by Alex Scarrow
God knows what they’ve been through.
‘How long?’ asked Chan again.
‘About four and a half hours,’ Maddy replied. ‘Four and a half hours and her condition should be stable. She’ll have replenished enough blood to function again.’
‘What about her arm?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether this healing thing actually regrows limbs and stuff. Bob, our computer system, just told me she’d be able to repopulate blood cells. We’ll see, I guess.’
Liam’s eyes came back from far away and met hers. ‘You said… function again?’
She nodded. ‘She has to go back, Liam. You know that. There are loose ends that need fixing.’
The others looked at her. It was clear to her that she was the only one doing any strategic thinking here, thinking beyond the moment.
That’s your job, Maddy. Team strategist… remember?
‘She has to go back and correct what happened… what it is that’s made the present the way it is.’
‘It’s those creatures, isn’t it?’ said Cartwright. ‘The ones that came through your portal… they’re the thing that’s different?’
Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Liam, is that — ?’
Oh my God.
She hadn’t noticed it before. In fact, she had, but she’d thought it was a streak of dust, or perhaps a dusting of some exotic jungle pollen. Looking at Liam right now, even in the dim crimson glow of the birthing tube, she could see a shock of white hair on his left temple. And his left eye… the white of it mottled with the web-like blur of a burst blood vessel.
‘Yes…’ he said after a few moments, not registering the look on her face. ‘Yes… those things, they learned a few tricks from us.’
‘There’s more?’ asked Sal.
He nodded. ‘Yeah… thirty or forty, I suppose. A pack of them.’ His eyes remained on the outline of Becks’s form, curled up like a foetus. In her sleep, vulnerable-looking — just a teenage girl. ‘She managed to kill some of them, but the rest are back there.’
Maddy looked at Sal and Cartwright. ‘Then those hunters across the river, they must be distant ancestors. They’re somehow linked, right? The long heads?’
Cartwright nodded. ‘It’s an unusual configuration.’ He stroked his chin. ‘No… it’s a unique configuration.’
Maddy had lifted the shutter door briefly after they’d seen to Becks and shown Liam and the other two the jungle that now replaced New York. The hunters were no longer probing the riverbank for mud creatures and had returned to the settlement on the far side of the broad river.
‘They’re descendants, Liam,’ she said. ‘Distant… very distant descendants.’
‘And their ancestors,’ cut in Cartwright, ‘must have learned something from you… something that enabled them to survive and prosper. Something, some sort of skill, that helped them survive the K-T event, whatever wiped out the dinosaurs.’
Liam nodded slowly. She could see he’d worked that much out already. ‘So… someone has to go back and kill the whole pack.’
‘Yes,’ said Maddy, reaching a hand out and holding his arm gently. ‘They can’t be allowed to live and develop any sort of intelligence that could save them. They should have died out with all the other dinosaurs.’
‘OK.’ He took a deep breath. ‘OK… I’ll go — ’
‘No,’ she said, a little too quickly. She tried not to let her stare at his bloodshot eye linger. ‘Not you, Liam. You need rest.’
‘If not me, then who? No one else — ’
‘The support unit.’
‘Becks?’ He shook his head. ‘No. She’ll take days to recover, surely. And she’ll not be able to face them all on her own. They’ll kill her, to be sure.’
Her? She?
She held his arm. ‘Listen to me, Liam.’ She nodded at the birthing tube. ‘I know you’ve been through a lot together, but remember… it’s just a support unit in there. A meat robot. A tool for the job. That’s all it is. It’s expendable.’
‘I’ll go with her,’ he said.
‘No.’ Maddy shook her head firmly. ‘No. You can’t go back there again.’
‘Why?’
He doesn’t know, does he? He hasn’t looked into a mirror. He hasn’t realized how much damage going so far back in time has already done to him. She wondered why he hadn’t yet noted the condition of the girl and Chan. Both looked like people suffering from advanced radiation sickness. But then… from his time, Liam wouldn’t know anything about radiation sickness. Perhaps he attributed the bleeding noses, the pallid complexion to shock. Perhaps he was too much in shock himself to have noticed.
