TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (7 page)

‘No time. Come on, next we need Jana’s chip.’

But as Steve hurried back to the door, Kaz held out a hand and stopped him. ‘They were going to use this information to hurt my dad?’

Steve nodded, impatiently. ‘Only as a way to hurt you. But they can’t because the drive’s fried. As long as we don’t get ourselves recaptured by standing around chatting when we should be running, you’re both safe.’

Kaz shook his head. ‘That’s not what I meant. What about the guard who was there? He heard everything. When he wakes up he can report what I said.’

‘Don’t worry about him,’ replied Steve, dismissively. ‘He won’t be telling anyone anything. Now can we go, please?’

As Steve pushed past him and swiped the card to reopen the door, Kaz realised that Steve had never answered his question about whether the guard was dead.

‘Split up,’ yelled Sweetclover as he burst through the main doors into the lobby. ‘Sweep the building floor by floor, room by room. If you find the impostor, radio in but don’t wait for back-up. Engage and destroy on sight.’

The five faceless drones walked smoothly, without hurry but also without pause. They broke apart and kept moving in different directions without conferring, moving and thinking as one. As they walked away a thought occurred to their master.

‘I shall remain here at the main desk until contact is made,’ he shouted. Then, more quietly, ‘Don’t want to get myself shot, do I.’

‘What is a labratree?’

Simon the guard looked confused, though whether he was puzzled by the question, or by the fact that it had been asked at all, was hard for Dora to say. ‘I’m sorry, miss?’ he replied, his voice rich with an accent that Dora found strange but not unpleasing. Wherever he was from, it was far from Cornwall.

‘This place. His lordship said it was the “central labratree”. I do not understand what those words mean.’

‘Um, well, it’s a laboratory,’ said Simon, confused by her confusion. ‘Where they do science and stuff.’

‘Séance? Ah, I understand,’ replied the girl with a firm nod of the head designed to make her seem resolute and sensible rather than terrified and confused. ‘This is a place of magic.’

The guard laughed. ‘Might as well be, for all the sense I can make out of it.’

Dora decided that she liked Simon and, realising that the lab was not going to reveal any of its secrets to her, she turned her attention to him.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked bluntly as she sat on a stool close to the door where he stood, no longer at attention.

‘Dulwich, miss.’

Dora shook her head. ‘I do not know this place. And I am not your mistress, my name is Dora.’

‘Um, Dulwich’s in London. So I’m a Londoner, I reckon.’

‘London.’ Dora spoke the name as if it were a curse. For some of the boys in her village – and some of the girls too – London had signified excitement and adventure. Her older brother, James, had run off to London on his fifteenth birthday and nothing had been heard of him since. But for Dora it had represented everything she wished to avoid. He father had once told her of a visit to the capital that he had made when he was a young boy, seeking his fortune. To hear him tell it, London was a squalid place of filth, disease and moral decay. It was also populated by strange peoples from around the world, which Dora supposed explained the boy’s aspect. She had heard of blackamores but Simon was the first she had ever encountered. She resisted the urge to approach him and touch his face and hair, feeling that it would be rude to give in to her curiosity.

‘I have never been to London,’ she said. ‘What is it like?’

Simon shrugged. ‘Like it is on the telly really. My part of town was banged up, yeah. No money, lots of drugs and gangs and shit. But, you know, it’s home. My mum and my sis are still there. It’s all right, I s’pose. But when I got this job, I can’t lie, I was happy to get out.’

Dora made a mental list of all the things she had not understood about Simon’s answer and began to work through them one by one.

‘What is telly?’ she asked.

As they approached a lobby that marked the junction of two wings of the building, the man disguised as Lord Sweetclover shoved Kaz back against the wall and raised a finger to his lips. They heard heavy footsteps echoing down the corridor ahead of them. Kaz held his breath, desperate to make no sound as their unseen pursuer stalked them.

Steve reached down and grabbed the gun Kaz was carrying. Kaz held on tight and scowled his refusal to let go, but Steve whispered, ‘Play prisoner.’ Kaz reluctantly relinquished the weapon, which Steve shoved in his pocket before grabbing him by the shoulder and pushing him forward, out into the lobby and plain sight.

