I smiled and shrugged. “I do now. I’m not as erudite as you, Milton, remember? Hell, I’d probably have to look erudite up!”
We both rose to our feet and I found I could not help myself. I flung my arms hard and tight around my friend, almost toppling him in the process. Then we stood back and looked each other up and down, me shaking my head in happy disbelief.
“Jeez, Milton. You got old.”
“And you...” he smiled, warmly. “...got Rachael.”
We both looked at her once more. The tears had cleared from her eyes, but she did not look at either of us. Instead, her gaze was fixed on the ground ahead once more. As perhaps it needed to be. She looked wide-eyed and innocent and, even caked in filth, she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever known. I smiled my own smile. “Indeed I did, Milton,” I said. “Indeed I did. But I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.” I nodded toward Ravven’s lifeless body. “Fuckwit nearly had me.”
“He won’t be missed.”
I shook my head with a smile. “So... what did I miss..?” I asked. “Was it destroyed?”
Porter smiled, though it seemed to carry a small sense of regret. He sighed through his nose. “Your little shit factory? Truthfully, I have no idea,” he said wryly. He raised an eyebrow, his leathery forehead forming deep ridges above. “The explosion certainly happened, but after that...?” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You weren’t there?” I asked.
“Good lord no,” Porter said, with a smile. “I came here about half an hour after you did. Long story; another time.” He smiled at the irony.
I could not help but look him up and down once more. He looked old. “So how long have you been here?” I asked.
Porter, now seated on a rough, long-chopped stump with the wheellock on his lap and the stick by his side, pursed his lips and thought. “A little over 40 years,” he said. “In truth that was a tad further back than I intended, but it’s been...” he searched for the word. “..fun. I have travelled and seen a lot of really delightful things. Long-lost empires, the birth of ideas and cultures, science and understanding beginning to take shape. These are the things we only ever read about and I have witnessed them first hand. I’ve been there at the birth. I don’t regret a moment.”
“So when did you come to Manningtree?”
“About ten years ago,” he mused. “I damaged my leg as I left our time. Like Rachael, the explosion managed to catch me and even though it healed it’s been getting worse again with age. So... I handed in my passport, so to speak, and came here to prepare for the young lady’s arrival. Like you, I had to spend a long time just sitting back and doing only what needed to be done.” He looked directly at me, apologetic. “I even had to make things happen and, for that, I am truly sorry.”
I placed my hand on his shoulder in warm acknowledgement. “It was how it had to be, I know that better than anyone.” Reluctantly, I had done exactly the same. We both understood.
Porter looked around. It did not feel that it was raining strongly, not any more, but the sound could still be heard padding the leaves of the trees which surrounded them.
“Have you given any thought to where you will go when this is done?” he asked.
I shook my head. I had considered somewhere in Europe, away from the horrors of the Civil War. Perhaps France, given that France was where Rachael’s mother would one day hail from, but I had made no plans. Not yet.
“I thought you might like to go home? Both of you,” Porter offered. He flicked his brows. “Well...” a shrug, “...sort of..?”
I looked puzzled and narrowed my eyes suspiciously. Porter just smiled back; knowingly.
“When I arrived here I, like you, had to find my way to - and passage from - La Paz. I suspect it was easier for you than for I. There were more ships taking the route and needing hands in your time, but not in mine. Besides, my leg was in a bad way in the months after I landed. There was no way I could work a passage, no matter what story I might spin and there is no room for dead weight on ships, not without money. Fortunately, however, I did find a ship: the Santo Tomás. The captain was a man called Sebastián Vizcaíno who had been surveying the island of California for some years. That’s what they believed it to be back then; an island. His son, Tomás, sailed with him, learning the ropes, quite literally. As he was just twelve, I offered to tutor the boy on ship and paid my passage that way. Sebastián and I became good friends through the journey and he ultimately took me to Japan. There he introduced me to Hasekura Tsunenaga, retainer of Date Masamune; daimyo of Sendai. I stayed with Hasekura and Masamune for over two years.” He picked up the gun and turned it in his hand as he had before, admiring. “Masamune had his craftsmen create this for me, based on the pistols Vizcaíno and his men carried with them.” He smiled, reminiscing. “It is the only one of its kind.”
