Paralysis Paradox (Time Travel Through Past Lives Adventure Series Book 1) (17 page)

Restricted by whom?

‘Enemy threat to Afghanistan airspace...’

I kept firing questions as quickly as I could. I had always shared this sphere with another mind, and before it had been there simply to deliver me information, but if it was just a computer, then it would have to follow its programming. It would only take some coding to make the computer in charge, but it was still programmed to respond to me. I could fire hundreds of questions at it, and even if every response were ‘negative’ or ‘restricted’, it would still have to answer me.

We were falling beside the humans now. All I had done so far was prolong their agony. I heard a crackle over the radio:

‘Foxtrot 2121, you are le...ing...sig...range, please...’

I kept firing my questions.
Why are they a threat?

‘China...’

‘Say again,’ I heard myself respond over the radio.
‘Radio check?
’

Not only was there no reply, but that information cocoon that I had perceived earlier was gone. Like a fog had been lifted and its very lifting meant that I could understand what had happened.

De-activate coms unit,
I commanded and the radio cackle ceased.
I have control.

There was a discernible shift in our course as I took control of the trajectory and kept myself close to the falling people. I would help them as soon as I could work out how. The trickle of radio chatter was in fact electrostatic signals to disrupt me from taking full command of the sphere. Electronic countermeasures, used internally rather than against an external enemy. But now that we were lower to the ground and so far away from our base, we had moved out of range.

Grab them,
I ordered, but there was nothing to grab them with. No physical protrusions, no force fields or tractor beams, which oddly enough I expected there to be. All I could do was fly, communicate and attack. I manoeuvred underneath one of the people and lifted slightly. It was hard to move around to the exact centre of gravity, but at least this crew member was unconscious, so they didn’t try to move. A dead weight, but still alive according to my sensors. I heard my own internal motors buzzing rapidly to keep us in balance. Once we were stable enough, I moved us underneath the other person, repeating the process until I had two people precariously balanced on top of me. All this whilst falling to Earth at hundreds of knots. A distinct crackle alerted me that the other computer brain was about to switch on the coms, to verify the radio chatter it had overheard.

Keep coms switched off
,
I ordered, but it didn’t work, so I changed our direction in a slow descent as otherwise my passengers would fly off, heading eastwards away from our base and the source of that signal. The radio buzzed and, afraid that it was about to come to life, I panicked and issued that fateful command whilst I still could.

Stop! Reset!

‘Confirm reboot?’

Confirmed.

My flight motors hesitated, the view before me flickered as my own flight computer was switched off. I was lucky that I could maintain control at all, however everything became harder. A good twenty per cent of my own concentration was now occupied with keeping the people balanced.

Time to restart?
I asked in my mind, but of course there was no response as the computer was not yet operational. I anticipated that it would attempt to retake control once it was back online. And even if it didn’t, it would switch on the coms unit and if I had not escaped that crippling signal, then I would become powerless again.

We were still descending, following the back end of a parabolic curve. At 77,000 feet my sensors informed me that the person right on top of me would soon go into cardiac arrest. This irregular electrical activity created interference that blocked the sensors from reading the life signs of my other passenger, so for all I knew, I could be losing both of them.

I was killing them by keeping them up here in this highly rarefied atmosphere. I needed to get much lower as fast as possible, without hitting the ground so hard that we all ended up dead. But the extra weight I was carrying was problematic. If I travelled any faster than this, I doubted that I could slow down in time for us to survive the landing. I could not calculate a
precise speed
without the flight computer. Wherever we went it had to be as far away as we could get from that signal, so I accelerated an easterly descent, but keeping us much slower than our terminal velocity, as I searched for softer landing zones. Somewhere I could hit, at speed. The sea would be good, as we could land on that at up to thirty knots and still survive, but we were over central Asia. Soft snow would be even better. Soft snow with ice and liquid below it could be survivable at up to 130 knots, so I hunted for lakes. I detected a few south-easterly and many frozen lakes to the northeast, with a few very curious anomalies amongst them. Confident that we could survive an even faster impact into one of these anomalies, I sped up as fast as I could without losing my cargo, just as the computer brain reactivated. I sensed it attempting to restart the coms unit as we continued an accelerated descent. This was bad, but I knew now that we were all better off without this flight computer at all.

Shutdown
, I commanded. At 19,000 feet I heard one of my passengers gasp as they regained consciousness. The slight movement that followed meant that they both fell off. Without any of their own means of flight they both accelerated past me, so I let myself drop at my full terminal velocity. I was no physicist but I knew enough to realise that the air resistance of a sphere was atrocious. Cannonballs came to mind as I fell past them and I attempted to gather how alive they were. One was tumbling around and they were either already dead, or still unconscious, the other had spread their arms and legs out, evidence of some skydiving training. I started firing my pulse weapon at three-second intervals directly into the centre of the Siberian crater from 7,000 feet up. The frozen crust was over fourteen feet, but only the first few feet were water—the rest was methane. The intent was to break up the water and methane ice into fine shards. The top of the lake would still act like a solid, although it had been weakened. Solids were denser, so it would slow us down far faster than a liquid. I was turning it into soft snow. The ice below it would shatter and then the liquid below would make the lake act like a giant airbag. I hit it at 170 knots, and it turned instantly into foam-like sponge. It should have been perfect, but whilst two life forms bounced, as predicted, I ended up embedded about six feet into the ice.

‘Confirm shutdown?’
asked the computer.

