Tempus: The Phoenix Man

by Matt Hilton

  ‘I think we’d best get moving then…’

  A highly pitched screech sounded down the hall. Coombs had heard nothing like it in his life. It was the sound of the very superstructure of the underground lab twisting in the bedrock as a tectonic shockwave powered through the earth. On its heels came a series of detonations as sheets of poured concrete were blown from their moorings, much of it vaporized into flying projectiles by the pressure. The detonations kept coming.

  Both men huddled together, spying back along the corridor. It was long enough and erected with a slight curve to the walls so that they couldn’t make out the murderous detonations heading in their direction.

  Above them the ductwork rattled and moaned. A pipe split along a seam and from it superheated vapor jetted into the hall. Coombs and Fox scurried for safety, Fox slapping at the scalding heat on the back of his neck and shoulders from where the steam struck him. He pulled at his shirt to stop the wet material adhering to his skin. He cried like a baby, stumbling to a halt. ‘I’m burning!’

  Coombs looked at the young technician, and moved to assist him. Then, he shook his head. He moved away, touching his palm to one of the yellow arrows.

  ‘Major Coombs! Please! Don’t leave me…’

  Coombs thought of Heller’s words just prior to their transvection. I’m a doctor not a murderer. Your fate’s solely of your own making. Well, the bitch had been stating fact. She hadn’t murdered them outright, simply left their destinies to be decided by their own actions.

  ‘I can’t let you slow me down. Sorry, George, but you’re on your own from here on in.’

  Coombs rushed away from the young man. Fox tore and pulled at his shirt, got it up over his head. He stumbled and went to his knees.

  The detonations now sounded like mortar fire.

  Running, Coombs craned back for a look and saw Fox on his knees. The tech was still struggling out of his shirt, blinded by the material, probably insensible with pain and unaware of the collapsing tunnel. Coombs hoped that Fox didn’t suffer too much before he perished: but he suspected he would. He ignored Fox’s plight, pounded away as fast as his legs could carry him.

  Within seconds the collapsing walls caught up to Fox. He was scoured by fragments of concrete that struck his torso like shot from a cannon. Then the larger chunks hit him, knocking him across the corridor to lie in a shapeless heap against the base of the opposite wall. He didn’t have time to scream before the wall split and a sheet of concrete easily ten times his weight cracked loose and toppled over him. The huge sheet of rock pulverized the debris on the floor, and Fox wasn’t spared either. His blood swept across the floor catching up the dirt and grit on its tide. A moment later liquefied earth began to pour through the rents in the walls and the tech was tombed in.

  A little over two hundred yards further on Coombs had no idea of Fox’s fate, and if he had he’d have cared less. He was too concerned with his own miserable hide and pushed harder for a safe haven. Many flights above him he believed Heller would offer a witch’s cackle if she could see him now. The bitch had doomed him, although she hadn’t broken her oath. She had not directly caused him harm, but she had ensured that it was on the cards if he didn’t find a way out of the lowest bowels of the Tempus facility.

  He ran, but his strength was flagging. Behind him the detonations were growing louder, and he occasionally felt the patter of dirt on his shoulders as the collapsing ceilings buckled under the stress.

  He’d run past a dozen yellow arrows.

  The next he fled by was different. This one was not solid yellow; at its centre was a circle of pale concrete upon which had been stenciled a number in white paint. “400 Yards” it said. Coombs sobbed when he understood how far it was to an access shaft. There was no way he’d outrun his fate. He slowed his run, stopped, and then leaned to brace both palms on his knees. He sucked in air to his labouring lungs, conscious that these were the last few breaths he’d ever take. Trembling with the effort of his run, he finally raised his head to look at the collapsing tunnel behind him.

  He couldn’t make out anything for the dust cloud advancing before the crashing walls. The noise was tremendous, and he was partly thankful, because his tiny animal-like gasps were shameful even to his ears. He braced himself for death as best he could, but his survival instincts screamed at him in denial, and at the last second he tried to run.

  He made it another ten feet before the falling ceiling crushed him. Mercilessly it ground him into the buckling floor, so that he felt his bones splintering within. His only saving grace was that the massive weight on his skull was only resisted for the shortest of seconds before it burst like a ripe fruit and all that Major Coombs had ever been was now a dirty stain on the rocks of the earth.

