by Alex Scarrow
Job done. But now he and his cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.
‘So, when exactly is this place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it. Yes? Am I right?’
‘This is the day the towers were knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.
‘September the eleventh, 2001,’ Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve been operating out of for the last few months.’
The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.
› Stand by. Field resetting.
They heard the soft whine of energy discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind at the moment.
‘And now… it’s yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us twenty-four hours’ breathing space before those psychotic killer meatbots come back to finish us off.’
Rashim’s dark eyebrows rose, looking from Maddy to the others, for someone to add a word or two more of explanation. ‘Psychotic…?’
‘There’re more of them?’ asked Liam.
‘Two more, we think,’ said Sal. ‘Six of them came through.’
‘What killer things are these?’ asked Rashim.
‘Six! Jay-zus!’ Liam’s jaw dropped. ‘And you two managed to kill four of ’em?’
‘Could someone please tell me what psycho killer things you’re talking about?’
‘Yes. We did pretty good, huh?’
Liam laughed. ‘I’ll say — ’
Rashim closed his eyes. ‘PLEASE, EVERYONE, WILL YOU STOP IGNORING ME!’
The others turned to look at him.
‘I… I’m…’ Rashim opened his eyes and smiled half apologetically. ‘I… I’m very close to… uh, losing my mind. Please — the least one of you people can do is answer just one of my questions.’
Sal pointed at Bob. ‘The psychotic meatbots we’re talking about are clones, support units like these two. Four men and two women. They came from the future to kill us.’
Rashim nodded gratefully, then silently appraised Bob. ‘He’s a military-grade gene product, isn’t he? One of the earlier-gen versions?’
‘Correct,’ Bob rumbled.
‘Computer-Bob dealt with two of them for us,’ said Maddy. ‘And one got taken out by a time wave, I think. The other one… well, you guys saw what happened.’
One of the units had managed to leap after Maddy and Sal as their hastily opened escape portal began to collapse in on itself. It had emerged on the other side missing both its feet and one hand and yet it had still managed to be quite lethal. As Bob held it down, Maddy had put several rounds into its bald human head. The first and last time she ever intended to fire a gun at anything point blank.
‘You said six of them?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yup, there are two more of them and they may be out there in New York somewhere.’
Sal sat down on the other chair beside Maddy. She scuffed the toes of her boots against the floor. ‘More of them could arrive,’ she said. ‘Right, Maddy? Another six?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Tuesday morning, sometime during Tuesday morning, that’s when they arrived. So right now it’s twelve noon, Monday. Which means we’ve got eighteen, maybe nineteen hours before they come again. And if another batch — technically, I guess, the same batch — don’t come then we’ve still got those other two to worry about. And they’ll be back from wherever computer-Bob sent them on a wild-goose chase. That’s right, Bob, isn’t it?’
› Affirmative.
‘Affirmative.’
Both Bobs answered the question.
Maddy turned to look at them all. ‘Two of them we might stand a chance against. But if another six turn up right here in this archway…?’ She pulled on her lip, made a face. Not the sort of face to instil confidence in her little team.
‘We could set some sort of a trap for them,’ said Liam. ‘As soon as they arrive, get Bob to open a portal and drop them right into that chaos space. Could we not do that?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘We could do. But, Liam, you’re missing the point. And it’s actually quite a big point.’
Liam splayed his hands. Irritated by her patronizing tone of voice. ‘What?’
‘Someone else knows about us, Liam. Someone knows exactly when and where we are. We’re not a secret any more.’
‘That means we’re still in danger?’ added Sal quietly.
‘If we stay here, yes.’ Maddy’s words rang round the archway, a reverberation off damp brick walls that seemed to last indefinitely and not quite fade away.
Liam muttered a curse under his breath. ‘That’s great. I was just about gettin’ used to this place, so I was.’
‘I’m thinking the sooner we leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it had become their home. It had become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes, between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there had been moments of… dare she say… fun.
Fun. Some good memories. Among all the scary ones, that is.
Liam sighed. ‘Ah well…’ was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’
‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal without a great deal of conviction.
The squat lab robot flexed its pliable plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it very much.’
‘Yeah, but it’s home,’ said Maddy. ‘Or it was anyway.’
She looked around the pitted and cracked floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing — where so many terrifying and unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled from the ceiling — from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side of the archway’s floor to the other — there had once lain a carpet of dead and dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls flanked the shutter door — the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.
And, planted on the very desk she was sitting at now, the severed head of a young woman had rested recently. Grey eyes, beautiful grey eyes, glazed over and lifeless, the cranium hacked open to reveal a bloody pulp, and a small, invaluable microchip inside.
Ahhh, memories. Precious memories, Maddy noted unenthusiastically.
‘You’re right, Sal, it’s just a bunch of bricks. The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.’
Chapter 3
10 September 2001, New York
Maddy took the subway across to Manhattan and emerged at 57th Street into the warmth of the sun. Middle of the day, that’s when the old man could be found in Central Park. That was Foster’s pact with her, his tacit promise when he’d walked out on the team after their first mission.
You’ll always find me here at the same time. Feeding the pigeons.
She’d made this trip nearly a dozen times now over the last six months. Six months’ worth of their ‘bubble time’ — Monday and Tuesday, the 10th and 11th, looped over and over again. Every time she sat down with him on that bench by the duck pond, beside the hot-dog cart, it was — for Foster — like their very first meeting after he’d bid farewell and left her in charge of the team. The world outside the archway’s protective field was linear, a s
equence of moments experienced by everyone in sensible chronological order.
But, for Maddy and the others, it was time that occurred inside the archway that appeared to be linear, while everything outside was a weird and endless forty-eight-hour Groundhog Day.
