‘I think I just might survive you, sir!’ he smirked. ‘In fact, I think we should have a bet to see who survives the longest.’
Kevin laughed.
It was at this point Youssef walked into the operations room and put his hand on Jacqueline’s shoulder. ‘What’s the situation?’
‘They’re trapped, sir. We’ve interfaced with the database, but the upload is going to take another five minutes. They have just a little over two minutes of air left in the room. They’re sealed in. I can’t lock onto them.’ She relayed all this information while simultaneously monitoring the database, looking for an exit or a weakness in the force fields and trying to lock onto their signals.
Youssef leaned in to see what was happening on the monitor. ‘Kevin, how are you two holding up?’ he asked.
This seemed to brighten him up. ‘We’re holding up fine, my friend. Will you still be able to upload the database after we’re gone?’
Jacqueline answered that one. ‘That won’t be a problem, sir. The interface is now nothing to do with any physical connection. We’ve got all the addresses we require to analyse it from here, we just need the portal device to be there until the upload is complete. I am so sorry, guys, I just can’t find a way out of that force field.’
Vincent looked at Kevin. ‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Less than a minute, you’re going to start to lose your breath pretty quickly in there.’
‘Can you just talk to us, as we go? You’ve got such a nice voice,’ Vincent said.
‘Sure, I can,’ Youssef replied.
This cracked Vincent up, and he began to laugh. ‘Yeah, you have too, sir. Kevin, Youssef, and you, Jacqueline. I just want to let you all know that it’s been an honour working with you and—’
‘GOT IT! I’VE FUCKING GOT YOU!’ Jacqueline shouted suddenly.
She pressed a few keys on her console, and Kevin and Vincent disappeared in a purple flash.
~~~~
Two figures appeared within the racetrack of the Hadron Collider. They were both crouched, and both were coughing as they fully re-emerged. Jacqueline ran to them and flung open the glass doors. Both men spilled out onto the floor.
‘You did it!’ Vincent spluttered. ‘You didn’t give up!’
‘That wasn’t an option, soldier,’ she replied curtly.
‘Did you get the whole database?’ Kevin asked staggering towards the console, doubled over and coughing
‘It is just finishing now, sir.’
He unstrapped a small device from his pack and put it down on the table next to Jacqueline’s console. He then turned and patted Youssef on the back. ‘Well, Youssef,’ he said stretching. ‘It looks like we have a couple of fine recruits here for this mission.’
‘These are two disciplined kids alright,’ he agreed.
Vincent and Jacqueline looked at the two men with distrust.
They both returned their look.
‘The situation was real,’ Youssef explained. ‘We knew about the antipersonnel systems from the database we got last time, but we couldn’t get any transponder info, so we had the ideal opportunity to run a real mission, and in the meantime, we got to monitor your reactions to real-life stress tests. I’m pleased to inform you that you passed, both of you. With flying colours.’
‘You pair of bastards! That was the worst five minutes of my life,’ Jacqueline stuttered, trying not to smile.
‘It was supposed to be. You may well encounter worse than that on the real mission. It was good to see that you both kept working until the very end. I’m proud of you, and very pleased to be working with you.’ Kevin extended his hand towards them both.
Vincent knocked it away and grabbed him in a huge bear hug. ‘You bastards,’ he said, his voice muffled from his face being buried in Kevin’s shoulders.
37.
London. 1888
‘ANOTHER ONE, SIR. Mutilated just like the last. It looks like it could be the same weapon, and the same modus operandi,’ the tall policeman reported as he stood to attention, almost regimentally, in Inspector Abberline’s office.
‘Do we know what type of weapon it was?’ Abberline asked the officer.
‘Not as yet, sir. Whatever it was, it was sharp. It cut the woman open like a hot potato, sir.’
Abberline sat back in his chair and sighed. He held his fingers to his mouth in a peak as he looked wistfully past the tall man before him. ‘Were there other mutilations? Was anything removed, like in the other murder?’
