True Path: Timesplash 2

by Graham Storrs

  “What’s that in real money?” she asked, tapping the display.

  “I dunno. Ninety kilometers an hour? A bit over?”

  “And it’s the best we can do?”

  He nodded, frowning at something ahead on the road. “Bugger,” he said. “It’s the roadblock at the main gate.”

  Sandra studied the obstacle. A dozen or so cars and vans, a horse-drawn cart, and some bicycle rickshaws were lining up to get out of the Shanty. SOBs were hanging about in large numbers. Beyond the roadblock, a motley collection of military vehicles with FBI markings—including a couple of APCs—were parked across the road. The actual roadblock was a couple of red and white striped poles between wooden trestles.

  Jay began to slow down.

  “No,” Sandra said. “Keep up the speed. In fact, sound your horn. We look like the Feds, remember. They won’t know what to do until we’re right on top of them.”

  Jay speeded up again. “I can’t see a horn,” he grumbled, studying the dashboard. “Why can’t they just have driverless cars like anybody civilized?”

  Sandra hung over his shoulder and searched too. She found a button on the steering wheel with a little horn glyph on it. “That one,” she said, pointing. Her breasts pressed against Jay’s shoulder as she leaned forward and she saw him glance quickly down at the point of contact before reaching out to push the button. The horn blared and Sandra retreated to her seat, confused and embarrassed. Outside, every head turned to look at them. Jay hammered on the horn again.

  “What’s that?” Sandra asked. They were so close now they could see the puzzled expressions on the faces of the men in the gun emplacements beside the barrier.

  “Bit busy to look,” Jay said, swinging across the road to get a good line between the queuing vehicles on one side and the small army on the other.

  “It’s a small truck with what looks like an F2 generator on the back and a couple of movie projectors on a rotating platform.”

  “Sounds like a radar-guided laser canon,” said Jay, swinging through the gap and smashing the barrier to pieces as they hit it. “Please tell me it’s not tracking us.”

  She turned to keep the truck in sight. “Oh, it’s tracking us all right.”

  She felt his hand on the back of her neck as he yanked her towards him, away from the window, yelling, “Get down!” At the same moment, a bright light and a hissing, spitting noise came from the back of the APC and then another came from the front. A tiny rain of molten metal splashed down from the hole that had just appeared above Sandra’s head. Jay threw the APC to the right and the hole turned into a line that burned its way above their heads. In the smoke it made, Sandra could see the thin line of the beam that was slicing through their armor.

  Then it stopped. The APC, turning hard left, skidded sideways for an instant before its rear end hit something boneshakingly solid and Jay got it back under control. Sandra looked outside again and was shocked to find they were weaving through the parked military vehicles. The object they’d hit was a tank. The words, “Are you nuts?” sprang to her lips but she bit them down. This was the perfect shelter. Probably the only shelter for miles that the laser gunner wouldn’t cut through to get at them.

  “Remember you said they didn’t have anything sophisticated?” she grumbled.

  “Yeah, well, I hadn’t noticed the ten megawatt laser.”

  “What’s the range on one of those things?”

  “Ten or twelve kilometers.”

  “Well let’s hope it doesn’t come after us, then.”

  It didn’t. Sandra could only assume that someone at the blockade had finally got through to English and he’d told them to stand down.

  Clearing the last FBI vehicle, Jay put his foot down once more and they motored along the ill-maintained concrete of U.S. Route 1 at top speed. Sandra checked her commplant. Thirty minutes left, give or take, with the whole of DC still to cross and no guarantee they would be safe even then. She sat back in her seat and rubbed her face with her hands. She could not remember ever being so tired.

  “How’s your chest?” she asked Jay.

  He gave her a sideways look. “You’ll be happy to know the FBI give their agents decent-quality armor.”

  “Yeah, I thought you were making a lot of fuss about nothing.”

  “Apology accepted. How’s the head?”

  “Nothing a week in intensive care won’t cure.”

