TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (5 page)

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
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‘We won’t need to take these
clunky old computers with us, will we?’

‘Negative. We can extract the
machines’ hard drives.’

Hard drives?
Then Rashim
remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside
sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data
suspended in water molecules.

‘Right … yes. Do you know
how to do that, uh … 
Bob
?’

‘I have a theoretical understanding of
the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI – known as
computer-Bob – can provide detailed instructions on how to
dismantle
the architecture. However, only Maddy has practical experience of this
process.’

‘Right. OK.’ Rashim pinched the
narrow bridge of his nose. ‘We’d best wait for her to come back before we
start dismantling things, then.’

‘Affirmative.’

He got to his feet. Across the archway, he
watched the Indian girl, Sal, talking quietly with another girl, pale as a ghost and
completely bald.

‘Who is that?’ asked Bubba
cheerfully.

‘It is a support unit,’ said
Bob. ‘It was set on a growth pattern before we had to deal with your Exodus
contamination.’

‘A genetically engineered AI hybrid,
SpongeBubba,’ added Rashim. ‘The US military were working with those back in
the fifties and sixties. Perfect soldiers. We had a platoon of gen-bots come along with
us on Exodus.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Leaner, more advanced models than you,
I’m afraid.’

Bob’s brow furrowed sulkily. ‘I
know.’ Then, with something approximating a smirk, ‘I did in fact manage to
disable one of them.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Rashim nodded
respectfully and then offered him an awkward high five. ‘Good for you, big
man.’

Bob cocked his head and gazed curiously at
Rashim’s palm left hovering in mid-air.

‘Uh … never mind,’ he
said, tucking his hand away.

Chapter 5

10 September 2001, New York

Maddy returned from Central Park with
Foster just after half past one in the afternoon. Following brief introductions of
Rashim and his novelty robot, they set to work. During the rest of the day Sal was
largely sidelined with the drooling child support unit in her tender care while Maddy,
Rashim, Foster, computer-Bob and SpongeBubba collectively pooled their technical
knowledge and carefully dismantled the equipment in the archway.

It was an exercise in identifying and
extracting only the technology components that could not easily be replaced elsewhere.
Bob and Liam meanwhile had been sent out to steal a vehicle big enough for them all and
the equipment they were likely to take along.

By the time lights started to flicker on, on
the far side of the East River, turning Manhattan, skyscraper by skyscraper, into an
enormous, inverted chandelier and the railway overhead started rumbling with trains
taking city commuters home from the Big Apple to the suburbs of Brooklyn and Queens,
they’d done most of what needed to be done.

A battered Winnebago SuperChief motorhome
was parked up in the alleyway, a snug, hand-in-glove squeeze between the row of archways
and the graffiti’d brick wall opposite. The rack carrying the displacement machine
had been carefully lifted in and secured tightly in the RV’s toilet cubicle. The
PCs had been
stripped of their internal hard drives and the filing
cabinet beside Maddy’s desk had been emptied. Its drawers were full of a messy
miscellany of discarded wires and circuit boards and gadgets: a taser, something that
looked like a Geiger counter, the babel-buds, a non-functioning wrist-mounted computer
of some sort with ‘H-data WristBuddee-57’ stamped on one side. Gadgets and
parts of gadgets, most of them clearly not from the year 2001. Nothing like that could
stay behind.

The improvised growth tubes were too large
to take along, but the pumps and computer interface were removed and carefully stored in
the RV. The protein solution and the dead foetuses were gone now, poured away into the
East River.

Like any normal family moving house, it was
a revelation to Maddy, Liam and Sal discovering how much clutter they’d already
managed to acquire. Magazines and books, a Nintendo and a TV, a kettle and sandwich
toaster, a chemical toilet, a wardrobe full of clothes, a shelf in their bunk archway
filled with half-used toiletries. And rubbish. A small pyramid of empty drinks cans, a
teetering Jenga tower of pizza boxes and takeaway cartons.

As they left the archway, tired after a busy
day, the last of Monday’s fading sunset left the sky a deep blue and there existed
that momentary gasp of air, that fleeting pause between the last of Manhattan’s
office dwellers vacating the city and the emergence of the first eager beavers of New
York’s nightlife.

