Eschaton

by Andrew Hastie

  Without a knock, the office door opened, and Edward Kelly strolled in. He was dressed in his usual eccentric manner: a cloak of ravens’ feathers fluttered from his shoulders, a jerkin of black studded leather and a pair of long black boots. She couldn’t help but notice that he’d painted his nails purple.

  How has it come to this? Ravana said to herself, forcing her mouth into a welcoming smile. ‘Grand Seer, thank you for your time. Please, take a seat.’

  ‘What are your thoughts on the Eschaton crisis?’ she asked as Kelly made himself comfortable.

  Kelly pretended to hold up a set of cards as if he were playing bridge. ‘A game of three hands — you are holding the clubs, but not aces, and the jack has gone missing.’

  His riddles drove Ravana to distraction, and nothing was ever simple with the Grand Seer, but she could make some sense of his words.

  ‘Does Lord Dee have a better suit?’ she asked.

  Kelly’s eyes widened slightly as if he hadn’t expected her to play along.

  ‘He has the King of diamonds — although still a little rough around the edges.’

  ‘And the third hand?’

  He folded the imaginary cards away and produced a real ace from his pocket. ‘Belongs to a demon. It bids for hearts, but its own is as black as spades.’

  Ravana was struggling to make sense of the last part when Kelly lifted one finger.

  ‘And don’t neglect the dragons. They will be needed sooner than you think.’

  ‘There’s an attack coming?’

  ‘Perhaps. A ruff at least, but one should never rely on a trick — play your best hand before the coup en passant.’ He waved his hand, and the card disappeared.

  Kelly stood up to leave, buckling his feather cloak back onto his shoulders with a golden clasp of two intertwining snakes.

  ‘Wait. My son — the jack. Is he still alive? How can I reach him?’

  The seer’s eyes glazed as they rolled back into his head, the whites staring at her like a blind man. His fingers made small movements in the air as if he were playing some unseen musical instrument.

  When he spoke, his voice was thin and distant. ‘Your son is changing suit. What returns may not be a card you wish to play.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  His eyes returned to normal. ‘Look to the past. He will be like a Phoenix, reborn in fire.’

  71

  Debriefing

  The eighth mission team were clustered around the blackboard, taking it in turns to add their own opinions to the algorithm. Josh and Caitlin watched them argue over the rights and wrongs of their plan, and like squabbling children, no one seemed to be able to agree on what happened.

  ‘Will everybody sit down!’ ordered Nostradamus as he entered the auditorium.

  They dutifully took their seats, leaving the board covered in a confusing set of random notes and rubbings-out.

  ‘Does one of you want to tell me what happened?’ the old man said, staring directly at Bartholomew.

  ‘It was my fault,’ admitted Josh, standing up. ‘I disobeyed orders.’

  Nostradamus seemed a little disgruntled by the interruption. Josh could see he wanted to make an example of Bartholomew and hadn’t expected anyone else to step in and take the blame.

  ‘While I appreciate your honesty master Jones, I would prefer to hear what the senior officer on the mission has to say about it.’

  As Josh retook his seat, Bartholomew stood to attention and cleared his throat.

  ‘We entered the facility at two hundred hours as planned. Team alpha swept the room for contacts and neutralised the guard by two-ten. Team Beta detected significant radiation and traced the source to a prototype nuclear reactor in the main chamber. Evidence suggested it had been recently used.’

  ‘He’s not going to mention the victims,’ Caitlin whispered to Josh.

  ‘Radiation exposure was set at a maximum of thirty minutes, and both teams proceeded to search the main chamber for material of interest. There was a considerable number of items, all were scanned and documented, and a chain of custody record and research label have been assigned to each and are currently being processed.’

  Nostradamus nodded. ‘All very commendable brother, but tell me, when did you realise that Schumann was not the one that had been adjusted?’

  Bartholomew turned towards Josh. ‘Not until after the Heisenberg journal was returned.’