‘Because you’re too valuable to lose, Liam. We need you here.’
‘We need you,’ added Sal, ‘and…’ Her face dipped out of range of the soft peach glow and in the darkness they heard movement, a scrape, the heavy thud of something metallic and the rattle and tinkle of a buckle. Her face returned and she held up something that glinted in the dull light. ‘And she’d have this gun, Liam. Not just a bamboo stick.’
Maddy nodded. ‘You saw how good it was earlier.’
‘High-calibre MP15 assault rifle,’ said Cartwright. ‘It’ll mince those monsters up no problem.’
‘We’ll give her a few hours to rebuild herself. OK?’
‘I’ll uhh… I’ll go and see how many clips of ammo Forby has… had,’ said Cartwright.
Maddy pressed out a smile, and nodded. ‘You do that.’
She turned back to Liam, watching the floating body of Becks. She could see he felt something for the support unit, that they’d bonded in the past… that this time, unlike last time, if the support unit fell, there’d be no one to retrieve its AI, no one to dig the computer out of its cranium and bring it back.
Be the leader, Maddy. There’s no discussion here. It’s decided.
‘Sorry, Liam, she has to go,’ she said forcefully. ‘That’s how it is. She has to do this. We need New York back; we need our power feed back before we run out of fuel. Anyway…’ She glanced at the silhouette of Cartwright shuffling cautiously out through the doorway by the light of a wind-up torch. She lowered her voice. ‘Anyway, there’s going to be one more job for you to do before we’ve dug ourselves out of this whole freakin’ hole.’
CHAPTER 73
2001, New York
Liam watched the sun setting across the river, picking out thin skeins of smoke from the settlement perched on the muddy banks on the far side. He saw several pinpricks of light in the middle of the round huts.
Fire. One of the earliest markers of intelligence. He wondered how many aeons ago this descendant species had learned they could control it, use it. A far cry from the primitive animal fear for it demonstrated by their ancestors.
He heard the shutter rattle as Maddy stooped under it and joined him outside. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Tired.’ Squatting against the outside brick wall of their archway, watching the jungle turn dark and the sky’s rich palette change from crimson to violet, he realized how utterly spent he felt. Finally, after two weeks of nervous tension, two weeks of fearing something primal, savage and hungry could snatch him away at any time
… here he was, somewhere safe at last. Somewhere he could close his eyes for a moment and actually, properly, rest.
‘She’s nearly ready,’ said Maddy. ‘We’re prepping the portal to take her back to one minute after we closed the last one. Those creatures should still all be gathered there, scratching their heads and wondering where you went.’
‘How is she?’
‘The arm looks like it’s begun repairing itself. I noticed there’s some new muscle tissue. No skin yet. I presume that regrows at some point. Anyway, Sal’s bound her arm and hand in bandages to protect it.’
‘How is she?’ he asked again. ‘Can she do it?’
‘She says she can operate to forty-seven per cent functional capacity.’ Maddy smirked. ‘And she’s really rather ple
ased about the weapon.’
Liam laughed softly. ‘Just like Bob.’
‘They could be brother and sister.’
‘Well, they are… I suppose.’
‘True.’
Liam nodded towards the village. ‘It feels wrong, in a way.’
‘What?’
‘What we’re doing… killing the rest of that pack. I mean, look what they became.’ He shook his head and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I’m almost proud of them, so I am. They’re like, I suppose… I feel like they’re sort of my creation. We showed them how to build a bridge, how to use a spear. And, after Lord knows how many thousands of years…’
‘Millions actually.’
‘… millions of years, they’ve become this. A brand-new intelligent race and here we are, going to wipe them all out. What’s that word for it?’
‘Genocide?’
‘Aye, that’s it… like that Hitler tried to do to the Jews. And we’re going to do it to those things. They’re not just dumb animals, Maddy. They were clever back in the jungle, you could see that. Very clever, and now here they are just as smart as us humans.’
