And now the nightmare was happening again—although Cara still had no idea what was going on. That man who had pretended to be from the electric company was part of it. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? Why hadn’t she and her mother just run? That was the plan, wasn’t it? But instead her mum had gone chasing after them and now they’d got her and Jay was going to …
She put her head in her hands and screwed her eyes tight shut. Nothing made sense and she wanted to scream.
The airman said, “Are you all right?”
Cara had forgotten she was there. She looked up, finding a focus for her anger. “Why don’t you fuck off? You’re my jailer, not my friend. So just sod off.”
The young woman stared at her for a moment. Her lips twitched in contempt and she looked away. Cara could plainly see what the woman thought of her. Some bigwig’s spoiled brat, wasting everybody’s time. Well, she wasn’t going to explain herself. It was humiliating enough to be there under guard, being sent home like a child so the grown-ups could get on with the serious business of setting her mother free.
A wave of anger against Jay surged through her but, infuriatingly, she couldn’t sustain it. She knew he was doing what he thought was best for her. She knew her mother would wholeheartedly approve of what he’d done. Sandra had been furious with him for taking her to Washington to help rescue her, even though Cara had explained over and over that it wasn’t Jay’s fault, that she’d made him do it. She seemed to think that Jay should have behaved like a brute and had her locked up or something. Well, he seemed to have taken her accusations of weakness and irresponsibility to heart. Cara had never seen her father be so rigid and authoritarian.
“Is this the place?” the airman asked.
Cara realized they were in Gran’s street, coming to a halt outside her house. She didn’t bother to answer, just reached for the door handle. But her companion reached it first and climbed out of the car ahead of her. For a while the airman stood blocking the car doorway with her hand on her sidearm. It was the first time Cara had noticed that the woman was armed.
“All clear,” the airman said and stepped back to let Cara out.
The idea that the woman wasn’t her jailer but her bodyguard made Cara suddenly anxious and she scanned the empty street as she emerged from the car. She caught the woman’s eye and said, “Thank you,” properly. At the same moment, Jay’s mother opened her front door and stepped out onto the porch. Cara hurried up the path to meet her and hustle her back into the house. Behind her the car door closed and its engine whined as it pulled away.
“Gran, listen, I’ve got to go out again. Right now.” She shut the door and began taking off her shoes. “I just need to change and make some calls. I’ll explain everything later, honest.”
The older woman looked at her with a steady gaze that made Cara aware of how shifty her own manner was. “You don’t need to explain anything. Your father called and told me all about it.”
That was a surprise. “Did he tell you Mum’s life is in danger?”
“Yes, for once he told me the truth. And he told me you’d be in danger too if you went after her. He also told me you nearly died last night.”
Damn it. It wasn’t fair setting Gran on her like this. “He’s exaggerating. He wasn’t even there. Look, Gran, it’s my mum, and I have to go. You understand, don’t you?”
“You don’t trust Jay to bring her home?”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“You know he loves her more than anything in the world?”
“I know he’ll do everything he can —”
“And you don’t think that’ll be enough.”
Cara threw out her arms, helpless to explain. “I don’t know, Gran. I just don’t know. And the thing is, what if it isn’t?”
The sympathy in her grandmother’s eyes brought a sob to her throat. Or was it helplessness that welled up in her? She pushed down on all of it. She wasn’t helpless. Summoning anger at her own weakness, she looked her gran in the eye and said, “I’m sorry, Gran, but I’m going and there’s nothing you can say that will stop me.” The old woman looked hurt. Cara had only ever seen her on family visits—Christmasses and summer holidays, happy times—she’d never seen her hurt. “Look,” she said, hardening herself. “You know I have to do this.” She stepped up to her gran and took her by the shoulders. “I promise I’ll come back.” She kissed her on the cheek and ran off up the stairs before there was time for any more argument.
She tore off her stupid dancing gear and tossed it in the bin. It was completely ruined. She replaced it with dark jeans and a warm jumper over a long-sleeved T-shirt, put on thick socks and walking boots and grabbed a fleecy jacket and a woolly hat. Her running-away bag contained all kinds of useful odds and ends, like a torch, a pocketknife, a cigarette lighter, and other things she might need in a situation she couldn’t have predicted. She grabbed what she thought might be useful and went downstairs.
Her grandmother was still in the hallway only now she was wearing a coat and shoes and carrying a twelve-bore shotgun. She held it up when Cara appeared. “Your grandfather got hold of it during the Adjustment. Things were a bit wild back then. I’ve got shells in my handbag.”
Cara wondered if her gran meant to try to stop her with it. “What are you doing, Gran?”
The old woman smiled and swung the long-barrelled gun up onto her shoulder. “I’m coming with you, dear.”
