Foresight

by Graham Storrs

  “And yet you want me to fly the thing because the world’s leading expert and his team are all too scared to risk their lives in it.”

  Hamiye stared at her for a long time as if he didn’t know what his next move was. Finally, he said, “We can pick up your daughter any time we like, you know.”

  Sandra felt a cold hand squeeze her heart. Her first reaction was to lash out at Hamiye. But she knew that by now Jay would be searching for her, that Cara was bound to be with him, that her daughter was safe, whatever Hamiye said. She took a slow breath and let herself relax. She noticed the hunted look in her captor’s eyes and took a punt.

  “You don’t want to be that guy, do you?” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You don’t like what’s going on here any more than I do, but you feel sucked up in it, somehow. You keep getting in deeper and you feel like it’s out of control.” She was encouraged by his sharp look, his quick frown. He was asking himself how she knew that—even though it was written all over his face. “Sure, you want the money, because that sets you free from this whole mess. Am I right? But you didn’t know, when you hooked up with Lee, where this was all going. And now people are dying—the pilot, the driver, maybe me next. The police will connect you with it for sure. You’ll get your money—if Lee doesn’t double-cross you, if this half-tested technology ever works—but you’ll be on the run. You’ll spend the rest of your life in half-civilized sink-holes with no extradition treaties. That wasn’t the future you had planned, was it?”

  She could see she was reaching him, saying out loud the thoughts he’d been pushing down into dark corners. He managed a weakly defiant, “What the hell do you know?”

  “And then there’s the event from the other night. You can tell yourself it was just coincidence as much as you like but we both know coincidences like that don’t happen. I’ve been through timesplashes and backwashes and I know when time-related shit is happening. That event wasn’t anything I’d seen before, but there was enough acausal craziness in the mix that it was obvious someone was screwing with time. Thousands dead, Farid. Tens of thousands. And if it happens again, maybe it will be worse. I don’t know if your conscience can handle all that death and misery but, even if it can, once they connect you to what’s happened, there won’t be a sewer on this planet deep enough for you to hide in—extradition treaty or not.”

  He had his back to her; his shoulders were drooping. In a hollow voice, he asked, “And your solution to all this is what?”

  “Get me out of here. I know someone you can talk to who will give you a fair hearing. Help them mop up Lee and his crew. Show you’re not a monster like them.”

  She stopped talking and waited. Seconds ticked by as he stood there. She didn’t know what else she could say. Anything else might undo any effect she’d had. She leaned forwards against her restraints, waiting for his reaction.

  At last, he said, “You’re right about one thing.” He turned to face her and she searched his grim expression for some sign of hope. “I’m in too deep. The only way out of this for me now is to see it through and pray you’re wrong about the event.”

  Damn! She’d laid it on too thick, or he wasn’t as decent as she’d thought. Bitterly, she said, “Pray? That’s your plan?”

  He sneered, at himself, it seemed. “I’m not what you’d call a devout Muslim, but I still have my faith.” He straightened his shoulders and pulled himself upright. “So you don’t want our money and threatening your daughter doesn’t seem to persuade you. That leaves us with just one option. Either you pilot the sphere and bring back the information we need, or you will be shot.”

  He stepped quickly to the door and left without waiting for her response, slamming it behind him.

  “Oh well,” she said to the empty room. “If you put it like that …”

  ***

  Hamiye went straight from Sandra’s room to search for Lee. He found his boss in Hong’s office, walking in on what seemed to be a heated argument.

  “They will not be happy if we bungle another shot,” Hong was saying.

  Lee advanced on the scientist, snarling. “Bungle another shot and I will not be happy. We do not have time for any more tinkering. You’re supposed to be a genius. Can’t you grasp that simple fact? We must do it tonight and get out of this place. Tomorrow, we—” He stopped dead, noticing Hamiye in the doorway.

  “Who won’t be happy?” Hamiye asked, looking from Lee to Hong.

