Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

‘I will protect you,’ she said calmly.

He wandered over to the balcony and looked out across the city. The heat of a mid-morning’s sun was baking the castle’s stone walls, and the air shimmered above the crenellations, making the dark slate rooftops of Oxford’s shacks and hovels dance and undulate beneath the cloudless blue sky. ‘Why has your colleague, Liam, not managed to find it yet? It does not sound like he has even started to look for it!’

There had been several couriers from Nottingham over the last few months, bearing a detailed account of matters up there. Most of Liam’s reports had been on his efforts to win the starving people round, to carefully rebuild some semblance of royal authority, law and order … all in John’s name.

‘He has been busy stabilizing the region,’ she replied. ‘Only when he has the support and sympathies of the people will he have a chance of locating this outlaw who has stolen your Grail.’ She was quoting Liam’s words from the last report.

‘I know! I know!’ snapped John. ‘But we have no more time now for making friends of the peasants! Richard will be here this very night … maybe tomorrow.’ He turned to look at her, trembling as he spoke. ‘Do you understand? There will be blood when he discovers it is lost! My blood!’

Becks’s eyes narrowed. She looked back out at the walls of the castle, the walls of Oxford. ‘You could hold out against him. Prevent him from entering the city.’

John scratched at his beard; a nervous tic of his that Becks had noticed gradually become increasingly pronounced over the last six months. ‘The city would fall to him,’ he said. ‘The people here love him.’

Becks nodded slowly. His evaluation was, of course, quite correct. She trawled through her database of history for this period and immediately hit upon the obvious solution. A solution that, as it happened, would also align with history as it was meant to happen.

‘You must retreat north to Nottingham,’ she said. ‘The castle has a better defensive configuration, and the city is sympathetic to you.’

John licked his lips, breathing noisily through his nose as he gave her suggestion serious thought. ‘NO! No … that w-will anger him f-further!’

Becks’s store of data on the correct timeline indicated a successful defence of the city and a siege by Richard that lasted several weeks. The siege concluded with John’s surrender and Richard demonstrating uncharacteristic mercy for his brother, letting him live as long as he swore allegiance to him.

That was the history that needed to happen now to prevent an unacceptable level of temporal contamination.

‘Nottingham is loyal to you,’ she said. ‘The city will hold. This may give the sheriff enough additional time to locate the Grail for you. The Grail could then be used as a bargaining tool, allowing you to negotiate an acceptable surrender.’

He looked at her. ‘You think that is possible?’

‘Of course it is possible. Liam may already have enough local intelligence from the people to successfully locate these outlaws. Winning their loyalty and support as he has been doing has been a necessary first step.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’ He cupped his chin in a shaking hand. ‘Yes … yes. Perhaps then, that’s — yes, that’s what I should do.’

‘The other alternative is to remain here,’ she added. ‘Which I calculate would be a tactically poor choice.’

He reached out for her and grasped her arms suddenly. ‘What would I do without you?’

She flashed one of her carefully selected smiles at him.

John’s face seemed to have reclaimed some of its colour. ‘Behind such beauty, you have a mind just as cunning as any ambassador or general. I … I — ’

Becks eased herself from his tight grip and pushed him gently back. ‘My lord, we should set forth immediately.’

‘Yes … yes, that would be advisable.’ His lovelorn puppy eyes cleared and focused on more practical matters. ‘Yes, we must assemble a caravan immediately.’

Yet he stared at her in silence for a while longer, his blue eyes narrowing, marvelling at her. ‘If only it were the way of things that I had been king … you would truly make a formidable queen.’

A part of her mind calculated whether she should reveal his future to him; whether knowing what fate awaited him would strengthen his resolve to stand up to Richard. But a hard-coded protocol reminded her that knowledge of the future to any man was just as big a contaminant to history as any careless time traveller. There were other ways to ensure he found a bit of backbone and stood firm against Richard when the time came.

‘Be strong for me now,’ she said gently, teasingly. ‘And perhaps I will yet be your queen.’

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

‘What are you going to do with me?’ asked Liam.

Locke looked up at him. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. ‘My merry men,’ he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, ‘were rather keen to make an example of you. It’s down to the fact that you’re a rich Norman and they’re all poor Saxons.’

‘But I’m Irish, not French!’

He shrugged. ‘All they see is a rich young man in expensive clothes.’ He pared a hunk of venison off the bone and handed it to Liam. ‘As it always was, it shall always be … rich overlords, a poor underclass and a world of hatred between them.’

Liam chewed on the meat, surprising himself at how hungry he was. ‘Mr Locke, the things you’ve said about your time … it doesn’t sound too good.’

He smiled sadly. ‘No … No, it isn’t.’ Locke held him with his eyes. ‘In my time things are going very badly … very quickly.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Where do I start? We — we’ve exhausted the world of its resources. The world ran out of oil in the late 2030s. It ran out of coal and natural gas in the 2050s. It ran out of many of the essential minerals and ores at the same time. We lost so much land to the advancing seas, land that contained fertile soils, mines, oilfields. And there’ve been wars. Plenty of them. Regional wars, as billions of dispossessed people migrate from flooded lands to already crowded lands.’

Locke shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a mess all of our own making. Perhaps if we’d changed our ways at the beginning of the twenty-first century … if we’d managed to control our population, if we’d all been less greedy wanting our shiny new things, then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s an exhausted world. It’s a dying world.’

Liam looked at the hunched form of the robot in the corner; just a dark outline and two pale blue eyes. ‘Mr Locke, why did you come back here? It wasn’t just to escape that world, was it?’

Locke sighed. A long silence followed, and outside they could hear the evening routine of camp: voices raised, several dogs barking hungrily. Liam had imagined the camp might have been alive with folk songs around a fire, the good-natured exchange of merry freedom-fighters. Instead it was the desperate sounds of a refugee camp — a hundred ragged half-starved outlaws living off what they could trap or steal.

‘You’re right. There was a mission.’ He picked at his teeth. ‘A mission of sorts. An objective.’ He frowned for a moment, as if trying to remember what it was. ‘In my time there are only a few of us left. No longer influential, no longer the silent power behind presidents and popes. We’re just a small band of believers .’

‘Believers?’

‘Templars.’

Liam stopped chewing. ‘You’re one of them knights? But you’re … you’re from the future , so you are! You saying they’ve got Templar Knights in the future?’