TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  Run!

  He scrambled to his feet, stepping over and on the bodies around him. He glanced back to see the guards finish loading their carbines and begin to level their barrels at the remaining prisoners still on their feet. Many of those still standing were rooted to the spot in shock. Others who’d been towards the back of the crowd were now on the run, scrambling away from the guards towards the open doors of their huts.

  The guards began firing again at will, now picking out individual targets with short aimed bursts, mechanically aiming and firing… aiming and firing… like automatons, obeying their orders mindlessly.

  Liam rose from a crouch to run for the nearest hut. The lurch of movement caught a guard’s eyes and he swung the barrel of his gun in Liam’s direction. Several shots whistled past him – close, very close – and over his head as he dived, staggered and fell across a writhing carpet of dead and dying towards the open door of the nearest hut.

  He fell into the dark interior and scrambled on hands and knees across the rough wooden floor to hide beneath the nearest of the wooden bunks.

  Outside the firing continued. Sporadic clusters of shots, short bursts, long bursts and single taps to finish off the wounded as the soldiers stepped forward among the bodies. Meanwhile, the rattle of gunfire in the field outside was coming closer. He heard the muffled thud of more mortar shells landing, this time inside the perimeter of the camp.

  He heard the shrill sound of panic in the guards’ voices.

  Liam prayed. It wasn’t something he often did. Rarely, in fact. Catholic faith, drummed into his head since birth by his mother, father and every schoolteacher he’d ever had, had never managed to take hold of him. But he certainly was praying now, begging the Virgin Mother of Jesus to make sure that none of those soldiers outside had decided to stick his head in through the open door and finish him off.

  He heard heavy jackboots slapping through the mud outside, running past the open door, the guards’ attention now on the approaching attackers. They began taking up defensive positions as the noise of exchanged gunfire seemed to be reaching a new intensity.

  It sounded like the fight was now within the camp itself.

  A row of jagged holes suddenly stitched its way across the thin plywood walls of his hut, sending a shower of wood splinters on to the floor and leaving a line of pale sunbeams lancing through the air.

  Another explosion, deafening this time, amid the mud and bodies right outside the hut, hurled a wet spray of soil inside through the open door.

  The guards were screaming in German. Not the barked orders of professional soldiers, but cries of sheer terror.

  ‘Der Eisenmann! Das ist der Eisenmann!’

  ‘Töten Sie ihn! Töten Sie ihn!’

  Liam heard the appalling sound of a protracted scream, suddenly ending with a fleshy ripping sound. Other cries. Across the compound, faintly, the sound of American voices could be heard.

  ‘Kill the guards! You kill them all!’

  Then the rattle of gunfire and feet splashing the bloodied ground outside. ‘You men! Get those guards… They’re running! Take them down! We’re not taking any of these scum prisoner, understand? Not a single one of them!’

  Liam wanted to climb out from beneath the bunk, but fear kept him cowering in the dark. There were plenty of shots still echoing around the camp, snarling angry voices of men appalled at the carnage in the compound.

  ‘Ahh man… ohh Jesus,’ he heard a man outside crying. ‘They massacred them. Before we could rescue ’em, those scum shot ’em dead… ain’t never… seen… Oh Jeeez.’

  The distant pleading of a German voice… ‘Nein! Nein! Ich… ich habe niemanden erschossen –’… ended with the single crack of a gunshot echoing among the rows of huts. He heard another pleading German voice silenced by a single bullet further away across the compound. And the distant rattle of gunfire as the fight continued somewhere on the far side of the camp.

  ‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’

  A deep and monotone voice without any sense of expression.

  ‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’

  Louder, closer, like a foghorn – without any variation.

  ‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’

  He heard the heavy splatter of boots in mud just outside the door and then the hut was thrown into darkness as a large body stepped into the doorway, blocking out all but the thinnest glimmer of light.

  ‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’ the voice bellowed deafeningly into the hut.

  It was almost too much for him to react. Almost too much. He’d convinced himself that he’d never see that big robotic ape again. The truth took a moment to sink in.

  Bob hovered a second longer then stepped out of the doorway.

  ‘Bob!’ Liam cried out weakly, scrambling on all fours to pull himself out from under the bunk. ‘Bob! Wait! I’m here!’

  A pair of broad shoulders and a small head crowned with a tuft of nut-brown hair leaned back into the hut. ‘Liam O’Connor?’

  Liam looked up. ‘Oh sweet Jay-zus-’n’-Mary-mother-of-mercy! It’s good to see you again, Bob, so it is.’

  The support unit stepped inside and then squatted down on his haunches, studying the frail form of Liam on the floor, his calm grey eyes quickly adapting to the darkness inside.

  Liam could have sworn that in that moment of recognition, as Bob’s computer mind confirmed Liam’s visual identity and verified the signature tone of his voice, he saw a tear in those dull, expressionless grey eyes of his.

  Then, of course, he went and ruined that sentimental moment of reunion by grunting emotionlessly: ‘Target successfully acquired.’

  ‘Good to see you too, Bob,’ replied Liam weakly, choking back his own tears and grinning as best he could.

