TimeRipper Page 7

  There was a woman standing in the middle of the road.

  All three of them would have sworn oaths, there and then, that the woman had not been there prior to the flash.

  Of this fact, Michael Stratton was certain. The newcomer was standing in the centre of the road where there was no shelter from the brief storm, but she was dry. He noted that she was dressed in the style of the day, but there was something strange about her attire. To him, it looked like she was trying to fit in, like the style was somehow forced. There was also a bewildered look about her. She staggered a little, looking around the street as if it was the first time she had ever seen the city.

  Slowly, he edged out of the doorway, unsure whether to approach her or not.

  The man under the bench was attempting to free himself, also to investigate the apparition.

  The man hiding in the shadows slid further back into the darkness, allowing it to envelope him. He attempted to become one with the dirty wall he was leaning against, to become an unseen shadow, an unknown witness to these strange events.

  ‘Hello!’ Michael shouted towards the confused woman. ‘Hello there. Are you OK?’ He held out his hands to her as he made his way into the centre of the road. The woman looked at him as if it had been him who’d appeared from nowhere.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ There was a slight Irish lilt to his voice. ‘Have you been drinking, sweetheart?’

  The woman continued to look around her, as if she was looking for someone or something. ‘What year is this?’ she asked, slowly.

  Michael cocked his head and offered her a crooked grin. ‘Darlin’, you must have had a skin full tonight. Here, let me help you. It’s not safe for a lady to be out in these streets on her own. Not at this time of night, anyway.’

  He held out his hands again. The two other witnesses watched the encounter with suspicion. The woman tentatively accepted Michael’s offered gesture. As they touched, a small, purple electric arc pass from her hand to his. Unperturbed, he gripped her hand and gently brought her towards him.

  ‘What year is this?’ the woman asked again.

  Michael flashed her a reassuring smile. ‘It eighteen eighty-eight, darlin’. July twenty-first, eighteen eighty-eight.’

  Her face lightened at this news, and a smile took over her features. ‘Good,’ she said. Then, from within the folds of her dress, she produced a small metal device. She pressed a button on it that unleashed a thin metal blade. Before he knew what was happening, Michael was clutching his throat. Ironically, he was still smiling as he pulled his hand away and the hot, thick, claret poured from the deep gash across his neck. He looked at his hands. His wide eyes were confused at the blood that covered them. His gaze then shifted towards the woman moments before he fell, hard, onto the cobbles in the road.

  The man under the bench watched as the reporter fell. He was now struggling to get up again.

  The man in the shadows held his breath and stayed where he was, as still as a statue.

  As Michael Stratton died, the woman swooped him up and carried his lifeless corpse over her back, making her way up Spitalfields with the cadaver dripping in the receding rain.

  She was long gone before the man could free himself from beneath the bench, and before the man in the shadows slinked off into the dark, wet July night.

  19.

  Inverness Castle. 2288

  EVERYONE WAS SPURRED on by Martha’s success. Mary Kelly smiled as she shouted, ‘Who’s next?’

  A tall, thin woman stepped up. ‘I’m next,’ she said.

  ‘Liz,’ she smiled. ‘Step right in.’

  The woman did as instructed, and the process began again.

  When all nine of them had been sent back to July, eighteen-eighty-eight, Mary stepped away from the console. She turned to Brian who was standing off to one side. ‘Are you ready to send me to OP One?’ she asked.

  He smiled and nodded back at her. ‘Co-ordinates have been entered. Are you ready now?’

  She walked over to the teleportation pod in the corner of the room and climbed in. ‘No time like the present, is there?’ she laughed at her own joke. ‘The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can get to London. Do it,’ she commanded.

  Brian pressed the buttons and pushed the lever. Instantaneously, Mary dissolved into a purple flash before his eyes.

  ~~~~

  Teleportation did not leave any residue, no one knew why.

