Quantum Break (34 page)

“Thank God. Guys, Monarch knows you’re here. They’ve always known. They’re probably on their way right now.”

Jack and Beth were on the ramp to the time machine’s airlock, waiting for Sofia to give them the go-ahead to depart.

“Horatio got you out?” Beth asked. “Is he with you?”

Nick’s expression said it all. “He…” Nick struggled. “Horatio … he was trying to e-mail you something. Martin Hatch … he … he’s got something going on. Something’s not right with that company, man. Or that dude. Way, way not right.”

Beth nodded, pushed the grief down. Horatio was a good guy. “Tell me about it when I get back. Sofia?” Beth entered the airlock. “We’re going to fix this. Nick, you should get out of here. Jack?”

Sofia brought the power online, chronon particles flooding the Promenade. The bare-bones frame of the old machine clunked hard, picking up a rattle like loose change in a dryer.

“Go now,” Sofia said.

Jack moved up the ramp.

*   *   *

“Breach,” Gibson said.

At the back of the swimming hall, thirty feet behind the time machine, the door to the locker rooms blew off its hinges.

Jack threw a stutter bubble at his feet out of pure reflex, as the cafeteria window shattered. Bullets impacted the shield, thudding dully. Sofia shrieked, going rigid, shoulders hunched, an upright target.

Irene opened up from above. Gibson kept up fire from one end of the cafeteria as Voss swept in doing likewise from the locker rooms. The bubble protected Jack from multiple kill shots, torn between entering the machine or protecting Sofia.

A shot from above blew a crater out of the tiles at Sofia’s feet, there was a spray of blood and Sofia fell forward across the controls. Collapsed, she vanished behind the instrument panel.

“Voss! Stay wide of the machine!” Gibson shouted. “Wide of the machine! We need that.”

The airlock sucked shut.

“Beth!”

Nick fell back into the lobby, wide-eyed.

Jack ran to the airlock, but he had been here before: it wasn’t opening. Beth had her notebook out, scribbled, tore off a page, pressed it to the viewport:

CHARGE MUST EXPEND. NOT SAFE TO OPEN. SEE YOU THERE.

He was shaking his head no. Beth pressed her hand to the viewport, and stopped.

Jack angled his view, knew immediately why she wasn’t going through. Something had gone wrong: the left hatch—the door to the past, the one they were meant to take—was closed. The right one was open. The past was locked, the future waiting.

Something must have happened when Sofia went down. Had the controls taken a hit? It was impossible to tell.

The machine began to tremble violently. From somewhere in the back of the Promenade a riveted steel plate detached and crashed to the tiles.

Voss didn’t risk getting into Jack’s line of sight. Irene and Gibson held fire, waiting for the shield to drop—at least fifty bullets waiting for permission to splash right through Jack.

Jack took a chance. He stepped out of the bubble, spraying three-round bursts toward the ceiling-line windows. Dirty glass shattered as military rounds punched through rusted iron paneling, sending Irene flinching back from the edge.

Gibson took a shot, but not before Jack manifested a second shield in his line of sight that took the hits. Jack cleared the short distance between ramp and console, throwing down a third bubble as Voss opened up.

Three rounds pounded dully into the bubble, eye level with Jack.

“Boss,” Chaffey piped up in Gibson’s earpiece. “You want us in there?”

“Negative. Stand by.”

Sofia was at Jack’s feet, facedown and unmoving. The dark fabric of her evening gown made it tough to tell where she had been hit. Blood pooled into antiseptically shaded tiles.

There was blood on the console, one thick line pawed diagonally across the screen and keyboard, ending at Sofia’s fall. The destination date had changed. The trip to the past was now the trip to the future, the destination committed and locked. And the date was blank.

Through the airlock’s grimy viewport Beth pressed a hand to the glass. She tried for an “oh well” kind of smile. Pointed at her watch, then at Jack—
Don’t be late
—gave a single wave and, just like that, walked into the future.

No date, headed forward. The end of time.

“Beth! Wait!”

The machine screamed and threw off a pounding beat of energy.

Jack didn’t notice Irene drop through the ceiling—a fast rappel—timed to coincide with the machine’s flash and noise. He leaped the console and went after Voss, who immediately booked it beneath the machine.

