Timecaster (9 page)

Five seconds . . .

I fired at waist level, straight into the side of the chute, the blank embedding itself in the metal and forming a molecular bond—

Four seconds . . .

The nanotube line whirred out of the reel, only a few millimeters thick but stronger than steel, and I kept my hands away so it didn’t slice them off—

Three seconds . . .

The autosensor in the reel adjusted tension, my belt digging into my gut like I’d been hit by a bus, slowing me down, but not fast enough—

Two seconds . . .

The chute ended, and I fell into open air, the line on my belt tugging me so I went from vertical to horizontal—

One second . . .

Light blurred by, and I gasped and choked on the strong reek of rotting garbage just as my back slapped into the ground with a wet
splat
.

Was the splatting sound my skin splitting open and spraying out blood? Was it my head exploding like a pumpkin?

I stared up at the chute, twenty feet above my head, and watched an orange peel flutter out and hit me in the chest while I waited for pain and death to overtake me.

But neither did.

I did a body inventory. Left leg worked. Right leg worked. Left arm worked, but hurt. Ditto the right arm. Head and neck okay. Shoulders and back seemed fine.

I snorted, amazed I had not only survived, but did so intact.

So what made that splatting . . . ?

Then the ground seemed to melt beneath me, and I realized I wasn’t on the ground at all. I was on a huge vat of decaying plant matter. The putrescent sludge swallowed me up like a flesh-eating blob, and I took one more gulp of air before sinking into the muck.

FOURTEEN

The Mastermind muses on the absoluteness of uncertainty.

He wishes he knew more about what was happening. But his reach is limited. His ears are silent. His eyes restricted to newscasts.

What’s going on? Where is the mouse?

Better not to know, he muses. The mouse is both on course and off course. Dead and alive. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Once you measure it, wavefunction collapses.

Perhaps instead of referring to Talon as a mouse, he should think of him as Schrödinger’s cat. For the Mastermind, Talon is everything and nothing at the same time. Best of all, the math backed it up.

There’s much left to do. Calls. Travel. Meetings.

The search has run its course, but there are other searches to perform.

He reaches up, feels his own heart. It pounds with excitement, and some trepidation.

Killing the woman was necessary. The cheese to lure the mouse.

But it was more than that. She gave him a precious and unique gift. Her life, for his amusement. He respected her for that. Even honored her.

However, she was only a footnote in the eventual history of his endeavors. An insignificant warm-up act for the magnificence to come.

It isn’t like comparing walking to crawling.

It’s more like comparing walking to breaking the light-speed barrier.

There will be more deaths.

Many more deaths.

His heart beats faster at the thought, and he smiles.

FIFTEEN

The effect was like quicksand. The viscous pool was somewhere between a liquid and a solid. Buoyancy wasn’t working, and every tiny struggle created a minivacuum that sucked me down farther. While I was grateful I couldn’t smell anything while holding my breath, I knew I’d have to breathe eventually, and the idea of taking this crap into my mouth, my lungs, was almost worse than the thought of dying. To make things even more disgusting, the goop was warm—probably due to bacteria activity, which generated heat.

Garbage was gross. Warm garbage was unbearable.

I dared not open my eyes, concerned what diseases would permanently blind me. But after more than a minute without air, blindness became the least of my concerns. When I kept absolutely still, I sank. When I moved, I sank even faster. There was no way to get on top of the stuff, to pull myself—

The nanotube line.

I moved my left hand toward the reel. Even using all of my strength, it was like pushing through mud, and I could manage only an inch or so a second. The energy expended by my effort depleted the remaining oxygen in my blood, and my head began to spin. Even through closed eyelids, I saw flashes of red and yellow.

I wondered if my body would ever be discovered. Or if I’d be recycled just like all of this biomass, eventually winding up in someone’s scooter tank.

My brain began to fool itself. It told me it was okay to breathe this shit. In fact, this shit had a high oxygen content in it. All I needed to do was take a big gulp and I’d be fine.