I was listening intently; intrigued. “Anyway, it seems that Sebastián passed away in Mexico the year after I arrived, but Tomás now commands his own vessel, the Tres Reyes. On board he carries a son of his own and, in a little over four months’ time, the Tres Reyes sails from Lisbon on a lengthy route to New Spain, via Japan. For the same cost of a few hours’ tutorage a day, I can secure a passage to La Paz for both you and Rachael; if you would like..? With a little local knowledge,” he shrugged, “the location of some mineral deposits somewhere near Coloma perhaps, I suspect one could actually live very well and very free in this burgeoning New World..?”
I smiled and looked to Rachael, still torn by constant conflict both inside her head and at every turn. “That would be greatly appreciated, Milton, and I think it would help. Thank you so much.” I turned back to the old man. “And what about you? Will you come with us..? Clean air? No war? New beginning?”
Porter smiled warmly at the prospect, but shook his head all the same. “I am too old for more journeys such as those,” he said. “But no matter... I have my own plans. Within the week I shall be packed and headed for London. There is a poet there for whom I believe my mother had a special fondness. He is going blind and so increasingly has to dictate his prose to helpers - amanuenses. He is recruiting as we speak. In the years to come this man is to dictate his most epic work to date; one of the most powerful pieces of literature to ever see print.”
“Paradise Lost..?” I said. See? I was learning.
Porter nodded in admiration. “Paradise Lost. It would be really cool to be there, don’t you think? To actually see it take shape. Perhaps even help to inspire the odd word?”
“To complete the circle?”
Porter thought for a moment and smiled. “Perpetual circle, multiform, and mix. Nourish all things, let the ceaseless change.” He nodded, as though quietly pleased with himself. “I may let him have those words,” he said softly. Then he smiled like a naughty schoolboy. “After all, they’re his anyway.”
I laughed gently and looked around. At everything. At nothing. “This really is fucked up,” I said.
“Indeed it is,” Porter agreed, “but it is not over yet. There are circles we still need to complete, and they are far from pleasant.” He nodded toward Rachael. “You know you have to remove it, don’t you?”
I sighed and looked at Rachael again, but the smile had vacated my eyes. “She’s been through a lot.” I said, almost as though pleading. “More than even we can comprehend. This could break her.”
Porter nodded. He understood, of course he did, and he felt deeply - both for Rachael and for me I guess - but it changed nothing. After all, that was the point, wasn’t it? Nothing could be changed. This had to happen. “It may well break a hell of a lot more if you don’t do it.”
I looked around again, searching for answers or alternatives that had chosen to remain hidden in the deep shadows of the forest which surrounded us. Eventually, and reluctantly, I nodded. I guess I looked far from happy.
Porter removed a small coarse thick-glass vial of pale yellow liquid from the side pocket in his coat. “You’ll need this
,” he said. He handed it over.
I removed the cork stopper and sniffed at the oily fluid. It smelled of cloves. “What is it?”
“Eugenol; it will act as a local anaesthetic,” he said. “I picked it up during my time in Japan. This batch is made from the Illicium anisatum, or the Japanese star anise. It’s a plant they call shikimi. It’s unlikely that it will completely remove the pain, but it will help. I had considered an opium sponge, but we don’t know yet how long you have before Prudence is discovered. You may well need to move fast and I doubt that having Rachael ripped on heroin is going to help you very much.”
I smiled and took the vial, catching hold of Porter’s gnarled hand in the process and holding on to it for just a few meaningful seconds. I still could not believe that so very recently, when I had last shaken that hand, it had belonged to a twenty year old man. “Thank you,” I said. “From both of us.”
