Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Tom righted one of the quad bikes and accelerated away in a spray of wet dirt. Stone ran to the other bike. Its rider sprawled beneath it, head twisted around, blood all over his face, no pulse behind his jaw. Stone used all his strength to heave the heavy machine onto its four all-terrain tyres. Its engine started at the first press of the button, and Stone pursued Tom toward the trees, the two of them peeling away from the railroad and Rebhorn’s team.

  Stone realised with sick dismay that they were heading toward the nuclear reactor. He opened up the throttle of the quad bike, gaining on Tom as he disappeared into the trees, leaning into turns, leaning out of turns when the tough little vehicle tipped sideways and two of its fat tyres lifted off the ground. A big animal crashed away, a ground sloth with a shaggy grey pelt and the build of a bottom-heavy bear, glimpsed and gone as Stone bounced and slithered down a corduroy track that dipped into a draw filled with mist that rose from the swift river running through it: the outflow from the reactor.

  The reactor loomed ahead, a squat, windowless blockhouse built across the draw. Smooth torrents of steaming water shot out of three huge outflow pipes at its base, sluicing through a concrete basin that emptied into the river bed. Tom was racing his quad bike along a track above this cauldron, cutting toward the flank of the reactor. Stone chased after him, saw him jump off his bike and jog up a steel stairway, and swerved to a halt, shouting Tom’s name.

  When Stone gained the second landing of the stairway, three loud shots made him crouch low. Tom was leaning over the rail, two flights above. He’d lost his helmet. Strings of grey hair hung around his face as he angled an assault rifle downward and shouted at Stone, telling him to get the fuck out of here right now.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ Stone shouted back. He had drawn his pistol but couldn’t get a clear sight through the grid of steps.

  ‘It’s my fucking destiny!’ Tom screamed. He rattled off three more shots and disappeared from view.

  Stone went up the rest of the stairway slowly and carefully, leading with his pistol. There was a short walkway to a locked steel door set in a deep recess. He pounded on it impotently, then ran back down the stairs, started his quad bike, and sped up the switchback trail that climbed past the reactor, blasting through mist, jolting along a track between dense trees, emerging at the edge of a wide strip of pounded earth. Railroad sidings fanned out in front of three hangar-sized buildings. Rain blurred the lights inside the hangars and the floodlights on tall pylons alongside the tracks.

  Colonel Rebhorn’s team was stretched across the far end of the sidings, firing at groups of apemen that rushed toward them through squalling rain. A string of boxcars burned fiercely. Mini-guns on top of the two APCs swivelled this way and that, firing short deadly bursts that churned dirt, disintegrated sandbagged emplacements, and vaporised apemen.

  Stone heard rounds snap past, saw apemen moving toward him, shooting from the hip. He gunned the quad bike, planning to cut across the tracks, but more apemen popped up from a trench right in front of him. He swerved sharply and the bike tipped and skidded away on its side as he jumped clear. He rolled three times and hugged the ground, reaching for his pistol, as rounds cut the air above his head. The apemen were climbing out of their trench and he took aim and shot two of them and jumped up as the rest charged, firing at their white helmets, their blank leathery faces, and beyond the sidings a line of power transformers exploded in great fountains of sparks, and floodlights and the lights inside the hangars all went out.

  The apemen screeched and dropped their weapons and clutched at their white helmets. Stone shot one down and the rest turned tail and fled. Across the wide space in front of the hangars, apemen were standing mute and still in the rain or wandering aimlessly this way and that, jerking and falling over as Rebhorn’s men picked them off, the soldiers’ gunfire slowly dying down as they realised that the battle was over.

  Stone caught up with Rebhorn in one of the hangars. The colonel had lit his cheroot and was puffing on it as he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of the huge space, studying the three Turing gates that loomed above him. Their empty maws were each twenty feet in diameter, big enough to take a truck. Soldiers were spraying foam at the burning Airstream trailer that housed the gate controls. Black smoke rolled out of its broken windows and rose into the hangar’s high roof and flushed out of its square doorway. Smashed equipment lay everywhere. Dead men and women sprawled in a pool of mingled blood.

