Foresight

by Graham Storrs

  He found Sandra Malone with the tape around her right wrist almost cut through. She glared at him with animal ferocity as he walked in. Then her snarl faded as she noticed his massive companion. Hamiye crossed quickly to her, irritated that she had almost freed herself. He grabbed her right hand and examined it. She held a button, pulled from the cuff of her blouse. It looked like the other buttons but its edge had been filed sharp, no doubt just for this purpose. He studied it for a moment in amazement. She had not had time to plan for the unlikely contingency that someone would tie her to a chair before she left home that morning … which meant she was always ready for it. Probably all her shirts had sharpened buttons on them. What kind of woman was this?

  He stepped back, threw the button aside, and looked at her. She was studying him and Langbroek. He could see her eyes darting back and forth, planning her moves. If he cut her free and tried to take her out to the car, she would attack both of them. It was unnerving. It was as if the odds didn’t matter to her or, if they did, she was confident of her chances. Somehow the bulk of Langbroek behind him didn’t reassure him. The big man and the small room made him feel hemmed in, vulnerable. If this spitfire were let loose he would need more room to manoeuvre.

  He drew his stunner. Her eyes widened in surprise the instant before he fired.

  ***

  Fourget studied the Clarke Engineering building from a distant rooftop. The lenses and electronics in his face mask amplified the dim light to the point where the night seemed like day; they magnified the image so that he could see the registration number of the black van parked by the loading dock; and their augmented reality software, working with the building plans, made it seem as if he could see through the outer walls to the rooms within. The full-body combat suit he wore was just a precaution but at least it kept him comfortably warm despite the bitter cold.

  This was the third vantage point he’d used to study the building and he thought he understood the situation well enough. Every car in the parking lot belonged to a HiQua employee, except for the black van. Infra-red revealed that the number of people in the building squared with the number of cars and the number of employees, except for five extremely bright signatures that probably belonged to the van.

  He knew very well what such bright IR signatures meant: he’d seen them often enough on combat missions. Hamsters—hormonally augmented mercenary soldiers—whose metabolisms ran far higher than normal so that they could manage their supersized bodies at a rate that would kill a normal human being. They were super-soldiers, strong and fast, with genetic modifications that gave them big advantages over anyone else they were likely to come up against. Tough sons of bitches, made unstable and mean by the shit they took to maintain their powerhouse physiques.

  Someone was paying a lot to make sure that building stayed secure. Five hamsters were enough to hold off a small army. Fourget had however failed to find any sign of a captive inside the building. So what were they guarding? He itched to get over there and take a look. Jay had said the Malone woman had a lead on some illegal time-travel technology. Something at least that big was going down here, but his primary mission was to find Sandra Malone—and he did not want to risk getting tangled up with those hamsters. That would be suicide.

  His mask optics had been recording everything he saw. He packaged it up and squirted it back to Jay on a secure channel along with a quick message saying he was moving on to locate “the target”. Jay could send a team to investigate if he wanted to—a big, well-armed team. Meanwhile—

  He froze. He’d seen movement in the property next to the Clarke Engineering building. A cat? An urban fox? He turned up his magnification and studied the area. He saw steamy breath rise from behind a pile of boxes. Someone was hiding, but was it from him or from the HiQua guards? The idea that one of the hamsters was stalking him made his stomach tense. Those guys had good IR vision, superhuman hearing. It wasn’t impossible that they’d spotted him, despite the combat suit’s insulation.

  He didn’t move, kept his gaze fixed on the breath that coiled up into the freezing air. One of the guards appeared and walked slowly along the length of the building, checking doors and windows and stopping occasionally to look around and sniff the air. As the giant moved around the corner, out of sight, the person hiding at the other side of the fence broke cover. Fourget’s software analysed the person’s height, shape, movements and began feeding data into his displays, but he didn’t need the flickering dimensions and probabilities to know he was looking at a woman, a tall, slightly-built woman, long-limbed and supple. Had he found Sandra Malone? If so, she was more reckless and daring than even her file suggested. And her taste in clothing was bizarre. Her tight-fitting jeans sparkled in the dim streetlight, he saw jewellery flash on her hands and ears, and her short jacket was pink. Not the outfit he’d have chosen for breaking into a heavily guarded building.

