by Hocking, Ian
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, in Italian, ‘this is not an exercise. My colleague and I are sky marshals. We have just made a precautionary arrest. There is no danger to yourselves or this aircraft. The captain has been informed. Please stay calm and do not attempt to leave your seats.’ In German, she added, ‘As you can see, the situation is under control. Do not obstruct us.’
Jennifer, Cory and Harkes remained still during Saskia’s speech. Then Harkes laughed. The sound was abrupt and forced. He tapped his forehead with his free hand. She wondered how the three had come to arrive at this extraordinary meeting. Was Harkes the spy that Jennifer had spoken about? If so, what had he spied upon? The time machine?
‘I carry no modifications that you can influence, Jennifer, so you needn’t bother. They are long gone.’
Jennifer continued to stare. There was no sign that she found this surprising or frustrating.
She said, ‘It doesn’t matter any more. I found you.’
Harkes rested the gun on the trolley. Saskia, concerned by this insouciance, inclined her head to check if his finger was still on the trigger. It was. Harkes smiled at Saskia, then at Jennifer.
‘I’m a little old to be tarred and feathered, don’t you think?’ he said.
‘It’s personal,’ replied Jennifer.
‘Listen to yourself,’ Harkes said. His voice had developed an edge. ‘You’re talking about something that happened fifty years ago.’
Saskia saw the muscles in Jennifer’s jaw flex.
‘Three days, you fuck. It’s been three days since I buried him.’
The silence played out. Saskia felt the heavy air of calculation, interpretation, prediction. She was not yet ready to intervene, but, when she did, it would mean disarming Harkes. It was not enough that he was her enemy’s enemy. She looked at Cory and found him looking at her.
The frisson of this exchange seemed to prompt him.
‘Harkes,’ he said, turning to the man, ‘where is it?’
Calculated or not, this question seemed to strike Harkes with an almost physical impact. He let his glass drop loudly on the galley cart.
‘It? How can you still believe that this is about an object? It’s about an idea.’
‘Of course it’s about an idea,’ said Cory. ‘Where is the diamond?’
‘Somewhere at the back of Jennifer’s mind, dummy, where it’s always been.’ He swilled the ice in his tumbler but did not drink. ‘The Confederacy was over before it began. It’ll take a whole lot more than a precious stone to kick-start their revolution. Lookit, you’re a trigger-happy grunt. A psychopath. You think you’re married? You have no wife. Forget the diamond. Forget carbon focusing. It’s a story. A fucked-up lullaby for a halfwit.’
Saskia studied Cory for the physical correlates of his thoughts: a faster blink rate, a skin conductivity spike, micro-movements in his muscles. But Cory did nothing. He did not look at Jennifer to seek a denial. And, as far as Saskia could detect, no electromagnetic communication passed between them.
Harkes sighed. He looked disappointed with the effect of his speech.
‘I know you like a work of art,’ said Jennifer, ‘so I hope you appreciate our finishing touch. S, T, E, N, D, E, C.’
‘What have you done?’ Harkes looked towards the cockpit, then back at Jennifer, who was beginning to smile.
‘What is gravity, but action at a distance? Harkes, that spinner ripped him apart.’ She swallowed. ‘Ripped Dad apart.’ Her next words came cold and slow. ‘In eight minutes and fourteen seconds, this aircraft, and everyone on board, will crash. There will be no survivors. Only a mystery: seven letters that could mean anything.’
At this revelation, Saskia expected the passengers to surge up. She had braced herself to disarm Harkes and attempt to control the crowd. But the men and women within earshot did nothing. One woman lowered her head in despair. Another raised her hands to her ears. There was a sense of sadness, impotence, and of worst fears confirmed.
‘You made a mistake at last,’ said Cory, relishing his words. ‘You spent too long with the zombies. You became part of their danse macabre.’
‘Wait a damn–’
‘I’ll give you one chance. Tell me the location of the Cullinan Zero.’
Harkes was trembling and flushed. His lips pouted childishly. Though Saskia had guessed that, like the passengers, he would either explode or acquiesce, she was surprised by the further deflation of his posture: his chin sank to his chest and he gave up the impression of youthfulness. He grew into his age.
