Eschaton Read online

  Caitlin was inspecting the other cabinets. ‘We could start by moving back a few years. This all looks pretty degraded and badly maintained. I think this place has seen better days.’

  Josh touched the wheel and felt the timeline unravel beneath his fingers.

  Its chronology spanned at least four hundred years, but Josh found it difficult to estimate exactly how far into the future they’d travelled. The facility had none of the temporal signposts a normal vestige would have, and its timeline was nothing like the ones the Copernicans created for the continuum.

  From what he could understand they were inside some kind of massive industrial complex built into the base of a volcano. The energy shaft they had crossed earlier was a massive geo-thermal generator, constructed to power the entire base.

  Josh chose a cluster of events at the end of the first century of operation and took Caitlin’s hand.

  ‘Let’s see what this place looked like when it was at its prime.’

  ‘This is more like it!’ Caitlin said, as she looked around at the clean, brightly-lit room of glistening steel and glass. All the pods were empty — the dust and mildew that had coated them was gone.

  Josh tried the door, and this time it opened easily.

  ‘Whoever built this facility planned on it lasting a hell of a long time,’ she observed.

  Josh nodded. ‘At least another three hundred years.’

  ‘But what does it do?’

  ‘That’s what we’re about to find out,’ said Josh, stepping through the door.

  Behind the door was a lift shaft. A metal platform floated in space where the floor should be, taking their weight without moving as they nervously stepped on to it.

  As if triggered by their presence, a holographic model of the facility appeared in the air between them, their location marked by a glowing red dot at the very bottom of the map. Caitlin quickly found that she could use her hands to rotate the model and zoom the layout. Many of the areas were marked with codes, numeric sequences or symbols that meant absolutely nothing to Josh.

  Finally she pointed out an area labelled ‘Central control’.

  ‘I guess that’s probably the best place to start?’

  Josh nodded and she tapped the label and the lift started to ascend.

  ‘Who were those guys in the timesuit? You seemed to know him — them.’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Just someone from way back.’

  ‘A friend?’

  Josh shook his head. ‘Not exactly. We used to hang out together,’ he lied, not wanting to have to explain his past, reminding himself that this version of Caitlin had never met Lenin, nor got shot by him in a gunfight.

  ‘So, how on earth did he end up in this place?’

  Josh had no idea what could have happened to Lenin in this timeline, nor why there seemed to be multiple versions of him.

  ‘Some kind of cloning maybe?’

  Caitlin’s eyebrows furrowed, the way they always did when she was mulling over a problem.

  ‘Sim once told me that the Copernicans had a prediction about genetics.’ She paused as if struggling to remember the details. ‘He said it was one of the potential wildcards from the O.D. — the Outliers Division.’

  ‘What’s an outlier?’ asked Josh, as the lift changed direction and proceeded sideways.

  She grabbed hold of his arm to steady herself. ‘Outside chances, small developments that can affect the whole timeline — left-field, wacky, conspiracy shit — Sim loved studying them.’

  ‘And cloning was one of them?’

  ‘One of many. It was going to revolutionise medical treatment and extend human life beyond one-hundred-and-fifty years.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘It also meant we were heading for over-population within two centuries. The O.D. had raised its threat level to a six.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘It’s one below an extinction-level event.’

  The elevator was beginning to slow, as an indicator on the holo-model showed them approaching the command centre.

  The lift doors opened and they stepped out into something from Star Trek. It was like the bridge of a starship with giant curved screens displaying hundreds of images from different locations, each one labelled with the same numeric sequence they’d seen on the tunnels.

  In the centre of the room a man was floating in a glass tube, his body held suspended in a clear liquid with cables and tubes plugged into vital points on his torso. He seemed totally unaware of their presence, his entire focus directed at the video feeds.

  Caitlin walked towards the screens and Josh followed close behind. Neither spoke, both too intrigued by the scenes playing out on the monitors. Random parts of the past were projected across the displays, each filmed from a head-mounted camera. Josh caught glimpses of Nazi nuclear bunkers, Egyptian temples and what looked like the Thames on fire. It was like watching a hundred different versions of the history channel.

  Small egg-shaped objects floated past their legs, emitting a feint blue halo. Caitlin moved aside as one came too close and its field turned to red. Josh decided against trying to touch it.

  ‘How are they filming that?’ Josh whispered, looking at footage of a Roman soldier marching out of view.

  Caitlin looked puzzled. They both knew it shouldn’t be possible to take that kind of tech back into the past.

  ‘That’s not video,’ said a man’s voice.

  Josh span around to the body in the tank, but his gaze was still firmly fixed on the array of screens.

  ‘Do not be alarmed,’ the voice continued calmly, as a semi-translucent hologram flickered into life in front of them. ‘I am a custodian sub-routine seven-sigma. May I ask how you arrived here?’

  The man was in his mid-forties, with dark hair and black-rimmed spectacles. He wore a grey tunic with the double-F insignia on his breast pocket.

  ‘We don’t know,’ lied Josh, winking at Caitlin.

