TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome Page 5

  ‘Brace yourselves,’ said Maddy. She looked at them across the breakfast table, Liam and Sal sitting beside each other on their threadbare sofa, eyes resting expectantly on her.

  They’re not going to like this.

  ‘Jahulla! Come on, Maddy … what is it?’

  ‘This agency of ours … it’s, I’m not sure how to say this …’

  ‘Well, just say it anyway.’ Liam fidgeted impatiently. ‘I’m sure we’ve heard worse already.’

  ‘Not really.’ She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘The agency is just us.’

  The words hung above the table in the space between them. They hung in the stillness of the archway, accompanied by the soft hum of networked computers and the muted rumble of a train running over the Williamsburg Bridge above them.

  ‘What do you mean just us?’ asked Sal.

  ‘I mean exactly that, Sal. We’re it. The three of us.’

  Liam sat forward, frowning, confused. ‘But … but Foster told us there were other teams, in other places, so he did.’

  ‘I know he did. But he lied.’

  Sal looked past her. One eye lost behind a fringe, the other one just lost. ‘But …’

  ‘There was that message, Maddy.’ Liam leaned on the table. ‘That message from the future about Edward Chan, so there was …’

  ‘There is one other person in the agency,’ she replied. ‘It’s that guy Waldstein. Roald Waldstein.’

  ‘That fella who invented time travel?’

  ‘That’s him. He’s the one who set this archway up. He’s the guy who recruited Foster and the previous team.’

  Sal shook her head, working it through in her mind silently.

  Liam slapped a hand on the table. ‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary! You know I … I was wondering why it’s always us who was dealing with everything! Why them other teams were too bleedin’ lazy to get off their backsides and help out!’

  Maddy splayed her hands. ‘Well, now we know.’

  ‘But didn’t Foster say this Waldstein was totally against time travel?’ asked Sal. ‘That he, like, campaigned against it or something?’

  ‘Yes, he did. But he also set this up, secretly, as a back-up plan. I guess he figured that even with international agreements prohibiting the development of time-travel technology, on the sly, every government would be having a go at it.’

  Liam laughed softly. ‘I knew it! I just bleedin’ well knew it!’

  ‘It’s not fair Foster didn’t tell us that,’ said Sal. She looked up at Maddy. ‘Why did he lie to us?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘I guess he didn’t want to overload us. Put too much pressure on us.’

  ‘Did he just tell you now, Maddy? This morning?’

  She nodded. ‘Yup.’

  Sal’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? What?’

  ‘Why did he wait till now to tell you?’

  ‘I guess … I guess he figured from all the stuff I told him we’d been through that we were ready to find out.’

  ‘Chutiya!’ She stood up, biting her lip angrily. ‘He thinks we’re bakra? Stupid? What else is he holding back from us?’

  Maddy would have liked to say ‘nothing’, but she wasn’t entirely sure that Foster had given them the whole picture yet. She too was guilty of that, holding truths back from her friends. For example, when exactly was she going to tell Liam that time travel was killing him? Ageing him? That he was going to look exactly like Foster very soon.

  A bigger deal than that – that he and Liam were the same person. When the hell was she going to tell him that?

  And what did that mean anyway?

  Maddy had tried running that little doozy through her mind many times over. Did it mean Liam had been recruited from the Titanic before? Did it mean that this archway existed in a bigger loop of time, that one day Liam was going to be an old man? An old man who had somehow outlived her and Sal and now needed to renew the cycle by revisiting the last moments of their ‘normal’ lives and recruiting them all over again?

  ‘Maddy?’

  She looked up. Sal was sitting on the end of the table. ‘There’s something I’ve seen, but I’ve been keeping to myself.’

  Liam looked from her to Maddy. ‘Uh? Hang on! Has everyone here got a bleedin’ secret except me?’

  Sal ignored him. ‘This may sound crazy, but … have we been recruited before?’

  ‘What?!’

  Sal ignored him again. Her eyes were on Maddy. ‘Has Foster said anything like that?’

