'- Brought them back here, yes,' Goodly nodded. 'Through the Mo'bius Continuum.'
And now Trask's jaw dropped open all the way, so that once again he must close it before gasping, The ... Continuum?' At which the truth finally dawned on him; if not in regard to Nathan, certainly in respect of Zek. The fact that she was alive! He'd known it was the truth, of course, even as Goodly said the words, but it seemed so far beyond his wildest hopes and dreams that even Trask had held back from letting it register. Just a moment ago he'd known that Zek Foener was dead - he had literally heard and felt her die - and yet now .. .
As Trask's feet touched earth again, he snapped out of it and demanded to know: 'Where are they? Are they okay? And Zek - is she okay?'
David Chung answered him. They're sedated. We've fixed up a couple of beds in the Ops room. But it was a close thing. They were in the sea. And when they came through
... I thought half of the Mediterranean was coming through with them!'
Trask grabbed him, said, 'But how did it happen? Don't we know anything about it? Christ, I take an hour off for lunch, everything goes mad!'
'Nathan said a few words before we put him under,' Chung answered. 'But we had to put them out of it for a while. They were exhausted and in shock - especially Zek -and it might easily have developed into something worse.'
'So what exactly did Nathan say?' Trask headed for the Ops room with the others in tow.
'It seems it was a party of Tzonov's thugs,' Goodly took up the story. 'Nathan's Special Branch minders were taken by surprise - and murdered! Nathan and Zek ran for it, into the sea. More of Tzonov's people were waiting for them; they had wetsuits and spearguns and were already in the water; for all we know at this stage, the entire operation was launched from the sea. But when the chips were down and there was no other way out, Nathan did his thing. Except. .. there was probably a lot more to it than that.'
'Oh?' Trask glanced at him, and pressed on into the Ops room, where a small knot of espers was gathered around a pair of six-foot tables.
Goodly followed on behind, nodding. There had been some pretty weird stuff going on here. Stuff that told us these two were in trouble.' He gave a shrug. 'So we did what we could for them.' Goodly was wont to understate things: his British phlegmatism. But the precog's 'pretty weird stuff statement told Trask a lot: namely, that there was still a lot he hadn't been told.
'All of this in an hour?' he said, as the espers around the tables moved aside to make room for their Head of Branch, and Trask came to a halt between a pair of prone figures apparently asleep in hastily made-up beds.
'In a lot less than an hour,' David Chung put in. 'Let me tell you about it...
'Myself, lan, Geoff Smart, we all got the message at the same time: that something was wrong. With me, it was Nathan's earring - the thing came alive in my hand! I can't say what it was for Smart, but he's an empath and he's done a lot of work with Nathan; maybe he sensed the trouble they were in even at that range. And of course lan reads the future, and apparently he'd "seen" me plugging in the computer in Harry's room. So we went there, and I plugged it in. Then - it was the same as before: the numbers, equations, whatever; I'm no mathematician, so you tell me! But it was all on the screen. Except it wasn't quite the same. This time, the numbers came together, fused, formed into something else. Something that was ... I don't know, solid? Well, almost solid.'
Trask had taken Zek's wrist; feeling the steady pulse, he issued a sigh of relief. ZeJc, you spoke to me. When you thought it was aJJ over, I was the one you spoke to! It meant an awful lot to him. Then, as if it were his first breath in a week, he filled his lungs to bursting; finally, frowning, he looked at Chung. 'Something solid, you say? On the computer screen?'