Corrupting Power
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Breakpoint - Part 12
🕑 Added 2023-08-23 02:07:07 +0000 UTCPart Twelve
Mick
“Run me through it one more time,” Mick said to Rin, despite the fact that he was almost certain a third time hearing it wasn’t going to clarify matters any.
“You’re our technical specialist, Mick!” Rin was worked up, pacing back and forth constantly, as if the idea of sitting still made her uneasy. “You tell me what I fucking saw, because I don’t have a fucking clue what it is I actuallysaw.”
“You said she said, ‘temporal and spatial rift,’” Mick reiterated. “You’re sure that’s the phrase she used? Word for word?”
“Yes, word for fucking word, Mick!” Rin hissed as she stopped over by the window, looking back at them, her face doubling down on the concern in her tone. “When you see a bullet spraying rainbows all over the fucking place, each and every detail becomes very goddamn important, and you tend to remember everything as much as you can.”
“I’m not even close to a specialist in quantum mechanics, Rin, so I’m just guessing at all of this,” Mick sighed. All of Scarab were sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment, along with Iris and Mira, both of whom had just been listening intently, except for Rin, who hadn’t been able to sit still for more than a moment or two since her arrival. “But there’s a theory going around talking about temporal magnetic resonance, how if you can shift your vibrational frequency in relation to the universe itself, you might be able to slide through time. It might be bullshit, but that may be what you saw. Something about the fundamental nature of the island shifts metal that moves too fast into some kind of temporal flux state, and instead of just moving through space, it starts skipping through time. That would explain the Nazi soldier that Len said he encountered.”
“I love how every time we’re talking about it, Mick, you add just that tiniest hint that sounds like you don’t believe me,” Len said, cleaning under his fingernails with the end of a paperclip.
“That’s just it, Len. I absolutely do believe you; it’s myself I’m trying to convince,” the large black man said, shaking his head a little. “So, if we’re assuming that bullets across the surface of the island cause temporal distortion, that… well, that would explain a lot of things, honestly.”
“What do you mean?” Rin said.
“Look at it this way – no guns, but also no planes ever come near the island. And you lot have encountered plenty of corpses in various uniforms all over the island, but none of them have guns, because as soon as one commanding officer figures out what’s going on, he strips everyone of their ammo, just to keep them safe. The last thing you’d want is someone shooting at someone else and then suddenly vanishing because they fell through a hole in time and space. Explosives would probably have similar effects, if there was metal shrapnel or casing of any kind. You gotta figure, whoever was stationed here, after the first couple of times they tried discharging their weapons, they changed their minds pretty fucking quick.”
“Yeah, trading a soldier for a fucking dinosaur probably didn’t make anyone happy, I imagine,” Len agreed. “And if it makes you feel any better, Mick, we can go dig him up from where me and Harry buried him, let you have a nice, good look at the body.”
“Why the bloody hell would that make me feel better?” Mick asked.
“’Cause it’s a dead Nazi,” Len countered with a chuckle, leaning back in his chair, pivoting it to balance on two legs. “Dead Nazis make everyone feel better. Except Nazis. And y’know, fuck them. They’re Nazis.”
“I think I’ll pass on the feel-good, must-see, dead Nazi show of the season, if you don’t mind,” Mick chuckled. “Maybe I’ll catch it when it’s off-Broadway, and the ticket prices have come down a bit. We should worry about the rest of our problems.”
“You mean the people underneath the mountain,” Len said.
“I do, in fact, mean the people underneath the mountain,” Mick said, tipping his glass of bourbon in Len’s direction. “We’ve got confirmation they exist now. And this Elise is one of them. So that’s one name and face we can put up on the enemies, even if we haven’t really got much of a clue who she is.”
“Oh, I’ve got that one,” Harry said. “She’s a quantum physicist named Elise Manye. She specializes in theories of time travel that focus on destabilization of acoustic harmonics using crystalline refraction and…” The youngest member of Scarab realized mid-sentence that everyone in the room was staring at him like a dog that had just been shown a card trick, completely unable to comprehend what was happening. “I saw a TED talk about it a couple of years back, and I found the subject fascinating. What?”
“I didn’t know you were interested in time travel.”
