Time's Arrow 3: White Noise (Pax Britannia (Time's Arrow))

by Jonathan Green

  Ulysses took the first of more than a thousand steps that would take him to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” he said with a sigh.

  “Here goes nothing!” the clockwork bird parroted.

  And with that, Ulysses Quicksilver set off.

  “ARE WE DONE here?” Le Papillon asked his partner-in-crime.

  “Well, the machine will keep running until it drains its power source or somebody switches it off. Just depends if you want to stay and watch to the end of the show.”

  He was tempted, but he had seen enough. The Arc de Triomphe, the Musée D’Orsay and the Louvre all turned to rubble. This was a disaster from which the French capital would never recover.

  “No. All good things, as the English say.” The terrorist turned to his accomplice. “Turn it off. We’re taking it with us.”

  “We’re going?” Moreau sounded disappointed. “You’re worried about Quicksilver? No one can get us up here, you know?”

  “Quicksilver can.”

  Moreau gave a snort of laughter. “You’re joking, right?”

  “He’s on his way as we speak.”

  “What? But we deactivated the lifts.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the other snarled, his voice suddenly shrill with anger and frustration. “

  “Like Napoleon said,” – the girl was laughing through her fearful tears now – “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  “Shut up!” Le Papillon snapped, silencing the girl in an instant.

  He turned back to Moreau.

  “Deactivate the machine,” he said, his voice icily calm again.

  “Are you ser – ?”

  “Deactivate the machine, dismantle it and load it into the balloon.”

  The anarchist glanced at the hulking ape, squatting on the parapet of the tower, staring dispassionately at the destruction befalling the city below. “Get the ape to help you if you need to, but don’t take too long about it.”

  Montague Moreau stared at him open-mouthed with shock.

  “What about...?” He nodded towards their prisoner.

  “Forget about her. She’s not important.”

  “And what are you going to be doing?”

  “I’m going to deal with... our little problem.”

  “You’re really going to go up against him – the man who’s survived not one, but two run-ins with Ishmael and survived the detonation of the sonic bomb, not to mention the earthquake?”

  Le Papillon looked at him.

  “Hmm... As much as I hate to admit it, you may have a point.” The anarchist turned away, his goggles’ glassy gaze lingering on the cyber-ape. “And as the saying goes, why have a dog...?”

  “No!” the girl cried out in horror.

  “Marvellous,” the doctor grumbled, eyeing first the earthquake machine, then the balloon tethered to the radio mast, and lastly the dangling rope ladder.

  Le Papillon held out his hand for the portable control unit.

  “If I wasn’t being handsomely paid...”

  “But you are,” Le Papillon cut in, “so pass me that remote.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Agent Provocateur

  THE THRUMMING VIBRATIONS within the iron-girder structure of the Eiffel Tower had ceased.

  Ulysses stopped. He had passed the second tier platform and was now heading towards the intermediate platform. He had got so used to the constant low level vibrations that it was more of shock to him when they stopped than the destruction of the Paris Opera House had been the night before. It had him wondering if there was something worse still to come.

  After several tense moments, during which nothing more terrible came to pass, Ulysses shook himself from his stunned reverie and set off again with a burst of renewed energy, taking the stairs two at a time. All that mattered now was that he made it to the top as quickly as he could.

  What he wouldn’t have done for the lift to be working, he thought, as he continued ever upwards. His knees were starting to ache, his heart was thumping in his chest and he was panting for breath. He was aware of the bullet wound in his shoulder again too, feeling the stitches pull as he exerted himself, using the hand rails to help pull himself up the cast-iron stairs. Adrenalin and the knowledge that time was running out allowed him to tap into hitherto unknown reserves of energy on his way to the top.

  As he jogged on up the stairs, Ulysses considered the very real possibility that he was already too late to save the day. The damage had already been done. Central Paris had been laid waste, homes, public buildings and glorious monuments that had stood for centuries brought crashing to the ground, now just so many millions of tons of rubble lying under a pall of dust and smoke.

  As if the destruction of the city hadn’t claimed enough lives already, fires had broken out around the centre, and burst water mains and damage to the embankments of the Seine had resulted in widespread flooding.

  The City of Lights had been transformed into a City of the Damned, and there was nothing Ulysses could do to change that, despite the fact that he had broken the very laws of time and space to change the world – his world – for what he hoped would be the better.

  There was one niggling doubt that lingered at the back of Ulysses’ mind and refused to go away. He could not recall hearing anything about the Paris earthquake before setting off for the Moon. A disaster on such an apocalyptic scale would surely have made the news across the Channel.

  Was he really back in time in his own timeline, or had he somehow crossed over into another version of the world he knew? Or, if he hadn’t crossed into another mirror world, had his actions since arriving in Paris somehow helped bring Le Papillon’s plans to fruition?

  He had told himself that the needs of the many surely should outweigh the needs of the one, when it came to Cadence Bettencourt’s fate, and yet his actions since escaping the gendarmes in Montmatre had been motivated by nothing more than his own selfish desire, no matter how much he might try to pretend otherwise.

