Spider wanted to hit him. He could feel the urge building in his arm, in his solar plexus, his whole body wanted to hit the bastard hard, put him down — not that he’d done such a stellar job of that with Soldier Spider, he thought, but he was different: he was a trained military guy. Dickhead was just a big lump of nastiness, more nastiness than Spider would ever have believed possible, he now understood — but he knew that would be the end of him. No more job. Certainly no reference. He’d be in deep shit. Spider was forty-four years old — not ancient, by any objective standard, but forty-four was sufficiently old that finding another job would be difficult. For one thing, he’d have to go back to school, and that meant back to TAFE, the technical college where he’d studied for his only non-police qualification, his Certificate in Chronosystems Maintenance and Repair, Level III, and that had taken three years’ full-time study, plus three days a week work experience on top of that. It had been insanely hard juggling all of it, but it would be much harder now, years later, with him that much older, and with that much less stamina.
He knew he could always get some kind of unskilled, entry-level laboring work, but to make more than poverty-line wages you really needed at least two or three such jobs, and that meant no sleep. Spider was up against it, and he knew that Dickhead knew that, too. Dickhead had him by the short and curlies, as Dickhead himself might say. It wasn’t like Spider could get another job in the time machine maintenance industry, either, not if Dickhead put the word out that Spider was no good.
He supposed he could freelance, work in people’s garages, that kind of thing, but he’d never make the same kind of steady money, such as it was. He had no idea where he would even live, if it came to that. Buying his own tools, that would cost money he didn’t have. When he was studying, he’d had to buy some basic tools, but the school provided all the heavy-duty diagnostic gear, stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Without access to such equipment, Spider would have a very hard time working the freelance angle.
All of which left the blunt reality: he would have to go back to school and learn something else, and somehow defer the considerable expense involved in such training until after he graduated, so for the first ten years of his new career he’d only get a fraction of his real wages. What would he live on in the meantime? Where would he sleep at night? He imagined going up to Iris and telling her that he would need to crash on her couch for another three years or more. “Yeah, that’s going to work,” he muttered.
Still, Soldier Spider had told him a situation like this would come up. “You’ll have to make a stand against Dickhead over something. No, it’s all right. He respects that kind of blunt-force approach. You have to make him see that you’re not a spineless wimp.”
“But I am a spineless wimp,” Spider had told his future self, full of self-pity.
At this, Soldier Spider punched him in the gut, and Spider crumpled to the ground, all fetal and struggling for breath. “Hey, if you say so, Spider,” he said. “You’re not spineless. You did the right thing about Superintendent Sharp, remember? You took them all on. You stood up to all his minions, even when they were threatening your life — and not just your life. Remember those letters, threatening Molly and even your mum and dad? Remember that?”
He remembered. Only in his memory, that entire business was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and it felt like a comprehensive defeat. It had cost him his health, even his mental health. If it had been any kind of great victory for the forces of clean policing, he had often thought, he’d be the commissioner now, right? He wouldn’t now be a pawn in some mad game of cross-time chess.
So, praying that his future self’s analysis of Dickhead’s character was correct, and that the boss would respect him if he pressed his point, Spider fought back the impulse to hit the bastard. He stepped back, and did his best to control his breathing. “Malaria,” he said, “is a good kid. Apologize to her.”
“You were gonna give me one just now, weren’t you, Spider?” He was grinning.
“I said, apologize to her. Now.”
“Hmm,” he said, “that whole speech I just gave you, concerning the matter of who owns whom, that didn’t really penetrate, did it?”
“Apologize, or I’m gone.”
Dickhead was amazed. “Threats, now? Spider, I’m almost impressed.”
This wasn’t going the way it was supposed to go. It was going to shit, and Spider could see it. Dickhead did not look at all like a man who could see that Spider was a credible equal; he looked like Sharp had looked on that long-ago morning when he’d told Spider what he thought of Spider’s “underhanded, backstabbing, cowardly” attack, following him around in ghost mode with a camera, instead of coming right out with his accusations, to his face, like a real man. Spider felt like a bug only too aware that it was about to be crushed. What should he do? He could persist with this issue, stick up for Malaria, do the right thing, fight the good fight, or he could fold. He knew Dickhead wanted to make him some kind of big offer. That would be the Zeropoint thing, Soldier Spider had told him. Dickhead wanted to recruit him into that other mirror-image version of the outfit, supposedly. It was important, he’d been told, that that recruiting effort succeed. They needed Spider to gain access to the other side.
It was just that Malaria needed him to stick up for her. If his situation was precarious, hers was just as difficult, and forcing the issue with Dickhead directly, face to face, would only get her fired with no legal recourse. Yes, she was young, and with her skills she could probably get another job relatively easily — Spider knew qualified baristas these days could sometimes write their own ticket. He remembered Malaria telling him, at her job interview, when he asked her why on Earth she wanted to work at a lousy time machine repair shop, “I just, you know, think time machines are really cool? Thought it’d be fun?” And that had been that. She got the job. Everyone else he’d interviewed — well, the three other candidates — told him, “I believe I can excel in this business environment, sir!” He still had nightmares about those candidates. All of which left him thinking he should have stayed in bed this morning.