  “It’s funny how our little get-togethers always end in the ICU.”

  Sandra fell silent. She wanted to say, “Yes, that’s why I’ve kept Cara away from you all her life.” But that would have been unfair. Jay was only there to save her. It was Sandra and her checkered past that had led them all into this mess, not Jay. On the other hand, if he hadn’t been so stupid as to bring Cara along, Sandra might have been home and free by now.

  She brushed idly at the tiny specks of molten steel that had embedded themselves in the back of her hands and her clothes. Jay had done well to get them out of that one. She had a memory of him as a bumbling, gangly youth, a nice person, the nicest she had ever known, but just a bit on the inept side. It seemed that sixteen years of police work had changed him. He’d certainly filled out a lot. He looked good. His soft, gentle eyes looked so much better in a face that had more character in it. She remembered how sweet he’d been when he’d declared his love for her. In the tough, violent world she lived in then, sweet was probably the only approach to which she had no resistance. He had quite overwhelmed her, and his lovemaking had been deliciously tentative and delicate. For a while back then, she had thought herself in love. Until Cara came along and her priorities changed.

  Chapter 31: Backwash

  “You’ve woken her up.” Cara sounded as if it had been reckless negligence on Jay’s part.

  He gritted his teeth and drove the APC up onto the pavement. People ahead screamed and ran for their lives. “Well, pardon me for trying to save everybody’s lives. Next time we hit a red light, I’ll just stop and wait for all the bicycles to go by, shall I?”

  “God, are you always so whiny?”

  “Yes he is,” said Sandra, rubbing at her eyes. “But don’t worry, love, he grows on you. What’s going on?”

  “We hit traffic,” Jay said. He gave Sandra a quick, worried glance. It was all he could spare.

  “I fell asleep,” she said, seeming as surprised as he and Cara and been. “Where are we?”

  “We just crossed the 14th Street Bridge.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “North on 14th. You said to go north.”

  “Dad’s got maps of DC in his commplant,” Cara said. “I’ve been navigating.”

  Sandra reached behind her. “Give me a copy.”

  Cara stretched out her hand and held her mother’s, creating a connection between their bodies’ natural electromagnetic fields. Their commplants connected across the merged field and transferred the data. It took only a moment. Then it took another moment for Cara to explain to Sandra where they were. Meanwhile, Jay had driven the APC back on the road and was weaving through the traffic. So far, no cops were chasing him, but he expected them any moment.

  “This is not good, Jay,” Sandra told him. “Have you seen the time?”

  He had no time to reply. He threw the APC across two lanes to avoid a hold-up, barging a delivery van off the road. “This thing should have flashing lights and a klaxon, like a fire engine,” he grumbled. The thought had occurred to him a dozen times in the past few minutes. Most drivers got out of the way when they saw the APC behind them—probably the big black crucifix on the front was more of an incentive than the fear of being rammed from behind—but some people were just plain stupid.

  “Jay, we’ve only got seven minutes. We’ll still be in the city when it hits.”

  “At least there’s no evacuation going on, just normal traffic. The bastards kept it to themselves after all.” He pushed down on the accelerator but it was already fully depressed. “I’m
going as fast as I can.”

  She must have heard the desperation in his voice, or seen the sweat on his forehead, because her own tone was kind and sympathetic. “I know you are.”

  He glanced quickly at her again.

  “If we don’t make it, it won’t be for lack of trying. I know that. Now let’s see if we can’t get off this main road, eh? Take the next right.”

  He barely made the turn. For the next couple of minutes, he found himself steering a complex route through back streets and alleys, plunging across streams of traffic at crossroads, and, at one point, pushing a parked car ten meters along a narrow road because there was no other way through. After that, however, they were on a long, straight road with very light traffic and were making good speed again.

  “Five minutes until it happens,” Sandra said but Jay’s right leg was already aching from pushing the pedal as far down as it would go. He thought again about swapping the heavy vehicle for something faster, but again rejected the idea. The APC’s armor might soon be all that stood between them and chaos.

