TimeRiders

by Time Riders (epub)

  Might as well forget those names, he told himself. I’m never going to see them again.

  The truck rattled past a picket fence plastered with photographs of all shapes and sizes, the smiling faces of those missing printed on Have you seen them? posters placed by worried husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Along the bottom of the fence were piled posies of flowers, fresh and old, crosses, mementoes, teddy bears and dolls. It was a shrine to those who had vanished amid the whirlwind carnage of recent weeks.

  Several of the other people in the back of the truck watched the fence pass by, a painfully endless display of hope and sadness. A woman opposite him sobbed at the sight of it.

  So many dead and missing.

  A soldier in the truck ground his teeth. ‘Never even stood a goddamn chance ’gainst them Nazis.’

  Perhaps the only comfort, Liam considered, was that the war had been so short, that it was already over.

  CHAPTER 45

  1956, command ship above Washington DC

  Kramer watched the nervous young Fallschirmjäger officer and his two men leave the room.

  He had a million and one things to attend to, a steady stream of command decisions waiting to be made, not only to do with this recently conquered country, but also with affairs of state back home in Europe.

  But his mind was now on this one thing, the report he’d just heard from the young officer, the report of a shimmering window of air among the White House trees. There had been eye-witness statements that one man was ‘swallowed’ by it, only to be returned a minute later, his body appearing and instantly merging with that of another man who had accidentally stepped into the shimmering air.

  These were eye-witness statements made in the immediate aftermath of a battle; the men’s blood was up, adrenaline flushing through their veins. Soldiers, after the rush of combat, have always been prone to seeing things. Military history is filled with the stories of soldiers who saw armies of angels coming to their rescue. Kramer might have dismissed this as the overexcited rambling of young soldiers, except the officer had brought them this…

  His eyes drifted across the twisted, mutated thing in the body bag between them.

  Karl looked up at his leader. ‘You think this might have been the result of another time traveller?’

  Kramer said nothing in response.

  How could someone else travel through time?

  Waldstein’s carefully hidden prototype had been the only time machine. International law had come down hard and unanimously, and thoroughly closed the door on this technology. Any nation, any corporation, any individual caught developing it was subject to the ultimate punishment: complete obliteration. No warning. No arguments. No mitigating factors. Even in the chaotic troubled world of the mid-twenty-first century there was an accepted understanding that, for better or worse, time could not be allowed to change.

  ‘That machine was the only machine, wasn’t it?’ asked Karl. ‘Paul…?’

  Only Karl was allowed that privilege now – using his first name, and then only when it was just the two of them.

  ‘Yes, Karl… it was the only one.’

  By destroying Waldstein’s prototype behind him, Kramer had been certain that no one could follow them back in time and their efforts to change the world for the better be undone.

  But what if there was another machine?

  The thought sent a chill down his neck.

  And someone determined to come back after us?

  If this twisted body on the floor was the result of a time window opening, then someone from the future had chosen to zero in on today. Someone from the future was trying to correct history and assumed today, 5 September 1956, was the day history was changed.

  But it wasn’t today.

  History had in fact been changed fifteen years earlier, the day Kramer and his men had fought their way through SS guards to have an audience with Hitler. The day Kramer had explained that Hitler’s impending attack on Russia would be the beginning of the end of his dreams, an end that would come four years later in a bunker beneath Berlin with a bullet in his temple and a cyanide capsule crushed between his teeth.

  Kramer looked up from the corpse, out through the panoramic viewing windows. ‘Karl, we must completely erase history.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything before today… particularly everything since we arrived in 1941.’

  ‘Covering our tracks?’

  ‘Yes. But we should present this to the people as a symbolic gesture.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This day will be known as Day One, a new beginning for all of mankind. We will announce that after so many thousand years of bloodstained history – countries, kings, popes, emperors fighting each other for land or money, or faith – that all war is over.’

  ‘No more wars, yes.’ Karl nodded. ‘It would be a popular message.’

  Kramer pointed towards the city skyline through the broad window. ‘America was our biggest threat, and now it’s part of our Reich. We can’t be challenged any more. We’re now looking at the chance that every person in this world can finally be united under one banner.’

  ‘The Russian and Chinese states still remain.’

  Kramer shrugged. ‘Their time will come.’ He turned to Karl. ‘I think now is the perfect time, anyway, to make this sort of a sweeping gesture.’

  He turned away from the smouldering body, glad the young officer and his two men were gone and that he could turn his pale face from the awful sight.

  ‘But, Karl, you and I must never forget that we’re strangers in this time. Even though it’s been fifteen years since we time-travelled, we must be ever vigilant of covering our tracks.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘By declaring today as the first day of a new era, we’ll be wiping the last fifteen years clean, Karl. Leaving absolutely nothing. No clues for anybody in the future to close in on. But, more than that, we’ll erase all of history. And why not? Isn’t this also the reason we came back? To wipe the slate clean… A new beginning. A new order?’