Dickhead, meanwhile, was advancing on Spider, backing him up against his desk, “You really care about her?”
All right, then. Moment of truth time. Trust the future. He said, his legs weak, “I do, yes. She deserves to be treated properly in her place of work.”
“And you’re prepared to go to the mat for her?”
“Yes.”
“Even given the way we met, the state you were in?”
“Are you a man, Dickhead, or just a cheap bully?” His pulse boomed in his ears, deafening. He had no idea he’d been about to say such a thing, but out it came.
Dickhead stared at him, stared hard, standing so close to Spider that Spider knew what he’d had for lunch.
Then, Dickhead backed off, glaring, and adjusted his tie and his jacket. He was breathing hard through his nose. After one more hard look at Spider, he yanked the door open, yelled out, “Malaria! A word!”
Spider shriveled inside, feeling cold and shaky.
Malaria said, “Sir?” She didn’t call him Dickhead this time. Listening to her voice, Spider knew she was feeling the way he felt, just waiting for the blow.
“Malaria,” Dickhead said, his tone gruff, “I’m sorry. I have been entirely unprofessional in my behavior towards you. Please accept my apology. I will do better.”
She was silent for a long moment. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”
Dickhead strode back into Spider’s office, performed an elaborate bow and said, “There. Feel better?”
Spider was speechless. He sat on the edge of his desk, breathing deeply.
Dickhead stood there, hands on his hips, and said, “Anything else on your mind, Spider?”
CHAPTER 15
While Spider was grateful that
Dickhead had at last done the right thing, he hated having had to ask Dickhead to do it. McMahon should have treated Malaria properly all along — or, if he really did fancy her, should have set about wooing her in a very different manner. There were times Spider hated Dickhead, but then there were other times when Dickhead would inexplicably turn genuinely decent and sympathetic. It was maddening.
Now, he thought, watching Dickhead, he could see that the bastard’s unexpected turn of decency was largely for show. Dickhead had gone along with apologizing to Malaria not out of an awareness that he had behaved inappropriately in the workplace, but on a whim, because he could. Spider’s situation had not improved, and neither had hers, while Dickhead got to look all magnanimous. Feeling cold and a bit nauseated, Spider went and collapsed in his chair.
Dickhead grinned at him and said, “Who’s for a coffee?” Before Spider could offer an opinion, he had disappeared into the break room. Spider could hear him rinsing out coffee mugs and mumbling under his breath about the evils of instant coffee, “in this day and age.”
Without Dickhead using his zone-of-control powers in Spider’s tiny office, the room suddenly felt huge and spacious; he felt he could breathe again. Soldier Spider was right. Dickhead had done the right thing, and Spider had, in a roundabout sort of way, kind of won. Or at least Dickhead had let him win, which wasn’t quite the same thing. Better, his heart was starting to settle back to something resembling a normal rhythm. Now he just had the post-confrontation shakes, as all that adrenaline worked its way through his system.
While he sat there, staring at nothing, going back over and over that business with Dickhead, Malaria popped in, smiled, and whispered, “Thanks!” He nodded, too exhausted to do much else. This had been one of those days, what with the unexpected jaunt off to visit the timeship Masada and all. He could hear Dickhead in the break room, loudly stirring coffee, working the teaspoon like a percussion instrument. The high-pitched ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding as he stirred jarred Spider’s weary nerves, and he was grateful when Dickhead was finished. He braced for the big man’s return to his office.
“I see you’re out of bloody biscuits and all!” Dickhead said as he brought in a tray bearing two large mugs of coffee.
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Spider said, and took the mug Dickhead offered him.
Dickhead said, his face straight, “Nine sugars for you, wasn’t it, Spider?”
Spider very nearly fell for it, but realized in time. He performed an impression of a “ha-ha, very funny” smile for his boss’s benefit, but all the same decided to leave the coffee to cool for a bit before trying it. One never knew, with Dickhead.
“So,” his boss said, between sips.
Spider, slumped back in his chair, hungry and tired, said, “So what?” He knew very well what Dickhead had on his mind, thanks to Soldier Spider’s briefing. The question at hand, from Spider’s point of view, was whether he had the nerve to go through with it. It helped him to think that all he could do at any given time was just work on the problem in front of him, and worry about later problems when he got to them. Right now, all he had to do was convince Dickhead he had no clue what Dickhead was really all about. Well, he thought, trying not to look tense, here goes nothing…
“I’m trying to decide,” Dickhead said, staring into his coffee, “whether to go ahead with my original plan for today.”
“Let me know when you decide, then,” Spider said, reaching for his own coffee.
Dickhead worked his mouth into a humorless smile for a moment. “When I took you on, lo these many years ago now, I thought you might grow into a useful asset.”
