How Do I Love Thee? Read online

  Shadrak had better have got it right this time or god or no god, she’d personally jam one of his articulated callipers up his evacuatory orifice.

  ‘That will give you sufficient time to brief Scott. And Commander,’ Julia added with a reassuring smile, ‘she’ll believe you. I have it on good authority that she’s been waking in a cold sweat for months.’

  When Burnett vanished, Wilkie said, ‘That’s it? No sirens, no fanfare, no flash of smoke? No banks of monitors to track him through time?’

  ‘That’s it,’ Julia said. ‘Same way as I arrived.’

  Admiral Prado led the way down the corridor to his office.

  ‘There are no words, Admiral,’ Julia said to him when he closed the door behind them. ‘I wish I could be here when Commander Burnett returns, to accept some of the burden of responsibility.’ Explaining the fate of Burnett’s wife and kids had been tough enough. Dealing with the reality would be much harder.

  ‘Three hours, you say?’ Wilkie looked at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, and following the Admiral’s gesture, sat back in one of the leather chairs.

  Prado reached behind his cluttered desk and opened a cabinet. ‘Another drink, Tom?’

  Wilkie nodded and pulled a lucky charm from his pocket, a red chess piece.

  Julia stared at it in disbelief. It was the king.

  The first thing she could remember after the avalanche had struck was the bliss of warm water. It took her a few moments to realise Anderson was bathing her in the hot springs inside the cave. By the time she was fully conscious and able to speak, he’d dressed her and was tenderly wrapping her in a sleeping bag.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I extended the ship’s force-field,’ he replied. ‘Couldn’t get it deployed before a lump of ice clipped your head. Sorry.’

  It was a miracle that he’d freed her and got them clear. The force-fields on Elthoran ships were skin-tight. Extending it a hundred metres to hold back a small mountain of ice would have drained the power supply in minutes.

  She looked around. Until shipping out for winter, the survey team had used the cave as a base. ‘How deeply is our ship buried?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s under about a hundred metres of ice.’

  As if reading her mind, he added, ‘It’ll take six months before the engineers get a second ship operational.’

  They’d been in worse situations. Much worse. The cave had a month’s emergency rations, each MRE with its own heat pack, for a four-man survey team. There was barely any fuel for fires, although the thermal springs would provide them with unlimited hot baths. She wasn’t even in that much pain, although she was certain her leg was broken. She looked down, surprised to see that he’d already set it, and that there was an IV drip in the back of her hand.

  ‘On the upside,’ he added with a rueful grin, ‘I found a gallon of morphine.’

  Nevertheless, shock was setting in and she began to shiver. Then his arms were around her, his body gently, firmly pressed against hers. Nothing unprofessional. On the contrary, it was survival training 101 because the temperature was plummeting like a stone. But sleeping that way over the following weeks fostered its own intimacy.

  Between blizzards, he’d gone outside and chipped away at the avalanche, hoping to tunnel down to the ship to recover the solar cells. An hour in the sun would reboot the engines and the force-field would take care of the ice. An hour after that and they’d be home. Except that the storms raged for days, sometimes weeks at a time, filling the partially dug tunnel with snow drifts that he’d barely been able to shovel out before another storm hit.

  At the end of their second month, a white furred bear-thing tried to make a meal of Julia. Out of habit, she kept her sidearm nearby, and the animal had made a welcome, if gamy, addition to their scant diet.

  Twelve weeks after they arrived, Anderson removed the cast from her leg. The bone seemed to have healed well and they celebrated with a half-bottle of contraband Scotch that she’d found in one of the survey teams’ kits. The following three days the weather held, and she insisted on working beside him as he tunnelled down to the ship.

  The next day was Christmas Eve. That evening he gave her the chess set. Fashioned from the soft, alien rocks, the red-and-black pieces were intricate, each a work of art lovingly carved over the months. She laughed aloud when she saw that the red king bore an uncanny resemblance to Shadrak. Then, for some unaccountable reason, tears came to her eyes. ‘I’ve never … no-one’s ever given me anything so beautiful before.’

