by Matt Hilton
Fox lifted narrow shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘Professor Doherty believes that those of us involved would still retain memory of all that we have personally experienced.’
‘What about knowledge of the breaches? The people out there are experiencing them. Will they retain memory of being…’ Semple faltered. Thousands of people were being annihilated. Even if the breaches were closed, what did that mean for their victims? Would those killed simply pop back into existence again? He exhaled, leaning on the back of George Fox’s chair for support.
He wondered if Sterling would rise from the dead with memories of having his throat slit. No, that was absurd! How could he?
Coombs had asked about the MoD man earlier, and Semple had brushed off the man’s absence saying he cared less. Coombs had assumed that the MoD man was in consultation with the Prime Minister, whom he also assumed had already been evacuated to one of the nuclear attack bunkers elsewhere in the country, or to another country. Perhaps, he’d decided, Sterling had jumped ship and fled there too. Semple didn’t make him any the wiser.
‘Can’t say as I blame him, not when we are planning a similar cut and run strategy,’ said the major.
The Tempus facility – originally named Naze Top Bunker - was actually based in a decommissioned nuclear bunker on the northern fringe of the Peak District national park. Originally built in 1952, it was a vibrant hub of activity during the Cold War, before it was abandoned after the destabilising of the USSR, and sold back to the local council authority. For some years the council allowed the facility to decline, and in the previous decade had opened the subterranean bunker as a supposedly haunted tourist attraction. When the Ministry of Defence once more took ownership of the bunker, allowing Semple’s riches to fund the fledgling Tempus Project, they had not deemed it necessary to commission any work at bringing the bunker to the same level of structural security as before. Semple doubted the integrity of the bunker, and did not believe it capable of withstanding the destructive force when it hit.
He began calculating how much time he had before he would have to skip out. An hour at most, he decided, and the sooner the better.
He glanced at Coombs.
As commander of the facility, the major was expected to stay behind. It was the military man’s duty to stand by and protect as best he could the Tempus project, but he didn’t blame him for wanting to escape. He doubted that anything Coombs could do would make a jot of difference anyway. So it was better that the major helped him with his get out plan, and also saw to the latest plot they’d hatched. Coombs could hardly order any of his regular troops to do what was necessary, not without raising suspicions concerning their motives, but there were some people that Semple could rely on.
‘I’ll leave things in yours and George’s hands,’ Semple said. ‘There’s something I’m not prepared to leave behind.’
Semple left them to their plotting. Time he got on with his business. It appeared that the Tempus facility was doomed, but not his project. No way was Semple about to allow the technology to be destroyed outright: not when he could utilize it to gain position and wealth again in some other place and time. He headed for his private chambers to retrieve the original blueprints and instructions for constructing the Tempus chamber that he’d placed in his briefcase after killing Sterling. He recalled the day when a knock at his door became the biggest surprise of his life. The memory of opening the door to his elder, time-travelling self, gave Semple a trickle of relief. One thing he knew was that he was destined to ride out the destruction of the world, because if he was to die along with everyone else, then how could he then come back from a future time to hand over the Tempus secret?
If there was anything that gave Semple pleasure it was that his own immortality was assured. Partly it was due to his wish for immortality that drew him to financing the Tempus project; his greatest desire was to learn if the transvection chamber was a tool for extending the natural order of his lifespan. The fact that others had to die in order from him to find out wasn’t so much a concern as it was a probability. It didn’t bother him that he’d ordered Sergeant Johnston’s death, killed Sterling, or that he’d condemned his faithful manservants to a living hell in the blighted alternate dimension of Old City. It actually pleased him to think that the two gullible men had found their way back to him by way of his Old City doppelgänger – if Rembrandt’s words could be taken at face value that first time he’d seen the orderlies – but not because either of the men had survived. It meant that they’d remained loyal to him. It also told Semple that everything and everyone, across all the planes of time and dimensions, were somehow intrinsically linked, and that fate or the design of the universe meant that they’d be drawn to one another like metal filings to a magnet. He wondered if, out there in some other time and place, he and his manservants existed in a place untroubled by the impending destruction of the planet. He sure wished he could trade places with that version of himself.
He could not. That wasn’t the nature of transvection. But perhaps in yet another dimension he’d find their doppelgängers there and they’d serve him once more.
“Transvection”.
He thought the term coined by Professor Doherty a quaint one. Transvection was the pairing of Latin terms meaning roughly ‘to fly over’ and was last used to explain the power that lifted a witch’s broom in the air. If he didn’t know the truth of the power contained within the Tempus chamber, he’d scoff at the idea of time and dimension travel as loudly as he would the idea of broomstick-riding old hags. But he had to admit that the term “transvection” held meaning when taken in its scientific or medical context, as it was often the term used for when infection spread from one unrelated area to another: well if the breaches caused a form of infection between dimensions, what better term was there for the results he’d witnessed?
