by Peter Ward
“OK, so I’ve never fired a gun,” Geoff said. “But I still think I should get one.”
“Sorry—it’s just too risky,” the captain said. “Just stay close to me, and try not to get shot.”
“Good advice,” Geoff said, already standing a little closer to the captain than was socially acceptable in normal circumstances. “I’ll do my best.”
“Right, let’s get ready,” the captain said.
“Now arriving at the remote operations deck,” the lift announced.
Twenty-Five
The first things that grabbed Geoff’s attention as the lift doors slid open were two twitching bodies, each lying in pools of their own blood and clutching their stomachs much the same way as Eric had done the night he was killed. Looking closer, he recognized them as the two technicians he’d seen in here earlier. This was not a good sign—Mr. Knight was obviously quite adept at killing people by breaking their ribs and puncturing their lungs. Geoff crossed his arms protectively over his chest and took a deep breath.
Captain Holland crouched down on the floor and scuttled out of the lift as quietly as he could, closely followed by everyone else. The place was eerily silent—so much so that you could have heard a pin drop, although there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between everyone that this was neither the time nor the place to start going around dropping pins, unless they were planning on catching Mr. Knight in some sort of hilarious Home Alone-style booby trap.
The group quickly dived for shelter behind a nearby terminal and took a brief moment to look around. Mai’s towering glass pillars looked cold and empty, the flashes of pale blue light now reduced to a dark, lifeless gray. Over to the left, a row of data banks and monitors were smashed to pieces, a thick carpet of broken glass, wires and microchips splashed across the surrounding floor.
A stray shard of glass cracked under the Defence Minister’s feet as he leaned back on his heels, the sound announcing the group’s presence as it pierced through the silence and echoed loudly down the rows of pillars. The Defence Minister shut his eyes and winced.
“Aha!” Mr. Knight called out, his voice booming from somewhere inside Mai’s maze of glass. “Is that my welcoming party I hear?”
Everyone chose not to respond, perhaps in the vain hope that Mr. Knight might dismiss the noise as a stray cat running into a milk bottle or something.
“I know you’re there!” Mr. Knight shouted. “It’s no use pretending!”
There was something a little different about Mr. Knight’s voice, as if some sort of vocal mask had slipped. It sounded more strained, more slithery, with a distinct hiss wrapped around every word. In many ways, he sounded much like the alien Geoff had spoken to in the simulated invasion of London he’d watched with Tim earlier.
“I assume you’re here to try and fix your stupid computer,” Mr. Knight called out, “and if that’s the case, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you—I forced those two technicians to reprogram it before I killed them, then I destroyed all the voice recognition data banks. So unless one of you is exceptionally good at jigsaws, I don’t think you’ll have much luck fixing her before your entire fleet is destroyed!”
The captain made a few hand signals at his guards, presumably giving them orders on how to proceed. Some of these orders were fairly easy to decipher—when the captain pointed at a guard and then pointed down a row of pillars, this must have meant he wanted that particular person to head in that particular direction. Other orders, however, were a little more complicated to understand and involved the captain pointing at his nose, interlocking his hands, and drawing circles in the air with his index finger. At least, Geoff assumed they were orders—for all he knew, the captain could have been pretending to be a bookie communicating the odds at a horse race. Unlikely, he reasoned.
Fortunately, the guards seemed to understand the captain’s bizarre hand gestures and split off in various directions to look for Mr. Knight. Some began to make their way cautiously into the grid of glass pillars, guns at the ready, while others tiptoed their way around the perimeter. Geoff and the others stayed with the captain, who was still sheltered behind the terminal, listening intently to the quiet footsteps of his men.
All of a sudden, a mild tremor shook the room, the glass pillars rattling gently as they absorbed the vibrations.
“You feel that?” Mr. Knight shouted. “That’s another one of your ships being blown to smithereens! Are you keeping count? Nearly half of your pathetic fleet has gone already!”
“Let’s get this Varsarian bastard,” the captain said, breaking his silence. Obviously there wasn’t a hand signal to convey that particular order.
Geoff followed the captain as he rushed over to the nearest pillar and sidled up against it, peering around the corner to see if the coast was clear. Tim, Ruth and the Defence Minister split off in separate directions.
“Looks OK,” the captain said. “Follow me.”
They began to edge tentatively into Mai’s labyrinth of glass, being sure to look left and right every time they approached a crossroads in their path. Occasionally, they would jump in false alarm when they came across a guard, who in turn would jerk his rifle up in surprise before lowering his weapon again in relief. From the inside, it was very difficult to see what was going on—the glass pillars had a nasty habit of playing tricks with the light and reflecting people in all directions. In many respects, everything around Geoff reminded him of walking through a hall of mirrors at a funfair, including the feeling that he’d much rather be at home eating chips.
“I see you’ve brought young Geoffrey with you,” Mr. Knight said, his voice sounding much closer than before. “How very interesting! How did you like my little plan, Geoff? Quite ingenious, don’t you think?”
The captain spun around to check the area behind them. Could he see them? Mr. Knight’s reflection was drifting from pillar to pillar, but it was difficult to tell exactly where he was.
