by Alex Scarrow
‘Young. Like you… and having to grow up fast.’ He looked away. His voice had faltered. He sipped his coffee, gave himself a moment to regain his composure. ‘Only they never got a chance to grow up properly.’
‘Were you very close?’
He nodded.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. They lived an extra life. They had extra time, so they did. Not many people get to have that.’
‘You miss them much?’
His gaunt face wrinkled painfully. Maddy realized this conversation was hurting him. ‘Stupid question, I’m an idiot. I apologize, that was — ’
He shook his head. ‘No need to apologize. I have the three of you now. We’re just as much a family together as the others.’
‘Family… see? That’s why I think this is a good idea heading to Boston. Perhaps my folks can help out? The way I figure it, now we’re not living in a resetting time loop, then that money in the bank account won’t last forever. There’s just under twelve thousand dollars in it. Now it doesn’t get to “reset” itself every Monday morning, that money’s gonna go quickly. At least if we go see my mom and dad, they might be able to lend us some money to tide us — ’
‘Maddy. I think going to see your parents is a big mistake.’
‘Why?’
She could see Foster was hesitating. He had something to say and was fidgeting just like Liam tended to do when he was unsure of himself. ‘Foster?’
‘Maybe those killer support units do know you. Maybe they know all about you. Everything about you.’
She looked at him. He said that in a funny way, like it was meant to mean so much more than just those words. ‘Foster? What’s going on? What do you know? What’re you not telling me?’
Just then she heard a scream. It echoed across the quiet mall, drowning out the soft burble of mall music.
Sal.
She was running across the toddler play area, kicking aside multicoloured plastic balls that had escaped the small ballpool.
‘ MADDY! ’ she screamed again.
Maddy stood up and waved her arm, directing her over. ‘SAL? We’re over here! What’s up?’
Sal corrected course towards them. Behind her she could see Liam and the others scrambling out of the mini-mart, crossing the space in the middle of the mall. Sal barged her way through the coffee-shop tables and stools set up outside beneath a fake pampas-grass sunshade as if this was supposed to be a coffee bar perched on the beach of some tropical island. Stools clattered, pampas-grass parasols wobbled and tipped over. Sal finally came to a rest, bent over a waist-high partition of fake sun-bleached wood, struggling for breath.
‘Sal? What’s up?’
‘They’re here!’ she wheezed.
Chapter 19
2054, outside Denver, Colorado
It was a small thing. An insignificant thing, but Dr Joseph Olivera noticed Roald Waldstein left notes lying around from time to time. The old man tended to prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of pen and paper as opposed to tapping out his thoughts on a virtual keyboard.
Joseph Olivera noticed that habit of his boss as they worked together setting up the archway field office. Scribbled notes on pads of lined paper on the computer desk, most of it in Waldstein’s unique shorthand: characters and glyphs that only he could make sense of. Joseph wondered how such a brilliant person could be so scatterbrained, so messy. Or perhaps being untidy went hand in hand with genius: the messier the desk, the more brilliant the mind?
His notepads of cryptic notes were scattered everywhere and Waldstein was constantly rifling among his notes, cross-referencing them, correcting them. It was on one of these pages filled with the swirls of Waldstein’s writing that Joseph one day spotted the word ‘Pandora’. It had been the only word on the pad not in Waldstein’s shorthand. Pandora, of course, meant nothing to him. He suspected it was a codeword for one of the many commercial projects Waldstein worked on simultaneously. He knew his boss was working on several projects sponsored by the US military. Technology they’d inevitably want to adapt to weapons systems.
Joseph knew the man was no fool. Waldstein was a genius. But also a ruthless businessman. His technology patents went to the highest bidder even if ultimately it meant his inventions were to be turned into devices for killing, maiming.
Pandora then… a word he noted on a scrap of paper, and promptly forgot about.
