For King and Country Read online

  Zenon Mylonas, who'd remained silent until now, nodded. "Very well, Captain."

  Dr. Mylonas was one of those perpetually mournful-looking chaps one expects to find in a mortuary, but seldom does. Sitting in the crowded pub, with his lesser colleagues ranged about him, he reminded Stirling of a gawky adolescent, all elbows and knobby shoulders and a discomfited awareness of not quite fitting in properly. His eyes held the look of a man who's faced the worst humanity has to offer itself and has not come up on the winning side.

  Realization struck like an electric shock: Mylonas was utterly terrified. By his own research.

  The implications were sickening, like a bottomless hole opening out under his feet, when he hadn't expected so much as a crack in the pavement. What the IRA could do with real time travel... The crowded pub crashed back into Stirling's awareness with a roar of voices raised in laughter and snatches of drunken song, the perpetual clink of glassware, the blue haze of cigarette smoke, all combining like the clattering of an unseen train roaring past in the fog. An ominous tremor began in the pit of his stomach, worse than pre-combat jitters. Stirling unfroze long enough to completely drain his glass in one long gulp, before gesturing for another. "All right," he finally managed. "Give me a lesson in time travel, professor."

  "We'll begin with the basic physics of the project," Mylonas leaned forward, rolling his own empty bar glass between his hands. "You understand, surely, the concept of infinite potential futures? If I do x instead of y and you respond with b instead of c and so on, multiplied by all the physical factors in the universe? A crushed butterfly that robs some bird of its dinner, which prevents the offspring from transmitting a fatal disease that would have wiped out half of Asia. Or a supernova or meteorite being taken as a sign from God, prompting someone to invade a neighbor, abandon a revolution, or engineer a new religion which in turn kills several million people under the guise of saving their souls. If one accepts this as fact—or, perhaps I should say, as unchallenged hypothesis, as we are all scientists laboring under the scientific theory—then one must also understand there are an infinite number of potential pasts, as well. I didn't do x, but did y instead, you didn't respond with b, but rather did c."

  "Well, I suppose so," Stirling frowned, "but look here, this doesn't make logical sense. How can both x and y have happened, when clearly, only x did happen?"

  "It's a matter of quantum physics," Mylonas said patiently, "or rather, a matter of fractural physics, which is not something even your average quantum physicist has begun to grasp."

  "Fractural physics?" Stirling echoed. "What the devil is that?"

  "A bloody Nobel Prize," Cedric Banning grinned, raising his half-drained glass in a salute.

  Mylonas shot Banning a quelling glance. "Quite. If the Home Office will ever allow us to publish our data." The haunted look in the man's eyes deepened. Stirling narrowed his gaze, realizing abruptly that Mylonas wanted the Home Office to keep his work classified. Oddly, none of the others appeared to be so deeply rattled. Rampant delight was the operative word at this table. What did Mylonas know, that the others hadn't glimpsed, yet?

  "Go on, please," Stirling said quietly, sipping from his second glass of stout. "What is fractural physics?"

  "A mathematical way of describing, of accounting for, the impossibilities in observation which neither quantum physics nor its mathematical system can explain. Surely you knew, already, that the simple act of observation literally brings a thing into being, at the quantum level? Observation equals creation. If you ask the right question, in other words, the universe obliges you by providing a previously nonexistent answer. And if a thing exists, it can be fractured into something else; time is no exception. In fact, without fractural physics, nothing would—or could—exist."

  It sounded barmy to Stirling, but then, he'd barely squeaked past subjects like tensor calculus and non-Euclidian geometry, never mind quantum relativity.

  "What we've done here," Mylonas nodded toward the distant research lab, "is the elementary work of understanding how fractural physical laws operate. And what we've discovered is both infinite futures and infinite pasts, all coexisting in fractured planes, sliding over and past and through one another, a bit like a child's kaleidoscope, where the patterns and colors shift as the colored pebbles tumble about. Fractural physics provides the only scientific explanation of psychic phenomena, in fact. The human mind has billions of neural connections hardwired into the nervous system and the senses. We haven't manufactured an instrument, yet, of that complexity.