His rooms were on a level three flights above the Tempus lab, but still dozens of metres below ground level, and the decrepit Naze Top farm buildings that concealed the entrance. He made his way to an elevator and stepped inside, placing his hand on an electronic pad that read the unique friction ridges of his palm and fingerprints. He spoke a command, and the voice recognition system caused the doors to close and the lift-car to set in motion. These security features were modern additions to the old bunker and did away for the need of keys and buttons, although they could be overridden by way of a swipe card that strategic members of staff carried. The lift rose at high-speed, and barely made a whisper as it halted at Semple’s level. The doors swept open and a recorded message bade him a personal “goodbye”. Semple ignored the electronic voice, marching away from the lift towards a set of doors. Another reader pad took his details and the doors opened on pneumatic hinges. Semple entered a vestibule and in front of him was the door to his personal chambers. Ordinarily his two giant orderlies would be there to greet him but their spaces flanking the door were bare. Unusually Semple felt a pang of separation, he missed the sense of security they offered. He didn’t enjoy the sensation of vulnerability, but told himself it was only fleeting, because soon they’d be by his side once more. He found that he hunched over as he unlocked his door, as if someone would creep up and attack him while his protectors were gone.
He closed the door quicker and harder than usual. Then he leaned his back against the door and sucked in calming breaths.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ he wondered aloud.
‘Is your conscience bothering you, Terrence?’
Semple jerked upright, stunned not at the voice but the person standing in the doorway to his bedroom.
‘How did you get in here?’ Semple demanded, as his hand reached for the knob. He was tempted to pull open the door and flee along the short corridor back to the lifts, but knew he could neither outrun the younger man nor – especially – the gun in his hand.
‘It was a simple enough task, now that your bodyguards are no longer with us,’ said James Rembrandt.
‘I, uh, I can explain about t
hat…’
‘Can you?’ Rembrandt nodded towards the room. ‘I imagine you’ll lie as strongly as you would about who killed the government man back there.’
Semple took his hand from the doorknob. He straightened, feeding one hand into his jacket pocket. He nipped at his bottom lip with his teeth, his gaze jumping from Rembrandt’s face to his gun, then back again. ‘It was necessary to send them back if there was any hope of halting the destruction caused here by the breaches.’
‘Doesn’t seem to have made much difference if you ask me.’
‘No. It didn’t help. But you must recognise my dilemma? I had to try something.’
‘You had to try by having me murdered?’
‘It was a case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. You must see that?’
‘No,’ said James Rembrandt stepping forward. ‘I take it very personally that you sent your men to kill me. They didn’t do a very good job, but their ineptitude doomed me to thirteen fucking years of living hell. Apparently you and your buddy Coombs don’t care who gets left behind, as long as you are safe.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I’ve been back long enough to learn all about your betrayal. You probably guessed that your assassins failed, but I bet you’re surprised to see me after deciding to leave me back in eighty-eight?’
‘When the breaches didn’t close we thought you’d failed your mission,’ Semple said. ‘What was the point of bringing you back here to die?’
‘So you planned on stranding me out of kindness? What a pile of shit.’
‘I take it that Doctor Heller was the one who brought you back?’
‘Yes. I helped by placing a suggestion in the mind of her younger self. Did you never wonder why she reacted so strangely that time in the conference room when hearing Barry Miller’s name? She recalled a story told to her by a friend at medical school. Her friend, Jessie Miller, was saved from a kidnapping by someone called James Rembrandt and asked that Heller always remember that. Well, the doctor remembered and she did the right thing in bringing me back. It allows me to do the right thing now.’
‘What do you intend to do?’
‘Like I said: I’m going to put things right. And, funnily enough, it’s just as you said: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. I’d like to say it’s going to pain me to kill you, but after your betrayal of me and my team, well, I can’t.’
Rembrandt lifted the gun and aimed it at Semple’s face.
Chapter 38
April 5th 2018
Tempus Facility, England
‘What are you planning on doing, son?’
Rembrandt curled a lip at Semple’s use of the term. ‘I’m no son of yours,’ he said. ‘And my plans should come as no surprise.’
‘You’re going to kill me?’
‘I should. You sent your men back to kill me, though they failed. But you murdered that man in your room: don’t deny it, I can see the dressing on your wound from the broken glass you used to cut his throat. An eye for an eye seems an apt response.’
‘But you’re not going to kill me,’ Semple said.
‘You seem pretty sure, yet here I am with a gun to your head.’
‘You need me.’
‘I don’t need you for shit.’
Semple smiled, as smug as ever. He moved forward and collected the briefcase he’d prepared earlier. ‘You’re forgetting something. Without me surviving, these blueprints never go back in time, the Tempus chamber will never be constructed, and everything that you are, everything that you’ve become, will mean nothing. Kill me, you effectively kill yourself.’
‘Seems a fair trade. Can’t exactly say I like the person I’ve turned out.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘Am I? The way I see it, we’re all going to die in the next hour any way. But if I kill you, then you can’t go back, build your fucking time machine and open the wormholes that caused the breaches. I’ve a feeling that if I put a round in your skull, we’ll see the effects of those breaches simply fizzle out.’
