True Path: Timesplash 2

by Graham Storrs

  But thank goodness she had her mother’s brains.

  “How are you doing?” Sandra asked.

  Cara looked up from whatever reverie she was in and gave her mother a small smile. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “It’s still four hours to the lob. Do you want to get some sleep?”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  For a moment they simply looked at one another. Sandra could have wept for all the trust and love she saw in that sweet face.

  “Honey,” she said, “I never asked how you got on with Jay.”

  Cara gave a shrug.

  “Did you get much chance to talk?” Sandra pressed.

  “Yeah, I suppose. He’s all right.”

  As much as she loved her daughter, this process of having to extract information in small, vague drips, was something she would not miss when Cara finally grew out of her teens. “I bet he was surprised to see you.”

  “He didn’t freak or anything. Not much. He’s got a nice flat.”

  “Yes? Near where he works, I bet. Was there a Mrs. Jay Kennedy?” She hadn’t meant to ask that, although, to be honest, it was something she’d often wondered about over the years.

  Cara looked scandalized. “Mum! You’re not thinking of getting back with him after all this time. That would be so … weird.”

  “No!” Sandra was equally scandalized. And then it struck her that, if the slightest possibility of such a thing existed, it would invalidate all the choices she had made since the day she discovered she was pregnant with Cara. All those years she had denied Jay the knowledge of his daughter, all those men and potential women friends she’d spurned so that she could keep Cara out of sight and safe from her enemies, it would all seem like cruelty and irrational self-denial if she were to get together with Jay again. Yet here was the possibility. The worst had happened. If she and Cara and Jay survived, a new kind of life might need to be negotiated. Of course, there was also a major obstacle to any kind of reconciliation. “He must really hate me,” Sandra said.

  “He seemed OK with it.”

  Sandra doubted that was the case. Her daughter probably didn’t know how to read Jay’s “brave face”.

  “Do you hate me, now you’ve met him and you’ve—you know—seen what you’ve been missing? Do you think I should have let him know about you?”

  She waited in an agony of hope while Cara chewed it over. “He said he might not be a cop anymore soon.”

  It wasn’t the exoneration Sandra had wanted. “Because of you?”

  “I don’t think so.” She suddenly brightened. “You were right about him dropping everything and coming after you. It must be nice to inspire such devotion in men.”

  Sandra shook her head, feeling leaden. “No, not really. Sometimes, it’s hard to cope with the guilt.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and blew out a big sigh as she sank back into her chair. She didn’t want to go on with the conversation. She should never have started it. It was a distraction, and it hurt.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want Cara to just sit there and fret for the next four hours.

  “Tell you what. Why don’t you tell me everything that happened to you from the minute you heard I was missing, while I get on with untangling this spaghetti code?”

  So Cara began telling the story, and Sandra listened with half an ear. At one point, she almost interrupted to say, “I think your father was the only man who ever really loved me,” but she stopped herself and let Cara talk on.

  -oOo-

  “I could have killed him when he dropped the gun and that thug charged at him.” Cara was now laughing toward the end of her story. Sandra could tell that her daughter was proud of Jay’s clumsy heroics. Her affectionate tone filled her with warmth. If Jay had helped raise Cara, they’d probably have been very close. Sandra might even have been jealous of their special bond. It was a curious idea, and not an unpleasant one. For a mad moment, she wished the machine she was working on could actually change the past. She wished that she might go back to the day in the institute when they told her she was pregnant, the day she had wrapped her arms around herself and thought, Oh God, how can I keep my baby safe?

  Sandra realized Cara had stopped speaking. “Honey?” Her daughter’s eyes were wide and her gaze fixed at a point on the floor. She looked like she was about to cry. “What is it?”

  Cara licked her lips in a quick, nervous gesture and frowned. “It’s that man. The one that Jay shot. A load of people started shouting and firing their guns, and Jay had to run for it. The bloke who’d been untying me ran after him too. But they left the wounded man on the floor in the room with me. I was tied up and I couldn’t do anything.” She seemed to be struggling with her words. “Jay shot him in the hip, and he was bleeding and bleeding. He must have hit an artery or something because there was just tons of blood, and the bloke sort of squirmed about in it, getting weaker and weaker. I screamed and screamed for help, but no-one came until it was too late. And then a stupid old woman came and she didn’t know what to do. But he was dead by then, anyway.”

  Sandra went to her daughter and wrapped her arms around her.

  “I know he was going to hurt Jay,” Cara went on. “I know it’s us or them. Only …”

  “I know, darling. I know.”

  Footsteps marched into the room. Sandra looked up to see Polanski and two armed men crossing the floor towards them. There had already been three guards in the room. Now there were five. Polanski was growing more paranoid as the moment for the lob approached.

  “Have you finished the work?” His tone was gruff and challenging.

  “Hello, Mein Führer,” Sandra replied, stepping away from Cara. “Come to see how the final solution is progressing?”

  One of Polanski’s bodyguards went straight to Cara and put a gun against her head. Polanski was taking no chances.

