Timecaster (28 page)

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “And Vicki?”

He shook his head, slowly. “Talon, Talon, Talon. I wouldn’t send her to that awful place. She’s safe in Wisconsin, with someone watching her. Someone you’ve come to know intimately well.”

“Where is she, Sata?”

Sata smiled. “She’s with you, of course.”

FORTY-FIVE

Words don’t normally fail me. But when I processed what Sata had said, and all it implied, I was speechless.

Vicki wasn’t with me. She was with that psycho Alter-Talon.

“Yes, he’s here,” Sata said. “Dimensional travel to parallel worlds. Extraordinary, isn’t it? We’re supposed to view this primitive Tower of Babel”—Sata swept his hands at the space elevator—“as mankind’s crowning achievement. The pinnacle of technology and human ingenuity. And for what purpose? So people can play volleyball and hump each other in zero gravity? But with this”—he patted the TEV—“I can travel to places beyond mere space. I can access an infinite amount of worlds, with an infinite amount of variation. If it can be imagined, it exists. And I can see it all.”

“How . . . could you?” I managed.

Sata frowned at me. “I assume you mean
How could you send people to the man-eating dinosaur planet?
instead of the far more compelling
How could you accomplish this miracle of modern science?
I’ll answer both. If you recall timecasting class, you know one of the many unique properties of tachyons, other than their ability to travel faster than the speed of light, is they have negative mass squared. Yet even with imaginary mass, they can decay to closed strings, which, in vibrational mode, can cause instability in spacetime itself. Can you even imagine?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t give two shits about the science. I just wanted him to keep talking until I was lucid enough to draw McGlade’s .44 Magnum, which was wedged in my chest plate.

Sata continued, “When I developed the tachyon emission visualizer, my immediate success was focusing this instability on our ’brane, to record the past in our universe. But at the same time, the disruption of spacetime caused by the tachyons opened wormholes to infinite other membranes. I ignored them, because even though it was theoretically possible to tune in to those ’branes, I had no way of knowing which one I’d be on at a particular time. The vastness of infinity made the process entirely random. What I needed was a way to impose order on infinity. I needed . . . a search engine.”

“Aunt Zelda,” I said, slipping my hand inside my padding.

“Yes. Mister—or I suppose I should say Miss—Debont had perfected WYSIWYW search-engine technology with uffsee. But she had an even greater patent. One she never got to use. A way to compile relevant terms by metacrawling an infinite data source, using a geometric fractal algorithm. Anything that can happen,
does
happen, on some parallel earth. With her tech, and my tech, I could now search those infinite dimensions.”

My fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun. “So you searched the infinite multiverse for a world where I killed her, and where I destroyed Boise.”

“An excellent deduction. You’d think it would be an impossible task. Finding a needle in an infinite number of haystacks. But it was only impossible without a machine to help search for it. Because when there are infinite parallel earths, there are infinite parallel earths where you are a killer. With the search engine, I had a one-in-one chance of finding an earth that matched my exact criteria.”

“And you brought this lunatic to our world. Why, Sata? What happened to you?”

Sata assumed a reflective pose, tapping a finger to his chin. “I’ve thought about that a lot, Talon-
kun
. Maybe it was my growing disdain for our race, and how we waste the opportunities handed to us. Or maybe it’s because life has become so damn boring these days. Here I stand. The man that erased violent crime from humanity. And I now wish I hadn’t done it, because nothing interesting has happened on this planet in years. Admit it, Talon. Didn’t you get excited when you saw me murder Zelda? Didn’t you feel your heart racing?”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“Yes. That’s the final conclusion I came to as well. My years of steroid abuse have severely compromised my judgment. But it’s still such great fun. Which brings us to the next part of my plan. Our space lift awaits. I’m going to give you a chance to stop me before I turn Chicago into a giant buffet spread for talking velociraptors. Won’t that be exciting? You and I, battling for the lives of eight million people? Head over to car number seven, please.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, whipping out the .44.

I’d never killed anyone before. But unlike Sata, I was in full possession of my faculties when I squeezed the trigger, aiming a shot right at his diseased head.