  ‘Interesting,’ said seven-sigma thoughtfully. ‘This may seem like a strange question, but when exactly are you from?’

  Josh suddenly realised that the avatar looked remarkably like the professor from the university — the one who’d caught him after Lenin’s stupid drugs heist, the one he’d left the tachyon with.

  ‘Eighteenth century,’ answered Caitlin.

  ‘And you?’ asked seven-sigma, turning to Josh.

  Josh wasn’t paying attention. Instead he was examining the face of the semi-transparent figure closely — a sense of dread growing in the pit of his stomach. ‘What?’

  ‘What year are you from?’

  ‘Twenty-sixteen.’

  The hologram faded for a moment, and Josh noticed that some of the screens flickered and went dark at the same time. As the image returned the old man in the tank shuddered and then went still.

  ‘Is he okay?’ asked Caitlin.

  ‘A minor power issue, nothing to concern yourself with. We are quite safe up here. May I offer you something to drink? The professor has been expecting you, but he is currently in a restore cycle.’

  The hologram waved them towards a space where a group of comfortable chairs appeared from the floor.

  Caitlin raised her eyebrows at Josh, as if to ask if he had a clue what was going on.

  14

  Chapter House

  [London. Date: Present day]

  Sim took his house key from his pocket and walked up to the front door of 71 Birkbeck Avenue. To any normal passer-by it was just another Victorian terraced house in a leafy part of Chiswick, and so it would remain until he turned the key anti-clockwise.

  It was nothing more than a subtle change in the shape and colour of the door that signified the entrance to the Chapter House, but when he stepped over the threshold he knew he was home.

  His father had built the house to be portable for just this kind of emergency. The random collection of rooms and floors could be detached and moved to another location in a matter of minutes. Sim had moved several times in the l
ast few days, just as his father had told him to do when they had arrested his mother.

  It felt strange not to be welcomed by Arcadin; their old butler had left with the rest of the staff just before the raid. It was over a week since the Protectorate had come and arrested the rest of his family and Sim had done his best to keep ahead of them ever since.

  He’d considered hiding the ring in a number of places; at the bottom of the baths in the basement, beneath his bed with the festering underwear — but somehow it felt right to keep it in the roof garden, amongst his mother’s collection of extinct carnivorous plants.

  While he was burying it inside the pot labelled ‘Archaeamphora’, he felt the familiar nudge of a beak against his leg. It was Maximillian, his mother’s dodo, whose constant chittering reminded Sim that he hadn’t been fed for a few days.

  The dodo followed Sim around the house and down into the larder where he found a tin of sardines.

  ‘Where are they Max?’ he asked the bird, dropping the last of the sardines into his open beak.

  Max squawked his gratitude and waddled off.

  ‘Big help you are.’

  He was sure Dalton had arrested his mother for purely political reasons. The trumped up charge of fatecasting was just an excuse. She’d been far too outspoken about the Eschaton Division’s heavy handed approach, and her loyalties lay with the Draconians, which made her a prime target.

  Sim went back to his bedroom and took the note out of his almanac. It was the last message from his mother.

  My dear boy, if you are reading this then the very worst has happened. I have been taken by the fascists. I have no time to explain, but it’s imperative that you remain at large and move the house to somewhere safe. The Eschaton Cascade must be stopped. Find Caitlin and Josh — they will need all the help they can get.

  Stay safe my brave boy. M x

  Sitting on his bed he read it over again, looking for hidden codes or cyphers, but all he could glean from it were three instructions: move the house, stop the Eschaton Cascade and find Caitlin.

  Then he remembered Astor.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked his friend, shivering on platform 5 at Waterloo Station. ‘I’ve been back here seven times.’

  It was a chilly December in 11.866 and the morning commuters were just stepping off the 08:34 from Guildford.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sim. ‘I was doing something for Eddington. Were you followed?’

  Astor looked furtively at the crowd of Victorian frock-coated men as they filed passed the steaming engine towards the exit. ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

  He handed Sim a small stack of books neatly tied with string. ‘This is everything I could find. The Eschaton Division had requisitioned nearly all of it, but the one by Peterson is quite good.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sim. ‘Where will you go now?’

  ‘I’ve got an aunt in Ethelred’s court who’s been studying the House of Wessex. I thought I could stay with her for a while.’

  Sim smiled and patted Astor on the shoulder. ‘Just keep an eye on those Danes.’

  Astor was right about Peterson’s treatise on the Eschaton Cascade. It was by far the most detailed thesis on the twelve crises. A slim volume of no more than a hundred or so pages, Sim spent the rest of the day familiarising himself with the theory.

  It wasn’t the easiest thing to follow; the formulae that Peterson used was not standard stochastic sequencing and his attempts to identify a unified thread that linked all of the crises together was tenuous to say the least.

  Sim made notes of his own, separating out the facts from the conjecture until he had the basics. He divided the twelve crises into four parts and was just about to analyse the grouping when Maximilian jumped up on the bed. His mother would have gone berserk if she knew he was letting the bird have the run of the house, but Sim enjoyed his company.

