Jaunt (38 page)

Narrowing his eyes, Gilmour witnessed the vessel’s lights flicker into the darkness of the horizon. Perhaps he didn’t have to choose...he could do both. But it wouldn’t be without a hitch. If Nicolenko’s rescuers were from Gilmour’s time, they’d be more than aware of his presence once he jaunted aboard, and more than likely able to stop him, or at least damage his gear enough to make a single jaunt hazardous enough.

Deliberating into the morning wasn’t going to finish his mission; Gilmour had to act now. Activating his HUD, he powered up his Casimir chamber and, once more utilizing his lidar, fixed the coordinates of the retreating military vessel into the Omni-Coordinate system. Once input, Gilmour extended an index finger and tapped a green sphere on the holographic interface. Within seconds, he watched himself being pulled inside the spinning spacetime vortex....

Gilmour landed with a thud on the military vessel’s top deck, a cloud of smoke descending over him. Rising up from all four limbs, he estimated that he had materialized almost a meter in the air before connecting with the deck’s machine-polished floor; it’s a wonder he didn’t leave a dent as a souvenir.

His head still locked inside his helmet, Gilmour performed a 180-degree sweep with his eyes, scanning the immediate vicinity for enemy troops. Finding none within sight, Gilmour detached his holobook from the magnetic lock on his torso and scanned for infrared lifescans. A red and yellowish band emanated behind him, stretching from beyond where his back hugged the outer wall of the ship’s bridge and topmost sections. Gilmour tapped a blue sphere, isolating the temperatures consistent with human body heat inside the infrared band. Immediately, six white hot spikes appeared on his holobook, each roughly human in shape. Extending the search, several dozens more moved about until all finally melted into the overriding heat of the vessel’s engine room, a few decks down.

Slapping the holobook back upon the magnetic ring, Gilmour wasted nothing in advancing to the stern of the ship, prowling the outer wall for any door or access hatch available. Doctor de Lis’ specific directives to the Temporal Retrieve team about inconspicuousness and non-alteration of the spacetime continuum was at an end; Gilmour had long ago shelved any qualms he may have once possessed about disobeying de Lis’

direct order. The time had come to follow through on the oath Gilmour had cited many years ago to protect his country and its liberties; his duty was to eliminate Nicolenko by any means possible, and disrupt the Confederation’s plan. Most important of all, de Lis wasn’t here to stop him from doing so.

Eyeing a metal hatch-release bar, Gilmour tried the handle, which didn’t budge. Trying it again, he felt the springing action of the interior locking mechanism. Readjusting the power in his gauntlets by several factors, Gilmour clasped the bar and utilized all of his hazard suit’s amplified might to turn the stubborn handle, breaking the lock with a pitiful snap.

Gilmour stepped inside the darkened entrance, flicking on his helmet lamp to illuminate the corridor within. Twisting his body, Gilmour turned left and headed down the corridor, away from the ship’s bridge. Checking his holobook while he rapidly navigated, several IR sources migrated his way, each seemingly approaching from every conceivable direction, and to Gilmour’s dismay, at a rapid pace. Picking up his stride, the agent bore ahead to the back of the vessel, determined to find evidence of Nicolenko’s presence, dead or live.

Just as the IR signals were theoretically within Gilmour’s visual range, his suit’s audio sensors picked up footfalls from behind steel walls and bulkheads, and the subsequent screeching of various doors. Gilmour raced down the narrow hall, which was soon flooded with light from a doorway scarcely meters away. Silhouetted figures burst from the beam of ochre and rushed Gilmour, who raised his left gauntlet and held it at arm’s length to meet the charging men. Clotheslining the lead man in the neck, Gilmour’s right gauntlet walloped the man’s abdomen, felling him. Without missing a step, Gilmour’s left gauntlet laid a powerful uppercut to the trailing man, a sickening crack gurgling from the man’s crushed throat. Gilmour leapt over the descending body and proceeded down the corridor. With the door left ajar, Gilmour entered a cross-corridor, where a set of stairs took him down a few decks.

Once more in consultation with his holobook, Gilmour scanned IR temperatures, discerning those in accordance with perhaps an injured or mortally wounded body. Damnably, the engine room’s excess heat still obscured his IR sensors, making it all the more probable Gilmour would have to extend his search of the vessel to more rooms than he pleased. All around him, his audio inputs discerned the footfalls of men closing on his position. Gilmour furiously propelled himself through the ship’s bowels, red and yellow wall lights bouncing around the perimeter of his faceplate.

