TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (25 page)

‘What do you …’ but he didn’t get a chance to finish his question, as Jana grabbed his hand and dragged him through the hologram after her. He flinched and raised his free arm to protect his face as he was pulled towards and then through a wall of not-really solid rock. He was relieved he managed not to yell.

The world went blurry and indistinct as he walked through the hologram, then snapped into sharp focus as he found himself standing in a doorway. In front of them was a heavy oak door, dotted with metal studs that held a criss-cross pattern of iron bands in place. It looked very solid, but it stood ajar. Beyond the door Kaz could see a large chamber. It had stone walls and a brick vault ceiling like the section of undercroft they had just left, but this new area was illuminated by light bulbs strung along the wall at regular intervals. He could not see much more through the half-open door, especially with Jana standing in front of him.

‘Am I going to ask the obvious question, or are you?’ said Kaz.

‘Be my guest,’ replied Jana, peering around the door to see what lay beyond.

‘Who leaves a big secure door lying open?’

‘Someone who doesn’t think anyone can see it because of the hologram,’ said Jana, slowly, as if talking to an idiot.

‘In which case, why make it such a strong door?’ said Kaz.

Jana turned back and glared at him for a moment before admitting that maybe he had a point. ‘You think this is an invitation?’ she asked.

‘Or a trap,’ he replied. ‘For someone who can see through holograms.’

Jana shrugged impatiently. ‘Or maybe someone just forgot to close it,’ she said as she pushed through the doorway.

Kaz turned the lamp off, stashed it in the backpack again, and followed Jana. ‘If I get mind-probed again,’ he said as he caught up with her, ‘I am blaming you.’

The chamber was wider and taller than the tunnels they had just left, so he was able to walk without stooping. He examined one of the light bulbs that were strung along the wall. It was a large glass ball with a zigzag vertical filament inside, intricate and beautiful; old-fashioned by his time, but insanely futuristic in 1645. The bulbs were strung together by a line of cable which hung off hooks in the wall. It was a strange mix of old and new technology. When he surveyed the rest of the room the sense of things being cobbled together grew stronger. Near the far wall stood a row of large wooden chests, entirely in keeping with 1645, but in the centre of the room stood a table with a Mac computer on it – not the shiny smooth white products of his time, but an old, beige box with a rainbow Apple logo on the side. The monitor, however, was something way beyond the machine it served – an oblong sheet of light which hung in the air above the desk, displaying an old screensaver of a starscape. The table was solid oak, the kind of thing Kaz would have expected to find if he ventured upstairs into the hall proper, but the chair was one of those wooden standing chairs that you loop your legs into and kind of perch on. The design was from the future, but when he examined it more closely he could see that it was freshly made and had what looked like hand-turned wooden features, presumably put there by a seventeenth-century carpenter working to a plan that had no right existing yet, unable to grasp the concept of minimalist interior decoration and believing that any round piece of wood should be shaped into something elegant.

A series of holographic screens, Kaz reckoned twenty at least, hung in an array in front of a long stretch of otherwise bare wall. He studied them closely. Three displayed what appeared to be real-time readouts of temperature, pressure and electrical output – monitoring some kind of generator? Some other monitors displayed images he couldn’t identify without context – a pool of water, some kind of furnace. Most of the rest showed scenes from around the house, better quality than the CCTV he was used to, but obviously from surveillance cameras that served the same function. One showed an aerial view of a country track down which a column of soldiers were trudging; he presumed that was the feed from the drone. Were those soldiers heading this way?

‘Come look at this,’ called Jana. She had perched on the computer chair and was using a keyboard to scroll through various forms of information. Kaz peered over her shoulder, but could make no sense of any of it.

‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.

‘I’m not completely certain, but some of this stuff looks like …’ She stopped scrolling when she found a document labelled ‘temporal displacement – theories and practice’. ‘Now that’s more like it,’ she said, smiling.

But Kaz wasn’t listening to her. ‘Scroll back,’ he said.

‘No, come on, this is the good stuff,’ said Jana, beginning to read the document.

‘It can wait.’ He shoved her roughly aside.