‘Even if I could tell you,’ he said. ‘I’m still dead. I’ve been dead the whole time, from a certain point of view. Isn’t that right, Jennifer?’
‘Yes. Think about that on the way down.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Harkes.
He drained the liquid in his glass and turned to Saskia. In the instant their eyes locked, a transmission pip five hundred nanoseconds long passed from him to her:
‘Well, my enemy’s enemy, I see you’re carrying Jennifer’s recall band. You will be aware that there are two ways out of this situation. The first is to use that band. The second is this. I’m too heavy for the band, though I can’t be sure about you, my dear. STENDEC.’
He winked and put the gun between his teeth.
‘No!’ she shouted.
A rush of panic carried her through a series of ballistics equations, even as she saw Cory lunge forward and Jennifer sink to a crouch. She considered the crushing force of the bullet and its cavitation; the kinetic energy and its reflection through the incompressible liquid matter in Harkes’s skull; the impact velocity and the residual velocity and the efficiency with which its energy was imparted. Each calculation folded within the next until she knew where the bullet would exit. She sprang into the air behind Harkes and put her head in the path of the bullet. Now, her death was as predictable as the products of the formulae. She closed her eyes. She would bring to bear the strength of physical laws that could never permit the time paradox of her death. She would cause the gun to misfire.
Wait.
Still in the air, she opened her eyes.
He sent me that message wirelessly. If he has hardware, it might deflect–
The electric ignition made no sound, but the bullet roared as it left the barrel. Saskia felt the airwash of the projectile like a slap to the head. Suddenly, there was blood in her eyes and she had slammed against the airframe. Through her disorientation, she became aware of a whistling sound near her shoulder. A man – Cory? – was shouting Harkes’s name. She turned. There was a hole in the exterior door. Saskia stared at it stupidly until the pitch dropped and
move
she sprang aside as the door boomed into the daylight.
The sound was like the roar of the passing bullet – but stretched. Her breath left in a sigh she could not contain.
She held the fold-out seat near the bulkhead of the flightdeck. She had twisted as she fell, and now she watched as Harkes was sucked outside. Cory was standing with nothing to hold. His jacket bloomed like a parachute and he reached towards Jennifer, who had pushed herself into the opposite corner of the bulkhead. She did not move to help. Cory was ripped from the aeroplane. Instantly, his white cane – no longer a sword – tumbled after him.
Saskia and Jennifer looked at one another across the foggy air. The woman’s expression was remote. Saskia reached for the oxygen mask that flapped above the fold-out seat and tugged the elastic strap around her head. For a moment, she looked at the sky through the doorway. It held a certain peace. All she had to do was release her hold on the seat. Lean into the river of air, close her eyes and wash away. Instead, she looked at the passengers. They stared mutely over beak-like oxygen masks. Scarves and hair fluttered. Saskia drew a breath and removed her mask. Jennifer was holding her elbow, as though injured, and Saskia remembered the girl that she had once been.
‘You killed both of them,’ she shouted. ‘Even your Huckleberry.’
‘Cor
y is a survivor like you,’ Jennifer called back. ‘And he’ll be on your trail unless you come back with me. What do you say? Still want to play the heroine?’
Saskia did not hesitate. She took the bracelet from her pocket and held it across the sucking, open doorway. Irritation, little more, crossed Jennifer’s face.
‘I think we can land this thing together if you’re sufficiently motivated, Jennifer. What do you say?’
Saskia felt the oncoming attack as an undertow before the crashing of a great wave. She began to open her fingers.
‘No, Saskia. No.’
Saskia could not complete the movement. Her hand locked tight around the bracelet. Every muscle jammed, and she lost command of her arm. Though she could not blink to oil her eyes, she saw Jennifer reach over, keeping herself low to the floor, and take the bracelet. She passed it over her wrist and elbow.
A single, burning filament of light appeared behind Jennifer: a vertical line about two metres high. It might have been the crack of a door opening onto something brilliant. Jennifer turned to it. The filament bobbed and canted as though its position relative to the aircraft was not perfectly fixed.
