TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (42 page)

‘I …’ Liam was pretty sure
his cheeks looked as red as hers did now. ‘I … well,
uh … I’m awfully sorry, I have to run along. I’m only
passing.’

‘Oh! I’m … s-sorry.
No, don’t worry!’ she cut in too quickly. ‘Just a thought. Just an
idea. I’ll … just …’ Her fingers knotted together
uncomfortably. ‘I’ll just go and check on your book. See if someone’s
retrieving it for you.’

She turned and hurried away from the counter
through swing doors and out of sight.

Maddy managed to pick up half a dozen
discarded newspapers and shove them under her arm. She was beginning to think she looked
like some mad bag lady – like that old vagrant in Times Square with his
tarpaulin-covered shopping trolley and all that bin-rummaging.

The people in Piccadilly Circus seemed far
too preoccupied to care about her, though.

Watching the comings and goings, the
exhaust-spewing bubble cars, the hundreds of people on bicycles, some of them so
overburdened with things she wondered how they didn’t topple over. She was
reminded of images of Beijing, of Mumbai, of Havana. There was an exciting, almost
frenzied, whirlwind of chaotic activity going on all around her. But like those places,
looking closely, she’d begun to note a threadbare quality to everything: a
stiff-lipped impoverishment hidden away behind broad smiles and exuberant
‘how-do-you-do’s. A make-and-mend place of limited resources.

The cars all looked old, patched up, held
together in places with tape, ribbon and rope. So many items of clothing seemed to sport
discreetly sewn patches. At first she’d thought it might be some sort of fashion
thing – a particular passion for elbow patches. But she noted thread giving way on
shoulder seams, trousers worn tissue-thin at the knees, shoe leather worn to a rough
suede.

They’re really struggling.
Britain’s poor.

She was about to grab another discarded
newspaper left on a bench near the fountain surrounding Eros, when a church bell – at
least that’s what it sounded like – gave an ominous single
claaaang
. She
looked up towards where it seemed to have come from and saw that the large television
screen had a logo slowly crawling across its black and white pixel blocks. Maddy
recognized it as the clock face of Big Ben. And beneath it:
SRBBC
1 –
LUNCHTIME NEWS
.

She noticed how many people in the bustling
space turned to look. The trams continued, of course, the bubble cars rattled on, but
the bicycles pulled over, the pedestrians stopped and turned. All those who could stop
seemed so very keen to view the screen and listen to the news.

A newscaster appeared in blocky black and
white pixelvision: smart, formal, a bow tie and a dark jacket. Silver-haired and with a
reassuring fatherly smile, he looked like Dumbledore after a wet shave and a sensible
haircut in smart gentleman’s-club evening wear.

‘
Good day, citizens. This is your
News at One
.’ A pause. A very long pause.

Looking around, Maddy noticed how many of
the upturned faces around her seemed to wear a frozen expression of anticipation.

No … more than that. Dread.

‘
The ultimatum presented by
Secretary Andrei Bechemov of the Soviet Republic, and Secretary Andrew Benn of the
Socialist Republic of Britain, has expired without any official response from
President Jonathan Elroy Bush. The convoy of American warships crossing the Atlantic
carrying the atomic materials to France appears to be proceeding undaunted. It is
thought that the convoy will cross the 20 degree west longitude – otherwise known as
the Bechemov Ultimatum Line – at some point late tomorrow afternoon. Discussions are
continuing among the other gathered heads of state in Berlin as to the official
response to the crossing, should it happen. There have been increased calls for a
naval interception. Soviet warships despatched over a week ago across the Arctic Sea
and around the top of the Atlantic and into the American-enforced “Trade
Embargo Noose” will be in a position to meet the convoy should it make any
attempt to cross the line.’

The newscaster took a breath.

‘
Secretary Benn reiterated that
the proliferation of atomic weapons, specifically President Bush’s insistence
on deploying a forward atomic weapons base on French soil, was a flagrant attempt to
provoke hostilities. French leader, President Durant, responded that France was at
one with American foreign policy in wanting to preserve a robust frontline against
socialist encroachment
.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t seem
good,’ Maddy whispered. She checked her watch. The one-hour window was due in just
under ten minutes. She decided to make her way back across Piccadilly Circus; now, with
the exception of the rattling wheels of the trams and the overhead fizzing of sparks
along the contact wires, it was an almost completely frozen tableau.

