TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (45 page)

‘Jay-zus, this is it,’ whispered
Liam. ‘That poor lady’s going to die in a minute. Not just die, Bob, but die
horribly!’

‘Affirmative.’

A gnawing sensation had been eating at Liam
for the last few hours. That there must be some other way to put history right.
‘Ahh, this feels all wrong, so it does.’

‘We must not intervene,’
cautioned Bob.

Liam ground his teeth. His mind was
replaying those two horrific photographs that Maddy had presented him with earlier, but
now colouring in the black and white with vivid reds and intestinal purples. But
then … wasn’t something else meant to happen? Wasn’t Becks
somewhere close by? Perhaps mere seconds away from altering this scene somehow? Saving
Mary Kelly? Killing this evil, psychopathic predator.

Where the hell is she?

‘Ah Jay-zus! I can’t do this. I
can’t just let that poor lady get carved up right in front of my eyes.’

He’d started to get to his feet when a
shrill scream came from behind the fogged window. He saw a lurch of movement obscured by
the net curtain and the scream was cut off. A shadow sliding across the ceiling, a
sudden jerking movement, then another, and another, and another.

Liam felt the acid burn of bile in his
throat, his stomach rejecting food.

Ah Jay-zus, I’m letting this all
happen!

He heard a soft keening moan from inside the
room.

‘Oh God, she’s still
alive!’

Enough.

He got to his feet.

‘Liam!’ growled Bob, reaching
out for him.

‘Stuff this, I can’t just
watch!’ He ducked out from under the low slate lean-to and darted across the small
courtyard, the shotgun in his hands and ready to use.

And it was then, just then, that he noticed
a figure to his right, striding quickly down the rat run towards him.

Both Liam and the other figure stopped. The
figure wore a dress and a bonnet. Her face, what he could see of it, was so very
familiar.

‘Becks? Jay-zus! Is that
you?’

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

Faith’s mind was all of a sudden
inundated with too many simultaneous decision loops running, each one of them furiously
demanding all of her processor time.

Even only as a silhouette she instantly
recognized the young man standing in front of her.

[Target acquired: Liam
O’Connor]

Not only that, the target was a mere ten
yards away AND in a dead end from which he had no hope of escaping her. Command
imperatives screamed inside her head to step forward quickly and get on with the job.
One of her fists balled and flexed, keen to get on with the task of killing him. But her
eyes darted to the door that led to Mary’s room. The very room Faith had been
sharing with Mary Kelly … her friend … for days now.

Her … 
friend … yes.
And her
‘
friend
’
had screamed just moments ago.

Her friend needed help.

Now.

Even
now
might just be a second too
late to save her.

‘Becks?’ whispered the young
man. ‘We have to help her!’

Faith realized that he’d misidentified
her. He thought he was addressing the child support unit. It was a mistake she could
take advantage of right now: draw closer to him while he still thought
she was the other unit, perhaps close enough that she could quickly strike with a jab
to his fragile neck before he could react and try using that gun he was holding.

But …

But …

Another desperate, dying gurgle from within
the room.

But her
friend
needed help.
Now.

‘Jesus! Becks!
C’mon … gimme a hand here!’

One imperative won out over the other.

Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’

No sooner had she taken three steps forward
when she sensed movement to her left. A dark blur. Something large and fast looming
towards her. She turned to face the threat and was halfway towards adopting a defensive
combat stance when every process in her mind, every spinning loop of code, every circuit
running hot and over-clocked, every data bus clogged with shuttling bytes like a highway
jammed with rush-hour traffic … all of it came to a shuddering, grinding halt,
as if an iron bar had been shoved through the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel.

Several thousand volts locked her body
rigid.

Her grey eyes fixed on Liam’s for a
moment before she keeled over, stiff as a board as the taser bolt, fired into her waist,
rendered every muscle in her body as rigid as granite. She landed on the ground like a
felled tree. And Liam, close enough to see her face clearly, took a backward step.

‘Jay-zus! It’s
not
Becks!’ Liam turned to Bob. ‘It’s one of them!’

‘Correct.’