“Well, it wasn’t supposed to be bloody real, was it?” Harry said, leaning forward over the table, his tone a bit cross. “It’s supposed to be a work of damnable fiction. Nothing real. Nothing practical. You know, just a silly little thought experiment. She seemed rather… calm and clever.”
“Any idea who was backing her work?” Len asked. “Where she was getting her funding from? They tell you that sort of thing at TED talks?”
“What, you mean did she have a badge on her blazer like some bloody Formula One driver?” Harry replied, rolling his eyes. “No, they didn’t make her explain who was paying her bills. It’s not like that at TED talks.”
Mick chuckled, shaking his head. “Sorry, Harry, we don’t all attend TED talks. We don’t know how it is.”
“You make it sound like I’m some kind of egghead.”
“Call’em like I see’em, boyo,” Mick chuckled, reaching over to pat him on the shoulder. “But don’t you worry much. You’re our egghead. Just how we like you.”
“Anyway, whatever she thinks she knows about this place, it’s probably just about as little as we do,” Harry said, “because theory means fuck all when you’re staring down the barrel of practicality.”
“She’s clearly allied herself with someone else on the outside, someone who’s getting people on and off the island, but, most importantly, we’ve got somebody we can watch now, somebody we can keep tabs on,” Len said. “That’s the thing. Up until now, it’s been faceless, indiscriminate, unable to be a singular person that we know to watch out for. But there’s a target now.”
The next couple of days, they were back to operating like a proper military unit again, taking turns, doing shifts, following Elise wherever they could, keeping tabs on who she was talking to and what she was doing. And the problem was…
…it was nothing. She wasn’t talking with much of anyone. She was, however, taking a copious number of notes, measuring things in paces, as if measuring things in any other way was ludicrous. And she would go over the same area of land multiple times, as if she needed to check, recheck and triple check how everything was put together on her map.
What they were able to do, however, was duplicate her work, and as such build a model of the village itself according to her blueprints and measurements. A constantly changing and mutating model, no less. There were entire sections that would flip or transpose without warning, always in the night, always between what they estimated was two and four a.m., although accurate timekeeping on the island had proven something of a nightmare.
So instead of one extremely accurate map, they had settled for six generally accurate ones, and were just rotating between them. And once Elise had finished her map, she seemed less interested in coming out of her room, and when she did, she was exceedingly paranoid, so much that keeping tabs on her movements was difficult at best, even for the trained mercenaries. She seemed to know how to use buildings as obstacles, crossing in between them, moving from one room to another in order to lose a tail in the time it took to get coordinated. If they’d had radios, all of this would’ve been child’s play, but instead, they were doing their best to do things the hard way.
The island way was always more complicated than expected.
With Elise mostly going dark, the group of them had taken to exploring the island again during the daytime. Two weeks after they first found it, Harry was able to lead Rin and Len to the ruby waterfall, something the team needed to see with their own eyes to be convinced it was real. And Len was able to bring Mick to the depot with the Vatican gold in it, still looking exactly as how it appeared in their last visit.
The strangest part of the two weeks between the first time and the second time they found the waterfall was how quiet the Village had basically run. The conflicts had been minimal, there had been almost no new arrivals and it felt like there was a lull in whatever plan those who had sent them to the island, so they’d had time to get their feet down and get comfortable.
Despite the fact that nothing was happening at the island, it still didn’t feel predictable, because they were able to notice there wasn’t a discernible pattern as to when the shifts of buildings happened, other than it couldn’t happen if anyone was awake inside the building. It happened most often in the dead of night, while all the occupants were asleep, but it could also happen if nobody was inside of the buildings at the time. The innards of two places would just swap without warning.
It was hard to think of the place as a prison with no obvious wardens, but there wasn’t any place to go, and, what bothered them the most, nobody asking questions. If they weren’t going to be subjected to questioning, what possible benefit could there be to keeping them alive?
Around the beginning of the third week after the event with Elise, Mick’s first request arrived. Tex had said they were allowed to ask for anything, and rather than music or literature or news, Mick had asked for diver’s goggles. To his surprise, the request had been granted. They hadn’t been anything too deluxe, but they were still actual diver’s goggles, and would allow him to go diving around the outskirts of the island.
Of the entire bunch, Mick was the most accomplished diver of Scarab, and once he had the goggles, he began exploring just beneath the watery surface. He didn’t have an air tank, so he couldn’t get too deep, but he was an accomplished free diver, so even on his first few dives, he was going deeper than he suspected almost anyone else on the island had ever done.
