Peripheral Visions: Popol Vuh

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

Popol Vuh

"You're a pain in the ass, Randall." Theriaux said in a flirtatious tone. I'd worked with him a few times when I was needed in the Northwest. More often than not he discovered something about my kit or my gear that needed his attention. He always made the necessary adjustments with a swift, precise manner, but he loved pointing out to me that without him I'd be going into the field woefully unprepared.

"What is it this time?" I asked.

"Going on a mission dressed like that?"

"It's not like I'm going to the opera. I'm gonna pop back half a day, take out some asshole, and then pop back."

"Not dressed like that, you aren't. MacNeill, what do think of Randall's ensemble?" he asked a tech who was working nearby.

MacNeill, a big tech with strawberry blond hair and coarse skin, approached and gave me a once over. "Hm," he said. "Not a totally complete look."

"Go get us what we need, would you?" Theriaux asked, and MacNeill bustled out of the departure room.

"What, am I needing different socks?" I preferred thick white socks. I knew that thin black ones would be more appropriate for the costume, but who was even going to see my socks?

"Nope. Very different," Theriaux said, already moving on to the next order of business. He clutched a pair of sunglasses with one hand and running a hand unit over and around them with the other.

I mentally ran through the standard pre-op checklist: Appropriate clothing, which was simple enough; I was only jumping back to earlier that same day. Retro styles were in, and I'd been provided with a black business suit that would have looked at home on a wheeler, a dealer, or a TV presenter in the 1950s. A weapon; my handgun rested snug in its shoulder holster. On-person tech support; that was in the form of the sunglasses Theriaux was fine-tuning even now.

"No special equipment needed for this one," I said. "It's simple: I jump back, I do the job and then I step back through the portcullis, right?" The entry point of the portcullis was across town; it would reactivate two hours after I arrived in the past. Stepping through would return me to the departure room of the agency's Portland HQ, at the very moment I left.

"Well... no, not really..." Theriaux said, inputting data to the sunglasses. This wasn't usually part of the process, but this mission and was a highly sensitive and secretive. I wasn't even going to know my target until I got to my destination, and then his - or her - file would activate.

The more typical use for the sunglasses was to display maps with real-time elements, as long as the computer hardware in the frames could uplink to the local data carriers. Going back all of eighteen hours, that wouldn't be a problem. It wasn't like I was going on a deep-time assignment. Those are exceedingly rare, in part because they are so expensive to pull off. The energy requirements for time travel are enormous, and they increase exponentially the further back you want to send someone.

"Here." Theriaux handed me the sunglasses just as MacNeill returned with what looked like a red tie clip. He accepted the clip from MacNeill and held it up to me. "This is what you need."

"Okay," I said, looking at the clip through the slightly golden tint of the sunglasses. "A tie clip."

"Right, only - it ain't." Now Theriaux set about linking his hand unit to the tie clip, syncing it up and downloading whatever it needed. "I can't believe those nitwits almost let you go without this."

That's when it hit me. "Jesus, I almost left without a brane tether."

"Got it in... well, not one, but two or three." Theriaux smiled over his work, then, still smiling, leaned over and placed the clip on my skinny black tie.

His proximity excited me despite myself. I never sleep with colleagues - I take pride in my professionalism - and besides, I have someone. I haven't seen him in years, thanks to The Terror and my work as an assassin for the government... multiple governments, at this point. Luckily, every administration has need of our black box brand of special ops, and that means they have need of people with my skills.

Especially my skills.

Professional or not, I'm still just a man, and Theriaux - who obviously doesn't play fair - was wearing a pheromone cologne. That was the only explanation for how I was starting to sweat.

His fussing over me took only a moment. Theriaux ran the hand scanner over me once more, then settled the hand unit into the holster on his utility belt, where he wore all sorts of clunky-looking equipment. The belt, plus his grey coveralls, made him look like a dataline maintenance man.

"This is why you make a point of reviewing the contents of your mission boxes," he told me.

"I know, I know..."

"Yeah, you know, but if I wasn't looking out for you, you would have gone into the past without a puppy cord."

