‘Now we’re both respectable, let’s see what’s left up in the pantry, shall we?’ the colonel said, rubbing his hands together.
Josh could see from the weak light of the gas lamps that the colonel had selected a brown houndstooth suit with a red waistcoat. His hair was slicked back, and his beard combed. He reminded Josh of a portrait of Charles Darwin that he’d seen once on a school trip to the Natural History Museum. He remembered it well, especially the feel of Monica Fellowes breasts as they were snogging during the film about dinosaurs.
‘Why do I keep losing my clothes?’ Josh asked as he followed the colonel out of the morgue and up the dark cast-iron staircase.
‘It depends on their chronological inception. Man-made fibres especially don’t make it back past 1937.’
‘Why 1937?’
‘That was the year Carothers invented nylon. Whilst he was working at the Dupont Experimental Station.’
It had never occurred to Josh that stuff like nylon had been invented by a bloke in a laboratory. It was something that he had read on every label he had ever washed of his mum’s things. To him it was nothing more than just another setting on a dial at the launderette.
‘The Order prefers older materials, like cotton and wool, materials that have been sourced from the seventh millennium — around 3000 BC. It’s called ‘jura’ and they use it in our standard-issue travelling robes. Can’t abide them myself — they just make you look like a damned monk.’
As they climbed to the ground floor, Josh began to realise how different the house was to the one they’d just left. The hall was decorated in heavy velvet wallpapers and thickly woven tapestries. There was no electric light, and the whole effect was made more gloomy by the weak glow of the flickering gas lamps. The colonel walked along the hall and adjusted the valves of each one with an audible hiss. Josh smelt the peppery scent of unburnt gas.
There was a bell near the front door and the colonel rang it once and then listened for some kind of response.
‘Seems we have the place to ourselves.’ The colonel shrugged. ‘Let’s find something to eat.’
The dining room was panelled in a heavy dark oak with ornately carved sideboards and cupboards stretching the length of the room. It had a vast, highly polished dining table with places laid out for at least twenty guests. The cutlery looked as if it were made of solid silver. Josh had to restrain himself from slipping a few of the smaller spoons into his jacket.
In the middle of the table and along the top of both sideboards was the strangest collection of stuffed animals in glass bell jars: Kittens playing with moths — frozen in a moment of intense play, bats in mid-flight, and many glass-eyed birds.
‘Taxidermy was also rather popular in this period,’ the colonel explained as Josh studied them closely. ‘You’ll find that the Victorians are more than a little obsessed with death,’ he added as he disappeared through a door.
There were two oil paintings hanging at opposite ends of the long room: portraits of aristocratic figures. Josh thought he recognised one of them and went closer to read the bronze plaque that had been screwed into the gilded frame.
In a fine italic script it read: Vc. Dalton Eckhart. 11.821.
Josh stepped back to study the image. The subject was a good likeness of Caitlin’s arrogant friend. Dalton was portrayed in a hunting scene with all the accessories: deerstalker hat, shooting stick, cartridge belt and shotgun, there was even a dog by his side proudly guarding a dead pheasant. They both stared out from the image straight at Josh. It was unnerving and not a little spooky.
A few minutes later, the colonel came crashing through the kitchen doors like a drunken butler, balancing a silver tray in one hand and his almanac in the other.
‘Change of plan,’ he blustered. ‘I have to get to 11.866!’
The tray was piled high with cold meats: chicken, ham and some thick sausages. There were two large glasses of a dark beer strategically balanced at each end.
‘Causality crisis,’ he said, opening his notebook and pointing at a page of symbols and formulas that were constantly changing around a branching set of lines. He went to one of the drawers in the long sideboard, and took out a velvet-lined box full of watches.
‘Need to return you to the present. Give me your arm.’ He muttered as he began strapping it to Josh’s wrist. ‘This is a Tachyon Mark IV, a timekeeper. One of its more basic uses is functioning as a homing device. I have set it to return you to the most chronologically recent point in your timeline — the moment you left the present.’
Josh examined the watch. It had a dial comprising clockwork gears and brass symbols, all encased in a series of concentric brass circles, each marked with fine lines and numbers. There was something underneath the dials that was emitting a faint blue glow, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
‘Why can’t I come with you?’ Josh asked, grabbing a sausage and following the colonel into the next room, which turned out to be another ‘Curiosity’ collection. The colonel was running his greasy fingers along a shelf of leather-bound books and counting off the years under his breath until he reached 11.866. He took the volume down from the shelf.
‘Encyclopaedia Britannica goes back to 11.768. Can’t beat it for chronology. Every safe house has one specially printed on twelfth century vellum.’
‘I said, why can’t I come with you?’
The colonel shook his head. ‘Oh no. Far too dangerous. This causation involves Irishmen and explosives, never a good mix in my experience. I suppose you could wait here for Mary if you would prefer?’
Explosives sounded far more interesting than meeting some Victorian woman, no matter how hot she was. ‘But I’m never going to learn anything if I don’t see it for myself. I’ve been to the heart of a Nazi bunker and survived — how bad can this be?’