She walked up the steps and through the
frosted-glass double doors they’d emerged through earlier. Halfway down the dimly
lit hallway, she passed the office on her left. The sound of clacking keyboards had
ceased and she glimpsed inside – every typist in the long room was now gathered round a
single desk,
watching something glowing a flickering blue. She could
hear the thin warble of the newscaster’s voice echoing out of the still and silent
office, following her down the dark hallway towards the doorway opening on to the
yard.

‘…
for everyone to be prepared for
the worst possible scenario. That a state of war may soon exist
between …
’

In the yard she was relieved to see Liam was
waiting for her, a fat, heavy-looking book tucked under one arm.

‘I think this might not be a future we
want to hold on to,’ said Liam as Maddy joined him.

She checked her watch. Five minutes to
go.

‘I’ve got a feeling you may be
right.’

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

‘This is incredibly
fascinating,’ said Maddy. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
‘From Jack the Ripper goofing up and getting himself killed in 1888, here we have
a 2001 sitting on the brink of global thermonuclear war!’ She looked at the
others. She had the history book Liam had ‘borrowed’ open on the desk in
front of her and resumed reading passages aloud.

‘
The revelation that the
Whitechapel murders were perpetrated by a Cathcart-Hyde, a member of the House of
Lords, proved to be the final straw. His intended victim, Mary Kelly, a common
street woman, was hailed as a hero for overpowering him and killing him in
self-defence. Upon her arrest for his murder, riots erupted across the East End of
London
.’

She looked up at them. ‘Which we saw
for ourselves.’ She resumed reading. ‘
Her trial in the spring of 1889
led to mass riots across the country. She was prevented from taking the stand and
testifying publicly, because the authorities feared Mary Kelly would incite the
working class to open revolt, so popular a figure was she by then.
’

Maddy turned the page, and scanned the
text.

‘
December the fifteenth 1890. The
hanging of Mary Kelly led to the Winter of Rage and the subsequent “Trafalgar
Square Massacre”; three hundred rioters were shot dead by soldiers of the
fifth Hampshire rifles and another hundred and seven people were cut down during a
charge down
Oxford Street by the Queen’s own Blues and
Royals of the Household Cavalry!
’

She turned another page. ‘
May the
seventh 1891, Queen Victoria and the royal family escaped to Canada as the
Libertarian Workers’ Transition Council took control of Westminster and the
Houses of Parliament and the first socialist state in the world was officially
declared
.’

She flipped through several more sections of
the thick book, taking her forward through time. The others sat in silence as she
skim-read the pages and timelines of dates and events.

‘So …’ she said presently,
‘it seems … then, when the Second World War should have been happening
in correct history, there was no war in this timeline; instead, a growing consolidation
between two sides. And an escalating arms race.’

‘Two sides? What, America versus
Britain again?’ said Sal. ‘Just like that time when the American Civil War
didn’t finish?’

‘No, not so much countries, Sal.
Ideologies
: socialism versus capitalism.’

‘What does that mean exactly?’
asked Liam.

Maddy looked at him. ‘Oh, come on!
Seriously? You must’ve read enough history books by now to know what those words
mean, right? It’s the struggle of the worker versus the banker. The poor versus
the rich. The idea of shared wealth versus personal wealth.’

‘Oh, right,
that
.’ He
shrugged. ‘Aye, I knew that.’

‘On one side we have Russia,’
her finger ran across a colour-coded map of Europe, ‘which has its revolution in
the 1920s. Germany, Britain, Poland, Austria … one after the other, by the
look of these dates, they experience their own workers’ revolutions. And then on
the other side we have America and Canada and some of the South American countries
becoming one big “Free World Zone”. That’s what they call
themselves.’

‘It’s an Atlantic divide,
then?’ said Rashim. ‘The Americas against Europe?’