  "I rather fancy that precognition occurs when an individual with particularly acute senses encounters the intersection of fractural planes and is abruptly confronted by two possible futures. Two or more. There are people attuned to the future of fractural planes, just as others are attuned to a fractural plane's past. You might think in terms of one set of instruments tuned to ham radio frequencies and another tuned to microwave transmissions. People who have learned to shift their own consciousness from one plane to another—so called astral projection or out-of-body experience—are actually moving the pattern of their consciousness from one plane to another, or to some other referent point on their own plane. What we've done is engineer a way to hook the conscious portion of a human mind, which is, after all, merely a pattern of energy which can be codified and transferred from one point to another, through the endless shifting of fractural planes—"

  "Wait, slow down!" Stirling resisted the temptation to massage aching temples.

  Mylonas halted, brows climbing into his receding hairline. "What don't you understand? It's perfectly simple, at least in concept. It's the engineering that's a bit tricky."

  "May be simple to you," Stirling muttered, "but it's perfectly impossible from where I sit. Look, perhaps I'll grant you that bit about consciousness being a shifting energy pattern. I've seen some pretty odd things, ran across a fellow once who swore on stacks of holy treatises he had yearly out-of-body experiences, and he wasn't a candidate for the loony bin, either. So maybe, for the sake of argument, I'll buy your story about projecting someone's consciousness somewhere else. But somewhen else? I'm not a credulous fool!"

  "Neither am I," Mylonas said very quietly. Stirling was struck again by the depth of fright in those dark eyes.

  "Suppose you explain it again. Pretend I'm a newspaper reporter or some chap on the dole, with no more science education than, say, that keg of ale can lay claim to. On second thought, perhaps you'd better leave off telling me why it works and just try explaining why it could prove dangerous in a terrorist's hands?" He had to fight the impulse to glance at Brenna McEgan.

  "They might well be interested," Mylonas said patiently, "because of the potential for change, which is inherent in the shifting of the fractural planes. Changing a variable, even a minor one, could have drastic consequences. I have tried to warn Dr. Beckett against rushing blindly ahead, before proper precautions can be taken, but he won't be stopped. Not by anything short of dying, anyway. Who do you think requested help from the Home Secretary? It was not Dr. Terrance Beckett. God help us, if terrorists ever get hold of this work."

  The level of tension at the crowded table rose abruptly, like a nasty miasma over a swamp, compounded of equal parts suspicion, fear, and anger. More than one set of eyes flicked uncertainly toward Brenna McEgan. She sat cool as a queen at her corner of the table, sapphire eyes focused on a speck of dust that floated somewhere over the center of the untidy tabletop. When nobody broke the awkward silence, Stirling cleared his throat.

  "Surely there's no way to actually change anything in the past? It's already happened, with no way to undo it. And even if you could, wouldn't paradox destroy any possibility of changing things, stop you before you got started?"

  Mylonas shook his head. "You're forgetting the infinite pasts part of the equation. If you projected the energy pattern of your consciousness into a past—say, the court of Henry II, as Dr. Beckett did, or even further back, to the time of King Arthur—"


  Cedric Banning snorted into his pint of bitters without quite laughing out loud. One of the graduate students dug her elbow into his ribs. As Mylonas reddened, Indrani Bhaskar put in mildly, "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that King Arthur was quite genuine. Not a king, perhaps, but a real historical figure."

  Stirling grinned. "Yes, Dux Bellorum, and all that. Sixth century A.D., wasn't it? Last of the great Romanized Briton Lords of Battle."

  "Quite," she smiled. "I see you're a well-read man, Captain Stirling. Mind your manners, Cedric."

  Banning laughed, clearly unrepentant, and lifted his glass in a mock salute.

  Mylonas cleared his throat. "Yes. Well. If you project yourself into a past, along the fractural plane that resonates most closely with your present, you then find yourself in a new present, with an infinite number of potential futures stretching out before you. Should you take an action contrary to the ones taken on your plane of origin, call it Fractural Prime, then your consciousness will slide into a different fractural resonance, perhaps close to your Prime, perhaps not, depending upon the magnitude of difference between the two."

