Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  ‘Initiating,’ Heller croaked weakly through the intercom. ‘On three…two…one…’

  Rembrandt and Mina were gone.

  Heller clutched at the entrance hole in a wound she’d hidden lower in her torso. Her blood was bright as it pulsed between her fingers. It was full of bubbles, oxygenated. Semple’s bullet had struck her in a lung.

  She coughed.

  Had to hold on, had to find the strength to initiate the second transvection, to bring Rembrandt and Mina back again. She doubted she’d hang on much longer.

  Another boom sounded and she sighed in remorse as the ceiling sagged, split and began dumping tons of concrete around her. Dust swirled past her, grit stinging her flesh, she could barely breathe. She slumped forward, and nudged at the controls with more instinct and familiarity than design.

  Chapter 43

  August 30th 2011

  Cheshire, Northern England

  Terrence Semple came from old money. In his lineage he could count politicians, foreign ambassadors, landed gentry and even a minor royal, a cousin three times removed to Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II. He owned property in various cities of the United Kingdom, as well as in foreign countries including Jamaica, France and Switzerland. He kept a townhouse in Chelsea for when business required him to be in London, but his favourite retreat was always his converted Tudor mansion in Cheshire.

  Unmarried, and childless, the house was far too large for one person, but Semple preferred things that way. He wasn’t a man who enjoyed sharing, either his time or his space, with anyone. He had known women in the past, had shared his bed with them for the length of time it took to satisfy his needs, but always preferred that they were gone soon after. Definitely they should not be there when he awoke from the deep sleep that sex brought on. He paid them and therefore they had to obey his rules. Once a girl he’d picked up from a hotel bar in Soho had outstayed her welcome, and he’d risen to find her strutting around his kitchen in her underwear, treating the house as if it was her own. Well, she’d earned more than her fee that day, she’d also took away with her a shiny black eye she hadn’t anticipated. The breakfast she’d been concocting for them both had been thrown up the driveway after her as she fled his house, still wearing only her underwear for the long trip back home to London.

  Semple rarely visited some of the rooms in his rambling home. He used a bedroom to sleep in, another for when entertaining lady friends. He used the study and a sitting room and kitchen, plus various bathrooms. But there still remained another half-dozen bedrooms, and the same number of domestic rooms he kept closed and barely went into. In those rooms he stored items he’d picked up during his travels. He favoured art over other treasures and the oil paintings he owned far outweighed the number of statues, vases and such, and if he’d inventoried them they would have numbered several hundred. He had no idea of the value of his collection: priceless at least.

  Recently he’d commissioned a portrait of himself, but he was dissatisfied with the end result and currently held out on discovering an artist worthy of catching him in all his brilliance. He felt that great things were headed his way, and his moment of glory should be immortalized in oils. Call it a gut feeling, a hunch, whatever, but Semple believed that both fame and notoriety were etched in his destiny. Fame and notoriety were commodities fitting to sit alongside great wealth.

  He sat in his study. His desk was huge, stretching out from beneath his folded hands like a dance floor. He’d been checking the FTSE Index, calculating the value of his stocks and shares, on his computer, and mildly pleased at the growth – though the world was suffering the worst recession since World War II – had poured a celebratory brandy, and had lit a cigar. The high quality brandy warmed him, while the cool smoke helped relax him. He was feeling good in a jittery sort of way.

  Call it a premonition, or an onset of déjà vu, but he had a sense that tonight was going to be portentous, and he sat and waited with a smile nipping the corners of his lips. He didn’t know why, but he was mildly anxious and had no reason to be. When he was a small child he’d experienced similar feelings, while waiting for Father Christmas to come down his chimney and deliver the mountain of gifts he always received. He remembered how he’d always tried to stay awake, to hear the distant jingle of sleigh bells, the tapping of reindeer hooves on the roof, the scuff and hiss of Santa squeezing his bulky frame down the chimney, and the hearty Ho! Ho! Ho! as Santa’s sleigh lifted off into the starry sky once more. As a small child he’d never completed his mission: always he succumbed to sleep, and on waking found that he’d missed the jolly old elf yet again. As an adult, Semple was not about to miss out on the magical visitor he sensed was coming tonight.

