Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

“I’m placing an alert on Beth Wilder, employee mike-romeo-one-zero-one-four with Martin Hatch’s authority, code mike-romeo…” What was it? What was the blasted number? “One-one-niner-four-golf-sierra. Do you copy?” Choosing one thought above all others hurt so much. His hand throbbed. He needed another treatment, and soon.

  “Who is this?” the idiot on the line demanded again.

  Lifeboat’s success required him to be a non-entity, but it never ceased to be an indignity.

  “Do you copy?”

  A pause on the line. “The code checks out.”

  “Twenty Technicians, chronon enabled. Ground floor. Extreme prejudice. You will have stutter cover. Double time.”

  “Whoever this is, we’re not gonna need twenty men to stop one girl.”

  That neatly put-together redhead was a woman Paul had met once, a very long time ago, a long time from now.

  “They won’t be able to stop her,” Paul told the security chief, getting out of his seat. “But they might slow her down.”

  Cutting the line he ran for the elevator.

  * * *

  The elevator hushed open, parallel to the main stage. The crowd was loving it, freezing and unfreezing. This was entertainment to them, a show, not cutting-edge science that could change the world. The elevators were outside the pylons’ bracket and remained unaffected by the demonstration.

  “Beth, we’ve got ten, maybe fifteen seconds before the stutter hits.”

  The second elevator with Gibson’s goons was right behind them.

  Beth exited. “Get Sofia. She’s Brazilian. Five eight, about a buck twenty. Dark hair, cut in a bob. Carrying a tablet. She’ll be backstage. Check the wings. I’ll draw them off.”

  She ducked into the assembly before Jack could protest.

  The second elevator opened and Chronon-1 fanned out, by which time Jack had warped toward the cover of side-stage: scaffolding, black cloth drapes, security barricades.

  He was over and up the aluminum stairs in a blink, backstage.

  The stutter slammed into being, disorienting. The entire world went still.

  The area for the demonstration had been boxed out in yellow, with audience members asked to space out evenly. The Monarch performers were getting off the stage and taking up positions next to audience members, intending to wow them once the stutter broke.

  Gibson silently signaled his crew to hold up. Hatch was onstage, waiting for the stutter to break before he could wrap up the performance. Gibson didn’t want him tipped off that something was up.

  “No shooting,” Gibson said. “Mr. Hatch needs this to go well.”

  “She’s got a gun, boss. You really want to bring blades to a gunfight?” Irene said.

  “She won’t shoot. She knows as well as we do: these people are bulletproof while immobile, but once that stutter breaks and the bullets start flying … heads pop.”

  Irene sighed, unclipped her knife.

  The elevator came to sudden life, heading back up to retrieve a passenger. Someone upstairs had channeled chronon flow from the Regulator to the elevator’s rig—part of the Tower’s emergency system. That took authority. The elevator headed back up.

  “Emergency system. Someone with clout’s coming down.” Gibson drew his knife. “Work fast.”

  * * *

  From the wings Jack could tell the stage was clear. The operatives were in position in the crowd, ready to surprise a few randomly selected guests by materializing in front of them.

  Jack saw Sofia in the wings, frozen in the act of checking her watch.

  Folding into a submoment he jetted across the space, unseen, right up next to her.

  “All right, Doctor. I’m gonna need you to work with me here.” Jack stepped behind her, placed one hand around her waist and one over her mouth—everything about her as hard as stone. “I’m really sorry about this.”

  With a little concentration he extended his chronon field across her and felt her begin to cohere into the frozen moment.

  Sofia came to with a hand over her mouth and freaked out.

  “Ssh! I’m not gonna hurt you, but I can’t let you go. You gotta listen to me.”

  That didn’t work. She elbowed Jack hard in the ribs, driving one stilettoed heel hard into his foot. Jack bit down on the pain.

  “I’m a friend!” he hissed. “My name is Jack Joyce. William Joyce was my brother.”

  * * *

  Beth moved low through the forest of still bodies, stealing glances toward the stage. Hatch was immobile. She couldn’t see Jack. Chronon-1 was entirely focused on her.

