Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  ‘We know who the KGB were,’ Coombs said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Rembrandt said. ‘I suppose you would. Whoever was behind the plot, Reagan’s assassination caused ripples around the globe. Blame and counter blame was cast around. Threats of reprisal were countered by denial. Diplomatic talks ended in anger and rebuttal. Within days, the Cold War was beginning to heat up. The Soviet President Gorbachev denied that the KGB was responsible for the attack, while some of the older communist guard practically shook their hammers and sickles in victory.’

  ‘That’s a dramatic picture you paint, Rembrandt,’ Coombs said, and Rembrandt wondered how long the man had waited to employ the play on words. Sarcastic piece of shit! He was beginning to dislike the man more with each passing second. But he ignored the quip in favour of concentrating on his report.

  ‘Vice President George Bush, newly instated as Acting Commander in Chief, responded by sending a fleet of warships to blockade Cuba. In response the Red Army mobilized along its borders, their weapons threatening Europe, while in the Middle East there were clashes along the Israeli and Jordanian border, and the fighting between Iraq and Iran escalated with tank battalions clashing at Halabja and Ahvaz, while the port of Faw on the Gulf of Oman saw close quarter skirmishes between infantry soldiers. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan both launched their fleets, and in response so did the Indians. North and South Korea began threatening a new civil war, while the Chinese and Japanese both prepared for war.’

  He paused for dramatic effect, before throwing down the pile of notes. He was in full flow now and had no further need of them. He’d studied the papers long and hard while he’d waited for the appointed time for his transvection back to 2018.

  ‘Within a month of Ronald Reagan’s death Gorbachev was deposed from power with the communist hard man, Valentin Pavlov, settling into power, backed by the military, and supported by a newly invigorated communist party. In the UK, both British and US military bases went to a DEFCON TWO alert level, the first and only time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wouldn’t take much to tip the scales and throw the world to a ‘Cocked Pistol’ stage where nuclear war was imminent.

  ‘People prepared for the worst, digging shelters in their back yards, stockpiling food and water, while the politicians and diplomats tried to avert war, but conversely the military leaders egged their opposites on. Meanwhile the investigation into the assassination showed that Barry Miller was a patsy, and had been coerced into his suicide attack on the president, and behind the plot the lives of his wife and daughter were at stake. It appeared that Miller had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war for nothing, because Marjorie and Jessie were discovered murdered, and their times of death predated his attack on the US president. Miller was tricked into the attack, thinking his wife and daughter would be spared: he couldn’t know that their deaths were as certain as his, having knowledge of their captors’ identities. The investigators discovered a link to a mercenary group who – though the link was tenuous – were associated with the KGB. Then again, there were also links identified to the CIA, MOSSAD, the Met police and even a pro-abortion lobby group, but all of these were conspicuously ignored. The finger of accusation was again directed at the USSR and DEFCON ONE announced.’

  Rembrandt halted. This time he didn’t attract sarcasm from Coombs, or further questions from the others. They could all guess what happened next. That was where the news media stuttered to a halt, as – quite simply – no news media continued to exist, except what could be shared by the few survivors hiding deep below ground in bunkers constructed to ride out a global disaster on this scale. Anything Rembrandt knew of the following events was all that he’d been told since he was dragged from the rubble of the National Gallery some years afterwards.

