Jaunt (17 page)

Gilmour stroked the curls on his jaw. “With all due respect to Colonel Dark Horse, I request a leave of absence.”

“There are no requests to be granted, Agent Gilmour. Your assignment to Ottawa stipulates your willingness to perform all duties as ordered by the DoD. As you quoted me just now, it ‘is the nature of our profession.’” De Lis’ teeth ground together. “I’m not above pulling rank. I am truly sorry for the loss of your partner, but don’t make me shatter your chances for directorship. We need you, Gilmour. The country, the world needs you.”

The agent placed his palm to his chest, just to see if his heart had continued to beat, just to see if he hadn’t actually died, too. Four days ago he wished he had.

Finally, Gilmour lifted his eyes to the doctor, and after the consideration and hindsight of nearly a week, nodded. “I’ll need a physical, and pain medication.”

De Lis’ lips curled at their edges. “I wondered how long you’d forgo treatment since your refusal in the hangar. We’ll get Doctor Anaba to look over you.” He then studied the growth on Gilmour’s jawline. “After that, lose the beard. I’m not sure the colonel or the DoD

would approve, even though Doctor Anaba might. Unfortunately for her tastes, she doesn’t see too many men here with facial hair.”

Despite the various greetings and slaps on the back he had received from the Ottawa scientists, Gilmour didn’t feel as though he had truly returned; a part of him still lay dead in Sakha, a part he didn’t know if he’d ever get back. Walking stiffly into the U5-1 laboratory, a finger slid down his shaven jaw, reinforcing the changes of the past weeks. No, he wasn’t comfortable here at all. In fact, he wasn’t too much in the mood for the debriefing he was certain to receive from Dark Horse, which, to Gilmour’s curiosity, was not in U5-29, but here, with de Lis’ staff present. Unusual for the lieutenant colonel.

De Lis slid his pass key through the circular panel suspended in U5-3’s fullerene glass wall, admitting the pair into the doctor’s office. “Have a seat.”

Gilmour eased his tender body into the chair, then noticed Dark Horse’s absence.

“Where’s the colonel?”

“This is a laboratory status report, not a debriefing, Agent Gilmour,” de Lis said, taking his own seat. “Colonel Dark Horse felt the need for one marginal at best. You know what’s involved, we know what’s involved. No reason to drag it out for our ears.”

Gilmour nodded; a silent thank you.

De Lis slid a holobook across the desk to Gilmour. “This is our latest update. While you were gone, the staff and I added quite a few pieces to our puzzle, as well as digging up new ones, pardon the pun.”

The agent scrolled down the report and examined the holographs accompanying it. This went on for a moment before pausing, then furrowing his brow. “Uh, what do you mean by losing an hour forty minutes?”

De Lis stroked his chin; this would be the hard part. “The specimens have a tendency—when exposed to a Casimir vacuum—of warping spacetime.” He discerned Gilmour’s well hidden disbelief, then continued, “That’s why our first Nepalese specimen seemingly disappeared.”

“Pardon?”

De Lis leaned forward, so Gilmour could fully comprehend. “Extradimensional travel, Agent Gilmour. We unknowingly sent it into the past. Twice.”

“Oh, God.” He collapsed into the chairback. “You can’t be serious...I hope you’re not serious.”

De Lis gave a curt nod.

“Then they have it too, don’t they? Sweet Jesus, they have one too.”

The doctor remained mute. HADRON, their little mole, the anonymous critter inside their own walls, perhaps inside U5-1’s walls, had done it. If the Russians knew what was in their hands—Gilmour couldn’t see why not—then it was all over. Memory could be erased like a fragged file, written over by someone with the will and the means to redo history in his own image.

“How long have you known this?”

De Lis sighed. “Three days after your team left.”

Gilmour rubbed his eyes. Reality didn’t seem so real anymore. “Well, then. What do we do about it?”

“Lionel is working on that. First, you need to finish the report. It doesn’t get any better.”

