Feedback (22 page)

He rested his hand on the side of the vessel as he traced the word
death
with the ax pick, thinking about the implications of the word and the style of writing. With his hand on the skin of the alien craft, a long, low growl reverberated through the air, like the sound of an animal in distress.

The UFO shook.

“She's alive,” Jason said.

“That's impossible,” Lily replied. “This is a machine!”

“I thought so too,” he said. “But she's not. She responded to my touch.”

Jason stroked the hide of the massive beast, feeling the hard exterior soften in response to his touch. What had looked like a stone surface had a texture similar to leather. Jason thought the hide resembled that of an elephant, thick and impenetrable.

“Come on,” he cried, running along the scaffolding, feeling the metal walkway vibrating beneath his bare feet.

As he ran, he tried to keep contact with the creature. His fingers trailed over the thick hide, skimming over the scars of various calculations and formulas.

“They're telling a story,” he said, “the equations,” lifting his hand every ten feet to dodge the scaffold support poles, always returning to the UFO.

The scaffolding wasn't level, at some points forcing him higher, dropping down lower at others as he jogged around the massive living vessel. The UFO seemed to breathe, expanding as the chest of a man would when inhaling deeply.

Lachlan had seen the craft respond to Jason and ran over to join them.

“What is it? What's happening?”

“She's alive!” Jason yelled in excitement. He stopped, looking at the formulas and words before him. For the first time, Jason could see the etchings as a continuous whole rather than a disjointed mess, and he understood what he was looking at.

“These markings,” he cried. “They're here for us. They're meant for us, so we would understand.”

“Understand what?” Lachlan asked.

“I'm still figuring that out,” Jason replied. “But this is deliberate and it's meant for us, I'm sure of it.”

“Who wrote these words?” Lily asked.

Jason shrugged. He ran his fingers over a series of words.

Beautiful

Lonely

Scared

Hurt

“The formulas,” Jason said, letting the words speak for themselves as he referred to a jumble of calculations to one side. “I know what they are. They're not calculations for time travel, they're trying to understand the impact of unshielded travel of regular matter through a wormhole comprised of exotic matter. They're trying to determine the consequences for anyone passing back in time.”

Lily had a pickaxe as well. Like Jason earlier, she ran the tip of the ax gently over the scars, tracing the words, seeming lost in thought.

“We need to get up higher,” she said, pointing toward the center of the UFO. There was a dome on top of the creature, barely visible from where they were on the rim of the gigantic beast.

Jason began climbing up the scaffolding hanging over the living being. Lachlan and Lily followed. Vacili hung back a few yards, catching everything on video.

Down below, gunfire erupted. Jason caught a glimpse of Bellum firing an M4, rattling off shots in rapid succession. The crack of each round being fired echoed through the dome. Stegmeyer was already heading back for the walkway.

“We have to go,” Lachlan cried. “We've got to get out of here while we still can.”

“We can't,” Jason replied, dropping down from the scaffolding and onto the sloping flanks of the vast interstellar creature. “We can't leave her. Don't you understand? She's waited. She's endured. She's held on for us, waiting for us to free her.”

Lily followed Jason, landing just a few feet away from him. She crouched as she absorbed the jump, and came to a rest with one hand reaching out and touching the thick, scarred hide. Even here, numerous formulas tattooed the skin of the animal.

Lachlan hesitated.

“Come on,” Jason cried, gesturing with the pickaxe still in his hand. “You want answers. They're all here. They're all around us, written in plain sight.”

“But it makes no sense,” Lachlan cried. “Who would leave these messages?”

Jason didn't have an answer, but he'd already figured out that all of these markings were made by only a couple of people. Although the carvings were crude in places, they were unmistakably related, as though the same people had written different messages at different points in time. One person had been preoccupied with the science, the other had focused on emotions.

Free

Release

Mercy

Jason watched in horror as the professor lurched forward. A bullet ripped through his shoulder, spraying blood over them. Lachlan struggled to hold onto the railing. He fell to his knees as a second bullet tore through his thigh.