The officer removed his hands from behind his back and regarded the notepad he was holding. ‘Yes, sir, it looks like there was something removed from the body, although the morgue doesn’t know what it was yet. I heard on the grapevine that it was…’ he looked at his notepad. ‘organs, sir. Something called the ‘vital’ organ.’
Abberline looked at the officer and shook his head, he sighed as the man put his notepad back in his top pocket. He looked at the inspector with a smug grin, as if he had just broken the case himself.
‘OK. Thanks for that, Bellis. I’m going to speak to my superiors. I need to get myself back to Whitechapel. I want in on this case.’
‘Why, sir? It’s a routine murder. You know what the natives are like after a skin full of ale. They’d chop up their own mothers for another drink and a whiff of quim.’
‘I beg to differ on this one, officer. It's nothing I can share with you right now, but I’ve got a hunch about it. Even if it means taking a demotion back to my old desk in Whitechapel, I have a feeling this will not be the last body we see passing through the precinct. Is there any evidence of a connection between the two cases?’ Abberline asked.
‘A bit of a tenuous connection, it seems. They shared some lodgings a few weeks back, but then, those lodgings were shared by eight other women too, all randoms apparently. Same old leaky records from the landlord. Cash was swapped, so precious few questions were asked.’
‘My hunch tells me that there’s a stronger connection than that. I wonder if the murderer was familiar with the victims or had at least singled them out for some nefarious purpose.’
Bellis had only understood half of that conversation and didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t even know if Abberline was still talking to him, or if he was talking to himself.
The detective picked up the case file that Bellis had put on his desk and looked at it. Bellis remained in the office, watching as Abberline put the file next to the one he already had on Martha Tabram. In Fred Abberline’s world, the officer no longer existed as he immersed himself into the file.
After a few moments of being ignored, Bellis saluted, turned, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
38.
‘IT’S BEEN CONFIRMED that the body found in George’s Yard was Martha,’ Mary Kelly reported with her head bowed low. ‘They say that she was cut up so badly, it’s taken them this long to get a handle on her identity. There was a rumour in The Ten Bells that her body was half eaten, although I think that was just drunk talk. There was a doctor who would tell anyone who’d buy him a drink that there were parts of her missing, or at least something had been cut out of her.’ She paused for a moment in reflection of their fallen comrade. ‘It’s amazing what people will talk about if they don’t think anyone of note is listening.’
Carrie was looking away, staring out of the small, grubby window onto the street below. It was busy out there, filled with hawkers, street gangs, and prostitutes. Every one of them now a potential threat to them and their mission. ‘This is worrying. Martha being dead means that there is either someone from the future, here, to try to stop us from getting back. That means that the EA have discovered what we’ve done. Or, the paradoxical laws, as we thought we understood them, are wrong and we’re as vulnerable as everyone else. Now, with Polly and Emily missing too, I’m afraid things have gotten rather serious.’
Carrie’s emotionless face was alarming Mary. ‘Do you think whoever killed Martha killed Polly and Emily too?’ she ask
ed.
‘We can’t rule it out. We need all the information we can get on this situation. Emily is not the type to just go missing and not inform us where, or why, she was going.’
‘She can handle herself; we know that. She was a personal security specialist before joining our cause,’ Mary offered.
‘None of that will mean a thing if whoever this is gets a jump on her with a binding field. Have any of the women mentioned anything peculiar? People hanging around, or being stalked, anything like that?’ Carrie asked, turning away from the street scene below her.
‘I spoke to them yesterday after Polly and Emily never checked in. But Carrie, this is the East End of London, eighteen-eighty-eight. Have you seen the quality of the locals around here? The only people who stick out here are the normal people!’
‘What did you say?’ Carrie snapped her head back towards her friend, her brow ruffled.