  Karl nodded.

  ‘I will make an announcement over state television and radio. We shall decree a day of celebration across all the nations of the Greater Reich – a unity day of –’

  ‘Unity Day… it is a good name for it, Paul.’

  ‘Yes… yes it is. We’ll call it that, then. As well as this celebration, we’ll begin a systemic purging of history books, documents, relics. It all has to go. It all has to be burned.’

  Karl nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And we’ll tell the people of America that there’s nothing to be afraid of. They will not be enslaved, but instead will be invited to join the Germans, the French, the British and all the other citizens of the Greater Reich.’

  ‘I will have a speech drafted for you,’ said Karl.

  ‘Thank you, old friend. This…’ he said, pointing at the body on the floor, ‘is nothing for us to be alarmed at, do you understand? We control history now, Karl… you and I… it’s clay in our hands to be moulded exactly as we want. There will be no way for anyone from the future to find our entry point.’

  ‘If this body was the result of an attempt by somebody to find us –’ Karl looked at Kramer – ‘the fact that they tried today and not back in the spring of 1941… this proves…?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kramer smiled. ‘That they have no idea what date we went back to originally.’ He patted Karl affectionately on the shoulder. ‘I think this shows that we’re safe.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Karl crisply saluted. ‘I shall see to your speech.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Kramer watched Karl go, closing the grand double doors behind
him, and then turned once more to look out of the panoramic windows.

  Will that be enough, though… erasing history?

  It would be a sensible precautionary measure, but Kramer still felt a chill of unease. Half an hour ago he’d been certain that Waldstein’s prototype had been the world’s one and only time machine.

  Is it possible I’m wrong?

  In the sky he watched a squadron of Messerschmitt Jetlanders swoop down from a higher altitude and hover just above the deserted streets below, sweeping them with their searchlights.

  What was left of the world to conquer would present even less of an obstacle than America had. His Reich was now unassailable, unbeatable, all powerful. The remaining countries would fall one by one. Russia and China, two large but backward nations, were isolated, blockaded on all fronts. Sooner or later he could finish them off and be done with war.

  Nonetheless, it was an unsettling prospect that someone somewhere out there in the future could – if they got very lucky – find a way to get to him.

  Or it might be something far worse, Paul. Do you remember what the old man Waldstein once told you?

  Kramer cursed, glancing at the body. He ordered his guards standing outside to take the thing away and dispose of it. He’d seen enough bloodshed for one day… and there was much to attend to now that the United States had officially surrendered.

  CHAPTER 46

  1956, Washington DC

  It was dark and wet. Bob’s eyes had adjusted hours ago to the dimness down here in the sewers. Pallid tendrils of light lanced through the grating in the pavement above. It was a grey, overcast afternoon in Washington DC, the day after America had been defeated by its invaders.

  The support unit sat motionless on a damp concrete sill, his legs dangling in the foul-smelling water that trickled past.

  From above, he could hear the occasional movement of vehicles, the tramping of boots and every now and then the rattle-dash of distant gunfire. Over the last twenty hours, thousands of people, potential trouble-makers – those who might try their hand at rallying the people: senators, congressmen, judges, lawyers, journalists – had been rounded up and put on convoys of trucks heading out of the city. The rest of the city’s population cowered in their homes and could only wonder at what Kramer and his invasion force would do with them all now.

  It was quiet at the moment, save for the persistent echo of water dripping from the sewer’s curved brick ceiling and the languid trickling of stinking sewage.

  Bob sat motionless. Absent-mindedly a finger flicked the safety catch of the pulse carbine held in his hands. On and off, off and on, the metallic click echoing loudly down the sewer.

  Waiting patiently. Counting down on his internal clock.

  Bob closed his eyes.

  [Information: final window due in 23 minutes]

  He was only ten minutes from the White House, a mile as the crow flies, and half that distance he could cover underground along the network of sewage tunnels, emerging from a manhole along Pennsylvania Avenue. He would have to run the rest of the way in plain view. His black rubber suit and mask might disguise him for a short few moments. But since all the other enemy soldiers had discarded those and were now wearing their grey Wehrmacht uniforms, he’d most probably attract attention the instant he was above ground.

  However, if he timed things correctly, and was lucky, he stood a fair chance of managing to fight his way quickly to the space beneath that copse of cedar trees just as the air began to shimmer and the window appeared. Yet it was quite probable that his body would suffer too much combat damage to recover itself.

  But that was of little importance.

  The small wafer of silicon in his head was all that mattered; getting that through the window and sent back to the future in one piece was the only consideration. Even if the best he could do was poke his head into the portal as it activated, leaving his headless corpse behind, then that would satisfy his primary mission objective. The gathered intelligence would be back with the field office, precisely where it needed to be.

