TimeSplash (34 page)

He put his face up near T-800’s so he didn’t need to shout too much. He pointed at the damaged carriage. “When we stop, uncouple that bastard, then get up to the engine. Edna and I are going to have a little chat with the driver.”

He jumped down from the tender and looked back. Several hundred metres away, the disconnected carriages had piled up into a writhing, shimmering mass. In the fields around the wreck he could see fractures twisting out from the centre, distorting the fields, folding trees and houses. In the sky above, a hole opened and began to draw the air into itself.

“Better hurry up, boys!” he shouted.

“You’re thicker than you look if you think you’ll get away with this.” Overman’s baleful eyes had not left Porterhouse for a moment since the gun had appeared.

“Shut up!” Holding a roomful of people at gunpoint was not improving the big man’s temper.

“I should shoot the lot of you!”

“Your gun’s a standard issue Glock,” Overman said. “Fifteen rounds. There are nine of us in the room, maybe six of us armed. I know you’re a good shot, but you’d have to be bloody Annie Oakley to hit all nine of us before someone jumped you or shot you.”

Porterhouse had already done the calculation and come to a similar conclusion. As things stood, he was safe. If the shooting started, he was a dead man.

“Everyone over there.” He waved his gun, but kept his eyes on them. In his view, Overman and Colbert were the most dangerous. Then maybe Bauchet and Holbrook—although he doubted that Holbrook was armed. That left the kid, Jay, and the girl. Jay would be armed but he didn’t rate him much. The girl was a nutter, and unpredictable, but a steady eye and a cool head were what counted in a stand-off. None of the three tekniks mattered.

He daren’t make them take their guns out and throw them down. He’d never be able to keep them all covered and someone was bound to try something. Maybe he could make them disarm one at a time. That might work. If he could just move them all away from the door and get himself over there before someone did something heroic.

“Get moving,” he shouted. They started shuffling along the wall, clearing his way. They all knew what he was up to, so they were all moving slowly and looking for their chance. “Hurry it up! I can easily start shortening the odds by picking one or two of you off.” It might not be a bad idea at that.

“Tell me it wasn’t just for money,” Holbrook said, his voice dripping with contempt. Porterhouse almost shot him for that. “What else is there but money any more? This world is going to shit, and we can’t stop it. A few more big splashes and governments will start to fall. Then it’ll be every man for himself. While you losers are sitting around hoping the mob in charge will honour your civil service pensions, I’ll be laughing at you from a good, safe distance. If any of us make it past today, that is.”

They had all moved clear of the door now. To escape, all he had to do was cross the room, step outside, lock the door and smash the electronic lock after him.

“Who’s behind it?” Bauchet asked. “Who’s paying you?”

“Why should I care?”

“If you don’t care, then tell me.”

Porterhouse sneered at him and continued edging toward the door. There was a bigger picture here. It was a matter of survival. Yet they still wanted to play spy games while the world went down in flames around them. Damn them all to hell! Especially that bloody girl! What did she have to stick her nose in for? He glanced at her, wondering if he could risk a shot. If it hadn’t been for her, the SAS could never have attempted a lob, and he wouldn’t have had to give himself away and risk everything to stop them.

He noticed that the girl had tensed up, eyes watching his eyes, like a fighter, ready to jump him if she could see an opening. The very idea that she thought she could take him on infuriated him. He wanted to tell the stupid brat to bring it on. It would feel unbelievably good to beat the crap out of her. And after that, well there were other things he’d like to do to her too. What the hell? A hostage wouldn’t hurt. “You. Nutjob. You with the tits.” He kept his eyes mostly on Overman and Colbert, but everyone knew who he meant. “Put your weapon on the floor and get over here.”

“Go to hell, creep.”

He pointed his gun straight at her. “Nobody move or she dies!” He let them think about it for a moment. “Now, you put down your gun and get over here, darling. I won’t tell you again.”

Carefully, Sandra reached for her gun and drew it out. She held it with two fingers and slowly bent down to place it on the floor. From a crouching position, she looked up at Jay. “Now don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

Jay gave her a look of pure astonishment and quickly turned to Porterhouse. “I’m not doing anything,” he said, holding up his hands.

Overman and Colbert both took their chances while this little scene was being played out. Almost simultaneously, they leapt from the wall and across the room, drawing their weapons and diving for cover.

As soon as he saw them move, Porterhouse knew he was dead. He fired three shots, hitting both of them. He swung his weapon back, desperate to take out as many of the rest of them as he could before they got him, but Sandra had already got a proper grip on her gun and fired back. Even as her shot smacked into Porterhouse’s chest, Bauchet and Jay fired too, a fusillade of rapid shots knocking him off his feet. The room seemed to spin away from him as the blackness closed in.

* * * *

Before Porterhouse’s body hit the ground, Nahrees ran straight past Overman and Colbert to her consoles. The rest hurried to help the fallen men. Overman was dead, with two bullets in him, but Colbert was still alive, bleeding profusely from a hole in his thigh. One of the tekniks ran for a medical kit, while Bauchet used his compatch to call for an ambulance.

“Oh my God,” Nahrees said and everyone fell silent, listening for the verdict. “He messed with the targeting controls. They went back over three hundred years.” She did a quick calculation in her head. “It’s a nine minute lob. They only have enough air for six minutes each way—the four minutes we expected it to take, plus a fifty percent contingency. Nearly two-thirds of it will have gone before they even reach the target. At that distance in time, they’ll have just a few minutes at the other end and then…” She stopped, staring bleakly at the platform. “Partway through the yankback, their air will run out.”

Holbrook checked his compatch. “They’ve only been gone a few minutes so far. If you could stop them, bring them back…”

Nahrees shook her head. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like throwing a rock. Once you let go, that’s it.”

