Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Stone’s army ID had got him into the administration building of the division responsible for perimeter security at White Sands, where he’d discovered that he was expected: Bruce Ellis’s aide had passed on his message.

  Bruce looked at Tom Waverly and said, ‘I guess this isn’t a social visit.’

  ‘Take a look in there,’ Stone said, pointing to the Macy’s bag. It sat on a desk next to Eileen Barrie’s attaché case. ‘It’s wrapped in my jacket.’

  The duty officer said, ‘We fluoroscoped and chem-sniffed both items, sir. They’re clean.’

  Stone flinched when Bruce lifted out the slim jade bar. ‘Don’t touch any of those little depressions. They’re switches.’

  Bruce asked his aide if he’d ever seen anything like this. The aide, a young captain with steel-rimmed glasses and traces of acne on his cheeks, said that he hadn’t.

  Stone said, ‘It’s at the heart of a clandestine op, Operation GYPSY, which has research labs right here in White Sands. That sort of makes it your responsibility, doesn’t it?’

  Tom said, ‘I can tell you all about it while you’re getting your men together.’

  He’d sat quietly enough while he and Stone had waited for Bruce Ellis to arrive, but he was fired up again now, wild-eyed and eager and impatient.

  ‘We need the army’s help,’ Stone said. ‘The people in charge of this clandestine op have taken Tom’s daughter prisoner.’

  ‘We need to get moving right now,’ Tom said. ‘We need to hit them hard and fast.’

  Bruce set the time key on the desk. ‘You guys need to take a couple of deep breaths and slow down. You come here to ask me to hit a Company facility because of something to do with Mr Waverly’s daughter? Is this Company business, or is it some kind of personal beef?’

  ‘It’s about fifty-fifty,’ Stone said.

  ‘We don’t have time to do things by the numbers,’ Tom said. ‘GYPSY’s labs in White Sands are a front, with a gate that leads to a wild sheaf and a black facility where the real work is done. If we don’t move right now, the main players will disappear through that gate and shut it down.’

  ‘We’re in a tight spot and time is of the essence,’ Stone said. ‘But I won’t ask for your help until I’ve explained everything.’

  Bruce Ellis studied him for a moment. ‘You have enough to make a credible case against this clandestine op?’

  Stone smiled. ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘You’re willing to go on record?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘We don’t have time for this shit,’ Tom said.

  ‘You can try to go it alone,’ Stone told him, ‘but I think you know how that works out.’

  ‘Your way or the highway, huh? Meanwhile, right now, those fuckers are probably putting Linda to the question.’

  ‘They won’t mistreat her, Tom. They want to use her as a bargaining chip, offer to exchange her for the time key.’

  ‘You don’t know that, you son of a bitch.’

  ‘I know we can’t do this on our own. Bruce, will you listen to what we have to say?’

  ‘Come through to my office, gentlemen,’ Bruce Ellis said. ‘Do your worst.’

  Stone told his story as quickly and concisely as he could, from David Welch’s arrival at the farm in the First Foot sheaf to the point when he’d escaped from Tom and Linda Waverly. Then Tom Waverly explained about his involvement with GYPSY and its chief research scientist, and the plan to rewrite the history of the Real by starting nuclear wars in other sheaves. Bruce Ellis listened with his full attention while his aide made notes on a palmtop. He swallowed the talk about time travel whole, like an oyster, and said, ‘Why come to me? Why not go directly to the Company?’

  ‘The Company offices at White Sands could be compromised by GYPSY’s presence.’ Stone said ‘I’d have to go all the way to the top, to the DCI’s office. It would take time, and in the end they’d need the army’s help anyway. So it made sense to come straight to you.’

  ‘If we don’t move quickly,’ Tom said, ‘the main players behind GYPSY will fumigate their cover and disappear.’

  Bruce picked up the time key again, held it in the sunlight that fell through the window behind him. ‘I can accept that this is some kind of classified device. But time travel? Really, gentlemen, don’t you have a better cover story than that?’

  ‘All you need to believe is that we’re the good guys,’ Tom said.

  ‘I think you should take a look at the stuff in the attaché case,’ Stone said.

