Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  Drury’s defiance went out of him.

  He held up McNeill, and Moira joined them, hugging tightly to both the men in her life.

  With his free hand Drury offered all the protection he could. He pressed out his palm, hoping to halt the onrushing wall of dirt. King Canute had seen better results when facing the advancing sea.

  Chapter 29

  April 5th 2018

  Tempus Facility, England

  ‘What’s the goddamn emergency?’

  Vincent Coombs had to swing out of the way to avoid the two lab technicians who pushed by. Easy telling they weren’t military men going by their disregard for his presence let alone his rank. He watched as the two men, one a Chinese, the other a West Indian, almost threw themselves into their respective seats and powered up their computer screens. There was a babble rising from the other two-dozen or so technicians in the room.

  The door swished open at the far end of the lab and in swept Terrence Semple and the MoD man, Sterling. Semple’s face was set in stone, blotchy around his cheeks and neck. He looked infuriated, and Coombs guessed it was at a berating from the PM by way of Sterling. Semple made a point of placing a workstation between him and the innocuous looking civil servant, his hands flexing. Coombs thought the distance was barely enough to save Sterling from a throttling.

  Coombs walked towards Semple, but the silver-haired man gave him less than a flicker of interest. He was standing next to George Fox, and the young tech was doing his wizardry on the computer. As Coombs arrived alongside Semple, he heard Fox say, ‘Inverness is gone.’

  ‘What? Gone?’

  ‘The entire city, sir.’

  ‘You told me we had hours, for Christ’s sake!’ hissed Semple, and he slapped a palm down on the counter, causing many to look around at the sharp intrusion.

  ‘It was a considered estimate only,’ Fox said as he chewed down on his bottom lip. ‘But the bloody thing is speeding up and building strength.’

  ‘Thousands dead…’ Semple scrubbed trembling hands through his hair. He turned to Coombs. ‘It appears that Rembrandt has failed in his mission.’

  ‘How can you be certain?’

  ‘That!’ Semple indicated the live satellite feed on Fox’s computer monitor. A dark grey blight continuously expanded over Scotland, now edging ever closer to the major conurbations of Glasgow and Edinburgh on its southern fringe.

  ‘No, I mean how can you be certain that Rembrandt failed to halt the assassination? Perhaps this anomaly has a life of its own now, seeing as it is here in our time and place.’

  ‘That’s a possibility. Shit!’ Semple glanced over at Sterling, who was too calm for one witnessing the end of the world. He ignored the man, began checking around for someone else. ‘Where is Professor Doherty?’ We need him here if we are going to make any sense of this.’

  It was Fox who answered. ‘He’s next door with Doctor Heller. One of the team – Brent Walker – went off-line. They’re coordinating his jump.’

  Semple shared a look with Coombs. Then he leaned down, lowering his voice so that only his two confederates heard. ‘Have Doherty brought here immediately, George. May I remind you that Rembrandt’s team is expendable: we must concentrate on saving the living, not the bloody dead. Start looking for a way out of this for us.’

  ‘Sir, there’s still a chance for us to stay. We don’t understand how a success in the past, in an alternate dimension, might resolve itself here. We’re still relying on Rembrandt and the others to halt the nuclear war there so that it negates this chain reaction. And, as you know, we won’t know if he was successful until his return.’

  ‘That-’ Semple pointed at the devastation on screen ‘-does not look like a success to me.’

  Coombs could tell that Fox was at a loss. Everything they hoped for was based on hypothetical theory and conjecture. None of it Fox’s. The young tech leaned down, pressed buttons and spoke into a comms-link, demanding Professor Doherty join them ASAP.

  The professor appeared at the adjoining window, frowning in confusion. Semple snapped a wave at him, beckoning him. Doherty turned away, probably telling Heller where he was going. When the door slid open, the redhead was alongside him. ‘What on earth’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve just halted us in the middle of calibrating the Tempus chamber.’

