Rebhorn scowled around his cheroot. ‘Any idea about how long we have before it blows?’
‘Could be hours, could be minutes,’ Tom said.
‘Then we better get moving,’ Rebhorn said.
He stood up and waved his hand in a circle above his head and pointed forward. Engines revved, and the column of vehicles accelerated alongside the railroad toward the tree line. Braced in the back of the command Jeep, Stone tried not to think about the nuclear reactor sitting just a few miles away, its core growing hotter and hotter. He felt that he was riding an avalanche he had triggered. Just one wrong step could wipe him out. A reactor was about to go critical, right here, right now, and the version of Tom Waverly who’d been killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels had been dying of radiation poisoning . . .
As the edge of the forest resolved out of the rain, muzzle flashes flickered in the shadows beneath the trees. A bullet cracked past Stone’s ear, and then the mini-guns on top of the APCs on either side of the command Jeep opened up, hosing rounds into the tree line. Trees tossed as if caught in a gale, shedding leaves and shattered branches, and a ragged line of figures stood up and charged through the long grass.
They were a species of apeman that Stone had never seen before, wiry creatures about seven feet tall, clothed only in greasy red fur and leather harness. They carried assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and their small heads were cased in fat white helmets: a battle computer in some remote bunker was controlling them through encrypted radio links to electrodes in their brains. They charged without fear, firing their weapons as they ran straight toward the column. A gout of smoke and dirt burst in front of the pair of quad bikes that led the command Jeep. The bikes tipped over and spilled their riders, hot dirt rattled down as the Jeep slowed and swerved past the raw crater, and Tom swung out of the vehicle, fell down, picked himself up, and ran back toward the overturned bikes.
Stone jumped out too, fell, rolled, scrambled to his feet and drew his pistol and ran after Tom. Wet grass immediately drenched him to the waist. Something reared up to his right, beyond the smouldering crater, and he turned and fired. The round knocked the skinny red giant onto its back but didn’t kill it. As it climbed to its feet, Stone braced his right wrist with his left hand, took careful aim, and put a second round through its white helmet. It fell bonelessly, a puppet whose strings had been cut, but more apemen were already running toward him. He picked his targets and fired off the rest of the clip, taking two of them down, dropped the empty clip and snapped a fresh one into the hot pistol, and the rest of the apemen vanished in a storm of dirt and flying foliage as a soldier standing in the rear of a Jeep hammered them with the heavy machine gun mounted on its roll bar.
Tom righted one of the quad bikes and accelerated away in a spray of wet dirt. Stone ran to the other bike. Its rider sprawled beneath it, head twisted around, blood all over his face, no pulse behind his jaw. Stone used all his strength to heave the heavy machine onto its four all-terrain tyres. Its engine started at the first press of the button, and Stone pursued Tom toward the trees, the two of them peeling away from the railroad and Rebhorn’s team.
Stone realised with sick dismay that they were heading toward the nuclear reactor. He opened up the throttle of the quad bike, gaining on Tom as he disappeared into the trees, leaning into turns, leaning
out
of turns when the tough little vehicle tipped sideways and two of its fat tyres lifted off the ground. A big animal crashed away, a ground sloth with a shaggy grey pelt and the build of a bottom-heavy bear, glimpsed and gone as Stone bounced and slithered down a corduroy track that dipped into a draw filled with mist that rose from the swift river running through it: the outflow from the reactor.
The reactor loomed ahead, a squat, windowless blockhouse built across the draw. Smooth torrents of steaming water shot out of three huge outflow pipes at its base, sluicing through a concrete basin that emptied into the river bed. Tom was racing his quad bike along a track above this cauldron, cutting toward the flank of the reactor. Stone chased after him, saw him jump off his bike and jog up a steel stairway, and swerved to a halt, shouting Tom’s name.
When Stone gained the second landing of the stairway, three loud shots made him crouch low. Tom was leaning over the rail, two flights above. He’d lost his helmet. Strings of grey hair hung around his face as he angled an assault rifle downward and shouted at Stone, telling him to get the fuck out of here right now.
‘Don’t do it!’ Stone shouted back. He had drawn his pistol but couldn’t get a clear sight through the grid of steps.
