Broken Hero (22 page)

Hermann’s weight shifts suddenly. A foot coming forward, an elbow swinging back.

“No, Hermann!” Volk shoves his bulk between the two of us.

For my part, I stand my ground.
He can’t kill me. It’s predetermined.

“How did you know we’d be here?” I ask again. “Because the leak could also be on our end—”

“So he admits it!” Hermann froths behind Volk’s outstretched arms.

“It’s another possibility,” I say, still keeping my voice flat. For once I feel in control of something. Hermann’s hysterics are terribly predictable. “It would be unintentional,” I hesitate, “obviously. But you being here suggests our communications aren’t as secure as we thought they were.”

“See,” says Volk, turning his back on me, voice placating, “this is concern. The same as ours. We work together.”

A wodge of oil arcs over Volk’s shoulder, lands in a thick puddle beside me. Which means Lang even designed a way for them to spit. That seems a little unnecessary.

“Calm yourself.” There’s finally an edge to Volk’s voice. And then a string of German words that I don’t understand. “
Du machst dich lächerlich
.” Then he turns to me.

“We have hidden for many years. Underground. Where you do not look. You have tunnels everywhere. You abandon them over and over. These hidden, forgotten spaces are ours now. They go many places and allow us to hear many things.”

I hesitate, working out the implications.

“There are tunnels below MI37?” I ask. “You just stuck a glass up against the wall and listened to us talking?”

Volk nods. The speaker-bar that is his mouth twists slightly—the suggestion of a smile. “Not just below MI37.”

Well, that’s not creepy at all.

“You are a fool.” Hermann spits again. Not at me this time. It spatters over Volk’s cloak, leaving an ugly stain on the side of his hood.

“But you haven’t seen Friedrich or any of his cronies down in the tunnels with you?” I say, ignoring Hermann.

Volk shrugs. “There are many tunnels. We cannot be in them all at once.”

Not quite the “no” I was hoping for. There are still no definitive answers.

“OK,” I say, “that’s your show and tell over with. My turn.” And so I lay it out for them. What we found beneath London, our plan to go to the Himalayas and do more research. I leave out the bit about the future echo. That feels personal. And likely to cause Hermann to have another hissy fit.

“So you have nothing,” Hermann says when I’m done.

“Well,” I snap back, “I do think I have a bit of a cold now that I’ve been standing in the rain for ten minutes telling you about all the shit we’ve been through on your behalf.” This, I remember, is why we normally let Felicity do the talking. She keeps her temper on a tighter rein.

“Forgive my friend,” Volk says. “It is hard to watch our people die. We are anxious for news.”

My anger ebbs. I think I have a little insight on that sort of stress now. “I understand,” I say.

There is a moment while everyone pulls themselves together a little bit.

“So,” Hermann breaks the silence. “Where is this plane? When do we take off?”

“We?” I say. “This—”

“Of course we,” Hermann snaps. “You do not think we will let you simply run off and abscond with what we need. You will show us the way and we will retrieve it. I will not have you fail again as you did at Lang’s house.”

“Hey,” I say, whatever momentary calm I enjoyed evaporating, “we’ve been on this less than a week and gotten further than you. So a little fucking gratitude might not go amiss.”

“Is everything all right?”

A voice from the car draws all our attention. Felicity is standing by the driver’s door, shielding her eyes from the rain.

“Fine,” I call back. “Just discussing Hermann’s desire to come with us to the Himalayas.”

Felicity’s mouth makes an “o.”

“When do you take off?” Hermann calls. “Your friend,” he spits the word, “is reluctant to tell us.”

“Well,” Felicity hesitates. “It might be hard to disguise your presence in Nepal, and—”

“We are coming,” Hermann insists.

I look to Volk. “Come on,” I say, “help me out here.”

“We are most anxious to retrieve the papers,” Volk calls to Felicity, “and eager to be of assistance in any way we can be.”

It doesn’t sound like any more of a request than Hermann’s statement. The tone is friendlier, but that’s about it. I sigh.

Felicity sees me do it. “Runway Bravo,” she calls. “Half an hour.”

