‘Oh, that’s it all right,’ said Macro, curling his lips in disgust.
The doors boomed again and this time a strip of oak from the left-hand door clattered on to the tiled floor.
Cato picked out the shape of Maddy near the doors, a comforting arm around Liam. ‘You! You two, come here!’
Maddy helped Liam to his feet and they both came over.
‘This sewage aqueduct, you have to follow the direction of the flow!’ said Cato. ‘It leads to the river.’
She nodded. ‘OK.’
‘You should go now.’ He glanced at the doors. ‘They’ll be through soon enough.’
Maddy nodded. She turned to Sal. ‘Can you help Rashim down?’
‘Right.’
Sal lowered herself down through the hole in the floor. ‘I can’t feel the bottom. I think it’s a drop.’
Maddy peered through a gap to the side of her, until she caught the flicker of reflected candlelight. ‘I don’t think it’s far.’
‘Here goes, then.’ Sal lowered herself down until her arms were fully extended then let go. Maddy heard the echo of a viscous, muddy splut.
‘It’s OK, not far.’ Her voice reverberated as if it was at the far end of an underpass. ‘Ughh! But it’s total chuddah!’
Maddy grabbed Rashim’s hand. ‘You next.’
Another deafening boom and more fragments of splintered wood clattered to the floor. Thick shafts of light speared into the darkness, and she could see the glint of helmets through the fractured doors.
Liam pulled himself painfully up to a seated position.
‘Liam? You OK to …?’
‘I’m fine, Mads … I’m OK. I can get myself down.’
‘Your friend … then you, Maddy and your Stone Man,’ said Cato. ‘But hurry!’
‘What about you?’
Cato glanced at Macro. Macro returned a subtle nod. An unspoken understanding between the pair of them. ‘We need to cover over the sewage trap. And perhaps we can buy you some time.’
She looked from one to the other. ‘They’ll kill you!’
‘Of course they will,’ Cato smiled. ‘But then, as you said, you can make it so this never happened? Am I correct?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but …’
‘Then you should go. Now. Give us both a better end than this one.’
Rashim was down. Liam eased himself into the hole, groaning with pain as his arms worked and his torso flexed.
Boom. The cavernous room echoed with Bob’s deep, angry roar as he thrust his sword through the jagged hole in the left-hand door and there was a yelp of agony from outside.
They heard the echo of a muddy splat and Liam’s voice groaning at the impact.
‘Bob!’ cried Maddy. ‘We’re leaving! Get here now!’
‘I must remain by these doors!’
Cato stood up and approached the Stone Men. ‘Will you two take my orders?’
‘Affirmative,’ they both replied. ‘You are to be protected.’
‘Then kill anyone who comes through.’
Both clones drew swords from their sheaths and crossed the floor to stand in front of the shuddering, flexing oak doors.
Bob nodded at them as he passed by. ‘Good luck,’ he offered. They paused to look at each other briefly, both clones bemused by such an oddly human gesture of compassion from another support unit. Then they took up their positions before the fragmenting remains of the oak doors, legs apart, a two-handed grip on their swords, braced to kill.
‘Go!’ said Maddy, slapping Bob on the shoulder as he squatted down beside her.
‘You first, Madelaine. I will guard the rear.’
Cato seemed to understand Bob’s intent. ‘He is right. Let him be the rearguard.’
She was about to drop down through the hole, but hesitated. She leaned over and kissed Cato on the cheek. ‘I’ll make things right … I promise you that!’ Then she grasped Macro’s forearm. ‘I’ll make it right.’
‘Go!’ said Macro. He grinned. ‘Go on … don’t worry, we’ve been in tighter spots than this.’
She lowered herself down into the sewer and landed with a splat. Bob quickly followed her down, squeezing, barely, through the hole in the floor.
Both Cato and Macro reached for the iron grating and eased it back into place as a final crash against the doors sent them juddering open. The clones stepped forward together into the light of flickering torches and braziers and engaged the Praetorians stepping across the splinters of wood and twisted iron bracing.
