TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Mission priorities recalculated, huh?’ Liam’s grin widened. ‘What I think you mean is that you chose to rescue… a friend.’

  Bob’s confused frown became a loose approximation of a disapproving scowl. ‘Negative. I do not have friends. I am a biological weapons platform, a field support unit.’

  Liam pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Fine. Sure… if that’s how you –’

  Bob’s eyes fluttered. ‘This location is currently being scanned for density packets.’

  ‘That’s them, isn’t it? Foster? Maddy?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Liam clapped his hands together. ‘Oh yes! Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary, we’re going home!’

  ‘One minute until window opens,’ said Bob. ‘Please stand clear.’

  Liam obediently stepped back, as did Bob. They both waited in the dark for the telltale pale flicker of light.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  Liam grasped Bob’s hand and shook it. ‘We make a good team, don’t we?’

  Bob looked down at the young man’s hand, folded in his giant sausage fingers. For a moment the gesture seemed to be lost on him, then he managed an unattractive smile.

  ‘Good team,’ he replied.

  A pale spark appeared, flickering dimly like a firefly. Then a moment later Liam felt a gentle puff of displaced air against his face, a soft pump of air that sent several damp scraps of newspaper fluttering up the backstreet, and empty tin cans rolling noisily across the ground.

  Some grit in his face – Liam was blinking and rubbing it from his watering eye when Bob’s deep voice rumbled.

  ‘This is not good.’

  Liam rubbed the grit out, wiped the tears off with the back of his hand and gazed down at the window: an undulating sphere of soft, pale-blue light. It was no bigger than a football, bobbing gently a couple of feet above the ground.

  ‘What the –?’

  ‘They have insufficient power,’ said Bob.

  ‘That’s it? They can’t make it any bleedin’ bigger?’

  ‘They have insufficient power,’ said Bob again.

  ‘Oh no,’ cried Liam. ‘Oh Jeez, no, no, no… this can’t be happening!’

  Bob turned to look at him. ‘Liam O’Connor, you must be very quick.’

  ‘Quick? Doing what?’

  Bob pulled a long knife from his belt. ‘Neither you nor I can go back, Liam O’Connor. But the data that they need must go back.’

  Bob pushed the knife into Liam’s shaking hands. ‘You must be very quick,’ he said again, dropping heavily to his knees so that Liam could reach his head.

  ‘I… I can’t,’ said Liam, the blade trembling erratically in his hands. ‘Bob… I can’t do this!’

  ‘I will not feel pain. Insert the blade between the top of my neck and the base of my skull, that is where the cranium casing is weakest, then press very hard –’

  Liam nodded. He stepped round behind Bob, and raised the blade until it was pointing towards the dark mop of hair at the back of his head.

  ‘You must do it now,’ insisted Bob.

  ‘I… I…’ Liam could feel his whole body shaking. His stomach tightening, lurching, getting ready to eject the last meal he’d eaten.

  ‘You must do it NOW.’

  The small blue shimmering light hovering above the ground began to flicker and modulate uncontrollably. In the middle of the sphere, Liam thought he could just about make out the flickering, undulating form of someone… no, three people… waiting, beckoning for him, for someone, something… anything… to step through.

  Then it was gone.

  And once again the backstreet was dark and quiet, save for the soft pattering of sleet around them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ mumbled Liam. ‘I’m sorry, Bob. I just couldn’t do it.’

  CHAPTER 70

  2001, New York

  Maddy and Sal stared at the space in the archway where a moment ago the very air had been thrumming vibrantly, a pocket of space that shimmered like the heat veil above a barbecue or the hot tarmac of a sun-baked highway.

  Foster had deactivated the time-displacement machine.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He leaned wearily against the computer desk, tired and finally looking like someone with no more answers left to give. ‘I thought we had enough of a charge to get Liam through. I was wrong.’

  Sal looked up from where the small ball of hot air had shimmered three feet above the ground. It had bobbed and undulated for less than a minute, and she was almost certain that through the flickering haze she’d seen Liam’s and Bob’s faces staring back at her.

