Alex Scarrow: TimeRiders: The Eternal War

You really have no idea how important you are … do you, Becks?

The female support unit had data embedded in her silicon brain, a minor sector of her miniature hard drive devoted to holding a secret. Their last crisis had involved being led to a medieval document, the Holy Grail no less, containing an encoded secret that dated from somewhere around the time of Christ. Becks had been able to successfully decode the secret, which, it seemed, had also rather annoyingly included a protocol that prevented her from revealing the message she’d managed to decode. And now, whatever this Big Secret was, it was locked away in a portion of her silicon mind.

Maddy had tried asking her about what was in there, but poor Becks knew nothing; she too was locked out of that portion of her own mind. All she knew was that at some point a ‘correct condition’ would arrive that would unlock the truth.

What Maddy did know was this: whatever truth was lurking in there, it wasn’t good news. Not good at all. And it had something to do with a particular word.

Pandora.

Secrets and lies. She hated them. There was never any good that came out of a secret. They were corrosive. Like another one, a secret she was having to keep from Liam and Sal … but Liam, in particular.

He’s dying. Time travel was killing him. Every trip through the portal was corrupting his body’s cells, ageing him before his time in a far more aggressive, damaging way than the forcefield that looped them and their old archway field office back around those two days in 2001 that they were stationed in.

She sighed. Even in their eternal two-day bubble world, the same cars, the same pedestrians, the same yellow cabs passing the end of their little backstreet at the same time every day … even in this world frozen into two endlessly looped days, time was passing for them. She’d noticed it … and wondered if Sal and Liam had noticed it too, not that either had said anything to her.

We’re all ageing .

She could feel it very subtly. It didn’t show, not yet, but she could feel it. Maddy had studied her face in the mirror of their latrine. Stared at her face wondering if she might detect the first faint signs of hairline creases in her skin. But … so far, to her relief, no.

As for Sal, she was perhaps a shade taller. After all, measuring the time they’d been in the archway together in a normal way, they must have been living there now for — what? — five months?

Was it as long as that already?

Five months, and like any thirteen-year-old Sal still had a few more inches of growth left in her. Perhaps, being the youngest of them, the corrosive ageing effect of the archway’s displacement field would be kindest of all on her — take the longest to make itself felt.

But Liam … poor, poor Liam . She could see the signs of accelerated ageing in his face even if he hadn’t noticed it yet. Or perhaps he chose not to. His jaw and cheeks were less rounded now, longer and leaner. And around his eyes — eyes that always seemed to be wide like saucers with genuine awe at something, or pinched tight mid-laughter, laughing at the oddness of this bizarre life they were living — those eyes … eyes that had seen more than any one person should ever hope to see. Around them, in his soft pale skin, Maddy could see the first hairline traces of age. The very same hairlines that would one day be the folds of wrinkled skin on Foster’s ancient face.

Yes, another freakin’ secret.

Liam and the old man who had recruited them, they were one and the same person. That’s what Foster had let slip to her. She couldn’t even begin to figure out how that worked. Was Foster a version of Liam from the far future? His older self? Or some other parallel timeline?

Oh God, it made her head hurt thinking about it.

Abraham Lincoln scowled at the flatboat captain. ‘But … but … this is no more than half the pay you promised me, sir!’

The captain’s dark-skinned face, buried beneath an even darker beard, wrinkled up with amusement at the young man’s indignant rancour. His eyes glinted under his faded red woollen trapper’s hat and he laughed, offering the young man a glimpse of half a dozen tobacco-stained teeth.

‘You are too lazy, monsieur. No good to me.’

Abraham’s jaw hung open. ‘Curse you, sir! I worked my fair share!’

‘ Non …’ He shrugged. ‘You lazy. No good to me. Not very good worker.’

‘Now … listen here …’ Abraham balled his fists in frustration, taking a step off the wooden dockside on to the bobbing prow of the flatboat, piled high with bundles of beaver pelts. The captain, Jacques, short and stocky, remained unfazed at the young beanpole of a man towering over him.

‘You get half … no more,’ he said calmly.

Abraham felt his temper get the better of him. He reached out and grabbed the collar of the little Frenchman’s chequered shirt in one big-knuckled fist. ‘Curse you … I earned —’

The little man was quicker and more agile than his stocky frame would suggest, and with a deft flick of his strong arms he pulled Abraham off balance. He stuck a booted foot behind his heels and shoved him backwards.

Abraham pinwheeled with his arms, his feet unable to step backwards to recover his balance. He toppled over the side of the flatboat and into the Mississippi river, surfacing from the muddy water coughing and spluttering to hear the rest of the flatboat crew, half a dozen lads his own age or thereabouts, guffawing with laughter.

Jacques bellowed at them to get back to work and they resumed tossing the bales of pelts from one to the other ashore on to the busy dockside.

Abraham pulled himself, dripping and still spluttering, on to the wooden planks of the dock, his hot temper doused for now by the cool river. He turned to Jacques, the man’s broad shoulders shaking with poorly concealed laughter.

‘It ain’t fair , I tell you!’ He pushed a tress of dark sopping hair out of his eyes and glared back at the captain. ‘Hell’s teeth, sir … you are even paying a negro more than I!’

Jacques turned to look at the one dark-skinned member of his crew. He shrugged at that. ‘He a better worker than you, boy.’

Abraham realized by the Frenchman’s undaunted, wrinkled smile that he was not going to get anywhere with him. ‘Well, to Hell with you, then!’ He spat. ‘Crook! You thieving piratical parasite!’ He stood on the edge of the wooden jetty, standing as tall and defiantly as his six-foot-four-inch frame would let him. ‘I shall … I shall go find other work, then!’

Captain Jacques’s bearded smile only widened further. ‘As you wish.’ He waved a hand at him. ‘Good luck, mon ami . You will need it.’

Liam found himself drawn back to the main hall and that splendid brachiosaurus skeleton erected in the middle of it. He was staring up so long at the long arch of vertebrae that comprised its neck that he failed to notice another bustling class of elementary students gather round him, just like the other class, all carrying bright orange activity clipboards. They coo ed and orrrrr ed as the others had, craning their necks to look up at the Cretaceous leviathan.

A teacher, or perhaps it was a museum tour guide, was giving the children the vital statistics of the beast, or, as Maddy would say, they were getting a ‘ fact-up ’.

‘… roamed the plains in small family groups of no more than a dozen …’

‘Well, that’s not true,’ grunted Liam under his breath.

A tiny boy beside him with thick-framed spectacles and a buzzcut of blond hair that stood erect like a toilet brush looked up at him curiously.