  * * *

  “We need you to help us,” Jack continued.

  Sofia twisted in his grip—“I do not care!”—then stopped. It dawned on her that the world about her had stopped moving entirely. The demonstration was to encapsulate the audience—not the entire building.

  “You admired Will. Believed in his work. He mentioned you in his notes.”

  Sofia wasn’t listening. She was taking it all in, like a kid in their first snowfall. “Zero state,” she breathed. “We exist within a deformation in the Meyer-Joyce field. Yet we see. We hear. We breathe. Move.” She wheeled on him, twisting round in his arms. “You must come with me. Paul needs you.”

  Sofia glanced behind herself, at Hatch, as static as all those gleeful faces before him.

  “Paul’s mistaken. Will had a Countermeasure, you understand? We can stop the end before it happens.”

  “Countermeasure,” Sofia cut him off. “To repair the fracture in the Meyer-Joyce field. To—”

  “To save us,” Jack said. “From the end of time.”

  “You!” It was Paul—a portrait of fury at the far side of the stage.

  Every chronon operative in the audience turned reflexively—with no idea what to make of the scene onstage. Performers to soldiers: weapons up.

  The jumpsuited Technician barked, “On your knees!”

  Weapons were pointed at all of them—Paul included.

  Paul had no time for them, stalked across the stage toward Jack. “Get away from her!”

  Jack realized they had no idea who Paul was.

  “On your knees!” the Tech shouted. Weapons tensed in all hands. “Final warning!”

  * * *

  Gibson risked a glance and saw the morons from the stage show pointing assault weapons at the Consultant.

  “Hold fire! Hold fire! Target: male, left! All others high-value friendlies! Strikers, go!”

  * * *

  The two armored Strikers—soda can fuses flaring sun-hot—flashed up from the audience, boiling energy tracing from their back units. Sofia shrieked as they tore past. Jack let go of Sofia and dashed fifteen feet out onto the stage as the Strikers snapped to a halt. A lucky swing saw a rifle butt glance across his forehead.

  Paul darted across the stage, driving his shoulder into Jack’s back and continuing on his way to stop in front of Sofia.

  Jack spun with Paul’s passing blow, the pistol slipping from his hand to skid across the stage, his back on fire.

  Paul took Sofia’s hand. “Come with me.”

  The Strikers flashed forward, each one taking a lock hold on one of Jack’s arms, jetting him across the stage, headfirst, toward a Marshall stack.

  Jack warped backward—just a nudge—the reverse momentum swinging the two Strikers into each other’s faces. There was a crack of shattering faceplates and Jack’s arms were almost ripped off in the process.

  He turned to see Paul spiriting Sofia into the shadows of the wings.

  * * *

  Beth saw Paul take Sofia through stage right—Beth’s left. She moved fast and low, aiming to circle around the back of the stage and intercept.

  * * *

  The jumpsuited Technician had her handgun out, while the Juggernauts awkwardly angled for a shot that wouldn’t endanger Hatch—still frozen onstage as the satisfied host. But they were having trouble navigating through a sea of smiling people who might as well have been made of c
oncrete.

  The Strikers recovered as Jack went for his gun. They split his focus by zipping left and right. He tracked one and popped a localized substutter over him. The Striker slowed fractionally, then escaped the field—his mobility rig rendering him largely immune.

  While Jack was diverted, the other Striker flashed in from behind and smashed his rifle like a club into the back of Jack’s legs. Which was when Jack realized the weapons were unloaded—show models.

  Jack went down hard as the Technician closed in with cuffs. Jack warped forward, cannonballing her legs out from under her, rolling into the stutter shield he just dropped as she snapped a shot off after him.

  Okay, her firearm was loaded.

  The bullet impacted the shield, caught. Jack stood, his knees feeling cracked, side by side with unmoving Martin Hatch.

  Jack’s energy levels were low, running out of zip. The Strikers didn’t seem to be having the same problem.

  They were wearing him down.

  * * *

  Beth exited the crowd and looped around the left side of the stage.

  Irene was waiting for her. “Hey there, chicken.” Knife out, combat-gripped.