  “What will it be like?” Cara asked. It was the thought on all of their minds.

  “We’re a long way from the center already,” Jay said, evading the question. The road climbed a little and he saw the dome of the Capitol building in his rear-view mirror. Even Polanski had expected the backwash to reach this far, but Jay trusted Sandra’s more pessimistic estimate.

  “It’s going to be scary,” Sandra said, answering Cara’s question. “At least as scary as anything we’ve seen yet. But we’ll get through it. Jay and I have done this before—more than once—and we can do it again.”

  “Can’t we just hide somewhere until it passes? Underground, maybe?” The fear in Cara’s voice was heartbreaking even to Jay. He didn’t know how Sandra could stand it.

  “I’m sorry, darling, there’s nowhere to hide. A backwash distorts spacetime itself. It messes with causality.”

  “I—I don’t even know what any of that means,” Cara said.

  “Neither do I,” said Jay. “But I know it gets very weird. Things are distorted, time runs at different speeds, sometimes backwards even, but it’s all broken and fragmented. At low levels, it’s like a mild hallucinogenic—which you wouldn’t know anything about, of course—but at high levels …”

  “But we’re going to be all right,” Sandra said, firmly, poking Jay in the arm.

  There followed a frantic period of turns and twists as they negotiated a maze of streets to another long, clear road. As Jay skidded the APC onto it, a police siren whooped into life behind them.

  “Two minutes,” Sandra said.

  Jay took a long, deep breath, feeling his pulse quicken. Driving at high speed through Washington, with the constant whistling and blast of cold air from the slot the laser had cut, and the fear that he might not get Sandra and Cara to safety, had frayed his nerves to the point where his mind was crying out for a break. Yet he knew that in two minutes, those things would be the least of his troubles. He certainly did not need the Washington police force hassling him too.

  “Shame these things don’t have guns on the roof,” Sandra said.

  “It had one when I set off,” said Jay. “But we lost it in the Shanty.” The APC bounced over yet another giant pothole and Jay’s teeth clacked together. He took a quick look at the wing mirror. There were two cop cars behind him and a third swinging into the road to join them. They weren’t Washington PD at all, but had the Sons of Joshua logo on their bonnets. Well, that was good. He’d feel so much better about having to sideswipe a bunch of SOBs than if they were regular cops. He looked again and they were all much closer.

  “One minute,” Sandra said. “Maybe you should slow down.”

  “When I have to. Distance is our only hope.”

  “We’re twenty-five kilometers from Mount Vernon.” Her voice was edgy and taught. “Everybody check your seatbelts, and hold on.”

  Jay recalled that there was a complicated formula for calculating how quickly a backwash propagated from its center. Something about a spherical wavefront coming up from the timesplash, its speed proportional to how far it had traveled through time and the intensity of the splash. There was other stuff in there too. The wavefront was an eleven-dimensional sphere, or something, but only the first four dimensions were what mattered. He should have paid more attention, he supposed, but he knew it wouldn’t have made any difference, either to his comprehension, or to how dead he was going to be soon.

  A sudden roar brought him fully back into the moment. Sandra had opened a hatch set into her door. “What the hell are you doing?” She didn’t answer him but pulled the gun from her waistband, stuck it out of the hatch, and fired three shots. He heard tires squealing outside as she ducked back in and slammed the hatch.

  “They were about to take a shot at our wheels. That’ll keep them away for a while.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s happening,” she said and braced herself against the dash. “It won’t be long. Less than thirty seconds. Hold on, Cara.”

  He kept driving hard and fast. Every meter farther from the center would help. He would be hundreds of meters farther on by the time it happened.

