TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (44 page)

She staggered down Dorset Street, cursing
and muttering as her feet slipped on rain-slicked cobblestones. She’d only
intended to have the one drink. After all, it was well-earned. But one had led to two
and more, and she’d spent more of that money than she’d really wanted to.
Not that she was too worried about that. They could make that money again tomorrow.
Easily.

Faith had an alluring way about her. An
innocence and beauty that drew men like bees to honey, like moths to candlelight. So
distracted were they with trying to chat her up, it was like stealing pennies from a
blind man’s cap.

What a splendid pair we are
.

Although Faith was a little peculiar. There
was an almost doll-like manner to her expressionless face. As if her features were as
rigid as porcelain. And an almost mannequin stiffness to her, as if she was always on
guard. Like one of them redcoat-’n’-bearskins standing to attention outside
Buckingham Palace.

Mary wondered about her. She was such a
puzzle.

She turned left off Dorset Street into the
dark alleyway that led into Miller’s Court, a cul-de-sac of dosshouses around a
small
cobblestoned courtyard that always seemed to reek of human
faeces.

She staggered in the dark, steadying herself
against one greasy brick wall.

‘Blimey,’ she muttered.
‘Bit too much of the blimmin’ laughing juice.’

Faith was probably already back in their
room. Tucked up in the one bed they shared, toe to head. Mary did actually wonder if
Faith ever slept. She always seemed to be wide awake, staring up at the cracked plaster
of the low ceiling. She wondered what thoughts passed through that mind of hers. What
wishes and dreams, wants and needs. She seemed to give so little away.

What a pretty puzzle she is.

Mary was in fact so puzzled by her friend
that she failed to notice the shadow of a man entering the alleyway behind her, casting
a long veil from the faint amber glow of a gas lamp on Dorset Street, all the way down
the dark little alleyway into Miller’s Court. Like some impossibly stretched,
impossibly tall being. The shadow fell across her back, marking her with
darkness … like the ghostly touch of the Grim Reaper, marking her soul for
imminent collection as she entered the last few minutes of her life.

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

‘What we’ve got on the Ripper
murders isn’t a lot,’ said Maddy. She’d grabbed the information and
dumped it into Bob’s head from Wikipedia back in 2001. Which, given that the site
had only been running since January, wasn’t a hugely detailed article.

‘The night of the eighth of
November … the early hours of the ninth of November is when the last victim,
Mary Kelly, gets murdered. There’s no precise time, just that she was supposedly
last seen at midnight and was discovered dead by a neighbour at eight thirty in the
morning.’

Maddy pulled up two grisly black-and-white
photographs on one of the monitors. ‘These were both taken by the Metropolitan
Police.’

‘Jay-zus,’ whispered Liam.

‘Yeah, not very nice I’m
afraid.’

He looked at Sal queasily. ‘I feel
sick.’

‘Well, you need to get over it,
Liam,’ said Maddy. ‘You’re gonna see this for real very
soon.’

‘Is that her face?’ asked
Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘What’s left of
it. The Ripper seemed quite keen for some reason to completely disfigure her
face.’

Rashim leaned closer. ‘My God, it
looks like he was trying to
remove
it.’

‘So, now that’s how the crime
scene is
supposed
to look. In
correct
history, her body is found in
her room, lying diagonally across her bed, her lower torso opened up and the contents,
her organs, placed on the bed beside her.’ Maddy reached across the desk and
picked up a pad with notes on it. ‘But this is the description I’ve summed
up from the recent newspaper articles.’

She looked down at her notes. ‘So,
this bit I’m about to read to you is the contamination bit, what
shouldn’t
have been found at the scene of the murder …’
She began to read.

‘… 
on the floor beside
Kelly’s bed in her small rented room off Miller’s Court was found the
body of her attacker. At first glance a wealthy gentleman in his middle years,
wearing an evening suit and thick coat, his top hat placed on a small table beside
the bed. His manner of death – a crushing of the cranium – was believed to have been
caused by the swinging of a coal shovel or similar device. Although Kelly claimed
she had no memory of the struggle with Lord Cathcart-Hyde, it is clear she must have
struck him once to the side of his head to render him unconscious, and then
repeatedly as he lay on the floor, until his head was completely stoved in as if
some workshop vice or similar device had been applied to the skull and wound tight
until it was crushed out of all recognition …
’

‘Good God,’ whispered
Rashim.