  Chapter 42

  April 5th 2018

  Domicile Level, Tempus Facility

  ‘Nobody came to let you out?’

  Mina Feeney met Rembrandt at the door to her quarters. She still wore the skirt and jacket over her blouse, and went barefoot, as she’d been when Rembrandt had pulled her from her previous cell to this one. Her hair looked fresh though and smelled of soap, and she’d scrubbed the make up from her face, and she looked more wholesome for it, but no less beautiful. Despite Doctor Heller’s disparaging remark about Mina, and her need to freshen up, he knew she’d had no access to a shower or bath, so her ablutions must have been at the washbasin in the corner of her small room. He noted that it was not unlike the room he’d been issued, four walls, a bed, a cabinet, and little else, whereas his had remained unlocked after his arrival from another time and place. Rembrandt hadn’t said so, but it was apparent that Elizabeth Heller had read the subtext in his voice and had assumed that Mina was more than a witness in the wrong place at the wrong time as he’d claimed. She’d been treated as a prisoner of war.

  ‘Everyone ran away about half an hour ago, maybe a little less: it’s difficult to tell the time when all you’ve got as a frame of reference is those explosions I can hear from down below. What the hell is this place and what’s happening?’

  Days earlier Mina had claimed to be a mercenary. Rembrandt didn’t doubt that those working for her were guns for hire – albeit not the most professional she could have engaged – but he’d been giving her some thought and believed there was more – and yet less if he forgave the contradiction – about this woman. He’d deduced and confirmed she had been the organizing factor behind the harebrained scheme to assassinate the president, and as shocking as such a decision to shoot Ronald Reagan was, he saw now how it was driven not by hatred of the man but of the policies that had seen her sister mentally tortured during her last few painful weeks of life. He wouldn’t have chosen Mina’s tactics to make a point but Rembrandt wasn’t full sure that he’d have been the type to stand by and do nothing either. In an attempt at regaining some kind of justice for her dead sister and niece she’d launched her plot to kill Reagan based upon a sense of rage and futility and it was wholly wrong. Yet, at heart, he didn’t believe the woman was totally evil: simply misguided. He’d torn her from the relative safety of the past and metaphorically placed her in front of the firing squad. Sure she’d kidnapped a family, and tried to coerce an innocent man into becoming her triggerman, but that was all moot now. Certainly she did not deserve to die trapped in a strange room, out of time and place. He felt that it was only right that she was given an opportunity at life.

  ‘You’re in a military bunker,’ he explained, ‘but it can’t withstand the attack it’s under.’

  ‘Attack? We’re at war?’ Fear flared in her eyes, making them large and moist and difficult to ignore.

  It would be unfair of him to lay the blame on her now, because the nuclear war her misguided plot had ignited was lost in the ether, but she still bore some responsibility for what was occurring in the present. ‘It’s not a war as such. Call it an unnatural disaster, if you must.’

  ‘It sounds like an earthquake or something…’

  ‘Definitely
something. Now I haven’t time to explain everything, only that I need you to do exactly as I say and don’t question me. You served in the military right?’

  She shook her head. ‘I was with the police force.’

  Her admission didn’t come as too big a surprise, made him wonder if those guys she had on her payroll were also disenfranchised ex-coppers, who, for the right amount of money, were willing to break the law. Apparently there were such corrupt police officers back in the eighties who weren’t beyond moonlighting as mercenaries when necessary. It would explain how Barry Miller’s snatch team had conducted themselves in the proper manner when stopping his Jag in central London.

  ‘You know how to obey an order then?’ Rembrandt said.

  Mina nodded.

  ‘I mean you no harm, Mina. I intend getting you out of this alive. But you’re going to have to work with me. Any enmity you feel towards me must be forgotten. Can I rely on you?’

  ‘You killed the men working for me…’

  ‘They were casualties of war. It wasn’t personal.’

  ‘Yet you allowed me to live.’

  ‘I didn’t see a reason to kill you. You’re not about to make it necessary now are you?’

