by Kyle Noe
“Not me, him!” countered Renner, with a chuckle.
The Marines turned down into a side hallway, where they spotted Marin and a handful of Syndicate soldiers.
“Congratulations are in order,” Marin said.
“With all due respect, lady, we’re beat,” Renner said. “So if you’d kindly step aside, I’d like to listen to my music and cop some Z’s.”
“Of course,” Marin said, with a quick nod. “Follow me.”
She led the Marines down a staircase and through a secure, pressurized door to a circular room fitted with a few single beds and bunk beds. Piles of clothing and toiletries were situated near appliances holding food and liquids of various colors.
“What the hell happened to the other quarters?” Milo asked.
“There are multiple areas for rest on the ship,” Marin said. “I’m sure you will find these more than adequate,” she continued, sweeping her hand.
Quinn marched toward the beds as Marin nodded at her.
“The Potentate was well pleased by your performance today,” Marin said.
“It’s not a game,” Quinn said.
“Yes, it is,” replied Marin. “In a sense, all of us are pieces on a chessboard being manipulated by his hand.”
“Wow. You have truly gotten drunk on the fucking Kool-Aid,” Quinn replied.
Quinn brushed past Marin and gestured at the bunk at the rear of the room.
“Dibs on that one,” she said.
She trudged forward and collapsed on top of the bed, rolling over, looking at the ceiling. She noticed that the lighting had the effect of making everything, the ceiling, the walls, the floor, look the same. As if it was all one continuous piece of material that had been warped and bent to fit inside the mothership.
Quinn mentally blocked out the noise from the other Marines. Exhausted beyond all measure, she rolled over and fought for sleep, but it did not come easily. Instead, she saw images of incoming missiles and smelled the funk of gunpowder and burned flesh. She heard the explosions and felt the displacement in the air as ordnance flew past her head. Quinn rocked up in her bed, eyes going wide.
Unable to sleep, Quinn slipped off her bed and exited the sleeping quarters. She strolled by empty rooms and down impossibly long corridors.
The place was too goddamn quiet, she thought.
And the fact that she could just wander at will? On the one hand it made her suspicious, but on the other, where the hell was she gonna go?
She continued inching down the corridor, lights flickering on overhead. She heard footfalls off to her left and right down other corridors, along with snatches of conversation and the hushed whisper of unseen mechanical devices.
She reached a four-way intersection in the corridor and stopped.
That’s when she heard it.
What sounded like a cheer rising off to her right.
Heading toward the sound, Quinn saw light building at the end of the hallway. Voices were audible, grunts, the repetitive sound of what could have been flesh being slapped and pummeled.
The repetitive sound built as she turned a corner to see a small congregation of human prisoners she’d seen before, along with a few Marines, busily engaged in hand-to-hand combat. She watched as the fighters, mostly men but a few women, kicked and chopped at each other. Some were practicing defensive moves, while others were clearly on the offensive, charging around on an elevated mat, tackling and pinning their opponents.
A hand grabbed Quinn’s shoulder and she instinctively turned and swept her leg, bringing the figure behind her crashing to the ground.
Quinn spun around, balled fist ready to strike …
Cody.
The good doctor was on the ground, smiling nervously, hands up in front of his face in a gesture of submission.
“Cool your jets, Sergeant,” Cody said.
Quinn’s fist came down. She looked at Cody like he was an insect.
“Oh. It’s just you,” she said.
“Nice to see you too,” he remarked.
Quinn grabbed Cody’s wrist and pulled. He shot to his feet and danced around a bit.
“Out for an evening stroll?” he asked.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“We’ve got things that can help with that,” Cody replied, with a knowing smile.
Quinn didn’t respond.
She spotted a pair of padded, non-lethal pugil sticks on the ground. Quinn hoisted one up and tossed the other to Cody.
“Hey, Quinn, I appreciate the mano-y-mano stuff, but I really was hoping to talk to you about—”
WHACK!
Quinn struck Cody across his left shoulder, knocking him back to the ground.
“What the hell, Quinn?” Cody cried out.
“Again,” Quinn replied.
Cody made a move to stand and again Quinn knocked him on his ass.
“You trying to kill me?” he yelled.
“You’d already be dead if I was,” she replied.
Cody struggled to his feet, swinging wildly at Quinn, who effortlessly ducked and avoided his strikes. Quinn lunged at Cody, then pulled back. She waited for Cody to strike and then worked him up around the head and shoulders.
Barely breaking a sweat, Quinn had Cody on his back, fumbling around like an overturned turtle.
“Say Aunt,” Quinn said, looking down at Cody, a tight smile on her face.
“Aunt! Aunt!” Cody shrieked.
Quinn dropped her stick and was turning away as Cody hustled to his feet and grabbed her shoulder.
“You got a death wish, Doc?” Quinn said.
“No, but I did want to talk to you,” Cody said, whispering. “I followed you here.”
“Why?”
“I’ve found something, and ...” Cody’s feverish eyes were everywhere. “If they see us interacting, Quinn—”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? The goddam Syndicate.”