  CHAPTER 61

  2001, New York

  ‘It really smells bad back here,’ complained Sal. ‘Phew. Smells like something’s gone off.’

  Foster panned his torch around. They’d not been in the back room of the archway since the power had failed them several days ago. His torch flickered across the row of large plastic birthing tubes along the back wall.

  ‘It’s them,’ he said, ‘the embryos inside have died.’

  Sal stepped across the floor towards them. She stared in through the murky plastic at the dark forms inside – the foetus, the baby, the small boy, the teenage boy.

  ‘They’re all dead?’

  Foster nodded. ‘Filtration system stopped running. Their own effluence must have backed up and poisoned the nourishment solution.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘They choked on their own poop,’ said Maddy helpfully as she poured a jerry can of diesel into the generator. ‘Hey, Foster, you sure this is the right kind of fuel I’m pouring into this thing? How do we know it runs on diesel and not, like, gasolene?’

  He stepped over towards her. ‘It’s diesel. Although whether this is the right kind we’ll know soon enough.’

  ‘My grandad used to have a generator in his basement,’ said Maddy, ‘and he was very particular about the kind of fuel you poured into it… two-stroke or whatever. He said you pour the wrong kind of fuel in and it eventually clogs up the carburettor or something. Costs a bunch of money to fix.’

  Foster shook his head. ‘Just as long as this generator keeps working long enough to get us out of this fix, then I’ll be happy. If it clogs it up and we need to replace it, then we’ll worry about that later, OK?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘OK.’

  Foster finished emptying the last can and screwed the cap back on the generator’s tank. ‘Right,’ he said, licking his lips, ‘right then… Fingers crossed.’

  He worked a manual lever on the side of the generator several times, grunting with the effort of pulling it down. With one last look at Maddy, he punched a red button on the front. The generator coughed to life and turned reluctantly over several times before spluttering and dying.

  ‘Well, that didn’t sound too good,’ uttered Maddy.
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  ‘She’s just clearing her throat, that’s all,’ he said with a less than convincing nod. He pumped the lever several times, his breath catching from the effort, before hitting the button once more. The generator thudded to life again, this time with far more enthusiasm. After a few perilous seconds, it found a slow chugging rhythm, then began to pick up the pace. The slow thudding, at first like a giant heartbeat, became a rapid stabbing, then a clattering purr that filled the back room with its deafening volume.

  Foster stepped to the side of the vibrating machine and flipped some circuit breakers on a fuse board. A cobweb-covered light bulb in the ceiling glowed to life, bathing the room with a flickering red light.

  ‘Yeah!’ yelped Maddy. ‘We did it!’

  Foster nodded and grinned, clearly relieved. ‘So now we’ve got power again,’ he barked loudly, struggling to compete with the generator’s noisy chug.

  He turned to Sal, still staring at the dead bodies in the tubes. ‘Hey, Sal, cheer up! We’re well on the way to getting the others back!’

  She turned round to look at him, eyes red-rimmed and wet. ‘But too late for them, though.’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘Although they look human, you must try not to think of them as such. They’re nothing more than meat robots, Sal, nothing more. Come on,’ he said, gesturing towards the sliding metal door leading back into the archway, ‘let’s get the displacement machine charging up.’

  He ushered them out, Sal craning her neck one last time to look at the tubes as they stepped out.

  ‘What will you do with them?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll deal with them, don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘But what will you do with them?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘We’ve got far more important matters to be thinking about right now.’

  He closed the door on the smell and the noisy rattle of the generator and made a mental note to dispose of the clone bodies when Sal was fast asleep. The last thing she needed to see right now was him carrying their bodies out.

  He stepped over towards the machine beside the large perspex cylinder, and flipped a switch. A long row of small red LED lights winked on. The first of them almost immediately flickered and turned from red to green.

  ‘OK, it’s charging,’ he said.

  He joined the girls slumped in chairs around their mess table. ‘We’ve been through a lot. And there’s still a lot more we’re going to have to do. When the machinery is charged up enough, we’ll need to get that message through to Bob. And, of course, we’ll need to decide exactly where and when we’re opening the return window. But for now,’ he said, sighing, ‘right now… I could murder a cup of coffee.’

  The girls, both grimy and tired, looked up at him. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ said Maddy.

  Foster settled back in his chair, suddenly feeling as old as the hills. ‘Come on, then, whose turn is it to brew up?’

  CHAPTER 62

  2001, New York

  ‘The shorter the message we try to send, the less energy we’ll use,’ said Foster. ‘We need to keep it precise and to the point. That way we can spend more of the energy of the tachyon burst on creating a wider spread of particles.’

  Sal pulled a face. ‘I still don’t get it.’

  Foster scratched a chin thick with several days of white and grey bristles. The first thing he planned to do once things had returned to normal was to get a nice clean wet shave.

  The idea of beams of sub-atomic particles that could be fired backwards through time had been a hard concept for him to get his head round back when he’d first been recruited as a TimeRider. In fact, a lot of the concepts, the technology, the gadgets had been alien to him. His young mind had struggled hard to absorb it all. But he’d managed.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s like this. What we’re doing, in effect, is spraying an area of America in the past, fifty years ago, with a shower of tiny particles – these tachyons. Now, if we knew precisely where Bob was standing at a certain time, then we could aim our transmitter right at that point and fire off a message using very little energy, needing to send only a small number of these tachyon particles. However, we don’t know where Bob is right now. We just have a general direction.’

