‘You are not permitted beyond this point,’ it said almost politely. ‘Leave immediately.’
Bob met its gaze. ‘You must step aside.’
The soldier studied Bob for a moment. A flicker of recognition, comprehension in his eyes. ‘You are a Heavy Combat Model.’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. You are a Multi-role Reconnaissance Model. A later version?’
‘Yes, I am.’ He smiled. ‘Same manufacturer.’
Maddy could have sworn both clones nodded a quick ‘nice-to-meet-you’ greeting at each other.
‘You must step aside,’ said Bob finally.
‘You are not permitted beyond this point.’
‘Our priorities conflict.’
‘Agreed.’
Both units’ eyes flickered for a split second as they processed the same conclusion, but it was the soldier-unit who reacted first. He thrust his sword at Bob’s neck – with the speed of a snake bite. Bob dodged to one side, but not fast enough to avoid the tip skewering him deeply just above the collarbone.
Bob retaliated with a roundhouse swing of the sword in his right hand. The soldier parried the heavy blow with his shield; a clatter and ring that sounded deafening. Bob thrust with his other sword at the unit’s midriff. Its reaction time, or perhaps it was a module of combat-prediction code, anticipated the move and sidestepped it with an almost Becks-like ballerina grace, as it yanked its blade free from Bob’s shoulder.
Macro took a step forward and thrust his sword at the unit. It swept its bloody blade down from Bob and effortlessly blocked Macro with a jarring rasp of clashing sword edges.
Bob tried again with his right sword: this time a thrust not a swing. The shield snapped down to intercept it; another clang filled the passageway.
This time, though, the guard of Bob’s sword caught on the curved edge of the shield. Leverage for him; a chance to use his brawn. Bob flung his sword arm to the right, wrenching the small gladiator’s shield out of the unit’s grasp and hurling it against the passage wall.
The soldier-unit backed up a step. Eyes flickering from Bob to Macro, and now Liam as he took a faltering step forward to help them out.
‘Liam! No, don’t!’ hissed Maddy.
‘You will lose,’ rumbled Bob. ‘Stand down.’
‘He’s right,’ snarled Macro.
The unit was crouched like a rattlesnake ready to strike, passing its sword deftly from one hand to the other. ‘You do not have security clearance to pass. Please leave immediately.’
Macro and Liam were edging round either side of it, Cato warily holding his ground in front of it: a three-sided confrontation for the unit. But Maddy suspected it had already identified Liam’s as the weak side. He was no soldier.
‘Liam!’ she cried. ‘Please get back!’
‘I’m fine, so I am, Mads!’ he called back over his shoulder.
The soldier-unit took advantage of that – the split second of distraction.
It took a quick step in Liam’s direction and thrust its sword at his gut. The blade disappeared into his linen tunic and Liam yelped in pain. The unit quickly pulled the blade back, the tip spattered with blood.
Liam clutched his side, a blossom of crimson spreading through the material as he dropped to his knees. Macro thrust his old sword into the unit’s flank, exposed by the lunge towards Liam. Once again the unit’s mind, working in nanoseconds of prediction, anticipated that and successfully dodged the thrusting blade.
With both arms committed now, however, one withdrawing from Liam, the other blocking Macro’s thrust, the unit had nothing left to counter Bob’s sweeping downward stroke. His blade bit deep into the unit’s head – through the skull, deep enough to cause catastrophic, irrevocable damage to the organic-silicon processing centre inside.
Stern teetered unsteadily on his feet for a moment, a look of complete incomprehension in his grey eyes. A small trickle of dark blood ran between his brows, down the left side of his nose and on to his cheek.
He gasped something incomprehensible before falling forward, flat on his face. Quite dead.
‘LIAMMMM!’ screamed Sal, starting forward. She raced across the passage and scooted down beside Liam, still kneeling, holding his side. His face had turned grey, his skin waxy with beads of sweat.
‘Ahhh Jay-zus! This hurts!’
Maddy was next to him. ‘Liam?’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Liam, how bad is it?’