Spider’s coffee was too sweet, but not insanely so. He sipped and waited. Here it came. The big pitch, the invitation. All the previous business, he’d been told, was just sparring: “Basically bullshit,” in his future self’s words. “It’s a big thing he’s got in mind for you, and he can’t just bluntly come out and say, ‘Well, Spider, how’d you like to join us in the Great War at the End of Time’ or anything like that, because you’d laugh, you’d think he was nuts. He has to introduce the topic a bit at a time, ease you into it. Otherwise, well…” He’d trailed off, and Spider could see why. But now, seeing Dickhead there on the other side of his desk, knowing what was on the big bastard’s mind, it still felt like a weird situation.
He’d asked Soldier Spider, “Why? Why’s all this happening to me?”
“Why you?” his future self had said sourly. “Well, why not you? Wasn’t it pure chance that you happened to go to that particular pub the night you met Dickhead? You could have gone to some other place and avoided him, maybe, though our simulations suggest he was actively looking for you.”
“What?”
“Yeah. And then of course, you’re the one who wound up finding Clea Fassbinder’s body.” Here Soldier Spider sighed, tired and sad. “She was one of our best people. Damn shame.”
This revelation jolted Spider out of his “why me?” funk. “Oh,” he had said, sitting up, staring at his future self, and remembering Fassbinder’s body wrapped in that blue plastic sheet.
“Very sad case,” Soldier Spider went on, distracted, clearly wanting to talk more about Dickhead and the mission.
Spider didn’t want to let it go. “Who was she, anyway?”
“She was one of us. A soldier.”
“That’s it?”
“She made her choice, Spider.”
“Choice? What choice? ‘Why, yes, I’d love to wind up slaughtered like a pig inside not one but two bloody time machines in the 21st century?’”
“Clea knew she died in your time. It freaked her out, knowing that, wondering why, how it happened, the whole thing. Then, when she found out she’d been murdered, well, it was like she had to find out all about it.”
“She went to investigate her own murder?”
“She knew we weren’t about to authorize something like that, so she spent a lot of her free time trying to investigate what happened to her from here, using our resources.”
“I’m guessing you weren’t crazy about that, either.”
“Let me just say,” Soldier Spider said, “Clea was getting a bit obsessed about it. Felt like her whole life was on rails. Occupational hazard in this line of work. And always, always asking, ‘why the fuck am I even in 21st century Perth, Western Australia in the first place? I mean, of all places to meet a sticky end, why there? Why not someplace interesting?’”
Spider felt a sharp pang of defensive pride about his home town, but wasn’t prepared to argue the point with someone from the End of Time, for God’s sake. “So what happened?”
“A job came up.”
“Ah,” he said.
“260th century AD. We’re conducting a covert op, don’t even think of asking the details. Out of nowhere this bloody space probe thing from the 21st century appears, and starts snapping photos.”
All at once, Spider felt large pieces of the puzzle grinding like heavy stones into place. “Kronos.”
“You’ve heard of it, then?”
“Time probe. Doing for the future what Voyager and Galileo did for the solar system. Hop-scotching across the future, sending back reports.”
“Exactly.”
“Surely, though,” Spider said, thinking about it, and thinking about James Rutherford’s strange story, “you could have easily avoided it?”
“By the time we spotted the thing, it had already snapped several terabytes of pix, run all manner of scans, and squirted it all back home, to your time.”
“Yeah, but if you just moved your covert op a light-year to the left, then the probe thing—”
Soldier Spider gave Spider a tired, sour look. “Been there, tried that. Over and bloody over. The fucking probe keeps turning up, like it’s hunting us, for God’s sake!”
“Ah,” Spider sai
d.
“You see the problem.”
“Even so, though. What would observers back in the creaky old 21st century even understand of stuff the probe showed them? Surely it’d be all very, ‘Uh, what the hell is that?’ and ‘It kinda looks like an espresso pot mating with a waffle iron.’ That kind of thing. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem, numbnuts, is follow-up probes. The morons not just back in your time but for thousands of years after that see they’ve found a manifold hot-spot, with interesting and colorful locals doing fascinating things. Let’s have a closer look, shall we? And next thing, more cameras are turning up to investigate our covert op than visit the Kennedy Assassination and the Crucifixion combined!”
“I suppose Dickhead somehow gets involved, too?”
“Of course. We think Dickhead’s people are the main reason the probe keeps finding our op in the first place, the bastards.”
“So. Problem.”
“Someone has to go back to your time and take care of it. Guess who volunteers?”
“You couldn’t stop her?”
Soldier Spider sighed. “I tried. I talked to her. Picked someone else for the job, even. But in the end, against orders, Clea went.” He shook his head, the memory painful even now.
Spider nodded, thinking about how it must have been. Then, a thought. He said, “By the way, does the name James Rutherford mean anything to you?”
“Rutherford was one of several people with access to the probe’s nav system software. High-level access, lots of influence, a heavy-hitter in all respects. Impeccable credentials, of course.”
“Of course. So Clea volunteers?”
“We try to talk her out of it, but by now she’s got something like a death wish.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 19
