Prehistoric Clock (14 page)

At noon on the day before their scheduled departure through time, Verity and Embrey headed a hunting party to the western forest. A plague of black, weevil-like organisms infested much of the
Empress’s
food reserves, and Polperro’s posse had all but run out of their meagre rations. While in her own time it was common enough for sailors and aeronauts to eat weevil-ridden meals, here in prehistory the grubs were an unknown entity. They might be poisonous, perhaps lethal. She therefore had little choice but to buttress these final days’ supplies—and maybe several others besides, if Reardon’s machine couldn’t find 1908—with as much dinosaur meat as Kibo’s car could carry.

Her engine man stopped the tri-wheel vehicle and ice cream trailer at the tree-line ahead of them and waited. The long grass fell away to a damp, spongy moss for the last hundred yards to the forest. Embrey’s over-the-ankle boots with white, spat-style uppers appeared ridiculous for any kind of wild terrain, but he was just as sure-footed as Verity. He also looked strikingly handsome in his winged-collared shirt and decorative waistcoat. Behind him, Carswell and his two cronies kept to themselves, while Reba, Philomena and three more of her crew continuously scanned the trees on all sides.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve hunted, Embrey?”
Let him brag.
A little macho hubris might go a long way to making her feel she was in familiar company. During her years spent with African hunters-turned-aeronauts, she had grown fond of that peculiar male tendency to extol one’s own life-or-death conquests as a measure of one’s masculinity. It was dumb, yes, but also, on occasion, reassuring.

“Why?” he replied.

“You don’t think it pertinent, considering our goal?”

He shrugged and loosened his collar. “Not especially. I’m by far the best shot here. Is that good enough for you?”

It was.

“What’s eating you, Verity…so to speak? You’ve faced leviathans of the deep and not flinched. A little hunting wouldn’t bring this on. What’s the matter?”

Was her anxiety so clear on her face? How well he knew her and yet how little. To think she hadn’t been stricken with absolute fear when they’d faced the liopleurodon gave her more credit than she deserved. But on this he was right; an unspoken fear had nagged at her ever since their tryst in the bough nest. Its insidious, gnawing quality was affecting both her appetite and her sleep. With all the incredible goings-on around her, that one personal question should preoccupy her mind like this was not something a captain should admit.

And yet, if she didn’t ask now, time was running out…

“Embrey?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wanted for treason. What are you going to do when we return to London?”

He halted, shrugged again and then carried on walking. “Whatever it is, it’ll be on my own. I might be a wanted man, but I have means of…I know what to do.”

Her insides turned queasy. What didn’t he want her to know? Did he already have an escape plan? If so, would that be the last time she’d ever see him?

“Everyone check your weapons!” he shouted to the party. “Let’s avoid any slip-ups
before
they happen. And no one goes anywhere alone.” Then he said quietly to Verity, “I think we should pair Kibo with one of the Whitehall cronies, so he can spy on them.”

“Agreed.”

He looked away and briefly mimed a whistle. “And you and I…let’s not separate.”

Funny, I was thinking the same thing.

They trekked a good half hour past the trees they’d felled, into the heart of the forest, without spotting a single dinosaur of any notable size. Several skittish bipeds no bigger than house cats darted across their path, while Reba found a nest of large, broken eggs. Embrey said he’d tracked game through the Amazon jungle before, and the route they were following—already somewhat hewn and trampled—had been forged by an animal of stupendous size. He pointed out huge prints in the mud and pine needles, and whole branches plucked bare high up.

“Some kind of sauropod?” Verity recalled the general name for the largest long-necked dinosaurs described in Billy’s book.

“A herd of them.” Kibo pointed his rifle higher each time they stopped.

Distant roars kept everyone alert, and the constant threat of meeting a baryonyx ensured the group remained silent and tight-knit. Occasionally a quick-moving shadow passed over the forest and Verity squeezed the slippery stock and barrel of her weapon.

She remembered Mr. Briory when they happened upon an area populated by beautiful yellow flowers. One or two bees quested through them, and she affectionately named the flowers “Briories.”

Shortly after, Embrey shot a lumbering, armour-plated quadruped through its upturned mouth, killing it. Philomena chased its even bigger cousin—about the size of a cow—into a glade and spent several bullets bringing it down.

No sooner had everyone rushed to congratulate her when she started back toward them, a look of terror frozen on her face. She began to shake uncontrollably.

“What is it?” Kibo caught her as she flopped in his arms, her eyes bulging like boiled eggs.

She mumbled something unintelligible over and over again before her partner, Reba, slapped her hard. “This no way for aeronaut to behave! Tell what you see.”