He grimaced with the pain. ‘Do I look like a bleedin’ doctor? I … I don’t know!’
Macro and Cato joined the girls. ‘Macro’s looked after enough of his boys on the field.’
Macro nodded. ‘Let me take a look at you, lad.’
Bob grasped Maddy’s shoulder. ‘We do not have much time, Maddy. The other units are nearby somewhere.’
‘Your Stone Man is right,’ said Cato. He nodded at the door in front of them. ‘If whatever you seek is in there … then perhaps we should hurry?’
Maddy looked back down at Liam, now sprawled on the mosaic tiles, looking ashen, Macro ripping open the bloodstained tunic to get a look at the wound.
‘Sal …’ she said.
She nodded. Understood. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him. You go on.’
Maddy got up and followed Bob and Cato towards the door. A thick, iron locking bar ran across both doors and Bob easily slid it back with a heavy rasp that filled the short secret passageway. Maddy reached for a handle.
‘Be careful,’ said Cato. He tapped the heavy doors with his knuckles. ‘These seem like doors built more to keep something in than keep intruders out.’ The tribune took a deep breath, a sign perhaps that despite his rational mind, a part of him still held a wary suspicion that the supernatural realm of gods might just exist.
Maddy grasped the handle and pulled. The thick oak door rattled heavily, but didn’t budge. She cursed. ‘After all that, it’s freakin’ locked!’
Bob gently pushed against the other door. It swung inwards with an ominous creak.
‘Negative. You just need to push, not pull.’
CHAPTER 66
AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome
Maddy reached for a tallow candle and stepped inside the dark room. The candle’s guttering flame picked out little detail. A vast room that echoed like a cavern. She could see a ceiling above, faintly. Frescos and decoration left for so many years in complete darkness. Bob and Cato entered behind her, another two candles marginally increasing the light in the room.
She took a dozen steps in until finally the candlelight glinted on piles of objects on the floor, laid out on several wooden tables. She went over to the nearest table and set her candle down on it.
‘Bob! Over here!’
The support unit and tribune joined her. Bob studied the items on the table. ‘Hydrogen cell powered pulse rifles,’ he said drily.
‘What are these devices?’ asked Cato.
‘Weapons,’ Maddy replied. ‘Weapons from the future.’
Cato’s eyes widened. ‘The stories of the Visitors … Cicero once mentioned they had “spears that roared”.’ He looked at them. ‘These?’
‘I doubt they’ll “roar” any more,’ replied Maddy, picking one of them up, blowing the dust off it and inspecting the weapon more closely.
‘Information: without maintenance, the hydrogen cells will be dead by now.’
Maddy looked across the wooden table. There were other things, supplies of all sorts: medicines, emergency food packs, tools. ‘This wasn’t just a field trip …’ She gasped. ‘Those Visitors came here to stay! Do you think? To … to colonize Roman times?’
Bob nodded. ‘That appears to be a plausible conclusion.’
She picked up her candle and wandered towards a pile of objects on the floor nearby. She squatted down and inspected them. Clothes. Shoes. Glasses. Some of them spattered with faded bloodstains. By the look of the mound of items of clothing there must have been a lot of them, perhaps hundreds. And all of them massacred?
‘And this, then,
’ uttered Cato almost reverentially. ‘This must have been one of the chariots they arrived in.’
Maddy turned to look. He was on the other side of the room now, holding his candle up to inspect something large that glinted dully in the gloom. She and Bob hurried over and a moment later, the three of them were inspecting the dusty, slanted metal sides of a large vehicle. To Maddy’s eyes it looked like a cross between a Humvee and a hovercraft.
‘Multi-terrain personnel carrier. With anti-grav thrusters for a limited-altitude vtol capability,’ said Bob. ‘This appears to be a more advanced model than the prototypes being field-tested by the US military in 2054.’
Maddy shook her head. ‘This is completely crazy! The scale of time contamination … I mean this is insane. What the hell were they thinking?’
‘Maddy?’ It was Sal.
She turned round and saw her silhouette in the doorway. ‘How is he?’