  ‘They weren’t going to follow it up!’ protested Caitlin, getting to her feet.

  ‘Our guests took it upon themselves to deviate from standard procedure: Jones and Makepiece stole the journal and went off-mission to investigate Heisenberg.’

  Nostradamus’ face looked as if he was chewing a wasp.

  ‘And I’m grateful that they did! I think we can all learn a lesson from their initiative — the information they have given the eleventh has significantly improved the chances of stalling the development of the time machine.’

  Humiliated, Bartholomew sat back down.

  ‘We have no idea how these crises will develop. It is imperative that we remain open to these kinds of deviations. Time does not travel in straight lines. You two, with me.’ He gestured to Josh and Caitlin to follow him and left.

  Without another word, Nostradamus guided them down the spiral staircase and into a sub-basement.

  It appeared to be a storage facility. They walked along a gantry suspended from the ceiling high above the thousands of items of unused equipment and crates stacked up in neat rows.

  ‘Our storehouses rival those of the Antiquarians,’ noted Nostradamus. ‘Although most of it has yet to be processed.’

  They arrived at a vault door, with a sentry posted outside. The man had the kind of stare that could freeze your blood. Josh got the impression they would never have been allowed to get this close if it hadn’t been for Nostradamus.

  There were a number of clicking sounds as if the combinations of a hundred locks were all being opened at the same time, and the door slid back.

  The Nautilus was suspended in dry dock when they entered the hangar. Josh and Caitlin both marvelled at the size of the ship. Having never seen it from the outside, it was hard to appreciate the beauty of the craft her parents had created.

  She was long and sleek, her knife-blade hull made from copper sheets riveted together. The engines along her aft were like jet engines from a 747; their paint stripped back to reveal a shining pair of silver turbines. Along the side, her father had painted her name in large copperplate letters, below which a team of engineers were bolting on a very serious-looking set of cannons.

  ‘Your father’s idea,’ said her mother, who was coming up the gangplank to meet them. ‘Time cannons. He’s been talking to Methuselah about some type of temporal phase induction.’

  They were huge barrels, each one nearly ten metres long and almost a meter wide. Josh was about to ask what kind of bullet it would fire when Juliana beat him to it.

  ‘Direct energy weapons are not my speciality, but at least it means we don’t have to store a ton of high explosives on board.’

  They met her father in the galley, where he was brewing tea and making Welsh cakes on the griddle. Caitlin hugged him tightly. It was still a novelty to have them back, and she found it hard not to burst into tears every time she saw them.

  Josh was relieved to learn they’d managed to retrieve the Infinity Engine, but Caitlin was sad to hear that Chief Mackenzie had sacrificed himself.

  ‘He was a good man,’ said Juliana mournfully. ‘They don’t make them like him any more.’

  ‘Broke the mould,’ agreed Thomas.

  ‘Where is the founder?’ asked Caitlin.

  ‘He’s taken the Infinity Engine up to Rufius,’ her father answered.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Lyra hasn’t left his bedside, and Alixia has returned to Draconian HQ. Da Recco is around here somewhere.’

  Caitlin closed the main door and spun the locking wheel. ‘We need to talk in
private.’

  ‘You met him?’ Caitlin’s mother said in disbelief.

  ‘An earlier version.’ Caitlin pouted. ‘Before he persuaded you to leave me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said her father. ‘The Shaman.’

  ‘That was the trouble with Marcus, always got too involved in the epoch and lost all his sense of perspective,’ added her mother.

  Caitlin glowered. ‘He said that it would make me strong enough to survive the future.’

  ‘Did he now?’ said her father. ‘What exactly —’

  Juliana interrupted. ‘We’ve talked about this, Cat. His predictions were very compelling.’

  Caitlin folded her arms. ‘And what exactly made him the expert?’

