Part Twelve
'Come on Virgil, step it up. We're running out of time.'
Virgil slipped the headset down and lodged it angrily around his neck. The last thing he needed was Scott in his ear, harping about time.
How much of it was left.
How much of it he didn't have.
His eyes slid towards John, stooped beside him at the directional display, the sleek profile highlighted by the greens, reds and yellows of the LED readouts. Virgil blinked, committed the image to memory, slammed his hand down hard on the throttle and ramped the Mole towards maximum.
Jolted by the increase in speed John lurched off-balance, grabbed hold of Virgil's chair and used it to heave himself back to the forward console. He removed the headset from Virgil's neck and slipped it on, positioned the mic close to his mouth. 'Scott, we're working with granite here.' A pause, then John leaned towards the monitor, refreshed the feed from Mobile Control, monotoned softly 'five degrees left left, thirty degrees vertical south.'
Virgil adjusted the trajectory and angled the Mole on a steep incline down through the dark earth. Beside him, John nodded intently into the mic and FAB'd, steadied himself on the console as they passed through a field of broken rock and the Mole shuddered violently around them.
'What was he on about?' Virgil asked when he was sure the connection was severed.
'The upper levels of the building have pancaked.' John raised a hand to rub at his mouth. 'We're not going to make it.'
'What?'
'By the time we get through this plug, the entire building will be down.'
Virgil stared at the console, at the geophys display, at the blinking green outline of the granite intrusion that stood between them and their target.
'Five hundred metres and we'll clear the plug,' John's finger traced along the screen. 'Another two hundred and we'll break through.'
'Sub-basement?' Virgil looked at his brother.
'There could be survivors.' John ignored Virgil's sceptical stare. 'We're continuing on trajectory.'
'The entire structure's on fire, John. There won't be anything left.' Virgil tightened his fingers on the steerage as the drill pierced the intrusion and jolted the cabin with the screech of metal on rock.
'Shit.' John knocked Virgil's hand from the console. 'Throttle back before you blow the core.'
Virgil stared at John's hand where it rested on the console, felt a stab of resentment at the day's division of labour, that John had been sent down to babysit while Gordon cooled his heels with Scott topside.
'I can handle it.' Virgil could barely hear himself over the vibration that juddered through the cabin, the whirling vortex of broken stone that clattered and scraped along the outside of the reinforced hull.
John relinquished the console. 'Whatever's going on inside your head,' he said, 'we don't have time for it now.'
Time…
Virgil slid his hand onto the throttle and stabilised the drill speed, stared at the freshly healed scars that etched their way in jagged streaks across his fingers.
'You shouldn't have taken the time! You should have got the hell out of there!'
'Jesus, Scott.' John's arms unfolded and flew exasperated into the air. 'What were we supposed to do?'
Virgil glanced up, unsurprised that Scott had taken up where their father had left off, surprised that John continued to doggedly argue the point.
'You were supposed to call for orders.'
'We tried!' John's face reddened, his irritation swelling as the debrief from hell continued without abatement. 'There was half a kilometre of rock in the way!' He turned to where Virgil sat on the couch, seeking corroboration.
'Comms were blocked by an interference pattern from the granite field,' Virgil offered. Was that what his brother had wanted him to say?
'Nevertheless,' Jeff re-entered the fray, aimed his dissatisfaction directly at John, 'we have a protocol and you should have followed it. As soon as you were certain that International Rescue's services were no longer required, you should have returned to the surface.'
John didn't miss a beat. 'I felt the circumstances warranted a physical search.'
The circumstances.
Virgil glanced again at John, at the tight planes of his shoulders, set stiff at attention. Why did he fight them? It was only a matter of time before Brains downloaded the cabin recordings and transferred them to their father's desktop.
And then everybody would see the circumstances.
It had taken twelve minutes for them to pass through five hundred metres of granite. A shard of primeval Earth that had speared its way towards the surface of the planet for eons beyond measure. Unthinking, unrespecting of all that time, the Mole had pierced the granite screeching, had worked its way through the intrusion as blindly as the stone itself had worked its way through millennia. And when the last of the rock had clattered screaming along the hull and the Mole had entered into softer earth, Virgil powered down the drill and sat back, waited silently as John took external readings.
'Shit,' John said after he had rechecked the data. 'O2 below survivable range. Temperature 187.'
Shit, Virgil echoed inside his head. He angled the forward scanner so that John could see the sensor display, watched his brother's lips twist in disappointment at the jumble of rubble it displayed, the collapsed ceiling, the mess of twisted metal beams that registered hot on the sensors. Hoped John understood that no life could possibly have lingered amongst all that destruction.
'Mole to Mobile Control,' John said into the comms, his face tightening at the static that returned in reply. He dropped his headset onto the console and turned to meet Virgil's gaze. 'We're on our own.'
Virgil shook his head. 'John, there's no way – '
'Don't, Virg.' John heaved a pair of fire suits from a locker and tossed one towards his brother. 'We didn't drill our way through all that shit only to turn back now.'
John keyed open the hatch and activated the floodlights, paused for a moment on the threshold, then stepped carefully from the ramp onto the smoking earth, like an astronaut stepping onto a planet composed of shadow and light and the inner workings of people exposed unexpectedly to the air.