The hammer rose, and fell, connecting with the bullet in the chamber.

It cartridge sparked, then fizzled, without firing.

A dud.

I pulled the trigger five more times.

Dud.

Dud.

Dud.

Dud.

And finally, a big, fat dud.

If McGlade had been nearby, I would have shoved that gun so far up his ass it would have poked out his nose.

Sata laughed, absolutely delighted by this. “Where on earth did you find a firearm?”

I thought about throwing it at him, remembered how much it was worth, then stuck it back in my shirt.

“And none of the bullets worked,” Sata continued. “How marvelous.”

“Fuck you.” It was the best I could come up with, under the circumstances.

“If you’re done playing around, we have a lift to catch. Or we could hang out here, and I could keep sending people to the land that time forgot as they disembark their cars.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“A noble, albeit shortsighted, choice.”

I walked through the metal detector and managed to palm a confiscated can of aerosol spray from the security bin. I tucked it into my
dô
as Sata prodded me forward, to the next available lift.

The tether car was about the length and width of a bus, with two rows of seats facing the gigantic front window. This lift was empty, except for the pilot, a chubby guy with wide eyes who was raising his hands up over his head.

“Please don’t send me to another dimension,” the chubby guy said.

“I should, because it’s impolite to eavesdrop,” Sata said. “These cars aren’t difficult to run. It’s just an up button and a down button, isn’t it?”

Sata aimed the TEV at the pilot.

“Leave him alone, Sata,” I warned.

“Or else what? You’ll misfire again?”

“I beg you, sir,” the pilot said, spreading his hands. “My name is Hinge. Jonbar Hinge. You really can’t predict the potential ramifications of your actions here. The slightest miscalculation could have far-reaching consequences that—”

“Boring.” Sata activated the wormhole and imploded Jonbar. “Some lucky allosaurus will make a good meal out of that tubby.”

I swung a fist at Sata, and he easily dodged the blow, rapping me on the head with his forearm, dropping me to my knees.

I stared at him, disgusted. “I used to look up to you.”

“It’s so sad when our heroes fail us,” Sata said. “Even sadder to not even know who the heroes are. You’re hated by over one billion Americans, and yet you’re still fighting to save them. Why even bother, Talon? They’re meaningless. Worthless. There are an infinite number of them on an infinite number of worlds. You could wipe out a trillion of them—a trillion to the trillionth power—and there would still be infinitely more. What does it hurt to have a little fun with a select few?”

“Every life counts, Sata.”

“Impossible. You could never count them all. Now, strap yourself in, or you’ll be allosaur dessert after he finishes with Jonbar.”

I crawled into a seat and buckled my lap belt. Sata went into the control booth and barked a laugh. “I was right. Two buttons. What a predictably primitive species we are.” He sat down, pressed one, and said, “Going up.”

The lift raced skyward, pinning me in my chair. The car floated on a track of ceramic magnets, the same mechanism used in bullet trains, and reached 300 mph in less than twelve seconds. I stared, impotent, out the front window as we shot up.

“Take a good look at the Chicago skyline, Talon. It will be the last time you ever see it.”

The ground, and even the horizon, quickly disappeared as we entered the domain of clouds. When we reached our peak speed, my body adjusted and I unbuckled my belt.

Sata chuckled. “I’m reading that dim-witted pilot’s cue card. All the little factoids he was supposed to share with his passengers. Did you know the tether is wirelessly powered by the Tesla field? During construction, six workers were blinded by Tesla lightning, which made their eyeballs boil, then burst. That’s not a very family-friendly tidbit to impart, is it?”

I stood up. From the control room, I saw Sata frown.

“Sit back down, Talon, or I’ll hit the emergency brake and you’ll have to be scraped off the ceiling.”

I sat, and rebuckled my safety belt.

“The dashboard says we’re going through the Tesla field now.”

On cue, the windows darkened like automatic sunglasses. The entire car filled with sparkling blue light as we shot up through the Tesla field surrounding the earth—the same field that supplied our electricity. It looked like a million lightning storms, all firing at once. I would have been impressed, but it was eerily similar to what I just saw at the station while getting shot several hundred times. I was grateful to be in the lift, and not out in that mess.