‘A crushed head.’ Liam had once
seen Bob do that. A German guard in one of those concentration camps back in America.
Bob had squeezed the poor man’s head in one of his big hands: squeezed like it was
nothing more than a ripe tomato. ‘Bob? Could Becks do that?’

‘Affirmative. Even partially grown she
has enough physical strength to deploy that kind of damage to a human skull.’

‘Then it really is Becks!’ said
Liam.

‘If that is Becks then she may have
flipped out,’ said Maddy cautiously.

‘May have? Jeez …’ Liam all
of sudden wasn’t quite so keen on the idea of a reunion with their lost team
member, even if she supposedly had some sort of weird, twisted digital version of a
schoolgirl crush on him.

‘Her AI must have been
unstable,’ said Maddy. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault. We
shouldn’t have tried loading her up with the stuff from the hard drive.’

‘We’re going to need to kill
her, aren’t we?’ said Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘We can’t leave
her running around out there.’

‘We could attempt to incapacitate
her,’ said Rashim. ‘We may even be able to reset her.’

Maddy looked at him. ‘How?’

‘Your support units are
older-generation units,’ said Rashim. He pursed his lips thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps twenty-year-old technology. I would say engineered around about the
2050s. Not like the support units you encountered in Rome. The ones procured for Project
Exodus.’

Bob nodded. ‘This is
correct.’

‘OK, so Bob and Becks are older
models,’ said Maddy. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘The computers are dense silicon
wafers. The circuitry is mainly a graphene construct with
some
conventional
silicon that is tightly meshed.
Very
tightly meshed. It is those small silicon
portions which are vulnerable to power surges that can cause instances of
micro-welding.’

Maddy noted Liam’s eyes already
beginning to glaze over. Mind you, she wasn’t actually any the wiser herself.
‘So? What are you getting at?’

‘The older wafers in your units have a
built-in trip switch to hard-set the chip into an “off” state to protect
these weaker silicon parts from that kind of surge damage. During the
Russian–Chinese conflict over the Caspian oilfields, it was a common insurgency tactic
by the Chinese to stun or incapacitate Russian hunt-and-kill squads with taser darts,
and then later reprogram and reboot them with trojan viruses that made them turn on
their own side after some trigger event – a word, a noise. There was a very famous
incident of one squad that returned from a mission behind Chinese lines, passed through
the sentry posts into the camp and nearly wiped out an entire regiment of Russian
conscripts as they slept in their beds.’

‘So, what are you
saying … we taser Becks?’

‘Well … yes.’

‘That’ll turn her computer off
without, you know, completely trashing it?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly right. You
see, the later-generation military units, the ones we had for the Exodus Project,
designs from 2069, had chips made entirely of graphene circuitry. Those are completely
resistant to that kind of surge-welding.’

‘So we taser her. That means
she’s switched off? I mean
properly
off. She’s not going to
reboot,
wake up
, or anything like that, then, is she?’

‘No. It is a hard-reset. A tiny
physical switch is flipped and it’ll stay flipped until someone physically gets
into her head and flicks it back on.’

‘Can you make something zappy like
that from the bits we’ve got lying around?’

‘There’s no need. You already
have one.’ Rashim nodded at one of the boxes of gadgets and spare parts piled
beneath the desk, still patiently waiting to be sorted through.

‘When we were packing up, I was
emptying that old filing cabinet,’ he shrugged. ‘I found one in there. I
thought you knew we had one?’

Maddy rolled her eyes; yes, of course they
had one. She’d
never used it. Never thought to. It had sat in
the filing cabinet with all the other junk, waiting to be useful.

Well, now it was.

‘All right, let’s get it out,
check the thing works. Meanwhile …’ She turned to address the bank of
computers. ‘Computer-Bob, start charging up; the sooner we go back and get this
done, the better.’

‘Maddy, what if that taser thing
doesn’t work?’ asked Liam.

‘You’re taking Bob along,
aren’t you? I’m sure he can handle little Becks.’

