Time Riders: The Doomsday Code (31 page)

He laughed a little sadly. ‘The end of times … I suppose.’

‘The end? But when?’

Locke said nothing. Outside the hut, there was a growing clamour of voices.

‘What do you mean by
the end
, Mr Locke?’

Locke waved the question away. ‘Maybe I’ll explain later. For now, though, I better tell that crowd of barbarians outside that there’ll be no Norman nobles beheaded today.’

‘You’re not going to kill me?’

‘Depends if you get in the way or not.’ He splayed his hands. ‘My advice? Don’t get in the way.’

‘Why? What’re you up to? Why did you come back here?’

He smiled again. ‘I came back to find out about
something
. Originally. But my plans have changed somewhat.’ He got up off his stool. ‘Be a good man and stay here … and don’t try and run or I’ll set
Rex
on you.’

The hooded figure stirred at mention of the name.

‘Is that a – a support unit?’

Locke clearly didn’t know what he meant by that.

‘A … clone,’ Liam added, unsure whether Locke was familiar with that term either.

‘A gen-engineered product? Good God, no. They’re far too expensive and far too unreliable. No, this is something altogether more practical. Do you want to see?’ Locke asked with a glint in his eye.

‘Errr … all right.’

He reached over and with a theatrical flourish he tugged the hood down to reveal a dented and rusted metal skull. Metal, that is, down to where the bridge of the nose would be on a human skull. From that point downwards, a synthetic skin cover descended, starting as a scorched and partially melted, jagged edge and becoming a waxy plastic-looking version of a nose, mouth, cheeks and jaw – an
almost
convincing facsimile of the lower half of a human face.

‘The people that sent me back … well,’ he sighed, ‘in the year I come from, we were lucky to get our hands on this model.’ He rapped the metal skull on the top, and the robot stirred with a soft whir of servo-motors. ‘Army surplus combat cyborg. Insurgency model with a synthetic plastene skin sheath … or at least what’s left of it. Used in the last Oil War. He’s not a particularly pretty boy but he’s as tough as a tank.’

‘Those people outside? They follow him … they seem to –?’

‘Worship him?’ Locke shrugged. ‘Yes … “worship”. I think that about sums them up. The simple fools think of Rex as some sort of a God-sent instrument of justice sent down to lead them in a war against their Norman overlords. They’ll do anything he tells them.’

‘You mean, anything
you
tell them?’

He laughed. ‘Indeed. Rex is programmed to take my verbal commands only. They think “The Hood” is leading them. And that works just fine for my purposes.’

‘And what’s that, Mr Locke?’

He tapped his nose. ‘We’ll talk later.’ He got up from his stool and stooped down to exit the small hut. Liam could hear the crowd outside and Locke’s voice explaining something about the ‘sheriff being a useful hostage’.

Liam turned to look at the robot’s face. Half human, half rusting metal dappled with peeling army-green paint. And two small and faint pin-points of blue light: LEDs that glowed dully, just like the power-up indicator on the displacement machine back home in 2001.

Liam nodded gingerly and waved. ‘Uh … so, errr … hello.’

It continued to stare at him, motionless and silent.

Bob surveyed the recruits as they trained, standing in the middle of several dozen of them, paired and sparring with wooden baton swords and wicker shields. The sun had climbed high enough now that it shone down into the castle’s main bailey, making the men perspire under the weight of their chain mail.

He observed their leaden and clumsy swordplay and evaluated their abilities as individual combat units.

[Evaluation: combat efficiency – insufficient]

There was no numerative score he could sensibly apply to them yet. They were that bad. Barely better than malnourished old men and young boys, struggling to remain standing under the weight of their armour, let alone able to sustain effective melee combat with properly weighted swords and heavy iron shields.

However, merely having columns of men tramping around the Nottingham countryside wearing the royal burgundy tunic sporting three amber lions and managing to approximate the look of soldiers seemed to have had the effect that Liam was after. The banditry, the raids, the lawlessness had receded from the town and the surrounding farming villages and disappeared deep into the woods.

Bob’s AI took a moment to shuffle through a high-level menu of mission objectives. The current primary goal of subverting a peasant uprising originating from Nottingham
appeared
to have been met. But until he received a tachyon signal from the field office confirming that history had realigned itself, it remained a mission goal yet to be struck off the list.

Liam O’Connor seemed content to leave the majority of the logistics of running the castle, leading the garrison and overseeing the feeding of the people of Nottingham to him. The fleshy part of Bob’s mind seemed to want to communicate something to him about that. An emotion of some sort. He tried to identify it, tried to find a human label for it, and finally came up with one.

Pride?

His silicon mind stepped in and decided to phrase that more concisely.

[Analysis: mission achievement verification bonus]

He tried out one of his library of smiles – one of the smaller ones that looked less like a horse flashing its gums. It matched that small buzz of satisfaction he was feeling. He decided the smile worked and matched this mild emotion he was currently experiencing. He labelled it: [
Proud-Smile-001]
.

A voice calling down from the gatehouse disturbed his musing. He looked across at the gatehouse’s entrance archway to see a wounded man being helped through the gates by several others.

‘You may now rest,’ he instructed the drilling recruits, and stepped across the courtyard towards the new arrivals.

Drawing closer, he could see the burgundy and amber colours on the man and recognized the face as one of the dozen men assigned to escort Liam to Kirklees Priory. He was aware that Liam was a day late but had assumed he had decided to stay with Cabot a second night. Bob’s pace quickened until he stood beside the man being lowered gently to the ground by several men from the town.

‘Sire,’ said one of them, ‘we found ’im collapsed in the marketplace.’

Bob knelt down and inspected him. Blood soaked half his tunic, turning it almost black.

‘He will not survive for very long. He has lost too much blood.’

The soldier was one of the first intake of recruits; Bob retrieved the man’s name from his database. ‘Henry Gardiner, you must tell me what has happened.’

The man looked up at him. ‘Sire … sire … they ambushed … us! They …’ He coughed, spluttering a dark spray of blood down his chest. ‘A … a … drink … please.’

Bob called for one of the water-bearers and then carefully helped the man to sip a ladle of water.

‘Continue when ready,’ he said as the man finished and let the ladle go.

‘Ambushed us … yesterday. The Hood’s men …’ he panted in short rattling breaths. ‘The sheriff …’

‘What has happened to the sheriff?’

‘Took … took him …’

‘He is alive?’

Henry Gardiner appeared to be waning fast, his eyelids fluttering, his face pinching from the pain.

‘He is alive?’ Bob repeated insistently.

‘Aye … y-yes … they took … they took him …’

Bob nodded. ‘Understood,’ his deep voice rumbled. He turned to one of the recruits standing nearby. ‘Fetch this man some mead from our store-room.’ He estimated the dying man had another hour of life left in him. The alcohol would at least make it a comfortable hour. Bob evaluated the man deserved at least that for dutifully struggling back to make his report. His grey eyes swivelled on to the townsfolk who’d helped him in. ‘You are good civilians. I am grateful for your assistance. You may also drink some mead.’

The men tugged their forelocks with gratitude.

Bob rested a hand on Gardiner’s shoulder and squeezed it gently. ‘You have functioned well, Henry Gardiner.’

He stood up, his mind already shuffling through a decision-tree of actions he was going to need to take. There wasn’t a great deal of calculative effort required to come up with the conclusion that retrieving Liam
alive
was the preferred course of action. It didn’t conflict with the primary objective; what’s more, Liam O’Connor’s role as sheriff had proven to be effective among the local population. The people appeared to like him and would want their sheriff back.

Bob had already made the decision to find and rescue him. He was just waiting for his code to spit that out as a formal menu option.

