She clicked on through the historical timeline on-screen. ‘How does Ancient Greece sound to you guys?’ She turned in her seat to look up at them. ‘Uh? Hey … Bob, we could enter you into their Olympic games. You’d win pretty much everything. You up for that?’
Bob regarded her coolly. ‘If that is what you wish.’
‘Attaboy.’
Maddy was about to pull up some details on Ancient Greece, the Peloponnesian wars, the Persian invasions … when it all went dark. Seconds passed. For a moment Maddy thought it might be the Holborn Bridge power generator shorting out again. The thing had a habit of doing that every few days. The lamp beside the monitors flickered on again; the computers began to whir and reboot.
As they waited, Maddy looked at Bob and Becks. ‘Do you think that was a time wave?’
‘I am unable to tell at present,’ replied Becks. ‘I will observe outside.’ She turned and headed for the door.
‘It is possible that was a wave,’ said Bob. ‘We know of at least one potential source of contamination.’
Not Sal. It wouldn’t be her – she was way past them in the timeline. Whatever nonsense she was getting up to it would affect only the years after 2025.
‘Liam?’
Bob nodded. ‘Liam. Or it could be someone else.’
The monitors flickered on with the W.G. Systems logo as they finished rebooting. Then computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on-screen.
> Maddy, I have just experienced a run-time interruption.
‘I know. We just lost power for a few seconds.’ She was about to ask Bob whether he’d detected any changes of data on their history database, but then realized that, with no protective field up and running, computer-Bob would have no ‘before and after’ comparison to make. If history had changed in some way, it would be there in its new form, on disk, and Bob would be none the wiser that the information had changed.
But I might be …?
‘Bob, open the history database. I think we might have experienced a wave.’
> Yes, Maddy. Do you believe the wave was caused by Liam?
‘That’s going to be my starting assumption. So, let’s start looking from the year we first lost sight of him, 1666.’
> Affirmative.
She had another thought. Sal was going to feel this wave when it passed up the timeline and eventually reached her. She was going to have access to more information in 2025. An Internet, for starters. If she was thinking along the same lines – supposing it might just have been caused by Liam – the first thing she’d want to do is come back.
Right?
Or was she too far gone? Too messed up in her head to care about anything any more? It was worth a go. The power was on and the displacement machine was busy charging.
‘Bob?’
> Yes, Maddy?
‘Let’s recharge and run the one-week return window. Maybe Sal’s decided to come back for that one.’
She had a sinking feeling this one was also going to be a no-show.
Chapter 66
2025, New York
Stop looking at me like that.
Sal scowled at the people who walked past the mouth of her alley, looked into it and saw the bedraggled Indian girl sitting on a wooden orange box. She hated the momentary look of disgust on their faces followed a second later by self-reproachful relief that it wasn’t them sitting there. It was that look – relief – that stung.
She was well aware that she didn’t look so great. A week of sleeping rough in and about Manhattan was liable to do that to a person. Particularly in this time, where she noticed people had become hardened, ossified by the increasing hardships of life. No different really to her installed memories of Mumbai. In an increasingly resource-poor world, isn’t the first casualty always humanity? Charity? Compassion? Love?
A week roaming the streets of Manhattan and she’d begun to see in everything the effects of the oil shortage: the lack of imported goods, the price of food. The infomercials on the huge screens over Times Square talked of avoiding waste, recycling, tips on how to grow food on roof-top gardens, window ledges and balcony grow-baskets. And the news itself …? It seemed every leader in the world had recently gravitated towards the Middle East in an effort to talk down Iran and Israel from going to war with each other. Images of convoys of transport vehicles loaded with tactical nuclear warheads constantly being shuttled around from arid canyon to rocky gulley. Constant manoeuvring, as both sides kept their nuclear arsenal mobile. Those were going to be the first opening moves of what would become a decade of mini-wars as world powers jockeyed to control the last super-reserves of oil in the ground.