‘No, not exactly.’ Maddy flipped
through some more pages until she found an entry she’d read earlier. ‘Ah,
here it is … 
1937: The DuMann/Roosevelt Accord. President Roosevelt and
Congress approve a loan of several hundreds of millions of dollars to the French to
help them invest in industry and weapons development. France is seen by the American
public as one of the last major outposts of capitalist values in
Europe
.’

She checked an index at the front.
‘The rest of this century, it seems, is one long Cold War. Tensions rising on both
sides. There’s a doozy of a quote right here at the front of this book.’ She
flipped to the title page.

‘
The twentieth century will prove
to be a century devoted to one purpose alone – preparation for an inevitable war.
Almost a hundred years spent in a race for industrial and technological supremacy. A
race in which the winning post will almost certainly be a brutal and catastrophic
global war … and no country will emerge unscathed.
’

‘Jay-zus,’ muttered Liam. He
recalled the strained look on that poor young girl’s face in the library.
She’d seemed so worried, so haunted by looming events. And Liam reminded himself
how he’d casually, glibly, batted away her concerns as if she was being silly. So
easy for him to be devil-may-care. His was a fleeting visit. But she … she was
stuck there waiting, like every other person in the country, to see how far the
Americans were prepared to push their challenge.

The young lady had returned with his book
and a mumbled apology for the awkward invitation she’d extended to him.
She’d covered her mouth, her braced teeth, as she’d whispered, but he could
have sworn she’d said something like, ‘
I just don’t want to be on
my own … if … when … it happens
.’

‘Everyone knew what was coming,’
said Liam. ‘They could see it coming, God help ’em.’

Maddy picked up one of the newspapers. She
looked at the others, Rashim and Sal in particular. ‘They have nuclear weapons in
this timeline, but they call them “atomics”. It looks like both sides have
“atomics”. They’ve been stockpiling warheads for decades.’

‘We need to see how it turns out,
Maddy.’

She nodded at Liam. ‘I think so. It
didn’t look good. We need to go further forward, Rashim. Can we do it?’

He shook his head. ‘I said it before.
We don’t have the power to send you any further, Maddy. Maybe remote-viewing. A
pinhole-viewing.’

‘That’s fine. That’s all
we need. How far forward can we go?’

‘I need to work it out.’

‘2070? Can you get us a look at that
year?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll work it out.
Just give me a moment.’ Rashim took a chair at the desk and pulled up a program on
the screen.

They waited silently, listening to him tap
on the keyboard and mutter calculations under his breath.

‘It’s always the same,’
said Sal after a while. ‘One way or another, mankind ends up wiping itself out
with some big weapon, doesn’t it? Why are people so completely stupid?’

‘It’s what we do best,
isn’t it?’ said Liam. ‘Invent things that we can use to kill everyone.
It’s what we’re good at, I suppose.’

‘That is correct,’ rumbled Bob.
His eyelids were fluttering, revealing the rolled whites of his eyes. He was
Bluetoothing data. One of his sporadic back-ups. ‘Mankind is essentially
sociopathic,’ he continued. ‘That is probably why
Homo sapiens
became dominant and wiped out the Neanderthals and the other sapient species; your
killer instinct was more clearly defined.’

‘Aye, we were tougher nuts than those
apemen,’ said Liam.

‘Negative. Not tougher,’ said
Bob, ‘just more ruthless.’

‘Thanks for that,
Dr
Phil
,’ said Maddy. ‘Since when did you become an expert on the human
psyche?’

‘I have files on –’

Maddy raised a hand. ‘It’s OK, I
was just being snarky.’

‘OK, I’ve got some rough
figures,’ said Rashim. ‘We can’t project a pinhole field all the way
to 2070, I’m afraid. It’s just not possible on the power we’re drawing
in right now.’

‘Jesus!’ Maddy gritted her
teeth. ‘We need to do something about that. This Holborn generator’s a pile
of junk!’

‘I have some thoughts on this. We
could do some reconfiguring, perhaps insert some kind of capacitor to build up a store
of surplus energy –’

‘Later. We’ll discuss that
later. Just tell me how far we can go right now.’

Rashim looked at the scribbled notes on the
desk in front of him. He sucked air through his teeth. ‘I think we can reach as
far forward as the early forties – 2042, perhaps 2043. But not much more.’