Alex Scarrow - Time Riders

Foster nodded. Maybe she’s got a point.

‘Well, a good day’s work, I think,’ he announced loudly. ‘I got afeeling that the worst of this is over.’

Sal looked up at him. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Sure. We’ll get this lot back. I’ll crank up the generator, get thingscharging up. We’ll have a nice hot cup of coffee whilst we wait. How does thatsound?’

‘Wonderful,’ she replied.

‘How long will it take until we can try bringing them back?’ asked Maddy.

Foster made a show of shrugging casually. His eyes, though, were on the lengthening eveningshadows on either side of the street. ‘I’d say about twenty-four hours until wecan actually try opening up a portal.’

‘Twenty-four hours!’ Maddy’s voice bounced off the nearest walls andrippled off down the deserted ruins of East 14th Street.

‘But — ’ he smiled — ‘the good news is that we should be able totransmit a message through to the support unit and Liam much sooner.’

‘Bob,’ said Sal. ‘That’s what we agreed to call him.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry… Bob.’

‘So, how does that transmitting-messages-through-time thing work exactly?’

‘I’m no physicist, Madelaine, so don’t start throwing questions at me. Butthe explanation I was given is that it’s all to do with tachyon particles. They’reparticles of matter that can travel faster than light and thus are able to travel throughtime. If we aim them at roughly where we expect Liam and Bob to be, then Bob’s on-board hardware will detect them and decode the message.’

‘But they can’t send a message back to us?’

Foster shook his head. ‘No. The particles can only travel back through time, notforward.’ He snapped his torch on, throwing a cone of light down the darkening street.‘We know they’re somewhere around Washington, so we’ll aim the tachyon arrayin that general direction.’

‘It doesn’t need to be that precise, then,’ said Sal, ‘you know,aiming the signal?’

‘Well, the more precisely you can aim the particles, the fewer particles you need tosend, which means you need less energy. If we knew exactly wherethey were standing, it would take a lot less energy. So, if we keep the message nice and shortand spread the beam wide… it amounts to just about the same power burn.’

Maddy nodded. ‘I think I get it. It’d cost the same energy if we had a longermessage but used a narrower beam.’

‘You got it.’

They walked in silence for a little while, accompanied only by the sloshing of the jerry cansin the pram and the clatter of its wheels over the rubble-strewn pavement.

‘I hope Liam’s all right,’ said Sal. ‘I know it’s been only afew days since he went back, but it feels like he’s been gone for ages.’

‘He has… from his point of view nearly six months has passed.’

She frowned. ‘That’s just so weird.’

They walked in silence for a while as she struggled with the idea that Liam’sexperience of this crisis had stretched over nearly half a year. ‘So… so how longhave you been a TimeRider?’ asked Sal. ‘You’repretty old, so I guess you must have been doing it for a while?’

‘Long enough, Sal,’ he replied, ‘long enough.’

‘Does it all make sense to you, yet?’

Foster shook his head and snorted dismissively. ‘Does it heck. It still messes with mymind.’

1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey

Liam was exhausted. Barely an hour into the morning shift digging the ditchalongside the camp’s wire perimeter and he felt drained, barely able to lift his spade.Nearly six months of poor food, little more than a starvation diet, had left him feeling weakand unable to sustain any sort of physical exertion for long.

He leaned on the spade, trying to catch his breath, giving his aching muscles a moment torecover. Sweat rolled down the small of his back, soaking his shirt. Clouds of his hot breathpuffed out into the crisp winter air in front of him.

‘You better not let Kohl see you,’ whispered Wallace in the ditch beside him.

Kohl was one of the more ruthless guards. Last week he’d pulled a man from thedefensive ditches being dug around the camp and beaten him repeatedly with the butt of hispulse carbine for stopping and taking a rest. News was the man had died later on from hisinjuries.

It was from one of the guards that Liam had learned why they weredigging these defensive ditches around the wire-fence perimeter. There’d been someraids, successful raids, by a small band of resistance fighters. Several camps had beenoverrun, the prisoners freed and most of the soldiers who’d been guarding them killed.There was a rumour spreading among the guards that these fighters were being led by somedemonic entity. There were varying descriptions of this thing; some of theguards who’d survived described a giant, eight or nine feet tall, with the horns of adevil protruding from its head. Another eye-witness described this demon as being made ofiron, yet able to move at a terrifying speed with the agility of a tiger.

They even had a nickname for this thing.

Der Eisenmann. The Iron Man.

One of the guards further down the line spotted Liam resting on his spade and barked a shrillorder at him.

‘ Weiterarbeiten, Du Amerikanischer Haufen Schei?e! ’

He started digging again, relieved that it hadn’t been Kohl.

‘O’Connor, you’re going to get yourself killed if they see you slackinglike that again,’ hissed Wallace.

He’s right.

The rumours of Der Eisenmann had put these soldiers on edge. Liamcould see fear in their eyes as they scanned the distant treeline, unhappy with being outsidethe wire fence of the camp.

The Iron Man.

So much time had passed in here that Liam had almost begun tobelieve his short time as a TimeRider had just been a figment of his imagination. That timetravel was just a fairytale… perhaps his life even, his childhood in Ireland, hisworking a passage on the Titanic ; all those things had been somedream. And in fact this dreary camp, his fellow starving prisoners in their grey rags, thelong low wooden huts — that was his real world. His real life.

But then he’d heard those rumours about Der Eisenmann . Adesperate hope had surfaced, a long-discarded possibility, that Bob was behind this Iron Manstory somehow. He hated himself for allowing that hope to momentarily flicker to life. Commonsense tried telling him that this Iron Man nonsense was nothing more than the superstitiousprattle of spooked soldiers completely unused to being on the losing side ofany kind of a fight.

You’re here for good, Liam. Now, just you bloody well get used toit.

It was hard, though. Hard not to hope that one day, totally without warning, a shimmeringsphere might suddenly pop up beside him, and Foster and Bob and the girls would appear andtake him back.

Stop it! No one’s coming for you now. It’s been nearly sixmonths. No one is coming.

Five months and three weeks. A hundred and seventy-five days. He knew exactly how longnow… One of the prisoners worked as a cleaner in the kommandant’s office and hadspotted a calendar on his desk. The prisoners kept track of time — marked the endless,identical days passed inside here — through him.

‘You all right there?’ whispered Wallace. ‘You mustn’t give up hope,kid. You give up… you die.’

He was right. It was the thin sliver of hope that came in the form of whispered rumours,overheard conversations between guards, that was keeping them going. Keeping them alive.

Liam turned to Wallace and gave him a thin, weary smile. ‘I’m allright.’