TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (33 page)

SpongeBubba was hovering curiously beside
Liam’s elbow. His plastic lips curled half convincingly. ‘Ewww!’

Another couple of minutes of shuffling, the
grunts and scrapes slowly receding, and Liam had lost sight of him. He snapped his torch
off. Now their main room was lit only by an oil lamp flickering away on top of a wooden
crate for a table.

The room was filling up with things from
2001 as well. They’d spent the last two days beaming back supplies and components
and spares of things they thought they might need. Sal and Maddy had raided Walmart. The
tools from their DIY section. The kettle, toaster and George Foreman griddle from their
Home Essentials aisle, all sitting in a yellow plastic stack-box, would have been an
unforgivable contamination of modernity under their old stricter contamination-averse
regime, their old mission statement. But down here in this dungeon-like environment,
under lock and key – and only they had the key, of course – no one was going to stumble
upon these things.

There were boxes of Coco Pops, pot noodles,
several dozen packs of Dr Pepper – enough to keep Maddy going for a few weeks.

Halfway up the brick wall on the far side of
the room another plastic stack-box protruded as if it had always been a deliberate part
of the viaduct’s foundation construction. A mis-translation.
A
box full of batteries, electrical flex, diodes, spare circuit boards that at some point
they really ought to chip out of the bricks and remove from the wall.

Rashim and Maddy’s response to that
mistake had been to offer him a nervous ‘oops’ grin. Liam had complained
that this instance of mis-translation could easily have happened to one of them. As it
happened, it turned out to be the result of a bug in the new code they’d written
for the reconfigured displacement machine. Since then, everything else beamed back from
2001 had landed in the middle of the chalk squares marked out on the floor of their new
home.

He was about to call out again to Rashim, to
check if he was all right, when he heard a loud knock on their small door. He was
planning on ignoring it until he heard the voice of their landlord, Delbert Hook.

‘Hoy! You gents all right in
there?’

He turned to SpongeBubba. ‘Go hide and
don’t make a sound.’

‘Righto, Liam.’

Liam tucked his torch away, picked up the
oil lamp and made his way to the door. He ducked into the low archway. Hesitant to slide
the bolt and open it, he cupped his mouth instead and answered through the door’s
keyhole. ‘Uh … I’m perfectly fine, Mr Hook, so I am!’

‘Come on now, Mr
O’Connor,’ the man’s muffled voice returned. ‘That’s no
way to welcome your good neighbour, is it?’

Liam cursed. He looked back over his
shoulder. SpongeBubba was out of sight and most of their bits and pieces from 2001 were
covered by a tarp. By the faint glow of lamplight Delbert Hook wasn’t going to see
anything much, and most importantly, not the far wall, vandalized as it was with holes
all along the length of it.

He quickly slid the bolt to one side and
pulled the door open – catching Delbert still hunkered down, caught in the act of
attempting to sneak a peek through the keyhole. ‘What can I do for you, Mr
Hook?’

Delbert awkwardly straightened up, flexed
his neck and smoothed down his waistcoat. ‘I … well, I heard some
knockin’ going on in here. Thought perhaps one of you might have got stuck. Locked
in by mistake, so to speak.’

‘No.’ Liam offered him a
reassuring face. ‘No, we’re just fine.’

Delbert was craning his neck curiously,
trying to see past Liam. ‘Is that some of your scientific paraphernalia I see
behind you?’

Liam looked over his shoulder at the dim
hump of the tarp in the middle of the floor. ‘Aye. Just assorted bits and
pieces.’

‘A lot of bits and pieces by the look
of it.’ Delbert frowned suspiciously. ‘I didn’t hear you bring all of
that lot in.’

‘We used the Farringdon Street door,
so we did.’

‘Very quietly it seems.’

‘Ah well, we didn’t want to
disturb you up the front.’ Liam offered him a polite smile. ‘Don’t
want to be a nuisance or anything.’

There was an awkward silence between them as
Delbert’s head ducked and weaved to get another look past Liam, and Liam shuffled
subtly from side to side to obscure his view.

‘So, is your Dr Anwar going to be
starting his experiments soon, is he?’

‘When he’s good and
ready.’

Delbert gave up on the peeking. The doorway
was too narrow. ‘Well, if you gents need anything … any supplies? You
know I’m the man to call on. I can get you anything you want.’ He winked.
‘
Anything
.’