  She ran to the fence, to a spot where a piece of carpet had been thrown over the razorwire, and scrambled up. She climbed like an amateur and made a terrible job of it. What the hell was she doing? Reaching the top, she looked left and right before vaulting over and Fourget got his first good look at her face. This was no thirty-five-year-old femme fatale from Jay’s dangerous past. This was a young woman, pretty as all hell, and scared half to death. He recognized Cara Malone just moments before his facial recognition software popped up her name.

  Merde!

  He had jumped off the roof before he knew he was going to do it, dropping three stories to a landing cushioned by the suit’s servo-assisted combat exoskeleton. Then he was off and running, heading for his car.

  ***

  Cara staggered away from the fence and almost fell. For a moment she stood still and listened, then hurried to the side of the building and the extra shadow of a doorway. Carefully, she tried the handle but it was locked. She had no idea what she was going to do. The windows were too high to see into and covered in bars. This was nothing like what she’d expected. Every light was on inside and the little parking lot was full. Worst of all, some kind of armed giant was patrolling the building. She’d never seen anything like him except in games. His arms were as thick as her whole body. He looked like he could pick her up with one hand and snap her like a toothpick.

  God, Mum, what have you got yourself into?

  She needed to get around to see more of the building, to see if there was another door, or an accessible window. But she daren’t move. What if the guard was round the corner? And what if he came back while she was standing there, dithering?

  She’d gone that far on an unrealistic expectation of how easy it would be to find her mother, but now the impossible reality of the task was sinking in. She needed to get out of there, fast. She needed to get well away and call her father again. She could tell him where her mother was now, and about the armed guard. He’d have to do something then, wouldn’t he?

  The racing of her heart and the sickening clenching of her stomach were horribly familiar. How long had she felt that way in Washington? How often had she told herself since then that it would never happen again, that she was safe, that lightning never strikes twice?

  She was still standing in the doorway, still not moving. She took a deep breath, then another, preparing herself to cross the open yard and reach the fence. She stepped out of the doorway, looked right, then left.

  “Hello, love. What’s your name then?”

  The giant was not three meters from her. He’d been watching her. His right hand held a gun, although it wasn’t pointed at her. Cara’s heart leaped in her chest as if it was desperate to get out through her throat. She tried to speak, to spin some yarn about looking for her lost dog. It was her cover story. But she couldn’t speak. Slowly, the monstrous man raised his gun.

  “I said, what’s your name?”

  “I—I—” She had to swallow, had to force some words out. “I lost my dog.” It was a stupid story, she realized.

  “You’re coming with me,” the guard said, fl
icking his head towards the front of the building.

  She couldn’t move. She certainly couldn’t go with him. Desperation gave her strength. “Where’s my mother?”

  “Your mother?”

  “My—” She stopped, seeing a pair of headlights coming in through the front gate.

  A car was heading straight for them, moving fast. The giant turned towards it, his speed startling her, though the car was almost upon them. The giant managed to get off a couple of shots and leap aside, but the shots went wide and the leap was too late. The car hit him a glancing blow that sent him spinning and tumbling across the yard. Cara stared in horror as the car kept coming, brakes screeching and body lurching as it spun through a half circle and came to a rocking halt beside her.

  “Get in!” someone shouted from inside the car, reaching across to push the door open. She saw a black helmet with a glass front, and an arm in a black suit with black struts and hinges. It could have been a robot.

  “Merde!” the robot man shouted. Then again, “Get in. There’s another one.”

