There was a time, Jack remembered, when Paul couldn’t bring himself to use a mousetrap.
Paul looked Jack in the eye, earnestly. No guile. “Monarch doesn’t exist to change the future-it exists to help us survive it. We have a plan,” he said. “We call it Lifeboat.”
“If you hand me a brochure, Paul, I swear to God-”
“We can’t stop the Fracture, Jack. We can’t stop the arrival of the end of time. That waveform has collapsed. But Lifeboat will assure-does assure-that our best and brightest remain able to repair and reseed the flow of causality after the Meyer-Joyce field collapses and time ends.”
It took a second for Jack to fully understand that his rage was becoming dilute with horror. Horror at the realization that he understood Paul’s decisions… and maybe sympathized with them.
“And Will?”
“Will was unique. A pioneer. He was given every opportunity to play a key role in the success of Lifeboat. But you know Will. No one can do his thinking for him. The knowledge and expertise that he had, and the powerful desire to use it against us, made him a very real threat to the future of humanity. I loved Will like a brother, Jack. You know that.”
It became harder to keep the gun straight, vision threatening to blur.
Paul took one step toward him and said, as gently as he could, “You are faced with the same choice.”
Standing as far from the open hayloft doors as she could Beth went through her breathing exercises, focused on what she was about to do. She shook the tension out of her hands, checked her watch again; and then she fished for the notes in her fatigues. They were a couple of crumpled pages torn from a Moleskine, written in blue ink, meticulous and neat for maximum legibility. No fuckups permitted.
She knew them back to front but checked the times again anyway, ran through her checklist, checked her watch. Closed her eyes and breathed.
Fifty-seven seconds.
Inside the house, Paul Serene said, “Six years ago I was exposed to a near-lethal burst of chronon radiation. I became ill, and my relationship with time changed even further. I can, with effort, stand at the junction between myriad possible futures-and choose which one to take.” The flesh of his arm ached, phased minutely from one state to another. Paul shuddered, discreetly.
“You want to tell me how this scene ends?”
“I use the ability sparingly, Jack. It costs me. I use it to save nations, not win the lottery. I’m here now because I trust you not to kill me, to hear me out.”
“I don’t trust me not to do that.”
Paul persevered. “This selective foreknowledge I have has allowed me to subtly exert a profound influence over government at local, state, and national levels, and consequently the world. Oncoming history is a slalom, Jack. The extinctions and conflagrations that I have navigated our idiot species past, my God. The atrocities I have had to facilitate in order to avoid a greater catastrophe down the road.” Paul couldn’t look at Jack as he said it, his left hand flexing uncomfortably. He cleared his head, got back to business. “Discreet teams of lobbyists, the manipulation of favor economies, deniable personnel, and leveraging the specialties of divisions within Monarch… all form a scalpel that can cut into deep tissue, remove, remodel, and leave no scar. It has been the work of sixteen years to reach this point.”
“And?”
“We call it Project Lifeboat. Monarch has been exploiting Will’s innovations and Dr. Kim’s advancements to allow ordinary people to operate freely in a chronon-devoid environment-the end of time itself.”
“So you can have a dozen people wandering around a frozen world, waiting to die. That’s a shitty use of sixteen years, Paul.”
“A few hundred people actually, all at the top of their field, all carefully selected.” Paul sighed. “If we have mobility then we have a chance to restart causality. It is our only chance.” Paul straightened. “Come with me. Come to Monarch Tower. You need to see what we’ve been building.”
Jack shook his head. “I need to think. Call off your goons.”
“With respect, Jack-”
“Thinking’s not my strong suit, yeah, I get it. Do it, Paul, or the next time you see me I’ll be waving at you as Monarch Tower falls into the Mystic River.”
Paul held up his hands. “All right. All right. Please don’t make me regret this.” Paul touched a finger to his ear. “Monarch Actual, this is your Consultant.”
Ten seconds. “Everything works, everything works,” Beth told herself. Five seconds. Four. One breath in for the road. Two. And out.
Go.
Two steps, turn, face the woods, and…
Beth jerked her head left as the.338 slug trilled past to blow a fresh-wood crater in the aging timber of the barn’s back wall. She translated the movement into a full-body turn, swept up the hunting rifle, and let the ShotSpotter tell her exactly where that bullet had come from.
A gunshot rang out across the front garden.
Disbelief. “You bastard.”
“Monarch Actual!”
Paul warped across the room, away from Jack’s gun. “Monarch Actual!” Then zipped from the kitchen and up the stairs.
Jack warped after him, overdid it, slammed into the back of the sofa, and flipped over it. Paul was shouting from the bedroom upstairs, which was when Jack realized he’d left the attic ladder down.
Gibson was over it. “You fucking missed?” This was bullshit. Up at sparrow-fart to lie in the dirt with some overequipped self-shitting paramilitary neckbeard only to have him completely fuck up the one thing he was here for.
There was a short zip and the shooter’s head snapped back. He slumped, lifeless, over his expensive rifle.
Gibson shouted, “Yes!,” tossed off his netting, grabbed his rifle, and threw himself down the slope toward the farm. Maybe the morning wasn’t a dead loss after all.
From outside: a second gunshot from the barn. Beth was still alive and armed, evidently.
Zipping and angling up the stairs Jack stopped short of the bedroom door, then swung in with weapon raised. No Paul. “Fuck.” He could feel his capacity for folding into the moment diminishing like a kind of soul-breathlessness. He moved into the hall, took a moment, and summoned enough energy to flash up the ladder, to the attic.
He found Paul in the middle of Will’s life, waiting. A slapping sting in Jack’s gun hand and, suddenly, the gun was in Paul’s. “Let’s talk about this.”
Back behind cover, Beth unzipped her jacket and checked the charge on her rescue rig: a lightweight belt-and-braces-style harness made of segmented plates attached to a power source distributed about her waist. A quick click revealed the chronon pack on the back of the belt was at full charge.
Slipping out of her jacket she took a mesh drawstring pouch from her leg pocket, unrolled it, and drew out a neatly tied roll of wires. Two sets. One end had a rudimentary series of plugs, the other a series of five cups: four for fingertips, one for the thumb.
Slipping the cups over her digits, Beth Velcro-strapped the thin cord to her forearm and bicep, and then slotted the five plugs into five jacks on her shoulder harness. She repeated for her other arm.