Covenant

by James Maxey

  She studied the yard for any clues about Neil Wayne Smith. For starters, he hadn’t raked the leaves that must have fallen a month or more ago. Given the general unkempt appearance of the house, it seemed plain to her that the man who earned his living cleaning toilets had no compulsion to keep his own living space tidy.

  She crept closer to the house, watching for any sign of movement. She suspected Smith lived alone. At this time of day, he was probably at work. She felt certain she’d be able to move freely within the house to investigate her target.

  Dogs started barking. She pressed herself against the back of the house. It was hard to tell if the barks were coming from inside or from the front yard. It took only a few seconds to deduce that the barks were coming from outside, and that at least three dogs were now racing around the western side of the house.

  She leapt up and grabbed the ledge of the second floor window and climbed to it as the dogs rounded the corner. They were the biggest dogs she’d ever seen, looking like an unholy mixture of a Doberman and a bear. They were making enough noise that people in the neighboring county probably wondered what was going on, which wasn’t exactly conducive to stealth. She pulled out her blowgun. Phht, phht, phht, the drugged darts flew swiftly, hitting the three dogs on the first try. Given their size, it would take several seconds for the tranquilizers to take hold. Best to move ahead with her mission.

  The second floor window wasn’t locked, but it was warped and painted over. Stealth again went by the wayside as she banged on the frame to inch it up enough to slip inside. She found herself in a room full of cardboard boxes thick with dust. It didn’t look like anyone had been into this part of the house in years.

  Outside, the dogs’ frantic barking took on a drunken, slurred quality. One by one, they fell silent. In the new stillness, she heard a humming from the lower floors, a steady, faint whir, like a fan running. Maybe a furnace? Unlikely. The house felt colder inside than it had outside, and heat on the lower floors would have warmed this level even if there were no vents. Perhaps it was a loud compressor motor on a refrigerator?

  She opened the door to the room slowly. The air of the hallway was just as musty as the closed off room. No footprints could be seen in the dust on the floor. She spotted a staircase and moved toward it, gazing down into the lower level of the house. The whirring was louder now. Definitely not a refrigerator. She moved down the steps carefully, not making a sound, no small feat given the warped and wobbly boards. She found herself in a living room that had the same abandoned, dusty air of the upstairs space. There was a television that looked like it dated from the 1960s, the screen covered with grime. Maybe Smith didn’t live here after all?

  Chimpion pushed open the door to the kitchen and finally saw evidence that the place was inhabited. The kitchen was huge, taking up a third of the main floor. Smith’s entire life seemed confined to this room, since there was a single mattress on the floor in the corner with a mound of wrinkled blankets. Dirty dishes filled the sink. Clothes were piled onto the kitchen table. The atmosphere of the kitchen had an unpleasant odor, a mix of rotting onions, sweaty socks, and stale urine.

  She spotted mail on the counter. She leafed through the envelopes. Nothing but junk mail and a tax bill for the property.

  She sat on a chair, her chin resting on her knuckles as she wondered if she was on—what was the human idiom?—a wild goose chase. Smith plainly wasn’t the person stealing raw research data from particle accelerators. If she’d returned from a rogue mission with valuable intelligence, she’d have been praised for her initiative and daring. Now, she’d be a joke. A dumb animal. She squeezed her fists tightly as the old taunts echoed in her memories.

  Chimpion looked around. She still heard the whirring sound. It was coming from below. The house obviously had a cellar. She knew she’d wasted enough time here already, but felt like she should at least see what was making the noise. It grew louder as she approached a narrow wooden door. She tried to open the door and found it locked. She crouched and studied the lock. Given the antique condition of the rest of the house, she expected to find a skeleton lock, but instead the door was locked with a brand new deadbolt. She pulled lock picks from her utility belt and set to work. The lock was well made, not something purchased off the shelf at Walmart, but a high security model with a half dozen internal features to thwart lock picks. Even with her superior dexterity and enhanced senses, it took her a full minute to open the lock. Behind the door, she found a staircase heading down into unexpected brightness.

  She descended carefully, brow furrowing deeper as each step revealed more of the room below. The cellar wasn’t some dark, musty, dirt-walled space. Instead, it was walled with white ceramic tiles, spotlessly clean. The air was nearly devoid of scents save for a vague hint of ozone. Overhead, stark florescent lights made the room painfully bright.

  All around the room were computers, neatly arrayed on metal shelves and wired together with tightly bound, color coded cables. An array of monitors were mounted on the far wall, the screens filled with streams of numbers, white against a black background.

  She swiftly spotted the source of the hum. In the center of the room, bolted to the floor, was a centrifuge. It was an industrial model, much bigger than the ones she’d seen in hospitals used for separating blood. On a previous spy mission, she’d caught sight of a centrifuge used to process uranium. This was similar in design though a little smaller. Was Smith working on a bomb in his basement?

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to identify the functions of all this equipment for her mission here to count as a success. She suspected the support team for the Covenant would be very interested in her discovery. She took out her phone and started snapping photos.

  She froze as she heard footsteps on the kitchen floor above.

  Chapter Ten

  BAM! POW!

