Jaunt (26 page)

A series of loud knocks along the port and starboard walls of the holding bay startled Gilmour, bringing his attention to the seawater now pouring in fast. Feeling the rising cold around his legs, the agent realized that another factor was in play; the rushing water was coming at much too rapid a pace for the extent of damage he witnessed from the stem, making a deliberate flooding of the lower deck the only culprit. Did the crew see him board? Did they know he had made it to the holding bay?

No matter. His new objective was to get back to the bridge and shut off the flooding water. Even if he couldn’t save the ship from eventually sinking, he might be able to buy himself a few minutes. Minding the water level around him, Gilmour retraced his steps, careful not to slip on any of the obscured debris. Placing a hand on the ladder, he felt vibration through the thick, rusted metal. A shaft of brilliant sunlight then poured over him, its warmth piercing the stone-cold bay. Looking up, he saw a silhouetted form descending with difficult urgency.

Gilmour retreated several meters and readied his pistol, tracing the person who was just coming into view. “Halt! I’m armed!”

Nicolenko’s boots met the watery floor. Not turning to meet the agent face on, he shrouded himself in the shadow cast by the ladder. “You. Somehow I knew this was all connected to you.”

“We seem to be in agreement,” Gilmour said, recognizing him as the Soviet

“supervisor” aboard the
Amiliji
, the man who alarmed his instincts. He circled round to Nicolenko’s right flank. “Men out of our time. Not all that we appear.”

“Time?” Nicolenko chuckled, despite the blinding pain. “What do you know about time?”

“No more than you, of course. We’re both just grunts, here to do our duties.”

Gilmour scrutinized the mysterious man. “Who are you? Who do you work for?”

Nicolenko cracked a smile. “You know that I can’t answer that. It’s all part of our mutual game, don’t you see? You do one thing, we do another. You retaliate...it’s all how we play.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you win. If you abandon this ship, I’ll allow you to live, maybe even go back to your own time. But I can’t allow you to have the objects.”

Nicolenko’s hand inched down to his waist belt. “I was about to tell you the same....”

The hair on Gilmour’s neck aroused him in time to nearly elude a round from Nicolenko’s revolver. Moving to his left, the agent was grazed on his right flank, the slug burning a hole into his overcoat, but missing anything vital.

Nicolenko grasped the ladder and flung himself behind it, allowing him to stand steadily with his impotent leg. Gilmour ducked below a pile of debris, shielding himself. Sliding out of the water, he shot off a round, hitting a rung on the ladder.

Nicolenko fired two rounds, then limped into the darkness. The echoes of his awkward steps resonated throughout the holding bay, giving Gilmour a decent idea of his location. The agent hesitated to use his lasersight to pinpoint the false NKVD man, fearing Nicolenko would conversely locate him.

Gilmour crept around the debris pile, careful to mask his movements under the sound of the incoming water; just getting to the ladder would be difficult enough without his opponent on surveillance. Gilmour couldn’t wait any longer, and the water wasn’t getting any lower.

Estimating his distance, Gilmour devised the easiest path around the debris. Launching off his feet, he fired a volley of rounds at Nicolenko’s apparent position, then rushed the skeletal ladder. Getting within a meter, Gilmour leapt from the watery deck floor and onto the ladder, clinging hard to the rungs. He then pulled himself up, hearing the air compress after a series of rounds from Nicolenko’s revolver zipped under him.

He ascended and stepped into the corridor again, his eyesight bleached by the absolute white of the portholes. Readjusting his sight, he headed for the ship’s bow, and an appointment with her captain.

Nicolenko grappled a metal beam and pushed himself to his feet. Around him, the water foamed red with his blood, which was duly churned by the rising ocean level. Threatening to be drowned in the ocean’s fury, the lieutenant forded the seawater, his animal-like grunts ringing in his ears and echoing in the darkness, reducing him to the basest of lifeforms.

One hand over the other, he jerked his unwilling body past each rung of the ladder, the grime and rust collected on its surface splattering onto his face and working its way into his mouth. Each second was more torturous than the last, but before long Nicolenko reached the top, pausing only to witness the water raging up the ladder behind him, now just meters away. The last of the metal debris was uprooted from the tallest piles and carried away, taking with them the vestiges of his mission.

