Quantum Break (48 page)

Will walked across the buckled floor, toward the torn-open wall, perhaps drawn by something only he could understand. Something written in the pulsing, wailing, pointillist nighttime landscape spread before him. Or perhaps he was simply a man who was looking upon what he had done, and found himself overcome by the horror of it.

Jack reached for him, pulled him back from the ragged edge, and saw for himself what was becoming of the town that had raised him.

“Will,” Jack shouted above the high-altitude wind. “Can you stop this?” He unslung his pack, opened it, showed Will the Countermeasure. “Can you?”

The sight of the device drew Will out of his shock. He nodded. “I can try. It’s what I built it for. Yes. Yes, I believe so. I need to get under the machine.”

Taking the device from the bag, turning it over in his hands, Will said, “The charge is unusually low.”

“Monarch was shielding the top floors from the stutter with it, running some kind of dampener network. Probably running a bunch of other crap as well. I have no idea.”

Will looked out across that terribly wounded city. “It…” He struggled to find the words. “Causality relies upon an agreed-upon sequence of events. This creates what we understand as the flow of time. The Fracture is inviting other potential realities to the mix. What was once a song is now a violent confusion. This building is falling apart beneath us.”

“Well, actually,” Jack said, “it’s a little of that, and a little of me throwing a train through the reception area.” He shrugged. “It was locked.”

Will took the Countermeasure and headed for the time machine, when a voice said:

“Jack.”

Jack scanned around: the corners, the control room above, no one was here.

Will didn’t seem to have heard it, examining the Countermeasure as he walked to the machine.

“Jack?”

“Paul…?”

Jack stopped cold. Paul was in the airlock, standing on the ramp, looking into the room with terror on his face. This wasn’t the Paul whom Jack had seen drop a building on his brother; this was Paul as he had been the night he had first traveled through the machine.

Will carefully put the Countermeasure down near the story-high platinum-cased chronon reserve Monarch used to power the machine and began an examination of the power’s routing to the Promenade.

As Jack moved toward his friend-who-had-been, a second figure materialized—standing at the bottom of the ramp. Martin Hatch.

This wasn’t real, Jack realized. It was a vision, like the ones he experienced back at the house.

“You and I are destined to be great friends, Paul,” Hatch was saying. “It is the honor of my life to provide all that you need to play your singular role.”

Hatch opened an arm toward three men and women, waiting to escort Paul out of the room—toward a future that turned him into the man responsible for all that was happening to the world at that moment.

Jack watched young Paul Serene—baffled and lost—get shepherded away. Hatch took a cleansing breath, with the air of a man who had just crossed a major milestone.

Who the fuck are you?
Jack thought.
You monstrous son of a bitch.

Hatch moved to leave … and then stopped. His back straightened, curiously.

Martin Hatch glanced behind himself. Turned fully. Then took a step toward Jack.

Martin Hatch—years into the future—stood five feet before Jack Joyce, and appeared to look him right in the eye. Jack stepped back.

Slowly, carefully, Martin Hatch looked Jack up and down … and smiled.

“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said.

Hatch clicked his fingers … and the vision ended.

Jack was alone.

The stutter hit without warning. The intercom overloaded and exploded in sparks. The glass walls of the control room shattered, rewound, remained intact. For a vertiginous microsecond the floor vanished, sharing a moment with a world where the entire building had collapsed, before native reality reasserted itself—the spasm between what is and what could be knocking Jack and Will off their feet.

Across Riverport the skies bucked, energy flashed, shock waves kicked down streets and thrashed the river. Whole blocks lit up or went dark, most often vacillating between the two. The chorus of car alarms was a background song to whole streets opening up along their length, to spot fires and infernos. Jack had no idea what was happening on the ground. If this could happen to steel and concrete, what was happening to people?

“Jack.”

“What is it, Will?”

Will looked up from his examinations of a rack of connectors on the corridor-ring. “Did you say something?”

“Didn’t—”

“Jack!”
The voice was wrong: layered, skitzing, fucked-up.

Paul Serene stepped off the stairwell to the control room, fifty feet from Jack. Broad-shouldered, and almost entirely consumed by the chronon sickness that was remaking him into something monstrous. Starlight flashed beneath his clothes. The flesh of his hands and neck was a shifting play of fractal light. When he spoke illumination poured from his throat. “Are you ready?”

