Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 69

AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome

Maddy and the others listened to the poor old wretch gabble. His cracked lips opened sores as they moved frantically; a trickle of blood and spittle rolled from his lips and into his thick, mucus-encrusted beard.

‘… I hacked them… I… you see I… they were… reset to take his orders…’

‘Slow down,’ said Maddy. ‘Please. Slow down. You’re not making sense.’

‘… chief technical officer… me… m-me! See?… I was in charge! Exodus! Exodus! ’

‘Exodus?’

‘P-project… the project. Exodus… I was chief t-technical officer.’ The old man squatted down on the cool floor, his painfully malnourished body already exhausted from the rush of excitement.

Cato crouched down beside them. ‘Ask him if he was one of the Visitors.’

‘Oh, I think he must be,’ replied Maddy.

‘R-Rashim… m-my name… it… it’s Rashim!’ he replied in broken Latin. ‘Yes! I… I was one of them! I w-was there! I was THERE!’

Sal came over to join them. ‘I’ve bound Liam up and… Jahulla!’ Her eyes took in the ruined facsimile of a human being, tucked into a foetal huddle on the floor. She stifled a gasp. ‘Who is that?’

‘We think he’s one of the Visitors,’ Maddy whispered in reply. She turned back to the man. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked. ‘What happened to the others?’

Rashim’s wild eyes danced from Cato to her. ‘B-betrayed! My fault

… oh my G-God it… it w-was all my fault I… I j-just wanted to… I never thought that… I… Oh God! OhGodOhGodOhGod — ’

Maddy touched his hand, held it to calm him down. ‘Shhh. It’s OK, it’s OK. You’re safe now. We’re going to get you out of here.’

‘No… m-must listen. Y-you must listen to m-me now!’ He snatched his hand from her. ‘Time! Not m-much time! It… it… it h-happens soon!’

‘What does?’

‘Tell me… tell m-me the day! What is… the day? WHATISTHEDAY? ’

‘Date? Is that what you want? You want the precise date?’

Rashim’s head nodded vigorously. ‘ TELL M-ME! ’ His thin voice was almost a childlike scream.

Maddy looked at Bob.

‘Information: today’s date in the Roman calendar is twenty-nine Sextilis, in the Twentieth Year of Gaius. In the contemporary calendar that would be twenty-ninth August AD 54.’

Rashim’s eyes rolled, showing the whites, and his eyelids drooped down, almost closing. His cracked and bloody lips fluttered silently, counting, calculating.

‘What is it?’ asked Maddy. ‘Rashim? Rashim — is that your name? What are you doing?’

He raised a bony finger tipped with a long claw-like nail to shush her, his lips still silently twitching and leaking bloody spittle into his beard.

‘Rashim? What’s up? What’re you doing? Are you counting? Is that it?’

‘ NO-O-O-O! ’ Rashim bellowed suddenly. ‘No-no-no-no… too soon, too soon, toosoon. TOO SOON! ’

Cato grasped Maddy’s arm roughly. ‘Tell me! What is he saying?’

Too many things, too much hitting her at once. Maddy was ready to scream along with this crazy scarecrow of a man on the floor beside her.

‘Rashim! What? Tell me, what is too soon?’

His eyes locked on her. ‘I am c-coming!! I will be here!!!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘B-beacons… BEACONS! L-light, to show the way!.. I… I came… I came years b-before! I w-was here! To show the way!!’

She shook her head. That meant nothing to her. It was complete gibberish.

‘R… r-receivers…’ Rashim continued. ‘I p-placed th-them. T-t-tachyon b-beacons — ’

Maddy looked up quickly at Bob; his inert face flickered with a reaction.

‘Rashim, did you just say tachyon?’ asked Maddy. He was burbling nonsense again, the half-whisper of a deranged mind. She grabbed his shoulders firmly. ‘Rashim! You said the word tachyon! You’re talking about time travel! Yes?’

He nodded frantically. ‘Yes… yes! M-markers! S-signals.’

‘Madelaine.’ Bob hunkered down beside her. ‘This could be an alternate time-displacement method. Marking out a locked location, a time-stamp.’

Rashim’s face lit up hearing that, his deranged whispering brushed aside in an instant. ‘Yes… y-yes! Understand?’ He grinned manically, looking at Bob then Maddy. ‘T-time travel! Exactly! We came through… all those, all those years… but I came through before the others. See? Yes. It was me. I had to set it up, you understand?’

‘You placed out… what, some kind of time-stamp markers?’ asked Maddy. ‘Beacons? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes! Y-yes! Then we a-all came through. We all came through! Exodus! ’

‘ Exodus? What is that? Is that the name of your… your group or something?’ She recalled a name stamped on the side of the first-aid pack. Project Exodus.

