She was cool with that. They all were.
A bunch of people just like her had been recruited, run through the program. Standard boot camp, double the pay. Pretty much nobody flaked out. The academic stuff weeded out about 30 percent. The stress tests zipped up another 50. The remaining 20 percent, herself included, had been black-bagged and shipped off to someplace anonymous. The usual shell game of trucks and planes and trucks and planes until they took the hood off and she was in the cell she’d occupy for the next six months, in between being groomed for Monarch’s fledgling Lifeboat program. That had been her first experience with laboratory-induced stutters and her rescue rig.
They started small, and brief: one cubicle, sterile, stuttered for a minute. Before long it was larger rooms, more complex environments, airborne detritus. Then came rescue scenarios, liberating frozen subjects and the like. Then came live fire, understanding how far a projectile travels and using the suit’s capabilities to best advantage against a hostile, chronon-active target.
Then came, one day, mankind’s first encounter with a Shifter-and it all went to shit. They were going to be in a sealed-and-stuttered environment for fifteen relative minutes. The environment would be in flux, posing a threat to life and limb.
The Shifter had phased in. The eager students calmly identified what they assumed was a new challenge-some engaged, others intended to evade en route to the exit zone. The blackly flickering thing had just stood there, immobile, taking a ton of punishment. IR remembered rounds pinging off it, squirreling away through space and freezing, before, finally, it activated. No, not activated: reacted. It came to life with such shocking ferocity she realized it hadn’t been patient, or biding its time: it was pain. The thing had been immobilized by the sudden, shocking agony of its arrival. It identified the operatives in the room as the sources of that pain, and it turned on them like a living thing no longer capable of reasonable thought.
It blitzed them. A combine harvester had a better grasp of foreplay. It put them down like a burning man tries to put himself out: frantically, furiously, blindly, desperately. In seconds a dozen operatives-men and women IR had come to know by name-were standing around, positioned like performance art, weapons half-lost from grips, spent shells glittering the air like rain, all of them dead before any blood could escape them.
It had been really interesting.
IR hadn’t moved from her starting position. Typically, she waited to see how the pattern of the room was going to play out before committing herself. It had paid off. Everyone else had died, she stayed put, the thing seemed to appreciate that. It stood there for minutes and minutes. So did IR-as still as she could. Finally, the thing was just gone.
Then the stutter broke and all her little friends hit the floor and started gushing blood. Ninety percent of the graduating class washed out in less than a second, leaving just her and everyone else in Gibson’s squad. The longest serving and the best. A-grade. Hatch’s favorites.
Paul Serene didn’t like Shifters. That was a well-known secret. He really didn’t like them. Tough man, but there were gaps in his armor, that’s for sure. Didn’t feel to her like he was meant for the life. But he was a big deal, a secret that had to be kept, and she liked that she and Gibson’s crew were in on that. Their little secret. She got to see the world, got presented with fun and complex tasks, and she usually got to kill someone at the end of it. She, Gibson, their family, were a big part of Monarch’s success: the strategic elimination of obstacles on the way to 2016. Paul Serene had some kind of foresight, told them who would be a problem and when… knew how things would Tetris out if a block here and there were removed. She and her crew removed those blocks. It was a great way to make a living.
And now here she was: time traveling.
IR let the airlock smooch and hiss, watched it open. She popped her head out and back, then committed to a slow pan of the barn down the barrel of her assault carbine. Clear, but the two rooms at the back were question marks.
She advanced down the ramp, carbine pressed to her shoulder, cleared both rooms: one crappy control room and the other storage for tech stuff. She let the carbine hang and turned up her left wrist. The Velcroed gauntlet had a clear window on the underside. In that window was a printed portrait of a ten-year-old kid. Jack Joyce. Target of the evening. Her orders were to kill the kid and no one else: especially not William Joyce, and especially not any other child in the house.
IR could do that. She was down with games.
She’d been given the rundown on how to operate one of these machines. Entering the control booth at the back of the barn she checked the date on the clock: Wednesday, August 16, 2000. 7:12 P.M. Neat. Weird. She unclipped one vest pouch, unwrapped a small piece of gum with one hand and her teeth, popped it in her mouth, and then reshouldered the carbine, chewing.
House.
Nice night outside. Nice and warm. About to get ugly.
Strawberry bubblegum.
Gravel drive. She progressed heel-toe, foot over foot, nice and quiet, scanning windows and doors. Got to the steps. Tested each one with her boot. Stepped over the creaky ones.
Front door unlocked. Big property like this, nice little town, traditional values. She couldn’t respect that. Nudged it open, crept on in.
Big room. Nine-to-three she clocked dining room, stairs, sofa, fireplace, kitchen entrance. Clear.
Dossier cited second floor as being where she’d find the kid’s bedroom. Stairs. Carefully as she goes.
Floorboard creaked. Spins to kitchen entrance-someone there. Finger almost hits the sweet spot and then she remembers: just the kid.
“Identify yourself.”
Female. Knife in hand. Big one.
“What’s up, IR.”
Recognition. “Wilder.” Guessing it was cool to smoke this one, but what about leaving blood all over the house? Probably not cool. Training said leave no tracks. “Outside.” Easier to conceal.
“I already fucked up one of your squad in this living room,” Beth Wilder said. “That tastefully eggshell loveseat is what saved Gibson’s life.”
“Won’t say it again.”
“How many more are coming? Randall? Voss? All of them?”
Safety clicked off.
Beth sighed, understanding. “All of them. Fuck’s sake, Irene, didn’t they teach you anything about the immutability of collapsed waveforms?”
Wilder took a step for the door, complying. A nervous lick of the lips, a half glance to the stairs behind.
IR’s instincts said: target. She glanced.
There was no one on the stairs. The new information, all of a sudden, was that she couldn’t breathe. Or feel her arms. Or legs. She watched the room tilt upward and rush to smash her in the face.
The flat blade of the carving knife caught moonlight just below her chin. Wilder’s bare feet padded over to her, careful to stay out of the dark lake spreading across the boards.
One disappointed sigh. “Goddamn it, Irene. I wanted more time.”
IR spat her gum onto the wet floorboards.
And that was that.
Thursday, 17 August 2000. 3:23 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts-Northside.
Starr Donovan walked home from school, same as every day. She didn’t much want to be there, but getting solid grades was one of the things that made her mother happy. That was pretty important these days.
She had her earphones on, the Discman looping that one Chumbawamba song. It was one of those songs that made her happy. That was pretty important as well. It got her to and from school, made sure there was a smile on her face when she walked in. She learned early that this was important as well. People reacted differently depending on what she did with her face, and how she felt seemed to affect that.