Day of the Predator tr-2

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Oh God! Oh God! She’s trying to kill me!’ Laura screamed. The rest of the group on the far side of the clearing, where a row of simple frames of wood had thus far been erected, were watching the scene in stunned, uncomprehending silence.

  Finally Laura collapsed in a pile at Liam’s feet, clasping at her arm and looking back in panic as Becks strode forward. ‘She speared me!’ gasped Laura. ‘Just walked up and stabbed me for no reason!’

  Becks came to a halt several yards away and looked calmly at Liam. She even smiled her faltering horse smile, lips slowly stretching to reveal a row of perfect teeth. ‘Hello, Liam,’ she said.

  ‘Jay-zus, Becks! Why’d you go and attack the poor girl?’

  ‘Mission priority. She has to be terminated.’

  ‘ What? ’

  Becks nodded at the others standing just behind Liam. ‘All of them as well. The others, and you, Liam.’ He thought he detected a hint of regret in her voice as she said that. ‘After that, I must purge this area of evidence of human occupation. Then I must self-terminate.’

  ‘What? That’s crazy!’ said Lam.

  ‘Becks, listen,’ said Liam, spreading his hands slowly. ‘This is not necessary, all right?’

  She took another two strides forward, reached down and grabbed Laura round the throat, and effortlessly lifted her up off the ground, her legs kicking in the air. Laura scrabbled and scratched at her face, one hand finally grabbing a fist of Becks’s red hair.

  ‘BECKS! STOP IT!’

  Liam’s command halted her. She looked at him, confused. ‘It is a mission priority. We have already caused unacceptable levels of time contamination.’

  ‘PUT HER DOWN!’

  Becks stared at him, but remained poised and perfectly still, Laura still dangling, kicking, struggling and slowly choking; the sharp ragged point of the spear held in Becks’s other hand hovered mere inches away from her throat.

  ‘THAT IS AN ORDER!’

  Becks’s eyes slowly panned from Liam to Laura then back again. Her eyelids fluttered momentarily then finally she said, ‘Affirmative.’ She released her grip on Laura and the girl tumbled heavily to the ground, Becks’s red wig wrenched from her bare head, still clasped by Laura’s bloody fingers.

  ‘Now, put that spear down!’ snapped Liam.

  She obediently released her tight grip and it clattered on the soft ground.

  Laura’s breath chugged in and out in whooping gasps while the others stared in stunned silence at Becks and her bald head, already sporting a quarter-inch fuzz of dark hair.

  ‘Oh my God! She’s a complete freakin’ psycho!’ said Lam.

  Behind him, Liam heard Jonah mutter, ‘Jeez… got that right, dude.’

  Becks was staring at him. There was something in those cold grey eyes, something that looked like guilt, regret. Possibly even sadness. Like a scolded baby in that moment — that stunned could go either way moment — just before the face creases up and the tears and wailing come.

  ‘No,’ said Liam, ‘no, she’s not.’

  ‘She’s not a psycho?’ said Lam. ‘Sure about that?’

  Liam nodded. He could see muscles twitching in Becks’s face. Confusion, desperation… her mind struggling to reconcile conflicting priorities: Liam’s direct order versus hard-coded mission protocols.

  ‘She’s just doing what she thinks is right. She’s following her programming.’

  Franklyn cocked his head. ‘Programming?’

  The fire crackled noisily, illuminating their faces as they gathered in a circle round it like so many amber-coloured ghosts in a graveyard. The jungle, beyond the thrown flickering glow of light, was dark and noisy with the far-off echoing cries of creatures calling to each other.

  ‘But how can we be sure that… thing won’t just freak out on us again?’ asked Kelly. He cast a glance at Becks standing several dozen yards away out in the darkness, motionless, dutifully keeping watch for any signs of a night predator entering the clearing.

  ‘She just won’t,’ said Liam.

  ‘Yeah, well, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.’ Kelly threw a small branch on the fire, sending a cascade of sparks up into the pitch-black sky. ‘I mean, it’s not like you knew she was going to attack Laura earlier.’