The colonel paused for a moment as if considering the consequences of taking Josh.
‘Nice try, young man. But I don’t think you’re ready for this.’
‘But if things get too hot I just use this,’ Josh said, pointing to the tachyon on his wrist and smiling, ‘and — boom — I’m back home safe and sound!’
The colonel scratched his beard. Josh noticed he did that a lot when he was pondering over a problem.
‘You have a point. I’m probably going to end up regretting this, but I don’t have the time to argue.’ He placed the large leather book on the table. ‘Remember you die just as easily in the past as the present. The first sign of trouble and you push this. Understood?’ He pointed at the larger button on the side of the watch.
While Josh was studying the watch, the colonel went over to a tall cupboard and unlocked it. The cabinet was a lot larger on the inside. It contained a room full of weapons, each one carefully displayed as if at a museum. There were swords, daggers, blunderbusses and all manner of pistols and rifles from the last century. The colonel took a moment before selecting one particular pistol.
‘Colt single-action army revolver. Model P — also known as the Peacemaker. It has a revolving cylinder, takes six bullets,’ he said, snapping the chamber open and showing Josh the bullets inside. He handed one to Josh. ‘Do you know how to use one of these?’
Josh had only held a gun once before: the one that Lenin had thrown into his lap. These were heavier than he expected. As held it, he began to feel its history — the men that it had killed — as though it were warning him of what it was capable of. Josh had never liked guns. He had known too many people end up dead because of them. He shook his head and gave it back.
The colonel placed both of them into holsters inside his coat. ‘Ah. Yes, with training you can learn how to control that. There are some simple exercises that can help you.’
Josh had never been that good at anything other than driving cars, something he had taught himself. This was different, like a superpower or an evil curse. He was beginning to wonder if this was something he could walk away from.
‘Do I have a choice?’ he asked. ‘Do I ha
ve to join your Order?’
‘I suppose you do have a choice, but I don’t believe anyone has ever turned us down. Most accept it as their destiny — they’re usually much younger than you. They tend to enjoy the thrill of their new abilities.’
‘So there more like me? Us?’ Josh looked back to the picture of Dalton at the other end of the room.
‘Yes, many more. Not all in this milieu of course, but spread out through time. We’re stationed at various points throughout the last twelve thousand years. I have particular fascination for the petroleum age; the twentieth and twenty-first-century obsession with fossil fuel has created some amazing technological advances, especially in space travel. So I was more than happy to be posted to the twenty-first, although there weren’t many other takers, to be fair.’
‘Why not?’
‘There are many factors. Your time is seen as a hostile territory: electricity, nuclear weapons, intrusive technologies, social injustice, terrorism and of course you’re very close to the Frontier.’
‘Frontier?’
‘The point at which the future and the present meet — where the known meets the unknown. We call it the Frontier. The younger members of the Order seem to be drawn to it, but many of my generation are scared of getting too close. They prefer staying further back in a nice safe posting in the past — they’re a bit chicken shy.’
‘Chicken shit,’ Josh corrected.
‘Exactly.’
Josh imagined what it must be like to be posted to the other end of history, just hanging out in caves and hunting with spears. He couldn’t remember if the dinosaurs had died out before there were humans — he wished he’d paid more attention in his history lessons.
‘So we need to get to the twelfth of December 11.866,’ the colonel said, leafing through the encyclopaedia.
‘You mean 1866?’ Josh corrected him.
‘Yes, but the Order work to a longer timeframe, one that starts at the end of the last Ice Age, over twelve millennia ago — so our years have an extra digit. It is more commonly known as the holocene calendar.’
The London Underground in 1866 was very different to the dirty, overcrowded, outdated version that Josh was used to. The train carriage was more like a decadent dining room than a commuter train: the seats were covered in a sumptuous velvet pinned in place with brass buttons, the electric lights were ornate brass lamps with glass shades — there were even curtains at the windows.
The colonel had made himself comfortable in one of the seats. He was pretending to read today’s edition of The Times while puffing happily on a pipe. The very thought of smoking on the tube was so alien to Josh that he found it hard to believe it was allowed — yet nobody seemed to care. In truth, the colonel’s smoke was nothing in comparison to the grey, soot-stained clouds pumping out of the steam engine and filtering through the vents in the windows.
Josh blinked back the sweat from his eyes. It was sweltering inside the tunnels. He couldn’t understand how the other passengers, who were mostly men in black coats and bowler hats, were able to stand it. There were a few women in heavy-looking dresses delicately wafting themselves with Japanese paper fans.
It was a surreal feeling to be standing in a carriage with a crowd of people that you knew would most probably be dead in the next few minutes. Someone within this group was a terrorist, their suitcase full of explosives, waiting for the right moment to detonate.
Josh studied their faces, looking for a sign of guilt or a facial tic that would give them away, but found that most people looked pretty pensive on this train. He had to remind himself that in this time people bought tickets just for the novelty of taking a ride — rather than actually going to a destination. It was a carnival attraction for many, or so the colonel had told him when they’d appeared at Farringdon.
