by Alex Scarrow
Maddy wanted both of the colonels to see this. Although she knew they more than half believed her story, it would do no harm for them to see this machinery stir to life. She trotted across the floor, skidding on loose grit and skipping over the thick flex of power cable running out through the raised shutter door. It snaked round the low entrance to the ‘fort’, and turned left along a freshly dug trench for twenty yards before rising up over the rear trench wall and across several yards of rubble and weed wasteland towards the opened rear engine hatches of Wainwright’s Mark IV tank. The engine casing, bulky and pitted with rust, juddered unnervingly like a feral cat trapped in a hatbox. It was spewing a thick cloud of smoke from an exhaust pipe at the top of its box-shaped iron turret.
The tank’s labouring engine was spinning a flywheel. Around the wheel was a cam-belt — a loop of thick leather — taken off the vehicle’s drive shaft and leading instead to their battered and sorry-looking generator. They’d hauled it out earlier and set it up beside the tank. The belt was turning the generator’s own internal rotor and armature.
Down the slope towards the river she could see Wainwright and Devereau standing above the borderline. Devereau squatted down and talked to someone in the trench, Wainwright smoking his pipe and looking out across the river.
‘Hey! You two! Colonels!’ she shouted above the rumble of the tank’s bad-tempered engine.
They both looked her way and she waved them over. ‘It’s working! We got power!’
She waited for them to jog over, and then led them back down into the trench, following the cable past the fort and ducking inside the archway across the floor to where the row of computer monitors were all now showing the same desktop wallpaper she’d put on several days ago.
An image of Homer Simpson.
‘Good grief!’ gasped Devereau, unsure what to make of the wall of grinning faces.
Maddy pulled a seat out and sat down at the desk. ‘Computer-Bob? You there?’
‘This … this yellow face,’ said Wainwright, ‘… is the face of your computer?’
‘Uh?’ She looked at the monitors. ‘Oh no … He’s just a … a …’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Doesn’t really matter.’
A dialogue box appeared on the monitor in front of her.
› Hello, Madelaine. It appears a significant malfunction has occurred.
He was seeing the wreckage of the archway behind her. That, or he was registering internal problems with one or more of the networked computers.
› I also detect two unauthorized personnel in the archway.
‘That’s OK, Bob … that’s OK. They have my authorization to be here.’
› Affirmative.
Wainwright’s jaw hung open. ‘You have a machine that can talk to you?’
‘Oh yeah … Bob, he’s … well, computer-Bob. Not, of course, to be confused with Bob, who’s a … well, sort of a guy-shaped computer and a copy of computer-Bob … and some of Becks, actually, who by the way is also a copy of computer-Bob …’ She looked up at the colonels and realized she was losing them. ‘Just think of Becks here and this computer system as family … sort of.’
‘Family?’ said Wainwright, looking at Devereau, not really any the wiser.
‘Bob, we got hit by a time wave, a big one.’
› This is apparent.
‘The wave was caused by Lincoln being here in 2001 and not back where he should be.’
› That is the most likely conclusion. What is Lincoln’s location now?
‘We do not have that information,’ said Becks.
› Hello, Becks.
‘Hello, computer-Bob.’
Maddy wrapped her knuckles impatiently on the desk. ‘Save the love-in for later, you two. We need to send them a message right now!’
‘The last known location,’ said Becks, ‘was the window opened near the FBI training academy, Quantico, Virginia. That was five days ago.’
› Correct. I have those coordinates in my event log.
‘They’ll have been making their way to us,’ said Maddy. ‘How far is it?’
‘Information: two hundred and twenty-six miles.’
‘They should’ve made it back by now, then … surely?’ She pouched her lips. ‘Unless they’ve decided to stay put and wait for me to open a window right where we dropped them off?’
› This is an equally likely possibility.
Maddy balled her fist and cursed. Both colonels exchanged a bemused look at her colourful choice of words.
