Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

The old man smiled. ‘They don’t have any choice in the matter.’

‘You’ll die if you stay. Please, you really need to come — ’

‘Everyone who remains behind will be dead, Rashim. This…’ He turned to look over his shoulder at the frantic activity going on behind him. ‘For what it is, this is our only future now.’

‘This is crazy!’

‘You have to go, Rashim. And you have to remain in charge of Exodus.’ He smiled again, an almost paternal smile. Odd that, coming from the elderly Japanese man. Rashim had always got the impression that Dr Yatsushita hadn’t liked him; that he disapproved of his maverick ways, his disorganized virtual workspace, the messy desk, his personalized lab assistant.

‘I trust you, young man; you… far more than I trust any of them. ’

Rashim swallowed anxiously. He could feel his stomach churning and a desperate need for a toilet visit. ‘OK… O-OK. I’ll… uh… I’ll try.’

Dr Yatsushita clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’ll do fine.’

2001, New York

‘So, Maddy, let me just check I got this wording correct,’ said the guy on the other end of the line. He was just the kind of help-desk type that bugged her: overfamiliar. Way too friendly. It’s not like they were dating or anything, so why’d he have to keep using her name like they’d known each other since kindergarten?

‘ A soul lost in time… that right, Maddy?’

She sighed. ‘Yes… so far.’

‘ Need to know what you know about Pandora. Aware it is “the end”. Have learned the “family” is just us and you. And we have been used before. Insist on further information. Will not attend any more “parties” until we hear back. ’ She heard the help-desk guy chuckle. ‘Whoa… Maddy, what are you? Some kinda super-secret agent or something?’

‘Yeah… that’s right.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Some kinda super-secret agent. Now you going to print that AD for me, or are you just going to carry on making fun of me?’

‘Hey, look, I’m sorry… I’ll… uh, I’ll make sure it gets in tomorrow’s edition.’

‘Thanks. It’s important you do.’

‘So that’s, let me see…’ She heard him counting under his breath. ‘Thirty-four dollars for a week in the classified section of the Brooklyn Daily — ’

‘No. I want it in just for tomorrow. Just Tuesday.’

‘Doesn’t cost you a cent more to be in the whole week, you know, Maddy.’

‘Just tomorrow’s edition, please. That’s all.’

‘OK… if that’s what you want. Gonna need your card details now, Maddy…’

She ran through them as quickly as she could, keen to get the call and the gratuitous and obligatory you-have-a-nice-day over and done with. Finally done, she put the mobile phone down on the desk and looked at the others. ‘So, there we go.’

Liam grinned a little anxiously. ‘Do you think we’ll tick this Waldstein fella off?’

She cocked her head casually. ‘I’m sort of past caring, Liam. Somebody owes us an explanation. We’ve been through Hell and back several times over. We’ve been doing his dirty work pretty much blind. I’m not lifting another finger until we get some information.’

Sal nodded at that. ‘Yeah. It’s not fair. They should trust us now.’

‘It’s he… not they,’ corrected Maddy.

Sal shrugged that away. ‘Whatever. Whoever. We’re owed an explanation.’

Maddy looked round at the archway. ‘I want to know who precisely set this place up. It couldn’t have just been Waldstein, though. And how long ago? How many teams have been here before us?’ She looked at the others. At Sal. ‘And yeah, maybe you’re right to ask, Sal. Were they really us?’

‘What if someone else gets the message?’ said Sal. Maddy hadn’t thought about that. ‘I mean it’ll be out there in a newspaper, right? What if someone else knows to look at that ad?’

‘Then we just made a big mistake.’ Maddy looked at Bob warily. ‘What about you, Bob? Any thoughts you want to share on this?’

‘It is a logical move to seek to acquire more information, Maddy.’

‘You don’t have any secret lines of code, do you? Hmm? Any deeply buried priority protocols that would make you object to us questioning our…’ She was going to say ‘HQ’, but she wondered if this agency even had something like that. ‘… questioning our boss?’

‘Negative, Maddy. My highest priority is preserving history and protecting you.’

‘You’re not going to suddenly rip our heads off or anything?’

His horse-lips protruded into something close to a sulky pout. ‘I would not hurt any of you.’

Liam punched his arm lightly. ‘Don’t worry, coconut-head, we all love you. So, Maddy?’ He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms defiantly. ‘Is this what I think it is, then?’

‘What’s that?’

‘A workers’ strike.’

She nodded, her mouth set with a determined smile. ‘Too right it is.’ She slurped some of her Dr Pepper from the can. ‘If they… he… Waldstein… whoever wants us to save history again, then we better start getting some answers.’

Liam nodded, raising his coffee cup. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

‘Me too,’ said Sal, lifting a glass of fruit juice. She presented it across the table and the other two clinked mug and soda can with her.

Bob nodded thoughtfully. ‘Affirmative.’ He looked around. ‘I have nothing to drink… is that required?’

2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

Rashim took his space on the translation grid, a yard square, as it was for every other personnel slot. Enough of a safety margin to ensure no one became ‘merged’ during the journey. Of course nothing was certain. Rashim knew that better than anyone else standing on the hangar floor. The laws of physics and its predictability had a way of breaking down in extra-dimensional space, or chaos space as the enigmatic Roald Waldstein had once named it.

There was no knowing if any of them were going to survive this. Worse still, with his estimates of the total mass being translated — his precious mass index — now being more a thumb-in-the-air approximation than a precise figure, they could quite possibly overshoot or undershoot the receiver station. Or — Jesus… it didn’t bear thinking about — they might never even emerge from extra-dimensional space.

Dr Yatsushita’s voice echoed across over the hangar’s PA system announcing the ten-minute warning.

‘Excuse me… no one’s told me anything about what’s going on.’

Rashim turned to look at a man standing in the floor grid beside him. The floating holographic data block floating above the ground said he was Professor Elsa Korpinkski: Physicist. Clearly he wasn’t her.

‘Excuse me, sir! You know what’s happening? What’s gonna happen in ten minutes?’

The man was wearing olive fatigues — an army corporal by the chevron on his arm. He was one of the last-minute ‘volunteers’ they’d rounded up as they’d sealed and locked down the facility. Effectively ballast, that’s what these last-minute personnel were — equivalent mass for the many empty grid spaces of those candidates who’d failed to make it to the facility in time.

Although Kosong-ni virus blooms had already been spotted in Denver, and a dozen miles further south in Castle Rock — perilously close given the blooms were airborne — they’d hung on until Vice-president Greg Stilson and his wife had arrived by gyrocopter before the facility’s nuclear blast-proof and airtight concrete doors had swung to, sealing off the world outside.

The corporal looked round the hangar floor. ‘What’s all these holo-lines and displays for? This some kind of inoculation for that Korean virus or something? That it? This a cure?’