A quick look behind and he saw Shining Palm take down one trooper before one long swipe reduced a second trooper to a dead statue.
Seventy feet. The pain in his leg was receding; it took weight more easily.
Jack warped.
Thirty feet.
He was dizzy, seeing stars. Glanced back.
Shining Palm was thundering down the gallery after him, and behind him came a wave of other Shifters.
Jack warped-fifteen feet-and almost blacked out. Laminate in hand he swiped it through the slot.
Glanced back. Shining Palm was fifty feet and closing. Forty.
The security doors opened. Jack leaped inside, punched the Door Close button.
As they slid closed Jack noticed the chronon frame that bracketed the elevator-charged.
Ten feet. Doors closed. Jack braced for impact… nothing but howls.
The elevator climbed upward, its own rescue rig keeping it mobile despite universal stasis.
He collapsed against the wall, slid to the floor. He hadn’t stopped to think the elevator might be as uncooperative as everything else in a stutter. Looked like Paul took that into account when he rigged the top floors with its own stutter shield.
“Good morning, Dr. Amaral,” the elevator said. “You are not due at the office for another six hours and eighteen minutes.”
A stutter shield that, Jack figured, was being powered by the Countermeasure.
The infoscreen told him it was 12:42 A.M.
The doors opened on floor forty-nine and Jack felt the chronon dampeners like the fug of a mild hangover. He’d have no advantages here if anyone tried to jump him.
Jack emerged into a hallway lit by recessed violet strip lighting and walked toward Paul’s office without so much as a limp. His leg had healed.
Paul’s door was fine mahogany set into a sci-fi housing. Sofia’s card clicked in, got green-lighted, and the door’s maglock released with a pleasing thunk.
Pistol gripped in both hands, Jack booted the door, sending it flying open hard enough for the handle to punch through the wall and keep it there. He stepped in briskly, scanning. He was alone.
Glass wall on one side, staircase curving up to living quarters on the other. Desk facing glass wall, big gnarled-looking expensive wooden chair…
Expensive art, expensive carpets, two-floor-tall bookshelves. Fully-equipped gymnasium on the far side.
Jack took Sofia’s map, checked the layout. The Regulator was kept in a sealed chamber directly beneath her chronon labs, and was accessible through…
Behind the desk, flush with the wall, was an armored security door. Reinforced, two-inches thick, and the eruption of technology next to it suggested that nobody was getting in without everything including a urine sample.
“… that suspiciously open door.”
The door was wide open, the chamber beyond lit blood red.
Jack approached sidelong and slow, gun at the ready. Could be it just popped open when the building started freaking out. Or maybe someone had panicked and left it like this.
He glanced inside.
Broad and deep, Paul’s side of the Regulator chamber ended at a thick transparent wall. That wall had a door-also open-and beyond that the chamber was walled with diagnostics. Two standing consoles faced the far wall, and set into the wall was a geometric depression.
Within that depression sat the thing Jack and Beth had gone through hell to find.
The Countermeasure had been reinforced since Jack had last seen it, back in 2010 when Beth had died. It was now gloved tightly within a reinforced titanium frame. Connectors and adapters had been built into it, conservatively, for the purpose of powering Monarch Tower’s chronon-related vitals. Otherwise, beneath the pretty new dress, it was still Will’s homemade dodecagon. It was a powerful thing for such a small object, no bigger than a volleyball.
He moved in. Nobody home. He stepped into the chamber proper. Everything quietly humming. Screens flashed blueprints of the entire Tower. Looked like Will’s volleyball really was powering everything that mattered.
Jack got closer to it, puzzled out the clamps and catches keeping it in place, which panel governed the release mechanism.
It was the panel with the screen opened on REGULATOR HOUSING RELEASE: Y/N?
Jack closed his eyes, sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it.”
Nothing.
“Come on! Door’s open? Every safeguard on this thing’s been disabled. Do it!”
Nothing.
REGULATOR HOUSING RELEASE: Y/N?
Jack stared at it, hating it.
“Fuck it.”
Catches popped like gunshots. Electromagnets powered off, cabling popping free from every socket on the device.
A klaxon blared, deafeningly, once, and the lighting in the room shifted to blue.
FLOOR 49 STUTTER SHIELD: DEACTIVATED.
FLOOR 50 STUTTER SHIELD: DEACTIVATED.
CHRONON DAMPENERS: OFFLINE.
ELEVATOR MOBILITY RIGS: OFFLINE.
Howls.
Jack leaped toward the Countermeasure, tugged it from its housing. A little resistance, a lot of heat, and it clacked loose.
Jack held it, surveyed it, the salvation of humanity.
“I have no idea how to use this thing.”
The Shifters were moving in.
Jack zipped the Countermeasure into Nick’s backpack, slung it, and ran out of there.
There was only one person left who knew what to do.
The chamber’s southern exit led to Paul’s office, and a western exit was designed for quick access to the time lab. Jack took the latter. The security door led to a dog-leg hallway. He rounded the second corner, swiped his way through the door, secured it behind himself.
He stood in a glass-box control room, looking down on the sterile expanse of the Monarch time laboratory, safety areas marked out in black-and-yellow lines, a raised grill-floored diagnostic station on the far side. The machine itself-that smooth, high-tech donut-sat heavy on the right side of the lab. The time core-the one Monarch had airlifted out of Riverport University two nights ago-hung twenty feet above the center of the ring, cabling draping down to the Promenade, ready for automated lowering and connection.
The time lab had its own stutter-proofing: a series of discrete generators in each corner of the room, drawing a chronon charge from the same batteries that powered the machine. Insurance, and an escape route, against the main shield ever going down in the midst of a crisis.
Jack slapped the release button, setting the machinery downstairs in motion. He exited the far side of the observation deck, clattering down the stairs as the time core lowered carefully into position at the center of the Promenade.
It was still inching downward as the Shifters crashed through the corridors upstairs.
Reaching the time lab floor, Jack looped thumbs through the straps of his pack, pulling it tight against his back to minimize bounce, and sprinted for the machine. He got to the controls just as various connectors began jacking into the core. The controls lit up.
A swarm of crazed light manifested inside the glass-box control room.
Shifters flickered and phased into the lab.
Fuck.
It wasn’t possible to go back any earlier than when the machine was first activated, which was around 4:15 A.M. the previous Saturday. Today was Monday. He gambled on 4:35 A.M. and activated the machine.
The Monarch machine was better made. The Promenade charged up immediately, the airlock levering itself open smoothly as the horde rolled out of the observation deck, already appearing here and there across the time lab’s expanse. Jack warped for the airlock, up the ramp, spun, and slapped the release plate. The airlock began levering itself closed as that galloping, tumbling mass of schizophrenic carnage filled the lab, skidded, and barreled toward him, howling hatred.