  There were no innocents behind Irene, so Beth drew her gun.

  Irene leaped right, under the stage.

  * * *

  Jack stayed under the shield, played up his difficulty standing, and let them come to him: one Striker to the left and another to the right. The Technician dead ahead with her gun leveled. Two Juggernauts behind, but he had to assume the auto-cannons were for show.

  The Strikers communicated something to each other, then one warped in hard, slowing a little as he hit the shield. Enough time for Jack to fold into a submoment, blip backward, grab the Striker’s back unit as he passed, and pull. There was an alarming crack of energy, and reflexively Jack blip-kicked the Striker out of the shield where he crashed into the back of his partner. The first detonated almost instantly in a corona of yellow-hot energy, setting off the chronon pack on the second—an eruption that sent him rocketing over the audience, where he exploded and locked. The Technician got caught in that first blast, was thrown backward by the eruption … leaving all three actors frozen in a catastrophic ballet, mid-air, as their rigs shorted.

  Jack ran out of charge. His shield flickered and vanished.

  * * *

  Beth cornered around the rear of the stage in time to see Paul Serene drag Sofia toward one of the two western elevators. The second elevator opened and twenty heavily armed and rigged goons poured out.

  Paul glared at his security and shouted, “Stop her!”

  Beth dove under the stage as two of them opened fire, three-round bursts chipping craters out of black Italian marble.

  “Hey chicken.” Irene was back.

  The blade came out of nowhere, sliced the top of Beth’s right shoulder—a line of white pain dangerously close to her carotid. The space was tight and low under the stage, interlaced with diagonal supports. Irene went for a second strike, Beth reflexively fired—no target, but the sound was enough to make her opponent flinch.

  Beth twisted away from Irene’s messed-up second strike, aiming her left shoulder toward the floor, firing twice as she went over. But Irene had followed through on the momentum of her aborted strike and used it to roll clear and vanish into the mass of shadow, half-formed shapes, and scaffolding. Beth sent two more shots after her, hoping for the best.

  Adrenalized and breathing hard Beth rolled back to her knees, ignoring the blood on her hands and legs and headed for the audience side of the platform. Slipping out from under the black cloth, she kept low and got back among the statue-crowd—equidistant between the two Juggernauts who were now moving into the open space on either side of the stage.

  Hatch was still frozen onstage. A Striker was paused behind him, mid-explosion, as was the Technician he had slammed into. Above Beth’s head a second Striker was airborne above the first row of the crowd, his back unit rupturing. Jack was onstage, breathing heavily.

  “Jack!”

  He saw her. She motioned: get after Paul, then ran deeper into the unmoving crowd, firing her pistol twice into the air. Every unit present, save the Juggernauts, went after her like it was their mission.

  Jack ran into the wings, headed for the elevators.

  * * *

  Beth bolted through the reception area—open bar, servers, trays of champagne—and beyond that into the far third of the atrium. It was all business here. The area was divided into nine islands, each island showing off a subsidiary or two of Monarch Solutions: Innovations, Industrial, Pharmaceutical, Multimedia, Technology, Business, Energy, Financial, Security, Childcare, Aerospace, Agricultural, Human Resources, Protective Services, Automotive, L&T, Consumer, Construction, Entertainment, and Communications.

  Even passing the displays at a run it was easy for Beth to see how Monarch was becoming ubiquitous. Hatch and Serene had a finger in every pie going. Superpowers and foreknowledge went a long way.

  Her pursuers entered the reception area as she jagged behind a giant display for a gaming console Monarch Entertainment was releasing next fall. They opened fire on her, rounds fragmenting and sparking off frozen bystanders and objects. Those bullets that sailed past eventually slowed to a halt. When the stutter broke they would continue on their deadly course.

  “These people are investors, assholes!” she shouted.

  Thankfully Hatch’s demo had pulled almost every person in the atrium toward it. The display area was mostly people-free and she was running away from bystanders.

  Her pursuers weren’t listening. She caught glimpses of twenty Technicians fanning out, Chronon-1 bringing up the rear—monster-faced Gibson super pissed.

