Jaunt (35 page)

The first strains of yellow sunlight lit the barren tree branches above the agents, filtering down to the marina’s docks half-a-kilometer away. Winter nesting birds awoke from the night’s freeze and began their daily rituals. Soon, Gilmour knew, the marina’s denizens would arise as well, putting a new strain on their monitoring duties.

“What do we have here?” McKean said, ending a quiet interlude.

His interest piqued, Gilmour stepped over. “What is it?”

McKean tapped a specific frequency on the holobook with his finger, highlighting it in yellow and eliminating the others for a moment. “Someone’s awfully friendly with a frequency I recognized from Valagua’s lessons a while back. It’s originating from somewhere in the eastern coast or mid-eastern region of the Soviet Union. Whoever it is, they’re not losing any time responding. I’ve recorded five hails between the two and one extended transmission—without a break—lasting ten minutes.”

“Hmm....” Gilmour committed a quick glance at McKean’s holobook. “They don’t appear to be too worried about a trace. Can you get a location fix?”

McKean tapped another series of buttons on the holobook, bringing up a holograph of the eastern seaboard of the Soviet Union. Several red spikes soon grew from the representation of the topographical map, each emitting at a different radio frequency. Further triangulation by McKean revealed the culprit, deep in the mid-region of the Asian continent. “Coordinates 52 degrees north by 104 degrees east. Do you want to listen in?”

Gilmour nodded.

Resetting his holobook, McKean tapped the specific frequency and activated the device, broadcasting it to the trio via a miniaturized speaker. Pops and squeaks were relayed first before a barely discernable voice, speaking in Russian, cut through the primitive radio static and continued with the dialogue. The broadcast lasted less than fifteen seconds before renewed interference extinguished the voice.

“Did you get any of that?” Gilmour asked the pair, still attempting his own translation after the fact.

Constantine shook his head.

“Neither did I,” McKean concurred.

Gilmour studied the holograph on McKean’s holobook. “Who were they talking to?”

“This one right here.” McKean’s index finger tapped a red sphere, one ship among many sailing across the Pacific.

“Course data on that one, Will?”

“It’s a larger vessel, roughly fitting Clayton’s description. According to lidar, her wake is leaving quite a mess behind, scattering oceanic debris everywhere she goes. All indicators are near certain that she was here at some point the past few days,” Constantine reported, but added the caveat, “but so could half the ships out there.”

Gilmour grunted an acknowledgement. “Still, the nature of the repeated communications and their locations is what sparks me. If you were a transport vessel, what the hell are you doing in typical fishing lanes, talking to someone beyond the coast?” he asked out loud, but to no one in particular. “No, it’s too peculiar...stow your gear, gentlemen. It’s got to be the one.”

Constantine and McKean switched off their holobooks and stowed them in sidepockets. Placing their helmets on and locking them into place, the trio pressurized their hazard suits and then activated the Casimir chambers.

Gilmour clicked his voxlink. “Let’s do it!”

Exploding in a crack of thunderous energy, the trio vacated the spacetime continuum, leaving behind a vaporous trail of smoke rising from the frost-covered turf.

“Lieutenant Vasily Nicolenko! Where is he?!”

Tugging an overhead light bulb chain, Gilmour finally saw the figure he had caged: a bedraggled Russian boy, dressed in oily and perspiration-laden grey togs, fallen upon the floor, gape-mouthed and scared witless; he couldn’t have been much older than eleven or twelve, Gilmour estimated, younger yet than the poor sailors on board the
Bradana
.

Gilmour stood over the boy, pistol barrel lowered to the child’s brown, soiled throat, enough to strike fear into his heart, but without causing him to defecate in his trousers. The boy looked from side to side in the closet, hoping to see a weapon he could employ against the agent. Gilmour had, however, scoured the place before trapping the boy as he passed in the corridor.

“Nicolenko, boy?” the agent asked again, enunciating in his clearest Russian. “Are you deaf, dumb?

The boy shook his head, flinging drops of sweat across the room. “No....”

Gilmour nodded, chiding himself for perhaps being too rough with the child. He was sure not to make the mistake that anybody could conceivably harm or kill you—regardless of age or gender—but this boy seemed sure to run like a rabbit at the instant Gilmour gave him room to wriggle. He holstered his pistol, confident the boy would not make a move towards him. “What’s your name, son?”