  Lee looked as if he might start snarling again but he composed himself and said, “Our backers. Will the woman do it?”

  But Hamiye didn’t want to change the subject. “Backers? I thought only Waxtead knew about this.”

  “There are others. It’s none of your concern. What about the woman?”

  Hamiye wanted to push him on it but decided not to. All right so Lee was a slimy, lying weasel, but that’s the kind of person you did business with if you wanted to be in on the deal. His own cut was agreed and if there were a thousand secret backers he didn’t know about, what difference would it make, especially at this stage of the game? He didn’t like it, but what could he do except make waves?

  “She’ll probably do it,” he said, distracted.

  “Probably? Did you offer her money? Did you threaten her daughter?”

  “Yes, yes. She thinks Hong’s equipment knocked the world out of joint the other day. She doesn’t want our money. She thinks we’re mass murderers.” His tone was surly. It occurred to him that if Lee had lied about the backers, he might be lying about the side effects of the machine too. “As for her daughter, she seemed to know I was bluffing. She’s probably got her hidden away safe somewhere.” Lee was looking at him as if he could not believe what he was hearing. “So I told her I’d shoot her if she didn’t do it.”

  “Very well,” Lee said, as if the matter was settled. “She will do it.”

  But Hamiye didn’t see it that way. “I don’t think we should let her. She’s … Well, you need to get to know her. She’s determined and cunning. She beat your driver in a stand-up fight. Killed him with her bare hands. She’s got this passion inside her. It’s … scary.”

  Lee was studying his security chief with an appraising eye. “Maybe you’d like to set up home with her? You seem very impressed with the woman.”

  Hamiye bit down on an angry retort. “I’m just trying to explain that you can’t trust her. Whatever you threaten her with, she’ll find some way of getting out from under it. I am very impressed. I admit it. I admire the woman. And I respect her the way I’d respect a caged lioness. That’s why I think it’s too dangerous to put her in that sphere again.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “One of the tekniks could do it. Double his pay-off. Quadruple it.”

  Lee pulled a sour face. “Tell him, Hong.”

  “We have no tekniks to spare,” the old scientist said. “It’s what we were talking about when you came in. Some members of my team have run away, left the facility. Your soldiers caught two of them and killed them. We have almost no-one left. It’s impossible to do another shot right away.”

  “We’re doing the shot,” Lee said, wearily.

  “What do you mean, ran away?” Hamiye didn’t understand. “Why would they run away? They’re being paid, aren’t they?”

  Hong didn’t reply. He looked anxiously at Lee, passing the responsibility for an answer to him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lee said. “None of the tekniks speak English. None that are left, anyway. They can’t do the job at the other end. So that leaves us three and the woman. I’m not doing it. Hong’s not doing it. So that leaves you. Now what do you say?”

  Hamiye shut his mouth. There was no way he was going in that thing, not after what happened to the last pilot. “What about bringing someone else in? I could find you someone. I know people. People who won’t ask questions. I could make a few calls.”

  “No.” Lee barked the word. His eyes were hard and his lips tight. “We will not bring anyone else in.
That is final. The woman will do it. She has done it before. No-one wants to die, not even your pretty lioness.”

  Hamiye could see there was no more to be said. He dropped his gaze from Lee’s and nodded. “She’ll do it,” he said.

  “Good,” Lee said. “See to it. And tell your gorillas not to kill any more of Dr Hong’s team!”

  ***

  Alpha Team set up its base in an empty hanger at the RAF base. A complete virtual model of the interior of Clarke Engineering had been run up from the plans. Gerhard Stoeffel and his men had their commplants synced to the simulation so they could wander around inside and outside the building in hi-def augmented reality and plan their assault. Jay left them to it.

  Fourget was deep in conversation with their base liaison, an RAF captain and head of base security. “Hello, I’m BaseSec,” she’d said when she introduced herself. Jay had already forgotten her name. He sat alone in a quiet corner with a three-bar electric heater shining a dull red glow on him but making almost no difference at all to the frigid air of the chill, echoing hangar. “I’ll rustle up a few space heaters,” BaseSec had said, smiling encouragingly. “Soon have the place warm as toast.” But Jay had turned down the offer. He didn’t expect to be staying long.