  ~~~~

  At nine-fifty-five a.m. on Orbital Platform One, Youssef was pacing the floor in the teleportation room. He checked his wrist device almost every fifteen seconds. Kevin Farley and Dr Hausen had arrived half an hour earlier and had been briefed on the recent events. They agreed that they would allow whoever it was coming to do the majority of the talking. They would then re-group after the meeting to talk strategy.

  At the stroke of ten, an alarm cried out, informing them of an impending teleportation.

  This is it, he thought as the EA personnel manning the teleporter boosted the containment field around the pod.

  ‘Sir, you do know that we could contain her almost indefinitely within this containment field,’ the officer advised him.

  ‘I know, but what would they do if we took one of them prisoner? We have to remember that we’re the ones on the back foot here. Right now, they hold all the cards.’

  Reluctantly, the operator nodded and watched as the diminutive figure of Mary Kelly appeared within the teleportation pod.

  Youssef recognised her immediately. She was the once shy, but absolutely brilliant, research assistant who had worked the lab with Carrie Millwood.

  It was obvious that she didn’t recognise him.

  As she stepped out of the pod, a decontamination wave passed over her, blowing her hair and her clothes in its strong wake. Although she did not recognise Youssef personally, she did recognise his authority within the room. She walked over to him and offered her hand. ‘Hello, my name is Mary Kelly. I’m a representative for The Quest. May we go somewhere private to chat?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied shaking her hand. ‘My name is Youssef Haseem. I believe we’ve met before. We worked together in an Earth Alliance lab many years ago.’

  She showed no interest in renewing old acquaintances.

  ‘I’ve taken the liberty of booking a meeting room for us to chat in. I have also invited my colleagues, Kevin Farley and Doctor Hausen, I feel they should be included in what we will be discussing.’

  ‘I’ve no problem with that,’ she shrugged. ‘If we may convene then, Mr Haseem.’

  As they entered the meeting room, Kevin and Dr Hausen stood to greet their guest. Youssef watched Kevin’s eyes follow her around the table. He couldn’t disguise the look of disgust on his face as Youssef introduced her. Dr Hausen curtly nodded to their guest before sitting down.

  Mary sat facing the three men. The room had been designed to intimidate her, psychologically, to make her feel like she was under scrutiny.

  It didn’t work.

  The moment she sat; she took control of the meeting.

  ‘Mr Haseem, I’m here to expedite the standing down of the Earth Alliance, and to begin the transfer of power, and resources over to The Quest. You have no leverage here, you have no counter offers, you simply have no option.’

  Kevin’s face went red. ‘Excuse me young lady…’ The irony on the word ‘lady’ wasn’t missed on anyone present. ‘Do not forget that you’re stood on our Orbital Platform. You’re here alone. I feel that it’s you who has no leverage.’

  She turned to face him, cocking her head, and smiling. It was a patronising smile, in ever Youssef had seen one. ‘If anything were to happen to me while I’m here, there would be dire consequences to the food store that we have. The same one that the remaining population currently rely on.’ As she spoke, she offered another condescending smile towards Kevin. Youssef didn’t believe it was possible, but he watched his colleague’s face grow redder.

  ‘Listen, no one is threat
ening anyone here,’ Youssef interrupted, trying to placate both parties. ‘What we want is to come to an arrangement.’

  ‘I’ll stop you there, if I may,’ Mary said shaking her head, her attention back on Youssef. ‘There’s no arrangement to be made. I’m here to inform you that you have exactly one year, to the day, to have abandoned these orbital platforms. You will hand over all scientific licence, all research licences, and all physical assets that Earth Alliance currently hold to The Quest. None of this is negotiable.’

  ‘Now hold on a minute,’ Kevin shouted again. ‘You expect us to just get up and…’

  ‘And to have informed the rest of the population of Earth that you plan to disband as an organisation and will join The Quest in making this planet a better place to live on,’ she continued, as if Kevin had not even spoken.