  One major flaw in Chimpion’s plan became sharply evident. Since she’d used the space machine to travel here without permission, no one at the Knowbokov Foundation was standing by to retrieve her. She’d also been assured that the phone she’d used to communicate with the base would work anywhere on the planet, but that apparently didn’t apply to basements in Kentucky surrounded by a few hundred computers generating electromagnetic fields. Since the stairs up to the kitchen were the only way out of the cellar, she suspected her stealth mission was about to turn into a combat mission.

  Chimpion positioned herself directly beneath the steps and pulled out a shuriken. It was likely that the person had noticed the drugged dogs. She’d pulled shut the door to the cellar, but hadn’t locked it, so if someone came down the steps they’d be coming down in a heightened state of awareness, looking for an intruder. Her one chance was to throw the shuriken as the person came down the steps, aiming it to land behind the furthest shelf of networked computers. The person would naturally look in that direction. In the brief instant of distraction, she could slip onto the steps behind them and silently bolt to freedom.

  The footsteps above belonged to someone quite heavy, moving with a halting step. This matched Smith’s physical profile. The steps moved near the door, then away, toward what she believed was the exterior door in the kitchen that led into the backyard.

  The lights in the cellar dimmed for a few brief seconds. The centrifuge behind her changed in pitch, taking on a strained sound. A curious hissing noise, like loud static, sounded from above. This was followed by the deep-throated barking of large dogs.

  “Get ‘em!” a deep male voice cried as the door to the cellar was thrown open.

  The big dogs thundered down the steps, one, two, three of them from the sound. Her nose wrinkled. From the scent, it was the exact same dogs she’d drugged. They should have been out for hours.

  While she might possibly have slipped past a man, she knew she had no real chance of evading dogs. Their claws clicked and clacked as they skittered on the white tile floor at the foot of the stairs. She pulled out her dart gun. Unfortunately, she wasn’t Batman. Her u
tility belt had a finite amount of space. She only carried four darts, and had already used three. Still, better to fight two dogs than three. She stepped out from beneath the stairs.

  By now the dogs’ nails had found purchase in the grout between tiles and they’d wheeled to charge her. With a puff, the closest one was darted, straight in the tip of his nose. The pain made him startle, lose his pace, and the two dogs behind him leapt over.

  Chimpion took her nunchucks from her belt. The dogs seemed to hang in the air, moving in slow motion. She aimed her blows carefully, striking each dog in the back of the skull, using just enough force to stun them, not kill them. In Russia, she’d often had to fight dogs. She’d always taken care not to permanently injure them. They weren’t to blame for attacking her. They were being abused and manipulated by humans, fellow victims of their cruelty, and she couldn’t condemn them to death. The two dogs fell limp. The third, drugged dog, lunged for her. She knocked it aside with her nunchucks, then hit again when it recovered, though its movements were showing signs of sluggishness. Following the second blow the dog stumbled sideways, then sank down, its facial muscles sagging as the drug reached its brain.

  The lights dimmed again. Once more, the centrifuge whined and there was an unidentifiable hiss in the room above. She heard more footsteps. A second large man had joined the first.

  “Who’s down there?” a deep voice shouted. “Come out where I can see you!”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I have a gun!” he shouted.

  She’d assumed he would.

  “Should we go down?” asked the voice who was calling down the stairs.

  “Not just the two of us,” said the same voice.

  The lights flickered again, the centrifuge spun faster. Once more, the hiss. Above, more footsteps. There were perhaps four men in the kitchen now. The only reason she couldn’t be certain was that all of their footsteps sounded exactly the same, as if all four men had identical weights, gaits, and footwear.

  “This is your last chance!” the voice shouted down. Only, now the voice seemed to be in stereo, as if two men with identical timbres of voice had called out the words at the exact same time.

  “You go,” said the same voice.

  “Why should I go?” said the same voice.

  “The only reason I brought you here was to go.”

  “You didn’t bring me here. I brought you here!”

  “I brought you both here,” said another, identical voice. It sounded like someone arguing with himself, but her ears could pinpoint that the speakers were standing a few feet apart.

  “I’ll go,” said the same voice.

  Chimpion again hid in the space under the stairs as a large man started down the steps, followed closely by another. Reaching into her belt pouch, she placed a respirator between her lips and slipped a pair of goggles over her eyes. She took out a pepper grenade. She still hoped to get out of the house without resorting to lethal force. Even if Smith was up to something unlawful, she hadn’t come here to be his executioner.

  Taking a deep breath as the man’s feet reached the tiles, she stepped from under the stairs and tossed her grenade. It exploded in a fiery red cloud that engulfed two men carrying shotguns. She furrowed her brow as she caught sight of their faces just before the cloud hid them. Both men were the man she recognized from the photo. It wasn’t that they were siblings, or even identical twins. They had exactly the same faces, with precisely the same fight-scarred features. Their clothing was identical down to the stitching, as were the guns they carried.

  She dodged back under the steps, knowing what would happen next. Sure enough, twin shotgun blasts clapped like thunder as the men fired blindly. Along the far wall, several of the networked computers were blown into fragments by the buckshot.