What he didn’t suspect was that the weirdness that permeated the island above the water had doubled down on that below the surface. There were plenty of fish swimming around the island, and while there were plenty of things he’d expected to see – tropical coral reefs, schools of brightly colored fish – there were also things he definitely hadn’t expected to see.
The ruby waterfall that they’d found – apparently, it seemed like a large portion of the island itself was made up of the surface, because he could spot highly polished portions of the floor of the ocean closest to the island that were made up of the same expensive mineral.
That wasn’t the big surprise though. That would be the fact that there were so many types of fauna that he’d never seen before. There were plenty of the sort of tropical fish he’d expected, based on their suspected location somewhere in the southeast Pacific, but there were also things like bioluminescent jellyfish and anemones, semi-transparent fish whose innards were on display through mostly clear skin, and a handful of types of sharks he’d never seen before, thankfully who respected his space in the water as much as he did theirs.
It was a visual wonderland, an orgy of color and light and motion, all constantly spiraling around him, like a technicolor vortex, spewing optic delights into his face, every shade in the rainbow reflected in some creature around him.
When he hit the surface again, he was still trembling a little.
‘Normal?’ he thought to himself. ‘Nothing about this island is normal in the slightest.’
Harry
“You know, leaving me out of your meetings is starting to make me think that you don’t trust me, Harry,” Stella sighed. “If we’re going to be partners, I need to at least meet your entire team at some point, you know?”
“Once they’re sure they can trust you, Stella,” Harry said, “then you can meet them. But for right now, they want to be sure their asses are covered, and that means not just doing their homework on you, it’s doing their homework on me and my actions moving forward, to make sure you haven’t compromised me.”
“The only kind of compromising position I’ve put you in,” Stella giggled, “was the time we fucked right up against the window in the middle of the night, so anyone who was walking by could get an eyeful of my tits pressed up against the glass, although I might have fogged it up pretty good with my breathing.”
“Yes, well, if you had put me in any sort of compromising position, it’s hardly the sort of thing you’d want to tell me about, is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said with another laugh. “It might be fun to make you squirm for a while. Are you going to at least tell me why you’ve been sneaking out a couple of nights?”
Harry decided it was probably time to start testing where Stella’s allegiances truly lay these days, so he gave her a taste. “We’ve been following one of the only people we know on the island who’s working for our captors and trying to figure out what she’s up to. As far as we can tell, it’s making some kind of map, although that map changes pretty regularly, as I’m sure you’ve probably noticed a little bit of.”
“Waking up on a different side of the village from the one you fell asleep in is the sort of thing I’ve definitely noticed, yes, Harry,” Stella scolded. “Who’s the person working for The Man?”
“Her name’s Elise,” Harry said. “She didn’t used to be in the spy game. She was a scientist specializing in time travel theory, but she’s here now, and she’s working for whoever’s running the island. One of my teammates saw her going through the big metal door.”
“Wait, going through the big metal door? The one that never opens?”
“Obviously, ‘never’ is an exaggeration, but yeah, none of the rest of us have seen it open, so I guess my teammate is the special one.”
“He have any idea why you’d want a time travel specialist on the island?” Stella asked.
“That’s… a longer conversation.”
For the next hour or so, Harry laid some of the bigger picture temporal weirdness that had been going on all over the island, not just in front of himself, but in front of all the members of his team, from the Nazi soldier appearing out of nowhere to the Vatican gold they’d found stockpiled in a bunker they could only seem to find once every couple of weeks or so. He even told her about the tear in spacetime that Rin had witnesses when one of the goons had fired a handgun at a former adversary of the team, although he chose to leave Krieger’s name out of it.
At first, he could see the skepticism plain as day on Stella’s face, but the more details he got into, including offering to dig up the Nazi body for her to see, or pointing out exactly how unusual the ruby waterfall that they’d found was, the more she was coming around to his way of thinking.
“We can’t trust anyone, can we?” she asked. “Well, what can I do to help get your trust?”
“We need to start identifying people who are working for Island Management,” Harry told her. “Hell, we really need to build a directory, a full list of everyone on the island.”
“You mean a phone book.”
“Like a phone book.”
“You mean a phone book.”
“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “I guess I do mean a phone book.”
