I stood in the back of the Hilton’s conference room, arms crossed. I watched Kilgore France where she sat behind the table at the head of the room. In the chairs, haphazardly spread around, were the rest of my people: Falcon, Cat, ET, and Winny. Against the wall sat Maxine Kaplan and her second-in-command, Virgil Wixom. Looming watchfully over them stood Karla, her arms crossed, hair pulled back in a ponytail. The look Karla kept giving them was nothing compared to the pained anguish in Kilgore France’s shattered gaze.
A somber Dr. Yusif al Amari sat with his legs crossed, expression lined and sad.
Everyone was present but Savage. He was freshly out of surgery and in intensive care at a hospital in Albuquerque. Bill Minor’s 115-grain bullet had smashed its way through a Surefire flashlight, slowing before punching into Savage’s lower left lung.
Grief-strained, Kilgore said, “Here’s the story as we have translated it so far. Fluvium and Gray—her name is actually pronounced Nakeesh—followed an entangled particle from their timeline back to our ancient Egypt. As Falcon suspected, the purpose was to test and study biological agents and their epidemiological effects over time. The first, and less virulent, was a form of red algae they released in the Nile. The second—the one we recovered from Fluvium’s sarcophagus—was to be released in either China’s Yellow River or the Mekong. Both had flourishing civilizations with sufficient populations to allow a modeling study of epidemiological patterns.”
She added, “We think the algae Fluvium released was the origin of the ‘water turning to blood’ plague referred to in the Old Testament.”
ET asked, “What kind of sick pukes infect a planet with disease?”
Kilgore’s voice filled with loathing. “Their studies were to be long-term, covering centuries, as they watched how populations and organisms adapted.”
“It wasn’t their world, or ancestors,” Falcon said softly, his eyes half closed. “We originated on a totally different branch of the timeline from theirs. One perfect for long-term evolutionary experimentation.”
“But something went wrong,” Kilgore continued. “On the banks of the Nile, Gray conducted a routine check of her navigator. It wasn’t connected to Fluvium’s cerebrum—the half of the device that actually monitored and calculated the data. When she energized her machine, it generated a series of entangled particles. One of which Skientia randomly trapped during one of their experiments.”
“And you people knew this?” Karla asked Kaplan and Wixom.
A defeated Maxine Kaplan said, “Uncontrolled by Fluvium’s cerebrum, her machine rode that particle through time. And pop, she appeared in our lab.”
Kilgore said, “But it left Fluvium stuck in the past. His cerebrum was worthless without the navigator. What was supposed to be a safety protocol doomed them in the end.”
“Glad to know they took such great care,” ET growled.
“The universe, Edwin, remains a random place,” Falcon said nervously.
I didn’t like the way Falcon’s hands and feet were fluttering.
Kilgore continued, “Fluvium, being the smart sort that he was, eventually learned ancient Egyptian, served as a scribe and physician, rose high in the pharaoh’s administration, and devoted his life to leaving clues for Gray to find. He knew she had to be somewhere in this timeline’s future, someplace with the kind of technology that manipulated entangled particles and was harnessing quantum gravity. He expected her to pop back in, rescue him, and take him back to their timeline.”
“What about paradox?” Karla asked Kaplan. At her hesitance, Karla added, “After unhooking Yusif from electrical leads, I can hook you up the same way.”
Maxine Kaplan spread her hands in surrender. “Based on some idle remarks Domina made, she didn’t seem concerned with paradox when it applied to her or Fluvium.”
Falcon said, “But I do not yet have a solution to Gray’s apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics: The problem with energy neither being created nor destroyed. We accept that going back in time doubles the mass/energy of the people or things being sent backward. In essence, duplicating mass/energy that already exists in that same time and space. We currently accept that the same mass/energy can’t exist in the same time or space.”
Maxine Kaplan answered, “We think the mass/energy that composed Fluvium and Domina, and their devices, was “loaned” or maybe “projected” into our branch from their parallel timeline. We’re still really fuzzy on this, but not being part of our universe, they may have operated beyond, or in an adjunct way, to our laws of physics.”
Falcon, an insecure fist to his mouth, was frowning. “And we have no way of knowing if Gray can get back to our past to rescue Fluvium?”
“Not at this time,” Maxine told him, her hostile eyes on his. “The machine we constructed based on her diagrams was a prototype. A first feeble attempt at reproducing her technology. Shooting stuff into the future is a piece of cake. Energize the stasis, stop the interaction and change between particles, and it simply rides the light cone forward, sort of like a surfboard. Once we have a firm handle on that, we can begin to grasp quantum gravity and entanglement manipulation. The point where we can begin applying the stasis and sending things, let alone people, to alternate universes like they did? That’s still a long way down the road.”