***
Fourget ran his men through the planned assault on Clarke Engineering. Jay watched, then had them do it again. The big, hulking avatars that stood in for the HiQua mercenaries made his scalp itch. He glanced at the readouts on the simulation as the rehearsal ended. Probability of success: sixty-five percent. Casualties: friendlies, three, hostiles, five, non-combatants, six. Fourget watched him in silence as he studied the figures.
“This is unacceptable,” he said so only Fourget could hear him.
“The simulator gets it wrong.”
That was only partly true. The real-life parameters of an engagement like this were so complex that no machine could hope to get it right. Intangibles such as team morale and quality of training were hard to estimate and could throw the calculations off by a huge factor. Also, the simulation was built to be conservative. Three dead was probably the worst of all likely outcomes.
Even so.
“A good plan violently executed now …” Fourget said.
Is better than a perfect plan executed next week. Who said that? General Patton? Jay didn’t like the way “executed” kept cropping up in the quote. All he knew about Patton was that he wore a shiny hat and carried a pearl-handled revolver.
But a general, however eccentric, would have been welcome just then. Jay very much wanted to pass the responsibility for this decision to someone else, someone for whom rescuing Sandra was not so damned important. His own judgment was tainted. Even if he told himself there was far more at stake than Sandra’s life, that there could be a FORESIGHT machine in that factory that could destroy the world, he should still disqualify himself. People could die—his own people, civilians … He had no right to put them at such risk when he couldn’t even know whether his reasoning was compromised by his need to save Sandra.
“OK. Pack up here and prepare to move. We go in as soon as Laura arrives.” For better or worse, the decision was made. Now he’d just have to live with the consequences.
Fourget said nothing but clearly approved. He moved off to organize his team. Jay put his hands in his pockets and wandered out onto the taxiway. Night had fallen already. He raised his head to stare into the ruddy bellies of the clouds above London. Cloud cover was total and the weather report said there would be rain before the morning. Cold, winter rain. He saw a light in the sky to the south and watched it as it drew closer. It came in fast and he soon heard the whup-whup of helicopter blades. As he watched, Fourget came to join him. They stood together in silence as the aircraft bore down on them, slowed to a crawl and began its d
escent.
“What the hell is that?” Jay asked. The bizarre craft had a body and a rotor just like a normal helicopter but also had two stubby wings with forward-pointing propellers and a broad tail fin where the tail rotor ought to be.
“Eurocopter ADS955 rotorcraft,” Fourget said. “Fastest chopper in the fleet. When I heard Dr Thalman needed a ride, I set this up for her. We’re keeping it to use on the mission.”
“You can get six hundred kilometers an hour out of those things,” said BaseSec, who had also joined them. “I see your team has all the latest toys to play with.”
“I’m sure the RAF has a few nice toys of its own, Captain,” said Jay, but only to be polite.
The strange helicopter was already down and its rotors were slowing. A ground crew airman with a couple of bots in tow made his way to the craft and opened a side door. One of the bots pushed a short ladder into place.
The sight of Laura Thalman’s elegantly-shod foot reaching down towards the top step snapped Jay out of his reverie. “All right, Pierre, which car do you want me in?”
“Number three, sir.”
“Right. I’ll be there with Laura if you need me. Carry on.”
Jay hurried across to the chopper and met Laura. She had a small overnight bag with her, which he took as he steered her towards the assigned Range Rover. He dropped the bag behind the seats and joined her inside.
“You read the report?” he asked, taking the seat opposite her.
She looked as if she might object to his peremptory plunge into business matters after barely saying hello, but she said, “Wild stuff. I know which part got you so excited.”
“The creation of free-floating universes. Explain it to me.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. Perhaps she thought the back of a car on a British air force base late in the evening was a strange setting for a physics lecture. Perhaps she also saw the intense focus in Jay’s face and decided not to comment.
“I know you don’t know much physics, so I’ll keep it simple. The best theory we have of how everything works is called MT-theory. Most other theories we had before the Adjustment took a severe battering when we discovered that a bunch of kids were traveling backwards in time. We had to rewrite everything we knew about time—and that meant rewriting physics. There was a candidate back then for a unified theory of everything called M-theory. With a bit of modification—well a lot, really—it managed to accommodate the new models of time. It became the MT-theory we all use now.”
“Can you skip to the part where time travel somehow shakes the whole solar system?”
“No,” she said, and carried on. “One of the more exotic corollaries of MT-theory is that there should be multiple Universes, existing as four-dimensional membranes in a higher-dimensional medium. These so-called branes are completely independent of one another but they can occasionally bump into each other.”
“And that’s bad?” He was pretty sure now he owed Kadan an apology.
“Maybe. The new physics in MT-theory suggests they should repel one another so that collisions are extremely rare.”
“Repel? As in negative energy?”
She studied him for a moment. To Jay it seemed she was trying to decide whether he knew more than he was saying, or was just a complete moron.
“If they do collide, it could be the end of one or both universes. It could trigger a new Big Bang. Some believe that’s how the first one happened.”
