he continued. ‘Both of your suits dissolved and, the instant the black oil touched your flesh, you both lost consciousness and collapsed. Those suits are made from extremely tough materials designed to withstand an enormous range of lethal environments, and yet they came apart like wet tissue paper in a hurricane.’
Albright lit another cigarette and drew on it, stepping away to lean against a nearby workbench. ‘The liquid in those pits clearly acts like a universal solvent. Some of your colleagues tried to bring back samples, but it dissolved everything they tried to put it in. Which all rather begs the question: are you, in fact, the real Mitchell Stone, or are you something else altogether?’
Mitchell shook his head and laughed. ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’
‘Okay, here’s what we’ve been thinking. Maybe the answer we need is inside you, in some way we can’t decipher just by running non-invasive scans or occasionally bouncing you off the walls. Maybe,’ Albright took another draw, ‘we’re going to have to go a little deeper.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mitchell.
‘Dissection,’ said Albright. ‘Peel back your skin and see what it is that makes you tick. Put your organs in steel trays and pick them apart to see if you’re really human.’
Mitchell felt his insides twist in horror. ‘How the hell is doing that going to tell you anything?’
‘We won’t know until we look, will we?’ said Albright, an unpleasant glint in his eyes. ‘We’ve tried persuasion and reasoning, and look where it got us. But now we’re staring a holocaust in the face and, in the absence of any willing response on your part, do you really think we’d hesitate one Goddamn moment to get the answers we need, by any means necessary?’
No, thought Mitchell, not for one second. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming,’ he insisted, regardless. ‘Don’t you understand that? From where I’m standing, you’ve all been dead for years. You’re a ghost, Albright.’
Albright’s jaw worked like he’d just swallowed something nasty. ‘Let’s be clear on one thing: I’m not interested in this predetermination shit. The future isn’t fixed.’
‘You brought this on yourselves. I saw how the science teams at Tau Ceti were forced to take chances. They were bringing technologies that nobody understood back to Earth without any idea what the consequences might be. The sci-eval staff all fled protests, but nobody listened.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘But I did listen, and I saw how anything that looked like it could turn a profit or win a war was packed into a crate and hauled straight back home.’
Albright stared at him, the cigarette burned down almost to his knuckles.
‘What you don’t seem to understand is that the future is indeterminate, yes,’ Mitchell continued, ‘unless you find your way into it through a wormhole, and then all time between now and then becomes fixed like a fly in amber. It’s like the observer effect: once you see it or touch it, it’s locked in one state for ever. That’s why the Founders disappeared so far into the future, to a point beyond the reach even of the wormholes. It was the only way they could escape predetermination.’
Albright wiped at his mouth with one hand, a fri
ghtened look in his eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’
Mitchell let his head fall back, suddenly exhausted. They would be recording this interrogation, the same as all the others, of course. He wondered what his unseen audience were making of it all.
‘I asked you how you could know any of this,’ Albright repeated.
Mitchell brought his head back up. ‘I already told you yesterday, because of the learning pools. When I woke up, I knew things.’
‘What kinds of things?’
Mitchell struggled to find words to describe the vast repository of knowledge now resting inside his brain. He had begun to suspect that this repository somehow existed independently of him – a library inscribed deep in the microscopic foam of reality, at the most minute level, something the black pools had somehow given him the means to tap into.
He shook his head helplessly. ‘Everything,’ he finally replied.
Albright let his cigarette fall to the ground and formed his hands into fists. ‘You’re making this shit up, Goddamn you.’
‘I can tell you what’s going to happen in a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or ten million – the broad details, anyway. Sometimes . . .’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sensed the repository there, hovering always in the back of his mind, vast and nebulous. ‘Sometimes I try to ignore it, to not always be aware of it, but I can’t. I know so much, from now until so far in the future, you can’t even begin to imagine.’
Albright didn’t say anything else for a moment, and Mitchell could hear the sound of a plane droning somewhere overhead, as well as distant voices, muffled through thick walls, passing by and then fading.
‘Assuming any of this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Albright.
‘Because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’d still wind up here in this garage having the shit beaten out of me, whatever I said.’
Albright nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Scott. ‘Hold him.’
Scott moved behind the chair, Mitchell twisting his head round to try and see him. Albright meanwhile stepped over to a workbench and began to rummage through a bag. As he turned back, he held a syringe in one hand, and a small plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid in the other.
‘What are you doing?’ Mitchell demanded.
‘Something new,’ said Albright. ‘A development from the Kepler pharms. Apparently highly effective.’
Mitchell shook his head, now terrified. ‘You don’t need to do this.’
‘Oh, but we do,’ Albright replied. ‘We were worried about damaging you before, but that’s not such a priority now.’ He came closer, an expression of what looked like genuine sorrow on his face as he approached. ‘I won’t lie to you, Mitchell. This is going to hurt. A lot.’
Mitchell twisted against his restraints, furious and terrified, and filled with a horrid certainty about what was coming next.
Scott came up behind him, wrapping one forearm around his neck and planting the other hand over the top of Mitchell’s head, effectively rendering him immobile. Mitchell struggled as Albright stepped around behind him, and out of sight, but any effort was useless.
‘Please don’t struggle,’ advised Albright. ‘I don’t want to wind up disabling you when I put the needle in.’
The back of the chair was partly open, making it easy for Albright to pull up part of Mitchell’s paper uniform and feel for his spine. A second later Mitchell felt something slide deep inside the thick musculature there.
