Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘Which bridge?’

‘Neither,’ said Rashim. ‘We follow… see?’ He pointed along the bank of silt to their left. ‘Takes us round the bottom of the city, then we go…’ He frowned as he thought, tapped his temple with his knuckles as if to shake loose a memory.

‘Are you sure you know where this portal’s opening?’

‘Yes! Yes!!.. We go north-east from Rome… for some hours.’

‘Can you be more precise than that?’

Rashim tapped away at his scabby temple. ‘In here… all in my head! Let me… let me get it out!’

‘Information.’ Bob lifted his head. ‘If we are within several miles of the correct location, I may be able to detect tachyon particles.’

‘As it opens… yes,’ said Maddy, ‘but if it opens for just a couple of minutes and we’re a mile or two away, we’ll miss it!’ She turned to Rashim. ‘We need the precise location. We need to be in exactly the right place!’

‘So long ago…’ Rashim muttered. He closed his eyes. ‘I… I remember coming along a road into the east of Rome.’

Bob’s eyelids flickered, accessing his database. ‘The Via Praenestina?’

‘Yes! Long road! A big archway! A… a market!’

‘Go back. Remember it backwards,’ said Maddy. ‘Before entering Rome…?’

‘Can we go now?’ said Sal, looking back at the sewage outlet they’d emerged from. ‘Can he remember and walk at the same time?’

Maddy followed Sal’s gaze. If Caligula’s soldiers had figured out they’d escaped through the sewage outlet, it surely wasn’t going to be long before they saw the faint flicker of torches emerging.

‘She’s right. Let’s get going.’

AD 54, outside Rome

Dawn saw them on a dusty track flanked by rolling fields of parched soil and withered wheat stalks on one side and an orchard of fig trees on the other. Rashim’s weak bow legs had long ago failed him and now he was fast asleep on Bob’s broad shoulders.

Sal walked beside him in thoughtful silence, occasionally sharing a word or two with Bob, but mostly lost in her own thoughts.

Liam walked beside Maddy, still holding his side protectively. There was a slight limp to his walk as he favoured his right leg with a longer stride.

‘You’re made of tougher stuff than I’ve given you credit for,’ said Maddy.

‘Ahh, I may not be whinging like a little girly-girl, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t hurting me like there’s a pitchfork stuck in me sides.’

‘Liam.’ She looked at him. ‘You took a sword in the gut!’

He shrugged at that. ‘I took a glancing blow. Looked a lot worse than it was, I’ll wager.’

She wondered. In the heat of the moment of that fight, she’d actually thought that it was all over for Liam. That he was going to hit the floor dying. Liam was right — a glancing blow. If it had skewered him, like she at first thought it had… that surely would have meant a ruptured spleen or stomach or kidney or liver, leaking all manner of toxic acids into his blood. A painful, agonizing way to go. Certain death for sure.

‘You’re incredible, Liam,’ she said, hugging his narrow shoulders gently.

‘Incredible, yes,’ he winced, ‘but not a bleedin’ Stone Man.’

‘Sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Maddy?’

‘Yes?’

‘When we return…’ he said, ‘we’re going to be walking into trouble, are we not?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if we can get back to our field office. It might not even be functioning any more.’

Sal overheard them. ‘What if we went back to whenever these Exodus people came from?’

‘I don’t even know when that is.’

‘It’ll be after 2001, surely,’ said Liam.

‘Well, obviously.’

‘The Exodus Project occurs after 2056,’ said Bob.

‘How do you know?’

‘The Stone Men were running AI software that is a later generation than mine.’

‘2056?’ Liam turned to Maddy. ‘Is that when our agency came from?’

‘That’s a safe-ish guess, I suppose.’

‘What about it?’ asked Sal. ‘What if we go into the future?’

‘Why, Sal? You know better than me and Liam what it’s like. It’s grim.’

Liam nodded. ‘That man who came through to Robin Hood times…’ He tried to remember his name. ‘ Locke… I think it was. I remember he said something about hearing rumours of our agency in the 2060s, so. He said it was bad then. Really bad.’ Liam met her gaze. ‘Sort of end-of-the-world kind of bad.’

The end. Words that were all too familiar to Maddy.

Maddy stopped walking. ‘Guys… that message in the Voynich Manuscript. You know Becks has it in her head. All decoded and everything?’

Liam and Sal stopped walking and turned round. ‘What about it?’ said Sal.

‘You know I said Becks couldn’t tell me what it was?’

They both nodded.

‘Well actually, Becks told me she could only tell me what the message was when certain conditions arose.’

‘What certain conditions?’ asked Sal.

‘She said “when it’s the end”.’

‘The end?’ Liam laughed scornfully. ‘Great! What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I dunno,’ Maddy shrugged. ‘But I get the feeling we’re all headed for something pretty nasty.’

‘We?’

‘Everyone! I’m talking, like, mankind.’

Liam made a face. ‘Well, that’s cheered me up no end, so it has.’

‘See… I think something awful happens one day. Something that wipes us all out. That’s what I think Pandora is. It’s a warning about that.’

‘That poor man…’ said Sal. The other two knew who she meant: that unfortunate soul who’d arrived out of nowhere back in New Orleans, 1831. An arrival that had been catastrophic, that had inadvertently caused the death of a young man called Abraham Lincoln. He’d arrived presumably without properly probing and checking his destination. He’d arrived in a hurry… presumably leaving his own time in a hurry. Arrived and instantly fused with the bodies of a pair of horses.

‘That man was the one who was warning us about Pandora,’ said Sal.

‘Joseph…’ Liam looked at her. ‘That’s what he said his name was, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah. He was the one that left you that note, Maddy.’

‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘Yup… I know.’ She shook her head. ‘But what do we do? Huh? So we’ve got a warning from some guy from the future that something awful happens to mankind. What the hell was he trying to tell us? Change history so it — whatever it is — doesn’t happen?’

Sal nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’

‘But we’ve also got a duty to make sure history doesn’t change,’ said Liam. ‘That’s what Foster told us. Remember? For good or bad… history has to go a certain way.’

‘My point exactly,’ said Maddy. ‘I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do any more, Liam. And now we’ve got whole freakin’ platoons of support units being sent back to kill us. So, obviously we’re making somebody angry. Doing something wrong!’

‘Or something right?’ volunteered Sal.

Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘See? Welcome to my world. The world of Not-Having-A-Freakin’-Clue-What’s-Going-On.’

They stood silent, in the middle of the road, the rising sun making hard shadows that stretched long and slender across the cobbles.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Liam after a while. ‘I trust Foster. He said we should keep history as it is. For good or bad it has to go a certain way. Well… if that means that one day there’s an end,’ Liam pressed his lips together — a conciliatory smile, ‘then, well… I suppose it is what it is.’

‘We’re just following orders,’ said Maddy.