TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (40 page)

She reached over and poured some tea into
her mug. ‘Here’s a change someone else has made. Let’s sort of
audition it
. We’re gonna see if it’s a good ’un. And if
not, we’ll fix it like a decent, responsible little team of TimeRiders.’ She
hunched her shoulders. ‘Other than that, we sit tight. We watch. That’s our
job. And maybe we even enjoy Victorian London. Maybe even get out and live a
little.’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded slowly.
‘I suppose you’re right.’

Maddy turned to Bob. ‘That OK with
your programming, you big lump?’

‘I concur with your assessment. The
logic is sound.’

‘So, if Rashim can get our
displacement machine to do it, I say we first get a look at a time and place we’re
all very familiar with. Something we can compare directly to.’

‘2001?’

‘Yup. The eleventh of September 2001.
New York. We know very well how it’s supposed to look, so that’ll be a
perfect place to check first to see if this contamination had had knock-on effects, or
self-corrected between now and 2001. You up for that, Liam?’

‘Aye.’ His face lifted.
‘Aye, of course!’

‘And then, after that, we’ll try
and get a glimpse at 2070, if we can do it. Sound like a plan?’

The others nodded. ‘Plan.’

‘Good. Now … who’s for
a nice cup of tea?’

6 November 1888, Whitechapel,
London

‘It’s best to be in pairs,
love,’ said Mary. ‘Ain’t so safe on the streets these days with that
madman out there somewhere.’ She grasped Faith’s bare arm.
‘That’s why you should stick close to me, you understand? We can look out
for each other while we work.’

Faith adjusted the muslin wrapped tightly
round her still-healing arm. ‘I understand,’ she replied evenly. ‘I
will stay close.’

She wasn’t entirely sure what the
woman meant by ‘work’ – they appeared to be doing nothing at all productive;
instead, they were standing together beneath the soft amber gaslight glow of a street
lamp and calling out peculiar greetings to males who happened to pass them by.

‘What is your
“work”?’ asked Faith.

Mary looked at her with a coy grin. ‘A
finger-snitch, love.’

‘What is a finger-snitch?’

‘Oi, you serious?’ She sighed.
Faith stared at her, awaiting an answer. ‘You really are a funny one, aintcha? I
s’pose I better explain. See, what I do is lift a little coin from gents who
should be behaving ’emselves better.’

Faith frowned. ‘I do not
understand.’

‘Pick their pockets, love. Only the ones
who look like they can afford it, mind. And usually gents who’ve had a bit too
much of the ol’ drink and rather fancy themselves.’

‘Pick their pocket?’ Faith ran a
search for that phrase in her head. ‘You are talking of theft? Stealing?’
she said finally.

Mary laughed. ‘Blimey, you’re a
bit slow on the uptake, love. Yes, I steal. I ain’t so proud of that, but
it’s that, my dear, or starve. And I’ll tell you there’s plenty of
gents in London who make a pretty penny by doing very little but sit on their fat
backsides while poor hardworking sods break their backs making ’em rich.
It’s a bloomin’ unfair place this city. One world for the rich, and another
world for the rest of us.’ Mary shrugged. ‘So, I don’t feel so bad
about lifting the odd coin from a gentleman’s back pocket.’ She winked.
‘It’s all in ’ow you go about distractin’ ’em.’

‘Distracting them?’

‘A saucy wink, love. That an’ a
cheeky smile.’ She laughed. ‘Men can be such fools. ’Specially when
they’ve ’ad a bit too much to drink.’

Faith nodded. ‘I understand. We deploy
mating signals to distract them. Then we steal from them.’

Mary shook her head, bemused and tickled by
Faith’s choice of words. ‘You’re an odd one, love. But, yes,
that’s the gist of it. You can ’elp me, Faith. Two of us? We could make a
good team. Pretty girl like you would get plenty of attention. You keep ’em
talkin’, an’ I can do the finger work. What do you say?’

Faith gave that a few moments’
thought. ‘We will require money to obtain food. I need food to sustain
me.’

‘Don’t we all. Ain’t
nothin’ bleedin’ well free in London.’

Faith nodded. ‘Your logic is sound. I
will assist you in finger-snitching. You will have to teach me the “saucy
winks” and the “cheeky smiles”. I can learn these actions.’