  Rebhorn told Stone that his men hadn’t found Linda Waverly yet, but they were still searching. ‘Looks like the sons of bitches killed everyone they didn’t need and went through one of these gates. We don’t know which one, and we don’t know where the gates went because they’re all stone-cold dead. We heard explosions as we were fighting our way in. I lost five men to those goddamn apes, twice that many wounded. I would have lost more if the battle computer hadn’t been taken out.’

  Stone told him that the power surge was probably down to Tom Waverly. ‘He got inside the reactor and locked the door in my face. We have to find another way in, Colonel. We have to get him out.’

  Rebhorn said that he’d do his best, but he was waiting on a specialist team that would be able to deal with the reactor.

  ‘Give me a couple of shaped charges,’ Stone said. ‘I’ll blow the door and drag him out by his hair.’

  ‘Can’t let you do that, Mr Stone. That reactor could go critical at any time, and we need you to help us understand what happened here. Let’s hope those specialists find your friend and pull him out of there before he gets himself a lethal dose.’

  ‘It might be too late already,’ Stone said.

  When he’d taken the time key and set out to confront Eileen Barrie, Stone had believed that he had been setting out on a path that was straight and true, but the path had betrayed him, had looped back to a place very like the one he’d been trying to escape. He wondered with a bitter weariness if he’d gone around the loop before, passing through minor variations and flourishes but always arriving at the same outcome.

  Rebhorn said, ‘It could have been a whole lot worse. My men found three small nuclear devices in various states of assembly. None of them were ready to go, fortunately, or I doubt we’d be having this discussion right now.’

  ‘This isn’t over,’ Stone said. ‘These people may have taken an armed bomb with them. Maybe more than one.’

  ‘You’re going to have to discuss that with General Ellis back in the Real,’ Rebhorn said. ‘My job is to secure this place, not to worry about imponderables.’

  ‘I’m not going back until I know what happened to Tom Waverly.’ As they walked out of the hangar toward the command Jeep, Rebhorn got a call on his radio; a couple of his men had spotted movement in an outbuilding.

  It was a small, stark concrete cube that stood at a corner of a field of smouldering, truck-sized transformers. One of the soldiers keeping watch from behind a boxcar told Colonel Rebhorn that someone was inside, and at the same moment the building’s door cracked open and a white shape - a T-shirt tied to the barrel of an assault rifle - fluttered like a ghost in the narrow aperture. A familiar voice shouted that he was coming out, he was unarmed. Stone told Rebhorn and his soldiers to hold their fire, and ran forward as Tom Waverly stepped out into the rain stark naked, hands held high.

  8

  Two of Rebhorn’s men drove Stone and Tom Waverly back to the train. Tom told Stone that he’d had to go onto the floor of the reactor and reinsert its control rods manually, and then he’d fed a killing surge through the power lines to the facility. He’d been suited up, he said, but he wasn’t sure if the suit had given him enough protection.

  ‘We’ll get you checked out as soon as we get back to the Real.’

  ‘They took Linda with them, didn’t they? They took her through their back door.’ Tom was slumped in the shotgun seat of the Jeep next to Stone, his wet hair hanging in rat tails, one blanket wrapped kiltwise around his waist, a second draped over his shoulder
s. ‘This didn’t exactly go according to plan. Linda’s gone; I got a lethal dose. You ever read Dante?’

  ‘I was brought up a Catholic.’

  ‘I remember there’s a circle of Purgatory where the sinners are condemned to live through the same thing over and over. But I can’t for the life of me remember which sin they had committed.’

  ‘We’ll take care of you,’ Stone said, but he felt a cold hopelessness. This is still the same loop, he thought. We haven’t changed anything important. Maybe it isn’t possible to change anything: we’re fated to go around in a circle. Tom will die. And Susan will die, and we’ll come back here, and start over, no end to it. No end.

  ‘If we don’t do something soon, we’ll be headed for Pottersville,’ Tom said. ‘They want to exchange Linda for the time key. That’s how we’ll get to them. They still want it. They still need it. They need it so very badly they’ll risk everything to get it back.’

