Jaunt (36 page)

That left them with the charge of taking Nicolenko back, slipping him out of here, without anyone knowing about it. The problem was, of course, at least two people knew he was here, still leading to the same conclusion about altering time. So, Gilmour thought, do they risk jaunting out of here with Nicolenko, or do they sit tight and wait for this ship to arrive at, most probably, Vladivostok, and discover just who arranged for Nicolenko to get back to their era?

“Charming cruise ship you found us,” a voice down the corridor reverberated.

Breaking his vigil, Gilmour greeted Constantine and McKean with a gesture of his hand, signaling them to quiet down. Taking his voice to a whisper, Gilmour jutted his thumb back to the door and said, “The boy is with Nicolenko inside. Did you encounter anyone on the way down?”

McKean looked to Constantine, both shaking their heads. “No one. Not even a rat.”

“Good, although if the NKVD could, they’d wire the rats, too.”

Constantine raised his eyebrows and nodded in full agreement.

“What the hell’s going on, Gilmour?” McKean asked. “Is the NKVD with the Confederation, or what?”

“I don’t know...that’s what makes all of this all the more dangerous. We can’t trust anyone, anything, to be who or what they appear.”

Constantine sighed hard, impatiently. “Then we’ll just wrap up the SOB in a blanket and jaunt out of here with him...he can be burnt to a crisp for all I care. Mission accomplished.”

“Under normal circumstances, Will, I’d be right beside you. But you’ve got to remember, that man didn’t just blink here by sheer willpower...he’s got a Casimir, has to have a hazard suit, and still possesses a jewel or two. And I sure haven’t found any of those yet.” Gilmour rubbed his temples, still attempting to sort out this mess in his own mind.

“Do you really want any of that equipment loose in the twentieth century? Surely you’ve listened to what Valagua told you these people did during this era? Every two-bit terrorist would pay a wife or two to get a hold of this technology.”

“Granted, but when did this—” Constantine caught his breath, then covered his mouth to keep his voice from carrying, “when did this mission change from a simple hit to fifty-two pickup?”

Gilmour looked back to the rusty steel door held ajar at the quarters’ entrance. “The moment I saw that boy I realized our actions in this era have consequences far larger than we will ever know, or acknowledge. Don’t you think I thought about putting a round between Nicolenko’s eyes and dumping him overboard? After what happened to Mason and Chief, I think it’d be perfect. But what about that boy? Think he’ll keep quiet? Think he’ll stand tough when the NKVD come calling, sticking a baton in his skull and cracking his brains out like an egg?!”

McKean let out a low whistle. “Christ....”

“Dammit, Gilmour,” Constantine said, pushing his face into Gilmour’s, “I care about the future, too, you know. But I don’t want us to have to second guess every step or every leak we take along the way, in the event that perhaps this ‘era’ is going to be changed by us. De Lis’ orders are sound and he has a good reason, I’m certain. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to be asked to tiptoe around the time streams because someone got in our way and that someone’s great-great-great-great-something ends up saving a species of mold that can cure every venereal disease known to mankind.”

Having shielded his eyes during Constantine’s harangue, Gilmour now lowered his hand and looked his colleague in the eye. Clearing his throat, he continued, “Point taken, as always, Will. As the special agent in charge, I respectfully disagree, though. These are my orders: We are going to attempt to locate Nicolenko’s gear and any jewels in his possession. One of us needs to stay behind here and look after Nicolenko and the boy.”

Gilmour’s eyes darted between the two. “Any takers?”

“I’ll do it.” Constantine hardened his gaze towards Gilmour, then nodded swiftly. “I’ll do it...and if the bastard moves a centimeter, I’ll blow his head clean.”

McKean raised an uncertain eyebrow at Gilmour while taking a deep inhalation of the ship’s stale air.

“Good...excellent.” Holding his hand out to Constantine, Gilmour asked for his sidearm back, then said, “We’ll keep our life scans constant on our holobooks, but remain silent on vox.” He checked his wrist chrono. “I want to limit our recon to no more than thirty minutes, so expect us back by nineteen-fifteen.”

Constantine nodded in agreement.

“One more thing, Will,” Gilmour said, holstering his pistol in his shoulder strap,

“have your bang-bang handy, and keep your eyes on Nicolenko at all times.”

“No need to remind me.”