But finding him, finding where exactly the Hood’s men were encamped within the forests of Nottingham, could take days, weeks, perhaps even months. He didn’t have that kind of time. He had just twenty-three days left until either he returned to 2001, or his silicon mind fused itself here in 1194.

Little time to waste.

If there’d been a skirmish in the forests – an ambush, logically – it would have occurred on the forest track north-east between Nottingham and Kirklees Priory. There would be detectable signs of the fight still: bloodstains, scuff marks … perhaps a trail to follow. Perhaps the raiders were still in the vicinity.

He turned to look up at the men in the guardhouse above. Several faces were peering curiously down. One of them he recognized as belonging to one of the original guard that had escorted them here from Oxford nearly six months ago. Like Eddie, a veteran with experience. He pulled the man’s name from his database.

‘Jethro Longstreet?’

‘Sire?’

‘Under the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham, I am promoting you to garrison commander of this castle in my absence.’

He could see the man’s eyes widen with disbelief.

‘You will continue the daily patrols of the farms outside.’ His voice echoed around the castle’s walls. ‘You will continue supervising morning food distribution in the town marketplace. You will also maintain the training regime for these new recruits. I will be absent for several days. Are these instructions perfectly clear?’

‘Aye … aye, sire.’

‘Then proceed in this role.’

He turned to the men standing nearby. ‘And bring me a horse immediately.’

Becks detected noises of distress coming from the castle’s outer walls: raised voices, high-pitched and signifying alarm. And one of those voices she identified as John’s.

A few minutes later he staggered into the great hall, gasping, looking for her. His eyes found her standing beside an arched window doing her best to look serene and ladylike. He came quickly over.

‘’Tis true! I have j-just this minute heard!’ he stammered.

‘What is true?’

‘R-Richard … he has s-set foot in England!’ John’s face was ashen with fear and damp with sweat. ‘The messenger … the messenger arrived this morning! He tells me he set foot in Dover yesterday!’

Becks consulted her database and a map of England. It was 118 miles from Dover to Oxford. A piece of data she didn’t have was how many miles an army from this period could travel in a day. However, a determined man could cover that distance in two days. John had already told her his brother most likely would gather supporters along the way, with his growing army eventually catching up with him.

‘Do you believe he will come to Oxford immediately?’ she asked.

John nodded frantically. ‘He will come here directly … b-because he believes the Grail is here!’ He swallowed nervously. ‘I will have to be the one to tell him – tell him that it’s lost. It was on
my
instructions the Templars were taking it north to Scotland.’ John’s nerves spilled out and became a manic laugh. ‘He’s going to kill me!’

‘I will protect you,’ she said calmly.

He wandered over to the balcony and looked out across the city. The heat of a mid-morning’s sun was baking the castle’s stone walls, and the air shimmered above the crenellations, making the dark slate rooftops of Oxford’s shacks and hovels dance and undulate beneath the cloudless blue sky. ‘Why has your colleague, Liam, not managed to find it yet? It does not sound like he has even
started
to look for it!’

There had been several couriers from Nottingham over the last few months, bearing a detailed account of matters up there. Most of Liam’s reports had been on his efforts to win the starving people round, to carefully rebuild some semblance of royal authority, law and order … all in John’s name.

‘He has been busy stabilizing the region,’ she replied. ‘Only when he has the support and sympathies of the people will he have a chance of locating this outlaw who has stolen your Grail.’ She was quoting Liam’s words from the last report.

‘I know! I know!’ snapped John. ‘But we have no more time now for making friends of the peasants! Richard will be here
this very night
 … maybe tomorrow.’ He turned to look at her, trembling as he spoke. ‘Do you understand? There will be blood when he discovers it is lost!
My
blood!’

Becks’s eyes narrowed. She looked back out at the walls of the castle, the walls of Oxford. ‘You could hold out against him. Prevent him from entering the city.’

John scratched at his beard; a nervous tic of his that Becks had noticed gradually become increasingly pronounced over the last six months. ‘The city would fall to him,’ he said. ‘The people here
love
him.’