Porter nodded and reached back into his pocket. “I also brought you this. I didn’t know what you had..?”
He pulled out a small, rolled leather wallet and handed it over. I opened it to find what looked like a folding pocket knife decorated with a fine tortoiseshell handle. As I carefully extracted the blade he could see that it was clean, as sterile as possible and incredibly sharp. The edge glinted back at me as spots of rain flicked like sparks of light across its surface. Such scalpels had been widely available since the 15th century. They were designed to fit in the pocket and, because they folded, they remained sharper for longer and didn’t tear up the physicians’ clothes. Where Porter had obtained it I shuddered to think, but obtain it he had. Indeed, Porter had done everything anyone might of expected of him, and so much more.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I do recall saying I would do all I could to help. Oh, and I do believe I also have something that belongs to you…” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. A silver coin around thirty eight millimetres in diameter and about two and a half millimetres thick. My Peace Dollar. “It was very much a part of me during my journey,” he said, squirming, “but I thought you might like it back. It has no value to me, not in this place, but I do suspect that it is very valuable to you.”
He rested it on his thumb and then flicked it over. Surprisingly, I caught it at first grab.
“Above and beyond, Milton,” I said. I still could not believe it. “Above and beyond.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Wednesday, August 23, 2043. 3:00am.
5th & Alameda, Los Angeles, California.
Readings collated from a number of sources, including phone-enabled crowd networks, would show that at precisely 3:00am on Wednesday August 21st 2043, a tremor of magnitude 1.6 was logged on the computers at Los Angeles’ Primary Seismic Detection Centre (PSDC), located with the California Institute of Technology’s Seismological Laboratory. This would be the kind of seismic activity one might expect from either a very low-level earthquake or, in more extreme cases, a bomb going off somewhere in the city with the force of approximately 15 megajoules, equivalent to around 3kg of TNT. It’s epicentre would be traced to an area just off the corner of 5th and Alameda, an area occupied by KleinWork Research Technologies Building One.
Or, more precisely, formerly occupied by.
Because, less that 0.8 seconds later, a second reading was recorded on those same computers and this reading was much, much larger. This one registered 5.5 on the Richter scale - 1.6 greater than the force of the explosion which had reduced the Chernobyl nuclear plant and the surrounding area to a heap of rubble and radioactive dust as far back as 1986.
The results of both were devastating.
Even though he was completely protected by the buildings between himself and the KRT offices, Mike Knight still felt the force of the blast and could see the waves of dust and rubble flowing down the street to his left like a dark tsunami. He stumbled to the floor from a blast of wind whipping round the corner and it stole his breath, and his endless cursing. He had spent the last five minutes trying in vain to find any Chevique in the lot, let alone a blue one with a white hood. Hell, there were only eight cars occupying any of the thirty-odd spaces so it wasn’t like it would have been hard to find. He was starting to think that Mr. Gra… that Milton was going mad.
When he could finally step back out, very tentatively, into the main street and look along the blocks to the KRT building he had not long since vacated, he realised that he no longer cared one little bit whether the young man was mad or not. It was instantly clear from what he saw - or rather didn’t see - through the dust and smoke that, whether Milton had known it or not, his agreeing to feed the meter had literally saved a life tonight.
It had just happened to be his own.
Whilst the primary blast might have been enough to destroy a laboratory, including all the equipment and computer systems contained within it, this secondary blast spread outward with a force of 11 terrajoules, over seven hundred thousand times more powerful than the first. It continued to spread out sideways until it hit the hard rock which surrounded the subterranean laboratory. Being located underground and having nowhere else to go, the blast wave then started to back up on itself, lifting and intensifying. Ultimately, the resulting blast of freedom completely obliterated the entire ground floor of the KRT building, including every structurally integral support contained within it. With no supports, the twenty nine upper floors swiftly began to crumple down upon themselves, compressing the building like a used drinks can as each level was flattened hard against the one below. In a pulsing attack that lasted almost thirty seconds, heavy debris both from the explosion itself and from each subsequent collapse raced across the streets at over 600 miles per hour, smashing into cars and buildings and leaving a trail of almost incomprehensible destruction in its wake.