The RAF seems a touch surprised to find two mechanical giants in the middle of one of their hangars. To be honest, I am too. They declined a ride from us and we left them by the side of the road. The idea that the pair of them can bypass military defenses so easily as to have beaten us here is a little worrying.

Still after a brief standoff where the pair of them are threatened by fifty or so soldiers with rifles, and alarm klaxons sound from every corner of the base, Felicity manages to smooth things over.

Eventually the base chief disperses his men with mutterings about “irregular bollocks.” A vast Hercules carrier plane waits for us, which at least solves the problem of where to store Volk and Hermann. Despite his immobile features, Hermann still manages to give me a dirty look as he gets on board.

“Friendly bugger, ain’t he?” says Hannah.

She and Kayla drove up together in Kayla’s car. They arrived only in time to catch the tail-end of the excitement.

I remember my conversation with Felicity the night before. About how Hannah unknowingly holds MI37’s future in her hands. About how important it is to be nice to her.

Then I remember how I’m going to get blown to bits in a few days, and how that is probably the only thing Hannah will ever remember about me.

So I don’t bother replying. I just get onto the plane, sit down, and wait for the future to get a little closer.

As far as in-flight entertainment goes, military aircraft are shit. Instead of a movie, I get to listen to Kayla discuss the desired genetic traits of a sperm donor with Hannah. Apparently she is looking for someone “intelligent and shite”, “not a fatty,” “with none of that genetic disease bollocks,” and with “a tiny wee bum.”

“Are tiny wee bums genetic?” Hannah asks her as I attempt to have the seat swallow me.

“Better feckin’ be.”

“I’ve always liked a good curve myself.”

“Yeah, but you’re looking for an entirely feckin’ different gender.”

“True.”

This is apparently enough to pique Hermann’s interest. “It is inefficient, your way. An inelegant means to procreate.”

“The feck?” Kayla looks at him with something close to open disdain. Felicity’s up in the cockpit chatting with the pilot so nobody checks Kayla’s attitude. I probably should, but honestly Hermann has it coming.

“You strive for something greater than yourself, for something worthy of preservation. But it is all random. It is all chance. You have no control over your variables. You have no idea if you will produce perfection or a mewling useless grub.”

“Oh,” Hannah brightens. “I thought you’d rejected your creator’s philosophy? Eugenics still OK with you is it?”

Hermann grunts from the depths of his hood. “Eugenics is just a variation on a theme. Biology is inefficient to the point of being useless. I am talking about design, mechanics. Our creator’s purpose was warped, but his tools for advancing himself, his race, they were correct.”

Volk shakes his head. “Why do you seek to antagonize always, Hermann? They are our friends.”

“They are convenient allies for as long as it suits them.” Hermann sneers. “Betrayal is the natural state of the biologic. History has taught us that.”

“Build a baby?” ask Kayla. “Hell, you find me the doctor and you sign me up.”

Hannah shakes her head. “Nah. That’d take all the fun out of it.” She smiles.

“Aye to that.”

It would probably be smarter to hold my tongue, but I do at least have the certainty of death by bomb, not by Kayla-wielded pointy thing, so I wade in. “Don’t you think,” I say, “that you should, maybe, try to patch things up with Ephie before you just have another child? I mean, all other healthy-relationship concerns aside, she’s a reality-bending demigod who is likely to take badly to you trying to quite literally replace her.”

“She can shove it up her arse.”

I look around for allies. Which is when I realize I am short on them.

“Where did Clyde and Tabitha go?” It seems like a good enough way to change the course of the conversation.

Hannah’s grin broadens. “They headed off to find the ‘bathrooms at the back of the plane’ about half an hour ago. Imagine they’re quite enjoying the inefficiency of biology at this point in time.”

I blanch. Betrayed on all sides, I head to the cockpit to find Felicity.

When Clyde does have the audacity to show his face up at the cockpit, he is thankfully alone. I don’t think I could meet his eye if Tabitha was right there as well.

