For King & Country (6 page)

It sounded barmy to Stirling, but then, he'd barely squeaked past subjects like tensor calculus and non-Euclidian geometry, never mind quantum relativity.

"What we've done here," Mylonas nodded toward the distant research lab, "is the elementary work of understanding how fractural physical laws operate. And what we've discovered is both infinite futures and infinite pasts, all coexisting in fractured planes, sliding over and past and through one another, a bit like a child's kaleidoscope, where the patterns and colors shift as the colored pebbles tumble about. Fractural physics provides the only scientific explanation of psychic phenomena, in fact. The human mind has billions of neural connections hardwired into the nervous system and the senses. We haven't manufactured an instrument, yet, of that complexity.

"I rather fancy that precognition occurs when an individual with particularly acute senses encounters the intersection of fractural planes and is abruptly confronted by two possible futures. Two or more. There are people attuned to the future of fractural planes, just as others are attuned to a fractural plane's past. You might think in terms of one set of instruments tuned to ham radio frequencies and another tuned to microwave transmissions. People who have learned to shift their own consciousness from one plane to another—so called astral projection or out-of-body experience—are actually moving the pattern of their consciousness from one plane to another, or to some other referent point on their own plane. What
we've
done is engineer a way to hook the conscious portion of a human mind, which is, after all, merely a pattern of energy which can be codified and transferred from one point to another, through the endless shifting of fractural planes—"

"Wait, slow down!" Stirling resisted the temptation to massage aching temples.

Mylonas halted, brows climbing into his receding hairline. "What don't you understand? It's perfectly simple, at least in concept. It's the engineering that's a bit tricky."

"May be simple to you," Stirling muttered, "but it's perfectly impossible from where I sit. Look, perhaps I'll grant you that bit about consciousness being a shifting energy pattern. I've seen some pretty odd things, ran across a fellow once who swore on stacks of holy treatises he had yearly out-of-body experiences, and he wasn't a candidate for the loony bin, either. So maybe, for the sake of argument, I'll buy your story about projecting someone's consciousness some
where
else. But some
when
else? I'm not a credulous fool!"

"Neither am I," Mylonas said very quietly. Stirling was struck again by the depth of fright in those dark eyes.

"Suppose you explain it again. Pretend I'm a newspaper reporter or some chap on the dole, with no more science education than, say, that keg of ale can lay claim to. On second thought, perhaps you'd better leave off telling me
why
it works and just try explaining why it could prove dangerous in a terrorist's hands?" He had to fight the impulse to glance at Brenna McEgan.

"They might well be interested," Mylonas said patiently, "because of the potential for
change,
which is inherent in the shifting of the fractural planes. Changing a variable, even a minor one, could have drastic consequences. I have tried to warn Dr. Beckett against rushing blindly ahead, before proper precautions can be taken, but he won't be stopped. Not by anything short of dying, anyway. Who do you think requested help from the Home Secretary? It was
not
Dr. Terrance Beckett. God help us, if terrorists ever get hold of this work."

The level of tension at the crowded table rose abruptly, like a nasty miasma over a swamp, compounded of equal parts suspicion, fear, and anger. More than one set of eyes flicked uncertainly toward Brenna McEgan. She sat cool as a queen at her corner of the table, sapphire eyes focused on a speck of dust that floated somewhere over the center of the untidy tabletop. When nobody broke the awkward silence, Stirling cleared his throat.

"Surely there's no way to actually change anything in the past? It's already happened, with no way to undo it. And even if you could, wouldn't paradox destroy any possibility of changing things, stop you before you got started?"

Mylonas shook his head. "You're forgetting the infinite pasts part of the equation. If you projected the energy pattern of your consciousness into
a
past—say, the court of Henry II, as Dr. Beckett did, or even further back, to the time of King Arthur—"

Cedric Banning snorted into his pint of bitters without quite laughing out loud. One of the graduate students dug her elbow into his ribs. As Mylonas reddened, Indrani Bhaskar put in mildly, "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that King Arthur was quite genuine. Not a king, perhaps, but a real historical figure."

Stirling grinned. "Yes, Dux Bellorum, and all that. Sixth century A.D., wasn't it? Last of the great Romanized Briton Lords of Battle."

