by Lee Bond
“What to do, what to do?” It’d be easy enough to launch the Zigg-head at Nickels. The push of a button, really. Wherever the Aleph was hiding, he’d cease hiding and tear through everything and everyone.
Until, of course, he reached his target. Nickels had already defeated a trio of Alephs and while they hadn’t been nearly as steeped in Ziggurat as might’ve been preferable, he’d done so all the same, making a singular Aleph’s attempts particularly laughable.
“Collateral damage isn’t enough. Not this time.” Samiel stroked his wobbly chin. There were too many variables to take into consideration. He was being forced to think in ways he hadn’t done since the very beginning of his lonely sojourn to save the Human race, and while some might find the effort invigorating, Samiel did not.
He wanted Nickels gone. That was the only priority.
The problem was the man was in the most important phase of the entire plan. The 21st century … those months in which he resided … everything hinged on them. Fighting a fellow time traveler at any other time in History would be much simpler.
That entire bend in the stream was so very fragile. Too much and the whole thing could -and already had, more than once, especially in the beginning- unspool to the point where a major overhaul was needed.
Samiel wasn't entirely certain the stream would survive a major catastrophe, not with this Nickels character perched right in the middle like a bobbing target.
"And yet I can't let it go." Samiel pressed his lips tightly together, unhappy with the conditions being forced upon him. By now, whoever Garth Nickels really was had to know that there was someone else capable of doing as he'd done; the regrettable incident with the predator drone had to've driven that particular message home.
Similarly, this sudden strike against his Alephs was a direct and bold maneuver, one that demanded reprisal. Cherry Cristal's life monitor suddenly guttered out, an electronic candle blown out by digital wind.
"What to do." A sudden swoop of stretched thinness caromed through him.
The terrific sense of vertigo had Baron Samiel clutching the sides of his head and praying for the end to come. Any end. There were times, ever more increasing now that Nickels was in the field, it seemed, where Time itself seemed eager to destroy him, and it was in these moments that Samiel was discovering something inside him that just wanted to have it all come crashing down around his head.
Then the feeling passed, and then he remembered what it was he sought to prevent, and all thoughts of quitting or dying or willfully failing drained from him, and Baron Samiel was forged anew.
As always, as ever, the feeling of being pulled into the tempestuous void, a man-shaped void bobbling through an endless storm, faded as quickly as it'd come, leaving Samiel feeling foolish.
Wiping a shaky hand across a sweat-soaked forehead, Samiel brought his mind back to the most important task in his crosshairs: Garth Nickels.
"Coming at the man front on seems to do no good whatsoever." Samiel reflected, somewhat bemused. "Every time I killed him with the drone, he just came back. A trick even I cannot master. So if I were to retaliate in the present of his time stream, odds are he would do the same all over again. Hm."
Thinking about that reminded Samiel of Granger, and how broken the man had become since the unfortunateness surrounding Nickels' immunity to death. As far as the master of time was concerned, the Special Agent was a complete write off, a lingering odor that would -soon enough, though not just then- be dealt with as all unwanted things must be.
Samiel didn't want a repeat. Not with his most important asset in that time period. It was unlikely, given that he was now aware of the risks in communicating down The Line while the man was using his own temporal abilities, but there was still the possibility.
"Definitely will not be using Lissande or the others." Samiel needed to keep his full-blooded children safe and sound until he either understood the extent of Nickels' powers or managed to eradicate the man from The Line altogether. "What if I ... yes. That might work."
Brooding over the sudden idea in his head, Samiel called up all the information -such as it was- on Nickels as given to him by Delbert Granger. It was sparse, but it was more than enough to dial in on a point in Nickels' life where he might not be prepared.
Ideally, targeting Nickels’ life while he was still in Switzerland was the best place to divert his energies. Removing an enemy before they even became one was a tried and true method of threat dismissal, yet Samiel couldn’t help but believe that –no matter how ironclad the proof was- everything concerning Garth Nickels and his early childhood through to his adult years was nothing but a fiction, one created by a man capable of time travel.
Trying to inflict damage on a ghost would do nothing at all.
“No.” Samiel flickered forward through Garth’s life, dismissing everything accumulated by Granger until he came to the first few hours of the man’s time in San Francisco. “The only things I can be sure of are right here, at this junction in The Line. Let me see.”
The Baron of Time Itself hunkered down and started reading through the files prepped by poor Delbert Granger. Even though there was little there that was of true informative value, they were nevertheless prepared in the same perfect fashion as every other file generated by one of the brightest stars ever seen in the FBI.
“Ah. Yes. Here. This will be a good place to start. Agent Abraham Delaware Jones.” Samiel entered the name into his computers and waited for the machines –linked, as he was, to everything in the past, and here, so far up The Line, there was so much past to dig through- to find the man’s entire existence and sum it up.
From there, it’d be child’s play to … massage … Agent Jones’ upbringing to bring him to the level where things would get positively sticky when the rising young star found himself in the same room as Garth Nickels.
It’d just take time.
