TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (36 page)

Faith shrugged a
whatever
. Becks
had to admire the fluidity of that gesture; it was so gracefully human-like.
‘Perhaps it is for the best.’

And that too sounded so human. That sounded
to Becks very much like an expressed
opinion
. Neither she nor Bob had quite
managed to master that. ‘Is this your personal conclusion?’

‘Of course not. Unfortunately, I am
unable to think that way.’ Faith entered the room. ‘Those are the words of
my Authorized User – Roald Waldstein.’

Becks lowered her aim ever so slightly.
‘You are following his instructions.’

‘Correct.’

‘In that case I understand your
reasoning.’

Faith nodded. ‘Good.’ She
stepped over the unconscious man on the floor between them as if he was nothing more
than a roll of carpet waiting to be taken out and dumped in a skip.

‘We are in agreement, Becks. There is
no need for conflict.’

‘Unfortunately, I also have orders to
follow.’ She shouldered the stock of the gun and fired in one swift motion.

Instinctively, Faith raised her arm to
protect her head. Several
rounds smashed into her wrist and lower arm,
rendering it a ragged, swinging pulp of flesh and chalk-white splintered bone. As the
weapon clicked noisily, the cartridge empty, Faith leaped forward. With her good arm,
she knocked the gun effortlessly out of the younger, smaller support unit’s
grasp.

With the side of one hand, the girl tried to
chop at her neck, an obvious weak point. Faith anticipated that and parried the jab with
the soft crunch of her bullet-shattered arm. With her good arm, Faith duplicated the
tactic and grabbed Becks by the throat, lifting her slight frame off the ground so that
her feet were swinging free. She hurled her like a rag doll across the room into a stack
of chairs and desks in the corner.

Becks disappeared among them, lost in a
mini-avalanche of classroom furniture. Faith raced over, flinging desks and chairs aside
as if they were mere scoops of dirt, digging for Becks before she could attempt to
burrow deeper and escape. She found her lying on her back, gasping, spraying fine
droplets of dark blood on to her pale chin. Her arms flailed pointlessly in an attempt
to get herself up. Legs lifeless and useless.

Faith knelt down heavily on her heaving
chest. ‘Your back is broken, is it not?’

Becks nodded.

‘Then you are incapacitated. You
should self-terminate.’

Becks sputtered blood, her jaw working,
trying to say something. Instead, she gave up trying to talk and simply nodded
again.

Faith remained where she was, studying
Becks’s face until the glint of digital consciousness ebbed from her grey eyes.
Now they rolled uncontrollably, a simple-minded animal stare. Nothing more than that.
And there – the faintest whiff of melted plastic, singed silicon.

This child with its broken back was just a
simple-minded
gurgling creature now, arms listlessly flailing. Faith
reached her good hand out and grabbed the creature’s slender neck. She snapped it
with a quick, savage twist. And the pitiful thing was finally still.

She got up and walked quickly towards the
metal frame sitting in the middle of a taped square on the classroom floor. A
two-foot-high metal frame with a rat’s nest of wires and circuit boards in the
middle. She understood what it was: a displacement device. There was a growing hum of
energy coming from inside it, like the stirring of angry bees inside a rattled and
shaken hive. She noticed a second taped square beside the first. Empty.

[Information: these are departure
markers]

She realized the support unit had been
getting ready to transport herself.

[Caution: the displacement device is
about to activate]

There was only one possible place this
displacement charge was going to take her – to where the others must have already gone.
She quickly stepped into the square. No need for any deliberation. Her mission was
simple: locate and terminate. It really didn’t matter when or where she ended up
in the course of pursuing that goal. Once the job was done, her fate was going to be the
same as the unit she’d just fought anyway.

It was then, over the electronic buzz coming
from the device beside her, that she heard a voice echoing up the passageway.

‘Faith?’ It was Cooper.
‘Hey!
Agent
Faith? You OK in there?’

The noise coming from the machine was
increasing in pitch and volume now, more a whine than a buzz. Faith felt the hair on her
scalp lift as the charge of excited particles enveloped her.