  He disappeared into the car then reappeared outside it having thrown open the driver’s door and climbed out. He raced back the way the car had come, drawing a weapon as he ran. She looked ahead of him and saw another giant appear, running round the corner at incredible speed. It took Cara a moment to realize the newcomer was a woman. The giant drew her gun when she saw the robot man but he fired before she did, missing her but forcing her to duck and dodge.

  Then he crashed into her. They rolled onto the floor and his arms moved in a flurry of blows, but the giantess did not seem especially bothered by it. She pushed him hard in the chest and he flew into the air, arms and legs flailing. Incredibly, he landed on his feet and instantly charged back at her.

  The woman was on her feet too and drew a knife the size of Cara’s arm. She slashed at the robot man with shocking speed. Cara cried out, certain the man would be sliced in half, but he somehow managed to block the giant’s arm with his own and ran into her again, hitting her chest with his shoulder. As they connected, a flock of small birds seemed to take off from the man’s back. The little birds scattered as the enormous woman grabbed the man and raised him over her head, her massive muscles bulging with the strain. It looked as if she would bring him down and break his back across her knee, but she wavered and staggered, shouting and cursing. She dropped the robot man, using her arms to protect her face as the little bird things swooped at her. There were tiny, bright flashes of intense light on her skin, and Cara realized the “birds” were little drones firing lasers at the woman’s eyes.

  Like a cat, the man was on his feet again and racing to the car. “Get the fuck into the car!” he yelled and, seeing that he was doing just that himself, Cara hurried to obey. The vehicle was moving before she’d had a chance to shut the door after her and it was clear her new friend meant to run down the woman. But it wasn’t going to be so easy: the car had no speed and the woman had already caught and crushed two of the birds. No doubt hearing the engine revving, the woman whipped her head round to look at them. Ignoring the remaining laser-spitting birds, she flipped her huge knife, caught it by the blade, and threw it straight for Cara’s head. It came like a rocket. Cara had no time even to blink. The car swerved and the knife smashed through the windscreen. She felt it whistle past her ear and thud into the back seat. An explosion of glass fragments rained over her face and upper body. She hadn’t had time to scream. She looked back and saw the woman grabbing her gun up from the ground. She moved so fast. Everything was so fast.

  Her companion swore again and again the car jerked sideways. Three more giants had appeared ahead of them. They all had machine guns. “Get down!” the driver yelled and aimed the car at the newcomers. She squirmed to the floor, huddling into a ball as the machine guns roared. The rest of the windscreen disintegrated, bullets tore up the seat she’d been sitting in. She looked up at the driver and saw his body jerk as round after round hit him in the chest and face. Then the car hit something hard and she saw one of the giants roll over the bonnet and over the roof.

  She found her voice at last and screamed.

  Chapter 12: Dinner Date

  Jay settled the bill for the meal and Olivia said good night. He watched Sandra’s old friend make her slightly unsteady way to the lifts and turned to Laura.

  “I’ll call you a taxi,” he said.

  She laughed. “How old-fashioned you are. Besides, I feel like another drink. Come on, let’s find a nice bar.”

  She put her arm in his and led him out into the street. He wanted to protest. He wanted to go home and sleep. But he caught the reflection of the two of them in the hotel’s window. It was a shock—it didn’t look like him at all. It looked like someone from a vid, someone who walked around with attractive women on his arm, someone who enjoyed his life.

  “I’m …” he began and wondered what he had meant to say. Something like, “I’m not used to being out with a woman.” Luckily, he stopped himself. Instead, he said, “There’s a place over there that looks OK.”

  They found a quiet spot and ordered. She had a glass of Rioja and he ordered a light beer.

  “Always on call,” she said.

  “Right now, for sure. I don’t really know any other way to be. I had a boss like that, Jacques Bauchet, lived the job twenty-four/seven.” Yet, somehow, Jacques had managed to court and marry Marie. How had that happened?

  “He set you a bad example, then. I would go crazy if I couldn’t switch off at the end of the day.”