“I…I see…” Everyone leaned in. “Look out.
Look out through the trees.
” The poor woman squirmed loose in a panic and then started to dance in the middle of the glade—a violent tribal dance reminiscent of one Verity had seen performed in Kenya when the first British airships had arrived to recruit African crews. It was as though she was warding off evil spirits.

“What’s got her so spooked?” Despite being limp with trepidation—Philomena had
never
displayed fear like this before—Verity cocked her rifle and ventured out toward the fallen dinosaur. Embrey followed close by.

Look through the trees?

She stood on the spot Philomena had reached and gazed northward. A brilliant glare, like the sun reflecting off the ribs of a rain-minted airship, blinded her. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The glare spread lower, and she made out the infinite glimmers of sunlight on the ocean. They’d almost reached the coast.

A cloud passed over, removing the glare and revealing…

What?

She rubbed the daydream out of her eyes and gazed once more. The impossible only came into greater focus. Waves broke upon it. Pterosaurs perched on its broken tip. And wait…
there
…much farther away, like a chalk shape in the blue ether,
another.
How was this possible?

She whispered, “Pinch me, Embrey. This can’t be real.”

He didn’t respond. He, too, was lost between worlds. For no other sight could have struck with such awe or such portentousness.

The farthest reached the clouds. The nearest was rusted and decrepit; it had crumbled and broken in two, its collapsed section lying half out of the water, touching the shore. In her own time, wars had been fought over them.

They were Leviacrum towers, and they had been put here long ago.

By the time they’d dragged the carcasses to Kibo’s vehicle and were making back for camp, the temperature plummeted. Heavy grey clouds blanketed the sky. Embrey had suffered enough British winters to recognise the clouds were laden with snow. Sure enough, before the party reached London, a blizzard swept over the field.

Every remaining man and woman helped hoist the carcasses onto the
Empress,
while news of the shocking discovery on the lake spread quicker than snow covering the dry deck. Embrey was only vaguely responsive to questions and events around him. A periodic lucidity jabbed at him, reminded him to put on a warm jacket, now see to Billy, now get up, now obey Verity’s summons to her cabin.

He didn’t appear to be the only one afflicted by this fractured state of mind either, as both Kibo and Reardon succumbed to long bouts of silence while the women talked. Verity’s cabin seemed as alien to him as everything else in this limbo between past and present. At least Billy was safe on B-deck with Tangeni watching over him.

“And it was how old, if you had to guess?” Miss Polperro leaned forward on her elbow, enthused by the discovery.

Verity stopped biting her nails long enough to swig another mouthful of her brandy. “Ancient—the metalwork had mostly rusted away. I’d guess at hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. And the height of the thing, if it was still erect, would be far taller than the London Leviacrum we know. Maybe twice as tall.” She paused, glancing at each of her guests in turn. “What do you suppose it all means, gentlemen?
When are we
?”

“Professor Reardon? Do you have a theory, sir?” Agnes Polperro hadn’t addressed anyone so politely since Embrey had met her. She rested her chin on her fist, and gave the professor her full attention. What about this revelation had perked her spirits so?

Reardon sat up as if from a daze, cleared his throat and then swabbed the spittle from his chin with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry. Did you address me?”

“She was wondering if you’d solved the riddle, old boy,” Embrey now spoke for the first time, himself wanting,
needing
some thread of logic with which to untangle the knot in his brain. “If not the Cretaceous, when the deuce are we?”

“Of course we’re in the Cretaceous, always have been.” The professor, suddenly animated, gesticulated with his hands as though he’d supped a full pot of coffee. “Briory’s observations of the plant life proved that, as well as the geology. If you are all suspecting this is the distant future, and that dinosaurs have been reintroduced at some point—perhaps as some kind of time travelling zoo—think again. There is no evidence here of a former civilisation, apart from the old Leviacrum towers.”

“Actually,” Verity interrupted, “Embrey and I discovered a metal panel on the lake bed, miles away from the collapsed towers.”

“A current could have moved it that distance, or a storm,” Embrey replied.

“True enough.” She resumed her nail-biting.

Elbows on his chair arms, Reardon formed a pensive V-shape with his forearms and touching fingertips under his chin. “No, my theory has the more straightforward logic, but its ramifications may be very disturbing indeed. It is obvious that sometime in the future—our future from a twentieth century perspective—the Leviacrum Council will harness time travel on a massive scale. Entire towers will be sent back through time. For what purpose I don’t know. Perhaps giant mineral deposits were found in the past, almighty quantities of gold, or even diamond geodes begging to be mined. Maybe we have happened upon the ruins of this cross-temporal industry.