Before Gilmour and McKean could turn down the corridor, Constantine proffered his hand to Gilmour. The pair shook vigorously, each forgiving the other’s obstinacy. Constantine watched the pair go off into the darkened corridor, then headed back into the quarters to acquaint himself further with the boy Gilmour had dug up. A half-hour shouldn’t be too long a stretch for a single man to stay vanguard over Nicolenko, especially while the man lay in a coma. Adapting his eyes to the dark, Constantine studied the room’s interior, then ducked underneath the low cutaway he found in the wall to locate a better seat for his wait.

“I wouldn’t rule out some sort of shrouding over it,” McKean said, walking up a set of stairs.

Gilmour referred to his holobook again as it performed continuous EM scans of the ship. A concentric set of red circles emanated from the pair’s current position on the holographic interface, carving out a large swath of the ship. “That’d be a hell of a technological leap to be able to hide that much energy without detection.”

“Well, perhaps his hazard suit,” McKean noted. Raising a finger, he paused in midstep. “If he shrouded his hazard suit, it would, at best, hide any EM signatures of the jewels, mostly keeping invisible the same sensors we employed in Nepal and Sakha. But what about gravitational distortion? There’s not enough energy in the entire solar system to be able to mask the gravity waves the jewels generate when we use them.”

Gilmour narrowed his eyes, tapping his holobook’s metal frame while thinking.

“Could a short EM burst with our Casimirs do the job? Enough to nudge a response from Nicolenko’s jewel, but not send it careening through spacetime?”

McKean nodded his head cautiously. “I think so, but I’m not Doctor de Lis—”

“Nor am I....”

“Well, the damnable part, as far as I can see,” McKean added, “is that Nicolenko’s jewel is at some distance. If I recall your reports correctly, the first jewels you recovered were actually inside the Casimir chamber when you activated them, or at least you never made mention of any jewels outside of the chamber affected.”

“True, but I’m willing to jerry-rig with our Casimirs here if we can do it.”

“Agreed.”

The pair unloaded Gilmour’s hazard suit from his rucksack, then detached his Casimir chamber from the torso section of the suit. Spending a few minutes removing the jewel already inside the chamber and securing it in a locked pouch, the agents then synchronized Gilmour’s chamber with McKean’s holobook, hoping to detect a satisfactory—

but not too strong—signal from within the ship. Recovering Nicolenko’s jewel was of the utmost importance, if not in the least to regain the pride lost when Roget manufactured the pilfering of several jewels to the Confederation.

Situating the detached Casimir chamber in a shadowed corner of the corridor and careful to brace it against the wall, Gilmour and McKean manipulated the chamber with a set of controls built into the mechanism’s flank, bypassing the holographic HUD controls. Tapping a green button, Gilmour activated the vacuum chamber, which hummed loudly after only a few seconds. Both men looked on, as if not quite certain or sure what to do next, while also consulting McKean’s holobook.

“What now?” McKean said, his eyes fixed upon the vibrating Casimir.

Gilmour shrugged. “This was your idea.”

McKean raised his hands, poising them for the next course of action while his brain tried to create one from scratch. “Let’s, uhh...let’s initiate the chamber plates. Maybe we can get some kind of reaction going.”

Gilmour nodded his head swiftly, then toggled the next button. Inside the chamber, hidden from view except by a tiny hole afforded by the dropchute, the twin plates migrated inward at a methodical rate, squeezed together—or so they had been told by Stacia Waters

—by a stew of virtual and anti-virtual particles.

“Anything?” Gilmour asked.

McKean looked up from his holobook and shook his head.

“All right...give it time to join the plates, then we can push the plates apart again.”

Once the plates had completed the full squeeze, they made the inexorable drive apart, drifting further as the seconds ticked by on McKean’s holobook. Anticipation grew in McKean’s eyes as he witnessed, via a holographic representation, the plates nearly extend to their widest point possible.

TTINNNGGG!!!

The pair broke their stares on the holobook to a metallic stirring behind McKean.

TTINNNGGG!!!

Rousing his curiosity, Gilmour stepped over to McKean, when a third TTINNNGGG!!!

pinpointed him to something in McKean’s equipment.

“What is that?” McKean asked, turning his back to see Gilmour searching through McKean’s gear.

