The archway was quiet except for its usual noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo.
‘Hey, what’s up with that girl, skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.
Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot. ‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam. ‘Computer-Bob?’
A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on the monitor beside the camera.
› Yes, Maddy?
‘Can you force the archway’s displacement field to reset to Monday?’
Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside the archway a collective pause had settled across the city: a pause in which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say, and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.
› Affirmative.
‘Do it, then. Do it now!’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Rashim.
‘We’re all going back in time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’
The young technician still looked bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago — from his perspective — he’d been approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that was all history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life working on… well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him, they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future completely throwing history off track.
Job done. But now he and his cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.
‘So, when exactly is this place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it. Yes? Am I right?’
‘This is the day the towers were knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.
‘September the eleventh, 2001,’ Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve been operating out of for the last few months.’
The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.
› Stand by. Field resetting.
They heard the soft whine of energy discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind at the moment.
‘And now… it’s yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us twenty-four hours’ breathing space before those psychotic killer meatbots come back to finish us off.’
Rashim’s dark eyebrows rose, looking from Maddy to the others, for someone to add a word or two more of explanation. ‘Psychotic…?’
‘There’re more of them?’ asked Liam.
‘Two more, we think,’ said Sal. ‘Six of them came through.’
‘What killer things are these?’ asked Rashim.
‘Six! Jay-zus!’ Liam’s jaw dropped. ‘And you two managed to kill four of ’em?’
‘Could someone please tell me what psycho killer things you’re talking about?’
‘Yes. We did pretty good, huh?’
Liam laughed. ‘I’ll say — ’
Rashim closed his eyes. ‘PLEASE, EVERYONE, WILL YOU STOP IGNORING ME!’
The others turned to look at him.
‘I… I’m…’ Rashim opened his eyes and smiled half apologetically. ‘I… I’m very close to… uh, losing my mind. Please — the least one of you people can do is answer just one of my questions.’
Sal pointed at Bob. ‘The psychotic meatbots we’re talking about are clones, support units like these two. Four men and two women. They came from the future to kill us.’
Rashim nodded gratefully, then silently appraised Bob. ‘He’s a military-grade gene product, isn’t he? One of the earlier-gen versions?’
‘Correct,’ Bob rumbled.
‘Computer-Bob dealt with two of them for us,’ said Maddy. ‘And one got taken out by a time wave, I think. The other one… well, you guys saw what happened.’
One of the units had managed to leap after Maddy and Sal as their hastily opened escape portal began to collapse in on itself. It had emerged on the other side missing both its feet and one hand and yet it had still managed to be quite lethal. As Bob held it down, Maddy had put several rounds into its bald human head. The first and last time she ever intended to fire a gun at anything point blank.
‘You said six of them?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yup, there are two more of them and they may be out there in New York somewhere.’
Sal sat down on the other chair beside Maddy. She scuffed the toes of her boots against the floor. ‘More of them could arrive,’ she said. ‘Right, Maddy? Another six?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Tuesday morning, sometime during Tuesday morning, that’s when they arrived. So right now it’s twelve noon, Monday. Which means we’ve got eighteen, maybe nineteen hours before they come again. And if another batch — technically, I guess, the same batch — don’t come then we’ve still got those other two to worry about. And they’ll be back from wherever computer-Bob sent them on a wild-goose chase. That’s right, Bob, isn’t it?’
› Affirmative.
‘Affirmative.’
Both Bobs answered the question.
Maddy turned to look at them all. ‘Two of them we might stand a chance against. But if another six turn up right here in this archway…?’ She pulled on her lip, made a face. Not the sort of face to instil confidence in her little team.
‘We could set some sort of a trap for them,’ said Liam. ‘As soon as they arrive, get Bob to open a portal and drop them right into that chaos space. Could we not do that?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘We could do. But, Liam, you’re missing the point. And it’s actually quite a big point.’
Liam splayed his hands. Irritated by her patronizing tone of voice. ‘What?’
‘Someone else knows about us, Liam. Someone knows exactly when and where we are. We’re not a secret any more.’
‘That means we’re still in danger?’ added Sal quietly.
‘If we stay here, yes.’ Maddy’s words rang round the archway, a reverberation off damp brick walls that seemed to last indefinitely and not quite fade away.
Liam muttered a curse under his breath. ‘That’s great. I was just about gettin’ used to this place, so I was.’
‘I’m thinking the sooner we leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it had become their home. It had become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes, between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there had been moments of… dare she say… fun.
Fun. Some good memories. Among all the scary ones, that is.
Liam sighed. ‘Ah well…’ was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’
‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal without a great deal of conviction.
The squat lab robot flexed its pliable plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it very much.’
‘Yeah, but it’s home,’ said Maddy. ‘Or it was anyway.’
She looked around the pitted and cracked floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing — where so many terrifying and unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled from the ceiling — from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side of the archway’s floor to the other — there had once lain a carpet of dead and dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls flanked the shutter door — the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.