The Empire of Time

by David Wingrove

  Even now, even as it’s all falling apart, they go through the motions. Not that the guard knows. Not as I know.

  The sun room is, in fact, a great, glass-walled balcony, looking west. The view is spectacular, the peaks of the Thuringer Wald dominating the skyline. There’s a long bar against the back wall and plush white leather settees facing the view. A steward looks up from behind the bar, then hurries over, all politeness.

  ‘What would the Meister like?’

  ‘A beer. A Beck’s if you have one.’

  He nods and hurries away, leaving me to walk over to the great curving glass and look down, five hundred metres and more, to the courtyard far below. People are milling about down there, getting into transports, hurrying like ants, for what good it’ll do them.

  It is seventeen minutes to five. Far to the east, more than a thousand miles from where I’m standing now, the second phase of the invasion is under way. Manfred’s southern army is sweeping north even as I wait for my beer, making directly for Kiev, at whatever cost. The Russians, shocked by the ferocity of the fighting, are reassessing their strategy. Three of their seven armies have been over-run and the situation is becoming serious. They have already recalled all reservists, and their eastern forces – under-strength and ill-equipped to fight a major campaign – have been brought west to beef up the defences surrounding their capital, Moscow.

  They have begun to think the unthinkable.

  The steward returns, hands me my beer, drops of ice-cold perspiration on the glass. I sip at it and smile my thanks, then turn back, studying, for a moment, the way the afternoon sunlight falls upon the distant mountains.

  Between them and where I stand, the land rises and falls in great folds of green, the Gera river snaking its way like a thread of blue across the rugged terrain.

  There’s no sign, from where I stand, of the great north German megapolis that sprawls like some deadly crystal growth across the continent, from Amsterdam in the west, to Berlin in the east. From here one might almost believe that it never happened; that the Germany of rolling hills and dense, dark copses still existed. A Germany of castles and principalities, of Saxons and Westphalians, Thuringians, Prussians, and all the myriad other German tribes.

  I have seen it all, and nothing – nothing – is as poignant as this. To see the last of it. Before the Earth glows molten red. Before the Nuclear Winter that’s to follow.

  I sit, relaxing, content to wait for once, to let it all wash over me. And it’s then that she comes, ducking beneath the lintel, then straightening, her head, even then, barely scraping beneath the ceiling.

  ‘Otto?’

  I turn on the settee and look across at her, surprised.

  ‘Gudrun … What are you doing here?’

  She smiles, then slowly comes across. ‘I came to see you.’

  I stand, facing her. ‘How did you …?’

  ‘My uncle’s secretary. He told me you were here.’

  ‘Ah …’

  The settees are huge, big enough even for her, and so she settles beside me, reaching across to take my hand, mine, as ever, engulfed within her own.

  The steward is hovering again, clearly overawed by Gudrun’s presence.

  ‘My lady …’ he says, in an reverent whisper, and bows so low I almost think he’s going to touch his knees with his forehead.

  ‘A glass of wine. A Lohengrin …’

  She turns her attention back to me, then grins, seeing what I’ve placed upon the low table to the side. She lifts the lavender-glazed cup and turns it carefully in her hands, understanding its significance.

  ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘I brought it back with me. Gehlen must have it, in his trunk. It’s a loop.’

  She nods, then sets it down again. Looking back at me, she smiles again, a pure radiance in her face. ‘I’m glad you didn’t go, Otto. I would have been sad not to see you one last time.’

  Me too. How sad I hadn’t realised until that moment. I squeeze her hand, and feel her respond.

  ‘How much time have we?’

  ‘Until the morning. Only …’

  Her eyes look a query at me. ‘Only?’

  ‘There are things I have to do.’

  She nods, a trace of sadness returning to her eyes. ‘What is it like, Otto, where you come from?’

  I smile. ‘It isn’t really a place at all. More a series of connected rooms. And there’s the platform … ‘

  ‘The platform?’

  ‘When I jump back. That’s where I go. Where the women are.’

