TimeSplash (39 page)

But the young man was not at all impressed. “You look bigger in your pictures,” he said, softly. Then he grinned like a slavering hound and his grey eyes lit with anticipation. He sighted along the barrel of his strange weapon.

Lenin gritted his teeth and steeled himself for the bullet that would come at any moment. The room around him was shaking and trembling. A wind was blowing inside the library. A strange light glimmered from every surface. The walls behind his young assassin were melting like ice cream in the sun. It occurred to him that the bullet might already have struck him and that he was experiencing death itself.

A woman and another man charged in through the door. She was tall and young and incredibly beautiful. For a moment he thought she might be an angel. She too was carrying one of the short rifles. The man was a British soldier in full dress uniform. They both leapt at the assassin and sent him flying across the floor. The assassin’s gun went off with an ear-splitting explosion and the bullets that were meant for Lenin smashed into the counter beside him. The girl—no angel, after all—and the soldier grappled with the assassin on the ground. Lenin watched in shock and fascination.

The fallen man was immensely strong and fast. In an instant, he had turned on his attackers and smashed his gun into the soldier’s face. Alarm rose in him for the safety of the girl and he took a step toward her, stumbling on a floor that seemed to move beneath his feet. She had dropped her weapon in the struggle and faced her opponent empty handed. Yet the girl was by no means helpless. She punched the assassin hard in the throat and then again, with amazing speed. Yet, even as he choked, the wild-haired young man grabbed her by the neck of her blouse and slammed his forehead into her face. She cried out and fell back, stunned. They fight like street brawlers, Lenin thought. But not so the cavalryman. He had gained his feet, blood streaming from a cut on his temple. He drew his Webley Mark IV service revolver from the white holster at his side.

“Don’t move!” the soldier cried. The gun was pointing at the assassin but the corporal’s eyes were flicking around the room, confusion and fear in his expression. The library had become a heaving, stuttering maelstrom, and the soldier struggled to keep his attention on the man at his feet. When a huge crack exploded through the library wall, scattering books and splintering shelves, he jumped like a nervous cat, and the man on the floor jerked up his weapon and fired at him.

Lenin gasped in amazement as the weapon belched out a constant stream of fire and the soldier was literally torn apart by what must have been dozens of bullets. The fusillade threw the corporal backward, yet he did not fall. Instead, he hung suspended in the air, with blood that had splashed from his chest hanging in a series of high arcs above him.

The assassin didn’t spare a moment to admire his magical handiwork, but turned back immediately to aim his weapon at Lenin. The girl, blood oozing from a cut above her nose, was on him again like a tigress. So ferociously did she attack that she managed to knock the weapon from the man’s grasp and, rolling away from him across the cracking, erupting tiles, snatched up her own weapon, pointing it straight at him. He snarled like a savage beast and leapt at her, fingers clawed, as though he would tear her to pieces with them. She pulled the trigger and fired. Whether it was the diabolical weapon, or some other kind of sorcery, Lenin could not tell, but as soon as the weapon roared into flame, the assassin disappeared.

* * * *

Sandra yelled in frustration and stood up, throwing the submachine gun to the ground. Sniper had been yanked back. He was gone. There was no way now to kill him. She turned to the man in the Russian fur hat.

“Are you Lenin?”

The man was staring at her open-mouthed, but he seemed unharmed.

“
Da
,” he said, forgetting to speak English. “
Mehr zobut Lenin
.”

Sandra didn’t understand a word but it sounded Russian and he looked about right and that was good enough for her.

“You should get outside,” she told him. “This place isn’t safe.”

He nodded. “
Da. Spasiba
. ”

It sounded as if he understood, as if he had thanked her, but he did not move. She looked at the dome above her and the cracks in the walls and floor. She couldn’t drag him out or force him to go. That might bring the whole building down on them.

“Please. You’ll be safer outside.”

Nodding, he began to shuffle forward.