  "Then it isn't changing history at all, is it?" Stirling's mind had filled with images of vast sheets of multihued crystal fragmenting and crashing into one another, until the universe resembled a pile of shattered quartz, pulverized under a geologist's hammer. The longer he thought about it, the more the image disturbed him.

  Mylonas sighed. "It's a bit of both actually. It isn't as simple as you imagine."

  "What do you mean by that? Either it is or it isn't."

  "Not in fractural physics. The key word is resonance. If you switch from one fractural plane to another, the law of conservation of energy—among other things—requires a transfer of resonant energy between them. If the two resonances are sufficiently dissimilar, a dissonance is created. An energy embolism, if you will. Depending on how far back the dissonance occurs, it may have either negligible or very serious consequences in your Fractural Prime. The resulting embolism may produce a minor bruise, or it could produce catastrophic damage."

  "Catastrophic?" Stirling blinked. "What, exactly, are we talking about here? What scale? Do you mean the traveler's energy pattern is violently disrupted? As in, fatally? Or do you mean something else? Something... worse?"

  "That," Mylonas said tiredly, "is precisely what we do not know. The traveler could die, yes. Maybe. Unless the dissonance only affects things after the energy pattern's shift between planes. You might be spared, while everything else fractures around you. If the dissonance is set up in the new fractural plane, you might destroy the future of that plane, rewrite it, so to speak. You'd start with a clean slate, from your perspective, although you might well be killing off billions of people in the secondary plane's future. No way to tell, of course, subjectively, from the traveler's viewpoint.

  "But suppose the dissonance affects the old fractural plane, the Prime you originally came from. This one." Mylonas rapped bony knuckles against the tabletop. "What do you have, then? Your action in moving from Fractural Prime to Fractural Secondary destroys both the present and the future of your plane of origin. Shatters it to bits, in fact. By setting up the dissonant energy pattern in the past of one fractural plane, you utterly destroy at least one future, possibly both. Not a terribly attractive situation for scholars, but frightfully attractive to some madman bent on vengeance. Or a terrorist bent on political blackmail."

  "Dear God," Stirling whispered, staring into Mylonas' haunted eyes. "You're talking about the murder of billions of human souls!" He didn't know precisely how many people there were in the world, but it was an appalling number to snuff out in one fell swoop.

  "Yes." Mylonas swallowed. "That is the reason the Home Office insisted on sending a chap who understands counterterrorism."

  Stirling struggled to reorder his entire view of the tactical situation. Indeed, his view of the entire universe. He glanced around the table, finding stunned eyes and expressions of rising horror. Clearly, none of them had fully grasped the project's lethal potential until now. Unless, of course, one of them was a terrorist, someone who would have realized exactly what could be accomplished using this project. Getting himself—or herself—onto the team wouldn't have been easy, granted. But there was that fatal motor crack-up, which had killed two members of the senior research team. The realization left Stirling's insides shaking. Brenna McEgan was staring bleakly into her own ale glass, fingers clenched white. Her sapphire eyes were nearly as haunted as Zenon Mylonas'. How much death had she seen, coming up from a place like Londonderry, where explosive violence and terrorist murder was nearly as common as it was in Belfast?

  Stirling cast back over those dossiers he'd read, both Colonel Ogilvie's and Marc Blundell's, trying to recall everything documented on Brenna McEgan. There hadn't been much, which left him cursing the incompleteness of the material. Dammit, he needed to know how many times the people at this table had wet themselves in their prams, and the Home Office handed him a synopsis measured in thirty-second sound bites. Was Brenna McEgan the evil djinn in the bottle? Or was she simply too obvious a candidate?

  Whoever his terrorist proved to be, if there even was a terrorist, once the djinn was loose... Several billion souls, destroyed instantly. It was unthinkable.

  Stirling shuddered.

  Northern Ireland's madmen perpetrated the unthinkable every day.