At last, Gilmour spied a sign painted with the names of several departments posted to a wall. He swiftly read “INFIRMARY” and snapped open the door leading the way. Standing in the corridor, a young man smoking a cigarette yelled a curse in surprise at the mysterious stranger running straight for him. The boy barely managed a defensive stance before Gilmour had shoved him with a light touch of his left gauntlet.

Wasting no time, Gilmour slipped past two more men stationed in the corridor, dispatching them with ease before coming upon an opening in the corridor’s starboard bulkhead. Peering inside, the room remained shadowed, his helmet lamp providing the sole illumination. With a foot inside, Gilmour swung his helmet laterally across the room, inspecting the facility visually before committing himself. The lamplight cut a swath through a thick layer of residual engineering steam or high-lying smoke, perhaps emanating from the cigarettes the men had been smoking earlier.

Retrieving his holobook, Gilmour scanned the ambient infrared energy, once more on the trail of body heat. Sweeping the device from one end of the infirmary to the other, the orange band of ambient IR energy was briefly interrupted by a patch of dark blue to Gilmour’s right, as if the energy pattern had been erased or draped in that portion of the room. Homing in on it, the erasure shifted ever so slightly, to which Gilmour immediately swiveled to and illuminated.

For a brief second, Gilmour saw a familiar flash of beige and the gleaming of a faceplate, then yelled into his voxlink, “McKean?!”

The surreptitious form dashed out of the lamplight and into the darkness again, then broadsided Gilmour’s right flank, tackling the agent. Gilmour rolled and crumpled into a ball, the tackle’s momentum carrying him a meter-and-a-half until he collided with a wall, stopping his involuntary retreat. In a few seconds that to Gilmour felt like an hour, the agent slowly uncoiled his startled limbs and shocked senses, only to have a sharp kick in the abdomen ignite an explosion of pain throughout his body. Two more rapid strikes from this unknown enemy’s boot occurred before Gilmour’s instincts took command. Grasping the boot as it went for a fourth attack, Gilmour pulled hard just at the moment the enemy’s balance would be the most precarious, taking it to the floor with a massive thud.

Gilmour’s right gauntlet supported his tender abdomen while he willed himself up, reclaiming the offensive solidly on both feet. The mysterious attacker proved harder to keep down and quickly regained its stance before the still-dazed Gilmour could counterattack. Both stood facing each other in the infirmary, Gilmour’s lamplight inadequately providing any information about his attacker’s identity, although Gilmour now recognized the attacker’s hazard suit was not from the Temporal Retrieve project.

The dark figure reached behind its back and produced a short, double-bladed axe, then performed a series of figure-eight swings at Gilmour, advancing upon the agent at every upswing. “Did you truly think you would succeed?” a heavily mechanized, male voice filtered through Gilmour’s voxlink, still providing an air of stealth.

Another upswing was brought unbearably close to the agent’s helmet; Gilmour retreated another step, his right gauntlet clandestinely searching for his magnetically attached pistol behind his back. “What business is it of yours?” Gilmour replied, playing the mystery man’s game, stalling for an opportunity to find a weakness in his enemy’s approach. Gilmour’s mind raced through the possible identities and motives of this man, leading him to only one conclusion....

“One should not interfere in the matters of a sovereign nation,” the filtered voice threatened. “You should not be here!” He swung the axe again at Gilmour, which the agent barely dodged, giving his attacker a margin of a few millimeters.

When the attacker’s axe swing carried his arms upward, Gilmour’s hand grasped his pistol, which he then swung around and aimed squarely at his opponent’s helmet. “I thought the same thing!” Gilmour’s index finger pressed the trigger, firing a single round into the clear faceplate.

A cloud of gas exploded over the attacker’s faceplate, but the clear material had enough resiliency to remain intact, although a spiderweb crack now obscured the attacker’s view by at least ninety-five percent.

Gilmour’s left gauntlet wrestled the double-bladed axe away from the attacker. Using its broad, flat end, he swung it against the attacker’s faceplate, knocking him to the floor. Now towering over his fallen adversary, Gilmour turned the full brunt of his helmet lamp against the man’s shattered faceplate, revealing for the first time the identity of his attacker. Gilmour tipped his pistol’s barrel to the man’s bobbing eyes. “Nicolenko....”