Taking it as a sign that he’d be all right, Sandra stepped around the still-suspended body of her dashing Hussar and hurried outside.

She had to shake Jay to wake him up.

“I…must have passed out.” It took him a moment to come to his senses. “Lenin! Is he safe?”

“Yes, I am safe.” The Russian stood over them. He looked less stunned now, more in command of himself. Sandra saw that he had picked up the submachine gun.

“Who are you? What are you?” His English was stilted and clumsy. “Why do you come to save me? What…” He looked around at the shimmering buildings and the shifting courtyard.

“What is happening?”

Jay propped himself up on one elbow and immediately fell back onto Sandra’s lap. He lay there with his eyes closed for a moment before he looked up at Sandra again.

“Sniper was yanked back,” she told him plaintively.

“But you saved him.” He looked toward the Russian.

“I want this weapon,” Lenin said. “I want lot of weapon. With this…”

“With that,” said Jay, “you could overthrow the Tsar. Your revolution would be guaranteed.”

He looked the confused Russian in the eye. “That’s why you’re still able to move around and talk while everyone else is twitching about like it’s Saturday night at the disco. You’re so focused on your damned revolution that no one and nothing else matters. Even this…chaos. Nothing could shift you from the path you’re on.”

Sandra put a hand on his arm. “Jay. Careful.”

Jay closed his eyes. Of course, he should mind what he said. Put the wrong idea in this man’s head, make him doubt himself, make him make one single decision he wouldn’t otherwise make, and the splash could be as bad as if Sniper had killed him outright. He reached out his left hand and grabbed his automatic from the ground beside him. He raised it, shakily, and pointed it at Lenin. “Put that gun down and walk away.” The Russian reluctantly obeyed. “Stay outdoors,” Jay added. “If you go inside, you could be injured or killed.”

“Why do you want me to live? Who are you?”

“Just piss off,” Sandra told him, picking up the gun.

Frowning, frustrated, Lenin moved away from them, watching them suspiciously.

“God, I feel sick,” Jay moaned.

“You look pretty awful too.” Sandra explored his wound, shaking her head. “Our suits are self-sealing if they get punctured. Yours has already sealed over the bullet hole. I can’t even see how much you’re bleeding.”

With a roar, part of the reading room’s wall collapsed. Dust billowed out from the hole, then billowed back in again.

“I think we’re safe enough here,” Sandra said. “And I don’t think Lenin’s going anywhere. If you can just hang on for fifteen minutes, honey, we’ll be on our way back. They’ll have medics waiting, I’m sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Jay said. It was a struggle to stay awake. “I’m sorry you didn’t get Sniper. I know what it meant.”

Sandra shook her head. “It’s okay. It would have been nice but…” But somehow it wasn’t as important as it once was. In fact, it hadn’t been for some time, she realised. Jay nodded, as if he understood. “When we get back,” he said, “I want to take you to the ’tractives. You know, like a normal couple.”

“A date?”

“Yeah. If that’s all right. I know I’m not anything special. And you’re…you’re so…”

“I’d love to. We’ll go see a big blockbuster, then have a burger and fries, just like real people.”

He smiled. “I’ve had enough of this running around being shot at for a while. I need a rest.”

She stroked his head and smiled at him through a blur of tears. “Fifteen minutes, darling. Then we can both have a rest.”

The yankback threw Sniper hard against the bars of the cage. The bodies of T-800 and Edna crashed around him. For a moment he was dazed and winded.

But he was alive.

Despite the pain in his leg, he threw back his head and laughed for the sheer unexpected joy of it. He’d beaten them all. He’d been the first to go back so far, farther than any other brick ever had, and he’d come back alive to boast about it. He was the best. No one could ever doubt it. No one would ever dare do again what he had done.

And, as for the splash, the library had looked like it was about to fall on Lenin’s stupid, fat head—and on that psycho bitch Patty too. Even if it didn’t, he’d left a trail of destruction from Deptford to Bloomsbury. Hundreds of people had been caught in it. Probably dozens had died. When the backwash came, it was going to be a monster!