“We have some free time before reaching the space station, so allow me to tell you what I have planned. Undoubtedly, news has gotten to the security force up there. I plan on dispatching them with the TEV. Unfortunately, unless any of them are wearing space suits, they’ll die immediately when they travel to a parallel earth without any space station.”

Sata smiled, as if the image pleased him.

“If any are in space suits, they’ll either float out into space, or orbit the earth a few times until gravity pulls them into a free fall. Hopefully their space suits will be heat-resistant, for when they reenter the atmosphere. And they’ll need parachutes. Of course, on dinosaur earth, they won’t have to worry about free-falling through the Tesla field. I’ve only done a cursory study of the life-forms, but there are several species of flying predators likely to pick them right out of the sky.”

His speech was getting faster and faster, like it had been a long time since he’d talked to anyone. And that might have been the case.

“The reason we’re going up here,” he continued, “is the same reason snipers use a perch. From this height, I’m able to aim my device thousands of miles in any direction. Yesterday I tagged Boise from the window of my bedroom suite at the Hilton. But this time it will be different. Once I send Chicago into the wormhole, the base of the space elevator will vanish as well, and it will float away. So I’ve made some provisions for that.”

I had a headache, and wanted more than anything for Sata to shut up. But as long as he was talking, he wasn’t killing me.

“In a locker in Airlock C, near the docking station, are two atmosphere suits of my own design, retrofitted with chutes. They’re insulated against cosmic rays, pressurized, and have rebreathers. They also have air jets, for getting to the earth’s atmosphere. Once gravity takes over, the suits will protect against the heat of reentry and the electricity of the Tesla field—though admittedly, I’ve never tested them. No one has ever skydived from two hundred miles up before.

“If you’re able to stop me, the suits will be unnecessary. But if you’re not, the TEV has a timer on it. You’ll have twenty minutes to jump out of the space station and get a safe distance away before Chicago disappears. We’ll then continue our game in Milwaukee. I hope you know your geography. You can adjust your aim accordingly as you plummet. Wisconsin is just west of the state that looks like a big mitten.”

Sata smiled again, obviously enjoying himself. “The highest known free fall was from twenty miles above the earth. The world-record holder attained speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour. I expect to beat that. Though, by next week, a world record won’t matter very much, because there won’t be a world left.”

“What about the nanopoison?” I asked. I was feeling lighter in my chair. We’d risen higher than the mesopshere, passing the Kármán line. The blue and white of sky had been replaced by the enormous blackness of space. I knew enough about gravity to understand that weightlessness didn’t happen because you were far from earth. In low-earth orbit, you weighed only 11 percent less than you did on the surface. Being weightless happened when you went into orbit around a planet, because an orbit was essentially a free fall around a curve. You could float in zero-G because you were falling at the same rate your ship was falling.

“That’s wonderful, Talon. You actually have delusions of winning. Alter-Talon has the antidote, of course. If you survive this game, there will be others to play. Which brings us to our current situation. At Airlock C, I’m going to mollybond the TEV to the wall, program the angle of the wormhole beam, set the timer, and leap to safety. Your goal is to try and stop me. It’s sort of like hyperfootball, with higher stakes.”

“Thanks for the info dump,” I said. “But what if I don’t want to play your game, Sata?”

His jubilant face darkened, becoming sinister. “Then I’ll call Alter-Talon, and you can listen in while he skins your pretty little wife.”

FORTY-SIX

I unbuckled my seat belt and stood up, convinced Sata wasn’t going to hit the brakes. He didn’t go through all of this meticulous planning for me to die in the lift car. I, however, had no such compunctions. If he died in the lift car, I was fine with that.

Sata eyed me, looking curious and somewhat superior, like a cat watching a mouse. Besides his TEV, I assumed he was armed. But he was pretty gung ho about going mano a mano, so I doubted he’d use weapons.

“You’re wearing
bō̄gu
,” Sata said. “Clever of you. But it won’t be enough.” He set down the TEV and reached behind his neck, drawing an aluminum sword.