TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (27 page)

‘Oh, it’s … it’s
just a little science experiment, so it is.’

‘That sounds kinda cool.’

He curled his lip casually. ‘Aw,
it’s nothing too exciting really. Uh, we’re … we’re
measuring –’ he scrambled to reach for a few sciencey-sounding terms and words –
‘measuring background particle emissions from, uh … from radio-micron
particle toxin materials.’

She gazed at him, none the wiser. An awkward
silence hung between them, begging to be filled. ‘Cool!’ she said, smiling.
‘I kinda liked science at school.’ Then she sighed. ‘Wasn’t any
good at it, though.’ She huffed a little sadly. ‘Wasn’t much good at
anything at school … that’s why I’m here, I guess.’

He followed her doleful gaze out of the
broad window of the diner across a high street that was half made up of boarded-up
stores. ‘I never see anyone else working in here. Is it just you?’ he
asked.

She nodded. ‘Pretty much in the
mornings. Arnie comes in at lunchtimes to cook. That’s when it gets
real
busy.’ She looked back at him. ‘We get a ladies’ sewing circle come in
for lunch, regular as clockwork. Five old dears. The place is totally
buzzing
then.’

Liam laughed. He picked up the tone of
sarcasm.

Yes, it was boredom that brought him up
here, that and a chance to get some exercise. It was a fifteen-minute trip into town on
the bicycle he’d found in the schoolyard. But … yes, if he was being
honest, it was a chance to pop into the diner – always quiet at this time in the morning
– and talk to Kaydee-Lee. Over the last few weeks they’d graduated from ‘how
ya doing today’ niceties to talking about the weather, to really talking, to
finally, politely exchanging their names.

‘Why do you stay here,
Kaydee-Lee?’

She filled the silence with getting on with
finishing up his
take-out order, busy spreading a thick layer of cream
cheese on to one of the bagels. She looked up at his question.
‘Harcourt?’

‘Aye.’

She hunched her shoulders. ‘Where else
am I gonna go? I got a job and it’s OK, I guess. It’s not like I go home at
night all stressed out or anything. I’m bored … but at least I’m
not stressed.’

‘But you don’t intend to work in
here forever, right? You’ve got a plan, a dream … a
goal
, so to
speak?’

‘Jeeez! I’m, like, seventeen. I
don’t even know what I’m gonna cook up for dinner tonight, let alone know
where I wanna be when I’m your age.’

‘My age?’

She nodded. ‘You’re what? Like,
twenty-five, twenty-six or something?’

Liam stifled an urge to gasp.
Twenty-five? I’m sixteen! Sixteen!!
But then he reminded himself he
wasn’t any particular age. Not really. His false memory calmly tried to reassure
him he was a sixteen-year-old boy from Cork, Ireland. But that was all meaningless
claptrap now. Someone else’s fiction.

Kaydee-Lee looked up from her work, studied
his troubled face. ‘Oh my God, did I just say something wrong?’

‘No … I just, I’m not
that
old.’

‘Oh God, you don’t have some
kinda awful ageing sickness or something? Did I just put my foot in my mouth?’

Liam laughed. ‘No, don’t
worry.’ He ruffled the scruffy mop of hair on his head. ‘It’s my grey
bit of hair. Some people think I’m older than I am.’ He offered her a
disarming smirk: an assurance that he hadn’t taken offence, that she hadn’t
clumsily blundered on to uncomfortable ground.

‘Ahh, don’t you worry now.
I’ve always had this little bit of grey. Me lucky silver streak, so it
is.’

She nodded. ‘Well, I really like
it.’ Her cheeks suddenly coloured a mottled pink once more. ‘I mean, you
know … it looks
cool
. Kinda gothic.’

‘Gothic? What the devil does that
mean?’

She smiled suspiciously at him.
‘Gothic? Sort of Sabbath-grungy-rocky? Kind of the whole steam-punky
thing?’

‘You know,’ he shrugged.
‘I haven’t the first idea what any of that means.’

She laughed at that. ‘You’re so
funny. The way you, like, talk … like a sort of young-old man –’

‘
Old?
Did I hear you just use
the word “old”?’ The look of horror on his face was mock-serious.

‘No!’ she yelped. ‘No, I
don’t mean that! I meant … I dunno, it’s like you’ve got
old-style manners. If you know what I mean? Like you just stepped out of one of
’em ancient black and white movies.’