  ‘I don’t care what I’ve halted,’ Semple snapped. ‘While you and the professor are playing about with the past, has it escaped your notice that we’re all threatened here and now?’ His next words were for the professor. ‘I hope you can explain this to me, because it’s beginning to sound as if your temporal shift theory is a load of old shit!’

  ‘Actually,’ Doherty said, as he adjusted his spectacles for a look at the computer screen, ‘this bears out my theories.’

  ‘You assured us that by sending Rembrandt back and averting the war, that it would put everything right once more.’

  ‘I promised no such thing. I hypothesized, that’s all.’

  ‘Hypothesized! God damn you, Doherty, I should-’

  Coombs stepped forward and took hold of Semple’s forearm. ‘This is not the time or place for recrimination, Terrence.’ He flicked a sideways glance at Sterling, who had turned his gaze on them. ‘Let us all go to the conference room where we can discuss this in relative privacy.’

  Semple shuddered, trying to control his anger. He looked around, noticing that more than one of the lab technicians was taking interest in their conversation. He nodded curtly at the major. ‘OK. We’ll convene in the conference room. Fox, that includes you. Mister Sterling, I’m afraid you will have to wait here until I return.’

  The civil servant merely nodded, then shifted his attention to the various screens dominating one wall of the lab. Coombs was happy to leave the man behind, and it had little to do with hating the Prime Minister’s spy. There were things needing said that should never reach the ears of Drake. Until now the Prime Minister had allowed Semple leeway in conducting the Tempus Project experiments, but with such an environmental disaster occurring on his watch he’d be forced into radical action. Coombs for one didn’t like the idea of what that action might entail: basically they could all expect more than the berating Semple had recently endured. He half expected that Drake might reinstate the death penalty for their crimes against humanity.

  A few minutes later they were all sitting around the large table, Coombs and the others surrounded by the portraits of the world’s greatest minds. Fox had already brought up the current satellite views of the four anomalies threatening the earth by way of a quad-screen feed to the larger screen. Not only had Inverness been engulfed by the breach over Scotland, those other breaches had engulfed massive swathes of territory, the one over Burma extending as far south to destroy the city of Yangon and much of north western Thailand. Another hour would see Bangkok reduced to a wasteland of ash and calcified bones. South America was a dustbowl where once there was the mighty Amazon rainforest. In Belarus, Minsk was overwhelmed, and the spillage heading directly for Poland. Warsaw and other large metropolitan areas had a life expectancy of hours. To the northeast, Moscow had little more than an hour or so after that.

  Fox had also turned on the news feeds, and pictures from the BBC, ITV, SKY, and many of the American and European networks showed live images of mass panic, of evacuations, and of white-faced politicians arguing about who was responsible for the calamities threatening their countries. Coombs shared a look with the governor: both of them guilty as charged. Semple told Fox to turn off the sound.

  While the others sat around the large table, Governor Semple adopted a position directly under his own portrait, standing with his hands clenched behind his back. It was a pose of confidence, but Coombs recognised it more as the need for Semple to hide the shaking of his fingers. The governor was beginning to panic, and little wonder. Coombs wondered if following the man’s planned course of action was the correct thing to do but couldn’t see any other way out of this. Should Coombs follow his head on
this he should run directly to his superiors and spill all about the Tempus project’s responsibility for causing the destruction. But to do that would mean his ruination. His heart told him to continue with their get out plan, and evacuate to some other time or place untroubled by self-destruction. His decision might be deemed cowardly, but who but his confederates would ever know? They wouldn’t tell a soul. Even now the governor was diverting blame: he once more challenged Doherty for an explanation of what in hell was happening.