‘Project Exodus?’

‘P-project! Yes!’ He huffed air into his lungs. ‘We came… the future is dead! We came back. We c-came back here! That… that is — was — m-my project. My project. My project!’

They heard the gravel-rasp of Macro’s voice, an exchange of voices outside the temple in the short passageway. A moment later, he was standing in the pooling light of the doorway.

‘Cato… we’ve got some company.’

‘Lepidus?’

Macro shook his head slowly. ‘No such luck.’

Cato cursed. He looked at Maddy. ‘Caligula’s on his way back. We may not have much time left.’

‘Can you buy us some more time?’

He gestured at the piles of dust-covered technology. ‘So, can we use these things?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe there’s a way out of here. I just… I…’

Cato nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can.’ He got up and headed to the doorway.

They watched him go until Bob broke the silence. ‘It is possible Rashim may have been part of an advance party that arrived in this time to deploy markers in order to plot out a safe arrival area for a much larger group.’

Rashim nodded. ‘But… calculations, I… made mistakes. So many m-mistakes.’ He shook his head, eyes leaking tears on to his scab-encrusted cheeks. ‘Too many new p-people. They made me guess. I had toguess! ’ His eyes darted wildly in their sunken sockets. ‘You… can’t just… guess. This… has to be precise. Time t-translation, you MUST be precise! You understand? PRECISE! ’

Maddy nodded. ‘Oh yes… I know that.’

‘I–I… I got it wrong. W-we lost half of them.’

‘Lost? Do you mean in chaos space?’

Rashim stilled. ‘… chaos? Chaos?’ He worked the word round his mouth. ‘Chaos… yes. Or Hell? Hmmm? Hell?’ He licked his dry, cracked lips, shook his head and began to giggle manically. ‘This is my Hell… my Hell, my Hell, my hidey-hole Hell. My hidey-hole Hell. Me and Mr Muzzy. Mr Muzzy and me — ’

‘Rashim!’ She shook him by the shoulders. ‘Rashim, come on, stay with us!’

His face steadied; the insane smile slid off his lips and vanished into his beard. ‘I lost them in chaos. Lost s-souls now.’

‘You said half of them. What about everyone else? What about the rest of you? You came here, right?’

Rashim laughed again. Bitterly. ‘Arrived… seven… seventeen years too early.’ Strings of blood-tinted spittle hung from his lower lip. ‘Wrong time… wrong time… wrong Caesar.’

‘Bob…’ said Maddy. ‘I’m just trying to figure this out. He’s saying he made a hash-up of things and his group what? Overshot these time-stamp markers?’

‘Correct. That is what I believe he is saying. They went back seventeen years earlier than intended.’

She looked at him. ‘And that happened about seventeen years ago? That’s when “the Visitors” supposedly arrived?’

‘Affirmative.’

She shook Rashim from his manic reverie. ‘Rashim! Is that what you’re saying? Your deployment team are going to appear sometime soon? Appear to place out those beacons?’

He nodded. ‘ He knows too.’

‘He? Who?’

‘ God.’ Rashim chuckled.

‘God?’ Bob looked confused.

‘Right,’ said Sal dismissively. ‘He’s a nut.’ She looked at the others. ‘And we’re listening to him?’

‘No, wait!’ said Maddy. ‘He’s talking about Caligula, aren’t you, Rashim?’

‘I told him… it was this year… this summer… I told him.’

‘Oh my God! You actually told him about your advance party appearing? About there being a portal?’

Rashim nodded. ‘He… his… his doorway to Heaven.’

Maddy looked at Bob. ‘Could we use it? Could we use this portal to get home?’

‘I have no information. This must be a time-displacement technique developed after my inception date. After the agency’s database was set up.’

‘But it’s got to be similar… the same basic technology, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘If it’s a beacon… could we use it to communicate forward to computer-Bob?’

Bob nodded. ‘Theoretically. The only way to transmit data is a tachyon transmission.’

The big question was whether computer-Bob was still in one piece, capable of receiving anything.

‘Rashim… you said it’s soon. A few moments ago you said “soon”. You were talking about the advance party appearing, right?’

He offered her an appalling gummy smile. ‘Too soon… too soon,’ he replied in a sing-song voice. ‘Three days.’

‘Three days’ time?’

Rashim nodded.

‘Do you know where? Can you tell us exactly where?’

He was mumbling to himself in that unhinged, sing-song way.

‘Rashim!’

‘I know… I remember…’ He tapped his skull of tatty, wiry hair. ‘All in here. Don’t worry, me and Mr Muzzy know.’

Sal cocked an eyebrow at her.