It was a big mistake coming here. Sal knew that now. And the day after she’d decided to let Saleena and her father go about the rest of their holiday unmolested, Sal had impulsively decided she just wanted to give up. Stay here … not even try to return to 1889.
There had been a dark moment. Two days later. The darkest moment, when she’d managed to find a way through the closed-off pedestrian entrance on to the Williamsburg Bridge. She’d walked halfway along it, worked herself through a gap in the rusting protective mesh grille, swung her legs over a handrail and stared down at the swirling grey water of the East River.
How long had she stared down like that? Three hours? Four hours? Wanting to let go, but not quite managing to convince her hands to release their grip on the rail. The instinct to survive desperately fighting with her. Her mean voice – that voice of reason – told her it was probably OK to die if that’s what she wanted. She was never meant to have lived anyway. And it would be quick.
But her body had other ideas.
She’d hung there for hours, her cheeks wet with tears and chilled by the gusting breeze. Here was where her short life, her short story, would finally come to an end. And no one … no one was ever going to miss her, ever going to know that she’d even existed.
The fact is she decided not to jump. Sal couldn’t say exactly why. Fear of the fall? Instinct? It certainly wasn’t a glimmer of hope or inspiration that saved her. Just that she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
The next day, though, the thing happened. A time wave. A subtle one, not a churning storm cloud on the horizon, but the subtlest shimmer like heated air above a sunbaked interstate highway.
A time wave.
If she ever lived to be an old woman and had grandchildren on her lap, perhaps she’d end up muddling the sequence of things and say that it was that time wave that saved her life, gave her hope and prevented her from jumping to her death. But no … nothing so poetic. It had come the day after she’d nearly thrown herself off the Williamsburg Bridge. What had saved her from jumping was fear. That was all.
The time wave itself was a mere shimmer. But it was also a reminder that there was something still worthwhile in her life. A job.
A mission.
Now she looked out of her dirty alleyway at the holographically projected news screen opposite. A newscaster was reporting some war going on in Africa as beneath her the time ticked seconds away. The time was approaching midday. The one-week window was nearly here.
The time wave meant something important. It was a clear sign. Almost certainly it was Liam. Either he was trying to cause a disruption in the past in order to get Maddy’s attention or he was just being careless as he enjoyed his frolicking in history. Either way, Maddy was undoubtedly going to go back and get him.
But it was also a sign for her, she felt. A reminder that she’d given herself a personal goal. Something to live for, to ensure …
You’re going to die an old woman, Saleena Vikram.
That meant she needed to get back home to Maddy and their London dungeon.
She’d been busy these last few days. She managed to beg, forage for, steal just enough money to buy herself an hour in one of the digi-stream cafes down the rough end of 5th Avenue. She’d found a place crammed with immigrants plugged into several rows of digi-consoles, desperate to contact loved ones.
Rows of cubicles filled with worried faces wearing headsets. A clamour of conversations in a dozen different languages. She’d paid for her hour, found a vacant cubicle plugged into a console and then began to look for a clue to the time wave’s point of origin.
Sal looked at the clock again. Just seconds to go. What worried her now was that the time wave might have altered things in the past – for example, enough that Holborn Viaduct, along with the world’s first commercial electrical generator, might never have been built – that there would be no return window.
She anxiously counted the seconds down until it was past midday.
Please … please … please …
She’d found a sign. Oh God, it was a sign all right. A cry, a loud bellow through history from Liam. A big ol’ completely unambiguous, unmissable come-here-and-get-me!
‘Come on … open, please,’ she whispered.
At fifty-three seconds past midday Sal’s plea was answered. She saw the rubbish in her alleyway begin to stir restlessly, paper and plastic bags suddenly chasing each other in childlike circles. Then, without fanfare, without a sound except for the soft thud of displaced air, there it was: a dark orb of swirling, oily reality.