It was all going to hell. Nicolenko had no choice but to stop Gilmour, even if the jewels were lost; he couldn’t allow the bastard to return...his duty was now personal.

“Sweet Jesus!”

Gilmour stepped over the bloody trail leading to the bridge, then glimpsed the form of Krasnowsky slumped before the holding bay’s controls. Gilmour felt for a pulse on the man’s neck, then bent down and cradled Krasnowsky’s head in his arms, wiping congealed blood from the captain’s cheek and mouth.

“Can you speak?” he asked in Russian.

Krasnowsky’s throat fought the thickened blood, coughing and vomiting out the fluids just to breathe a meek “Yes.”

“Who is he—where is he from?” Gilmour implored, disregarding the man’s failing state.

“Nico...Nicolenko...all I knoww—aarhhh....” Krasnowsky burbled out more spit and mucous, which foamed over his chin.

“Relax, I have you...you’re not alone.” Gilmour cleared away the vomitus, then pressed, “Who sent him?”

“NKVD all I know...please—let me die. I’m just a fisherman....” Krasnowsky’s eyes rolled into his head, a final gurgle ejecting from his throat.

Gilmour laid the man to the deck floor and rose to his feet, wiping his hands on his wool overcoat. Turning to the instrument panel in front of him, he discovered the source of the extra water in the holding bay. Reading the Cyrillic characters, and seeing the blood coating the respective switches, he realized the captain had flooded the bay with ocean water, seemingly intending to destroy the evidence of any cargo. Was it an attempt to thwart this Nicolenko, as he called him? Or was it to save his own name, perhaps absolving any relations of his potential criminal activity, since Gilmour was pretty damn certain that the man was not NKVD?

Gilmour crossed over to the radio and tuned the receiver. Picking up the headphones, he said, “Gilmour to
Amiliji
, over.”

A crackled voice answered, “
Amiliji
. Osipiak here.”

“Get Clayton to send his men over here, and quick! This ship is going down! Repeat, this ship is going down! We’re going to lose—”

A pair of gunshots blew the radio board to pieces, showering Gilmour with wood and metal. Ripping off the headphones, Gilmour whipped his head around to see Nicolenko standing there, his smoking revolver gripped in his hands.

“Don’t be stupid, Nicolenko,” Gilmour hissed, “if that is truly your name. I have the tactical advantage here. Your men have fled this trawler, and your cargo is sinking to the bottom. All you have left is my mercy.”

“I have no wish to see you dead just yet, Gilmour,” he said, stepping closer. “Tell me what you know, and hand over all that you possess, and I will consider allowing you to swim back to Canada.”

Rumbling beneath their feet caused the two to glance down at the deck floor, then back at each other.

“This ship is going down fast!” Gilmour yelled. “I can get you off it, if you allow me!”

Nicolenko shoved his revolver into Gilmour’s face. “Your mercy is not worth losing the cargo! Give me the jewels!”

Another rumble below decks buffeted the trawler, allowing Gilmour a distraction. He punched the revolver out of Nicolenko’s hand and struck the lieutenant’s jaw with his flattened palm, felling him to the floor. Nicolenko quickly recovered to give a swift kick with his uninjured leg to Gilmour’s ankle, toppling him with a crack. Despite both men being disabled, they landed repeated punches to each other, scuffling even while they lay flat on their backs.

Multiplying in intensity, the rumbles below deck reverberated at a constant pace, the
Marinochka
buckling under the extreme stress. Seams in the walls and floors opened, with cracks soon growing from the weakest areas of the trawler. Unbeknownst to the two men, the ocean horizon had disappeared from the forward window, replaced by the blue daylight sky.

At once, Gilmour and Nicolenko slid back towards the aft section of the bridge, both landing hard against the metal wall. Gilmour’s hand reached out to the floor and grasped a thin, wooden panel that had pushed up. Digging his fingertips into it, he clawed his way up the increasingly angled floor, fighting the combined push of gravity and Nicolenko’s own feeble attempts at combat.