  ‘Recruited before? How do you mean?’

  ‘Foster said there was another team before us, right?’

  Maddy nodded.

  ‘That they died. That that ghost thing … that “seeker” killed them.’

  Liam cupped his jaw in his hands. ‘Hold on! That’s right! I remember that.’

  ‘Was that team us, Maddy?’

  Sal’s eyes remained resolutely on Maddy, watching her fidget, delay … fudge.

  Do I tell them that Liam is Foster? Because if Liam’s been here before … maybe Sal’s right and all three of us have.

  ‘I’m asking because I’ve seen something I can’t explain,’ said Sal. She looked at Liam. ‘Your uniform from the Titanic.’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, you told me you saw one a bit like my –’

  ‘No, Liam. No. It IS your tunic.’

  Maddy frowned. Her turn to be silenced by a revelation. ‘What?’

  ‘In that antique shop, the theatre costume shop near us. There’s Liam’s tunic hanging up.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ replied Maddy. She pointed at the rack of clothes hanging just outside their bunk nook. ‘It’s over there!’

  ‘It’s the same, Maddy. Exactly the same!’

  ‘How can it be the same one, Sal? How can it be here and in that shop at the same time?’

  ‘It is. It’s missing the same button. It has exactly the same stain on it. The same shape in the same place!’ She stood up, strode over to the wardrobe beside the nook. She pulled out his white tunic, still on its hanger, and brought it over to the table. She spread it out beneath the light above them.

  ‘There. See?’

  Liam got up and studied it.

  ‘You got that stain on the Titanic, right? Down the left side. Big stain. What was it … wine or something?’

  Liam frowned. ‘I see it. Jayzzz … never even noticed that before.’

  Maddy joined them. ‘Me neither. It’s faint.’

  He looked at Sal. ‘I … I don’t think I ever spilled wine down me jacket. I don’t remember doing anything like that. Chief Steward would’ve had me guts for garters.’

  ‘So then it wasn’t you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Maybe someone who had the uniform before me?’

  ‘That’s possible,’ said Maddy.

  Sal shook her head irritably. ‘That’s not the important bit. The point is there are two copies of it!’ She looked up at them both. ‘Do you see? Maybe that means Liam’s been here before?’

  Liam’s eyes widened. ‘This is …’

  ‘Messing with your head?’ asked Sal.

  He nodded.

  CHAPTER 10

  2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

  Who was it that once said, ‘A week is a long time in politics’? Well, that was a pretty good observation to take note of, if not to adapt very slightly.

  Rashim stared at the news-stream from New London, in the north of England.

  A week is a long time with a pandemic.

  This particular media feed had been running uninterrupted for two days now; a digi-streamer dropped on its side on the street by some panicked cameraman, had still been broadcasting powered by its own hydro-cell battery pack. The signal was being streamed round the world, no doubt watched by millions of other frightened people like Rashim.

  The street had been full of people running from faint blooms descending from the sky like flakes of ash from a bonfire of paper.
The blooms – viral spores – landing lightly on scalps, backs of hands, faces had an almost instantly lethal effect. The street had been full of stampeding people, and screaming voices … Then, five minutes later, after the camera had dropped and settled on its side, it was silent and full of corpses.

  Twenty-four hours ago, he’d been shaken by the sight of a solitary young girl staggering into the static view of the digi-streamer. A girl no more than eleven or twelve, collapsing to her knees, whimpering with fear and agony as her left arm dissolved and bacilli-like growths, like veins on the surface of her skin, snaked past her elbow and spread to her shoulder, her neck, her face.

  She’d collapsed into a huddle very quickly, quite dead. And over the next six hours transformed into a pool of reddish-brown liquid and a bundle of empty clothes.

  He’d watched with increasing horror as the puddle had grown slight protrusions, like humps, almost mushroom-like, that eventually opened to reveal fluffy spore heads like those of dandelions.

  A fresh breeze had carried those away long ago.

  Somewhere in a refugee camp in Kazakhstan, his parents most probably looked like the girl now. A tangle of clothes and a puddle of liquid.