  ‘So, that’s it?’ she said quietly.

  Foster nodded.

  ‘Hang on! We’ve still got some charge left,’ said Maddy, pointing at the row of little green lights on the machine. There were three green LEDs and an orange one; the rest were now red.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘So… why couldn’t you have used that power to widen the window?’ she asked, a sharp edge of desperation creeping into her voice.

  He took a deep breath. ‘It was as wide as I could make it. There just wasn’t enough to work with. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Couldn’t we have…’ Maddy was looking for possibilities. ‘Couldn’t we have kept the window open longer? Maybe we could have communicated with them somehow?’

  ‘We were just wasting energy, Madelaine. Just wasting it. It was obvious they couldn’t come through.’

  ‘So you closed it off?’

  He nodded. ‘At least we still have some charge left.’

  She shook her head, a shrill, desperate laugh escaped her lips. ‘For what, Foster? For what?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Maybe…’ cut in Sal, ‘maybe there’s enough diesel left in the generator to –’

  Maddy snorted. ‘To what? Charge it up again so we can open up another midget-sized window?’

  The muted chugging from the back room filled the long silence between them.

  Foster finally nodded towards the small line of lights on the machine. ‘We have a little stored power left. I suggest we should be thinking how best to save ourselves now that…’

  ‘Now that it’s too late to save history?’ said Maddy.

  Foster’s smile was pinched and weak. ‘Yes. What power’s left will provide us with light for a while at least.’

  ‘And coffee,’ said Sal.

  He laughed softly. ‘And coffee… until it runs out.’

  Maddy looked up at the ceiling light. ‘And then eventually that will flicker out.’ She looked at the other two. ‘And then we’ll be like those things out there… in the city, foraging in the dark for scraps.’

  She immediately wished she hadn’t said that. They all realized they’d run out of options. It hadn’t needed spelling out quite so bluntly.

  Sal slumped down on one of the armchairs around the breakfast table. ‘I guess that’s it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ replied Foster. ‘It does seem like that’s it.’

  CHAPTER 71

  1957, Washington DC

  That’s it, then. We’re finished.

  Liam looked at the dark hulking silhouette of the support unit, standing in the alley beside him. Still, calm, as always – free of doubt and despair.

  The sleet had turned to rain and pattered softly around them and the darkness flickered every now and then with passing light as searchlights from above panned routinely across the rooftops, across the top of their little backstreet.

  ‘You must assign new mission parameters,’ Bob’s voice rumbled.

  New mission parameters?

  Liam could have laughed cruelly at that. There was nothing they could achieve now, not in the time they had left. In just under two days’ time, a tiny explosive charge inside Bob’s head would leave him little more than a comatose giant, a mindless, dribbling vegetable. Liam figured he might be able to keep Bob’s body alive, feeding it like a big baby, keeping it going with protein and water. But to what end? Bob
would be gone… unable to protect him any more.

  ‘I don’t know what to suggest, Bob,’ whispered Liam. ‘Do you?’

  Bob was silent for a few moments. ‘Negative.’

  Go back and rejoin the freedom fighters?

  Liam’s smile was thin. He wondered what they’d make of their superman – Captain Bob – slumped against a tree trunk, drooling long strings of saliva and staring lifelessly at their crackling campfire. Hardly the stuff of legends.

  He’d listened in on those men talking about Bob in hushed reverential tones, huddled in one of the tents. It was almost a form of worship. One of them told an exaggerated account to some newcomers of the raid in which Liam had been rescued, claiming he’d seen a shimmering ‘godly’ halo around Bob as he strode unharmed through the prison camp, protecting him from the guards’ bullets… and angels in the clouds looking protectively down on him.

  Liam wondered if that’s how all the legendary figures in history began, as tales told round a campfire, then retold and retold through successive generations, grandfather to father, father to son, each time the tale growing more exaggerated.

