TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (32 page)

And now they were acting entirely on their
own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much
need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman
history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their
eyes only.

A warning? A truth? A threat? A
revelation?

‘Come on, then,’ she said.
‘This won’t do itself.’

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

It took Maddy half an hour to successfully
connect the hard drive to the networked computers. The new PCs had a different method of
logging the hard-drive idents, which meant computer-Bob had some data-shuffling to do
before he could get the underlying DOS code to recognize the hard drives, and this
external one, under their original ident tags.

Presently, Becks closed her eyes. The influx
of new data being Bluetoothed into her mind was an odd sensation. One, of course,
she’d had before as Bob had worked with her, slowly bringing her mind up to speed
with his. But that had been a trickle. This was a flood. The nearest sensory equivalent
was like having ice-cold liquid injected into an artery, feeling it spread, branch,
travel … envelop.

There were duplicated memories among the
incoming data. Memories she’d already inherited once before from Bob. Memories of
memories. Then there were her very own memories: recollections of dinosaurs and jungles.
Liam … and an emergent mind-state for him – a
feeling
– that
she’d labelled and carefully put to one side. In her mind she saw medieval towns
and castles, Prince John, ridiculously besotted with her. A battle … the siege
of Nottingham: ranks of glinting armour and flapping banners shifting in the heat haze
of a summer’s day. A remote monastery, a monk called
Cabot.

And then an ancient scroll of parchment.
Becks recalled leaning over it and, by the dim, flickering light of the archway, moving
a deciphering ‘grille’ across faded ink nearly a thousand years old. She
could see herself writing down the letters on a pad of lined paper. Then, the decoding
complete, starting to read it.

Then the discontinuity. Whatever she’d
read had included an instruction that locked it all away into one part of her mind.

After that her memories were of the archway
dropping, literally, into a war zone. A destroyed America tearing itself apart. She
remembered the one-sided battle. Skies filled with giant airships, and hulking
behemoths, engineered monsters, ascending the slope of a battlefield and dropping down
into their trenches. Butchery. Blood. The dismembered ruins of bodies cluttering the
floor of a trench.

She recalled taking one of those giant
beasts down. Staring closely into its eyes as it lay dying and seeing what looked like a
plea for death:
End me
.

And then she’d found a heavy machine
gun and fired it from the hip until its spinning barrels had overheated and locked. She
remembered a dozen gunshot and bayonet wounds, her body’s enhanced biochemistry
rushing to fight fires, to clog arteries and preserve a dwindling reserve of blood. But
slowly losing the struggle.

Then that final lucky gunshot. The ricochet
of a bullet inside her cranium, a glancing blow off the silicon in her head followed by
a complete and instant shutdown.

‘Becks?’ Maddy’s voice
sounded distant. A cry from the end of an impossibly long tunnel. ‘You
OK?’

[System Update
Complete]

Nanoseconds that felt like minutes passed in
her mind, an almost reassuring pause. It appeared that the intelligence that
had existed before her shutdown and death was actually largely
undamaged and fully functional, but then …

[Warning: System
Conflict]

Becks’s breath caught in her throat.
At the very base level of her digital mind two insistent lines of programming, two
distinct imperatives, were firmly at odds with each other. Commands issued by two
different individuals and embedded in her, each as unavoidably authoritative as a
command from God Himself might be to a holy man. One recent – Madelaine Carter’s
new mission statement:
The end must be prevented
. And the other one much, much
older. She realized that certain unlock conditions must have been satisfied. Whatever
those conditions were, the part of her AI sectioned off and responsible for being the
gatekeeper code had clearly decided, rightly or wrongly, that the gate could be cracked
ajar.

And it opened the door on conflicting
instructions she was struggling to resolve. Because the other imperative, the other
mission statement released from captivity, was quite the opposite.

The end must be allowed to
happen
.

And those words had come from nearly two
thousand years ago.

More to the point, they were Liam’s
instructions. His words. Not Maddy’s.There was more. Much more in there. Her mind
queried this conflict between Maddy’s mission statement and the other from
antiquity, Liam’s, but the gatekeeper code refused her entry to that part of her
hard drive. The explanation was in there, but not available. Not yet.

[Resolve Conflict]

Becks was on her own. She was going to have
to choose between Liam and Maddy. But she realized that was a problem her mind had
already been quietly working on. She had the recent mission reappraisal from Madelaine
Carter complete with
a perfectly logical justification:
Waldstein’s initial mission parameters could no longer be trusted. The man was
quite clearly insane and bent on seeing mankind destroy itself. But she also had just
one sentence from Liam. A future Liam. And no justification or explanation to go along
with it.

[Resolve Conflict]

1. Carter imperative – logical
validation

2. O’Connor imperative –
none

She located a thought buried in her head like
a prehistoric mosquito entombed in amber. A frozen decision, an instruction code with an
internal time tag attached to it. It was a moment of thought that had occurred in an
eye-blink, fifty-nine nanoseconds after a single British bullet had penetrated her skull
and fluked a glancing impact on her computer chip. Her dying mind had attempted to
unlock the secrets in that portion of her drive, to propagate the data stored there
elsewhere in case of damage to that partition. The gatekeeper code must have agreed this
emergency measure was valid and the process had just begun … when she’d
‘died’.

And there it was – just one command from
Liam with no sensible explanation to back it up. All there was to lend it authority,
credence … was that it was an older Liam with knowledge of what destiny lay
ahead of them all. And logic dictated that a future Liam would have the benefit of
hindsight; a future Liam’s command must exceed Maddy’s authority now.
However, Becks’s scrambled, dying mind had turned that logical statement that
future-Liam’s command must be trusted … into love.