My hand touched something. A dial. Something familiar about it. Something important.

My utility belt reel.

I turned it counterclockwise and felt a tug on my belt. My sinking had stopped. But had it reversed? The sludge was too thick, too warm, for me to tell if I was moving through it.

I had no idea how much time had passed, but my willpower was gone. Betrayed by my body, I could no longer keep holding my breath. My immediate future would be choking, gagging, and dying, accompanied by a horrible taste.

My mouth opened with a will of its own, my diaphragm spasmed, and I gasped for air I knew I wouldn’t get.

I was right. The taste was terrible. Like taking a bite out of a rotten egg coated with sour milk and dog feces.

But I was also wrong. Because it was, indeed, air.

I opened my eyes, squinting against the sting, and saw the nanotube reel had brought me to the surface of the muck and was slowly winching me out of the vat. My peace officer training had apparently paid off, because one of the things drilled into our heads was to never let go of our weapons. I was pleasantly surprised to see I still clenched my Taser. I shoved it into my holster, then shifted my weight so I rose vertically.

Thirty seconds later I was hanging in midair, above the biomuck. I hit the reel, pausing the ascent, and then moved my arms and legs to swing. Slowly at first, then picking up speed as momentum kicked in. Timing it right, I pressed the release on the reel just as I cleared the edge of the vat.

The fall could have been fatal—a fifteen-foot drop onto grass. But I twisted my body around as I fell and managed to catch the lip of the vat, my body slamming alongside it. I released my grip and hit the ground hard, flexing my knees to absorb the landing, then slamming onto my side and slapping the ground with my open palms, like a judo fall.

I lay there for a moment. Then I laughed. A wet, garbled laugh that ended in me turning over and throwing up on the floor, the fear and the stench too much for my stomach.

I wiped my good hand across my face, trying to squeegee away the goo from my eyes, nose, and mouth. Then I got on all fours, and eventually my feet, and tried to figure out where I was in the building.

The smell was supernatural. Besides the biomass vat I’d crawled out of, there were six others of equal size, plus two toilet vats. Like plant and animal matter, human waste was also compostable and recyclable. I’d never given much thought to what happened after I flushed, but it apparently ended up in a holding facility like this one. The pools were even larger than the biomass vats, making me glad I chose the right chute to drop down.

Keeping my nostrils pinched together, I staggered past the vats to the near wall, which I followed until I found a door. I didn’t encounter anyone, but that didn’t surprise me. This wasn’t a part of the building where you’d hang out for fun.

The door led to a hallway. I tugged out my DT, wiped off the screen, and brought up a schematic for this building. One room over was the furnace, and then beyond that the stairwell to the parking garage.

Every step felt slow and ponderous, like I was still in the muck. As anxious as I was to get out of there, I also had an irrational desire to curl up in a corner and get some sleep. Two near-death experiences within four minutes really took a toll on the body.

I managed to find the garage, and incredibly it was empty. It took me a moment to get my bearings, and then I half ran, half stumbled to my Corvette. It was hardly anonymous, but they could already track me with my chip, and I chose horsepower over a less auspicious ride. I fished my keys out of my pocket and hit the security button.

Then the garage filled with cops.

They came streaming in from all directions. I pulled out my Taser and shot twice, each shot hitting a peace officer.

But there was no bolt of Tesla lightning. No falling over in spasms. They kept coming at me, pulling out and aiming their own weapons.

They’d suspended my electricity account.

I managed to get behind my car door as the firing began, the blue storm starting off with just a few bolts and then gathering speed and strength until the wax bullets hitting my car sounded like hurricane hail. I jammed my key into the ignition—grateful it was a real key because if they’d killed my electric account, they’d probably disabled all other chip functions—and then gunned the engine and slammed the Vette into gear.

It was like driving into a supernova, too bright for me to be able to steer, so much light it hurt like someone was poking my corneas with splinters. I turned sharply, plowing through parked biofuel bikes, getting ahead of the barrage just enough to be able to see again. I gunned the engine, drowning out the electric bullet maelstrom, and then was whiplashed into my seat by a rear impact.