Cato picked up his sword as Macro pulled the rotting and dusty artefacts across to cover the manhole.
‘Is that the truth, Cato? They can change this?’
He bent down and picked up a shield from the floor. ‘Perhaps.’
Macro pursed his lips as he gave that a moment’s consideration and finally nodded. ‘Good enough for me.’
‘That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Macro.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You never overthink things.’
Macro laughed. The two clones were doing a lethal job so far, holding the doorway and filling it with a growing pile of squirming bodies.
‘I hope our other fate sees us both as old men,’ Cato grinned. ‘Old and rich. How does that sound?’
Macro flexed his arms, sword in one, shield in the other. ‘I always figured we’d go out like this, you and me.’
Cato smiled at his old friend. ‘Ever the optimist. Shall we?’
He shrugged. ‘No point standing here gossiping like a pair of old fishwives.’
CHAPTER 76
AD 54, outside Rome
They emerged into the night. No shining light at the end of the tunnel, just the darkness of full night, the stars and moon lost behind clouds and a pall of smoke from the many fires across the city.
They took several steps down a delta of silt and sewage into the cool water of the River Tiber to wash the muck off. Rashim shuffled over, savoured the cool tickle of water on his skin, cupped it in his hands and drank and drank.
‘Eww … I wouldn’t drink from here,’ whispered Maddy, watching him.
‘Liam? You OK?’ asked Sal.
He was holding his side, wincing with pain. ‘I’ll hold together … I think.’
Maddy washed her hands clean and waded over to him. She pulled her glasses out from beneath her tunic. The arms were bent. She fiddled with them for a moment then put them on crookedly. ‘Let’s take a look.’
‘You won’t be able to see a thing in this light,’ replied Liam.
She reached out to his side. ‘Is it bleeding?’
‘It’s OK, I think.’ He touched the tight binding Macro had fastened round him. ‘It’s dry.’ It burned painfully – literally burned – but it seemed his exertions hadn’t opened the wound.
‘Macro did a good job,’ said Liam. He looked up at her, an expression on his face that told her what she already knew. He’d grown rather fond of the ex-soldier.
Maddy nodded. Me too. Between gasps back in the tunnel she’d explained that the pair of them had decided to stay behind and cover their escape.
‘We owe them,’ she said sombrely. She looked around at the city, dotted with the flickering light of fires. ‘We’ll fix this for them. I promised them that.’
‘Aye. Then we’ll make sure we do it.’
‘No time for this!’ said Rashim. ‘No time! We must leave Rome now! Aye, skippa! Yes, indeed!’
Sal nodded. ‘I’d really like to leave now.’
Maddy looked up and down the river. To their right a bridge running across stone arched supports. To their left, further along, a rickety-looking bridge made from wood.
‘Which bridge?’
‘Neither,’ said Rashim. ‘We follow … see?’ He pointed along the bank of silt to their left. ‘Takes us round the bottom of the city, then we go …’ He frowned as he thought, tapped his temple with his knuckles as if to shake loose a memory.
‘Are you sure you kno
w where this portal’s opening?’
‘Yes! Yes!! … We go north-east from Rome … for some hours.’
‘Can you be more precise than that?’
Rashim tapped away at his scabby temple. ‘In here … all in my head! Let me … let me get it out!’
‘Information.’ Bob lifted his head. ‘If we are within several miles of the correct location, I may be able to detect tachyon particles.’
‘As it opens … yes,’ said Maddy, ‘but if it opens for just a couple of minutes and we’re a mile or two away, we’ll miss it!’ She turned to Rashim. ‘We need the precise location. We need to be in exactly the right place!’
‘So long ago …’ Rashim muttered. He closed his eyes. ‘I … I remember coming along a road into the east of Rome.’
Bob’s eyelids flickered, accessing his database. ‘The Via Praenestina?’
‘Yes! Long road! A big archway! A … a market!’