  Confused, he gently brushed the tears from her cheek. She took his hand and kissed it. She had meant it to be a chaste thank-you, but it shattered five years of emotional walls and the constraints that bound them finally gave way.

  She had always imagined, in the few times she had allowed herself such thoughts, that it would be impassioned, a desperate loss of control, but his sensuality and generosity was unexpected. As the night wore on, their lovemaking turned playful. Who would have guessed?

  When she woke, a dim glow lit the cave. She turned, and her breath caught in her throat. He was watching her, a strange innocent wonder in his eyes, but when she looked deeper, she saw … melancholy.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, touching his lips with her fingers.

  ‘I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.’ He smiled bitterly, and kissed her one last time. ‘Sunrise.’

  How had he known?

  The sound of Wilkie chewing ice was annoying as all hell. ‘Can you tell us more about these … aliens?’ he said as his fingers caressed the chess piece.

  ‘They’re highly advanced predators who’ve set themselves up as gods in multiple dimensions,’ Julia replied. ‘To them, it’s a game, like chess. They go back in time, mess with a world, it buds, then the new branches split again and again. Left untrimmed, the timeline turns into a mass of brambles and you get cross-dimensional quantum entanglement.’

  Wilkie closed his eyes. ‘Migraine, Commander.’

  ‘An infection that crosses the multiple worlds. Fortunately another alien species with almost godlike capabilities can see where to prune the timelines to stop the infection.’

  ‘So we’re inter-dimensional, temporal hedge trimmers? Damn! And I left my Stihl back in the garage.’

  Julia sighed and shook her head. If she couldn’t stop these random thought associations, she was useless as a TD agent.

  ‘What’s it like being dead?’ Wilkie said, thoughtfully.

  ‘Painful, sir. Shadrak grabbed me from my world in 1991 because I could be revived with a defibrillator and a few units of blood—nothing magical, just good, twenty-first-century medical care.’

  ‘I suspect the reasons he “grabbed” you were more to do with your PhD thesis on quantum mechanics, Commander.’

  She doubted it. Once Shadrak showed her how things worked, her PhD became something of an embarrassment. ‘Then I went back in time for the other team members. SEALs, Rangers, and Special Forces, all clinically dead with no chance of survival where we found them, and with no family members to speak of. This allows us to time jump without being shunted to another dimension, unless we so choose, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Wilkie eyed her curiously. ‘And you do the bidding of these aliens freely?’

  ‘Without them Earth would have long since been destroyed. And there are fringe benefits.’

  Like running around the galaxy in a souped-up Elthoran ship. The Admiral was going to be pissed when he learned they’d turned the last one into a popsicle. Maybe they could ask Shadrak to go back and pick it up. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have room to spare.

  Shadrak’s city-sized ship hovered overhead.

  ‘Just a day earlier, Shadrak. Couldn’t you have come just a day earlier?’ Anderson whispered bitterly. Releasing his grip on the ice pick, it fell into the snow with a soft thuck.

  Julia stiffened. ‘I’ll retrieve our things from the cave, sir.’

  ‘T
here’s nothing there, Commander.’

  ‘Captain?’ She stared at him. Everything there belonged to the survey team, but the chess set …

  ‘Leave it, Commander Scott.’ His eyes were flat, shutters drawn once more, but his meaning was clear. ‘Leave it on the planet.’

  Any nervousness that Rob Burnett might have felt about the TD jump vanished as he stepped from beneath the tree into the warm 1995 spring morning—to recoil in shock. The brief flash of relief that he’d made it vanished in the face of the unfolding human tragedy.

  The dust and airborne debris had mostly settled, although papers continued to flutter around like damaged butterflies. On an upper floor, a twisted filing cabinet lost its precarious grip and fell. Its metallic crash punctured the vacuum of sound that had briefly followed the explosion and subsequent collapse of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.

  Then came the screams.

  Bloodied victims groped blindly for sanity. Shouts and orders filled the air, followed by a pandemonium of fire trucks and ambulances. Black jackets with bright yellow FBI and ATF patterns on their backs, survivors of the bombing, began scurrying around like startled beetles. Then there was the smell. Of blood and terror and death.