  An odd thought occurred to him. He wondered if the ancient Greek hero, Achilles, had merely been a support unit like Bob, caught up somehow in the Siege of Troy, his presence unintentionally becoming a part of history. Or how about the super-strong Samson from the Bible? Or Attila the Hun? King Leonidas of the Spartans? He wondered if any of those implausibly heroic characters from history were the unintended side-effect of a mission like theirs… some other agency team going about their work, leaving unavoidable footprints in time.

  Footprints in time.

  ‘You must assign new mission parameters.’

  Footprints in time.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he whispered. ‘Footprints.’

  Bob remained silent.

  ‘Footprints,’ he whispered again. ‘Bob?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘I think there’s a way we can communicate with the field office.’

  ‘Negative. Tachyon transmissions can only –’

  ‘Shhh!’ hissed Liam. ‘Listen to me. How long will it take us to get to New York?’

  CHAPTER 72

  2001, New York

  Maddy realized she’d nodded off. The steady muted chug of the generator in the back room had lulled her into a fitful sleep.

  She’d been dreaming.

  Dreaming of the day she’d been snatched from a doomed airliner, waking up on this same cot and opening her eyes to see Liam slouched on the bed across from hers. That daft, lopsided grin on his face.

  She realized how much she missed Liam. Even Bob. If she added up the looped Mondays and Tuesdays they’d all been here in this archway together – before things had gone wrong, that is – it came to several weeks’ worth of days. That’s all. But it seemed like she’d known them both so much longer.

  She missed them.

  Another memory floated into her half-conscious mind. Foster taking them down to the Museum of Natural History. She’d been there before on school trips. But this last time had been different. This time not a bored schoolkid gazing at dusty old exhibits behind glass panels, but seeing these things as precious heirlooms of the past, mark-points of a history crying out to her to protect it, to preserve it… to keep it unchanged…

  She remembered…

  Maddy jerked herself out of her drowsy wool-gathering.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she whispered.

  The generator was still chugging away in the background. She climbed off her bunk and looked around the archway. Sal was sitting at the long desk listlessly staring at the turned-off monitors.

  ‘Where’s Foster?’

  Sal gestured towards the sliding corrugated door leading to the back room. ‘In the back fiddling with the generator, I think.’

  Maddy paced across the floor, slid the door to one side and stepped into the smelly darkness. ‘Foster!’

  Torchlight flickered towards her, and over the noisy chug of the generator she heard him make his way over. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Foster, I think… I think there’s a way Liam can communicate with us.’

  ‘Sorry. What’s that you say?’ he replied, cupping his ear. ‘It’s noisy,’ he barked, ‘let’s step out.’

  They emerged from the back room and he slid the door shut. The noisy percussive rattle of the sickly-sounding generator was once more a background thud.

  ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘Liam… I think there’s a way Liam could try to contact us.’

  Foster shook his head. ‘You know Bob can’t return a tachyon beam transmiss–’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ she cut in impatiently. ‘Listen… the museum. The Museum of Natural History…’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘When you took us there, Liam and I were looking at the visitors’ guest book. We were having a laugh at some of the comments.’

  Foster shrugged. ‘And?’

  ‘Anyway… the museum has kept a guest book in the entrance foyer since the museum first opened. They have an archive of them that they kept in the basement. They’ve kept that archive since, like, the 1800s, I think.’

  Foster’s eyes suddenly widened. ‘Yes!’

  ‘If we go there –?’

  The old man nodded. ‘They might still be down there!’ The hope on his face made him seem much younger. But only for a fleeting moment. Almost as quickly as it arrived, the hope faded away.

  ‘But Liam doesn’t know all this.’

  Maddy grinned. ‘But he does! The security guard there told me. Liam was standing right beside me at the time. He was telling us both! And if I remembered…?’

  Foster’s lined face rumpled with a wide lopsided grin. ‘Then Liam would too.’

  ‘That’s what I figured.’

  Foster nodded. ‘Yes… yes, he would. He’s a smart lad.’

