TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (4 page)

She decided probably not. She suspected in
any dimension she was the same kind of person, destined to get stressed-out on all and
everything and die young. Probably of high blood pressure or a heart attack.

Nice thought.

She emerged round the end of the queue and
Foster’s eyes were drawn away from the pigeons chasing each other for breadcrumbs
at his feet.

His eyes lit up at the sight of her.
‘Ahhh!’ He smiled. ‘You found me!’

She raised a hand to hush him politely.
‘I always do.’

Foster laughed. ‘I gather from that
we’ve met before?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Quite a few times
now.’ She looked around at the park, the duck pond, the hot-dog vendor.
‘This is like
Happy Days
. Like a TV show I’ve seen way too many
times.’

‘Talking to me must be like talking to
someone with –’

‘Alzheimer’s?’

Foster grinned. ‘I’ve said that
before, haven’t I?’

‘Only every time we meet up. Listen,
Foster.’ She sat down beside him. ‘This time’s going to be different,
though.’

‘Oh?’

‘We have to leave New York.’

‘Leave? Why?’

Maddy explained as succinctly as possible:
the handwritten message addressed to her about Pandora from some mysterious informant;
sending through a message to the agency in the future and asking what the hell
‘Pandora’ was all about. And then, in short order, a squad of support units
arriving right in their archway hell-bent on killing them all.

‘I don’t know what’s going
on, Foster. Maybe our ability to contact the agency, to contact Waldstein, has been
compromised somehow. Intercepted by someone else?’

She didn’t bother telling Foster that
the last time they’d met here she’d told him about the Pandora message and
it had been
his
suggestion that she ‘communicate forward’ and ask
if
Waldstein knew anything about it. Maddy hadn’t come here to
blame him for that. Neither of them were to know asking about Pandora was going to lead
to this.

‘Point is, someone now knows where we
are, Foster, and we could be jumped at any time by more of those things. We have to
leave. Like … as soon as possible!’

Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It
wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a
problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know,
Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the
agency … it’s just –’

‘Just us.’ She shrugged.
‘I know.’

‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy
eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’

‘Yup.’

‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you,
hearing me –’

‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving
first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again,
and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’

‘Right.’ He nodded thoughtfully.
‘That’s probably very sensible.’

‘And I want you to come with
us.’

Foster shook his head. ‘I can’t
go back. You know I can’t enter a displacement field again.’

‘I know.’ She reached for one of
his frail hands and squeezed it gently. ‘I know. We’re just relocating for
now. No time travel, no fields, no tachyon particles. No more damage to you. We’re
just taking a drive away from New York. That’s it.’

She realized just how fragile he looked now.
When he’d first recruited them, yes, she’d noted he was old, but he’d
looked robust-old. Like some seasoned old army veteran, hard as nails beneath a
weathered exterior.

‘Maddy … I don’t think
there’s much left of me.’ His smile broke her heart. ‘I’m dying.
I have cancer. All over.’

She knew that; it was something else
he’d already confessed on a previous visit.

‘Foster … I wish I could
leave you here.’ Maddy looked around at the park, the sun streaming through
September leaves, turning golden and beginning to fall. Beautiful. He’d told her
he thought he might have just a few weeks left maybe; if he was really lucky, a couple
of months. The rate of cellular damage caused by time travel wasn’t really
quantifiable. It happened, that’s all they knew.

‘I know you’ve earned
this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve given the agency your
life … and you deserve to choose how to spend the time you’ve got left.
But we need you.’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘
I
need
you.’

‘You know as much as I
did … do, Maddy.’

She shook her head. ‘No. No, I
don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things
stitched
in history …’ She shook her head. Not quite the right
expression. ‘Things
pre-baked
into history. Messages … written
for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before
or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I
don’t …’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across
the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I
can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready
when you walked out on us.’

‘And I wasn’t ready for this
when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for
this job.’

She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided
old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam
or Foster.’

He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying
man’s defiant snort.

‘Does Liam know now? About me?’

Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a
way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’

‘But maybe he’s not so happy
that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’

‘I think he’s accepted
that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t
grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life,
right?’

‘Aye.’

They sat in silence for a while, watching a
young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how
bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.

‘Please, Foster,’ Maddy said
again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’

His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers
zigzagging up the path and away from them.

‘Don’t make me get on my
knees,’ she said.

‘All right,’ he nodded.
‘I’ll come.’

10 September 2001, New York

‘She’s … what do you
reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at
the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.

‘It’s hard to tell,’ said
Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked
into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them.
The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was
definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.

‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said.
‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’

Liam wasn’t sure about this.
Maddy’s instructions – birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and
probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was
going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.

The other foetuses in stasis, on the other
hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage
to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and
none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon;
it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking
things floating in the other tubes.

Liam looked again at what would become Becks
soon. ‘The
body’s just that of a child. She’ll be
younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’

‘She’ll still be stronger than
me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose … if
we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’

Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on
with it.’

Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in
anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on
the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d
done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’
tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a
forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the
clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the
pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased
from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.

Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of
bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand – we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we
can.’

Sal braced herself against the weight of the
tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside
twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.

‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal.
The tube was impossibly heavy.

‘I got a hold … it’s
all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’

He carried on pulling, the tube canting over
enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the
floor.

‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I
can’t –’

‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just
ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’

‘It’s going to slip! It’s
–’

‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it,
so I –’

The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor
under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled
redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud
thunk
on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open
top and engulfed her.

The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and
all but ending up in Sal’s lap.

‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his
hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just …’

Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it
from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.

‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed,
almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’

Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over
and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to
comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the
foul-smelling gunk coating.

‘I am so
very … very …’

‘I think I’m going to be
sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.

‘You all right in there?’ It was
Rashim’s voice.

‘Fine!’ called out Liam.
‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the
clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly
opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.

Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a
smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’

Its mouth flexed open and closed several times,
dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.

‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the
clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this
pinchudda
.’

Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello?
You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling
salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s
hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young
at the same time.

He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders
till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you
go.’

Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against
her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I
see … 
she
gets the towel, does she?’

Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of
circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side
and Bob over the other.

‘Incredible,’ he whispered.
‘The design is quite … quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see?
He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’

‘I see it, skippa!’

He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s
field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally
generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’

‘Your displacement device was much
bigger than this one, correct?’

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And
large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so …’ He shook
his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so
ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.

Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead
of anybody else
.

‘We should take this whole
rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be
replaced – duplicated with present-day electronics – but I need to take some time to be
sure I know how he’s put it all together.’

‘Affirmative. We will take the
complete rack.’

‘What about the controlling
software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one
with an
ON
light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive.
‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as
the circuits.’

‘Correct.’

Rashim shook his head. ‘Those
computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s
software?’

‘Networked together these computers
are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating
software.’

Rashim recalled the charming old names of
computing’s early twenty-first-century history:
Microsoft. Windows.
Linux
. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English.
Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.