  ‘No. I will do as you say.’

  ‘OK, follow me, and don’t question anything you see. There are people here who might not wish for the same end result as we do.’ Rembrandt used the Spectra to urge her out of her room. ‘Careful where you place your feet, there’s debris on the floor.’

  She’d forgotten she was barefoot. She checked the hall and saw that there were chunks of concrete where they had fallen from the walls and ceilings. She moved out ahead of Rembrandt hesitant at first, but as the sound of collapsing walls and detonations built, she hurried along mindless of any slight abrasions she might suffer. Rembrandt followed, trying hard to concentrate on his own path instead of the lithe figure before him. He felt a pang, realizing how much Mina reminded him of Crystal Kwolek. Thoughts of his friend also brought forth memories of the other members of his team, but it served to lodge an ember of anger in his gut, making him more determined that Terrence Semple would pay for his betrayal of them all: by sending his brutes back to murder David Johnston he’d inadvertently created the man Rembrandt had become, and by virtue his team mates too. But he’d also condemned them all – Kwolek, Bowlam, Walker, Dhand and Oxford – to limbo with his meddling with the dimensional timelines. First opportunity that he got, Rembrandt would gladly empty the Spectra’s magazine into Semple’s head.

  Mina had reached the end of a corridor, and she halted, deferring to Rembrandt for direction. He indicated left, towards the mess hall. The woman set off again, back bent slightly in anticipation of the roof collapsing. They entered the mess where Rembrandt had first met with his team after pulling them out of Old City. He again experienced a pang of loss, but shook it off and told Mina to head for the double doors at the far end of the large room. It appeared that the order to evacuate had been given during a meal rotation, because many of the trestle-style tables held half-eaten lunches and cups of cold tea and coffee. The evacuation had been carried out in an orderly fashion, there were no signs of haste or panic, with only the occasional chair out of place to show that things weren’t as normal. There was another indicator too: everything was now covered with a fine layer of dust. By the exit door a warning light flashed red, but whatever had powered the emergency siren had fallen dead and the siren with it.

  ‘We need to go down a few levels,’ Rembrandt said as they came to a bank of elevators.

  ‘We’re underground right?’ Mina said. ‘Shouldn’t we be going up?’

  ‘Trust me; very soon you won’t want to be anywhere near the surface. We go down. No not by the lifts, we can’t rely on them to keep working. Use those stairs there.’ Rembrandt ushered her to a set of doors that allowed access to a stairwell. Like everything else the staircase was constructed of poured concrete and steel, the walls and stairs a uniform institutionalized grey colour. Mina only paused to check him out before setting off down the stairs. She studied his bruised face and the scuffs on his knuckles.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I’d a couple of old scores to settle.’

  ‘You’re injured.’

  ‘I’m OK. Now go on, you needn’t worry about me.’

  Mina’s gaze had softened as she eyed his minor abrasions. Now she straightened and he could see determination in the set of her features. This time her resoluteness had nothing to do with escape.

  ‘Take it easy,’ he cautioned, ‘we might meet someone coming up. If it’s a white haired man in an expensive suit, you’d better duck.’

  Rembrandt couldn’t be positive if any of Major Coombs’s men had been sent against him; and he wasn’t about to take the chance. Anyone with a gun would be treated as a possible enemy, he decided. Semple would have got his hands on a weapon for sure, and he expected that the man would shoot without hesitation now that he’d served his best hand in the form of his two giant bodyguards. Where had Semple fled after dragging his bleeding arse into the elevators while Rembrandt fought his armoured giants? His best chance at escape would be to utilize the Tempus chamber to jump to a safer time and place. He only required one person at the controls, and George Fox had shown himself to be Semple’s man. Recognising Elizabeth Heller and Professor Doherty as Rembrandt’s allies, he might hurt them out of spite.

  ‘Quicker,’ he urged Mina.

  ‘You told me to take it easy.’

  ‘I also asked you not to question me. Things have changed: I need you to hurry.’