He heard movement behind the window. The
Ripper was busy.

‘All right, she’s down! Now
let’s go and catch that murdering –’

‘No!’ Bob reached out for
Liam’s arm.

Liam backed away, stepping up against the
window. He turned to look over his shoulder – and got a second’s glimpse through a
ragged gap in the net curtains of a scene lit by a single oil lamp inside. A scene of
ghastly crimson spattered across exposed ghost-white flesh.

My God …

Bob stepped forward and grasped his arm.

‘Let me go, goddammit!’

‘Negative.’ Bob pulled Liam back
towards the unconscious body of the unit. ‘Both mission parameters have been
satisfied. We have what we came for. We must let this happen.’

‘The man’s an animal! No, worse
than that! A
monster
 … a … a …’ Liam realized he
was crying; there was a vague acknowledgement that his cheeks were damp with tears for –
how crazy’s this? – a complete stranger. A woman he’d glimpsed for less than
ten seconds. A poor wretch immortalized in the black and white grains of a
scene-of-crime photograph. Forever frozen in her own timeless horror.

Bob gently eased him back from the front
door. ‘We must let him go. The killer must escape and must not be discovered or
identified.’ His voice managed to soften from its usual Dobermann growl to
something resembling empathy. Understanding even.

‘I am sorry. We have to let him go,
Liam. And we have to let Mary Kelly die in that room.’

Otherwise stupid, powerful men in the
future will blow each other to pieces, right? And not just themselves, but women,
children … even innocent young librarians. Why? Because their ideologies
don’t agree. Like children who can’t agree on which toys to have at
playtime and decide instead to set a match to the lot of them.

Children. No better than
children.

He let Bob pull the shotgun out of his hands.
The support unit stooped down, picked up the unconscious body of their pursuer of the
last few months, their assassin, and hefted her over one shoulder as if she was a
pillowcase stuffed with charity shop seconds.

Liam was also dimly aware of the weight of
one of Bob’s arms around his shoulders. Not exactly a hug. But the clumsy,
heavy-engineering approximation of one.

‘We must go, Liam.’

He nodded. Maddy had a pick-up portal for
them arranged for 4 a.m. located down among the warehouses and quays of Blackfriars
docks. A couple of hours and change to spare yet, but they would want to get moving away
from this crime scene as quickly as possible. The noises out here must have disturbed
someone. There might even be people peeking through curtains at them now.

The sooner they were gone, the better.
Otherwise, over a hundred years from now a Wikipedia article on the ‘Infamous
Whitechapel Murders’ and various ‘Famous Grisly Murders’ anthologies
might just feature in their footnotes an eyewitness sighting of ‘
a large ox of
a man, almost certainly a labourer, accompanied by a slight and slender younger man
with dark hair
’
directly outside the room of the last-known victim
of Jack the Ripper at the estimated time of half past midnight.

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct,
London

‘This is incredible,’ said
Rashim, looking at the others. ‘We will see the wave approach, you say?’

‘Yeah, it’s like a weather front
or something.’ Maddy led them outside the dungeon, through their side door to
stand on the kerb of Farringdon Street. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for something that
looks like a big bank of dark cloud.’

‘It’s always a spectacular
sight,’ added Sal, ‘and a bit scary when it hits you.’

Rashim looked giddy with excitement.
‘You know, we argued about this, Dr Yatsushita and I, about how a universe would
accommodate an alteration to its past. What form the reality shift would take?’ He
gazed down Farringdon Street. Busy once again, although the usual kaleidoscope of
activity was heavily punctuated with clusters of crimson tunics of soldiers and the
black morning coats and tall pith helmets of bobbies stationed in protective cordons
round the few shopfronts yet to have been stoved in by rioters. There’d been
rumours that more riots were going to happen again later on today. But of course they
weren’t going to happen. The corrective time wave was going to arrive first.

‘I thought reality would flip its
state with some sort of global, instant paradigm shift.’ Rashim shook his head in
awe. ‘Some
sort of a … a pulse of change. Not like a
tidal wave.’ He turned to them. ‘How quickly does this wave
arrive?’

