TimeRiders: The Infinity Cage (book 9)

by Alex Scarrow

  Why the hell do I keep doing that? Reading her old entries? Every time I do, it makes me feel so low. Then, of course, if Maddy or Rashim look over at me and ask what’s up … I do that thing I always do: grin like a fool and throw it away as nothing, or I just say I read or thought of something funny.

  Truth is I’m the one who’s having to keep us all going. Maddy is damaged goods. And Rashim? Well, I suppose, to be fair, he does his share of hand-holding. But this trip was my idea. This extended sightseeing jolly to experience some of the British Empire, Africa, the Far East; eighteen months of remarkable sights and sounds and smells. We’ve seen so much, so many amazing things and not once needed to step into that awful chaotic white mist to do it.

  Liam’s eyes drifted from the smudged words he’d just written to the fountain pen in his hand. Not for the first time, he wondered if they would ever need to, or should, do that again. There was enough in this world that was racing towards the twentieth century. So much to explore. And this trip had been a useful distraction for them all. Particularly for Maddy. It had taken her mind off dwelling morosely on the loss of Sal. On losing Adam. More than that, it had been a much-needed distraction from endlessly pondering the purpose of that artefact they’d discovered in the Nicaraguan jungle. They’d glimpsed a scheme they couldn’t possibly begin to understand: some impossibly large design by beings who could just as easily be angels or aliens as people from the far future. Perhaps even God Himself.

  It was enough to drive a mind to the very edge of insanity.

  Liam looked up from the diary. Their ship was waiting for its turn to berth somewhere along the Albert Docks in Liverpool. Thick funnels were tossing snow-white plumes of steam up into a promising blue sky, and the wharves were alive with cranes and teams of stevedores noisily barking orders at each other. On the deck beside him the railing was lined with their fellow passengers, excited at the sight of the busy port before them.

  Why can’t we just be like them?

  But he, Maddy and Rashim weren’t like them. They were separated from normal people – and always would be – by the simple fact that they knew what others didn’t. A curse, or a gift, they knew that time was a stream that could be swum up or down. They knew reality was as malleable as clay, as impermanent and insubstantial as a wisp of smoke … Nothing, nothing, was forever … or even safe.

  I suppose the question is this: what’s best? To be ignorant – or to know?

  CHAPTER 2

  1890, London

  Rashim turned the brass key in the padlock. Its unlocking clack reverberated around the dark interior beneath Holborn Viaduct. He unlooped the padlock from the latch and briefly inspected it by the light of his oil lamp. He turned and showed the others some scuff marks on the locking bar.

  ‘Looks like Delbert has had a go at fiddling with this while we have been away.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said Maddy.

  She stared into the darkness beyond the partially opened small oak door. Eighteen months of daylight and sunshine they’d experienced. Eighteen months and travelled so far. Seen blue skies rimmed with snow-capped mountain peaks, the stepped terraces of paddy-fields, the lush sloping carpet of tea plantations. Endless days savouring the warmth of the sun on her face and listening to and smelling the world about her. The aroma of spices and ripe meat of a hundred different marketplaces. The clamour and chorus of teamed manual labour; the crank and grind of coal-powered machinery; the hoot of steamships coming in and setting sail; the energetic symphony of a bustling, busy colonial empire feeding voraciously hungry mouths thousands of miles away.

  Liam had been right. She’d soon realized that on their travels. It was the tonic she’d desperately needed: to witness this vibrant world, alive and industrious, mobilizing itself for the looming twentieth century. For once to just be a tourist, someone passing through without a care. Miss Madelaine Carter – an apparently well-to-do young American woman – with her curious coterie of travelling companions.

  And now, after visiting a part of the Raj that would one day become Mumbai, after taking a train journey across the Kashmiri mountains and a paddle steamer down the River Nile, they had finally returned home to London.

  ‘Back to living like a bunch of weird mole people again.’ She sighed solemnly.

  ‘Aye, well … it’s not like we have to hide away in here all the time.’