  Her father stepped in. ‘Your uncle was one of the most dedicated Dreadnoughts I’ve ever known. But when Marcus came back from the Solomon mission, something had changed in him. Then he just disappeared for years, and we’d pretty much given him up for dead until he showed up that night.’

  ‘What was the Solomon mission?’ asked Caitlin.

  Thomas shrugged. ‘No idea. Top secret. Marcus had a thing for dark operations.’

  ‘Like the SAS?’ asked Josh.

  ‘I guess so. Whatever it was, he never spoke about where he went or what he did, but that was nothing unusual. He’d always been a bit of an odd fish.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked Caitlin.

  Her father shrugged. ‘He was there at the breach, working with Jaeger’s team on a new equipment test. He got pulled into the maelstrom with the rest of us. I don’t know what happened to him after that. We’ve never found any other survivors,’ Thomas added with a sigh. ‘Until, of course, you two showed up. Just as Marcus predicted in the fourth crisis.’

  ‘We need to find out what happened on this Solomon mission,’ insisted Caitlin. ‘I want to know what he saw that caused all this.’

  ‘I don’t know how that will help,’ her mother said, trying to reassure her. ‘The path we’re on seems to be following the course he predicted.’

  Caitlin stood up, her face flushed with anger. ‘But don’t you want to know why mother? Do we have to follow it blindly? Shouldn’t we be doing everything in our power to change it?’

  ‘Don’t you think we’ve thought about that?’ her mother snapped. ‘Every single day since we left you. There’s no way to know whether we’ll make it worse.’

  ‘I don’t think it could be much worse, do you?’ Caitlin shouted, her eyes glowering. ‘You’re all so scared of screwing up that you can’t see that could be the exact reason it’s going to happen.’

  She stormed out before she said something worse.

  ‘Wait for me!’ said Josh, going after her.

  Thomas caught up with Josh and stopped him. ‘Best to let her go,’ he whispered. ‘Makepiece women tend to need to break things when they get like this.’

  ‘I heard that,’ said Juliana.

  72

  Curing the colonel

  Lyra looked exhausted when Josh walked through the door, as she hadn’t left the colonel’s side since they’d arrived at the Citadel.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said, hugging him as she left.

  The founder was sitting on the other side of the bed, the casket of the Infinity Engine lying in his lap.

  ‘This will require all of your focus,’ he said, standing up and putting the box on the old man’s chest.

  ‘Before we begin, I need to teach you how to protect yourself from the time dilation effects of the engine. It’s a complex meme that’s easier if I intuit.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Josh nervously, standing at the end of the bed.

  The founder put his thumbs on Josh’s temples and opened his mind. He felt the intuit establish between them and the memories of how to manipulate the engine flooded in.

  Once it was complete, he motioned to Josh to sit on the opposite side of the bed and placed the colonel’s hand inside the box.

  ‘The aetherium has corrupted his timeline, and we need to reassemble it; a billion fragmented moments scattered across the continuum. For that, I will need to channel the power of the engine, and you will act as its lodestone, attracting the relevant threads and weaving them back into a cohesive pattern.’

  ‘But I don’t know everything about his life.’

  ‘You’re the Paradox. It means you have an inherent ability to know the right path to take. Trust your instincts, Josh, and let them guide you.’

  Josh felt like a ten-year-old again, feeling the adrenaline rush as he got into the driver’s seat of his first car. The founder motioned for him to sit on the opposite side of the bed, then took his left hand.

  ‘Lyra tells me that he’s holding on to the time he found out his wife was pregnant. I suggest you begin there. Use it as a springboard into his past.’

  Josh placed his right hand on the colonel’s forehead. His skin was so deathly cold and clammy it felt more like wax. Closing his eyes, he let his mind drift into the old man’s timeline, or what was left of it.

  He found himself in a storm of ash, tiny fragments of moments whirling around him in a chaotic cloud of disconnected events, shifting like black sand through his mind as he searched for some sign of the colonel’s old life.