‘No, Liam, they’re not. Something that old man, Cartwright, said
…’
‘What?’
‘Ask yourself this: just how long have they been at this stage of development? Hmm? They could have got this far — canoes, spear, huts an’ all — millions of years ago and yet… and yet this is as far as they ever got.’ She gazed at the distant village. ‘Otherwise, why aren’t they walking around in smart suits and talking on cell phones?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe they did once. Maybe millions of years ago they were that smart, and this place was a big city like New York.’
‘And what? They chose to become savages again?’
‘Who knows? Maybe they had some sort of war? Maybe they once had an incredible civilization that eventually collapsed into ruins. Or some doomsday weapon wiped them out but for a few poor bloody survivors.’
Maddy nodded. ‘It’s possible, I guess. A lot can happen in sixty-five million years.’
‘Aye, and who’s to say it doesn’t one day happen to us too, eh? And soon.’
She looked at him. ‘Kramer’s time?’
‘Foster’s time, perhaps. You remember the things he told us about the future? The dark times ahead. All that global warming, the flooding, pollution and the poisoned seas… the starving billions?’
She did. It was a future she’d thought she was beginning to see in her lifetime. That big meeting in Copenhagen that was supposed to be the last best chance for the world to agree on how to stop global warming — it had failed miserably. She wondered whether historians from midway through the twenty-first century would point to that day as the very beginning of the end.
‘Well… that’s the future whether we like it or not, Liam. And it’s our job to fight to keep it that way.’
He nodded. ‘Hmm… but do you ever wonder, Maddy?’
‘Wonder what?’
He looked at her, with his bloodshot eye and thin shock of snow-white hair, and for a moment he looked both old and young at the same time. ‘Do you wonder whether that future, the one Foster told us all about, whether that’s the right future to fight for?’
‘I dunno. I suppose we just have to trust him that it is.’
The sun dipped behind the far horizon of trees, behind the thin lines of campfire smoke. From inside the arch they could hear the voices of the others: Sal helping the support unit… Becks… get ready.
‘She’s been given orders to kill them all, then destroy your camp. Burn everything so there’s nothing left behind to leave fossil traces. We’ll know if she’s successful — ’ Maddy nodded out at the jungle — ‘when this all goes and we get New York back, and…’ She lowered her voice a little. ‘And the tricky situation we were stuck right in the middle of just before jungle-land arrived…’
‘Cartwright?’
She nodded.
‘So…’ He cocked a brow. ‘I’m presuming he, and the poor fella with the gun, are the chaps who found our message?’
‘Not exactly. It was found a lot, lot earlier. In the 1940s, apparently. But Cartwright runs this little government agency,’ she snorted, ‘an agency a bit like ours, I guess — small and secret. Its job for the last sixty years has been to be a custodian of your message. And to finally make contact with us in 2001.’
‘And he came knocking?’
‘Oh, he came knocking all right. Just before the last time wave, we had men with guns standing guard outside in the backstreet. In fact, they had several areas of the neighbourhood sealed up with roadblocks and soldiers and stuff. Helicopters overhead and everything. Quite a big deal. You’d have loved it.’
‘My fault.’ Liam looked guilty. ‘Sorry about that.’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t be. You had to send the message. There was no other way we would have found you.’
Sal was calling out for her. It was time.
‘Thing is, Liam,’ she said hurriedly, ‘we have to be ready to move, and move quickly. If Becks is successful… we’ll get all of that situation right back in our faces. We’ll be right where we were. So, I’m going to need to send you back to make sure they don’t get your message.’
‘Dinosaur times?’
‘Oh no. Not that far.’ She managed to stop herself saying because that would probably finish you off. ‘No… it’ll be the second of May 1941. You need to prevent some kids from finding a particular chunk of rock.’
He smiled. ‘And Cartwright and his agency will never have existed?’