“Jesus.”

“Close enough.” Paul spasmed, a flurry of multiple Pauls all at once. He was phasing from humanity to whatever the Shifters were. “You and I die here,” he rasped. “But in doing so save a universe.”

“Will, get that thing hooked up, and fast.”

“I have it connected to the primary chronon flow. I think we’re ready.”

“Then do it!”

Paul snorted. “It makes no difference.”

Will socketed the Countermeasure into the battery’s main outflow and … nothing.

“Don’t fight me, Jack.” Paul was having a hard time keeping it together. “We stick together, right?”

It was then that Jack noticed the silver chain dangling from Paul’s balled, luminescing fist: the chain attached to the bullet.

He raised that fist. “We’ve known each other all our lives … the universe … fate … arranged it just so.…” Paul shuddered. Multiple Pauls flashed and rioted for control of his friend’s identity, and were beaten back by an excruciating force of will. “I know this because I’ve seen it.”

“I’ve seen things, too, Paul.”

“We are here now because my futures make themselves known to me … and I choose the futures into which I take the world. And I
know,
Jack, that this is where you and I end … because I’ve never had a vision beyond tonight. Beyond now. They all narrow to the same inevitable point. You fail, you die, I die, and Monarch triumphs.”

Paul straightened up, then marched toward Will. “Give me the Regulator.”

Jack warped to intercept. At the last second Paul wasn’t there and Jack went careening into the diagnostic bank against the wall.

Paul stopped. “As I near my end the visions don’t stop. The less time I have, the clearer they become, as potentiality narrows. You may attack as you wish…”

Jack warped, and again Paul wasn’t there. Jack skidded, stopping short of tumbling into the maintenance recess.

“… but I am beyond surprises.”

Will ripped the Countermeasure from the machine, held it before him like a weapon. “I’ll breach this before I let you take it. It almost killed you once, it can—”

The Countermeasure vanished from Will’s grip, leaving him yelping and clutching wrenched fingers.

Paul held it, unconcerned. “This is meant for Martin Hatch, and the future.”

Jack took a gamble. “In all those visions, Paul, do you ever see Hatch?”

Paul said nothing for a moment, then, “Martin has always been with me.”

“And?”

Paul didn’t say anything.

Jack smiled, didn’t enjoy it. “That’s what I figured. So what is it? What’s off about him?”

Jack warped, Paul had moved, appeared farther down the lab, toward the breach.

“You know what I’m going to say, you know what you’re going to say. Flip ahead. Tell me how this conversation plays out.”

“Lives … are messy,” Paul said. “Martin’s … is not.”

Jack blinked. “Meaning what?”

Will stepped up. “In all the futures you can see and choose from, Martin Hatch’s actions never deviate?”

“He is the most focused man I have ever met. My life, all that I am, I owe to his clarity.”

“Think about that,” Jack said. “And…”

Paul’s outline flickered, wavered, but not in the way that Shifters spasmed out. This was more of a superimposition.

“… give me…”

The room tunneled and slowed, as a crowd of Paul Serenes—like ghosts, like after-images—stepped, moved, gesticulated, swung, ran …

“… the…”

Not after-images: fore-images. Jack saw his own image dashing out, intersecting with Paul’s. A million potentials exploding from all three men present to form a chaos of moment-to-moment potentiality. Too much to make sense of, so Jack narrowed focus down to what he needed: the device Paul now held.

Ghosts faded. The futures in which he made a play for the Countermeasure solidified. Paul intercepted or avoided him in all of them. In some of them Jack went flying out that breach.

He chose one where he didn’t.

“… Countermeasure.”

He shot forward. Paul wasn’t there. Jack knew where he was, feinted, counted on Paul making a bad choice from the futures he was seeing. Failed.

The game became one of seeing who could see deepest into the mesh of move and countermove and take action accordingly. Jack had far less experience, but Paul was being reassembled from the inside out.

Jack zipped toward him, failed to intercept, feinted, failed, swung for him, failed, outflanked, failed. Paul flashed for the stairwell, Jack moved to intercept, Paul saw it coming and jagged left and swung over the railing. Jack was already there, waiting. Paul swung, Jack grabbed for the Countermeasure, Paul was gone.