  Was he, in truth, too late to change Emilia’s fate anyway? Was it already written in the stars? And if this was an alternate timeline, he had to consider the possibility that in this reality he might not even have a relationship with Emilia to save in the first place. At that thought, his steps began to slow.

  No, he couldn’t start thinking like that. If he had indeed turned time on its head and challenged destiny for her sake, then he had to see things through to the end, otherwise all his endeavours would have been for naught. If Paris had died because of him, then he should damn well make sure it had died for a reason!

  A sound from above him shook him from his musings; the crash of metal on metal getting louder all the time. Something was coming, clattering and bouncing down the zigzagging stairs towards him.

  And then he saw it, shadows strobing through the open portions of the iron staircase above his head as something heavy barrelled towards him.

  Ulysses contemplated turning and running, before admitting to himself that the tumbling object would surely catch up with him in the end.

  No, his best bet was to stay precisely where he was.

  The object rounded the turn with a hollow crash. It was a metal drum, bouncing down the steps as it spun, picking up speed again now that it was past the turn.

  Ulysses braced. The barrel bounced off a step and crashed down directly in front of him. Ulysses launched himself into the air, up and over the barrel as it rolled beneath him. He landed two steps further up from where he had been standing before.

  As the barrel continued to crash its way down the stairs towards the secondary viewing platform, Ulysses resumed his climb. Another crash echoed from above him, and another. This wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

  Ulysses hesitated. Remaining where he was would probably give him the best chance of avoiding any other barrels coming his way. But then who knew how many more barrels there may be, and of course the longer he delayed, the greater the chance Le Papillon a
nd his accomplice had to get away.

  Ulysses took the next flight of stairs two at a time, reaching the turn to the next flight just as a barrel caught up with him. Using the handrails to help him again, Ulysses pulled himself up so that his feet were balanced on the rail, his arms braced against an iron pillar as he stretched his body across the stairs. The barrel bowled past beneath him and on down the tower.

  Not wanting to waste any more time, Ulysses jumped from the handrail onto the next flight of stairs, his landing sending a reverberating clang through the ironwork just as another metal cylinder bowled into view.

  Gripping the bannisters, Ulysses readied himself to jump again. As he was tensing, the barrel hit the very edge of an iron step and was sent spinning into the air.

  Ulysses pulled himself low, throwing his arms up over his head. He could just see the barrel hurtling towards him at the periphery of his vision. Its shadow fell across him as it came down. Fearing the worst, he punched upwards with both arms, catching the edge of the rotating drum with his fists and altering its trajectory, ensuring that it didn’t come crashing down on top of him. For the price of a few bruised knuckles, he had saved his skull.

  With three barrels avoided so far, the adrenalin flowing freely again through his body and dousing the lactic burn in his legs, he resumed his ascent of the Eiffel Tower.

  THE ROAR OF the primate made Ulysses freeze, his heart racing, the bullet wound in his shoulder throbbing.

  He wasn’t that far from the top of the tower, and at first he had taken the crashing sounds coming from above to be more barrels hurtling towards him. But the animal bellow had instantly dispelled any such thoughts. The ape was still very much alive and just as angry, and he was about to face the demented cyborg-monster once more, armed with nothing more than a pistol, his natural charm and charisma, and his God-given good looks.

  But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t shimmy up the side of the Eiffel Tower like the ape. Could he?

  Ulysses dismissed the idea as nothing more than a foolish notion, a consequence of his exhausted, over-wrought mind, as prone it seemed to fits of madness as it was flashes of inspiration. Instead, his footsteps suddenly as heavy as those of a condemned man climbing the scaffold, the dandy set off up the next flight of stairs.

  Above, he could see the bottom of the deactivated elevator stuck at the apex of the tower; beneath it, a nine-hundred-foot drop to the ground.

  With a resounding clang, the ape dropped onto the landing above him, the shock of its landing making Ulysses grab for the handrails either side of him.

  Their eyes met – his single right eye and the silverback’s beady black marble gaze.

  It stood there in all its terrible, mechanically-enhanced glory. Biceps bunched, thick toes curling around the leading edge of a step. The electrodes implanted in its skull crackled with coruscating energy as the ape raised its arms. In each huge hand it gripped the rims of two more barrels.

  Ulysses glanced about him. There was no point trying to run. And if the animal decided to throw its missiles at him, no manner of dramatic athletics was going to be able to save him.

  “Your move,” Ulysses growled.

  The ape snorted, nostrils flaring, black rubbery lips creasing in a grumpy pout. With a roar of bestial anger, it sent the last of the barrels at Ulysses.

  “HE’S DEAD? YOU’RE sure of it?”

  The ape said nothing but returned Le Papillon’s goggle-eyed gaze with the same angry black stare it had given the British agent.

  “What am I even doing talking to a monkey?” Le Papillon added under his breath.

  There was no sign of a body, and the ape would have seen and pursued the dandy if he’d managed to double back down the stairs.

  “All right, I’m satisfied. The bastard’s dead. Let’s go.”

  Without a second thought for the dead man, the anarchist returned to the top of the tower, the hulking cyber-ape knuckling its way back up after him.