Sal was on her feet in an instant, down the alley, and thrust herself into it, not sparing a thought, a moment’s dread, for the seconds of milky-white horror beyond.
1889, LONDON
She emerged into the gloom of the dungeon, stepping quickly out of the mist and almost knocking Maddy over.
‘Sal! It’s Liam!’ she howled. ‘It’s Liam!’ Maddy stopped, held Sal steady by the shoulders, looked at her, then wrinkled her nose. ‘My God, what happened to you?’ She grimaced. ‘You smell like a garbage bin!’
‘Living rough.’ Sal blew out the answer quickly. Not important right now. ‘Maddy, the time wave. You got it here too, right?’
She nodded. ‘Oh, I got it all right!’
‘It is Liam, isn’t it? It’s Liam and Rashim?’
‘Yup!’ She smiled. ‘Apparently the pair of them decided to name a frikkin’ pirate ship after me.’ Maddy giggled. ‘They … they named a whole frikkin’ port after you, Sal!’
‘I saw that on a database,’ said Sal. ‘Not exactly subtle.’
Maddy clucked and laughed. ‘Liam doesn’t do subtle. For Christ’s sake, he and Rashim even named a whole frikkin’ island nation Pandora. Can you believe that?’
Sal nodded. ‘I saw that too. It’s like their own country or something.’
‘Yup. What used to be called Hispaniola then later Haiti.’
They stared at each other, Maddy grinning so much that some of it leaked across on to Sal’s face. ‘I guess he did want to come back after all.’
The emotion was too much for Sal and she began to sob into Maddy’s shoulder.
‘Hey, you poor bedraggled thing.’ She let Sal cry herself out, deep racking sobs of relief coupled with tears that trickled down Maddy’s neck and soaked into her blouse. She let Sal have this because she clearly needed it.
So, it seemed Liam and Rashim hadn’t intended to escape the present and go play pirates. For whatever reason that transponder ended up in someone else’s hands, quite clearly they’d resorted to whatever measures they could to make their mark in history, to ensure Maddy would spot them here in 1889. No mistaking that as their intention.
I mean … Fort Bob? Republic of Pandora? The good ship Maddy Carter? Only an idiot like Liam would be so recklessly unsubtle about the whole thing. Clearly he was thinking along the same lines as her. ‘Come get me and then together we’ll fix this contamination – hopefully – before it ripples forward to Waldstein’s time.’ On the other hand, Maddy suspected he wasn’t even thinking that analytically. ‘Just come get me … and Maddy can figure out the rest.’
She smiled as she soothed Sal’s juddering sobs.
Typical Liam.
The news was mixed, though, and she was going to need to share this with Sal once she was done sobbing on her shoulder. Maddy now had his where-and-when-abouts, but – and isn’t there always a goddamn ‘but’ when it comes to our luck? – the news from the past, from 1687, didn’t end particularly well for Liam and Rashim.
It wasn’t good.
Maddy decided to give Sal a few more minutes before breaking the news.
Chapter 67
1687, Port au Vikram, Republic of Pandora
Liam looked again at the note in his hands. He read the first sentence once more. The opening words of this despatch told him all he needed to know.
Your Excellency, it is with the deepest regret …
The rest was all political flattery and an excuse that sounded less than convincing.
‘Oh well,’ he muttered. He dismissed the courier with a nod and tucked the note in his waistcoat. ‘Nothing I didn’t already expect.’ He adjusted his neckerchief and collar, placed his tricorn hat firmly on his head and inspected himself in the ornate gilt-framed mirror beside the door of his private suite of rooms.
He still cut a lean figure despite the advancing years. If there was an accurate age that could be applied to him, he’d be about thirty-seven. Not that Liam ever celebrated his birthdays; there wasn’t exactly a day he could point to and call it the day of his birth.
Thirty-seven.
The way things were headed, like as not there wasn’t going to be a thirty-eighth.