  Chapter Three

  Brenna McEgan left the boisterous warmth of the Falkland Arms pub to enter to a cold and wet night. The rain and wind and scudding clouds were as full of foreboding as she herself was—not a pleasant feeling for a woman in her position. Her cover story would not stand up to the kind of scrutiny Captain Trevor Stirling would shortly bring to bear. The SAS, for God's own sake... As Brenna unlocked the driver's side door of her car, she was as close to blind terror as she'd been since leaving Londonderry, all those years ago. The phone call which had come, tracing her to her Dublin flat and her new life, had not frightened her precisely, only filled her with a nameless dread which had all too quickly found its familiar shape and hue.

  Orange terror tactics. Again.

  Indeed, what else?

  It was the reason she'd left Londonderry, the reason she'd never married, unwilling to bring a child into the madness, to inherit the hate and the killing. She still woke up some nights, drenched in cold sweat, watching her older sister and niece dissolve into blasted bits of human flesh not a dozen paces in front of her, coming out of a little shop where she'd agreed to meet them, planning to lunch together after their shopping was done. She'd joined, right afterwards; and had left for almost exactly the same reason, five years later: a Protestant woman and her child caught by an IRA car bomb, with a young girl on her knees beside them, tearing at her hair and screaming.

  "I left a long time ago," she'd told them over the phone lines. "I'm not active and you bloody well know it. And the reasons."

  "There isn't anyone else."

  "Don't give me that—"

  "Brenna. At least hear us out. Arlyne is coming to Dublin to see you."

  God and thunder, her own grandmother...

  Worse and worse.

  And it was, the worst news ever given a member of Cumann Na Mbann. The whole future of humanity at stake, if they were right, and she the only operative—former operative, she insisted forcefully—with the credentials to get inside, to trace the Orange mole, identify and stop him.

  "Brenna," her grandmother had leaned close, holding her and rocking her slightly, "I know, child, why you left us and I respected that, you know I did. But we need you, child, and it isn't just Cumann Na Mbann or the Provos trying to stop it. The leadership of the Orangemen came to us, to the Provos, I mean, to say one of their own had gone off the deep end and disappeared, vowing to destroy Britain."

  She stared at her grandmother, eyes wide.

  "Aye, love, it's that serious. He doesn't want the elections to go forward, knows the Catholics have a majo
rity this time around, and he's vowed to unleash genocide, not only against the Irish Catholics, but the British, as well, for betrayal. The Orangemen are frightened, love, and they can't find him."

  "But you did?" Her voice came out whispery, little-girl frightened.

  "We did. And, child, if there's truth in the rumors about the laboratory he's joined, he can destroy all of us, and I mean everybody on this bloody planet, billions of innocent lives."

  She'd sat in her grandmother's arms for a long time, shaking, listening as her grandmother explained everything they'd learned, why they couldn't just hit the bastard with a standard IRA hit team. No publicity, not even the breath of publicity, nothing that would look even remotely like anything but pure accident—and before they could do even that much, they had to know. Was the threat real? Was the research viable? And if so, how far away was the team from success? And literally the only person in all of Ireland who could infiltrate that team as the Orangeman had done was Brenna McEgan.

  "They'll pull strings, child, our own people and the Orangemen, both. They're afraid of him, Brenna, terrified of the man they've created and now must stop. They can't do it on their own. They've no one with the credentials to get close to him. And even if they did, he'd recognize them in a flash, drop them off a cliff somewhere. Together we'll get you inside that lab, Brenna. From there, it's you and no one else must discover the truth and stop him."

  It was, ironically, the first time in the Catholic-Protestant history of the island that the Orangemen had voluntarily worked with the IRA Provisionals. All it had taken was the realization that they'd unleashed a creature so deadly, he would risk destroying the entire world—including the Orangemen who'd turned him into a weapon—to take his vengeance against Catholics and the British who'd "betrayed" him.

  Cedric Banning—not his real name, but the name of his carefully constructed cover persona—was ruthless, brilliant, and utterly mad. To refuse the mission was unthinkable. He had to be stopped. So she'd come to Scotland, with no idea how many strings had been plucked to get her there, and she'd identified Banning, and she'd assessed the threat level—utterly deadly—and now she had an SAS captain on the job, who knew none of this, whose every glance tonight had shouted plain as daylight that she topped his suspect list.