TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome (17 page)

‘I am not picking up Alpha-two’s signal,’ said the female.
Faith
. ‘He may be damaged.’

‘That is a lower priority. The targets will still be in the immediate vicinity. Spread out and search.’

Something brushed against the fern they were huddled beneath. Maddy felt a long thick twig under her bottom shift
as the weight of a foot settled on the other end. Looking up through gaps in the leaf swaying above her face, she could see the female unit – the Becks-lookalike – her grey sentinel eyes slowly panning the mist around her like a guard on a watchtower.

My God … she’s right there! She’s RIGHT THERE!

Maddy held her wheezing breath and screwed up her eyes. She was absolutely certain that any second now, a hand was going to reach down and push that fern leaf aside. That ice-cold voice was going to calmly call out her discovery to the other two.

Maddy could feel her chest collapsing with a growing panic. A faint memory skipped through her mind of her and her cousin, Julian, both much younger. They were play-fighting, wrestling; he had her in a hold, her arms trapped by her side and his dead weight lying across her chest. She’d been squirming, panicking, squealing, and he’d genuinely thought she was just playing around. Until she’d started screaming.

Panic … like that. Breathless panic.

Hold your breath, Maddy. HOLD IT!

For seconds that felt agonizingly like minutes ‘Becks’ remained where she was, scouring the milky mist with her piercing eyes. Then finally Maddy felt that twig shift again, relieved of the weight on its end as the support unit lifted her bare foot and took a step, then another, away from them.

She slowly faded into the mist until she was an unrecognizable blur, another grey pillar, just as easily another tree trunk. Then she was finally gone. They listened to the sound of movement of all three support units receding in different directions, the careless, echoing crack of twigs and cones, the swish of bramble and undergrowth casually pushed aside. The still forest slowly stirred to life after them; a disapproving shake of its head at such noisy and clumsy intruders.

Maddy hoped they were far enough away not to hear her wheeze like a blacksmith’s bellows as she finally eased her breath out. Dizzy and light-headed she quickly drew in another one.

‘Shadd-yah!’ whispered Sal. ‘I thought we were so-o-o-o dead!’

‘Me … too …’

The thump, rustle and crack of distant movement grew steadily quieter as the units moved further away.

‘We got to …’ Maddy grabbed at another breath. ‘We’ve got to get back to the archway.’

‘But won’t they expect us to do that?’

‘We need help.’ She looked at Sal. ‘We really need Bob.’

And we really need to get back to the archway before they figure that out too.

‘Come on.’ Maddy got to her feet then realized she hadn’t a clue which direction to start off in. ‘Which way?’

Sal looked up at the faint canopy of branches and leaves above them. She pointed to a dull, cream-coloured disc, still relatively low in the morning sky, playing hide and seek with them behind the mist-shrouded canopy of leaves and branches. So very easy to miss.

‘The sun,’ she said. ‘Rises in the east, doesn’t it?’

‘Yup. So that way.’ Maddy nodded to their left. ‘That way, then … should take us to the East River.’

They began to move slowly, cautiously, Sal one step ahead of Maddy, picking a path across the woodland floor that managed to avoid their stepping on the kind of gnarled, brittle dead wood that would crack like a gunshot.

They made their way through the wood in almost complete silence, for what seemed like an hour, but in all likelihood was no more than a few minutes. Finally Maddy thought she heard
the gentle sound of the tidal lapping of water ahead of them. The ground beneath their feet stopped being a sponge of decaying leaves, forest moss and fir cones and became firmer, harder.

The cool mist was beginning to thin with the morning sun’s warmth working on it, and soon they could see past the narrow waists of forest-edge saplings to a small cove and beyond that the broad, flat surface of the East River.

Sal settled against the base of the slender trunk of a young tree. Maddy joined her and they studied the shingle and placid, lapping waterline in front of them; the soothing draw and hiss of low tide playing with pebbles.

‘There’s nothing,’ said Sal quietly. ‘New York’s just a wilderness.’ She shivered. ‘And it’s colder. How come?’