She’d asked the old man once why it was that she never bumped into copies of herself. His answer had been both straightforward and oddly cryptic.
‘You’re not of this timeline, Maddy. None of you are. You might as well be aliens visiting from another planet as far as earthly cause and effect is concerned.’
Reassuring perhaps, but she’d still ended up none the wiser.
As always, she caught sight of him sitting on the bench, sitting back and savouring the sun on his wrinkled face, in that dark blue cardigan of his, jeans too big for his narrow frame and that scuffed old Yankees baseball cap clasped in his liver-spotted hands. She stopped for a moment, watching him through the hot-dog queue, watching him through the clouds of billowing steam coming from the cart’s griddle.
A quiff of silver-white hair fluttering on his head: untidy, unruly hair. The likeness was so obvious now Maddy knew, now they all knew. She wondered how none of them had ever noticed, or remarked, how much alike Foster and Liam looked. Yes, age completely alters a person’s appearance, but there are those things that survive the years intact: the shape and set of a person’s eyes, the habitual expression on one’s face, the lazy way you sit when you think no one’s looking — things that are as unique as a fingerprint.
Liam and Foster, the very same person, and she hadn’t seen it until he’d told her.
Foster had given her no explanation for that. None at all. She had her theories. Perhaps one of them didn’t belong in this timeline; perhaps one of them had stepped across chaos space from another similar world and now there were accidentally two of them. She wondered if somewhere, beyond dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, there was an old-woman version of herself.
She decided probably not. She suspected in any dimension she was the same kind of person, destined to get stressed-out on all and everything and die young. Probably of high blood pressure or a heart attack.
Nice thought.
She emerged round the end of the queue and Foster’s eyes were drawn away from the pigeons chasing each other for breadcrumbs at his feet.
His eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘Ahhh!’ He smiled. ‘You found me!’
She raised a hand to hush him politely. ‘I always do.’
Foster laughed. ‘I gather from that we’ve met before?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Quite a few times now.’ She looked around at the park, the duck pond, the hot-dog vendor. ‘This is like Happy Days. Like a TV show I’ve seen way too many times.’
‘Talking to me must be like talking to someone with — ’
‘Alzheimer’s?’
Foster grinned. ‘I’ve said that before, haven’t I?’
‘Only every time we meet up. Listen, Foster.’ She sat down beside him. ‘This time’s going to be different, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘We have to leave New York.’
‘Leave? Why?’
Maddy explained as succinctly as possible: the handwritten message addressed to her about Pandora from some mysterious informant; sending through a message to the agency in the future and asking what the hell ‘Pandora’ was all about. And then, in short order, a squad of support units arriving right in their archway hell-bent on killing them all.
‘I don’t know what’s going on, Foster. Maybe our ability to contact the agency, to contact Waldstein, has been compromised somehow. Intercepted by someone else?’
She didn’t bother telling Foster that the last time they’d met here she’d told him about the Pandora message and it had been his suggestion that she ‘communicate forward’ and ask if Waldstein knew anything about it. Maddy hadn’t come here to blame him for that. Neither of them were to know asking about Pandora was going to lead to this.
‘Point is, someone now knows where we are, Foster, and we could be jumped at any time by more of those things. We have to leave. Like… as soon as possible!’
Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know, Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the agency… it’s just — ’
‘Just us.’ She shrugged. ‘I know.’
‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’
‘Yup.’
‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you, hearing me — ’
‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again, and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’
‘Right.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s probably very sensible.’
‘And I want you to come with us.’
Foster shook his head. ‘I can’t go back. You know I can’t enter a displacement field again.’
‘I know.’ She reached for one of his frail hands and squeezed it gently. ‘I know. We’re just relocating for now. No time travel, no fields, no tachyon particles. No more damage to you. We’re just taking a drive away from New York. That’s it.’
She realized just how fragile he looked now. When he’d first recruited them, yes, she’d noted he was old, but he’d looked robust-old. Like some seasoned old army veteran, hard as nails beneath a weathered exterior.
‘Maddy… I don’t think there’s much left of me.’ His smile broke her heart. ‘I’m dying. I have cancer. All over.’
She knew that; it was something else he’d already confessed on a previous visit.
‘Foster… I wish I could leave you here.’ Maddy looked around at the park, the sun streaming through September leaves, turning golden and beginning to fall. Beautiful. He’d told her he thought he might have just a few weeks left maybe; if he was really lucky, a couple of months. The rate of cellular damage caused by time travel wasn’t really quantifiable. It happened, that’s all they knew.
‘I know you’ve earned this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve given the agency your life… and you deserve to choose how to spend the time you’ve got left. But we need you.’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘ I need you.’
‘You know as much as I did… do, Maddy.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things stitched in history…’ She shook her head. Not quite the right expression. ‘Things pre-baked into history. Messages… written for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t…’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready when you walked out on us.’
‘And I wasn’t ready for this when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for this job.’
She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam or Foster.’
He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying man’s defiant snort.
‘Does Liam know now? About me?’
Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’
‘But maybe he’s not so happy that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’
‘I think he’s accepted that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life, right?’
‘Aye.’
They sat in silence for a while, watching a young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.
‘
Please, Foster,’ Maddy said again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’
His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers zigzagging up the path and away from them.
‘Don’t make me get on my knees,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll come.’
Chapter 4
10 September 2001, New York
‘She’s… what do you reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.
‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them. The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.
‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’
Liam wasn’t sure about this. Maddy’s instructions — birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.
The other foetuses in stasis, on the other hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon; it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking things floating in the other tubes.
Liam looked again at what would become Becks soon. ‘The body’s just that of a child. She’ll be younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’