The agency, or the New York Project, as Waldstein sometimes referred to it, became ‘active’ on Friday 4 September 2054. An occasion marked only by Joseph and Frasier Griggs. From the comfort and safety of a private research lab at W.G. Systems’ main research campus building in Wyoming, hidden a dozen miles away from the nearest town — Pinedale — amid tall, balding Douglas firs clinging to the valley slopes, the pair of them quietly clinked two glasses of Soyo-Vina Rouge in celebration and began to monitor the archway beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in a place called Brooklyn, New York, in the year 2001. They scanned for potential tachyon leakage or any emergency signal bursts.
Meanwhile, Waldstein had insisted on staying behind in 2001 to directly mentor the team. He wanted his to be the first face they saw as they woke up in their bunk beds. He wanted to be the father figure to the three of them. Said it was important that they wholly trusted him.
‘ They’ll be disorientated and frightened when they first come round,’ he said. ‘ I want to be there for them.’
And so Waldstein’s top-secret project had begun: one team, one field office, and all of history for them to watch out for and protect.
The agency was Waldstein’s back-up plan to keep history safe. That’s what he’d once told Joseph. It was his B plan.
His A plan had been his very public campaign three years ago to ensure that the world’s leaders signed up to an international law forbidding any nation from continuing to develop time-travel technology. It was to be a banned science. But he was wily enough to realize that in this troubled time, while every world leader might publicly denounce the technology, secretly they’d be vigorously funding it. Working on it. Desperate to be the first world power with the ability to take control of time itself: the ultimate weapons system.
‘ I want the New York Project to be self-reliant,’ Waldstein confided in Joseph.
‘ Once it’s up and running, the team will have to manage their own affairs, decide their own mission priorities. They must be entirely self-sufficient. ’
The team would have all the data, equipment, critical replacement parts they needed: spare support unit foetuses, growth tubes, spare component boards for the displacement machine.
Anything else they might need they could buy from a hardware or electronics store back in 2001.
‘ Here in 2054 we must have as little contact with them as possible. We cannot be directly linked to them, Joseph. I cannot afford to be caught dabbling in time travel like this. I must have a plausible, believable… deniability. ’
The team in 2001, then, was to be left entirely to their own devices. Griggs was the most vociferous on that. They had to survive on their own. No way could there be any interaction between the team and them. It could lead to their discovery in 2054. Their arrest. And the penalty under international law — ‘Waldstein’s Law’ — was rightly severe: the death penalty.
However, Waldstein devised a safe way they could make contact. If the team desperately needed to communicate with them in 2054, there was a way that they could do so. He called the method ‘a drop-point document’.
Joseph had been impressed by the man’s ingenuity.
It was a private ad in a Brooklyn newspaper. They had a yellowing page of newsprint contained in a glass case here in 2054. A dog-eared page that had somehow survived intact through half a century. If the team in 2001 needed to send a message forward in time, they simply had to dial that newspaper’s classifieds desk, and place a personal ad to go in the next issue. A personal ad that was to begin with the words, ‘A soul lost in time’.
T
he personal ad represented history being meddled with in a very small way. It would cause a tiny change. A tiny, harmless time wave that would ripple across fifty-three years to the present and change just one thing: the sheet of newspaper in that glass case.
That was the only method of communication Waldstein intended to permit them to use. Safe. Secret. Untraceable. Under no circumstances were they to beam a tachyon signal forward. If anyone in the present was scanning for telltale signs of time-travel technology development, the tachyon particle would be the giveaway. The smoking gun.
Pandora.
Joseph would have completely forgotten about that word if it wasn’t for another discovery he made not so very long after Waldstein returned from 2001, content that his team based in Brooklyn — the TimeRiders… that was the nickname he had for them — were ready to do the job entirely on their own.
As it happened, that team was the first team based in that Brooklyn archway.
They did quite well. Lasted quite a long time.
Chapter 20
7.27 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven Plaza, outside Branford
Maddy led Foster by the hand out of the coffee shop, through the stools and tables to meet the others in the middle of the toddler play area, ‘Chuckle Zone’.