  ‘I studied again the recordings from when James Rembrandt was debriefed on his return to us,’ Doherty said, with a surreptitious glance at Coombs. The major knew he was about to receive a sideways insult and offered a wry smile. Give it your best shot, Prof. ‘Although Rembrandt’s grasp of temporal paradox and anomalies were in simple terms, I think it also serves us well in the here and now. His understanding of the timelines was describing them like the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram. He believed that the manipulation of one timeline and dimension could have consequences in another. He was correct in that respect, as is borne out by what we are witnessing here. He quite rightly hypothesized that by going back and changing the course of history in an adjacent timeline and dimension then it would correct the problems occurring here, caused due to the colliding of the two and the resulting overspill of one timeline into the other.’ At mention of the word “hypothesized” Semple tutted, but Doherty continued. ‘What Rembrandt and I - it regrets me to admit – failed to consider was that once the overspills occurred then they became part of our reality, our here and now. Going back and saving Reagan might stop the nuclear war from ever happening in the timeline where Rembrandt is now, but as I’ve already explained, the timelines and dimensions are infinite. In another time and place, Reagan still died, the war still occurred, we tapped into it and we brought the devastation across and are now suffering the consequences of a chain reaction. Because our worlds are melding, the nuclear devastation wrought on our twin is altering our landscape, and causing pipelines to rupture, for power grids to fail, and for the infrastructure to be destroyed. Largely the environmental disaster we’re witnessing is down to fresh catastrophes occurring in the here and now. We are no longer talking about simply fixing the past. It’s here and it’s now and it’s our current reality too.’

  Stunned silence followed as all in the room tried to come to terms with what they’d just heard.

  Coombs, never being one to fully understand all the implications of the Tempus Project, wasn’t afraid to admit his failings. But he was also happy to surprise Doherty by being the first to catch on.

  ‘You’re saying that it doesn’t matter how many times we try to fix the past, this is now our reality and therefore it can’t be fixed?’

  ‘I’m afraid so…if we continue to follow our current plan,’ Doherty said.

  Semple said: ‘There has to be a way to put this right, and I suspect you know a way of doing that.’

  ‘I have a theory,’ Doherty began.

  ‘Fuck your theories,’ Semple snapped, ‘from now on I want facts.’

  Doherty lowered his head. Beside him Elizabeth Heller sat back in her chair and met Semple’s gaze. ‘The professor and I are in agreement on this one, however it is still only a theory, but one I believe you should hear, however immoral it may sound.’

  Semple waved a hand at the screens. ‘Believe me, at this moment I don’t give a fuck for morality, only putting an end to this.’ He turned back to the professor. ‘Sorry, Doherty, you were saying?’

  Doherty adjusted his spectacles. ‘We caused the original breach when first we jumped James Rembrandt out of the past place. The only way we can negate that first breach happening, and of course the subsequent three formed because of the following jumps, is to go back to the beginning and sever the timelines completely.’

  Coombs twined his fingers together, and then pressed them against the tabletop to help him stand. Time to get things moving. ‘I get where you’re leading, Prof. You think we need to go back and stop Rembrandt’s jump before it happened and that will therefore wipe out all the subsequent events that have followed.’

  Doherty shook his head. ‘Not the first test, Major Coombs, we still need that to exist in order that we can use the results learned from it now. Neither Henry Chen’s nor Sergeant Johnston’s first transvections out of here had any effect on our time and dimension. What must be stopped is the chance of ever bringing back James Rembrandt. Though he was dying when he was pulled out, bringing Chen back had no measurable effect on either timeline, and therefore an anomaly wasn’t born. Rembrandt was different. He existed there for thirteen years, and was as much a part of that dimension as this. It was through snatching him from death, causing a conjoining of our two timelines that caused the first breach to form. The others are simply cause and effect of our first mistake.’

  ‘You’re suggesting that someone goes back and warns us not to pull Rembrandt out?’ Semple asked, a look of doubt for Doherty.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,’ Doherty said.

  ‘It would mean leaving James Rembrandt to die as he originally did in that grenade blast, but…’ Heller’s words petered out, as if she was uncomfortable with dooming the man a second time. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, pinching with her thumb and index finger. ‘As I said, it’s immoral, but would we really be condemned for simply realigning him with fate?’

  George Fox shook his head, while drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

  ‘You have something to add, George?’ Coombs prompted.