Liam nodded. ‘Well, if we do need your
help, Mr Hook, we’ll be sure to ask.’

The little man stood on tiptoes and craned his
neck to one side, one last time. Liam mirrored him. ‘Anything else, is there, Mr
Hook?’

He sighed. Back down on flat feet.
‘No … no. Just remember, your rent’s due on the Sunday.’

‘Aye, every Sunday. I won’t
forget.’

‘Right then.’ A frustrated smile
flickered across Delbert’s lips. ‘I’ll bid you good day.’

Liam watched him turn and go, whistling
tunelessly as his feet scuffed the floor and he finally disappeared from view. He closed
and bolted their door.

‘OK, SpongeBubba, you can come out
now.’ The lab unit shuffled out of a dark corner.

Liam heard Rashim’s voice echoing down
the passage and out of the hole in the back wall. He couldn’t make out what
he’d said, but it sounded encouraging. A moment later he spotted the soles of
Rashim’s feet followed by his rear appearing in the crawl space as he slowly,
awkwardly, reversed back out.

He stood up; his chest and back, hands and
face were caked with dirt and grime. But he was grinning like a child. He held up a loop
of modern plastic-sheathed flex, taped off to insulate the end. ‘I managed to
patch into their copper wiring.’

It took him another few minutes to wire in a
heavy-duty transformer and then finally pull out a desk lamp from beneath the tarp. He
plugged it into a four-way connector.

‘So, here it is.’ Rashim licked
his lips anxiously and flicked the switch. ‘Hopefully.’ The desk
lamp’s bulb flickered on with a dull
snick
.

‘And
voilà
! Now we have
power!’

9 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary
School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘OK. So we’re jumping to 14
December 1888. That’s a clear day and night after Liam and Rashim’s return,
so we shouldn’t get any tachyon backwash.’ The boys had had a total of nine
days back there fixing their new ‘home’ up, ready for their complete
relocation.

‘This is how we’re going to go
about it,’ said Maddy. She pointed at the PCs. ‘We can operate this
displacement window on just one of those. It’s a relatively close time-stamp, just
over a century away.’

‘One hundred and twelve years, nine
months and –’

‘Thanks, Becks. Like I said, just over
a century – so we’re nowhere near pushing the calculative side of things. One PC
will be enough. The rest we’re gonna box up and send through.’

She looked around the derelict classroom,
their home for nearly three weeks. It was almost empty now. All that remained was what
they’d found in there: abandoned tables and chairs. She pointed at the two squares
marked in tape on the floor.

‘We’re going in pairs.
Obviously. But the way I see it, we’ve got a bit of a problem with the last
displacement.’

She hesitated to see whether Liam or Sal
were thinking along
the same lines as her. Keeping up to speed. She
sighed; of course they weren’t. Liam shrugged at her to get on with it and Sal
stared vacantly.

‘Right,’ she said with another
sigh, ‘good to see you two are on the ball.’

Liam nodded assuredly.
‘Aye.’

She rolled her eyes, noting that Liam
wouldn’t recognize a gentle prod of
snark-asm
if it slapped him in the
face.

‘The last displacement, guys, has to
transport the displacement machine itself. We can’t leave it behind. Which means a
certain amount of untested risk.’ She looked at Rashim to elaborate.

‘Yes … uh … yes,
you see, when we activate the last time window, we will effectively be severing the
power supply to the displacement machine. In theory the heavy lifting has already been
done by opening the window, so this should not, theoretically, be an issue. But –’
he spread his hands – ‘it is untested. The interruption could cause a
glitch.’

‘And if it does that?’ said
Liam.

‘We could lose our machine and be
stuck in 1888,’ replied Maddy.

‘The window could collapse in on
itself,’ continued Rashim. ‘Or the time-stamp might deviate in location or
time.’

‘Which is why someone has to go at the
same time as it,’ said Maddy. ‘Go with it.’

Liam’s eyes widened. ‘You mean
one of us has to run the risk of being turned inside out? Or get blended with a brick
wall?’

‘Or get lost in chaos space?’
added Sal.

Maddy shook her head. ‘You won’t
end up merged with it. Remember, these are separate displacement envelopes. But, if a
glitch
does
happen and the displacement machine remains here in 2001, or – I
dunno – ends up blapped ten years into the future
or something, we
need someone right there alongside it to destroy it. To make sure it doesn’t end
up in someone else’s hands.’