‘Aye. But … she’s
quick. She’s very agile.’

‘Look, Liam, if for some reason you
guys can’t incapacitate Becks – if Bob can’t wrestle her to the
floor … or she looks like she might be doing a runner – she’s got to be
killed. Do you understand? If her mind has gone wonky, she’s a contamination
worry. More than that … whatever crazy stuff she gets up to may attract
attention to this moment in time. She could blow our cover. Either you grab her and
taser her, or you take her down.’

She looked at Foster’s old pump-action
shotgun leaning against the wall in the corner. Although why she still thought of it as
his
, she didn’t really know. ‘You should take the gun along
with you. Just in case you need it.’

She was expecting an argument from him. She
knew Liam was fond of her,
it
, the
unit
. She knew he’d have
reservations about gunning her down in cold blood.

‘Aye, the gun.’ He eyed the
weapon nervously. ‘Good idea.’

Or actually, on the other
hand … maybe he wouldn’t.

12.32 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel,
London

Liam was soaked to the skin. This dark
little corner of Miller’s Court where they’d chosen to huddle and wait for
Jack the Ripper offered little protection from the fine rain. It was as if God was
hanging over London with a giant fine-nozzle plant spray, gently wafting aerosol clouds
of moisture down on to the city. Moisture that seemed to find its way into every nook,
crack and crevice.

They were beneath a lean-to: little more
than four rotting posts of wood supporting a roof of rain-slick slate tiles that all
seemed to be conspiring to channel bulbous, greasy drops of rain on to Liam no matter
where he chose to crouch.

In the stillness of the early hours, the
only sound to be heard was the soothing symphony of a rain-damp city fast asleep: the
soft hiss of persistent drizzle; a dog far away with an intermittent worrisome bark; the
soft cooing of pigeons tucked away under guttering, pleased with themselves for being
dry.

Liam groaned.

‘You must remain very still,’
whispered Bob.

‘My legs are killing me. I’m
cold, I’m wet and I’m getting pins and needles.’

‘Nonetheless you must be still,’
said Bob.

He sighed and resumed his uncomfortable
vigil on the narrow
entrance to this godforsaken courtyard.
They’d been huddled here since 11 p.m. Watched a steady procession of drunks
stagger home and noisily fumble their way through front doors. A dozen or more
dosshouses seemed to have openings on to this place. And everyone, it seemed, in each
dosshouse, seemed to enjoy drinking the night hours away.

‘Bob, what’s the
time?’

He consulted his internal clock.
‘12.32 a.m.’

‘Maybe we missed it? Maybe it’s
been and done?’ He looked at the small dark square that was the window on to Mary
Kelly’s downstairs room.

Maybe she’s already in there?
He shuddered at the thought of that. Beyond the pale ghost of a net curtain was a small
bedroom that quite possibly resembled an abattoir right now. A body almost
unrecognizably human slowly losing the last of its warmth. Dots, commas and question
marks of blood in arterial lines up the walls, now drying and crusting.

‘Information: someone is
approaching,’ said Bob.

Liam heard the clack of footsteps. A shadow
cast by one of the gaslights on Dorset Street danced down the rat run, then a moment
later the long shadow was followed by the outline of a woman. He could hear the
woman’s soft voice, chattering to herself. Clearly, utterly, completely,
passing-out drunk.

Mary Kelly
.

She stopped outside the front door to her
dosshouse, pushed the creaking door in and staggered clumsily inside.

More footsteps, quick, light, pattering down
the rat run. Liam saw a long, thin shadow dancing along the wet brick opposite, then a
man came into view. Tall and slim, a top hat cast a shadow across his face. He was
wearing a thick cloak, but Liam managed to catch a glimpse of a leather surgeon’s
bag under one arm. He quickly stole across the courtyard, and caught the front door to
Mary’s dosshouse with the toe of his boot before it slammed
shut.

The man wrestled the door open and Liam
heard a muttered exclamation from the hallway inside. The man pushed his way in and the
door shut behind him. A moment later there was life in the room to the left of the front
door. A gentle orange bloom appeared behind the tatty net curtain. Liam saw foggy
movement going on inside: shadows cast up the walls, across the low ceiling.