‘Becks? Talk to us, goddammit! You
OK?’ That voice again. Still far away, but a little closer now. Becks opened her
eyes. She
saw Maddy, Sal and Bob staring at her, a concerned
expression on all their faces.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I now have near full
recollection,’ she replied coolly. Her gaze met Bob’s. ‘My own
memories are restored. I calculate 6.7 per cent data corruption.’

‘That is better than our original
simulated estimate,’ rumbled Bob.

‘What about Liam?’

She looked at Maddy. ‘What do you wish
to know, Madelaine?’

‘When we ran the software simulation
of your mind on the computer system, you said something very odd about him. Do you
remember what you said?’

‘Information: it was read-only,’
said Bob. ‘She would not remember the simulation as her mind-state was not
stored.’

‘Oh yeah. Of course.’ Maddy
rolled her eyes at her own stupidity. ‘Of course. OK, then … uh,
let’s try a different approach. Let me see …’

Sal stepped in. ‘Becks, tell us how
you
feel
about Liam.’

[Recommended Answers]

1. I am presently confused by
undefinable variables

2. I love him. Love him! LOVE
HIM!

3. He is my
operative

She offered the third answer and that seemed
to please all three of them.

Maddy grinned with relief. She patted Becks
affectionately. ‘It’s really good to have you back again.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied,
smiling. ‘It is good to be fully functional again.’

5 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

‘Do you hear that, Liam?’
Rashim tapped the brick wall again. They both heard the faint clatter and rustle of
loose mortar dropping on the far side.

‘It sounds like there’s a hollow
there.’

Rashim nodded. ‘That’s got to be
it – the conduit.’

‘Well done, skippa!’ chirped
SpongeBubba. Above the lab unit’s goofy grin, its small gherkin-shaped nose
wobbled slightly as it fidgeted from foot to foot.

Liam, Rashim and SpongeBubba had settled
into their viaduct archway –
the dungeon
they were calling it now – a few days
ago and all three had been kept busy. Rashim had figured out a way to make them some
money. Obvious really. So obvious the entire team had collectively, figuratively palmed
their foreheads when he’d mentioned it.

Gambling. More specifically, card games.
Every public house seemed to have a room at the back, thick with pipe smoke, where a
‘gambling party’ had gathered: working men who were stupid enough to lose
their wages night after night. Rashim and Liam had played faro several nights on the
trot, learning how to count the cards, and Rashim calculating the odds. There was also
hazard, which relied purely on chance, and a game they avoided like the plague. Chance
wasn’t any good to them.

After four consecutive nights of winning at
several different gatherings, they were beginning to be recognized. Liam suggested any
further money they’d need to make might be best earned placing bets on horses. A
little trip of a few weeks into the future would give them the names of every winning
horse in the country. Once they were all properly settled, that was going to be the
first order of business.

With some money to tide them over, Liam had
been busy buying some furnishings and comforts. There were plenty of pawnshops and
second-hand furniture shops nearby in Holborn. It also gave him a chance to find his way
around this part of London. To drink in and learn the finer nuances of London life in
this time.

This morning, though, their attention had
turned to the task of hooking into the source of electric power that was chugging away
close by. They’d been digging small ‘sample’ holes along the back wall
all morning. At first where they’d expected to find the narrow space according to
the blueprints Maddy had printed out for them. And then, when it became clear the
blueprints weren’t entirely accurate, at random intervals along the wall.

Rashim worked the tip of his screwdriver
along the mortar around a loose brick. This time, finally, it looked like they’d
found the narrow voids beyond; they could hear the hollow echo of skittering rats, the
tap and echo of grit and mortar falling off the brick wall on the far side. The mortar
was like clay.

‘Not very good,’ he said.
‘The building contractor must have been using a cheap mix.’

The brick shifted. It was loose enough now
to remove with his fingers. He pulled it free. Liam flipped on a torch and shone it
through the small hole in the wall into the darkness beyond. They could make out a
passage about a yard wide and only the same again high.

Rashim cursed. ‘I was actually hoping it
was tall enough to be a walk space.’

Liam studied the floor of the passageway,
littered with rat droppings. ‘It’s a crawl space,’ he said. He
grimaced. ‘And it’s covered in rat poo.’

‘Great.’

They eased another dozen bricks out and
widened the hole. Rashim consulted the blueprint by the light of Liam’s torch.
‘Twenty, maybe thirty metres down there, and that takes us very,
very
close to where the generator is supposed to be located.’

Liam took off his thick felt coat and began
to unbutton his waistcoat.

Rashim sighed. ‘No,
maybe … I should go. If they’ve used this conduit for laying down cables
then it’s best I take a look at them.’

Liam looked again at the rat poo. ‘Are
you sure?’

Rashim grimaced at the fleeting sight of
tiny grey furry bodies, flickering bald pink tails and the glint of dozens of beady
black eyes. ‘Not really.’ He sighed. ‘But I … it’ll be
easier if I can see for myself to do the job.’

Liam nodded. Patted his shoulder.
‘Aye, there is that. I’ll probably get it wrong and end up blowing this
place to kingdom come, or something.’

Rashim stripped to the waist, folding his
clothes carefully. He grabbed his tool bag and then, with a cheap keyfob pen torch
between his teeth, climbed into the hole in the wall. He hesitated outside the crawl
space.

‘I really hate rats.’

‘Ah now, go on. They’re probably
more frightened of you than you are of them.’

Rashim ducked down into the space and began
to crawl along the passage.

‘Ughhh!’ His voice echoed back
after a minute of grunting and shuffling. Liam heard him swearing in Farsi.

‘You OK in there?’

‘I have just put my hand in something
disgusting.’ Liam heard Rashim’s breathing and muttering echoing back
towards him. By the light of his own torch Liam could only faintly see the soles of
Rashim’s boots.

‘Rashim, are you OK in
there?’

‘Dead rat.’