  While they absorbed the enormity of all that he’d revealed to them, Rembrandt looked each of the others in the eye by turn. Then, deciding that he preferred to talk than to listen to the foreboding silence, he carried on. ‘Between the assertion of the ultimate defence readiness condition – DEFCON ONE - and declaration of war, you could have slipped a single sheet of this paper.’ He touched a loose page on the table, but then edged it away. ‘ On April second nineteen eighty-eight Armageddon struck, initiated by Valentin Pavlov sending simultaneous rockets across the Bering Strait, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. The US, UK, France, China and Japan responded in kind, their nuclear strikes targeting their own perceived enemies, regardless. No capital city was spared, no strategic military bases or atomic plants. Missiles also rained from the skies in the Middle East, Australia and South America. No continent was pardoned the conflagration. The initial devastation was on a scale you couldn’t imagine, and in itself a civilisation killer, but the after-effects threatened the stability of the planet itself. Lakes, rivers, seas, all were contaminated. Much of the fauna and flora was wiped instantly from the face of the earth, or died horribly soon after, burned or poisoned, or lingering to a death from starvation and thirst. The skies were filled with the dirt pulled into the stratosphere by the colossal mushroom clouds that followed the atomic blasts. An unnatural winter shrouded the planet, and some of the poor bastards that had weathered the initial firestorms now perished from the cold or from contamination by poisonous rainwaters that bled into their shelters. Only those people sheltering in the deepest, most fortified bunkers survived with relatively good health. People forced to come up from underground through lack of food and water found a world devoid of both, and it wasn’t long until they took to attacking each other to steal what they couldn’t find. Warren Frome – that piece of shit I told you about - wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last, to turn to cannibalism to keep his miserable hide alive. Family groups built fortifications and defended what little they could scavenge from the ruins. In turn they warred on their neighbours, clubs and spears used as often as firearms. The world became a feudal place where only the most desperate, or brutal, of its inhabitants stood any chance of survival.’

  ‘Men like you,’ Doherty said, with not a little awe.

  ‘My story begins during that new Dark Age,’ Rembrandt admitted.

  ‘But it isn’t important that we hear it,’ Coombs said. ‘We only need to know what led to the war, not how you were reborn from its ashes.’

  Rembrandt nodded. The major was correct.

  But Semple had another opinion. ‘I’d like to hear it, and more of my doppelgänger, this Guvnor Semple you’ve mentioned before.’

  Shrugging, Rembrandt rested his knuckles on the table, hunching forward to better relate his desperate story. ‘I’ve no memory of the first part, and can only tell you what Guvnor Semple later told me, but here it is: During the waning of the nuclear winter, humanity began the crawl back to the surface and the reinstating of some form of rule and organisation. Healthier, better equipped, organised, they were the new masters of the ash-covered wastes. Those fortunate people – politicians, military leaders, doctors, scientists, and mega-rich men and women - the likes of Guvnor Semple - became its new rulers and set up their strongholds, and initiated the iron-fisted rule of law necessary to bring the world back to some kind of order.’ Rembrandt peered once at the current Terrence Semple, but offered no apology for his next words. ‘In his previous life, Guvnor Semple was egotistical, avaricious and - quite possibly - sociopathic. He had been one of the super rich, he was landed and influential, and he’d have it that way again. He set up his fortifications above a bank vault in the Old City of London, recognising the location as strategically important to his return to power, and an ideal place from where he could seek the kind of accessories suited to a man of his stature. He regularly sent out search parties looking for treasure spared by the holocaust and began to amass them in The Castle. One search for treasure turned up an unexpected find: namely, me.

  ‘I’d no idea of my identity or past, I was scarred by chemical burns and other wounds, I was half-starved and practically a wild animal when I was pulled from beneath a shelter of rubble and priceles
s artwork. He didn’t spare me because of any sense of humanity, but through his greed. Since the bombs had dropped, I’d survived more than four years of a brutal existence, and apparently I was exactly the sort of person the guvnor required enforcing his rules. Semple had me carried back to his castle, and nursed back to health, even though my amnesia remained intact. Because of the painting I’d been found lying under, Guvnor Semple nicknamed me “Rembrandt”, and it stuck. My given name of “James” wasn’t scratched from the fog of an amnesiac’s memories; it was taken from the burnt edges of a photograph found among my possessions. The other parts of my name were missing, singed off by whatever it was had burned me a few years earlier.’