Liam spoke first. ‘Bob just picked up a warning signal from SpongeBubba.’
‘I also just detected two idents,’ added Bob.
‘Where?’
‘Three hundred and seventy yards in that direction,’ he said, pointing along the central concourse of the shopping mall towards the front entrance to the parking strip beyond. He was pointing in the direction of their RV.
‘They must have visited our bus first,’ said Sal.
‘How did they know which vehicle was ours?’ Maddy asked. The parking area out front already had a few hundred cars in it. Even more now surely.
‘Your lab unit,’ said Bob. He turned to Rashim. ‘Your lab unit must have left its wireless communication on.’
Rashim nodded. ‘They must have homed in on Bubba’s signal.’
‘All the way from New York?’ said Liam. ‘I thought — ’
‘It’s only a short-range signal. Half a mile and you’d lose it,’ said Rashim.
‘Then they must have already been tailing us,’ said Maddy. She looked at Foster. ‘Do you think?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’
Becks had been watching the quick-fire conversation, her gaze snapping from one person to the next. But now her eyes suddenly widened as they settled on something at the far end of the concourse. ‘They are here,’ she said softly.
She pointed.
All of them turned to look. Two silhouetted figures emerging through large rotating glass doorways, striding purposefully in their direction, the pallid glow of morning light outside behind.
‘Jay-zus! There’s two of them!’
‘We can’t fight,’ said Maddy. ‘We’ve got to run!’
Bob stiffened, bristled like a guard dog. ‘I can fight them. I can provide you with time to escape.’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Bob,’ said Liam. ‘They’ll rip you to pieces, so they will.’
‘Shadd-yah! Who are they?’
‘We’re wasting time,’ said Maddy. She turned to look in the opposite direction. The concourse carried on another fifty yards where it terminated as a circular eating area, tables and plastic bucket chairs surrounded by a dozen fast-food outlets. A lift and a couple of escalators could take them up to a balcony overlooking the central area, and the upper floor of shops. But as far as she could make out, the only way out of the mall was back towards the approaching support units… and out of those big revolving glass doors at the front.
‘How about in there?’ said Sal. She pointed towards a large store with two floors, upper and ground. A pre-school toy store called TOYS-4-TOTS! All bright, happy-clappy colours inside. Out in front of the store a tall, surly-faced young man was putting on the head of a costume, the store’s mascot, a livid pink dinosaur that Maddy suspected was a blatant rip-off of Barney.
‘Yes! Go! Go!’ She grasped Foster’s hand and led the way. The others followed.
She pushed her way past a toddler on reins. The child turned to watch them pass by, blue eyes suddenly round and wide at the sight of Bob. Presumably thinking he was another store mascot, the toddler chuckled gleefully and reached out to grab and hug one of his tree-thick legs.
‘Back off!’ boomed Bob. The toddler toppled backwards in shock, landing and bouncing on its nappy-cushioned behind. It gazed up at them in confused silence, watching this odd assortment of grown-ups leave the play area before finally deciding to bawl.
Maddy led them into the store TOYS-4-TOTS! She shook her head. How’d they get away with a name like that? Still early enough in the morning it was mainly staff milling around inside: puffy-faced teens in gaudy pink store shirts bearing plastic name tags.
It was the right place to hide, cluttered with racks of chunky, plastic nonsense, large furry soft toys, rotating display stands of storybook CD-ROMs and nursery-rhyme favourites.
‘Everyone split up! We’ll lose ’em in here.’ She had hold of Foster’s hand still. She wasn’t going to let it go. She wasn’t losing him again. ‘Split up… and we’ll rendezvous…’
Where?
‘The diner?’ said Sal.
‘Yes…’ Not the RV. Definitely not the RV. There might be another of them waiting for them there. The diner was next to the motel. Good enough. ‘Make your way to the diner!’ She looked back out past the knock-off-Barney mascot standing out on the concourse. She could just make out the distinctive outlines of the support units. Closer now. The pair of them could so easily be Bob and Becks.
