Crossover Read online

it was usually a sign of extreme trauma. Yet, he had suffered no trauma. Quain was suddenly plagued by a strange sense that this had happened before. Redmond caught a change in Dillard's facial expression. A fear that hadn't been in his mind only a second ago expressed itself freely in his features. Was he experiencing the shift as well?

  As suddenly as the shift had come, it was gone again. Quain let out an inward sigh of relief, but Dillard still seemed agitated. Mind racing, fear gripping every fibber of his being, an unmistakable imbalance just behind the left temporal lobe. Then that was gone as well.

  Quain walked to where Dillard was sitting, and bent close to him in order to get a better scan. "Are you alright, Doctor?" he asked.

  The Doctor shook his head slowly. "Yes. Yes of course I am. Why shouldn't I be?" He stood and moved toward a work station, pulled up a stool, and told his computer to bring up the file on R6.

  "Do you know my work, Mister Quain?"

  "Only what I've read, and that was rather vague. Something about regenerative genetics?"

  "Quite right. A boon to man kind. Soon, if you lose an arm or a leg, or your kidney or heart fail, I will be capable of growing you a new one in a matter of minutes rather than the usual six to eight months. I will be able to do it without surgery and with no chance of rejection. Yet, I have to wonder.” Dillard turned from his computer screen and looked Redmond in the eyes. “You’re a soldier, of sorts. You tell me the implications of such an advancement."

  "The field potential is enormous as long as the other side doesn't have the same technology." He didn't know what else to say. Redmond knew that within the next six months, Dillard’s R6 would be responsible for building an army of mutants.

  Soldiers injected with the R6 gene were virtually immortal. If one was wounded in battle, the nanotech program imbedded in the gene would repair and regenerate the afflicted area without the need for medics. A man would fall, only to rise again twice as healthy as he was before. The only problem was the indirect side effect the serum had on the brain. Trauma experienced when a soldier was injured would naturally put him into shock. That proved to be the catalyst for a bizarre chemical reaction to take place, temporarily shutting down that part of the brain responsible for conscience, love, compassion, and empathy.

  When in that state, unspeakable horrors were perpetrated without the slightest remorse. That is, until the drug wore off. Most of the first test subjects went insane upon realizing what they had done, but Dillard had a solution for that too. It turned out that all he had to do was keep his subjects in a perpetual state of shock. This he eventually accomplished by adding a virulent strain of flesh eating bacteria to the serum.

  Now the Agency had the perfect killing machines. Men on the edge of sanity, with nothing to lose but their inner torment, and no way of dying. These walking dead not only wreaked death and destruction upon enemy troops, but a short time after the bacteria was introduced to the gene, R6 mutated it, facilitating the realization of the disease's dormant desire to become air born.

  The soldiers brought with them a plague such as the world had never seen. Whole populations were decimated in a matter days after contact with `The legions of the beast', as they came to be known. Eaten by a bacteria there was yet no cure for.

  "The field potential." Dillard spat the phrase in disgust as if the taste of those words were poison on his lips. "We can always count on your people to twist a miracle into an abomination. Hasn't your damn war brought enough misery?"

  Again Redmond was surprised by the doctors reaction. This was not the man Redmond had come to despise.

  "When we met, you seemed relieved that the Agency was taking you seriously. If that's not the way you feel, why continue developing R6?" Quain was travelling dangerous ground, but something was terribly wrong. He needed answers.

  "I am not an unpatriotic man, Mister Quain. But if it were only for patriotic reasons, I would burn this building and my life's work to the ground. The war won't last for ever.

  Then, out of the darkness of despair, R6 will arise to take its rightful place as a medical break through. It's the medical potential that drives me, Quain! Your god forsaken war be damned! I will let history judge its outcome. But the merits of my work are beyond question. If it were not for the government funding, I'd be the first to tell the Agency what to do with its meddling."

  "How ironic," thought Quain. Dillard had it all wrong; It was history itself that was being judged here. At that moment another wave of nausea hit him hard, and again the room listed violently to the left. Quain heard a voice from the back of his head. In his confusion, his senses told him the sound came from behind. He turned quickly, weapon drawn, ready to do battle if the need arose. No one was there.

