TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome (44 page)

We lost them.
Dr Anwar and that ridiculous customized lab unit of his.

He sat back down in his chair. The other technicians in their monitor-high cubicles sat up to get a look at the project leader, wondering how to read his body language. Their heads bobbed above partitions like a coterie of meerkats.

Yatsushita balled his fists. He’d just lost the brightest mind on his team and in a limited field like this … where do you go to recruit a replacement?

‘Dr Yatsushita?’

He looked up. One of the beacon deployment team was
standing over him. ‘We uh … we picked up a faint signal. One of the beacons squawked a signal for about a minute, but that’s all we got.’

‘Nothing now?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s like it just got switched off.’

‘Or it malfunctioned?’

The man shrugged. That was probably a more likely answer. The translation of Dr Anwar and his armful of beacon markers and that stupid yellow robot probably ended up with them being fused into a layer of rock in the middle of some mountain range or simply lost in that horrific subatomic broth that reduced the calculations of the world’s best particle physicists to little more than
eeny-meeny-miney-mo
guesses.

Their system was still far too unreliable for human transmission. It appeared that Dr Anwar had been too confident with his own calculations. Yes, their system could send an apple fifty minutes, fifty hours … fifty days, even fifty years into the past. But once every two or three times, they lost it; that or they brought back apple purée.

‘All right, shut it all down.’ He sighed. They were burning gigawatts of power that couldn’t be wasted endlessly. Not in this resource-poor time anyway. ‘Shut it down!’ he snapped louder. The deployment team technician nodded and turned away quickly.

A few moments later, the deafening hum of power surging through the giant Faraday cage running across the roof of the hangar died away, leaving a hollow echo behind.

Losing Rashim was going to set them back months. Maybe even years. If they couldn’t even reliably send a single human test subject there and back without losing him, they certainly weren’t even close to ready for the proposed party of three hundred.

‘Let’s get the diagnostics running!’ he called out. Overall the system had been powered up for a total of three hours and twenty-nine minutes – when Dr Anwar had stepped confidently into one of the translation grids and disappeared. They had countless terabytes of diagnostic data to sift through. Hopefully somewhere in there they might locate a single solitary variable that was miscalculated. But he doubted it.

Time travel seemed horrifically, frighteningly
random
.

More like magic than science.

The archway was empty. A single webcam iris on top of a computer monitor in the middle of a messy desk studied the still darkness. There was no sign of movement. No sign of anyone: none of the team and none of the unauthorized intruders. They were dealt with. For now.

Computer-Bob was on his own and was going to have to wait.

Through the iris of the webcam, computer-Bob noted that the shutter door was smashed open, bent slats of corrugated aluminium hanging from one side down to the ground on the other, and outside pale daylight, filtered green by a canopy of foliage, seeped into this gloomy brickwork cave.

Computer-Bob calculated the generator could keep the one running PC going for another seventy-seven hours. A lot more if he shut down the growth tubes in the back room, effectively killing Becks and the other foetuses held in suspended animation.

But he couldn’t do that. Or didn’t want to. Not yet at least.

No external feeds of data to examine and explore. Just this still archway. Just this one view across a messy desk, a half-empty can of Dr Pepper, sweet wrappers.

If the monitor hadn’t been in sleep mode, one would have seen a cursor dance across a dialogue box.

>Information: Maddy is messy.

Like he didn’t already know that.

His idling AI moved on to consider more important matters. Who were those intruders? Who sent them?

>Information: the intruders had W.G. Systems idents and AI software.

>Information: the intruders had mission logs authorized by user: R.G. Waldstein.

Two things occurred just then at almost the same moment in time.

Firstly computer-Bob picked up a clear and distinct tachyon signal. The time-stamp location was precise and the message was perfectly straightforward, for once. ‘Open a portal at this time-stamp immediately.’ Computer-Bob at once began directing power to the displacement machine. It would require approximately two minutes of recharging, enough to flip one of the LEDs on the display back from amber to green. Enough of a safety margin to ensure a stable portal force field.

The second thing was the arrival of a fresh breeze stirring the woodland outside, teasing the branches of a cedar tree directly beyond the entrance, right in the middle of what was normally a rubbish-strewn alleyway.

The hum of the displacement machine competed with the hiss of whispering leaves shifting excitedly as the breeze picked up and became a somewhat blustering gust of wind.

Computer-Bob recognized the wind for what it was. A bank of air pushed by the sudden shifting of reality, the emergence of possibilities wrestling with each other deep within an enormous wall of approaching change.

The gust stirred rubbish inside the archway, paper cups and burger wrappers chasing each other in a game of tag on the breakfast table. The curtain that hung beside the bunk beds from an improvised rail fidgeted impatiently like a bored child
swinging from a parent’s hand. The hum, meanwhile, rose in pitch as it sucked in power from the generator; the hum was like a cockerel announcing dawn, desperately wanting to tell the empty archway that it was nearly good to go.

Once again the cursor blinked across its black dialogue box.

>Ready to transmit displacement field.

>Activating field-office bubble.