‘Macro’s bound him up.’ She managed a relieved smile. ‘Not serious, he said. Just a flesh wound.’
‘OK … OK.’ She sighed. ‘That’s good.’ She looked round the room. There were plenty of other things to inspect. Perhaps, somewhere in this room, please God, a time machine of some sort. Something to get them back home. Now.
‘Bob, if they’ve brought with them some sort of a time-displacement device, and it’s in here somewhere, we need to find it.’
‘Affirmative. But there is unlikely to be a viable source of power still.’
Bob clambered up on to the slanted metal hull of the vehicle. ‘I will look inside the personnel carrier.’
‘You do that.’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’re going to find a way home, Sal. I promise. Stay with Liam, OK?’
Sal nodded and quickly disappeared out of the doorway.
A time machine. Please tell me you idiots brought with you a means to get back home. Please. You guys can’t have been that stupid. Right?
Perhaps they weren’t stupid. Just desperate.
She returned to the tables stacked with guns and ammunition cartridges and webbing and field equipment, hoping to find some first-aid packs. Anaesthetic for Liam, more importantly something antiseptic to cleanse the wound. Antibiotics to fight any potential infection. He wasn’t going to make it if that sword wasn’t clean. In this pre-penicillin time even a paper cut could finish you off if you got unlucky. She found a first-aid pack, unzipped it. It was fully stocked.
‘Sal!’
Sal came back in. ‘Here … unwrap Liam. There’s an antibiotic spray in here. Use that and use these bandages; at least they’re clean.’
Sal took the first-aid pack and hurried back outside. Maddy resumed looking round the vast room. Her candle picked out a large object in the middle. A box, a crate of some kind.
Crate? A protective crate?
She made her way quickly towards it, doing her best to stifle the growing hope it might actually contain a machine eagerly waiting to be switched on and ready to conveniently whisk them back home to 2001.
Life doesn’t actually work that way, does it, Mads? Not for them at any rate.
Closer, she could see it looked less like a packing crate and more like the kind of travel cage you’d transport a wild animal in. She’d once watched a show on cable TV, a ‘day-in-the-life-of’ kind of show based on LaGuardia Airport. There’d been an episode with a sedated Indian tiger in a crate in the back of an aeroplane. Last of its kind or something. Anyway, the crate had looked not unlike this one. She stepped warily closer to it … expecting at any moment to hear the enraged snarl of a roused tiger or a lion coming from inside. She noticed a sliding trapdoor on one side of the crate.
Lion, tiger … or time machine. This crate, reinforced with iron brackets on the corners, had to contain something important. Gently she eased the trapdoor to the side, revealing a hatchway eighteen inches wide and six high. A viewing slot? A feeding slot?
She wrinkled her nose. There was an awful stench spilling out of it. Like sewage. Slurry. No, even worse. Decay.
A feeding slot, then. It had to be there was some kind of animal being kept in there. Or one that had died and was quietly decomposing. Slowly she raised her candle, its flickering glow beginning to pick out a few slats of wood on the inside.
‘Hello?’ she uttered softly. ‘Anything in there?’
She heard a sudden scratching sound, the scramble of movement inside the box. Then a pair of eyes suddenly lurched into view.
Oh my God!
Eyes. Wide and milky. Almost human. Or perhaps human, but entirely insane, animal-crazy. Completely feral. The eyes were accompanied by a shrill, frantic, gurgling, whinnying cry. Its face – yes, a human face, she could see that now – was hidden from the bridge of the nose down to the chin by some sort of leather and iron mask strapped round the head and caked in scum and dirt.
‘Oh God! Over here!’ she cried. ‘There’s someone alive in here!’
CHAPTER 67
AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome
Bob worked the reinforcing brackets off then pulled away the thick bars of wood that made the cage.
‘Jeeez!’ whispered Maddy as she caught her first glimpse of the rest of the pitiful creature cowering inside. ‘Is that really a man in there?’
The frail, skeletal body inside looked like that of an old man, edges and bulges where bone pushed out against paper-thin skin. His skin was darker than Mediterranean skin; Middle Eastern, Asian perhaps. And hair. Lots of it, cascading down his narrow shoulders, once upon a time dark, but now grey threaded with white in places.