  There was more to Rembrandt’s tale, but he left it unspoken. He didn’t mind speaking about the past that led to his rebirth, but didn’t see how relating his life as James Rembrandt could help. Basically, it was a tale of hardship and violence where he’d quickly proven a more than capable warrior, the savagery of the past few years developing in him a will to survive that went beyond any soldier trained by conventional means. He’d quickly risen above the heads of the other men and women drafted into Guvnor Semple’s fledgling police force, and attained the rank of Chief, a leader of a six-man team, and equivalent to the pre-nuclear war police sergeants. He’d been fully expected to exceed that rank too, but Rembrandt had declined any further advancement, preferring to work alongside his team than steer them from afar like the “Base Sergeants” and “Supers” did. It made little difference, and was a best of both worlds scenario, because being in an elevated position of trust Rembrandt took orders only from the top man himself, the Guvnor.

  For the best part of nine years, he had policed the post-apocalyptic cityscape of Old City, and in that time had not lost a single member of his team. Not until the terrible events at the British Museum on July 12th 2002. But that fact was moot now. The effect of bucking Doherty’s Paradox Loop theory had allowed him to save them all, transport them here to this future time and place. After what he’d learned of Barry Miller and his attack on the president, he hoped that a similar intervention could save them all – and that, he now understood, meant the inhabitants of two worlds, and countless billions of lives. Never had a person carried such a responsibility on his shoulders, but Rembrandt was optimistic about it all.

  Whatever the odds, he was up to the challenge.

  ‘Miller’s the key,’ Semple offered.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Rembrandt said.

  Semple nodded. ‘Despite the growth we’ve seen in the various anomalies in the meantime, it seems that your reconnaissance mission to nineteen eighty-eight was worthwhile. You now know what you have to do to halt the war.’

  ‘Yes. I have to stop Miller from killing the president.’

  ‘By any means necessary,’ Semple reminded him.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not one to shy away from death.’

  Chapter 19

  April 5th 2018

  Tempus Facility, England

  The newspapers were dated from more than thirty years ago, but in real terms had been printed only hours before, when Rembrandt had collected them from various vendors on the streets of 1988 London. The paper was pulpy, the black and white print a tad fuzzy, but there was a crisp newness to them that was undeniable. It was from the selection of papers that Rembrandt had learned of the events that led towards Pavlov’s nuclear attack. The dates on the papers ranged from 31st January through 1st April 1988, the final leader story screaming “DOOMSDAY LOOMS”, in the hysterical fashion of the time. Rembrandt laughed sourly at the irony of the date: he just bet that the readers of the day hoped it was a cruel April Fool’s jest.

  He was standing with Terrence Semple and Major Coombs, feeling odd in his 1980s fashion alongside the up-to-the-minute Saville Row suits they wore. He’d shorn his hair, shaved, prior to his trip back to eighty-eight, and dressed in the fashion of the day so that he didn’t attract any attention from the pedestrians he passed while out collecting newspapers. Here and now he felt conspicuous in tan leather jacket, striped Le Croc polo shirt and bleached-out jeans: kind of like he was at a fancy dress party, even if he couldn’t reference one to compare against. Elizabeth Heller’s fitters had also dressed the rest of his team, but he hadn’t seen them in their ensemble outfits yet. It was going to be odd; whenever he’d worked a mission with them in the past it had always been in hooded coveralls, visors and cumbersome breathing kits.

  ‘It’s surreal reading these headlines,’ Major Coombs said, not for the first time showing his incredulity at how quickly the parallel world had gone to shit. ‘It reminds me of how lucky we were back in the eighties, but also how close we all came to a similar fate.’