“I don’t know,” Geoff said aloud, suddenly sensing an opportunity. “It didn’t seem that brilliant to me, really.”
“What the hell are you doing?” the captain whispered. “Keep quiet!”
“Wait,” Geoff said. “We may have just found … a weak spot.”
“A weak spot?!” the captain said, struggling to keep his voice down.
“So it didn’t seem that brilliant to you?” Mr. Knight replied, his voice sounding a little agitated. “That’s because you don’t understand. You don’t understand your involvement in all this. That’s the clever part.”
“Then tell me,” Geoff said. “Tell me how you …”
“He’s here!” one of the guards shouted. “Lower your weapon and …”
Unfortunately, the rest of the sentence was obscured by a very loud burst of laser fire. And some screaming. A bright streak of red light reflected through the towers of glass, momentarily lighting up the room in a flash of color.
“Hitchford?” the captain said, wiping some sweat off his forehead and giving Geoff an uncertain look. “Did you get him?”
No answer.
“Hitchford, respond!”
“Hitchford would love to respond,” Mr. Knight called out from somewhere, “but I’m afraid his head isn’t quite attached to the rest of his body at the moment. Can he get back to you?”
The captain shut his eyes and shook his head as the remote operations deck echoed to the sound of a piercing, high-pitched laugh.
“Shit,” he said.
The room shook again, but much more noticeably than before. Geoff watched as a few hairline cracks appeared in some of the glass pillars, which clearly weren’t designed to take this kind of strain.
“That was a big one, wasn’t it?” Mr. Knight teased. “Whatever ship just exploded must have been pretty close! Anyway, where were we Geoffrey? You were going to ask me something?”
“Yes,” Geoff said, staying close to the captain as they made their way deeper into the computer. �
��What’s all this got to do with me? What did I do to bring forward the date of the invasion? And why did you break my hand?”
Mr. Knight laughed again.
“That’s a lot of questions,” he said, “but since you’re about to die anyway, I might as well start from the beginning.” There was almost a childlike excitement to his voice as it echoed across the room, as if he’d been waiting to tell someone this story for years.
“He’s taken the bait,” Geoff whispered to the captain. “We need to listen to what he’s about to say very carefully.”
The captain nodded.
“We’d always planned on invading the Earth in the early twenty-first century,” Mr. Knight said, his reflection fading in and out of view like some strange kaleidoscopic effect. “The human race was so primitive back then, so basic. You didn’t deserve to live on that planet, wasting all those natural resources on powering your motor vehicles and microwave ovens. It was a crime. So we decided to take it from you by force. We thought it was going to be easy enough—according to our research, the most advanced weapon you’d developed at that stage was the nuclear bomb, which, to be honest, we could protect ourselves against with a simple face cream. On paper, the invasion looked as though it was going to be a complete walkover.”
“So what happened?” Geoff said. “What went wrong?”
“I was just getting to that,” Mr. Knight said impatiently. “Having decided that we were going to invade, the battle fleet travelled fifty-eight thousand light-years across the galaxy, arriving in your solar system exactly on schedule. The Earth looked as harmless and primitive up close as we’d thought, aimlessly revolving round the sun like some stupid fat kid sitting on a carousel. It was almost too good to be true. So everything was set. The entire fleet readied its weapons, moved into attack formation, and accelerated towards the Earth, monitoring all communications on approach. However, just as we were about to break through the atmosphere and reap destruction across the planet, we picked up a transmission.”
Mr. Knight went silent.
“A … transmission?” Geoff said, trying to prompt Mr. Knight into continuing his story.
“It was very faint,” Mr. Knight continued, “but we could just make out the words: ‘I see you alien fuckers, and the Death Bringer is coming your way!’ As we later found out, that transmission came from you, playing your stupid computer games. You were talking to another human being over the ‘Internet.’”
“Please,” Geoff said, struggling not to laugh. “Are you telling me you thought I was talking to you?”
“We didn’t know what to think,” Mr. Knight said. “For a start, we thought we’d gone undetected, and second of all, we’d encountered a ‘Death Bringer’ before, when we tried to invade another planet several centuries earlier. It was a devastating weapon, capable of taking out every ship with one strike, and when we heard the name again, there was a moment of panic. Was our research correct? Everything we thought we knew about the human race suggested you wouldn’t be able to detect us until it was too late, yet here was this message. If we’d somehow underestimated your technological ability to detect the battle fleet, had we also underestimated your military capabilities as well?”
“So you broke off your attack?” Geoff said. “You broke off your attack … because I was playing Space Commando?”
“Yes,” Mr. Knight said. “As a precaution, the fleet did an immediate about-face and retreated back across the galaxy to reassess the situation. The Varsarian high command was very unnerved by your message, and they wanted to double-check the accuracy of their intelligence.”
“So I was right!” Ruth called out from somewhere, apparently listening to the conversation as well. “Geoff was originally responsible for delaying the whole invasion!”
“Yes, my dear,” Mr. Knight said. “It’s terribly embarrassing, isn’t it?”
Geoff laughed out loud.
“You travelled fifty-eight thousand light-years across the galaxy,” he said, wiping his eyes, “and you had to travel all the way back again because I was playing a computer game? That’s hilarious!”