  ‘And maybe it’s time you got a haircut, Liam?’

  He shook his head stubbornly. His dark hair had grown down to his shoulders and was now tied back into a ponytail that swung and batted his ears. ‘I’m getting rather used to it.’

  ‘You look like a hipster.’ She folded her arms. ‘That’s not a good thing, by the way.’

  ‘And what about the beard?’ he asked, stroking his chin. Eighteen months of not shaving and he’d just about managed to grow a half-convincing goatee.

  ‘With that grey bit at the side of your head, and that face fungus … it really ages you. Do you actually want to look old?’

  He looked at Rashim. ‘Does it?’

  Rashim frowned, hesitating with his hand on their small arched doorway. ‘I would say it is a distinguished look, Liam. But then it looks good on me too. I suppose I’m biased.’

  He pushed the door inwards. It creaked loudly and echoed into the dark space beyond. He ducked through, and Maddy followed him in, with Liam right behind her. The two support units squeezed through after them, Bob laden down with travel valises and Becks pushing a heavy leather trunk on castor wheels.

  Maddy stepped cautiously across the stone floor towards the computers, wary not to trip over the cables she knew were snaking from one side to the other. She noticed the dungeon was completely dark.

  ‘It’s all off in here. Everything’s been turned off!’

  Rashim held out his oil lamp in front of him. He weaved between the armchairs and leaned over the table to try the lamp. He flicked the switch on and off a couple of times. ‘That circuit breaker I installed must have tripped while we were away.’

  ‘Is that good news or bad news?’ asked Liam.

  ‘Good news,’ replied Rashim. ‘If there’d been a power surge, then without the breaker there would have been damage to the circuit boards in the computers and the displacement machine.’ He headed over towards the rear wall of their archway, where a nest of thick insulated cables spilled out from a jagged hole. He squatted down and examined a fuse board. ‘Yes. That is exactly what happened.’

  He flipped a breaker switch and the electric bulb imprisoned in its wire cage above the table glowed softly amber, while standby lights beneath the row of computer monitors blinked a muted neon blue.

  ‘I’ll start up the computers,’ said Maddy. She hefted her heavy skirts up, knelt down and crawled under the table, flicking on each computer one after the other. The faint, deep hum of the Holborn Viaduct generator, coming through several brick walls, was now accompanied by the soft chorus of a dozen hard drives clicking and heat fans whirring.

  ‘SpongeBubba’s … uh …’ Liam nudged the lab robot several times. Normally a light knock was enough to trigger the robot’s inertia sensors. ‘I think he’s dead, Rashim, or broken or something.’

  Rashim came over and gave SpongeBubba’s squat frame a gentle kick. ‘Hmmm … he is just completely powered down. I suspect the circuit breaker must have flipped several weeks ago. His internal standby battery can last up to two hundred hours if he turns off all but his essential functions.’ He rapped his knuckles on the unit’s yellow casing.

  ‘Awww.’ Liam patted the top of the unit. ‘Poor little fella.’

  ‘He will be all right. He just needs to charge for a few hours.’ Rashim checked round the back of the robot. ‘Ahh, do you see? He is plugged in. He must have been in the process of recharging himself when the breaker tripped. Give him twelve hours to get his AI and language rebooted and his motorized circuits charged up and, once again, he will be annoying all of us as usual.’

  Across on
the far side of their brick dungeon, the monitors flickered to life one after the other, each now displaying diagnostic boxes running software-module checks as computer-Bob’s AI awoke from his enforced slumber.

  ‘Would you like me to put the kettle on and make some coffee, Maddy?’ asked Becks.

  Maddy turned round and cocked a brow at her. ‘Tell me, why is it that out of the pair of you it’s the female meatbot that thinks to ask that?’

  Both support units looked at each other for a moment.

  ‘Would you prefer me to make this hot beverage instead, Maddy?’ asked Bob.

  Twenty minutes later, Maddy, Rashim and Liam were sitting round the table, reminiscing about all the things they’d seen over the previous year and a half. In particular, Rashim had been astounded by the sight of tens of thousands of springboks moving together like a school of fish across an African savannah, cunningly herded by a pride of lions towards a bottleneck.