Tech slang for a brane tether.

"You might have ended up in some proximal, but parallel and entirely separate, universe."

"Yeah," I said, "but you did notice. And thanks!"

"Whoever prepped your mission box should be put on report," Theriaux muttered. "You not coming back would be bad enough..." He gave me a salacious wink. "But it's not just you at risk. There's a slight... small, but non-zero... chance that if a time traveler ends up in a parallel universe, or doesn't come back to his own time, then the reality he left from might collapse. Be replaced by a new cause-event matrix."

I had never really understood this part, but I tried to play along with his spiel. "Because new realities spontaneously generate every time a probability wave collapses."

"In this case, more like alternate threads to the same universe - the same tapestry - but yes, sort of. Though it's a little more complicated than a mere wave collapse," Theriaux said.

"You're the guy with the degree, not me," I said. "But here's what I don't get... I go back in time, I take someone out who, if I don't, will become a problem. Someone who has become a problem, and that's why I was sent back in the first place. But when I come back to the moment I left, things have changed, so I'm not really where I started, am I? By definition, I'm in a new reality."

"In one sense, yes. In another, not quite. It's only a few hours, a very limited time for cascading alterations in the causality matrix to take place. The universe has a certain amount of flexibility, a certain degree to which it can self-correct without spalling a new reality. But go back far enough and change even a minor event... or change a truly major event even a few moments before it takes place... and yes, you can create a whole new reality and, potentially, eradicate the one you started out from. That's why we try to be surgical about these things.

"But the puppy cord... well, that's a different matter," he added. "If you'd gone through without that tie clip, or some other brane-tethering tech, there's a very good chance you would never have come back at all. Not here. You'd return somewhere, of course, probably a universe so similar as to be indistinguishable, and you would never know the difference... but I would. And I'm still hoping to ask you to dinner." He smiled salaciously.

"So, from your point of view I would simply never return?"

"Well... theoretically. Though some other version of you, from some other origin point, might turn up here - just to preserve the balance of things."

"And what about his universe?"

"Threads of reality are always rejoining or dissolving, so he'd have come from one of those continuums," Theriaux said, his smile growing wider with incongruous delight.

There's no accounting for taste; the idea of living in a dissolving universe made me shudder.

Theriaux retreated toward the control podium. "In effect, he'd be a survivor from a universe that happened to be evaporating just when he transited here, or he'd be a handily available element from a universe that had split away earlier but now was folding itself back into this one."

"So you won't even know it if I get stranded in the great multi-reality cosmos and some other version of me takes my place here."

"I'm not so easily fooled," Theriaux told me. "I have a degree in advanced mathematics and temporal mechanics, and anyway..." He took up his position at the podium and punched some keys. The portcullis didn't change, but pinpoint lights on the floor in front of it did. "You're unique." He gave me a final twinkling grin.

I rolled my eyes at him and stepped through the portcullis. The departure room seemed to wink away, and suddenly I was walking out onto a street from the alcove of a red brick apartment building. It was daylight... around 7:00 a.m. from the slant of the sun. I walked causally up the street, reaching up to run a fingertip along the frames of my sunglasses.

The display lit up. First, a city map of Portland. The display zoomed in to the street I was walking on. Trees, buildings, streets - all were there, in pale poison green, like camphorous vapor given visibility. One building flared with a momentary glow, and an address appeared: 1412 Curtiss Street. That was my destination.

Now the target appeared, a 3D portrait of a man with sharp features: Close set eyes, a thin nose, a pinched mouth with thin lips. Now a name: Ethan Darby Raster. Employed at a local research campus of The Trimble Consortium. A former consultant for NatSec's special technologies department, before Arancia's best buddy and meddling industrialist Zeron took over and started eradicating whole governmental agencies, including NatSec. Bad idea, but not my problem; I worked for an intel agency so dark it wasn't within reach of that techno-fascist creep.

More text on Raster appeared and began to scroll, but so much of it was redacted I didn't catch much. He was a graduate of MIT - double doctorate, all impressive but nothing surprising for a man described as the lead developer of emerging tech projects for Trimble, including the newer generations of the QSlate tablet.

The text scrolled down to a red box - which meant some pretty serious high-level shit. I blinked the access code to unlock the red box. The words POPOL VUH appeared in red capital letters.

I drifted to a halt next to a bus stop sign, trying to scroll further and getting nowhere; looking for any sort of appended notations, and finding none. What the hell was POPOL VUH supposed to tell me?

Perplexed, I reached up and fingered the tie clip absently. It was a random gesture. If I'd had cigarettes in my shirt pocket, I would have pulled them out. If I'd been wearing a lapel pin, I'd have stroked it. But I had none of those things. What I had was a tie clip that was also a "puppy cord." A tie clip I almost hadn't had at all, except that Theriaux noticed its absence.

As my fingers came into contact with the tie clip, it was as if the little piece of metal and hidden circuitry started shouting into my ear and showing me photos on a movie screen. I saw Agent Brance - one of the temporal ops supervisors - handling the tie clip, removing it from a mission box. "He won't be needing this," Brance was saying. But it was what he was thinking that was more interesting...

Can't have any loose ends on this one. Got to make sure this is a self-sealing package. Randall might come back wondering about the Popol Vuh, and he doesn't have clearance for it. With his clairvoyant talents there's no telling what he might find out... did I touch anything in the box? Anything metallic? No, just the tie clip, and he's not getting that...

Along with Brance's thoughts I got images. Ethan Raster; photos of an advanced-looking QSlate that seemed worn, scratched, its reflective surface dulled. Brance had thoughts associated with that slate: How old it was... centuries old... he was thinking about information the slate contained that no one knew - not yet, anyway - information that somehow came from the future - the future! Another image of the same slate, only brand new. No, not the same... a duplicate, reverse engineered from the original... a dupe containing whole libraries of information dowloaded from the original, some of it from the future...

The thoughts and images started to make sense. The new slate was prototype created by this Raster guy, whose whole job for years now had been to duplicate the original slate, both its hardware and its memory archive. Brance's thoughts moved on to a brief clip of surveillance video he had seen, his memory making the image fuzzier and grainier than it really was. A group of men: In Brance's imagination they were cloaked in sinister secrecy, like a coven of sorcerers...

Shocked, I let my hand fall from the tie clip. My reaction wasn't just because of the impressions that Brance had left on the clip - impressions just beneath those left behind by Theriaux and MacNeill. Theriaux's thoughts were predictable horny - he really did have a thing for me - but MacNeill's thoughts were more interesting just now. He had found the clip where Brance had set it aside on the tabletop where the mission box had been. The tech who brought the mission box into the departure room would have overlooked the tie clip since everything for the mission was supposed to be in the box already. It was a nice little bit of plausible deniability that would have left Brance saying, "Oh shit, Randall didn't get his puppy cord? He's lost in the wilds of the multiverse? What a shame, and it's all because someone was in a hurry and the tie clip fell out, or was left out, of the equipment and wardrobe in the mission box we fixed up for him..."

MacNeill's exasperation at such carelessness almost outshone Brance's impressions, which were emotionally inert and calculating. That didn't shock me. I was working with intelligence guys, after all, and they were unsentimental about tossing an agent if doing so served a larger mission.

What did shock me, though, was something playing back in the sunglasses. There was a second target file in addition to the dossier on Rance. The second file was so startling that it tore me away from the drama of Brance's betrayal - it displayed a name and a portrait I knew all too well: Those of former HomeSec agent Henry Darrow.

The same guy who was part of the reason I was never going to get busy with Theriaux, pheromone cologne or no.

Henry and I had been lovers for a while years ago, when he was still with the FBI. Back before Kirsch had dissolved the FBI, that is. Back before the coup that saw Kirsch deposed, and the subsequent short-lived attempt to return America to a democratic form of government. Short-lived, because what did the American people do once they had the vote again? They elected Arancia, who is, if anything, even worse than Kirsch.

