TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (10 page)

‘The Oil Wars?’ said Liam. He
had heard another traveller from Rashim’s time mention them. A man called
Locke.

‘Yes. Wars between India and China.
Japan and Korea. The first of those was in the 2040s. Russia and the European Bloc,
there was a short war between those. And, of course, what we should have been doing is
trying to fix another bigger problem. The world itself dying: warming up, rising tides,
poisoned blooms of algae killing the seas.’

Rashim fell silent for a moment.
‘Anyway, that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox; most – if not
all
– civilizations either destroy themselves or mine themselves dry long before they ever
spread out to other planets and are able to mine, harvest them for resources. Once
you’ve exhausted your home planet … it’s all over for you. Either
you become extinct, or you eventually end up being cavemen once more.’

‘It’s a one-shot deal?’ said
Maddy.

He nodded. ‘And perhaps every
civilization makes the same mistake. Spends what it has, thinking it will never run out.
Then, all of a sudden, it does.’

‘Wonderful,’ sighed Maddy.

‘But on Earth we didn’t just run
out. We decided to destroy ourselves in style.’ Rashim snorted. ‘It was some
kind of a genetically engineered virus … pretty much wiped us all out in the
space of a few weeks. We made a nice tidy job of pretty much erasing ourselves from
history.’

‘Shadd-yah,’ whispered Sal after
a while. ‘This is depressing! You’re great fun to hang out with, you know
that, don’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘You
did
ask
what the future’s going to be like.’

‘I didn’t,’ she replied.
‘It was Liam who asked.’

‘Aye, and now I wish I bleedin’
well hadn’t.’

12 September 2001, Washington DC

Cooper was up and at work despite the time.
The Department was as much his home as the single-bed studio apartment he kept in Queens
Chapel, DC. Thirty-nine, with no family, no partner, no children, not even a pet, one
might say this twilight office with empty desks, a watercooler that hadn’t been
switched on in years and a fading poster of Jane Fonda was his life.

Custodian of secrets so secret even
Presidents aren’t privy to them. That’s me.

Perhaps not the world’s most exciting
job. But an important one nonetheless.

Last night he’d stayed here, slept in
the cot he kept in his personal office.

His PC was on and he was streaming MSNBC,
watching it as his coffee and breakfast bagel cooled enough to have without burning the
roof of his mouth. It was quite early in the morning; outside in the world, the sky was
still dark. On the monitor he watched a news camera pan across rescue workers picking
through the smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Brilliantly stark floodlights
illuminated the enormous mound of rubble and twisted spars of metal. Dots of neon-orange
light-reflective jackets decorated the mounds of dust and concrete; dozens of emergency
workers picked through the remains of the towers in the vain hope of finding
survivors.

The phone rang.

Cooper looked at it. The phones down here
never rang. Well, rarely anyway.

He picked it up. ‘Cooper.’

‘Coop, it’s Damon.’

Damon Grohl. A friend from the FBI Academy
many years ago. Friends still. Christmas cards were exchanged every year and every now
and then they shared a beer, if that counted.

‘Damon!’ Cooper’s mood
lifted. ‘Well, been a while! How are you, ol’ buddy?’

‘Fine. Fine. The Bureau down this way
is chasing around like a headless chicken with what went down yesterday.’

Headless chicken? Damon was probably right
about that. FBI heads were going to start rolling pretty soon over this. Letting
something like this slip through their fingers.

‘I can imagine. Not much
fun.’

‘Look, Coop, something’s come up
that, uh … might be, well, your thing, if you get my meaning.’

Cooper’s curiosity was piqued.
‘My thing?’

‘We’ve got a double cop killing
over in Brooklyn. Happened after midnight this morning.’

‘How’s that anything to do with
me? The Department?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is this linked to
yesterday …?’

‘Twin Towers? Who knows? Might be.
We’re looking at pretty much anything that moves right now.’

‘You said this cop killing might be my
sort of thing?’ A little careless of him, to be honest, talking so candidly like
this over the phone.

‘Your phone line is encrypted,
right?’

‘Yes. But keep what you say
foggy
 … if you know what I mean.’

‘Foggy? Sure. So, Coop, are you still
doing that whole X Files thing down in Washington?’

‘You know I can’t comment on
that.’

He heard Damon draw a breath.

‘Damon? What the hell is
it?’

‘I think I’ve got something you
might want to take a look at, if you can get up here quickly.’

7.01 a.m., 12 September 2001, outside
Branford, Connecticut

Maddy was knocking on the adjoining motel
room wall for him to get up. Liam yawned and cracked open eyes to look at the digital
clock on his bedside ledge. Just gone seven.

He thumped the wall back. ‘All right!
Jay-zus! I’m getting up, so I am!’ he shouted.

He heard Sal’s muffled laughter on the
other side.

Bob was already awake. Not that he ever
slept. ‘Maddy has instructed me to tell you we are getting ready to move
on.’

They’d all decided they needed a good
night’s rest before resuming their journey up to Boston. They’d all been
strung out, far more exhausted than they’d realized. A week in Ancient Rome
struggling to stay alive and now this. Fatigue had finally caught up with them all.

‘Maddy says we will eat some breakfast
then set off.’

Liam’s stomach still groaned. Last
night’s triple-decker meat platter pizza was still lying heavily in his gut. He
wondered if he could manage anything else right now.