"Quite," she smiled. "I see you're a well-read man, Captain Stirling. Mind your manners, Cedric."

Banning laughed, clearly unrepentant, and lifted his glass in a mock salute.

Mylonas cleared his throat. "Yes. Well. If you project yourself into
a
past, along the fractural plane that resonates most closely with your present, you then find yourself in a new present, with an infinite number of potential futures stretching out before you. Should you take an action contrary to the ones taken on your plane of origin, call it Fractural Prime, then your consciousness will slide into a
different
fractural resonance, perhaps close to your Prime, perhaps not, depending upon the magnitude of difference between the two."

"Then it isn't changing history at all, is it?" Stirling's mind had filled with images of vast sheets of multihued crystal fragmenting and crashing into one another, until the universe resembled a pile of shattered quartz, pulverized under a geologist's hammer. The longer he thought about it, the more the image disturbed him.

Mylonas sighed. "It's a bit of both actually. It isn't as simple as you imagine."

"What do you mean by that? Either it is or it isn't."

"Not in fractural physics. The key word is
resonance.
If you switch from one fractural plane to another, the law of conservation of energy—among other things—
requires
a transfer of resonant energy between them. If the two resonances are sufficiently dissimilar, a dissonance is created. An energy embolism, if you will. Depending on how far back the dissonance occurs, it may have either negligible or very serious consequences in your Fractural Prime. The resulting embolism may produce a minor bruise, or it could produce catastrophic damage."

"Catastrophic?" Stirling blinked. "What, exactly, are we talking about here? What scale? Do you mean the traveler's energy pattern is violently disrupted? As in, fatally? Or do you mean something else? Something... worse?"

"That," Mylonas said tiredly, "is precisely what we do
not
know. The traveler could die, yes. Maybe. Unless the dissonance only affects things
after
the energy pattern's shift between planes.
You
might be spared, while everything else fractures around you. If the dissonance is set up in the new fractural plane, you might destroy the future of that plane, rewrite it, so to speak. You'd start with a clean slate, from your perspective, although you might well be killing off billions of people in the secondary plane's future. No way to tell, of course, subjectively, from the traveler's viewpoint.

"But suppose the dissonance affects the old fractural plane, the Prime you originally came from. This one." Mylonas rapped bony knuckles against the tabletop. "What do you have, then? Your action in moving from Fractural Prime to Fractural Secondary destroys both the present
and
the future of your plane of origin. Shatters it to bits, in fact. By setting up the dissonant energy pattern in the past of one fractural plane, you utterly destroy at least one future, possibly both. Not a terribly attractive situation for scholars, but
frightfully
attractive to some madman bent on vengeance. Or a terrorist bent on political blackmail."

"Dear God," Stirling whispered, staring into Mylonas' haunted eyes. "You're talking about the murder of
billions
of human souls!" He didn't know precisely how many people there were in the world, but it was an appalling number to snuff out in one fell swoop.

"Yes." Mylonas swallowed. "That is the reason the Home Office insisted on sending a chap who understands counterterrorism."

Stirling struggled to reorder his entire view of the tactical situation. Indeed, his view of the entire universe. He glanced around the table, finding stunned eyes and expressions of rising horror. Clearly, none of them had fully grasped the project's lethal potential until now. Unless, of course, one of them
was
a terrorist, someone who would have realized exactly what could be accomplished using this project. Getting himself—or herself—onto the team wouldn't have been easy, granted. But there was that fatal motor crack-up, which had killed two members of the senior research team. The realization left Stirling's insides shaking. Brenna McEgan was staring bleakly into her own ale glass, fingers clenched white. Her sapphire eyes were nearly as haunted as Zenon Mylonas'. How much death had she seen, coming up from a place like Londonderry, where explosive violence and terrorist murder was nearly as common as it was in Belfast?

Stirling cast back over those dossiers he'd read, both Colonel Ogilvie's and Marc Blundell's, trying to recall everything documented on Brenna McEgan. There hadn't been much, which left him cursing the incompleteness of the material. Dammit, he needed to know how many times the people at this table had wet themselves in their prams, and the Home Office handed him a synopsis measured in thirty-second sound bites.
Was
Brenna McEgan the evil
djinn
in the bottle? Or was she simply too obvious a candidate?