Bauchet paced angrily across the room. Seven men dead. Plus the MI5 agent, Overman. And Colbert wounded, perhaps dying. “We have to call in a second SAS team,” he said.

“It’s too late.” Holbrook sounded defeated, staring at Porterhouse’s body.

“No, no.” Bauchet wasn’t going to give up yet. “Sniper’s team set off—” He glanced at his compatch. “—fourteen minutes ago. We still have forty-two minutes.”

It was Holbrook’s turn to shake his head. “The Regiment is based at Aldershot these days. It’s only fifty kilometres away, but even if they scrambled a helicopter, it would take them—what?—a total of forty minutes to reach us? They could suit up and be briefed on the way, but that still gives us just two minutes after they get here. The trip from now to 1902 takes four minutes. And then they still have to cross London at the other end to get to the British Museum.”

“Then I will call in some police officers. We can get them ready in ten minutes. We cannot give up now, Jonathan! We are London’s last chance!”

“It still won’t work, sir.” Jay had been helping tend Colbert’s wound. Now he stood up and faced Bauchet. “If we send untrained police officers back there, we will just create the same kind of disaster we are trying to avoid. I’ve been trying to tell everyone this for days now. They’ll get themselves killed just trying to get to the target, and they’ll create a splash that—well it won’t be on the Beijing scale, but it might still kill hundreds or thousands of people.”

Bauchet snarled in disgust, talking past Jay to Holbrook. “So you want to give up? You want to let the city be destroyed without even putting up a fight?”

“No, sir,” said Jay, stepping into Bauchet’s line of sight. “There is a way to do this.”

“Yes, there is. You can send me.”

Everyone, including Jay, looked round in surprise at the speaker.

“After all,” said Sandra, “I’m the only one who’s done this before.”

“That’s not what I meant!” cried Jay. “I meant that I should go.” He turned to Holbrook.

“She’s…she’s just a civilian, sir.”

“She shoots pretty well for a civilian,” said Bauchet. Sandra exchanged a small smile with him.

Something kindled in Holbrook’s eyes. “Jesus Christ almighty,” he whispered, as much in prayer as in amazement. “Okay. You’re both going. Get suited up.” Jay looked like he was about to argue. “On the double, Kennedy!” He turned to Nahrees. “Fire up that infernal machine of yours, young woman. We’re tossing two more Christians to the lions. God help us.”

Sandra ran for the changing room and grabbed Jay’s arm on the way, dragging him with her.

* * * *

The steam engine rattled along at a hair-raising speed. Sniper leaned out the side of the cab, blond hair streaming, teeth clenched against the wind. For the hundredth time, he blew the whistle and laughed like a maniac.

Edna and T-800 were stoking and driving the engine by guesswork and inspiration. They’d had to leave the engineer and fireman behind because the two astonished men were creating too much of a splash around them. The bricks’ madcap dash across the English countryside was not without its own ill effects. As they pushed the engine farther from its abandoned train and farther off its original spacetime coordinates, it began leaving a trail of temporal anomalies behind it. At first, the disturbance was minor, but it grew as they travelled. Now, as they approached Cannon Street railway bridge, they could see a shimmering, rippling wake of acausal mayhem spreading out behind them.

“You’d better slow this thing,” Sniper shouted.

“What?”

“Stop the fucking train!”

They were sweeping along a wide curve of track, toward the bridge. Immediately beyond that were two brick towers flanking the huge glass arch of the station. Sniper had researched the route in 2050, riding the same line into the same station. It had looked different then. The towers were there still, but the glass arch had been replaced by now-decaying office blocks. Cannon Street station in 2050 had also lacked the thick layers of grime that made everything in sight a uniform, dirty brown.

Edna and T-800 had already worked out the main controls, so applying the brakes was no problem.

“Slow us down more!” Sniper yelled. The bridge was not far away now and it was clear that they weren’t going to stop in time.

Edna applied the brakes with a vengeance, and they were all pushed forward into the nest of valves and gauges that filled the front of the cab.

“That better?” he asked.

Sniper stuck his head out again. They were on the bridge, crossing the Thames, and still going too fast. Sparks were flying from the wheels as they ground along the rails. “Put it in reverse,” he shouted. He considered jumping out while they were still over the river and taking his chances with a six or seven metre drop. He didn’t want to die uselessly in a train wreck. Yet the idea of surviving without being able to reach the target on time was unacceptable. He must live, but he must complete the splash too.

T-800 managed to dump some of the pressure from the boiler, steam billowing from the engine in massive white clouds. It had no effect on their speed at all. They were all looking out of the cab as they reached the station, unable to tell which of the eight platforms they would come in on, clinging to whatever they could as the engine swerved wildly through a branching spaghetti maze of tracks. Some of the platforms had trains already in them. If they hit the back of one, they were done for.

With a final, gut-wrenching swerve, they switched away from a full platform onto an empty one. They were still slowing, but not enough. Even the extra train-length they had won would not let them slow to a stop. With one mind, they threw themselves into the cab and braced their backs against the wall of controls, clutching their carpetbags to them. They eyed the massive coal-filled tender behind them with nervous eyes.

When they hit the buffers at the end of the platform, the engine was hardly moving, yet they smashed through them as if they were made of balsa. The engine ploughed into the concourse, burying its undercarriage in concrete and earth, sending people running for their lives as debris exploded into the air and steam burst from every broken pipe. The tender slammed forward into the back of the cab, crushing its couplings, and then engine and tender concertinaed into the air, lifting Sniper and his crew two metres before the slow-motion crash came to a stop. Then it unwound again. The back of the engine and front of the tender dropped to the ground. The coupling unbuckled, concrete and earth gathered out of the air and reformed the concourse, and the engine reversed out of it.