Time Riders

by Alex Scarrow

  She looked around his apartment and realized it was a reflection of him, a reflection of his attempt to completely reinvent himself. No longer a narrow-shouldered pigeon-chested nerd with bad skin and bad breath, but now the very essence of success: smart, intelligent, confident.

  ‘It’s in here somewhere. All the stuff I did on the Voynich, all my degree stuff on dead languages. I never let any of it go –’ he looked up at her – ‘because I always knew I’d be needing it again.’

  She crossed the lounge and carefully perched on the saddle of the exercise bike. She looked down at his things. ‘Warhammer … you were into Warhammer?’ She giggled.

  He hunched his shoulders. ‘Oh yeah, but I keep that all locked away. The people I work alongside, people I bring back here, they, uh … they don’t get that kind of thing. If you know what I mean?’

  ‘Hell no,’ she said. ‘I bet most of your girlfriends wouldn’t be too impressed.’

  He pulled out a plastic bucket full of a tangle of wires, plug adaptors and electronic doo-dads.

  ‘I used to play with my kid brother’s Warhammer figures when I was younger,’ she added. ‘Made up my own basic combat rules because the rule book was like way-y-y too much.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ he replied, carefully pulling bits and pieces out.

  She watched him picking his way carefully and realized he reminded her so much of her older cousin, Julian. She’d idolized him. He’d been smart and cool – an über-geek, always the high-school outsider, but with an air about him … a confidence that he carried with him always, like an impenetrable force-field.

  Adam, hunched down there in his smart Dolce & Gabbana trousers and shirt like a boy hunched over a toy-chest, reminded her so much of him. And her heart ached. She’d been nine when it happened; when the world stopped for several hours and watched, on TV, three thousand people die, like it was just some kind of movie. Just nine … She hadn’t really put it together in her young mind that after that second tower came tumbling down she was never going to see Julian again.

  ‘Ah … I think this is the one,’ he said, pulling out a hard drive that looked almost as big as a shoebox. ‘Twenty gigabytes!’ he laughed as he got to his feet. ‘And look at the size of the bloody thi–!’

  He stopped. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Maddy hadn’t even realized she was crying. Tears were rolling out from behind her glasses, down her cheeks and on to her T-shirt. She bit her lips, angry with herself for allowing him to see her blubbing like this.

  Adam stood up and held her shaking shoulders. ‘What’s up?’

  She shook her head. What do I say? You reminded me of someone I once worshipped? Someone who’s going to die tomorrow morning. Maddy felt her resolve crumbling. Why hadn’t Foster rescued Julian instead of her? He’d have made a far better TimeRider, a far better team leader. Right then, she realized if she had the choice to walk out of the archway and back home to her parents’ house in Boston – the choice to leave all the time travel, the worrying about history timelines, this so-called agency that seemed quite happy to throw raw recruits into the thick of it without any sort of assistance … If she was given the choice to walk away, she’d take it in a heartbeat.

  And then, without a word spoken, she found herself sobbing against Adam’s shoulder, dampening his expensive pale blue shirt with her tears.

  ‘Hey, it’s all right,’ he cooed softly, patting her heaving back awkwardly. ‘Heavy day, uh?’

  ‘Yuh, sorta,’ she mumbled snottily against his shoulder. She let go of him and stood back, her puffy eyes trying to find a million things to look at, other than his.

  Outside, the sun was busy with finding a bed for the night, and Manhattan was beginning to find its light switches.

  ‘I … really … don’t know why … I … did that.’ She started to fumble for the first words of an explanation.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he replied. ‘Honestly, you don’t need to explain –’

  ‘No.’ She decided to straighten her glasses. ‘I do need to explain. I … it’s just the work, the stress. That’s what it is: stress. And …’ She sighed, suddenly realizing that if she wasn’t careful, she was going to go all girlie and cry again. She took a breath. ‘I miss my old life … and it feels like we’ve all been in this weird time-travel agency for years, and … I know it’s only been, like, a few months.’ She laughed whimsically. ‘I guess for a bunch of mysterious time travellers from the future, we must come across as a bunch of losers.’

  ‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose even mysterious visitors from the future are still human, right? Still stub their toes? Still choke on their gum? Still slip on banana skins?’

  She nodded, dabbing at her eyes. ‘Oh, we’ve done that enough freakin’ times already.’

  He reached for a hand; she tried pulling back, but he grasped it and squeezed it gently. ‘So, it turns out that the history of mankind is in the hands of real people. Someone like you.’ He smiled warmly. ‘You know, I think I prefer that – instead of some team of superheroes who think they know it all.’

  CHAPTER 28

  1194, woods, Nottinghamshire

  The fire crackled hungrily on the pine cones and dried brittle branches they’d gathered by the waning light of the winter’s afternoon. A steady dusting of snow had slowed down their cart, and Cabot – sounding a lot more like a bad-tempered soldier than he did a pious monk – had finally had to concede they were going to have to make camp in the wilderness instead of seeking lodgings in the safety of some hamlet as they had done the night before.

  Had they been travelling during a warmer month, he said, they’d be safer not having a fire and running the risk of attracting brigands like moths. But it was too cold not to.

  Cabot spat on the flames as he finished a mouthful of stale bread. ‘We will be in Oxfordshire tomorrow. And the royal household at Beaumont before afternoon.’

  ‘Are you sure we’ll be seen by John?’

  ‘Aye. I’m sure. The poor fool is losing his hold on the country. He has done much that will enrage his brother, including his foolish orders to Richard’s Templars to take the Grail up north to Scotland ’stead of letting them store it in Beaumont.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘I know not. Perhaps he had plans to hide it up there, to barter something out of his brother? So –’ Cabot’s eyes locked on Liam – ‘if none of ye are of the Templar order, as I suspect, how is it ye know so much about the Grail?’

  Liam smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  Cabot spread his hands. ‘I am willing to listen.’

  Liam looked at Becks and Bob, both standing a dozen yards apart at the edge of the light cast by the fire, silently standing guard. He wondered how much the monk should know; how much he could help them if he did know. And, of course, how much contamination to history that might cause downstream from them.

  ‘We’re … we’ve come from the future.’

  Cabot’s grizzled face remained still, unimpressed by that. ‘Future?’

  ‘Quite a long time into the future, so it is. And, well … there’s an ancient manuscript that mentions this Pandora. We came here to learn more about it.’

  ‘Future … Do ye mean this in the way I think ye mean it?’

  ‘Yes, future. As in days and years that haven’t yet happened, but will.’

  Cabot’s eyes narrowed sceptically. ‘How is that? A man’s life can travel but in one direction. The sun rises then it sets. It cannot move the other way.’

  ‘It’s science,’ replied Liam. ‘I don’t get how any of it works. But it does.’

  ‘Science? What is this word?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘Knowledge of how things work, I suppose. It’s quite big in my time. Science has given us all sorts of machines and understanding.’

  The old man absently stroked the ridged scar down across his cheek. ‘Some Saracens I met did talk of such things. Of numbers and such, of things that can’t be held, wei
ghed, bought or sold. Ideas … ideas our church would consider heresy.’ His face creased with a grin. ‘Would ye believe – many Saracen scholars say we live on a giant ball!’

  Liam nodded.

  ‘Aye!’ Cabot’s loud cackle filled the quiet wood. ‘Would ye believe such foolishness? A ball!’

  ‘They’re right, though. The world is shaped like a ball.’

  Cabot’s laugh choked, the smile wiped from his face in an instant. ‘A man could burn at the stake for saying such as that in the wrong company!’

  ‘But it’s true, Mr Cabot. The world is a ball, and there are other balls; we call them planets – millions of them up there in space. And they rotate around other suns in what are called solar systems.’

  ‘Our world … goes … about … the sun?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ye say there is more than one sun?’

  ‘Aye. That’s what the stars are. Suns.’

  Cabot looked up at the sky. He could see none tonight. His face seemed undecided between creasing with another good-natured cackle of laughter, or folding into a stern scowl of scorning disbelief. Finally, cautiously, he looked back down at Liam and shook his head.

