TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code (Book 3)

by Alex Scarrow

  The robot’s response took a moment to come back.

  [Current location coordinate offset is within target combat zone]

  Bob tried a different approach.

  [Information: current date is 12 June 1194]

  [Negative. Present time data is 11-03-2047, 07.45 hours]

  [Transmitting correct time data]

  The robot received the information, then cocked its head curiously.

  [Transmitted data . Data confirmed as valid. Please wait]

  [You are beyond mission parameters. You are not in the target combat zone]

  [. Data conflict]

  [Deactivate combat status immediately]

  The robot’s blue LED eyes dimmed and flickered out. And its frame sagged and shuddered.

  Liam clapped his hands together. ‘Bob! You did it!’ He got up off the ground and took a cautious step towards the immobile statue of corroded metal and melted plastic. ‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mary, you made it turn himself off, so you did! You’re a bleedin’ genius!’

  Bob shook his head. ‘It is not turned off. It is merely … considering …’

  Liam’s eyebrows arched and he stopped mid-stride. ‘Oh, in that case …’ He took several steps back. ‘Couldn’t we just hit it over the head? You know? While it’s busy considering things?’

  ‘An offensive action may activate its self-defence routine.’

  ‘Oh. How about we just run?’

  Bob’s mouth had just opened to reply when the statue stirred to life with the soft whirr of servo-motors.

  [Primary mission priority override]

  The blue eyes glowed once more.

  [Verbal command from J. LOCKE (password verified)]

  [Command received 4 minutes, 34 seconds ago]

  [Command status: active]

  [Command = ‘kill them both’]

  Bob eased his broadsword out of its sheath; the scrape of metal on leather seemed deafeningly loud in the stillness of the woods. The noise seemed to trigger a reaction from the robot. It pulled its own sword from a scabbard and, holding the weight of the long blade effortlessly in one hand, it advanced towards Bob.

  ‘Liam O’Connor, you should run.’

  CHAPTER 61

  1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

  The robot’s last step took it within striking range and with a whiplash movement it swung its sword at Bob’s head. Bob quickly raised his own, parrying the blow with the sharp, vibrating clatter and ring of metal on metal.

  Bob’s riposte was a lightning-fast lunge towards the robot’s ‘armpit’ – hydraulic fluid pipes momentarily exposed between plates of pitted metal armour. The lunge nipped at one of the pipes, causing a clear yellow liquid to spray out under pressure.

  The robot swung its arm down, snapping Bob’s sword like balsa wood. It reached out and grabbed Bob by his neck, lifting his feet off the ground and hurling him like a child’s toy against the fallen oak. He bounced off the stout trunk. The tree shuddered under the heavy impact.

  ‘You must run!’ barked Bob as he struggled to get to his knees.

  Liam shook his head. ‘I can help!’

  ‘RUN!’

  The robot reached down and grasped hold of Bob’s right ear in an attempt to lift him up off the ground. But with a loud ripping sound it was torn from his head, spattering them both with a thick gout of blood. The robot tossed the ear aside and reached down again, this time picking Bob up by his neck, raising him above its head.

  Liam could see a fine spray of the yellow liquid puffing out from the rubber pipe that Bob had managed to nick with his blade. It was pumping out in arterial pulses …

  Like blood … just like robot blood.

  The robot carried Bob, still aloft, like some sort of trophy, towards the trunk and then slammed him down across it. Liam thought he heard something snap as Bob grunted and rolled off the side, falling heavily to the ground.

  Jay-zus. It’s going to kill him!

  The robot thrust the sword still held in its other hand through Bob’s left upper arm, skewering him to the trunk, like a butterfly pinned in a collector’s cabinet.

  ‘Bob!’ Liam shrieked. Bob struggled to wrench the sword out of the wood, but its blade was buried at least a foot deep into the old dead oak.

  With Bob pinned down, the robot now slowly turned round to focus on Liam. Blue eyes softly glowing, evaluating its next target.

  ‘Please!’ Liam’s voice quaked. ‘I’m not in your war!’

  It advanced on him.