Computer-Bob didn’t have emotions. Not really. He had files. They were useful back when he used to live inside a W.G. Systems wafer-processor, inside an engineered human body when those files could be used to stimulate muscle movements … a smile, for example. He missed that. Missed the ability to use those files in a meaningful way. Oh, but actually he decided he could. It wasn’t quite the same thing, but it was good enough. The tachyon signal appeared to be good news. It seemed that his team, or at least some of them, were alive still. Cause for some sort of a celebration.

The cursor scuttled along, albeit briefly, to form three ASCII characters.

> 8-)

Air was displaced inside the archway as it gusted noisily in from the outside. A sphere of pulsating energy blinked into existence and lit the gloomy archway with a bright Italian sky and a parched, rust-coloured field of baked earth and dry grass.

Dark silhouettes clouded the dancing image then, a moment later, one of them, the biggest by far, stepped into the archway. Bob crouched, legs apart, sword drawn and ready to swing it. His eyes swept quickly round the dim archway, into the dark corners. He ducked down to look under the bunk beds. He crossed the floor and pulled aside the sliding door into the back room. The chugging of the diesel generator spilled out as he checked inside. He returned to the main archway as the wind outside began to become a hurricane-like roar.

Standing beside the shimmering orb of Mediterranean blue, he beckoned the other dark shapes to join him. ‘The archway is clear!’ he roared above the deafening whistling of wind outside, and the thrashing branches of the woodland.

They came through one after the other: Liam, Sal, Dr Rashim Anwar and his lab unit, and finally Maddy.

She emerged into the archway swearing as she almost tripped over SpongeBubba. ‘Goddammit! Out of my way!’

‘Sorr-
eee
!’ SpongeBubba cried out in his sing-song voice, and waddled a few steps back from her.

‘
Close the portal!
’ she shouted above the scream of wind from outside. The portal collapsed behind her.

‘
What’s going on here?
’ shouted Rashim above the roar of wind outside. ‘
Is this a storm?
’

‘
Time wave!
’ she shouted back.

‘
A what?
’

‘
A TIME WAVE!
’

Liam hurried across to close the shutter and stopped dead in his tracks as he realized the door was ruined. ‘
What happened to our door?
’

His words were lost in the roaring wind.

It went completely dark outside. The tree trunk right there, a yard beyond where their concrete floor became dirt and flora,
liquidized
… spun into strands of insubstantial matter, like a wispy tendril of sugar in a candyfloss tumbler. Amid the pitch-black it became a swirling maelstrom of fleetingly seen things: another different tree, a rock formation … a tipi … a wooden shack … an Easter Island monolith.

And then, all of a sudden, it was a brick wall covered in graffiti and lined with rubbish along the bottom.

The roaring receded quickly, fading into something else entirely: a commuter train rumbling over the Williamsburg Bridge’s old tracks above their heads; the sound of impatient traffic, bumper to bumper, coming from the intersection at the end of their alleyway. The distant
whoop
of police sirens. The soft chop of a helicopter swooping across the East River. Somebody somewhere nearby had a thumping sound system in the back of their car.

Noisy … but so much less noisy than it had been a moment ago.

‘We’re back,’ cried Sal, running towards the opening and the alleyway outside. ‘We’re back! We made it!’

Liam nodded. Subdued. ‘We’re back,’ he replied.

Maddy crossed the floor and joined both of them standing in the ruined doorway. She stared out at the brick wall, the rubbish piled against it. She listened to the noises of Brooklyn, the irritable, impatient noises of blissful ignorance. Millions of normal lives being led … all of them content with their little decisions, their little dilemmas, the day-to-day jostle of office politics and the nightly family squabbles.

‘Maddy?’ said Sal. ‘You OK?’

‘What do we do now?’ said Liam.

They were all looking at her. Sal, so much like a little sister, lost without her leading the way. Liam –
oh God, poor Liam
– was putting a brave face on things, but she knew he was affected badly by what he’d discovered about himself. Bob. Useful, helpful, loyal like a Labrador, but – let’s not fool ourselves here – nothing more than a database on muscular legs.

And now this Dr Anwar and his stupid SpongeBot, the pair of them looking like lost sheep right now.

And I’m everyone’s
mom.
I’ve got to come up with the ‘what-do-we-do-next’ bit.

Funny thing was that for the first time in a long time she knew exactly what they had to do next.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said.

‘Huh?’

Maddy stepped back from the ruined shutters. ‘Somebody out there knows exactly
where
we are, they know exactly
when
we are … and
who
we are. And they want us all dead. We’ve got to grab what we can, whatever we think we’re going to need, and we’ve got to get the hell out of here.’

Liam raised his eyebrows. ‘Leave this archway?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean … like
now
?’

Maddy nodded. ‘I mean, like,
right now
.’

Cato and Macro are two characters that I’ve long wanted to cross paths with the TimeRiders team. They actually have their own series of books (the Roman Legion series by Simon Scarrow) in which we see them as much younger men serving in the legions of Rome. If you’ve enjoyed their company in this book, I heartily recommend giving this series a go, starting with the first book
Under the Eagles
. A big thanks again to my brother, Simon, for letting me use them. As always, those two fellas have been great fun to be with.

PUFFIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa