The Time Gene, page 9
“You have not eaten, Ms Kaczynski,” Skegness observed. A food tray lay strewn on Krystal’s bed, containing a plate of mouldy toast with rubbery fried egg.
“Then I’ll die all the sooner,” she croaked, fixating on a moth twitching its death spasms.
“Come now! You lived well enough,” said Skegness. Prometheus kicked him on the ankle.
But she nodded in languid agreement. “Money. Sex. Power. I had too much of all of them. But it didn’t satisfy me.” She drained her port glass and poured herself another. “And yet, I had a life before the war. All-night parties. Drunken orgies. Drug-fuelled euphoria. Now it’s gone. All gone.” Her voice fizzled out like a candle in snow.
Murdo shuddered. They would need to handle her like an unexploded bomb.
Prometheus tiptoed over to her. “Ms Kaczynski, we need your help.”
She looked indifferent.
Hathersage showed her his copy of Canute Confidential and asked if she recalled interviewing Arwen Silverblade.
Krystal lit a cigarette from a gun-shaped lighter. “That bitch,” she said, taking an indulgent drag. “Called me every twenty minutes for twenty-four hours. I filed for harassment.”
“Yet you gave her information.” Hardwin read out the infamous quotation from Canute Confidential. She stretched out her stringy arms, and took a long drag. “She must have caught me when I was on a bender.”
“But they do exist then, Paper A and Paper B?” Hathersage probed.
She perched on that bed, passive as a mermaid on a rock, gazing in tranquility as another ship perished.
“If it’s money you want...”
She laughed. It was a sweet laugh, long and languorous. “Oh, you are venal, aren’t you? I’d burn all I have.” She pressed the trigger on her lighter as if to incinerate imaginary banknotes. “They brought me to this cesspit two years ago, after the chemo failed. No-one reckoned on me holding out this long. You know Marigold Grove used to be where the well-heeled came to die? Now they’ve sold all the silverware, and the Rembrandt. Latest I heard, they’re even trying to flog the curtains. Money doesn’t stop the war from turning you into toast, and it doesn’t stop cancer from burning holes in your flesh.” A coldness rose in Murdo’s gut as her icy eyes blackened.
Murdo stumbled forward. His heart was hammering, but it was now or never. “Ms Kaczynski, um, I’m the newest in the League,” he stammered. She wasn’t really one for small talk. “I got recruited...out o’ the blue.” Her stare was cold, yet playful. Like she was the cat and he the mouse she’d trapped with her paw. “You don’t know me, but...”
“Murdo Ironside, enchantée.”
Dear God, that voice. Permafrost. His legs caved in. How could she know him? Canute might have hacked into Infinity files, but he’d been dead four years. Whatsmore, she’d lived the last two in a hospice without internet. He couldn’t fight the feeling – and he sensed the others felt it too – that she knew more about the League than the League knew about itself.
“Ms Kaczynski, if you know anything o’ Paper A or Paper B, I beg you to divulge it.” Murdo felt like a slave pleading his overlord not to have him whipped. “If there is any chance we can restore the planet, we need to seize it.”
She glowed a phosphorescent blue in the watery sunlight. He watched with macabre fascination as her long skeletal fingers skimmed under the bed and pulled out a long high-heeled shoe. Crushed into the toe was a yellowed piece of paper, spattered with mangled green handwriting. Murdo could not have read it even with a magnifying glass. “Paper A,” she spat. “And damn all good it’ll do you.”
Skegness grimaced. “You stuffed a document of that magnitude into your shoe?”
She shrugged. “If the Gauntlet raid the place, they’ll think it’s an insole for my bunion.”
Before Murdo could uncrumple the tiny ball, Hardwin Hathersage snatched it and began to read. He had good eyesight for his years. “A method and device for transmitting information to the past, and receiving information therefrom...” He buckled, like a priest trying to exorcise a ghost. “Does this work?”
“Oh, it works,” yawned Krystal. “The tachyophone, or tachyonic telephone. We managed to break into the White House. JFK blamed Republican spies.” She smirked. “And we didn’t stop there. Not all the bugs at Watergate came from Nixon.”
“Didn’t he warn Kennedy of...um...?” Skegness trailed off.
“Not to take a ride to Dallas on 11/22/63? No. He thought it prudent to leave the past unaltered. He said that chronokinesis, or movement through history, was like a Hydra snake. You cut off one head, and two more grow in its place. You save one man, and the assassin strikes elsewhere, twice as venomous and tenfold as deadly.”
“That shows nobleness,” Murdo said. Krystal smiled at him as like a favourite chicken whom it was time to slaughter.
“But now is different. Now we must use it to save the world.” He thought of Callie, in her fairy wings.
“Bollocks.”
Murdo bristled towards her. “What do you mean, it’s bollocks? Don’t you realise we can stop the assassination of Senator Schuster? We can save Hotel Asgard. And warn the villagers on Mani. And get the Russians to elect Zorin instead of Titov.”
“I am afraid, Murdo,” Prometheus sighed, “that Ms Kaczynski is almost certainly right. Paper A alone cannot prevent World War III.”
Murdo keeled over in shock. “Why not?”
“I’ve worked in Security Services almost all my life. How many ‘urgent messages’ do you think we receive every day, claiming to be from UFOs, alien civilisations, or A.I. supercivilisations billions of years into the future? We’ve had it all.”
Bile rose in Murdo’s throat. What had they done to him but kindle false hope? The white-hot pain of branding tormented him night and day. And now they were telling him that a few lame wolfcriers had stolen their chance to drive the monster back into its lair.
Hardwin put a hand on his shoulder. “Come, boy. There is still Paper B.”
“Equally useless,” spat Krystal.
Hardwin ignored her. “Of course, Paper B wasn’t really Canute’s, was it? It was Cronin’s.” A coldness blew through the room. “Silverblade said Canute visited Cronin in prison. I’m not condoning him, but he pioneered biological teleportation. Without Cronin’s research, no Portal phones, Electron lifts, Quantum helicopters...”
Krystal nodded. “I remember in the late ‘80s. There was a media buzz about him. The Human Beam was a bestseller. If he hadn’t got himself banged up, he’d have been bigger than Darwin – and even more loathsome to the church. But the rumours say he had wanted even more. He told Time magazine that his dream was to extend the principle of teleportation to the fourth dimension, that of time.”
Murdo gasped. “Are you saying that Cronin knew how to transfer a human being not just through space, but through time?”
Krystal’s lips twisted. “He called it Chronoportation. The principle is the same. The subjects are beamed. They are converted to waves. But the key difference is that by travelling at the speed of light through space, they also travel forward in time. Of course, prison ruined his health. By the late ‘30s, his body was wracked with cancer. He wrote to Canute begging him to visit. Course, they’d all shunned him – even his family. Canute was the only one who’d talk to him. Cronin told him there existed a decades-old blueprint concealed in a drawer in his old home at Cologny...where his daughter still lived. Cronin said it was dangerous…he didn’t want it getting into the hands of the public…he begged Canute to destroy it. The blueprint gave explicit instructions on how to build a ‘chronoporter’. But Canute kept it because he had a gnawing feeling it had potential – that someday, this loathsome planet might have need of it. Of course, Canute’s research was stymied. He couldn’t risk having his good name sullied by the delirious scribblings of a convicted terrorist. But Canute kept the paper. It lay mildewing in a drawer for two years, but it haunted him. I reckon he might have tried experimenting if his heart hadn’t given out.”
Gordonstoun shuffled about the floor, almost losing his footing. “I can’t get my head round this. It might work on paper, but the physicalities would be impossible.”
“Not if you use the infinite playground of space. For example, to beam a man 50 years into the future, you need only find a planet 25 light years distant from Earth…”
“It’s odds on that such an exoplanet, even if it existed, would be a gas giant or an ice ball.”
Krystal rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously, you can’t roll up on any old planet. First, it’s got to be 25 light years away. Second, it’s got to be made of rock. It doesn’t need to be the Costa del Sol, but it’s got to support life long enough not to incinerate you on arrival. If you don’t cock it up, ions on the planet’s surface interact with the beam and convert you back to mass. You realign the transmitter. You beam yourself back to Earth. Then you use Paper A to ‘phone home’ and tell Mummy her little angel’s arrived safe and sound.”
Gordonstoun’s voice grew shaky. “Cronin tested this device on…humans?”
Krystal’s eyes burned with flaming ire. “Canute harangued a deathbed confession out of one of Cronin’s minions. At least a hundred souls that monster must have blasted into oblivion between late ’95 and early ’97.”
Murdo’s legs had turned to paper. What kind of demon beamed a human being to a light years-distant planet? It was a desecration of body and soul.
“Doesn’t it…kill you?”
She nodded. “Less than 5% even radioed back. But Cronin was like a dog with a bone. He just kept on and on. Death-row prisoners, mostly. It went on for years. The CIA turned a blind eye for a long time. Cronin was an oligarch. Family must have owned half of Russia. They nailed him in the end, though.”
“But how did he have the time?” Gordonstoun mused. “Wasn’t he planting bombs and masterminding attacks?”
“That’s the lie they told the public. Cronin was never a terrorist. They could hardly tell the public he’d been zapping people forward in time. It was ultra-classified.” She paused. “Especially after the experiments began to work.”
“Began to work, you say?”
Horror and revuslsion engulfed Murdo. “You cannot mean you would sanction this?” he railed at Prometheus. “Cast a human into decades of darkness and oblivion, with only the merest chance the host planet will not turn him into mincemeat? Haven’t we sent enough good men tae die?”
Yet why was he surprised? They’d promised him he’d never be dragged into wanton slaughter. Yet hadn’t it been inevitable, since the day they’d plucked him from his school and his maths teaching to join the League of Kairos, that he too would be hauled into the bloodshed? Murdo steadied himself, still shaking. It wasn’t a new idea. Humankind had always had sacrificial lambs. Champions sent to die for a kingdom whose abiding glory mattered far more than the lives of its subjects.
Prometheus laid a hand on his shoulder. “Fear not. I have no plans to beam a man to the future.”
“Then what the hell...?”
“It is the past who will beam people to us. We will use Paper A to elicit help from powerful time-travellers from the past; and they will use Paper B to leap across spacetime to join us here. Like it or not, joining forces with past masters is our only hope of preventing this terrible war.”
Murdo quivered like a man nailed to either side of a chasm where one side is everlasting joy, and the other unending torment. His face contorted as if a jolt had wrenched apart the chasm, ripping his body in two, one half bound to agony and the other to bliss, his life’s blood spilling inbetween.
A fleet of time-travellers surfing the stars! An anchor to tether mankind! It made his stomach turn, somehow. It reeked of dark magic. Titanism at its most dangerous. But oh, the rewards! Unbroken cities. Bloodless streets. Unblighted forests. And Callie running in her fairy wings again.
“What happened to that blueprint that Canute took from Cronin’s home, Krystal?” Prometheus demanded.
“Is it in the other shoe?”
Krystal twisted her bony fingers, clearly lapping up the tension “Now, where did I put it? Hmmm…” Her words channelled the innocence of an old lady fumbling for her glasses, but malevolence brewed below the surface.
Shafts of light ribboned in through the gap in the blinds. “Get...that damn...blind...closed!”
Prometheus bolted towards the window. Panicking, he pushed the slats of the blinds shut. But there was no holding them together. They were old and broken. Light pooled onto Krystal’s sylphlike form. She curled into a foetal position as if to shield herself from lethal radiation. “You will close them now,” she said quietly. Her eyes danced with venom that could have liquefied steel. She tossed her silver gun lighter from one hand to the other. “This was Cronin’s,” she said. Murdo momentarily froze, fearing it was a real weapon, but she clicked open the breech and extracted a crumpled piece of paper.
Hardwin edged forward. “Ms Kaczynski, we are forever in your debt.” But before he could seize the blueprint, she tapped her lighter and held the paper close to the nascent flame. Light flickered on the fragment, dried and aged. It would burn away easily. “Ms Kaczynski, please no!” So choked was his plea that Murdo could not believe it came from the indomitable Prometheus.
In panic, Murdo pulled off his long coat and wedged the collar in between the blind slats.
“That’s better,” said Krystal as though slaking a deadly thirst. She extinguished the lighter. Prometheus prized the document from her almost translucent hands.
“‘Chronoporter: Method and device for transporting matter, in particular a human or animal, to a future chronological worldline. Closest prior art is the teleporter. The chronoporter demonstrates significant inventive step over the latter, because said chronoporter permits the transportation of matter through time in addition to space...’ See this, friends. Intricate as DNA, and yet so simple.”
But Skegness gazed at it in dismay, darkness welling in his eyes. “Prometheus, this is just a drawing. A scribble, mainly.”
Prometheus brushed him aside. “No, Gordonstoun. This is our destiny.”
Hardwin echoed Skegness’ pessimism as he eyed the yellowing document. “Gordon’s right. We cannot build a chronoporter from this. It would be like trying to reconstruct the theory of relativity from a child’s drawing of a black hole.”
But Prometheus was undeterred. A ray of sunlight glinted through the slats as he proclaimed: “We just need to combine this with Cronin’s old laboratory notes. The Swiss police will release them.”
Agent Perun glanced briefly up from his minuting. “I’m afraid that’s doubtful. They would’ve burned them straight after Cronin’s trial. Once they’d nailed their man, they didn’t want anyone snooping. You’re talking a top-level State Secret.”
Krystal was screaming again. Murdo’s coat had slid from its perch, spilling sunlight onto Krystal’s flaky skin. She stared into the mirror, immersed in a cruel halo of light.
What was it that terrorised this woman who veered between melancholy and sadism? Why did she dread the sun? What part of herself did she want to hide? In that moment he grasped, as shivers slid down his spine, that Krystal Kaczynski had witnessed depravities that surpassed violence, bloodshed and barbarity, horrors beyond anything any human could conceive.
Not that the League were strangers to barbarity. Murdo had watched a man being dismembered by a Golem. He had heard the savage screams of children burning to death. They’d never leave him. But as to Krystal, her eyes mirrored back something else. The hellfire in those icy irises! It was as if some demon had burned the humanity out of her.
Murdo tucked the coat back behind the blinds, banishing the light. She fell silent and limp, like a lioness struck by a dart. He flinched. She was staring right at him. How frail and helpless her body lay. Oh, but her eyes! So vital, so ardent. Fire ice. This dehumanised woman was pleading.
“Murdo Ironside…stop this war.”
Chapter Nine
Lazarus
Broughty Ferry, Dundee, Sunday 22nd January 1995
Roxy hurtled at breakneck speed through a dark void. The world span around her in slow-mo. Blood rushed to her head. Her ribcage cracked and caved in. She wilted onto the floor, only to watch him die again.
And again. And again.
Blurred shapes danced before her eyes. But only as a formless mass, veiled by a white mist as dense as Antarctic snow. “Don’t jus’ stand there.” The haze that dulled her senses had deafened her to her mother’s screams. “Call an ambulance!” It was addressed mainly to Chantelle. But she just stood open-mouthed.
A cold wind howled. Rain pelted against the windowpane. Roxanne ran to the telephone and dialled 999 as Dexter’s hot little body draped itself around her, his bloodshot eyes mazed with terror. Roxy hurled open the door. Her mother had prostrated herself over Fergie’s body. Her lips blew into his mouth as her fingers massaged his chest, as if she were pouring her own soul into his body. At length she collapsed beside him, shaking like a snowdrop. “Fergie! Oh, my Fergie!” Her voice ebbed. “The only man I ever loved.”
“Mum, is he gonna be all right?” whimpered Dexter, as tears pooled over his cheekbones.
“Must’ve been his heart...all the times he said he had indigestion...said it was my cookin’, the skellum...he was always short o’ breath...if only we’d kenned...” Mary wailed. Dexter repeated his question.
“Lordy, my wee boy, no!” she said, reaching for him with one arm, while the other still massaged Fergie. “He’s gone, wee bairn, I felt him leave me. I kenned before you called the ambulance.” Tears spurted from her eyes like jets from a mad geyser.