  He waited for the knock at his door.

  He waited.

  He waited some more.

  Finally in the early hours he did sleep.

  The knock never came.

  When Semple awoke on the morning of 31st August 2012 it was with the same feeling of disillusionment he’d felt as he had that morning as an eight year old boy, when he’d woken from his light slumber on Christmas Eve, and hearing stealthy movement downstairs had thought to steal up on Father Christmas and experience the magic at first hand. He’d crept downstairs, and sneaking a look around the doorframe into the living room, had found his slightly inebriated parents laying out his mound of gifts under the tree. It was a gut wrenching sensation for the boy to discover that Father Christmas didn’t exist.

  Magic wasn’t real then.

  And magic wasn’t real now.

  His wondrous visitor bearing precious gifts had failed to materialise in the night. Within hours of him waking Terrence Semple had laughed off the premonition-like dream that told him that he’d be the recipient of an amazing power. He’d shifted his attention from fantasy to reality and gone back to checking the value of his stocks and shares. There were more ways than one to achieve greatness, he knew.

  Chapter 44

  April 5th 2018

  Central Command, Tempus Facility

  Doctor Heller slumped forward and nudged the pre-set controls. The strength went out of her as rapidly as the blood pooled from her body to spatter the floor between her feet. She knew she was dying and that if the blood loss didn’t get her then the collapsing laboratory would. Terrence Semple was dead, but he’d killed her before he left his own mortal coil. She knew that the blood on the floor was less than half the amount of what she’d bled internally. She had seconds before she fell into unconsciousness and death would follow soon after: probably hastened by a chunk of stone landing smack on her head. She must fight the onset of blackness at the edges of her vision, concentrate on the controls. She’d warned James Rembrandt that his latest transvection might be a one-way trip into the past, but not if she could help it. Her fingers fluttered over the keys of her computer, even as smaller chunks of rubble pounded her shoulders. It was hard to hit the correct buttons when being pummeled and twice she’d to abort the sequence and start again.

  A crack widened in the laboratory wall to her right, and earth and bedrock began spilling into the lab. The seat she sat on jumped up and down with the force of the tremors. She hit keys. Glancing over at where Terrence Semple lay with a halo of gore around him, she offered the dead man a snarl of defiance, and then hit the final key.

  To no one but herself she said, ‘Initiating. We jump in three…two…one…’

  A flutter went through her. It was both nauseous but exhilarating at the same time. She thought this must be death and waited for the out of body sensation she’d heard reported on numerous occasions, followed by the acceleration through a tunnel towards a blinding but welcoming white light. How like travelling through a wormhole must the ascent to heaven be? The fluttering inside continued, almost painful now, but the agony was only at the edges of her consciousness. Then all pain was gone, and the residual sickness in her gut receded equally as quickly.

  Heller sat back in her chair and straightened her skirt.
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br />   Behind her the laboratory was noisy, but that was always the way when a transvection was underway. Technicians bustled at their stations, some calling out readings and status updates. Professor Doherty, always a conscientious leader was standing in front of the large viewing window observing the airlock entrance to the Tempus chamber. He turned to peer over his shoulder at the doctor. ‘Is everything in order, Elizabeth?’ he asked.

  Heller was caught between two worlds, as the timelines converged and fixed themselves, and had full memory of the impending destruction, of being shot, of almost dying. She looked again for where Terrence Semple lay in a pool of his blood, but the floor was bare and clean. No Semple. No rubble, dirt or sparking conduits either. She quickly scanned the laboratory and saw faces she recognized, and many she didn’t. There was no Major Coombs, no George Fox: obviously Doherty – whom she sensed was the commander of this ship – had chosen well when selecting personnel for his Tempus Project.

