“Ten, a dozen. No more than that. Why?”
“Ever heard of Russian Roulette?”
Zhivov locks the deadbolt on the sick bay door. “A dozen men ready to shoot the crap out of whoever shows up before they can do a thing about it.” He smirks. “But say they detect twenty, thirty arrivals, all simultaneous. Arrivals dispersed all around.”
“Twelve goons, thirty arrivals.”
“Let’s make it twelve goons, fifty arrivals.”
“And I’m one of the arrivals,” I say. “Who are the others?”
“We’re one of the arrivals,” Zhivov says. “The other forty nine are no one. They’re accelerators accelerating pure fresh air.”
“Russian Roulette,” I say. “If Asmus and his goons pick our acceleration, that’s the bullet in the chamber?”
Zhivov nods. “Is it crazy?”
“Yes, it’s crazy,” Bess replies for me.
“And you didn’t mention your career-ending idea to Prasad?”
“You’d take that risk,” Bess asks me. I nod. “And you?” Zhivov nods.
“You can round up fifty accelerators?”
“I can.”
“And weapons?”
“Weapons? Okay Rambo. Now that we’ve taken the taint off crazy, we may as well go for it.”
FORTY-SEVEN
I’ve come to notice there’s a pattern to TMA planning. It involves a lot of specifics on how to get to where you need to be, alive, and then from there it plummets on detail. This plan is no exception. In fairness, there’s not much to base a plan on. Gallie is either in a mansion or in a barn. The third option, that she’s in neither, is outside the bounds of the feeble plan we’ve stitched together. The plan has it that we arrive, well-armed, three days after we had escaped, and about the same amount of time before the missile strike. As we arrive, so do another fifty tachyons bursts carrying nothing but air. The plan–the prayer–is that our personal tachyon burst is not among the ones that get enveloped in a hail of lead. This is where the strategy plummets and we lean on pure luck. What we do is go in there, find Gallie and bring her home. My private strategy is to also deal with Asmus in a conclusive way. Not figuring into the strategy is that Boris and I lack even a rudimentary training on the weapons we’ll be taking with us.
I have a couple of days to spend with Bess as Zhivov goes about his business of collecting the inventory of tools for our wild plan. Because of the stupidity of time, there’s no big rush on preparing, but it’s not the temporal logic that’s driving us. It’s that my heart is in my mouth and every second that passes without knowing what’s happening to Gallie is agony.
If Bess is still trying to give a second chance to the marriage she never had, she’s concealing it well. But she is serious about restoring the career she never had. We talk wine to the limits of my knowledge. One thing about which there’s no uncertainty is that she has no intention of going home, and no patience for anyone dumb enough to bring it up.
“Prasad can fuck off to 2030 if he likes, but I’m going nowhere.”
“Can’t think about that right now.”
“I know.”
The night of the mission has arrived. My room is where it starts, and Bess and I are waiting for Zhivov to show up with his final box of tricks.
“You going to keep each other safe?” Bess asks. She takes my hand and squeezes it.
“Yes. You know, I had Boris all wrong. First impressions weren’t good, but thank god for him.” I notice my hand is shaking a little so I pull it from Bess’s grip. “He’s not who I thought he was. Breaking the rules. He’s a surprise.”
“Really?” Bess says with a faint smile.
“Yeah.”
“Why is it the smartest people are sometimes the dumbest people?” Bess says. She’s shaking her head. “Didn’t you know?”
“What?”
“If your regular IQ was equal to your emotional IQ, you’d never have gotten the gist of breathing,” Bess says. “Boris is head-over-heals for Gallie Galois. How can’t you see that? I’m guessing he has been for years.”
“No.”
“Yes. And then you fall out of the blue.”
“You think they–?”
“No. He has the look of a man who’s never dared act on it. I wish I knew how not to act on things. My downfall, I’m afraid.” I smile. She doesn’t know it but she had said that same thing to me once before, and my mind turns to Den, the wine entrepreneur and stealer of wives. “Maybe that’s why Jane Galois has men beating her door down and Elizabeth Sato ... doesn’t.”
Zhivov bursts in carrying the final box. All furniture had been stacked against the walls to make room for his inventory. Boxes of accelerators, eighteenth century clothes and weapons. First he lays out the wrist accelerators across the floor in neat rows. One at a time he programs them, all fifty. They look of different designs and vintages but they’d better all have the same precision. Them arriving even minutes apart turns the game from Russian roulette to straight-up carnage.
Next we kit up in the breeches, boots, jackets and tricorns. We get an assault rifle each with spare clips and a solid movie-based understanding of how to reload. Zhivov ushers us to the corner of the room to keep out of the tachyon inner blast radii of the unmanned wrist accelerators. We wait, and then like fireworks, the accelerators pop off in twos and threes. They’ll be highly curious picking up these accelerations in the detector control room not a hundred yards from here, but they’ll have no time to do a damn thing about it. After the last one pops, Zhivov and I stand back to back,