‘Go!’ she hissed. ‘We stand out like a sore thumb. Split!’
Their group fragmented in different directions: Rashim and Sal; Bob, Liam and Becks.
She pulled Foster with her, quickly weaving past an extravagant diorama made from BaBe-Blox building bricks into a maze of aisles laden with romper suits and cute, frilly Babygros. He was already breathing hard. This was getting difficult for the old man. ‘Maddy… I…’
‘Shut up, Foster! I’m not leaving you behind.’
She crouched low, pulling aside clothes hangers on a rail to peer out. Across the store she could see the top of Rashim’s head for a moment, then it was gone behind a row of super-large Sesame Street cuddlies. She looked back at the store’s entrance, hoping to see the support units striding past and missing them.
Nothing for the moment. Perhaps they’d already gone past.
‘Maddy…?’
‘Foster, shhhh… I’m trying to see — ’
‘Excuse me? Miss?’
Maddy turned to see a member of staff looking down at her. A girl in a pink shirt, with a nose stud and up-way-too-late-last-night red-rimmed eyes, stared wearily down at her. A face that clearly indicated this was too early in her cruddy day to put up with customer-stoopid like this.
‘Ma’am, you’re not really allowed to hide among the clothes like that.’
Maddy straightened up. ‘I… err… I was just looking for… umm… bargains.’
‘I think it might be best if you step out of the store, ma’am.’
Maddy remained where she was, her eyes on the store’s entrance. ‘Just give us a sec here… we just need… to uh…’
‘You need to leave, miss. You’re clearly not shopping. You’re being a nuisance — ’
‘Christ!’ Maddy turned on her. ‘Just give me a freakin’ moment, will you? It won’t kill you!’
The girl didn’t like that. ‘I’m asking you politely to leave, please. If you don’t, I’ll call the manager. I’ll call mall security.’
Just then Maddy saw them. The support units standing in the entrance, two pairs of grey eyes sweeping the toy store like prison searchlights.
Knock-off Barney, the implausibly pink dinosaur, sauntered cheerily towards them, probably we
arily parroting the store’s moronic catchphrase: Friends That Play Together Stay Together!!
The female support unit — Becks, Maddy found herself thinking — lashed out with a fist and caught Barney in the throat. He disappeared from view.
‘Whuh?’ said the girl in the pink shirt to herself. ‘Did she just punch Joshua…?’
The male support unit’s eyes panned round and caught sight of Maddy just as she was about to duck back down out of sight. He raised his arm, something in his hand glinted. Someone screamed.
And then the gunfire started.
Chapter 21
7.29 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven Plaza, outside Branford
Maddy felt a warm puff of displaced air on her cheek as the shot whistled past her head. She heard the shot impact on something. A soft thud followed by a gasp.
She turned to see the girl on her knees beside her, dark crimson blossoming across her store shirt. She looked down at the blood then at Maddy, perplexed.
‘I… I… just got shot…’
Another couple of gunshots, deafening in the shop’s stillness. The baby clothes hanging from the rail above Maddy lurched and danced. A blizzard of foam stuffing erupted from a Humpty Dumpty on a shelf nearby.
Maddy remained hunched down, Foster beside her. ‘My God, we’re gonna die!’ she whimpered to him. There were raised voices outside the toystore in the mall’s main concourse. A male voice. Two of them, issuing a sharp challenge. A warning.
More shots, aiming out of the store this time.
‘Maddy… you go!’ It was Foster.
‘They’re distracted!’ she whispered. ‘Come on, let’s — ’
‘No!’ He shook his head. ‘I can slow them down. You go!’
‘Slow them down?’ She made a face. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Not fight them… I’ll talk to them.’
More shots. One of them hit a wall nearby, showering them with flakes of plaster.
‘You can’t talk to — ’
‘They’re just like Bob! They have the exact same AI.’