Mary nodded. ‘I’ll teach yer,
that and a few saucy things to say to ’em gents. They like that. We should
practise on someone …’ She spotted a likely candidate. ‘Hoy! Cooeee,
love!’ Mary
called out to a gentleman a little worse for wear,
tracing a drunken zigzag along the pavement opposite them. ‘You want some
company?’

The drunk snarled something back at her and
staggered on.

‘Charming,’ muttered Mary.

Faith looked up and down the street. It was
almost completely empty apart from them and another couple more women down the far end,
like them, huddled in the pool of light at the base of a street lamp.

‘Trade ain’t good tonight.
’S the rain see? All the gents stayin’ at home with their missus.’ She
laughed. A throaty sound. ‘Get things for free at ’ome now,
dontcha?’

Faith offered the distant women a polite
nod, but they ignored her. She wasn’t fully listening to Mary as she talked. Faith
was busy evaluating her mission status. It was, of course, still active, yet to be
completed. And she knew her targets were close by. They’d come here to this time,
this place for a good reason – whatever that was. She was reasonably confident – 76 per
cent – that they wouldn’t know she’d actually managed to follow them through
the portal. And here in this time with no CCTV cameras, no wireless transmitters, no
radios, mobile phones, no computer tracking and monitoring they would probably feel
entirely safe.

Which meant they might get careless.

She had identified a search radius of a mile
in diameter, the approximate distance she’d been offset by the displacement
process. A lot of people in such a densely populated place as London, but her eyes were
good, her recognition software exceedingly fast. Yesterday Mary had taken her along
Oxford Street to a pie shop that sold ‘proper meat in the middle’. Oxford
Street had been a good place to be. Faith had locked on to and evaluated 7,056 faces in
just under ten minutes.

Streets were the best place to be, Faith
decided.

A sea of humanity out there, plenty of
opportunity for her to wait and watch. At some point one of her targets was bound to
walk down one of these busy roads, in need of some essential thing: food, drink,
clothing. And, if she was standing in the same street, she would spot them, and make her
move.

‘… although it is a
shame …’ Mary was still talking. ‘Pretty flower like you ’aving
to do something like this. ’Aving to be a common thief. But that’s ’ow
it is, I’m afraid.’

Faith turned to her. ‘I am a
“pretty flower”?’

Mary laughed. ‘Course you
bloomin’ well are!’ She sighed. ‘Mind you, even I was pretty once.
This place does that to you … sucks all the blimmin’ life out of
you.’

Faith sensed that was probably some sort of
a metaphor, not to be taken literally. The woman was talking about fatigue, attrition.
Being ‘worn down’, to use another human aphorism. Faith considered how long
she had been pursuing the targets. Her ‘elapsed mission time’ counter was
showing four weeks, five days and seventeen hours. Given that she’d been birthed
nine hours before being sent back from 2069 to 2001, she’d effectively been
on-task pretty much
all
of her short life.

She wasn’t exactly
tired
;
the proteins she’d managed to get hold of and consume were
keeping her organic chassis fed. Perhaps not ideal forms of nutrition long term; her
digestive system wasn’t exactly designed to deal with pigs’ trotters and
eels.

No, her body was well-fuelled for
now … it was
her mind
that felt tired.

Her hard drive was filling up with a
trillion things observed, heard, smelled, felt, tasted. She needed to compress her data,
to offload the unimportant, trivial data and defragment the spaces left behind. Data
retrieval, sorting, ordering, filtering, all those
necessary processes
were getting markedly slower and that was undoubtedly beginning to affect her
performance.

She looked at Mary and imagined that her
hard drive looked like the skin on this woman’s face: pockmarked, weathered,
lined.

A visual metaphor, of course. Not
literally.

A drip of rainwater from the lamp-post
landed on Mary’s upturned face. She wiped it away. ‘I wanted to be a
musician, a piano player when I was a little girl,’ she said. ‘You know, I
was brought up near a convent. And they had an old piano there they let me play on. I
could play some pretty tunes on that, Faith, I could. Even though I couldn’t never
read the music.’ She smiled wistfully and listened to the soft patter of raindrops
all around them. ‘We all ’ave silly dreams when we’re children,
don’t we?’

Faith felt she should nod at that.

‘Only dream I got left, I
s’pose, is taking meself back ’ome ’gain. To me mum and dad. Be a
little girl all over again.’ Mary sighed and the soft hiss of drizzle filled the
silence.