  Bruce leafed through Eileen Barrie’s papers: classified studies of geopolitical destabilisation plans; details of laundered funds; read-and-burn operational orders, intelligence reports and service management orders; memos; payrolls. She had collected evidence against GYPSY with forensic and fanatical care.

  ‘I can’t move on a Company facility without authorisation,’ he said at last. ‘My superiors would give me a permanent posting in some ice-age sheaf.’

  ‘Go talk to your superiors, Bruce,’ Stone said. ‘But before you do, maybe you can provide Tom with a phone and a tape recorder. He can buy time for his daughter and provide evidence that she is in clear and present danger.’

  Tom said, ‘Yeah? How am I going to do that?’

  ‘By calling Victor Moore, and telling him that you’re willing to negotiate. That you’re willing to swap the time key for your daughter.’

  Tom made his call. He didn’t get through to Victor Moore, but talked to someone who claimed that he could arrange a deal and agreed to a meeting at a spot out in the desert in four hours. Bruce Ellis said that it gave them plenty of time to organise a strike force, but he would have to do some fast talking with his superiors. While Tom described the layout of GYPSY’s black facility to the colonel who would be running the front end of the operation, Stone sat in front of a video camera in Bruce Ellis’s office and made a sworn deposition, and then had nothing to do but wait while Bruce talked to the Joint Chiefs and people from the DCI’s office.

  The aide brought him coffee he didn’t want to drink and sandwiches he couldn’t eat. Bruce’s office smelled of furniture wax and floor polish and a hint of industrial disinfectant, an obscurely comforting institutional odour that reminded Stone of the orphanage where he’d spent his early childhood. He kicked off his boots and stretched out on the red leather sofa and dozed, waking at once when Bruce returned. It was almost noon; more than two hours had passed. Bruce was in uniform now.

  ‘Bottom line, I have a green light to move on GYPSY’s facility,’ Bruce said. ‘What I need to know now is that you’ll trust the army to get the job done.’

  Stone felt relief fall clean through him, like sunlight through glass. He smiled and said, ‘I’m in your hands, Bruce.’

  ‘You bet you are. We’re going in hard and fast to take control of both the facility here in White Sands and the facility on the other side of the Turing gate, and we don’t know what we’re going to run into. You and Tom can ride along as advisers, but only if you agree to follow the instructions of my men at all times. We have to be clear on that.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘However it falls out, it’s going to give the Company a serious black eye,’ Bruce said. ‘Also, Tom is going to have to answer for killing Dr Barrie when this is all over. A good lawyer should get it pled down to manslaughter, but he’s facing some serious jail time.’

  ‘If GYPSY is everything he claims it is, he’ll probably get a presidential pardon,’ Stone said. He was pleased and excited. Things were very definitely different now. Everything was in the air; nothing should come out the way it had before.

  Bruce pulled a bottle of Jim Beam from a desk drawer, poured two measures into paper cups from the water-cooler in the corner, and handed one to Stone. They toasted old times, drank.

  ‘I’ve been in charge of security at White Sands for just over a year,’ Bruce said. ‘It’s an important job, a necessary job, but it’s police work, not soldiering. This is soldiering
. This is what I’m trained to do, and what my men are trained to do.’ He smiled at Stone. ‘Don’t tell my superiors, by the way. They think I’m enjoying my promotion. But if this goes wrong, I’ll go down and you’ll go down with me. You won’t ever get to go back into retirement and play at being a farmer in your cosy little wild sheaf. Hell, even if it goes right, you probably won’t get back there for several months.’

  ‘I can’t ever go back,’ Stone said, ‘because in a manner of speaking I’m already there.’

  ‘Yes, you are. Your deposition, the papers, and Tom’s phone conversation were pretty persuasive. It also helped that Company officers were dispatched to check Dr Barrie’s house and found and arrested several people who were tearing up the place. But the fact that you are in two places at once was a major factor in convincing the Joint Chiefs to move against GYPSY.’

  Stone felt a prickle of alarm. ‘You sent someone into the First Foot sheaf to check on me?’

