TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (39 page)

‘You think we should intervene,
Bob?’

‘I am not programmed to define agency
policy, Maddy.’

‘Oh, cut the crud, Bob. Just speak
your mind!’

‘Give him a rest, Maddy,’ said
Liam. ‘He can’t do opinions. He’s not really made that way.’ He
got up, wandered across the dungeon and patted Bob affectionately. ‘But we
are
made that way.’

She nodded at that. ‘OK … then
this seems to be the first test case for our new mission parameters. That’s a
pretty big change going on outside. So … I guess the way we deal with this is
we check the outcome. We take a look forward in time to see where this is going to take
us. And depending on what we see, we’ll have to decide whether this Mary Kelly
gets to live or … you know, die.’

‘That’s kind of brutal,’
said Sal. ‘That’s a lot of judgement in our hands.’

‘Yeah … I sort of
didn’t think about that bit.’ Maddy chewed her lip. ‘That kinda makes
us judge, jury and executioner in this kind of situation. That’s a lot
of … of power. Sheesh, I’m not sure how I feel about that. It was sort
of easier when we were just following orders.’

‘There’s a quote I can think
of,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t know if it helps us or not.’

‘Go on, let’s have
it.’

‘With great power comes great
responsibility.’

‘What is that … Shakespeare
or something?’

‘Uh … no.
Spider-Man.’

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

At about 11 p.m. the night before,
they’d heard the first wagonloads of Metropolitan Police arriving to try and
restore some order. The rioting increased in intensity and they heard a volley of shots
being fired in the early hours of the morning. As the first touch of dawn began to
lighten the night sky, the angry mob had finally melted away.

Now, in the cool steel-grey light of the
morning after, with a light drizzle spitting fat drops of rain on to the cobbles, it
looked like a war had been fought across Farringdon Street.

‘Hoy! Mr O’Connor, Dr
Anwar!’ It was Delbert Hook and his assistant, Bertie. They emerged from the
warren of archways and passageways to join them, standing just outside their side door,
beneath the looming iron arches of Holborn Viaduct.

‘Spent the blimmin’ night, me
an’ Bertie, guarding our front entrance and praying we wasn’t about to be
cleared out and robbed blind.’ He shook his head and tutted. ‘Blasted
anarchists, some of them even ’ad a go at our doors with ’ammers an’
the like.’

He finally noticed Maddy and Sal; his scowl
washed away and was replaced with a greasy charm. ‘And who are these delightful
young ladies?’

‘Friends of ours. This is Maddy
Carter.’

Delbert reached for her offered hand.
She’d expected it to be shaken; instead, he stooped and kissed her knuckles.
‘
Enchanté!
’ he said with cavalier flamboyance.
‘That’s French, that is, love.’

‘Right,’ she said, doing her
best to smile. ‘Yeah, I sort of figured that. Hello.’

‘And this is Saleena
Vikram.’

Sal stuck her hand out and chuckled at
Delbert’s theatrical gesture. ‘Your moustache tickles!’ She giggled as
he kissed the back of her hand.

He stood up, straightened his rumpled
waistcoat. ‘Are you ladies ’ere to help with Dr Anwar’s
experiments?’

Maddy looked to Liam for the answer.
He’d mentioned that he’d spun Delbert Hook a vague cover story to do with
science and experiments. She wasn’t so sure she liked the idea of being seen as
some sort of mere lab assistant to Rashim, though; just because she was female she had
to be the gopher not the brains?

Typically sexist.

She sighed. ‘We’re here to help
him out, I guess. And you … you must be our landlord, Mr Hook? Liam’s
told me a little bit about you.’

‘Mr
Delbert
Hook at your
service, ma’am. Although you can also call me Del if you so wish. Self-made
businessman. Importer and exporter of the finest goods in the world. You name it, and I
can probably get ’old of it. And if I can’t, I’ll know someone who
can. And this tall drink of milk standing behind me is Bertie.’

The young man offered a limp,
pen-pusher’s hand to the girls. ‘Herbert actually. I do his accounts for
him.’

Delbert looked out. Shopkeepers were already
trying to restore some semblance of order to the street, brushing up piles of debris,
the shards of glass, damaged, soiled goods looted from their stores and discarded in the
dirt of the road. ‘Shocking
business this is. We’ve
’ad this going on in the East End of London for the last four nights in a row now.
First time it’s spread here to Holborn, though. Never thought it would come this
way.’