“Pa—Pashenka,” the boy coughed out, barely audible.

“That’s a handsome name.” Extending his hand, the agent helped the boy to his feet. Looking at Pashenka’s dingy togs, Gilmour tidied the boy up, straightening his collar and adjusting his shoulders. Reaching into his back pocket, Gilmour’s left hand produced a three-by-five-inch, black-and-white emulsion photograph. Holding it up, he handed it to the boy. “Do you know him?”

Pashenka’s hands felt the slick photograph, an index finger tracing a line over the image of the man’s face. He nodded, then said, “Papa is a doctor on our ship. Papa making him better.”

A glimmer of hope galvanized Gilmour, releasing a surge of energy throughout his body. “Where is your papa? I need to talk to this man.”

“Papa doesn’t like strangers. Papa doesn’t like bang-bangs, too.”

“Bang-bangs, huh.” Gilmour cracked a grin. “All right, Pashenka. No bang-bangs.”

Turning his head, Gilmour took out his sidearm and called out, “Will....”

From around the corner of the closet door, Constantine and McKean appeared out of the darkness, dressed in their bodysocks and jackets. Extending his hand, Gilmour proffered his pistol to his colleagues. “Hang on to this for me, will you?”

Constantine raised an intrigued eyebrow.

“I’ve got a lead. Keep close to the jaunt rendezvous. I’ll call with more info in about,”

he checked his wrist chrono, “twenty minutes.”

Constantine and McKean looked at each other and nodded, more out of faith in Gilmour than in what the agent was actually up to.

Gilmour turned back to the boy. “All right, Pashenka.”

The pair left behind the other agents and the closet, walking out into the corridor. Pashenka took Gilmour through the cavernous ship, each succeeding deck darker and more foreboding than the last as they descended. The temperature soared the farther Pashenka walked, causing the agent to wipe his brow several times; even the steel walls perspired, meaning the engineering room couldn’t have been too far.

Down in the ship’s bowels, no one crossed the pair’s path, despite their proximity to its essential systems. Stepping down rusty stairs, the boy led Gilmour to a corridor with an arched ceiling, adorned with metal pipes running length-wise. Several doors lined the hall, each no larger than three dozen centimeters in width, not much of an infirmary if indeed Pashenka’s father was the ship’s doctor. No more than a footstep inside the corridor did Gilmour realize this was the crew’s quarters, so low in depth that a rupture or breach in the hull would instantly kill everyone down here.

Pashenka produced a key ring and unlocked an oxidized iron door on his left, which creaked and stalled in mid-push. Giving it a kick with his heel, Pashenka persuaded the door to open. He hurriedly waved Gilmour inside, then quickly slammed and locked the door behind them.

Despite the dark, Pashenka strode over to a tabletop and lit a match, which flared like the sun to Gilmour’s light-starved eyes. The boy held the flame to the bottom of a kerosene lamp, then adjusted the intensity of the light. A mattress was situated in one corner of the room, surrounded by stacks of books and, of all things, what Valagua had once referred to as a phonograph, an ancient music playing device, complete with a bellshaped horn to one side, to which Gilmour smiled at its quaintness. Three large squares were standing upright beside the machine, probably the recordings.

Pashenka gestured to Gilmour again, almost taking the agent by hand through the tiny living space. An opening in the wall—less than a hallway, but more than a door—was on the room’s right, through which Pashenka took the lamp. Gilmour ducked under the low cut in the bulkhead, following Pashenka into the adjacent room, where another mattress, upon which a darkened figure lay on one side, dominated the floor. Pashenka discreetly walked over to the mattress, careful to lower the light output from the lamp.

Placing the lamp on the floor, Pashenka put a hand on the figure’s sheet, perhaps to rouse him after a long slumber. Narrowing his eyes, Gilmour tried to make out the form’s features; was it Pashenka’s father, passed out from too much drink? A quick second look around the room revealed scattered bottles, some tipped onto their sides, all over the deck floor. Small glints of reflected light caught the agent’s attention; needles?

Turning back to the boy, Pashenka had rolled the bearded man onto his back and was now dabbing perspiration from his forehead with a rag.