  Liam looked at the girl. Her arm was bandaged with a strip of cloth torn from her sleeve. The black girl, Keisha, had done a good job with the dressing. It hadn’t been a particularly deep gash, but luckily hadn’t severed an artery. Laura must have been incredibly lucky; Becks had stumbled on the uneven ground as she’d lunged with the spear. Laura had been fortunate Becks hadn’t managed to get hold of her. Liam had seen enough of Bob in action to know that, male or female, these support units were lethal killing machines up close and personal.

  ‘She won’t,’ said Liam again. ‘I’ve discussed the situation with her.’

  ‘Discussed the situation?’ snorted Jonah. ‘Can’t you just pull some sort of plug on her? I mean… she’s a robot, right?’

  ‘No.’ Liam shook his head. ‘She’s not that sort of a robot. Not all wires and motors and metal bits. She’s an organic unit, what the agency call a genetically engineered unit.’ He looked around at the pale faces. ‘You’ve heard of that term, have you?’

  ‘Well, duh,’ sighed Keisha. ‘Any kid who watches the Cartoon Channel knows that term.’

  Liam shrugged apologetically. ‘Anyway, she’s what we call a meat robot. Flesh and blood, so she is. But she has a real computer up in her head.’

  ‘And what? You sayin’ her programmin’ made her go for Laura with the spear?’ said Juan.

  ‘That’s right. She was concerned about all the contamination we were causing, and without me being there to discuss it with her she had to make a decision on her own.’

  ‘Concerned?’ said Jonah ‘ Concerned? Dude, I’d hate to see what she’s like when she’s really mad at something.’

  Liam ignored that.

  ‘Liam, you said contamination,’ said Kelly. ‘You mean, creating evidence we’ve been here? Like our camp and the bridge?’

  ‘That’s right. Every cut, every scrape, every footprint — in fact, everything we do — just our being here could potentially alter history in such a way that the future is totally destroyed.’ Liam glanced at the motionless silhouette of the support unit standing guard in the middle of the clearing. ‘It’s a basic command for her… like, I suppose, like one of the ten commandments would be to us.’

  ‘Thou shalt not mess around with time,’ chuckled a dark-skinned boy called Ranjit. ‘That would be a cool eleventh commandment to have.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jonah. ‘Thy shalt not kill your ancestor, for he begets — ’

  ‘You think it’s funny?’ cut in Howard sharply. The others looked at him, taken aback at the outburst. Thus far he’d been one of the quieter members of the group. ‘You think messing with time is just some sort of a game? It’s the most insane thing man has ever done.’ He stopped himself short. Took a breath and dialled it back a bit. ‘What I’m saying is… it’s just pretty insane, time travel.’

  Liam nodded sombrely. ‘He’s quite right. It is insane. Although a man called Waldstein is the first man to travel through time — ’ he looked at Edward, the smallest face around the fire — ‘it all begins with you. It’s all based on work that you will do one day.’

  ‘So… theoretically,’ said Kelly, ‘if Edward had, for example, died in that explosion back in the reactor, and not gone on to do his work, then this Waldstein guy would not have invented a time machine?’

  ‘And we’d not have been blasted back into dinosaur times?’ said Laura.

  Liam noticed one or two heads turning towards the young boy, giving him a long, silent stare that looked like careful deliberation. Liam could see where this conversation might go.

  ‘There can only be one correct history, one correct timeline. And, whether we like it or not, that timeline includes an Edward Chan who becomes a maths genius, and a Mr Waldstein
who makes that first machine, so he does. That’s how it goes. That’s how it has to go.’ Liam stared at them all, each in turn. ‘And that’s why you can trust me… why you can trust Becks, to be sure. Our primary goal now is to make sure that this young lad gets back home to 2015 to do what he has to do. And that means the rest of you too.’

  ‘So, if there’s, like, a primary goal… then there’s a secondary goal,’ said a dark-skinned girl with long black hair and a pierced upper lip that glinted with several metal studs. It was the first time he’d heard her speak today. Quiet, pensive, she reminded him a little of Sal. She was still wearing her name tag: JASMINE.

  ‘There’s no other goal, Jasmine, I promise,’ said Liam. ‘Me and Becks want to get you all back home, so we do.’

