Dudding leaned forwards in his excitement. “There was a scintillation in the rings of Saturn.”
“A scintillation?”
“The best explanation is that a significant portion of the particles in the rings were displaced slightly and that new particles appeared.” Again he paused, waiting for the penny to drop.
Slowly, Jay said, “You think the same thing that happened here happened to the Sun and to Saturn.”
“And the Moon and Mars and, as far as I can tell, to every astronomical object within the Solar System, up to and including the inner fringes of the Oort Cloud.”
“The Oort Cloud?”
“It’s a huge cloud of comets and other junk that orbits the Sun way out beyond all the planets, way beyond the Kuiper Belt. It extends to almost a light year away from the Sun.”
Jay struggled with the implications. “You’re saying that whatever affected us affected the whole Solar System, even out as far as this …?”
“Oort Cloud, yes. Unfortunately, we’ve only got a couple of days of observations. The speed of light limits how far we can look in that time, but so far every new piece of data that comes from the period of the event the other night is consistent with this thing happening everywhere. Trouble is, since the far end of the Oort cloud is as much as a light year away, we won’t know for a full year if the effect went out that far. Same with the stars: Alpha Centauri is a very long way out.”
“That’s the closest star, yes?”
“Well, it’s a binary but, yes, it’s the closest—at four-point-two light years. That means—”
“Right. Four years before we know. All the same, it’s … staggering.”
Jay sat back to contemplate the incredible size of the phenomenon. He did a quick look-up and found that two light days came to fifty billion kilometers.
“Yes, it is,” Dudding agreed. “But that’s not the most interesting thing about all this. We’ve been trying to—”
“We?”
“A couple of astronomers I’ve been working with. They’re sworn to secrecy. Don’t worry. Anyway, we’ve been trying to calculate the rate of spread of the phenomenon and it seems to be instantaneous.”
“Instantaneous?”
“It happened everywhere at once. It’s got the astronomers very excited.”
Even Jay could see the importance of this. “So it didn’t come from Earth?” Because, if it had, the effect would spread, at an absolute maximom, at the speed of light. The backwash from a timesplash expanded at a very much slower speed than that.
“That’s right. It might be happening everywhere in the Universe simultaneously, but even if it’s local to our Solar System, it’s still on a massive scale.”
Jay found himself staring at Dudding and blinking. He had barely a thought in his head, just, Not a timesplash. Not from Earth. Not future time travel. He pulled himself up. “So it was some kind of natural phenomenon?”
Dudding pulled another comic face that said, What else could it be?
“What do your astronomer friends say?”
“They say it could only be a collision between branes. They think it’s wonderful.”
“Brains?”
“Branes. Short for membranes. Some variant of string theory that has multiple Universes floating about in a multidimensional soup, bumping into one another from time to time.” He waved a hand past the top of his head. “Didn’t understand a word of it. Cosmology’s not really my thing.”
Jay felt his body lift as if he’d been pumped full of air. If the event had been a natural phenomenon, it was none of his business, none of K Section’s business. He could drop the whole damned investigation and focus on what Sandra had dug up, make it all official.
“Kadan, I want that in a report and in my inbox in half an hour. I’m going to see Crystal right now.” He got up and Dudding scrambled to rise too. Jay was so elated, he grabbed the analyst’s hand and shook it. “Excellent work. Brilliant.” He swung open his office door and left Dudding open mouthed in his wake. He almost ran to Crystal’s office. He burst out laughing. Time travel to the future indeed!
***
“Time travel to the future?” Sandra asked, incredulous. “In that?”
The black sphere sat on its platform at the dead centre of the six pillars. It was scarred and dented, as if people had been hitting it with sticks and throwing rocks at it.