  Then, just as Lyra had described, Josh glimpsed the faint glow of a distant sun. He felt the founder squeeze his hand tighter as he tried to move his mind towards it, but some invisible force was resisting him, trying to hold him back.

  ‘Let the engine do the work,’ the founder whispered. ‘Feel its energy flow through you.’

  As he spoke, a prickling sensation wound its way up Josh’s arm, as if someone had injected ice into his veins. Josh felt the rush he used to get from driving at a hundred miles an hour in the middle of the night — like he was unstoppable.

  He swept the chaos aside and the moment glowed brightly before him, and nothing had the power to stop him from entering it.

  ‘I’ve found him,’ he said through clenched teeth.

  The colonel was sitting in the waiting room of a Victorian hospital reading The Times newspaper. Lyra had told Josh that this event was like a panic room, or a bomb shelter, somewhere that you would instinctively go to when your life was in danger, a place of safety to wait until the threat had passed. In the case of time travellers, it usually meant jumping back into your most treasured moment.

  Josh could hear the muffled voice of Doctor Crooke in the consulting room.

  ‘It’s our first,’ the colonel said proudly, looking up from the paper.

  Josh forced himself to smile. There were so many things that went wrong in his friend’s life after this point it was no surprise that the colonel retreated to this moment.

  ‘Is your wife joining you?’ the colonel asked politely, putting down the paper.

  ‘Soon,’ Josh lied, buying himself some time while he tried to think of the best way to break the news.

  ‘Good. Well, sit yourself down, before you fall down. You look half asleep boy! They say you should make the most of it while you can; not much rest when the little ‘un comes!’

  Although they were safe within this interval, Josh could already sense paths that would ultimately lead to her death, strands of time rebuilding from this moment as the organising influence of the Infinity Engine began to take effect.

  ‘When did you first meet?’ Josh asked, trying to ignore the lines of inevitability.

  ‘Now let me think,’ the colonel mused.

  Josh saw new lines spiralling out towards the past. He watched the events connecting, mapping a path to their beginning, like pieces of a four-dimensional puzzle snapping back together.

  ‘It was at the end of the first English Civil War. I was on a mission, serving under Sir Thomas Fairfax for the Parliamentarians. She was a Royalist, daughter of Sir Francis Throckmorton, and a Catholic to boot.’

  As the past was reconstructed, Josh could see other minor moments being restored, like the roots of a tree, branching off in all
directions.

  He drew on the power the founder was channelling into him and pushed himself down the timeline, strengthening and accelerating the healing as he followed it back.

  73

  Lady Anne

  [Warwick, England. Date: 11.646]

  The colonel was dressed in the red coat of a musketeer with a bandolier of twelve cartridges slung over one shoulder and a sword belt over the other. He carried a heavy-looking matchlock musket and looked rather young with his short hair and lack of beard.

  She was a lady, or at least the daughter of one. Fairfax’s detachment had surrounded their estate, Coughton Court, a grand Tudor house set in the Warwickshire countryside.

  Once they had overcome the local militia, the company commander lost control of his men, who began to ransack the mansion: plundering the house of all its silver and plate, as well as harassing the women and killing any man that got in their way.

  The colonel left the musket at the door and moved swiftly through the house, avoiding the pillaging, until he reached the upper floor and opened a secret panel that led up into the tower.

  Because of his connection with the engine, Josh intuitively knew it was an old priest hole from the days of the Catholic purges of James I, when his Secretary of State, the infamous Robert Cecil, hunted down any practising Catholic priest.

  ‘Come no further,’ said a woman’s voice from the shadows.

  ‘I mean you no harm my lady,’ replied the colonel calmly.

  ‘I beg to differ,’ she said, coming forward and holding a rapier out before her. A tremor ran down the blade as it glinted in the candlelight. She was stunning, even with the cobwebs caught in her hair — Josh could see that the colonel was batting well out of his league.

  The colonel held up his hands in surrender.