Jay’s mouth felt dry. It was starting to get scary. “You still haven’t explained—”
“Then do be quiet and let me.”
The noise around them increased as Alpha Team arrived and began stuffing materiel into the vehicles. Car doors opened and slammed shut. Men shouted.
Laura went on. “The idea in the FORESIGHT report is that, if you push forwards through time, forcing a path into the future ahead of the present, you’re effectively creating a branch sticking out from our universe. There are reasons why this branch is stable for a while, but it is probably quite transient and therefore does not permanently affect the direction our own future will take.”
“Probably?”
“This is all new to me too, Jay. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is, when you stop the time traveling and go back to letting time flow at its normal rate—”
“When you arrive in the future?”
“That’s right. The future you get to is a very strange place. Informationally, it should be complete, but—”
“What?”
“There’s a way of seeing the multiverse as a hologram, deducible from the information on its most distant surface.”
“That didn’t help.”
She screwed up her eyes with the effort of trying to find a way to make it clear. “No, no. I see that. OK. Don’t worry about it. Look, when you get to the future, everyone there—every particle and field there, in fact—will feel as if they have a complete and full history. But the reality is that your arrival has seeded a whole new universe that expands outwards from the moment and place that you arrive. Like a growing bubble.”
“So you arrive in a possible future and a new universe starts growing around you but, to everyone in the new universe, it seems as if they’ve always been there.”
“Exactly!” She gave him a big smile that felt like a gold star on his workbook. “But now we’ve got this new universe growing right next door to our own, expanding at the speed of light.”
Jay groaned. “Why does the speed of light always have to come into it?”
Fourget opened the car door and looked in. He was dressed in a combat suit minus the helmet. “Ready?” he asked. Jay nodded and Fourget disappeared again. A few seconds later all three cars started up and left the airfield in convoy.
Laura looked nervous. “You’re taking me with you on the mission?”
“Don’t worry, you get to stay well away from the action. I just might need you to come in afterwards and look at some equipment.”
“To see if it could send someone into the future?”
“That’s right. Now tell me about the speed of light thing.”
She took a long breath. “Don’t think of it as the speed of light as such. Think of it as the maximum rate at which events can happen.”
“The speed of time.”
“If you like. Time really has two components. There’s a kind of time field—which you can think of as part of the geometry of spacetime—and there’s the time stream which is a kind of entropic—”
Jay held up a hand to stop her. He struggled for a moment to frame a question that might get her back to what he needed to know. “Tell me why it matters how fast the future universe expands.”
“It matters because that tells us how long it will take before we bump into it.” He must have looked as astonished as he felt because she hurried on. “It’s not really likely that two universes would ever collide. As I said, they ought to repel one another. If they collide at all it could be that the smaller one will just bounce off, like a ping-pong ball hitting a tower block. Of course, the farther you go into the future, the bigger the new universe will be by the time it hits you. If it’s going to hit you. Which it probably won’t. If you go a hundred years into the future, say, the new universe will expand from that point and it will take a hundred years before its brane nudges our own. It will only be two hundred light years across by then. Very, very small compared to our own universe.”
Jay could see the light at last. “What if you went forwards two years?”
“Then, two years later, there’s a possibility of bumping into the future universe you started. It’s always the same. If you go forwards X years, then the potential collision is X years away.”
“But isn’t our own universe expanding too? Shouldn’t it be half the time? You know, you go forward two years, it starts expanding, but we’re expanding too so we meet after one year?”
“You’d think so, but there’s the relative motions of the two universes to ta
ke account of too.” She shook her head. “Look, my analogy is very three-dimensional but the reality is eleven-dimensional. It isn't really like two bubbles bumping surfaces, more like they overlap, occupying the same spacetime. I don’t know the maths well enough to really understand it but that’s how it works out. You go forwards two years; two years later, you bump into the new universe.”
“I think that’s what happened.”
“What?”
“I think, two years ago, someone went forwards in time. The universe they created bumped into ours two nights ago.” He found himself squirming in discomfort as he tried to explain his mental image of what had happened. “It’s probably all this multidimensional crap I don’t understand but it’s like the two universes merged for a brief while.” He spread the fingers of both hands and pushed one set through the other. “Not like the ping-pong ball bounced off the outside, but like it went through the inside. It would explain everything—especially the weird juxtaposition of things that are …” he held up one hand, fingers spread “… with things that might have been.” He held up the other, then interlocked them again.
Laura’s eyes glazed. He supposed she was pondering the mechanism. Eventually, she shook her head again. “I don’t know. I can’t say if it could happen like that or not. It would take better minds than mine to work it out.”
“But it’s not impossible?”
She turned down the corner of her mouth. “I can’t rule it out. That’s all I can say.”
“Then we have to stop these people, just in case the next lob they do starts a new Big Bang. Don’t you agree?” Laura was looking sceptical. He wondered how he could convince her. It would be important to have her support if he needed to go back to Crystal for more resources.
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