The Lacquer of Still Moments

The klaxon was a high-frequency whine that bypassed the ears and drilled straight into the skull. Conroy was on his feet before his conscious mind registered the alarm, his body already moving through the ingrained sequence. Socks, trousers, boots. The muscle memory was a cold comfort, a little machine inside him that worked even when his thoughts were a useless static.

He yanked the tactical vest from its hook. The ceramic plates were heavy, a dense, stupid weight that promised to stop bullets but offered no defence against the kind of threat the violet alarm signified. He cinched the straps, the rough nylon scraping his skin. The whole uniform smelled of ozone and cold dust, the permanent scent of the facility, a place that was part bunker, part forgotten small-town museum.

His rifle was already in his hands, stripped from its magnetic lock by the wall. He didn’t check the chamber. It was always loaded. Protocol was a religion here, the only one that mattered. He clipped two spare energy cells to his belt, the metal cold against his hip, and slammed the door of his room open, stepping into the concrete hallway.

The main corridor was a sterile tube of painted cinderblock and flickering fluorescent lights. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and fear. Major Gordon stood waiting for him at the junction to the service tunnels, already encased in her own heavier armour. She was a statue carved from impatience, her face unreadable behind the polarized visor of her helmet.

"Conroy. Report," she commanded. Her voice was tinny, filtered through her helmet’s internal comms, stripped of all warmth.

"Operational, Major," Conroy said, his own voice sounding thin and young. He hated that.

"The incursion is a Class-Three bleed, localized in the East Wing Archives. Sector Gamma-Seven. You know the area?"

"The agricultural history exhibit, ma'am. Threshers, ploughs, seed drills."

"Correct. The bleed’s epicentre is somewhere within the collection. Preliminary readings show significant chroniton displacement. Time is… frayed. Your objective is primary containment. You will establish a stable anchor point. I will handle the deployment of the sink. Do you understand the parameters of your engagement?"

"Understood, Major. Stabilize the field for sink deployment. Maintain the anchor until you give the all-clear."

"Precisely," Gordon said, a ghost of approval in her clipped tone. "Do not deviate. Do not engage with any temporal apparitions. They are echoes, nothing more. Your focus is the anchor. Is that clear?"

"Crystal, Major."

She turned without another word and started down the tunnel at a brisk, purposeful stride. Conroy fell into step behind her, the rhythmic thump of their armoured boots echoing in the narrow passage. The museum upstairs was a carefully curated fiction of local history, a place of dusty glass cases and faded photographs of men with large moustaches standing beside dead bears. Down here, in the sub-levels, was the truth: a forgotten Cold War project dedicated to policing the cracks in reality. They weren’t curators; they were janitors of the impossible.

The air grew colder as they approached the pressure door to Gamma-Seven. A visible frost coated the heavy steel, tracing intricate, impossible patterns. A low hum vibrated through the floor, a sound that felt ancient and wrong.

"Ready your primary," Gordon ordered. She placed her palm on a biometric scanner beside the door. A series of locks disengaged with heavy, metallic clunks.

Conroy took a deep breath, the filtered air doing little to calm the frantic drumming in his chest. He reached inward, past the fear, searching for the strange, quiet thing inside him. It felt like a knot of cold string in his gut. He focused on it, pulled at it. The world outside him seemed to thin, the colours desaturating slightly at the edges of his vision. The hum in the floor resolved into a thousand distinct, discordant notes.

"I am prepared, Major," he stated, the formal words a shield against the rising panic.

"On my mark." The massive wheel on the door began to turn, powered by a groaning hydraulic system. A sliver of wrongness leaked from the opening—the smell of wet soil and burning sugar, the sound of a distant summer thunderstorm.

The door slid fully open. The room beyond was not the archive he remembered.

It was a cathedral of chaos. The vast, warehouse-like space was filled with floating islands of moments. A collection of antique scythes hung suspended in the air, each droplet of condensation on their curved blades frozen in time. A hundred-year-old Massey-Harris seed drill was caught in a state of violent disassembly, its iron components exploded outward in perfect, motionless symmetry. The air was thick with a shimmering haze, like heat rising from asphalt, except it was freezing cold.

"Contact," Gordon said, her voice flat, devoid of awe or terror. "The field is unstable. I need my anchor, Conroy. Now."

