The Paradox Paradox, page 26
‘Iscah was right,’ he said, gasping for air as he looked up at the four massive thugs standing over him. ‘That was the worst bit.’
* * *
Kez couldn’t quite put a finger on which part of her current predicament was the most distressing. Was it that the luggage hold of the parked spaceship that she found herself trapped in was particularly tiny? Was it that the gag in her mouth tasted like an abandoned pair of underpants that her kidnappers found in a park? Or, was it simply the fact that the thin plastic ties around her wrists made it impossible for her to reach the itch on her eyebrow.
‘Mmmffmf-fmfmfmm,’ she said with an eyeroll.
‘Mmfffm,’ replied Eureka.
Suddenly, a bright light split the darkness in half as the luggage compartment opened again.
‘Got a friend for you,’ the guard growled, as he single-handedly heaved a damp Theo on top of them. With that he slammed the lid shut, plunging the three of them back into darkness.
‘Mffmf,’ said Theo sarcastically.
‘Mffmfmm,’ replied Eureka, trying to push his shoes out of her face with her shoulder.
‘Mmmff!’ yelled Kez as some limb of Theo’s caught her in the small of her back.
‘Mmff,’ apologised Theo.
‘You’d fucking better be,’ said Kez.
It took her a second.
In surprise, she raised her hands up to her face. Her gag was gone. Presumably, so were the plastic ties around her wrists.
‘Hey, I’m free,’ she whispered.
‘Same,’ said Eureka, shifting around to get more space in the small area.
‘AHH!’ yelled Kez suddenly. ‘There’s something on me!’
‘It’s my nanobots, you ploove,’ said Theo, reaching deep into his vocabulary to pull out the required insult.fn49 ‘Next time, don’t use all of yours to make straws!’
A high-pitched whine was emitted from below Kez, followed by a soft red glow. Then, a small circle opened up by Theo’s head, lighting the tiny space and giving Theo a view outside, into the same welcome area that they had arrived at. The ship must have teleported in, which made him feel slightly better about having cut a hole through its airtight seal.
‘I count four, no, five of these pricks,’ he said. ‘That’s just on this side.’
‘I counted eight as we got dragged in here,’ said Eureka. ‘Those bags they used were naff.’
‘Does it matter how many there are?’ Kez asked. ‘We’ll be out of here soon, right? They’ll get Iscah, throw her in here with us, and we’ll be sent back before they know what’s happening.’
Theo sighed.
‘They took the beacon,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the shard of time machine we came here for in the first place.’
‘So we’re two for two on dreadful missions,’ said Eureka, stretching as best as she could in the confined space. ‘Go team.’
‘I’m three for three,’ muttered Kez.
‘Damn it,’ said Theo as his nanobots scurried back in through the hole. ‘The lock is shielded, can’t crack it without knowing how.’
‘No secondary mechanism?’ asked Eureka.
‘Nope.’
‘Well that’s just bad design,’ she tutted. ‘What if someone gets trapped inside?’
‘I believe that’s the idea,’ said Theo.
‘Who are these people?’ asked Kez. ‘Law enforcement?’
‘I watched one of them gun down a defenceless woman,’ said Theo darkly, grimacing at the memory. ‘I think these are boots for hire. Well trained, ruthless. Somebody wants something valuable from that spa.’
‘Us?’ asked Kez.
Theo didn’t answer. He had suddenly leaned forward, twisting his neck at a horrific angle to see something specific out of his little window.
‘Come here, you two, I need you to see this.’
With way more fuss than was necessary, Eureka and Kez spun themselves around, elbows bashing off walls, knees bashing off each other.
‘That bloke there,’ Theo said, nodding towards one of the closer guards to them. ‘Notice anything odd about them?’
‘Nope,’ said Kez, squeezing Theo out of the way to glance through the hole. ‘Same armour, build, weapons …’
‘They’re holding their gun backwards,’ said Eureka through Kez’s hair.