‘Hey,’ she said, but Kaz ignored her. He leaned over her shoulder and pressed the back button, scrolling back through the contents until he found what he was looking for. It was a collection of thumbnail images that had caught his eye.

‘Make these bigger,’ he demanded.

Jana was looking daggers at him, but Kaz was not bothered. He was sure of what he had seen. Eventually Jana spat ‘Fine,’ and pressed a few buttons that made the screen zoom in. The thumbnails increased in size until they could make out the faces of the people in the photographs.

‘Oh, crap,’ said Jana, when she realised what she was looking at.

‘Yes,’ said Kaz simply.

He was looking at photographs of himself, Jana and Dora. Photographs that he knew hadn’t been taken yet. There he was, holding a huge gun, running towards the camera, shouting. Jana, covered in dust, a livid gash across her forehead, dripping blood into her eyes. Dora, older, hard faced, snarling. And more images, a dizzying array of soon-to-be hims, not-yet Doras and someday-maybe Janas.

After the shock had worn off, Jana mused aloud, ‘No timestamp on the images, and the filenames don’t give anything away. We have no idea when or where these were taken.’

Kaz leaned forward and pointed to a picture of Jana crouching behind a partially collapsed wall. ‘Look at the top right of that picture.’

Jana zoomed in and whistled softly. A small patch of sky was visible above a jumble of sandy-coloured buildings. It had a brownish tinge to it like nothing Kaz had ever seen before.

Kaz and Jana exchanged a look but neither vocalised what they were thinking – it was so outrageous.

Jana moved the focus down so they could examine her face. ‘It’s hard to tell through the grime and the, um, blood, but I look about the same as I do now, yeah?’

Kaz nodded. ‘Yes. Do you recognise the gun you’re carrying?’

‘Nope. Nothing like that in my time.’

They both stared at the photo for a moment, taking in the implications.

‘Try that one,’ said Kaz, pointing to another thumbnail. But before Jana could pull it out and enlarge it they heard a distant voice calling, ‘Hello?’

Jana nearly toppled off the seat as she jumped in surprise at the unexpected interruption.

‘Where did that come from?’ she asked, unfolding herself from the seat.

‘Hello?’ came the voice again. ‘Is there someone out there? Is that you, Hank?’

Kaz looked in the direction the voice had come from and saw a door in the far wall. ‘Over there,’ he said. He and Jana hurried to the door, but she held up a hand to stop him rushing right in.

‘We have no idea who is on the other side of this door,’ she said.

‘Sounds like a woman,’ replied Kaz.

‘Still think this was a trap?’ asked Jana.

Kaz shrugged. ‘Let’s find out.’

He pushed the door open gently and stepped into a large room at the centre of which sat a grand wooden bed. On it lay a woman. The bed was ringed by machines, many switched off. Some appeared to have been brought from the future, others seemed to be the best possible seventeenth-century equivalent of medical equipment not yet invented. A wooden pole held a bladder of some kind – literally, an animal’s bladder, Kaz suspected – from which a thin tube snaked into the patient’s arm; a primitive drip. A strange metal and wooden contraption with a big internal wheel could perhaps have been a sort of dialysis machine, he thought. The ECG was genuine, though, and the heartbeat of the bedridden patient was traced in glowing light on its cathode ray monitor screen, strong and healthy. There were other instruments and contraptions arranged around the room on tables and chairs.

Although lying in bed, the woman was dressed for outside, even down to a pair of sturdy boots, and her trousers had numerous bulging pockets. She also had some kind of helmet on, completely enclosing her head. It was red and polished smooth, as if made of plastic or ceramic. It hummed softly, and there was a little green light blinking near the neck, indicating that it was doing whatever it was supposed to be doing.

‘Hello?’ she asked again. Her voice was strong and clear, but she spoke English with an accent Kaz had never heard before. There was a bit of American in it, he thought, but something else that he couldn’t quite pin down.

‘Should we speak to her?’ said Kaz.

Jana shrugged.

