Warlord: Dervish (27 page)

Somewhere in the distance an explosion, the missile impacting.

He went from boy to boy, checking their airways, feeling for their breathing, their circulation. Automatic rifles crackled from the rooms, from the roof and the street. Dust rolled down the wall as an RPG detonated against it. Drooper followed with a lengthy salvo.

Jason finger swept a boy’s mouth, checking to see it was clear. He moved to the next child and took a pulse, didn’t find one.

He hung his head and breathed.
Have to keep it together
.
Not here
.
Not now
. When he looked up, he noticed the prisoner for the first time. The man sat with the wounded but did not appear harmed. He wore a white lab jacket, the fabric discolored with filth and blood. His wrists and ankles were bound with plastic restraints.

Jason would have recognized him anywhere.

“You…”

“You know me?” Dr. Kaku was startled.

Jason strode over to the man and promptly smashed him about the head and shoulders with the butt of the AK. The man cowered on the floor, covering his head with his hands and arms, drawing his legs up to his chest. Jason walloped him until he was winded, then he settled cross-legged across from the doctor.

The battle raged around and above them.

“…you…you know me?” Kaku spoke through a bloody mouth.

Jason watched him.

“…when…when did you know me?”

“Why are you acting like you don’t—”

“I do not.” Kaku sounded sincere. “What is your name?”

“Motherfucker!” Jason sprang back to his feet, bringing up the rifle, “And don’t act—”

“I am not!” His despair was genuine. “When did you know me?”

“When
?” Jason couldn’t believe his ears.

“Yes,
when
?”

Jason considered putting a burst through the doctor here and now, ending him. It would be so easy, so satisfying. But there were questions he wanted answers to.

“Why are you here?” he demanded of Kaku.

“I am a prisoner.”

“No, why are you here—in this city?”

Kaku had crawled back to a sitting position. “The GWANGI project.”

“Great. That don’t tell me shit.” Drooper fired another volley out of the building. “What’s your role here?”

“I’m an astrophysicist.”

“You’re an astrophysicist. That’s great.”

“Let me ask you—”

“You ask me shit, you son of a bitch, I should—”

“Can you travel faster than the speed of light?”

“
What
?”

“Can you travel faster than—”

“I heard you motherfucker. The fuck—”

“Galaxies are dragged along while space swells. Our universe is inflationary,” the doctor’s eyes shone with intensity, “and the rate of recession between two galaxies can exceed the speed of light, which—”

Around them, children hollered and hemorrhaged, bedlam and tumult reigned, and through it all Kaku spoke clearly, reasonably.

“What are you talking about?” Jason yelled at him.

“The Einstein-Rosen bridge—what we refer to today as wormholes. You can ‘outpace’ light. Interdimensional travel in eleven-dimensional hyperspace…”

Jason scanned the area for SAW barrels, spotting one on the floor next to Drooper and Bingo.

“…once we learned to harness dark energy…”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying to me.”

“Which does not mean it should not be said!” Kaku replied defiantly. “Negative energy made wormholes transversable, effectively negating event horizons. Two way trips
are
possible. Do—you—not—see!?”

Jason punched him in the face. “I just told you I don’t motherfucker! And damn, that felt good.”

“…if you can get through a wormhole before the throat pinches off…”

“Is that what that is—up in the sky?”

“…the beauty of spinning black holes, centrifugal forces opposing gravity, keeping it open! You see? You can survive an event horizon! I know! I have—”

An explosion rocked the building around them. When the ringing in Jason’s ears died down, Kaku was still ranting. “…and the problem with travelling back is that you may travel only as early as the construction of the wormhole. But a
naturally
occurring wormhole—
yes
! We could visit ancient times. And we did! We did!”

Drooper screamed, a tracer round impacting his body armor.

“
We did
—do you hear me?!”

Jason turned his upper body in the direction of the mercs, watching his arm blur in the air as he did so. What the…?

Kaku jabbered on about Planck times.

Jason waved his hand in front of his face, nothing. He waved it again, faster. His hand left a trail, a blur of molecules that faded before vanishing.

“…and that is
exactly
the problem with going back into the past, that one might act so as to change that past. The solution—multiple parallel universes, each branching off another…”

Rolling his fingers into his palm, Jason stared at his clenched fist. His hand wavered slightly.

“…individual universes are finite,” a triumphant look masked Kaku’s face “…the multiverse is not!”

Jason punched Kaku in the jaw again, flattening him.

“What’s wrong with me?” Jason crouched over the doctor, yanking him back to a seated position by the lapels of his lab jacket. “What’s
wrong
with me?”

A coherent look crossed Kaku’s face as he made and sustained eye contact, his mouth and jaw bloody. “Oh…” Kaku spoke from a new-found realization. “They wounded you, did they?”

“
You
—
wait
—
here
!” Jason bellowed, breaking away from the man, crossing the blood-sodden floor to the mercenaries. Bingo had slumped over Drooper’s legs, barely breathing. His eyes glowed. Drooper struggled to fit a fresh belt of ammunition from a cloth camo-pouch to his SAW. Errant rounds chipped concrete from the broken wall near his head.

Jason snatched the SAW barrel from the ground and raced back towards the stairs, ignoring Kaku, ignoring the boys who lay dying and the ones who scrambled in and out of the rooms.

On the roof, red ash fell from the sky like snow, covering all. Empty Javelin launcher tubes lay pell-mell among the shell casings and dead children’s bodies. The kid with all the gold in his mouth was flat on his back, cinching a tourniquet about his bloody thigh. Judging by the look of the leg, Jason doubted the boy would be able to stand on it. A kid who could have been his twin sent the contents of an AK magazine down into the street before stooping to reload.