  Judging by the professor’s ease in which he was taking everything in his stride, she realized that Doherty had no memory of the events leading up to this moment. Apparently, when Semple had burst into the lab shooting, the bullets that struck the professor had proved fatal. This Doherty was a different man to the one she’d worked alongside, and she could tell that his lifeline had been slightly different to the timid man who Semple and Coombs had browbeaten.

  Heller felt the tickle of butterflies in her stomach again. The sensation wasn’t as acute as before, but nevertheless, she understood it was a by-product of the realigning of the universe. She stood up, her lab coat pristine and checked the overhead monitors that showed the British Isles for the green and pleasant lands they’d always been. She would never forget what had almost befallen them, but in time her memories might fade into a mist, like when waking from a nightmare with no clarity of the events but being unable to shake the lingering uncanny feeling that something was amiss. She didn’t doubt that some of the regular technicians were feeling similar sensations of wonderment, but they would shake off their own recollections as being a momentary daydream or such.

  Shaken by the turn of events, but unable to show it for fear her exclamations might undo some of the good that had come of the manipulation of time and space, she merely offered a smile to the old professor and said, ‘All is well.’

  ‘Then bring them out,’ the professor said with a nod of appreciation.

  ‘Sir,’ she acknowledged, the word springing unbidden to her tongue. ‘I’m already on it.’

  Her fingers played across the keys of her computer, and clicks and whirs sounded from the airlock chamber. A short while after the chamber was disinfected and sterilised and then the outer airlock door slid open.

  Professor Doherty leaned towards a comms-link microphone and hit a button. ‘Welcome home, Chief,’ he said with some familiarity with the term.

  James Rembrandt stepped out of the lock. He was clean, fit, unwounded. He was wearing civilian attire contemporary to almost a decade earlier. Under the black leather jacket, with twin contrasting cream parallel stripes down the sleeves, he had a firearm holstered to his belt. His T-shirt, jeans and rubber-soled boots were also black. His hair was cut neatly, and his skin was tanned a shade darker than last time Heller watched him step into the Tempus chamber. Minutes had past here, but it seemed Rembrandt had spent some time in 2011.

  Following him out of the chamber was Mina Feeney. The woman looked similarly attired to Rembrandt, in leather jacket and jeans. Her hair, short and fair, was a tad plastered down at one side, and Heller thought that she’d been wearing a helmet until recently. It struck her that they both looked like motorcyclists, and assumed that they’d had to make a speedy return to the prearranged jump site she’d told Rembrandt about. Unlike the previous times when the tracking device implants had been configured with the Tempus machine, there’d been no opening for such fine-tuning. She’d prearranged with Rembrandt to return to the same location he’d been jumped to at a specific time and date a month to the day after liberating the Tempus blueprints from the inter-dimensional time-travelling version of Terrence Semple and handing them to Professor Doherty instead. Rembrandt and Mina seemed at ease with each other’s company, and trying not to feel a streak of jealousy, Heller wondered how they’d spent the time, and what had made their speedy return to the jump site as urgent as they required a fast motorcycle. She thought that perhaps, some time at least had been spent lounging on a beach somewhere hot.

  Although she had full recollection of the events of before, other memories were inserting themselves in Heller’s consciousness. In this current timeline nothing about Mina’s role in instigating a nuclear war remained. Here much had occurred differently between 2011 and now, and it was apparent that Mina was now a trusted and valued member of the team.

  As Chief Rembrandt and Agent Feeney entered the laboratory, Heller lifted her head and smiled at them in greeting. ‘Welcome home,’ she said. ‘I needn’t ask if all went to plan.’ She gave a conspiratorial nod towards the satellite feed screens. They showed that the wormhole dimension links and the subsequent destruction caused by the breaches had been consigned to limbo.

  She received a frown from Rembrandt, and she feared that she was the only one left with any recollection of all that had gone before.

  But once he’d shaken hands with Professor Doherty, received a pat on his shoulder for a job well done, Rembrandt approached the doctor. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. Then, shielding his action from the professor’s view, he tapped a finger to the side of his nose and gave her a conspiratorial wink.