  He jumped out of his seat and made a grab at her. Youssef jumped too, matching his colleague’s speed. He just about managed to grab Kevin’s arm, stopping him from striking their guest.

  ‘The threat of physical violence does not scare me, gentlemen. I can teleport out of this room at any given time, but I’m not finished here. You need to listen to this last part, very carefully.’

  Both men sat back down. Dr Hausen listened raptly in the corner of the room.

  ‘When we get back in one year, we will point our Higgs Storm turrets towards these platforms. They will all be destroyed. If you haven’t complied with our orders, and deserted them, then you will be destroyed with them. We will then disable a further twenty percent of the Earth’s surface, and another ten percent one month later.’

  The three men were silent.

  ‘You must believe that this is not a bluff. We’ve already destroyed forty percent …’ she cocked her head towards the three men, ‘…on a whim! So please, believe me that we will do it. You will step down.’

  ‘What’s to stop you crazy bastards from doing it anyway, even if we do step down?’ Kevin asked, incensed again at how this meeting was shaping.

  Their guest turned calmly and shook her head. ‘We have given you no reassurances, Mr Farley. If we do decide to do it, then please believe me, we will do it. There’ll be nothing that you, or any other power on this planet, can do to stop us.’

  ‘If you wanted to do it, then why didn’t you just do it on the first strike?’ Youssef asked.

  Mary Kelly blushed, only slightly, but undeniably, and she looked at him. Your first tell, he thought. You were not ready for that question. There’s something you’re not telling us here.

  Youssef stood and offered his hand. ‘Ms Kelly, thank you for your time. We’ll be having considerable talks between our heads of departments, and I’m sure we’ll be liaising with you quite a bit. Do we have any way of contacting you directly?’

  She blushed again; however, it was more fleeting than the first one. This time he was watching for it.

  She smiled; he noted that it looked forced. ‘My representatives will be in touch with you, Mr Haseem. This will be the last time we communicate personally.’ She shook his hand and gave curt nods to the other two men. Kevin ignored her but Dr Hausen stood and offered his hand. She took it, then pressed a series of buttons on a control on her inside wrist and promptly disappeared.

  Kevin was on his feet within seconds of her departure. ‘I can’t believe you showed that bitch courtesy,’ he snapped. ‘We should have taken her the moment she stepped outside the pod.’

  ‘Please, Kevin. Calm down. She was hiding something, and something big.’

  Dr Hausen was smiling. ‘You saw it too, didn’t you? The twitches and shuffling. Her small tells. She was good, but she would never make a poker player.’

  Kevin was looking at the two men as if they were mad. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s something else going on here. Ms Kelly made three big mistakes this morning, and I’m ready to find out what they are.’ Youssef moved away from the table. ‘Gentlemen, follow me.’ He walked out of the office with a little smile on his face; Dr Hausen did the same.

  Kevin followed, shaking his head.

  20.

  MARY MATERIALISED IN the laboratory beneath Inverness castle. Brian was waiting for her. ‘Thank you, Brian. Can you now make the calculations to send me to my sisters? I just need to get changed.’

  He smiled at her. ‘Yes, ma’am, the calculations are ready and stored into the collider. I’m just waiting on you.’

  She smiled back and slipped out the door. Ten minutes later, she emerged wearing her Victorian garb and stepped into the collider. Brian manipulated the controls and the protective shield was deployed. He then activated the Higgs-Boson particle accelerator, and Mary disappeared, four hundred years into the past.

  Brian was left alone in the large subterranean laboratory. He sat for a while listening to the extractor fans do their work. When their work was done, and they shut down. Whistling, he powered down the Hadron Collider and left the room. As he flipped the large power switch, all the terminals in the room went dark. On closing the door, he produced a light lock from his pocket, pointed it at the entrance, and keyed in a code on the device.

  The room was now light-locked for exactly one year.

  21.

  THE THREE SENIOR EA members hurried into the main control room of OP One. ‘Amanda, give me some good news, please.’ Youssef quirked as they ushered past her station, heading towards his meeting room.

