He kept reading until darkness fell over the little mountainside cabin in Cotopaxi, Ecuador.
7 | The Timekeeper’s Log
Keene heard a knock at the workshop’s door. He jumped a little, finding that his back was stiff and sore. The hours in the dim, windowless room had flown by as he had read the journal from cover-to-cover, then returned to its pages to confirm that what he had read was real.
“Come in.”
“How you doing, buddy? Been in here for almost a day,” Strike said.
Keene looked up with bleary eyes at his partner. Her figure swam in and out of focus, the black tank-top merging with the walls. He shook his head and tried to keep himself from getting dizzy.
“A day?”
“So what the hell is in that thing that makes it so damn good?” Strike walked over, hand outstretched. “Let me see.”
Keene clutched the cracked leather to his chest like it was an artifact of immeasurable value. As for the contents—well, he wasn’t sure if he was willing to accept what he had read as truth quite yet. Although it did all make sense. As much sense as a time-travelling tale of fate and unquenched desire could.
He unwrapped his arms and started carefully thumbing through the book. “You might want to sit down.”
“You might want to get some rest while I read it myself.”
“Then stand,” Keene said, finding the page he was looking for. Yes. This laid it all out in about as succinct a fashion as could be expected from a man grandiosely known as the Timekeeper. A sort of suicidal epitaph, summarizing his efforts in the vain hope that they might be canonized after his demise. “I’ll read it to you.”
“Great, just like first grade.”
Keene ignored her barb and began, his tired voice reading the impeccable handwriting in a low monotone. “I believe that my efforts at altering the time continuum in my own favor have met with resounding disappointment. When I was banished to this nineteenth century backwater for illegally altering temporal events for my own profit—a gross miscarriage of justice by my former cohorts of the Chronological Council—I was fortunate enough to have the prescience of developing a backup plan. The chronosium—that element which allows one to traverse time—sewn within the folds of my suit jacket provided me a method through which I could escape my temporal shackles, and assume the leadership role at the Council which so desperately eluded me. It would also grant me a path to the revenge upon my comrades which I so desperately sought.”
“Sounds pretty sane,” Strike said. “Shame we didn’t meet him.”
“It gets crazier,” Keene said, before continuing his reading of the journal entry. “But as I myself could not traverse through time’s waters without alerting suspicion—surely the Council would look for such disturbances—I had to contract someone to stand in my stead. Perhaps, if someone is reading this—hopefully in a museum dedicated to my genius—they wonder why I didn’t travel back before the Council had been invented, install myself as leader through force. Time, however, does not work that way. There are only twenty inflection points that one might visit in all of recorded history, to the current day—those events that left an enormous energy signature on the universe, so great that they have essentially become set in temporal stone, immortalized. This is the same reason why one can return from these points to present—the present’s energy signature is the strongest of all. Immortal, however, does not mean immutable. And the Chronological Council, upon the discovery of chronosium in the late twentieth century, took it upon themselves to safeguard these twenty inflection points from tampering.”
“Can you travel to the future?” Strike said.
“Don’t interrupt.”
“But it’s so damn long. I thought this would be short. This is like physics class.”
“There’s a footnote that says you can’t travel to the future. 2015 is the present, and you can’t go beyond that,” Keene said. “It has a lot of physics equations and notes to museum curators.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
Keene cleared his throat and picked up the reading. “Many of these inflection points are obvious. The death of Christ. The fall of the Roman Empire. The start of the Revolutionary War. Less obvious are others—such as the importance of nineteenth century Guangzhou, where I find myself. The council, sharing my confusion, decided that this was the place where I was least likely to cause harm. Recollecting my examinations of the inflection chart, I recalled that there were a few inflection points some hundreds of thousands of years before the civilizations of Earth came to prominence. Naturally, the Council did not know the importance of these, and no temporal scouts had been sent out to examine them. There was an opportunity here. My plan was simple—bring back someone from such a time, whom the Council would not recognize, nor have any ability to trace. One agent from my own temporal jail would be a risk I would have to assume. But the main agent of change would be someone nigh undetectable.”
“I think I know where this is going,” Strike said.
Keene nodded and continued. “I found Fox, an American woman who had come to China with her husband and son, praying in a church for their resurrection, her beloved family recently perished from some viral illness endemic of the times. A thought came to me that this woman, so desperate, would do anything to revive her beloved family. This, of course, was an impossibility—for they had perished many weeks before I had arrived in Guangzhou. The inflection point being after their deaths, there was no way for me to save them. Actually, that is not entirely true. There is one way to travel anywhere, through the use of a special ship capable of picking up the faintest traces of temporal energy. It is this ship I ultimately sought—but I had no intention of using it for such banal undertakings as reviving deceased loved ones, should it have ever fallen into my possession. I, however, told her otherwise, and gave her an actual demonstration of my capabilities. After meeting in secret, to avoid the Council’s surveillance, I convinced her to assist me on my endeavor, in exchange for the lives of her husband and son.”