Kez shoved Eureka back out of the way and squinted through the hole. Sure enough, the goon in question was holding their weapon back to front, as well as looking around, almost anxiously.
‘Odd,’ said Kez.
‘Not odd,’ smiled Theo. ‘Iscah.’
A scramble at the hole. Theo wisely backed up as best as he could.
‘I don’t recall Iscah being a couple of feet taller than me,’ Kez said.
‘Her disguise,’ said Eureka. ‘She must have fixed it!’
‘Oh, that’s clever,’ Kez said. ‘Properly clever.’
A wave of movement swept across the guards as the majority of them suddenly turned and jogged back into the spa, leaving the guard with the backwards gun alone.
‘I guess they’ve found what they were looking for,’ said Kez, offering the view to Theo. Theo glanced outside, his retina taking a moment to adjust to the bright light outside, before he saw this last guard walking directly towards them.
‘She’s on her way,’ he reported as relief filled the small hold.
‘Fantastic!’ said Kez.
‘Go Iscah!’ celebrated Eureka.
‘She’s almost here,’ said Theo.
‘So brave,’ said Kez.
‘So brave,’ emphasised Eureka.
‘She’s here!’ cheered Theo.
‘Back to the future we go!’ exclaimed Kez.
‘Good old Iscah!’ beamed Eureka.
‘Someone’s hit her with a pipe,’ updated Theo.
Silence in the hold. Outside, muffled yells.
‘Huh?’ Eureka asked, just before something heavy crashed into the ship above them, sliding down its exterior with an awful, drawn-out squeak. Suddenly, the three of them were flooded in two things. The first was brilliant daylight. The second was a smell that nearly took Kez’s eyebrows clean off her face.
‘Wotcha,’ Iscah said, beaming over her crewmates, kicking the unconscious guard out of the way.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Eureka, dragging her uniform’s tight neckline over her nose.
‘The fuck is that?’ said Kez, scrambling for air.
‘What died multiple times?’ asked Theo, gagging horribly for the second time today.
Iscah frowned, offered the group some choice words, and shut the hold again. She didn’t let them out until they’d all apologised.
* * *
‘When Theo spilled the drink, I noticed that our room had a direct connection to a huge waste system,’ Iscah said, standing under one of the reception’s waterfalls and rubbing her long dark hair as she spoke. ‘So I eventually made it back there and used the sewers to move about, unseen.’
Eureka, Kez, and Theo watched from a distance as the … debris … that had covered Iscah’s uniform was washed away by the colossal water pressure.
‘From there it was easy,’ she said. ‘I found the security room, remotely accessed the keyring network, forged some locational data and tracked you lot down.’
She hopped out of the waterfall, climbing over the perfectly lit bushes that surrounded it, and squelched towards them in her sodden shoes. ‘They’re hired muscle, and they want us and the beacon. Now they have the beacon, we’ll have to get it back from the office they’ve set up shop in,’ she said, swiping a towel off a nearby display and going to town with it. ‘We’ve got about five minutes until they come back here, there’s only one functional uniform left, and we are outnumbered four or five to one. We should get going.’
Nobody moved.
‘Is it still that bad?’ Iscah asked.
The group nodded.
‘We don’t really have the time for me to shower again …’
The group took a collective step back. With a sigh, Iscah looked around, snatched a reed diffuser off the reception desk, and poured ‘Fairy Jasmine’ oil over herself.
‘Better?’
The group shook their heads.
‘Why the sewer?’ Kez asked, making sure to not breathe through her nose. ‘We thought you’d disguise yourself as a guard.’
Iscah laughed and flicked her hair back, sending an ellipsis of water both ways across the reception.
‘Well, it turns out that if you give me a choice between potential dysphoria and climbing through a shit pipe, I’ll take the shit pipe every time. Now come on, we’ve got a beacon to recover and they’re about to realise that I’m not hiding under a table in the conference room.’
With that she walked away, leaving a trail of wet footprints for the group to follow, which they did, at a distance.
* * *
A table soared across the room, splintering as it landed on the marble floor of the hireable conference room.