  Chapter 45

  April 5th 2018

  Naze Top Farm

  Rembrandt found Elizabeth Heller sitting on the porch outside the dilapidated farmhouse that concealed the entrance to the Tempus facility. It was his first trip on the elevator to the surface world in this time, and on exiting the farmhouse he stood for a moment taking in the scenery of the rolling moorland, dotted here and there with vibrant spring growth. It was evening, a faint scattering of clouds on the western horizon, above which twinkled the brightest stars of the firmament. A quick look eastward showed him a vivid orange glow on the horizon where the sun was settling in for the night. As unfamiliar with such beauty as he was, the sight caught and held his breath for a moment.

  Doctor Heller didn’t turn to look at him. She didn’t need to.

  ‘It feels very strange. I can now appreciate how difficult it must have been for you when you were taken out of the timeline you knew.’

  ‘You’ll feel uneasy for a day or two,’ Rembrandt said, ‘but soon the sense of disassociation will fade and everything will feel normal again.’

  ‘Normal? Now there’s an unfortunate choice of word. The truth is nothing’s normal. Nothing will ever be normal again.’

  Rembrandt moved alongside her and sat down. They sat in companionable silence, enjoying the view of an untainted world. Finally Rembrandt turned to the doctor.

  ‘Something I’ve learned through these transvections is that there’s no such thing as normal. Normality is only perception, a meme that our psyches grasp to in order to make sense of our existence.’

  Heller laughed at his pop-psychology, but there was nothing bitter in it. ‘Professor Docherty once said that if I gave him half an hour he’d convince me that I didn’t exist. He said that all that is in our perception is simply energy in motion, and everything that we perceive is simply a human coping mechanism so that we don’t realise how totally insignificant we are in such a vast multi-dimensional universe.’ She tapped a hand on the planks beneath them and asked,’ Did you hear that?’

  Rembrandt pursed his lips in bemusement.

  ‘I sound solid enough to me,’ she said.

  ‘I think, therefore I am,’ Rembrandt quoted. ‘We do exist, Elizabeth.’

  ‘I wonder about it now,’ Heller said. ‘If everything is as intangible as time has proven to be. Look around you, Rembrandt. You see the moors, the far off hil
ls, the farmhouse behind us, right?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘As do I. But a little while ago all of this was destroyed. Torn to pieces, ground to ash, and poisoned by radiation. Yet look at it now: whole and unspoiled again. It’s either real-’ she tapped the planks again ‘-or an illusion conjured by our minds from the energy in motion that the prof talked about.’

  ‘I prefer not to think about it. It will send you crazy if you dwell on it too long.’

  Heller exhaled, her shoulders lifting in a shrug.

  ‘There’s only the two of us who knows anything about what happened.’

  ‘Three of us,’ Rembrandt corrected. ‘There’s also Mina.’

  ‘Aah, Mina? What are we going to do about her?’

  ‘I’ve an idea. But it isn’t Mina I’m worried about right now. It’s you, Elizabeth. It’s why I followed you up here, to check that you were OK.’

  ‘The world was being torn apart around me, I’d been shot and was dying, but now…well, that isn’t what’s troubling me. I recently killed two men, Rembrandt. How do you think I feel?’

  ‘If it’s any comfort to you, you didn’t kill Coombs or Fox in this reality. They’re still alive. They’re out there somewhere living their lives.’

  ‘I still sent them to their deaths, and the guilt of my actions is something I’m going to have to learn to live with. They still died up here.’ She tapped her head. ‘I killed them in my memories.’

  ‘You did what you had to do.’

  She pushed her hands through her hair. ‘Sending them to their deaths was unforgivable of me.’

  Rembrandt grunted. ‘If you hadn’t, I’d have killed them for trying to have me murdered. They got off easier your way, believe me.’

  ‘So I did them a mercy?’ Heller laughed, and this time it was with a note of incredulity.