The man cowered in the corner at the sight of Bob pulling the cage open, bar by bar.
‘Shhh! It’s OK,’ Maddy cooed softly. ‘We’re not going to hurt you!’
Cato stepped closer to get a better look at him. ‘Is … is this one of the Visitors?’
The man in the mask glanced at him quickly. He nodded vigorously, manic, darting eyes growing even wider. He whimpered, mewed and gurgled, bony hands gesturing frantically at the mask over his mouth.
Maddy stepped forward. ‘Let me take that off you. Is that what you want?’
The man scrambled unsteadily forward; his bare feet padded off a soft bed of trampled faecal matter – years’ worth of human waste compacted into an almost compost-like bed – on to the cool, hard tiles with a gentle patter. He turned his back to Maddy and frantically lifted his long, matted hair to reveal a crusted iron band with a padlock on it.
‘It’s a lock. I’m … I’m sorry … I don’t …’
‘Let me,’ said Cato. He pulled his sword out and carefully dug the tip of his blade into the lock’s rusted clasp. With a sharp twist, it snapped and showered flakes of rust to the floor. Maddy eased the band away from his head, grimacing at the skin worn bald at the back of the man’s head, the fresh scabs, the fading scars.
The old man untangled his matted hair, the long wisps of his beard and moustache, from the mask’s locking band. He eased the mask itself away from lips crusted with scab and dried mucus. The feed tube, the outside of it coated in the slime of rotting food lodged in the front of the mouth, emerged from a largely toothless face; gums almost completely black with the ruined stumps of dead teeth.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Maddy whispered, controlling the urge to retch.
The mask clunked to the floor, the echo filling the cavernous, dark room.
‘Are you one of the Visitors?’ Cato asked.
The man seemed to be in a state of shock, hyperventilating. Gasping. His tongue, snaking out and tasting the air, relishing its release from captivity.
‘Did you come from the future?’ tried Maddy in English.
His darting eyes stopped on her immediately.
‘English? You can understand me?’
His jaw flexed – trying to speak. Trying to form words with his ruined mouth.
Just then Bob stirred. ‘Information.’
Maddy held a hand up to shush him. ‘He’s trying to say something.’ The old man was gurgling something. Trying to produ
ce a word.
‘Caution!’ said Bob more insistently. ‘I am detecting two more idents! Approaching from the east quickly!’
‘Two of them? We don’t stand a chance against two of them!’
‘What is your Stone Man saying?’ asked Cato.
Maddy turned to look at the doorway. ‘The others are coming!’ she hissed in Latin to Cato. ‘Sal!’ She started towards the doors. ‘SAL! Get Liam inside! HURRY!’
A moment later, she saw Macro and Sal with Liam dangling between them, shuffling inside.
‘We’ve got to close the doors!’ screamed Maddy. ‘Help me!’ She jogged across the floor and began to wrestle with one of the oak doors. Macro grabbed the other, the doors creaking on solid iron hinges. Bob was beside her a moment later and with a heavy, rattling thud, the wan light from the oil lamps in the small passage outside was gone.
By the light of her candle she could see there was no way to secure the doors, no locking bar on this side, no padlocks, nothing.
‘They are twenty yards away,’ said Bob.
‘Everyone! We’ve got to hold the doors!’ she barked, wedging her shoulder against one of them.
Cato was beside her now. ‘No! They’ll lock us inside and we’ll be trapped in here!’
Macro nodded. ‘Cato’s right. We’ll be dead men if we’re stuck in here when Caligula returns.’
Cato drew his sword. ‘We should fight them now. We have a chance against them.’
‘They’ll kill us all!’ Maddy cried.
‘Better that,’ said Macro, ‘than Caligula finding us in his palace.’
‘They are now directly outside,’ said Bob.
The doors suddenly boomed and rattled under the impact of something. A shaft of light spilled in as the doors momentarily parted. Bob threw his weight against them both and they clattered shut again.