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER LET out his pent-up breath. He stayed where he was for a moment, hanging from the bottom of the frozen elevator, arms and legs wrapped around the steel bars. The breeze blew in his hair as he waited for his thundering pulse to return to a steadier pace.

  He’d taken a big risk, but then desperate situations and all that...

  His ruse had relied on the ape’s view being obscured by the tumbling barrels, and that the gorilla wouldn’t realise that the dandy’s death-defying leap to safety had been anything other than a death plunge, down through the middle of the tower.

  But the risk had paid off in the end, and he had regained the element of surprise.

  Ulysses gingerly extricated his legs from under the lift, hanging over the nine-hundred-foot drop for a moment before swinging himself across to the more secure position of a maintenance ladder. The only issue that remained was how best to turn the situation to his advantage.

  “HOW LONG?” LE Papillon asked bluntly as he returned to the uppermost viewing deck, ignoring the sobbing of the girl bound to the girder.

  Moreau paused as he struggled to climb the rope ladder to the balloon whilst manhandling a curiously-shaped piece of the Earthquake Machine.

  “With help,” the doctor grunted breathlessly with a nod of the head towards the gorilla, “not long now. Otherwise...”

  “It’s time we were gone from here. Paris bores me. I want to depart as quickly as possible. I have a meeting to attend elsewhere.”

  “Really?”

  Le Papillon spun round, unable to hide the gasp of genuine surprise that escaped the vent of the mask covering his mouth.

  The dandy was standing at the edge of the platform, the pistol in his hand trained on the anarchist.

  “You! But you’re...”

  “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m still very much alive! I’m like a cat, me. I’ve got nine lives.”

  “Well I’d say you’ve used up a fair number of them by now,” Le Papillon countered. “And you know what did for the cat, don’t you? And you’ve been so very curious, haven’t you, Mr Quicksilver?”

  The anarchist began to raise the remote control still clutched in one white-gloved hand as the ape turned to face the interloper.

  “Don’t,” the dandy growled, the knuckle of his index finger whitening as he increased the pressure on the trigger.

  Le Papillon lowered the hand holding the remote.

  “Time’s up, Leroux. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Is that so?” the anarchist countered, his voice as cold and as sharp as an ice pick. “You really think you can stop me now? Do you not think that I would have prepared for every possible eventuality, leaving nothing to chance?”

  “Not every eventuality. You didn’t factor my escaping the death you had planned for me, did you?”

  “You’re too late. What are you going to do? Paris isn’t doomed – it’s already dead!”

  “I’m Time’s Arrow. I can’t ever be too late.”

  It was only the action of a micro-second, but the dandy’s glance at the girl gave him away.

  “Oh, I see. The fate of one girl matters more to you than all of Paris, does it?”

  “Right at this moment, yes,” Quicksilver replied with icy calm, his gun never wavering from its target. “Or to put it another way, you have to be able to come to terms with the things you cannot change and yet have the courage to change the things you can.”

  “I see,” the butterfly-collector said, not moving an inch. And then, directing his words at his accomplice, “Untie the girl.”

  “What? But –”

  “Just do it!”

  For a moment no one said anything, as the doctor descended the ladder, placing the piece of technology he had been carrying on the ground and beginning to loosen the knots securing the girl to the tower.

  “You know this thing responds to verbal commands as well, don’t you?”

  “What?” The dandy suddenly looked startled, his previously calm demeanour cracking at last.
r />   “Ishmael,” Le Papillon said, a wry smile taking shape beneath his mask. The ape looked at him. “Grab the girl.”

  Obediently, the ape seized the girl in one huge hand. Cadence gave a scream.

  “And now, Monsieur Quicksilver,” the anarchist went on, “I give you a choice. You can either finish what you came here to do and stop me, motivated by some misguided desire for revenge, or you can save the girl.”

  He could see by the look on the dandy’s face that he had uncovered the fool’s weakness.

  “So, Mr Quicksilver, what’s it to be? Me, or the girl?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Beauty and the Beast

  ULYSSES HAD NO choice.

  With a scream of frustrated rage he took aim at Le Papillon as the anarchist dashed for cover, even as the gorilla came for him.

  The gunshot’s report was amplified by the echoing ironwork of the tower. The bullet ricocheted from a girder as Le Papillon ducked for cover behind the lift housing.

  And then the silverback was in front of Ulysses, its gaping maw open in another roar, the blunt enamel chisels of its teeth on show, giving Ulysses an idea of what the ape had in mind for him.

  Cadence Bettencourt cried out as the beast swung her about in its huge right hand. She was still alive, at least. Ulysses guessed that however Le Papillon’s accomplice had re-wired the ape’s brain, it responded very literally to instructions. The anarchist hadn’t told the animal to kill the girl, so she wasn’t dead – yet.

  Ulysses turned the gun on the cyborg ape even as it brought its left arm around across its body in a powerful back-handed swipe. But before he could pull the trigger, the weapon was sent flying from his hand by a blow that left his fingers stinging with pain. The gun vanished over the edge of the tower, clattering and clanging its way down the stairs.