‘Nothing here, boss,’ a grunt grunted as behind him several handfuls of thugs tore the room into shreds. ‘She must have escaped.’
The large man growled, reaching into one of the few pockets in his outfit that didn’t contain ammunition and pulling out a wafer-thin tablet. With the swipe of a gloved finger, the keyring data was displayed, pinpointing her location as the very empty bit of floor in front of him.
‘First you lose her in the corridors, now you lose her in a room with only a single exit,’ he growled. ‘Find her. Now.’
He scrunched up his face, glowering at the pathetic bit of hardware on which the data was displayed. This is why he liked old CRT monitors. They could take a punch.
‘Kermit says they’ve escaped,’ one of the grunts announced, finger to earpiece. ‘He was attacked.’
‘MORONS,’ the large man roared, shattering the tablet in his palm. ‘Who decided to put the new man on solo guard duty?’
Fourteen men pointed in fourteen different directions. With a slow, careful breath that his therapist would have been proud of, the large man took a moment to rethink. The mission, a quarry of four. His crew, fifteen men. The pay, doubled if alive. With the mathematics sorted, he wiped out half of the room in a hail of gunfire before dividing the survivors up into search parties. Now, financially, it didn’t matter if he killed all four targets.
* * *
‘This is the place,’ Iscah said, stopping her run next to a huge set of wooden double doors, perfectly centred along a short, well-lit corridor.
‘Fancy,’ said Kez, slightly out of breath, admiring the intricate hand-carved woodwork. ‘So, do we blow it up or … ?’
‘I think we’ll just pick the lock,’ said Eureka, seriously out of breath. ‘Any explosion might spread to whatever Iscah is covered in.’
‘She could take us all out,’ nodded Theo cheekily.
‘I should have left you all in that hold,’ muttered Iscah.
Theo placed his hand on the door, fingers splayed. Within seconds, what remained of his nanobots crawled across it, disappearing into the keyhole whereupon a flash of light indicated that something had taken them all out.
‘Damn,’ said Theo, poking at an upturned bot. ‘Electronic pick protection.’
‘So, do we blow it up or … ?’ Kez asked.
‘Watch and learn,’ said Theo, taking a few steps back before charging forward, crashing into the door with all his might. Instantly, he was propelled backwards, his body leaving an imprint in an anti-gravity zen garden that was raking itself up the opposite wall.
‘Forcefield,’ he coughed, standing up and testing his leg.
‘So, do we blow it up or … ?’ Kez asked, happy that her solution was becoming more viable by the second.
‘There’s a window round the back,’ Iscah said, gazing through the keyhole at a room full of old monitors, a lot of weaponry, and two objects that belonged to her crew. ‘It seems to have a latch so a forcefield is unlikely.’
‘We’re sixteen storeys up,’ said Kez. ‘Hell of a climb.’
‘There’s a window here,’ said Eureka from further down the corridor.
The gang wandered over to the window and looked out. Below them, jagged diamond rocks sat, punching twinkling, razor-sharp points into the sky. To the left of them, the edge wall of the office, jutting out perpendicularly from the corridor wall. Four pairs of eyes followed it, and the thin ledge that underlined it, until it vanished out of sight in another sharp right angle. Silently, Theo grabbed a nearby vase and lobbed it out of the window. It sailed for half a second, before suddenly accelerating into the ground at an extraordinarily high speed. It didn’t just shatter when it hit the diamonds below. It dissolved.
‘Not it,’ said Kez, shrinking back. ‘Why don’t we just wait by the door and hope we’re close enough to the beacon?’
‘The forcefield might diminish the beacon’s range,’ said Eureka, listing off reasons on her fingers. ‘We’d fail the mission and, most importantly, we might not be close enough.’
Kez pouted and took another look out the window. ‘I think it’s the best idea we’ve got,’ she said.
‘Well, at least if I fall, I won’t be falling for long,’ said Theo, hopping up onto the ledge. Eureka grabbed his arm.