‘I was reading about it in
yesterday’s paper,’ said Maddy. ‘This has something to do with those
murders in Whitechapel, doesn’t it?’

Delbert sucked on his teeth. ‘Any
excuse for these yobbos to make a ruckus and take all they want, as far as I can
see.’

‘They’re anarchists,’ said
Herbert. ‘Workers, the common man. And they have good reason to be angry, Del.
It’s an unjust country. The rich get richer and the poor starve. Those
murders …’ Herbert paused and stroked his thin, pencil-line moustache.
‘That was just the tinderbox to the fire. There were riots brewing anyway, but
that lady, Miss Mary Kelly, she’s an inspiration to the poor, isn’t she? An
inspiration to the oppressed proletariat.’

‘Proletariat?’ Delbert turned
round slowly and looked up at his assistant. ‘Listen to yer and yer poncey
posh-boy talk. Since when did you swallow a whole blimmin’ dictionary?’

‘I read a lot, Del. When I’m not
keeping your business running for you, or humping boxes around for you, I actually read.
You should give it a try.’

‘You think this is going to get
worse?’ Maddy directed her question at the young man.

Herbert nodded, his eyes wide, his
Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. ‘Oh yes, Miss Carter, I
think this’ll get a great deal worse.’

They let Delbert and Herbert get back to
patching up the damage to the front doors to their business and decided to take a walk
down Farringdon Street. Then along Blackfriars Passage, all the way down to the River
Thames. Across the city’s skyline, beyond London Bridge, they could see smudges of
smoke rising
up to the overcast sky. Hundreds of smouldering fires
from the riots last night. It seemed the unrest had spread out of the East End in all
directions – south over the river to Newington, into the City of London. And, if the
view hadn’t been obscured by the tall quayside warehouses along the river’s
edge, Maddy suspected they’d see more hairline columns of smoke to the north of
them.

‘It’s a real mess.’ Sal
pulled a lace veil aside so Maddy could see her eyes more clearly. ‘Maybe we can
go back now?’ Sal chose to wear a broad-brimmed ‘ladies’ touring
hat’ with dark lace trim that dangled over the edge and hid most of her face. She
felt a little better that way. It was the combination of having darker skin in a city
where there appeared to be virtually no black or Asian people – that and wearing clothes
that she felt looked like pantomime costumes. Walking the streets by gaslight was one
thing, but by broad daylight she felt too many eyes lingering curiously on her.

‘Yeah, let’s go back.’
Maddy nodded. ‘We need to decide what we’re going to do next.’

Half an hour later they were back inside the
dungeon, top hats, bowlers and bonnets dangling from their coat rack.

‘All right, here’s the thing,
guys … it’s a change. And, by the looks of it, it’s clearly going
to run and run and develop into a huge one.’

Sal cleared a space on the wooden crate they
were using as a table and placed a pot of freshly brewed tea on it. She dealt out a
mismatched collection of chipped teacups and enamel mugs.

‘So?’ Liam nudged her.
‘Your suggestion is?’

‘So –’ the rocking-chair creaked
as Maddy worked it gently backwards and forwards – ‘this is a test case for our
new role, our new function. Time’s been changed, right? So we’re going to
take a look forward and see what this contamination gives us.
I
suggest we go as far forward as we can ideally, get a look at the year 2070 and see if
this Pandora thing is still going to happen to us.’

‘You know going forward is very
energy-intensive, Maddy,’ said Rashim. ‘I’m not sure how much forward
displacement-reach I can coax out of this current set-up.’

‘Well, let’s find out. I
mean … look, we don’t exactly have to send Liam and Bob forward all the
way to 2070. What if we just open a pinhole camera and take a look-see? Zero-mass, less
energy, that’s how it works, isn’t it? Just get a pinhole image. I mean, a
picture tells us a thousand words, or something like that.’

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes … yes,
of course. Let me get some calculations together.’ He got up and went over to
their networked computers, now all linked up, a chorus of CPU fans whirring and hard
drives clicking contentedly. ‘SpongeBubba!’

‘Hey, skippa!’ the lab unit
squawked, emerging from a dark corner.

‘Come over here, you and I have some
work to do!’

‘Yes, skippa!’ it bleated,
irritatingly happy to be of service.