“What a sack of shit,” Strike said. “Jesus Christ.”
“It gets worse,” Keene said.
“Let me guess. She travelled back in time to one of these mysterious inflection points, oh, maybe 200,000 years or so, and stumbled upon you, who seemed like a good candidate to help this process along, being a space pirate and all. Then Fox sent you off in cryogenic stasis and whipped forward to the present day to knock on your capsule and say hi.”
“Not quite. She sent out hundreds of ships into cryogenic exile, all with a basic trajectory towards Earth. The Blue Maybelle was the only one that survived. We just got lucky.”
“And here I thought you were special, like out of all of human history, they chose you to come to Earth and save the world a couple times. And, apparently, help them control all of recorded history by unwittingly recovering artifacts of ungodly power for them.”
“My ego says thanks.”
“Why not just send these recruits directly to the present day? Why go through the cryogenic bit and risk losing them?”
“He tried directly transporting them straight through time at first. He says that people freaked out and Fox had to dispatch them, so as not to raise any alarms. Also, chronosium decays with use, and he didn’t have an unlimited access to more,” Keene said.
Strike nodded, like this admittedly ridiculous narrative was actually plausible and did not defy the laws of physics, time, space and all known science.
“Can I finish?”
“Nah, I get the gist.” Strike paced about the room as she spoke. “Bad man with stupid self-appointed nickname manipulates bereft woman into doing his evil time-altering work. She finds some candidates from another galaxy and another time that won’t raise the suspicions of his former employers. You’re the sole surviving candidate after all is said and done and you’re subtly encouraged to retrieve thes
e artifacts by her helping you along, doing just enough to keep you alive but not enough to trip any temporal alarms. All so that Timekeeper man can use them to—what the hell is the purpose of the artifacts, anyway?”
“Besides visiting inflection points when combined, they are the key to using the mysterious silver ship, with which you can travel anywhere in time. Allegedly. It kind of devolves into rambling and hearsay at the end, with a lot of whining about it being a futile search for the Philosopher’s Stone.”
“Philosopher’s Stone?”
“Alchemy nonsense. Turn lead into gold, get rich, retire to your harem of women. Big in the Middle Ages according to our friend here. There are pages about the parallels between this pseudoscientific quackery and his search for this elusive ship.”
Strike shifted from one leg to the other. “What’s he call it?”
“The Silver Songbird, actually. Apparently this little silver statue in the corner is the only known surviving part of it. Fox stole it from the archives of the Louvre, if you can believe what’s written here. The ship itself is said to be pure chronosium, so powerful that it can travel to even the faintest pockets of temporal energy.”
“Damn.” Strike looked at the corner, where the black box sat innocuously, its simple design belying tremendous power. “So his master plan all falls apart when Fox decides to stop giving him help because he’s an insane, megalomaniacal jackass. Then she leaves you the final piece of the puzzle and jets. Presumably so you’ll dispatch his sorry ass after finding what he did.”
“But he already took care of that. Not like I’d kill him anyway. He already had it bad, from the sounds of this mess.” Keene tapped the cover of the now closed journal.
“Didn’t Fox leave a bunch of other stuff with that silver bird statue?”
After Derek Dash had died, Fox had gotten his ashes back to Cotopaxi, leaving them at the crash site of Keene’s ship The Blue Maybelle high in the Andes. In addition to the ashes, she had left Keene the mysterious note about continuing her work as god in the machine and some supplies.
The other supplies had come without explanation. Along with the Silver Songbird statue, Fox had left him six USB drives and a large golden key wrapped in 24 karat leaf. Keene hadn’t bothered to think about these other clues until now.
“You’re right.” That reminded Keene—he’d left the rest of the stuff with Franz, all those months ago, along with everything else.
Surely they were around somewhere. But where?
A phone call brought him back to reality. He answered the call with unsteady fingers.
“Keeney?”
“What is it, Linus?”
“Jesus, you sound horrible,” Linus said.
“Thanks for the medical assessment, Linus.”
“Right, dude. Uh, it’s about that strange woman—that Fox lady who always seems to help you out of jams?”
“What about her?” Keene’s heart rate shot through the roof.
“I found a report on Interpol that says a Caucasian Jane Doe matching her description was found in a ditch around a month ago.” Tapping could be heard coming from Linus’ end of the call. “The report says she had a hidden dashboard camera that recorded the event. It’s blurry. I’m sending it over.”
“Where’d they find her?”
“Right outside Guangzhou.” Linus paused, like he was weighing his next words carefully. “And Keeney?”
“Yeah?”
“She was shot.”
Keene hung up the phone and sighed. His phone chimed, and he played the attached video.
Grainy, low-light footage popped up. A hooded figure of unknown sex appeared from a pickup truck. A flash came. Then the figure emerged into the frame a few minutes later holding something in their hand. It shined.
Keene paused the video and zoomed in. He couldn’t tell what the object was, but he suspected that he understood what the gleam was.
Chronosium.
