Alex Scarrow - Time Riders

‘ Was — ? … Was istdas? ’ He looked down at the severed limbs on the ground, oozing blood on to theconcrete floor. ‘ Was geschieht?Wo bin ich? ’

His mouth fluttered in fear, his voice broken, shrill, like a child suddenly finding himselflost in a crowded mall.

Maddy reacted first. She stood up and slowly approached him, hands raised.‘It’s OK,’ she cooed softly. ‘Everything’s all right…We’re not going to hurt you.’

The young man gathered his wits enough to unsling his gun and swivel the barrel down to pointat her.

‘ Halt, stehen bleiben!Wer sind Sie?Wo bin ich? ’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t… I don’t do German, sorry,’ shesaid, offering him a friendly smile.

‘Keep him talking,’ said Foster quietly.

Maddy pointed to herself. ‘My… name… is Maddy. And you?’

The young German stared silently at her, his breath rasping in and out, fluttering withfear.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked in her best motherly voice.‘This,’ she said, pointing to Sal, ‘this is Sal.’

‘Hi,’ said Sal, smiling sweetly and slowly offering him a small hand toshake.

He glanced from one girl to the other.

‘ Ich… Ich bin Feldwebel Lohaans .’

Maddy guessed she was hearing his rank and surname.

‘But what’s your first name? Hmm?’ she asked,taking another step forward.

The young man racked his gun nervously. ‘ Stehenbleiben! … Stay! ’ he barked, licking his drylips.

Maddy stopped dead and shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry. I’ll stay rightwhere I am. I won’t hurt you.’

He nodded, seeming to understand that. He took another deep breath. ‘You… Amerikaner ?’

She smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘This…?’ he said, and shrugged, lacking the words in English to completethe question.

‘This place is in America. In New York, actually.’

The man’s eyes widened. ‘This… NewYork ?’

She nodded.

He snorted nervously. ‘Washington… zehn -’ he made a whooshing noise — ‘ NewYork ?’

‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘ Whoosh … and now you’re right here. Crazy, huh?’

That seemed to be one of the three or four English words he knew. He nodded and managed abemused grin. ‘ Ja … craz-ee .’

The generator suddenly hummed, the lights winked and a moment later the young soldier, thearm, leg and most of the tuft of grass and soil were gone.

‘What happened?’

‘I initiated an emergency dump,’ replied Foster. ‘He’s back where hecame from. Although he’s…’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he replied. He looked at Maddy and Sal.‘That… that was a German soldier who looked like he’d just been sucked outof a fight, right off the lawn of the White House, no less.’

‘An invasion?’

He nodded. ‘Day one of recorded, or should I say approved ,history, it would seem, begins the day that America was successfully conquered by the Germans.Just like we were saying.’

‘Oh, no,’ whispered Maddy, ‘then we dropped Liam and Bob right into themiddle of a battle.’

Sal’s face paled.

‘We can get them back, though, right?’

‘We’ll try again in an hour. But only if we don’t see any other odd densitypackets at the last moment. I don’t want to bring back another Nazi, or a part of one,if I can help it.’

‘But if we can’t bring him back? Is that it? Is he stuck there?’

‘There’s another scheduled for twenty-four hours later.’

‘And if he misses that too?’

‘Madelaine, he’s a resourceful lad. He has Bob with him. They’ll do justfine where they are. And, as I said, there is a way we cancommunicate with them. We can let them know a where-and-when for another extractionwindow.’ He turned to both the girls. ‘What’s of more importance to us rightnow is whether there are any more shifts due, whether the world has stabilized as it is, orwhether it’ll get worse.’

‘Is there anything we can do?’

‘All we can do right now is try to work out where history was altered, see if we cannarrow things down a bit. My guess is something must have happened during the Second WorldWar, something that changed the balance.’

Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah… maybe.’

‘So,’ continued Foster, ‘what we’ll do is work with what we have.We’ll have to explore the New York out there. Perhaps there’ll be clues as to whathappened prior to the invasion of America. OK?’

She nodded.

‘OK, Sal?’

She looked at him, tears rolling down her pale cheeks. ‘Poor Liam,’ shewhimpered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

Foster got up tiredly and walked over to her. He stooped down in front of her.‘Don’t worry, Sal… He’ll be fine. With Bob right beside him,he’ll be just fine, I promise you.’

‘What now?’

‘We need more information. Sal, I want you to head out to Times Square again. Just finda seat somewhere and observe all you can. See if you can pick out any visual clues…anything at all that hints at events prior to 1956. And, Madelaine?’

She nodded.

‘We need to trawl their historical database. If you can find a way tohack through their security measures, perhaps we can learn a bit more. And then we’llget ready to activate the back-up rendezvous.’ He sucked in air through gritted teeth.‘Hopefully, second time round it won’t be cluttered with German troops,eh?’

1956, Washington DC

Bob observed the hive of activity going on around him. His cold eyes locked on andstudied the giant disc floating gracefully above the city and intermittently spewing outtroops. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire, the muffled thud of explosions.

Somewhere in the city, small pockets of American soldiers were still holding out, unawarethat the struggle was all over, that their leader, President Eisenhower, had gone downfighting, and even now his body was being carried out and laid across the steps in front ofthe building along with the rest of his cabinet and chiefs of staff.

An officer standing nearby adjusting his tunic and Wehrmacht peaked cap, no longer encumberedwith a drop suit, was hurriedly directing activity on the ground.

‘You!’ He pointed at Bob. ‘You can remove the mask. The air’sclear.’

Bob silently removed the gas mask. His hair — only a fortnight’s worth of growth,still just coarse bristles — and his hard emotionless face made him look no differentfrom the other storm-troopers around him.

‘When we’ve tidied up the mess out here, then you can take a rest,’ theofficer said. ‘Now, get a move on, man.’

Bob’s eyes narrowed as he made a millisecond calculation on whether he should continueto pretend being an enemy unit or sprint a dozen paces across the ruttedgrass and effortlessly rip this man’s arms from their sockets.

[Attack: tactically incorrect at this moment]

He turned away and reached down for the body of a marine, flinging the ragged remains overhis shoulder and carrying it across to where a pile of corpses was slowly growing. As he didso, Bob’s inexperienced silicon mind worked on a bigger issue, more important than anyimmediate tactical assessments. He had a strategic command decision to make…

Tactical Options:

1. Rescue Operative Liam O’Connor

2. Return to field office with gatheredintelligence

3. Prevent further contamination — self-terminate

Bob’s AI routines worked more efficiently with smaller numbers of options oneach branch of its decision tree — two or three was the ideal number. Any larger anarray of choices slowed down the risk-assessment processing exponentially.