‘There has to be another way…’
‘I know there is. But where’s the satisfaction in it? You sent your bullyboys back to murder me, Semple. You murdered that man in your room. You have to pay for your crimes.’
‘And I’ll gladly answer for my actions…in a court of law. What gives you the right to decide on my punishment?’
‘It’s the way I’ve always worked.’
‘Judge, jury and executioner might have been permissible in a barbaric society like Old City, but not here.’
‘Sorry, Semple, but you don’t get to set the rules any longer.’
Semple held up the briefcase again. ‘There’s something that you don’t understand about the Tempus process. You can go back and sideways. You can never go forward. You can’t change the future beyond this present moment. And here’s the clincher to all of this. When I travel back and place this briefcase in the hands of my younger self, I’m an older man than I am now. I’m confident that I cannot be killed, otherwise how could any of that happen? So you may as well put your gun away, because it doesn’t concern me.’
‘Tell me this,’ Rembrandt said. ‘Was this older version of you steady on his feet when he turned up?’
Semple’s forehead creased in a frown.
Rembrandt shot him in his right thigh.
Howling, the man sat down on the floor. The briefcase was forgotten as he grabbed at the hole in his leg. Blood pulsed between his fingers. He couldn’t believe that Rembrandt had gone through with the shooting, but the agony told him otherwise.
‘Still as sure of yourself?’ Rembrandt placed the gun to Semple’s head.
‘Dear God! Don’t kill me!’
‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t? You gave the order to have me killed. Did you show any pity towards me? You piece of shit, as much as I despise your big pals, you also condemned them to hell.’
‘But none of you were killed!’
‘Tell that to the man with the slit throat.’
‘You can’t murder me in retaliation for that! For God’s sake! All I’m guilty of is misguided judgement: I was trying to save everyone here!’
‘You were trying to save your arse, no one else’s.’ Rembrandt steadied the gun. ‘I’m the one who’s trying to save the world. And if that means shooting you, then I’ve no regrets.’
Behind Rembrandt the door opened. He thought that perhaps Vincent Coombs had come to join his confederate, to plan their escape from the doomed bunker. Well, that was OK. The major must have agreed any order Semple had given in order for the operation to kill him to go ahead. Coombs was as complicit in the decision to have David James Johnston murdered as the punk bleeding on the floor. Rembrandt turned slowly to greet the new visitor.
He shouldn’t have been surprised at who stepped inside the room. He’d seen enough, experienced plenty of ways in which time could be manipulated, but he had not expected to see this man again. The giant grinned maliciously as he lifted a gun and aimed it at Rembrandt’s chest. The weapon was a compact sub-machine gun, and didn’t take a skilled shooter to pull the trigger. The man was dressed in the storm trooper kit Rembrandt had grown accustomed to seeing him wearing in Old City. But the appearance of the armed giant wasn’t Rembrandt’s biggest concern. If one of Semple’s giant bodyguards could be brought back, then so too could the other.
He turned in time to see the next man appear from a concealed doorway, not ten feet away. This was the brute that preferred the use of a truncheon, and he’d armed himself accordingly. He too was dressed in full battle kit, and appeared ready for action. He aimed the club at Rembrandt, the corner of his lips tweaking in violent promise. If Rembrandt hadn’t turned at the appropriate moment, the second giant would have cold-cocked him.
‘Round two,’ the gun-wielding giant said. ‘We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Thirteen long years to be precise.’
Rembrandt f
licked a glance at Semple. The smug bastard grinned back at him, his eyes streaming with pain, but also pleasure at the appearance of his body detail.
‘You should have shot me while you had the chance,’ Semple said.
‘There’s still time,’ Rembrandt told him.
In the next instant, he fired.
Semple flinched, but the bullet wasn’t for him. Rembrandt had gone for the giant with the machinegun.
The round struck the big man in the chest, causing him to step back at the impact against his anti-ballistic vest. The bullet took the wind out of the man, but didn’t stop him. However, that wasn’t Rembrandt’s aim. It also brought up the muzzle of the machinegun and the man’s return fire flew overhead and tore furrows in the ceiling. The ceiling was constructed from poured concrete, smoothed by a film of plaster. The spent bullets ricocheted around the room, one of them shattering his helmet’s visor and slicing a raw gash in the face of the second giant. The big man’s truncheon dropped by his side, hanging from his wrist on a leather strap, as his palms went to his wound. ‘Bastard,’ the man muttered, one of the few words Rembrandt had ever heard from him. It would be the last. Rembrandt had turned and his second shot was aimed at the wounded man. His shot was cleaner than the first, more accurately directed, and it struck the giant in the back of his right hand. The thing was, the hand was cupped to his face, and no barrier to a jacketed slug. The big man crashed down, dead after only being in this plane of existence for the shortest of times.
Semple had grabbed his briefcase once more. He scuttled across the floor backwards, using his one good leg and one arm to propel him towards the safety of the exit. He left a swathe of blood in his wake. The second giant stepped further into the room, placing himself between Rembrandt and Semple.
Rembrandt fired, but so did the giant.