“Gilmour!!! Damn you!!!”

Looking back, Gilmour saw Nicolenko struggling to free himself from the wall. Gilmour recoiled his biceps and pulled himself up using the panel, which was slowly arcing backwards under the agent’s mass. Just when the panel began to splinter, sparkles of light cascaded past him. Turning his head to the stem of the ship, Gilmour witnessed the sudden collapse of the bridge window above, bringing a deluge of shattered glass down around him, followed by a heavy metal weight. Bouncing off the floor above him, the weight crashed into Gilmour and sent him falling into the wall below. He opened his eyes long enough to see a creeping blackness overtake him.

An alarm sounded on Waters’ holobook, startling her. “Richard, sensors are detecting elevated meV levels...” she paused, “rising to forty-one, centering on the lab!”

“Grab your equipment and alert Anaba,” de Lis ordered, picking up his own holobook from the lab desk.

Seconds later in the U5-1 laboratory, de Lis, Dark Horse, Waters, Marlane, Valagua, Roget, Constantine and McKean converged around an array of sensors, emergency equipment and the laboratory’s monitors, awaiting the definitive signal.

Marlane and Waters kept their eyes on the bank of holographic monitors, watching a spinning, amorphous black shape grow in scale on the screens.

“Topology is consistent,” Marlane said to Waters.

Waters looked to de Lis. “This is it.”

De Lis thrust his arms out, yelling, “Stand back, give him room!”

On his command, the group took refuge behind the assembled equipment, waiting for the characteristic hum and sizzle of the Casimir reaction, while Constantine and McKean stood ready with chemical extinguishers, aiming them for the projected area of the return.

At the climax of a cascade of alarms from the laboratory’s sensors, a brilliant white sphere ripped open in the center of the room, a vortex of swirling energy that emitted a haunting siren song. The sphere belched, vomiting a beige lump that landed on the tile floor and slumped over. Two instantaneous streams of chemical extinguisher poured over the form, creating a thick blanket of smoke throughout the room.

De Lis pointed to the fallen figure, shouting, “Help him up! Help him up!”

Wearing sanitized gloves, Constantine and McKean grabbed the humanoid form and set it on a nearby chair. The two men then started work on releasing the still-smoking suit’s numerous latches. Rotating the metal rings on the shoulder apparatus, they removed the helmet, revealing the perspiring countenance of Special Agent James Gilmour, fresh from the mists of time.

“Thank God, Gilmour,” Constantine blurted, “we were beginning to worry.”

McKean clapped Gilmour’s shoulder. “What the hell kept you?”

Gilmour rose to his feet, slipped off his gauntlets and unlocked the torso piece. “Help get this thing off me....”

After a few moments, the two agents and de Lis stripped Gilmour down to his bodysock. Wiping off his face with a towel, Gilmour inhaled a chestful of air, the first in some time not tinged with diesel exhaust.

Looking at the gathered scientists—colleagues, again, he reminded himself—he felt a pang of remorse, not quite guilt, but disappointment perhaps in a way only he could understand.

“I failed, Doctor...the jewels are still buried there...aboard a Soviet trawler.”

De Lis nodded. “We know, Agent Gilmour. The DoD’s latest satellite reconnaissance detected the trawler buried under several thousand tonnes of seafloor.”

Gilmour perked up at this potentially positive turn. “Than there’s still a chance to recover them, despite this?”

De Lis glanced at Constantine and McKean, a sudden, weary cast in his eyes.

Gilmour’s jaw tightened. “Something happened when I was gone. What is it?”

“Agent Constantine and Agent McKean returned from their respective jaunts to the Confederation’s main manufacturing plants of neutronic particles,” he explained.

“Estimating forward from the times they each monitored the Confederation, the Russians have enough weapons to level half the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, if they so pleased.”

An ashen pall fell over Gilmour’s face.

“It gets worse.” De Lis deferred to Dark Horse, who produced a holobook from his jacket. Handing it to Gilmour, the device displayed a holograph dotted with green circles over a map of the North Pacific Ocean basin.