  * * *

  Gibson knew what Wilder was up to. She was falling back to the eastern elevator bays, pulling attention from Joyce’s pursuit of Mr. Serene and Dr. Amaral.

  He rounded on C-1, headed double-time back the way they’d come.

  “Top floor. Now.”

  * * *

  The reinforcements fired at Beth with little fear of hurting anyone, but Beth’s firing line included the demo crowd on the other side of the atrium—directly behind every asshole that was coming after her.

  Fuck it. She’d been telling Jack she couldn’t die. Time to put her money where her mouth was.

  Three five-man squads crept down an aisle a piece while the fourth hung back covering. Beth waited behind the Medical display at the far end, leftmost aisle. In moments fifteen armed men would be in her firing line as they passed the final displays.

  She swung out when she heard the nearest squad just around the corner.

  The stutter broke.

  A Striker in front of the stage arced out over the audience, back unit exploding, before flailing heavily to smash through tables and glassware. Onstage, a Striker detonated as he flew into that nice Technician lady in the jumpsuit. Gunshots rang out simultaneously onstage and beneath it. Reanimated bullets whipped to life in the display section and blew a Monarch GMO display to pieces.

  Hatch, however, was gone.

  People freaked the fuck out.

  Beth shot five goons in the legs and ran for the nearby eastern elevator bays. The middle squad moved to assist their injured comrades while the third and most distant squad opened up, perforating a 3-D-printed concept car as she fled.

  * * *

  Jack felt the stutter quit as his elevator arrived on the fiftieth floor.

  The elevator purred: “Good night, Dr. Amaral.”

  Jack pocketed Sofia’s ID. “I’ve had better.”

  A security door was pneumatically swinging shut as he exited. A short dash and he was through, the door clicking behind him.

  Down a corridor to his left he heard Sofia cry out.

  * * *

  Paul booted through a security door into Martin’s thousand-square-foot private garden: an open-air platform, green and pathed, with a bird’s-eye view of the city. A series of stone steps l
ed to Martin’s office dead ahead. The branching path also led right, toward the chronon operations for the building. When the Tower was designed Martin had been clear: he wanted to be close to the most critical elements of Project Lifeboat.

  “Faster,” he said. “We’ve got to make it to the helicopter before—”

  His hand tore from Sofia’s grasp as her soft flesh turned to stone. The stutter had kicked in again. Sofia stood, static, movement captured in her pose, the expression on her face perplexed and anxious.

  Behind her: monsters.

  Shifters. The ones from the Joyce farm, the same ones he always saw. He was sure of that now. Ahead, foremost and advancing, came the Shining Palm.

  * * *

  Jack caught sight of them as Paul open the door to a rooftop garden at the end of a long enameled wood hallway. Jack folded, propelled forward, but not fast enough.

  He felt the stutter kick back in, a pulse throughout his entire body.

  With a desperate surge he wedged a hand in the door, tore it open, and got through.

  The tight, enclosed hallway led to a green expanse open to a night sky, slashed by the slow beams of spotlights positioned on every corner of the Monarch Tower block. A Y-shaped path divided flat green lawn, one path branching left toward the pillared, glass-fronted façade of what had to be Martin Hatch’s apartment. The other cut right, toward a doorway in the building proper. Had to be the chronon labs, like Beth said.

  The apartment was fronted with a pillared open-air deck. An L-shaped gantry led from that, over a fifty-floor drop, to a suspended helipad where a helicopter waited, lit bright—polished and sharklike. Paul had stopped running, Sofia having deanimated for a second time as she stopped cold and the stutter settled in.

  A wall of Shifters stood between himself and Paul. Paul was pinned, terrified. That was the kid he remembered from Bannerman’s Overlook.

  The phalanx of Shifters recoiled, shrieking with something like rage—or pain?—as Jack had thrown the door open. As if his very appearance had sent a wave of fire rolling through them all.

  As one they forgot poor, terrified Paul, and rounded on Jack.

  * * *

  Jack was a closer potential-generator than Paul and, because he was making this up as he went along, generated more Shifter-agonizing variables. He was an excruciating presence to these monsters and, as such, a thing to be destroyed.