Given that it was 3:00am, the streets were by no means busy, but nor were they empty. Mike staggered upstream through the fleeing crowd, still unsure as to exactly what had happened. The scene was quickly becoming one of carnage, panic and complete devastation and a state of emergency was swiftly imposed.
It was ultimately reported that a number of people who had been located close to the site itself as the blast went off were killed instantly and many more were injured either critically or, ultimately, fatally. The number of walking wounded was soon rising well above the two hundred mark. There had been reports that within the KRT building itself had been two members of staff, reportedly security guards. This was seemingly confirmed by their families when neither of them returned home. Short of a few shattered or charred personal belongings, definitive evidence of these men’s remains were never found. They seemed to, quite simply, evaporate.
Specialist investigators, brought in at the direct request (and under strict instructions from) Senator Barbara Scalise who had decided to oversee the crisis management teams, managed to ascertain that a bomb had indeed been placed either in or under the KRT laboratory some considerable time before the explosion took place. What led to the explosion being intensified to such a degree could only be speculated at, but the theory was that some experiment, chemical or process within the laboratory itself had contributed heavily toward creating the second, far more devastating, explosion. KRT, and Scalise's, we're giving nothing away.
Scalise herself spent most of the day briefing and de-briefing her specialist team, fending off journalists and city officials and doing everything in her power to bolster a sudden drop in diplomatic relations with France who, on learning of the Los Angeles explosion, had not taken long to draw the necessary parallels. Both sites were KRT owned and operated, both sites contained laboratories whose experiments were, for now at least, unknown and both sites had been destroyed entirely by explosions whose magnitudes were almost unprecedented in the 21st century.
Explosions which had occurred exactly one week apart. To the second.
What the public would never know, what the investigators would never know, and what even Scalise herself would never know, was that there was
one more common factor linking both the Alameda explosion and the explosion in Cardou, France. It was something that even the person responsible for planting the initial devices could never have foreseen.
Both laboratories had, without any official reason, been in full operation at the time of the initial blast.
FIFTY-FIVE
Friday, July 21, 1645.
Launderwood Edge, Essex, England.
In the dwindling shards of rain I sat on the edge of the Arl’d Well and held up the wooden cross, turning it slowly toward the light. The world around me was quiet and, for the first time in as long as I could recall, so was my mind. I had carved this very cross from the body of Big Red, Diamond, a long time from now, and given it to Rachael as a gift. Now, here I was carving letters in its face with a 17th Century pocket scalpel. The deep wood, cochineal from the steady infusion of Rachael’s blood, seemed almost black now and it allowed my own words to shine back at me clearly:
MEDIUS CRUX EXCUCIO RELEVO
‘The centre of the cross shall relieve me’, with small indentations placed beneath each of the letters MDXCLV: 1645. Rachael, seemingly reaching out and asking someone to help her ‘in 1645’. Those were the words that had told me precisely when I had needed to be here; and here they were again, being carved not by Rachael, but by me. To tell me when to come. They looked a dog’s dinner, if I’m honest, and I’d never be employed as a mason or a woodsmith, but it didn’t matter. I already knew they would be legible when it mattered.
Yeah, this really was seriously fucked up.
Rachael had been really good, considering. Better than good, in fact, an angel. As I had approached her, the scalpel hidden as I readied to console and appease her, she had simply ignored me and instead unbuttoned her top to reveal the upper part of her breast; the cross still pronounced and stretching her dirty skin. She either knew what I was doing, or she just wanted the damn thing out. Possibly both. Clearly, along with the cross, there was also some degree of understanding still embedded within her. I would coax more of that out too. Much more.
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