‘What about you, Faith? Was you a bit
of a dreamer?’

Faith hadn’t told Mary much about her
past. In fact, Mary had
assumed
most of it – country girl from a farm? Longed
for the excitement of the big city? Came to London with little or no money and soon
found herself in trouble? All Faith had really needed to do was nod at Mary’s
stated presumptions.

Did she have ‘dreams’? Faith
gave that a moment’s thought.

[Information: I have goals.
Objectives]

But dreams … in a different sense,
dreams
. She had trace memories: the faintest recollection of pre-born foggy
images and muffled sounds. A growth cycle in her tube, before her miniature silicon chip
became active and thinking became a digital process.

‘I sometimes dream,’ said Faith
finally. She panned her cool grey eyes on to Mary. ‘I dream that I can go back
home also.’

Mary laughed. ‘Right blimmin’
daft couple standin’ here, ain’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Faith.
‘
Blimmin
’ daft.’

‘You an’ me … we
should try and save every penny we make. No more of the gin, no more of the bad
stuff … just save up all the money we can lay our ’ands on.’

‘Agreed. The gin is toxic to your body
chemistry. It does you harm consuming it.’ Faith looked at Mary. ‘What is
your intended purpose for the money?’

‘To pay for a train, of course! A
train away from ’ere. A train back home. That’s where you an’ me
should try and get. Back to our ’omes. This ain’t no decent place to live.
Farm animals live a better life than most of the poor sods trapped ’ere in
Whitechapel. I wish I’d never come ’ere in the first place.’

‘Correct. Many of the humans here
appear to be in poor condition.’

‘It’s so hard to get by.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘Even just gettin’ enough to eat. But then you
walk no more’n a mile west … places like Oxford Street, Piccadilly
Circus … and you see ’em posh blighters in their fancy clothes, in their
fancy carriages, stepping into fancy clubs and eateries. None of ’em done a
day’s work in their lives. Ain’t right.’ She sighed. ‘If I
’ad a say in things … I’d change it all. Take what’s
theirs
and share it among all them poor beggars out there workin’ all
day an’ night just to scratch together enough money to blimmin’ well
eat!’

A thought occurred to Mary just then.
‘Where did you tell me your ’ome was, Faith?’

Faith looked at her. ‘I have
no … 
home
.’

‘Then, blimmin’ ’eck, you
could come with me!’ Mary’s face creased with a gap-toothed grin. ‘How
about that? Would you
like that? Wales is lovely, Faith. Mountains and
valleys. Nothin’ like London.’ She grabbed Faith’s arm. ‘We
could both go live in Wales. Would you like that? You and me? We could pinch as much
money as we can … save every penny, an’ buy us some tickets away from
this miserable city.’

Faith’s tight lips curved, producing a
practised-several-times, almost genuine-looking smile. ‘That sounds like a
blimmin’
good plan, Mary.’

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

Liam looked down at himself. He was wearing
a pair of grey flannel trousers and a white cotton shirt; it was as time-neutral a look
as they could get from his Victorian clothes. Maddy as well: just a plain grey skirt and
a vanilla-coloured blouse – no frills, lace or bonnet. At worst they’d look like a
pair of rather dull nerds in 2001.

Or a rather unimaginative couple.

‘So, it’s Piccadilly Circus,
then,’ said Liam. They were heading for London, 2001, instead of New York. Having
crunched the numbers, Rashim had come to the conclusion that the charge they could
muster was not going to be enough to project them that far into the future unless they
compensated on the geo-displacement and aimed for somewhere closer to home.

‘We’ll do a one-hour
visit,’ said Maddy. ‘One hour then open the return window at the same place.
And a two-hour back-up window for just-in-case. OK?’

Rashim was sitting at the desk.
‘Understood.’

Liam centred himself in his square.
‘Nice not to be going back wet.’ He grinned. ‘That’s a blessed
relief, so it is.’

Maddy nodded. She tucked a small digital
camera into a clutch bag. There were dozens of digital images of Piccadilly Circus on
it, pulled from their database. They had a fair idea
how it
should
look and she could reference those images on the camera. If it
turned out to be only a moderately different Piccadilly Circus, then perhaps they were
now heading along a timeline that was preferable.