While they had been waiting for the train, the colonel had briefed him on the ‘Fenians’ — Irish freedom fighters who were planning to attack the railways as a protest over the occupation of Northern Ireland. The fact that Josh was standing less than ten metres away from a real terrorist was making him nervous. He’d contemplated testing the button on his new watch, but the colonel caught his eye and given him a reassuring wink. Josh could see the pistol handle nestling inside his jacket, as if to say he had it all under control. He assumed that bombs needed fuses and timers in this era; there was no such thing as remote detonators, so the Fenian had to be on this carriage.
His first suspects had been a couple of navvies standing at the far end of the compartment. According to their coats they worked for the Thames Ironwork Company. Rough-looking men, their hands were like sledgehammers, scarred and solid from years of manual labour. Each of them carried a canvas bag, the cords of which were wound round their wrists so tightly he could see the red welts where they’d cut into their skin. He ruled them out when they got off at Smithfields, taking all their possessions with them. This left him with what appeared to be a respectable bunch of potentials with very little to separate them. Josh knew they would have to have a case, virtually every one of them did, and he assumed that they would leave it behind and get off at the next stop. The netted luggage racks were full of various valises and leather Gladstone bags, so knowing out whose was whose would be impossible.
The colonel looked at his watch again. He had been doing it every couple of minutes, like the white rabbit out of Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly there was a loud crash from the next carriage and the screeching of metal against metal as the engineer applied the brakes. Everyone was thrown forward, and Josh found himself in the lap of a young gentleman with a very odd looking moustache. When Josh put his hand out to steady himself, he touched the man’s case.
His mind caught the image of something odd, a memory of a mineshaft and gunpowder. Josh apologised and pushed himself back up, trying not to be too obvious as he studied him more closely. The man was no more than twenty years old, with a chequered brown suit and derby hat, and he was looking around nervously now, trying to avoid eye contact. He put his hand into the bag.
Josh nodded to the colonel to indicate that he was sure this person was the one they were looking for, and the colonel smiled as if he already knew.
The train wasn’t moving, and the other passengers were getting frustrated. There was a general murmur growing among the more disgruntled ones about ‘inconveniences’ and ‘infernal machines’. The colonel stood up and came over to Josh.
‘Ready?’ he asked, folding up the newspaper.
Josh nodded even though he’d no idea what he was going to do next. His heart began to race inside his chest.
Something happened to the young man’s case as the colonel grabbed Josh by the arm and clicked a button on the side of his watch. Time slowed down. He watched an orange ball of fire blossom from the bag when the bomb detonated inside it. Josh gaped as he watched the destructive force tear apart the body of the man, his body slowly scattering across the confined carriage. The pressure wave blasted the other passengers like dolls caught in a hurricane, and then, just when he felt the heat hit his chest, the world started to vibrate and flicker as time went into reverse.
[<<]
In a blink of an eye, they were back in the carriage of two minutes before. The navvies were still on board and the train was gently rocking along the rails. It took Josh a minute to register that they had just jumped back from the explosion, but he didn’t have time to take that in before the colonel nudged him and walked over to the young man in the brown suit.
The punch completely threw the Fenian off his guard. Josh hadn’t expected something so brutal either. The colonel hit the man square on the jaw, which caused the other passengers to stand back in amazement. It gave the colonel enough time to grab the case and throw it to Josh, who caught it instinctively without even thinking about what it contained. The colonel produced his revolver and waved it at the others, shouting something about being from Scotland Yard. He took the man by the arm and bent it behind his back as the train pulled into Smithfiel
ds Station.
The two navvies, who’d taken a great deal of interest in the commotion, picked up their bags and got off as they had before. The colonel pushed his prisoner out of the carriage and Josh followed with the case. As the train pulled away, the colonel released the man, who immediately ran off down the platform. Josh dropped the bag and began after him, but the colonel caught his arm and pulled him back. Josh turned, half expecting the colonel to be taking aim with his pistol, but the gun was back in its holster. The colonel simply nodded toward the escapee and whispered ‘watch’ under his breath.
As the man reached the gate near the end of the platform, his body shimmered as if going out of focus and then faded away. Josh scanned the crowd for the man, but he was gone. He looked back at where he had dropped the bag, but that too had vanished.
‘What the —’
‘The paradox of time,’ said the colonel rather smugly. ‘The real mission objective was to find out exactly who carried the bomb onto the train; there were no real leads from the historical data. Once we had identified the culprit, someone — probably me, would go back and stop him from ever being on the train or even involved with the Fenians. Quite neat really.’
‘But didn’t this happen, like, a hundred and fifty years ago? How come it is suddenly a crisis?’
‘Takes a while to process. Copernicans are thorough if not a little slow.’
There was a scream of metal on metal again from inside the tunnel.
‘Unfortunately we couldn’t stop the other disaster,’ he sighed as he began to walk away from the dust and smoke that came swirling out of the mouth of the tunnel. ‘The first accident recorded on the London Metropolitan Railway. Workmen dropped a load of steel girders onto the tracks. The driver wasn’t able to stop. The train derailed and crushed three people on the train coming in the opposite direction.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 12