The filament began to pulse. Daylight. Night. Daylight. At the peaks of its intensity, Saskia felt sensation and control return to her body. Interference? Saskia tried to capitalise on these intermittent spells but she could not make large movements without revealing herself to Jennifer. She settled for blinking and taking long breaths of ice-cold air. The paralysis came and went with the regularity of a revolving door.
The filament expanded on the horizontal axis, left and right, forming a rectangle of solid light at right angles to the hole in the fuselage. Jennifer glanced at it and completed her work on the bracelet, which she tapped like a keyboard.
Then, without fear, Jennifer touched the centre of the rectangle. The portal lost its brilliance and assumed the reflectivity of a mirror. In it, Saskia saw the open doorway, herself, and an object that lay between the loafers of the foremost first-class passenger.
Jennifer cocked her head. She might have been listening to the equivalent of a pre-flight check. She stepped into the mirror. Its watery, reflective surface closed on her hips and shoulders until nothing remained.
With that, Saskia felt movement return. She leapt across the cabin and punched into the quicksilver. She was face to face with her fury. She groped for Jennifer’s arm and found her elbow. She squeezed, rotating the bracelet to crush the tendon of Jennifer’s triceps. She felt Jennifer stop and spin. Saskia squeezed harder and pulled her through the door. As the woman emerged, her scream mixed with the waterfall-boom of rushing air. Her eyes cleared and focused on Saskia. Jennifer tugged back, desperate to extract her arm, and she slipped out of Saskia’s grip, relinquishing the time bracelet.
‘Don’t forget this,’ said Saskia.
She raised her free hand and put Harkes’s GLAS 1 pistol to Jennifer’s forehead. The shorter woman screamed and shut her eyes. But Saskia did not shoot. She pulled out the collar of her T-shirt and dropped the gun inside. At this, Jennifer opened her eyes. She looked down in horror.
‘The mass–’
Saskia shoved. The quicksilver swallowed Jennifer and her scream without a ripple.
A boom, deeper than the noise that had accompanied the decompression, and fundamental, shook the aircraft. Heatless light raked the cabin. Saskia crouched. Her hair streamed towards the exit door. Unmoved by this, she transferred the recall band to her pocket as white flames trumpeted from the mirror. Tendrils spiralled towards the cabin lights and the EXIT/SORTIE sign above the intact starboard door. The mirror gathered to a silvery point, hovered for a second, then fell. A circle of floor immediately below it crunched to nothing. Saskia moved to the hole and looked down. She could see through to sunlight on the clouds below. The wormhole – or whatever it was – had collapsed to something infinitesimal and fallen through the aircraft. She watched the shaft close with a sound like that of a suction toilet. Baggage had tumbled into the gap and sealed it.
Saskia rose. She felt for the mechanisms controlling the communication system onboard the aircraft. There were... twenty antennas. No, twenty-one. Only two could be hacked. The rest were hardware-locked. She concentrated and, on the cramped deck, the Internet opened as wide as the sky. She downloaded their flight plan from EuroControl and confirmed the model of the aircraft. A Boeing 737, the 800 series. Fine. From there she skipped to a company who trained pilots for this model; she burst through their security measures and pulled a flight manual from their server and read each word in parallel. She downloaded several electronic textbooks on avionics, aerodynamics, and jet propulsion.
Meanwhile, she tried to access the flightdeck, whose door had been sucked shut. She pushed against it but the lock was engaged. A wash of anger surged through her body. The keypad comprised plastic keys of numbers and letters. Even if she knew the length of the code, it would be impossible to guess. She kicked the door in frustration. Harkes’s gun could have shot through the lock. She scanned the vicinity for anything useful, but there was nothing. Just then, the aircraft banked steeply to the left. Saskia steadied herself against the fuselage. Passengers screamed.
She looked for wiring around the lock, but there was none. How had Cory gained access? She inspected it more closely and saw a mark on the LCD. She touched the crack and hissed; the edge had cut the pad of her finger. The blood welled to a teardrop and Saskia noticed clear fluid around the wound. She sniffed. It was odourless.