“Come closer,” Dr Hong said, and set off towards it. One of the giant super-soldiers held her arm firmly and urged her to follow. At the best of times, she’d have thought twice about tackling such a brute. Today she didn’t bother with the second thought. She felt weak and her muscles ached. That last stunner attack by Hamiye had really shaken her up. With her hands cuffed behind her back again, she felt wrung out and helpless. So she walked tamely along after the morose old physicist, hoping for a miracle.
Close up, the damage to the sphere looked even worse. Some of the gouges in its skin were so deep they had cut through the paint to expose bare metal. And that added to her scepticism. If you were going to make a vehicle to travel in time, you’d make it light, as light as possible. Every gram of mass cost energy. Sure, they had plenty of F2 generators in the building but a metal sphere that size couldn’t be lobbed very far even if they could draw on the entire National Grid.
Hong put his hand on a green button on the rim of the sphere and a section opened and lifted up. They moved to the front to look inside. There wasn’t much room in there. A large black padded seat with restraints; instruments embedded in the door that was now above their heads; and thick, cream-colored padding on the walls—that was it. From the difference in internal versus external volumes, there was plenty of space in there for electronics or other machinery.
“Cosy,” she said. Then she noticed the large brown stain on the floor and other, smaller smears on the walls and door. Her stomach knotted. Someone had bled in there. Possibly, they’d died.
“What’s this all about?” she asked.
“They need another pilot,” the giant said. The idea seemed to please him.
Hong spoke up. “It’s very simple. We don’t need you to do anything much, just push a couple of buttons. We could reprogram it to be fully automatic if we had the time.”
Sandra could hardly believe what she was hearing. “You think you’re going to put me in that thing after it killed your last volunteer?”
Hong hurried to correct her. “No, no, the chronosphere did not kill him. That was … something else. The sphere is perfectly safe.”
Meaning someone had definitely died in there. “Of course, and that’s ketchup on the floor, I suppose?”
“No that’s blood all right,” the giant said. “Damnedest thing. Tell her what happened, Doc.” Not waiting for Hong, he leaned into the inside of the sphere, pulling Sandra along with him. He poked a sausage-sized finger into a small tear in the seat. “What do you think did that?”
The tear was a couple of centimeters long and quite neat. She noticed another and then another. There was one in the wall padding too. It looked as if someone had repeatedly stabbed the chair and wall with a small, sharp knife.
“Arrows,” the big man said, grinning. “When it came back, the pilot was like a pincushion. Shot full of arrows.”
Sandra turned to Hong. “I don’t understand.” When was the last time they used bows and arrows in England? The Middle Ages? And why would the arrows come back with the sphere anyway? They should have stayed in the past where they belonged.
Hong was agitated. “There was a miscalculation. The sphere overshot, went far into the future. It should not have happened. A careless error. Everybody is rushing so much. There is no time to make proper checks. It has already been fixed. It won’t happen again. There will be no danger.”
And there was that talk about the future again. Sandra looked at the sphere, at the tall gantries around it, at the blood on the cream padding. Finally, she looked at Hong. “The future isn’t made yet,” she said.
The old man shrugged. “Should that stop us from making it ourselves?”
“But—But there’s nothing there yet. To go forwards would be to create the Universe. The energies …”
Hong shook his head. “We make only a narrow strip. A path to travel along. The energy is there waiting. We need these reactors only for an initial shove, if you like, to shake the sphere loose of our spacetime. The Universe is straining at the leash. It wants to be born, to grow. Time wants to flow. All you need to do is give it a nudge and it will do the rest. The trick is to rein it in, to control the immense power you unleash. To go a million years into the future is trivial. To go one day is almost impossible.”
Sandra felt her heart beat faster. Despite herself the idea was exhilarating. To travel into the future! Then she remembered her predicament. “Send one of your tekniks. Send pretty boy here.” She nodded towards the giant still holding her by the arm. “Go yourself for all I care. You’re not getting me in that thing.”
“The tekniks are too valuable to risk.” She turned at the sound of Hamiye’s rich, cultured voice. “Mr Langbroek’s men …” he glanced at the mercenary “… have already made their position clear. I’m afraid it has to be you, Sandra.”