“You said we die here?” Jack gasped.

Paul nodded.

“Got a time on that?”

Paul warped forward, bringing down one flash-skinned hand, missing, following through on the momentum, and swinging the Countermeasure like a bowling ball into Jack’s chest. Jack flew six feet and hit the deck hard.

“No!”
Will scrambled toward them. “You’ll breach it!”

Paul looked at the device in his hand as though he had never seen it before, an expression of animal confusion on his face.

“Paul?”

He glanced at Will, then, as if hoping to see understanding in another’s eyes. “Wars, calamities, plagues, they were all prices paid to cause and effect, to lead us to this moment.” He slung the silver bullet about his neck, beheld it. “I miss the little things.”

He let it go. Looked away as it fell against his strobing chest.

Paul Serene shuddered, cried out, as the sickness extended farther up his throat, into his skull, and touched his brain.

Jack kicked off against the diagnostics, used what energy he had left to flash the distance between them …

 … which Paul countered by warping at him, a half foot to the left, swinging an extended forearm into Jack’s face. Jack went down, and the thing that had been Paul Serene followed up, driving a booted heel downward. Jack flinched aside, the boot cracking the floor near his head, pressed his hands to the floor and …

Paul dropped a knee into Jack’s back. Jack buckled, smashed to the floor, realizing almost immediately that he could feel nothing below his waist.

Paul stepped backward. “You die here so that Monarch can succeed.” He pointed toward the stairwell. One level up, phasing and flickering, was a Shifter. The Shifter. The Shining Palm. “That kills you.” Paul drew out his handgun. “This … here … is the last vision … I ever had.…”

He was almost gone. Shifter Paul clutched for the bullet about his neck, tore it free, focused on it—the reminder he had carried for over twenty years: of friendship, his humanity. A reminder that nothing is to be taken for granted and that time is finite, so better get on living. It seemed to grant him some cohesion, some peace, some focus.

The sickness surged, Paul screamed. Jack pulled his handgun and fired. Agonized howls rolled out of the Shining Palm as potential actions condensed to singular realities, moment to moment, lacerating it. The bullet passed through empty air, sparked off the diagnostics.

“You’re not all gone, are you?”

Paul was by the breach; Jack fired. Retargeted back, fired. The Shining Palm kept screaming, writhing, staggering, and flashing in microbursts down the stairs. Jack dumped his last magazine, tossed the gun aside, rolled.

The Shining Palm flashed across the space.

“You”—Shifter Paul gasped, tearing himself apart through the act of keeping himself together—“waste … time…”

Jack flipped on his back. The Shining Palm reached down and opened its flashing hand toward Jack’s face.

“Not really.” Jack gasped, rolled, flipped to his feet, and cannoned shoulder-first into Paul. The Countermeasure flew free from Paul’s hands. Jack flashed, intercepted it, skidded to a halt, spun toward Paul.

Jack had the Countermeasure.

And realized the Shining Palm was now directly behind him.

Jack had dumped his entire chronon reserve in the warp-fight, and replenished just enough to snatch the Countermeasure from a rapidly deteriorating Paul. Now he was back at zero.

Paul came for him. Jack spun, hand over the Countermeasure’s release.

“I’m pretty sure I can pop this. And I’m pretty sure that if I do it’ll take out you and this thing behind me.” Jack backed up, keeping an eye on both Paul and the Shifter. “Did you see this?” Jack said. “Can you see how this plays out?”

Paul, or whatever was left of Paul, was beyond language. It just held out one hand, reaching for the Countermeasure—a complex mind reduced to the last thing that drove it, perhaps.

The Shifter took one heavy step forward.

“I will do this. Will,” Jack said. “Get behind something.”

The Shifter roared, flexed that open palm, and lumbered straight for Jack—screaming.

Jack spun, Countermeasure extended in both hands, catch ready to pop.
“Stop!”

Unexpectedly, the Shifter did exactly that. Its phasing, shining palm hovered two feet from Jack’s face.

It did not move. It only growled, in a thousand voices, and strained its hand toward him.