Authors: Cam Rogers
The canopy was an undulating design that tapered toward the ground on the far side. Three hundred feet beneath their shoes waited the hard, polished floor of the atrium. Two panels of glass—reinforced or not—between them and about two seconds of terror.
Will was transfixed, staring at the ground below with an expression of total horror.
“Will? Hey, Will.” Tucking the handgun into the back of his jeans Jack shook Will by the shoulder. Will reacted violently, stance wide, struggling for balance. “Will! We’re fine. We walk across this, to the far side, into your car, and we’re gone. Easy.” Will clearly wasn’t convinced. “C’mon, this’ll be fun.”
“Fun?”
And then, “Oh, this is your coping strategy manifesting again. I understand.”
“I’ll go first, you follow.” Jack walked twenty feet to the next segmented glass panel, held in place by the ornate geometrical webwork of steel beams. He jumped up and down. “Totally safe.”
“Please don’t do that.” Will took a breath, followed.
* * *
The old physics building—that redbrick relic of a bygone era—was mostly enclosed by the crystalline shell of the Monarch Innovations Quantum Physics complex. Only its new top levels jutted above the glass dome, the levels that held the lab and Monarch’s time machine. It was from the ground floor of this building that Senior Operative Randall Gibson emerged, into the vast domed lobby of the Quantum Physics complex. On his earpiece was his second-in-command, Donny, now in charge of the squad Gibson had left in the time lab.
Gibson’s ear mic pinged—a call from the Tower. “Actual to C-1, activate rescue rigs.”
Beneath their armor Gibson’s crew wore delicate wire-and-brace filament exoskeletons, wired to the portable chronon battery on their back. Simultaneously slapping a small chrome plate on each hip brought Gibson’s battery online. His skin stung sharply along the lines of the wiring.
“Donny, you copy that?”
Donny was a good guy. Gibson had worked with him for years: easy to get along with, happiest when taking orders, reliable in a fight.
“Yeah, boss. We’re live.”
This is what they’d trained for. Chronon-1 could now move freely. Interruptions to causality flow would have no hold over them.
“Actual, C-1 is chronon-active.”
“Boss, heads up. Getting word: gunfire on fifth, and Reaper squad is down. Fifty percent casualties. Looks like a grenade mishap.”
“Are you fuckin’ serious, Don?”
Chronon-1 was the only squad on-site authorized to deploy rigs. Reaper squad was filled with regulars. Nothing special, but casualties meant leaving DNA, fiber … evidence. Ah, Monarch had the best cleaners in the biz.
“’Fraid so, sir.”
“You’re in charge, Don. I’m overseeing Guardian’s sanitization run. Buzz me if you need me.”
Guardian squad was hanging out in the atrium. No rigs, no skills. This wasn’t how Gibson had imagined his first live chronon op: coddling a gang of masked chumps. Fuck this, man. Right in the car.
Guardian squad’s CO—a young senior operative, carbine strapped across his chest—saluted as he strolled over, like he was still in the Corps. Didn’t even take the mask off to do it.
Asshole.
The light from the double-dome superstructure was throwing down crazed shadows that made Gibson’s eyes hurt.
“Boss,” Donny piped up over the earpiece. “Be aware: the two strays from the time lab aren’t among the bodies.”
Stupid idea for a building, Gibson thought, taking it all in: a football field’s worth of space between here and the other side of the dome. Racks of Segways spaced around it just so the civvies could get to the stairs. So fuckin’ inefficient.
“Do what we do, Don. Lock it down. They’ll be in there.…” His eyes traversed the geometrical curvature above him, the inner and outer webwork clashing into still more patterns.
Gibson stopped where he was, eyes up.
Well,
Randall Gibson thought.
Ain’t that something
. “Don?” he said. “Look out a window.”
“Hey, Randall,” Guardian’s CO said, eye on the time. “You ready?”
Gibson kept his eye on the ceiling. “Sure, sure. Listen, let me borrow that six-pack your boy’s carrying.”
Donny piped up. “Well shit, boss. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“Wait twenty seconds, Don,
then
tell me what you see.”
* * *
Jack and Will had covered about ten panels—maybe a hundred feet—and were making good time.
“See? No big deal. Close to halfway there and no casualties.” No response from Will, so Jack checked behind him. “Will?”
