Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01)

by Jonathan Green

  And then there was no more time for reminiscing about what might have been. Time had caught up with him.

  Ulysses turned, and with a mumbled “Here goes nothing!” threw himself into the retina-searing sphere of light...

  ...HE WAS FALLING through time again, the past, the present, the future...

  A myriad possibilities...

  An infinite number of potential realities...

  He saw the fingerprints of the Creator across eternity...

  A ball of incandescent heat, like a captured sun, fell through the years. The chronosphere left a trail of unresolved potentialities in its wake, whilst he lay curled at its centre, shivering as impossible fractal patterns of frost etched their way across his exposed skin.

  The furious heat of the tamed sun evaporated, the shell of the chronosphere melting away like ice on a magma floe...

  ...THE LIGHT FADED and Ulysses Quicksilver was plunged into darkness. His body felt uncomfortably hot.

  His nose wrinkled in response to the distinctly unpleasant smell of burnt hair and scorched fabric.

  Slowly, he stood up.

  He felt vitrified soil beneath him, as hard and smooth as glass. It splintered and cracked with every move he made.

  He peered bewilderedly about him, not knowing where – or even when – he was.

  The cold gust of wind took him by surprise.

  He took a deep breath, sniffing the air as he did so.

  He looked up, the all-enveloping darkness that had first met his gaze softening to midnight blue.

  As he blinked the last of the grey patches from before his eyes, he made out pinpricks of light in the heavens above. The luminous white ball of the moon gazed down at him from behind the shadows of clouds.

  He took a wary step forward, the earth beneath his feet snapping like sugar glass.

  Wisps of smoke rose from his suit. Running a hand through his scorched hair, he realised that it was standing on end.

  He took several deep breaths, keen to clear the stink of burnt hair from his nostrils.

  He was able to make out other scents now. The resinous aroma of pine needles. A dampness on the air. Leaf mould.

  And then the night lit up all around him as half a dozen torch-beams pierced the darkness. Somewhere nearby an engine roared and he was caught in the searing glare of sodium headlights.

  “Halt!” a harsh voice shouted over the sudden revving and the clatter of rifles taking aim.

  The voice was speaking German.

  “Stop, in the name of the Führer! Raise your hands where I can see them and do not move if you value your life. You are now a prisoner of the Third Reich. Sieg heil!”

  Slowly, obligingly, Ulysses did as he was told...

  ...HE CAME TO, to find himself being slapped repeatedly across the face.

  Blearily he opened his eyes, struggling to focus on the person in front of him. There was the impression of an armoured helm.

  Losing the battle with consciousness, he phased out again for a moment.

  “Wake up!” a voice snapped. It sounded like it was coming from another room.

  Ulysses struggled to open his eyes but his eyelids felt as heavy as lead.

  “I said wake up!” the voice came again, louder this time. It was accompanied by a mighty blow across the face that snapped his head round, shocking him into opening his eyes.

  The chair he had been tied to rocked on its legs, threatening to tip over.

  There was blood in his mouth. Mustering what strength he could, he spat a great gobbet onto the stone-flagged floor. Probing at the inside of his cheeks with the tip of his tongue, he felt a molar give and wondered how many more blows it would take before the tooth came out altogether.

  A claw-like hand grabbed hold of his chin, and he winced. All he could see of his gravel-voiced interrogator, under the glare of the lamps, was the silhouette of a hooded figure. It appeared almost monastic.

  Blinking against the intensity of the arc-lights Ulysses concentrated on the shaded face in front of him.

  It was metal; he was sure of it.

  “What’s your plan, eh?” the helmed figure demanded.

  Ulysses stared at the metal mask in confusion. Try as he might he was struggling to recall who his interrogator was, where he was, what he was doing there, and why he was being interrogated at all.

  And then he remembered.

  Peering up through eyes blackened and swollen from the beatings he had received he saw the metallic faceplate more clearly now.