The pain was like nothing he had ever experienced. Fire spread through his muscles and, as he struggled to escape, he felt as if his bones might snap. Bile surged up the back of his throat and he vomited over Scott’s arm.
After a little while the pain faded. He drifted on a black tide under a starless sky, his skull seeming full of soft cotton wool that scratched against the back of his eyeballs.
Well, he’s still alive, Albright said from somewhere far, far away. Tell me more about the learning pools, Mitchell. Tell me what they told you about the Founders.
Mitchell woke to the dawn light spreading across the upper wall of his cell. He lay there for some minutes without moving, thinking about what it might be like to be strapped to a table and cut apart with scalpels. Albright and the men he worked for were little better than primitive sorcerers, desperate to divine their own fate from his still-warm entrails.
He brought his right hand up close to his face and opened it, keeping it cupped around the thin strip of serrated metal he’d grabbed from the workbench when Scott had taken him down. He could recall only vague snatches of what he had told Albright under the influence of whatever drugs they had pumped into his body, but he was fairly certain he had gone into detail about the Repository, elaborating on the few details he’d already given them.
Mitchell twisted around on his narrow cot until he lay facing the door. If he didn’t escape, he would die – and soon.
Mitchell unfolded himself slowly, grimacing with pain while keeping his fist tight around the blade. Do it now.
He kneeled by the door, pressing one temple against its cool metal, as if momentarily resting h head there. He used one end of the blade like a screwdriver, slowly working out one of the screws securing a thin metal plate to the door frame.
His palm started bleeding where it clutched the serrated length of the blade. He put the strip down and clenched his bleeding hand for several seconds, swearing under his breath until the worst of the pain had passed.
He started working again. It was funny how things turned out, because the locks were cheap and shoddy crap, the result of some budget-cutting exercise. Fortunately for him.
He took a fresh grip on the blade and started working at the screws once more. After fifteen or twenty minutes of labour, he had removed four of them, but the plate wrapped its way around to the other side of the door frame, where it was presumably held in place by more screws.
Mitchell dropped the blade and took a grip on the loosened plate with the fingertips of both hands and started to pull, grunting with the effort. The metal was thin and malleable but even so it took a considerable effort to bend the plate back aside and expose the delicate electronics beneath. He fell back and massaged his injured hand for a minute, before pulling himself up close to the task once more.
He studied the exposed electronics with a practised eye, then, working carefully, used the tip of the blade to tease a single wire loose, the thumping of his heartbeat increasing to a roar between his ears. He meanwhile took extreme care not to touch any of the circuitry connected to the alarm system.
The door clicked loudly, and swung inwards. Mitchell let out his breath in a rush. He hadn’t even realized he was holding it in. He stepped out into the corridor and listened carefully, but there was no sound of anyone approaching. He began to walk, slowly at first, then more quickly, the tiles cold and hard under his bare feet. His injured hand throbbed against his side, the blade held in the other.
Halfway along the corridor, he came to the stairwell leading down to the garage. At the bottom he found a door with a security keypad, where he tapped in a standard override code, then watched with relief as it clicked open.
Mitchell continued down the rest of the stairwell below, noticing the lights were on and the van had been lowered to the ground. A tool bag had been dropped next to one wheel, and the door on the driver’s side stood open. He stopped and listened for a moment, but heard and saw no one. Even so, he ducked down to take a look under the vehicle, in case someone was standing on the far side. Seeing nothing but the other side of the garage, he quickly heaved himself up and climbed inside the van, pulling the door shut.
He barely had time to think any further, when the door was suddenly ripped from his grasp. He heard a muttered curse, in the same instant that a fist struck him on the side of the head. Mitchell raised a hand to try and defend himself, moving with the same inexplicable speed as before. Bright pain flared through h
is body, leaving him helpless, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that his assailant was Albright’s assistant.
Scott dragged him roughly out of the seat, and Mitchell landed hard on the garage’s ccrete floor. His assailant leaned down and took hold of Mitchell’s head, apparently preparing to smash his skull against the concrete.
It was a sign of how badly the cryogenic process had affected his thought processes that he only now remembered the hacksaw blade still gripped in one hand. He drew it straight across the bridge of Scott’s nose, then watched as the other man screamed and leaped back, his hands clasped to his face.
Mitchell managed to stagger upright and then over to a workbench. Taking hold of a heavy wrench, he gasped as Scott wrapped one arm around his neck from behind. Mitchell swung the wrench wildly around behind him, hearing a wet thud as it buried itself in the side of Scott’s head.
It was Scott’s turn to stagger, collapsing against one side of the van. Mitchell leaned over him, his breath rasping, and struck him a second, then a third time. He was lost in a black fury, and blood and hair spattered across the grey concrete before he finally let go of the wrench. He wiped one trembling hand across his mouth, then forced himself to look away from the devastation that was the remains of Scott’s face.
He headed over to the garage doors and pushed them open, still gasping hoarsely. Brilliant sunlight spilled across the concrete as he gazed out at the same buildings and the airstrip he’d viewed from his cell. The Rockies stood blue and hazy on the horizon beyond the airstrip. He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
The anger had felt good, even cleansing. Mitchell worked at regaining some semblance of calm, all too aware of how lucky he was that nobody had yet noticed his escape from the cell and sounded the alarm.
He stepped back to the van, and rummaged around in the rear until he found a set of overalls. He pulled them on quickly. They were baggy and loose, but a lot better than the paper blues he’d been wearing before.