I squinted into my rearview mirror.

Teague. In his Porsche 911. As I watched, he rammed me again, jerking my head backward.

“You want to play, old buddy? Let’s play.”

I pinned the accelerator, throwing dirt and clover onto his windshield as my fat rear tires dug two trenches in the greentop.

I squeezed my earlobe, activating my headphone. No dial tone. Disabled. So I flipped on the dashboard microphone.

“Sirens,” I told the car.

The police lights came on, embedded in my front and rear fenders, strobing red and blue and accompanied by the piercing wail of the emergency horn, belting out the familiar
weeeeeeeeee-ooooooooooooo-weeeeeeeeeee-oooooooooooo
.

When was the last time I’d hit my siren? Months? Years? Hectic as the situation was, I managed a tight smile. Being a cop felt pretty good.

I shot out of the garage, my chassis taking to the air, and burst out onto Wabash, the El train racing by overhead. I jerked the wheel, fishtailed, and floored it, chasing the El, weaving through the metal beams that supported it. The siren would automatically change all the signal lights to green, giving me the right of way.

In six seconds I was doing eighty miles an hour, my tires losing traction on the greentop. I turned the wheel slightly. The car didn’t respond, beginning to skid.

“Ice treads!” I hollered.

Metal spikes poked out of the rubber in my tires, finding traction on the bioroad, digging into the greens and dirt. The traction returned, and I finessed the car past a support pylon, clipping off my driver’s side mirror as I scraped by.

“GPS. Route to home.”

The video superimposed over the windshield, plotting a map through the streets to my house. But it wanted me to get off of Wabash. Since Wabash was the only road without traffic, it was best I stayed on it as long as possible.

“Reroute. Wabash primary.”

The display changed, keeping me on this street for the next two miles.

“Rearview. Bottom left.”

My rearview mirror switched to the lower left-hand side of my windshield, which was easier for me to see. Teague was still behind me, a pinpoint blur in the distance.

I had to get home, had to talk to Vicki before I went underground. Chances were high that every peace officer in Chicago was plotting my course and knew my destination. But the only one I really feared was Teague. He knew me. He had a TEV. He’d be able to find me no matter how far underground I went.

That meant I had to stop him, and stop him now.

I cut around a pylon and stomped on the brakes, doing a one-eighty, three-sixty, and finally a five-forty, facing south on Wabash. I could make out the flash of Teague’s police lights in the distance.

“You want me? Come get some.”

I mashed down the gas pedal and headed right at him.

SIXTEEN

Teague and I were childhood buds. Grew up in the same neighborhood. Went to the same schools. Both majored in peace studies and law enforcement down in Carbondale. We applied for the CPD on the same day, and both joined the Timecaster Division on the same day. I loved him like a brother, and would have died for him, knowing he felt the exact same way about me.

Then Vicki came along.

Teague was the one who found her.

“She’s the most incredible woman I’ve ever met, Talon. She makes other women seem like they’re from a different species. You have to book her months in advance, but you really need to try her out. Trust me, man.”

I trusted him. And I booked the time, expecting the most incredible sexual experience of my life.

I didn’t expect to fall in love.

I really didn’t expect her to return that feeling.

And it completely blindsided me when Teague showed me the engagement ring he’d bought for her, because he was in love with her as well.

I was no idiot. I wouldn’t trade a woman for a brother. Not even the greatest woman in the world.

I kept my mouth shut. Teague proposed, and was politely turned down. I swore I’d stop seeing her, out of respect for our friendship.

But I didn’t. I kept seeing her. And I bought an engagement ring of my own, one that Vicki accepted.

Teague went ballistic. Our fight was so brutal that if we both weren’t peace officers, we would have spent at least a decade each in jail. My left arm, right knee, and six ribs all have carbon nanotube weaves thanks to Teague, and his jaw, right arm, and skull suffered similar damage.