  She leapt back out and BAM! POW! Two solid swings of her nunchucks dropped the men where they stood. She raced up the steps toward a third identical man standing in the door. She saw his body tense as he aimed his shotgun, but her digital reflexes allowed her to reach the top of the steps and push the barrel toward the ceiling half a second before the shot went off. She drove her head hard into his gut, knocking him backward, then rolled over his falling body into the kitchen where she found another duplicate. She leapt toward him, aiming her fist right at his chin, but wound up passing through empty air as he shimmered. The hissing noise she’d heard before was quite clear now, a sound like static mixed with light rain on a tin roof. She landed and spun around, to find that her single foe had split in two. Then these two split in two. The four turned toward her, shotguns raised.

  “Chimpion!” the Smith’s said, in unison.

  “Drop your weapons and I won’t hurt you,” she said.

  Two of the four Smiths shimmered and split.

  “Don’t!” said the two Smiths who hadn’t split in perfect stereo. “You’ll trip the circuit breakers!”

  “She can’t dodge if we all shoot at once!” said the four Smith’s who’d split. As if to demonstrate, they all pulled their triggers.

  They were wrong, of course. Chimpion had ample time to read their body language and by the time fire spit from the shotgun barrels she’d leapt behind the kitchen table and knocked it forward. Against actual bullets, the Formica tabletop and dirty laundry wouldn’t have been much of a shield, but it was more than adequate to absorb the cloud of buckshot. She rose with shurikens in each hand and whirled to face the two Smiths who hadn’t fired their shotguns, throwing the razor sharp stars with precision aim into the wrists of the trigger hands. Both men dropped their guns.

  Before the guns even hit the floor, she was in motion, her nunchucks whirling, as she leapt from Smith to Smith. Five seconds later, they were all flat on their backs, groaning.

  “What manner of being are you?” she asked, grabbing the nearest Smith by his shirt collar and jerking him upright.

  “A man!” he shouted. “And you’re an animal who needs to be put down! What right do you have to break into my home? What right did you have to hurt my dogs?”

  “Your dogs will be fine,” she said. “Though I’d love to know how you woke them up. They should have been drugged for hours.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything!” he snarled. “I don’t have to tell you—” at that moment, there was a loud POP and the whirring in the basement came to a sudden halt. The static hiss sounded again, louder than before, but distorted, like it was playing backwards.

  The Smith she held vanished. She spun around toward the only heartbeat she still heard in the room.

  A solo Smith was sitting next to the overturned table, clutching his bleeding wrist. His eyes were red and swollen, with tears down his cheeks, as if he’d been hit by the pepper spray. Through clenched teeth, he grumbled, “I warned them they’d overload the damned breakers.”

  “What kind of machine are you using to do this?” she demanded.

  “Why should I tell you anything?” he said, his tone balanced between defiance and despair. “I didn’t do a damned thing to you. Why did you break into my house?”

  “I’ve proof that you’ve been stealing data from particle accelerators.”

  “So?” he asked. “Most of that data would be made public in a few months anyway. I just wanted an early glimpse. They really send goddamned ninja apes out now to beat up a guy for some harmless hacking?”

  “Considering that you have the power to split just like the dervishes, I’d say you’re guilty of more than hacking. And that centrifuge in your basement didn’t look so harmless,” she said. “What are you refining? Uranium?”

  He snorted. “They say Pangean’s are smart. That’s not a centrifuge. That’s my time machine.”

  She stared at him, not sure of what to say. Her first impulse was that he was crazy, but what if a time machine could explain the duplicates? The same man, overlapping in time, again and again?

  “How did you get smart enough to build a time machine?” she demanded, grabbing him by the collar. “For
that matter, how do you know anything about physics at all? I’ve seen your files. You flunked out of high school. Now you’re analyzing particle data in your basement?”

  “I was a late bloomer.” He met her stare, his spine stiffening.

  “It’s a bit of a leap to go from cleaning toilets to building time machines.”

  “I don’t owe you an explanation,” he said, wiping the pepper tears from his cheek with his uninjured hand. “On the other hand, fuck it. What good will it do you to know? Last year, I was watching a porno about a time traveler who goes back and bangs famous broads in history. Instead of looking at all the tits, I noticed that the time machine in the film was just a bunch of random wires and flashing lights glued to an old cedar chest and… I dunno. Seeing a time machine that plainly couldn’t work somehow put a picture in my head of one that might, though not forward and backward in time, but sideways. Time is forever branching into infinite alternate universes. Some of those alternates had to be very close to ours in vibrational resonance. I could see it all worked out in my head on how I could make a machine that would let the timelines overlap in the same space for a little bit. It would be a lot easier to clean bathrooms if I had four or five of me ready to push a mop. So, I started building.”

  “Alternate universes? Vibrational resonance?” she found herself mystified, but not at the concepts. “How does a man with no formal education even know such terms?”

  “How does a goddamned chimp know enough to stand here and ask me stupid questions?” asked Smith. “Go fuck yourself. I’ve said enough. You going to arrest me? Cause I’m looking forward to telling the sheriff about how you broke in to my house, vandalized my stuff, and poisoned my dogs.”