“Arthur,” he says, “if you don’t mind, I would love a brief word. Well, in all honesty, knowing myself, as I think some king once advised someone… Or maybe it was just a line in that
Matrix
movie. The one with all the leather and slow-motion. Oh God, now it sounds like high-end pornography. But it was a big Hollywood blockbuster, I swear. But anyway, well, demonstrating in fact that, this being me, it may not be a brief word. But not a completely protracted word. Perhaps a word as brief as I’m likely to make it. Or a medium word. Not a word like ‘antidisestablishmentarianism,’ but also not a word like ‘and’ or ‘to’. A sort of middle ground.”

Felicity turns her head to hide the fact that she’s smiling.

“Go ahead,” I tell him.

“So, the whole earlier incident with you sort of insulting Hermann and him losing his temper, and you saying that you knew you weren’t going to be killed by anything except the bomb.”

“Yes,” I say. It seems like the one silver lining to all of this. There’s nothing to worry about right up until the end.

“Not actually true.”

Clyde tears away the silver lining, bunches it up in a ball, and proves it to be kitchen foil.

“You see, it’s not as deterministic as that. You’re
supposed
to be killed by the bomb as far as reality is concerned. However, you could still be killed by something else. Totally a possibility.”

Oh crap. I start to sag again.

Felicity shakes her head. “We’re sorting out the bomb thing.”

“Erm…” Clyde looks dubious, then shrugs. “Yes. Of course. But the thing is, if you do die, Arthur, it’ll actually be worse than, you know, regular usual death. Well, caveat that. I mean, firstly, unlikely to be a regular usual death given our line of work. Probably an abominable snowman crushing your head into your chest cavity or something awful like that. And secondly, I mean, for you there’s a probably a pretty definable upper limit for how awful dying can get. At a certain point it’s just dying. Not that… I mean, I don’t want to undersell how awful you dying would be. It’s very awful. It’s just, well… the experience for the dying person pretty much standard, I imagine. A singular experience. At least looking at it from a biological point of view. But I’m not talking about you. Actually trying to talk about everyone else in the world. Which may or may not bother you, but I’m hoping that, given your choice of profession, you are the sort of fellow who cares about his fellow man even in the act of death. Because, well you see, as mentioned, you’re supposed to die by the bomb.” His eyes flick to Felicity. “At least at this moment in time. So, if, say,
before
we sorted that out, the whole abominable snowman, head-chest cavity scenario were to play out, or some variation upon that theme, well that would violate reality and the future echo. And that in turn would lead to a paradox. I mean, why would that future echo have occurred if that wasn’t what killed you?”

I am suddenly very aware that I’m thousands of feet up in the air in what amounts to a tin can manufactured in the fifties, and that no one has given me a parachute. “Paradoxes not a good thing then?” I check.

“Depends on the scale. I mean at best you’re looking at minor amounts of reality changing. Not many accounts of when that happened as it’s hard to detect, writes itself back into history, but you know, sort of loss of a nation and its population. Elimination of a genetic line. Shifts in the turning points of history. Standard time-travel disaster sequence.”

“That’s the
best
case?” I check.

Felicity tries to jump in. “Isn’t this all a moot point?” she asks. “We’re going to sort this all out.” She makes it sound like the threat of me dying, tearing reality apart, and scattering the pieces about like confetti is on a par with keeping a library book out too long.

“Well the worst-case scenario,” Clyde barrels on ignoring Felicity, “is a self-perpetuating paradox. One that’s so problematic that resolving it leads to more paradoxes which then need to be resolved. But then the resolution of those leads to further paradoxes, et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth, down the dominos all fall, everyone watches it on YouTube and is very impressed, and then reality collapses in upon itself, is no more, and not only is everyone dead, but they never existed in the first place, and neither did anything else.”

I chew on that for a bit. “That is a pretty bad worst-case scenario.”

Clyde nods. “Sort of why no one really messes around with reality magic. Leave it to the Dreamers and other professionals like that.”

Felicity shakes her head. “This is a totally moot point.”

But it strikes me that Clyde is worried enough about the event that he just had sex with Tabitha in the back of a crowded plane just so he could get it in one more time.

And yet, what else is there to do? What does this change? My death is imminent one way or another. Just keep on fighting the good fight, until it’s not good anymore.

“You’re right,” I say squeezing Felicity’s hand. “Moot point. Doesn’t matter at all.”