“But for whatever reason, it did not endure. They may have exhausted the resources, or this epoch red in tooth and claw got the better of them. The point is that they scarred prehistory in a major way, and in doing so changed it irrevocably.” He shook his head, a grim smile of disbelief quivering his rectangular chin. “Think on it—by leaping back to precede all mankind had achieved, they altered it. Civilisation as we know it in the twentieth century, everything from ice cream cones to advanced steam technology, might not have come to pass but for that meddling millions of years before. Perhaps the influences were subtle, like the thriving of a species of crustacean on the Leviacrum’s warm exterior around the boilers. Before the tower appeared in prehistory, that species was doomed to extinction. But now it becomes hardier and spreads, supplanting other species and changing the ecological system forever. The knock-on effect of that influence over millions of years might become the difference between sperm whales existing and not existing. Ponder the import of that result for man and marine life. The world is not the same place.

“My friends, we are living proof of history revised. All that we are may not be all we were meant to be.”

“Or perhaps this was all
meant
to be,” Miss Polperro argued. “What if the Maker resews fate around those frays, and ensures things return to His initial plan for us? We make these changes by travelling through time, but the Lord unmakes them in equally subtle ways. Nature’s forces are all about balance. Maybe time has an underlying, reshaping force as well—the way a mountain rises and falls by the same subterranean forces. Over time, what is done is also undone. What we do here may ultimately have no more effect on 1908 than a fistful of salt thrown into the sea. Time and the sea will have dissolved the change, the addition. It only seems far-reaching to us because we perceive ourselves as the centre of the universe, when in fact we’re inconsequential in the grand scheme. Nature is patient and resourceful, like the meandering river. She will resume her intended course because God’s design is not so fickle as ours.”

“Yes, but over millions of years, we’re not a fistful of salt, we’re a bloody great landslide!” Reardon wagged his finger at her, and Embrey felt himself ebbing and flowing on the convictions of these two learned scientists. “Nature isn’t going to simply erase the legacy of those Leviacrum towers merely because they erode and eventually disappear. I tell you they have changed the face of the planet, and we are their progeny. Orphans, that’s what we are—orphans of a temporal storm that’s been raging for millions of years. And we knew nothing about it…until now.”

Embrey’s mind clicked into gear. “What about the other anomalies—the perfect web and Billy’s influence on time travel? Could
they
have been caused by all this meddling with time? Has all this tampering with history damaged the very underlying forces Miss Polperro predicts? And time is simply springing leaks?”

They all pondered that for a while, until Kibo, who hadn’t yet said a word, cleared his throat. “Professors, that is all fascinating, but can you please answer me this? If we return to 1908, will it be the same as when we left?”

Miss Polperro sat up. “Yes, I am certain of it. By whatever means, I believe those elements of time and fate will reconvene for us. You’ll see.”

“I wish I knew, friend.” Reardon glanced at Kibo, then looked gravely at the carpet. “I wish I knew.”

It was a hard truth to take, but even Reardon had had to concede that, when it came to time, they were all at sea.

Sunrise on the last day crept up on Verity as she lay wide awake in her bed, planning, hoping, dreading. In her years as a Gannet officer she’d grown accustomed to the wind’s caprice, to the sea’s insidious nature. But she’d always had precedent and knowledge to bear her out, mankind’s millennia of experience lending her vital intuition. Here, Reardon had baited a new, unquantifiable beast. He knew as little about time travel as the first
homo sapiens
who jumped off a cliff, copying the birds, did about flying. And she was along for the next leap!

Freezing fog and a dank half-light stilled the deck while she wandered out for a stroll. Sleet and rain had washed the snow away overnight. A vague smell of cooked meat, quite pleasant, still clung to the
Empress.
Though she’d insisted the unused parts of the dinosaur carcasses be buried to remove the scent of blood from the air, predators often had extraordinary senses of smell. Billy’s book concurred. Dinosaurs could probably sniff out a feast miles away. Which way had the winds blown during the night?

Embrey waved to her from the poop deck. He wore an oversized blue slicker and a sou’wester. They were wet. How long had he been standing there?

“Odd, is it not?” He pointed to the vague shape of Big Ben. The hands on its clock face were barely visible.
Five past eight.
“How time has stopped
and
carried on? What do you suppose the world made of our disappearance? A great chunk of Westminster obliterated, leaving no evidence.”

“The night-lights will be burning in the Leviacrum for quite some time, I imagine.”