“Damn you,” the Russian gasped, this time without the filtration of a voxlink to disguise his voice. “Even if I have to die, you will not be victorious in our war, my friend. It is larger than any one of us, Gilmour, larger than any man or child born in the next century. It is a war for the very possession of the
secrets of the universe itself
.”

Gilmour’s trigger finger twitched. “You sound like your friend HADRON.”

Nicolenko’s eyebrows furrowed, expressing ignorance.

“Don’t be surprised...all you madmen think alike, when it comes down to it. World domination, selling out of colleagues. HADRON is the very reason you’re here right now, Nicolenko. Sold his soul for a few dollars from your government. Honor among thieves, and all that, you know.”

“Kill me now, Gilmour, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” Nicolenko hissed. “That’s all you have dreamt of since the death of your partner...since your failure in Yakutia. Even after your failure at the trench in stopping me from retrieving all the jewels. Oh, yes, a slight omission on my part to inform you that I have recovered all the jewels, Gilmour. You have lost.”

Gilmour detected the hint of a smile creeping over Nicolenko’s face. “Even liars believe their own lies, Nicolenko.”

“But the truth coming from a liar’s mouth would be misconstrued as a lie, no? You and your team have lost, Gilmour. The Confederation now has the capability to use the jewels at our discretion. Kill me now, if that soothes your worried soul. But remember, I exist in any time, in any location. Remember to thank your colleague...HADRON, you say his code name is? Remember to thank him for me, the next time you see him. Kill me an infinite amount of times, and I sprout back again, ready to resume the fight another day, another era. This Pandora’s box can never be closed!”

“I beg to differ. Who rescued you from the trench, Nicolenko? Who are you working with?”

Pitiful laughter echoed throughout Nicolenko’s helmet. Pausing for a moment, the Confederation vanguard gasped and replied, “You Westerners are dense, aren’t you? To think, we all wanted to be just like you once. We were foolish, just like you are now.”

Gilmour twirled the axe in his left gauntlet. “Answer the question, Lieutenant! Who are you working with in this century? Who rescued you—”

“Gilmour, the answer is so obviously under your nose, but then again, you have a hard time seeing it. I am working with....”

The agent gritted his teeth. “Yes?”

Nicolenko laughed again. “I saved myself, you ignorant, fucking fool! I told you it was under your nose! That’s why I am here right now, to keep you from killing me. I guess it didn’t work, eh?”

“You’re mad. Your repeated jaunting has rotted your brain.”

“I am infinite, Gilmour, you should realize by now. Everywhere, everywhen...as are we all.”

Gilmour lowered his pistol and the axe. “What...what did you say?”

Nicolenko frowned and gestured with his hands. “Kill me already, dammit!”

“No, you said we are all infinite....” Nearly the same words Gilmour had spoken to Waters, before he, Constantine and McKean had left. Many Gilmours, many Nicolenkos, many Masons? “Then killing you now would do no good, would it?”

“You want to purge your soul, Gilmour?! Kill me, then! Murder me!”

Gilmour stepped backwards, retreating several paces from the crazed man on the floor. “Get the hell out of here, Nicolenko. I will not kill you to give you some satisfaction, some small victory over me! Jaunt back to your superiors and tell them your enemies will not be defeated so easily. The most toys will not guarantee your victory.” Just how you play with them.

With that, Gilmour turned and walked out of the infirmary, leaving the fallen lieutenant to his own devices, hoping the crazed man would be driven further over the edge by the knowledge he had provided his own enemy a way of thinking perhaps critical to ending this standoff, this Pandora’s box, once and for all. It was all about overcoming one’s natural instincts, an instinct to automatically kill your enemy, without seeing his point of view, without understanding him. About turning your enemy against himself.

It was Gilmour’s only hope in a universe of infinite possibilities, and an infinite enemy.

A brief second elapsed before Gilmour felt his extremities tingle, then the buzzing that always accompanied the jaunt returned, only to be replaced by the sound of his heavy breathing and a grunt as he collapsed in a great heap.

Blinking his eyes, his brain was flooded with an immense white light. One side of his body was then yanked upwards, and a few tense seconds later, jostled into a seated position.