He spread his hands. ‘Well now,
you’re never too young or too old for a dose of good manners, my dear.’

She chuckled behind the counter as she
finished fixing the salt beef and cream cheese bagel, wrapped it up in greaseproof paper
and put it in the plastic bag with the others. She tossed in some napkins and plastic
forks and passed the bag over the counter to him. ‘I know an old-fashioned word
that I can use to describe you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Enigma? That’s how you say it,
right? You’re
en-ig-mat-ic
?’

‘You mean, a puzzle?’

She nodded. ‘Oh, you’re that all
right, Liam. Exactly that. You’re a puzzle.’

3 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary
School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘It may look a bit random,’
said Maddy, ‘but, trust me, it all works.’

Liam cast another wary glance at the cables
snaking across the classroom floor. The displacement machine at the moment was nothing
more than an array of circuit boards placed on a row of orange plastic bucket chairs,
all of them linked by dangling loops of electrical flex, blobs of solder holding the
whole fragile thing together.

The computer system controlling the
displacement machine looked very like it had back in Brooklyn: a dozen base units and
half a dozen monitors hooked up together and occupying a cluster of school desks pushed
together.

They didn’t have their own version of
a displacement ‘tube’ filled with freezing cold water. According to Maddy,
they didn’t need one of those any more. Since their mission was now a different
one – no longer the rigid preservation of one particular timeline with all the necessary
strict measures to ensure no unwanted contaminants came back into the past with them –
there was no longer the need for a ‘wet drop’. If a minor contaminant, for
example a chunk of modern-day linoleum floor, went back into the past, it might possibly
result in some minor contamination. But, as far as Maddy was concerned, that
was OK; that was an acceptable risk. The rules were different now.
And anyway, a minor change, a minor time wave, might just be the thing that ultimately
deflected the course of history and resulted in there not being an engineered
super-virus known as Kosong-ni in the year 2070.

Totally unlikely that a chunk of classroom
floor could alter history that much. But you never know.

‘Don’t worry, Mads,’ said
Liam, looking at the guts of the machine spread along the row of plastic chairs.
‘I trust you.’ He hoped his voice sounded as confident as he was trying to
look.

Rashim pointed to one of two squares marked
out on the floor with lengths of masking tape. ‘That’s where you stand,
Liam. It’s a metre square, wide enough for comfortable clearance just as long as
you’re not waving your arms around. Each square has its own departure software
that controls the distribution of energy and channelling of the field. I enter the
precise mass figure into each entry field … with an acceptable nine per cent
margin of error, of course,’ said Rashim. He pointed at the square in front of
Liam. ‘The left square has your stats, the right one has Bob’s.’

Rashim had made his mass calculations
several days ago using a rather old-school method. He’d filled a plastic drum with
water – cold, of course, straight from a bathroom tap – right to the very top, then
asked Liam to climb in and completely submerge himself. The water had spilled out as
he’d displaced it. The displaced water was caught in a tray beneath the drum. And
that water was then measured carefully to determine Liam’s mass. The process was
repeated for Bob, then the girls, then Rashim and SpongeBubba. Provided none of them
lost too much weight or put too much weight on in the meantime, the figures were good
enough. Comfortably within the nine per cent margin for error.

‘So it’s squares now?’ Liam
arched his brows and looked at Maddy. ‘Not one big circle any more?’

She shrugged. ‘Rashim’s
deployment method. That’s how they did it with Exodus, separate displacement
volumes.’

‘It’s safer. There’s a
much lower risk of mass convergence. Plus I’ve calculated for an additional amount
of mass. Each time we use the same square, we’ll take a half inch of the floor
with us, no more than –’

‘Mass convergence?’ Liam could
guess what that harmless-sounding phrase meant. He’d seen ‘mass
convergence’ before and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight.

He grimaced. ‘You’re telling me
that kind of thing happened with your lot often enough that you had a proper technical
term for it?’

‘We had thirteen mis-translations in
phase alpha!’ piped up SpongeBubba. ‘What came back was real
gooey!’