Henry was working on a murder case when he caught on to the inconvenient fact that I was the hit man he was looking for. That posed some serious relationship issues, but somehow... I can't even say how... we got past that. Maybe the empathic messages I impressed into various objects that I managed to get into his hands conveyed the sincerity of my feelings for him: The fact that if there's anyone I ever loved, anyone I'd keep safe no matter what, it's him.

Maybe some of my mind got into his. Maybe some of my sociopathic tendencies counteracted some of his deep-seated principles. Or maybe he picked up on the fact that even if I am a sociopath, I'm a sociopath with a code of ethics. In my way, I'm trying to make the world a better place. People like me, we play rough - and I didn't used to target people who weren't in the game in one way or another. I do now, at the bidding of the agency I work for, but that's just because the alternative is a quick death and an unmarked grave.

Darrow's discovery had meant the end of my earlier career freelancing for corporations and private security firms, but I simply switched to my current government gig. I doubted Darrow had ever fessed up to having been my lover. I was sure he had reported me as the killer in the case he'd been working when he found me out - Henry can be sort of idealistic and naïve. But that detail would have been buried and forgotten.

Looking over Henry's dossier, I saw at once that it differed from Raster's in one crucial respect: It was classified 220, indeterminate. Raster's file was 260, meaning he had definitely seen or done something he shouldn't have and now he had to be eradicated. Darrow might or might not be a mandatory target. But there was no indication of what he had to do with Raster, or why he might have posed a danger serious enough to warrant sending someone... me, whether by chance or with malice of forethought... on this particular op. Thinking about it, I decided that Henry was a "by the way" - as in, by the way, as long as you're there, check on this other guy and, if needed, scrub him.

I focused on my instructions regarding Raster. Follow him on his way to work; take him out at an opportune time. I had two hours to get the job done and be back here at the portcullis. Plenty of time to manage the operation.

It didn't take long to get to Raster's building. Once there I looked at the map showing the path the intel guys thought he'd be taking this morning. It was 7:20 a.m. when I took up a position across the street, loitering over my Intelliphone™ like a tourist or a guy trying to follow directions to an unfamiliar place. I had timed it well: At 7:24 Raster emerged from his building and started walking up the pavement. I followed after.

The dossier indicated that Raster witnessed something, but the specifics had been redacted. Still from a few key words here and there - police response, active shooter situation, key asset losses, collateral losses - I had the feeling that he'd seen a politically motivated op, maybe a political assassination, and came away from it knowing something about the people behind it. I hadn't heard of any such action being undertaken in Portland or anywhere else, and between my special talent and my connections in the intelligence world, I'm usually well informed. Curious, I bided my time, in less of a hurry to liquidate Raster and get back home than I was anxious to see what it was he was going to witness that would warrant him being taken down.

But nothing happened. I followed him all the way to the Trimble Consortium campus, a cluster of old brick office buildings located downtown, quite unlike the company's sprawling, modern campus outside of Seattle. I had heard something about Trimble using smaller campuses scattered around the Northwest for sophisticated technical work - stuff they wanted to keep contained, stuff that didn't need a lot of lab space. That squared readily enough with Raster having been in charge of their QSlate development team. He was probably the one who designed improvements and new functionalities. I pictured him hovering over a hi-res holo screen, manipulating different virtual components and testing them using a quantum computational matrix. Admittedly, that idea came straight from the movies. I have no clue how an engineer actually does such things.

It was starting to look like there wasn't going to be a political assassination after all. I regretted my curiosity, because now Raster was approaching the main building, falling in among a small swarm of other Trimble employees who'd materialized out of nowhere. It wasn't even eight in the morning, but here they were, bright-eyed little beavers ready to jump into their day.

This was a bit of a mess. I could kill Raster in front of all these people and then try to keep ahead of the garda until the portcullis would reactivate in just over an hour. Or I could try to infiltrate the building and kill Raster in his office. Or maybe I could flush him out by... I wasn't sure. Calling him? Accessing his dating apps and posing as a hookup who wanted a repeat visit, if he'd agree to slip out of work for a while and meet me? Claiming to be a relative who needed to see him right away? Claiming to be a police detective looking into something that had happened to a relative? Did he have relatives in the area? Would such a story make even a modicum of sense?

