Hamshaw’s men tightened into a defensive knot round Modyford and together they shuffled back across the deck towards the boarding ramp. In the thick of the scrimmage Liam saw Kwami’s huge bulk swinging a long-handled axe at a pair of soldiers, desperately trying to force a gap between them to get to his former owner. But Modyford was now already stepping up and over the rail.
In frustration, Kwami threw the axe he was holding at the man in the hope of knocking him off the ramp, but it passed by harmlessly as Modyford jogged down the ramp towards the wharf.
Don’t let him get away. The man was rich, powerful, connected and now undoubtedly determined to make it his life’s mission to see him and Rashim hanging from a rope. Better he was dead than alive.
Liam had a shot left unfired in the pistol he’d scooped from its hiding place. He swiftly levelled his aim at the man as he backed up against the side of his carriage and fired. The shot ricocheted off the carriage beside Modyford’s head, sending stinging shards of wood into the man’s cheek. He turned sharply to look at Liam, his luxuriant auburn-coloured wig falling off the back of his head as he did so.
The soldiers were now attempting to follow his retreat, the rearmost throwing their legs over the rail and scrambling down the ramp, a couple of them simply throwing themselves over the side.
‘Dammit! Let them go!’ shouted Rashim. He looked around for Old Tom and quickly found him. ‘Tom? We have to go … now!’
The quartermaster nodded. ‘Cut her free fore and aft!’ he bellowed through cupped hands. ‘All hands to the sails! We … are … leaving!’
Someone swiped a blade at the boarding ramp’s tethers and kicked the ramp off the rail. It clattered down between the ship’s hull and the wharf into the water below. The mooring rope upfront whip-tailed as someone sliced at it and the gap between ship and wharf almost immediately began to widen.
Liam had begun reloading his pistol, but Modyford was now almost completely obscured by the soldiers gathered tightly round him. But he saw the man’s face, a cheek running with blood, his sore-encrusted scalp rudely exposed to the sun, a snarl of outrage like a wide-open gash across his face.
‘I WILL HUNT YOU DOGS DOWN!’ he roared, his eyes still locked on Liam. ‘I WILL HAVE THE KING’S NAVY AND I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN!’
The aft mooring rope cracked like a whip as someone cut it and the Pandora started to turn and pull away with more urgency. The sail above Liam unfurled and began to flap with a noisy rustle. The wharf began to recede quickly. Modyford’s shrill voice, carrying promises of hanging, disembowelling, quartering across the water to them, also began to diminish.
Rashim came to stand beside Liam, watching the redcoat soldiers now drawn up in a line along the edge of the wharf. They had nearly finished recharging their muskets, slotting ramrods back into their holders. Hamshaw raised his sword to ready a command.
‘HEADS DOWN, LADS!’ called Liam. He pulled Rashim down with him as the soldiers fired a parting volley. The rail above them was smacked by a couple of well-judged shots and rained shards of wood down on to them. The rest of the musket balls hummed harmlessly over the deck.
They both slowly stood up again. Then Liam laughed nervously. ‘Hey! Morons! You missed!’
Rashim shook his head and tutted like a disappointed tutor. ‘Really, that’s just childish.’
Chapter 63
2025, New York
There were one or two dusty, cobwebbed corners of the archway that looked almost the same as she remembered. Almost as if they’d left it behind yesterday. The room right at the back was mostly as she remembered it. No generator now, no growth tubes, of course. In one corner were stacks of flattened cardboard boxes that were turning to a brown, soggy mulch at the bottom where seeping water was making its way in.
Sal worked her way forward into the main room. It had clearly been used by some other business, several in fact, by the various telltale signs of occupancy. For instance, someone had at one time tried to paint the brick walls white, but the mortar and the bricks were so crumbly it looked like they’d given up halfway along one wall. Someone else had replaced the tube light on the ceiling – the one that had always flickered annoyingly – with a low-energy halogen bulb.