  But that’s not strictly true, is it, Liam?

  He and Becks had spoken in private earlier. He’d managed to reason with her calmly — to talk her down from proceeding any further with her self-decided mission objective to kill them all, then herself. But it was a compromise. A perfectly logical compromise that successfully reconciled the conflicting protocols in her head.

  ‘ In six months’ time,’ he’d agreed with her, ‘ if they haven’t rescued us by then, before your six months is up and you have to self-terminate… then, yes, you’re right… I suppose we’d all have to die. I’ll even help you.’ He’d smiled at her. ‘ Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? ’

  The campfire crackled noisily.

  ‘So, there you go, all friends now, right?’ said Jonah. ‘Even robo-girl.’ He grinned. ‘Now about a nice sing-song. A round of “Kumbayah”?’ he added sarcastically. ‘I’ll take the lead. Kumbayah, my Lord!.. Kumba- ’

  Someone threw a chip of dried dino dung across the fire at him.

  CHAPTER 30

  Wednesday, 2001, New York

  A Wednesday. Maddy realized she hadn’t seen one of those in quite a while. Since she’d been on a plane trip back home to her folks in Boston, in fact. Since she’d become a TimeRider.

  She looked down the flagpole approach to the Statue of Liberty’s star-shaped podium and spotted only half a dozen other people. She’d been here once before, on the same school trip that they’d visited the Museum of Natural History. It had been a tedious day full of queuing. Queuing to get ferry tickets, queuing to get on a ferry over to Liberty Island, queuing to get inside the podium building beneath Liberty’s feet and look at the small museum’s exhibits. Queuing once again to get a look up inside the statue itself. A pretty dull day of standing around, being shoved, bumped and barged into, waiting to look at things she actually had precious little interest in.

  Today though there were no queues.

  The island was all but deserted. Half a dozen ferries had arrived throughout the day, each offloading no more than a handful of muted whispering visitors. And, even then, their eyes had been more on the column of smoke coming from across the bay, coming from Manhattan, than they had been on the giant copper-green statue in front of them.

  Maddy took another slurp of the cooling polystyrene cup of coffee in her hands. Horrible. She’d lost count of how many she’d bought from the stall opposite the embarkation pier. She was almost on first-name terms with the bewildered-looking man behind the counter who’d served her every time. He certainly should know by now she took it white with three sugars.

  Come on, Foster… where the hell are you?

  Through the morning she’d been hopeful as each ferry had arrived. But not now; it was nearly four in the afternoon. Another hour or so and the Statue of Liberty’s little museum would be closing, the last ferry back across the harbour getting ready to leave.

  She was beginning to realize today had been wasted, loitering around like this. Cluelessly hovering around the podium’s entrance in hope that the old man would turn up. Never mind, she told herself, now at least she knew that Foster hadn’t spent the first Wednesday of his ‘retirement’ out here. She’d head back to their archway. Today, Wednesday, it would be nothing more than an empty brick archway with a TO LET sign pasted on the roller-shutter door, and outside that shutter door she’d wait until eight in the evening when a shimmering portal would appear, ready to take her back into Monday again.

  Then she’d do this all again, try Wednesday once more, but next time she’d loiter outside the Empire State Building.

  Her eyes drifted off the tourists as they passed by her and into the podium, pausing as they did to look once again at the pall of smoke in the sky.

  She remembered this day, remembered the day after. She’d been what? Eight? Nine? Mom and Dad at home all day, sitting in front of the TV, watching as dust-smeared emergency workers scrabbled at the edge of the smouldering wreck, pulling twisted spars of still-warm metal away in the hope of finding someone alive. She’d been playing on the floor of the lounge with her Tech-Meccano set, trying to build her version of a Transformer, half her attention on what she was doing, half on her parents: Mom sobbing and Dad cursing.

  And here she was again. Different place, same day.

  An odd urge occurred to her. What if she found a way through the security cordon around the ruin of the Twin Towers and found a TV camera and reporter to be stopped and interviewed by. She could wave at her eight-year-old self, wave at her mom and dad watching the TV. She could reassure them that she wasn’t going to die along with 137 other people aboard Flight 95 in nine years’ time. Tell them she was going to be OK.

