Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

The capacitor was beginning to hum.

‘Fifteen seconds!’ called out Maddy. ‘No more fidgeting now, please!’

‘I’m not!’

‘Yes, you are! Hold still!’

Liam sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes.

Ah dear, here we go again.

So much seemed to have happened since the last time he’d done this. It seemed like a whole lifetime ago. In many ways it was a different life. Someone else’s. The last time he’d volunteered to have his body discharged through chaos space into unknowable danger he’d been certain of who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. This time around… it was so very different.

‘Ten seconds!’

This time he understood why his body could take such punishment. It was engineered specifically to take it. This time around he knew if he took a bullet, or the stab of a sword or a knife, it might well hurt, but he’d live. That meant there was less to be scared of. Right?

‘Five seconds!’

Nope. He was starting to tremble like he always did as Maddy counted down the last few seconds.

Liam, ya big wuss. You’re meant to be some kind of support unit, aren’t you?

He was just about to start wondering whether Bob actually ever experienced fear when he felt the floor beneath his feet suddenly give way like a hangman’s trap, and that awful sensation of falling.

1 December 1888, London

Liam kept his eyes shut. The white mist of chaos space no longer held him in thrall; it wasn’t a Heaven-like magical white wilderness any more but a place that increasingly unsettled him. He’d seen shapes out there so faintly that he couldn’t begin to determine whether they had a certain form or not. They flitted like wraiths, like sharks circling ever closer. Or perhaps his eyes or his mind were playing tricks with an utterly blank canvas. Perhaps it was his imagination. But then hadn’t Sal said she’d seen them too?

His solitary limbo in chaos space couldn’t end soon enough.

A moment later he felt his feet make a soft landing.

Soft, and sinking.

‘Whuh?’

And sinking.

He tried to pull a foot out of whatever gunk he was gradually sinking into, and lost his balance. His hands reached out in front of him, bracing for a face-first impact with the sludge, but brushed past something firm. He grabbed at it.

It felt like wood. A spar of damp wood, coated in a slime that he nearly lost his grip on.

‘Liam?’

‘Rashim?’

It was dark and foggy and cold. But he could make out Rashim’s faint outline. ‘I think there’s been a mis-transmission. We’re out on some sort of mudbank.’

‘No… I think it’s low tide.’ There could have been some small offset miscalculation that had dropped them several yards to one side. In this case further into the river. It could have been worse. High tide for instance.

‘Bob, you there?’

‘Affirmative,’ his deep voice rumbled out of the fog.

Liam held tightly on to the wooden spar. He wasn’t sinking any more. He pulled one foot out of the glutinous mud with a sucking sound coming from the silt. ‘There’s a wooden post here, hold on to it. You can use it to pull yourself out of the mud.’

‘That is not necessary,’ Bob replied.

‘We’re not actually in the mud,’ said Rashim. ‘We’re standing on what appears to be a wooden-slat walkway.’

The fog thinned and he saw them both several yards away, standing on a creaking, rickety wooden jetty. Quite dry.

Liam realized there must have been a small error in Rashim’s calculation of his mass. Then again, not necessarily Rashim’s fault. He’d eaten a small bag of pecan doughnuts just half an hour ago. That might possibly have altered his mass enough to cause a deviation from where he was supposed to be.

Rashim had actually cautioned them all not to eat just before a jump. Liam cursed his carelessness.

Only got yourself to blame, greedy guts.

He muttered as he took several sinking, teetering, laboured steps towards them through the silt and pulled himself up on to the jetty to join them. His legs dangled over the side and he attempted to kick the largest clumps of foul-smelling gunk off his boots.

‘Information: the translation was offset by fourteen feet and three inches,’ said Bob.

Rashim nodded. ‘We should let Maddy know when we get back. She’ll need to recalibrate the spatial attributor.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Liam. ‘It was three doughnuts that are to blame.’

‘Ahh… now, yes, I did warn you, Liam,’ said Rashim.

Liam got up off the damp wood, most of the cloying mud shaken off. He grinned in the dark at him. ‘Lesson learned.’ He took in the freezing mist all around them. ‘So this is Victorian London, is it?’

‘Affirmative, Liam.’

‘Yes… Liam. Say yes, not affirmative.’ He picked out the dark mountain of Bob’s back and slapped it gently. ‘You’re never going to get your head around that, are you?’

‘That particular speech file appears to be resistant to replacement.’

‘Should we not proceed?’ Rashim interrupted.

‘Hmmm, you’re right,’ said Liam. ‘Let’s find some solid ground.’

They followed the jetty until it widened and finally terminated on firm shingle at the base of a slime-encrusted stone wall. A high-tide line marked the top of the slime halfway up, and it was mist-damp stonework the rest of the way. The pinhole image they’d gathered earlier had shown this jetty wall. The mist hadn’t been here then. And there were the steps they’d spotted in the image. A dozen slippery, narrow stone steps up the side of the jetty wall.

At the top Liam looked around. A carpet of mist covered the river below like a wispy layer of virgin snow, dusted silvery blue by a quarter-moon. He saw the humps of river barges emerge from the mist, topped with pilots’ cabins like isolated stubby lighthouses rising from a milky sea. The milky sea itself seemed to stir with life; he watched enormous dark phantoms loom through the river mist, like those ever-circling wraiths in chaos space — shadows cast by fleeting clouds chasing each other across the moonlit sky.

The other two joined him.

‘It’s so dark,’ said Rashim.

Liam nodded. Compared to New York, compared to whatever future cities Rashim must be used to, it must seem like some medieval netherworld.

Dark, yes, but punctuated by a thousand pinpricks of faint amber light: gas lamps behind dirty windows, candles behind tattered net curtains. They were standing in a cobblestone square. On one side there appeared to be a brick warehouse or small factory.

They heard something heavy rumbling, rattling across the river, and turned round to look across the carpet of mist. It was then Liam noticed the arches and support stanchions of a broad, low bridge.

‘According to my data that is Blackfriars Bridge,’ said Bob.

Not so far beyond it another bridge… and the toot of a steam whistle confirmed what Liam suspected. It was a train crossing the river to their side. He could just about make out the faintest row of amber lights on the move — lamps in each carriage.

‘My God!’ whispered Rashim. ‘Is that a… a steam train?’

‘Aye.’

‘We should proceed towards our target destination,’ said Bob.

He was right. Liam would rather be back here for Maddy’s scheduled window than have to flap his hands around like an idiot hoping for one. There was no knowing how good their temporary set-up back in 2001 was at picking up hand signals.

‘We must head north,’ said Bob, pointing towards a narrow street.

They made their way up the street, dark and quiet. It curved to the left and a hundred yards up at the end it joined a much broader street. They could hear it was busy even before they stepped out of their dark side street. The distinctive clop-clop-clop of shoed horses, the warning honk of a bulb horn, the rattle of iron-rimmed coach wheels. They emerged on to a broad street lit on either side with stout wrought-iron lamps, twelve feet tall, that spilled broad pools of amber illumination across a wide thoroughfare busy with horse-drawn carriages and carts.