TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (28 page)

He nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, all right, then,’ said
Liam, clapping his hands together. ‘Shall we?’

‘Be careful,’ said Sal.

‘That I most certainly
will.’

‘Have a nice trip, skippa!’
SpongeBubba called out. ‘Bring me flowers!’

Rashim turned to Liam. ‘I need to
change his programming sometime soon. It’s beginning to get annoying.’

‘The order of departure is Bob and
Rashim first,’ said Maddy. ‘Then you, Liam, on the left square.’

Bob and Rashim took their places in the two
taped-out squares.

‘Uh, guys … one minute
countdown. Mark!’

A single LED flickered on one of the circuit
boards – clocking the energy being drawn in and stored on the capacitor. A single diode
that would wink out when there was enough on-board energy to discharge. Maddy told
Rashim it would do for now. When they were properly settled, she’d build something
a little more elaborate.

She counted the minute down and, with a hum
of discharged energy, they both vanished, along with the scuffed linoleum floor
they’d been standing on.

‘You’re next,’ she said,
ushering Liam on to his square. He was standing on freshly exposed wooden floor. The
displacement volume had dug down two inches into the ground.

‘Thirty seconds. Stand still
now!’

Liam put his hands down by his side. It felt
a little unsettling, looking down at the tape on the floor surrounding him, and not
knowing for sure if the tip of an elbow, the heel of a foot, might be too close, or even
overhanging the tape. At least bobbing around in that perspex tube he knew for certain
he was wholly ‘in’ the displacement envelope.

The capacitor was beginning to hum.

‘Fifteen seconds!’ called out
Maddy. ‘No more fidgeting now, please!’

‘I’m not!’

‘Yes, you are! Hold still!’

Liam sucked in a deep breath, closed his
eyes.

Ah dear, here we go again.

So much seemed to have happened since the
last time he’d done this. It seemed like a whole lifetime ago. In many ways it was
a different life. Someone else’s. The last time he’d volunteered to have his
body discharged through chaos space into unknowable danger he’d been certain of
who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. This time around … it was
so very different.

‘Ten seconds!’

This time he understood why his body could
take such punishment. It was engineered specifically to take it. This time around he
knew if he took a bullet, or the stab of a sword or a knife, it might well hurt, but
he’d live. That meant there was less to be scared of. Right?

‘Five seconds!’

Nope
. He was starting to tremble
like he always did as Maddy counted down the last few seconds.

Liam, ya big wuss. You’re meant to
be some kind of support unit, aren’t you?

He was just about to start wondering whether
Bob actually
ever experienced fear when he felt the floor beneath his
feet suddenly give way like a hangman’s trap, and that awful sensation of
falling.

1 December 1888, London

Liam kept his eyes shut. The white mist of
chaos space no longer held him in thrall; it wasn’t a Heaven-like magical white
wilderness any more but a place that increasingly unsettled him. He’d seen shapes
out there so faintly that he couldn’t begin to determine whether they had a
certain form or not. They flitted like wraiths, like sharks circling ever closer. Or
perhaps his eyes or his mind were playing tricks with an utterly blank canvas. Perhaps
it was his imagination. But then hadn’t Sal said she’d seen them too?

His solitary limbo in chaos space
couldn’t end soon enough.

A moment later he felt his feet make a soft
landing.

Soft, and sinking.

‘Whuh?’

And sinking.

He tried to pull a foot out of whatever gunk
he was gradually sinking into, and lost his balance. His hands reached out in front of
him, bracing for a face-first impact with the sludge, but brushed past something firm.
He grabbed at it.

It felt like wood. A spar of damp wood,
coated in a slime that he nearly lost his grip on.

‘Liam?’

‘Rashim?’

It was dark and foggy and cold. But he could
make out
Rashim’s faint outline. ‘I think there’s
been a mis-transmission. We’re out on some sort of mudbank.’

‘No … I think it’s low
tide.’ There could have been some small offset miscalculation that had dropped
them several yards to one side. In this case further into the river. It could have been
worse. High tide for instance.

‘Bob, you there?’

‘Affirmative,’ his deep voice
rumbled out of the fog.