The succeeding pages had been composed by the DoD, complete with several holographs of the Asian continent. Dozens of green points—a multiplication of the sites from Dark Horse’s report six weeks ago—popped up from the cartographs, followed by a smattering of reddened spikes. The green points coincided ominously with a smuggled list of factories and industries located inside the Confederation. The red spikes, while only a handful, were centered on remote regions of the continent, areas Gilmour knew to be hard to access, even with military transportation. His finger tapped a peripheral button, providing a DoD quantum analysis of each spike. They were explosions...neutronic test blasts.

The holobook clacked on the desktop.

“What exactly is my objective, Doctor?”

De Lis raised a finger to his lips before knocking on Stacia Waters’ office door. Inside, Waters rose to her feet and opened the door, allowing the two into the room. Shutting the door behind her, she gestured to the chairs.

“Welcome back, Agent Gilmour. I trust Richard has updated you?”

Gilmour nodded. “Regrettably.”

De Lis glanced to the device in Waters’ palm. “Stacia.”

Gilmour received the holobook thrust to him by Waters, then scrolled through the text. A holograph of a miniaturized Casimir chamber, small enough to be affixed to a man, appeared in the report.

“This is all well, Doctor, but what good does this do me?”

De Lis pointed to the holograph. “This is your new objective, Agent Gilmour. We need you to penetrate the Confederation and wipe out their potential extradimensional capabilities.”

“Bomb them?”

“It’s not quite that simple,” de Lis corrected him. “For all we can discern, the samples themselves are infinitely dense, incapable of being reduced to a more fundamental—hence, safer—state. The Secretary of Defense is ordering you to eradicate the extradimensional potential at the source: returning to the moment of the specimens’

landfall.”

“You mean,” he raised an eyebrow, “you want me to use one of those
things
to erase history?

“No, not erase,” Waters said. “We think we can construct a way for you and a team to retrieve the jewels before they are covered by the elements. But it would involve utilizing the jewels we have to do so.”

Gilmour covered his nose and mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

De Lis put a hand to the agent’s shoulder, steadying him. “At this moment, the DoD

believes the Confederation is preparing to utilize a neutronic device to unearth the Pacific Ocean site. According to Javier, this site is potentially the largest one yet, capable of yielding several tonnes of the jewels. We’ve beaten them to the punch twice, but there’s a mole here, and it knows what only a few of us have been privy to.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed. “If we blink, sneeze, or hesitate long enough to even lick our wounds, the Confederation has won. I don’t need to tell you what that means.”

“Just how do you know this...harebrained idea will succeed? Do you have
exact
evidence that these jewels went back to the past?”

“We’re pretty sure,” Waters said, glancing at de Lis.

Gilmour looked to the doctor as well.

“Well, empirical evidence is scant, honestly.”

The agent rolled his eyes and turned away.

“Gilmour, listen.” De Lis touched the agent’s sleeve, grabbing his attention.

“Everything we do here is risky.
We’ve never done this before
. My staff and I have been working since your departure to determine the precise meV charge that will activate spacetime warping. A narrow margin has been discerned, and we’re continuing to narrow it further until exact.”

“All right.”

“Gilmour,” Waters stood, “we wouldn’t have even presented this as a possibility to the secretary unless we knew there was a chance it would work. Richard and I need you to work with us during the lab experimentation. That means your input on design procedures and other practical considerations, since you’ll be the one performing the mission...we’re just the eggheads in the lab coming up with the stuff.”

“Where do we start?”

“Lionel’s office,” de Lis answered, heading for the door. “He’s been working on a way to construct a miniaturized Casimir vacuum chamber.”

“Any luck?” Gilmour asked as the trio exited.

Waters looked to de Lis, who merely raised his eyebrows.

De Lis, Gilmour and Waters walked into Roget’s office in time to smell the acrid air wafting to the ceiling. At their feet lay the remains of some mechanism, now blown to thousands of irretrievable shards. The trio stepped over the larger debris to find Roget shaking his head at his exam table, holding a shard in his hand. “That was Mark II. I guess it needs more work.”