Fleegle sat with his back to the pillbox, powdery dust covering him like flower.

“What’s
he
doing here?” Jason retrieved the SAW and began to swap out the barrels.

“We did it.” Fleegle ignored Jason’s query.

“What’s he—”

“We did it.”

“Did what?”

Jason rose, risking a look over the roof, over the city. A column of smoke rose from the area where the red building had been, clouding the sky, dispersing the ash that floated down around them. Children were braving the streets, pointing out the merc’s positions to insurgents who stepped from cover, shouldering rifles and RPGs. Snork sniped them all, man and child alike.

Jason turned back to Fleegle. “I’m out of here, and I’m taking—”

“You don’t look so good.”

“Take a look at your fucking self!”

“They got you too, like they got Bingo. Didn’t they?”

“What do you…?”

“Your eyes…”

Jason didn’t answer him. He watched as the wounded kid jabbed himself in the thigh with a syringe. Almost immediately the boy was back on his feet, limping to the nearest parapet, his defiant scream drowned out by his Kalashnikov. Okay.
That
was intense! Jason paused long enough to fix a two-hundred round ammunition box to the SAW.

A high pitched whine sounded on the street.

“Mech!” Snork roared, throwing himself down.

The gold-toothed kid ducked, but his comrade next to him was not as fast. A pulse of distorted air demolished a section of the roof’s wall, lifting the second boy through the air, pitching him off the other side of the building.

“Boss!” Snork barked. “Javelin!”

Fleegle peeled himself from where he sat, fatigued and bloodied. “I’m taking him with me!” Jason shouted after the man, who seemed not the least interested.

Downstairs, he passed two kids removing the pins from grenades before tossing them to a third child, who alley-ooped them through a gaping hole in the wall to the street.

He got a good look at a Mech on the road, stepping awkwardly on its oversized feet, firing its pulse cannon, the wet, dematerialized remains of insurgents deposited all over the road. The shadow of another Mech stepped into view behind the first.

“None of you understand…” Kaku was in tears.

“Up!” Jason barked. “Let’s go!”

“…our collider, our imploder, the inflator…”

“Shut the fuck up and walk!” Jason sliced through the plastic flex cuffs restraining the doctor’s ankles. “Downstairs and out onto the street—you keep fucking close to me and don’t try to run away.”

The kids who’d taken firing positions on the first floor were all dead, sprawled in various grotesque poses. Jason dragged Kaku, glancing through windows and doorways and holes, searching for the best way out.

“Keep your head down,” Jason warned. They stared over the ruins of what had been a solid wall. Jason wasn’t concerned about the doctor’s safety. But if Kaku was seen by anyone or anything out on the street, it would bring unwanted attention their way, his way. Jason was all about keeping a low profile and finding a way out of this hell house.

He witnessed the last moments of a dozen insurgents, their AKs flashing before they came apart in a soup of bodyparts, geysering sand, and junked rifles, a Mech’s auto-cannon churning away.
Not that way
.

He pulled Kaku through the house, following his nose and the stench of acrid smoke. An ashy little black hand protruded from a pile of bricks beneath a window, unmoving. Past the window, thick black billows obscured a street where tires blazed. Gun reports, blasts and the whines signaling a Mech’s sonic pulses seemed to be coming from everywhere
except
this street. Jason made a decision. They would risk it.

He pushed Kaku through the blown out window first, and when the doctor drew no fire, Jason followed.

They shuffled through the wisps of smoke, the echoes of gunfire and explosions more pronounced out on the street. The buildings around them were damaged to varying degrees, from bullet riddled facades to flat-out collapse.

“Hold you breath.” Jason gripped Kaku by the wrist, forcing the man ahead. “Shut up.” Kaku continued his disjointed harangue. They moved into the smoke, squinting against its acrid sting. The road ahead was impassable, mounds of rubble and downed electric poles blocking their route. Jason dragged Kaku over the wreckage, both of them coughing.

They took cover on the other side of the ruins, behind a section of erect wall. The smoke wasn’t as bad here. They could breath and talk.

“What’s with the sky?” Jason scanned the empty street and buildings beyond their wall.

Kaku did not answer, prattling on. “Before an observation is made, an object exists in every possible state, in every possible time. When we determine the state the object is in, when we make an observation, our very act of observing collapses the wave function. Do you understand what this means?”

Jason sank down against the wall next to him. “No fucking idea.”

“In our world,” Kaku continued excitedly, apparently unconcerned that Jason comprehended little if any of what he said, “objects interact with the environment and the smallest interaction with our outside world can disturb wave functions and then—” Jason heard the screech of tires further up the block and peaked over the wall “—they decohere, losing synchronization. They separate.”

“Dammit.” A car had stopped in the road, insurgents in flip-flops piling from it. Jason ducked back down and confronted Kaku. “Where are my friends?”

“…what I have been saying all this time—you’ve decohered from them! Our wave functions have broken from the other possible worlds. We have no contact with them. Can’t you see?”

“Stay down.” Jason leaned around the corner of the wall, sending a hail of lead licking down the street. An insurgent dropped to his knees and hands while the others returned fire and sought protection.

“Move!” Jason pushed Kaku, his free hand pressing the doctor’s head down. They stayed behind the wall, moving away from their previous position. The first RPG hit where they’d been, dislodging bricks.

“Will I see my friends again?” They’d pressed themselves against another section of the demolished wall, a view of the street where a window had been cut into it. Jason clutched the SAW, intent on the road, waiting for insurgents. Kaku ranted on about quantum particles and the gravitational field.