The wall against which the computer table, monitors and PC cases had stood was now lined with sheets of plywood leaning up against it. There were tatters of paper stapled across them, layer upon layer. Sal looked closely at them. Flyers, adverts for events, staple-gunned to the ply. It seemed the last business using this premises was some sort of printer for flyers or bill posters, or something.
The little archway alcove where their bunk beds used to be was occupied by a couple of large metal wheelie bins. She lifted the lid and winced at the smell of decay that wafted out.
This was our home. Once. But it felt desecrated now. Twenty-four years of use by various other occupants, businesses, vagrants, drug addicts – even urban foxes – had left their mark.
The entire concrete floor of the archway was soaking wet. In places water sat in shallow puddles. Not from the occasional drop of water that had always found a way down through the tons of brickwork above to drip annoyingly on the floor. This was floodwater.
She splashed her way across the floor, to the middle, then coyly probed a circular puddle with her toe. It was several inches deep. She smiled. That was the shallow crater of concrete their displacement machine had scooped out of the floor over and over.
Sal felt a warm feeling standing here in their archway. Returning to this place that for a while had been a home of sorts. A place that had once echoed with Liam’s guffaws, Bob’s rumbling deep voice, Maddy’s rock music, the soothing chug of the filtration pumps in the back room. A place where they’d played board games on a makeshift table between the bunk beds. Where Liam had been introduced to the delights of the Nintendo 64 games console. Over there, where their long wooden kitchen table had stood surrounded by a mix of mismatched chairs and a couple of old threadbare armchairs. How many evening meals had they eaten together around that? How many pizza boxes had been piled up there, cans of soda, cartons that had once held noodles and foo yong.
She smiled. And how many bizarre conversations had they had between them? Three teenagers from three very different worlds brought together to live in this one. Sal remembered delighting in hearing Liam describe what it was like to be a steward on the Titanic, and he in turn had been fascinated by all the modern things the twenty-first century had produced.
Now it was just a damp, empty archway once more. And soon, perhaps within five years, it would be submerged beneath the rising sea.
Sal made her way towards the open shutter door. A different one, she noticed. She ducked under it and stepped into the backstreet. That was no different. Graffiti-covered brickwork and trash piled in heaps against the far wall. She turned to her left, towards the end of the alley that used to look out across the East River. There was no view now. A large concrete slab, lined with thick metal support braces, obscured it. The levee wall was fifteen feet high, built along this side of the East River to protect Brooklyn. But it had failed in several places a couple of years ago and most of Brooklyn had been flooded. The waters had receded but the flood damage remained. There had been some talk of regenerating the area and bolstering the levee walls, making them higher, thicker, stronger. But that idea had died when Brooklyn was flooded again the following winter.
The sea was rising. No way the city authorities were ever going to win that particular fight. Sal looked up at the wall. High above it she saw the grey underbelly of the Williamsburg Bridge. Even that, high as it was, was a victim to the rising tide. It was no longer used. Being a bridge to the abandoned Brooklyn it was now, basically, a bridge to nowhere. All closed off either end.
No hiss of traffic from above. No occasional rumble of a train passing overhead. Not any more. It was an iron, brick and tarmac relic of better times. She could see twigs and leaves wedged into the corners and joints of the ironwork. The nests
of seagulls and terns.
When Foster had first brought them outside the archway, she remembered it had been dark. She recalled stepping out beneath the shutter door, turning to look that way and gasping with delight at the lights from Manhattan shimmering across the calm water. The buzz of life and energy. New York right at the very pinnacle. The night before those two beautiful towers, those proud inverted chandeliers of light, would be gone.
Now … twenty-four years later, there was this – a dying city. Not dead just yet but the writing was writ large on the wall.
Sal wondered if it had been such a good idea coming here. After tailing Saleena Vikram and her father for another day, she had decided to let them go. Eventually Sanjay Vikram might notice they were being followed everywhere by a shabbily dressed girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to his daughter. He might call the cops. There would be questions she couldn’t answer. She would probably end up being sectioned by the authorities for her ‘own protection’. And then no chance of making the one-week return window.