Conroy stepped across the threshold, and the wrongness hit him like a physical blow. Gravity felt… negotiable. A wave of nausea washed over him as his inner ear tried to reconcile the conflicting signals. He planted his boots on the concrete floor, which seemed to ripple under his feet like disturbed water.

He focused. He ignored the sight of a flock of crows, black as polished jet, frozen mid-flight, their wings spread against a sky that wasn’t there. He ignored the sound of a woman softly humming a lullaby that seemed to come from inside his own helmet. He focused on the knot in his gut, feeding it his will, his concentration.

He extended his hands. The air around him began to resist the temporal chaos. A circle of stability, perhaps ten metres in diameter, started to form around him. The shimmering haze receded from his bubble. The floor solidified. The disorienting sensory input faded to a dull background hum. It took everything he had. A tremor started in his arms, a deep, cellular vibration. Sweat stung his eyes.

"Anchor is established," he grunted, the words feeling heavy in his mouth. "Field is… stable. For now."

Major Gordon moved past him, her boots making solid, reassuring sounds on the concrete floor inside his circle of influence. She carried a heavy metallic cylinder, the chroniton sink. Its surface was covered in complex brass dials and glowing vacuum tubes, a piece of technology that seemed as archaic as the farm equipment it was meant to save.

"Hold it steady," she commanded, kneeling to activate the device. "The bleed is pulling hard."

She wasn't wrong. Conroy felt the pressure building against his projected field. It was like holding back a tide with his bare hands. The temporal apparitions grew more insistent at the edge of his anchor. He saw a young boy in denim overalls chase a hoop and stick through the floating wreckage of a thresher. He heard the metallic clang of a blacksmith's hammer, impossibly loud and clear.

*They are echoes, nothing more.*

He clenched his jaw, pouring more energy into the anchor. His vision started to tunnel. The muscles in his back and shoulders screamed in protest. The cold knot in his gut was now a raging fire, consuming him.

Gordon worked with methodical speed, twisting dials, flipping switches. A low-frequency thrumming began to emanate from the sink, growing in intensity. A network of pale blue light, like captive lightning, arced from the device and spread across the floor.

"Almost there," she said, her voice tight with strain. "Just a few more seconds. Don't you dare falter."

Conroy couldn’t have answered if he wanted to. His teeth were grinding together so hard he thought they might crack. The pressure was immense, a physical weight pushing in on him from all sides. The world outside his bubble was a swirling vortex of disconnected moments. He saw snow falling upwards. He smelled birch smoke and damp wool. The humming lullaby was inside his head now, a mournful, looping melody.

The sink emitted a final, resonant chime, like a massive tuning fork being struck. A wave of absolute silence and stillness washed out from it, expanding through the room. The floating scythes clattered to the floor. The exploded seed drill collapsed into a heap of iron. The frozen crows vanished. The shimmering haze dissolved, leaving only the smell of cold ozone.

The pressure against Conroy's anchor vanished. The sudden release sent him stumbling forward, his concentration shattering. He fell to one knee, gasping, his entire body shaking with exhaustion. The fire in his gut subsided, leaving behind a hollow, aching cold.

Major Gordon stood and deactivated the sink. She looked around the now-still archive, her posture unreadable.

"Containment successful," she announced, as if commenting on the weather. "Class-Three Incursion neutralized. Your performance was adequate, Conroy."

She walked over to him. He was still on one knee, trying to control his breathing. She didn’t offer a hand.

"On your feet," she said. "Debriefing in thirty minutes."

Conroy pushed himself up, his legs feeling like jelly. The room was a mess of fallen artifacts and temporal residue that coated every surface in a fine, grey dust. It was just a cold, quiet room again. A storage space for history. He had looked into the raw, unspooled engine of time, and all he had to show for it was a tremor in his hands and the Major’s lukewarm assessment of 'adequate'.

Back in the sterile box of his quarters, he stripped off the armour and let it fall to the floor. He sat on the edge of his thin mattress, the frame groaning under his weight. The adrenaline had faded completely, leaving a profound, bone-deep weariness in its place. He felt scraped out, hollowed.

He looked down at his hands, expecting them to still be shaking. They were steady. But there was something new. A faint, oily shimmer clung to his skin, a pearlescent film that caught the light of the single overhead bulb. It moved when he moved, a subtle, impossible rainbow trapped beneath the surface of his epidermis.

He flexed his fingers, watching the faint, oily shimmer that now clung to his skin, and wondered how many more pieces of reality he had to bolt back into place before he broke, too.