Will was where they’d started.
Eyes screwed shut, frozen on the spot, Will stammered, “I-I can’t move, Jack. I…” He looked down. “Oh God.”
“Will, look at me, okay? Straight ahead. Slow and steady steps.”
“I…” Will never finished the sentence. He was staring down, fixated by the glass at his feet, the drop beyond it.
“Will?”
His head whipped up, breath snagged in his throat, and, suddenly, Will was running right at him.
* * *
“Whoop,” Gibson muttered, tracking the grenade launcher’s barrel across the underside of the dome. “We got a rabbit.”
Forty-millimeter grenades have a casualty radius of about 130 feet, so Guardian squad had hunkered themselves behind the info stand. Gibson had positioned himself as far away from his target as possible, firing at an angle. Mama Gibson didn’t raise no dummy.
Gibson sighed and pulled the trigger. The M32 kicked with a satisfying
thoonk.
* * *
Will sprinted straight for Jack.
“Will! It’s cool! Rel—”
Three glass panels thirty feet behind his brother shocked white as the entire superstructure smashed into the underside of their feet. Jack was knocked on his ass, the handgun striking sharp against his tailbone, ankles and shins wracked with splintering pain; Will left the surface completely, arms pinwheeling, and came down hard, smashing into the glass. Jack couldn’t hear himself shout,
“What the fuck was that?”
He couldn’t hear anything.
Will was hyperventilating, scrambling to his feet, but something was wrong. His feet wouldn’t take his weight. Jack’s own feet and legs were a riot of tingling excruciation. His bones burned. Facedown as he was, pressed to the glass dome, he saw what was happening below: a smiley-faced squad taking cover behind a curved information desk and a bare-headed trooper with a six-shot rotary grenade launcher, eyeballing Will with the happiest expression Jack had ever seen on a human face.
* * *
Cordite stench and hot glass particles settled into the atrium. Gibson rolled his shoulders, cricked his neck, and sighted up a second shot.
Gibson called out his next shot to Donny. “See if I can pinball him off the roof.”
“Damn, boss. You know I could just shoot ’em from here.”
“Don’t you dare. I got me five shots left.”
Foonk.
* * *
Jack struggled to his aching feet.
“Will, get up.”
If Will’s body was pressed to the surface when the next one hit it could scramble his organs.
“Get up!”
Will did, sort of. With a desperate heave he got his body off the glass as a section of panels to his left took the hit, knocking him sideways. Jack watched his brother flail, collapse, and slide, his fingers dragging across the glass. He was close to the curve—it was gentle, but another blast like that would send him flying over the edge, three hundred feet down to the university lawn.
* * *
Gibson hitched his lip, dissatisfied. “I got a better idea.” He switched targets.
Foonk.
* * *
Jack got halfway to Will when the shock wave hit—blowing him backward.
* * *
Gibson retargeted.
Foonk.
* * *
Both brothers shouted as the panel section behind Will that had taken the first grenade hit took a second. Thick, reinforced glass volcanoed upward. The ejecta from the explosion tinkled delicately as it rained in heavy, jagged fistfuls across the dome.
Punch-drunk and battered, Jack struggled to interpret the world around him through senses that had traded places with one other: he smelled pain, felt brightness, heard fear. The world was two images skating atop one another. His head was an endlessly sounding dial tone. He stood on a hot crystal moon that sweated dollops of melted polycarbonate. The atmosphere was sharp and poisonous. His eyes didn’t work.
His brother was on his feet, back on top, away from the curve, away from Jack. Will was also standing on unreliable feet—low and unsteady.
Jack said his brother’s name. Will seemed to realize that he was not alone in this place, and recognized his brother. He extended a hand, like a child wanting to be lifted from dock to boat.
The fifth round struck exactly between them. Jack flew one way, Will toward the freshly blasted hole in the dome.
* * *
Gibson hooted, long and loud, as the body flipped a low arc through the night air, and through the ragged wound in the double-dome. “Hole in one, son!”
* * *
Jack’s perception of time slowed. He reached for Will, futile as it was, wanting him back and safe more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. His boots gripped the hardened polycarbonate, braking his backward flight, and he kicked off, launching himself toward Will, crossing the space between them—impossibly—in a heartbeat.
The world stopped, Jack ran, and the world restarted a moment too soon.