  ‘That’s the thing; if your mission isn’t successful, Rembrandt, and the breaches aren’t closed, then we can expect much of the same.’ Semple rubbed at his forehead, leaving it mottled. He was stating the obvious, yet it was understandable. He was afraid that Rembrandt would fail to halt the nuclear war in the cross-dimensional place and time, and that the breaches would continue to spill their poisonous effects here. Or maybe something else gave him pause for regret. It had to be playing on his mind that by initiating the Tempus Project, he was ultimately responsible for the devastation it was causing now. ‘The latest reports are that since first appearing all four anomalies have doubled in size. At this rate of spread there’s a good chance that there will soon be a major loss of life. And that doesn’t include the monetary value, or the damage to infrastructure and the ecology of the landscape. If this isn’t halted we can expect environmental disasters that far exceed anything we’ve ever seen before.’

  ‘As troubling as the notion of environmental disasters is, they aren’t my main concern.’ Coombs tapped the headlines heralding doomsday. ‘Already governments are screaming abuse at each other about who is responsible for our events, and Prime Minister Drake is demanding answers and resolution. All it takes is for someone to start pointing the finger of blame, or for some tin pot dictator or terrorist organisation to claim responsibility and we can expect a similar knee jerk reaction as these governments showed. Don’t forget, we might be thirty years down the line, but intrinsically we’re the same people with the same mentality. Iran, North Korea, they’re both weaponized now – I don’t care what they say to the contrary – and don’t forget Pakistan and India. If they think they can gain by a pre-emptive strike then they’re going to take it. If those anomalies aren’t curtailed soon, we can expect no less than nuclear devastation of the same magnitude.’

  Semple looked directly at Rembrandt. ‘Are you still prepared to do what needs to be done?’

  If Semple was to be blamed for bringing this devastation down on the earth, then Rembrandt accepted he was partly complicit. His hand wasn’t on the controls, but the rips in the fabric of time and space had been opened while jumping him back and forth. He supposed that it was his responsibility to go back and seal them. Such might prove impossible, of course, but if he averted the nuclear war in the other dimension, and their timelines became contemporaneous once more, then there’d be no concern regarding overspills from one dimension to the other. He hoped. There’d always be changes – if Doherty was correct – but who would ever know but them? Who knew, if by going back and averting one earth-changing disaster, it wouldn’t throw into motion another? By saving Ronald Reagan from assassination, who was to say it wouldn’t give rise to another problem further down the line? He’d been told about the events of 9/11 – following his conversation with the two guards a few days ago – that had brought this world to a constant state of alert and readiness for war, what was to say that back in the other dimension it wouldn’t trigger more desperate reactions than the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan it had here?

  Rembrandt forced down the doubt, recalling Doherty’s wisdom. They would never know until they tried, he decided. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  Semple laid a palm on his shoulder. ‘Then all that’s left to
be said is “good luck”. Now go and step on a few of those butterflies.’

  ‘Butterflies?’ Rembrandt smiled in confusion.

  ‘Sorry, I guess you never heard that old Ray Bradbury story?’

  ‘If I did I don’t remember it.’

  ‘Let me phrase it a little simpler for you,’ Coombs said. ‘Go and kill that fucking assassin.’

  ‘Now that’s an instruction I do understand.’

  Coombs also stuck out his hand, and Rembrandt shook it. Though he’d taken a disliking to the major, there was no room for personal animosity. Rank or pecking order didn’t exist here, only three men with as much to lose as the next. ‘God speed, Rembrandt,’ the major said.

  ‘Tempus fugit,’ Rembrandt replied with a wink.

  Then he turned and strode towards the laboratory facility and the Tempus chamber. He didn’t witness the sly look shared between Semple or Coombs, or their brief discourse that followed.

  ‘We need to begin thinking of another way out of this, Major,’ Semple said as soon as Rembrandt was out of earshot. ‘I truly hope that Rembrandt and his team is successful, but I don’t hold much hope. They are expendable: I’m sure you don’t think of yourself in similar terms? I certainly don’t want to spend my last days stuck down this hole like a rat, or – heaven forbid – dying from radiation sickness.’

  ‘Even if we were to survive, where would that lead us then? Ruination for us both, court martial and a dishonorable discharge at the very least for me, and the Lord knows the criminal charges levied on the two of us.’