The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg Read online

  ‘It's like finding a missing link. It might mean the discovery of a hidden masterpiece or the validation that Granny's pretty vase is going to pay for her nursing. Stuff like this is incredible.’

  She knew she wasn’t as clever as Julius, not even close, but she wished occasionally he would find her fascinating. They had met at a quiz night where her team was smashing it. At the bar, he had smiled at her and said he and his team needed her expertise. Apparently, he didn’t even watch TV. She had thought that was incredibly endearing. She didn’t normally make the first move, but had suggested that they go out for a drink; she had been delighted by his surprised smile.

  Now she tried to stifle a yawn. Whatever Julius was working on was always amazing or incredible. A new type of medieval hinge, amazing; a recipe for cheese, incredible; a diary entry for the yield of a field, revelatory. It didn't matter what the subject matter was or the time period, Julius found it all fascinating. Rebecca yawned again and made a point of looking around the room.

  Julius grimaced. He had been playing back yesterday’s conversation with Charlie in his head. The police report had said the death was unsuspicious, but Julius was alarmed. Charlie, however, wasn’t. Old people died all the time; that was sort of the point. Even so, the discovery sat uncomfortably with Julius, who hoped his friend was not getting involved in something dangerous. Just as he was about to replay the conversation again, he noticed Rebecca was yawning.

  He knew he was rubbish with girls. They were clearly worth the effort, he just wished he were better at it. He thought Rebecca was a lovely girl who always saw the world differently, in a way that was refreshing to him, but he didn’t seem to be able to convey that. He had tried once to explain how he felt about her, and was horrified when she asked if she was some sort of experiment. He knew she was upset, but he wasn’t sure how he had hurt her and tried harder to be attentive. The problem was, he was no good at small talk; he didn't tend to notice current affairs or the weather, he rarely watched TV or the papers, and probably couldn’t pick the current Prime Minister out of a line up, let alone which party they represented. Talking about his own work seemed to constantly bore her, so he moved to a subject that he was sure would please her. ‘How's your day been?’

  Rebecca’s attention swung back to him and, stabbing a broccoli stalk, she waved it at him. ‘You remember Nikki? You'll never guess what she did in the new window display.’

  Julius nodded appreciatively as Rebecca launched into a tale of high skulduggery in the Jonas Dept Display Team. Rebecca was a display designer for the department store, displaying goods to their most enticing best and guaranteeing sales. Apparently, Nikki had positioned one of the mannequins in the window so that it appeared to be pinching another mannequin’s bottom. Julius duly laughed, and then apologised as Rebecca explained to him that it wasn't actually funny.

  ‘It's like she doesn't take her job seriously. We have standards, you know.’

  At this Julius could sympathise. He knew Rebecca worked hard and was proud of all she had achieved. Her thematic windows often made the local papers, and she had made the new season window reveals into something of an event. Last Christmas the police had to temporarily close the street as the crowd was so large. Julius knew she was looking for a promotion. She deserved it, but her company were quite traditional. They wouldn't create a new position for her, so she was likely going to have to move. Julius knew she had London firmly in her sights.

  ‘That reminds me. I was talking to Charlie today.’

  Rebecca stared at him blankly. She had been discussing the new layout of the perfume floor and what Gino had said to her about customer targeting. Had Julius been listening to a word she said?

  Returning to his college office after lunch, he tried to concentrate on his paper on the Myth and Migration Patterns of the Early Hallstatt Cultures, but he couldn’t focus. No matter how much he tried to settle down, his mind drifted to his earlier conversation. Charlie had asked if he wanted to accompany him to visit Zofia’s elusive brother-in-law. Julius knew this was a big deal. If Charlie was on the path of a Fabergé, then it showed great faith and trust that he had invited him along. He had almost said yes, it was that tempting. Then he thought about all the effort involved and decided he preferred his treasure hunts in the old library stacks and the pages of the web. All within reach of a decent cup of coffee or a warming glass of single malt. What was the appeal of getting cold and wet, running down leads in the rain, hanging around in strange places and wandering when you'd be back in your own bed? Both his best friend and his girlfriend were outward going sorts. Maybe he should try a little harder. He knew Charlie understood him. Maybe if Julius tried a bit harder with Rebecca she’d understand him as well.