‘And what makes you think you’re going?’ she asked.
‘Osheen made me the twat-in-charge,’ he shrugged as he stepped down onto the thin ledge. ‘A role I take very serious—’
With a crack, the ledge under him crumbled away. Eureka tightened her grip as Theo grabbed the windowsill with his other hand. Together, they heaved him back into the corridor.
‘Kez is right,’ Theo said, waving off the usual visions of his life that were flashing in front of him. ‘We’ll wait it out.’
‘I’ll have a crack at it,’ Iscah said, kicking her damp boots off and drying her feet on the carpet for grip. ‘I’m clearly the smallest and lightest here.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that,’ said Theo.
‘Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t waiting for you to,’ she smiled, slipping out of the window and onto the ledge, taking care to not step near the section that Theo had put his foot through. She glanced down at the certain death below, and decided that she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry.
‘Be careful!’ said Kez suddenly, causing Iscah to wobble slightly, gripping the edge of the windowsill for stability. She turned and glared.
‘None of you, under any circumstances, are allowed to say anything to me until this is over,’ she hissed. ‘Understood?’
Rapid, apologetic nods came through the window. Theo pointed and mouthed ‘We’ll wait by the door’, before the three of them disappeared out of the frame.
Iscah shifted around the side of the window, still clinging tightly to the edge of it, her back flat against the wall, weight on her heels, head up straight. She became instantly aware that if she shifted her centre of mass too far forward, she’d have no way of stopping the fall.
After a moment of shuffling, she’d made it to the corner where the wall came out from the corridor, her hand still firmly locked onto the window frame.
Facing towards or away, she wondered, plotting her steps along the ledge. Back to the wall will give me a better centre of gravity, but the corner will be far trickier. Front on would give me flexibility on my toes, plus better intel of any upcoming hazards and handholds.
Iscah glanced down the wall, a slightly bumpy stucco. Handholds were going to be few and far between, if any.
Towards, Iscah decided, kicking off the exterior corridor wall and pivoting around the toes of her left foot. She came to a stop against the outside wall of the office, hands out to the side, lightly pressing on the bumps in the concrete like they were trying to whisper braille.
OK, she breathed to herself. Five, maybe six metres to the corner. I can do this.
With her head tilted to the side, face against the rough wall, she slowly slid a foot in the direction of her goal, planted it, shifted her weight, and moved the back one to join.
One step down.
She did it again, ignoring the sharp pain as the wall scratched against her face, her hands longing to grip something, anything.
Two down.
She pressed on, taking each step on her toes, heels floating above the abyss.
Three. Four. Five.
Her foot landed on a sharp piece of concrete that cut into the skin. She pressed it down, keeping the stability through the pain.
Where are you?
Another handful of movements came and went. She could now feel blood dripping from the deepening scratch on her cheek.
Why can’t I feel you anymore?
Her calves started to burn, lactic acid doing its darndest to make this more difficult.
Why have you left me?
Iscah reached the corner, her right hand instinctively gripping the edge. She rounded it carefully, taking a second to appreciate the lack of wind on the planet, her steps quartering in size as her right foot transferred onto the new wall. As her head passed the corner, the landscape beyond caught her eye. Miles and miles of transparent rocks, sitting behind the resort. From here, the sun didn’t catch them properly, making them appear dull and lifeless, like all the joy had left the world.
A crack. The pressure of moving her back foot forward had taken a chunk of the ledge away. She breathed slowly, keeping her heart rate as calm as she could.
With one last small step, Iscah’s fingers left the gritty wall and squeaked across glass. Quickly, they played across the join between the two, looking for anything to grip onto. They found nothing.
Iscah began to panic. Not only was the window flush with the wall, but from this side it was clear that the latch was decorative. This window didn’t open.
Of course. High up. No wind. No breeze. No need for a window that opens. I should have spotted that. I should have noticed.
A fearful tear rolled down her face, stinging as it ran through the crevices of the cuts on her cheek. She couldn’t go back, she couldn’t go forward. She was stuck.
