But at some point in the preceding ten minutes Mountfort had acquired a sword, which he now drew and levelled at Dora. ‘I am sorry, girl, but Lord Sweetclover has pledged aid to the king’s cause. Consequently, I am now under his command.’ He gestured towards the undercroft door with the blade of his weapon. ‘If you two would precede me.’
Dora turned to her mother, who was standing by the kitchen table, hands coated in flour, looking lonely and afraid. Dora reached up and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come, Mother,’ she said. ‘Our master requires our presence. Let us walk together.’
Sarah allowed herself to be led and, at the point of Mountfort’s sword, she and her daughter descended the undercroft steps.
23
Reeling from Kaz’s sudden disappearance, and that of the mysterious patient whose touch had sent them both spinning off into time, Jana momentarily had no idea what to do next. She sat with her back against the cold stone wall and tried to gather her thoughts. She knew she hadn’t got long before she was discovered; if the bedridden patient was being monitored so closely by various machines, it was likely that someone had received an alert when the patient vanished. Deciding that her best course of action was to rendezvous with Dora upstairs, she pulled herself to her feet, grabbed Kaz’s discarded backpack and hurried back out into the main chamber, heading for the door. She was halfway across the chamber when she heard the distant clack of footsteps coming down the undercroft stairs.
Desperately she spun through 360 degrees, looking for an exit or a place of concealment. The anteroom she had just left would be the first place someone would search, so she discounted it immediately. The only hiding place it offered was under the bed, and the humiliation of being found cowering there would be intolerable. Her gaze lighted on a door in the farthest corner so she ran towards it. As she approached she realised that it was an elevator. With nowhere else to run, she pushed the button as soon as she reached it, praying that the car didn’t have to travel far. Her luck was in, and the door opened immediately. She stepped inside the spartan, functional carriage. It was made of wood, and was lit by a single light in the ceiling. Beside the door was a simple control panel. There wasn’t a lot of choice – there were two buttons, up and down. The up was already lit. She hit the down button and the door closed silently. She was thankful for that, and for the noiseless descent that then began; the quieter it was, the greater the chance her descent would remain undetected by whoever was about to arrive in the chamber she had just vacated.
The journey was smooth but slow, so Jana took the opportunity to prime her pistols in case she was jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Allowing the chip to take control of her actions, she performed the task as if she had done it a thousand times. She half-cocked the pistol, pushed the striker forward, primed the pan with gunpowder, locked the striker, poured gunpowder down the barrel, dropped the ball after it, pulled the ram out of the pistol stock and used it to push down a plug of wadding. Then she replaced the ram, fully cocked the pistol, and repeated the process on the other gun. She had just completed her task and adopted a stance with legs apart and her brace of pistols aimed forward ready for firing when the elevator juddered to a halt and the door opened to pitch darkness.
She stood still for almost a minute, waiting for something or someone to come looming in on her from the gloom, but nothing and nobody did. Deciding that she had better get out of the elevator in case it auto-returned to the undercroft, Jana uncocked the pistols, stashed them in her belt and pulled the lamp from the backpack. She clicked it on and stepped out onto smooth, wet rock. The elevator door closed behind her but there was no indication whether the carriage was rising or remaining in place.
The air was cold and damp and even in the feeble light of the lamp, which was beginning to run out of gas, Jana had a good idea where she was. She could see that there were lights strung along the rock wall behind her so she cast about for a switch and eventually found one on the cable itself. She flicked it. As the bulbs flickered into life one by one, she was rewarded with a sweeping panoramic view of a vast cavern. She surveyed the vista, whistling softly at the enormity of it.
She knew where she was.
She lacked the words to describe a space so big. The edges were so distant that she had to use her eye-mods to make out the details of the stasis pods that lined the farthest wall. When she, Kaz and Dora had briefly stopped here to catch their breaths on the way to 1645, they had known it was large, but they hadn’t grasped the true enormity of it. The cavern was a huge dome with a floor that gently sloped inwards to the centre where a large rock sphere sat, as if a giant marble had been dropped into the cavern and rolled to the lowest point. As Jana cycled through the spectrum she saw that it was giving off a faint glow of radiation, as if it had been daubed with fluorescent paint.
She used her eye-mods to take measurements and established that the cavern was a fraction shy of two miles wide, almost perfectly circular, with the apex of the dome being half a mile high, exactly above the lowest point. There was a mathematical precision to the dimensions of this cave which demonstrated that it was not natural; this space had been made somehow.
To Jana’s left was a collection of wooden buildings that gave out a hum she could feel through her feet. This must be the source of the vibration they had detected earlier, in the undercroft above. Apart from these buildings, the cavern was entirely given over to thousands upon thousands of stasis pods, which lined the entire circumference of the cavern and were stacked ten high. Jana could see that only a fraction of the pods were occupied, those closest to the elevator door; she reckoned about a thousand or so had people – or whatever – inside them. She was pretty certain that there had been more occupants last time she had been here, so she mentally flagged her previous visit as taking place at some point in the future.