Gilmour remained mute, his hands intent on rifling to find the source of—

TTINNNGGG!!!

“Got it!”

McKean sat up and saw Gilmour with his hands on McKean’s hazard suit, specifically the torso, and the pair’s other Casimir chamber. Another TTINNNGGG!!! resonated through the chamber’s hollow body as the pair looked on in astonishment.

McKean furrowed his eyebrows. “It’s like a damn magnet....”

Gilmour slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out the rock sample Mason had picked up on the grounds of the LZ in Nepal. Clenching it in his fist, he brought his arm down to McKean’s level and opened it. On his exposed flesh, the stone performed a halfturn, acting like a compass needle.

“Scan the ship!” Gilmour exhorted McKean, trying to keep the jewel from flying out of his palm.

McKean furiously tapped several buttons on the holographic keypad, instructing the holobook’s sensors to thoroughly check the local gravimetric field for disturbances. In an instant, three signals in the room burned a bright yellow on the holobook.

“I’ve got three in here,” McKean confirmed. “Our jewels and the one in your hand.”

Another signal, though fainter, blipped on the holobook, several meters below them.

“I’ve got Constantine’s,” he added.

The acrid scent of burnt flesh suddenly tore Gilmour’s attention away from McKean’s report. A piercing pain prompted a bellow from Gilmour, and looking down to his left palm, he saw his curled fingers smoking profusely. Prying his fist open with his right hand, Gilmour let loose of the jewel, only to have it fling from his palm and fly across the room to the humming Casimir chamber on the floor. It struck with such velocity that it ricocheted into some distant corner of the corridor.

“Sweet Jesus....” Calming his trembling hand, Gilmour peeled his fingers back to see a red semi-circle seared into his palm; the jewel had nearly bored a hole through his hand trying to get to the Casimir chamber.

Looking back on his holobook, McKean’s eyes visibly widened. “Holy.... Gilmour, we’ve got a bigger mess than we thought.”

Painstakingly kneeling down next to McKean, Gilmour caught a glimpse of the holobook. Before them, a bevy of yellow spheres—some bright, others paler—were separated into two distinct groups among the schematic of the transport ship, both above the two agents.

“Damn.” Standing up, Gilmour straightened his back and observed the humming Casimir chamber, along with the newly-created dent in its outer casing. “Well, I failed the first time...let’s see if we can get it done now.”

Constantine’s curiosity grew as the two blue spheres on his holobook traversed one side of the ship’s schematic to the other, descended one level, then separated. Growing thoughts of the pair’s well-being continually crossed him, despite no warnings from their patchedthrough life scans; elevated heartrate and respiration, to be sure, but that was nothing unusual.

On the mattress, Nicolenko slept peacefully in his coma, almost indistinguishable from the eternal slumber. The boy, however, had been administering to him for some time now, periodically cooling the man’s forehead and cheeks with a damp cloth out of a small tin bucket, a luxury Constantine was soon to the point of obsessing over. Considering the damnably hellish temperatures in the bowels of this ship, why should he waste cool water on that man? Rubbing his own forehead with the back of his sleeve, Constantine plotted at least three different ways he could nick the water for himself, but soon thought better of it, lest the boy go squealing and alert whomever patrolled this ship. Constantine became all the more determined to eliminate Nicolenko, if only to rid him of his monopoly on that water.

Close to passing into a coma himself, and determined to stay away from any selfcaused trouble, the agent rose from his squat on the corroded deck floor and passed into the other half of the quarters in an attempt to keep himself conscious. Clicking his torch on, he swung it around the room and performed a rudimentary search, perhaps in the process learning something more about this strange culture.

His hand found several books next to the other mattress and rifled through them, stirring dust into the air and releasing the distinctive odor that only ancient books possessed. Trying to read the old Cyrillic was a challenge, as the language Constantine knew had evolved past the archaic, almost seventeenth-century style all the volumes here seemed to evoke. To his eye, just about all the titles reflected the October Revolution in some manner, praising many of the men history would later come to revile. Men, Constantine realized, who were still alive and breathing in this era he found himself in this very moment. Constantine shuddered to think what these men were capable of in coordination with the Confederation...an unholy alliance perhaps, bridged by two centuries. If it was indeed true, as Gilmour slowly began to believe—and Constantine as well—then Nicolenko had to die.