  ‘Ye are a strange young man, Liam of Connor, with an odd way about ye and the way that ye talk.’ He smiled. ‘And ’tis a fanciful tale ye tell. Despite my better judgement warning me otherwise, ye are a young man I like. But I would strongly caution ye to keep such tales of coming from tomorrows-yet-to-be, and ball-shaped worlds and many suns, to yerself!’

  Liam shrugged. Maybe Cabot was right. He’d read enough history books to know medieval Europe was a couple of centuries away from accepting ideas like these. To them the world was a flat plain, and the sun moved obediently across it from one side to the other simply because God willed it. And there were no other worlds, just this one. And no other suns. Trying to explain time travel to him, trying to explain how a history yet to happen already exists and – just to make things even more complicated – could even be rewritten, well, even Liam struggled with that sometimes.

  ‘Anyway – ’ Liam tossed a branch on the fire – ‘all that aside, we came back to learn a bit more about what the secret of Pandora … the Grail … is. But now we know it’s been stolen by someone, our mission has changed. Now, I suppose, we’ve got to get it back first.’

  ‘Aye.’ Cabot gazed at the fire. ‘There will be a terrible reckoning if ’tis not returned before –’

  ‘SILENCE!’ barked Bob, waving an arm to quieten them both.

  Cabot hushed and for a long minute they listened to the soft hiss of wind stirring branches and the far-off hoot of an owl, until finally Liam heard something, very quiet, but close by: the metallic jangle of a harness or a buckle.

  ‘Ye hear?’ whispered Cabot. ‘We are no longer alone.’

  Then they all heard it – the almost musical note of a released drawstring, followed by the whistle of something arcing through the air. Liam heard the smack of impact and saw Bob recoil a step backwards. By the light of the fire he could see the glint of something metal protruding from between his shoulders. The support unit turned round to face Liam and he could now see a pale wooden shaft and the white fletching of an arrow embedded deep in his chest.

  ‘DANGER,’ his barrel-deep voice boomed and echoed into the forest.

  Several more arrows whistled out of the darkness, another finding Bob’s right hip, a third hissing past Liam’s head so close he could feel the rush of air on his ear.

  ‘Bandits!’ shouted Cabot, scrambling to his feet and heading for the open back of his cart.

  Into the pale dancing light of the fire, a dozen shapes in rags emerged, all of them armed with bows and long double-edged swords that glinted and flickered. By the look of them, Liam guessed their intention wasn’t to demand they hand over their valuables, but to kill them all first, then to pick through their cart for what might be worth taking.

  Bob and Becks moved at exactly the same moment, identical AI routines calculating risk and available courses of action in precisely the same number of micro-seconds. Bob sprinted towards the nearest man, ducking down swiftly at the last moment to dodge the careless swing of his sword. He sprang up again and crushed the man’s throat with the bullet-hard jab of his oversized fingers just beneath his jaw. As the man dropped to his knees, gasping and spraying blood from his mouth and nose, Bob grabbed hold of his sword, flipped it blade-over-hilt and caught it, then finished the bandit with a lightning-quick thrust into his chest.

  Becks meanwhile had effortlessly relieved another man of his bow and, using it like a quarterstaff, had scooped him off his feet and on to his back. She dropped down on to him, knees on his chest, and grabbed his head, twisting it sharply until cartilage and bone cracked.

  Bob’s blade clattered with a heavy ring as a second man stepped forward and swung at him. Sword pommels locked, Bob pulled his sharply, yanking the other man’s sword out of his hand. It flew through the air, still humming like a tuning fork, and clattered off the trunk of a nearby tree. The man, older than the others, a florid face framed with wisps of dirty white hair, screamed, ‘I yield!’

  He raised both his hands in surrender, a gesture entirely wasted on Bob. His next swing severed both of the upraised hands, sending them spinning to the snow-covered ground. The man screamed in agony, turned and ran into the darkness, waving bloody stumps before him.