Cooper’s head poked cautiously into
view. ‘Agent Faith?’ His eyes darted quickly from the body of the man on the
floor, the body of a young girl on the other side of the room and Faith calmly standing
in the middle of the floor, motionless like a
child playing musical
statues, blood dripping from the ragged end of one arm. ‘What’s going
on?’ He frowned. ‘What the devil’s that noise?’

Faith cocked her head and tried out a
faltering smile on her lips. As close to a fond farewell as she could manage.

‘Goodbye, Agent Cooper,’ she
said coolly. ‘It has been agreeable working with you.’

‘Uh? Goodbye? Where are you go–’
He looked at her, then glanced at the odd contraption on the classroom floor. The
growing hum that was filling the room seemed to be coming from it. He noticed the
taped-out squares. Indents several inches into the floor within them. For some reason he
was reminded of those teleportation pads in that TV series
Star Trek.

Oh no.

The electronic whine became deafening.

‘Agent Faith! Please step out of that
square! Now!! Please –’

He felt a hard puff of air on his cheeks,
dust and grit in his face. By the time he’d quickly swiped at his eyes and blinked
the grit out, she was gone.

Mallard was beside him. He’d just seen
Faith disappear. ‘Jesus … she … she just vanished!’

Cooper stepped over the man’s body.
Mallard ducked down to check for a pulse. Then he was up again on his feet and out in
the passage bellowing for a medic to get the hell in here. Cooper ignored all that; it
was a commotion that seemed a million miles away and entirely unimportant. He squatted
down on his haunches and stared at the scuffed taped lines on the floor – at the
fizzing, smoking end of a power cable that draped across the tape and ended abruptly
where the floor dropped down into a shallow square recess.

He followed the snaking trail of cable back
across the floor and up on to a school desk where a single commonplace Dell
desktop computer was quietly humming away, its hard-drive light
blinking silently.

His heart lifted with hope.

They must have left it behind by
accident!

Perhaps in too much of a hurry to get out of
there maybe? Perhaps … perhaps all the answers were right there on that
machine? He got up and hurried over. There was something on the screen. An open dialogue
box. Text. A cursor blinking, and a final phrase skittered across the screen.

> Reformatting complete.
Goodbye.

The dialogue box closed, the screen went
black and a DOS prompt appeared and blinked vapidly.

C:/

Cooper’s voice echoed down the
passageway, echoed through abandoned classrooms and corridors, gymnasiums and
cloakrooms. A plaintive wail of grief and frustration. A lifetime’s worth of
waiting … for this. For nothing.

The entire boarded-up school reverberated
with one miserable word.

‘
No-o-o-o-o-o!
’

14 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

Maddy felt the familiar thud of impact
beneath her feet, and the usual flood of relief that she’d emerged from the
haunting mists of chaos space. She could smell a damp mustiness, unpleasant and yet
somewhat familiar; it reminded her of their old archway back in Brooklyn.

She opened her eyes and for the briefest
moment she thought that’s where she was: the same low arched brick ceiling, the
dim light, the snaking of cables and untidy clutter everywhere. She could almost believe
she was right back in Brooklyn.

‘Best step aside, Maddy,’ said
Liam. ‘The last one will be coming through soon.’

Rashim had already stepped out of his
square, taken off his anorak to reveal a crisp white gentleman’s dress shirt and
waistcoat. She smiled; out of all of them he seemed to most relish wearing the smart
tailored clothes of this time. He rolled his sleeves up to the elbow and immediately
started working with a knife, splicing a loop of thick insulated cable that emerged from
a hole in one of the walls. Getting ready to hook up the displacement machine to their
source of power, the moment it arrived.

‘Maddy?’ prompted Liam.
‘The square? You should get out of it.’

‘Oh yeah.’ She stepped aside.
‘My God, Liam … it’s just like, well, almost like the Brooklyn
place.’

‘Aye.’ He grinned. ‘That
was my thought too. You like it?’

She smiled, the first time in weeks that
she’d felt like smiling. It felt a little like that first time she’d woken
up, Foster hovering over her with a tray of coffee and doughnuts. ‘Pity there
isn’t a Starbucks nearby, though,’ she said.