‘It’s my fucking destiny!’ Tom screamed. He rattled off three more shots and disappeared from view.
Stone went up the rest of the stairway slowly and carefully, leading with his pistol. There was a short walkway to a locked steel door set in a deep recess. He pounded on it impotently, then ran back down the stairs, started his quad bike, and sped up the switchback trail that climbed past the reactor, blasting through mist, jolting along a track between dense trees, emerging at the edge of a wide strip of pounded earth. Railroad sidings fanned out in front of three hangar-sized buildings. Rain blurred the lights inside the hangars and the floodlights on tall pylons alongside the tracks.
Colonel Rebhorn’s team was stretched across the far end of the sidings, firing at groups of apemen that rushed toward them through squalling rain. A string of boxcars burned fiercely. Mini-guns on top of the two APCs swivelled this way and that, firing short deadly bursts that churned dirt, disintegrated sandbagged emplacements, and vaporised apemen.
Stone heard rounds snap past, saw apemen moving toward him, shooting from the hip. He gunned the quad bike, planning to cut across the tracks, but more apemen popped up from a trench right in front of him. He swerved sharply and the bike tipped and skidded away on its side as he jumped clear. He rolled three times and hugged the ground, reaching for his pistol, as rounds cut the air above his head. The apemen were climbing out of their trench and he took aim and shot two of them and jumped up as the rest charged, firing at their white helmets, their blank leathery faces, and beyond the sidings a line of power transformers exploded in great fountains of sparks, and floodlights and the lights inside the hangars all went out.
The apemen screeched and dropped their weapons and clutched at their white helmets. Stone shot one down and the rest turned tail and fled. Across the wide space in front of the hangars, apemen were standing mute and still in the rain or wandering aimlessly this way and that, jerking and falling over as Rebhorn’s men picked them off, the soldiers’ gunfire slowly dying down as they realised that the battle was over.
Stone caught up with Rebhorn in one of the hangars. The colonel had lit his cheroot and was puffing on it as he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of the huge space, studying the three Turing gates that loomed above him. Their empty maws were each twenty feet in diameter, big enough to take a truck. Soldiers were spraying foam at the burning Airstream trailer that housed the gate controls. Black smoke rolled out of its broken windows and rose into the hangar’s high roof and flushed out of its square doorway. Smashed equipment lay everywhere. Dead men and women sprawled in a pool of mingled blood.
Rebhorn told Stone that his men hadn’t found Linda Waverly yet, but they were still searching. ‘Looks like the sons of bitches killed everyone they didn’t need and went through one of these gates. We don’t know which one, and we don’t know where the gates went because they’re all stone-cold dead. We heard explosions as we were fighting our way in. I lost five men to those goddamn apes, twice that many wounded. I would have lost more if the battle computer hadn’t been taken out.’
Stone told him that the power surge was probably down to Tom Waverly. ‘He got inside the reactor and locked the door in my face. We have to find another way in, Colonel. We have to get him out.’
Rebhorn said that he’d do his best, but he was waiting on a specialist team that would be able to deal with the reactor.
‘Give me a couple of shaped charges,’ Stone said. ‘I’ll blow the door and drag him out by his hair.’
‘Can’t let you do that, Mr Stone. That reactor could go critical at any time, and we need you to help us understand what happened here. Let’s hope those specialists find your friend and pull him out of there before he gets himself a lethal dose.’
‘It might be too late already,’ Stone said.
When he’d taken the time key and set out to confront Eileen Barrie, Stone had believed that he had been setting out on a path that was straight and true, but the path had betrayed him, had looped back to a place very like the one he’d been trying to escape. He wondered with a bitter weariness if he’d gone around the loop before, passing through minor variations and flourishes but always arriving at the same outcome.
Rebhorn said, ‘It could have been a whole lot worse. My men found three small nuclear devices in various states of assembly. None of them were ready to go, fortunately, or I doubt we’d be having this discussion right now.’
‘This isn’t over,’ Stone said. ‘These people may have taken an armed bomb with them. Maybe more than one.’