The old man tumbled from the scaffolding, falling awkwardly onto the creature. The massive beast responded to his presence, wailing in a tone deeper than a fog horn. Lachlan slid to one side. He was in danger of rolling off the edge of the wing when Jason grabbed his wrist. A single finger, a thumb and three mutilated stubs grabbed desperately at Jason's hand. Lily grabbed her father's other hand. Together, the two of them hauled the old man further up the steep incline on the flanks of the beast. The thick hide on which they stood trembled, shaking as the creature groaned.

Jason fought to get beneath the professor, hoisting Lachlan's arm up over his shoulder. Together, they staggered up the craft.

As they approached the dome, the gradient lessened, making the climb easier. Down below, explosions rattled the scaffolding.

Jason had no idea how many armed men had stormed the nuclear reactor building, but Bellum was holding his own, that much was clear. Handguns cracked as they fired, rifle shots echoed around them. A flash of light lit up the shaking scaffolding, followed by a thunderous crack.

“No more,” Lachlan cried as Jason dragged him roughly up toward the dome of the UFO. “I ... I can't take any more.”

Jason swung the professor down, resting him gently against the dome.

The central dome of the creature was easily thirty feet in diameter, but it was torn and damaged. The front portion had been ripped open, but the wound was old. Jason could see inside the cavity. There were electronic monitors and computers set up on tables. Wires snaked their way out from inside the dome, leading over to the scaffolding on the far side of the craft.

Lily crouched by her father, pressing on the wound in his shoulder.

“I'm dying,” the old man said.

“Don't say that,” she cried.

“They've hit an artery,” he managed. “It's just a matter of time.”

Jason took his mentor's hand. Immediately behind Lachlan's head there were more words, only this time they were in complete phrases.

You cannot save him

You can save him

Listen to him

Lachlan must have seen Jason staring. He turned to one side, twisting his head and looking up.

“When we first met,” he grimaced. “You told me you knew how I died.”

Jason held his hand, not saying anything.

“I've always known this day was coming, but I believe in you. You can change this,” the dying man said, struggling to breathe. “History doesn’t have to repeat.”

“Time travel won’t allow for paradoxes,” Jason replied. “Nothing changes. Nothing can ever change.”

“Who says it’s a paradox?” Lee said, gasping for breath. “I think I finally understand what this is, what all the scribbling is ... For years, we’ve wondered about the meaning. We didn't understand that the equations are not the answer, they’re part of the question. A question that has been asked over and over, through thousands of time loops spanning tens of thousands of years.”

The old man slumped against the wall of the central dome. Jason squeezed the dying man’s hand gently.

“Feedback,” Professor Lachlan said.

“Feedback?” Jason asked, his mind remembering the word he'd seen chaotically spelled out when the photos had fallen to the floor of the RV. “You mean, like a microphone getting too close to a speaker?”

“Yes.”

Jason looked up, looking at the scratchings and messages, the words that seemed so disjointed and confused.

“So all this, it’s feedback from previous iterations? These messages we see here. These are messages we've left for ourselves?”

The professor nodded, his breath hitching as he said, “Each message defies fate. Each etching represents a small, subtle change. Each disproves the apparent static nature of time.”

“So we can break out of this feedback loop? We can end this?” Jason asked.

“Yes.”

“Feedback builds until something gives,” Jason said, realizing what the professor was getting at.

The old man nodded, saying, “Each time, we learn more.”

“But it’s too late!”

“It’s never too late,” the professor said, struggling with those final words. His eyelids drooped. His head bowed, and his hand went limp.

Lachlan was dead.

Jason struggled to swallow the lump in his throat. Tears spilled down his face. He was overwhelmed by the loss of this man. His mentor. His friend. This man who was two men had saved his life. Jason owed him every breath. So much had been lost here. Jason barely knew the man that had rescued him from North Korea, but he knew he owed him a debt that could never be repaid.

“We should have left,” he sobbed, feeling the weight of the professor's death because of his irrational insistence that they stay with the craft. “I'm sorry. You were right. We should have grabbed what we needed and ran.”

Lily cried. She rested her head on her father's shoulder and sobbed, combing his thin hair with her fingers.