  ‘Rashim!’

  It had all happened too quickly. The city lockdowns, quarantine. The complete shutdown of transportation systems. None of it had managed to stop the Kosong-ni virus.

  ‘Dr Anwar!’ He looked away from the holo-projection above his desk. Dr Yatsushita was leaning over the top of his cubicle partition. His tie loose and his top shirt button undone, his sleeves were rolled up and his lab coat dispensed with days ago. He’d taken to sleeping on a camp bed among the cubicles. As all of them had, working in ceaseless shifts to get things ready for T-Day.

  ‘I must have those figures now!’

  Rashim felt disengaged from the hustle and noise of activity going on around him. The hangar floor was now filled with people, equipment and machinery being brought in. He could see on one side of the concrete floor some famous faces he recognized: the vice-president, Greg Stilson, and the defence secretary. A few dozen yards away a Saudi prince and his family; next to him the bulk of some Central African dictator whose name he couldn’t quite remember and his three young wives. Rashim suspected he must have spent the last of his nation’s wealth to buy a place for himself on Exodus.

  There were other faces he vaguely recognized: old men with young wives. The rich and powerful.

  ‘The figures! Rashim!’

  Rashim nodded slowly, and palmed the data off his screen and floated it on to Yatsushita’s infopad. ‘It’s not even close to accurate,’ he muttered absently.

  ‘We have no more time,’ Yatsushita said, lowering his voice. ‘They will have to take their chances.’

  So many of the carefully selected and vetted candidates for Exodus had not made it to the Cheyenne Mountain facility. Some of the B-list candidates had managed to be flown in, but there were many grid spots now either empty or filled with last-minute replacements. No longer the great and the brilliant, rocket scientists and geneticists. But a motley random collection of people – army truck drivers, clerical officers, project technicians – and, of course, a handful of politicians, billionaires, dictators; the well-connected who’d caught wind of Project Exodus’s last-minute chance to negotiate themselves on to the transportation grid.

  Not exactly the best representation of twenty-first-century society to send back into the past to make a new start.

  Rashim looked up at Dr Yatsushita. ‘You said “they”. They will have to take their –’

  ‘I am not going.’

  ‘Why?’

  The old man shook his head sadly. ‘I cannot … not without my family.’

  ‘Still no news?’

  Yatsushita shook his head. He had managed to get his wife and daughter on a flight from Tokyo to Vancouver. But there they’d been stuck. No commercial or military flights left. Not even using leverage as the senior technician on Exodus was going to get them over here.

  The old man looked over his shoulder at the chaos on the grid. ‘Anyway, this is not the project I signed up to lead.’

  Rashim knew exactly what he meant by that. This frenetic, undignified scramble away from the sudden and messy end of mankind was not what Project Exodus had been about. Even though it was a flagrant breach of ILA Ruling 234, known informally as Waldstein’s Law, there was something worthy to it. The idea of rebooting civilization back in a time before man had begun to suck the world dry; the idea of bringing back twenty-first-century knowledge and enlightenment to an ignorant world that believed in gods and omens, repression and slavery. There was a germ of hope in all of that.

  Hope. Something there seemed to be precious little of in this poisoned and dying world.

  But these weren’t the specially selected candidates, quietly informed over a year ago to settle their personal affairs and be ready to be collected and taken to the Exodus facility. It was a random collection of the rich, the connected … and, in a few cases, the plain lucky-to-be-grabbed-at-the-last-moment. A poor cross-section of candidates to be sending on such an important mission.

  ‘So you’re staying, Dr Yatsushita?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You’ll die.’

  ‘We all die eventually, Rashim.’

  ‘I’ll stay with –’

  ‘No! There needs to be a project technician with them. As senior technician on the grid, you will have full authority! I will make that official with a data entry.’

  Rashim shook his head. ‘Me in charge of them? Look, I’m just a –’

  ‘There is a mission protocol. Mission jurisdiction. They are all aware of this and signed contracts of agreement to come along. They must accept you as Project Exodus leader.’