If that’s what she planned to do. Sal wasn’t sure of that yet. Her head was all over the place. But she’d been hoping that a visit to the archway would lift her dark mood. Hoping to find something from the past to make her smile. Instead, she was standing alone in a part of New York that was dead. Necrotic flesh on the side of the Big Apple. Brooklyn was now inhabited by rats, dogs, foxes and quite probably a few rough-living tramps and addicts, taking refuge on the drier first floors.
Coming here was a stupid idea.
Chapter 64
1667, Port au Prince, Hispaniola
Liam studied the busy shoreline of Port au Prince ahead of them as their crew rowed them ashore.
‘Looks no different to Port Royal to me. Smells the same too.’
‘The only difference is that it is not run by the English.’ Rashim looked at Liam. ‘Which, given we are now fugitives, is the relevant difference.’
‘Aye.’
Port au Prince was the principal settlement on the island of Hispaniola. An island that over a hundred and thirty years later would be called Haiti. It was officially a Spanish territory, but their hold on the island, and their interest in holding it, had lapsed over the last fifty years. And now French and Dutch privateers, buccaneers had moved in and established several coastal settlements, principal among them being Port au Prince. It had been Pasquinel’s suggestion that they make for this place. The port was a lawless haven for all manner of scoundrels escaping the long reach of vengeful governors and monarchs.
Liam regarded the hotchpotch of wooden buildings on stilts, shingle roofs at all manner of random angles, spilling tendrils of smoke from countless cooking fires. There was, of course, a bustle of activity along the shoreline, but not the ordered work of trade ships being loaded and unloaded. Instead, he could make out random knots of people, light-skinned and dark-skinned, in coloured smocks and shirtless. Sailors – pirates – working on repairs to their beached pinnaces. On one side there seemed to be a fight in progress: two groups of men swinging drunkenly at each other. Further along a beach party seemed to be in full swing. A bonfire flickered and tongued sparks into the evening sky. Around it figures danced, staggered, slumped and Liam could hear a lively tune played by an accordion and sung along to by several men who didn’t seem to agree on the words or even the tune.
Not nearly so ordered as Port Royal had been. There seemed to be no stone-built structures, no sense of a town centre, or a main street, no apparent warehouses. And no forts to protect it.
‘A frontier town,’ said Liam.
‘What?’
‘Like in them Western movies?’ said Liam. ‘Total anarchy. No one’s in charge here.’ He made a face. It meant any man with a grievance and a loaded pistol to hand could settle his argument without fear of facing a charge of murder. Although, that said, the same man faced the equally likely chance of being ‘settled’ in return.
‘It’s more than that, Liam. More than anarchy.’ Rashim smiled. Liam could see the glint of the reflected firelight in his eyes as their pinnace bucked gently on the waves as they began to break on the gently sloping shingle towards the beach. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a power vacuum. No laws here. No navy. No militia. No soldiers. Every man for himself.’ The crew drew in their oars and the boat was carried by one last lazy wave up on to the soft white sand with a soothing hiss. The men climbed out and splashed into the withdrawing surf. Liam and Rashim followed suit, wading up through the water on soft fine sand that gave beneath them like virgin snow.
To their right, the party round the fire continued without even a solitary curious glance their way. New arrivals. No big deal. The business of cavorting, singing, drinking continued unabated.
Rashim stamped his wet boots on firmer, drier sand. He took in a deep breath of air that smelled both inviting and repulsive: the mouth-watering smell of a suckling pig being roasted on a spit nearby more or less negated by the stench of a sunbaked pile of offal and faeces further along the sand from which Liam thought he could see a rotting pair of bare human legs sticking out.
‘Lovely,’ he said with curled lips.
Rashim wrinkled his nose, assuming the smell was what Liam was referring to. ‘That’s one of the first things we’ll sort out here. Hygiene.’
