TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 38. 2001, somewhere in Virginia

Bob’s single-minded pursuit of the small creature that had boldly dashed into the farmhouse kitchen and stolen their one firearm from right under his nose was getting him nowhere.

He was standing in a field of corn. It was too dark now for his eyes to pick out the broken stalks suggesting which way the creature had fled. He was four hundred yards away from the farmhouse, the light failing, and a cautionary warning flashing in his mind.

[Tactical error]

He was about to process that into an analysis tree when he first heard the shouting and banging drifting across the silently swaying field of corn from the farmhouse.

Several conclusions presented themselves:

The childlike creature is not alone

The gun being stolen was a distraction

The others are in danger

He bounded back through the corn, taking the path of flattened stalks he’d already made. Ahead of him, the noises grew more distinct, more frantic. From the sound of it he determined the struggle was coming from inside the house somewhere and as he drew closer he could see that the back door through which he’d rushed out only minutes ago was nothing more than a splintered frame swinging gently on bent hinges.

He heard a high-pitched scream and identified the voice as Sal’s. Something inside his head twitched. Not the silicon wafer but the small wrinkled nugget of flesh, the brain the size of a rat’s with which it had a synaptic-wire link. As he bounded across the overgrown garden, his mind was drawing up a shortlist of candidate words to describe what he felt.

Guilt (90 % relevance)

Shame (56 % relevance)

Anger (10 % relevance)

He’d been fooled, lured out into the field so that the others were left entirely alone, vulnerable. No gun between them. No support unit to protect them.

He crashed through the remains of the swinging back door, knocking it off its hinges. The kitchen looked as if a tornado had passed through it; everything that could be dislodged or broken had been. The wall was a mess of plaster dust and holes, revealing the wooden slats of support posts. The fist-sized holes punched into it all the way through to the hallway beyond. The door into the hallway looked just like the back door — smashed to splinters.

‘LIAM!’ Bob bellowed into the house.

He heard nothing now. The sound of struggling and screaming had ended at some point in the last thirty seconds.

‘SALEENA!’ he tried again, stepping into the hallway, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.

He could see scratch and scrape marks across the floor, along the walls … up the stairs. Quickly, urgently, he clambered up them, the old wooden steps groaning and creaking under the burden of his weight.

He turned right at the top of the stairs. A door at the end, scratched, battered and split with a deep crack down the middle, hung wide open. And into the room beyond he could see the frame of a bed on its side, an overturned chair. A last stand had taken place there. No bodies, though. Gone.

In the space of only minutes, seconds, the humans it was his duty to protect had been snatched away from him.

He took another few steps into the room and saw more signs of the struggle. A chair leg, wrenched from its seat, perhaps used as a club. One end of it was spattered with blood — black in this waning dusk light. There were splashes and dots of it on the pale walls.

The logical part of his mind berated him with a simple message.

[Mission status: FAIL]

The organic part was prepared to express its assessment of the situation with a flood of feelings he was unable, or unwilling, to find appropriate labels for right now. He backed out of the room and slumped against the landing wall, sliding down until he was a hunched mass of dejected muscle at the bottom of it.

‘You have failed,’ his deep voice rumbled softly, like a gas boiler switching on, a subway train passing through a subterranean tunnel.

‘You failed,’ he said again, this time his voice trembling slightly. He supposed, if Becks had been right here, she would have found that intriguing, impressive even, that his voice was unintentionally conveying an emotion.

The computer in his skull was nagging him to make a judgement call on a growing list of new mission-priority suggestions: to continue making his way north-east to New York? After all, Madelaine Carter was still there and still needed protecting. To attempt to locate the bodies of Liam O’Connor, Saleena Vikram and Abraham Lincoln? Because there was always the chance, a possibility, one or more of them might still be alive.

To self-terminate … out of sheer shame. Perhaps his AI was now unreliable, faulty. He had made a poor judgement that had resulted in this. An all-too-obvious ploy to lure him outside.

Subconsciously he balled a giant fist, angry with himself for being so … stupid. Perhaps another support unit uploaded with freshly installed software and not burdened with many months’ worth of memories of kinship, adventures, jokes even … would turn out to do a far more efficient job than he.

He was giving self-termination some serious thought, even though the software was advising him quite strongly that it was an illogical conclusion and achieved nothing useful … when he heard the scrape of a footfall beside him. He turned quickly to look along the almost pitch-black landing, quite ready to tear something, someone, apart, limb from limb, for no other reason than mere revenge.

And he saw Liam, standing there, wide-eyed, exhibiting post-traumatic stress behavioural indicators.

He was in shock.

‘LIAM O’CONNOR!’ his voice boomed.

Liam took a shuffling step forward, clutching his head. ‘Bob … Jeeez, I … don’t know what … I just …’

Bob lurched to his feet, closed the gap between them, and before his computer brain could cringe with disapproval, distaste and embarrassment at the behaviour of its host body, Bob’s huge muscular arms were wrapped round Liam’s narrow frame and squeezing him hard.

‘You are alive!’ he rumbled unnecessarily.

‘Bob … I … think they took Sal … and Lincoln.’

‘They are alive?’

Liam was struggling to breathe, his nose and mouth crushed against the wall of Bob’s sweaty shoulder. He pushed the support unit back and Bob loosened his hug.

‘I think so. I think they took them —’

His words were suddenly drowned out by a deafening roar that made the landing, the whole farmhouse, vibrate like the head of a snare drum. White light flickered into the building, dazzlingly bright, finding holes and cracks in the ceiling above them, sending pin-sharp blades of light down on to them that swept across their skin, across the wooden floor.

Light from above … the roar too. Directly above them. They tumbled down the stairs before either of them had discussed whether it might be a good idea to actually remain hidden somewhere inside. They stepped through the shattered remains of the front door and out on to the porch, looking up at the brilliant white light. Liam shaded his eyes; it was as intense and uncomfortable as looking directly at the sun. A false dawn of artificial sunlight trained down on them.

‘What is it?’ he all but screamed. He couldn’t even hear himself, let alone hear whether Bob managed to answer.

An icy blast of air swept down on them and he felt something cold and wet settle on his cheeks. In the light he could see a million white fluffy flakes of something slowly descending, swirling in the downdraught, seesawing like feathers, like ash from a forest fire. But they were neither.

My God … it’s snowing!

That’s exactly what it was.

Snow?

The deafening roar that had filled the air, making talking, shouting, an utterly pointless endeavour for the best part of the last minute, suddenly ceased. It left them in a silence filled only with Liam’s rasping breath and the soft whisper of snow falling and settling on the ground around them.

‘What the …?’ uttered Liam, feeling more and more flakes landing on his upturned face, on the back of the hand shading his eyes.

The blinding light swept off Liam and Bob and back on to the farmhouse, then across the other buildings in the small rural hamlet, like a probing eye trying to make quick sense of the scene.

Liam tracked the thick beam of the spotlight all the way up into a dark and completely starless sky. He thought he was looking at a dense bank of snow-laden cloud above them; that might be the best explanation for the unseasonal and surprising arrival of snow. But then a row of smaller lights suddenly appeared. A row of spotlights trained upwards, casting fans of light across a smooth, burnished copper hull.

His mouth was useless, slack and open and doing little more than making a gurgling note of surprise.