  ‘You aren’t going anywhere, Tom, except straight to hospital. I’ll take it from here. I’ll get Linda back. All you have to do is tell me where these guys have gone and what they’re planning to do.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘There’s no point going to hospital. I know I caught a lethal dose in the reactor. I know I’m gonna die this time around, like I did the time before. I know it, and you know it too. They’ll want to take me away for debriefing, and then they’ll throw me in the deepest, blackest hole they have. But you can’t let them do that to me, Adam, not if you want to save the life of your woman. We still have work to do, old buddy. One last op.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll let you go anywhere, Tom. But if you tell me what needs to be done, I promise I’ll do my very best.’

  ‘I’ll tell you this: they took a suitcase nuke through one of their gates. They’re going to try to start a war some time in the past of another sheaf. They’re going to try to change its history, and if they succeed they’ll change our history too. The Company is going to have to let me go because I know where the bomb is going to be planted. I helped scout it out and set it up, and I know how to stop it, too. You’re coming with me, Adam. We’ll find the bomb, we’ll find them, we’ll find Linda. Otherwise, they’ll change history. They’ll change everything.’

  ‘Where did they go? Which sheaf?’

  Cold rain blew over the Jeep as it sped along the muddy track. The train stood in the distance, small and black in the wide, empty grassland.

  ‘We’ll go after them together,’ Tom said, and wouldn’t say anything else.

  Back in the Real, Stone told Bruce Ellis, ‘Linda, Tom and me, we’re caught in some kind of loop. It’s about two weeks end to end. We travelled back to the beginning, and now we’re going forward. And if we don’t figure out how to stop it, Tom will end up killing himself in Pottersville and Linda and I will go on to meet another version of Tom in the Nixon sheaf, and we’ll all end up back here.’

  Bruce said, ‘If you catch up with these bad guys, will it stop this loop of yours?’

  ‘I hope so. Rebhorn found three partially assembled nuclear devices at that facility. If they abandoned those in place, it’s likely that Tom was telling me the truth when he said that they took a suitcase nuke with them when they fled through the mirror. If we don’t catch them, Bruce, they’ll change history. Strictly speaking, they may have already done it.’

  Stone was jittery and exhausted. When he lifted his cup of coffee, the disk of black liquid inside it shivered and shook.

  ‘Let me bring you up to speed on what’s been happening here,’ Bruce said. He was sitting in the leather chair behind his desk, his back straight, his hands folded on the blotter in front of him, the creases in his uniform sharp enough to draw blood. ‘Most of the people we arrested at the facility on this side of the mirror aren’t talking, but we managed to convince a few of the smarter ones that they wouldn’t have to face the most serious charges if they made statements right away. We’ve heard a lot about the time key, but no one seems to know anything about the operational side. It seems to have been rigorously compartmented. Research here in White Sands; black ops run from the facility in the wild sheaf.’

  ‘How about Victor Moore?’

  ‘We have his wife. She told us he left home in the early hours of this morning, and she isn’t saying anything else. We’re trying to bargain a plea, but our lawyers think we have a pretty weak case because we can’t prove that she had anything to do with this. We’re examining the documents we rescued from the facility, and the documentation you took from Dr Barrie. And although most of the people we arrested seem to be pretty low in the pyramidal organisation of this thing, it’s possible that they’ll lead us to bigger fish. The DCI’s office is sending teams to continue the interrogation process, and to investigate every square inch of GYPSY’s facilities. They’ll want to talk to you, too.’

  ‘We don’t have time for that, Bruce.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Adam. It’s out of my hands.’

  ‘There is something you could do for me. One more big favour, my last. You remember what I told you about Susan Nichols? What happened to her - what might happen? She and her son have to be moved from her farm in the First Foot sheaf and placed in a safe house in the Real. I can’t do it myself because I have to do this thing with Tom—’

  ‘I wish I could help,’ Bruce said. ‘I really do. But the DCI’s office is in charge now, and I can’t do anything without talking to them first. I do know that they’re taking this extremely seriously, Adam. I’m sure your friend and her son will be looked after.’