  ‘Hey there! H-hey! James Locke said to go an’ get me, right? Not … n-not kill me?’

  Liam fell as he took a backwards step, landing amid a cluster of nettles. The robot stood over him and then slowly squatted down, placing one glove-covered hand around Liam’s throat.

  ‘P-please! I can help Mr Locke! … I can h-help … h-him!’

  Behind the robot, Liam thought he heard something crack and rip. Or maybe that was the sound of the tendons in his own throat. He felt the robot’s fingers begin to compress his windpipe, firm and steady like someone winding a vice closed, feeling tender muscle and trachea, cartilage and his Adam’s apple pressing in on each other. His eyes saw white sparks, his ears roared with pulsing blood struggling to find a passage up to his brain through a dangerously compressed carotid artery.

  Then suddenly hot foul-smelling liquid was splashing into his face.

  The hand round his neck twitched painfully as if attempting to snap it, but then released its grip as if someone had suddenly decided to spin the vice’s handle the other way. The hand dropped down on to his chest like the lifeless appendage of a paralysed man.

  His vision cleared again and he saw the robot’s left arm dangling by its side. From beneath its armpit the rubber pipe flapped like a serpent, gushing yellow liquid in hot spurts. The combat robot flopped to its knees, blue-light eyes looking down uncomprehendingly at its powerless arm.

  Behind it he saw Bob standing triumphantly with the broken, jagged remnant of his sword in one hand. His other hand, his left arm, was a dangling tattered stump that ended with the fragments of an elbow and dangling loops of frayed tendons and muscles.

  Bob thrust the sharp edge of his broken sword into a small gap between the robot’s armour-plated shoulders and twisted. The robot lurched and more of the hot clear yellow liquid spurted out under high pressure.

  The robot’s half metal, half plastic-human face seemed to express something. Surprise. Shock. Then finally, with a whirr of hidden motors working against hydraulic pressure that no longer existed, it collapsed on to its side.

  ‘We were fortunate. It appears the combat unit’s rear motion sensor panel was damaged in an earlier fight,’ said Bob matter-of-factly as he began to examine the ragged remains of his left arm. The arterial spurts of his own opened veins already beginning to cease as the blood clogged into a thick sealing glue.

  ‘Bob!’ Liam managed to gulp. ‘Your … your arm!’ He looked round Bob’s wide frame to see the rest of it was still pinned to the tree.

  ‘I will live,’ he said gruffly. He looked down at the robot. ‘It is still active. Although motion on its combat chassis has been disabled.’

  Liam could see the blue-light eyes burning angrily still and its head turning frantically left and right with the loud whirr of a small overworked motor, as if that alone was going to move its heavy lifeless chassis across the forest floor.

  ‘What – what did you do to it?’ Liam struggled to talk. His throat was killing him.

  ‘I severed a major hydraulic pipe. The liquid provides the pressure system that enables the servo-motors to activate limb movements.’ He examined the disabled robot. ‘A design flaw of mechanical units,’ he said dismissively. ‘They cannot heal themselves. They are old technology.’

  ‘Right.’

  Bob started looking at the ground until he spotted what he was after. He stooped down and picked up a rock the size of a human head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Liam.


  ‘This unit is still active. It needs to be destroyed.’

  As Bob raised the rock over his head Liam found himself looking away. Even though it was just a machine on the ground, the plastic skin from the nose down made at least half its head look too human for him to want to watch it being smashed in.

  He heard several heavy thuds followed by a clanking and the clattering whirr of some part of it still working frantically. Another final thud and the noise stopped.

  ‘Is it … dead?’

  ‘It is dead,’ Bob replied.

  Liam turned to see a flattened hump of crumpled metal and shredded flesh-coloured plastic.

  ‘Before this unit found us, you indicated we need to return to the camp.’

  Liam looked at Bob. ‘We can’t go back … you’re in no condition to fight. Not like that.’

  ‘My combat proficiency has merely been reduced by fifty per cent. I am still an effective combat platform.’

