Alex Scarrow - Day of the Predator

Maddy slapped her hand on the desk. ‘Right, then. I guess we have a plan of action. Since we’ve got no time to waste, Sal, could you go see to the growth candidate? Let’s get that process sped up.’

‘OK.’

‘And I guess I better start gathering all the data I can on this Edward Chan guy,’ she said, pecking at the computer’s keyboard.

‘What about me?’ asked Liam.

Maddy tapped her fingers absentmindedly on the desk. ‘Er… hell, I don’t know.’

‘I suppose I’m coffee-maker?’

She smiled. ‘If you’re doing a run to Starbucks, can you grab me a chocolate-chip muffin as well?’

‘Yeah, me too,’ called Sal from the back room’s doorway.

2001, New York

‘So, this is what I’ve got,’ said Maddy, producing several sheets of computer printout.

This evening the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant’s eating area was deserted apart from them. Brooklyn’s streets were quiet, everyone back home now that the last light of the evening had gone. All home, watching the news on their TV sets. Today’s sky had been divided all day by the thick column of black smoke from the collapsed Twin Towers, and New Yorkers were emerging from the fog of shock and dismay at the day’s events to a mood of contemplation and mourning.

They were lucky to find even this place open. Only a couple of staff seemed to be on, and they were busy half the time watching the news updates on a small TV set up right on the counter.

‘Edward Chan, as you guys will remember Foster telling us, is this bright young maths kid who went to the University of Texas. He graduated there, then went on to do some post-grad work.’

‘What is that… what’s post-grad?’

‘It’s just more studying, Liam. The kind of studying where you tell your teachers what specific area you intend researching, and they just check in with your work every now and then, and help out if they can.

‘So anyway,’ she continued, looking down at the printouts and reading, ‘at the university he sets out to do a research paper on zero-point energy.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Jeez, Liam… are you going to keep stopping me to ask what stuff is?’

He looked hurt. ‘I’ve got to learn all these modern words, right? I mean, I’m still really just a lad from Cork who’s running to catch up on the last century, so I am.’

Maddy sighed. ‘It’s sort of like energy that’s supposed to exist at a sub-atomic level. It was still just theoretical mumbo… jumbo in my time.’

‘I think they started building something to do with that in India in my time,’ said Sal. ‘Experimental reactor or something, because we were running out of oil and stuff.’

Maddy scooped up some fries from her box. ‘Anyway, if I can continue, Liam? Chan set out to do a paper on zero-point energy and ended up changing course. Instead he wrote a paper on the theoretical possibility of time travel. The main point he was making in his work was that the theoretical energy that was assumed to be there in normal space-time, the sub-atomic energy-soup that was meant to be everywhere, was in fact a form of “leakage” from other dimensions. He writes this science paper and does nothing else notable until his death from cancer a few years later at the age of twenty-seven.’

‘So, like Foster told us,’ said Liam, ‘this Chan lad is the true inventor of time travel, not the Waldstein fella?’

‘Well, he did the theoretical work that led to Waldstein’s machine, so I guess they’re both responsible for inventing it.’

‘The message from the agency said he’d been assassinated,’ said Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘Which means… what?’ She looked at both of them. ‘I’m guessing it means someone is trying to prevent time travel being invented?’

Liam reached for a ketchup sachet. ‘So… hold on. Isn’t that what the Waldstein fella wanted in the first place? To make sure time travel never got invented. Isn’t that why this agency thing exists, why the three of us’re here instead of dead?’

‘So why would the agency want us to save Chan?’ asked Sal. ‘I mean

… no Chan means no time travel, right? That means no more time problems.’

‘S’right.’ Liam raised a finger. ‘The message didn’t actually tell us to save him.’

Maddy leaned forward. ‘It was an incomplete message. Maybe that’s the bit we missed at the end?’

‘But we don’t know that for sure,’ replied Sal. ‘Maybe it was someone from the future letting us know that time up ahead was changing and that there was now no more need for the agency… for us?’

Maddy shook her head and pointed to the message printed out on paper. ‘Look… it begins with “contamination event”. I’d say that suggests they considered this to be a bad thing. And they’re not too happy about it.’

They were silent for a moment, all three of them staring at the printed words on the page, trying to determine the intent of the message.

‘Foster was very, very specific about this,’ said Maddy after a while. ‘History must go a certain way, for good or bad. Even if the history yet to happen features some kid called Chan who makes time travel possible… that’s the way it has to be. And if it changes from that, the agency has to fix it.’

Liam nodded after a few moments. ‘I suppose you’re right. So… do we know where his death is going to happen?’

‘The date in the message is August eighteenth. In our database it mentions Chan was one of a class of high-school students who were on a field trip to the Texas Advanced Energy Research Institute, on this date. This is biographical data on Chan taken from 2056. If this really is an assassination attempt by somebody, the chances are they have access to the same data as us. In other words, they looked at Chan’s biography and noted he was going to be at a particular place at a particular time…’

‘And sent themselves back in time to be there waiting with a gun,’ added Liam.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yup.’

‘Well…’ Liam bit his lip anxiously. ‘You can see now why I’m so bleedin’ keen to have big ol’ Bob by my side. Seems these bad guys have got guns with them and Bob’s a dab hand at dealing with people like that, so he is.’

Maddy glanced at her watch. ‘We should probably get back to the arch. The time bubble is due to flip over in a few hours and we could all do with some rest. Bob’s new body should be ready to birth tomorrow morning and then we’ll be ready to send you guys forward in time to see what’s what.’

Liam sighed. ‘Back in that ol’ bathtub for me.’

2001, New York

Sal stared at the curled-up form in the growth tube in stunned silence for a good minute before she finally gasped. ‘Oh no.’

By the dim red light of the back room and the peach-coloured glow of the tube’s interior up-light she could see they’d really messed up with growing Bob’s body. Well, actually… it looked like she alone had messed things up.

They’re going to be mad at me.

Maddy’s voice echoed through the open door into the back room. ‘How’s he looking?’

Sal didn’t know what to say. So she said nothing.

‘Everything OK in there?’

They’ve got to find out sometime.

‘Uhh… no. Not really,’ she replied.

‘What’s the matter?’ Maddy’s head appeared in the doorway, squinting into the gloom of the hatchery. ‘Sal? What’s up?’

‘It’s uh… it’s Bob…’ she said.

‘Oh God, what now? It’s not a mis-growth, is it? We can’t afford to start off another one.’

Sal had caught a glimpse of the few mis-growths that had been floating in the tubes back here not long after Foster had recruited them; they’d looked like awful freakshow specimens in some carnival tent, contorted, with faces like gargoyles and demons and limbs twisted into impossible claw-like stumps. She thanked God it wasn’t something like that.