***
David Duchovny, in what Garth was sure was an intentionally irritating and grating voice, strutted back and forth on the screen, decrying the lovely Gillian Anderson’s inherently rational point of view for something like the eight millionth time. His tinfoil hat antics were especially irritating because –from the point of view of anyone who’d ever watched the series front to back more than once and who remembered everything they saw and heard- he fucking leaped to aliens and weird shit virtually one hundred percent of the time and refused to admit it could just as easily be some fucking guy in a mask.
The other side of that coin, though, was Dana Scully and her refusal to admit –even after being kidnapped by space aliens- that the weird shit they were currently trying to unravel in forty-five minutes lest they incur the dreaded ‘to be continued’ trailer at the end was, in fact, actually fucking weird shit and they should be wearing tinfoil hats and chomping down on rad pills to keep their insides from turning into glowing liquid goop.
Garth checked the time on his watch. Then he checked the time on his computer. Then, because you never really could tell when you were trapped in a temporal breach, he checked the time on every PC in the place, then went online and checked the time according to Greenwich.
“Oh, I do not like this at all.” Garth flipped the channel from X-Files to the security cameras and watched the police do their thing outside. From the looks of things, they were just wrapping things which was nice.
After all, they’d been at it for damn near four solid hours now, canvassing the area, doing that whole CSI thing, which Garth discovered via camera was a lot less badass one-liners and looking really awesome while eating sandwiches over dead bodies and looking disinterested and a whole lot more wearing stupid Hazmat-style suits and … being boring.
The worrisome part was that it’d been four hours.
“Four hours. Of nothing.” Garth checked the local Twitter feeds in search of, like, random people going randomly insane and going on kill sprees or anything like that and found nothing. Loads of regular old people doing regular old stuff on a reg
ular old night in San Francisco.
There was an obvious lack of evil time traveling Barons doing anything … evil and … time-travely.
Garth tapped the mic he was wearing on his shirt; following the assassinations of the Zigg-head crew, the arrival of the police and the lack of temporal space ninjas trying to murder him, he’d decided it would be best to keep in constant communication with Rommen and the others.
“Rommen from Nickels.”
“Go for Rommen.”
“Everything good up there?”
There was no need to worry about the police ‘accidentally’ horning in on their chit-chat. Just like everything else streaming from Camp Nickels, the encryption running on their walkie-talkies was being handled quite nicely by the almost-AI. Even though there really wasn’t any chance that the cops would overhear anything incriminating anyways; Kaptan Innit hadn’t trained no fools, so vagueness was the watchword of the day.
“That’s a negative. They did a few interviews, took a few notes. I gave them our business card.”
“Seem suspicious?”
“Also a negative. Birchy did a little side-interrogation and learned that a few people in the neighborhood had complained about the four on their own. Since they weren’t doing anything really wrong, they let it slide.”
Garth pulled at his chin. Time for a shave, soon. “Any hints about what they figger?”
“Negative, but given their chemical pastime and looks, odds are the police will chalk it up to drug-related shenanigans, regardless of the … method of their … execution. They’ve got other things to do with their time. Say, Garth …”
Here it comes. The questions. “Yeah, Rommen?”
“I thought you said this guy would come at you hot and heavy for something like this.”
“Yeah.” Garth nodded to himself. “Yeah, I did. And he should be. Which means I’m missing something.”
“Well, we’ll keep our eyes peeled. Let you know if anything weird starts happening.”
“Copy that. Garth out.”
“Roger. Rommen out.”
Garth dropped his hand away from the mic button listlessly. Everything about the Baron screamed ‘instant retaliation’. At the source. The man wasn’t –at least, in the real proto-Reality he hadn’t been- the kind of dude to do any serious thinking on what he was doing. Oh, sure, when it came to laying down the path for his overall victory the man was goddamn Rainman, but when dealing with enemies?
Hellfire from the skies. Final stage ODDities being dropped in from everywhere, hard shell contact lenses spiralling with all the colors of the rainbow and then some, their cruel mouths grinning nastily as they tore into whoever and whatever it was the Baron wanted gone.
Hell, even straight up temporal excision wasn’t out of Samiel’s reach. Garth’d seen that more than once, up The Line.
“Ah, fuck.” Garth cursed again, this time in very colorful IndoRussian. He knew what was going on now. “Fucking time travelers.”
The Kin’kithal sat down in his chair and held on tight. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but at least he knew now that something was going to happen.
When, though. When was the key.
Faint rippling sounds, like cards in a deck being shuffled, filled Garth’s ears. The world around him grew blurry and as he sat there, holding on for dear life, staring at the most distant wall, splotches of black light started trying to push through the walls.
“Heeerreee weeee gooooo.”
***
Agent Abraham Delaware Jones listened to everything his commanding officer, Special Agent Angela Devlin was saying with half an ear and felt regret at being unable to fully concentrate ; there was some kind of … mosquito in his brain, some high-pitched buzzing sound rolling back and forth. Had been all morning, since he’d crawled out of bed, but since they’d been deployed to this pizza joint, it’d gotten so much worse it wasn’t even funny.
“Jones.” Devlin’s voice was loud as a gunshot in the back of their armored vehicle. “Jones!”