  He started making calls, catching up on what the analysts were digging up for him back in Berlin. It wasn’t much. HiQua seemed to be a completely legitimate company. Its present CEO, Sir Roger Waxtead, looked like a bit of an idiot. He’d inherited his major shareholding and his current position from his astute and ruthless father and was in the process of eroding the company’s value little by little as his incompetence slowly revealed itself. But HiQua was a massive, multinational conglomerate and would take years, probably decades, to run into the ground. Nothing in Waxtead’s background suggested anything criminal or even particularly reckless about him. “Although there are increasing signs of a willingness to take risks to improve the company’s performance,” as the analyst said. A case in point being a series of major stock-market gambles in the recent past, which had surprised everyone by coming good just two days earlier. Jay set the coincidence aside and moved on.

  The Special Projects Division of HiQua Research International Ltd appeared to have been set up when Lee Shaozu first joined the company. Until then secret projects had been conducted within the various specialist divisions of the subsidiary. Jay’s analysts were unable to come up with any evidence of particular projects the division had spun off into the company. No patents had been applied for. “If they’re doing long-term, blue-skies research,” the analyst said with a shrug, “that’s not really too surprising. The budget is pretty big—enormous, actually—and, apart from the top management, admin functions, a handful of technicians, and security, I can’t find anybody on the payroll. Which is a bit weird, isn’t it?”

  “Anything else weird?”

  “Only one thing. They have a top legal firm on retainer. Costs them a fortune.”

  “Patent lawyers?”

  “No, that’s the weird thing. Immigration specialists. Do you want me to find out what services they’ve been providing?”

  Jay said yes. “I want to know what they’re working on in the Enfield facility. Reach out to the local security agencies. Pull rank if you have to. Remind them that EDF MI is the overarching security agency for the whole European Union.” He recognized his own frustration talking and shut up. Inter-agency turf wars were the bane of his life. He wrapped up. “Find a disgruntled ex-employee. Someone must know something. Only don’t let anyone go near that engineering works.”

  He moved on. Lee Shaozu turned out to be a man of mystery. Like Farid, his past was murky and probably fake. Which added to Jay’s unease. Why would a respectable company like HiQua set up a shadowy research division and put shady characters like Lee Shaozu and Farid Hamiye at the top of it? Was Waxtead pursuing some kind of crazy high-tech long-shot? Something not quite legal, maybe? And, if so, who was the brains behind it? Not Lee for sure: his qualifications and experience—which were also probably fake—pegged him as a manager, not a scientist or engineer. Jay added instructions to find out who was chief scientist in the Special Projects division, again with the caveat that no-one go anywhere near Enfield.

  Kadan Dudding, unlike the rest of his team, who were now focused on the current mission, had allowed himself the privilege of continuing to study the global event.

  “I told you HiQua and their Special Projects Division were our top priority.” Jay couldn’t hide his irritation.

  Dudding pulled one of his eloquent faces. This one seemed to say, “Yeah, but …”

  “I took another look at the timings—”

  “Simultaneous, you said.”

  “Yeah, not the spread this time. I was looking at the apparitions.”

  Jay felt his body and mind go still. He saw Cara on the staircase of his apartment block, fading to nothing as he reached for her. “Go on.”

  Dudding seemed to sense his intensified focus. He swallowed and straightened up in his seat. “There seems to be a two-year horizon on events leading to every encounter.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning no dead person who came back died more than two years ago. No building that appeared was built more than two years ago. People turned up in places that they couldn’t have been for reasons invariably less than two years old. There’re a few exceptions but every one of those I’ve looked into had a pretty unreliable source in my view. The vast bulk of the reports are completely consistent.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not a splash, that’s a guarantee. But it is a spacetime event. Something hit us—something hit everything. The only thing that’s as big as everything is, well, another everything. And the horizon means that it’s a two-year-old everything, max.”