Times Square was still busy, but mostly with
ambling tourists coming home to their 5th Avenue hotels after a day’s sightseeing.
Bob, SpongeBubba and the freshly birthed girl clone – yet to be called
‘Becks’: they were still debating whether to consider her a new personality
entirely, that was still up for discussion – were left to watch over the SuperChief and
the archway. The rest of them headed across to Manhattan, one last time in Times
Square. They found a Mexican-themed place that looked out across the
winking lights and animated billboards, the news ticker around the Hershey store, the
stop-start intersections and sluggish convoys of yellow cabs, gaggles of goggle-eyed
tourists, and the last city suit walking home with a gym bag slung over one
shoulder.

It was quiet in the restaurant. They ordered
from the waitress quickly and then were left alone to the privacy of their faux dark
wood and red-velvet-cushioned booth to talk.

‘So …’ Maddy clasped her
hands like a host desperate to get her party started. ‘Here we are,
then.’

‘Aye,’ said Liam, ‘the
first proper chance I’ve had to sit down, rest and eat in ages.’

Maddy nodded. It seemed an eternity ago that
they’d been cornered by guards in Caligula’s palace. Since then they’d
been running, hiding, scavenging. She realized she hadn’t eaten properly in days,
the best part of a week in fact. That went some way towards explaining her ordering the
triple bean and beef mega-burrito.

‘You’re running,’ said
Foster. ‘I can understand that … but have any of you thought where
to?’

‘No.’ Maddy tucked hair behind
her ear. ‘Not yet.’

‘Well now, to be sure, we want to know
who sent those support units after us.’ Liam looked at Sal for support.
She nodded. Clearly the most pressing question hovering between them
all.

Maddy shook her head. ‘Somebody from
the future. Obviously. I don’t know.’

‘Did you say the male units looked
just like our Bob?’ asked Foster.

‘Yup. Like his evil twin or
something.’

‘These are military clones
you’re talking about,’ said Rashim.

She nodded. ‘Military use,
yeah.’

‘Then if they looked
exactly
like your Bob, they’d be from the same or a similar birth batch. The cloning
process develops genetic-copy errors if you reproduce from the same DNA indefinitely. So
the batches have relatively small print runs. Twenty maybe thirty units per base DNA
pattern.’ Rashim stroked the fine tip of his nose. ‘I recall that the
military contractors producing clone units back in the 2050s were constantly having to
start over with new candidate genomes to engineer.’

Liam chuckled. The others looked at him and
his face quickly straightened. ‘
Back in the 2050s?
’ He grinned.
‘I mean, doesn’t that sound odd? That’s the future for all of us, so
it is. The
far
future for me!’ He shrugged; no one seemed particularly
tickled by that. ‘Just sounded a bit funny, that’s all.’

‘When does your clone unit come
from?’ said Rashim. ‘Do you know his precise inception date?’

‘Bob?’ Maddy struggled to
remember. ‘Uh, I think it’s the 2050s …’

‘2054, if I recall correctly,’
said Foster.

‘Then your enemy, whoever sent those
killer units, must come from the same time.’ Rashim folded his arms.
‘That’s an assumption, of course.’

Liam shuffled uncomfortably. ‘But
who’s our enemy? Who’ve we gone and annoyed?’

‘What?’ Maddy laughed.
‘Who’s our enemy? You mean apart from some secretive association of Templar
Knights? A government-backed top-secret project called Exodus, that group of anti-time
travel activists who tried to assassinate Chan, Kramer’s bunch of
neo-Nazis.’ Maddy paused. ‘Need I go on?’

‘Well,’ Liam shrugged,
‘apart from them, that is.’

‘The point is,’ cut in Foster,
‘the world, down the line, is an
increasingly grim place.’
He looked at Sal. ‘You’ve seen the storm clouds of the future, haven’t
you, Sal?’

She nodded. ‘Not good.’

‘A world full of people who see the
only way of escape is back through time. And we …?’ Foster looked around at
them. ‘We’re who’re standing in their way. That’s a lot of
enemies to choose from.’ He turned to Rashim. ‘Maddy told me your group came
from 2070?’

‘2069 actually,’ Rashim sighed.
‘The world’s dying. I mean, it’s not good at all. The food
chain’s poisoned so that we’re all living on soya-synth products. And the
floods took a lot of land. Migrating people, billions. And wars. And God knows
we’ve had a lot of them. But that’s what everyone’s worried
about … petrified of, you see? A big war. There are countries and power blocs
in my time that are in a desperate position. Desperate enough to consider the use of
extreme weaponry: bioweapons, nanoweapons.’