Silver streaks laced through his hair and peppered his full beard. That plume of hair on his left temple was now a Frankenstein streak of ghostly white. He buttoned his cuffs, his morning coat, cinched tight the sword belt round his middle. If today was going to be the day … then, damn it, he was going to be a smartly dressed corpse by the end of it. Liam opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. An elderly doorman bowed respectfully.
Liam patted him on the arm fondly. ‘George, you should go home to your family. Today the fighting will happen. You should gather your wife and children and find a way off the island.’
He strode out across the hall, into the sunshine filling the courtyard in front of the governor’s mansion. A stable boy had his horse ready and helped him up into the saddle.
‘You as well, lad. Best you go home now. The English and the Spanish are coming.’
He steered his horse through the small courtyard, a beautiful place that he was truly going to miss. A small orchard of mango and orange trees. A place he came to meditate. To try and recall that old life he’d once lived long ago as a young man. He remembered their names, of course, those two girls he’d once thought of as sisters: Madelaine Carter and Saleena Vikram. But he struggled now to remember precisely what they looked like. He recalled a vague impression of Maddy, of frizzy, reddish-blonde hair and pale, freckled skin. Sal with her jet-black hair and intense, dark brown eyes.
So long ago now. Twenty-one years. There were things he remembered and so much he’d forgotten about that time. Most of it seemed like an impossible dream. He retained a fading memory of airships and mutant monsters, herds of dinosaurs, skyscrapers and knights, castles and Romans. All of those things had seemed to merge into one confused story that no longer made much sense to him. Indeed … just like a dream, although he knew those things had once happened in his life.
But since then another whole life had filled the many intervening years. A good life if the truth of it was to be weighed out. A life with a woman he’d loved, married and lost. Fleur, a beautiful woman, once upon a time a plantation slave, and for twelve happy years his true love. She’d died giving birth to his child three years ago. The physician had said it would have been a boy, if he’d lived. But the poor wretch was so malformed he would not have lived for very long. It was kinder that way.
Liam had grieved and still did in the quieter moments of any given day.
He coaxed his horse out through the mansion gate. He was met with a salute from a captain of the Republican Guard. The uniform was a flamboyant one: a deep blue tunic with gold cuffs and braids, yellow breeches and tricorn hats topped wi
th a yellow parrot’s feather. Rashim’s design, of course. Those were the affairs of state that interested him the most: their small nation’s flag, their modest little army’s uniform, the names of the ships of their naval flotilla. The ephemera of nationhood.
‘Where is Lord Governor Anwar?’ asked Liam.
‘Overseeing the defensive works on the east side, sir. The English main body has been sighted.’
‘Thank you.’ Liam looked at the captain and the half a dozen men guarding the entrance to the governor’s mansion. ‘You gentlemen should rejoin your unit. We’ll need every man we have this morning.’
‘But your … your home, sir?’
Liam looked around at the busy thoroughfare, Lady Rebecca Street. Shopkeepers and merchants were busy at work, hammering wooden planks over their doors and windows. Quite understandable. Once the British and Spanish soldiers entered Port au Vikram, there’d be looting. No hammered planks would protect his mansion, though. All that he owned would be confiscated and handed over to Edward Pullinger, the British general commanding the forces that had landed on the east end of their island.
‘Don’t you worry about my mansion, Captain. It’s the fight that matters now. That’s all that matters now.’
The captain nodded gravely. ‘Yes, sir.’
Liam steered his horse up Lady Rebecca Street, observing the panic and mayhem all around him: families packing all their worldly goods on to the backs of carts and donkeys, in a hurry to evacuate the port by boat or hide in the jungle wilderness of the island. He didn’t blame them. Most of these families were black or of mixed race. Most of them had once been slaves from Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, or they were the children of slaves. Once Port au Vikram fell, Liam imagined General Pullinger would treat the majority of the citizens of Pandora as assets to keep for himself, to share among his senior officers or sell on to pay for the military campaign’s mounting costs.