Embrey
hmmed,
turned to her. “May I ask you something?”

“Uh-huh.” She pinched the ends of the blanket together under her chin.

“Am I all right in your book?”

“Excuse me?” To frown dutifully or give nothing away and inhale his sweet, unexpected surrender—she lost her bearings for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…is there a chance…could you possibly conceive of…with all that we… Oh, Good Lord, spit it out, Garrett!” He gave a deep, self-berating growl. “What I mean to say is, do you still hold me in contempt?”

No outward smile, but her satisfaction lightened her inside like a fresh ballonet. Then of a sudden it fell, and she recalled Bernie’s graveside funeral—the blacks and greys billowing austerely, the droning preacher reciting secondhand testimonies from friends and family, the passing of simple joy from her young world. It seemed only yesterday. So much had happened since then, but in Verity’s eyes, no one had yet atoned for Bernie’s needless death in the Benguela fire.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “Were it on personal regard alone, I should not hesitate in esteeming you very highly, Embrey, but—”

“Of course. The dreaded small print.”

“Don’t try and belittle it, damn you! For all I know, you and you father and uncle are the liars, and the Council acted appropriately. Ah, ah, not so fast.” She stilled his vicious temper in mid-huff. “You asked the question, knowing how sensitive this topic is for both of us. So don’t send for your second just yet. Let me finish. What I was trying to say was…inasmuch as your father’s and your uncle’s complicity in the rebel attack that killed my sister, I simply cannot take your word for their innocence. But nor shall I take their guilt for granted either, based on the findings of a court whose veracity is now in question. I’m therefore reserving judgment on the Embrey family name.”

His gaze softened, glazed. He looked away, cleared his throat—his manly pride at stake. “Which leaves your personal regard for me?”

“Aye. And yours for me.” She widened her eyes, batted her lashes. “Tell me, am I all right in your book, Embrey?” Turning to give him a look at her side profile empowered her a little—other men had remarked on how striking it was.

He fidgeted, as though he were struggling to come up with the perfect response. “I say, fluky weather we’re having.”

“Very.”
And fluky conversation.

“Tell me. As a Gannet officer, at what point would you disobey an order from the powers-that-be?” he asked.

Again a moment of disorientation. His mercurial questions were really making her dizzy. “Pray clarify.”

“It’s just that, given the sheer ambition of the Council, as we’ve witnessed here—” he roved his hand over the mist in unison with his carefully chosen words, “—do you still consider yourself subject to its corrupt commands? Morally speaking?” He chewed his lip.

“I think I know what you’re getting at, Embrey, and the answer is…probably not, no.”
If father could hear me now!
“Before Bernie died, I daresay I would have followed any order to any end without thinking twice. That was what my father preached. The might of the empire was a force for good in the world, bringing light to the dark continent, etcetera. But when Bernie died, I
did
start to question why we were being asked to throw our lives away in countries so far from England we could barely find them on the map. I followed orders, yes, but something changed inside me. I can’t explain it. It was on the bottom of the English Channel when I finally felt—how can I put it?—expendable? Futile?”

“You’d surrendered yourself to a cause you no longer understood?”

“Yes, exactly. How did you—”

He nodded over the taffrail. “That was what my father said. He served in the colonial forces for years before his arrest. And in that one moment, despite his years of blind loyalty to a greater cause, he realized that devotion was not mutual. The empire cared nothing for those who truly sustained it—the workers, the troops, those who sacrificed the most and reaped the fewest rewards. He never profited a penny from those overseas ventures, and it didn’t matter. They scapegoated him all the same.”

“I don’t care about rewards,” she replied, “but I’d rather the Council explain exactly what it is they’re up to building these towers around the world. It costs too many lives to sustain them. That’s where they and I part company.”

“Indeed. I’m glad.”

“And after everything you and Professor Reardon have told me about the Council, I must admit it has shaken my trust somewhat.”

She fidgeted, and found the seditious conversation curiously exciting. But why was her admission of mistrust so empowering? Father had always maintained the opposite was true—fighting for one’s country was the ultimate source of pride.

“And what of you?” She determined the interrogation wasn’t going to be completely one-sided. And she didn’t want to expose too much of her newfound rebelliousness in case he made her say something she’d regret. “What have you learned through all this, Embrey?”

“All this?”

“Hobnobbing with aeronauts, seeing life outside your fancy circles.”

“What a bloody impertinent thing to say,” he snapped.

She sighed.
Why can’t I last two minutes without antagonising him?

“But I tell you what I have learned.” He demonstrated his freezing breath with a prolonged exhale.