Whoever his terrorist proved to be, if there even
was
a terrorist, once the
djinn
was loose... Several billion souls, destroyed instantly. It was
unthinkable.

Stirling shuddered.

Northern Ireland's madmen perpetrated the unthinkable every day.

Brenna McEgan left the boisterous warmth of the Falkland Arms pub to enter to a cold and wet night. The rain and wind and scudding clouds were as full of foreboding as she herself was—not a pleasant feeling for a woman in her position. Her cover story would not stand up to the kind of scrutiny Captain Trevor Stirling would shortly bring to bear. The SAS, for God's own sake... As Brenna unlocked the driver's side door of her car, she was as close to blind terror as she'd been since leaving Londonderry, all those years ago. The phone call which had come, tracing her to her Dublin flat and her new life, had not frightened her precisely, only filled her with a nameless dread which had all too quickly found its familiar shape and hue.

Orange terror tactics.
Again.

Indeed, what else?

It was the reason she'd left Londonderry, the reason she'd never married, unwilling to bring a child into the madness, to inherit the hate and the killing. She still woke up some nights, drenched in cold sweat, watching her older sister and niece dissolve into blasted bits of human flesh not a dozen paces in front of her, coming out of a little shop where she'd agreed to meet them, planning to lunch together after their shopping was done. She'd joined, right afterwards; and had left for almost exactly the same reason, five years later: a Protestant woman and her child caught by an IRA car bomb, with a young girl on her knees beside them, tearing at her hair and screaming.

"I left a long time ago," she'd told them over the phone lines. "I'm not active and you bloody well know it. And the reasons."

"There isn't anyone else."

"Don't give me that—"

"Brenna. At least hear us out. Arlyne is coming to Dublin to see you."

God and thunder, her own grandmother...

Worse and worse.

And it
was,
the worst news ever given a member of
Cumann Na Mbann.
The whole future of humanity at stake, if they were right, and she the only operative—former operative, she insisted forcefully—with the credentials to get inside, to trace the Orange mole, identify and stop him.

"Brenna," her grandmother had leaned close, holding her and rocking her slightly, "I know, child, why you left us and I respected that, you know I did. But we need you, child, and it isn't just
Cumann Na Mbann
or the Provos trying to stop it. The leadership of the Orangemen came to us, to the Provos, I mean, to say one of their own had gone off the deep end and disappeared, vowing to destroy Britain."

She stared at her grandmother, eyes wide.

"Aye, love, it's that serious. He doesn't want the elections to go forward, knows the Catholics have a majority this time around, and he's vowed to unleash genocide, not only against the Irish Catholics, but the British, as well, for betrayal. The Orangemen are frightened, love, and they can't find him."

"But you did?" Her voice came out whispery, little-girl frightened.

"We did. And, child, if there's truth in the rumors about the laboratory he's joined, he can destroy all of us, and I mean everybody on this bloody planet, billions of innocent lives."

She'd sat in her grandmother's arms for a long time, shaking, listening as her grandmother explained everything they'd learned, why they couldn't just hit the bastard with a standard IRA hit team. No publicity, not even the breath of publicity, nothing that would look even remotely like anything but pure accident—and before they could do even that much, they had to know. Was the threat real? Was the research viable? And if so, how far away was the team from success? And literally the only person in all of Ireland who could infiltrate that team as the Orangeman had done was Brenna McEgan.

"They'll pull strings, child, our own people and the Orangemen, both. They're afraid of him, Brenna, terrified of the man they've created and now must stop. They can't do it on their own. They've no one with the credentials to get close to him. And even if they did, he'd recognize them in a flash, drop them off a cliff somewhere. Together we'll get you inside that lab, Brenna. From there, it's you and no one else must discover the truth and stop him."

It was, ironically, the first time in the Catholic-Protestant history of the island that the Orangemen had voluntarily worked
with
the IRA Provisionals. All it had taken was the realization that they'd unleashed a creature so deadly, he would risk destroying the entire world—including the Orangemen who'd turned him into a weapon—to take his vengeance against Catholics and the British who'd "betrayed" him.