‘Hang on!’ She held a finger up. ‘I can give them all the time they need … say a whole month if that’s what they need to — ’
‘We cannot hold the British for a whole — !’
Maddy shook her head. ‘Relax … relax. This is time displacement. We can open the portal up as soon as the machine’s charged up enough. Say, in about twelve hours’ time. But I could set the time-stamp to open a space one month from now. Do you see … with time displacement, all time — past, present and future — is effectively now … as long as you’ve got enough energy to reach it. Easy as easy peas.’
A cursor flashed across the dialogue box.
› Negative.
‘What?’
› Diagnostic on the displacement machine indicates the tertiary downstream phase analysis module has failed. We cannot at this time open a window in the future.
She banged her fist on the desk. ‘Why is it always so freakin’…? Arghhh!’ She shook her head.
‘Does this mean your machine cannot operate?’ asked Devereau.
Maddy sighed. ‘No … no, it just means we have to wait this out in real-time.’ She shrugged. ‘Stupid me … I was hoping for the easy option.’
She settled back in her chair. ‘All right … all right, plan B, then. We pick a place roughly halfway between New York and Quantico, and give them, what? Two days … no, three days — time enough to make sure they can get there.’
‘From now?’ asked Devereau.
She nodded. Then noticed the look of concern on both men’s faces. ‘We can hold on here that long, can’t we?’ Her eyes went from one to the other. ‘Right? I mean … you know, if they attacked, say, right now? Your men could hold this ground for three days?’
The officers’ eyes met. It was Wainwright who broke the long silence. ‘It will depend what force they throw at us … and, of course, how quickly they have decided to respond to news of this mutiny.’
‘And how well our men will fight,’ added Devereau.
Wainwright nodded. ‘The officers in my regiment … I know will fight to the death. As men of rank we all now face firing squads if we were to surrender. The enlisted men? They would face a British military prison.’
Devereau nodded grimly. ‘A similar fate awaits our officers. But I think my men will fight well because there can be no retreat if the South attack. The Legionnaires will be lined up behind us ready to shoot anyone retreating.’
‘So?’ She was still waiting for an answer. ‘Three days, then?’
Wainwright stroked his chin. ‘To be certain … you can promise us this new history?’
‘If I can pick them up and drop them back in 1831, yes.’
And if Lincoln is still alive.
She suspected Bob and Liam were probably fine; so far together they seemed to have been able to weather anything. And Sal would probably be fine with them looking after her. But Lincoln … the guy was a loose cannon. A big-mouth. A hot-head. Anything could have happened to him over the last week.
‘Then our men will give you your three days,’ said Wainwright. ‘What do you say, William?’
Devereau nodded. ‘This is a good defensive position.’
Maddy turned back to face the webcam on the desk. ‘OK, computer-Bob. Three days rendezvous from now, we just need to pick some place halfway between here and Quantico. Somewhere relatively quiet and peaceful if possible.’
› Affirmative.
‘We got enough charge to send a broad-range signal?’
<
br /> › Affirmative. Information: my diagnostic has also picked up calibration errors on the transmission array.
‘Affirmative,’ said Becks. ‘A replacement component — a conventional radio communication dish — has been connected. I can run the recalibration with you, Bob.’
‘Well, you two sort that out now.’ She turned to Wainwright and Devereau. ‘Either of you got any relatively up-to-date maps we can look at? We need to pick a place for our guys to get to.’
CHAPTER 70
2001, New Wellington
Sparks danced up into the night sky from their campfire, one of several dozen they could see up and down the side of the roadway. Refugees heading south and those on foot, like them, stopping at the side of the road for the night to rest, eat and perhaps sleep.
They were cooking cobs of corn they’d plucked from a field earlier this evening over the fire. Somewhere across on the other side of the road, someone was roasting coffee beans over theirs, and someone else, salted bacon.
‘It’s cooler tonight,’ said Liam.