  Dillard looked pale, his eyes clouded and unfocused. His head was back and his mouth open. A weak scan of his mind revealed only a sub‑conscious garble. He was in some kind of coma

  "Redmond!" The voice screamed at him. He turned again almost losing his balance in an effort to respond, and then he knew the unthinkable was true. His bond was reconnected.

  "Rachel?" he was slipping into a darkness he'd never experienced before, and his mind fought to keep him aware a few minutes longer. He found her presence anchoring him as the room continued to shift. This time it didn't stop.

  As the lab continued on a slow rotation to the left, a fog of swirling colours drifted by like smoke in slow motion. They were interweaving with a ray of sun shine streaming through a window on the hot summers day. For a split second he fondly remembered better times on another world, light years from here. He shook it off.

  Redmond could discern only vague shapes at first, but as his head cleared to a tolerable level he began to understand what the shapes really were: Windows in time. He was seeing past, present, and future events as if on a light beam swirling around him. Quain knew full well what that meant. He was in big trouble.

  "I remember." Rachel said through the link. "Not all of it, but enough to know something's gone terribly wrong. I think you’re in a nexus caused by a linear shift in time and space. Somehow we've caused a focus in the continuum and it's manifesting itself as a small black hole. As far as I can tell, time, where earth is concerned, is converging, falling in on itself.

  You were...are, at the center of that nexus."

  "Who was sent to kill Dillard?" He asked through the link. That had been an unknown from the beginning. History didn’t say. But Redmond knew the time line had changed. He knew both histories. He knew the one where Dillard lived, and he knew the one where he died. He also knew the second one had to be corrected or the earth faced destruction in less than a hundred years.

  But a reply from Rachel wasn't necessary. From across the room he saw the door to the lab open in slow motion. He saw himself walk in. His weapon pulsing red with pent up energy, begging for release. Redmond instantly understood that it was set to kill. His double raised the gun and took careful aim as he scanned the room. This shouldn’t have been happening for another three days, and when was he given the order to kill Dillard? Why couldn’t he remember?

  "Wait!" Redmond shouted.

  As the two men's line of sight connected, he saw the pain in his own eye's for the first time, and knew what it was going to cost him to leave this place in more or less one piece. "What are you doing here?" he heard the other Redmond ask. The question was echoed over the bond link.

  Rachel responded instantly. "You have to tell me when and why you were sent to kill Dillard. Only you can know that, Redmond. We have to find out which timeline is the one that must continue."

  "I don't know. I can't remember. Are you in contact with my double as well?"

  "No, I shouldn't even be linked to you." she didn't say it, but her time line was shifting as well, falling backward almost imperceptibly, but that wouldn't last. Rachel knew, instinctively, that what was going on would have never ending repercussions if it was not stopped before the black hole grew much larger than the head of pin.

  "The
n there's only one way to find out." Redmond thought. Talking to yourself is one thing, but talking to yourself standing across the room with a charged photon weapon pointed at your chest is another.

  "Why were you sent to kill him?" They asked simultaneously through the dream like fog.

  The double looked as if he were in deep thought for a moment and then answered.

  "Rachel says you must tell her to bring you back now. We're caught in a nexus. For obvious reasons I can't tell you why, but it's my time line that must prevail."

  "No!" Rachel shouted. "Tell me...her, I was wrong back then, and she's wrong now. Damn, this is confusing! Why can’t I remember sending Redmond to kill Dillard?"

  "I'm not here to kill him." Both men said.

  The double's lips were a full three seconds out of sync with his voice.

  Redmond was going to ask about the photon weapon he was brandishing then changed his mind. If his double had wanted to kill Dillard, the doctor would have already been dead. And had he arrived in the situation as his double had, his reaction would have been the same: find the danger, and if possible, eliminate it. Besides, why would his past self lie to him? What would he gain?

  Redmond noticed something odd about that gun. Then instantly he knew what it was... he'd never seen that design before. As his mind bent around the ramifications of this