Liam held tightly on to the wooden spar. He
wasn’t sinking any more. He pulled one foot out of the glutinous mud with a
sucking sound coming from the silt. ‘There’s a wooden post here, hold on to
it. You can use it to pull yourself out of the mud.’

‘That is not necessary,’ Bob
replied.

‘We’re not actually
in
the mud,’ said Rashim. ‘We’re standing on what appears to be a
wooden-slat walkway.’

The fog thinned and he saw them both several
yards away, standing on a creaking, rickety wooden jetty. Quite dry.

Liam realized there must have been a small
error in Rashim’s calculation of his mass. Then again, not necessarily
Rashim’s fault. He’d eaten a small bag of pecan doughnuts just half an hour
ago. That might possibly have altered his mass enough to cause a deviation from where he
was supposed to be.

Rashim had actually cautioned them all not
to eat just before a jump. Liam cursed his carelessness.

Only got yourself to blame, greedy
guts.

He muttered as he took several sinking,
teetering, laboured steps towards them through the silt and pulled himself up on to the
jetty to join them. His legs dangled over the side and he attempted to kick the largest
clumps of foul-smelling gunk off his boots.

‘Information: the translation was
offset by fourteen feet and three inches,’ said Bob.

Rashim nodded. ‘We should let Maddy know
when we get back. She’ll need to recalibrate the spatial attributor.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Liam.
‘It was three doughnuts that are to blame.’

‘Ahh … now, yes, I did warn
you, Liam,’ said Rashim.

Liam got up off the damp wood, most of the
cloying mud shaken off. He grinned in the dark at him. ‘Lesson learned.’ He
took in the freezing mist all around them. ‘So this is Victorian London, is
it?’

‘Affirmative, Liam.’

‘Yes … Liam. Say
yes
, not
affirmative
.’ He picked out the dark mountain of
Bob’s back and slapped it gently. ‘You’re never going to get your head
around that, are you?’

‘That particular speech file appears
to be resistant to replacement.’

‘Should we not proceed?’ Rashim
interrupted.

‘Hmmm, you’re right,’ said
Liam. ‘Let’s find some solid ground.’

They followed the jetty until it widened and
finally terminated on firm shingle at the base of a slime-encrusted stone wall. A
high-tide line marked the top of the slime halfway up, and it was mist-damp stonework
the rest of the way. The pinhole image they’d gathered earlier had shown this
jetty wall. The mist hadn’t been here then. And there were the steps they’d
spotted in the image. A dozen slippery, narrow stone steps up the side of the jetty
wall.

At the top Liam looked around. A carpet of
mist covered the river below like a wispy layer of virgin snow, dusted silvery blue by a
quarter-moon. He saw the humps of river barges emerge from the mist, topped with
pilots’ cabins like isolated stubby lighthouses rising from a milky sea. The milky
sea itself seemed to stir with life; he watched enormous dark phantoms loom
through the river mist, like those ever-circling wraiths in chaos
space – shadows cast by fleeting clouds chasing each other across the moonlit sky.

The other two joined him.

‘It’s so dark,’ said
Rashim.

Liam nodded. Compared to New York, compared
to whatever future cities Rashim must be used to, it must seem like some medieval
netherworld.

Dark, yes, but punctuated by a thousand
pinpricks of faint amber light: gas lamps behind dirty windows, candles behind tattered
net curtains. They were standing in a cobblestone square. On one side there appeared to
be a brick warehouse or small factory.

They heard something heavy rumbling,
rattling across the river, and turned round to look across the carpet of mist. It was
then Liam noticed the arches and support stanchions of a broad, low bridge.

‘According to my data that is
Blackfriars Bridge,’ said Bob.

Not so far beyond it another
bridge … and the toot of a steam whistle confirmed what Liam suspected. It was
a train crossing the river to their side. He could just about make out the faintest row
of amber lights on the move – lamps in each carriage.

‘My God!’ whispered Rashim.
‘Is that a … a
steam
train?’

‘Aye.’

‘We should proceed towards our target
destination,’ said Bob.

He was right. Liam would rather be back here
for Maddy’s scheduled window than have to flap his hands around like an idiot
hoping for one. There was no knowing how good their temporary set-up back in 2001 was at
picking up hand signals.