Sal, snuggled beside him, nodded.
‘You all right, Sal?’ he said.
She nodded again, her eyes on the fire, glistening.
‘I know,’ he started. ‘Look, I know what happened was hard — ’
‘Hard?’ she whispered. Hard was a lazy, careless word to use for what they’d witnessed. ‘I … I keep seeing it, Liam. You know?’ She looked up at him. ‘I see Samuel looking at me, looking right at me when they shot him. He was …’ Her voice faded to nothing. Together they stared at the fire in silence, watched the cobs slowly blacken on the edge of the fire.
‘I feel …’ She chewed on a fingernail. ‘I feel strange. Like I’m … like I’m not who I used to be. Not the same Saleena I used to be.’
Liam nodded. ‘We’ve both seen a lot, you and me.’
‘It’s like my old life — my parents, my home, my school friends — all that’s become someone else’s life, not mine any more. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Aye,’ he said softly. ‘Me too.’
‘It feels like you, me and Maddy have been together for years.’ Although she knew exactly how long it had been: a hundred and fifty-five days — seventy-five bubble-time cycles plus five days.
‘For me it is,’ said Liam. ‘Six months in 1956 … and another six months in the twelfth century. And another in dinosaur times.’ He looked at her, quizzical. ‘You know what? I’ve lived a whole year longer than you since we were recruited.’
‘I know.’ She looked up at him, tilted her head to look at the tress of grey hair by his temple. ‘You do look older.’
‘Well, I’d be seventeen now, I suppose.’ Mock serious. ‘I went an’ missed me birthday!’
She smiled and punched his arm lightly. ‘Happy birthday, then.’
He reached out and prodded one of the charred cobs with a stick. Still too hard to want to eat yet. On the other side of the fire Lincoln was muttering something to Bob about his childhood, something to do with skinning hares.
‘You’re right, though,’ Liam said after a while.
‘About what bit?’
‘That we’re different people now. You, me and Maddy. I’ve seen things, done things, that I think have changed me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well … I killed a man, so I did.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘The fight for Nottingham. Killed a soldier with me sword. He looked at me … was staring at me as I did it to him. Like … I don’t know, Sal, it was like he wanted me to know him, in his final moment, like he wanted me to make sure I remembered him forever.’ Liam shook his head. ‘And it worked. I see him every night … in my dreams. That same fella. The same face.’
‘Do you ever dream of the moment when Foster recruited you?’
Liam closed his eyes. Not recently. Since Nottingham it had been this man over and over, haunting his sleep. ‘I used to.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Almost every night. I remember every little detail. I see it all every night like a holo-movie.’
She’d told him once about how she’d been recruited. ‘The fire?’
Sal nodded. ‘Every morning I wake up and want to cry … because it’s like I’ve just left my parents … my mathaji, baba all over again.’
‘I can barely remember my parents,’ he said. He tried to remember them and struggled to conjure their smiles, their frowns in his mind. Only one memory successfully gave him their faces, a fleeting recollection of holding in his hands a badly faded photograph of them in an old tin frame. He shook his head. How could that be the only decent enough memory he’d managed to hang on to?
‘But there’s this thing, Liam, this odd thing …’
He gave up fishing for another mental image of Ma and Da. They were gone. People from someone else’s life now. ‘What? What odd thing?’
‘My memory of Foster saving me from that burning tower. There’s this moment, when the building finally begins to collapse. It’s horrible.’ She shook her head and winced at that sensation of the floor collapsing beneath her feet, of falling … and the fire beneath waiting for her to drop into it as if she was falling into Hell itself.
‘I’m falling, Liam … but beneath me, spinning beneath me, there’s this soft toy. A teddy bear. A blue teddy bear. It belonged to one of my neighbours, Mrs Chaudhry’s little boy. I used to babysit him.’
He shrugged. ‘What’s so odd about that?’