  Liam looked at him. Perhaps he was right. Even with one arm he pitied any poor man who decided to stand in Bob’s way. But, looking at the pitiful dangling shreds of his left arm, he didn’t feel he had the heart to ask – no, to order – Bob to fight his way back into the camp.

  Then his gaze rested on the robot’s discarded dark cape, then the tattered rags and woollen hose that still clad the dead robot’s body.

  ‘All right … All right, I’ve got an idea. I guess we should bury the robot?’

  ‘Correct. The metal will corrode in due course.’

  ‘Well, let’s undress it first.’ He looked at Bob and cocked an eyebrow. ‘Guess who you’re going to pretend to be …’

  CHAPTER 62

  1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

  Liam eyed them cautiously as he stepped through the camp. There were expressions of hostility. Someone picked up and threw a handful of horse dung at him. It broke up in mid-air and rained down his chest as Liam covered his face behind bound hands in case there was any more coming his way.

  Behind him, the tall hooded figure silently prodded him forward with the tip of his sword and the crowd jeered as Liam stumbled and nearly fell. They made their way across the camp, the crowd parting reluctantly to let him through; he felt the soft tap of spittle on his shoulder and in his hair, and grimaced beneath his hands. The crowd was growing noisier.

  ‘Bloody French scum!’ a woman shouted and Liam felt something hard and sharp bounce off his back.

  ‘CEASE!’ boomed Bob from behind him.

  The effect that had on the press of gathered people was instantaneous. An utter silence. So quiet, in fact, that Liam could hear the gentle crack of burning kindling and the bubble of simmering water from a cooking pot nearby.

  They’ve never heard the Hood talk before.

  Perhaps that was a mistake. He wondered if the silence would be broken by someone claiming the hooded form was some impostor. But instead the respectful silence remained, and the crowd parted before them … all the way towards Locke’s hut.

  Liam led the way, doing his best to continue to look cowed, beaten and humiliated. With one last unnecessarily hard prod from behind that made him yelp, Liam stooped down through the low entrance and Bob followed behind.

  The hut was lighter. Of course it was. Bob had casually demolished one side of the round wall.

  He saw Locke standing, a gun aimed at them held in his shaking hands. ‘Stay where you are!’ he snapped. He glanced at Bob. ‘Where is it? What have you done with my combat unit?’

  Bob pulled the hood down. No point maintaining the ruse. ‘Your combat unit has been deactivated.’

  Locke’s eyes narrowed. ‘Good God … you’re a – you’re a genetic model, aren’t you?’

  Bob nodded. ‘W.G. Systems combat prototype. Foetus batch WGS09-12-2056.’

  ‘My God!’ he uttered with a smile of admiration.

  ‘Lower the weapon,’ said Bob.

  Locke hesitated, staring at the tip of the blade and realizing his gun wasn’t going to stop the giant standing in front of him. He slowly dropped his aim. ‘What now?’ he asked quietly.

  Liam flexed his wrists and wriggled out of the loose rag binding. ‘The Grail. It’s here somewhere in the camp, isn’t it?’

  Locke was silent. His face offered nothing.

  ‘Come on, Locke,’ said Liam. ‘We’re here for the same reason as you. We need to know what’s in it!’

  ‘The prophecy?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘If that’s what it is. If that’s the big secret in there … then yes!’

  Locke’s eyes remained on the sword.

  ‘Come on … Look, we’ve got the same goal, right? We can work together, so we can. There’s something coming, right? And there’s a warning about it in the Grail? Tell us where it is and maybe we can work out how to read the thing together!’

  The man shook his head. ‘King Richard possesses the only way to decode the Grail.’

  Liam glanced at Bob for help. But the support unit had nothing to offer at that moment. ‘We could take it back to our field office. We’ve got a powerful computer. There’s got to be a way we can use that to help us decode the thing.’

  ‘You have a way back!?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A way back to the future?’

  ‘Of course! We’ve got a rendezvous – time, place and everything.’

  Locke shook his head. ‘You’re lying! Apart from Waldstein, no one’s ever managed to develop a reliable return system!’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘Good God … then you people are for real. This agency of yours …’

  ‘The agency is real,’ said Bob.