Raster vanished inside the building even as I was hesitating. I found a nearby park, sat myself on a bench, and called up his dossier again. I accessed various appendices and worked out that my idea of posing as a hookup wouldn't work; Raster was straight, with two ex-wives. I switched from the dossier to the ancillary mission documentation, a mini database with information dedicated to the specific place and time where I was operating: Timetables for Portland's public transit system. Internet addresses and passwords that would enable me to tap into the communications of the local garda, or even sabotage their efforts if I needed to. Significant happenings in the city in the next few hours...

Shit.

There was about to be a workplace shooting in Raster's building. In his lab, in fact. The cache of news articles stamped with today's date, but hours from now, said that a number of people had been gunned down, but Raster himself had not been among the dead. He was a "person of interest."

Was Raster about to kill a bunch of people? Would one of them be somebody important to the agency I worked for - an ops agent working undercover at Trimble? Had I just allowed him to commit the crime that was about to occur?

I checked the time and realized the shooting was about to happen. I got up from the park bench and, abandoning protocol, broke into a run. I didn't even reach the building before I heard the shots, and realized that whoever was doing the shooting, it wasn't Raster - or if it was, he wasn't alone, and he wasn't using some little hand weapon he might have smuggled past security. I was hearing the quick stutter of automatic machine rifles - a lot of them at once.

What the hell was going on?

I reached the building and grabbed at the door. No luck; I'd need a company-issued ID chip to gain access, or else I'd have to be buzzed in. I checked around for a call button or a camera, but saw nothing.

Suddenly, the door unlatched itself and swung slightly ajar. The security system had been disengaged. Maybe in order to let the employees escape? I had a different idea; I yanked the door wide open and plunged into the hallway. I had reviewed the building's schematics while loitering outside of Rater's apartment building, and memorized the location of Raster's lab. I was trying to recall if I wanted the first or second stairwell when I realized all I had to do was follow the sound of the gunfire. The clatter of machine guns had subsided, but there was still the occasional report of a lone weapon.
I flew up the stairs to the third level, and then burst into the corridor; a glance to my left brought the sight of a couple of bodies and a shattered glass partition. That must have been Raster's lab.

I rushed up the corridor, weapon drawn; my caution was unwarranted. The shooters were gone, and there was no sign of Raster. Either he'd gone with them, or he'd escaped.

The garda sirens were still in the distance when I darted back through the still-open door at the building's entrance. I'd chosen a door on a side of the building that faced away from the street, toward the park. I angled toward a dense copse of trees. I heard the buzzy whisper of multiple drones reaching the area, the garda sirens getting closer. I wended my way through the park, then made my way back through the city street and to the portcullis. Even as I approached, a two-minute timer readout appeared in my sunglasses. The moment the timer switched from red to green, I stepped through.

"Howdy, stranger," Theriaux said as I emerged in the departure chamber.

"Hey," I said.

"Mission go well?" Theriaux asked.

I stared at him, not sure how to respond. "Not really," I said.

Just then, Brance entered the departure chamber. His face betrayed nothing. If he was surprised or upset to see me return from my mission, he hid it well. then again... would he even remember his attempt to scrub me from this reality? Of course he would. I had not completed the mission. Nothing in the present had changed, because I had not altered the past in any significant way.

"Hey Randall," Brance said. "Want to come into the break room and tell me why I remember the mission we just sent you on?"

That's when I saw what I was looking for: His eyes flicked ever so briefly to the tie clip. He would naturally assume - correctly - Theriaux had noticed its absence and corrected the "oversight." Would he worry that I had touched the clip and read the impressions he had left on it? Now it was my turn to be inscrutable. Let him wonder and worry.

The break room was what we called the conference room where temporal ops agents explained why they'd been send back, and then reported in detail on how the mission had gone. Body camera video would be parsed, mission data transferred, and a final report filed.