‘Because I’ve seen it, Liam. The same bear — the exact same bear — in that antique shop near us.’
CHAPTER 71
2001, New Wellington
On the other side of the fire, Lincoln grimaced, confused, frustrated. ‘How can a world be so very different from the absence of one man?’ muttered Lincoln. ‘It seems a highly illogical notion. A man such as myself, even.’ He scratched at his dark beard. ‘I had hopes of making some mark, but to cause an entire new world to come into being … from my not being there? I still struggle to make sense of this.’
‘Since all time — past, present and future — exists at the same time, it is logical to say the future has already happened,’ said Bob. His eyes warily scanned the night around them as he spoke. ‘Therefore all events are predetermined to happen a certain way. Every event, every human is a part of that sequence of events.’ He looked at Lincoln.
‘The predetermined sequence — you would call this “history” — can tolerate the absence or alteration of minor events. Your influence on the outcome of the American Civil War was a significant event.’
‘Surely it is important that you tell me more about the life ahead of me, then? For me to make all the correct decisions in my life in which I end up as this wartime president of the north?’
‘Negative. You do not need to know. The events of history, the circumstances of your life and what is in your own nature will conspire to direct you correctly.’
‘But there must surely come many moments in my life ahead where my destiny might hang on the fate of — ’ Lincoln shook his head, trying to think of an example — ‘of the simple toss of a coin, or even the distracting smile of a pretty woman.’
‘If the course of your life was dependent on such marginal variables, you would be a minor sequential event, and your absence would not have caused this time wave.’ Bob cocked his head as he fished for an appropriate saying from his database. ‘Destiny has a plan for you.’
Lincoln gazed at the flames as if in their flickering momentary shapes hidden answers lay waiting to be discovered. ‘In other words … you are saying I must trust my instinct?’
‘All that you will be already exists in you,’ said Bob. ‘The human mind is a store of data … memories. The memories plus the behavioural template you inherit genetically define you.’
Lincoln nodded. He thought he understood the gist of that. He’d once had a conversation very similar to this with his father. A simple, uneducated man, but wise beyond the grime on his farmer
’s hands.
We are all that we see and what our forefathers have seen.
And in the last few days he had seen some very questionable things, those creatures for instance. Creatures capable of intelligent thoughts and speech — reading and writing for God’s sake! — treated like possessions. Like objects, things to be dispensed with or recycled when broken. To know a creature has human-like intelligence and yet still treat it like a yard dog — worse, to treat it like cattle?
He nodded. ‘I believe you may have a point there, Bob. My father once — ’
‘Just a moment.’ Bob cocked his head and started blinking.
Lincoln scowled at him. ‘What the devil is the matter with you?’
Liam had stopped talking with Sal. Both looked across the campfire at Bob.
‘Bob? Are you — ?’
‘Affirmative, Liam. I am detecting tachyon particles.’
‘At last!’ said Sal. ‘What’s Maddy saying to you?’
Bob’s head remained cocked, like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. ‘Just a moment … I am compiling the message.’
Lincoln looked at the three of them, one to the other, as if they were all mad. ‘Are you saying he is hearing Miss Carter’s voice?’
Liam shrugged. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Presently Bob nodded, straightened up and looked at Liam. ‘We have a rendezvous data-stamp.’
‘Where?’ asked Sal.
‘More to the point, when,’ added Liam.
‘Seventy-one hours, fifty-nine minutes, three seconds.’
‘Three days to you and me,’ said Liam to Lincoln.
‘Location is thirty-one miles due west of our present location. A location known as New Chelmsford.’
‘Thirty-one miles!’ Sal looked at Liam. ‘Jahulla! That’s … that’s quite a trek for us. Isn’t it?’
Liam thumbed his chin as he looked out across the night. The direction in which they needed to go was going to take them away from the north-south road they’d been walking along. Across countryside, away from roads clogged with refugees. Away from New York.
