Farley felt a mortal chill. Even now, eight thousand miles and seventy years away, he heard the keening air across the straining wings. The stuttering clatter of the .50s back behind him. The whump of flak exploding in the air ahead. Even now.
Farley reached for the tablet like a man receiving unsolicited commandments. Breathed fast as he regarded the plummeting shape he knew contained himself and nine other men. The arc of their lives beyond that captured moment. The estranging world beyond these walls. The unconveyable immensity still locked inside himself. The vindication in one impossible image. Here it is. Here it is at last.
The screen timed out and Farley looked down on his darkly mirrored face. Old and tired and struggling for control. He looked up at Kitchner and held out the tablet and she took it back.
“Thank you,” they both said at the same time. And laughed in surprise.
“But how did Mr. Broben know to send me to record you?” Kitchner asked. “I never met him.”
“The military buys a lot of hardware from Blue and Gray Technology,” General Andrews said. “I had a lot of business dealings with Jerry over the years. Some of it was highly classified systems. We both had top-secret clearance and a lot of connections.” He shrugged. “War hero, missions over Germany—something like this was bound to make its way to him.”
“So Jerry sends Dr. Kitchner to hear our story because she’s the one person on earth with evidence to support it,” Farley said. “But he wanted you here, too.”
“I have a pretty good idea why, now that I’ve heard your story,” Andrews said. He nodded at Kitchner. “And yours, doctor.”
Kitchner frowned.
Andrews leaned back in his chair. “When Jerry wasn’t trying to sell me technology from the future, he was beating me at poker and drinking my Pappy van Winkle’s. I would get him talking about the war, because my grandfather had flown out of Thurgood. He was a flight engineer on the Rude Awakening.”
“Rude Awakening.” Farley frowned. “She went down over—” He stopped.
“Over Zennhausen.” Andrews nodded. “I never met him. When I was growing up I was obsessed with the Fighting Forty-Ninth, and the Zennhausen mission in particular.” He shook his head. “I would pester Jerry all the time about it. He never let on there was anything odd about the mission, but some things about it just never made sense to me. The explosion was ten times the blast it should have been, even for a munitions plant. It went up like you dropped an A-bomb on it.”
“We dropped a typhon on it. Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”
“Maybe. But then Dr. Kitchner’s bunker showed up.” He looked at her. “Only one section of it was devoted to Allied bombing records,” he said. “The rest was highly classified information about the Zennhausen facility.”
“You were one of the people who took over the project?” Kitchner asked.
“No, ma’am. I only found out about it later, the same way Jerry did—through channels. People who knew my interests. I didn’t know about your picture. But I did find out the truth about Zennhausen.”
Farley felt an odd misgiving, but he had to ask. “What about it?”
Andrews glanced at Dr. Kitchner. “Most people know the Nazis were trying to build an atomic weapon,” he said. “They actually came close to building a working reactor, they just ran out of time.”
“And Nazis.”
“Yes, sir. But they were also trying to invent high-energy weapons. Very sophisticated stuff—particle beams, directed-energy streams. Things we’ve only just learned how to build.”
Farley’s hands shook on his cane. “Zennhausen wasn’t a munitions plant at all. Was it.”
“No, sir,” said Andrews. “It was an energy-weapons lab.”
“Energy-weapons lab,” Farley repeated dully.
Andrews nodded. “Huge. Underground. Blast-hardened. Self-contained. Heavily defended. And way ahead of its time.” He spread his hands. “When I found out the truth I thought, well, now I know my grandfather’s death really meant something. Because who knows what might have happened if that mission had failed? What the Germans might have gone on to invent.”
“Who knows?” Farley whispered.
“You do, captain.” Andrews pointed at him. “Jerry knew. Your crew. And now I know, too. If that mission had failed, the war would have dragged on, escalated, overtaken everything. Until the Germans invented the locus.”
Farley nodded. Heart pounding.
Andrews leaned forward. “You and your crew didn’t blow up a munitions plant. You prevented the future you had just escaped. You saved billions of lives.”
Farley saw it. The jewel-like symmetry of it. The explosion hadn’t just destroyed the locus. It had destroyed the facility that would have built the locus.
Ever since the Mission Farley had worried about what might emerge from the knowledge they’d brought back, feared the discovery of the thing they had really dropped over Germany. A force immeasurably more destructive than any mere bomb. A thing that had reached across time to achieve its goals. But by attempting to manipulate events to guarantee its existence, it actually had prevented its own creation. Unmade the future Farley had seen.
All those years of lonely silence. All that private fear. All the awful dreams and sleepless nights. And all of it suddenly redeemed. They had prevented the end of the world. For one brief moment of raw apprehension Farley’s troubled soul was given peace.
But he could not stop his mind from following the implications of the general’s revelation, and fleeting redemption fell beneath the relentless machinery of consequence. Because Farley realized that by preventing that future, he and his crew also had eliminated the typhons, the doomsday crater, the Redoubt, the Dome—and Wennda.
A white-hot flare ignited in his chest. He fell back in his chair.
“Captain?” he heard Dr. Kitchner ask. “Are you all right?” From far away he watched the cane shake in his hands. Wake turbulence. The vortex left by the passage of something huge.
There had been no other proper course to take. One man’s heart could not be weighed against the human race.
And yet. And yet.
Wennda.
Farley gripped his cane and fought inside himself.
All his life he’d held on to her eventuality. That she existed someday up ahead was a balm at least against the pain of not being able to find a way back to her. And now at last he knew he hadn’t found it because it wasn’t there. Had been unmade along with so much else. Wennda.
His hands would not stop shaking.
Don’t you dare lose your ship, Captain Midnight. Not now. Not after all this. It was seventy years ago, you stupid sap. You’ve steered through worse a dozen times and you’re still here. It’s just wake turbulence. Power up, push through, roll off. Do it. Soldier through, god damn it.
Cold sweat chilled him. He loosened his collar and held up a hand. “Just give me a minute,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” Andrews said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought—I was sure this was why Mr. Broben wanted me here.”
“It is,” Farley said. He coughed into his fist. He pointed at the water pitcher and Dr. Kitchner poured the rest into the glass and handed it to him, not letting go until he’d brought it to his mouth. “It’s why all of us are here.” He set the glass back on the little table and looked at the general and the professor. “We had the missing piece to each other’s puzzles, and Jerry saw it. The big picture. God I miss him.” He shook his cane at the ceiling of the tent. “I got you into a church after all, you son of a bitch.”