Quinn shook her head, but Cody wouldn’t let up. “I think … I think I found a way to fight back.”
Quinn paused, trying to ascertain whether this was bullshit or something worse. A test maybe? A way for the Syndicate to see who was disloyal. Who was to say that Quinn hadn’t been injected with something that would immediately fry her brain or explode her heart if she agreed to go with Cody?
“If you are fucking with me, Cody, so help me God…”
She let her voice drift and waited for Cody’s eyes to show fear. They did.
“Show me,” Quinn said.
***
Cody moved around inside an extraordinarily spacious lab, flipping switches and powering up air handlers and other devices that produced a symphony of white noise sounds. His eyes darted everywhere as he closed the entrance to the lab, checking and rechecking that the hatch was locked several times.
Quinn ranged around the room, inspecting the gear, the medical devices. Much of the equipment looked like it belonged to a pathology lab back on Earth. There were washing bays, blood cell counters, auto analyzers, hordes of centrifuges and strange looking alien microscopes, and an assortment of oddly colored liquids and gasses in glass containers. It was a scientist's wet dream. And in the middle of it all was a small platform with a raised, red button.
Quinn reached for the red button and Cody grabbed her arm.
“Don’t touch that.”
“Why not?”
“What are you? Five years old?” he asked. “That’s the lab plunger. You do that if there’s a fire or a sentinel event. Blows everything out a hatch and into space.”
She reached for a vial of purple liquid.
“Don’t touch that either. It’s concentrated neuromic acid. Derived from the urine of an extinct alien. It seeps through the skin and eats the victim from the inside out.”
“Look, Cody, your little science experiments and lab here are cute, but what the hell do you really want?
Cody glanced over at the silver object that Quinn had retrieved back on Earth. It sat on a long meta
l table.
“Have you told anyone about the temporal totem you reconned?” he asked.
“The what?”
“The silver object.”
“Oh,” she said. “No.”
“Did you tell anyone I gave you Black Sunshine?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“If this is some kind of weird sex thing, Cody—”
He waved his hand.
“Why would I mess with a woman who could kick my ass in five seconds?”
“Two seconds.”
Cody picked up the silver object, the temporal totem, and moved to a device that was unlike any Quinn had seen before. The object, which was the size of a coffin and amber in color, had an opening at one end. Eerie green light flowed out of a circular hole in a raised middle portion. The device was tethered by metallic tubes and piping to a series of what looked to Quinn like tablets or super computers.
“What is that thing?” Quinn asked.
“It’s a Syndicate scanner.”
“What does it scan?”
“Whatever you’ve got.”
Cody placed the temporal totem in the scanner. Quinn moved alongside the scanner, shadowing Cody, watching the machine thrum to life. There was a burst of yellow light and then some unseen engine revved up, making a terrific whirring sound.
Quinn shielded her eyes as the eerie green light flashed yellow. A holographic image appeared out of the scanner, suspended in the silty light. Instead of the image of a carved horse, Quinn saw a massive projection of the constellation Sagittarius. The image quickly enveloped the room.
Quinn stared at the image, which seemed to take up every inch of the lab.
“What is this? Fortune telling shit?” Quinn asked.
Cody shot a look at Quinn. “Don’t you realize what you’re seeing?”
“A little man playing astronomist.”
“It’s ‘astronomer’ by the way,” Cody said, pointing to the scanner. “Don’t you get that this is serious?”
“So explain it like I’m five,” she replied.
Cody ran a hand through his hair and nodded. “Okay, so the way this scanner works, at least the way it was explained to me, is it projects the likely path of an object, giving the Syndicate an advantage in weapons development. It’s sort of like collecting your social media likes and dislikes and compiling them together to figure out what you’re going to like in the future. Does that make sense?”
“Nope,” Quinn said, turning as Cody reached out and grabbed her arm.
“Do you know why I gave the Sunshine pills to you?”
“You wanted to get laid.”
“Screw you, Quinn, I’m being serious here.”
She hesitated, and Cody leaned in close to her.
“I gave you those pills because I saw something in you.”
“That’s cute.”
“No offense, but you’re not like Renner and Milo and the others. I could tell that the first time I saw you. And the pills, they change you. They break layers of patterned behavior and alter neural pathways and help you to discover cognitive modes you’ve never even dreamt of. I mean, the human body has been using the same software for hundreds of thousands of years, and whatever is in the pills, it changes all that. It allows you to hack yourself. You can feel the change, can’t you?”
Quinn definitely felt different, but couldn’t articulate precisely what had changed.
“I feel … something,” she said.
“‘Something’ is good. It means you are, for lack of a better word, awake. You’re beginning to see the truth, which means if you focus, you’ll understand what I’m telling you.”
Cody pointed to the Scanner.
“That thing over there is not projecting. It’s showing.”
Quinn blinked, and slowly recognition began flooding her gray matter. The pieces started to come together, and she realized that the temporal totem she’d found on Earth should have a likely projection, but it didn’t. It had a certain outcome. That meant one thing ... the object’s outcome had already happened.
“So it’s not from here?” Quinn asked.