Obviously perturbed by the lack of response, the woman reached up a hand to grab a cord that hung from the ceiling. At the end of the cord was a small switch with a red button on it, the kind they had in hospitals so the patient could call for a nurse. Kaz leapt forward, determined to stop her raising the alarm. The backpack slipped off his shoulder as he dived across the bed and grabbed the woman’s hand. He was conscious of Jana shouting at him to be careful, but he couldn’t hear her properly because of the roar in his ears. He immediately realised his mistake and tried to release his grasp, but it was too late. He heard the woman cry out as he was engulfed in red fire and the room began to fade around him.

Just as Dora had been, he was flung into time by the touch of the woman from the future. And he was powerless to stop it.

Jana watched in horror as both Kaz and the woman on the bed glowed and vanished. The release of energy was enormous; screens flared, machines sparked and shut down in a storm of mini-explosions. Jana was thrown backwards and slammed into the wall. She pulled herself upright and then sat there, senses reeling, wondering what she was supposed to do now.

Sarah worked the soft dough on the wooden tabletop, her hands mechanically going through motions she didn’t even have to think about any more. Push, fold, add some water, push, fold, add some flour. The tactile squish of dough between her fingers felt like safety. The fire warmed her back, and the smell of the slowly roasting chicken that hung on the spit above it made her mouth water. As long as there was bread to make, and chicken roasting above an open fire, she could pretend that her world was the same as it had always been, that the war was still far, far away from her door. When she judged the dough ready she placed it in the cloth-lined wicker basket and left it to prove. She rubbed her hands to remove the clinging specks of gooey dough and flour, then wiped them on her apron as she turned to see a silhouette in the internal doorway and gave a small yelp of surprise.

‘Ooh, you gave me quite a …’ She trailed off in amazement as the silhouette stepped forward and she saw her daughter’s face for the first time in five years.

Sarah’s eyes went wide and then rolled back up into her head as she gasped in surprise and her legs began to crumple beneath her. Dora darted forward but she was not fast enough to catch her collapsing mother. A man Dora had not noticed was close enough, and fast, too. He had been sitting at the kitchen table, Dora’s view of him obscured by her mother. His chair crashed to the floor behind him and he grunted with effort as he lunged forward just quickly enough to get his hands beneath Sarah’s shoulders and ease her gently to the floor.

It took Dora a moment to recognise her mother’s rescuer as her fellow captive from the green. He looked up at her, did a double-take and then smiled.

‘It gives me joy to see you again, young lady,’ he said. His voice was croaky and raw; a side effect of his botched hanging.

‘And I you, sir,’ replied Dora, kneeling beside her mother, who lay still. ‘She is quite insensible. I fear my appearance was too great a shock for her senses to bear.’

‘It would be best to leave her to recover her wits in her own time,’ said Mountfort. ‘Waking people from such a swoon can result in great distress.’

Dora looked around the kitchen for something soft to place beneath her mother’s head. As she did so she registered a number of items that seemed similar to the kind of things she had seen in the future, including a silver machine with two slots in the top and a cable running from the base, a box with a glass window beside a panel of numbers, and a tall white cabinet that was surely a fridge. Filing these anomalies away for later investigation, she spotted a spare apron hanging by the door, rose to collect it, then folded it into a makeshift pillow. She handed it to Mountfort, who placed it beneath Sarah’s head and rose to his feet as Dora resumed kneeling by her unconscious mother.

‘May I ask why your arrival occasioned such alarm?’ he asked as he righted his chair and sat down again.

‘It has been many years since my mother has seen me,’ explained Dora. ‘I think she believed me dead.’

She looked at her mother’s face. There were many new lines, especially on her forehead and around her eyes. They were not lines worn by countless smiles, but betrayed years of frowning worry. Her hair, once so brilliantly blonde, was now almost entirely grey. Dora guessed that her disappearance was the most likely cause of such marked changes in her mother’s countenance. This thought brought her father to mind. So fraught had their reunion been that she had not fully registered the changes time had wrought upon him. Now she thought back on it, he too had been aged prematurely by the last few years, his eyes deeper set, his hairline in full retreat across his scalp. She felt tears come to her eyes but wiped them away immediately, unwilling to let Mountfort see her cry.

‘I must thank you for your kindness towards me in Pendarn,’ she said, careful to keep her voice from wavering.