They met outside in the car park beside the
RV. Rashim was looking particularly ill.

‘Jesus, what’s up with
you?’ asked Maddy.

‘I’ve been up all night,
vomiting.’ His face looked almost grey.

‘The food wasn’t
that
bad!’

He shook his head, his dark ponytail wagging
limply. ‘No, it’s my fault. I was stupid. The food was too rich. I’m
used to synthetic proteins. Soya products.’ He gulped air and stifled a belch that
could easily have been an empty retch. ‘Not used to the real thing.’ Rashim
had had a mixed grill. Wolfed it down as he relished the texture and savoured the
billionaire-luxury of eating nuggets of real meat.

Foster obviously hadn’t slept well
either, dark bags evident under his sunken eyes. Maddy looked at the men in their party
with a mixture of pity and contempt.

The diner was open and several trucks were
parked up in the gravel car park, their drivers inside already tucking into pancake and
waffle breakfasts. Further along their side of the highway was an out-of-town mall
called North Haven Plaza. Across acres of car park it looked open already. At least the
eateries probably were.

‘OK then, let’s try and find
something a little healthier over there, if you guys are feeling a bit
precious.’

‘Let me quickly check in on
SpongeBubba.’

Maddy unlocked the side door to the RV for
him and Rashim stepped up inside.

‘Morning, skippa!’ chirped the
robot, squatting in the passenger seat upfront. It was playing with the steering
wheel.

‘We’re having some food over
there.’ Rashim pointed through the windscreen at the mall. ‘We won’t
be long.’

Maddy joined him inside. ‘Does your
robot have a wireless broadcast protocol?’

‘Sure.’

‘If anyone comes looking at our
vehicle … cops, for example, can he bleep a warning over to Bob?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She looked down at the lab unit. ‘Reckon
you can do that for me, then, SpongeBob?’

‘SpongeBubba,’ corrected the
robot. His lips quivered a jocular, angry snarl. ‘That’s my name,
missy-miss!’

Maddy rolled her eyes at the lab
unit’s pre-programmed plastic expression. ‘Just tell your
toy
to
keep a lookout,’ she said to Rashim. ‘OK?’

The mall wasn’t busy. A few people
inside walking freshly polished floors, mostly people who worked there. Clearly no one
felt like shopping today. A jazzy rendition of a Stevie Wonder hit wafted across the
bright and cheerful circular centrepiece atrium and a pair of overweight security guards
shared a joke with a janitor and made one or two heads turn with their echoing
laughter.

‘Up there,’ said Maddy, pointing
to a balcony overlooking the atrium. ‘RealBean Coffee. The place looks open. We
can get a panini or …’

She checked herself. Stupid. Sure, although
the mall looked no different to any other in her time, it was still 2001. No one did
paninis back then. Back
now
.

‘… or maybe we’ll get a
toasted sandwich or something.’

7.20 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate
95, south-west Connecticut

‘Information: you are driving too
fast,’ said Faith.

Abel turned to look at her. ‘The
driving is suitable,’ he replied.

‘You are driving at a faster velocity
than specified on the roadside indicators.’

Abel narrowed his eyes at her, then turned
to look back at the road ahead flanked by signs indicating, advertising, proclaiming all
kinds of things. Finally a speed indicator
wooshed
past on his side. ‘The
number fifty-five indicates a recommended velocity.’

‘No. I believe it means
maximum
velocity. You are in excess of that. That will attract unwanted
attention.’

Abel lifted his foot off the accelerator,
causing the truck behind to brake hard, and then a moment later the driver leaned on his
horn angrily. Abel looked over his shoulder. ‘Why did the vehicle behind make that
noise?’

Faith followed his gaze. ‘I believe he
is annoyed.’

‘Annoyed,’ Abel repeated.
‘Why?’

She frowned for a moment. ‘I do not
know why.’

The truck driver overtook them, glaring down
from his cab as he passed by.

The NYPD squad car they’d stolen in
the early hours of the
morning had been replaced with a different car.
After listening to police chatter over the radio, they’d quickly realized the
vehicle’s identification number on the roof was going to make them too easy to
track down. Before the light of dawn had fully arrived, they’d switched to a
solitary car parked in an empty forecourt. It was small and bubble-shaped and an
uncomfortable squeeze for Abel’s broad frame as he wriggled into place behind the
steering wheel, but at least it wasn’t going to draw the attention of any police
helicopters scanning the highways for their stolen vehicle. Of course, it wasn’t
until dawn that they saw their new ride – a Volkswagen Beetle – was a rather conspicuous
tangerine orange decorated with hand-painted pink daisies.

They drove in silence for a while, as they
had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully
sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty
minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.

The first nine hours of his consciousness,
just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning
room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each
of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently
‘birthed’.

Six of them, naked and coated in the
gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together
on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then,
without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential
packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike
fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.

Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.

Abel recalled his mind filling with
compressed knowledge
that unpacked itself into segments of his hard
drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place
called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards,
intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile
phones, the Spice Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11 …

And then, finally, into that dimly lit,
womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was
already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be
obeyed without question.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down in
front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these
humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.

In their six minds, simultaneously, they
received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images
of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young
teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with
jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.

‘You should also terminate any other
humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal
is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be
arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important.
There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an
unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.

‘When these things are done, you are
to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is
complete
only
when these people are dead, their field office has been
completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are
these mission parameters perfectly clear?’