Jana walked over to the wooden buildings and pushed through a simple door into a room dominated by a large polished metal container with doors like a closet or cabinet, about two metres high. It sat in the centre of the floor, humming with power. A collection of cables ran from its base out through holes in the wall. Jana pushed through three similar buildings, all housing the same sort of metal cabinets. She knew what they were – cold-fusion generators. Stable, powerful and, if configured correctly, capable of maintaining the stasis pods for millennia. It would have been possible for Quil to create generators such as these quite easily at any point in history, once she had collected the right raw materials. So that explained how she was generating power in Sweetclover Hall, and what she was using it for. Which only left the bigger question: why?
Slipping back into the cavern, Jana walked past the last of the generator buildings to the point where the stasis pods began and examined one carefully. In a conventional pod the cocoon would be made of metal, shaped roughly to mimic the figure of a human being, sealed on top with a strengthened glass cover. But for these pods, the shape of a human had been cut into the rock walls of the cavern itself, and the glass cover had been placed over the top and somehow fused into the rock. The glass was mottled and uneven, definitely not mass produced or brought from the future.
It was an ingenious solution to the problem of time, energy and resources; in the past, Quil would have had less of all, so she would have needed to figure out another way to create the pods. And she had. Even so, it must have taken a team of workers decades to carve all the alcoves, even if the correct tools had been procured from the future to speed up the work.
There were lifetimes of backbreaking effort implicit in the existence of these pods.
Jana knew enough about the science of cryogenics to know that the pods should have been flooded with some kind of gas, but she could see no evidence of it. Perhaps it was just not visible. She turned her attention from the pod to its occupant. Male, short, stout, naked. His face and body were covered with intricate indigo tattoos which, now she could see them up close, were obviously Celtic. She glanced around. All the occupants nearby were si
milarly decorated. These were Celtic tribesmen from Britain’s distant past, frozen in time for – Jana whistled as she realised – about a thousand years. The scale of Quil’s operation took her breath away. She had been assuming that 1640 was as far back as Quil travelled, but it seemed she had been active in, around and beneath the site of Sweetclover Hall for at least two thousand years. Building this chamber, equipping it to store warriors and then freezing them down here to wait … for what?
She skirted the edge of the chamber for a while, examining the frozen men. In one pod the occupant was clearly dead, mummified by the hermetically sealed cocoon. His tongue was black, his fingers were raw and there were streaks of dried blood on the inside of the glass where he had tried to claw his way free. There was dried spittle on his lips. His cloudy eyes bulged in terror, staring through the rough layers of silicate that separated him from the air he needed. There was no way of knowing how or why he had not been preserved like his fellow tribesmen. Jana shuddered and moved on.
After a while the Celts were replaced by men without tattoos, which made them far harder to date. But assuming they were placed in here chronologically, Jana thought she could see ranks of Vikings, Romans, Normans and many other tribes and ethnicities. All the knowledge, about periods of history, peoples and places that were of no interest to her and which she had never studied, was provided by her chip. She was now certain that it had been hacked before she left home; she had suspected as much when she had discovered it was full of English Civil War trivia. Someone had filled it with the information she would need to make sense of her travels through time – historical info, weapons training, Polish. She could only assume that it had been some ally or other, maybe Steve. Whoever it had been, she was grateful but wished they could have done something more useful, like perhaps warned her to stay at home instead.
Jana decided she had seen enough. There was a small army down here, and room for lots more recruits to come. It was clear that whatever else she was doing, Quil was playing a long, long game. But there was nothing else for Jana to learn.
She returned to the elevator and sat by the door, trying to decide what to do next. She was trapped. There was no way out except back up in the elevator, where there were almost certainly people lying in wait. She felt suddenly hopeless. When she’d fallen through time it had all seemed so exciting, such an adventure. After the cold sterility of her home, her distant parents, the hateful school, the parade of faceless security guards who dogged her every moment of every day, the expectations, the requirements, the arguments and rebellions and all the tedious, predictable stuff that goes with being a teenager, all of it made a hundred times worse because of her parents’ political profiles … after all that, time travel had seemed like the most wonderful gift she could have been given.
There was no more complete form of escape. Nobody in 2013 or 1665 was likely to say, ‘Oh, you’re that Yojana Patel!’ with the normal mixture of curiosity, disapproval and sycophancy that most people oozed when they found out who she was. Lost in time, she could be herself, free of it all.
Plus, it was not only time travel – she’d been given an actual, proper, honest-to-goodness quest! An enemy to confront and travelling companions who, against all odds, she actually liked. She couldn’t have imagined a more perfect opportunity to reinvent herself.
But where had it gotten her?
Dora was probably captured, Kaz was gone, and she was trapped in a cave with a creepy sleeping army and a dead Celt.
As she sat against the wall feeling uncharacteristically sorry for herself Jana was able, just for a moment, to be completely honest with herself. To admit that she would trade everything this day had given her for a single loving hug from her mother. A treacherous tear trickled down her cheek, but she hated herself for her weak sentimentality and she felt the familiar fury rising in her again.
Wiping the tear away, Jana rose to her feet and pressed the button to call the elevator. The doors slid open and she stepped inside, pressed the button to go up, and drew her pistols.