‘What’re those?’ asked
Liam.


Plague
 … is
perhaps the best word for it, Liam. Whether it’s something genetically revamped,
or self-replicating nano-bots, either way it becomes a weapon that doesn’t
discriminate over borders, nationalities.’ He looked out of the window at the
flickering lights of Times Square. ‘We’re in a bad place. Desperate times.
It’s inevitable that something like that will eventually happen. We’ll wipe
ourselves out. We’re destined to engineer our own end.’


The end
.’ Maddy leaned
forward. ‘That’s what Becks said to me. That was what she said was the
“reveal condition” for the Pandora message, the Grail message.
The
end
.’

‘Pandora?’

She looked at Rashim, wondering how much
they should be letting their new, temporary accomplice in on.

‘All we know,’ said Foster,
‘is that the people who want you dead had access to weapons technology from 2054.
Apparently, the very same foetus batch as Bob and Becks, no less.’

‘I don’t like the sound of
that.’ Maddy stared at him. ‘That feels like an enemy very close to home.
Perhaps someone inside the agency?’

Liam started. ‘You mean a turncoat in
our Mr Waldstein’s secret time-police force?’

‘A traitor.’ She pressed her
lips together thoughtfully. ‘I just hope not. We can do without that.’

‘Maybe when you sent that message
asking about Pandora,’ said Sal, ‘someone else got it? Intercepted
it?’

That thought was met with silence. A silence
that lasted several minutes and ended when the waitress arrived with an arm laden with
hot plates. She served them out, along with the drinks they’d ordered, and, after
looking at their glum faces, put a hand on her hip.

‘This some kinda office
party?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Sort of.’

‘Sheeesh …’ The waitress
made a face, half pity, half amusement. ‘I’d hate to work at your
place.’ She wished them a perfunctory ‘bon appetit’ and left them to
it.

‘We’re none the wiser as to who
wants us dead,’ said Liam. ‘So, how about we decide what we’re doing?
Where we’re going to go? Because … I’m completely
confused.’

Sal nodded at Rashim. ‘And what about
our new friend? Is Rashim staying with us?’

‘Uhh …’ Rashim cleared his
throat, fidgeted with his cutlery. ‘Well, I’d really like to tag along. You
know, if that’s all right? I won’t be a nuisance.’

Maddy shot a glance at Foster.
Is this
my call?
She wondered if now they had Foster back with them, he might resume
the
mantle of team leader, relieve her of the burden of making the
decisions.

Foster smiled. ‘You decide,’ he
said softly. ‘It’s your team now. Not mine.’

She picked at the burrito on her plate,
fumbling with both hands to keep the mince and assorted gunk from spilling out either
end. ‘I suppose we could use Rashim. He’s got a better understanding of the
displacement technology than I have.’

‘Than any of us,’ added Foster.
‘To be fair.’

‘True.’ She nodded and glanced
up from her food at the man. He seemed fascinated by the rack of ribs on his plate,
inspecting it like a forensic pathologist picking over a cadaver. She smiled at that.
Of course.
He’d probably never experienced real meat in his time.

‘And he knows forty-four years
more
of the future than I do,’ said Sal.

‘Excuse me.’ Rashim looked up
from his ribs. ‘You’re all talking about me like I’m not right here
sitting next to you.’

‘Sorry, Rashim,’ said Maddy.
‘You’re right, that is kinda rude.’

Rashim nodded. Apology accepted. He turned
to Sal. ‘When do you come from?’

‘2026. From Mumbai.’

‘Really?’ His eyebrows arched.
‘That’s not long before the …’ He stopped himself.

‘Before?’ She looked at him.
‘Before what?’

He shrugged. ‘The first Asian
War.’ Rashim winced apologetically. ‘I’m sorry … I
shouldn’t –’

‘No, tell me. Please.’

He deferred to Maddy. ‘Tell her about
it later if you like, Rashim. Right now we need to focus on our next move. We’ve
got to decide what we’re going to do.’

‘What is it
you
wish to do,
Maddy?’ asked Foster.

He’s pushing me to lead
. Not
for the first time, Maddy wondered if she tended to open things up for discussion too
much.

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)
6.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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