Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘You placed out… what, some kind of time-stamp markers?’ asked Maddy. ‘Beacons? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes! Y-yes! Then we a-all came through. We all came through! Exodus! ’

‘ Exodus? What is that? Is that the name of your… your group or something?’ She recalled a name stamped on the side of the first-aid pack. Project Exodus.

‘Project Exodus?’

‘P-project! Yes!’ He huffed air into his lungs. ‘We came… the future is dead! We came back. We c-came back here! That… that is — was — m-my project. My project. My project!’

They heard the gravel-rasp of Macro’s voice, an exchange of voices outside the temple in the short passageway. A moment later, he was standing in the pooling light of the doorway.

‘Cato… we’ve got some company.’

‘Lepidus?’

Macro shook his head slowly. ‘No such luck.’

Cato cursed. He looked at Maddy. ‘Caligula’s on his way back. We may not have much time left.’

‘Can you buy us some more time?’

He gestured at the piles of dust-covered technology. ‘So, can we use these things?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe there’s a way out of here. I just… I…’

Cato nodded. ‘I’ll do what I can.’ He got up and headed to the doorway.

They watched him go until Bob broke the silence. ‘It is possible Rashim may have been part of an advance party that arrived in this time to deploy markers in order to plot out a safe arrival area for a much larger group.’

Rashim nodded. ‘But… calculations, I… made mistakes. So many m-mistakes.’ He shook his head, eyes leaking tears on to his scab-encrusted cheeks. ‘Too many new p-people. They made me guess. I had toguess! ’ His eyes darted wildly in their sunken sockets. ‘You… can’t just… guess. This… has to be precise. Time t-translation, you MUST be precise! You understand? PRECISE! ’

Maddy nodded. ‘Oh yes… I know that.’

‘I–I… I got it wrong. W-we lost half of them.’

‘Lost? Do you mean in chaos space?’

Rashim stilled. ‘… chaos? Chaos?’ He worked the word round his mouth. ‘Chaos… yes. Or Hell? Hmmm? Hell?’ He licked his dry, cracked lips, shook his head and began to giggle manically. ‘This is my Hell… my Hell, my Hell, my hidey-hole Hell. My hidey-hole Hell. Me and Mr Muzzy. Mr Muzzy and me — ’

‘Rashim!’ She shook him by the shoulders. ‘Rashim, come on, stay with us!’

His face steadied; the insane smile slid off his lips and vanished into his beard. ‘I lost them in chaos. Lost s-souls now.’

‘You said half of them. What about everyone else? What about the rest of you? You came here, right?’

Rashim laughed again. Bitterly. ‘Arrived… seven… seventeen years too early.’ Strings of blood-tinted spittle hung from his lower lip. ‘Wrong time… wrong time… wrong Caesar.’

‘Bob…’ said Maddy. ‘I’m just trying to figure this out. He’s saying he made a hash-up of things and his group what? Overshot these time-stamp markers?’

‘Correct. That is what I believe he is saying. They went back seventeen years earlier than intended.’

She looked at him. ‘And that happened about seventeen years ago? That’s when “the Visitors” supposedly arrived?’

‘Affirmative.’

She shook Rashim from his manic reverie. ‘Rashim! Is that what you’re saying? Your deployment team are going to appear sometime soon? Appear to place out those beacons?’

He nodded. ‘ He knows too.’

‘He? Who?’

‘ God.’ Rashim chuckled.

‘God?’ Bob looked confused.

‘Right,’ said Sal dismissively. ‘He’s a nut.’ She looked at the others. ‘And we’re listening to him?’

‘No, wait!’ said Maddy. ‘He’s talking about Caligula, aren’t you, Rashim?’

‘I told him… it was this year… this summer… I told him.’

‘Oh my God! You actually told him about your advance party appearing? About there being a portal?’

Rashim nodded. ‘He… his… his doorway to Heaven.’

Maddy looked at Bob. ‘Could we use it? Could we use this portal to get home?’

‘I have no information. This must be a time-displacement technique developed after my inception date. After the agency’s database was set up.’

‘But it’s got to be similar… the same basic technology, right?’

‘Correct.’

‘If it’s a beacon… could we use it to communicate forward to computer-Bob?’

Bob nodded. ‘Theoretically. The only way to transmit data is a tachyon transmission.’

The big question was whether computer-Bob was still in one piece, capable of receiving anything.

‘Rashim… you said it’s soon. A few moments ago you said “soon”. You were talking about the advance party appearing, right?’

He offered her an appalling gummy smile. ‘Too soon… too soon,’ he replied in a sing-song voice. ‘Three days.’

‘Three days’ time?’

Rashim nodded.

‘Do you know where? Can you tell us exactly where?’

He was mumbling to himself in that unhinged, sing-song way.

‘Rashim!’

‘I know… I remember…’ He tapped his skull of tatty, wiry hair. ‘All in here. Don’t worry, me and Mr Muzzy know.’

Sal cocked an eyebrow at her.

AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome

Cato strode down the dimly lit main passageway towards the front portico.

‘I said… they’re not actually from Britain.’

Macro looked at him. ‘They’re not?’

‘No… the place they come from is…’ Cato made a face. ‘I’m still struggling to make sense of it myself, as it happens. The place they come from is the future.’

‘The future?’

‘Yes, the very same place as the Visitors. Time ahead of us.’

Macro frowned as his mind worked on that. ‘Years yet to be?’

Cato nodded. ‘But from a place more than a thousand years yet to be.’

He expected his old friend to struggle with that concept. Instead, he nodded casually. ‘Well, that explains quite a lot, then.’

‘Macro, I don’t understand what’s going on with that prisoner we found. They’re talking about something. Perhaps they’re discussing some of the Visitors’ devices. Perhaps their chariot. I don’t know. But all I do know is we have got to find a way to give them some more time.’

‘Cato, there’s you and me, your centurion, Fronto, and that giant of a man back inside.’

‘Bob.’

‘Yes, Bob… strange name. Anyway, I’m not sure how long the four of us can hold back the entire Praetorian Guard, Cato. That’s a fool’s errand.’

‘We have Fronto’s men. That’s enough men right there to hold the front gate for a while if it comes to a fight.’

‘That’s if they’ll fight on our side.’

‘True.’

They strode through the entrance portico. Cato nodded at the section of men stationed there. They carried on down several steps outside into the courtyard. He could see Fronto’s men across the courtyard drawn up in an arc round the iron gates. Through the iron bars he could see a body of troops outside. Dismounted equites. Cavalry on foot acting for the moment, very reluctantly, as infantry.

He picked out Fronto and approached him. ‘Centurion!’

‘Sir!’

‘What’s going on here?’

Fronto nodded to the decurion still standing outside the gates. Beyond him Cato could see in the failing light of the late afternoon what looked like two or three hundred men and their horses. Still more of them in the distance, a column on horseback trotting up the avenue.

‘This traitor, sir!’ Fronto barked loud enough for his men to hear him clearly. ‘Wishes to loot the emperor’s palace.’

‘I see.’