“How’s your stomach?” she asked. She could see a neat bandage beneath the tear in his bloodstained shirt. “I hope it doesn’t get infected or anything.”
Hamiye didn’t rise to the bait. “Such a fuss,” he said, walking past her to look inside the sphere. “You’ll only be going two weeks into the future. You won’t have to do anything, just pop out for a minute, confirm the date, hop back in, and bring it home. Honestly, even a child could do it.” He turned suddenly to face her. “Your daughter for example.”
Her jaw set but she said, as calmly as she could. “You don’t have my daughter. You don’t even know where she is.”
Hamiye smiled. “Tell her, Dr Hong.”
To his credit, the old man looked ashamed of himself. “You tell her,” he snapped.
“One of Dr Hong’s clever young assistants found her for me. You won’t believe this but, at the moment, Cara’s in a rental car, driving here. I think stupidity must run in your family. She’s just been to my house, by the way. I hope all that blood didn’t upset her.”
Relying on Langbroek’s unshakeable grip to support her, Sandra leapt into the air and fired a fast, high kick at Hamiye’s head. It would have connected easily, Hamiye was so unprepared for the attack, but, with a quick jerk of his arm, Langbroek threw her aim off and the kick went wild. Too late, Hamiye cringed away from her. She let her momentum carry her round the giant’s body, closing the gap between herself and his massive chest, then threw all her strength into smashing her free elbow into his nose, hoping it might hurt him enough to make him let go. But Langbroek pulled back his head as if they’d rehearsed the move all morning and the blow missed. With a strength that almost dislocated her shoulder, he pulled her back to his side.
Hong had stepped away from them and was looking horrified. Hamiye stood there scowling. When she looked up at Langbroek, she found him grinning down at her.
“So,” Hamiye said, regaining his composure. “What’s it to be?”
She wished she could stab him with that spoon again. “If I do this, you leave Cara out of it?”
“Scouts honor.”
“Honor?” She almost spat the word.
She saw a hint of bitterness in his pursed lips. “Believe me or not,” he said. “You don’t really have a choice. You do this for us and Cara won’t be hurt. Langbroek?”
The hamster shrugged. “It’s your dime. The kid’s off limits. But if she comes back with that special forces jerkoff, the bastard’s hide is mine.”
“So long as the girl’s safe, you can do what you like to anybody else.” He turned to Sandra. “Satisfied?”
She looked into his eyes. The fact was she had almost nothing to bargain with and she would have to take the risk. All the same, she thought she could see something trustworthy in Hamiye’s face, ridiculous as that seemed. She turned to Hong.
“All right. Show me how to drive this thing.”
***
Crystal heard Jay out in silence and then called for Laura and Kadan to join them. “How’s your man?” she asked as they waited.
“Fourget?” Jay worded his answer carefully. “I had a call from the hospital this morning to say he is still unconscious and has a concussion.” He didn’t mention that the call had come from his daughter.
“Sounds serious.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be all right. Knowing Pierre, he’ll be on his feet and chasing after bad guys before we know it.” Quite literally, Jay thought.
“And your investigations into future time travel?”
“Hit a wall. The Brits are being cagey about their findings but everyone seems to agree it hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.”
“And your, er … Sandra Malone?”
Jay wished Laura and Kadan would get a move on. “She’s still missing. And I still believe there’s something fishy going on at HiQua. In fact, once you’ve spoken to my people, I’m taking a team over to the UK to get to the bottom of it.” He didn’t need Crystal’s permission to set his section’s operational priorities. He just needed her to agree that the event of two nights ago was not their problem.
“Assuming I agree.”
“Yes, of course.”
Laura and Kadan came in carrying coffees and took seats. Laura didn’t meet Jay’s eyes and he took that as a bad sign. Jay had his chief analyst go over the astronomical findings once more.