She wasn’t going to just sit down here and wait to be discovered. If she was going to be captured, she was going down fighting.
She rose through the earth, ready for war.
24
Richard Mountfort had considered his mission to Sweetclover Hall straightforward, if unconventional; warn of the imminent attack, solicit Sweetclover’s help. That the help he was supposed to be soliciting was supernatural seemed absurd to him, but he did as he was ordered. He was a loyal subject and a good spy. His orders stated that if Sweetclover pledged himself to the king, Mountfort was to remain at the hall under Sweetclover’s command until Parliament’s attack had been dealt with. Afterwards he was to escort him to Oxford, where the court now resided. Now that Sweetclover had agreed to serve the Crown, Mountfort was duty-bound to follow his orders. He had expected these to consist of siege preparations – defences, supplies and so forth. He had not expected to be holding a brave girl and her halfwit mother at the point of his sword, and he was far from comfortable with it.
Mountfort had heard tales of terrible atrocities visited upon innocents during this war. More than once he had stumbled across the aftermath of such events, seen the gruesome evidence of what can happen when a group of armed men feel themselves above the law and seek only to satiate their baser urges on the general population. He had seen victims of slaughter and rape left to rot in the streets of towns and villages once prosperous and peaceable. Women, children, old people and boys so young they should never have been called upon to bear arms, all cut down and abused most heinously. Neither side was exempt from the stain of such sin, so Mountfort knew that one day he might find himself explicitly instructed to participate in such actions by a superior officer. It was one of the reasons he preferred espionage to soldiery – a spy customarily works alone. Nonetheless, he had always sworn to himself that should he find himself present at such an event he would stand in opposition to it, even if it cost him his life. Which is why he felt so uneasy as he ushered Dora and Sarah down the steps into the undercroft. To his way of thinking, nobody would drive people such as these below ground with anything but the foulest of intentions. This, he realised, may be the moment he had been dreading. He only hoped he was adequate to the challenge.
Earlier, when he had entered the drawing room without invitation, Mountfort had found Sweetclover and his wife, to whom Mountfort had never been formally introduced, embracing. She was a tall woman, taller even than her husband, and she wore striking, scandalous clothes – trousers and a shirt. But as tall as she was, she had appeared to Mountfort to be vulnerable in that moment, seeking comfort and support in the arms of her husband. Their relationship had seemed to him, based upon that first momentary glimpse, what he would have considered conventional – strong, solid husband; weak, emotional wife. But when they became aware of his presence, and she lifted her head from Sweetclover’s shoulder and stepped away, it was not only the impassive mask that surprised him, it was her posture and attitude, which spoke of command and control. It was she who first demanded to know who he was and why he was intruding upon them, and her husband seemed content to allow her to speak to another man in such an unfeminine manner. It was she, also, who informed him of the attack upon Parliament’s forces in Pendarn, as if it had been orchestrated by her rather than her husband. To Mountfort this made little sense. He could not understand how such a mannish woman, who took command with such ease and authority, could at the same time be the feminine creature whom he had found seeking solace in the arms of her husband.
He also struggled to understand Sweetclover. Here was a member of the aristocracy, who had married a woman by all accounts horribly disfigured, who never left the grounds of the estate, wore a mask and unusual clothing, and gave orders with the peremptory decisiveness of a general. Yet Sweetclover did not seem to be the kind of weak-chinned man to marry a harridan who would terrorize and belittle him. Mountfort had met a few of those, and Sweetclover was defin
itely not the type; Sweetclover’s bearing and face bespoke pride and self-confidence, though he allowed his wife to command their militia.
It was, whichever way Mountfort examined it, a relationship that he could not fathom, between two people he found entirely confusing. The only explanation which seemed to make any sense to him was that which Dora had offered – that Lady Sweetclover was an enchantress of some sort. She did not fit his image of such a woman, but then she did not fit his image of any kind of woman, so there was no reason she could not be a witch who had cast a spell upon her household. The idea that it would be her intervention which swung the tide of war back in the king’s favour was absurd but he found that he could not discount it entirely.
Now, marching two defenceless, terrified women to subterranean imprisonment, Mountfort wondered what the cost of such intervention might be, and whether the victory of a just cause, if secured by infernal means, was truly a victory at all.
At the bottom of the stairs Sweetclover held up a hand to halt their progress, then pulled a candle from one pocket and a small box from another. He slid the box open, removed a small splinter of wood from it and then struck the splinter against the side of the box. The wood sparked into flame, which he used to light the candle. Mountfort was agog. ‘My lord, what magic is this?’ he asked.
‘Not magic, Mountfort,’ said Sweetclover. ‘Simple alchemia. A creation of my wife’s.’ He held up the candle to light their way. ‘Follow me, ladies,’ he said.
Dora and Sarah Predennick followed, although Dora flashed Mountfort another look of mixed disappointment and scorn.
‘What know you of your wife, my lord?’ asked Dora as they walked. ‘From where does she hail?’
Sweetclover did not acknowledge the question.
‘Let me frame my question differently,’ said Dora, undeterred. ‘From when does she hail, my lord?’
TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Page 22