  Liam heard the twanging release of another drawstring and saw Becks had retrieved some arrows from the corpse at her feet. A grunt on the far side of their crackling fire, and a man, who had been sneaking around to take Liam and Cabot from behind, staggered slow baby-steps forward, sporting a tuft of fletching from his forehead and a yard of bloody shaft out of the back. He toppled over on to the fire, sending a shower of sparks up into the dark sky.

  The remaining bandits had already seen enough and turned and fled like startled hares, boot soles and swinging arrow quivers disappearing into the darkness. Someone’s agonized drawn-out wailing – presumably the unfortunate handless old man – quickly receded to an indistinct echo that merged with the other frightened calls of the remaining bandits as they tried to find each other in the darkness of the woods.

  In those few seconds – little more than the time it had taken Cabot to retrieve his trusty campaign sword from the back of the cart and adopt the once-learned-never-forgotten on-guard stance of an experienced swordsman – four of their attackers lay dead.

  ‘Good God!’ gasped Cabot.

  Bob walked over towards Liam. ‘Are you all right, Liam O’Connor?’ he asked casually.

  ‘I’m fine, Bob. But you might want to take care of those,’ he replied, pointing at the arrow shafts protruding from Bob’s chest and hip.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Becks joined them. ‘I will assist you, Bob,’ she said, calmly reaching for the barbed tip of the arrowhead poking out from between his shoulders. She snapped it off with a flick of her wrist. She reached around in front of Bob and pulled the shaft out of his chest with the sucking sound of puckered flesh.

  Cabot watched in goggle-eyed silence as she snapped the second tip off and pulled the arrow out of Bob’s hip without even a flicker of reaction on his face.

  ‘Blood is congealing from the two wounds already,’ she said. ‘I would estimate your combat functionality to be no less than ninety-five per cent of full capacity.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Bob.

  ‘What in the saints’ names are ye?’ hissed Cabot.

  Bob glanced at him. ‘Very tough human being, serr,’ he replied unconvincingly.

  ‘And ye,’ Cabot said to Becks. ‘No lady have I ever seen fight like that!’

  ‘I am also a very tough –’

  Liam laughed a little shakily, still adrenaline-pumped from the attack. ‘It’s all right, I told him we’re from the future already. You can drop the old English now.’

  Becks frowned. ‘That will cause unnecessary contamination.’

  Liam shook his h
ead. ‘Ah well, it’s not like the fella believes a word I was saying anyway.’

  Cabot was still holding his longsword aloft. His arms, now tired, lowered it to the ground. He leaned on the hilt and regarded the three of them in silence.

  ‘Well, Liam of Connor … I think I believe ye now.’

  CHAPTER 29

  2001, New York

  ‘Oh my God, yes! Yes, it has! It’s changed!’

  Sal stared at the grainy image on the computer screen. Old stone dimpled and worn with age and mottled with olive-green blooms of algae. She could see faint lines inscribing the name Haskette, a gouge in the lettering where at some point in the last eight centuries someone had hacked at the gravestone or perhaps it had been shot at.

  At the bottom of Adam’s photograph, where brambles emerged into the image, she could just make out the faintest groove of several lines bisecting. If he’d taken this picture in poorer lighting it might not even have been visible. They’d easily have missed it.

  ‘That’s definitely it!’ he said. ‘Do you see it?’

  Sal nodded. Maddy said nothing.

  Sal’s finger traced the shape on the screen. ‘And that’s the coded symbol for an L?’

  ‘Yes – yes, it is!’ Not for the first time his jaw hung open, dumbfounded. ‘I can’t believe it. I visited the ruins of Kirklees Priory six years ago and took all these graveyard pictures. And these digital images have been sitting on my old hard drive, in my chest … Jesus, I haven’t plugged in this drive for a couple of years – it’s just been collecting dust. And, yet, something’s happened on there! Something changed on my hard drive! That picture’s been altered. That’s … that’s just … well, it’s just messing with my head!’

  ‘A minute wave,’ said Maddy. ‘That’s what happened. A tiny, tiny time wave. So slight only Sal felt it.’