  Bob stirred. It was nearly time for him to make his move.

  But something in his small organic mind urged him to reassess his mission priorities, like a small child’s nagging voice. A whimpering plea that travelled down thin internal wires.

  Don’t leave him behind.

  Bob’s head twitched uneasily as his AI attempted to deal with conflicting assertions. There was an authoritative, emotionless silicon reply to that child’s voice.

  [Mission objective: gather and return information]

  But… there was so little information to relay, so very little that they’d managed to gather. Bob could return to the field office – alive or dead – and they could download from his head what he’d seen and heard. But the vast majority of this data was just smoke and gunfire; there was little they’d learned that could be of use. Not enough to fix on a precise point of origin for this time contamination. More information was needed, much more. Specifically – knowledge of the events that had come before this invasion. Located here in 1956 he had a far better chance of uncovering the recent past than back in the altered world of 2001.

  His head convulsed anxiously, his finger thumbed the safety catch with increasingly distracted vigour.

  [Mission parameters require reprioritization ]

  The unit was out of his comfort zone now. His AI could deal with detailed and speedy situation analysis, but decision-making was something far better dealt with by a human mind. His on-board memory recalled Foster’s words from a few days ago.

  ‘… And that’s the reason the agency sends a human operative back as well as the support unit. A robot can’t make intuitive judgements, Liam… not nearly as well as a human can…’

  The tiny nodule of wrinkled flesh in Bob’s skull – the undeveloped brain – understood this all too well. It understood help was needed while the hard-wired computer code continued to argue the case that mission orders were orders to be obeyed at all costs.

  Must Find Him.

  [Recommendation: update mission parameters]

  Bob’s finger froze; his body remained rigid, utterly still. His internal computer focused now on one thing alone, every micro-volt of computing power devoted to one end.

  Re-ordering his mission priorities.

  Making a decision.

  [Mission updated: locate and rescue Operative Liam O’Connor]

  CHAPTER 47

  2001, New York

  Foster and Maddy watched the countdown on the computer screen. ‘Thirty seconds,’ he announced.

  Maddy nodded; she could see the display too. ‘And what if they miss this window as well?’

  ‘We’ll deal with that when – if – it comes to it.’

  Maddy looked over her shoulder at the floor, an area cleared of cables and detritus with the faint circle of chalk inscribed in the middle where Liam and Bob were – hopefully – going to materialize very soon. She was glad Foster had sent Sal out to sit in Times Square and observe. If she was here, she’d be worrying, interrupting, agitating… distracting. Foster already looked stressed enough as it was, without having to constantly assure her Liam and Bob were going to be fine.

  And what if they came back, Liam wounded… or worse?

  Better that Sal was elsewhere right now.

  ‘Since they missed the other back-ups,’ she said, ‘something must have happened to them. Right?’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure. Quite often I’ve missed a scheduled window or two on the missions I’ve been on,’ said Foster. ‘The unforeseen happens – that’s why we have several back-ups.’

  ‘But if they do miss this one…?’

  He looked at the disp
lay.

  Ten seconds.

  ‘If they miss this one, then we need to communicate a new rendezvous point to them.’

  She looked at him. ‘Communicate? How?’

  ‘It’s complicated. I’ll talk you through that later.’

  She let out a breath. ‘So it’s not the end of the world, then? I thought… you know… I thought we’d lost them forever.’

  Foster checked the phase interruption indicator; no sign of any shifting packets of density where the extraction portal was due to open. That was good. The soldiers must have gone.

  ‘All right… here we go,’ he said.

  The displacement machinery began to hum and the lights in the archway dimmed as all power diverted towards it. Then, across the floor from them a large sphere suddenly began to shimmer, and through the undulating air Maddy thought she could make out the dancing, twisting form of tree trunks.

  ‘Come on, Liam,’ whispered Maddy. ‘Move your butt.’

  Foster swallowed anxiously. ‘Yes, get a move on.’

  If they were there, they should step through immediately. Keeping a portal open unnecessarily wasn’t wise; a window on to chaotic dimensions in which anything could lurk… The sooner it was closed the better.

  ‘Come on!’ he uttered impatiently.

  The sphere hovered, shimmered, glowing a soft blue in the flickering dimness of the archway. Foster glanced at the computer screen. The portal had been open ten seconds and a red caution message had already begun flashing on the screen.

  ‘I have to close it,’ said Foster. ‘Any longer and we risk attracting a seeker. They’re not there.’

  ‘No!’ cried Maddy. ‘Let it stay open just a bit –’

  ‘They’ve failed the rendezvous,’ snapped Foster. He hit the abort button on the screen and instantly the sphere vanished, the hum of surging power diminished and the dimmed flickering ceiling lights grew bright once more.