“Ma’am! Yes, ma’am.” Jones blinked a few times and oriented on his commanding officer.
“You copy what I’m saying?” Devlin bit back a bitter curse when she saw that Jones was struggling to lie. “You’ve been off your game all day, Jones, so listen to me clearly right now. You copy?”
Jones nodded slowly, mosquito in his brain zipping through loudly. “Yes, ma’am.” He gripped his rifle a little tighter.
“There’s no indications this Nickels character is associated with any of the organized crime elements in the US. So far, he checks out as a successful immigrant with intent to restructure our failing economy. But he’s messing with American companies in ways that don’t jibe with how we do things, so we’re going to give him the regular treatment. Can’t have people coming here thinking they can do what they want. We’ve got enough of those kinds born and raised right here. So we go in hot and heavy and put the fear of Maiden America into him, but that’s it. Orders from on high, we razz him about the AI-side of UA only. Zero mention of crime orgs or anything like that. You got that, Jones?”
Jones nodded. They all nodded. It was SOP as always. “Check that, ma’am. Hot and heavy.”
Devlin stared Jones in the eye for a thoughtful second, then nodded. Even if he wasn’t one hundred percent, Jones looked solid enough to be in the room. “All right, people, let’s move. Let’s scare the bejesus out of Garth Nickels. Move move move.”
Jones nearly fell out the back of their armored vehicle when the mosquito stopped buzzing at the mention of the man’s name. As he clambered after the rest of his team, he probed the depths of his brain, groping around in search of the high-pitched whine that’d been driving him to madness this whole time, wondering why it’d stop now, after hearing the name of the man?
Surely Special Agent Devlin had said the name before? Had the keening sound in his brain -still gloriously, miraculously gone- kept him from hearing it prior to that moment just past? Running the last hour through his mind as he hustled with the rest of the crew across the road towards the cafe, Jones found ... almost nothing. He remembered walking in to work, remembered making the usual jokes with the usual crew, remembered listening to the rundown on the day's events and even gearing up for the sitrep as per: Nickels, but it was all drowned out, buried beneath the droning mosquito between his ears.
Jones hurried to get behind Aziz, hunkering down as they crossed by the front window; thanks to the rows of computer screens and advertisements, they weren't even seen, which was nice, because Jones didn't think he was up for a runner.
Inside, their target, Nickels, was by now experiencing the inexorable lockup that'd keep all his assets frozen in place until Devlin decided whether or not the man was guilty or just plain old ignorant.
Jones licked his lips and followed Aziz in through the door, Special Angela Devlin's crisp voice barking orders to everyone left inside. Because of the tactical helmet, Nickels' resounding retort was only half heard.
Or ... was it the silence now that was proving to be as deafening as the mosquito whine? Jones couldn't tell.
He licked his lips and walked around the corner.
Garth Nickels stood there before all of them, looking casual and calm and collected as the day was long, completely unruffled at being surrounded by Federal Agents pointing deadly weapons at him. Blue eyes gleamed beneath a frame of curly, coal black hair.
The silence echoing deeply through Jones suddenly rang like a bell and the mosquito was back, only this time, this time it was flying through the air and it landed on Garth Nickels’ face and it seemed to stare back at him.
Jones licked his lips and tightened his grip on the rifle in his hands. There was only one thing he could do if the mosquito started making that noise again, and that was to make the noise go away.
It happened. Right in the middle of Nickels blandly explaining everything that was going on, the mosquito filled the whole internet café with that high-pitched whine, a
sound that slammed right into the center of Jones’ forehead like a diamond-tipped drill and kept on going until it seemed that the whole of his head was vibrating.
Jones did the only thing he could do.
He took aim on the mosquito, apologized mentally to Nickels, who didn’t seem to be such a bad guy after all, and fired.
Pop pop pop.
That’s all it took. The sound disappeared. His head stopped pulsing. The pressure disappeared. Jones barely even noticed the fact that he was being taken down to the ground in the roughest manner possible, couldn’t even hear Special Agent Angela Devlin’s crisp, authoritative voice shrieking in his ears.
He was free.
***
So far up The Line that there was hardly any line left to consider, Baron Samiel leaned back in his ancient chair and grinned from ear to ear, ignoring the not-so-subtle tearing sensation pulling at the corners of his over-wide mouth. This was the kind of success that demanded celebration, even if it was nothing more than a smile.
Before him, the length of green light indicating the life and times of one Mister Garth Nickels, alleged time travel and insidious pain in a true time traveler’s behind, winked out in the blink of an eye.
“And that, is Mister ‘Nickels’, what happens when you mess with Baron Samiel.” With all of time at his command, it’d been a simple thing –in the end, mind, not during the act itself- to take the life of Abraham Delaware Jones and massage it ruthlessly, nearly day in and day out, starting from his life as a child all the way up to the day in question, when he’d lost his mind and shot his target dead.
Samiel grinned again. “Twenty, thirty years of my life, expended on the act? No matter. A drop in the bucket when compared to how long it used to take me to do things like this. I truly am a master.”