  ‘But why don’t we aim the beam to the location and the point in time that we sent them back to? You know… the White House front lawn, say… thirty seconds after they’d arrived there. They won’t have been able to wander too far in, like, half a minute,’ said Maddy.

  ‘True,’ said Foster, ‘but then they won’t have had time to gather any useful intelligence in just thirty seconds. We’d be right back where we started, none the wiser and with no information to work from.’

  He looked across at the machine beside the perspex tube. The winking row of red lights showed the displacement machinery was still a long way off from being charged up enough to use.

  ‘Look, I’ll be honest. I really don’t know yet whether we’re even going to be able to get one of them back, let alone both of them. The point is – and this is really important – we have to hope they’ve found out enough in the past to be able to tell us exactly when and where this wrong history diverged from our own. Because,’ he said, looking up at both of them with a stern expression, ‘we may only have enough power left to get one shot at sending someone back. One last shot.’

  He sipped from his mug.

  ‘Just one shot to put things right.’

  ‘Right,’ said Maddy quietly.

  ‘So, we know they missed the return window, and the back-up window an hour later… and the last back-up twenty-four hours later. Which means they must have run into trouble. But that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.’

  Sal made a face. ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No. From my many years’ experience as an operative, running into trouble is inevitably how you end up learning things.’ Foster smiled. ‘The more trouble they’ve been in, the more they’ve probably learned about the world in 1956.’

  ‘If they’re still alive, that is,’ added Maddy.

  ‘Liam is a very resourceful young lad. He’s a quick learner. And the support unit with him, well… they’re very tough things. Takes quite a lot of effort to kill one of those. Between them, I’m sure they will have managed a way to lie low, to gather information and await a message from us.’

  ‘So then… what message are we going to send them?’ asked Sal.

  Foster looked at her. ‘We send them a time-stamp: a location and moment in time for them to make their way to.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We can assume they have remained in the area of Washington.’

  ‘You sure?’ cut in Maddy. ‘Can we assume that?’

  ‘Yes, because it makes sense. Bob will assume we’ll pick them up from roughly the same area. So he’ll have kept as close to the White House as is safe to do.’

  ‘We’re doing a lot of guessing here,’ said Maddy, a note of scepticism in her voice.

  ‘Guessing is all we’ve got, I’m afraid.’

  Neither girl looked too happy with that.

  ‘Look, here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We’re going to turn on the computer system, pull up a street map for Washington and try to find some quiet backstreet not too far from the White House… say within a mile or two. That’ll be where we’ll open the return window. We’ll write down the co-ordinates, turn the computers back off since they’re drawing power from the generator and we’ll have what we want.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So the other part of the message is the when. That’s the part of this we’ve got to guess right.’

  ‘How about the day after the twenty-four-hour back-up?’ suggested Sal.

  ‘Could do… but if they failed that, then something must have prevented them getting there. I’d say we need to give them more time.’

  ‘Something prevented them?’

  Foster shrugged. ‘Many things. Bob or Liam might have been wounded, incapacitated somehow… unable t
o move. They might have been arrested. The area might have been sealed off or hazardous.’

  ‘So, how long after that, then?’ asked Sal. ‘Two days? Three days?’

  His lips tightened. ‘As long as we possibly can. We don’t know what their situation is, how much planning or recovering they might need to get to this location.’

  ‘How much time are we talking about?’ asked Maddy. ‘A week?’

  ‘The maximum mission time possible. Six months,’ he replied.

  Maddy pulled off her glasses and absent-mindedly wiped the lenses. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Maximum mission time? You mentioned that once before.’

  ‘Maximum mission time,’ repeated Foster. ‘Twenty-six weeks. Six months. That’s the support unit’s expiry point.’

  ‘Expiry point?’ said Maddy. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘The support unit, Bob, is programmed to destroy himself if he’s not been returned to the present after a period of six months.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sal.

  ‘To prevent him falling into the wrong hands… to prevent him becoming a dangerous weapon.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘His mind is adaptive AI. It’s software that learns. Imagine if Bob fell into the wrong hands. Imagine if Bob’s software began to learn about the world from someone evil, or mad. Imagine if Bob learned about the world from someone utterly insane like the Roman Emperor Caligula. Or was used as a weapon by Napoleon, or Genghis Khan.’

  The girls considered that prospect in silence.

  ‘Worse still,’ Foster continued, ‘since his organic body doesn’t age, and provided he’s able to eat, he could live indefinitely. A strong man, almost impossible to kill, who never ages. Think about it. Something like that could end up – particularly back in a superstitious time – being worshipped as a… well, as a god.’

  ‘Sheesh,’ whispered Maddy, ‘I bet ol’ dumb-nuts would love that.’

  ‘Point is that it’s a particularly bad idea leaving a support unit behind in history. So they’re programmed to self-terminate after six months.’