  He saw the thin slit in imitation of a mouth, through which the desperate man’s rasping words came. He saw the rectangles that had been cut for his eyes. They were lit from within by an eerie ice-blue glow as the ion mask laboured to stabilise the cellular structure of the man’s face, and prevent it from collapsing altogether.

  “Daniel Dashwood,” Ulysses said with a chuckle...

  ...ULYSSES GASPED FOR breath. He felt a chill on his brow from the evaporating beads of sweat.

  He looked around himself anxiously, and soon realised he was only seeing through his left eye. The right seemed to be covered by something. He tried to blink, but his right eye stubbornly refused to respond.

  He was in some kind of laboratory, that much was plain. Flickering, inconstant sparks of blue-white light lit the chamber, revealing bare stone walls, banks of primitive Babbage-esque engines, and workbenches supporting a plethora of glass tanks. The tanks were full of a soupy yellow-green fluid, and suspended within that murky miasma...

  A host of hideous memories – or were they hallucinations? – abruptly assailed his waking mind...

  Masked surgeons. Glinting, razor-edged scalpels. The glare of arc-lamps. Fingers probing where fingers were never supposed to go...

  Ulysses gasped in shock and tried to sit up, but he was prevented from doing so by the leather harness that had been used to secure him to the operating table.

  He could move his head, but that was all.

  He started to panic. He had been somewhere like this before.

  More memories...

  An operating theatre, its tiled walls crusted with dried bloodstains...

  His heart quickened, his breathing nothing more than shallow panting gasps.

  It was said that after it was gone, a man did not remember the pain he had once had to endure. And it was a good thing too, otherwise Ulysses would have gone mad, he was sure of it.

  However, he was aware of a dull ache in his face. It was his eye. He went to rub it, before remembering that he couldn’t move his hands.

  Tensing his arm, Ulysses tried once more to extricate himself. He gritted his teeth as the leather cuff rubbed the sparse flesh of his wrist raw. It was no good; no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t going to be able to free himself that way.

  He stopped and tried to relax, hoping to clear his mind so that he might come up with a way out of the fix he was in.

  As he lay there, pondering his predicament, the sounds of the lab filtered through to his conscious mind.

  There was the rising hum of electrical capacitors, the crackle of discharging energy, and the wheezing hiss of a bellows, the rattle of an Enigma engine processing streams of data, and the glub-glub of air bubbles in a tank of fluid. Lastly there was the clatter of surgical instruments in a kidney dish and a murmur of voices. It took Ulysses a moment to register that they were speaking German.

  “He’s awake, Doktor.”

  A voice; young, male and subservient. It sounded strangely familiar.

  “Is he now?” came another voice. This one was more thickly accented and cracked with age, or with insanity.

  There was a metallic crash as something was dropped into a pan. It was followed by the sound of footsteps ringing from the floor of the laboratory.

  Moments later Ulysses found himself staring up at an emaciated spectre in a blood-stained surgical gown, the splatters glistening wetly in the crackling lightning bursts.

  “Ah, so he is,” the scarecrow-like
creature said in its broken voice. Various magnifying lenses were mounted on a metal clamp around the creature’s head.

  Pulling away its surgeon’s mask, the freak regarded him with a disquieting death’s head leer. The demonic doctor was smiling at him.

  “Good evening. And how are you feeling?”

  Ulysses stared at the gaunt face in abject horror. How was he feeling? What kind of a question was that?

  “But how rude of me. I have not yet introduced myself,” the deathly surgeon fretted. “I am Doktor Folter of the Frankenstein Corps, and I shall be your surgeon for the duration of this procedure.”

  Ulysses swallowed hard. “Procedure?”

  “But of course. It is a long time since we have had any spare parts of such quality to work with, even despite the injuries you have sustained since being brought here. But thankfully, most of that is only superficial damage. Your left arm especially,” he said almost hungrily. “Such strong and supple flesh. So young and fresh.”