‘You’re going to have to discuss that with General Ellis back in the Real,’ Rebhorn said. ‘My job is to secure this place, not to worry about imponderables.’
‘I’m not going back until I know what happened to Tom Waverly.’ As they walked out of the hangar toward the command Jeep, Rebhorn got a call on his radio; a couple of his men had spotted movement in an outbuilding.
It was a small, stark concrete cube that stood at a corner of a field of smouldering, truck-sized transformers. One of the soldiers keeping watch from behind a boxcar told Colonel Rebhorn that someone was inside, and at the same moment the building’s door cracked open and a white shape - a T-shirt tied to the barrel of an assault rifle - fluttered like a ghost in the narrow aperture. A familiar voice shouted that he was coming out, he was unarmed. Stone told Rebhorn and his soldiers to hold their fire, and ran forward as Tom Waverly stepped out into the rain stark naked, hands held high.
8
Two of Rebhorn’s men drove Stone and Tom Waverly back to the train. Tom told Stone that he’d had to go onto the floor of the reactor and reinsert its control rods manually, and then he’d fed a killing surge through the power lines to the facility. He’d been suited up, he said, but he wasn’t sure if the suit had given him enough protection.
‘We’ll get you checked out as soon as we get back to the Real.’
‘They took Linda with them, didn’t they? They took her through their back door.’ Tom was slumped in the shotgun seat of the Jeep next to Stone, his wet hair hanging in rat tails, one blanket wrapped kiltwise around his waist, a second draped over his shoulders. ‘This didn’t exactly go according to plan. Linda’s gone; I got a lethal dose. You ever read Dante?’
‘I was brought up a Catholic.’
‘I remember there’s a circle of Purgatory where the sinners are condemned to live through the same thing over and over. But I can’t for the life of me remember which sin they had committed.’
‘We’ll take care of you,’ Stone said, but he felt a cold hopelessness. This is still the same loop, he thought. We haven’t changed anything important. Maybe it isn’t possible to change anything: we’re fated to go around in a circle. Tom will die. And Susan will die, and we’ll come back here, and start over, no end to it. No end.
‘If we don’t do something soon, we’ll be headed for Pottersville,’ Tom said. ‘They want to exchange Linda for the time key. That’s how we’ll get to them. They still want it. They still need it. They need it so very badly they’ll risk everything to get it back.’
‘You aren’t going anywhere, Tom, except straight to hospital. I’ll take it from here. I’ll get Linda back. All you have to do is tell me where these guys have gone and what they’re planning to do.’
Tom shook his head. ‘There’s no point going to hospital. I know I caught a lethal dose in the reactor. I know I’m gonna die this time around, like I did the time before. I know it, and you know it too. They’ll want to take me away for debriefing, and then they’ll throw me in the deepest, blackest hole they have. But you can’t let them do that to me, Adam, not if you want to save the life of your woman. We still have work to do, old buddy. One last op.’
‘I don’t think they’ll let you go anywhere, Tom. But if you tell me what needs to be done, I promise I’ll do my very best.’
‘I’ll tell you this: they took a suitcase nuke through one of their gates. They’re going to try to start a war some time in the past of another sheaf. They’re going to try to change its history, and if they succeed they’ll change
our
history too. The Company is going to have to let me go because I know where the bomb is going to be planted. I helped scout it out and set it up, and I know how to stop it, too. You’re coming with me, Adam. We’ll find the bomb, we’ll find them, we’ll find Linda. Otherwise, they’ll change history. They’ll change everything.’
‘Where did they go? Which sheaf?’
Cold rain blew over the Jeep as it sped along the muddy track. The train stood in the distance, small and black in the wide, empty grassland.
‘We’ll go after them together,’ Tom said, and wouldn’t say anything else.
Back in the Real, Stone told Bruce Ellis, ‘Linda, Tom and me, we’re caught in some kind of loop. It’s about two weeks end to end. We travelled back to the beginning, and now we’re going forward. And if we don’t figure out how to stop it, Tom will end up killing himself in Pottersville and Linda and I will go on to meet another version of Tom in the Nixon sheaf, and we’ll all end up back here.’
Bruce said, ‘If you catch up with these bad guys, will it stop this loop of yours?’