I started using my pulse weapon again to clear away the slush, which was rapidly re-freezing around me, but it ended up dislodging more below, so I sank even deeper into it. Everything was freezing. The sensors indicated that it was minus 27 degrees, and just as I fell, so did the temperature. It made little difference to me; the outside air temperature had dropped to minus 55 degrees at the tropopause and I hadn’t sensed a thing, but this was not ideal for the people I was trying to save.

Activating my infrared sensors, I peered through the ice. One body lay motionless and had partially sunk into the lake. I could see the heat literally bleeding out of them. The other person was crawling along. My coms device activated, a blip and then the influx of electro-magnetic chatter.

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday strike command, this is Foxtrot 2121. Have performed forced landing within the Tunguska Exclusion Zone, request auto triangulate for exact position. Have prisoner.’

Shutdown
, I ordered.

‘Negative.’

I have control.

‘Order invalid.’

It was of no use. Despite being buried several feet in a frozen, deserted wilderness thousands of miles away from my launch site, the interference signal was clearer than ever. Again all I could do was observe as the ‘prisoner’ kept crawling. I hoped that they would escape, but that hope was dashed as I watched via infrared as more humans ran on the ice and dragged them away, followed by repetitive thud-thud-thud vibrations as drilling equipment was deployed to extract my sphere partner and me.

How could I have done things differently? If I’d aimed south-easterly we could have plunged into a lake. I would have had to slow down to below 30 knots for it to be survivable, so my passengers would have had a slightly longer journey time, but I might have sunk and they could have drowned. I consoled myself that I might have saved one life, as I felt the familiar tranquilised feeling. I was being switched off and hoped to never be turned on again, not in this life.

‘Reset!’

THREE WEEKS

LATER:

The Bunker, 1996

Apparently that creepy old Konrad had become ill and hadn’t been able to leave Deerden. He kept glancing over at me now as I tried to eat my eggy bread. I couldn’t help but feel queasy near him. He sat sideways beside the kitchen table, watching a portable television set.

‘I’ve never seen such a small colour TV set, when did we get that?’ I asked, having never seen even seen one at the Bond Street Beriozka outlet.

My father didn’t look up from his precious newspaper, and Konrad’s head tilted to the side, with one eye on me and another on the screen. His antique brain struggling to think of a suitable answer, without missing what was said or shown. The BBC news service broadcasting the familiar images of war from one far off land to another. Peculiar, how I took these images for granted, and hardly watched; yet how disturbing death was when I was close to it. Deerden was my castle, a place to keep me safe; so the last thing I ever wanted to do here was watch the news.

‘Its military tech—you know how they’re always light-years ahead of anything in the shops,’ said Vera at last.’ Konrad needs it to stay abreast of what’s going on in the middle east.’

She must have heard the term “light-year” somewhere, as I was convinced that it was a concept beyond her understanding.

‘They’re always fighting over there!’ I said looking away from the screen.

I had received a call on my mobile from my dad three days ago saying that Frankie had been found dead in the woods. Tom had picked me up from school last night, and it felt very odd returning in such circumstances. The excitement of going home when I should be at school jarred uncomfortably with my guilt over not being more upset. There was this awful morbidity around everyone, yet they seemed to actively avoid talking about what happened, which was really frustrating. Dad just read the newspaper, like he did every morning. I yearned for him to look up, but he seemed so engrossed.

‘Now, you will be sure to dress appropriately tomorrow, Vicky—all black,’ said Vera.

‘Of course, it’s hardly my first funeral, you know,’ I snapped back.

She looked sheepish for a moment, and I caught Dad giving her a brief glare.
Good, you bitch; you imagine what it’s like to be at your mother’s funeral at six years old.

‘It says here that the rebels used a new kind of shell,’ my father said, leaning over towards Konrad and pointing at some article, before Konrad snatched the paper off him.

‘What, how did they get hold of that information?’ Konrad asked, but both my father and Vera said nothing.

I knew his question was more senile muttering than genuine enquiry, but I did enjoy seeing him irate. So I just couldn’t help myself.

‘They’re a newspaper—aren’t they meant to report the news?’ I asked, before filling my mouth with a large, warm piece of croissant.

My father occupied himself turning the page of his paper, and I may have imagined it, but Vera looked like she smiled very briefly. Konrad stared right back; looking at me as if I was an alien and I instantly regretted what I said. I preferred his face when only one eye was on me. In fact, none would be the preferable state. So why could I not help but provoke him?

‘You’re so naive. Military information like that needs to be kept secret.’

‘I understand that,’ I swallowed the rest of my croissant before carrying on, ‘our stuff should be secret, but people should know what the enemy possess—surely?’

My father finally looked up, his mouth even opened, before Konrad raised his hand, palm facing my father’s face. The implied gesture to ‘shut up’ altogether was embarrassingly clear.

‘So if I told you that they used a shell with Plutonium in it, what would you think?’

‘I would think that they may have used a radioactive substance that is very dangerous and best kept behind layers of concrete and lead. I thought that even experimenting with that was banned, since the Sellafield and Agadir incidents?’

‘Precisely. It is banned. I bet you don’t even know what a nuclear blast is?’

‘No, should I?’

‘No. Because if you did, you would be very afraid. So the information they have just released, is the tip of the iceberg.’

‘To a secret that could lead to mass panic?’ I asked, intrigued more than scared.

‘Naive, but smart nevertheless,’ he said in a disconcertingly, approving manner. I preferred him despising me. ‘I’ve seen what deep fear can do: whole civilisations collapse into anarchy, or become paralysed by it.’