Triptych (37 page)

Yet from far away, it would look identical to an official scout ship. Basil knew this for a fact. He
remembered.
His stomach flipped and something sour pressed against the base of his throat.

“Was it this one?” Basil asked, swallowing heavily, dropping his voice into a whisper for no reason save that it felt wrong to ask this out loud, to vocalize it. “Can you tell?”

Gwen shook her head. She had to swallow once before speaking, too. “It was so crushed up that I didn’t…I thought the only modifications were in the cockpit. But this means they stole more than one of the ships from the Institute or somewhere and fixed them up. They must have been planning for months. I just don’t
understand.
”

Basil came around beside her, sparing only a glance at the parchment frailty of the skin on her face, the deep hollows under her eyes. She looked haunted. She looked as if she was remembering this ship, not from three days ago when they had travelled in time, but from the first time she had seen it, before she could talk.

Basil didn’t resist the urge to press the dry palm of his hand against her hot cheek. She was pale, but her skin burned hot with her anger, her confusion. She turned her face into his touch. He wanted her to kiss the base of his thumb, like she usually did when they were sharing an intimate moment like this, but she didn’t. Still the soldier, as long as she had the vest on.

He turned away, climbed up the ladder rungs welded awkwardly up the ship’s sleek body and pressed his face against the window of the cockpit. There, on the seat, was an old fashioned mini disc player. Basil had a very good guess at what album they’d find inside it.

He dropped down to the dusty, rat-crap strewn floor of the shed. The force made the dust billow up, bringing with it the gagging scent of vermin and gasoline. He tried not to breathe too deeply. “I think there’s just this one.”

“But,” Gwen said, then stopped and licked her lips and said again, “but we already shot one down.”

“No, we
will
shoot one down,” Basil said, and now he could feel it, the surge of adrenaline that was the preface to discovery, the soaring glee at being
right
. “This one.” He tapped the nose. A low metallic chime rang through the shed, and he grinned.

Gwen’s face went even more ashen and her mouth thinned into a knife slice. She pulled her gun from her hip holster and levelled it on the ship.

“No, Gwen,” Basil said hastily, his joy cracking apart in the face of the reality of what this discovery meant. “What if the bullets ricochet? I…I’ll get under the hood! Gimme a sec.”

Reluctantly, Gwen reholstered. Basil got down on his knees, gagging at the closer odour of stale machine oil and old feces, and peered under the nose of the craft. There wasn’t really a “hood” to these things so much as a hatch-door that let a mechanic stick his head and shoulders up into the guts of the ship.

He raised his hands, his shoulders too broad for an opening made for an entirely different species, and began tracing the wires back to their metal origins, trying to figure out how to do the most amount of damage that would be the least repairable in the shortest amount of time.

It was easy to pull this wire, yes, put it over here, yes, okay, and re-secure a piece upside down so when the ship…oh yes, like that!

He was so focussed on the multi-coloured strands and the clumsy patches the workers had engineered that he had no warning. He heard Gwen’s sharp cry — déjà vu! — felt the tug on his ankle that yanked him out of the ship and smacked the back of his head off the floor. Then he was staring at the barrel of a paradoxically wide-mouthed pistol. Or, no, the barrel was normal circumference. It was just that Basil’s head was swirling from the hit and the gun was really, disturbingly close to his face.

Basil tried to bring his hands up, but the woman in the tight teal flight suit kicked them back down. She had a helmet under her other arm, the animatronic face on the thing nauseatingly familiar.

So was her own.

Basil tried to keep the look of dumb surprise out of his expression, but he was sure it was a losing battle.

“Agent Aitken,” he said softly, by way of greeting.

She inclined her head slightly, like a magnanimous Hollywood villain. Impotent, the gun aimed between his eyes, he lay still on the ground and shook with fury. She looked to the side and Basil followed her gaze, found Gwen crumpled against the wall. Fear twisted his guts until he saw that her chest was still rising and falling, still alive, thank God. The gash in her temple was oozing blood again and a goose egg was already forming.