This debriefing would be different. Instead of explaining what had once been, I was now going to have to explain why things were still the same as before.

"I didn't have a clear opportunity to take the target out before he got to his workplace," I said. "But as it turned out, it didn't matter. This was not lone wolf scenario. I heard at least half a dozen weapons, all blasting away at the same time. If Raster was a shooter, he had plenty of help - and they all got away."

Brance nodded slowly. He gave nothing away. What was he up to?

"But I can still complete the mission," I said. "At least, when it comes to Raster."

"How?" Brance asked.

"I think you know. You're familiar with the briefing material I was given? You know that Henry Darrow and I have a history? I'm guessing Henry has some connection to all this."

Brance's face tightened. He was clearly unhappy; he hated having to share information he didn't need to. Well, he needed to now.

"I know how to find Darrow," I told him. "And if he's mixed up in this, when I find Darrow I'll also find Rance."

Brance shook his head. "You really fucked this up," he said.

"Yes," I said, "but it seems to me I'm the only one who can fix it at this point... at least, with a minimum of fuss."

"I ought to shitcan you," Brance said coldly, "but we'll talk about that later. If you clean up this mess, maybe we can overlook your incompetence."

I felt like arguing that point, but I held my peace.

"You have until tomorrow morning. Make this right." Brance walked out of the room.

I went to the prep room and changed back into my own clothes, sloppily folding the mission garments and leaving them in a heap in the box. I went through security procedures, stepped outside the building, and activated my PCD.

And phoned the one person who might be able to help me: Jason Darius.

That Last Jump's A Killer

"Randall?" Darius' voice registered surprise.

"I'm using a clean phone," Randall said without preamble. "The kind they give spooks. The kind that's invisible to the comm net and doesn't get tapped by the usual monitoring programs. This call won't even register on your calls received log."

"Okay," Darius said. "I appreciate that. It'll keep me out of trouble."

"Me too," Randall said, "though I suspect I'm about to get myself into a whole lot more trouble than this one phone call."

"What do you need?" Then, before Randall could answer: "You're looking for Henry."

"That's right."

"He said you had a way to get both of you out of this shithole of a country. Though where you'll go in this shithole of a world, I'm sure I don't know."

"Doesn't matter... not yet, anyway," Randall told him. "Do you know where he is?"

"I left him with some priests."

"What?"

Darius gave him the name and address of the church and its rectory, where he and Darrow had met with a group of priests earlier that day. "They belong to a group called the Alephs. They've been guarding an artifact that church missionaries took from Mayan people, like, six hundred years ago."

Randall nodded. "The slate. I know about it." The slate Darius was talking about wouldn't be invented for several years to come, but it had already survived for centuries as a sacred artifact thanks to the modern miracle of time travel.

Randall was a time traveler himself: A professional killer whose specialty these days was to be sent back, usually no more than a few hours, to take someone out before they could become a problem. His latest assignment had been just such a mission, but he'd failed due to his own curiosity and a feeling that something about the assignment wasn't quite right.

But time travel wasn't how he knew about the slate. That information had come to him thanks to mental impressions left by someone with knowledge about both the device and the larger objectives of the assignment Randall had been sent to carry out - a man named Brance who was part of the same black ops agency as Randall. Brance had proven willing to discard Randall if it were convenient. For that, Randall told himself, the bastard would pay.

Randall had also seen something else through those impressions: A brand-new slate, unlike anything currently on the market because it used technology that hadn't been invented yet.

"You haven't seen an advanced slate by any chance, have you?" Randall asked.

"Henry has it," Darius told him. "Or rather - an engineer from the Trimble Consortium has it, a guy named - "

"Raster, I know," Randall said.

"Wait, are you mixed up in all this?" Darius asked.

"More than I want to be," Randall said. "So, is Raster with Henry?"

"Yes. The priests weren't going to be able to keep him safe, so Henry made arrangements."

"Good old Henry, so good at keeping his contacts," Randall said. "So, he's taking Raster to a safe house?"

"That's my understanding."

"Where?"