  But I notice that she’s looking past me, and I turn and see at once what’s caught her attention. Two craft, coming in low – maybe no more than fifty metres above the surface.

  ‘Ours,’ says the steward, as he hands Gudrun her drink. ‘They’ll be coming in from—’

  But we don’t hear what he says, because suddenly an alarm is sounding, and the two craft have peeled off – one to the left, one to the right.

  There’s a sudden grinding sound from above our heads – the sound, I realise, of a massive gun-turret rotating to face the incoming threat – and then it opens up, sending out a vivid trace of shells

  The two fighters change trajectory, cutting back in, heading straight for us now, coming in fast, and I realise that if they keep on their current course, they’ll hit the castle right slap bang where we are.

  Other guns have also opened up now, and a continuous, deafening hail of shells and lasers are arcing through the air. But still the craft come on.

  And then, suddenly, one explodes, a searing ball of flame leaving its after-image on the retina, yet even as it does, so two missiles snake out from the other craft, cutting the air like torpedoes, haring directly towards us at a frightening speed.

  I close my eyes and place my free hand on my chest, preparing to jump right out of there, when there’s an enormous explosion; one that makes the whole castle shudder. My eyes jerk open, to see a great ball of smoke rolling up into the sky, fragments of superheated metal cascading into the courtyard far below.

  ‘Close,’ the steward mutters.

  My ears are ringing. I swallow, then look to Gudrun. She sighs, then gives a little shudder.

  ‘Guildsmen,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ she says, shocked by what I’ve said.

  ‘I said they were Guildsmen. It’s civil war, Gudrun. Meister Adelbert has had enough.’

  ‘Enough? But he’s—’

  ‘A powerful man,’ Gehlen finishes, stepping alongside.

  I look up at him. ‘I thought you had work to do.’

  He looks back at me clearly now, like a veil has lifted from his eyes. ‘I did. But it didn’t take me long. I’ve finished now. It was …’ He shrugs. ‘I’ve left it on the board. If you’re interested. Which I think you may be.’

  Gehlen turns, looking to the Princess, then bows. ‘My lady …’

  ‘Hans.’ She leans forward and picks up the lavender-glazed cup. ‘You must take this. Put it in your trunk. It’s … necessary.’

  ‘A loop?’ he asks, looking to me. ‘Like the toy?’

  I nod. ‘A loop.’

  Gehlen smiles. ‘This is strange. I mean … that you’re here at all. It means that it works.’

  I smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you can get me out of here.’

  ‘I …’

  I am about to say no, but I stop dead, my heart racing suddenly. Why not? After all, all we have to do is get a team back here and fit a focus into Gehlen’s chest. Even this late, there’s time. Time for the graft to take, that is.

  But it would mean leaving his wife and children to their fate, because there’d be no time to get them done. And besides it isn’t always safe – not on children their age.

  I’m quite certain that I wouldn’t want to make such a decision. But Gehlen might think differently.

  ‘Wait here,’ I say, meaning to jump. Yet even as I say the words, I notice a movement in the air beyond Gehlen, then hear laught
er. Familiar laughter.

  Reichenau steps out and points the laser directly at my head. He’s grinning, like this is the ultimate joke.

  Gehlen whirls about. ‘Michael …?’

  ‘My name is Reichenau,’ he says, introducing himself to Gudrun, ‘Michael Reichenau.’ And, stepping forward smartly, he rips Gehlen’s shirt open and, with what’s clearly a practised move, slaps a small, flesh-coloured circle against his chest.

  ‘There,’ he says, smiling across at me. ‘Mine.’

  ‘Yours?’ And then I realise. It’s the same kind of ‘plug’ as was used on Ernst. Coded to Gehlen’s genes, no doubt.

  I’m about to say something, when Reichenau turns and gestures to the steward.

  ‘You! More drinks! A Lahmung for me, and make it a large one!’

  He gestures towards the settees with the gun.

  ‘Come now. Sit down everybody … We’ve so much to talk about.’