‘It varies,’ said Maddy.
‘Sometimes almost immediately. Sometimes hours later. It’s not predictable.
It almost seems random.’

He nodded. ‘Like some kind of
Schrödinger flux? As if quantum particles are deciding to flip state or not?’

‘If you ask me, more like quantum
particles are having some freakin’ union meeting and they need to vote unanimously
on a change before something happens,’ Maddy replied. ‘Sometimes it’s
a no-brainer; sometimes I guess reality has a real struggle agreeing which way it wants
to go.’

Rashim chuckled. ‘You make it sound
alive.’

‘I do wonder sometimes.’

‘Liam!’ Sal called out for him.
She ducked back inside and cupped her hands. ‘Liam, you coming out to watch for
the wave?’ Her voice echoed inside the dark brick-built labyrinth.

He was inside, curled up on one of the bunks
they’d improvised. He’d returned from the last short jump in an odd,
un-Liam-like withdrawn mood.

‘Best leave him, Sal.’

He’s internalizing something
,
Maddy figured.
Guilt? Disgust? Anger?
Bob said he’d glimpsed the murder
scene, the inside of Mary Kelly’s room. Maddy could only imagine what horror he
must have seen through her window. It must have been the stuff of nightmares. The kind
of image once seen that remains in your mind like life-long retina burn.

‘Just leave him be, Sal. The time wave
isn’t anything he hasn’t already seen before.’

‘Caution,’ said Bob. He nodded
down the street. ‘There is the time wave.’ He pointed.

To the east, above the tall townhouses
opposite them, above
roof eaves and smoking chimney pots, the
afternoon sky was darkening prematurely. Soldiers and policemen, street sweepers,
peddlers and traders, the man standing on the flatbed of his coffee shop on
wheels … 
all
began to look up with burgeoning curiosity as the
crisp winter sky became an overcast and improbable, swirling impressionist’s oil
painting.

‘My God!’ uttered Rashim.
‘It’s incredible. Quite beautiful!’

‘Won’t the wave affect our
dungeon?’ asked Sal. ‘You know, not having a field up and
running?’

‘It shouldn’t. Holborn Viaduct
is here in either timeline. Mr Hook and his dodgy import/export business were here in
either
timeline too, so they won’t change. And everything Liam and
Rashim have done setting this place up had happened, would happen, whether Jack the
Ripper had been killed or not. Two timelines, Holborn Viaduct and everything inside the
same in either one.

‘In theory we should be all
right.’ Maddy looked at Rashim for confirmation as she spoke. ‘Our dungeon
shouldn’t
be affected by this.’

He nodded. ‘Maddy is right.’ As
he spoke, his eyes remained on the sky. ‘But this street, the rest of
London … all of this will change. The riots will have never happened. This
damage will never have happened.’

All returns to normality once more
.
Maddy watched as a cloud of pigeons fluttered from a rooftop nearby, startled by the
first gasp of a squalling wind.

The poor remain poor and subservient,
ignorant of a gentleman psychopath whose sport was carving up the bodies of
unfortunate fallen women.

It didn’t feel particularly good this
time around restoring the status quo. But, as Foster had once explained, sometimes you
have to allow space for a little evil in order to sidestep a much
greater one. An irradiated earth, that’s what they were avoiding by allowing a
murderer to escape and live the rest of his life undiscovered, perhaps even going on to
murder again and again, indulging his secret, grotesque pleasure, undiscovered. Of
course they were never going to find out for sure if this evil monster went on to kill
again, whether ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ victims went on to secretly number
far more than the commonly accepted five.

The Wikipedia article listed many more
prostitutes who died grisly deaths after Mary Kelly, who might have also been Ripper
victims, but somehow didn’t quite fit the same pattern of mutilations as the first
five. Perhaps he was going to kill more. Perhaps his near capture and discovery
frightened him off his grisly pleasure once and for all.

Maddy decided she needed to sit down with
Liam and remind him that whatever that sick animal did, and possibly went on to do, once
again their actions had saved this world. A fair transaction in the greater scheme of
things.