What Could Possibly Go Wrong (The Chronicles of St Mary's Book 6)

by Jodi Taylor

  My knee was holding up well. I loped along with the others, feeling the beat of my heart and hearing my own breath in my head as we jogged over that lonely landscape all those tens of thousands of years ago.

  We halted for a position check. Far, far away in the distance behind us, I could see the glow of prehistoric campfires. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could smell roasting meat on the wind. I looked up at a wide sky whose brilliance would never be seen again. A thousand million stars glittered across the heavens. A huge golden moon hung over the horizon, casting long black shadows behind us. The wind still moaned. The grasses still rustled. There was snow in the air.

  And still something dogged our footsteps.

  Cox and Gallaccio both had their blasters on full charge. I could hear them whining.

  ‘Not far,’ said Guthrie. ‘A little over half a mile. Everyone all right?’

  The question was rhetorical. We had no choice other than to be all right. If we weren’t all right and whatever was behind caught us up then we would very shortly be even less all right.

  I heard another sound and the night was suddenly bright and hot as Cox fired a short burst into the darkness. I saw eyes. Everywhere. Golden, glittering eyes.

  I pulled out my stun gun, although it’s only effective at close range, so I’d have to be half way down a sabre-tooth gullet for it to be effective in any way. The trainees weren’t armed because if I was doing my job properly they shouldn’t need to be. I was completely unsurprised therefore, to see Atherton pull out a nasty looking and completely illegal flick knife which, for all I knew, was standard issue for those in the banking profession, and awarded him another couple of points. Hoyle had a pepper spray. The canister was blue and ours were red, so God knows where he’d got that from. Never mind. I awarded him a point for ingenuity. We all looked at North who unzipped a pocket and flourished a small gold capsule.

  ‘You’re going to lipstick them to death?’ enquired Cox, grinning.

  ‘One of those sonic anti-rape things,’ she said, expressionlessly. ‘Please approach and allow me to demonstrate.’

  ‘Time to go,’ said Guthrie.

  We set off again, but something had changed. The owners of those glittering eyes were level with us now, keeping pace. Guthrie flashed a torch.

  I’ve only ever seen lions in a zoo and I’ve never seen a real tiger at all. But I was seeing one now. It stood bigger than a table, with a browny-gold pelt, its eyes coldly glittering. Above all, I remember those huge, curved fangs. It crouched in the beam and snarled, lifting its lip to reveal teeth not very much smaller than its fangs. For some reason I was fascinated by its paws, which were big and soft and spread out to give it a good grip in the snow. These cats were fearless – no human could threaten them. I saw its muscles bunch to leap and then Cox directed a beam of liquid fire at its feet. It leaped back from the flame and disappeared into the night.

  ‘There’s more than one,’ shouted Hoyle. Of course there would be. I’ve seen Ice Age. They hunt in packs. And they were hunting us.

  ‘Stay together,’ shouted Guthrie. ‘Do not let them separate you from the others. Tight clump. Don’t run. Don’t panic. Stay together.’

  We did. We did everything right. We stuck together. We trotted faster but we didn’t run. The Security people were flashing their torches around. I could make out at least three and probably four big cats keeping pace with us. There would be others behind us.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ panted Guthrie. ‘They don’t like the blasters. We’re going to make it.’

  We nearly did make it and then Atherton stumbled. Hoyle ran into the back of him and I ran into the back of them and we all three fell to the ground. I rolled over, stun gun at the ready. Someone pulled me to my feet. All around, the security team were firing controlled bursts into the night. There were more eyes now. Something ran at us, snarling. Cox fired, hitting it on the shoulder. There was a terrible smell of burnt cat, a yowl of pain, and it disappeared back into the dark. They were circling closer now. If they only attacked one at a time, then we could hold them, but if they all jumped at once then we were lost. And they were pack animals. They would work as a team. Any minute now … I watched them sink on their haunches, wriggling a little as a cat does just before it pounces. Although pounces was far too girlie a word for the massive leap that would end in huge fangs tearing out our throats and drenching the snow with our red, wet blood.