  143

  Gehlen sits there, deeply uncomfortable. The plug on his chest is itching, only he can’t get beneath it to scratch it and he can’t remove it. Reichenau, sitting across from him, looks on, gun in one hand, drink in the other, amused.

  Gudrun stares at him angrily. ‘What manner of creature are you?’

  ‘I am a Doppelgehirn,’ Reichenau answers coldly. ‘I was made thus, in the laboratories of the Konigsturm itself.’ He smiles icily. ‘You might say I am a king’s man.’

  ‘And that?’ Gudrun asks, indicating the plug.

  ‘It’s as I said. It makes him mine. Ask Otto. He knows.’

  Both Gehlen and Gudrun look to me, but I can’t answer them.

  Reichenau turns to me, waving the gun idly before him. ‘Work it out. I’m sure you can. Only don’t take too long. I know you won’t.’

  He’s right. In fact, I’ve worked it out already. He needed me to save Gehlen, so that Gehlen might have the chance to ‘discover’ the time equations. But now that’s done, he wants Gehlen for himself. Or – to be precise – for the equations that are in Gehlen’s head.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ I ask. ‘You have what you want.’

  Reichenau raises his glass. ‘I thought it would be pleasant to share a glass or two … to toast our success.’ Again he smiles, his over-large mouth stretched thin. ‘That was some maze, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’ Only I sense that I haven’t even got to the edges of this maze. Not yet.

  I stand. If I can’t do anything here, then I can at least jump back and change things earlier. But Reichenau is smiling again.

  ‘No point,’ he says. ‘I only change it back … And here we sit.’

  I sit again, sip at my Beck’s, and stare out at the sunlit mountains. Why is he waiting? Why hasn’t he just jumped? And then it hits me.

  The ‘plug’ is like a focus. It needs time to interact with the body. Maybe not as much time as an actual focus, but … Reichenau finishes his drink, then throws the glass aside and stands. ‘Wrong,’ he says to me. ‘It’s immediate. But you’d have found that out.’

  He reaches out, placing a hand on Gehlen’s shoulder, then looks to me and smiles. ‘Until the next time, eh?’

  And they’re gone. Like they were never there. I look to Gudrun, but she’s looking down, into her lap, and I see – now that I’ve freed myself of my obsession with Reichenau – that she’s been crying.

  I walk over to her and take her hand once more. ‘What?’ I say gently. ‘What is it?’

  She looks up, her big blue eyes staring back at mine moistly. ‘It’s nothing. Really, it’s nothing.’ She sniffs deeply, then, forcing herself to smile, points past me.

  ‘The cup,’ she says. ‘It has to be placed in Gehlen’s trunk, doesn’t it?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then let’s do that. Let’s at least get that right.’

  ‘Okay …’ And as I think where Gehlen’s trunk is, I remember what else is in that room, and what Gehlen said to me no more than fifteen minutes back.

  I’ve finished now … I’ve left it on the board. If you’re interested. Which I think you may be …

  Interested? I laugh, and Gudrun stares at me, astonished.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Stay here,’ I say, grabbing up the cup. ‘I promise I’ll be back.’ And I hurry from the room, heading for the lift.

  144

  Diederich stares at the screen a moment longer, then looks up, giving me a beaming smile.

  ‘It’s all here. Everything we need. And more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Yes. He worked it out. Look.’ And Diederich flicks through several pages until he comes to what might as well, to my eyes, be ancient Babylonian.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s Ernst’s position in Space-Time,’ Hecht says, coming into the room. ‘Gehlen pinpointed exactly where it is, and thus where the leakage was going to. That’s the equation for it.’

  ‘I thought we’d lost Gehlen.’

  ‘We did. But now we’ve snatched him back. Or part of him …’

  ‘You’ve …’

  ‘No time,’ Hecht says. ‘We need to get a team back there to Orhdruf straight away. If we can plug the leak …’

  Ernst will go free.

  ‘A team?’ I ask.

  ‘Three of us,’ Hecht says, and looks to me meaningfully, as if to ask ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘Why, yes …’

  ‘Then let’s go. Horst … make a copy of that. We’ll need it when we’re there.’