  ‘So,’ she continued, ‘if he made his way to New York and visited the museum in 1957, it’s possible he could have left a message for us in there.’

  Foster nodded. ‘And that message could give an exact time and location for us to open a return window for them.’

  ‘Closer to home? Maybe in New York? Would we have enough of a charge left to do that?’

  Foster glanced at the blinking LEDs. Another red light had turned back to green. ‘Generator isn’t going to last much longer, by the sounds it’s making. The fuel tank’s virtually on empty. We need it to get the charge meter up to ten green lights, at a guess.’

  ‘But if it can?’

  Foster chewed his lip, deep in thought for a moment. ‘If we open a window close enough to home… and even then, only for a few seconds. We’d need an exact time… I mean exact.’ His eyes met hers. ‘Then… yes, we could make a window big enough for Liam. Possibly even for Bob.’

  ‘Then –’ she chewed a fingernail nervously – ‘then we have to go see, don’t we? We have to go check out the museum?’

  Foster took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think we have any other choice.’

  Maddy felt her arms and legs trembling. Oh God. Why did I have to open my mouth and suggest this? The thought of stepping outside again terrified her. But the prospect of being stuck in this nightmare forever scared her infinitely more.

  Foster turned to Sal. ‘Maybe you should stay here, Sal. Madelaine and I won’t be gone long. We –’

  She shook her head. ‘No… I’m coming with you.’ She stood up, sucked in a deep breath, steadying her own nerves. ‘We’re a team, right? The three of us… TimeRiders.’

  Foster’s grin was infectious – both girls suddenly found themselves sharing it. ‘The best, Sal,’ said Foster. ‘The very best.’

  Sal shoved the office chair beneath the desk and zipped up her hoodie. ‘Then what the jahulla are we waiting for?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Atta girl.’

  ‘What the jahulla are we waiting for, indeed,’ replied Foster. ‘I’ll get the shotgun.’

  CHA
PTER 73

  1957, New York

  Liam gazed out of the window at the streets of New York, crowded with brown and grey stone skyscrapers so tall he had to scrunch down in his seat to look up to catch the very tops of them.

  Some buildings he remembered seeing before when Foster had taken them through Manhattan: the Empire State Building – Foster said a movie called King Kong was made that featured the building and an eighty-foot gorilla swinging from the top of it. Liam suspected the old man was joking with him. The idea sounded too daft to be made into a real movie.

  He noticed Kramer’s influence was already stamped across the streets of the city. Large billboards seemed to hang on every street with the man’s face smiling benignly down upon them. Messages such as ‘We are here to unite the world in peace’, ‘Unity is Progress’, ‘I promise you a thousand years without war’ were stamped beneath him.

  Liam could see troops on the street, checkpoints at some of the busier intersections, soldiers stopping pedestrians and inspecting identification papers. Above the tall buildings either side of them, hoverjets patrolled the sky. And hanging motionless above the Hudson River he could see another one of those colossal grey command saucers – a clear reminder to everyone that the war was over, Kramer’s forces had won and that continued resistance was… well, futile.

  The uniform Liam was wearing was uncomfortable – the stiff collar made his neck itch. Bob wore a similar uniform – SS. Black with silver buttons and epaulettes, an eagle on the left breast pocket and a red armband on the left arm featuring the looped serpent.

  Bob had managed to stop a German army automobile, a VW Kübelwagen, earlier this morning as it cruised down a quiet suburban road in Queens. The officers were both easily dispensed with by a quick edge-of-the-hand chop to the neck. The attack – Bob’s suggestion – had been a calculated risk. Some civilians on the road had witnessed it, but hurried along on their way rather than remain at the scene and risk being questioned. Somebody might call it in. It was possible. Either way, the bodies were going to be found sooner or later.

  Liam craned his neck to look up at the patrolling Messerschmitt hoverjets and wondered if the alarm had yet been raised to be on the lookout for the stolen vehicle.