Will clattered down the stairs. “What have you done?” He hadn’t run a comb through his hair in days; shirt and pants were a calendar of use.
“What’s happening, Will?”
His brother rounded on Jack, his thin-fingered grip pinching into Jack’s shoulders, gaze flicking over factors and dependencies only he could see. “You have to help me. We have to shut this down. We have to shut this down, Jack!” He abandoned Jack, faced the machine. “The core is live, but if we disconnect the Promenade it’s useless for transport…”
Paul’s voice crackled over the quad-system. “Jack! Stop him! If he damages the network anything could happen!”
“Shears!” Will screamed. “Cut the power to the Promenade at the trunk!”
Jack grabbed his brother before he could run off. Will wrenched himself free. As he did something heavy fell from his pocket and thudded on the deck. A 9mm automatic. Will tutted exasperatedly and picked it up. “Their calculations are wrong, Jack.”
“What is that?”
Will disregarded the gun, annoyed, but didn’t pocket it. “Jack, you’re not listening. The Meyer-Joyce field is being rendered unstable. It will fracture entirely if-”
Will was never any good with his hands. This could end badly a number of different ways. “Will. I need you to look at me. Can I please have the gun?”
A wild sweep of his arm distanced Will from his brother. “Don’t patronize me, Jack.”
“You’re not thinking straight.”
“This device has been sabotaged. It will-”
“Listen-”
“Time! Is going! To end! If you won’t work with me, then you must get out of my way.”
Jack refused to engage with the madness, an old tactic. “Or what, Will?” Jack moved carefully toward his brother. “You’ll shoot me?”
Will raised the gun and fired into the ceiling, a needle in the ear that killed all sound, and then the shot was reverberating from a dozen surfaces. Will shoved his brother aside, knocking Jack to the rubberized floor.
Through his hands and chest, pressed against the rubber, Jack felt the floor suddenly thump from somewhere deep in its guts.
“No. No no no no no!” Will hammered the controls, the machine’s innards shifting from that low signature hum to something different, more alarming. It wasn’t the charge building up. This was something else. Something more uneven, distressed, broken. Escalating. Jack scrambled to his feet.
Paul’s face was framed by the airlock’s small viewplate as smoke filled the internal cavity. “Jack! You have to stop him! Jack!” The Promenade vibrations doubled their rpm, the distortion-shimmer shifting out of synch with itself-becoming something more serrated and angry. Paul looked terrified through the clouding glass. Jack was at the hatch, failing to find any kind of manual override. “We can’t,” Paul said, coughing, the smoke so thick he was little more than a shadow. “Even if you could open this thing the environment in here is chronon-charged. It needs to be discharged in a controlled fashion-which means I take a stroll down the Promenade. It’s cool. But you have to hit that Go button.” Paul’s hand stabbed the glass, pointing at the control bank where Will stood.
The machine shrieked; a ceramic panel popped free, splanging to the mesh maintenance floor.
“Will! Hit the button!”
Will was too preoccupied to listen. “Bringing the core online: wrong thing. Charging the Promenade: wrong thing. Using…” Will’s eyes ran over one of the screens, panicked. “You used it? You’ve used the Promenade? Oh God oh God.”
“Will!”
No response.
“Paul. Hang tight. I’ll-”
Air pressure shifted. Jack felt himself being pressed bodily into the muscle of a giant heart for one monstrous, elongated beat and…
Boom.
Jack was lifted off his feet, hit the deck.
Twenty-seven tons of metal tortured by torsion screamed like a living thing.
Jack scrambled off the gangway and sprinted for the controls. Maintenance grills tumbled fifty feet from the ceiling, bouncing off walkways, cracking glass. Without slowing, Jack shouldered Will to the floor, grabbed the corner of the panel, and slammed the Go button.
The distortion field amplified, leaped outward, broke the air. Every socket in every panel and recess vomited sparks and flamed up. White enamel tiles were painted in upward tongues of char. The machine’s whine dropped. Jack gasped with relief.
Then it began cycling up again, harder and harder, faster and faster.
He couldn’t see Paul anymore: the interior of the airlock had filled completely with black haze. Abandoning the controls, Jack cleared the distance to the hatch in seconds, slammed into it, pounded against the glass, and screamed, “Paul! Go! Go!” He had no idea if his friend was even conscious inside that armored sarcophagus.
Will shouted Jack’s name, was back on his feet, bracing himself against the control panel. “We’re too late! Get away from the machine! Get…!”
The core threw off three-foot sparks in colors Jack had never seen before.
The Promenade buckled inward. Jack’s atoms yanked toward the core, for a second. And then the opposite, times ten.
The blast wave punched through Jack, flowing through his cells like water around stones, and into the room. Lights erupted, glass exploded, panels fried, monitors crazed, and everything…
… stopped.
Silence. Like he had known inside the Promenade. Perfect, utter silence.
Lowering his hand from his face, Jack opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was silent because nothing moved. Nothing. Not the shattering glass, not the flying sparks, not the billowing and rising black smoke. Nothing. Not even his brother.
Every last thing had paused, mid-action. Frozen. Perfectly paused, immobile; people, objects, smoke, and sparks locked in time and space-a snapshot of a moment. He reached out, touched a floating shard of glass, felt it resist, watched it budge but remain suspended in space.
Jack was moving, but not a single other thing was.
Will was still behind the control console, hands thrown up to shield him from the console that had erupted in sparks and flame, his face contorted like a badly-timed snapshot. Jack reached out, fingers stretching toward his brother’s frozen expression. “Will?”
An alert-bright green-caught his attention from one intact monitor. It read, in no uncertain terms: DESTINATION DATE: ERROR.
If the destination date was an error, then where-when-had Paul gone?
God pressed Play.
Metal crashed into metal as the control panel blew up. Will shrieked and toppled backward as glass shotgunned from the observation deck’s frame. Smoke rolled out from the machine in a terrible wave as emergency lights kicked in blood-red and, instantly, the room filled with nine soldiers in hard-chested tactical gear.
They didn’t have helmets, they had masks for faces, and those faces leered yellow, circular, smiling.
Green lasers sliced the smog, attached to black rifles that swept the room like terrible eyestalks. Behind each one a black-eyed idiot grin.
The white lettering on their black chests read PEACE.
Oh good, Jack thought. None of this is real.
Will was on his feet. “Jack. Someone is still in the machine.”
“Targets!”
“‘Targets?’”
Every green beam flew home to one of two focus points: Jack or Will. A lethal wall of cartoon smiles.
Jack and Will should have died. They didn’t.
One of the men lowered his weapon: barrel-chested, ’roided, confident. Ex-marine bikers, African heterodox Christian militiamen, Israeli mujahideen… Jack had seen enough veteran mercs over the last few years to recognize one on sight. Had to be the leader.