  #7 Neith – Alpha Earth

  Live events were treasured. You could play fast and loose with the timeline as there was less to screw up. They were also high risk, with greater chance of failure or death, and a greater chance of glory. No wonder we were all leaning forward in our seats. The Q Field was capable of letting us through to any place on Beta Earth in any time zone, but sometimes it lined up with Beta Earth at the same time we were currently at, hence a live event.

  ‘It looks like a Fabergé egg is about to resurface.’ Clio nudged me, and the flush of adrenaline through my system swept away the hangover. Just like that, the polar bear disappeared and all I had was a slight muzziness. The joy of quantum hangovers. I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head to get a better view of the large screen behind Captain Nymens.

  According to record, Carl Fabergé made only fifty eggs for the royal imperial family of Russia. The location of forty-four were known to Beta Earth. We knew of a further two that were in undeclared private collections, and another two were in our own vaults. That left a further two whose locations were truly unknown. It would be our job to watch the path of its discovery. We would monitor it right until the moment it went public or was melted down.

  Believe me, that nearly happened once.

  We had been getting ready to grab the egg. Someone had bought it at a flea market and didn’t realise what it was. Idiot. Anyway, he could see it was made of gold and jewels and thought he would melt it down and sell it for scrap. However, the surprise that this egg contained was a watch, and the bloke thought he might be able to flog it. He did a quick internet search for the watch, and mentioned the egg as well, and suddenly he was receiving lots of search results about missing Fabergé eggs. Needless to say, he didn’t melt the egg down after that.

  If it hadn’t been saved though, we would have stepped in. At the moment that the item is destroyed, we are then able to enact the live protocol. The Q Field confirming the item has left the Beta timeline permanently then opens a window for us to step through. We head back a few days or weeks beforehand and prepare to extract it at the moment of destruction.

  ‘Any questions?’

  There was a sea of hands. This was going to be a hotly contested consignment.

  ‘Which egg is it? Have we got any intel yet?’

  ‘No, nothing yet.’

  ‘Do we know which continent it's on?’

  ‘All the intel suggests Europe at the moment. Or Asia,’

  There were lots of groans. Researching two continents was twice the workload. At least it was a Fabergé. That meant only a hundred years of research.

  ‘Any sense of timescale?’

  ‘Not yet. The quantum alert has only thrown this up as a possibility at this moment. As we get closer to the event, we'll get more details. And no, we don't have any names yet either.’

  Which meant loads of tedious fact finding about stuff that we will ultimately need to ditch. Step forward, Clio. I was okay at research and loved tracking down active clues, but Clio was a beast at it. It was a toss-up between her and Ramin as to who was better.

  ‘Any idea what the hidden treasure is, or if it’s present?’

  I watched as Sam raised an eyebrow at Tyler. It was a stupid question and he had almost certa
inly ruled themselves off the team. Every egg had been crafted to contain a unique treasure. When the jewelled egg was open, something special was hidden inside. A portrait, an automaton, a jewel, a toy; all in miniature. No two were the same.

  ‘If we knew what the treasure was, Curator Jones, then we’d know what the egg was, wouldn’t we?’ asked the chancellor in an openly mocking tone. ‘I think you need to spend a bit more time in the library and not the gym. Yes?’

  I looked at Sam’s impassive face. As captain, it was his place to comment and discipline his curators, but the chancellor outranked him. Still, it was an unnecessary rudeness both to Sam and Tyler. Not that I cared much for Tyler.