“Boss! I need cover!”

Gibson pressed a finger to his ear mic. “Nice goin’, Voss! Keep him busy!”

“I ain’t playin’, boss!”

Irene glanced over her shoulder. Nick was still at the entrance, framed and petrified in the doorway. “Don’t sweat it, Voss. I got you.” She blasted a few random shots in Nick’s direction, sent him hobbling. “Gonna play with your little friend, Joyce! Hope you don’t mind!”

She set off after her target with an easy, loping grace.

Jack gave up on Voss, changed course, and jetted after Irene. Nick retreated to the lobby. Irene used gunfire to herd him up the stairs to the cafeteria and chased along behind.

*   *   *

Gibson waited until Jack had pursued far enough to take him beneath the cafeteria, then hopped out the window. “Chaffey. Time to bug out.” He landed on the roof of the prefab housing the diesel generator, then down to the ground floor. He went straight for the machine’s bloodied controls.

Subvocalized into his mic. “Voss, come on out. You’re first up.”

Voss rolled up from the maintenance recess as Chaffey, Reeves, and Dominguez flowed in from the locker rooms.

“Wilder went through, Voss.”

Realization dawned. “She knows the mission. You think … she went back to protect Joyce?”

“Get into the airlock. I’ll scatter us all wide, different dates. Chaffey’s boys as a crew, the rest of us solo. She won’t be able to pick us all off.”

*   *   *

Jack zipped to the base of the cafeteria stairs. As Irene ducked out of sight Jack heard the machine crescendo. Dust punched off the walls and ceiling as the core fired. A framed black-and-white from a 1940s swim meet crashed to the floor.

Irene called out, “You’re looking tired, sweets. Is all the fun taking it out of you?”

Then, behind Jack, the front door kicked open and a Monarch Security team flowed in.

A shot took Jack through the side, spinning him. Shouting, Jack encapsulated the first four members of the squad in a sphere of frozen time, blocking the door with it, and fell to the ground.

Prone and gasping, he fired bursts at the first two, six rounds suspended on a trajectory for their targets’ helmeted heads.

The round had blown a hole the size of a golf ball just below Jack’s ribs. Manifesting a handful of stutter bubbles, and flying after Irene, had expended almost everything he had. He felt the cells of his body thirstily draw in every scrap of chronon energy they could get, shock and instinct repurposing and localizing it to the wound. His body was pulling itself back together, but it was going to take time.

Upstairs Nick threw himself out the cafeteria window as Irene closed in from behind. He hit the tiles hard, yelped, and hobbled to his feet, limping hard.

*   *   *

Irene pulled her sidearm as the time machine shrieked and flashed.

“Voss is clear! Irene, get down here! Chaffey, Reeves, Dominguez, you’re up! Go go go!”

She didn’t hesitate. This was everything they had trained for. She hopped down, bounced neatly off the roof of the generator prefab, just as Chaffey’s crew went through. Crossing the distance to the machine’s ramp in no time flat she sprinted—straight to the airlock, no hesitation.

Gibson closed it down, gave her a new date, and sent her through.

*   *   *

Nick limped to Jack—his hockey injury now kicking his ass. That fall hadn’t treated him kindly. He found Jack on his back in a pool of blood, a bloodied hole shot through his side and pale as a sheet. “Jack … Jesus man don’t be dead.”

“I’m … okay. Irene went through didn’t she?”

“The machine? Yeah. I think they all did.”

“Fuck.” Jack got to his feet.

Gibson changed the date again. Four different dates meant anyone who came after C-1 had no chance of stopping them, or knowing when they would emerge from the machine.

The airlock door opened. Gibson keyed the machine to activate. The airlock door hissed, preparing to lever itself shut.

He quickly changed the onscreen date but did not commit it—just covering his tracks, making sure nobody could pick when he had gone to—then leaped the console, pounded up the ramp, and slid inside the airlock just before it sealed.

Atmosphere vented, internals pressurized, the airlock and Promenade flooding with chronon particles.

Mission accomplished.
Ha-ha fuck you
.

The door to the past opened, and Gibson was history.

So.

Jack felt the fight go out of him.

That was that then.

Nick leaped backward as Jack turned and emptied a full magazine into the stutter bubble behind him.