Cedric Banning—not his real name, but the name of his carefully constructed cover persona—was ruthless, brilliant, and utterly mad. To refuse the mission was unthinkable. He
had
to be stopped. So she'd come to Scotland, with no idea how many strings had been plucked to get her there, and she'd identified Banning, and she'd assessed the threat level—utterly deadly—and now she had an
SAS captain
on the job, who knew none of this, whose every glance tonight had shouted plain as daylight that she topped his suspect list.

How could she not? She was Irish, wasn't she? Reason enough for any self-respecting Brit to hate and distrust her, given the circumstances. By the end of Mylonas' hideous little lecture, every colleague at the table had been shooting her furtive, unhappy little glances.
The IRA,
those looks said,
the IRA's threatening us and ours, and you're by-God Irish.
It would have done no good to stand up and say, "You're absolutely right, mates, I'm IRA to my bones, and I'm the only thing standing between you and a disaster so enormous, you can't even comprehend it."

Admission would only earn her a one-way ticket to prison—and leave the man she'd come here to stop with a free and easy road to success. A very powerful intuition was screaming at Brenna that her enemy—all humanity's enemy—would waste no time, now that the SAS was on the job. It wasn't logical, not even remotely. Logic said he'd simply sit back on his own forged and impeccable credentials and smile while the SAS locked her up. But intuition said otherwise. Intuition whispered,
He'll move now and throw blame on you, Brenna, so what are you going to do to stop it, eh?

She turned the key in the ignition and put the car into a smooth reverse in the crowded carpark, then set out for the lab. Whatever he planned, he would do it tonight. Sitting at the pub all evening with a crowd of eyewitnesses would get her an alibi, but what good was that if he blew the entire future to hell while she earned it? She thought of Terrance Beckett, alone in a silent lab office, working like a fiend to prepare them all for the next trip into time, and shivered.

There was a gun in her cottage, the most illegal thing she owned, urged on her by her own grandmother, for safety's sake on a mission like this. Not for assassination, no. Her job was to identify the Orange mole, so that others could take him out—under circumstances that would not throw suspicion on the IRA. This was a covert ops job of the most delicate kind ever undertaken by the Irish Republican Army Provisionals and one of the very few where publicity was the very
last
thing they wanted. Enough to get the job done.

But the bloody SAS had thrown everyone's timetables into disarray.

Brenna was torn between the desire to drive back to the cottage to slip the gun into her pocket and the equally powerful desire to drive to the Firth of Forth and throw it into the bay. An impossible situation. It had been from the outset. And dithering about it would do no one any good.
Get on with it,
she told herself fiercely, hating the tremors in her hands.

She drove carefully, swinging off the main highway onto the access road, windscreen wipers slapping with futile energy at the downpour hammering the glass, and finally pulled to a halt beside her temporary home, the drab and repulsively ugly cottage assigned to her by Terrance Beckett. None of the others had returned from the pub, yet. Only Beckett's car was visible, in front of his own cottage, the one closest to the main lab building. No way to tell if he were in bed or still working, since the lights in his cottage were off and there were no windows in the lab to reveal a telltale glow.

She shut off her car and dashed across to unlock the cottage door, wiping water from her face despite the overhang protecting the door from the elements. She switched on a single light and stood irresolute for a moment, gazing bleakly at her belongings scattered through the room. There was less of her personality in this cottage than there had been in her dorm room at University. Old habits, consciously set aside for the move to Dublin and the declaration of independence from the organization she'd finally found the courage to repudiate, had returned to haunt her, as familiar as her own skin and far more disturbing. Brenna's face twisted, half bitter recrimination, half grief. Once
Cumann Na Mbann...
They had you for life, whether you willed it or no. Insanity, to stand here wishing like hell she'd walked a different road as a girl.

Pride and hatred. They solved nothing. Unfortunately, neither did walking away from the trouble. God knew exactly how hard she'd tried
that.
What, then, was the answer, when the other side refused to put down its weapons and be reasonable? When, backed into a political corner and snarling like a wounded dog, the other side viewed your very existence as a threat to their survival? Who could win a war like that? She'd told that SAS captain no more than God's honest truth.
Nobody
won in Northern Ireland. Brenna slid open the drawer, hands trembling as she gazed down at the gun hidden there.