  Ignoring the interruption Sam cleared his throat and dismissed the room, reminding all of us that an hour in the gym was as important as an hour in the library and that neither should be neglected.

  As we left, Tyler barged past us, and the four of us headed out into the sunshine and down to Snaps, our favourite riverbank bar. There was always a lovely breeze at this time of day, and they served a mean Melon slushie.

  We pulled up our chairs and relaxed in the shade. Out on the river a few teenagers were playing on the hover punts, trying to goad the crocodiles for a bit of sport, but these crocs were old and sleepy and used to the irritations of children. Occasionally, one would snap its jaw, causing the kids to scream with laughter, and their mothers to come down to the edge to admonish their children. It was mean to torment the crocodiles; even if they fell off their boards, their exo-suits would bubble up and protect them from drowning, or falling, or being bitten in half, or any one of the myriad ways in which children tried to kill themselves.

  I remember playing with the crocs as a child, but when we did it Ramin and I both switched off our exo-suits. Where was the fun if there was no risk? Shortly after that we'd been reassigned schools to a place more suitable to our skills and attitudes. The Library of Alexandria.

  ‘So, an egg!’

  Paul looked as excited as I felt. The last egg hunt had involved an exploding tanker, and the one before that had taken part during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fun times.

  ‘Which teams do you reckon they'll pick?’ We were both in with a chance. No one could step within seven days of their last step; it was a simple safety protocol. For the next week none of us could be considered, but on day eight we'd be eligible. So long as we weren't then assigned to another retrieval. We discussed it for a while, all agreeing that we hoped the Fabergé Event spun out slowly. It would be just our luck if it sped up.

  Clio sipped on a cucumber smoothie and asked the boys why there had been no mention of their mission in the weekly briefing.

  They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘We've been instructed not to discuss it with anyone.’

  We both smiled at them, our eyebrows raised in matching expressions.

  ‘Yeah, okay, fair enough.’

  They looked at each other and nodded. ‘It's not like we weren't going to talk to you about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I mean Sam practically said “Talk to no one about this. Except Neith and Clio”.’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, he didn't say the bit about you two out loud.’

  ‘No, not out loud as such, but yeah, reading between the lines.’

  ‘Exactly, Sam could hardly expect us not to talk to you two about it.’

  This was interesting. Clio sat forward. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We were stepping over to pick up Rembrandt's “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee”.’

  ‘Oh ho, you got that one? Was it a total nightmare?’

  The Q Field had a programmed list of lost items from Beta Earth that were available to claim. It was a long list, and it would randomly generate the next lost treasure to go and track down. There were generally three or four a week, sometimes as many as ten. It could be a painting, a book, even a plant. There was no rhyme or reason, but when the stars aligned, we were to go and grab it. Honestly, I suspect it’s more complicated than when the stars align, and I know we had to study it for five years in high school. Ultimately, the most I understood, I mean really understood, was that when we were told to jump, we stepped.

  Rembrandt’s sea scape was one of the larger items on the list. It had been stolen in a raid on the Gardner Museum over fifty years ago, along with a collection of other works of art. Most were in private collections, but the Rembrandt was so large that the thieves had been unable to fence it quickly and storage had been an issue, so they burnt it. Philistines.

  A quantum slot had opened up and a team were tasked to go back and grab it before it was burnt. These sorts of extractions were always tricky, as you had to ensure that the involved parties. i.e. the idiots burning the art, couldn't know that the painting hadn't actually burnt. We had a range of tactics to ensure the timeline remained stable. Early attempts of “Shh, don't tell anyone” failed massively and prompted a slew of alien visitation reports on Earth Beta. It was all a bit embarrassing. Now we relied on sleight of hands, auto-suggestion, and good old drugs. “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” was almost two metres tall. That was going to require some manipulation. Plus, a fire was always tricky to fake.

  ‘What did you go with, drugs or a dummy? Don't tell me it did get burnt?’ asked a horrified Clio.

