Both headed through the opening to the back room and a moment later Maddy sighed with relief at the reassuring sound of the generator chugging to life.
The archway’s strip lights flickered then winked on in unison.
Devereau cursed. He reached out towards the shutter door and yanked it down. ‘Gimme a hand,’ he said to a young soldier. Together they wrestled it down until it clattered and bounced against the floor.
‘We’re right in the middle of the dead zone!’ said Devereau. ‘Last thing we want is begging the attention of their sky navy with a careless show of lights!’
‘Oh … yeah.’ Maddy nodded an apology.
The computer monitors were on, all of them busy showing the system slowly booting up. Becks emerged, Freeman with her.
‘There was damage to the fuel tank,’ said Becks. ‘We have lost a significant portion of our reserves.’ She approached Maddy and Devereau. ‘We will need more fuel, Madelaine.’
‘To recharge the displacement machine?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘But hang on! What’s the point? You said the tachyon transmission array was — ’
‘I believe it may be possible to acquire analogous transmission technology and reconfigure it to channel tachyon particles — ’
‘Excuse me!’ Devereau made a face. ‘Can you two stop talking whatever gibberish mumbo-jumbo that is for a moment?’
They did and then both looked at him.
‘All right, now … I suppose I’m more than halfway towards considering the pair of you aren’t Southern spies.’ He pulled out his packet of Gitanes and lit one, hacking up a gob of discoloured phlegm on to the floor as he did so.
‘Do you mind?’ said Maddy testily. ‘That’s disgusting.’
He ignored her. ‘But you, miss — both of you, actually — have got yourselves a lot of explaining yet to do if you don’t want to find yourself chained up in a federal military prison.’ He pulled on his cigarette and puffed a cloud of rancid smoke into the air between them. Maddy wrinkled her nose at the stench.
‘A hell of a lot of explaining,’ he added.
Becks was silent. A guarded expression on her face.
Maddy shrugged. ‘Sure … why not? You might as well hear it all … everything.’ She turned to Becks, expecting her to sound a note of caution. ‘After all, this timeline isn’t meant to exist. None of it … not this war, not these soldiers.’ She smiled candidly at him. ‘Not even you, Colonel Devereau.’
‘I should not … exist?’ His voice was midway between incredulity and anger.
‘Not the way you are. Not like this.’
He frowned and jutted his bearded chin indignantly. ‘Ma’am, I rather like the way I am, if that’s all the same to you!’
‘Look.’ Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘It’s really complicated. Devereau, I guess I’d better explain to you all about how time travel works.’ She nodded towards their threadbare armchairs. ‘Want to go grab a seat? This could take us quite a while.’
CHAPTER 38
2001, somewhere in Virginia
Bob’s single-minded pursuit of the small creature that had boldly dashed into the farmhouse kitchen and stolen their one firearm from right under his nose was getting him nowhere.
He was standing in a field of corn. It was too dark now for his eyes to pick out the broken stalks suggesting which way the creature had fled. He was four hundred yards away from the farmhouse, the light failing, and a cautionary warning flashing in his mind.
[Tactical error]
He was about to process that into an analysis tree when he first heard the shouting and banging drifting across the silently swaying field of corn from the farmhouse.
Several conclusions presented themselves:
The childlike creature is not alone
The gun being stolen was a distraction
The others are in danger
He bounded back through the corn, taking the path of flattened stalks he’d already made. Ahead of him, the noises grew more distinct, more frantic. From the sound of it he determined the struggle was coming from inside the house somewhere and as he drew closer he could see that the back door through which he’d rushed out only minutes ago was nothing more than a splintered frame swinging gently on bent hinges.
He heard a high-pitched scream and identified the voice as Sal’s. Something inside his head twitched. Not the silicon wafer but the small wrinkled nugget of flesh, the brain the size of a rat’s with which it had a synaptic-wire link. As he bounded across the overgrown garden, his mind was drawing up a shortlist of candidate words to describe what he felt.
Guilt (90 % relevance)
Shame (56 % relevance)
Anger (10 % relevance)
He’d been fooled, lured out into the field so that the others were left entirely alone, vulnerable. No gun between them. No support unit to protect them.
He crashed through the remains of the swinging back door, knocking it off its hinges. The kitchen looked as if a tornado had passed through it; everything that could be dislodged or broken had been. The wall was a mess of plaster dust and holes, revealing the wooden slats of support posts. The fist-sized holes punched into it all the way through to the hallway beyond. The door into the hallway looked just like the back door — smashed to splinters.
‘LIAM!’ Bob bellowed into the house.
He heard nothing now. The sound of struggling and screaming had ended at some point in the last thirty seconds.
‘SALEENA!’ he tried again, stepping into the hallway, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.
He could see scratch and scrape marks across the floor, along the walls … up the stairs. Quickly, urgently, he clambered up them, the old wooden steps groaning and creaking under the burden of his weight.
He turned right at the top of the stairs. A door at the end, scratched, battered and split with a deep crack down the middle, hung wide open. And into the room beyond he could see the frame of a bed on its side, an overturned chair. A last stand had taken place there. No bodies, though. Gone.
In the space of only minutes, seconds, the humans it was his duty to protect had been snatched away from him.
He took another few steps into the room and saw more signs of the struggle. A chair leg, wrenched from its seat, perhaps used as a club. One end of it was spattered with blood — black in this waning dusk light. There were splashes and dots of it on the pale walls.
The logical part of his mind berated him with a simple message.
[Mission status: FAIL]
The organic part was prepared to express its assessment of the situation with a flood of feelings he was unable, or unwilling, to find appropriate labels for right now. He backed out of the room and slumped against the landing wall, sliding down until he was a hunched mass of dejected muscle at the bottom of it.
‘You have failed,’ his deep voice rumbled softly, like a gas boiler switching on, a subway train passing through a subterranean tunnel.
‘You failed,’ he said again, this time his voice trembling slightly. He supposed, if Becks had been right here, she would have found that intriguing, impressive even, that his voice was unintentionally conveying an emotion.
The computer in his skull was nagging him to make a judgement call on a growing list of new mission-priority suggestions: to continue making his way north-east to New York? After all, Madelaine Carter was still there and still needed protecting. To attempt to locate the bodies of Liam O’Connor, Saleena Vikram and Abraham Lincoln? Because there was always the chance, a possibility, one or more of them might still be alive.
To self-terminate … out of sheer shame. Perhaps his AI was now unreliable, faulty. He had made a poor judgement that had resulted in this. An all-too-obvious ploy to lure him outside.