‘Yes, thanks, SpongeBubba. Certainly,
we had … uh … a
few
failed trials. But look –’ Rashim
pushed his glasses up his nose – ‘this system,
Waldstein’s
particle-projection system, is way more elegant than ours. I mean … quite
incredible! The man was … 
is
 … a genius! It’s the
simplicity of the calculation pipeline that amazes me – the way he’s truncated the
whole process into a basic two-step process …’ He stopped himself.
‘Sorry … the more I’ve worked on this machine, the bigger a fanboy
I’ve become. The point is, Liam, this is a much more reliable system than ours
was. Plus we’re dealing with a much smaller mass conversion. Two departure squares
at a time. And they’re separate. Which means if one square happens to malfunction
in some way, the other person won’t be involved.’ Rashim shrugged.
‘Only one person gets turned inside out, not two. Relax, Liam … you and
I will be fine.’

Liam looked at Maddy for reassurance. She
nodded. ‘Separate’s
not a bad idea. It is actually a lot
safer than the spherical portal we used to share.’

‘All right, then.’ Liam buttoned
up his waistcoat. ‘If you say so. Remind me, what year are we going back to
exactly?’

‘I decided on 1888. That puts you at
several years
after
the viaduct and its generator were built. Time enough for
any gremlins to have worked their way out of the system.’

Liam frowned. For some particular reason the
year rang a bell with him. ‘1888? Didn’t something big happen that
year?’

‘I’m sure a lot of things
happened in that year, Liam.’

‘No … I read something
recently. Something pretty big in London.’

Bob scowled as he trawled through the data
uploaded into his head. ‘The Whitechapel murders happened in that year,’ he
said.

‘Murders!’ Liam snapped his
fingers. ‘That was it! Wasn’t it that Jack the Ripper fella? He did those
murders.’

‘Affirmative. The murders occurred in
Whitechapel, east London. Five female victims over several months. The last victim, Mary
Kelly, was murdered on the ninth of November 1888.’

‘Aye! That’s it!’ He
turned to Maddy. ‘It was all a big mystery, so it was. No one ever found out who
did it.’ Liam had an idea. ‘We could find out who did it! You know, while
we’re back there looking around for a new home?’

‘No, Liam. We aren’t the police.
We’re not a homicide squad. Just concentrate on the job at hand, OK?’

He huffed. ‘Just an idea.’

‘And that’s all it will remain.
We’ve got more important things to worry about.’

Sal finished dressing Bob. She’d
visited a men’s clothing store in the retail park. Liam and Rashim were now
wearing modern
polyester slacks and smart shirts with collars that
were clearly not Victorian, but the grey flannel waistcoats helped date them both a
little. If no one inspected their clothes too closely, they’d be OK. Once again,
though, Sal had struggled to find clothes to fit Bob. She’d had to resort to
shopping at a branch of X-tra-MAN, ‘the store for gentle giants’, and the
choices were pretty limited. Dungarees again for Bob and a loose striped shirt. With a
flat cap perched on his coarse hair, he could just about pass as some lumbering
navvy.

‘So, I’ve set up a time-stamp
for half a dozen years after the setting up of that Holborn Viaduct generator.’
Maddy stepped towards the row of computer screens, and studied one. There was the image
of an old parish map. ‘The location is about a third of a mile south of the
viaduct, right next to the River of London.’

‘Ah … I think you’ll
find it’s called the
Thames
, Mads,’ said Liam.

She squinted at the screen. ‘Oh yeah,
of course. Yeah … the Thames. We did a bunch of pinhole tests on the arrival
location, looks like a small shingle bank, brick wall on one side and what look like
some steps leading up the side of it. There’s very little spatial disruption.
Small stuff, occasional pigeon or something I’m guessing. So, it looks like a
pretty quiet spot.’

‘Grand.’

‘So … remember this is just
a quick look, OK? Go check out that viaduct, see if there’s someplace we can make
ourselves at home. Then come back to the river.’

‘How long have we got?’

‘As long as you want really. I can set
up a scheduled return window if you want, or we can just monitor the location for a
regular rhythmic spatial displacement signature. Remember? Like you did back in
dinosaur-land? Just wave your arms in a regular rhythmic fashion … we’ll
pick it up just fine.’

‘Hmm … I think I’d
like the scheduled return window, to be sure.’

‘OK,’ she said, tapping it into
a keyboard. ‘Three hours? More?’

‘Aye, three hours sounds like
enough.’ Liam looked across at Bob. ‘You ready for another jaunt, big
fella?’