“But even then, we would not be able to send people into our own past,” I remarked.
Karla had to nudge the woman with a foot before Kaplan responded. “No, Dr. Ryan. Paradox and the second law preclude that. You can’t force energy back into a universe where it already exists, and you can’t ride entanglement backward by ‘undoing’ change between pairs.”
ET looked skeptical. “So, Gray’s just gonna turn up someday? Pop, and she’ll be sitting there where that gray bubble was? Just like the day she left? And what then?”
“She’ll hope that she can make a better deal with whomever is waiting for her. A better deal than Reid was going to offer,” Kilgore said angrily.
“Yo,” ET agreed. “That bullet in the head’d be persuasive if you ask me.”
I asked, “Chief? You said Reid took a shot at her. Did he hit her?”
“Couldn’t tell, sir.” Her expression tightened. “Could have been a miss.”
Falcon, oblivious to the woman’s hostility, asked, “Maxine? The fact remains, she might eventually manage to find a way back into our past, correct?”
Maxine Kaplan shrugged. “This is strictly hypothetical, but I think she’s been working on a program that would have allowed her to transport back to her own timeline. Some of the equipment she was having us design just didn’t make any sense. But Mr. McCoy gave the orders, so we followed them.”
“Ah,” Falcon looked half panicked, his eyes darting here and there. “And if she’d made it back to her timeline, obtained another cerebrum, she could have followed the entanglement—however that’s done across timelines—back to Egypt, rescued Fluvium.”
“Which means what for us?” Cat asked. “Fluvium and Gray created our timeline when they arrived in ancient Egypt. Our timeline exists, de facto, because Fluvium became part of its past, and Gray ended up in our present.”
Falcon murmured, “Our past has not yet changed. Paradox has not been violated.”
I raised my voice. “Dr. Kaplan. I want to know how you got Gray out of Grantham Barracks that night?”
Maxine Kaplan gave me a condescending smile. “Dr. Ryan, she’d already transported across three-and-a-third millennia. Using her doohickey, somehow she activated her navigator, had it lock on her particle transmitter, a couple hundred miles was child’s play.”
“She beamed herself and the doohickey out of Ward Six?”
“Correct. We were watching the holo display, struggling to understand the graphics. And pop! Stunned us out of our socks, so to speak.”
“And does the machine, what we called the doohickey, still exist?” I asked.
“It does.” Kaplan’s expression fell. “But it’s useless without the navigator.”
Tears were welling behind Kilgore’s eyes. She had to be thinking of the gruesome thing Karla had wrapped in a tarp that lay, for the moment, in the Blackhawk. With no word from Grazier, God alone knew what we were going to do with Kaplan and Wixom. And the Skientia lab was a mess waiting to be discovered. The ramifications of our night’s work were trouble I hadn’t even had time to . . .
The door to my right opened. I didn’t recognize the two men who entered; both were dressed in suits, ties, and shined shoes. The first was a tall, washed-out looking, white guy. Skinny, as if he had a glandular condition. His pale-blue eyes, however, seemed to gleam with anticipation. Behind him came a medium-built, brown-haired Latino in his mid-thirties. His suit looked rumpled, and he gave me a predatory smile as he fixed cunning eyes on mine.
I did immediately place the two MPs behind them and the sheriff’s deputy in his tan uniform. Other officers crowded the hallway beyond.
“Good morning,” the tall white-blond greeted as he flipped open a badge in a leather holder. “I’m Special Agent Hanson Childs, Army CID.”
The brown-haired Latino with the square face had opened his own credentials, adding, “Special Agent Jaime Chenwith, US Air Force OIS. You’re all under arrest for murder, misuse of government property, fraud, conspiracy, assault, conduct unbecoming, and a host of other violations of both the uniform code and federal, state, and local civilian law.”
“In short, people,” Childs followed up with a cold smile, “your wild little joyride has just come to a screeching halt. Your lifelong and most-intimate association with the Federal penal system, however, is about to begin.”
Chenwith stepped slightly to the side, clearing a path to the door. “Now, if you’ll each step forward when your name is called, you will be handcuffed, officially charged, and apprised of your rights.”
The guy’s sick smile deepened as he turned hawklike brown eyes on me. “We’ll start with you, Dr. Ryan. As a retired colonel, you get the privilege of rank.”
I tried to swallow, only to have my tongue stick in the back of my mouth. A sick feeling flooded my gut.