She was ducking down under the shutter when she paused. ‘Well… his agency might not exist, or maybe it will, but it will be busy with some other secret it’s trying to keep from the American people.’
‘Right.’
‘When that time wave comes, Liam… we’ll need Cartwright standing outside when I turn on our time field. His life will be rewritten along with the rest of the corrected reality. He’ll have no memory of all of this.’
Liam bent down and looked under the shutter and into the archway. He could see Forby’s dark boots poking out of the end of the blanket they’d wrapped his body in.
‘And what about him?’
‘Forby? Not sure. If his body is outside the field I suppose he gets to live again, doing whatever job he was doing before Cartwright and his agency suddenly winked into existence. The point is… whatever that means for him and the old man, we won’t have a backstreet full of spooks with guns. We’ll be back to normal.’ She grinned up at him. ‘Which would really be quite nice.’
‘True… but do we not still have to get Edward Chan back home?’
‘One thing at a time,’ she sighed. ‘Come on, let’s send Becks on her way.’
Liam followed her under the shutter and then cranked it down after him.
He rejoined Maddy and the others gathered around the computer desk. He saw Becks standing in the middle of them, the assault rifle cradled in her arms, one of them swathed in bandages up to her elbow.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked over the hubbub of other voices: questions from Cartwright and the kids that Maddy was busy trying to field as she configured the return time-stamp.
‘I am fine, Liam.’
‘What about that spear wound? That looked pretty bad, so it did. Are you sure you’re fit enough to go?’
‘My organic diagnostic systems indicate my kidney was ruptured and is no longer functioning. The organ can be repaired later,’ she added. ‘It will not affect my performance.’
‘Your arm?’
‘My arm is operable.’
‘OK,’ said Maddy. ‘I’ve set it to one minute after the other window. There’ll still be background tachyon particles around from the previous window, but I’ve moved the location thirty feet away so there shouldn’t be any disruptive effect on your arrival portal. OK?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘You understand the mission parameters?’
‘Kill all the reptile hominids. Destroy all evidence of our camp. Return window set for two hours after arrival.’
Maddy nodded. ‘You got it. And, of course, remember to bring the gun back with you.’
One of Becks’s dark eyebrows arched slowly. ‘Well… duh,’ she said flatly.
Sal giggled. ‘That’s cool!’
Maddy grinned at Liam. ‘Looks like she’s been doing some learning of her own.’
He nodded.
‘All right, we haven’t got time to fill the tube. She’s going back dry. Stand clear of that circle on the ground.’ She pointed to the circle of chalk, and within it, a patch of concrete floor darker than the rest. She sighed. ‘We’re gonna need to fill in the floor once again after all this is finished.’
The others pulled warily back and Becks wandered over and planted her feet inside the circle, her knees bent, ready to react at a moment’s notice, the gun loaded, cocked and raised, the assault rifle’s butt pressed firmly against her shoulder and ready to fire.
‘Be careful, Becks,’ said Liam. ‘We want you back safely.’
She nodded hesitantly. ‘Affirmative, Liam O’Connor. I will be careful.’
‘Are we all set?’ asked Maddy.
‘Affirmative.’
‘All right, Bob.’ Maddy turned back to the desk mic. ‘On my countdown. Ten… nine… eight…’
The archway filled with the sound of power surging into the displacement machine, the green LEDs winking off one after another as they indicated the drain of stored energy. A three-yard-diameter sphere of shimmering air suddenly enveloped Becks. The ceiling fluorescent light dimmed and flickered.
‘Seven… six… five…’
Her cool grey eyes turned to rest on Liam and she smiled uncertainly.
‘Four… three… two…’
‘Good luck,’ he mouthed, unsure whether she could read that in the flickering fizzing light.
‘… one…’
And then she was gone. Air whistled past them all to fill the sudden vacuum created.
‘Wow,’ whispered Edward.
‘Now we wait,’ said Maddy. She shot a glance at Liam. ‘And we make sure we’re ready.’