  ‘Not now Max!’ Sim said, scowling at the ridiculous bird.

  But Max wouldn’t be told, and jumped up and down until Sim looked at him.

  There was something shiny and silver in his beak — a key.

  Sim had only ever seen this particular key once before; it was his father’s most treasured possession.

  The key to the Parabolic Chamber.

  15

  Reaving

  Jarius stood over the pale corpse of Professor Eddington, trying to summon the courage to touch the body. The mortuary was a cold and soulless place, borrowed from the exhibition room of the Paris Morgue. Bodies were laid out on grey marble slabs, continuously sprayed from above with water from an antiquated sprinkler system.

  He’d never come this close to a dead body, at least not a naked one. Seeing him laid out like an exhibit was very different to those casualties of war and plague they’d all witnessed during training. Those were more like props from a movie, or a photograph, and there was an unreal sense of detachment when you didn’t know the victim personally.

  This was different, more visceral, and the stench was making him gag.

  Jarius was preparing himself to enter the timeline of a dead man, even though it went against everything he’d been taught. It was known as ‘Reaving’, and Bedlam was full of seers who’d gone insane from attempting it.

  Eddington’s skin was cold and waxy when he touched it, the indentations made by his fingers remaining long after he lifted them away.

  I can’t do it, he thought, looking at the rose-like wound in the corpse’s chest. The man is too long dead.

  Yet, the alternative was to face Dalton and his damned sword. His leader wasn’t going to show him any mercy for another failure. Jarius had watched him kill for less than this, and even though he knew many of his secrets, it was foolish to think he wouldn’t make an example of him to the others.

  The timeline was already quite degraded when he finally entered it. Skeins of memories and events moved in random eddies around the dark centre. The terminus was like a black hole, consuming everything around it and no matter how hard Jarius tried to avoid looking into the darkness, there was something drawing him in.

  Frantically, like a kid snatching at butterflies, he grasped the last remnants of Eddington’s life, hoping they would have some significance, but finding only snippets of random, unimportant memories: a picnic on a hill, the face of a lover, and the last words of a dying father: ‘Nice to see you.’

  There was nothing useful left except the black void, which seemed to speak to him of other terrible things, and Jarius felt himself give in to it.

  16

  Parabolic Chamber

  The Parabolic Chamber was a circular room with a domed roof. The cylindrical walls were covered in mirror lenses configured to create an infinite number of reflections of any subject that stood at its centre — which was exactly where Sim appeared, still holding the key.

  It was hard to focus on any one image, and Sim found it easier to close his eyes while he made his way to the side of the room.

  His father was a temporal architect and had spent most of his adult life working on his ‘experiment’. It was a complex arrangement of lensing prisms that was supposed to allow the operator to search the continuum for anything that had intersected with their own timeline.

  His father described it as a kind of temporal telescope, letting you explore any part of history that you were even remotely connected to without having to go rummaging around in a museum or a library to find the relevant object — and it was very accurate.

  And incredibly powerful.

  Which was why his parents had never let their kids anywhere near it.

  Sim took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The room seemed to shimmer as the lensing fields adjusted to his presence, so he closed them once more.

  Lensing was not one of his favourite activities. The multi-layered vision of possibilities gave him motion sickness, and since it wasn’t something any decent, upstanding Copernican should ever be seen doing, he’d managed to avoid throwing up over himself for quite some time.

&n
bsp; But not now — now he had to find Caitlin.

  Taking three steps away from the wall he opened his eyes. He was staring into an infinite number of copies of himself, and only by focussing on the memory of her could he make them fade away.

  The chamber darkened as the first images of Caitlin appeared. Sitting at the dinner table next to Dalton, it was the last time Sim had seen her before she joined the Draconian Academy. He lingered in the moment, enjoying the banter between his friends and wondering where they all were now.

  He focused in on her timeline and moved forward, following her through her training until he came to the moment she entered the maelstrom. The lines disappeared and he dare not follow them, but there was a tiny thread that reappeared later and he latched onto it and dived in.

  The images were distorted and blurry, but Sim could just make out that she was at some kind of party. He could hear Josh’s voice in the background, but everyone except her was an outline, a two-dimensional sketch. Caitlin seemed to be rocking out to some eighties classic, dancing like she did when she’d been drinking.

  Sim shifted forward in time, following her through the gardens of some university towards an old college building. Rufius appeared in the periphery and they followed him into a wood, when something really odd happened.

  Suddenly it was as though a thousand timelines converged on them at the same time — too many to count. The event became difficult to hold onto, the effort making Sim nauseous, and he fell to his knees.

  He closed his eyes and reluctantly let go of her timeline.

  When he opened them again he was staring at pale versions of himself kneeling on the floor.

  Something bad had happened, and there was no more path to follow. Caitlin had simply disappeared from the continuum, which could only mean one of three things: either she’d died — which he didn’t even want to contemplate, entered the maelstrom, or gone into the future. None of these options were anything he could do much about.