Clearly he wasn’t the only person interested in this Silver Songbird—a ship that could rewrite human history. Fox could handle herself, so it was doubtful this was a random act of violent thievery—no, it had to be calculated. But the only other person who knew about the ship, as far as Keene could tell, was lying dead on a table in rural nineteenth century China. Which threw another couple of questions into the murky waters.
Who killed Fox?
And what were their plans for the Silver Songbird?
8 | The Chase
It’d been a couple hours since Keene’s first collision with the world of time travel. He found it didn’t particularly suit him, although the old cliché about not getting what you want seemed quite relevant at the moment. There wasn’t much choice in the matter.
Reluctant hero had a kind of cool ring to it, like the lone gunman on the western plains. Too bad it was a bunch of crap. And where was Franz? He’d told the old man to get the rest of Fox’s stuff out of storage over two hours ago.
Keene gazed at the sun overhead. His plan had been to get some rest in the clean outdoor air, but his mind had raced far too fast for sleep to overtake him.
He’d been on some insane adventures. Escaped the crumbling Lost City of the Incas. Rediscovered the mythical city of Atlantis. And now, apparently, he had to track down a mysterious time travelling ship—and keep it from an unknown enemy who could erase everything that had ever happened.
Keene pondered whether the eradication of his own life story would be a bad thing. Even if the Machiavellian machinations of suspect human beings had brought him to this planet, he didn’t want his life to be erased, struck from the history books.
Everything wasn’t perfect, but it never would be.
This is what Fox, the Timekeeper and the hooded murderer all didn’t understand.
The door to the cottage slammed, and Keene jumped off the ground with a start. He relaxed when he saw the stout, silver-haired man coming towards him, holding something in his wrinkled hands.
When Franz got closer, it was apparent that the old man was clutching a single thumb drive. A panicked, grave look strained his features—an expression unfamiliar, ill-suited to his normally placid face.
“The rest are gone.” He huffed and panted. “Only one is left.”
“Where’d they go?” Keene’s stress levels soared, and he felt a wisp of perspiration come down his cheek. “They didn’t just walk off.”
“They did not.”
“And the golden key?”
“Missing as well,” Franz said.
“Who took them?”
“I have an idea.”
“Best get explaining.” Perhaps leaving the old man in charge of all these items had been a poor decision. First, a portal through the sands of time. Now five out of six upgrade drives—part of Fox’s final gift, along with the Silver Songbird—for Keene’s neural implants were missing.
Franz’s words came out in halting fragments. “She came five weeks ago. Five and a half?” He shook his head and cursed in Spanish, another unusual occurrence, the words sounding radioactive spitting from his tongue.
“Who?” Keene asked, even though he knew the answer, put it all together when he heard she, understood that it could only mean one person, the one goddamn person he hadn’t been able to track down these past five months, who had disappeared after Derek Dash—that man she loved—died, who hadn’t called or texted or web chatted or made the slightest effort to tell Keene that she was still alive.
“You’re gonna have an aneurysm, you keep gritting your teeth like that,” Strike said, walking up the path. She stopped near Keene and flicked him on the check with her index finger. “And you, old man, you need to breathe.”
Silence overtook the scenic landscape, the only sounds the omnipresent call of the wild.
After a minute that passed slower than most days went by, Keene said, “So
my sister came to see you.”
“Lorelei begged me not to tell you,” Franz said. “I know why, now.”
“Why didn’t she take all of them? And the components of the box?”
“I put this drive in a separate drawer. She must not have searched it.” Franz wrung his hands together, his shoulders slumping. “I kept the lab locked. She had no access. Where did I go wrong?”
“I think I went wrong,” Keene said. His crew had officially disintegrated into pure entropy. Maybe it was the way of the world, but it didn’t feel good. Him and physics were gonna have it out one of these days, once he figured out just what the hell was going on.
Keene examined the drive’s handwritten label, scribbled in an elegant hand on a piece of masking tape. Neural interface firmware upgrade #1.
“I can run it on the computer,” Franz said. “In the lab.”
“Let’s see what happens, then. It’s our only lead.”
Keene and Strike followed the old man back inside, past the energetic terrier, down the hall to the clandestine workshop. Thoughts bounced off the walls of Keene’s head, all coming to one conclusion.
His sister had gone off the rails completely.
She was trying to do what Fox could not.
Rewrite history and save the man she loved.
And she had murdered Fox to do it—whatever was on those other firmware updates had pointed her to the truth about the Timekeeper’s carefully orchestrated plan. A truth meant for Keene’s eyes, not hers.
Franz took the drive back from Keene and shoved it in the computer. A simple interface appeared on the screen, diagramming the necessary supplies and installation procedures. Beneath the image, a single button was labeled “start.”
“You have this stuff?” Keene glanced at the instructions, then swiveled his gaze about the workshop. He had no idea what to look for, but if building a crazy, futuristic device was possible, this looked like a prime place to start.
“Brilliant. So obvious,” Franz said. He burst into action and began running around the small workplace picking up components. “A high school student could assemble this.”
The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 35