“She’s a hard one to keep down,” Aitken said. Lying beside Gwen was a bloodied asp.

Basil shook his head. Then he wished he hadn’t. Blackness swirled at the corner of his vision, bulbous and thick like the lava in the lamp he’d had on his bedside table as a child.

“But you’re one of
us
,” Basil protested, blinking hard to keep conscious. “You’re Institute!”

“I was!” Aitken snapped. “I believed in what we were doing. Until…until you two
twisted it
, made it
wrong.
”

“It’s Integration! Jesus, Aitken, it’s what we were hired to
do.”

“No!”

The shout echoed through the shed, bouncing painfully against the metal walls and back at Basil’s already throbbing head. He winced.

“No,” Aitken snarled again, her voice dropping low. “No, they were supposed to become like
us
. They were supposed to be made
right
. We weren’t supposed to be like them. It’s wrong. And you two are to blame for everything, for all of it, for all those disgusting lemmings following you into Aglunation! It’s perverted!”

“You xenophobic asshole,” Basil snarled and Aitken’s finger tensed on the trigger. But she was smiling. And she didn’t fire. And Basil had to know. “You’re the mole, then. And you didn’t warn your compatriots about today.”

“I needed the distraction.” Aitken smiled. “Something to cover the noise that this thing is going to make, keep the Institute and their nosy little devices busy.” She patted the nose of the ship affectionately and then brought the heel of her modified boot down hard on the Flasher tracker that had fallen out of Basil’s pocket. It crunched hard, and Basil winced again.

“But they died!” Basil protested.

Aitken’s lips curled up further and for the first time Basil caught the glaze-eyed expression of complete belief in what she was saying, the zealot’s fever. “For the greater good,” she said, and it sounded like a recitation. “All to help me with this, the only important mission.”

Basil seethed. “So you shot Kalp on purpose. Did you plant the letter in our house, too, you fucking traitor? Did that trigger come from one of your Flashers?”

Aitken laughed and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected hard with the side of Basil’s cheek and he was rolled onto his side with the strength of it, seeing sudden stars. Basil curled up to protect his head, but no further blows came. Carefully, he peered out from between his elbows. Blood ran into his eyes. It stung.

“It wasn’t me,” Aitken said gently, as if she was talking to a particularly stupid child. “I have no idea who sent it. It was fortuitous, though.”

“Fortui — !” Basil was too furious to finish the word. He spluttered.

“And now…” Aitken said, and one handed, slipped the alien head on over her own, hiding a blade of a smile behind an animatronic snout and fake fangs. She reached into a zippered pocket of her flight suit and there was another altered cellular phone, a red progression bar sliding inexorably from one side of the screen to the other. Warming up. She pulled something else out of her pocket — a Flasher trigger. The one that Basil had dropped in the conference room yesterday. She snapped it in place against the back of the cell phone and the progression bar on the screen started flickering urgently.

But why would she need Basil’s Flasher trigger when there had been one right on the workshop table?

Oh, no, of course!
That
was why Aitken had been trying to get into the warehouse, and hadn’t retreated when Wright had given the order. She had been trying for the new Flasher trigger just in case. She had the burnt out, half melted one she had stolen from Basil, and it looked like it might survive at least one or two more trips, but Basil couldn’t blame her for wanting another, more reliable component.

But then, where did the newer one that Basil had found in the cockpit come from?

And then suddenly Basil
understood.
 

Basil took a deep breath to ground his spinning head, reached into his pocket while her eyes were on securing the trigger to her Flasher, and flicked the trigger in his hand at Aitken. She ducked and it pinged off the back of the seat and skittered into the cockpit, where he assumed the crash would jam it into the console. Exactly where he had found it three days ago.

“Missed me,” Aitken gloated. “Just for that, I think I’m going to do you two perverted little shits first.” She sneered, and the mouth of the fake head moved with her words, and eerie ghosting that just looked
wrong
. “Gwen first, though, I think. Just so you can have the agony of watching her fade from existence.”

“It won’t be like that,” Basil wheezed from the floor.