  ‘The guy in charge. It’s Ralph Kohler, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yeah. I met him a few days ago, two weeks in the future . . .’

  Bruce studied Stone, then said, ‘I think you need to get some rest, Adam. You’re going to need your wits about you when you talk to his people.’

  9

  Bruce Ellis’s aide escorted Stone to a bleak little room in the unmarried officers’ quarters. He stretched out on the narrow bed, convinced that he wouldn’t sleep, and woke six hours later. He was still tired, but his thoughts were moving more easily now.

  He used the phone beside the bed to call Bruce’s office, hoping to get an update. The man who answered told him that the general was away from his desk, and that two men from the DCI’s team wanted to talk to him.

  ‘I guess they know where to find me,’ Stone said.

  He did several sets of crunches and sit-ups. There was still some stiffness in his left leg, but the exercise eased it. He took a shower, and was eating a hot meal in the mess when the two Company officers found him.

  They interviewed him in his room. One of the officers was tall and pale and not much older than Linda Waverly; the other had a cool, hooded stare and a Brooklyn accent that could score glass. Stone told them at the outset that he wanted protection for Susan Nichols and her son, and they assured him that measures had already been taken.

  The officer from Brooklyn, Bradley Cramer, said, ‘We’ve locked down the Turing gate to the First Foot sheaf. No one can get in or out without passing through two layers of security.’

  His partner, Preston Echols, said, ‘We have people watching the New Amsterdam ferry too.’

  ‘For all you know, some of the officers on the security detail could be part of GYPSY,’ Stone said. ‘And the people behind GYPSY definitely know I’m involved in this - one of them recognised me after I took him down at the El Dorado Motel. It puts my friend and her son in immediate danger. You should move them out of First Foot and put them in a safe house.’

  ‘I agree we don’t yet know how many people are involved in this thing,’ Cramer said. ‘We’ve discovered links to cells in every part of the Company, and we’re still tracing contacts, trying to work around cutouts and other precautions. Those names you and Waverly gave us are a big help in that respect. So far none of them are talking, but we think that the ex-Marine, Buddy Altman, is close to telling us what he knows. We’ll bring this who
le thing down, I guarantee it. Meanwhile, we have army units stationed either side of the First Foot gate in addition to our own guys. Every train that goes through is checked out top to bottom. The same goes for the ferry.’

  Echols said, ‘Even if we took Mrs Nichols and her son to a protected facility, it’s possible that some sleeper will get to them. They’ll be safer where they are, Mr Stone. And so are you - or rather, so is the earlier version of your good self.’

  Stone said, ‘Does he know about this?’

  Thinking about this other version of himself, two weeks younger but otherwise identical, made Stone feel like a ghost haunting his own life.

  ‘He knows that there’s a situation, but he doesn’t know about you,’ Cramer said. ‘And neither he nor Mrs Nichols wants to move out.’

  Stone smiled a little. ‘I don’t suppose they do.’

  ‘We’ll look after Mrs Nichols and her son,’ Echols said. ‘And we will be taking very good care of the doppels of Dr Barrie, too.’

  Cramer said, ‘We’re going to do our level best to make sure that this loop or circle of whatever it is doesn’t swallow its own tail. For that, we need your help.’

  ‘To begin with, we need to know everything you know,’ Echols said, and opened his briefcase and took out a small video camera and a folding tripod.

  ‘I’ve already made a deposition,’ Stone said.

  ‘Then you won’t mind making another,’ Cramer said. ‘You can start at the beginning, and take it from there.’

  It took three hours to get through the entire story. Stone bottled up his impatience and anxiety and answered every one of the two officers’ many questions and requests for clarification. At the end, he spoke straight to the camera. ‘Colonel Rebhorn found three nuclear devices at the facility. I believe that the people in charge of GYPSY escaped through one of the Turing gates and took with them a fourth, functional device. I believe that they intend to use it, and I believe that Tom Waverly knows when and where. I am willing to go with him and do whatever is necessary to stop them.’