  She shook her head. Nice idea. But she wasn’t going to do that.

  She turned her thoughts towards more pressing matters. Liam and the support unit. Bob had assured her that the copy of his AI in the female unit would make the same recommendation to Liam as he would: to find a discreet way to make contact. Discreet… because a too-obvious message, a message that stood out above the background noise of history, could significantly affect the timeline. But there was the problem. A subtle message carefully laid down in whatever historical period they were in, laid down for only her and Sal to find…?

  I mean, where the hell are we supposed to start looking for something like that?

  If they’d only been bumped back less than 150 years, then perhaps there was a message waiting for them once more in the Museum of Natural History’s guest books. That was something Sal had decided to try and check out. But what if they’d been knocked further back in time?

  Five hundred years ago? A thousand years ago? What was in the middle of Texas a thousand years ago? A lot of buffalo, she guessed, and some Indians. But certainly no visitor guest books for them to discreetly slip a message into. A ‘get us out of here’ scrawled across an ancient Navaho tribal history rug was almost certainly something the support unit would NOT recommend to Liam. Not unless they wanted every historian studying Native American history discussing the message at some symposium.

  Subtle. It could only be subtle.

  But, she sighed to herself, too subtle and how were they ever going to find it?

  Unless it’s a message that’s meant to find us.

  She looked up from her coffee.

  … Find us…

  ‘My God,’ she whispered to herself. Maybe that’s what they’d try to do. A message addressed to its finder, whomever that might be. A message that perhaps might promise a reward of some kind to the finder provided it was delivered to a certain location on a certain date. A message that might promise untold wealth, access to an incredible time-travel technology? And think about it. Such a message would be too important, too powerful, to become public knowledge, wouldn’t it? A message like that would become a closely guarded secret, right? A secret handed down by the original finder to his offspring, like a dark family secret or a horrendous supernatural curse. Handed down from one to another, until finally the message is passed to someone who is able to make their way to a certain backstreet in Brooklyn on 10 September 2001 and gently knock on their door, calling out to see if anyone’s inside.

  Oh my God… it’s possible, isn’t it?
/>   And what if that happened while she was standing out here like a complete lemon? Waiting for Foster to turn up, when quite probably he was never going to. Computer Bob was right. That’s what he’d said, wasn’t it? ‘Just wait.’

  ‘Oh, you freakin’ idiot, Maddy,’ she hissed to herself, tossing the polystyrene cup into the bin beside her and heading down the walkway towards the pier.

  CHAPTER 31

  65 million years BC, jungle

  ‘You can do what?’ said Liam.

  Becks hefted the log up in her taut arms and held it steady as Liam lashed it in place with a hand-woven length of rope made from the species of vine they’d found dangling from virtually every tree around the clearing.

  ‘I believe it is possible for me to calculate when in time we are with a very high degree of accuracy.’

  He wrapped the rope tightly round the log, tugging it hard so that it shuffled up against its neighbour. The palisade wall so far stretched only a dozen feet: about twenty logs, each just under eight inches in diameter and all roughly about nine feet tall. When they were done, they’d have a circular enclosure about four yards across — large enough for all sixteen of them to huddle inside should something nasty find its way on to their island and they needed somewhere to retreat to.

  ‘How?’ asked Liam.

  ‘I have a detailed record of all the variables during the time of the explosion.’

  ‘Variables?’

  ‘Data. Specifically, directly after we arrived here. The particle decay rate.’

  Liam cocked an eyebrow. ‘I haven’t a clue what that means, Becks.’

  She walked over to a dwindling pile of logs and effortlessly picked up another. They were going to need more. Across the clearing he could see Whitmore and several of the students carrying one between them, stumbling across the lumpy ground towards them. She slammed one end of the log down into the soft soil with a heavy thud, next to the last log, and Liam began to lash it into their wall.

  ‘I have a detailed record of the explosion. The number and density of tachyon particles that we were exposed to in 2015 and the number and density of tachyon particles that emerged here alongside ourselves.’