‘Good luck,’ said Jeff.
Mitchell silently nodded, then slammed the passenger door shut. Shuffling sideways into the driver’s seat, Jeff took manual control, guiding the van back out of the car park. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, to see Mitchell making his way over to the sedan.
Jeff parked alongside the gates, just next to the short driveway leading up to Arcorex’s main entrance. He got out and walked the rest of the way, trying not to think about the gasoline canisters Mitchell had wired up in the back of the van. Floating in the air before him, a message appeared as he approached the entrance, warning him to comply at all times or risk facing unspecified countermeasures. His contacts chose the same moment to let him know he was being remotely scanned. Jeff tried hard to relax, to avoid looking as scared as he felt, but in truth he was rigid with fear.
Another message appeared, telling him he was clear to go forward. He felt his shoulders sag with relief, and he walked on at a brisker pace. He really hadn’t believed until that moment that he would still be listed as an active member of staff.
Just then he saw a beam of light flicker between two buildings as Arcorex’s armed security made their regular patrol. He wondered if anyone from the neighbouring businesses had ever paused to wonder just why a toy manufacturer needed countermeasure warnings and guards armed with Cobras.
He thrust his hands deep in his pockets and pushed on through the entrance. At least it was the kind of operation where people often put in very irregular hours, which meant being here so late at night did not, in itself, imply suspicious activity.
Jeff had spent much of the last four days helping Mitchell prepare his elaborate plan. Whatever time hadn’t been spent sleeping or hiding in the back of whichever van, car or truck they’d stolen that day had been spent driving around Omaha, trying to locate supplies and looking for what Mitchell called the ‘right’ motel.
‘That’s it, right there,’ Mitchell had gestured through the windscreen towards a nondescript two-storey building set back on the other side of a wide lawn.
‘You’re sure that’s where we took you?’
‘Yeah,’ Mitchell nodded, still staring out at the motel. After a moment, his shoulders lifted and he let out a heavy sigh. ‘That’s the place, all right. I remember it distinctly.’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ asked Jeff, ‘that you’re caught up in a temporal loop?’
‘How do you mean?’ Mitchell had asked, as he guided them to a stop.
‘We’re about to help the other you escape from Arcorex, so he can make his way to the Moon, where he’ll get caught. Except – if I’ve got this right – he’ll escape, and wind up putting himself in cryogenic suspension, until a team from Tau Ceti arrives through a wormhole link sometime in the near-future. Yes?’
Mitchell had nodded. ‘Right so far.’
‘That team brought him – and by him, I mean you – back through the gates, back through time to the present, and now there’s two of you. And now you’re trying to make sure the Mitch I knew from Site 17 makes it to the Moon, so he can escape to that same cryogenics lab and become you. It’s just . . . mind-boggling.’
Mitchell nodded, his expression distracted, as he walked around to the rear of the van. He had opened it and lifted out a couple of shopping bags full of clothes that had been stowed in next to the cans of gasoline they’d purchased at such exorbitant cost.
‘Shouldn’t you book the room first?’ Jeff had enquired.
‘Did it right there, while you were talking,’ Mitchell replied, slamming the doors shut again.
The motel was self-service, and had therefore scanned their UPs before allowing them access to the vestibule. Directions appeared in the air; they followed them up a stairwell and along a cramped corridor. The door of the room Mitchell had booked swung open at their approach.
A TriView opposite the single tiny bed came alive as they entered. It was tuned to a news feed revealing how more growths had been detected, in the Antarctic and North Atlantic respectively, a long, long way from where the first of their kind had appeared.
They two men had glanced at each other wordlessly, then Jeff fell into a chair to watch the rest of the report, while Mitchell ripped open several vacuum-wrapped packs of freshly fabbed clothing, before dumping them on top of a cheap dresser.
‘I already kept an eye on the news while you were sleeping on the way here,’ Mitchell had explained, after glancing briefly up at the screen. ‘There’ve been a lot more bad quakes occurring in the Asian Pacific.’
‘Are those growths the reason?’ asked Jeff.
‘Not exactly,’ Mitchell replied. ‘More of a side-effect.’
‘Side-effect of what, exactly?’
‘They need a lot of power to be able to grow the way they are. What they can’t get from the sun, they get by tapping into geothermal energy in the very deep crust.’
Jeff had frowned at that. ‘Are they really capable of digging that deep? They look just like big flowers. Terrifying, alien, monstrously huge flowers, but still . . .’
Mitchell had smiled thinly. ‘You really don’t want to know how much they’re capable of.’
After that, they had left the motel and headed for an autocafé, where Mitchell told him more of what had happened to him following his return from Site 17.
‘No,’ Mitchell had concurred, shaking his head. ‘I can barely remember anything from those first couple of hours after you pulled me out of the pit chamber. The first thing I can remember clearly is being taken off heavy sedation, days later.’
‘You said they kept you under sedation at Arcorex, too?’
Mitchell had nodded. ‘After that, they kept me deliberately unconscious a lot of the time. I have vague recollections of being prodded by lots of people in biohazard suits.’
‘They were worried you might be carrying something, right?’
‘I suppose. Some kind of future-tech plague, or whatever they thought I might be carrying inside me.’
‘And you say you woke up with all this . . . this alien information in your head?’
Mitchell nodded. ‘What you have to understand is, those pits were helping me and Vogel, and not killing us. They actually remade us: no more diseases or ill-health. I might even live for ever. And I learned so much from them . . .’ His voice grew distant for a moment. ‘It’s hard to even know where to start.’
Jeff’s coffee had rested untouched and forgotten in his hands as he listened.
‘The Founders weren’t a single race,’ Mitchell had explained. ‘There were many of them, machine as well as biological intelligences, and a kind of hybrid of the two that’s difficult to explain.’ He paused and cracked a smile. ‘Jesus, I could tell you about things that haven’t happened yet, that won’t happen until our own sun’s cold and dark and black.’
Jeff had licked his lips. ‘Try me.’
‘There’s a war being fought, right now. It’s been going on for countless aeons and it’ll continue for countless more.’ He took a sip at his own coffee. ‘Really, it’s more like thousands of individual conflicts, all through this galaxy and a myriad others. But they’re all being fought otedme thing.’
‘The Founder Network?’
Mitchell nodded and grinned, almost shyly. ‘It sounds like bullshit, right? Like I made this all up. But you’ve been there too, under that night with no stars, a hundred trillion years in the future. You’ve been to Site 17, so you know I’m telling the truth.’
‘Yeah, I guess I do.’ Jeff’s voice had cracked slightly. He remembered the coffee and gulped it, to wash a dry stickiness out of his mouth. ‘But it’s going to take time to get my head around all of this.’
‘Not too much time,’ Mitchell had replied, nodding at a screen mounted at an angle over in one corner.