  It did happen. Despite our best efforts, we occasionally failed to save the item and we had to step back empty handed and wait for the next quantum window to open up, which could be next week or a decade later. It was the sort of error that first years made, not seasoned steppers like Paul and Ramin.

  ‘No, nothing that mundane. When we arrived on Beta Earth we started to investigate the brief. Imagine our surprise when we saw the painting in pride of place in the National Museum of Art.’

  ‘What!?’ It was hard to say which of us sounded more astounded.

  ‘What the hell? Was it a fake?’

  Ramin shook his head. ‘No, we ran a full spectrum analysis and it was the genuine article.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Had you arrived too early?’

  ‘No. It’d been recovered the day before, and to great acclaim.’

  ‘The thieves?’

  ‘No, their identity remained unknown. The picture had been found propped up again a dumpster.’

  ‘Was that on fire?’

  ‘There was no fire.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, what could we do? We took a load of notes and then requested a step back.’

  ‘Has that happened before? Anyone?’

  We all shrugged. It was possible to arrive way before the extraction point or the day after. But arriving on time to find that the artefact was safe and sound? Unheard of. But had it happened before? Was the timeline not as secure as we thought it was?

  ‘Do you want to know what the really weird bit is?’ asked Ramin. ‘When I left the debrief this morning, I checked the library catalogue and the picture’s status. It’s listed as Retrieved. According to the library, it did burn, and it was recovered. But when I pulled up the catalogue number, it showed an error report.’

  Paul frowned at Ramin. ‘What did you do that for? Sam could’ve put you on report and then you’d have lost any chance of going after this egg.’

  Still, what Ramin had discovered was unsettling. ‘That's pretty serious. What did Sam say?’

  ‘I didn't mention it to him. Remember he’d told us to leave it alone.’

  I continued to sip on my slushie. We worked for the library and tended not to ask questions. It was a fabulous job, working for a great organisation. The pay was good and my colleagues were fun, so why would I question anything? And yet, that was two odd events in a row. A quasi-religious or mythical artefact retrieved, and a painting unburnt. And now we had a live event looming. What could go wrong?

  # 8 Julius – Beta Earth

  He knew his part in the hunt was done, but Julius couldn’t let it go. When it came to dangling threads, he was like a terrier. Besides which, before he had only the basic
awareness of Fabergé. Now he wanted to know more. Was it possible for him to guess which egg Charlie was on the trail of? Might knowing which one it was help him?

  He could tackle this problem from two sides, what he knew about the current trail and what the world knew about the eggs. In his experience, you never tackled a problem from one angle only. You always tackled what was known and what was unknown. And whenever possible, you always started with primary sources. Which were not books, or websites or newspaper articles, but people.

  Smiling, he dialled a number then headed out across Cambridge to Magdalene College to visit Marsha Favilova, a professor in cultural anthropology. The low morning sun was in his eyes, so he nipped through the alleys until he arrived at one of the side entrances. Showing his university ID to the porter, he headed into a small quadrangle. In summer this was one of his favourite gardens. The honeysuckle and roses filled the air with perfume as the red brick walls radiated warmth. Today though, the walls were bare except for the skeleton branches of the climbing shrubs. It had been so cold last night that even in this sheltered garden, frost clung to the vines. Heading along the stone-flagged path, he entered the college and took the steps two at a time before knocking on Marsha’s door. He loved visits to Marsha, even if they were always a bit full-on. Maybe because they were.

  The door flung open and a tall woman looked at him in horror.

  ‘Julius. My boy! The cold! Do not stand there letting all the heat out. Come in, come in.’

  As she closed the door, she looked as though he might have been in some way responsible for the cold, but that she would also be prepared to forgive him. She was almost as tall as Julius, and was draped in a long, slim, black wool dress and covered in many layers of shawls, each artfully arranged and fixed by elaborate broaches. Several necklaces hung at her neck.