  Atherton and Hoyle were roaring, jumping up and down and waving their arms. Trying to make themselves look bigger and more threatening. North thrust out her arm and an ear-bleeding tone split the night sky. She pointed it first in one direction then another. Again, they fell back. They didn't go away, however, and the tone was dwindling away, dropping down to a bearable whistle. But she’d given me an idea. I called up the pod. Sykes and Lingoss might not have a clue, but Evans would. If we were close enough to the pod for it to be effective. If it had been installed. Not for the first time, I wished I listened to Leon more attentively. ‘Activate the Sonic Scream. Sonic Scream. Quick.’

  For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. Were we too far away for it to be effective? Then, there it was. Something nasty on the edge of our hearing. Like nails inside the blackboard of our heads. Like biting into aluminium foil. Like the worst case of airsickness ever. The stars swayed. The ground heaved. I felt an old, familiar pain in my chest.

  But the sabre-tooths ran. Bloody hell, did they run. One minute our world was full of giant hungry cats and the next minute they’d fled. I heard Guthrie speak and then, mercifully, the Scream stopped.

  The silence was almost as painful as what had gone before. I thought I might throw up anyway. I staggered a little, but a few deep breaths sorted me out. I made a mental note to show my gratitude to Leon in a practical way.

  Slowly, we straightened up.

  Guthrie opened his com. ‘Get the ramp down.’ He turned to the trainees. ‘Go. It’s only a couple of hundred yards or so. Keller, go with them. We’ll cover you. Go.’

  I could hear them pounding off into the night. We edged backwards, torches and weapons raised and swinging from side to side, covering them, but there was no need. The sabre-tooths had gone.

  I heard Evans report their safe arrival and a minute later, we were there ourselves.

  They had the ramp down. Evans stood at the top, blaster raised. Keller waited at the bottom.

  We pounded up the ramp, into the warm safety of TB2. Evans closed up behind us. We were safe.

  I took a few minutes to get my breath back, hands on my knees, waiting for my head to clear. I still felt sick and disoriented. The floor was not steady under my feet and the walls were waving around in a very disconcerting manner.

  When I looked up again, Guthrie was stowing the weapons away and all my trainees were in a little huddle at the far end of the pod.

  Something was wrong.

  ‘Everyone present, Miss Sykes?’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘Is anyone hurt?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘All equipment accounted for?’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘FOD plod done?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Right, no reason to linger. Let’s get out of here.’

  I was in no mood to hang around. Everyone exposed to the Sonic Scream felt like crap and looked worse. I just wanted to get back, have a long hot bath, and thank the god of historians I didn’t live in the prehistoric age. Being on the receiving end of the Sonic Scream isn’t pleasant. Even Guthrie looked as if he was about to bring up his boots at any moment and the Technical Section gets very irritated when people throw up in their pods.

  ‘Computer, initiate jump.’

  ‘Jump initiated.’

  Chapter Eight

  And here we were – safely home. What an exciting day!

  I watched Sykes operate the decontamination lamp and waited for the nasty cold blue lamp to kill off any Pleistocene bugs we’d brought back with
us.

  I thought they’d be in a mad rush to get their records uploaded. That they’d want to share their experiences and findings. That at the very least they’d stampede into the bar for a well-deserved drink. After the terrors of Sick Bay, obviously. Or possibly because of them.

  But they didn’t. All right, those of us on the receiving end of the Sonic Scream still looked a bit the worse for wear, but I would have thought Sykes and Lingoss would be raring to go. They weren’t. They stood around, fiddling aimlessly with bits of kit.

  There was silence.

  Something was wrong.

  I caught Guthrie’s eye. He folded his arms.

  I folded mine.

  ‘Right – no one’s hurt, are they?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Let’s go then.’ I shouldered my bag.

  No one moved.

  OK. Something was definitely wrong. I let my bag fall to the ground and looked for the weakest link. My first thought was Atherton, but just because he was quiet didn’t mean he wouldn’t go to the stake for his colleagues. North was the one to challenge. I wondered how quickly she would give them up.