‘We must head north,’ said Bob,
pointing towards a narrow street.

They made their way up the street, dark and
quiet. It curved to the left and a hundred yards up at the end it joined a much broader
street. They could hear it was busy even before they stepped out of their dark side
street. The distinctive
clop-clop-clop
of shoed horses, the warning honk of a
bulb horn, the rattle of iron-rimmed coach wheels. They emerged on to a broad street lit
on either side with stout wrought-iron lamps, twelve feet tall, that spilled broad pools
of amber illumination across a wide thoroughfare busy with horse-drawn carriages and
carts.

‘My God!’ whispered Rashim.
‘I never imagined it would be quite so busy!’

‘It’s only ten,’ said
Liam, pointing to a clock on a nearby building. ‘People stay up even later in my
hometown, Cork.’

He stopped himself from correcting that. Not
his
hometown … of course. But it was a constant, unsettling
inconvenience for him and the girls, continually self-correcting statements like that,
that he’d finally stopped giving a damn about it. As Maddy had told him,
It
doesn’t matter if they’re second-hand memories, Liam – we ARE the sum of
what we remember. And that’s how I’m dealing with this.

Denial. It was as good a way as any of
dealing with the knowledge that your whole life was a lie.

‘This is really quite
fantastic,’ Rashim uttered.

‘Glad you like it. Which way now,
Bob?’

‘This is Farringdon Street.’ He
pointed up the busy thoroughfare. At the far end a low bridge arched over the wide
street. Along the top of it were glowing orbs of light of a different colour, more of a
pale amber, almost a vanilla colour. And a steadier, more resilient glow than the
occasionally flickering, shifting illumination coming from the gas lamps.

‘And that is the Holborn
Viaduct.’

‘Those lights …?’ Liam
nodded at them.

‘Affirmative,’ replied Bob.
‘They are electric lights.’

The three of them picked their way up the
broad pavement on the left-hand side of Farringdon Street. It was busy with pedestrians,
a mixture of smartly dressed gentlemen and ladies taking the air after a show, and
costermongers and hucksters of various goods packing up and making their way home for
the night.

‘Come on! Make way there, lads!’
barked a thick-shouldered man with a handcart laden with pigs’ heads and trotters
as he pushed his way past them.

An elegantly dressed woman walking with a
whippet-thin man in a top hat curled her lips in disapproval as the cart wheeled past
her. ‘Oh really!’ she muttered.

Liam and Rashim shared a grin. The noises,
the smells – the acrid smell of burning coke, horse manure, the sight of such churning,
shoulder-to-shoulder life – seemed reassuring, life-affirming. After all that time alone
in the abandoned school it felt good to be back among so many people.

Liam caught the faintest whiff of it first:
the smell of coffee beans roasting in a skillet. Parked up in the dirt at the side of
the road was a large four-wheeled cart. Wooden steps unfolded down on to the pavement
invited them up to a wooden deck where several tables and stools were occupied by
gentlemen and ladies taking coffee and a slice of cake. At one end of the cart a woman
and a man in aprons were serving cups of freshly roasted coffee from large tin urns that
steamed over small skillets. Candles lit the small tables. Mini oil lamps were strung
across the top, like Christmas lights.

‘Just wait till Maddy sees
that,’ Liam laughed. ‘A horse-drawn Starbucks!’

A few minutes later they were standing
beneath the viaduct, looking up at the thick ribs of glossy green-painted iron arching
across the broad street. Overhead, alongside the road that crossed
over the viaduct, the orbs of electric light at the top of tall iron lampstands bloomed
proudly.

‘London’s first public,
electric-powered street lights.’ Liam nodded approvingly. ‘Not
bad.’

‘We have used half an hour of our
allotted time,’ said Bob.

Liam stopped gawking at the lights and
turned his attention to life beneath the viaduct. The underbelly was a row of hexagonal
stone columns on either side of the street from which the arches of iron branched out to
meet each other. On both sides of Farringdon Street there were pedestrian walkways lit
by yet more electric globes. The walkways were flanked by stone columns on one side and
rows of brickwork archways on the other, each archway seemingly occupied by one sort of
business or other.