"I have no idea. Darrow and Raster left without saying. I stayed with the priests for a while, trying to explain to them that, no, God is not going to magically protect them when Zeron's thugs show up. You do know Zeron's part of this mess?"

"He's part of every mess," Randall said. Then: "Can you contact Henry?"

"I don't think so. He doesn't have a PCD. He used a burner to make arrangements, then I disposed of it for him."

"Of course he did. Good thinking."

"Think you can find him?" Darius asked.

"Maybe. Depends."

"On what?"

"The priests at walls at that rectory," Randall said.

"They don't know anything."

"Then maybe the rectory itself does. Let's see if those walls can talk."

*** *** ***

The walls were spattered with blood - droplets, mostly, but a few long streaks. The bodies of the priests were heaped on the floor.

"Darius tried to tell you," Randall said, crouching by one body. He considered touching the man's crucifix, which hung from a chain around his neck, but the metal icon was covered in blood and he didn't want to risk that kind of contact - the bodies and blood of the dead carried impressions, yes, but those impressions could be psychologically destabilizing.

Randall touched the wall instead, carefully avoiding the blood.

The killings had happened not long before, and the impressions were strong. Randall saw and heard the assassin, his forceful questions and threats... and then the quick work he made of the clerics. It was a brief interrogation, and a quick, methodical killing.

It was also carried out by someone who looked exactly like him.

"Do I jump back to earlier tonight and take these guys out?" Randall muttered to himself. Jumping back a few hours and trying to intercept Darrow here at the rectory was something he had considered doing. Maybe he was bound to resort to that measure later on tonight.

But had he learned anything... would he learn anything from the priests before he killed them? And had he.., or would he... end up killing the priests on Brance's orders? Was Brance going to get Randall even more deeply mired in this quagmire - and was he going to insist that Randall kill Henry?

Was there any threat or leverage that could induce Randall to harm Henry? No; impossible. But Brance could have offered him and Henry passage through the portcullis to some other time, some past epoch before the government descended into fascistic madness and the world went to hell...

There were other possibilities, though. The Randall he'd seen kill the priests could have been a version of himself from a parallel universe, someone who ended up here because, unlike Randall, he didn't have Theriaux keeping an eye on details and he jumped to the past without a brane tether and got stranded in the wrong reality.

Unsure what to do next, Randall stood in the room with the dead priests and the blood-smeared walls for a long moment. Then he left the rectory and walked half a kilometer away before he used his PCD to summon a taxi. He didn't want to be pegged at the scene of a crime that his doppelgänger had committed; getting busted for killings he both had and hadn't committed (and still might commit) would be too maddening, and too much of an amateur mistake - and Randall was a professional.

*** *** ***

"Randall! Didn't think I'd see you again." Theriaux grinned. "Or am I the reason you came back in tonight?"

"Sorry, I'm here for business rather than pleasure... though it's a tempting prospect." Randall forced himself to smile at Theriaux. The tech was attractive, but Randall had no interest in him. Still, if he was going to ask a favor of the guy and play on his attraction, Randall needed to give him a little encouragement.

"Maybe another time, then," Theriaux said, then jabbed a thumb at the portcullis behind him and laughed. "Get it?"

Randall laughed without enthusiasm, then asked: "Do you know if my mission box from earlier is still sitting around? Or has it been processed?"

"No, I'm sure it's still sitting it the locker room. That's what happens when you downsize the support crews and make the techs do everything."

"I'm gonna have a look," Randall said, crossing to the door at the room's far end. On the other side of that door, in the prep room, he found the box where he had left it - sloppily folded clothes heaped on top of his field weapon, a pair of special sunglasses... and a tie clip that was, in reality, a brane tether. The very device Theriaux had noticed was missing from his equipment a few hours earlier, before he went back to kill Raster and blew that assignment.

Carrying the tie clip and the sunglasses back into the departure room, Randall asked Theriaux, "Listen, can you link these?"

"They should already be linked," Theriaux said.

"I thought so. In case the tie clip were to get lost..."

"And then the sunglasses would help you find it. Right. Otherwise, as I was telling you earlier, without the brane tether you might get lost in the shift."