  “Funny you should mention that,” said Polanski. “Do you know there were six million Jews living in America when the Lord’s True Path Party took power? Would you like to guess how many there are now? Can’t guess? Well, it’s zero. That’s the official figure. There was a period of enforced conversions—just like they used to have in Europe under the Inquisition. Then came the voluntary repatriations. You might have seen the news pictures when you were a child? Huge cruise ships, massively overcrowded, sailing to the Middle East to dump them where Israel used to be. The rest, the ones whose ‘conversions’ didn’t take, were moved to the labor camps and were no longer counted on official censuses. It happened to the Muslims too—only in smaller numbers, of course—and to the Hindus, the Buddhists, every non-Christian religion.”

  He was pacing up and down like a caged animal. “The Idolaters—Catholics, you probably call them—were a special case. They were allowed to remain free and unmolested for a limited period, to enable their gradual re-education. They weren’t allowed to practice their religion, of course, because it was blasphemous. They proved very stubborn, and it looked like the Jewish thing was about to start up all over again, but the Pope gave them special dispensation to worship according to the dictates of the Lord’s True Path without their souls being damned to Hell, and that seemed to solve the problem.”

  Sandra thought the whole lot of them should be under psychiatric care. “What’s your point, Napoleon? You think killing millions of people for the sake of your revolution is somehow better than killing them for the sake of religion? Is that it?”

  He stopped pacing, rigid with rage. “I thought you’d understand. I thought you might have some feeling of compassion for all those people out there.”

  “What the hell do you care what I think? I’m just your instrument, aren’t I? Another living tool to be picked up or tossed aside depending on whether you can use me. Like all these poor deluded bastards playing soldier for you.”

  Polanski turned his back on her, apparently struggling to control himself. It occurred to Sandra why he kept trying to explain himself. It was because he liked her
. He thought she was OK. An educated, reasonable person, the kind of person he might expect his future America to be peopled with. And her relentless condemnation of him showed him how that future America would see him—dedicated and self-sacrificing, perhaps, but hideously misguided, monstrously callous, criminally insane, exactly the kind of demonic figure he did not want to become.

  Well, tough.

  “Did you just drop by to give me another lecture on how enlightened you are, or did you want something?”

  He turned back to face her, rigidly self-controlled, and stepped up to the console. “Show me the lob parameters. Convince me everything’s exactly the way it should be.”

  Sandra was prepared for this. She opened displays, pulled up data, explained what everything did. Every number Polanski saw was consistent with the lob he wanted, even the date of the splashtarget. It took a long time. He made her go over it again and again until he understood how the many variables related to one another.

  “Those variances are still large,” he said, scowling.

  “I’ve still got a couple of hours. They’ll be better.”

  “I will check.”

  “You do that.”

  He stomped out as abruptly as he had stomped in, his bodyguards in tow.

  -oOo-

  “I didn’t know you could do all this.”

  “What?”

  “Build a time machine.”

  Sandra smiled weakly and then pushed back from the console. She squeezed her eyes shut, exhausted. When she moved her head the world had a noticeable lag in catching up. She’d had a few hours sleep the night before last and had been on a physical and emotional roller coaster ever since. The past few hours of programming and troubleshooting the rig had required the last dregs of her energy.

  “I didn’t know you were such a badass either.”

  “You know I’m in the karate club at the uni.”

  “Yeah, but I thought that was like your ‘keep fit’ class, you know how Sonja’s mum goes to pilates twice a week? I didn’t know you could, like, kill great big men with your bare hands.”

  Sandra gave a wry grin. “It comes in handy once every sixteen years or so.”

  “But the time machine stuff …”

  “They’re called displacement rigs. No-one calls them time machines.”

  “You always told me you were a technician in the Direct History group. You always made it sound really boring, like you were the one who plugged the computers together for the bigwigs.”

  It was true. Just another piece of misdirection in Sandra’s grand plan to keep the wool pulled over everybody’s eyes. “Yeah, well. I didn’t want you telling all your friends your mum was a cool teknik. I’d have told you more if you’d asked. Fortunately, you never showed any interest in what I did.”

  Cara’s frown suggested she didn’t much like that idea. “It’s like I don’t really know you at all. I mean, you told me about being an orphan and all, and about the foster homes, and how you fell in with a bad crowd, and that, but you never told me you were the one who saved London.”

  “Who told you that load of old nonsense?”

  “Jay did. He said you stopped a brick called Sniper from killing Lenin in the British Museum in 1902. I mean, holy crap, Mum. It’s like I’ve lived with a stranger all my life.”

  Sandra rubbed tired eyes and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “We should probably talk about this later, honey. It’s nearly time for the lob and this conversation is going to take a while, I think. Look, I promise you, the mother you think you know, that’s me. My job is pretty mundane most of the time, I don’t kick the arses of big tough guys except in the dojo during competition fights—and, most of the time, they kick mine, I assure you—and if I did some stupid, dangerous things when I was a kid, believe me, none of them were the least bit glamorous and I regret just about everything.”

