Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

Olivera had a sense that this was where their conversation met its logical conclusion. No bartering. No pretending. No back-out clause. This was the place they were at. ‘Mr Waldstein? What… what happens now?’

Waldstein backed up several steps. Turned and said something softly to someone who must have been standing outside, just out of sight.

‘Who’s… Mr Wald-s-stein. Who’s out there? Who’re you talking to?’

A tall, muscular figure appeared behind the old man, completely bald, with the calm dispassionate face of a recently birthed support unit.

‘I’m so very sorry, Joseph.’ Waldstein looked back at him with sadness in his eyes. ‘I’m truly sorry that it has to be this way…’

In a heartbeat he was certain of Griggs’s fate. Murdered. Not by some gang of starving vagrants but by Waldstein. Directly or indirectly. The old man had made sure Frasier Griggs wasn’t going to remain a dangerous loose end.

And now I’m dead.

He backed up a step, past his own workstation to what used to be Griggs’s workstation.

‘Joseph,’ said Waldstein, ‘please don’t make this harder than it has to be. Come here.’

‘You… you don’t n-need to do this. Please… you don’t — ’

‘But here’s the problem — I can’t trust you any more.’ There was genuine sadness on Waldstein’s face. ‘Do you see? I couldn’t trust Frasier either. And that’s the important thing. This is too important, Joseph. More important than Frasier, than you… than me even.’

Joseph eyed the holo-display shimmering inches above the mess of Griggs’s desk. He’d been looking through those folders of his ex-colleague’s that hadn’t been code-locked. Frasier had been recently pinhole-viewing history. One of his unofficial hobbies. He rather liked to discreetly spy on favourite historical moments, particularly civil-war history. Joseph had once caught him glimpsing the final moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, as General Pickett’s Virginians had finally withered under the barrage of musket fire, broke and routed. Then another time Frasier had been listening to Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg Address.

‘Tell me,’ pleaded Joseph, ‘what’s so important? Tell me!’

Waldstein sighed. ‘If that I could, Joseph… if only I could…’

Joseph shot another glance at the display. The pinhole-viewer interface was in standby mode, as Griggs had left it last time he’d used it. The displacement machine was fully charged after having sent back the Saleena unit. Good to go, ready to dispense its stored energy. He just needed to open the interface, dilate the pinhole, three feet, four feet. That’s all. It would be enough.

‘W-why c-can’t you tell me, Mr… Mr Waldstein? Maybe, m-maybe if you explained — ’

‘Explain Pandora to you? Explain why mankind has to wipe himself out?’ Waldstein smiled sadly. ‘I explain that to you… and what? All of a sudden I’ll be able to trust you unreservedly?’

Joseph nodded. Perhaps too eagerly. His mind was on something else, though. Calculating escape.

‘I’m sorry, Joseph. What has to happen is my burden, my burden alone, and I’ll burn in hell forever for what I know has to be done.’ The old man looked like he was crying. ‘Good God, Joseph… you don’t want to know what’s in my head. Trust me!’

Three feet, just about wide enough for him to dive through. But… but… he had no idea what time-stamp, if any, was already set in the location buffer. He looked up at the support unit, still standing obediently just behind Waldstein. On a word of command it could be across the small lab in seconds, not enough time for him to pick out and tap the coordinates for a safe, density-verified location.

Oh God help me… If nothing was in the entry buffer, he’d end up in chaos space. That horrific nothingness. A swiftly crushed neck at the hands of the unit standing behind Waldstein would be infinitely preferable, surely?

‘It all has to end, Joseph. In that way. Pandora. Only then will they let it happen.’

They?

‘Let what… what h-happen? Who… who are you talking about?’

‘I’m sorry, Joseph. The time for talking is over.’ He turned to the support unit and nodded.

The support unit pushed past Waldstein, strode round a table cluttered with Joseph’s mind-map charts and printouts of gene-memory data templates.

Not daring to think what horror awaited him if the time-stamp entry buffer was empty, Joseph’s finger hovered over the commit touch button on the holo-display. A warning flashed on the screen that a pinhole was now activated. The air near him pulsated subtly. It was there… but so small it was invisible. On the lab floor, yellow and black chevron tape marked out a safety square, a place not to enter while a pinhole was active. Walking through a pinhole would be like being shot by a high-calibre round — a tangent carved through the body and sent elsewhere, no different to the path of a speeding bullet, blasting a hole right through a body and depositing what it had eviscerated out the other side.

‘My God!’ Waldstein’s eyes widened as he understood what Joseph intended to do. ‘ DON’T DO IT! ’

Joseph tapped a command in, an instruction to widen the pinhole.

The support unit picked up on the urgency in Waldstein’s voice and leaped towards Joseph. The pinhole instantaneously inflated, from apparently nothing to a shimmering, floating orb a yard wide. Joseph turned towards it, time enough in the half second left to see that the churning, oily display was showing something more than featureless white. It was showing somewhere. Somewhere.

Not chaos space. Good enough.

He instinctively cradled his head and dived into the shimmering orb, tucking his legs up, his elbows in, to be sure he left none of them behind. In the last moment before entering it he was screaming. A wail of panic, a long, strangled bellow of defiance and fear. Most definitely fear.

This is insane!

As his head entered that swirling escape window — a window that could mean safety or death in any number of unpleasant ways — he thought he could make out the shape of horses. A wagon. Barrels.

At least it wasn’t all white, right?

At least there was that.

15 September 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts

Rosalin Kellerman stared at the man in a smart business suit standing on her doorstep, and a woman beside him. A striking young woman, with startling grey eyes, wide and intense, wearing a loose gentleman’s checked shirt, several sizes too big for her but tucked into tightly fitting jeans. Athletic. But striking… in that her head was shaved almost down to the skin. And yet somehow she was still quite beautiful. Just like that Irish rock singer-songwriter from the eighties… what was her name? Sinead something or other.

‘This is number 45?’ he asked again.

Rosalin shrugged and pointed at the brass number plaque on her green door. ‘Uh… well, there’s the number right there! See it?’

‘And this is your residence?’ asked the man.

Rosalin narrowed her eyes. This was already becoming a peculiar encounter. And not the first one she’d had in the last few days.

‘Have you received a visit from a stranger recently?’ The man seemed to immediately realize that was a stupidly vague question. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. A photograph. Held it up so she could see it. ‘A visit from this person?’

Rosalin recognized the face. The oval-shaped chin, the glasses, the frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair. Oh yeah, she remembered this girl all right.

‘You mind telling me what the hell this is all about?’

The man smiled. ‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah… she came knocking a couple of days ago.’ Rosalin shook her head. ‘Crazy. I was pretty stupid. I really shouldn’t have let her in.’