  ‘With respect, Professor Doherty’s plan won’t work. If we did that, we can’t be certain that our past selves would listen. In fact, I’m pretty certain in our supreme egotism that we would decide to go through with the test just to prove to our future selves that they – or we – are wrong. Ergo we could not be confident in halting the breaches from forming. We must be more thorough. We must send someone through to a point not long after David James Johnston arrived in the past, before he was marooned and became James Rembrandt: it is the only recourse I can think of.’

  ‘You’re suggesting we terminate him, George?’ Coombs demanded, playing at surprised.

  Fox wouldn’t meet the gazes of Heller or Doherty, who were stunned by the young tech’s bloodthirsty nature. ‘It’s him,’ Fox said, ‘or everyone else on this planet.’

  ‘Spoken like a true soldier.’ Coombs sat down again, satisfied. He didn’t take his eyes off Governor Semple until he received a subtle nod to go ahead. It wasn’t the first occasion they’d agreed on Rembrandt’s expendability, but it was the first any but George Fox was party to their decision. ‘It’s time for extreme measures. Are you in agreement, Terrence?’

  ‘It must be done,’ Semple said finally.

  Heller lifted an accusatory finger at Coombs. ‘You are talking about murder.’

  ‘Is it any different from when you suggested euthanizing him?’ Semple said.

  ‘You know I was only joking when I mentioned it. And besides, back then Rembrandt wasn’t one of us.’

  ‘He isn’t one of us now,’ Semple spat. ‘He’s as much a product of that bloody nuclear holocaust as the devastation he brought through with him. Can I remind you that it’s through him that we all face annihilation?’’

  ‘But David James Johnston-’

  ‘Is dead,’ Semple concluded. ‘Rembrandt is an anomaly.’ He directed his last at Doherty. ‘Stop him, and we stop the other anomalies attached to him.’

  ‘We can’t have him murdered!’

  Coombs couldn’t bear to miss a barb he could prick the doctor with. ‘What’s wrong, Elizabeth? Have you gone soft on him? You fancying yourself a bit of rough or something?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Heller snarled.

  ‘You’ve been acting strangely since you skipped out of the conference room earlier. Are you sure you’re not worried you’ll never see Rembrandt’s scarred face ever again?’

  ‘It’s not him I’m worr
ied about…’

  Coombs and Semple shared a glance.

  Heller shook her head. ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘Forget about what?’ Semple demanded.

  ‘There are other people’s lives involved in this,’ she said, her voice growing quieter with each syllable.

  Coombs waited for clarification about these other lives she referred to, but it seemed they weren’t forthcoming. There was something Heller was keeping close to her chest, but Coombs knew that she wasn’t prepared to tell him. Frankly he didn’t care. He couldn’t give a damn for these others. ‘Exactly,’ He said. ‘Our lives are involved. Now I say we quit stalling and go through with the plan, with or without your blessing, Elizabeth.’

  ‘You’ll never get my blessing.’

  ‘I’d prefer that you were onboard with the decision, Doctor,’ Semple said, although Coombs understood that the governor was merely going through the motions, prodding Heller in the direction they both desired. ‘We’ve always been a team. It would be a shame if we had to part ways now in our most dire moment.’

  ‘You’re only looking to smooth your conscience,’ Heller snapped. ‘Or hoping to apportion blame later on.’

  ‘If we go through with George’s suggestion, then there will be no need for blame. Everything will be put right once more.’

  ‘You’re talking about murdering a man who sacrificed everything for us…’

  ‘Not if he dies before it becomes necessary for him to do so.’

  ‘Now you’re being pedantic!’

  ‘I’d rather we were all in agreement,’ Semple said.

  ‘No! I’ll be no part of this.’

  ‘Fine,’ Coombs interjected with a smug smile for Semple. ‘We don’t need the doctor’s permission to go ahead with the plan.’

  ‘I also wish it known that I object to this course of action,’ Professor Doherty put in.

  ‘Noted and accepted,’ Coombs said, happy that he’d pushed the professor into making a decision too: there was less chance that Heller or Docherty could derail their get out plan if the execution of Rembrandt failed.