  -oOo-

  The first thing he noticed was how the road began to slope upwards. They were accelerating up the slope so fast that he was pressed down in his seat. Sandra shouted something that could have been, “Gravity!” but her voice was low and distorted. Buildings at the side of the road began to collapse. Pieces fell from walls and rocketed to the ground at unnatural speeds. The downward pressure was crushing him. He had to slow down. This rate of ascent was crippling. But slowing down had no effect. And then he understood what Sandra was trying to tell him. The local gravitational force was increasing. He pushed down on the accelerator pedal. He heard Cara scream from behind him. They were going to be crushed to death under their own weight.

  With a sickening lurch the APC bounced so high, its wheels momentarily left the road. What he had felt had been just a patch of high gravity, and they were finally through it. He almost laughed, the relief was so intense. Sandra unbuckled and went back to sit next to Cara. She was moving too fast. A temporal distortion. He groaned, already yearning for release. But the nightmare was just beginning.

  One of the SOB patrol cars shot past him, racing up the road at panicky speed. It didn’t get far before a crack opened ahead of it and the car drove straight into it. It wasn’t a wide crack, but enough for the car’s front wheels and axle to drop into it and snag there. A cloud of sparks erupted from the car’s front as its nose bit the concrete. Then it flipped into the air and somersaulted down the road.

  Jay hit the brakes but there was no chance of stopping. The APC hit the crack but its giant wheels were big enough to straddle the narrow chasm. It thudded into the hole and bounced out again, slowing almost to a stop. Heart racing, Jay hit the accelerator again. He couldn’t afford to come to rest with his wheels in that gap. Another jarring drop as more wheels hit, but the all-wheel drive saved them, and dragged the vehicle back onto the road.

  Clinging to the steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white, Jay built up speed again. He went through a junction and saw that the lights were out. Probably the power was down throughout the city. A row of townhouses to his right buckled and collapsed into the road as if their brickwork was turning to dust. A row of shops ahead was ripped to fragments by a massive explosion. A huge fireball rose into the air from the ruins.

  “Directions,” he shouted back at Sandra.

  “It doesn’t matter. Keep going north.”

  His wheels crunched over the debris from the shops and the stink of burning filled the cab. “There’s a T-junction ahead.”

  “Go right then left,” she said.

  “You just made that up.”

  Sandra didn’t answer.

  “Find me a park,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A park.”

  “You want to feed the ducks
?”

  “Christ!”

  He spun the wheel as the road ahead began to ripple like water. He had to get right up on the pavement to be clear of it. The APC rang like a drum as bricks and tiles rained down from the adjacent buildings onto its roof. He gunned the engine, pushing on, fighting the urge to just stop and cower.

  Then everything moved into slow motion.

  He asked Sandra again for directions but she merely blinked at him in slo-mo, her face slowly creasing into a confused frown. To her, he knew, he must be twittering unintelligibly. Cara, also regarding him as if he’d gone mad, turned to her mother and began growling out a question that he had no time to listen to. However slow things seemed to him, the APC was still racing along the street, and buildings were still about to fall on top of it.

  The rippling, liquid road beside him seemed more solid now, but he saw that a cyclist—caught in the ripples—was slowly sinking, now to his wheel hubs, now to his knees. Another falling brick hit the roof and the sound was like rolling thunder. Slowly, slowly, the APC inched its way past the danger.

  People everywhere had run out into the street, no doubt trying to escape their crumbling homes. Jay watched them with a terrible fascination as they slowly ran from one deadly danger to another, their faces contorted with fear as they screamed and shouted or looked wildly about them at a world gone mad. He saw a woman run from her home straight into the liquefied road, sliding down into it as if into thick quicksand. He saw a man and his young son standing together as a pile of bricks drifted down from the sky to crush them. An old lady, limping up the street towards him, waving her arms to flag him down, collided slowly with a young man running away from the APC. Then they spun together, whirled off their feet like a couple in a graceful ice ballet. The APC bore down on them with relentless inevitability. Jay grabbed the wheel to turn it, but had plenty of time to think about the cost of plunging Sandra and Cara into that concrete quagmire. His arms locked. He couldn’t turn the wheel. As the APC slowly ground its way over the two people, he screwed up his eyes and put his head on his hands.