  ‘Come on, what do you say, Mr Locke?’

  ‘We … we need what King Richard has in his possession. We would need the grille. There is no mathematical way to decode it.’

  Liam’s brow locked. ‘There must be another way. But look … it seems to me, the one thing we can’t do is allow King Richard to have both, right?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Bob.

  ‘History as it is says the Grail is a myth,’ continued Liam. ‘That’s how it goes. It gets lost. It becomes a myth and that’s all there is to it, no matter what secrets lie in there. It certainly doesn’t end up being found by King Richard and … and inspiring him to run off again to conquer the world on some fourth crusade or something.’

  ‘Information: the correct history is that King Richard attempts no more crusades. The last five years of his reign are spent attempting to re-establish royal authority in England and reclaim his lost territories in France.’

  ‘Right. No Grails. No more crusades. He’s all done with that.’

  Locke stroked his bearded chin thoughtfully.

  ‘If we can work out how to decode it, we will, you and me. And if we can’t, well …’ Liam shrugged. ‘Then we make sure it stays lost. Mr Locke? What do you say to that?’

  He pressed his lips together. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘There is little time to delay,’ said Bob. ‘If King Richard’s forces are on the way to Nottingham –’

  ‘The Grail would be safer in Nottingham Castle than out here in the woods,’ cut in Liam.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘And then we can decide our next step.’

  ‘All right.’ Locke finally nodded. He handed the gun to Liam. ‘All right. I … I suppose, yes, I should speak to my people out there.’

  ‘What will you tell them?’

  He looked at Bob. ‘If you wear the hood as you just did, they will believe you are the Hooded Man.’ Locke again stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘I will tell them we must offer our loyalty to John. That we should prepare to leave for Nottingham.’ He stepped towards the doorway and then turned to Liam. ‘If they return to Nottingham … you do still have the authority to pardon them all, correct?’

  Liam nodded. ‘Yes. Until I hear otherwise from John, I suppose I’m still the sheriff.’

  Locke smiled. ‘Thank you. T
hey’re not outlaws. They’re not bad people … they’re just hungry, desperate.’ He ducked and stepped out of the hut.

  Liam let out a breath and waited until the sound of Locke’s footsteps was lost amid the babble of voices outside. ‘Well, that went better than I thought it would.’

  ‘Do you trust Locke?’ asked Bob.

  ‘He’s after the truth; that’s all. He’s after the same thing as us. And he came back here using a one-way time machine. That’s a pretty brave thing to do. Not sure I’d have the guts to do that.’

  ‘But do you trust him?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I think I do. I think we have to. It makes sense we should work together, right?’

  Bob didn’t look entirely convinced. Liam nodded at the torn remnants of Bob’s arm. ‘How is it?’

  ‘Gone,’ replied Bob flatly.

  Liam winced. ‘Well, what I mean is, how’s what’s left of it – the upper bit?’

  ‘The arteries are sealed. There is no additional blood loss. I will need to dress the wound to ensure no foreign matter gets into the wound and causes secondary infections.’

  ‘It will regrow, right? You’re not going to be stuck as a one-armed support unit forever, are you, Bob?’

  Bob shook his head. ‘It will not regrow on its own. I will need to return to a growth tube for healing.’

  ‘Right. Well …’ he slapped Bob affectionately on the back, ‘that’ll be first thing on the “to-do” list when we get home,’ he grimaced. ‘Poor you, it always seems you have a tough time of it, each occasion we’ve gone back.’

  ‘That is my role.’

  ‘Aye, but … Ah well, I suppose I –’

  They both heard a sudden commotion: voices calling out, the sound of horses’ hooves thudding on soft ground.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Liam ducked down and stuck his head outside to see Locke’s people standing around bemused and motionless, watching the retreating rear of a baggage cart bounce across the lumpy ground of the camp and rattle on to a narrow track that curved and weaved into the forest and out of sight.

  Liam cursed. He stuck his head back in. ‘That slippery sod!’