Gilmour picked up one of the curved shards and rolled it over, soon realizing that it was a fractured section of the Casimir. “And this is what’s supposed to take me back?”

A petulant look crossed Roget’s face as he tried to ignore Gilmour’s not-so flippant comment. “Richard, I’ve got two more housings in the wings. We’ll get it completed.”

“Good. Three days, no more.”

“Not much of a deadline for the work everybody’s being asked to do,” Gilmour said to de Lis.

De Lis returned a few pieces of the shattered Casimir to the table before leading the three out. “The secretary understands the difficulties involved, but we’ve had some successes. As we speak, several of my associates are finalizing a series of hazard suits to deploy for the missions, and—”

“Missions? How many missions?”

“At least one for yourself, Agent Constantine and Agent McKean. There are three sites to reconnoiter,” de Lis explained, raising a finger. “Agent Gilmour, we’re sending you to the Pacific Rim, per Colonel Dark Horse’s recommendation. It is the most complex—and dangerous—of the missions, requiring your expertise as the lead agent in the Temporal Retrieve Project to execute. Agents Constantine and McKean will each be sent to a separate site deep within the Confederation: Irkutsk and Magadan, respectively, two industrialized cities suspected of being important neutronic facilities, where they will conduct reconnoitering on the Confederation’s current neutronic capabilities.”

“We’ve been directed to manufacture hazard suits flexible enough for multiple missions,” Waters added. “If need be.”

Gilmour gave a small sigh. “Then I’ll be sure to do it right the first time. I’m not given to being kicked around time repeatedly.”

“We can’t afford to lose you, either,” de Lis said. “If, for any reason, the other site retrievals go awry, we’ll need the other agents to take up the failed mission. To counter this, Javier will brief your team extensively on the conditions of the century to which you will be traveling, even though you’re slated to be the only agent going back to the twentieth century, Agent Gilmour. We can’t lose. Period.”

Forty-eight hours of almost non-stop preparation had the three agents’ minds reeling from mass data input. Valagua made excellent time on de Lis’ schedule to brief the trio of men, squeezing in copious references about the times, including customs, political affiliations, language, clothing styles, popular culture, and most importantly, the Second World War, which was just entering its second year by late 1940.

De Lis and Waters periodically spelled them from the intense research by involving the trio in the final construction of the hazard suits, supervised by Ivan, Crowe, Lux and Jaquess. U5-7, the theoretical studies lab’s hardware bay, was the current home of the suits, each of which hung from the ceiling in the center of the office. A deck of monitors ringed the haz suits, displaying dozens of design graphics and schematics. Tools pertinent to the suits’ maintenance—modern quantum tunneling microscopes and EM pulsers, timetested mallets and screwdrivers—were arrayed on several shelves lining the four walls. Above them, a bay of lights exposed every square millimeter with pleasant, warm illumination.

Handed a batch of holobooks by Waters, the trio looked over the holographic designs, comparing theory to the actual results. The half-completed exolayers of the outfits were composed of a beige, quilted material—tough to the touch—underneath which was a layer of quanta-conducting fiber, enabling the myriad mechanisms and sensors to draw power from a secured quantum battery deep inside. Concentric metal rings formed the shoulder-to-neck harnesses, where helmets would be latched to the suits to maintain livable atmospheric pressure.

“So we need to run around in these things to prevent us from broiling alive?”

Constantine asked. The thought of wearing twenty-kilogram spacesuits weighed heavily on his mind; just one more operational hoop to jump through.

“A precaution, Agent,” de Lis explained. “I’ve seen firsthand what the last object did to Lionel’s Casimir chamber. Quantum analysis of the charred remains revealed that the interior material had been stripped of ninety-five percent of its bosonic matter, reducing the chamber to the equivalent of atomic ash.”

McKean playfully plucked a portion of one of the hazard suits with his finger. “Ouch. Sounds like a plan, Doctor. When do we have our measurements taken?”