  “My eye,” Ulysses mumbled. “What’s happened to my eye?”

  “This eye, you mean?” Folter said casually, holding up a pair of forceps. Gripped within its metal teeth was a glistening ball of white jelly, shreds of fine muscle still attached...

  ...ULYSSES STEPPED OVER the body of the guard. The soldier had been unconscious ever since Victor Frankenstein’s creation had smashed the man’s head into the wall hard enough to knock his eyeballs out of his skull. Past this first obstacle, Ulysses squeezed past the hulking giant, which brought him to the threshold of the cell. There he froze.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.

  The young man standing in the middle of the room gave him an appraising look and then, smiling, took a step forward. He offered Ulysses his hand.

  Ulysses stared at him dumbly.

  He had seen the young man’s photograph a thousand times – with his instantly recognisable bushy moustache and strong jaw-line. Then there was the painting that had once hung on the wall behind his desk, back in his study at his home in Mayfair. And most importantly, his own memories of the man.

  He had never looked this young, of course, but the man was still, unmistakeably, his father.

  “Quicksilver,” the young man said, Ulysses dumbly taking the proffered hand and shaking it. “Hercules Quicksilver.”

  Ulysses mouthed the words as his father spoke them, continuing to stare at the haggard-looking man in stunned amazement.

  “And you are?”

  “What?” Ulysses mumbled, coming out of his catatonic stupor.

  “Your name; what is it?”

  Ulysses’ mind raced as he tried to think of what to say.

  “Shelley,” he suddenly blurted out.

  “I can honestly say that I am very pleased to meet you,” Hercules said, shaking the older man firmly by the hand. The older man who was, in reality, the son he did not yet know he would have.

  Ulysses continued to stare at him, tongue-tied and open mouthed.

  “Now, if you’ll pardon me for saying so,” Hercules said, taking charge, “if this is a rescue, shouldn’t we be about escaping?”

  “This way,” said Katarina Kharkova, the blonde-haired vampire appearing within the devastated doorway.

  “Excuse me,” Hercules said, giving the looming giant a wary glance as he squeezed past.

  Still in a state of shock, Ulysses turned to follow...

  ...HIS PULSE QUICKENING, he strode between the pillars supporting the castle sepulchre’s vaulted ceiling, heading in the direction of the clinging shadows and spasmodic bursts of lightning. Half-hidden by the colossal columns was something Ulysses had never thought to see again.

  The broken concentric rings of the gyroscope had gone, replaced by two interlocking rings joined perpendicular to one another. The gleaming steel rings bristled with connectors and electrodes. From these the barely contained energies harnessed by the device dissipated into the atmosphere. Despite looking quite different from its last iteration, it was still unquestionably the same machine that had landed him in all this trouble in the first place.

  But now, as he stood before the Sphere, bathed in its crackling glow, to Ulysses it appeared as nothing less than a beacon of hope; the means to his salvation. A second chance.

  A way home.

  The device was already running up to speed. Someone was planning on teleporting out of there; that much was clear. To Ulysses’ mind it could only be one person.

  Darting anxious glances about him, Ulysses’ knuckles whitened around the butt of the gun in his hand. Pressed flat against a pillar, he searched for his quarry, his heart playing his ribcage like a xylophone.

  The horrifically-disfigured and molecularly-unstable sociopath Nazi collaborator Daniel Dashwood was here, Ulysses was sure of it. With the Icarus Cannon destroyed and Schloss Adlerhorst succumbing to the Iron Eagle’s attack, the traitor was clearly planning on cutting his losses and getting out of there while he still could.

  But then he hadn’t counted on Ulysses Quicksilver catching up with him.

  “Ten minutes and counting,” came the dulcet synthesised tones of the Enigma machine on the other side of the crypt.

  Ten minutes. More than enough time to bring Dashwood’s audacious scheme to an end. Perhaps even enough time to make his own escape back to the future.

  Warily, Ulysses peered around the column.