‘I said the only people who stick out are the—’
‘Normal people,’ Carrie finished for her. ‘Exactly!’ She walked away, holding her hands to her face in contemplation.
‘Exactly what?’ Mary asked.
‘Who are the only ‘normal’ people around here who you know?’
She thought about this for a while. ‘Probably only us…’ she paused, taking in what she had just said. ‘Oh my God, do you think we’re being targeted because we stand out from the crowd?’
‘It’s a distinct possibility. Do we have anyone working in a pub?’ Carrie asked.
Mary thought about this question for a moment. ‘Annie Chapman is in The Ten Bells.’
‘Excellent,’ Carrie replied. ‘Get her to keep her eyes open for anything strange, and I’ll have a word with the others too. Is she working tonight?’
‘Yes. She’s taken on extra shifts as the landlord in her lodgings is pressing her for more money.’
‘Keep her on the shifts, the more eyes we have out there, the better.’
Mary nodded. ‘OK, in that case, I’ll have to get going, because she’s on at ten this evening, and I’ll need to speak to her beforehand. I’ll pop in and see you tomorrow, give you a report of the night’s activities.’
‘Thank you, Mary,’ Carrie said softly as the other woman began making her way to the door. ‘Be careful, won’t you?’
She nodded as she closed the door behind her.
39.
EMILY CALLAGHAN WAS immobilised in a chair. There was a hood over her head and something in her ears was playing white noise. The combination of the hiss and the dark gave her complete sensory deprivation. She couldn’t smell anything other than the overpowering stink of rotting leather from the mask over her face.
She couldn’t feel any ropes around her wrists or feet, or anything holding her to the chair, but still she couldn’t move. It’s a binding beam, she thought, a difficult thing to do through the white noise. This has to be someone from our time. She had trained as a personal protection agent while in the EA, and she had a very tactical, analytical mind.
Even though she had no perception of time, she guessed she’d been sat here for two days. There had been no contact with anyone in all that time. She was hungry and uncomfortable. She had been forced to do her ablutions while sat on the chair, and even after all the years of tough, intense training, that was still one of the hardest things to do.
Ignoring the discomfort, she tried her best to assess the situation. If the binding beam has been on me for two days, then I’m guessing that the battery is going to need to be charged sometime soon. Unless it is a nuclear battery, then I’m out of luck, them bastards will run and run and run. She mused; she had a lot of time to muse. But, if I remember right, you can’t travel time with nuclear devices, or at least you can’t travel time accurately with a nuclear device. So, it must be cell based, therefore it should be due to run out soon. She hoped she was correct, as she needed to make sure Polly was OK.
The white noise in her ears suddenly stopped, and it took a moment for her brain to register that it was no longer there. The sudden silence snapped her out of her thoughts.
‘Hello?’ she shouted, not entirely in control of her voice levels. ‘Is anyone there? If so, can we try and sort this out as sensible, civilised human beings?’
‘Civilised? You?’ the voice sneered. ‘After what you’ve done to the planet, to your own people? You have the audacity to talk about being civilised?’
‘I’m just a soldier,’ she replied.
‘Oh, and I suppose you were just doing your duty, eh? Obeying orders? Hasn’t that been the excuse for atrocities performed for thousands of years?’ the voice sneered again.
Emily thought there was something funny about the voice, something she couldn’t put her finger on.
‘If any of you sheep stopped to question your orders from time to time, then we would be in a whole new world.’
‘They weren’t orders, they were suggestions. Suggestions that were voted on, democratically, among the group.’
The voice laughed. It was a strange sound, devoid of all humour. ‘Democratically? How can you begin to call the decision to genocide the human race democratic? Did you cast a vote between the four billion victims? I think not.’
Emily smiled underneath her leather mask. ‘Are we here to talk about the ethics of what The Quest did? Because if we are, I’m afraid that I have other things to do.’
She heard the stranger move around the room; the voice got nearer. ‘No, Emily, we’re not here to talk about ethics, because I’d win that conversation hands down. We’re here to talk about how much you want to save the rest of your group.’