“Well, we can build a phone book, Harry,” Stella said, kissing his cheek. “It’ll just take some work.”
With the idea agreed upon, the two of them set out to start cataloging every person on the island, taking the time to get names and basic profiles of each of the people populating the island. It was supposed to be something they could be done with within a day or two, but it ended up taking another week, just because some people were reticent to provide names or any details, so either Harry or Stella had been forced to follow those people around until they relented and provided a bare minimum of information. Nobody was asking them to spill state secrets, but they were still looking for some kind of baseline set of details that would let them keep track of the island’s population.
The island had 74 people on it, 46 men and 28 women, and on first blush, Harry and Stella had divided them into one of four categories: Probably Management, Could Be Management, Probably Not Management and Who The Fuck Knows. The fourth category had more people in it than either of them was comfortable with, but spies were notoriously paranoid and guarded, so figuring out who was playing for which team had never been something spies had gone out of their way to advertise.
Only five people – three women and two men – had fallen into the Probably Management category, an uncomfortably low number of people to have sorted as such. About twenty people fell into the Probably Not Management category, which felt a little bit better. Some of those people were his teammates and their partners, but there were also people who were well enough known within the espionage community that the idea of them working for someone else beyond the country they’d notoriously sworn their loyalty to seemed improbable at best, insane at worst.
The least accurate part of the profile they’d done on each of the people was the ‘known associates’ section, because nobody reliably hung around with anybody else. Sure, there were a handful of people who’d formed their own clique, but for the most part, people were trading shacking up partners about as often as they were passing around books and records. It was almost as though people were just trying on sexual partners like clothing, willing to give everything and anything a try, working to find something that fit comfortably and without resistance.
It wasn’t meant to be slut shaming on either end, for men or women, especially since it had come as a surprise to Harry just how many bisexuals, again, both men and women, who were in the spy game. He supposed he shouldn’t have been all that caught off guard, but the annotated profiles about who’d slept with who, just in the ones they could confirm, were always a laundry list of connections. If anything, he was starting to suspect that the fact that he and his team hadn’t made mad moves might have them standing out a bit, although Mick was with Iris, Len was with Mira and Harry had to suppose that he was with Stella, although Stella seemed to also be encouraging Harry for them to pick up another piece of ass for her to play with, as if the loss of Callisto had left her feeling a little lonely or overwhelmed in being with just Harry.
“Think maybe Kateryna would be willing to crawl in bed with us?” Stella asked him as they headed into the canteen. “She’s a little bony for my liking, and I dunno about that Eastern European accent, but she’s got tits that just won’t quit, and I bet those thighs would look great wrapped around my head, y’know?”
“The accent is Ukranian,” Harry told her. “And if you want to try and pick her up, you go right ahead. I won’t say no if she crawls into bed with us.”
“I knew you liked big-titted blondes,” Stella said, poking him in the ribs, mirth not jealousy on her face. “I should’ve tried to bet you on that.”
“I’m a man, Stella,” he sighed. “Wagering that I’d like well-endowed beautiful blondes is like wagering that I enjoy breathing. Nobody’s going to be willing to bet against you on that.”
The two of them headed over towards the wall of closed tiny doors where all the food was kept. Neither Harry nor Stella had ever seen anything like it before, but Len had told Harry that it was something called an automat, where the food was kept either warm or hot, depending on which little window it was sitting in. Normally, a person was supposed to put money into the slots, but the system had been set up so that all the food was provided without cost. The one thing that was a little difficult was that sometimes the names of what the food actually was weren’t written in English.
So today he’d picked up a sandwich of some kind, but he wasn’t certain what kind of meat or vegetables were mixed into it. It sort of resembled a Vietnamese banh mi, with daikon radishes as the one thing he could definitively identify for certain, but the rest? It was a tasty meat sandwich of some kind, and that would have to be enough to satisfy his curiosity for the time being.
Stella, on the other hand, grabbed something marked as a Regal Salad, although what exactly was supposed to make it ‘regal’ was beyond him. Maybe the fact that they’d used some of their short supply of dried cranberries atop it. They’d certainly slathered it with ranch dressing in bulk, so much that it looked like the lettuce was in danger of drowning. And the bacon crumbles were about as fresh as they could get, considering the wild boar they’d been harvested from had been killed just a week or so back when it had decided to try and scavenge inside the borders of the Village. At least, Harry hoped it was wild boar bacon – a couple of the chefs had been trying to figure out what to do with the more unusual kills that the Village residents had been dragging in for the chefs to fiddle with, although it wasn’t always welcomed as eagerly by the patrons of the canteen. It’d taken a couple of very brave soul before anyone was willing to try what giant preying mantis meat tasted like, although Harry had been one of the first people through the door.