‘Go back. Remember it backwards,’ said Maddy. ‘Before entering Rome …?’
‘Can we go now?’ said Sal, looking back at the sewage outlet they’d emerged from. ‘Can he remember and walk at the same time?’
Maddy followed Sal’s gaze. If Caligula’s soldiers had figured out they’d escaped through the sewage outlet, it surely wasn’t going to be long before they saw the faint flicker of torches emerging.
‘She’s right. Let’s get going.’
CHAPTER 77
AD 54, outside Rome
Dawn saw them on a dusty track flanked by rolling fields of parched soil and withered wheat stalks on one side and an orchard of fig trees on the other. Rashim’s weak bow legs had long ago failed him and now he was fast asleep on Bob’s broad shoulders.
Sal walked beside him in thoughtful silence, occasionally sharing a word or two with Bob, but mostly lost in her own thoughts.
Liam walked beside Maddy, still holding his side protectively. There was a slight limp to his walk as he favoured his right leg with a longer stride.
‘You’re made of tougher stuff than I’ve given you credit for,’ said Maddy.
‘Ahh, I may not be whinging like a little girly-girl, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t hurting me like there’s a pitchfork stuck in me sides.’
‘Liam.’ She looked at him. ‘You took a sword in the gut!’
He shrugged at that. ‘I took a glancing blow. Looked a lot worse than it was, I’ll wager.’
She wondered. In the heat of the moment of that fight, she’d actually thought that it was all over for Liam. That he was going to hit the floor dying. Liam was right – a glancing blow. If it had skewered him, like she at first thought it had … that surely would have meant a ruptured spleen or stomach or kidney or liver, leaking all manner of toxic acids into his blood. A painful, agonizing way to go. Certain death for sure.
‘You’re incredible, Liam,’ she said, hugging his narrow shoulders gently.
‘Incredible, yes,’ he winced, ‘but not a bleedin’ Stone Man.’
‘Sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Maddy?’
‘Yes?’
‘When we return …’ he said, ‘we’re going to be walking into trouble, are we not?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if we can get back to our field office. It might not even be functioning any more.’
Sal overheard them. ‘What if we went back to whenever these Exodus people came from?’
‘I don’t even know when that is.’
‘It’ll be after 2001, surely,’ said Liam.
‘Well, obviously.’
‘The Exodus Project occurs after 2056,’ said Bob.
‘How do you know?’
‘The Stone Men were running AI software that is a later generation than mine.’
‘2056?’ Liam turned to Maddy. ‘Is that when our agency came from?’
‘That’s a safe-ish guess, I suppose.’
‘What about it?’ asked Sal. ‘What if we go into the future?’
‘Why, Sal? You know better than me and Liam what it’s like. It’s grim.’
Liam nodded. ‘That man who came through to Robin Hood times …’ He tried to remember his name. ‘Locke … I think it was. I remember he said something about hearing rumours of our agency in the 2060s, so. He said it was bad then. Really bad.’ Liam met her gaze. ‘Sort of end-of-the-world kind of bad.’
The end. Words that were all too familiar to Maddy.
Maddy stopped walking. ‘Guys … that message in the Voynich Manuscript. You know Becks has it in her head. All decoded and everything?’
Liam and Sal stopped walking and turned round. ‘What about it?’ said Sal.
‘You know I said Becks couldn’t tell me what it was?’
They both nodded.
‘Well actually, Becks told me she could only tell me what the message was when certain conditions arose.’
‘What certain conditions?’ asked Sal.
‘She said “when it’s the end”.’
‘The end?’ Liam laughed scornfully. ‘Great! What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I dunno,’ Maddy shrugged. ‘But I get the feeling we’re all headed for something pretty nasty.’
‘We?’
‘Everyone! I’m talking, like, mankind.’
Liam made a face. ‘Well, that’s cheered me up no end, so it has.’
‘See … I think something awful happens one day. Something that wipes us all out. That’s what I think Pandora is. It’s a warning about that.’
