‘So, I’ve set up a time-stamp for half a dozen years after the setting up of that Holborn Viaduct generator.’ Maddy stepped towards the row of computer screens, and studied one. There was the image of an old parish map. ‘The location is about a third of a mile south of the viaduct, right next to the River of London.’
‘Ah… I think you’ll find it’s called the Thames, Mads,’ said Liam.
She squinted at the screen. ‘Oh yeah, of course. Yeah… the Thames. We did a bunch of pinhole tests on the arrival location, looks like a small shingle bank, brick wall on one side and what look like some steps leading up the side of it. There’s very little spatial disruption. Small stuff, occasional pigeon or something I’m guessing. So, it looks like a pretty quiet spot.’
‘Grand.’
‘So… remember this is just a quick look, OK? Go check out that viaduct, see if there’s someplace we can make ourselves at home. Then come back to the river.’
‘How long have we got?’
‘As long as you want really. I can set up a scheduled return window if you want, or we can just monitor the location for a regular rhythmic spatial displacement signature. Remember? Like you did back in dinosaur-land? Just wave your arms in a regular rhythmic fashion… we’ll pick it up just fine.’
‘Hmm… I think I’d like the scheduled return window, to be sure.’
‘OK,’ she said, tapping it into a keyboard. ‘Three hours? More?’
‘Aye, three hours sounds like enough.’ Liam looked across at Bob. ‘You ready for another jaunt, big fella?’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Well, all right, then,’ said Liam, clapping his hands together. ‘Shall we?’
‘Be careful,’ said Sal.
‘That I most certainly will.’
‘Have a nice trip, skippa!’ SpongeBubba called out. ‘Bring me flowers!’
Rashim turned to Liam. ‘I need to change his programming sometime soon. It’s beginning to get annoying.’
‘The order of departure is Bob and Rashim first,’ said Maddy. ‘Then you, Liam, on the left square.’
Bob and Rashim took their places in the two taped-out squares.
‘Uh, guys… one minute countdown. Mark!’
A single LED flickered on one of the circuit boards — clocking the energy being drawn in and stored on the capacitor. A single diode that would wink out when there was enough on-board energy to discharge. Maddy told Rashim it would do for now. When they were properly settled, she’d build something a little more elaborate.
She counted the minute down and, with a hum of discharged energy, they both vanished, along with the scuffed linoleum floor they’d been standing on.
‘You’re next,’ she said, ushering Liam on to his square. He was standing on freshly exposed wooden floor. The displacement volume had dug down two inches into the ground.
‘Thirty seconds. Stand still now!’
Liam put his hands down by his side. It felt a little unsettling, looking down at the tape on the floor surrounding him, and not knowing for sure if the tip of an elbow, the heel of a foot, might be too close, or even overhanging the tape. At least bobbing around in that perspex tube he knew for certain he was wholly ‘in’ the displacement envelope.
The capacitor was beginning to hum.
‘Fifteen seconds!’ called out Maddy. ‘No more fidgeting now, please!’
‘I’m not!’
‘Yes, you are! Hold still!’
Liam sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes.
Ah dear, here we go again.
So much seemed to have happened since the last time he’d done this. It seemed like a whole lifetime ago. In many ways it was a different life. Someone else’s. The last time he’d volunteered to have his body discharged through chaos space into unknowable danger he’d been certain of who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. This time around… it was so very different.
‘Ten seconds!’
This time he understood why his body could take such punishment. It was engineered specifically to take it. This time around he knew if he took a bullet, or the stab of a sword or a knife, it might well hurt, but he’d live. That meant there was less to be scared of. Right?
‘Five seconds!’
Nope. He was starting to tremble like he always did as Maddy counted down the last few seconds.
Liam, ya big wuss. You’re meant to be some kind of support unit, aren’t you?
He was just about to start wondering whether Bob actually ever experienced fear when he felt the floor beneath his feet suddenly give way like a hangman’s trap, and that awful sensation of falling.
Chapter 44
1 December 1888, London
Liam kept his eyes shut. The white mist of chaos space no longer held him in thrall; it wasn’t a Heaven-like magical white wilderness any more but a place that increasingly unsettled him. He’d seen shapes out there so faintly that he couldn’t begin to determine whether they had a certain form or not. They flitted like wraiths, like sharks circling ever closer. Or perhaps his eyes or his mind were playing tricks with an utterly blank canvas. Perhaps it was his imagination. But then hadn’t Sal said she’d seen them too?
His solitary limbo in chaos space couldn’t end soon enough.
A moment later he felt his feet make a soft landing.
Soft, and sinking.
‘Whuh?’
And sinking.
He tried to pull a foot out of whatever gunk he was gradually sinking into, and lost his balance. His hands reached out in front of him, bracing for a face-first impact with the sludge, but brushed past something firm. He grabbed at it.
It felt like wood. A spar of damp wood, coated in a slime that he nearly lost his grip on.
‘Liam?’
‘Rashim?’
It was dark and foggy and cold. But he could make out Rashim’s faint outline. ‘I think there’s been a mis-transmission. We’re out on some sort of mudbank.’
‘No… I think it’s low tide.’ There could have been some small offset miscalculation that had dropped them several yards to one side. In this case further into the river. It could have been worse. High tide for instance.
‘Bob, you there?’
‘Affirmative,’ his deep voice rumbled out of the fog.
Liam held tightly on to the wooden spar. He wasn’t sinking any more. He pulled one foot out of the glutinous mud with a sucking sound coming from the silt. ‘There’s a wooden post here, hold on to it. You can use it to pull yourself out of the mud.’
‘That is not necessary,’ Bob replied.
‘We’re not actually in the mud,’ said Rashim. ‘We’re standing on what appears to be a wooden-slat walkway.’
The fog thinned and he saw them both several yards away, standing on a creaking, rickety wooden jetty. Quite dry.
Liam realized there must have been a small error in Rashim’s calculation of his mass. Then again, not necessarily Rashim’s fault. He’d eaten a small bag of pecan doughnuts just half an hour ago. That might possibly have altered his mass enough to cause a deviation from where he was supposed to be.
Rashim had actually cautioned them all not to eat just before a jump. Liam cursed his carelessness.
Only got yourself to blame, greedy guts.
He muttered as he took several sinking, teetering, laboured steps towards them through the silt and pulled himself up on to the jetty to join them. His legs dangled over the side and he attempted to kick the largest clumps of foul-smelling gunk off his boots.