TimeSplash (16 page)

With a scream, she brought her arms up around her head and pulled herself down into a foetal position, cowering on the ground at Flash’s feet, waiting for the blows to fall. But they didn’t come. She waited and waited before she dared to look up. Flash stood over her, triumph blazing in his eyes.

A flicker of contempt rekindled her defiance. That’s where Sniper has you beaten, she told him in her mind. Sniper never would have stopped until I was utterly broken. Gently but insistently, he reached a hand under her chin and raised her to her feet. “Now you are going to tell me everything you planned to do for Sniper. Do you hear me?”

She shook her head. “I’m not working for Sniper.”

Anger flashed in his eyes and he drew back a hand to hit her.

“I’m trying to find Sniper!” she shouted, to forestall the blow. “I thought I could get you to tell me where he is.”

“Tell you where he is?” The idea seemed to open dark avenues of thought in Flash’s mind.

“What are you, a cop? If you’re a cop, I’ll—”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“What?” Flash seemed genuinely incredulous. He even gave a brief snort of laughter. “You?”

His reaction stabbed at Sandra’s heart. Was it that hopeless? Was she that ridiculous? She gathered her anger and her fear and focused it into a defiant glare. “Yes, me! Stupid, silly little girl, me. I’m going to find that vicious bastard and I’m going to kill him. Me! Me! Me!”

Suddenly Flash was smiling again. He stepped back from her and let her go. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” He walked calmly across to a shelf and grabbed some underwear. “I think we should discuss this over breakfast? I’m sure there’s lots of ways I could help.”

“Look, you little Yankee faggot, get out of my face or you can do the fucking lob yourself!”

Sniper was raging, pacing up and down inside an enormous warehouse, yelling into his compatch.

“Do you hear me, McGarry? I’m this close to telling you and your chickenshit friends to take their money and stuff it.”

The little image of McGarry looked mortified. “I, sir, am no Yankee.”

“I don’t care if you’re a fucking Martian! If I see your face again before the lob it’s all off.
Comprendes
?” He cut the call before the American had a chance to respond. “What do they want from me?” he asked the echoing spaces of the warehouse. “I don’t need a bloody nanny!”

Klaatu stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls. Wiring up the power circuits for a forty-megawatt supply was serious engineering and tricky enough without Sniper doing his
prima donna
routine. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“It’s these money people you found us, they want to have their noses in everything all the time.”

“It’s a lot of money.” Klaatu’s tone said, stop being such a baby. Sniper looked sharply at his teknik. Theirs was a long and successful association, yet there was no question that they were friends, however much Sniper liked to say they were. They were oil and water. They didn’t mix, and one of them was always going to be on top. Yet there was a powerful, mutual need.

“Who are these people?” Sniper demanded, his tone quieter but by no means conversational.

“What are they getting out of this?” He walked up to Klaatu and stood so close that the young teknik had to look up at him. “What have you got us involved in?”

“I’ve told you. It’s a consortium of American fundamentalist churches. They want God’s wrath to fall on the decadent fleshpots of Europe, starting with Berlin, Satan’s home away from home. What do you care?”

Around them Klaatu’s team of tekniks carried on working but the clatter of tools and the whine of forklifts faded out of Klaatu’s awareness as Sniper’s cold eyes bored into him.

“I don’t like anyone thinking they have any control over me,” Sniper said in a level voice.

“If these religious freaks think I’m their bitch, they’re wrong.”

Klaatu nodded without speaking. Sniper seemed to feel he’d made his point and turned away. But then he turned back. “And who paid for the Beijing lob?” he asked. Klaatu shrugged. Jimmy, the Korean, had been connected to nationalist elements in his own country who resented China’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula in ’26. Klaatu had always assumed it was the nationalists who put up the money.

“And what about Flash? From what you said, he’s living like a king. Where’s his money coming from?”

“He didn’t say, but one of his guys said there are gangsters in Hong Kong who have a problem with the black market diamond trade going through London. They’d like it disrupted.”

Sniper ran a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration. He walked away and then walked back again. “So we’re hired guns now? Terrorists for rent? Any crook or crank with an agenda can throw a few million our way and we’ll take out whatever city they want? Is that who we are now?”

Klaatu didn’t know how to respond. Surely Sniper knew all this? Surely Sniper hadn’t been kidding himself that it was still like the old days? Yet, looking into the big man’s tortured eyes, Klaatu could easily believe that was exactly what he had been doing. He said, “We still get the fancy cars, the penthouse suites, the girls…” But he could see that wasn’t enough. He tried something else. “And you still get to do the splash. That’s the big thing, eh? You still get to do the lob and you still get to be the best.”

Human psychology wasn’t exactly Klaatu’s greatest strength, but he could see from Sniper’s expression that he had hit on something at last that might mollify him. “Every brick on the planet knows you’re the best. No one’s beaten Ommen in more than two years—except those jerks in Beijing and they got themselves killed. Once you pull this off, no one will be able to touch you for years to come. You’ll be a legend.” Sniper wasn’t frowning so hard now. He seemed to be relaxing. “Who gives a toss where the money comes from or what other people want? This is what you want. This is your legend we’re building here. Not theirs.”

He thought he saw something like relief in Sniper’s expression. Then the big man grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “You’re right. Fuck ’em! This is my show, my triumph. Everything else is just noise, just gnats buzzing in my ears.” He smiled and slapped Klaatu on the shoulder.

“Come on, let’s go out and have a drink. You spend too much time cooped up in here. Let’s get some girls and have a party!”