Nick looked away as the stutter bubble collapsed and freed rounds tossed the Monarch Security squad like dolls.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

He ran to the controls, kneeled, examined Sofia. The hit was to her left arm. She was cold, and her breathing was shallow, but she was alive.

He glanced at Nick. “Can you get her to a hospital?”

Nick nodded toward the television. It had been running on silent the whole time, tuned to coverage of the Riverport situation. It was clearly getting worse. It wasn’t just the attack on Monarch Tower; things were beginning to go wrong across the city. The Riverport power grid was fluctuating, brownouts traveling across neighborhoods.

“The Riverport Emergency Facebook group has a conversation going at the moment. People are seeing ghosts, reporting lost time. Not a lot, but a few. Checked it on my way over here.”

“Sofia said the end was coming soon.” Jack got to his feet and tried to make sense of what Gibson had done. He didn’t know where to begin. The date field was blank. Sofia wasn’t going to be able to help with this. There was only one date that he knew for certain would get him somewhere he needed to be: the date he tried to send Beth to. The date she would head for, if she could.

Jack set the controls for July 4, 2010. The day of Bannerman’s Overlook. The day Will’s Countermeasure went missing.

“I’m going to catch up to Beth. It doesn’t matter if the city’s losing its mind, Sofia needs a doctor.”

“I’ll get her there.”

“See you soon.”

Jack slapped the button, activating the machine. He ran up the ramp and swung into the airlock. Earlier Beth had noticed an odor to the machine. She wasn’t wrong. He smelled it now. It was the odor of rot and decay.

The airlock smooched shut. Chronon particles flooded the chamber. The door to the past opened, and Jack ran.

16

The hatch between airlock and the bulb-lit Promenade hissed and smooched shut behind her, the homemade corridor curving away ahead. In that moment some higher power hit Stop on the player. Abruptly, cruelly, every sound and movement ceased. Stillness. The follicles on her arms and scalp puckered closed. This world was separate and apart from the one she had just left.

Her wounded leg ached, powerfully.

Ninety-eight percent of chronon trainees washed out once they hit their first laboratory stutter. Finding themselves isolated in a death-calm reality, a world in which they had no agency whatsoever, flipped most trainees out. They couldn’t open doors, move objects, eat or drink anything. They couldn’t be heard. Monarch psychologists concluded this triggered base-level lizard-brain fears of entrapment, inflaming terrors of suffocation, dying alone, being forgotten, and nullification of self.

Twenty percent of candidates who washed out in the stutter training phase left the company, followed by institutional stays at Monarch’s expense.

Something about it disassembled people on a code level.

Something about being in that tight curving corridor, the air thick with the hot nasal tang of superheated metal and the world gone voiceless, she understood why so many couldn’t handle it. It was as close as Beth had come to being buried alive.

She marched forward, fast, cleaned out her thoughts with improvised ritual: handgun, loaded. Hair, tied and out of the way. Figured she must have been halfway around the loop. It was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to think about the possibility of the door not being open at the other end. Cricked her neck, rolled her shoulders. Three quarters. Breathe, Zed. Ashleigh. Starr. Wilder. Whatever. Breathe.

The exit hatch, dead ahead. Punched the release plate.

Fuck. Come ON.

She felt the charge bleed from the air. The Promenade deactivated, causality kicked back in.

The Promenade transformed
completely.

Lighting flicked from warm to cold, amber to white. The sterile chill of environmentally friendly fluorescents, half of which didn’t work, replaced the warm filament bulbs.

As the floor beneath her feet snapped from waffle-treaded insulation to cheap and heavy iron grillwork she almost lost her balance.

Will’s pentagonal corridor was gone. She was now in a four-sided corridor, the construction of which made Will’s look like a masterwork of thoughtful craftsmanship.

Will’s Promenade was gone, Beth laying at the doorstep of what could have been the entrance to a moonbase’s methadone clinic.

Get it together, Wilder. This is just the load screen.

Beth leaned against the new wall. Her leg didn’t want to take the weight, but she made it. Ignored the pain, put it in a room, locked the door.

She glanced at the overheads. That type of fluorescent hadn’t existed when Will made the machine. The machine had grown older.

Gun held in a double-handed grip, Beth peered into the airlock.