  Cara opened her mouth to argue but gave up and flopped back in her chair. “All right. Later. If there even is a later.”

  “There will be. Trust me. I—”

  Footsteps drummed in the corridor and the door burst open. Polanski and his bodyguard marched in. There were more of them this time. Two went straight to Cara and pointed guns at her. Another two went to Sandra. They grabbed her by the arms, yanking her out of her chair, dragging her away from the control desk.

  “What the hell are you doing, Polanski? You know you can’t operate that thing without me.”

  “Shut up.”

  There were more people at the door. They carried in a man whose head was swathed in bandages and whose left arm was splinted. All that could be seen of his face were eyes so bruised that one was closed and the other barely open. She saw the good eye swivel towards her. The man seemed unable to walk, and his two assistants had to place him in the chair Sandra had just vacated. Carefully, they pushed it up to the desk so that his one good arm could be lifted to rest near the sensor field.

  “Matthew?” she asked, although it had to be him.

  “Yo, bitch,” he said, through a jaw bandaged shut.

  Chapter 25: Waiting

  The FBI treated Jay with exaggerated politeness, even though he plainly saw the suppressed anger in everyone he met. After his initial call to Special Agent Simmons, he’d heard nothing from the man. Given the way he was being treated, Jay assumed Simmons was in big trouble for letting him slip away. He felt sorry for his former minder, and several times tried to explain to people that it wasn’t Simmons’ fault.

  They had him in an interview room and the wooden chair he sat on was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He thanked the stars they’d let him go to the hotel to shower and change before bringing him in, otherwise he’d still be stewing in the mud and effluent of the Shanty which had penetrated every fiber of his clothing. People had come in to ask him questions. Lots of people. To every one of them he repeated, with as much urgency as he could, that Polanski was planning a timesplash, that it was going to be big, that they’d better evacuate the city, that they should mobilize everything they could and stop him.

  He was hoarse from talking, and he’d had enough.

  He went to stand in front of the two-way mirror—an apparatus he’d only ever seen in very old 2D movies. “I want to see the Director now,” he said to whoever was listening. “I want to speak to the European Ambassador, and I insist on calling my superiors in Brussels.” He had a vague notion that the ambassador might have some means of airlifting herself out of harm’s way. If so, he wanted to be on that flight—with Sandra and Cara. “I am a representative of the European Union and I insist on being treated with appropriate respect.” Which Jay thought sounded a lot better than, “I’m just a police officer of no particular status who got sent here against his will and who would very much like to be somewhere else before the Apocalypse starts.”

  Nothing happened. He waited a few seconds then banged on the glass and repeated his message, trying to sound as much like an outraged visiting dignitary as he could.

  Again, nothing happened, so he went to sit down on the bruising chair to consider his next move. After a few minutes, the door opened and Deputy Director English came in with another man. The man went to stand quietly against the wall while the Deputy Director eased himself into the chair opposite Jay.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Chief Inspector, but the Director is busy at the moment. As you can imagine, the Bureau is taking your new intelligence very seriously and action is being planned even as we speak.” He punctuated the news with a small smile that seemed completely disconnected from his words. “Arrangements are being made for you to call your people, and the European Ambassador is being located.”

  Jay was surprised—astonished, in fact—but tried not to seem it. “Thank you. And the evacuation? Has it begun?”

  “There will be no evacuation. We wish to avoid panic.” The deputy director raised his voice to override Jay’s protests. “It is considered far better that we attack Polanski’s compound and prevent him from usin
g his time travel machine. You will accompany us on the raid, I hope. You’re the only person who knows exactly where this equipment is.” He hesitated. “You will be pleased to hear that the Director has vetoed an earlier plan to send in helicopter gunships to destroy the compound.” English, however, did not look pleased. “He believes there will be some advantage to seizing the time travel device and letting our technicians examine the way your … ah … Miss Malone has configured it for this ‘long lob’ you say they are planning.”

  Jay suppressed his objections. It was better in the short term that the FBI got hold of Sandra’s work than that they blew her and Cara to pieces. As least the damned rig might help keep them alive.

  “It’s not really a compound as such,” Jay said. He didn’t really know what a compound was given the context, but English made it sound like some sort of fortified stronghold. “It’s just another shanty, built out of odds and ends. A strong wind would blow it over. Frequently does, I gather.”

  “Good. That makes things easier.”

  “And it’s full of women and children. People living there. It’s their home.”

  English looked grim. “We’re used to terrorists like Polanski hiding behind human shields. Don’t worry, we know how to deal with the situation.” He gave Jay an extended scrutiny. “So we can count on you joining us for the assault?”

  “Of course. When do we leave?” He started to rise but English smiled again.

  “Oh, not for some time yet. These things take a while to organize, you understand.”

  -oOo-

  The Deputy Director took Jay to his own office to let him use the phone. Along the way, they passed a small group of men going in the opposite direction. They were all FBI agents, except for a very short man in a cowboy hat that he pulled down over his face as he went by.

  Jay stared after him and English asked, “Do you know that man?”