  ‘Don’t worry. It was done discreetly. A Company officer went through the mirror and phoned the sheriff of New Amsterdam from First Foot, and the sheriff confirmed you were at home. He wanted to know what it was all about, of course, but he was told it was just a routine background check. We checked with the transit authority at Brookhaven, too. You haven’t been back through the First Foot gate since you quit the Real, two years ago. Either you’re a ghost, or a doppel, or you’re telling the truth.’ Bruce downed the last of his bourbon, tossed the paper cup into a wastebasket. ‘I’ll take you over to the quartermasters and get you kitted up, and then you can talk to the man in charge of the assault team. He’ll run you through the plan.’

  7

  It kicked off with a frontal assault on Operation GYPSY’s research laboratory: fifty acres of desert scrub fenced with electrified razor wire, a spur line that ran through a Turing gate inside a concrete bunker, and a two-storey office block and a couple of workshops, tucked away in the sprawl of storage yards, industrial sheds, vehicle parks, and maintenance facilities at the northern edge of the White Sands interchange. A jump-out crew in a delivery van secured the guards at the checkpoint in the perimeter fence, and three attack helicopters swooped in above the parking lot in front of the office block, the downdraught from their rotors blowing a storm of sand and litter as ropes flopped out from their hatches and soldiers in combat armour slid down and scattered in every direction. One squad kicked down the door of the prefab shed where the gate controls were located and tossed flashbangs and gas grenades inside; the rest combed the offices and workshops, marched out men and women at gunpoint.

  When the Jeep carrying Adam Stone, Tom Waverly and General Bruce Ellis drew up outside the control shed, soldiers were standing over three men who knelt with their hands secured behind their backs by plastic ties. The air stank of tear gas and bits of paper blew everywhere; the raid had disrupted an orgy of computer-smashing and document shredding. Colonel Rebhorn, commander of the counter-insurgency team that formed the core of the assault force, saluted Bruce Ellis and told him that they’d found more than a dozen fresh bodies behind one of the workshops, every one of them shot in the head.

  ‘They were definitely spooked before we arrived,’ the colonel said. He was a sturdy, compact man with a red handkerchief knotted in the open collar of his camo jacket and an unlit cheroot stuck in one side of his mouth. ‘They were destroying files and smashing up equipment in the offices and workshops, and we caught these geeks trying to activate a suicide sequence in the quantum computer that controls the gate. They didn’t move fast enough, though. It’s still up and running.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if they had managed to shut it down,’ Bruce said. ‘We have our own gate into that very same sheaf, a weapons-testing range only a couple of hundred klicks away from their dirty little secret. These guys were left behind to sacrifice themselves for no good reason. They should be reminded of that when they’re being interrogated.’

  Tom said, ‘If the gate’s still working, why aren’t we going through?’

  ‘How about it?’ Bruce said to Colonel Rebhorn.

  ‘The gate was shut down to minimum aperture, sir, but we’re bringing it back online. It’ll be wide open in five minutes, and the train’s standing right outside the perimeter, ready to go.’

  Bruce smiled at Stone, asked him if he was ready for some real soldiering.

  ‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ Stone said.

  Colonel Rebhorn’s men were battle-hardened veterans who in addition to the usual gear toted a variety of unconventional weapons, from combat shotguns to crossbows. They rode through GYPSY’s Turing gate in a short train of boxcars. Stone braced as it accelerated toward the gate, but the black flash of transition was no worse than usual. There was a brief roar overhead as a robot drone launched from its cradle on the roof of the leading boxcar. A sergeant handed Colonel Rebhorn a palmtop that displayed the drone’s video feed, and a few moments later the train began to brake hard in a shuddering screech of steel on steel.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Tom told Stone. ‘The railroad runs all the way into the facility.’

  They were both wearing camo fatigues, heavy Kevlar vests, and flak helmets. Tom was unarmed; Stone had an army-issue Colt .45 in the holster on his right hip, and orders to shoot Tom if necessary.

  Colonel Rebhorn studied the palmtop’s screen for a few moments, then sang out to his men. ‘They blew the track. Get ready to roll - we’re a sitting target out here!’

