Authors: Cam Rogers
He grabbed for the glass-and-steel balustrade as if it were all he had ever wanted. Got his forearms across, fell, bashing chest against the flat of it and his chin against the rail.
Stars. Flailing. Didn’t let go. Felt nothing beneath his feet. A terrible and total nothing.
He let himself hang for just a moment, gasping.
Slipped his boots onto thirty-five and rolled himself over the rail. His back hit the ground hard. Just breathed as if he’d forgotten how to.
“Kill him!”
Ah, shit.
He slapped both hands against the slate-gray carpet, popped a shield, almost blacked out from the effort. Heard a ton of bullets
thwip
against the carapace.
He was done. Running on fumes.
“Fuck off,” Jack said to the ceiling, flatly. “Whoever you are just fuck off.”
“That shield has a half-life of about, what, ten seconds? Fifteen?”
Jack heard the
snick-snack
of weapons reloading. The subtle pneumatic hiss of German-engineered microhydraulics. The question mark whine of servos.
He sat up beneath his bubble.
“That’s Jack Joyce,” someone else said.
There were thirty guys and two Juggernauts—all of them rigged for stutter mobility. They’d been hauling ass and braked to a halt when Jack flipped over the railing. The ones bringing up the rear were swinging assault rifles back and forth like they were expecting to get jumped any second.
“Who gives a shit?” another said. “We’re almost there.”
The leader—a clean-cut kid with a movie-star complexion—shook his head. “Uh-uh. Shifters can’t pass through the stutter shield, but
he
can. We can’t leave him wandering around.”
The kid opened up, barking a thirty-round mag into the shield, wide coverage. Hundreds of bullets waited for permission to splash Jack to paste, while the squad kept him covered with everything they had.
“Figure that half-life is down to about five,” the kid said.
If Jack stepped outside, he was going to die; if he stayed put, he was going to die. He didn’t have enough left in him for a warp.
“Four,” the kid said.
Jack looked left and right: He was on a curved mezzanine, with the Monarch crew in front of him. There was cover behind the elevator bay to the right. To the left was all glass-walled meeting rooms along the full line of the gallery. Not enough charge in him to cover a warp of ten feet.
The shield trembled. So did the bullets.
“Three.”
Jack glanced behind him. “Over the side,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to Paul’s panicked face at Bannerman’s Overlook six years ago. “Legs first.”
The kid smiled. His buddies braced weapons.
Jack backed against the rail, got a firm grip.
The stutter watered down fast.
Jack tensed.…
“One.”
The top half of the kid tore free and flew a messy twenty feet toward Jack before freezing mid-air, trailing wet red machinery.
Mad light. Howls.
The stutter shield collapsed as Jack leaped to the right, instead of backward, the designer railing blasted to slag by the simultaneous impact of a cloud of military rounds and at least one micromissile. Something hot—slag, shrapnel, or a bullet—blazed through his hamstring. The entire squad had now forgotten him, going full auto on opponents far more lethal than Jack.
Rising to one knee he came face-to-upside-down-face with the kid’s shocked expression. He shuddered. “Tough break.”
The squad had scattered like billiards.
Shifters were tearing them to pieces. Back pressed to the elevator bay, chest pounding, Jack scanned the mezzanine for a way to Paul’s office on forty-nine … and found it. Security elevator—black-and-chrome edged. He fumbled in his pockets—trying to ignore the pain and keep the weight off his crippled left leg—and found Sofia’s security laminate.
He glanced around the corner.
A trooper flew past at waist height and hit the railing, where his spine snapped like a gunshot, before flipping slackly into the void.
One Juggernaut wheeled in an awkward forty-five-degree three-step, targeting laser drawing a bead on one monster approaching at speed. The pilot spat his entire missile pod at the thing, a dozen micro-missiles
vip-whoosh
-ing in rapid succession down seventy feet of office hallway, clothing the thing in shrapnel and blooming flame clouds. To no effect.
The Shifter raised both arms, brought them down and through the Juggernaut’s only protection: the front armor plate.
The man tried to wrestle free, had no chance.
A second Shifter zapped in from behind, grabbed the guy around the face and waist. And pulled.