  “I know what you mean, I suppose, but …” How did he explain the fear that drove him, the idea that a major timesplash could happen on his watch, that the death and destruction he’d seen could happen again if he failed to prevent it?

  She moved closer to him. “Well, tonight you can take a break. It will be good for you. Trust me: I’m a doctor.”

  He smiled. “I don’t think a doctorate in physics counts.”

  “Sure it does! If nothing else, it means I’m cleverer than you and you should listen to what I tell you.”

  She was a little bit drunk, he realized. He supposed he must be too, although he didn’t feel it. How much wine had they had with the meal? Olivia and Laura had been cheerful and talkative, renewing their old friendship. Jay had been gloomy, trying to hide his disappointment in the way the day had gone. His team was letting him down. Laura was letting him down. And so was Olivia. He needed them to find some brilliant explanation for what had happened, some way of tracking the perpetrators and preventing it from happening again. But all they had come up with was Olivia’s pie-in-the-sky nonsense about traveling into the future.

  For a second, he thought how good it would be to forget all about that, to just lose himself in the moment, to make a joke, laugh, take Laura’s hand and tell her he was glad he’d stayed. But he couldn’t. His heart felt like lead in his chest.

  “What would happen if we went forwards in time?” he asked, killing the mood.

  Laura sighed and drew back a little. It was a tiny gesture but eloquent. “As you’ve said, many times, it’s impossible.”

  “Yet they’re working on it at Aldermaston.”

  “The military works on all kinds of crazy projects all the time. Generals are easy to persuade and they have lots of money to speculate with when it comes to new super-weapons.”

  “But what would happen?”

  She looked away, perhaps to hide her irritation. When she looked back, she wasn’t smiling and playful any more. “We move into the present as each quantum-level event makes a choice about its current state. The future is simply the next set of states based on the next set of choices. Even so, we can’t fully describe the present because there’s a fundamental uncertainty about it, and we can’t predict the future because there’s a fundamental randomness in the progression from one state to another. To move ahead of the present, you’d either have to be able to outguess the Universe about where it’s going or somehow force a set of choices
on it. Even then, I can’t see how any choices you force on the Universe could lead you to the actual future, just a more-or-less probable one.”

  “And if you got there, to this probable future?”

  “I don’t know, I suppose it would be like being in the present.”

  “But you could still generate anomalies, couldn’t you?”

  “Could you?” She was patently angry and bored now but he pressed on anyway.

  “If I met my own son in the future—and I don’t have a son, let’s say—and immediately killed myself, that would be an anomaly, right? So what would happen?”

  “This is all hypotheticals piled on hypotheticals.”

  “Would there be a timesplash? Would things start trying to fix themselves up?”

  She lifted her hands, fingers splayed. “Maybe. Your guess is probably as good as mine. It’s only a probable future, and not one that has actually happened. If you die in the future and never come back to have a son, then that future won’t happen. Maybe it will just collapse out of existence. Who knows?” She started gathering her things. “I should probably be going. It’s getting late.”

  “And if a future collapses, could that create some kind of disturbance in the past—in the present, I mean?”

  She stood up. “We’ve probably both had too much to drink to have this conversation.”

  “Laura, would there be a backwash?”

  She sighed and her shoulders dropped a little. “No, I don’t think so. The timestream flows only one way. If you start in the future, it would always flow away from you.”

  “But we can jump back. It isn’t true that the future can’t influence the past.”

  “Jay, can we do this in the morning?”

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m being … Please, just answer that one question.”

  “Very well. You’re wrong. We cannot affect the past. Whatever we do to it is corrected. That’s what the timesplash does. You know this. When the bricks are yanked back to the present, the past becomes exactly what it used to be.” She repeated it for emphasis. “Exactly what it used to be. If last night’s event had been some kind of time-traveling disruption from a future anomaly, it would all have been put right by now and none of us would remember any part of it. For us, it would not have happened.”