  Rob had seen it all before. He’d been responsible for delivering far worse. But this was different. This was his home town. He’d known some of the victims. The mawing hole in the building gaped at him accusingly. If he’d arrived fifteen minutes earlier and called in an anonymous threat, one hundred and sixty-three people would still be alive, and countless more lives would not be shattered by horror and grief.

  The regret—and temptation—passed swiftly with the knowledge that if he changed history, he could trigger something infinitely worse.

  A side door he was making for was shoved open from the inside. A slightly built fireman stepped out and looked around. She was good, Rob thought. She wasted no more than two seconds staring at the carnage before turning to the underground carpark beneath what remained of the building. He reached her in a few strides, grabbed her arm and, leaning close to her ear, said, ‘Commander Scott, Admiral Prado sends his regards. Your mission is aborted. If you stay, an FBI agent will recognise you and history changes.’

  Startled, she turned and stared up at him with familiar green eyes. ‘Is that you, Burnett? But you’re not due to report to Garden Island until—’

  ‘As you suspected, Commander. We can’t go back in time to our own world. This is a parallel dimension.’

  ‘Oh … crap.’

  The sound of sizzling bacon and the clang of cooking utensils seemed unusually loud in the packed diner; shock and grief muted the normal buzz of conversation. Every eye was fixed to the too-small television above the servery.

  Wearing a baseball cap and Clark Kent glasses, Rob kept his eyes on the screen. He wasn’t morbidly curious, but anyone not watching would look suspicious.

  They had removed their firemen’s clothes and placed them in a dumpster, the contents of which would be incinerated in a few hours. As with everything else about the Oklahoma City bombing, any evidence, including the building itself, would be removed with indecent haste. He and Julia now wore dusty nondescript jeans and shirts, while Julia had mussed her shoulder-length hair a little to look like she’d been caught in the fallout. Most everyone in the diner looked equally dishevelled.

  ‘How … when did you find out?’ Julia demanded in a low voice.

  ‘A younger version of you from a different dimension suddenly materialised inside Admiral Prado’s car. The Australian Defence Minister, Wilkie, was with him.’

  Julia grimaced. ‘Headache?’

  Rob snorted. ‘Migraine. Long story short, they collected me from the airport and briefed me on the way to HMAS Penguin.’

  ‘So, an FBI agent recognised me?’

  Except for a few more signs of age, she was identical to her other-dimensional counterpart, which, Rob decided, was a little freaky. ‘In this world,’ he said, ‘you and I were shot down over Iraq in 1991.’

  ‘Leaving a dimensional gap for us to slide into.’ Her fingers had found a paper napkin and began shredding it. ‘I worried something like that might happen, but it was just a theory. There’s so much we don’t yet know. So here on this world, we’re dead?’

  ‘We bailed okay but ended up being target practice for a couple of local tribesmen. You remember that Navy corpsman we used to play poker with on Saturday nights? Weedy guy with acne scars and a monobrow?’

  Julia nodded. ‘Dubrovnik.’

  ‘That’s the guy. He was with the recovery team that collected our bodies.’ Rob screwed up his nose. ‘Not sure I’m ever gonna get used to that notion. Anyway, Dubrovnik left the Navy in 1993—’

  ‘And joined the FBI.’

  ‘You got it.’ He glanced at the television. ‘Just like in our world, until Timothy McVeigh is arrested, everyone automatically assumes that either Iraq or some fundamentalist group is behind this. Like a lot of other FBI and ATF agents, Dubrovnik was inside the building when it blew. He got banged up some, but he’s helping search for survivors. If you’d stayed there, he would have spotted you and flipped out. What happens next changes the history of this world. You play it cool, tell him he’s mistaking you for someone else. He’s insistent, so you start with the “you’re in shock” routine, but he doesn’t buy it. He notes your unit and badge number, calls them in, and learns that there are no female fire fighters in that squad, plus the number is a fake. Remember, paranoia is rampant and he’s assumed Iraq is behind this, so he’s already developing a theory as he follows you. He sees you retrieve the unexploded bombs attached to the support columns—’

