Alex Scarrow - Time Riders

He shook his head firmly. ‘Although they look human, youmust try not to think of them as such. They’re nothing more than meat robots, Sal,nothing more. Come on,’ he said, gesturing towards the sliding metal door leading backinto the archway, ‘let’s get the displacement machine charging up.’

He ushered them out, Sal craning her neck one last time to look at the tubes as they steppedout.

‘What will you do with them?’ she asked.

‘I’ll deal with them, don’t you worry about that.’

‘But what will you do with them?’

Foster shook his head. ‘We’ve got far more important matters to be thinking aboutright now.’

He closed the door on the smell and the noisy rattle of the generator and made a mental noteto dispose of the clone bodies when Sal was fast asleep. The last thing she needed to seeright now was him carrying their bodies out.

He stepped over towards the machine beside the large perspex cylinder, and flipped a switch.A long row of small red LED lights winked on. The first of them almost immediately flickeredand turned from red to green.

‘OK, it’s charging,’ he said.

He joined the girls slumped in chairs around their mess table. ‘We’ve beenthrough a lot. And there’s still a lot more we’re going to have to do. When themachinery is charged up enough, we’ll need to get that message throughto Bob. And, of course, we’ll need to decide exactly where and when we’re opening the return window. But fornow,’ he said, sighing, ‘right now… I could murder a cup ofcoffee.’

The girls, both grimy and tired, looked up at him. ‘Just what the doctorordered,’ said Maddy.

Foster settled back in his chair, suddenly feeling as old as the hills. ‘Come on, then,whose turn is it to brew up?’

2001, New York

‘The shorter the message we try to send, the less energy we’lluse,’ said Foster. ‘We need to keep it precise and to the point. That way we canspend more of the energy of the tachyon burst on creating a wider spread ofparticles.’

Sal pulled a face. ‘I still don’t get it.’

Foster scratched a chin thick with several days of white and grey bristles. The first thinghe planned to do once things had returned to normal was to get a nice clean wet shave.

The idea of beams of sub-atomic particles that could be fired backwards through time had beena hard concept for him to get his head round back when he’d first been recruited as aTimeRider. In fact, a lot of the concepts, the technology, the gadgets had been alien to him.His young mind had struggled hard to absorb it all. But he’d managed.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s like this. What we’re doing, in effect,is spraying an area of America in the past, fifty years ago, with a shower of tiny particles- these tachyons . Now, if we knew precisely where Bob was standing at a certain time, then we could aim ourtransmitter right at that point and fire off a message using very little energy, needing tosend only a small number of these tachyon particles. However, we don’t know where Bob isright now. We just have a general direction.’

‘But why don’t we aim the beam to the location and the point intime that we sent them back to? You know… the White House front lawn, say… thirtyseconds after they’d arrived there. They won’t havebeen able to wander too far in, like, half a minute,’ said Maddy.

‘True,’ said Foster, ‘but then they won’t have had time to gather anyuseful intelligence in just thirty seconds. We’d be right back where we started, nonethe wiser and with no information to work from.’

He looked across at the machine beside the perspex tube. The winking row of red lights showedthe displacement machinery was still a long way off from being charged up enough to use.

‘Look, I’ll be honest. I really don’t know yet whether we’re evengoing to be able to get one of them back, let alone both of them. The point is — and this is really important- we have to hope they’ve found out enough in the past to be able to tell us exactly when and where this wrong history diverged from our own.Because,’ he said, looking up at both of them with a stern expression, ‘we mayonly have enough power left to get one shot at sending someoneback. One last shot.’

He sipped from his mug.

‘Just one shot to put things right.’

‘Right,’ said Maddy quietly.

‘So, we know they missed the return window, and the back-up window an hour later…and the last back-up twenty-four hours later. Which means they must have run into trouble. Butthat’s not necessarily such a bad thing.’

Sal made a face. ‘It’s not?’

‘No. From my many years’ experience as an operative, running into trouble isinevitably how you end up learning things.’ Foster smiled. ‘The more troublethey’ve been in, the more they’ve probably learned about the world in1956.’

‘If they’re still alive, that is,’ added Maddy.

‘Liam is a very resourceful young lad. He’s a quick learner.And the support unit with him, well… they’re very tough things. Takes quite a lotof effort to kill one of those. Between them, I’m sure they will have managed a way tolie low, to gather information and await a message from us.’

‘So then… what message are we going to sendthem?’ asked Sal.

Foster looked at her. ‘We send them a time-stamp: a location and moment in time forthem to make their way to.’

‘Right.’

‘We can assume they have remained in the area of Washington.’

‘You sure?’ cut in Maddy. ‘Can we assume that?’

‘Yes, because it makes sense. Bob will assume we’ll pick them up from roughly thesame area. So he’ll have kept as close to the White House as is safe to do.’

‘We’re doing a lot of guessing here,’ said Maddy, a note of scepticism inher voice.

‘Guessing is all we’ve got, I’m afraid.’

Neither girl looked too happy with that.

‘Look, here’s the plan,’ he said. ‘We’re going to turn on thecomputer system, pull up a street map for Washington and try to find some quiet backstreet nottoo far from the White House… say within a mile or two. That’ll be where we’ll open the return window. We’ll write down theco-ordinates, turn the computers back off since they’re drawing power from the generatorand we’ll have what we want.’

‘OK.’

‘So the other part of the message is the when . That’sthe part of this we’ve got to guess right.’

‘How about the day after the twenty-four-hourback-up?’ suggested Sal.

‘Could do… but if they failed that, then something must haveprevented them getting there. I’d say we need to give them more time.’

‘Something prevented them?’

Foster shrugged. ‘Many things. Bob or Liam might have been wounded, incapacitatedsomehow… unable to move. They might have been arrested. The area might have been sealedoff or hazardous.’

‘So, how long after that, then?’ asked Sal. ‘Two days? Threedays?’

His lips tightened. ‘As long as we possibly can. We don’t know what theirsituation is, how much planning or recovering they might need to get to thislocation.’

‘How much time are we talking about?’ asked Maddy. ‘A week?’

‘The maximum mission time possible. Six months,’ he replied.

Maddy pulled off her glasses and absent-mindedly wiped the lenses. She narrowed her eyes.‘Maximum mission time? You mentioned that once before.’

‘Maximum mission time,’ repeated Foster. ‘Twenty-six weeks. Six months.That’s the support unit’s expiry point .’

‘Expiry point?’ said Maddy. ‘I don’t like the sound ofthat.’