The Juggernaut froze in a position of alarm, the trooper inside the suit froze mid-air; pilot and frame violently disarticulated.
A second Juggernaut pivoted and cut loose with its auto-cannon—pointlessly; 7.62mm rounds sprayed into the Shifters, wild rounds mowing down a handful of his workmates who were still alive.
Realizing he was a drowning man strapped to a multi-million-dollar anchor, the pilot activated the emergency release, stepped backward out of the exoskeleton, and ran—straight toward the elevators.
“No,” Jack hissed. “Not here. Not here.”
A seven-foot fractal silverback dropped on the pilot, crushing him.
Jack breathed a sigh of relief.
The Shifter snapped its head up, roared, and reached for him—palm filled with starlight.
“Oh fuck.”
Jack warped. He didn’t make it far, but he cleared the distance between elevator bays and the glass-walled rooms, the nearest of which were now bullet-riddled and shattered. He came out of the warp and kept running, old-school, his left leg bright red with pain. The security elevator was a hundred feet away and closing, the sounds of carnage behind him dwindling as the Shifters began to run out of people to butcher.
A quick look behind and he saw Shining Palm take down one trooper before one long swipe reduced a second trooper to a dead statue.
Seventy feet. The pain in his leg was receding; it took weight more easily.
Jack warped.
Thirty feet.
He was dizzy, seeing stars. Glanced back.
Shining Palm was thundering down the gallery after him, and behind him came a wave of other Shifters.
Jack warped—fifteen feet—and almost blacked out. Laminate in hand he swiped it through the slot.
Glanced back. Shining Palm was fifty feet and closing. Forty.
The security doors opened. Jack leaped inside, punched the Door Close button.
As they slid closed Jack noticed the chronon frame that bracketed the elevator—charged.
Ten feet. Doors closed. Jack braced for impact … nothing but howls.
The elevator climbed upward, its own rescue rig keeping it mobile despite universal stasis.
He collapsed against the wall, slid to the floor. He hadn’t stopped to think the elevator might be as uncooperative as everything else in a stutter. Looked like Paul took that into account when he rigged the top floors with its own stutter shield.
“Good morning, Dr. Amaral,” the elevator said. “You are not due at the office for another six hours and eighteen minutes.”
A stutter shield that, Jack figured, was being powered by the Countermeasure.
The infoscreen told him it was 12:42
A.M
.
The doors opened on floor forty-nine and Jack felt the chronon dampeners like the fug of a mild hangover. He’d have no advantages here if anyone tried to jump him.
Jack emerged into a hallway lit by recessed violet strip lighting and walked toward Paul’s office without so much as a limp. His leg had healed.
Paul’s door was fine mahogany set into a sci-fi housing. Sofia’s card clicked in, got green-lighted, and the door’s maglock released with a pleasing
thunk
.
Pistol gripped in both hands, Jack booted the door, sending it flying open hard enough for the handle to punch through the wall and keep it there. He stepped in briskly, scanning. He was alone.
Glass wall on one side, staircase curving up to living quarters on the other. Desk facing glass wall, big gnarled-looking expensive wooden chair …
Expensive art, expensive carpets, two-floor-tall bookshelves. Fully-equipped gymnasium on the far side.
Jack took Sofia’s map, checked the layout. The Regulator was kept in a sealed chamber directly beneath her chronon labs, and was accessible through …
Behind the desk, flush with the wall, was an armored security door. Reinforced, two-inches thick, and the eruption of technology next to it suggested that nobody was getting in without everything including a urine sample.
“… that suspiciously open door.”
The door was wide open, the chamber beyond lit blood red.
Jack approached sidelong and slow, gun at the ready. Could be it just popped open when the building started freaking out. Or maybe someone had panicked and left it like this.
He glanced inside.
Broad and deep, Paul’s side of the Regulator chamber ended at a thick transparent wall. That wall had a door—also open—and beyond that the chamber was walled with diagnostics. Two standing consoles faced the far wall, and set into the wall was a geometric depression.
Within that depression sat the thing Jack and Beth had gone through hell to find.