  ‘Stash them inside one of those fake missiles that Customs had stored in the building, and then mysteriously vanish.’ Julia’s nostrils flared in anger. ‘The Prime Minister ordered me to undertake this mission. Did Tom Wilkie tell you he resigned over it? It won’t take effect until tomorrow morning. The only reason I agreed was because hiding the evidence in the fake missile won’t change our history because it’s still sitting hidden in the basement of the Oklahoma City Sheriff’s office, in 2009. When I got back, the FBI was going to “discover” it and the real bombs inside of it. Meanwhile, files proving that President Clinton wanted to avoid a war with Iraq at all costs—including the truth about Oklahoma—will be “leaked” to CNN.’

  Julia paused when a rake-thin waitress with steel-wool hair and tired eyes came by. ‘More?’ asked the waitress, waving a coffee pot around like a weapon.

  Nodding wordlessly, Rob held out his cup. Julia shook her head and settled for staring morosely at the shredded napkin.

  ‘C’mon, honey, you look like you need it,’ the waitress said in surprisingly gentle tones. ‘High-octane stuff, this.’ She patted the pot.

  With a wan smile, Julia agreed.

  When Rob reached into his pocket, the waitress shook her head. ‘Coffee’s on the house, all day.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Julia, accepting the refilled cup.

  Rob waited until the waitress was out of earshot before continuing. ‘Yeah, well, before the White House could silence him, Dubrovnik exposed all. At a press conference, he theorised that the Iraqis had faked your death—our bodies were badly burned and he’d identified us from our dog tags; there was no such thing as DNA testing in 1991—and you were brainwashed into turning traitor.’

  ‘I removed four devices that had failed to detonate. We now know that Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards attached them to the support columns. McVeigh’s truck bomb had been a poorly executed piece of camouflage to hide that fact.’

  ‘You got it. An outraged American public forces Clinton’s hand. He declares war on Iraq in late 1995.’

  ‘Oh … God.’ Julia dropped her head into her hands. ‘UNSCOM didn’t unearth and destroy all of Saddam’s biological weapons until 1997!’ Cringing, she said, ‘What happened?’

  ‘During the 1990–91 Gulf War, President Bush warned Hussein that if Iraq used
chemical or biological weapons, the US would nuke Baghdad back to the stone age.’ Rob tore open a sachet of sugar and added it to his coffee. ‘Hussein countered that if American troops crossed Iraq’s borders he’d pass out his bio and chemical weapons like party favours to terrorist groups—starting with his fundamentalist enemy, Osama bin Laden.’

  The blood drained from Julia’s face and the mangled napkin fell from her hands.

  Rob stirred his coffee and glanced out through the window. Sirens had been screaming past the diner all morning, ambulances and fire trucks, police cars and paramedics. Ambulances were now returning. Pitifully few had their sirens blaring; their passengers were beyond help.

  ‘While US warplanes softened up Baghdad,’ he went on, ‘using fifty-cent plastic spray bottles, bin Laden’s agents wandered around Heathrow airport dispensing a weaponised virus—an Ebola-smallpox chimera. Twenty-four hours later, sitting around the table for Thanksgiving dinner in the US, attending conferences in China or shopping in a mall in Australia, thousands of people began falling ill. Impossible to contain, eighty per cent contagious and ninety-nine per cent fatal, by the time epidemiologists knew what was happening the chimera virus had seeded every corner of the planet. It wasn’t a pandemic; it was a mass extinction.

  ‘That has no impact on our future, of course,’ he continued. ‘But it’s like I said, this world’s history was near identical to ours. A time jumper named Captain Anderson from here went back to our 1995 charged with a similar assignment. Anderson purposely failed to carry out his mission so he didn’t change our history, but when he returned to his world of 2009, he found a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which the few humans immune to the virus had become urban scavengers. Drink your coffee, it’s getting cold.’