Emily remained silent.
The voice laughed; it was mostly a chuff. ‘I admire your silence, I really do, but if you want to save your friend’s lives, then I’d give me what I’m politely asking for.’
‘And what’s that?’ Emily asked.
‘I want your transponder codes.’
She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You want our transponder codes. You travelled all the way back from twenty-two-eighty-eight to Ye Olde London, and you don’t even have a plan.’
‘Oh, I have a plan all right. This binding beam I’ve got you in, well it’s also monitoring your quantum slug. I can actually see it right now; it’s currently residing in your shoulder. Now if I was to set this quantum tracker to search for nearby slugs, I have no doubt that it would find yours. Your slug would know that it was being tracked, and it would hide. My beam would chase it, and it would eventually win. I would then be able to retrieve your slug and deactivate it. Then no one from the future would be able to locate you and bring you back, and therefore, no Higgs Storm. Oh, and there would be no chance of you surviving the extraction either…’ the voice paused for a moment, allowing the drama of the speech to lie heavy in the air. ‘Or at least, there wasn’t for the last two I got. Martha and Polly.’
On hearing the names, Emily began to struggle against her chair. ‘You bastard, you killed them, didn’t you? You bastard,’ she began to shout, her voice muffled beneath the heavy leather hood.
She heard the voice tut. ‘Yes, I killed them. I didn’t particularly take any pleasure from it, as I’m not murdering scum like you, but I’ll do it again. If it means stopping you from completing your sick mission, I’ll do it again, with… aplomb.’
Emily began to calm down, she knew that there was no point struggling with the binding beam, she would just have to bide her time until it depleted. She didn’t think that there would be anything to power something like it in this time. ‘I’ll never tell you the codes.’
‘In that case, you’ve condemned yourself, and all your colleagues, to death.’ Due to the white noise she had been listening to, she couldn’t differentiate anything from the voice, neither gender nor an accent. To her, it sounded purely neutral. It paused for a short while. ‘I’ll give you another few days to think about it. I think this binding beam will last longer than you will, it is nuclear after all. We’ll see how you feel tomorrow when I bri
ng you news.’
~~~~
Annie Chapman was behind the bar in The Ten Bells. Normally she worked as a cleaner, rinsing the vomit and the blood from the floors, collecting tankards, and wiping them into a passable form of cleanliness to be reused. Tonight, however, one of the regular girls had let the landlord down at the last minute, and he had asked Annie to step in to cover the shift.
‘You’re a cheery sort, and not all that bad to look at,’ the fat landlord spat, looming over her as she scrubbed the floor under the bar area. He down out and grabbed at one of her breasts. ‘You’ll do all right behind the bar tonight. Bring a few of the fellas in, you will. An extra two shillings do ya?’ he asked as she brushed his molesting hands away from her. He harrumphed as he turned away. ‘Well it’ll ‘aft to anyways, coz that all ya getting. It’s more than the others, mind, so don’t you go blabbing ya mouth off or ya won’t get it again, d’y’hear me?’
Two shillings was not to be sniffed at; it would pay for at least another two nights in her lodgings, all for a six-hour shift. She was more than happy to accept it. ‘I’ll do it,’ she answered.
‘Good,’ the landlord grunted, pushing past her.
She felt his fat, grubby hand cup her backside as he went. She turned to face him, ready to give him a piece of her mind, but she saw that he was still facing her, one of his hands down his trousers, grinning as he winked at her. She decided it would be best just to give him the widest berth she could tonight, and every night, she thought.
It was a Friday in the East End. The weather had been warmer than usual, and the revellers were out in force. She knew she would have a busy night ahead of her. She thought that this would also be a good opportunity to keep her ear to the ground regarding any ‘queer activity,’ as the locals would put it. Maybe get some of that information that Mary wanted her to report.
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