Yet Cory had defeated the lock. Perhaps it was still broken. She pressed the key marked ‘enter’ and heard the bolts snap back. Saskia pushed through. Before she did anything else, she reached beneath the left seat and withdrew a bulky oxygen mask and, as she inhaled, the dry gas cleared the butcher-shop smell. Her vision brightened. She took ten breaths – counting each one – and looked at the pilots. Their white shirts were crimson with blood. A stewardess was slumped across the engine throttles, perhaps dead, perhaps not.
Saskia moved her gaze from the bodies and looked for the artificial horizon on the instrument panel. At the moment, it was level. The windows were opaque with condensation. An intermittent siren bleated. The sound matched a flashing button near the pilot. It read ALT HORN CUTOUT. Saskia almost touched it, hesitated, then pressed. The siren stopped.
Beyond the dead pilots, the two yokes moved as one. Their countenance was ghostly.
Saskia was considering which pilot to remove when an itching, stinging sensation spread from her cut fingertip. She raised her hand. It was numb.
‘Fuck,’ she said.
Cory undid the lock. Now he’s undoing me.
But the defeat should not have surprised her. After all, Jennifer had warned that the aircraft would crash and, despite Saskia’s desperate hope, Jennifer could not have lied. Still, she heard herself repeat, emphatically, ‘Fuck.’
At the same time, the yokes drifted forward and to the left. Saskia lost her balance and fell sideways as the aircraft dived.
She felt a disturbance at her core. Rolling shutdowns passed through her mind. Death by degrees. The wetware device at the base of her brain winked out and
Whoop, whoop.
she went
‘Overspeed warning! Overspeed warning!’
offline into sleep without end.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ute Scheslinger, last conscious many months before, awoke on the flight deck of an aeroplane. She was gripping her right hand; blood was bubbling from a cut on its index finger. Her eyes left the wound and widened on this sudden, bright cockpit. The fittings shook and the alarms sang. She was being pushed into the bulkhead by the force of acceleration. She looked at the blood running into horizontal lines across the pilots’ necks, dripping towards her. Disconnected memories returned: a girl without a passport, a cat called Ego, a new apartment in Berlin, pink sheets that foretold the future, and a rendezvous in a darkened church. She had no narrative that gave meaning to Saskia Brandt, a mind once bur
ned onto the device that pierced the back of Ute’s brain.
Ute had woken to her death. She struggled to stand, flung back the door to the flight deck, and entered the cabin. As she moved between the seats, the passengers beseeched her with masked faces. No. Nothing I can do. Ute climbed the ramp-like deck. The narrative of Saskia’s last hours took shape in her mind. Ute remembered feeling excitement at the prospect of a journey to Milan with
a new lover
and irritation at a desertion, then a hurt that struck deep.
The overhead lockers had sprung their loads. Bags and clothes blocked the aisle. Extraordinarily, one man, who wore a bow tie, was reading a newspaper. He lifted it to follow a moving track of the sunlight. Another man was dead. His skull had ruptured. Jammed between his thighs was a bloody laptop computer. His neighbour stroked his hair. Others held hands. Some embraced. Puke. Plastic cups, rolling.
She trampled copies of Die Welt, The Times, Corriere della Sera, and found the summit of the aircraft: its tail, a dark space that struck her as fundamental, but as what and for whom, Ute could not say.
There was a girl alone in the row. No-one had attached her mask. Ute sat next to her.
‘Komm,’ she said, ‘gib mir deine Hand.’
The cabin lights stuttered; gave up. Spokes of sunlight slit the compartment and Ute felt a sense of déjà vu. The G-force pulled a starfield of tears upwards. Oxygen tubes swayed. She heard the faint whoop-whoop of a cockpit alarm, unanswered.
She squeezed the girl’s cold hand. Her last thought was triggered by a jade band around her bleeding finger, flashing in unexpected sunlight.
Jem. Her name was Jem.
~
Everything stopped.