A small shadow of doubt crept across his moment of triumph. Somehow Patty had gone back to try to stop him. Whoever had sent her could match what he’d done. Well that was all right. It just meant that, next time, he’d have to go back farther, make the whole splash bigger. There would come a point where no one would dare follow him. No one.

Until then, he was alive, and free, and London would soon be in flames. He laughed again. Life was good.

“Having fun?”

He jumped to his feet, pain vying with surprise. A woman was standing there, outside the cage.

“Camilla!”

“Hello, Sniper. Care to share the joke?”

She looked crumpled, her normally immaculate hair and clothing dishevelled. There were bruises on her face. More importantly, she held an Uzi submachine gun in her hands and it was pointing right at him.

Sniper swallowed hard and glanced around the cage. T-800 and Edna were slumped across the only exit and the door… The fucking door opened inwards! He would need to drag them out of the way before he could get out. He wondered what kind of protection two bodies would provide against a modern automatic weapon at close range. Not much, he supposed. He limped to the back of the cage, adding a meagre two metres of extra distance between him and the gun.

“Good news, Camilla,” he said, forcing a smile. “I suppose you’re here on behalf of the investors, to see how things worked out. Well, you can tell them it was a huge success. Well, they’ll see for themselves in a couple of hours when London turns into a madhouse. Their money was well invested. You must be up for a promotion now, eh? Or at least a big bonus?”

Camilla said nothing. She just continued to watch him with cold clear eyes. Sniper cast about the room, looking for something that might help. Maybe something to distract her for a few seconds while he dragged those stupid bodies out of the way.

That’s when he noticed Klaatu lying face down on the concrete floor beside the control console. The boy wasn’t moving. There was blood all around him and ugly holes in his back and legs. It shocked Sniper as much as anything that had happened yet that day.

Rage boiled up in him. “You fucking deranged bitch! You’ve killed him. What the fuck was that for? Are you out of your tiny little mind?” He grabbed Edna’s body and threw him across the cage. His leg was screaming with pain, but he welcomed it. Pain and rage were all he wanted just then.

He reached for T-800’s body and froze as gunfire exploded into the echoing spaces of the warehouse.

“Do you want to die right now,” Camilla asked, calmly lowering the gun to point it at him again, “or would you rather have a few more seconds?”

Sniper sat down heavily, his hands still resting on T-800. He tried to look crestfallen and defeated, but inside he was excited and triumphant. Tucked into the back of T-800’s harness, out of Camilla’s line of sight, was a small handgun. It was just ten centimetres from his right hand.

“Go on and shoot me, bitch,” he said. “It’s all over now anyway. I did what I wanted to do. The splash was incredible.” Imperceptibly, his hand moved toward the gun.

* * * *

Camilla had had enough. It had been a real pleasure killing the boy and she’d had fun watching Sniper squirm, but she needed to get on and get clear before the backwash came. It was time to end it.

“Who gives a toss what you’ve done, you stupid jerk?” she sneered. “You’re just a tool. Something to be used and discarded when the job’s done. And that’s what I’m here for. To tidy up the loose ends. To finish the job properly. That was always the plan, you know. Get you to do the dirty work, take the risks, and then blow you away. You were never going to live to brag about this. I always had this planned for you. You and your little boyfriend over there.”

For an instant, her eyes flicked to where Klaatu lay, for a fraction of a second, the barrel of the Uzi moved in the same direction, and in that moment she realised she had made a fatal mistake. Sniper rolled behind his dead friend and came up holding a gun, aiming it directly at her chest. Shocked, Camilla couldn’t muster her thoughts quickly enough to shoot first. The knowledge that she was going to die right there and then, was all that her mind could cope with. Sniper, on the other hand, looked cool and relaxed as he squeezed the trigger, clearly savouring the fear and defeat that must have been in her eyes. Click! Click! Click!