  ‘Attention,’ said Bob. He nodded at one of the computer monitors. On the screen, a dialogue box had been silently flashing. The cursor was blinking red. ‘Attention: computer-Bob has an important message.’

  All of them turned to look at the monitors. Text was now flashing on every screen. Computer-Bob’s equivalent of shouting for attention. Maddy jumped up and hurried over. She quickly squinted at the text before her breath caught in her throat.

  ‘What is it, Mads?’ asked Liam. ‘Mads?’

  She let it out with a slow whooshing noise. ‘What the …?!’

  Liam was up out of his chair now. ‘Mads? What is it?’

  She turned to look at him, then at Rashim. ‘OhMyGod, it’s … it’s a message.’ Her mouth hung open. ‘A message for us!’

  ‘A message? From who?’

  They both joined her at the computer bench and stared at the array of monitors. On each screen was the same dialogue box, text laid out in bold and red.

  > Broad-sweep tachyon signal. Decoded signal reads: ‘All past sins forgiven. Come and seek me out. Your work is done.’

  CHAPTER 3

  1890, London

  > My calculations indicate the message comes from the first three months of the year 2070.

  ‘Can you identify the location it came from?’

  > Negative. It is a broad-sweep signal, which makes it impossible to calculate a precise origin point.

  ‘It’s a message from Waldstein …’ Maddy looked at Liam and Rashim. ‘Right? I mean, that much is obvious!’

  Liam sucked air between his teeth like a dodgy building contractor considering bumping up a quote. ‘I dunno …’

  ‘I dunno? Great,’ she said, sighing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means, I dunno … maybe it’s a trick, Mads?’

  ‘A trick?’

  ‘A trap,’ he clarified. ‘If that is Waldstein, then maybe he’s trying to lure us into an ambush? But, hold on … maybe it’s not even him. It could be someone else trying to flush us out into the open?’

  Rashim nodded. ‘Liam is right. If it is not Waldstein, then it might be a third party that is aware of your agency. If it really is Waldstein … then it is clear he has only a vague idea of where we are.’

  ‘The broad-beam signal?’

  He nodded. ‘If he knew exactly where we were, well … he would be here talking to us face to face. I suspect he knows he cannot find you, certainly not if you continue to choose not to correct any further time waves.’ Rashim stared at Maddy pointedly. ‘And that was the message you quite clearly communicated to him, wasn’t it?’

  The impulsive ultimatum Maddy had communicated forward to Waldstein so many, many months ago … that unflinching demand that Waldstein had better start explaining what the hell ‘Pandora’ meant, otherwise they were not going to correct any more time contaminations – the message that had caused them to run for their lives. How often had she quietly regretted shooting her mouth off like that?

  Rashim shot a quick glance at Becks. ‘Since no other clones have followed us here to Victorian London, it is fair to assume he has no idea where we are. At the very least, this message indicates we are actually perfectly safe here. That he can’t find us.’

  Maddy nodded thoughtfully. ‘So … he’s got no alternative but to appeal to us to make ourselves known. To step out into the open. To come to him.’ She pressed her lips together and frowned. ‘It could be a trap … or maybe …’

  ‘What?’

  Maddy considered that for a moment. If it wasn’t a trap, what was it? She settled back in the wooden chair in front of the computer table, fingers absently stroking the soft flesh beneath the corner of her jaw.

  Bob came over with a tray of steaming mugs. He set down one of the mugs heavily on the table in front of her. ‘Coffee,’ he grunted.

  ‘Rashim’s right. We haven’t been visited by mad killer meatbots,’ said Liam, ‘so Waldstein doesn’t know we’re sitting pretty.’ He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘We did it, Maddy … we escaped him. We’re out of sight.’

  ‘But now comes this message,’ said Rashim. ‘If this is him, is his only option to try to lure us out?’

  ‘And kill us,’ added Liam.