“You and I,” Jason said, grasping the professor's hand and squeezing. “We have lived for thousands of years, never able to escape this prison, but this time, it will be different. I promise.”

Jason knelt beside Lily, gently rubbing her shoulders, whispering to her. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Bullets sliced through the air around them, zipping past just inches away from striking them. A battle continued to rage beneath the creature, but there was only so long Bellum could hold out. It was only a matter of time before he was outflanked. Gunmen were moving in from all sides.

In the confusion, Jason had lost sight of Vacili, but the cameraman had been there. He'd followed them onto the wing of the craft although Jason had no recollection of him jumping down from the scaffolding. A blinking red light on the camera told Jason he'd caught Lachlan's last few moments on video.

Jason looked up at Vacili, looking deep into the dark, cold, impersonal camera lens as a bullet struck the back of Vacili's head. An explosion of red sprayed to one side as the cameraman's body crumpled and fell. His lifeless body slid a few feet after hitting the hide of the great animal, while the camera rolled down the sloping wing, slowly gathering momentum before it bounced off the edge and out of sight.

Lily grabbed Jason, holding on to him as though she were desperate not to fall. Jason could feel the terror in her trembling body.

On the distant scaffolding, April Stegmeyer's body lay prone, sprawled to one side in a pool of blood.

The gunfire beneath the UFO ceased abruptly. Bellum was either dead or had been wounded and captured.

“We need to go,” Jason said, pulling Lily to her feet.

“Where?” Lily asked.

“We'll go where we've always gone. Back in time.”

As the words left his lips, he realized she was going to die. He wasn't sure whether she would die there in the nuclear reactor, within the time stream, or in the dark waters off the coast of North Korea, but there had only ever been one survivor, a boy. And that was the answer to the calculations. What was the consequence of traveling through time with a ruptured shield? The answer was that any matter that travelled through the wormhole reverted to its then current form. But that couldn't be the whole answer. His body had retained its magnificent genetic changes, but where had those genetic enhancements come from? Were they the result of exposure to radiation while traveling through time? But surely, he thought, such radiation would be destructive. There was some other hidden element he didn't yet understand. Some other influence swaying the course of the mighty river of time, and that puzzled him.

“We should run,” Lily said, pulling away from him, dragging him from the dome of the creature. “We need to get back to the truck. If you go back in time, this will never end. We need to get back out the way we came.”

Jason never saw the shooter, but he heard the shots ring out, echoing around the vast dome.

Lily's body convulsed as three bullets ripped through her abdomen. Bright red blood sprayed across the dark hide of the creature. Lily sank to her knees and fell to one side clutching at her bloody stomach. She screamed in agony.

“No!” Jason cried. Crouching beside her, he raised her head and cradled her in his arms. “Oh, no. Not you too!”

“You have to run,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “You can't go back. If you do, you'll never escape. Your only hope is to get out of here.”

Her body spasmed, but the spasms were only from the waist up. Holding her, he could feel her shattered spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down. Blood and fluids poured from her wounds, soaking his hands.

“No, no, no,” he murmured, brushing her hair to one side and inadvertently smearing blood on her forehead. “It can't end like this. Please, don't let it end like this.”

“Don't you see,” she gasped, squeezing his hand. “This has to end. You have to break out of the time loop.”

“No,” he whispered. “I can't leave you.”

“You have to,” she said, closing her eyes as she whispered, “Run!”

Like Lachlan before her, Lily's body went limp in his arms. Her eyes flickered open, but they stared blindly up at the vast ceiling of the reactor dome.

“Nooooo!” he screamed, arching his back and tensing every muscle in his body in a futile bid to roll back time, but there was nothing to be done for her.

Run!

Lily's last word seemed to echo in his mind.

Run?

Sitting there, he trembled, trying not to collapse beside her lifeless body. Jason was shaking uncontrollably. Standing seemed impossible, let alone walking or running. Here he was, sitting on a time machine, unable to roll back just one minute to save the young woman. He couldn't explain the connection he'd forged with Lily over those past few days, but it had been severed violently and abruptly, tearing at his heart.