Liam looked at his friend standing there in the fading twilight, with his hands on his hips, taking in the raucous chaos of Port au Prince like some invading general. The scene reminded him of something else Liam had seen back in New York. Another film that he’d stumbled upon while channel-hopping on their TV. He tried to remember the name of the film but nothing came to him. He remembered, though, one scene in particular … wandering through a large house stuffed to the gills with teenagers. Every room seemed to have its very own party going on, every person staggeringly drunk, wild-eyed and out of control. Pranks and japes were being played, stupid pranks. Idiots thumping beer cans into their foreheads in an attempt to crush them flat, but leaving bloody gashes instead. ‘Aw, that’s just a typical frat party,’ Maddy had said. Liam didn’t have a clue what one of those was, but this … this looked a lot like one.
It also reminded him of a painting he’d once spent several hours studying in one of the many history books he’d pored through. A painting by an artist called Bosch. Something called The Garden of Earthly Delights. A depiction of Heaven and Hell. On the left, Heaven: a scene of order and tedious tranquillity, green rolling pastures and hills, fair people in flowing silk robes looking piously at their navels. On the right, however, a macabre scene of grotesques and freaks, fires lighting an endless dark wilderness populated by leering faces and guffawing simpletons.
Pretty much a medieval frat party.
Their men were gravitating towards the fire, drawn by the smell of sizzling pork.
‘Liam,’ said Rashim, watching them go. ‘This is the perfect place for us.’ He turned to look at him, the nearby bonfire lighting his eyes and making them glint and shine like the flickering embers of a dying brazier. He put an arm round Liam’s shoulders. ‘Now isn’t this exactly what we were looking for? Hmmm? The sort of place you and I can rule just like kings.’
Chapter 65
1889, London
Maddy didn’t notice the first tiny ripple when it happened: she was far too busy researching where she wanted to live out her years. Trawling through their vast digital encyclopedia of world history, she joked with the po-faced support units sitting beside her.
‘Hey. Look at me, eh? Just like someone picking out a holiday online.’
Because that’s how she figured she must appear to anyone looking on: some college kid picking out a gap-year tour of exotic places to visit. Ancient Rome?
Nah, been there, done that.
Egypt in the time of the pharaohs?
Too hot.
Tudor England?
Too much beheading going on.
Elizabethan England?
Too much Catholic-burning going on.
Renaissance Italy?
Hmmm … She rather liked the fancy clothes and the idea of looking up Leonardo da Vinci and maybe posing for a portrait or two. But then decided that the poor sanitation, plague and a little too much zealous persecution of heretics was somewhat off-putting.
Maddy had awoken that morning in their dungeon, entirely alone, save for the meatbots, the stupid-looking lab unit and computer-Bob. Her circle of friends. All robots together. After all, that’s kind of what they all were, including herself. AIs of one sort or another. So, alone then … but not lonely. And surprisingly upbeat. Last night, after computer-Bob had opened the first recall window, recharged and then opened the twenty-four-hour recall window for Sal, and she had failed to appear, Maddy had taken herself to bed. She’d pulled a blanket over her head and quietly sobbed tears of self-pity until she’d fallen fast asleep.
But this morning … stepping outside their side door and watching Holborn stir to life, smelling freshly roasting coffee beans, woodsmoke, horse manure, hearing the toot of a far-off train whistle, she realized she still had a burning desire to live on, to explore the rich variety of history. There really was so much to see, to experience, to taste. And maybe she’d take Bob and Becks along for the joyride as travel companions. OK, Bob could be a bit stiff, formal and not the greatest laugh, but he would be her protector. And Becks … hadn’t Becks’s AI begun to loosen up a bit before she died? Maybe not exactly a party girl, but she’d made a couple of lame stabs at being funny.
Maddy was beginning to build a picture in her mind of a life she could lead. A life after the agency, after being a TimeRider … and it was beginning to look inviting. She’d be just like that weird British TV show character, Dr Who … wandering from adventure to adventure with her two trusty sidekicks.