‘Well now …’ He laughed.
‘Actually, there is. Of a sort.’

Maddy looked over the top of her glasses at
him. ‘What?’

‘Well, sort of. A coffee shop on the
back of a wagon, so it is. Roasted chestnuts. Vanilla slices. Fresh baked pies and
tarts. You’ll love it.’

Sal looked around the gloomy space.
‘Where do we sleep?’ She turned back to Liam. ‘Where do we do
toilet?’

Liam raised his hands apologetically.
‘Me and Rashim have been doing like everyone else seems to do. You sort of find a
dark corner in a backstreet somewhere and you just go –’

‘Not doing that,’ said Sal.
‘Not going to happen.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ added Maddy. ‘Me
neither. I want a toilet.’

‘Aye, all right,’ he said with a
shrug. ‘I s’pose we can fix something up.’

‘Immediately, I’d suggest. Like,
top of the list.’ Maddy turned her attention to Rashim working with SpongeBubba on
the cable, slicing strips of insulating rubber away, exposing copper. She looked at the
thick cable protruding from the hole in the wall. ‘That’s where our
feed’s coming from?’

‘Yes,’ replied Rashim.

‘Have we got some sort of
circuit-breakers installed? Some sort of spike protection?’

‘That’s what I’m working
on right now.’

‘Right.’ She nodded. ‘Good
job.’

She put her hands on her hips and allowed
herself a moment of self-congratulation.

That all went rather well, then.
Once the displacement rack arrived and they’d set it and the networked computers
up and checked that everything had come through unharmed, they were going to be pretty
much back in business. Back to where they’d once been, but this time round
they’d be pulling their own strings. This time round they were going to be wholly
in charge of their own destinies.

How cool’s that?
Maddy
smiled.
Very.

‘Bob? You getting any particles
yet?’

Bob nodded. ‘I am detecting precursor
particles. The last displacement volume should be opening very soon.’

‘This has really gone smoothly.’
She nodded, satisfied with things. ‘You know, Liam, I think we’re all
getting quite slick as a team at this whole time-travel thing.’

‘Aye. Best team in the
business.’

‘The
only
team in the
business,’ Sal said drily.

‘True.’

‘Caution!’ said Bob.
‘Maddy, you should stand back now.’

Maddy did as he said and felt the air around
her pulse with the sudden arrival of a dozen cubic metres of air and mass. In one marked
square, the displacement rack sat on the floor, powering down with a disgruntled whine,
freshly severed from its power source.

The other square was empty.

‘Uh … where’s
Becks?’

1 November 1888, Whitechapel,
London

Faith found herself standing in a narrow
courtyard. Dark, damp, grimy brick walls on all four sides of her that rose up to eaves
that overhung and narrowed the dull grey sky. A washing line ran across from one wall to
the other, from which faded, wrinkled and threadbare rags of clothes hung limply like
forgotten dried berries ready to drop.

Rain spattered on her upturned face as she
took in her surroundings. She blinked fat drops of it from her eyes as her mind silently
assessed the present situation.

[Information: translation
error]

Her first thought was how lucky she was not
to be partially merged with something. A dense urban environment like this – the odds
were probably even between empty and occupied space. She turned her mind quickly to
situation-assessment.

The rapidly decaying tachyon particles told
her some of the story. She’d been misplaced spatially by – at her quick assessment
– one or two miles. She was unable to be sure whether she’d also been misplaced in
time: an overshoot of days, weeks, months. It was, of course, a distinct possibility.
She had no idea at all when in time this rogue team had decided to head back to, but she
was pretty sure, running the figures in her head, that she couldn’t have over – or
under – shot by much time. Days or weeks at worst.

Immediate matters first, though. She needed to
blend in to whenever this was and certainly not be the cause of any unnecessary temporal
contamination or undue attention. Then, when she was suitably dressed for this world,
she could run the calculation in her head and work out precisely how far – spatially –
she was from the intended location. There was no way of knowing in which direction
she’d been offset, but if she could calculate a more precise distance then
she’d have a viable search radius to work with.