Maddy shook her head. She had no real idea. Maybe this was a world with far fewer humans in it. Less people, less pollution, less methane, less carbon – less global warming. Or more likely, given how chilly it felt – autumn cold – perhaps this was a world with absolutely no humans at all in it. It was a well-known fact among ecologists that if you took humankind out of the equation, you could easily knock three or four degrees off planet earth’s temperature.

Anyway, Sal was right; it was much cooler. No humans. Nice idea that.

‘Look! What’s that?’ said Sal suddenly. She pointed along the shingle cove.

‘What?’

‘Over there!’

Maddy squinted into the haze at what looked like a large chunk of driftwood, a log carried up on a high tide and left stranded.

‘It’s a boat!’

Maddy pushed her specs up her nose. Actually Sal was right. ‘I think it’s a kayak … or canoe or something.’

So much for no humans, then.

She studied the twisted form merged into the trunk of the tree. It certainly explained the reason why Alpha-two’s ident signal had suddenly ceased to register.

The support unit’s head appeared to be buried within the tree; the rest of his body dangled lifelessly, slumped against the base of the trunk. It looked oddly like he’d been attempting to charge the tree head first, like an enraged bull, and the tree had simply decided to swallow him up to his neck. She cocked her head, fascinated at the glutinous and fleshy bubbling where the unit’s neck intersected with the bark. The instantaneous merging of trunk, skull and the computer inside at a molecular level would have instantly reduced Alpha-two’s head to a meaningless pulp.

Faith sensed the wireless signals of the other two support units drawing closer, approaching through the thinning mist.

Abel emerged first. His eyes immediately rested on Alpha-two’s body. ‘That is to be expected,’ he said calmly. ‘The area has a high mass density. There was a significant probability of intersection.’

Faith nodded. ‘Agreed.’

Alpha-four – Damien – emerged from the mist, his eyes momentarily on their colleague before reporting in to the other two. ‘I have not located the targets. They appear to have successfully evaded us.’

Abel nodded. ‘We must reacquire them immediately.’

Their three minds began to exchange data electronically, a Bluetooth committee meeting in the silent woodland space between them. All three support units frozen like statues absorbed in a collective reassessment of variables, options and mission priorities. A meeting of minds that resulted in a decision less than ten seconds later.

‘They will attempt to return to their field office,’ said Abel.

The other two nodded.

‘This way,’ said Abel. He turned on his heel and had just begun to force his way through a thick nest of thorny brambles when he stopped. Ahead of him stood twelve of them. Humans. Primitive humans.

The wood seemed to hold its breath in silent expectation as the Indians slowly spread out, bows drawn and ready to use. Charcoal paint smeared round their eyes and across the bridges of their noses; the whites of their eyes almost seemed to glow in the gloom beneath the canopy of leaves.

‘These are not our targets,’ said Abel.

One of the Indians replied with a barked challenge, a language of guttural croaks and hard consonants. He raised a tamahaken of wood and flint; a clear gesture of warning for Abel and the others to back up the way they’d come.

Faith drew up alongside Abel, her curious mind cataloguing these strange-looking humans. Their heads were also bald, except for a crest of hair in the middle, and they were naked, their skin a rich copper colour, adorned with tattoos of swirling, dark blue patterns.

‘I have no data on these,’ she said to Abel.

‘A significant time contamination has occurred.’ Abel looked at her. ‘But this is not a concern of ours.’

She took another casual step forward, curious, wanting to get a closer look at these odd-looking humans, when a nervous
young hand released twine. The wood echoed with the vibrating hum of a bow’s drawstring and the sound of a fleshy
thwack
. Faith glanced down at the feathered end of an arrow protruding through the grubby orange nylon of her anorak.

She cocked her head as she looked down at it. ‘An arrow,’ she announced matter-of-factly as she yanked its bloody barbed tip firmly from her chest. Then she raised her pistol and fired.

‘You hear that?’ said Sal. She stopped paddling. ‘That was a gun!’

Maddy pulled the wooden oar out of the water and rested it across her thighs. A moment later, they heard the distant crack of another single shot echoing from the receding, mist-shrouded shoreline.

She swallowed nervously. ‘That’s them! I guess they came across the owner of this canoe.’

‘Who …
what
are they, Maddy?’