  145

  We jump back in – Hecht and Diederich and I – directly into the room where the singularity’s kept.

  We’re suited up, of course, even though it’s switched off right now.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ I ask, staring at that dark absence that’s at the centre of it all.

  ‘We’re going to flood it with energy, that’s what,’ Diederich says enthusiastically. ‘In fact, we’re going to push so much energy through it that it’s going to overload.’

  ‘And what good will that do?’

  ‘No good at all,’ Hecht answers, ‘here.’

  ‘But if we’re right,’ Diederich adds. ‘That is, if Gehlen’s figures are correct …’

  I don’t understand it at all. Least of all why we’re inside here if we’re going to flood the black hole with energy – presumably its own.

  ‘But how do we …?’

  In answer, Diederich takes something from his pocket and holds it up. It looks like a pebble. A tiny, silver pebble. ‘This here. We just toss it in like so …’

  And, like a child playing a game, he casually casts the tiny, silver pebble into the heart of the singularity where it vanishes.

  I’m about to say something when I hear voices from the room next door. Gehlen’s voice, and then my own.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Now out,’ Hecht says, placing his hand to his chest. And like ghosts, he, and then Diederich, and finally I, vanish.

  146

  ‘No wonder,’ I say, back at Four-Oh, as I step out of my suit, thinking of the way the singularity changed colour so spectacularly while Gehlen and I were in the room with it. ‘But what was that?’

  ‘The gizmo?’ Diederich combs back his thinning hair with his fingers and laughs. ‘That’s something Gehlen came up with. And not before time. He’s been thinking on the problem for the best part of two centuries now.’

  ‘Ah … But has it worked?’

  Hecht shrugs off the suit trousers and nods. ‘If you mean, has it freed Ernst, then yes. Only …’

  ‘Tell him,’ Diederich says. ‘It won’t harm.’

  I frown. ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘He has his own platform,’ Hecht says.

  ‘He?’

  ‘Reichenau. At least, that’s what Gehlen now thinks. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. And we think we know how. The black hole, at Orhdruf. He stole it.’

  I laugh. ‘He stole a black hole?’

  Diederich nods. ‘So Ge
hlen reckons.’

  ‘And we think we know where,’ Hecht says.

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘You remember that huge gap in space and time we ran across, after Seydlitz’s “Barbarossa” project in 1952?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When we over-loaded the time-anchor, we made it unstable. In effect, it broke loose.’

  ‘And?’

  Diederich looks away. ‘We didn’t realise …’

  ‘Realise what?’

  Hecht gives a long sigh, then answers me. ‘Imagine you’ve got a really taut steel hawser, keeping a ship tight to the shore, and then you cut it. Imagine it flying back, all of the tension in the cable suddenly released, so that it whips back. Well … it was like that. When we made the time-anchor unstable, it whipped back through time, burning a huge great hole through it.’

  ‘A hole?’

  ‘More like a gash,’ Diederich says.

  ‘It’ll heal,’ Hecht says, ‘given time. Only …’

  ‘Only that’s why,’ Diederich finishes for him.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why we can’t see him. Reichenau … Because that’s where he’s been. Inside that tear in Space-Time. Only now that we know where it is …’

  ‘Back in 1952?’

  Hecht nods.

  ‘Then why don’t we …?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Hecht says. ‘Not until we know more. Anyway, there’s something else we have to do first.’

  ‘Ernst?’

  Hecht nods. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s go bring him home.’

  147

  The clearing is different this time. The bivouac-style tents are still there, and the stalls, yet there’s no sign of Ernst. The place is still and dark, no shining presence in the air.

  I look to Hecht, alarmed, but he seems unperturbed. He walks on, towards one of the larger bivouacs and, ducking beneath the awning, goes inside.

  I follow, and there, on the floor, surrounded by a kneeling host of pilgrims – two or three dozen of the ragged fellows – is Ernst. He looks deathly pale and his breathing is faint. As I step closer, he mumbles something and then groans, such pain in so weak a sound.