‘Stuff that,’ said Liam.
‘If that happens then it happens.’

Sal shook her head. ‘I … I
don’t want to do it. I don’t want to end up … lost.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Maddy
replied solemnly, ‘I’m not actually asking for volunteers to go alongside
the machine.’

‘Jay-zus, Maddy! Don’t be a daft
idiot! We can’t do this without you.’

Incredulity on her face. She half-laughed at
that. ‘I’m not frikkin’ volunteering, Liam! Do I look like a stupid
moron?’

‘Then who?’ asked Sal. She
looked at Rashim. ‘Not …’

He grinned. ‘I’m not a stupid
moron either.’

‘Becks,’ said Maddy, settling
the issue. ‘It’s Becks who’s doing it.’ She looked at the
support unit sitting cross-legged beside Bob, dismayingly small and slight in contrast
to him – an orange compared to a pumpkin.

Becks nodded. ‘Maddy and I have
already discussed this. I am logically the most expendable team member.’

‘Expendable?’ Liam shook his
head. ‘She’s not expendable … she’s …’ He studied
his flapping hands for something to back that up. Then he had it. ‘She’s got
that big secret in her head, so she does.’

‘We’ve also got that same secret
on a hard drive, Liam. And now we know her AI is pretty stable.’ Maddy pursed her
lips. ‘Despite that crush she seems to have on you … it means we can
either run her mind on the network, or upload her AI into Bob if worst comes to worst
and we lose her.’

‘It’s a relatively low
probability,’ added Rashim assuredly. ‘I have run some calculations on this.
Severing the power to the machine should have no effect.’

‘Aye, says the genius fella who beamed
three hundred people seventeen years too far into Roman times.’

‘Now
that
was not
my
fault! I had to make too many guesses without any preparation! I had to –’

Maddy waved them both silent. ‘Forget
it, guys. The point is one of us has to babysit the displacement machine through the
last window. And Becks is going to be the one to do it. Aren’t you?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Like Rashim said, it’s a low
probability anyway. But … if it
does
happen then we need her
alongside to trash the machine then self-terminate so there’s nothing left for
anyone, anywhere, to make use of.’

Maddy had toyed with nominating Bob, but she
was pretty sure that it was unlikely that they were going to be able to grow any new
support units where they were setting up base. If they
did
end up marooned in
Victorian London forevermore then she’d rather have that big ape by their side to
protect them than this small-framed female. A child. And yes, stronger than a fully
grown man, but still nowhere near as lethal a weapon as Bob.

‘I want us to get this done this
morning. I think we’ve pushed our luck hanging around here for weeks on
end … and God knows if those support units are still out there looking for us.
They’re not stupid. They’ve managed to track us down twice
already.’

‘No one’ll find us here,’
said Liam. ‘Surely?’

‘There’s no knowing what sort of
a breadcrumb trail we’ve left behind us. I think we’ve got very lucky so
far. We don’t want to push it, right?’

Liam and Sal nodded.

‘We’ve got power-tap established
and a nice new place we can call home. So, let’s pack up the last of our gear and
get this thing done.’

9 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio

‘That’s the girl,’ said
Sheriff Marge McDormand. ‘The waitress. Her name’s Kaydee-Lee
Williams.’

Cooper caught a glimpse of her through the
diner’s broad glass window, dotted with fading yellow cardboard stars with
handwritten assurances on them: ‘All Day Breakfast – we’ll fill you up like
a truck!’, ‘Freshly Brewed Coffee – unlimited refills!’

They crossed Harcourt’s main street,
quiet at this hour. Cooper put a hand on the door.

‘Go easy on her,’ said Marge.
She glanced at the other agent – ‘
Agent Mallard … like the
duck
,’ he’d joked as he’d presented his ID – and the young woman
with Agent Cooper. She’d not offered to show any kind of ID. Not even given a
name. She had an icy face, the calm, lifeless look of a serial killer if truth be
told.

‘Just go easy on Kaydee-Lee,’
said Marge. ‘She’s no troublemaker. She’s certainly no
terrorist
.’

Cooper nodded and smiled politely.
‘Thank you for your assistance, Sheriff, we’ll take it from here.
Mallard?’