“Laura?” Crystal asked when he’d finished.
The physicist asked the analyst a few questions, mostly about the quality of the evidence and the teams that had worked on producing it.
“Well?” Crystal asked, cutting the discussion short.
“It sounds convincing,” Laura said. “It’s definitely not a timesplash—unless it happened in interstellar space an unimaginably long time ago and was unimaginably huge, and we’re just feeling it now. We’d be able to test for that by finding asymmetries on a galactic scale.”
Crystal wasn’t interested in technical asides. “So you agree it’s a natural phenomenon?”
“I agree it’s too big to have anything to do with us. Disruption across the whole Solar System is well beyond human capabilities. Whether there’s some natural explanation for this or if it’s our first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligences, I couldn’t say.”
“Extra—?” Crystal bit her tongue. “But you agree this is outside the remit of K Section?”
Jay waited for Laura to give her seal of approval but, instead, she hesitated. “There’s still an unknown.”
“An unknown?” Jay asked, his irritation showing.
Laura glanced at him, obviously surprised by his tone. “There’s still the future time-travel angle. Olivia—” She looked at Crystal. “Dr Olivia Bradley, our consultant from Aldermaston, has shown me the Hong formulae. We’d be wrong to dismiss all this as blue-skies research.”
Jay couldn’t keep the impatience out of his tone. “Is there anything at all in these Hong formulae that suggest you can shake a whole star system to its foundations with them?”
“Well … no, but nor is there anything in the gigarange formulae for backwards time travel that would lead you to expect a backwash.”
Jay found it hard to sit still. “Look, I was the only one taking this forward time-travel stuff halfway seriously ten minutes ago, and now you’re telling us it exists and it can rattle the whole Solar System. No, that’s not it, is it? You’re saying that because we don’t know what it can do, we can assume it’s the most powerful force we’ve ever encountered, that it can shake the Universe and raise the dead and do it all simultaneously everywhere?”
He was glaring at Laura, waiting for her response. Then he realized that everyone in the room was watching him.
Crystal looked away first. “Thank you, La
ura, Kadan. That’ll be all for now. Jay, if I could just have another minute or two.”
The others got up and left the room. Jay kept his eyes on Crystal’s desk until the door closed behind them. Crystal leaned back in her chair and regarded him. “Not like you to be snappish, Jay.”
“No. Sorry.”
“I’m seeing it a lot, lately. People in the corridors of power are having kittens. The rumour is that it’s a Chinese secret weapon.”
“Against who? God?”
“Others are just starting to add up the cost. I don’t think they have enough zeroes in their spreadsheets for what it will take to repair all the damage. They’re working on a fifty-trillion-euro bailout for the insurance companies. Either that or they’ll all go bust. It drives civil servants a bit crazy when they have to explain that kind of thing to their political masters. We’re looking at yet another recession—and in an election year too.”
“It’s nothing to do with any of that,” Jay said. “I just probably need to get some sleep. It’s been a long forty-eight hours.”
Crystal went on studying him. “You’ve got plenty of vacation time to take.”
“No! I mean, I have things to do. Maybe later. In a week or two.” He needed the section’s resources in London. HiQua was using hamsters. He needed something more than an optimistic outlook and a stunner.
“Is it your daughter?”
“What do you know about Cara?”
She held up her hands, palms out. “Nothing specific. Don’t worry.”
Jay wondered if that was concern in her eyes and, if it was, whether it was for him or her department.
She sighed and sat upright. A decision had been made. “All right, Jay. This is what we’ll do. You’re going to take a team to London and join Fourget in extricating Sandra Malone and your daughter from whatever mess they’re in. I’m putting Captain Harnois in charge here until you get back.” She paused to let him speak but he said nothing. “When you get back, I will review the details of your little adventure and come to a decision about whether it was justified as a legitimate K Section operation. If it was not, I will expect your resignation.”
Foresight: Timesplash 3 Page 15