  He was immediately transfixed by the object resting atop its own specially fashioned iron dais. He stared at the whirling rings of the device as it powered up to launch speed.

  It truly was a wonder of German engineering. With all the resources of the Third Reich at his disposal, Dashwood had achieved in a matter of months what had taken Alexander Oddfellow several years.

  Taking a calming breath, tightening his grip on the pistol, Ulysses stepped out from behind the pillar. He ducked behind it again immediately as the screech of unoiled hinges carried across the vault. It had come from the other side of the sepulchral chamber.

  Ulysses froze. His heart was pounding so hard he was sure that whoever else was there in the chamber could hear it echoing off the walls.

  And then, over the thrumming whirr of the energising Sphere, there came a scrabbling sound from somewhere behind him.

  A booming clang echoed across the chamber as the protesting hinges gave and the steel door banged open. It was followed by the tap-tap-tap of running footsteps and then a familiar voice exclaimed, “Damn! What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know,” came a young woman’s voice in response to Hercules Quicksilver’s enquiry.

  Panic-stricken, Ulysses risked another glance from behind the pillar. Hercules and his companion had no idea of the danger they were walking into.

  For a moment he considered calling out to them, warning them that they were not alone. But Dashwood – and he was certain that it was Dashwood lurking in the shadows at the back of the crypt – already knew they were here. He was doubtless moving to deal with the threat they posed at that very moment. If Ulysses called out to them, the only person who would benefit would be Dashwood. The villain would be alerted to the fact that Ulysses was there too, and the precious element of surprise would be gone.

  Creeping around the crumbling column, Ulysses made his way ever closer to the Sphere platform. He glimpsed movement at the periphery of his vision, and ducked out of sight once more. His back to another pillar now, he peered to his right across the chamber.

  And then he saw them, still making their way towards the Sphere. Hercules was leading the way, his female companion – the one called Cat – padding along behind him. She was moving as quietly as her feline codename suggested.

  “Nine minutes and counting,” came the Valkyrie voice of the Enigma engine.

  In the time it took to blink, a shadow detached itself from the darkness and then Dashwood was there, seizing Cat from behind, his right arm around her neck. The woman gave a startled cry that quickly became a choking wheeze.

  U
lysses stared in appalled horror at the man, the same man who had stolen fire from heaven. It was he who had brought the future crashing so catastrophically into the past and had tortured Ulysses to the very edge of sanity.

  Even as Hercules made to go to the girl’s aid, Dashwood – the ion mask still hiding his face – raised the gun in his right hand and put it to the woman’s head.

  Before Hercules realised what was going on, Ulysses was already breaking into a sprint.

  “Not so fast!” the masked man said as Hercules turned to confront him. “I have your woman, so I wouldn’t try anything clever if I were you. Or anything stupid, for that matter...”

  The villain’s voice trailed off. There was confusion in the man’s eerily-lit eyes.

  “Dashwood!” Hercules exclaimed.

  “Wait a minute,” the other spluttered. “You’re not Quicksilver.” His arm went limp and the gun slipped from his captive’s temple.

  “Oh but I am,” Hercules snarled and sprang at the man.

  In that split second, Dashwood’s strength of purpose returned.

  Without a moment’s hesitation he pointed the gun at Hercules and fired –

  – just as Ulysses collided with his father.

  ...ULYSSES QUICKSILVER OPENED his one remaining eye. All he could see was a blur of black shadows and ice-white light. He felt cold all over, even though there was sweat beading on his brow.

  He had been shot. He felt sick with pain; a dull, throbbing ache in his right shoulder.

  He blinked, trying to clear his clouded vision, and sat up, feeling woozy.

  There in front of him was a mound of rocks and rubble as high as the vaulted ceiling of the chamber.

  He felt the insistent throbbing in his bones and knew that he wasn’t out of danger yet.

  He turned to the source of the pulsing light. The Sphere was still active, tearing a hole through time and space that should never have existed.