  Mina hurried, with one hand on the metal banister for support as she negotiated steps that had twisted askew in their wall mountings. Rembrandt bounded down after her with both of his hands clutching the submachine gun. At the bottom of the first flight of stairs the roof had caved in – or more correctly the under flooring from the steps above. It lay in jagged mounds across the breadth of the stairwell. Rembrandt offered a hand to help Mina negotiate the rubble. She eyed him, her gaze one of mixed emotions. As she reached the far side and waited for Rembrandt to join her, she braced herself against a wall. It trembled beneath her.

  ‘Why save me now?’ she asked.

  ‘I told you, I don’t see a reason to kill you.’

  Her sculpted eyebrows flicked upwards.

  ‘How did you bring me here? At first I thought you must’ve drugged me, and the experience I had in that weird chamber was all a hallucination. But it wasn’t, it was real. What was that thing? Also, where and when am I? I know that the technology I’ve seen here outstrips anything normally available: if I didn’t know otherwise I’d swear I’d stepped onto the set of Star Trek.’

  Rembrandt pursed his mouth to answer. But if he tried to explain any of it now then they’d be here until the entire facility collapsed around their ears. It had taken him days to admit that what he had experienced was real and a few days after that before he’d fully accepted it. He didn’t have the luxury of days to bring Mina round to the idea that she’d jumped thirty years into the future let alone sideways into a parallel dimension. In fact, judging by the destabilization of the superstructure he’d give them a timescale of minutes. ‘I told you: no questions. Now go on, that way.’

  Mina padded ahead of him once more, going down another flight of stairs. They came to solid steel doors, burnished and dull. There was no indication that this floor was any different to the others, apart from the signs to each side of the portal proclaiming it a restricted access area.

  ‘Are you sure we can go in there?’ Mina asked, tongue in cheek.

  ‘I’ve got the universal key,’ said Rembrandt swiping Doctor Heller’s access card through an electronic reader. An automated voice recording welcomed Heller back to the laboratory. The doors slid open soundlessly. They were some of the only mechanisms still in working order. Beyond the doors the quakes had wrought damage to the entrance hall, pulling down part of the ceiling and ductwork. Bare wires sparke
d and hissed where they’d been ripped from their moorings by falling masonry.

  Mina moved ahead without instruction.

  Rembrandt saw danger looming before she did.

  He pounced forward, catching her around the waist with his left arm, barely conscience of the pain of his wounds from his battle with the giant. He scooped her around so that she was chest to chest with him, her feet suspended off the floor, her face inches from his. Her mouth came open in a surprised ‘O’. But then debris began raining down on the spot she’d been standing a second earlier. The suspended ceiling installed to make this area of the work environment more appealing sagged, spilling panels and T-bars of metal, some of them bouncing and rebounding from Rembrandt’s back. He shielded her with his body as he charged out from under the injurious rain, thankful that Mina bent her knees and hugged her thighs to his side so she didn’t trip him. Beyond the collapse he set her down once more, but they remained chest to chest perhaps a heartbeat longer than he’d intended. Her gaze was still locked to his, his to hers. Rembrandt breathed out, slow to unfurl his embracing arm.

  ‘You’re beginning to make a habit out of saving me,’ Mina said unashamedly.

  ‘I haven’t saved you yet,’ Rembrandt told her, trying for perfunctory, but his voice was a tad huskier than intended. ‘And there’s nothing to say I can. So don’t hold me to a promise, OK?’

  Mina smiled fleetingly, the opportunity for a rejoinder there for the taking. Yet she chose not to speak, only nodded slowly, before she slid her gaze away and to the mound of ceiling debris that might have pulverized her. She was lucky to have Rembrandt watching her back, she understood, which was exceedingly odd considering a few days earlier they’d been at odds, and him seconds from shooting her to save Barry Miller. Her memory of those incidents in the industrial unit in Clapham were stark, with vivid recollections of him aiming a gun at her face, his hand steady, gaze fixed and unwavering. If he’d wanted to shoot her dead then, she had no doubt he could have done so easily, instead of firing into her shoulder. He came over as the remorseless type, whose moral compass was severely skewed, but by his failure to pull the trigger when he had the opportunity – not to mention coming back for her on two occasions, and saving her from the cascading ceiling – told her that there was more to the sanctity of life to this man than there was the taking of it.