“Not from here,” Cody chuckled. “Exactly. No. Certainly not, and here’s the kicker. I don’t think it’s from now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a trick,” Cody said. “Sort of.”
“A trick,” Quinn said, baffled. “I think maybe you’re the one who’s been dropping some Sunshine.”
Cody chortled. “I wish. No, but this is important. Or at least it should be. Time travel shouldn’t be possible intuitively. Because whatever leads to time travel would cause a paradox where the person going back could change what had happened and not lead to time travel, creating a loop.”
No response from Quinn so Cody continued. “Grandfather paradox. You've probably heard of it, yet nobody can figure it out. But here’s the thing. What if … and I’m only spitballing here, but what if you could make a loud enough noise that it reverberates in every direction, forward and backwards? So loud that the past hears it?”
Quinn was silent.
“Earth to Quinn…”
“I’m processing, Cody.”
“What I’m trying to say is, the message is like an echo. It hit a wall. That wall is the past. Am I getting through to you?”
Quinn flinched at what seemed like condescension, but the truth was, Cody wasn’t being flippant at all. He was just a passionate scientist, geeking out over what he wanted to share with her. And Quinn was starting to see that he was on to something.
Cody ran his hands through his hair. “If you could change the past after you’ve discovered time travel, would you?”
“Of course.”
“What if someone else discovered how to go back in time, and they could save your family and humanity from the Syndicate? Wouldn’t you want them to do it?”
“Yes. What’s your point?”
“The further away from the beginning you get, the more chaotic things are. The Universe turns back and repeats in reverse from our point of view. But it’s really all happening at once. As long as you get to the beginning point and the end point, what happens in between doesn’t really matter. So, changing the past is possible.”
“And that’s how we’re getting messages from the future?” Quinn asked. “So we could get more.”
Cody laughed. “Funny. More messages. I mean, if that’s what we need. Great. But we could get an armada! As long as it doesn’t interfere with the beginning and end of the Universe.”
“Yeah, okay, I get it,” Quinn said. “Somebody is trying to make a loud enough noise that the universe can’t help but respond with an echo. Bounce off the edge of the universe and you don’t have to change the past. You just have to change what we sensed in the past, instead of changing the past directly. We change it by communicating with it. Then we can take a new path.”
Cody cheered with excitement. “Yes, yes, yes! I knew you’d understand.” He calmed down slightly. “And I need your help to hear that echo. Are you game?”
Quinn took a deep breath. She stepped back and looked to the floor. “We’re the listeners.”
“Exactly,” Cody said.
Quinn looked to the side. Her first thought was how they could use this to make things better. But she had no idea what Cody wanted to do with it. Should she trust him? She did know that this was bigger than both of them. And she seemed to have few better options.
“Here’s the thing, though,” Cody said, with expectant eyes. “The temporal totem you found, it only tells half the tale. I need more.”
“They only had one.”
“There are others,” he said, with a smile.
Cody moved over and tapped buttons on the scanner. The holographic image changed to something grander in scope. The air above Quinn and Cody immediately filled with a stunning panoply of images and bursts of light, like a high-tech orrery. She spotted Earth, and then the images zoomed down to ground level and coor
dinates followed, mapping a cluster of locations illuminated by red dots.
“Someone left us a map,” Cody said.
“Why?”
“Someone wanted us to find the objects.” Cody pointed at the red dots. “Those are where the other ones are located.”
Quinn squinted at the map of Earth. She reached out a finger and tapped one of the red dots, which revealed that it was hidden somewhere in New York City.
“New York City?”
Cody nodded and tapped other dots.
“Looks like one was left in almost every major American city.”
“By design?”
Cody shrugged. “Maybe whoever left them wanted to make sure at least one of them was found.” He looked to Quinn, his features softened in the hazy light. “And I think there are more out there that will tell us what we need to know. At least another, if not more.”
“And you need me to get one for you?”
Cody grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“If I do that, I need you to do something for me.”
Cody nodded. “Anything.”
“I need you to run a test for me.”
He nodded, though his eyes narrowed.
Quinn removed a small piece of her exo-armor and placed it in Cody’s palm.
“Run a piece of my exo-armor through the scanner. See what you can learn about this, would you?”
Cody smiled. “Will do. I'll just need to reconfigure some things so it's not logged and doesn't blow up the lab.”
Cody and Quinn exchanged a hopeful glance as she turned to leave. Cody reached out and touched her wrist this time, instead of grabbing it.
“Promise me you’ll be careful about who you tell this to,” Cody said.
“Who would I talk to?” Quinn asked.
“Milo for one. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
“He’s a colleague.”
“He wants to be more than that I think.”
“I can handle it, Cody,” Quinn said, with a sigh.
“I’m sure you can, but there’s another element onboard. A very small unit called Icarus. They’d likely be classified as a counter-terrorism unit back on Earth. They’re Syndicate snoops, eavesdroppers and the like whose sole function is to root out traitors.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” she replied, with a nod.
Cody summoned a smile and patted her wrist. Then, as if thinking he’d gone too far, he withdrew his hand.