Klaatu shrugged. “The work is going well. A few hours off won’t hurt too much.” Besides, Klaatu knew it was best not to say no to such invitations. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get changed. But I must talk to you about some equipment we still need. Some switches.”

“Switches?” Sniper laughed. He was in a good mood now. “Send someone down to the hardware store.”

“I don’t think they’d stock the kind of thing I have in mind.”

* * * *

Superintendent Jacques Bauchet faced a prestigious and attentive audience. The auditorium in the Berlaymont Building had a capacity of two hundred and was about half-filled. As he looked around, he saw Euro MPs, cabinet ministers from various European governments, heads of intelligence agencies and police forces, as well as senior civil servants from many different countries. It was his first high-level briefing as head of the Temporal Crimes Unit and the size and quality of his audience gave him the grim satisfaction of knowing how rattled everyone was. The Chair of the European Parliament’s Standing Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, no less, made the opening remarks and introduced Bauchet. Now the Frenchman had the job of focusing all these powerful people on the job that needed to be done.

“Travelling in time has been one of the most unusual technological developments ever.” He gazed out at them from the podium. “For most of its history it has not been part of mainstream science or technology.” He remotely controlled the room’s huge 3-D display as he spoke. “The original scientific work was done in the early part of this century but was ridiculed by the scientific establishment at the time. The so-called Kentucky formula, which clearly showed how it could be done, was rejected as pseudoscience and ignored by almost every respectable research lab. Of course, when the oil ran out, a few years later, mainstream physics and the more obscure scientific backwaters alike were swept aside by the global depression that we now call the Great Adjustment. Basic science came to be seen as an unnecessary luxury. Any country that could still afford science at all, set its best people onto finding alternative energy sources.

“It was during this period of economic collapse and resource wars that two former PhD students in the north of England used the Kentucky formula to build the first time machine. They were unemployed and disaffected. So were most young people at the time. They used this remarkable invention recreationally, as a kind of sport.

“Pretty soon, they had developed a following. Others started building time machines. A party culture developed around the weird effects, with its own music, its own heroes, and its own jargon based on the metaphor of lobbing bricks back into the timestream to create timesplashes.”

Bauchet’s eyes swept the room. His audience was growing a little restless. No doubt most of them knew this much already.

“For many years, it was a minor phenomenon and well below the radar of law enforcement agencies. Travelling back in time requires a lot of energy and, fortunately, when you try to go farther, the energy requirement goes up exponentially. These early timesplashers went just a few years—ten if they were lucky. The fun involved for the participants and the partygoers is in creating an anomaly. The biggest anomaly of all is a temporal paradox. If you kill your past self, or stop yourself being born, for example, you create a logical impossibility which the universe must reject. This creates what they call the timesplash—an area of disruption in spacetime where causality is damaged. The damage is self-healing and localised so there is never any possibility of changing the past, but there is always a certain amount of disruption that flows down to the present. There, where the edge of the timesplash meets the present—” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “—for reasons any physicists in the audience might like to explain to me afterwards—the disruptions to causality are not repaired and may cause permanent damage.

“As I said, the early bricks could not travel far and the anomalies they could create were not large. What is more, the strength of the effect diminishes rapidly as it flows upstream to the present. It was enough for the bricks to have some excitement and for the kids at the splashparties to enjoy a little weirdness. Nothing dangerous.

“Until the focus fusion generator was perfected in 2035. Timesplashers quickly realised the potential of these small, powerful generators and, while we were building F-Twos as fast as we could and dragging ourselves out of the depression, the splashparty craze was sweeping the whole world. Kids everywhere were organising bigger and bigger parties and the bricks and their technicians were pushing their lobs farther and farther into the past.

“Incredibly, it was only then, when splashparties had become a huge global phenomenon and the most daring bricks had their faces on our children’s bedroom walls, that the world’s scientists woke up to the fact that time travel had been invented and had actually been practised regularly for more than a decade!”

He shook his head in amazement and looked around once more. “Of course, splashparties themselves became big enough to attract the interest of law enforcers. The use of recreational drugs—particularly tempus—at these events had prompted some authorities to ban such parties. However, the sheer scale of the phenomenon meant that most law enforcement agencies focused on containing the noise and disruption from the events—happy to force them out into remote country areas—and to use their resources to crack down on the drug suppliers. Most people still considered the theatre of the timesplash—the brick, the cage, the backwash—just a harmless show. Very few in authority actually believed that kids were going back in time to shoot their own mothers!

“It was not until Ommen that the real dangers became apparent.” The display behind him showed vidlog footage of damaged buildings and people being rescued from under fallen masonry.

“A young man died that day, one woman lost a leg, and twelve more were injured. The insurance bill for the damage to buildings and infrastructure ran to millions of Euros.”

He began a series of still shots from other disaster scenes. “Ommen was a lob of sixty-five years—the absolute maximum that the technology was capable of at the time. We also believe the anomaly created was of the order of shooting one’s own grandmother. Other bricks have tried to emulate it but have been unable to go so far back—it takes a lot of technical expertise.” Wanted posters for Sniper and Klaatu appeared behind him. “After Ommen, new laws came into force throughout Europe vastly increasing the penalties for unauthorised time travel. The bricks and their tekniks have now all gone underground. The great majority have given it up but there is still a hard core who continue to timesplash. Finding out where they are getting the money to do this and stopping it, is one of our top priorities.

“For the past ten years, mainstream physics has been running to catch up with what these youngsters can do. Unfortunately, this resulted in a far deeper understanding of the theory behind time travel. I say ‘unfortunately’ because this new understanding led to a new, generalised time travel formula. About a year ago, scientists at CERN developed this ‘gigarange formula’ as it has become known and immediately let it leak onto the net.