  I have to admit that at this stage, I was only thinking in terms of a broken viewfinder or that in the excitement of the moment, someone had forgotten to hit ‘record’ and missed the hunt. It does happen.

  I waited for North to speak and she didn’t. She just stared at the floor.

  The silence spoke volumes.

  And it wasn’t just my crew. Evans was also doing his best to become invisible as well.

  Finally, it was Lingoss who spoke.

  ‘The thing is … the thing is …’ she stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ I said testily, still waiting for a bit of broken kit to be guiltily produced. ‘What is the thing?’

  She fell silent again and then I heard it. A tiny sound in the toilet. Guthrie pulled out his gun and said, ‘Back, everyone.’

  ‘No,’ said Sykes in a panic, waving her arms. ‘Don’t shoot.’

  A hideous, cold, horrible certainty settled in the pit of my stomach.

  I said, ‘What have you done?’ and even I didn’t recognise my own voice.

  The silence continued until Guthrie shouted, ‘Answer her,’ and I didn’t recognise his voice, either.

  Lingoss stepped forward. ‘We didn’t mean to but you were in such a hurry. We only meant to give her a few minutes’ respite but then we had to leave quickly and we tried to tell you and then it was too late …’

  I said again, ‘What have you done?’

  Guthrie motioned to Cox who strode forwards and grasped the door handle. Guthrie covered the door. ‘On three. One. Two. Three.’

  Cox pulled the door open.

  Shit! Shit, shit, shit!

  I actually closed my eyes – as if that would help. Guthrie said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and lowered his gun.

  Occupying most of the available floor space stood a very young female woolly mammoth. So young that she wasn’t so much covered in matted dreadlocks as fluffy ringlets. If this was a Disney film then this was the moment for everyone to say ‘Aaawww,’ as the protagonists broke into a catchy tune.

  No one broke into a catchy tune.

  Cox, peering around the door to see what was in there said, ‘Bloody hell!’ and slammed the door shut.

  Strangely, once the door was closed, everyone seemed to take a breath and relax. Except me. I was still staring at the door as if I couldn’t believe my eyes. Which I couldn’t. Then I couldn’t find a voice. Then I could.

  I got as far as ‘Who …?’ when the com squawked and Leon’s voice said, ‘Everything all right in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, amazingly calmly for someone who was about to murder five trainees and then have to go on to annihilate an entire Security team to cover it up. I wasn’t too sure of my ability to take down Guthrie’s Security team, and God knows what I’d do with all those bodies afterwards, but I’d make bloody sure I’d spread trainee guts and gizzards from one end of TB2 to the other and maybe hang a few of their soft, wobbly bits from the ceiling as well. Like wind chimes.

  ‘OK then,’ said Leon. ‘See you in a minute.’ He closed the link.

  This time I got as far as ‘What …?’ before I was interrupted by a tiny, tinny trumpet from the toilet.

  ‘I think she’s a bit scared,’ said Sykes.

  ‘She,’ said Guthrie, significantly, ‘is not the one who should be scared. Have you any idea of what you’ve done?’

  ‘But we didn’t do it,’ began Lingoss.

  ‘Oh really? She wandered in and got herself locked in the lavatory like the three old ladies in the song?’

  ‘We think she followed us. Perhaps she thought we were her herd. Perhaps she was looking for shelter and thought the pod was a cave.’

  ‘So,’ said Guthrie, turning to his people with a very nasty expression. ‘The ramp was down and unguarded?’

  ‘No!’ said Lingoss hastily. ‘But we – I – persuaded them to let her stay for a few minutes.’

  ‘Just to rest,’ said Sykes with the air of one struck with inspiration. ‘She was very frightened.’

  The toilet trumpeted again.

  ‘They’d killed her mother,’ said Lingoss, ‘and those things were after her, so we thought …’ She tailed off because it was very apparent none of them had thought at all.

  ‘And then …?’ prompted Guthrie.

  I looked at Hoyle who had to decide whether or not to go down with the sinking ship.