‘That poor man …’ said Sal. The other two knew who she meant: that unfortunate soul who’d arrived out of nowhere back in New Orleans, 1831. An arrival that had been catastrophic, that had inadvertently caused the death of a young man called Abraham Lincoln. He’d arrived presumably without properly probing and checking his destination. He’d arrived in a hurry … presumably leaving his own time in a hurry. Arrived and instantly fused with the bodies of a pair of horses.
‘That man was the one who was warning us about Pandora,’ said Sal.
‘Joseph …’ Liam looked at her. ‘That’s what he said his name was, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah. He was the one that left you that note, Maddy.’
‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘Yup … I know.’ She shook her head. ‘But what do we do? Huh? So we’ve got a warning from some guy from the future that something awful happens to mankind. What the hell was he trying to tell us? Change history so it – whatever it is – doesn’t happen?’
Sal nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’
‘But we’ve also got a duty to make sure history doesn’t change,’ said Liam. ‘That’s what Foster told us. Remember? For good or bad … history has to go a certain way.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Maddy. ‘I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do any more, Liam. And now we’ve got whole freakin’ platoons of support units being sent back to kill us. So, obviously we’re making somebody angry. Doing something wrong!’
‘Or something right?’ volunteered Sal.
Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘See? Welcome to my world. The world of Not-Having-A-Freakin’-Clue-What’s-Going-On.’
They stood silent, in the middle of the road, the rising sun making hard shadows that stretched long and slender across the cobbles.
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Liam after a while. ‘I trust Foster. He said we should keep history as it is. For good or bad it has to go a certain way. Well … if that means that one day there’s an end,’ Liam pressed his lips together – a conciliatory smile, ‘then, well … I suppose it is what it is.’
‘We’re just following orders,’ said Maddy.
‘Aye.’
‘You know who said the very same thing?’ Maddy didn’t wait for him to pull out an answer. He wasn’t going to know. ‘Nazis, that’s who. Concentration camp guards.’
‘So, what are you saying we do, Maddy?’
She turned to Sal. ‘I’m saying I don’t know. I just don’t feel like trusting anyone right now.’
>
Liam nodded at that. ‘Let’s just get home, then?’
‘Let’s get home. If we can. And then we’ll figure it out from there.’
CHAPTER 78
AD 54, outside Rome
Rashim had mentioned that the Exodus group had travelled most of the one-hour journey on a broad brick road. Winding the memory backwards, he said that it eventually became a broad dusty track. Two lanes, busy with cart and foot traffic. The old man had said it had taken them an hour … but they had travelled quite slowly because their multi-terrain vehicles were heavily laden: people crammed in below, equipment stacked all over. Slow, then. Not much faster than a person could jog. His words. Hardly precise.
But he did mention a range of hills. Nothing too spectacular, hills that would be on their right coming out of Rome. And one hill beyond a gently rolling valley with a notably flat top.
As it approached midday, Maddy scanned the horizon. There were hills ahead of them, as he’d said. And beyond their smooth outline, on the far horizon, the more distinctly sharp-edged silhouette of a range of mountains.
‘Rashim!’ she called out.
He twitched slightly on Bob’s back.
‘Give him a prod, Sal.’
She obliged.
He lurched, opened his eyes then howled at the bright daylight. His eyes instantly clamped shut. ‘What is this? Where am –!?’
‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ Sal reached up to calm him. ‘We escaped, remember?’
The old man winced and covered his face with his hands at the glare of daylight, or perhaps it was some sort of agoraphobia – a mortal terror of the infinite openness all around him. Maddy wondered how much of her sanity would be left if she’d spent seventeen years cooped up inside a large packing crate.
‘Rashim, over there … those hills? Are they the right ones?’
Bob eased him down to the ground and he shaded his almost completely shut eyes against the painful brilliance of the morning sun. ‘I … think … yes. Or maybe … I’m not sure.’
‘Come on! We need to be sure.’