Who decides, Virgil wondered as he and John heaved at concrete the size of boulders, tugged free the body of a woman broken and smashed to pulp. Who decides who lives and who dies? He slid his hand beneath a twisted beam, felt his gloved fingers slide through congealed blood. Who decides?
Virgil stared at the silent faces, some destroyed by concrete and steel, some still smooth and unblemished, even by fear.
If these people been given a choice, if a woman in white had offered them life instead of death, would they have taken it?
In a way it was fitting, that his return to duty should be marred by failure. That the images he returned with were stained with soot and blood and the scent of utter, utter futility.
Virgil swallowed in his sleep as memory returned, unbidden, unwelcome, unwanted. Images that rose to the surface of his brain and eddied there, suspended on currents of nightmare.
Three times.
He hears the words.
And he's back there, in that room, with her. It seems he can never get that place out of his head. Never get her out of his mind. Can never forget her voice, dulling his brain, mesmerising him, urging him towards the unspeakable.
Her lips part and he sees her speak. Follows the movement of her mouth with his eyes. 'This is the third time we have given you this opportunity.'
'But I don't…' Virgil cast about in the shadowless room for answers. 'How is that possible? I've never been here before, never even met you...'
'We have met twice before, Mr Tracy, and your response is always the same.'
'But I'd remember…' Virgil searched the deepest recesses of his mind, found himself clutching at straws as slippery as silk. 'Surely I'd know?'
She shook her head, once, a blunt and sympathetic no. 'Each time we are forced to come back a little earlier in your Timeline.' She lowered her eyes, and it seemed to Virgil that she sighed. 'But every attempt costs, each incursion fracturing the Timestream further.'
He stared at her, felt himself drowning in possibilities as endless as Time itself.
'Alright!' he said, suddenly, angrily, tired of the argument, tired of the world spinning in useless circles. 'What if I believe you? What if I play along? What if I don't go?'
'You will always go. It is what you will do that is always in doubt.'
He stared uncomprehending at her, wondered how many times she had brought the unsuspecting to this room and presented with the impossible. Wondered how many times she would bring him here to get what she wanted.
'If this attempt doesn't work,' she said, intuiting the question in his eyes, 'we will cease manipulating this particular Timestream. We will have no choice but to leave the world to its fate.'
'Fate.' Virgil bowed his head. 'Maybe that's the way it's meant to be.'
'Perhaps.'
Virgil thought of the world. The injustice, the poverty, the violence. The constant spectre of death, breathing down his neck. Said again, less certain than a moment ago, '…maybe that's the way it's meant to be?'
'There is a theory,' she said, her voice grown cold and the muscles of her fingers tight where they rested on the table, 'that some things cannot be changed. That the Timestream will always find a way to assert itself.'
'A theory?' He raised his head. 'Don't you know?'
'You will be the first casualty in this war, Mr Tracy. You will never see what follows. The systematic destruction of countries, entire populations erased from the face of the planet. The survivors wounded and broken and utterly crushed in spirit. You are spared all of this, while we have lived it many times over.'
Virgil felt himself touch the pain and the disbelief, felt bile rise into his gut and sweat prickle slick upon his brow. He stared at her as she stared at him. Felt as trapped as Shrodinger's legendary cat, a prisoner here inside this cold, white box, with nothing but her eyes to give him life. Wondered at what point he existed. At what point he would cease to exist.
He could already feel the blood on his hands.
He awoke, as usual, to the sound of the ocean. To the clatter and hiss of palm leaves rustling outside his window. To the familiar sensation of dread as it coiled cold and hard in the pit of his stomach.
Virgil lifted an arm, groped blindly across the bedside table until his hand fell on his timepiece, the watch-face smooth and cool beneath his fingers. He opened one eye and brought the dial into sharp focus, dropped the watch abruptly to the side table as the blood drained from his fingertips.
November 26.
Virgil lurched from the bed. He staggered to the bathroom, hung his head over the basin and wished, for a moment, that he could summon her here. That he could ask her, now, at the end, to turn back Time.
Scott watched as Gordon poked at his breakfast, eyes following as his brother raised his fork into the air, studied it as though it held the secrets of the universe, then replaced it gently on his plate.
'Is there something wrong with the breakfast, Mr Gordon?'
Scott's eyes slid to the only other occupant of the kitchen.
'No, Kyrano. Thank you.' Gordon lifted the napkin from his lap and placed it on the table. 'I'm not very hungry today, I guess.'
Kyrano placed a towel onto the servery, dark eyes clouded with concern. 'Are you feeling unwell?'
Scott raised his coffee to his lips as his eyes moved back to their scrutiny of his younger brother.
'No, Kyrano, thanks. I'm fine.' Gordon pushed the plate away, looked up to find Scott staring at him over the rim of the coffee cup. Gordon's face stilled, a shutter coming down, a blandness of expression that smoothed the creases from the corners of his eyes and wiped away the frown that had threatened at his mouth.
Scott's tongue played against the rim of the cup as his brother stared blankly back across the table, poised somewhere between coming and going, caught on the blue spear of Scott's gaze.
Scott tilted the cup, let the coffee fill his mouth with scalding heat.