“Is this your papa?” Gilmour asked, swallowing a bead of sweat that had dripped over his lips.

A baffled look grew over the boy’s face. Setting the rag down, Pashenka pointed to Gilmour’s hip.

“What?” The agent’s left hand searched his trouserleg, his fingers running up and down over the fabric. Fruitless, Gilmour raised his hands. “I’m sorry...what, again?”

“No.” Pashenka reached over to Gilmour’s trouserleg and tugged at his hind leg, pulling the agent’s trousers closer. Gilmour jumped as the boy fumbled behind his back, finally yanking out something. Pashenka sat back and held out the photograph so close to Gilmour’s eyes he momentarily blocked the agent’s sight.

Gilmour snatched the photograph, blurting out, “Hey! What the—” Lowering his hand, the agent saw Pashenka pointing excitedly to the man on the mattress. Gilmour shook his head. “No, this man, Pashenka. Not your....” Another scan by Gilmour shut him up. Rubbing his eyes, Gilmour committed another look at the photograph, then crawled closer to the man on the mattress.

“This isn’t your father, is it....” In his mind’s eye, Gilmour shaved off the man’s beard, cut his hair a few centimeters, than healed the purple bruises on his forehead. He clinched his jaw. “Nicolenko....”

Kill him now! Do it! End it now!!!

Gilmour rose to his feet slowly, never taking his eyes off the comatose Nicolenko on the mattress. “Can you wake him, Pashenka?”

Puzzled, the boy stood also. “He’s been sleeping for a long time. Papa says we should let him sleep till he wakes up.”

“Then leave the room, Pashenka.” Gilmour swallowed. “I’ll wake him up myself.”

The boy walked closer to the agent, so close now Pashenka could retrieve Nicolenko’s photograph again, if he chose. “Are you going to hurt him?”

Gilmour’s gaze upon Nicolenko broke, his concentration shaken by the boy’s forthrightness. He swiveled his head to meet the boy’s cherubic visage.

“Papa says people will try to hurt him...he says he’ll be killed.”

“H—how does your papa know people are going to hurt him?”

“Papa says he talks to them every day, here on this ship.”

Gilmour’s hand rubbed his jaw, wiping the dripping perspiration from his skin. It was so bloody hot in here. “Then we must not allow these people to hurt this man, should we?”

A sudden vibration on Gilmour’s left leg caught his attention. “Excuse me, Pashenka.” Walking across the room, Gilmour stepped under the bulkhead cutaway and paused in the first room. Reaching down, his hand found his holobook. Tapping a button on its side, he whispered, “Gilmour.”

“We were starting to wonder about you,” Constantine’s voice broadcasted softly over the holobook’s speaker. “It’s been twenty-nine minutes.”

“Sorry...I’ve found someone interesting. Nicolenko’s here, still comatose. Do you have my coordinates?”

After a brief pause, Constantine answered, “Affirmative.”

“Meet me here ASAP. Bring everything, but be discreet. I’m not alone, and I’ve got good information that this ship is crawling with NKVD, let alone anyone else. I’ll meet you in a corridor outside of some quarters. Gilmour out.”

Tapping the same button, Gilmour powered down the holobook and replaced it inside his pocket. Now came the dilemma; if the NKVD were hiding about the ship—and Gilmour had no reason to believe otherwise—was Nicolenko indeed a target of them, or was the target the man or men who came after him, Nicolenko being the bait? The Soviets were devious, curious and dubious, all at once. If they had reason to believe there was more to Nicolenko then the identification he carried and the uniform he wore, then no effort would be spared to discern just who he was, and who employed him.

Killing Nicolenko just to eliminate him from this game they all played may have been warranted—if killing can be warranted, a duty some IIA agents couldn’t handle after their first hit—but not on this ship, perhaps now not in front of the boy. Little children weren’t immune from the NKVD’s tendrils; despite de Lis’ belief that Nicolenko was the lone Confederation operative with jaunting capability, who was to know just who and how many watched the Temporal Retrieve team and where they hid? One little event in this era could potentially cause a break in the chain of time, re-linking and weaving a different set of circumstances for the Temporal Retrieve team’s contemporary and future eras, essentially erasing everyone, everything the team had ever known or loved.