  Amanda spun on her chair to face them; she was wearing a neural interface adaptor and was reading data while talking to them. ‘I don’t know about any good news, sir, but we’ve gleaned some information from her visit. First, she was magnetically tagged, we got that reading as soon as she exited the pod. Unfortunately, the magnetic tagging stopped us from tracing her signal back to the source; without the correct encryption key that’s difficult to do. But what has given her away, to a degree, is that she was flashing some kind of quantum signal. It didn’t seem to be active within her, like what we would have expected. It was akin to her having been spending quite a bit of time around quantum flares.’

  ‘So, she’d been tagged to allow them to be able to locate her physically, and she has been tinkering with quantum tags.’ Youssef wrapped his arms around himself and put a finger over his mouth. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t they used for locating objects in time?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Theoretically only. The time-travel experiments were closed after the accident with the Higgs Storm, so no more research was done on quantum tagging.’

  ‘Do we have any knowledge of how they would deploy a quantum tag? Within the body, I mean.’ Dr Hausen asked.

  Youssef shook his head. ‘Not off hand, doctor, but I’m sure if we did some digging in the data files, we could find something.’

  ‘Do it,’ Kevin ordered and then dragged the two men into Youssef’s waiting room, slamming the door behind him. ‘OK, you two, no more holding back. What’s going on here, and why am I the only one who doesn’t seem to know anything about it?’

  ‘When we knew there was a representative of The Quest coming, we decided to scan her on entry, and on exit. We found it difficult due to the magnetic tagging she had, probably injected under the skin.’ Dr Hausen explained. ‘This means that someone wanted to be able to verify her location.’

  ‘OK, so she was tagged, so what?’ Kevin asked, sitting down and listening intently. ‘We do that all the time.’

  ‘Well, she also had a lot of quantum signal residue about her,’ Youssef continued, ‘Much like what we did with the apples and onions back in the day. This is another clue to what they’re doing. Quantum signals are used to locate items in time, not space.’

  ‘So, do you think they are planning on going back in time?’

  Hausen shrugged. ‘Maybe. At least some of them. She made her first mistake by telling us ‘when they get back’. I think the leaders are going into hiding. Maybe somewhere in time.’

  ‘Are they going to try to change the future? To wipe out
the EA before they’re even formed?’ Kevin asked, the worry in his voice palpable.

  Doctor Hausen shook his head. ‘You have been watching too many old films,’ he laughed. ‘That’s impossible. If I remember from the quantum lectures, back when we were studying time travel as a legitimate science, nature has its own paradoxical law. It will fight, tooth and nail, to keep the timeline correct. You’re simply not allowed to change it.’

  ‘So why go back then? There must be a reason. There’re plenty of places to hide on our planet.’

  ‘I’m wondering why they have the need to give us one year to stand down. A year is a long time, a lot can happen. It feels like they have no choice but to give us a year,’ Youssef mused. ‘There has to be a reason for it, and if there is, it’ll probably be something, a hole that we can exploit.’

  ‘Now you’re talking my language. Exploitation is what I do best,’ Kevin added, glad to be back in the conversation.

  22.

  London: 1888

  LIFE IN THE PAST was hard, harder than any of them had envisioned. It had rained constantly since they’d arrived, and the streets of London were muddy, filthy and dank.

  As were the people.

  Carrie Millwood had gathered all ten of them together in a lodging she had taken, and paid, much to the astonishment of the landlord, in advance for a few months. She had made provisions for a limited amount of funds to be brought back with them, but it had proven difficult to obtain legitimate currency in twenty-two-eighty-eight that could be used in eighteen-eighty-eight. They had been careful not to obtain anything that would disturb nature’s paradoxical laws and cause issue for their stay.

  All ten of them had made the transition with ease. Only Martha had any issue on arrival, but it had been swiftly dealt with, as was her mission brief.