  Maddy shook her head slowly. ‘Or maybe he wants to explain himself.’ She turned to Liam. ‘This feels … I don’t know, it feels kind of genuine. Maybe he’s ready to talk with us? Make peace with us?’

  ‘What?!’ Liam looked at the monitor in front of them. ‘That’s –’ he raised his finger and counted up the words on the screen – ‘that’s thirteen words, Maddy. You get that – you get “genuine” – from just thirteen flippin’ words?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ She turned in her seat and stared at the monitor in front of her. ‘You know what I think? I think all we’re ever going to have is a bunch of theories, suspicions … speculations. We’re never going to find out anything sitting here. We’re never going to know why we were given the job of steering history towards disaster. We’re never going to find out what that large transmitter in the jungle was all about – right there in the middle of that ancient Mayan temple … unless we go find Waldstein and talk to him face to face.’

  ‘You’ve got to be flippin’ joking, Mads!’

  ‘No. I’m quite serious.’

  ‘He already tried to kill us once! You want to give him another go?’

  ‘Look … all right. I’ve been thinking about that. My message was … OK, it was an ultimatum. It was a challenge. All right, it was pretty –’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘Combative … I think what I did was make us sound like we were turning on him. So maybe he had no choice? Maybe he just panicked?’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust that insane old bugger …’ Liam shook his head. ‘You want answers? Well, Jay-zus, we all of us want answers, Mads, but this is stupid. You go to him … even if he doesn’t have us all killed as soon as we arrive … tell me, are you actually going to be able to trust a single thing he says?’

  She looked down at her lap and sighed. ‘Liam, I suppose I’m tired of guessing. I’m tired of half knowing things, speculating on Waldstein’s motives. I’m tired of worrying that someone’s out there looking for us, that there might be another batch of support units roaming around. And you know what? What if we really ARE meant to be doing something important, and instead we’re just sitting here and it’s not being done? We literally have No Idea what the hell we’re supposed to be doing any more.’ She sighed again. ‘I’m tired of that too.’

  ‘And I want to know these things, just as much as you: why we’re here, why we were made, why we have to see to it that mankind ends up wiping itself out!’ He laughed drily. ‘I know you think I make a joke out of everything … but I want to know what that thing was that we found out there. I want to know what it does, why the hell it’s doing what it does … and who put it there!’

  ‘Right … so, we can ask Waldstein about those transmitter things as well as everything else that –’

  ‘Jay-zus! What makes you think he even knows
those transmitter things exist?!’

  They sat in silence for a while, giving that idea a moment to sink in.

  ‘Seriously, Maddy … if we’re getting ourselves involved again … if we’re going to go down that road and get some answers, then the only things we can trust for sure are what we find out for ourselves.’

  ‘So? What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Well, for starters … we don’t serve ourselves up to Mr Waldstein like lambs to the slaughter.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps we go find that other transmitter. Maybe we’ll come across one of the people who set those things up?’

  ‘And of course they’ll open right up to us, Liam, and explain everything, right? Just lay it all out there for us?’

  ‘At least they’ve not tried to kill us.’

  ‘Yet.’

  He looked at Rashim. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think we may, if we are lucky, find another “transmitter”. So, all we will have found then is another large stone column covered with symbols that we cannot begin to decode. And that is all we discovered in Central America: a device that is channelling tachyons to the far side of the world. We do not know who set it up or why it is doing this. All we discovered is there is some other scheme at work … that is all.’ He shrugged. ‘And we lost two friends in the process.’

  Liam looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘What are you saying? We just ignore that thing sitting there in that city in the jungle, doing God knows what?!’

  ‘Oh, I want to know what its purpose is … but I suspect that Maddy may be right. Perhaps our best chance at getting answers is agreeing to meet with the one person we can guarantee knows more about things than we do. Waldstein.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘He must know about them. I can’t imagine for one moment that he doesn’t.’

  ‘I think it’s dangerous,’ said Liam. ‘I think it’s bloody stupid! We should go and find out what we can in Jerusalem first.’