‘What? You are not leaving me here, Bob! Do you understand?’ Liam snarled under his breath. ‘That’s an order!’
A guard stepped forward and roughly grabbed Liam by the shoulder.
‘Be quiet!’ he snapped in accented English. ‘Join the others!’
Liam staggered forward and then slumped to his knees among the group of prisoners. He watched as Bob stood perfectly still, face still hidden by the mask and hood, and looked helplessly on.
An officer called out to Bob from across the lawn to help with dragging and stacking the bodies for disposal.
The unit turned hesitantly.
Behind the glass plates of the gas mask, a complex computer loaded with AI that was still in the process of learning, still almost childlike, was desperately juggling mission priorities and variables, calculating a million different ways to proceed.
Liam watched the lumbering figure move away.
Oh blimey. What kind of a mess am I stuck in now?
CHAPTER 39
2001, New York
‘How long until the return window, Madelaine?’ asked Foster.
Maddy looked up at a screen. ‘We’re counting down the last two minutes,’ she replied.
‘All right, then. We’ll find out what the boys have seen and work it out from there.’ He smiled thinly.
The sudden erasure of history before 1956 made it almost impossible to identify exactly when and where things had begun to change – and to zero in on that. While the wiping out of historical records may well have been on the whim of some insane Nazi dictator, to appease his ego no doubt, it also had the additional effect of completely hiding the tracks of whomever had instigated this time shift. If that’s what some time traveller had intended, then he was being very, very clever. Leaving no trace, no tracks… nothing for them to identify the moment they’d arrived in the past.
Very clever.
Maddy interrupted Foster’s train of thought. ‘Uhh, Foster… a warning dialogue box has come up.’
He looked at it.
LOCATION POINT PHASE INTERRUPTION
ABORT OR CONTINUE?
‘The computer’s picking up varying density packets in the pick-up window.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The computer monitors the area inside the target window for the minute before we’re due to send back our operatives. If there’s a lot of unexpected movement through it, we can assume there are unwary people or perhaps an animal walking across it. If it’s persistent enough, the computer flags a warning.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Wait and see if it continues,’ he replied, pointing to a graphic display on the screen. ‘There’s a density packet spike. Someone or something walked through about ten seconds ago.’
‘We aren’t going to leave them?’ asked Sal, her voice brittle with worry.
Foster shook his head. ‘That won’t happen,’ he reassured her. ‘If we need to abort this window, we’ll try again in an hour.’
He looked at the display. There were no more density spikes.
‘It looks like a one-off,’ he said. ‘Could easily have been a bird flying through, or rubbish blown across. It happens quite often.’
Sal managed a wan smile. ‘OK.’
‘Thirty seconds,’ said Maddy. ‘We aborting or continuing?’
The display looked flat. Whatever had passed through didn’t look like it was coming back. In all likelihood it was Liam accidentally stepping in too early. The support unit had probably advised him to stand clear and now they were both waiting patiently to come home.
‘Continue,’ said Foster.
Maddy clicked the mouse and the dialogue box winked off screen.
‘Ten seconds.’
Sal turned towards the middle of the archway’s floor, ready to welcome them both back.
‘Keep well clear, Sal,’ said Foster, pointing at a faint circle of yellow chalk on the concrete, scuffed and in need of a refresh. It marked out the dimension of the return window. You really didn’t want to be standing there when it opened.
‘Five seconds.’
The generator hummed, the lights momentarily flickered and dimmed. Foster looked at the graphic display, expecting to see the graph spike as Liam and Bob stepped in together. But it remained flat.
Come on, boys… stop messing around.
‘And three… and two…’
The graph suddenly spiked.
The lights went out completely.
As they flickered back on, he was about to turn round and give them both a telling-off for cutting it so fine when he heard Sal’s scream.
A young man stood there, staring at them, eyes widened with fear and incomprehension – a young soldier, perhaps no more than a couple of years older than Liam, blond hair cropped short, his pale choir-boy cheeks smudged with dirt and flecks of dried blood. He wore a black rubber boiler suit, rolled down to his waist. Beneath it was a grey army tunic with oak leaves on the collar and an eagle emblem on the chest.
His eyes darted from Sal, to Maddy, to Foster… and then to someone else’s dismembered leg and arm lying at his feet amid a scattering of dried leaves, twigs and a circular tuft of blood-spattered grass and soil.
‘Was –?… Was ist das?’ He looked down at the severed limbs on the ground, oozing blood on to the concrete floor. ‘Was geschieht? Wo bin ich?’
His mouth fluttered in fear, his voice broken, shrill, like a child suddenly finding himself lost in a crowded mall.
Maddy reacted first. She stood up and slowly approached him, hands raised. ‘It’s OK,’ she cooed softly. ‘Everything’s all right… We’re not going to hurt you.’
The young man gathered his wits enough to unsling his gun and swivel the barrel down to point at her.