The footsteps had been made by a short, wide man encased head to toe in riot armour. Upon noticing Kaz and Steve, the guard stopped dead and turned to regard them from behind his mirrored visor. There was a predatory stillness to him that made Kaz deeply uneasy.

‘Good,’ said Steve, pushing Kaz ahead of him towards the stationary sentry. ‘You can help me get this prisoner to a secure location …’

The bluff didn’t work. Kaz saw the guard’s arm begin to rise, registered the heavy gun it held, realised that there was a good chance he was about to die and felt a huge surge of fear-fuelled adrenaline coursing through him. His stomach felt empty, his head felt light. Fear paralysed him. Then he felt Steve pushing down on his shoulder, understood what he was being asked to do, forced himself to relax and crumpled to the floor in a heap.

There was a flash of light above his head. Before he could gather his wits, Kaz was being dragged back to his feet and hurried past the twitching guard, who lay sprawled against the wall, his gun lying useless in his outstretched hand. Steve paused and pulled the guard’s helmet off. Upon seeing the guard’s face he nodded, as if confirming something to himself.

Kaz didn’t know what he would have expected to see beneath the helmet, but it certainly wasn’t a bald head and face covered in elaborate indigo tattoos. The guard’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

‘Down here, quickly, we haven’t much time,’ said Steve as he handed the gun back to Kaz. ‘My disguise doesn’t seem to be fooling anybody.’

Kaz ran after Steve and the gun almost fell out of his hand, so badly was it shaking with excitement and fear.

‘Can’t we make a break for it?’ he gasped.

‘I told you, no,’ replied Steve as he skidded to halt outside a heavy door. ‘We need the chip and the girls.’ He swiped the card, the door slid open and they slipped into a stairwell. Steve led them up the stairs at a run.

They were two storeys up when they heard a door crash open somewhere below them. Heavy footsteps echoed upwards. Without breaking his stride Steve reached into his backpack and pulled out a small round object, about the size of a casino chip. He stuck it to the wall. Kaz noticed that it shimmered and vanished as he passed.

They reached the next landing and Steve again swiped the card in an entry coder and pushed Kaz through a door, this time into a long corridor lined with windows on one side and glass-walled cells on the other. The door closed behind them and Steve broke into a run. Kaz followed suit. As they reached the final cell there was a muffled explosion from the stairwell they had just ascended. Kaz looked back at the door and saw smoke and dust billowing upwards behind the glass.

Kaz turned back and saw that Steve had opened the cell and was now kneeling by the single bed it contained, shaking a sleeping girl. Crimson sparks flashed around the pair of them as he did so. Kaz recognised her at once.

‘Jana,’ Steve was saying urgently into the girl’s ear. ‘Jana, wake up, you need to wake up now.’

The girl moaned and stirred, rolled over and tried to bat him away.

‘Has she been drugged?’ asked Kaz.

‘And worse,’ replied Steve. He pulled a syringe from his backpack and, in one fluid move, popped off the plastic cap and delivered its content into Jana’s jugular.

That woke her up fast enough. She roared in pain, sprang up in bed and began pounding on Steve’s head and face with tightly curled fists, yelling all the time. Red fire arced and spat in the air each time she made contact. It took Steve a few moments to get a grip on her wrists and restrain her, but eventually he stopped the onslaught. For a second they faced each other, she sitting up on the bed, fists raised, he kneeling at the bedside, restraining her, preventing her from hitting him any more.

So she head-butted him.

Steve reeled back, his nose spraying blood, but he still held her wrists tightly so she tumbled out of the bed on top of him. They sprawled in a jumbled heap on the black and white tiled floor, a penumbra of crimson fire surrounding them like an electric halo.

This bastard’s grip was too tight to escape, so Jana decided to keep up her assault another way. She opened her mouth wide and snapped forward, intending to bite off his ear. But before she could crunch the cartilage she felt strong hands around her waist and she was lifted onto her feet. More red sparks flashed in the air around her. The man on the floor let her go. Jana turned her attention to her new assailant, but stopped as she recognised the boy from the old house.

‘Please stop,’ he said. She wrestled herself free of his grasp and stepped backwards into clear space, adopting a fighting stance. She didn’t have the first clue how to fight, but they didn’t know that. Jana had long ago learned that a posture of defiance was always better than one of submission.