  Jay didn’t like the implications of this. He didn’t like them at all. “You told me it was a natural phenomenon. Now you’re telling me it’s some kind of parallel-universe thing that started with an event two years in the past?”

  Dudding's face made a What can I do about it? Them’s the facts! expression that Jay found particularly irritating. “I’m not saying someone went back two years and did something. It might still have nothing to do with time travel at all. My physicist friends tell me that in an infinite universe of branes we might have bumped into one that just happens to be similar.”

  Jay treated that idea with the contempt it deserved. “Get with the mission, Kadan. I don’t want you wasting any more time on this stuff.”

  “I thought—”

  “We’ve got a team ready to go into a heavily guarded facility over here. People whose lives are on the line. I don’t want to hear crap about branes and apparitions. I want something I can use to keep those men safe and increase our chances of success. Do you hear me?”

  Dudding looked stricken. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  Jay hung up on him, knowing he was unreasonably angry. He was twitchy and distracted. Gerhard would come and tell him when his team had worked out a solid assault plan. Then they’d brief him and they could all get on with it. In the meantime, all Jay could do was wait. He remembered the material that he’d received from Aldermaston and popped up a reader. He pulled out a document called, “Project FORESIGHT: Worst Case Scenarios—Report of a facilitated brainstorming session held at the Army Staff College, Camberley, 15 May 2067.” He began flicking through it, barely paying attention, letting the obscure physics jargon and technical language wash over him until a section heading leapt out at him. He blinked in surprise and read it again to be sure. “The Possibility that Future Time Travel Might Create New Branes Displaced in Time.”

  He stared at the words as long seconds ticked past, knowing what they meant but finding himself unable to move past them to act on this shocking revelation. With a shudder, he shook himself free of their spell. He made a phone call. “Laura,” he said, when she picked up. “I need you here in London, right now. Requisition whatever is the fastest means of g
etting here. I want you with me when we get into that facility.”

  ***

  Cara sat quietly in the car as it wound through the London streets to her grandmother’s house. The young airman tried to start a conversation a few times but finally got the message and gave up. Cara didn’t want to talk. She wanted to think.

  Her mom was being held by bad guys for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom but which were probably something to do with time travel—a technology that she could only see as a curse on her family and on the whole planet. Her father had brought some tough-looking guys to go and get her out of it, and she had every faith in him doing just that. For all the stupid reasons he had for staying away from Sandra, Cara knew that the bond between Jay and her mother was like one of those classic love stories of star-crossed lovers. He would do anything to save her. Anything.

  It was a notion that had often comforted her, but now it scared her. Fourget and the other soldiers were hard as nails and they had tech that made them superhuman, but those monstrous creatures guarding her mother were even tougher. She’d seen one pick up Fourget and toss him around like a child’s doll. She knew Jay would send his men in to their certain deaths if he thought it would help free her mom. And she wanted that! She wanted him to do anything and everything that might get her mother back. Even if it meant Jay himself died in the attempt.

  She found herself crying, feeling wretched at the admission she’d just made. Jay was her father. She shouldn’t want him to die, even to save her mother. Yet she did. Her mother had to come back. She had to, no matter what the cost.

  And there was the nub of her fear. She had seen death and injury. She’d seen people suffer in hideous ways. And yet she would condemn all those soldiers to pain and death to satisfy her own selfish need. Even her own father. What kind of monster was she?

  On an intellectual level, she understood. At least, she thought she did. She’d been almost sixteen before she even met her father. He’d been an abstraction. She’d only really known him for a bit over two years. And her relationship with her mother had always been abnormally close. She’d hidden Cara from Jay, from the whole world, avoiding friendships, keeping a low profile, creating a bubble of isolation around Cara in which the two of them developed a too-tight, co-dependent relationship.