‘Halt, stehen bleiben! Wer sind Sie? Wo bin ich?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t… I don’t do German, sorry,’ she said, offering him a friendly smile.
‘Keep him talking,’ said Foster quietly.
Maddy pointed to herself. ‘My… name… is Maddy. And you?’
The young German stared silently at her, his breath rasping in and out, fluttering with fear.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked in her best motherly voice. ‘This,’ she said, pointing to Sal, ‘this is Sal.’
‘Hi,’ said Sal, smiling sweetly and slowly offering him a small hand to shake.
He glanced from one girl to the other.
‘Ich… Ich bin Feldwebel Lohaans.’
Maddy guessed she was hearing his rank and surname.
‘But what’s your first name? Hmm?’ she asked, taking another step forward.
The young man racked his gun nervously. ‘Stehen bleiben!… Stay!’ he barked, licking his dry lips.
Maddy stopped dead and shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry. I’ll stay right where I am. I won’t hurt you.’
He nodded, seeming to understand that. He took another deep breath. ‘You… Amerikaner?’
She smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘This…?’ he said, and shrugged, lacking the words in English to complete the question.
‘This place is in America. In New York, actually.’
The man’s eyes widened. ‘This… New York?’
She nodded.
He snorted nervously. ‘Washington… zehn –’ he made a whooshing noise – ‘New York?’
‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘Whoosh… and now you’re right here. Crazy, huh?’
That seemed to be one of the three or four English words he knew. He nodded and managed a bemused grin. ‘Ja… craz-ee.’
The generator suddenly hummed, the lights winked and a moment later the young soldier, the arm, leg a
nd most of the tuft of grass and soil were gone.
‘What happened?’
‘I initiated an emergency dump,’ replied Foster. ‘He’s back where he came from. Although he’s…’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he replied. He looked at Maddy and Sal. ‘That… that was a German soldier who looked like he’d just been sucked out of a fight, right off the lawn of the White House, no less.’
‘An invasion?’
He nodded. ‘Day one of recorded, or should I say approved, history, it would seem, begins the day that America was successfully conquered by the Germans. Just like we were saying.’
‘Oh, no,’ whispered Maddy, ‘then we dropped Liam and Bob right into the middle of a battle.’
Sal’s face paled.
‘We can get them back, though, right?’
‘We’ll try again in an hour. But only if we don’t see any other odd density packets at the last moment. I don’t want to bring back another Nazi, or a part of one, if I can help it.’
‘But if we can’t bring him back? Is that it? Is he stuck there?’
‘There’s another scheduled for twenty-four hours later.’
‘And if he misses that too?’
‘Madelaine, he’s a resourceful lad. He has Bob with him. They’ll do just fine where they are. And, as I said, there is a way we can communicate with them. We can let them know a where-and-when for another extraction window.’ He turned to both the girls. ‘What’s of more importance to us right now is whether there are any more shifts due, whether the world has stabilized as it is, or whether it’ll get worse.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘All we can do right now is try to work out where history was altered, see if we can narrow things down a bit. My guess is something must have happened during the Second World War, something that changed the balance.’
Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah… maybe.’
‘So,’ continued Foster, ‘what we’ll do is work with what we have. We’ll have to explore the New York out there. Perhaps there’ll be clues as to what happened prior to the invasion of America. OK?’
She nodded.
‘OK, Sal?’
She looked at him, tears rolling down her pale cheeks. ‘Poor Liam,’ she whimpered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’
Foster got up tiredly and walked over to her. He stooped down in front of her. ‘Don’t worry, Sal… He’ll be fine. With Bob right beside him, he’ll be just fine, I promise you.’
‘What now?’
‘We need more information. Sal, I want you to head out to Times Square again. Just find a seat somewhere and observe all you can. See if you can pick out any visual clues… anything at all that hints at events prior to 1956. And, Madelaine?’
She nodded.
‘We need to trawl their historical database. If you can find a way to hack through their security measures, perhaps we can learn a bit more. And then we’ll get ready to activate the back-up rendezvous.’ He sucked in air through gritted teeth. ‘Hopefully, second time round it won’t be cluttered with German troops, eh?’
CHAPTER 40
1956, Washington DC
Bob observed the hive of activity going on around him. His cold eyes locked on and studied the giant disc floating gracefully above the city and intermittently spewing out troops. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire, the muffled thud of explosions.
Somewhere in the city, small pockets of American soldiers were still holding out, unaware that the struggle was all over, that their leader, President Eisenhower, had gone down fighting, and even now his body was being carried out and laid across the steps in front of the building along with the rest of his cabinet and chiefs of staff.
An officer standing nearby adjusting his tunic and Wehrmacht peaked cap, no longer encumbered with a drop suit, was hurriedly directing activity on the ground.
‘You!’ He pointed at Bob. ‘You can remove the mask. The air’s clear.’