‘They’ve got to be support units, Sal. They’re Bob and Becks. Or very similar.’

‘But why are they after
us
?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t know!’

‘Maybe we caused it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That message … the message we sent forward to Waldstein?’

God, Sal might be right. ‘You think it might have been … I dunno …
intercepted
by someone?’

Sal said nothing. Her eyes on Maddy’s.

‘Jeeez …’ She watched the shoreline they were leaving behind, the mist dissolving before her eyes. ‘Someone knows about us, Sal. Someone who knows
where
we are,
when
we are.’

‘Maddy, do you think the Roman contamination is anything to do with this?’

‘I dunno.’

‘It happens at the same time. It can’t be a coincidence, can it? Maddy?’

‘I don’t know! I just …’ She screwed her eyes up. ‘I don’t know anything, Sal! I’m just running … running scared, like you.’ Frustrated, she banged a fist against the side of the canoe. Its fragile wooden frame flexed alarmingly. ‘Just give me a moment to think here, OK?’

‘Sorry, Maddy.’

They drifted in silence for a minute. ‘Sal, why’s someone sent a bunch of support units after us? I mean why? What have –’

‘Do you really think that’s what they are? Maybe they’re –’

‘Come on! You saw them too! What do
you
think?’

Sal nodded silently. ‘They did look like Bob and Becks.’

They drifted for a while, the water gently slapping the taut hide like the palm of a hand on the skin of a bodhrán. ‘I’ve got no idea what this is about. But if those really are support units … we’re freakin’ dead already, Sal. I mean it. We haven’t got a chance here!’ She picked her paddle up. ‘We need the others.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘We need to get Bob back.’ That was it. That was her plan. That’s all she had to offer right now. ‘
He
can fight them.’

‘But there’s, like, three of them, Maddy … he can’t fight them all by hims–’

‘That’s
his
problem, OK?’ She turned round and squinted at the far side of the river where home, Brooklyn, had been only ten minutes ago. It was yet more dense woodland. If it wasn’t for the sun rising into the morning sky indicating which way was east, she would have been hopelessly lost. The canoe had drifted in several lazy circles since they’d stopped paddling and one shoreline looked exactly like the other.

‘Let’s just get back over there … see if we can find the archway.’

That alone was going to be a challenge. It was all trees and thick brambles. And somewhere,
somewhere
, in the middle of all of that, provided it wasn’t buried or so overgrown by moss or briar, they were hopefully going to be able to find their shambolic molehill of red bricks.

Hopefully
.

Sal offered her a supportive smile. ‘I’m glad I’m with you. You usually figure something out, Maddy.’

Do I? Do I really figure stuff out, or have I just been lucky so far?

Maddy returned the gesture with a shrug of bravado. ‘Well, I guess that’s why I’m the boss, right?’ She looked back over Sal’s shoulders at the hump of woodland that was once Manhattan and hoped there weren’t any more canoes lying around waiting to be used.

She dipped her paddle into the water and the canoe began to slowly pull round in the other direction. ‘Come on, Sal … we should get back to the archway as quick as we can.’ She was going to add ‘before
they
do’, but it seemed an unnecessary thing to say. And saying it was almost like inviting bad luck to come knocking at their front door.

Yeah, right … like, ‘don’t say it and it just won’t happen’.

If only life could be that straightforward.

Ten minutes later, they had beached the canoe on the far side of the river. As they walked along the shoreline looking warily up at the edge of the wood to their left, Sal couldn’t help thinking they were going to be jumped by screaming savages at any moment. Or worse.

‘Hey, Sal?’ said Maddy. ‘Remember those weird-looking reptile people?’

An edgy laugh. ‘They’re exactly what I was trying
not
to think about right now.’ The mistake,
her
mistake that had bumped Liam back to the late Cretaceous, had produced an alternate present in which
Homo sapiens
had never even got a look-in. In their place were lean hominids with elongated heads, descendants of a species of therapod that had managed to survive. They too had developed to a similar level as the humans who lived here now: spears, huts, round hide and wood-framed rafts. But they’d been quite terrifying to look at. The stuff of nightmares. It was an alternative history Sal was more than glad they’d managed to snuff out.