“Indeed. So you can imagine how stupid we felt when, two hundred years later, we discovered the mention of a ‘Death Bringer’ was just an amazing coincidence, uttered by some stupid kid, sitting in his pajamas, totally oblivious to the invasion. The Varsarians were the laughing stock of the galactic community.”
“So when you realized your mistake,” Geoff said, “you came all the way back again?”
“We did. In the two hundred-odd years that had passed, Earth was still an easy target. Your planet had been ravaged by a couple of big wars, and you’d developed a few more fancy weapons, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle. So the decision was made to go back and finish the job.”
“So that was back in 2181,” Geoff said. “The twenty-second century.”
“Correct,” Mr. Knight replied, “and our intelligence was correct—your military capabilities were still no match for ours. So we began destroying your cities from space, one by one—London, New York, Beijing …”
“Basingstoke,” Geoff said.
“Yes, Basingstoke,” Mr. Knight said. “The battle was even easier than we’d predicted. However, we didn’t count on one silly little university in Malta coming to the rescue, firing that temporal vortex into the path of the fleet. Because they’d kept the technology a secret from the world, we had no idea you’d developed it. And whilst it wasn’t principally designed for military use, it was ultimately responsible for our near annihilation.”
“So the temporal vortex transported your fleet six hundred years into the future,” Geoff said.
“Indeed it did,” Mr. Knight replied. “And because the trip was instantaneous, we didn’t realize anything had happened. So when we arrived in the year 2781, we carried on attacking. So you can imagine our surprise when, all of a sudden, an enormous battle fleet appeared out of nowhere, firing back at us with weaponry far beyond our expectations—in a split second, we were faced with quite a formidable opponent. You know the rest of the story—our fleet was all but destroyed in that battle, save for one lone ship that crash-landed on the Earth. That ship belonged to my ancestors. Fortunately, it was equipped with a prototype molecular rearranger, which allowed them to change form into human beings and blend into society. To this day, there are hundreds of us roaming your planet, each one plotting to get into a position of control: politicians, media barons, chat show hosts, scientists, and me—the President of Time Tours Incorporated.”
“Chat show hosts?” Geoff said.
The room shuddered again, this time quite violently. Another ship must have exploded outside, and this time, it must have been much closer than any ship that had exploded before. This appeared to be a little bit too much shuddering for one day, as a few of Mai’s pillars couldn’t take it any longer, shattering into millions of tiny shards and coating the floor in a crunchy, snow-like layer of glass. As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, parts of the ceiling were also showing signs of strain, collapsing all around them in a thick cloud of dust.
“From the moment I started running that company, I began to think about how I could use the technology to change the course of history,” Mr. Knight shouted over the crash of falling debris, “how I could change the past to make sure our original invasion in the twenty-first century would succeed. Using the supercomputer, I played back the events surrounding that date and discovered it was you who sent us that stupid message—it was you who sent us fleeing back home. So I began to think about how I could get to you. At first, I thought about just going back and killing you, but with Eric’s blasted safeguards popping up everywhere, I knew I’d be found out, and I’d come too far to take such a stupid risk. I needed to be smarter.”
“Which is where the Time Rep idea came in,” Geoff said, brushing some glass from his shoulder.
“Exactly. The more I found out about you, the more I was amazed at how insignifican
t you were, and I began to wonder if I could use this to my advantage. You were less important to the world than certain types of mushroom, for goodness sake.”
“Which mushrooms?” Geoff said. In spite of everything that was happening around him, he was dying to know.
“Shiitake, mainly,” Mr. Knight said. “But only because some world leader or other choked to death on one in 2054.”
“I knew it,” Geoff said. “Bloody shiitake mushrooms.”
“So that was when I came up with the idea for Time Reps—using insignificant people to act as tour guides for each time period. And it was perfect—the time-tourism industry was on its knees, crying out for innovation, and whilst I couldn’t get to you, this scheme would bring you straight to me. Everyone was happy. Of course, I needed to cover my tracks in case anyone started asking questions, so I let Ruth take the credit for the idea and got her promoted to the board. With all the success she gained from it, I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that the Time Rep idea was actually mine.”
“You bastard!” Ruth shouted out. “You used me!”
“The next stage,” Mr. Knight said, ignoring Ruth, “was to work out how to change history but in such a way that it wouldn’t register on the paradox scan. That was where I used the help of a few ‘friends’—fellow aliens posing as scientists. So I leaked the algorithm to them. It wasn’t long before they figured out a loophole—one that would allow me to interfere with the space-time continuum in such a way that the computer wouldn’t realize. All I had to do was make sure that the final nanosecond remained the same as the one in its data banks, and I could make as many changes as I liked!”
“But Eric was on to you.”
“Eric was never on to me,” Mr. Knight said. “He knew there was a problem with his ‘double-Nobel Prize’-winning code, and he knew someone on the inside had leaked it, but he had no idea it was me. Nevertheless, he was on the verge of ironing out the loophole, and I couldn’t let that happen. His new and improved algorithm would have made changing history far too difficult, if not impossible.”