Ian Hocking - Flashback

‘Yes. Think about that on the way down.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Harkes.

He drained the liquid in his glass and turned to Saskia. In the instant their eyes locked, a transmission pip five hundred nanoseconds long passed from him to her:

‘Well, my enemy’s enemy, I see you’re carrying Jennifer’s recall band. You will be aware that there are two ways out of this situation. The first is to use that band. The second is this. I’m too heavy for the band, though I can’t be sure about you, my dear. STENDEC.’

He winked and put the gun between his teeth.

‘No!’ she shouted.

A rush of panic carried her through a series of ballistics equations, even as she saw Cory lunge forward and Jennifer sink to a crouch. She considered the crushing force of the bullet and its cavitation; the kinetic energy and its reflection through the incompressible liquid matter in Harkes’s skull; the impact velocity and the residual velocity and the efficiency with which its energy was imparted. Each calculation folded within the next until she knew where the bullet would exit. She sprang into the air behind Harkes and put her head in the path of the bullet. Now, her death was as predictable as the products of the formulae. She closed her eyes. She would bring to bear the strength of physical laws that could never permit the time paradox of her death. She would cause the gun to misfire.

Wait.

Still in the air, she opened her eyes.

He sent me that message wirelessly. If he has hardware, it might deflect–

The electric ignition made no sound, but the bullet roared as it left the barrel. Saskia felt the airwash of the projectile like a slap to the head. Suddenly, there was blood in her eyes and she had slammed against the airframe. Through her disorientation, she became aware of a whistling sound near her shoulder. A man—Cory?—was shouting Harkes’s name. She turned. There was a hole in the exterior door. Saskia stared at it stupidly until the pitch dropped and

move

she sprang aside as the door boomed into the daylight.

The sound was like the roar of the passing bullet—but stretched. Her breath left in a sigh she could not contain.

She held the fold-out seat near the bulkhead of the flightdeck. She had twisted as she fell, and now she watched as Harkes was sucked outside. Cory was standing with nothing to hold. His jacket bloomed like a parachute and he reached towards Jennifer, who had pushed herself into the opposite corner of the bulkhead. She did not move to help. Cory was ripped from the aeroplane. Instantly, his white cane—no longer a sword—tumbled after him.

Saskia and Jennifer looked at one another across the foggy air. The woman’s expression was remote. Saskia reached for the oxygen mask that flapped above the fold-out seat and tugged the elastic strap around her head. For a moment, she looked at the sky through the doorway. It held a certain peace. All she had to do was release her hold on the seat. Lean into the river of air, close her eyes and wash away. Instead, she looked at the passengers. They stared mutely over beak-like oxygen masks. Scarves and hair fluttered. Saskia drew a breath and removed her mask. Jennifer was holding her elbow, as though injured, and Saskia remembered the girl that she had once been.

‘You killed both of them,’ she shouted. ‘Even your Huckleberry.’

‘Cory is a survivor like you,’ Jennifer called back. ‘And he’ll be on your trail unless you come back with me. What do you say? Still want to play the heroine?’

Saskia did not hesitate. She took the bracelet from her pocket and held it across the sucking, open doorway. Irritation, little more, crossed Jennifer’s face.

‘I think we can land this thing together if you’re sufficiently motivated, Jennifer. What do you say?’

Saskia felt the oncoming attack as an undertow before the crashing of a great wave. She began to open her fingers.

‘No, Saskia. No .’

Saskia could not complete the movement. Her hand locked tight around the bracelet. Every muscle jammed, and she lost command of her arm. Though she could not blink to oil her eyes, she saw Jennifer reach over, keeping herself low to the floor, and take the bracelet. She passed it over her wrist and elbow.

A single, burning filament of light appeared behind Jennifer: a vertical line about two metres high. It might have been the crack of a door opening onto something brilliant. Jennifer turned to it. The filament bobbed and canted as though its position relative to the aircraft was not perfectly fixed.

The filament began to pulse. Daylight. Night. Daylight. At the peaks of its intensity, Saskia felt sensation and control return to her body. Interference? Saskia tried to capitalise on these intermittent spells but she could not make large movements without revealing herself to Jennifer. She settled for blinking and taking long breaths of ice-cold air. The paralysis came and went with the regularity of a revolving door.

The filament expanded on the horizontal axis, left and right, forming a rectangle of solid light at right angles to the hole in the fuselage. Jennifer glanced at it and completed her work on the bracelet, which she tapped like a keyboard.

Then, without fear, Jennifer touched the centre of the rectangle. The portal lost its brilliance and assumed the reflectivity of a mirror. In it, Saskia saw the open doorway, herself, and an object that lay between the loafers of the foremost first-class passenger.

Jennifer cocked her head. She might have been listening to the equivalent of a pre-flight check. She stepped into the mirror. Its watery, reflective surface closed on her hips and shoulders until nothing remained.

With that, Saskia felt movement return. She leapt across the cabin and punched into the quicksilver. She was face to face with her fury. She groped for Jennifer’s arm and found her elbow. She squeezed, rotating the bracelet to crush the tendon of Jennifer’s triceps. She felt Jennifer stop and spin. Saskia squeezed harder and pulled her through the door. As the woman emerged, her scream mixed with the waterfall-boom of rushing air. Her eyes cleared and focused on Saskia. Jennifer tugged back, desperate to extract her arm, and she slipped out of Saskia’s grip, relinquishing the time bracelet.

‘Don’t forget this,’ said Saskia.

She raised her free hand and put Harkes’s GLAS 1 pistol to Jennifer’s forehead. The shorter woman screamed and shut her eyes. But Saskia did not shoot. She pulled out the collar of her T-shirt and dropped the gun inside. At this, Jennifer opened her eyes. She looked down in horror.

‘The mass–’

Saskia shoved. The quicksilver swallowed Jennifer and her scream without a ripple.

A boom, deeper than the noise that had accompanied the decompression, and fundamental, shook the aircraft. Heatless light raked the cabin. Saskia crouched. Her hair streamed towards the exit door. Unmoved by this, she transferred the recall band to her pocket as white flames trumpeted from the mirror. Tendrils spiralled towards the cabin lights and the EXIT/SORTIE sign above the intact starboard door. The mirror gathered to a silvery point, hovered for a second, then fell. A circle of floor immediately below it crunched to nothing. Saskia moved to the hole and looked down. She could see through to sunlight on the clouds below. The wormhole—or whatever it was—had collapsed to something infinitesimal and fallen through the aircraft. She watched the shaft close with a sound like that of a suction toilet. Baggage had tumbled into the gap and sealed it.

Saskia rose. She felt for the mechanisms controlling the communication system onboard the aircraft. There were… twenty antennas. No, twenty-one. Only two could be hacked. The rest were hardware-locked. She concentrated and, on the cramped deck, the Internet opened as wide as the sky. She downloaded their flight plan from EuroControl and confirmed the model of the aircraft. A Boeing 737, the 800 series. Fine. From there she skipped to a company who trained pilots for this model; she burst through their security measures and pulled a flight manual from their server and read each word in parallel. She downloaded several electronic textbooks on avionics, aerodynamics, and jet propulsion.