A Russian-made 9mm Makarov, sleek and semiautomatic, sixteen centimeters long. Small enough to conceal in a sturdy coat pocket, large enough to pack a lethal punch. Smuggled in from God alone knew where and brought south across the border into Dublin by her own grandmother. And carried in her luggage from Dublin to Scotland, reminder of why she was here and of the ugliness that had erupted once again, threatening her life and her world. '
Tis no answer!
Brenna's very soul screamed the protest. Yet what choice did she have? He must be stopped.

Headlamps flashed past outside the window, sending her eight centimeters off the floor. Her heart thundered into the hollow of her throat. The SAS captain, come to search her rooms? Brenna caught her breath on a ragged gasp and switched off the lamp before slipping over to her window to peer out through the murk and the rain. She knew the car which rolled to a stop at the cottage next to hers, knew the man who climbed out into the raw night, who glanced toward her abruptly darkened window before turning and heading toward the lab, crossing the road at an easy jog.
Damn, damn, damn!
He was making his move and she was out of position, wasn't ready... And there was no time to call in the Provos team that was supposed to make this hit...

She stuck the gun into her coat pocket, hands shaking, made sure of her own ID card to get through the security door, headed into the wind and the downpour at a run, slithering through puddles and mud and filth. She had a longer way to run than he'd had, her cottage being farther than his. She fumbled the card at the reader, had to grope through muck to find it, wiped it against her skirt and got it, shaking, through the reader. The door clicked and released and she yanked it open, jerking the gun from her pocket and slipping inside. She slid the Makarov's safety downward with her thumb, ready to fire with a simple double-action, first pull of the trigger. He had a good five-minute lead on her...

She caught the sharp, coppery smell of death instants before his fist caught the side of her head. Brenna crumpled into blackness, knowing only the terror of defeat.

The telephone shrilled somewhere close to Stirling's ear, shattering sleep and jangling his nerves. He groped in the unfamiliar darkness, fumbling the receiver onto the floor with his wrist cast. He tried to read the time on the bedside clock as he searched along the cord to find the handset again. Bloody murder!
Two-thirty a.m.?

"H'lo?"

"Captain Stirling!" He didn't recognize the voice.

"Who is this?" he demanded, coming slightly more awake as the panic in that voice hit home.

"It's Marc Blundell. Dear God, you have to come at once! We're sending a car for you, there's been a disaster at the lab."

That woke him up. "What kind of disaster?"

Blundell gulped, voice shaking. "It's... it's Dr. Beckett. Someone's killed him."

Oh, sweet Jesus... "Get that bloody car here yesterday!" Stirling was already out of bed and moving. "And for God's sake,
no one
leaves the building! No one in or out, except me."

"But—"

"But
what
?" He already had his uniform buttoned and was slinging on his gunbelt with the ease of long familiarity.

"The constables..." Blundell quavered. "We'll have to contact the police—"

"Like bloody hell you will!
Nobody!
Got that? Not even the local bobby, not until I've seen
everything
firsthand!"

The project liaison gulped audibly over the line. "Yes, sir. Oh, God,
please
get here quickly! There's more—I daren't say what over an unsecured phone line."

Stirling snarled under his breath.
Worse
he did not need. "The car's just pulled up," he muttered as headlamps stabbed past the curtains in his cottage window, sending shadows swinging wildly. "I'll be there in five minutes."

He grabbed up his field kit, carefully prepared before leaving London, and ran, lurching on his bad knee. He snatched open the driver's side door. "Move. I'll drive."

Bad knee or not, he could outdrive any graduate student on the planet, and Miss Dearborne was shaking violently behind the wheel. She slid frantically into the other seat. Stirling gunned the engine and squealed out onto asphalt. He didn't even take time to fasten his safety belt. The road roared past in the wake of their passage, tearing great holes in the drizzle and mist. Water sheeted down across the roadbed. Ghostly trees skittered and jumped as he skidded the Land Rover through the turns.