"In the shit?"

"That too, but no... the shift. The way new realities can spall off existing ones if there are significant changes to their event matrices."

"Right," Randall said. "A guy could end up in the wrong parallel universe."

"You were paying attention," Theriaux said brightly, delighted.

"Yeah." Randall positioned the tie clip on the edge of a work bench and leaned into it. The clip didn't yield, so he pulled his weapon out of his shoulder holster, dropped it to the floor, pressed the nozzle to the clip and pulled the trigger.

"What the hell are you doing?" Theriaux cried.

"I just saw myself," Randall told him, surveying the destroyed clip, the hole in the floor, and the powder burn marks on both clip and floor. "A version of me killed some people across town. If it's an alternate me from earlier, this won't matter. But if it's me from the future... me a couple minutes ago, if I'd chosen to go back a few hours and ask those dead guys some questions... then I'll be able to locate myself."

Theriaux looked at him in confusion.

Randall sighed and tried to explain. "I'm choosing right now not to do what I considered doing a little while ago: Jumping back through that portcullis into the recent past, just a couple of hours, in order to quiz some people that Zeron and his goons want dead."

"Wait - Zeron? He's involved in this?" Theriaux exclaimed.

"Keep it to yourself. At least, don't let Brance know that you know."

"Brance is working with Zeron?"

"Focus!" Randall barked, and Theriaux blinked and kept quiet. "Now, either an alternate version of me actually does go back and find those guys before Theron's kill squad get to them... or else a version of me earlier today, a me that you didn't make sure had a brane tether before he went on that last assignment, has ended up here from some other version of reality. If it's the latter, then I'm out of luck. But it it's former...":

"Then that's the same brane tether," Theriaux said, looking at the mangled tie clip. "And you can track it using the glasses." He grinned at Randall. "Not bad, pea brain!"

*** *** ***

The gamble paid off: The glasses showed a location for the tie clip. It was in a part of town that, once Randall thought about it, seemed ideal for a safe house: Residential, but not too upscale. Not too busy, not too quiet, not too rough, and not too gentrified. No gangs looking to protect their turf, no neighborhood watch types or private security on patrol and taking notice of strangers.

Randall took an agency vehicle and parked it a few blocks from where the safe house was located, then walked the rest of the way, the sunglasses now serving as night vision goggles. He spotted two men walking up the sidewalk, about a block away from him. One of them suddenly staggered, then fell against the other.

Randall saw the heat signature of a silenced firearm's discharge and turned his head in that direction. He saw... himself.

Looking back at the two men, he saw one was now lying on the ground. Dead, he thought. I hope it's not Henry.

The other man had scuttled into the shadows - not that it would help; Randall saw himself walk across the street toward the other man, who was crouched in a defensive posture and staying motionless. Randall could see him well enough to know it was Darrow.

Randall let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Then he started walking, quickly, weapon drawn, toward Darrow. The other Randall was almost there. Now he was talking to Darrow, and Darrow was looking at him. The other Randall pointed his gun...

Randall squeezed off three rounds in quick succession. They all struck his counterpart, and the doppelgänger crumpled to the ground.

Darrow sprang back, then looked at Randall, who was close enough now to take off the sunglasses and be seen by him. "Henry - it's me. Don't panic, don't run."

The gunshots had been loud. Randall had not put his suppressor on his weapon, the way his doppelgänger had. The city's gunshot detectors would dispatch cops here quickly. It wasn't the nicest part of town, but it was nice enough that cops would be here in a few minutes - maybe less.

Maybe considerably less, Randall realized, seeing the approach of red and blue flashing lights.

"Let's get the fuck outta here," he urged Darrow.

*** *** ***

The agency car was, like Randall's phone, able to both interface with the net system and remain invisible to it. They drove right past a small phalanx of cop cars without drawing any attention at all.

"So, you just blew away yourself... from another reality?" Darrow asked.

"Looks that way," Randall mused. "I'm not sure he actually would have hurt you. I,/i> would never hurt you - I hope you know that."