‘Jana – it’s Jana, isn’t it?’ said the boy. ‘We met before.’

She nodded, wary, keeping her eyes on the other man, the one who had kidnapped them, who was rising to his feet looking very annoyed indeed.

‘OK, listen, Jana,’ said the boy. ‘Like you, I have no idea what is going on. I don’t know where we are, I don’t who anybody else is and I don’t know why they’re doing this to us. But this guy’ – he indicated his companion – ‘is trying to rescue us. I think.’

‘You don’t sound very sure,’ Jana replied.

The boy shrugged and held out his right hand, offering her the gun that lay within it. ‘I’m not. But we can ask for an explanation later. There are security guards with big guns trying to catch us, so I say we get out of here. Yes?’

Jana eyed the gun suspiciously. It was old and crude, heavy, metal and alien to her. She could not deny she would feel safer with it in her hand, but she had no idea how to use it. She looked up at Kaz, trying to work out the angle, the trap she was missing. But try as she might, she couldn’t get a handle on the situation. Reasoning that it was better to be armed and confused rather than merely confused, she took the proffered weapon and nodded.

‘Great,’ said the boy. ‘I’m still Kaz, this is Steve, but I don’t think that’s his real name and it’s definitely not his real face. And you’re Jana, yes?’

‘Have they already removed the ENL?’ snapped Steve, before Jana could answer the boy’s question.

Jana’s left hand flew to the back of her neck where it found a patch of gauze. She ripped it off and felt a raw, puckered wound, glued shut. She nodded, which pulled at the wound, causing a flash of hot pain that made her wince.

The man cursed under his breath and reached into his backpack, pulling out another gun, which he handed to Kaz.

‘What’s this?’ asked Kaz, handling the strange device warily. The way he held it told Jana it was heavier than the revolver he had just given her, although it had no metal components that she could see. It looked like porcelain, cream coloured, smooth and featureless. There was a trigger, barrel and handle, but instead of a hammer there were two dials sticking out of each side, like the volume controls on an old radio. Jana recognised it as laser weapon, not that dissimilar from the ones used in her time. Which meant this Steve character could be from the future, like she was.

Steve snatched the gun away from Kaz, adjusted the two dials, pressed a small button on the top of the barrel, and handed it back. ‘Point and shoot. I’ve set it to non-lethal, OK?’

‘But …’

‘Give it to me,’ said Jana impatiently, offering the revolver back to Kaz. ‘I know how to use one of those.’

They swapped weapons. Jana felt the cold weight of the laser and smiled. This was more like it.

‘Are we done?’ asked Steve impatiently. ‘We have very little time. We need to get to the central lab. That’s where they’ll be running the analysis. We need to get that chip back at all costs. I’ll lead the way. Kaz, bring up the rear. Shoot if you see any guards.’

Without waiting for agreement, Steve ran out of the room. Kaz shrugged at Jana again and indicated that she should go ahead of him.

Seeing no other choice, Jana raised the gun and ran.

‘I do not understand. You say that if you were to walk down one of the streets in your town wearing any garment coloured blue, a gang of boys would attack you with knives?’

‘Yeah.’

Dora shook her head in frustration. She was certain there was some deeply buried religious or philosophical grievance behind such territorial aggression, but she could not get Simon to explain it to her. ‘But why they would do this? Is the colour blue a symbol of a particular religious sect? Do the boys who wear red pledge their allegiance to a different church?’

She was certain this would prove to be the explanation; surely the blues were Catholic and the reds were Protestant. Simon shook his head, as confused by her suggestion as she was by his answers.

‘Nah. ’Sjust territory.’

‘So the dispute is political. Either Reds or Blues claim their territory for a foreign power. Are they Spanish puppets?’ Dora did not understand how they could be Spanish agents without being Catholics, but she was determined to try.

Simon laughed at her, which made Dora blush with embarrassment and annoyance, even though she knew his laughter was not unkind.

She pouted, folding her arms crossly.

‘Calm down, I’m not taking the piss,’ he said. ‘’Sjust funny. Look, it’s real simple. The Dully White Gang own my part of town, the Kingswood Estate. They hate the Ninerz from Norwood. They don’t want them on their patch, causing trouble, trying to cop off with their sisters. If everyone stays in their territory, there’s no trouble, is there.’