  ‘They – we pushed her into the toilet in case she … dirtied the pod,’ was his reluctant offering. ‘And then you turned up and we had to leave in a hurry and …’

  ‘They tried to tell you,’ finished North, making sure all the blame was allocated as far away from herself as possible, ‘but you jumped and …’ she tailed away.

  I groped for the left-hand seat and sat down. Lingoss started to speak.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, put my head in my hands, and tried to think.

  Pods won’t jump with anything contemporary on board. We can’t bring anything back from the past. But – and it’s a big but – we can rescue items that are about to be destroyed because they have no future influence on the timeline. Last year, we’d rescued three Botticelli paintings from the Bonfire of the Vanities. We’d even jumped back to Alexandria and saved a tiny part of the Great Library as it was being burned by command of Pope Theophilus in 391AD. That we’d been able to jump with this little creature on board meant she had no future. She would have died if she’d remained behind.

  Guthrie waved them all down to the other end of the pod and took the right-hand seat.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, quietly, ‘but you did this yourself, once. You jumped back to 1666 and rescued I can’t remember how many dodos. This is no different. And she would have died. Realistically speaking, she wouldn’t have lasted an hour out there on her own. You saw what was on our trail. Remember how quickly the humans legged it back to their own camp? They even left part of the carcass behind to distract predators.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Let them live, Max.’

  ‘It’s not them I’m worried about,’ I said bitterly. ‘What on earth do we do with her?’

  ‘Send her back.’

  ‘If we jump now then everyone will know something was wrong and Dr Bairstow won’t rest until he finds out and then they’ll be out and I’ll be …’

  I tried to think what I would be. At the very least, I’d be known as Maxwell the Mammoth Murderer for the rest of my probably very short life.

  ‘Well, we could leave her in the toilet and jump back later.’

  ‘Techies will be all over this pod the minute we’re out of the door. One of the first things they do is empty the toilet. They’re not bright – don’t tell Leon I said that – but even they’re going to notice a mammoth the size of an Irish Wolfhound in there.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Tell them it’s an Irish Wolfhound.’

  ‘With
an eighteen-inch-long nose? Who can trumpet? You’re not being very helpful.’

  He grinned. ‘No, I’m not, am I?’

  ‘And your people let them do it,’ I said nastily, which wiped the smile off his face.

  Sykes approached, not exactly on her knees, but the general impression was there.

  ‘Um – we’ve had an idea.’

  ‘It had better be an improvement on your last one.’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s quite neat, actually.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said, bitterly. ‘Go on then.’

  ‘The Pleistocene Park.’

  Oh my God – the Pleistocene Park!

  Half of me thought, bloody hell that’s brilliant, and the other half … the other half had packed it in for the day.

  ‘What’s the Pleistocene Park?’ asked Guthrie.

  Sykes hastened to explain. ‘It’s a nature reserve in north-east Siberia where they’re trying to recreate an Ice Age ecosystem. They already have reindeer, bears, horses, wolves, moose and so on, but … but …’ she was beginning to gabble in her excitement, ‘they’re planning to extract DNA from mammoth carcases and recreate mammoths but they’ve got problems because they don’t have an intact string of DNA. They need a live mammoth and now we actually have one. It’s perfect.’

  Guthrie looked at me. ‘Is this legal?’

  ‘A bit of a grey area.’

  ‘You’re as bad as they are.’

  ‘We can turn disaster into success,’ said Sykes. ‘It’ll be amazing.’

  ‘They won’t cut her up, will they?’ said Guthrie, displaying an unexpectedly warm and fluffy side.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Sykes. ‘It would be like cutting up the Koh-i-Noor to make industrial diamonds.’

  ‘But how will they look after her? What will they feed her on?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Hay? Grass? Elephant milk? But if anyone can work something out, they can. We have to do this, ma’am. We can’t keep her here and we can’t take her back to die. Her best chance of survival is the Pleistocene Park.’

  ‘We can’t jump now,’ I said. ‘There’s a whole army of technicians waiting out there and they’re not going to go away.’

  ‘No, we’ve thought of that. We take her out on a flatbed …’