Inches from Jack’s grasp Will’s body fell through the jagged maw of the dome’s wound. Watching him fall Jack’s every thought became singular:
No.
The air around his brother’s limp body buckled. Inverted? And snapped.
Jack skidded, stumbled, kept his footing.
Will floated twenty-five feet below the wounded dome, suspended inside a ministutter of Jack’s creation.
* * *
“Ah … Monarch Actual. This is Senior Operative Gibson at the Quantum Physics Building.”
“What the fuck am I seeing, boss?”
“Shut up, Don. You there, Actual?”
“Actual here. What is it, Senior Operative?”
Gibson eyeballed the space-time distortion filling most of the hole he had blasted through eight layers of sandwiched polycarbonate.
“Actual … at least one of the two escapees from the time lab are chronon-active. Natively.”
“Say again?”
“They’re live. Actual. Teleporting. No rescue rig, no Striker tech. Target spontaneously manifested an M-J field deformation, with intent. Check the feeds.” Gibson slung the M32 over his shoulder, turned to Guardian’s CO. “Good luck.”
And walked out the door.
* * *
Will’s body was an arc, eyes to the stars, mouth open in a silent exclamation. Fragments of heated polycarbonate and acrid smoke were suspended inside the bubble with him, a three-dimensional portrait frozen in a sphere of paused time. He had fallen wide of the walkway that connected the fourth floor of the old science building to the admin facility on the other side.
When the stutter broke, Will would fall 270 feet to the lobby floor.
The six smiley-faced goons on the floor below were done being impressed.
Jack dropped through the shattered dome without a thought, straight into the ministutter. Jack’s feet connected with Will’s chest, with zero give.
Jack balanced there, above the drop, surfing his brother in mid-air.
“Don’t wake up, don’t wake up, don’t wake up.…” It had been a calculated bet. Will held.
The squad opened up, Jack flinched, and a hundred military rounds
vip vip vip-
ed as they impacted the stutter … and caught—leaving the outside of the sphere stippled with lead acne.
The squad reloaded.
* * *
Gibson’s playdate with five rounds of forty mike had the attention of pretty much everybody. Monarch’s regular squads had done a good job of preemptively securing the neighborhood—nothing was getting in or out—but now encrypted comms chatter was rattling off sightings of media closing in by road and air. Civvies were congregating on main thoroughfares. It was a cowboy move, lighting up the dome like that, but orders were orders. Monarch wanted the Peace Movement to make an impression; consider it made.
His earpiece pinged.
“Mr. Gibson?”
Shit.
“Receiving, Mr. Hatch.”
“Guardian tells me you’re responsible for the chaos I’m witnessing. Is that correct?”
“More than likely, sir.”
Gibson was marching toward the last remaining BearCat—one of a couple Monarch had assigned to university security six months ago in preparation for this strike. A plausible story about keys stolen from dead guards was ready for the media.
The vehicle was still idling on the lawn. Almost all other Monarch forces had been reassigned to crowd control on a four-point perimeter. He muted his mic, put two fingers in his mouth, and ripped a sharp whistle. The pair manning the BearCat—one on the MG, the other stretching his legs—acknowledged with a salute.
“Explain yourself.”
Mic on. “I was given orders to make a scene. The scene has been made.” Mic off. “I need your ride.”
“You are aware that one of the men you attempted to kill is considered a high-value asset? We need him alive.”
The gunner dismounted as Gibson climbed into the cab. “The skinny guy?”
“Dr. William Joyce: a pioneer in chronon theory and the originator of much of the technology you have been trained to use.” Hatch confirmed something on another line. “Guardian tells me both targets remain, miraculously, alive.”
“Sir, I consider it a miracle that Guardian is reporting at all.” The engine woke with a satisfying thud beneath his feet, soundless inside the cab. “And I’m returning forthwith to render them the benefit of my wisdom and experience.” One round left. The BearCat spat dirt and leaped forward, toward the dome.
* * *
Jack leaped to the walkway and reached inside the stutter. His hand penetrated the sparkling cloud and closed around his brother’s ankle. “I,” he admitted, “have no idea what I’m doing.” Jack drew back his arm. Will didn’t budge. How had he done this the first time? What had he been feeling? Thinking? Jack closed his eyes, pulled gently, and still Will remained fixed. “Come on, Will.”