The Countermeasure had been reinforced since Jack had last seen it, back in 2010 when Beth had died. It was now gloved tightly within a reinforced titanium frame. Connectors and adapters had been built into it, conservatively, for the purpose of powering Monarch Tower’s chronon-related vitals. Otherwise, beneath the pretty new dress, it was still Will’s homemade dodecagon. It was a powerful thing for such a small object, no bigger than a volleyball.
He moved in. Nobody home. He stepped into the chamber proper. Everything quietly humming. Screens flashed blueprints of the entire Tower. Looked like Will’s volleyball really was powering everything that mattered.
Jack got closer to it, puzzled out the clamps and catches keeping it in place, which panel governed the release mechanism.
It was the panel with the screen opened on
REGULATOR HOUSING RELEASE: Y
/
N
?
Jack closed his eyes, sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it.”
Nothing.
“
Come on!
Door’s open? Every safeguard on this thing’s been disabled.
Do it!
”
Nothing.
REGULATOR HOUSING RELEASE: Y
/
N
?
Jack stared at it, hating it.
“Fuck it.”
Catches popped like gunshots. Electromagnets powered off, cabling popping free from every socket on the device.
A klaxon blared, deafeningly, once, and the lighting in the room shifted to blue.
FLOOR 49 STUTTER SHIELD: DEACTIVATED.
FLOOR 50 STUTTER SHIELD: DEACTIVATED.
CHRONON DAMPENERS: OFFLINE.
ELEVATOR MOBILITY RIGS: OFFLINE.
Howls.
Jack leaped toward the Countermeasure, tugged it from its housing. A little resistance, a lot of heat, and it clacked loose.
Jack held it, surveyed it, the salvation of humanity.
“I have no idea how to use this thing.”
The Shifters were moving in.
Jack zipped the Countermeasure into Nick’s backpack, slung it, and ran out of there.
There was only one person left who knew what to do.
The chamber’s southern exit led to Paul’s office, and a western exit was designed for quick access to the time lab. Jack took the latter. The security door led to a dog-leg hallway. He rounded the second corner, swiped his way through the door, secured it behind himself.
He stood in a glass-box control room, looking down on the sterile expanse of the Monarch time laboratory, safety areas marked out in black-and-yellow lines, a raised grill-floored diagnostic station on the far side. The machine itself—that smooth, high-tech donut—sat heavy on the right side of the lab. The time core—the one Monarch had airlifted out of Riverport University two nights ago—hung twenty feet above the center of the ring, cabling draping down to the Promenade, ready for automated lowering and connection.
The time lab had its own stutter-proofing: a series of discrete generators in each corner of the room, drawing a chronon charge from the same batteries that powered the machine. Insurance, and an escape route, against the main shield ever going down in the midst of a crisis.
Jack slapped the release button, setting the machinery downstairs in motion. He exited the far side of the observation deck, clattering down the stairs as the time core lowered carefully into position at the center of the Promenade.
It was still inching downward as the Shifters crashed through the corridors upstairs.
Reaching the time lab floor, Jack looped thumbs through the straps of his pack, pulling it tight against his back to minimize bounce, and sprinted for the machine. He got to the controls just as various connectors began jacking into the core. The controls lit up.
A swarm of crazed light manifested inside the glass-box control room.
Shifters flickered and phased into the lab.
Fuck.
It wasn’t possible to go back any earlier than when the machine was first activated, which was around 4:15
A.M
. the previous Saturday. Today was Monday. He gambled on 4:35
A.M
. and activated the machine.
The Monarch machine was better made. The Promenade charged up immediately, the airlock levering itself open smoothly as the horde rolled out of the observation deck, already appearing here and there across the time lab’s expanse. Jack warped for the airlock, up the ramp, spun, and slapped the release plate. The airlock began levering itself closed as that galloping, tumbling mass of schizophrenic carnage filled the lab, skidded, and barreled toward him, howling hatred.
Jack stopped. Someone was in the lab, standing unbothered, eyes on Jack as the horde flowed around him.
Martin Hatch.
The Shifters didn’t acknowledge Monarch’s CEO, didn’t lay a claw on his finely tailored suit. Hatch watched the airlock close as the monsters flowed around him, galloping and tumbling for Jack, until he was lost from sight behind the strobing and shifting mass.