Bob silently removed the gas mask. His hair – only a fortnight’s worth of growth, still just coarse bristles – and his hard emotionless face made him look no different from the other storm-troopers around him.
‘When we’ve tidied up the mess out here, then you can take a rest,’ the officer said. ‘Now, get a move on, man.’
Bob’s eyes narrowed as he made a millisecond calculation on whether he should continue to pretend being an enemy unit or sprint a dozen paces across the rutted grass and effortlessly rip this man’s arms from their sockets.
[Attack: tactically incorrect at this moment]
He turned away and reached down for the body of a marine, flinging the ragged remains over his shoulder and carrying it across to where a pile of corpses was slowly growing. As he did so, Bob’s inexperienced silicon mind worked on a bigger issue, more important than any immediate tactical assessments. He had a strategic command decision to make…
Tactical Options:
1. Rescue Operative Liam O’Connor
2. Return to field office with gathered intelligence
3. Prevent further contamination – self-terminate
Bob’s AI routines worked more efficiently with smaller numbers of options on each branch of its decision tree – two or three was the ideal number. Any larger an array of choices slowed down the risk-assessment processing exponentially.
He scanned the prisoners clustered together and identified Liam crouched miserably among them and looking back at him. If Bob had had a little more time to become more familiar with human facial expressions and muscle tics, he might have been able to recognize the mixture of fear, anger and betrayal written across the young man’s face.
His eyes suddenly registered a growing commotion among the cedar trees; the place where the time window had been due to open. Soldiers were gathering round something on the ground – something unpleasant enough for one or two of them to double over and dry-heave.
Whatever was going on it was becoming too busy to clear the area, too busy to consider it a viable extraction point, for now, at least. He decided the option that best satisfied the mission’s parameters was the first option: to rescue Liam.
Option 2 left Liam stuck in the past where he might potentially be tortured and expose dangerously revealing details of the future.
Option 3, to trigger his computer brain to fry itself, achieved absolutely nothing useful at this moment in time.
He cocked his head.
Option 1 had the highest mission-relevance rating. He closed his eyes for a moment.
Option 1 Solution Assessment:
1. AWAIT 2nd extraction window – 57.30 minutes’ time
2. IF success of extracting Liam is greater than 25%, THEN proceed
3. ELSE… Await 3rd extraction window in 24 hours
Bob opened his eyes and tossed the corpse he’d been carrying on to the pile. The solution was an acceptable one, even though it amounted to little more than wait and see. He was not going to leave nor was he going to terminate himself; instead he was going to wait for a better opportunity to rescue Liam to present itself.
But, he realized, something else had been factored into the decision, something to which he couldn’t assign a recognizable label.
For now he decided to give it the name indefinable factor.
This indefinable factor wasn’t coming from his database or his AI code; it was coming from the small part of his brain that was organic, the tiny nub of wrinkled flesh in his skull linked by a myriad hair-thin wires to his on-board silicon wafer-cell computer. And all this indefinable factor could do was whisper a very illogical and impractical message into his logical computer, an awkward message that was beginning to ca
use a little confusion amid his carefully ordered AI code.
Liam O’Connor is my friend.
CHAPTER 41
1956, command ship over Washington DC
Oberleutnant Ralf Hoffman stepped on to the freight platform with two other men who were hefting a heavy body bag between them. They let it down gently and, like him, looked up in awe at the dark sky above them, at the giant grey underbelly of Der Führer’s command ship.
Hoffman had been billeted aboard the ship with the men of his unit, the 23rd Fallschirmjäger Assault Corps. He was familiar with the inside of the air vessel – but, viewing it from outside, the truly immense size of the thing came home to him.
The freight platform, a square alloy plinth large enough to fit one truck at a time, slowly began to winch upwards. Beneath them the grounds of the White House and proud boulevards of Washington DC gradually receded.
Hoffman watched the waning light of the afternoon fade as dusk rapidly toned the smoke-smudged sky over the city. There were no street lights on, no lights on in any of the buildings. The city’s power stations had been taken out in the first wave of the assault. Only sporadic fires burning here and there illuminated Washington DC, along with the occasional stabbing flicker of gunfire in the streets.
He took a deep breath.
Nerves.
He was on his way up to Das Mutterschiff… ‘the mother ship’, the nickname his men had for the giant airship. More specifically, he was on his way to the upper deck of the mother ship, where a long line of broad windows looked out on to the world below – Der Führer’s viewing deck.
Hoffman had never been invited up there. Few men, other than the Führer’s high command and senior chiefs of staff, had. It was more than the great man’s command and control point – it was his campaign home. A very special place.
The platform continued to winch them up with a dull motorized clacking from above. He looked up to see the trapdoor yawning open in the vessel’s belly.
All of a sudden, floodlights kicked in and powerful columns of light speared down into the gathering twilight, panning across the city below. Hoffman winced and shaded his eyes. Gazing up just as the damned things had been switched on, he was surprised he hadn’t been blinded.
TimeRiders Page 15