  Rashim looked across at the vice-president.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yatsushita, ‘even he must accept you as his …’ The old man paused, smiling. ‘… as his boss.’ He nodded at the vice-president, the prince, the dictator and a handful of others – all of them clearly elated to have made it into the facility before the security lockdown.

  ‘Don’t let any of those parasites become leader, Rashim.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Let this be a proper new beginning for mankind. Eh?’

  Rashim nodded, stood up, pushed his chair back on its castor wheels. Beyond the calm of the small enclave of cubicles, the hangar was a riot of noise and activity. Voices raised in confusion, fear, excitement. The clattering of two dozen military combat units weighed down with carbon-flex body armour, weapons and equipment. The whirring of exoskel-kinetic loaders depositing heavy crates of supplies into specially holo-flagged grid markings. The deep rumble of three Mobile Command Vehicles backing into their large grid slots.

  Dr Yatsushita reached a hand out and grasped one of his tightly. ‘The military units are programmed to follow the Exodus protocols. They will accept your authority, Rashim, once I’ve logged you in as my replacement.’

  ‘Dr Yatsushita, please, you have to come. I’m not ready for this.’ Rashim looked at the dictator, the prince, the politicians and the billionaires. ‘I can’t lead them … they won’t accept that.’

  The old man smiled. ‘They don’t have any choice in the matter.’

  ‘You’ll die if you stay. Please, you really need to come –’

  ‘Everyone who remains behind will be dead, Rashim. This …’ He turned to look over his shoulder at the frantic activity going on behind him. ‘For what it is, this is our only future now.’

  ‘This is crazy!’

  ‘You have to go, Rashim. And you have to remain in charge of Exodus.’ He smiled again, an almost paternal smile. Odd that, coming from the elderly Japanese man. Rashim had always got the impression that Dr Yatsushita hadn’t liked him; that he disapproved of his maverick ways, his disorganized virtual workspace, the messy desk, his personalized lab assistant.

  ‘I trust you, young man; you … far more than I trust any of them.’

  Rashim swallowed a
nxiously. He could feel his stomach churning and a desperate need for a toilet visit. ‘OK … O-OK. I’ll … uh … I’ll try.’

  Dr Yatsushita clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’ll do fine.’

  CHAPTER 11

  2001, New York

  ‘So, Maddy, let me just check I got this wording correct,’ said the guy on the other end of the line. He was just the kind of help-desk type that bugged her: overfamiliar. Way too friendly. It’s not like they were dating or anything, so why’d he have to keep using her name like they’d known each other since kindergarten?

  ‘A soul lost in time … that right, Maddy?’

  She sighed. ‘Yes … so far.’

  ‘Need to know what you know about Pandora. Aware it is “the end”. Have learned the “family” is just us and you. And we have been used before. Insist on further information. Will not attend any more “parties” until we hear back.’ She heard the help-desk guy chuckle. ‘Whoa … Maddy, what are you? Some kinda super-secret agent or something?’

  ‘Yeah … that’s right.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Some kinda super-secret agent. Now you going to print that AD for me, or are you just going to carry on making fun of me?’

  ‘Hey, look, I’m sorry … I’ll … uh, I’ll make sure it gets in tomorrow’s edition.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s important you do.’

  ‘So that’s, let me see …’ She heard him counting under his breath. ‘Thirty-four dollars for a week in the classified section of the Brooklyn Daily –’

  ‘No. I want it in just for tomorrow. Just Tuesday.’

  ‘Doesn’t cost you a cent more to be in the whole week, you know, Maddy.’

  ‘Just tomorrow’s edition, please. That’s all.’

  ‘OK … if that’s what you want. Gonna need your card details now, Maddy …’

  She ran through them as quickly as she could, keen to get the call and the gratuitous and obligatory you-have-a-nice-day over and done with. Finally done, she put the mobile phone down on the desk and looked at the others. ‘So, there we go.’

  Liam grinned a little anxiously. ‘Do you think we’ll tick this Waldstein fella off?’