  Men got busy inside the confined space of the boxcar, readying their weapons, unclipping the straps that held down a Jeep and four quad bikes, hauling back the sliding door of the boxcar, dropping a metal ramp. Colonel Rebhorn swung into the shotgun seat of the Jeep, Stone and Tom Waverly climbed in behind him, and the sergeant took the wheel and gunned the sturdy vehicle down the ramp.

  The climate of this sheaf was warmer and wetter than the Real’s. Rolling grassland stretched away under a slate sky and blowing drifts of rain. Quad bikes, Jeeps, and two squat armoured personnel carriers drove out of the other boxcars and lined up alongside the little train, which had stopped about a hundred yards in front of a huge crater of raw, upturned dirt. On the other side of the crater, the railroad track ran toward thickly forested mountains whose peaks were lost in low cloud.

  Rebhorn angled his palmtop so that Stone and Tom could see the grainy video feed, pointed to a cluster of buildings in a rectangular clearing, and a brilliant white gem in the forest about half a mile to the southeast. ‘Am I right in thinking that’s their nuclear reactor?’

  ‘It powers the Turing gates they’ve hidden here,’ Tom said. ‘If you can shut it down, you can stop them escaping.’

  ‘This was taken in infrared,’ Rebhorn said. ‘The reactor is running hot, and the drone has detected radiation, too. I think the unfriendlies have sabotaged it.’

  ‘They’ve done what TW Two did,’ Tom said. ‘Lifted the core rods, and started a runaway reaction. It’s an obvious move, Colonel. The ultimate in deniability. A core meltdown would render hundreds of square kilometres uninhabitable for at least a century. If they’ve sabotaged their power source, they’ve either gone through one of the gates, or they’re about ready to go through.’

  Rebhorn scowled around his cheroot. ‘Any idea about how long we have before it blows?’

  ‘Could be hours, could be minutes,’ Tom said.

  ‘Then we better get moving,’ Rebhorn said.

  He stood up and waved his hand in a circle above his head and pointed forward. Engines revved, and the column of vehicles accelerated alongside the railroad toward the tree line. Braced in the back of the command Jeep, Stone tried not to think about the nuclear reactor sitting just a few miles away, its core growing hotter and hotter. He felt that he was riding an avalanche he had triggered. Just one wrong step could wipe him out. A reactor was about to go critical, right here, right now, and the version of Tom Waverly who’d been killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels had been dying of radia
tion poisoning . . .

  As the edge of the forest resolved out of the rain, muzzle flashes flickered in the shadows beneath the trees. A bullet cracked past Stone’s ear, and then the mini-guns on top of the APCs on either side of the command Jeep opened up, hosing rounds into the tree line. Trees tossed as if caught in a gale, shedding leaves and shattered branches, and a ragged line of figures stood up and charged through the long grass.

  They were a species of apeman that Stone had never seen before, wiry creatures about seven feet tall, clothed only in greasy red fur and leather harness. They carried assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and their small heads were cased in fat white helmets: a battle computer in some remote bunker was controlling them through encrypted radio links to electrodes in their brains. They charged without fear, firing their weapons as they ran straight toward the column. A gout of smoke and dirt burst in front of the pair of quad bikes that led the command Jeep. The bikes tipped over and spilled their riders, hot dirt rattled down as the Jeep slowed and swerved past the raw crater, and Tom swung out of the vehicle, fell down, picked himself up, and ran back toward the overturned bikes.

  Stone jumped out too, fell, rolled, scrambled to his feet and drew his pistol and ran after Tom. Wet grass immediately drenched him to the waist. Something reared up to his right, beyond the smouldering crater, and he turned and fired. The round knocked the skinny red giant onto its back but didn’t kill it. As it climbed to its feet, Stone braced his right wrist with his left hand, took careful aim, and put a second round through its white helmet. It fell bonelessly, a puppet whose strings had been cut, but more apemen were already running toward him. He picked his targets and fired off the rest of the clip, taking two of them down, dropped the empty clip and snapped a fresh one into the hot pistol, and the rest of the apemen vanished in a storm of dirt and flying foliage as a soldier standing in the rear of a Jeep hammered them with the heavy machine gun mounted on its roll bar.