It wouldn’t, actually. If Gwen was erased from history, it wouldn’t be as if Basil would be able to watch her vanish beside him, like a ghost in an old sci-fi flick. No, the world would just rewrite itself, instantly, and Basil would suddenly and without knowing, without remembering, be somewhere else, doing something else, and Gwen would have never existed.

But this scenario wasn’t actually going to play out like that. Basil meant that, too, but he was fairly sure that Aitken didn’t understand.

Aitken lifted her Flasher, and Basil recognized that, too. He’d spent a whole night fixing it, once. “Funny thing, serendipity. Trying to figure out their transportation technology, we accidentally invented a time machine. We’re going to use their technology to make sure that the perverts like you who welcomed them — 
fucked them
 — were never born.” Basil felt his eyes widen. “Oh yeah,
Doctor
Basil Grey
. I’m going to take great fucking pleasure in killing your mother while you’re still inside her. Then just think of the kind of reception those
freaks
will get when they show up, especially when they’re already in the books for murders that are thirty years old.”

Bile roiled against Basil’s Adam’s apple, but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to give this
psychopath
any reason to shoot right now and be done with him instead. It would be an irony, a bloody cop-out on the part of whatever sci-fi author had been writing the last few surreal months of his life.

Aitken chuckled. It looked wrong, parodied by the mechanical mouth.

Everything was all wrong
.

“Pussy,” she snarled at Basil. When he didn’t lash out or fight back, she stepped over him.

Basil could have grabbed her foot, dragged her to the ground, wrestled with her on the reeking floor, maybe even managed to wrest the gun away and take that final deadly shot.

Instead he said, “Leave her alone. Please.”

Aitken scoffed without even turning her eyes back to him, without loosing her grip on her gun. “Why should I?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Basil said. “Because nobody deserves…not for just loving — ”

“You sure as fuck do!” Aitken snarled and her voice rang once again through the metal hanger, beating against the side of Basil’s abused temples and his already-puffing ear.

Basil closed his eyes and said nothing else. There was no point in provoking her any further. One stray bullet could finish either him or Gwen. One ricochet and it could be over. No, better to let the asshole go. Because she wasn’t going to succeed. Because she was still going to die. Basil had wondered why a few bullets from a P-90 could have taken down that ship, and he now knew that it was because the ship had already been sabotaged.

Gwen was going to get Aitken between the eyes in five minutes, three days, and twenty-nine years ago.

Aitken mounted the steps and heaved herself into the cockpit. She connected the Flasher to a twisted cord of wires that Basil had already ripped one sleeve on, trying to disconnect them from the scrunched metal of the ruined dash. A snap of a switch and Raquel Winkelaar’s hideous excuse for music slammed into the air around them. The engine whined to life.

Basil’s heart collided against his throat in time with the syncopated backbeat.

For an instant he was back in that parking lot with the punks and the baseball bats. He could hear Gwen’s anguished shriek in the piercing riff of the electric guitar, Kalp’s furious roar in the thumping drums. Basil swallowed heavily, closed his eyes, pushed that memory, that horror back and down, away.

“Any last words, doc?”

“Yeah. I know how this is going to end,” Basil said softly.

Aitken laughed. “Oh yeah? And how does this end, Doctor Specialist Basil fucking Grey?”

Basil lifted his empty hand, formed his thumb and index finger into a child’s mimic of a gun. “Bang,” he said softly. Aitken blinked. “Try not to look too surprised this time, though,” Basil cautioned, giving voice to his earlier thought. “It’s a pretty stupid face to die in.”

She flipped him the bird, closed the clear hood, then jammed her hand down on the Flasher.

The ship disappeared. The bright light, the loud noise that Basil had expected, none of it happened. Just a quiet sucking pop where the air rushed into the vacuum.

Gone.

He dropped his arm, a circular and horrible déjà vu prickling under his skin.

“Bang,” he said again, staring at his hand.

NEXT

BASIL WATCHED THE HOUSE
blossom into view around the bend in the road, fancied he could see it emerging up from the curvature of the Earth, before he saw the name on the red-flagged mailbox.