‘Retrieve my energy-conversion
templates from Exodus.’

‘Yes, skippa!’ It waddled over
to join Rashim at the computer table and together they started a hushed discussion of
numbers.

‘So then,’ started Liam,
‘we investigate whether this Jack the Ripper contamination needs to be corrected
first before we do anything else?’

‘That’s right. That’s how
we’re going to operate. From now on we watch and wait for contamination events and
when one comes along, the procedure should be that we take a look at what future we get
from it. If it’s a good one,’ Maddy said, shrugging, ‘we just let it
happen. If it’s bad news then we do like we used to and go fix it.’

‘But … let’s say the
future is good,’ said Liam, ‘no Pandora, no virus that wipes out all of
humanity; you’re saying if we get that future … we should do absolutely
nothing?’

‘Yup. That’s what I’m
saying.’

‘I’m going to say
it … because I’m sure I’m not the only one here thinking
it,’ said Sal.

‘Thinking what?’

‘Well … doesn’t it
strike you as unlikely that this Kelly woman could overpower a serial killer like the
Ripper?’

Maddy tapped her chin thoughtfully.
‘Not really. She seems a fiery character from what the papers are saying.
She’s got a real potty mouth on her too.’

‘No, that’s not what I’m
getting at. This is wrong history now, Maddy. We’re in a contamination.’

‘I know that. Somehow Liam and Rashim
changed something small that led on to something else, that led on to something else,
like dominoes, that somehow resulted in a situation where Kelly had a chance to fight
back. Who knows? Liam buying a chest of drawers from one trader instead of another might
just have caused the same man to have to make a journey to pick up another chest of
drawers that somehow impacted on the plans of the Ripper causing him to mess up
somehow?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s impossible to determine
for sure.’

‘Or maybe we aren’t alone back
here.’

‘Becks!’ said Liam. ‘Maybe
she made it back alive!’

‘Crud …’ Maddy stared at
them both. ‘Maybe she did.’

‘And maybe it was Becks who killed
this Cathcart,’ said Sal.

‘In which case we also have to go back
to the night of that murder, then, and see if it is her.’

‘Becks wouldn’t kill someone
like that,’ said Liam. ‘Not without having a good reason. It’s an
unnecessary change to history. She knows not to do that.’

‘Unless she’s not right in the
head, Liam. Maybe that upload wasn’t stable. Maybe there’s stuff going wrong
in her head.’

‘Ah Jay-zus, that’s just great!
The last thing we need – a wonky support unit going around killing bad guys.’

‘OK, look … it just means we
have a bit more work to do here. Right.’ Maddy stopped rocking her chair and sat
forward. ‘This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take a look
at the future. If there’s now no Pandora event thanks to this contamination, if
mankind appears to be going merrily along and not wiping itself out with a killer gooey
virus, then we’ve got a winning contamination. But … we still go back to
the night that Mary Kelly should’ve been murdered. We know precisely when and
where to go, since the papers have given us nothing but the details of that night for
the last month. If it is Becks who did it, or is involved somehow, we grab
her.’

‘But if it is Becks who, say, killed
Cathcart … we need to let her do that first, right?’ said Sal.

‘Yes, of course. We let her do her
thing, then we grab her. On the other hand, if the future is still Pandora, then I
suggest we grab her before she can mess with the sequence of events.’

‘And Miss Kelly dies,’ said
Liam.

‘Yes.’ Maddy shook her hands
subconsciously – Lady Macbeth shaking blood from her fingers.
‘Yes … I’m afraid so.’

Liam pulled a face. ‘That feels a bit
like we’re taking advantage of things, so it does.’

‘So?’ She shrugged nonchalantly.
‘Sue me.’

Liam looked uncertain. ‘We’re
meddling.’

‘Christ, Liam, that’s what
we’ve been doing for the last six months for Waldstein –
meddling.
Worse
than that, we were meddling without even really understanding why!’

‘But that last woman, that Mary Kelly
lady,’ said Liam. ‘Surely there’s a way we could try and save
her?’

‘We could do. We could try and save
every one of the Ripper’s victims, Liam. Sheeeez, we could go wandering through
time saving
everyone
who didn’t deserve to die. But we don’t have
an infinite supply of energy, and we can’t survive an infinite amount of time
travel. So we have to be tactical about this, we have to be
smart … 
surgical
.’