(It had been like an even gamier duck, although it also had a natural sort of spice to it, which was odd, because despite the fact that the chef had insisted there was no chili powder in the recipe, the meat had a sharp kick of heat to it that left a stinging on the lips.)
The two sat down to enjoy their dinner in the mostly empty room, with only a couple of people scattered around the room, but they’d only been sitting and eating for a couple of minutes when two people staggered in, each of them holding a knife in one hand and a half-drained bottle of alcohol in the other. “Hey! You! Limey! Get the fuck out of our dining room!”
It was a pair of familiar faces, Dougie McCormack and Bruce Lancaster, more commonly known as Demolition Derby. McCormack was an ex-Marine specializing in demolitions, and Lancaster had been his counterpart over in the Australian army. Both men had been caught engaging in extra-curricular activity over during the second Persian Gulf conflict, blowing up civilian businesses after having been paid off by local mob bosses. After both were dishonorably discharged, they’d hooked up and formed their own Private Military Organization, known as Demolition Derby Deployments, or 3D for short.
Normally, 3D was one of the units that Scarab had tried to steer clear off, more for their own safety than out of any particular fear for the group. Len had described them to Harry once as ‘the cousins you had who you just knew were going to blow off their own fingers with firecrackers someday,’ and that barring beers and M-80s, they were pretty much as much a danger to themselves as they were anyone else.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Harry said, looking up. “I know you two think you’re some swinging dicks who can stroll into any room and command respect, but we’ve decided that’s gone out of fashion recently, so you’ll just have to bugger off and bother someone else.”
“The fuck did you say to me, shitstain?”
Harry politely raised a fingertip to Stella then rose up from the bench, grabbing the steel metal tray that he’d used to bring his food over to the table. “Too many syllables? Try this. Piss. Off.”
“You’re fucking dead!” one of the two said, lunging at Harry with his knife.
If the two hadn’t been three sheets to the wind, Harry might’ve exercised a bit more caution, but these two were three sheets to the wind and he felt like giving them any bit of daylight would only embolden them.
He went to work.
As soon as the knife was within reach, Harry snapped out with the metal tray to knock the knife out of his hand. The two drunks were sloppy, dangerous and wild, which meant they weren’t all that much trouble.
The first knife flew off wildly in one direction before it hit the ground with a loud clatter, and the second one came charging at his face before he simply dropped down and whipped the metal tray upward, knocking the blade away as he kicked his foot squarely into the drunk’s solar plexus, the man coughing immediately as he collapsed to the floor.
Harry looked back to the first guy, who was looking about for the knife, and then Harry brought the tray around with a sharp snap against the back of the man’s head, knocking him unconscious. After that, he stood up, dusted himself off, picked up both knives and then walked back over to continue dinner, shaking his head. “Bloody idiots.”
“Should we worry about them coming after us later?” Stella asked him.
“Nah,” Harry said with a laugh. “Honestly, considering how drunk they both were, I’d be amazed if either of them even remembers this when they sober up. They’ll probably just think they got drunk and passed out here.”
“Without their knives, though?”
“Their loss,” Harry said. “If you come at me with a weapon, you’d better be prepared to use it because if you don’t, I’m not going to baby you and treat you with kid gloves.”
Stella laughed, nodding her head. “That’s good to know, then.” A minute or two later in their dinner, she looked up and canted her head to one side. Then she stood up and moved her way across the room over to one of the corners, where one of the cameras overlooking the room had been knocked loose from its perch. The slender woman moved quickly towards the corner, pulling a chair along with her, setting it up beneath the camera, before moving to stand atop it. Once on the chair, she could get a better look at the tiny device.
“Harry?” she said. “You best come take a look at this.”
“Hm?” He rose up and walked over to stand below her. “What?”
“The camera… it’s not connected to anything.”
Comments
Ronan
in the automat description, you said warm or hot -- did you mean warm or cold?
