TimeSplash (35 page)

Then it started again, crashing into the concourse, tender and engine mounting into the air.

Sniper grabbed T-800 as soon as the second bone-jarring impact was over and the engine started un-crashing again. He dragged him to the edge of the cab and, as soon as the wheels hit the ground again, they both jumped clear.

Behind them, Edna didn’t quite make it before the crash started again. This time, they saw him thrown against the front of the cab, his face smashing into the valves and gauges. Then the oncoming tender pushed the engine up once more and they lost sight of him. Sniper tried to get to him when the back of the engine came down once more, but the ground around him was heaving and shifting so much he couldn’t even stand. They saw Edna’s limp body slammed against the boiler yet again with the same sickening force. Then they turned and half-crawled, half-staggered away from the wreck that was smashing their friend’s body again and again. They said nothing, but kept going doggedly across the madly bucking concourse. People all around them were screaming, some were in furiously oscillating motion, or were sinking into the floor. Way above them, the great glass arch shattered and tonnes of broken glass fell in sheets of deadly rain.

Sniper and T-800 made it to the relative safety of the main entrance before the glass hit the concourse. They sprinted out through the frightened crowds while dozens behind them looked up at a million soot-covered blades dancing in the air above them.

“This way!” They’d both lost their top hats, but they had their carpet bags. Sniper led them at a run down Cannon Street, dashed recklessly across the busy road, and turned into St. Swithin’s Lane. It was a road of tall stone buildings, with little shop fronts and courtyards. They stopped in the archway of the first courtyard they came to and caught their breath, out of sight of all but a very few. They were dirty and dishevelled, bruised and hatless, smeared with oil and soot, but they were alive.

Sniper started laughing.

T-800 looked at him and gave a wry smile. He shook his head. “Edna just died, you know?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t.”

They tidied themselves up as much as they could and set off again. At the bottom of the road they turned left into King William Street. They were still attracting wary looks from the people they passed. All around them was a shimmer, a slight blurring of outlines, a movement of road and wall, even of the air itself. Everything threatened to explode into madness at any moment. They crossed the street, dodging between horse-drawn carriages and coaches, shouted at by cabbies, honked at by a chugging, rattling motor car.

At the end of the street, on the corner, was Bank underground station. They hurried inside and down the stairs, ignoring the ticket booths and going unchallenged. The westbound platform was busy but not crowded, and they quickly found a quiet spot at the end of the platform where they could wait without too many people staring at them.

“There’s only twenty minutes left,” Sniper growled.

“Maybe we’d be better off on the surface?”

“No way. Look.” He nodded toward a young couple, a few metres away. The couple was watching them. The woman’s hand was twitching back and forth and the platform around them was undulating in small ripples that spread from her feet. “Just the sight of us standing still seems to be enough to trigger a splash. If we go up there and sprint through central London, think how many people we’d shock, bump into, knock over. We’d get about twenty metres before we had a full-scale splash on our hands.”

“I thought that’s what we wanted.”

Sniper turned on him angrily. “This isn’t some amateur-night outing, man. We’re not here for a few cheap laughs and a bit of excitement. This is the biggest lob of all time and we’re going to make the biggest splash ever recorded. We’re going to shoot fucking Lenin, man! Nothing else is good enough. You understand?”

T-800 met Sniper’s stare for several long seconds before he gave a small nod of agreement. A breath of dusty air along the platform announced the imminent arrival of the tube train.

“About fucking time,” Sniper growled.

* * * *

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jay demanded. He was wearing a one-piece pressure suit in pale blue and feeling gangly and self-conscious. The suits were there for the lobsite staff and were mostly unused and spotless because none of the equipment had been tested yet. Jay tried not to dwell on that.

Sandra was still in one of the changing cubicles, getting into Nahrees’s splashgear. “I’m doing what I have to,” she shouted.

Jay was worried. “I know what you went through at Ommen. I’ve read your file, remember. I saw you. This could be much, much worse. You don’t have to do this. Bauchet can get some police in. I can do it on my own. For God’s sake, I—”

His jaw dropped as Sandra walked out of the cubicle. He had a vague memory of how great she’d looked in the cage at Ommen, and he’d been highly impressed by her looks since she’d turned up again, but the way she filled that figure-hugging, pale blue catsuit was quite literally breathtaking.

Seeing him standing there with his mouth hanging open, she put her hands on her hips and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “You were saying?”

He blinked, having for the moment lost whatever he’d been about to say. Instead, he managed a feeble, “You look… nice.”

Sandra shook her head and sighed in exasperation. She grabbed her helmet and stomped past him. Jay picked up his own and followed her into the other room, where all conversation immediately stopped. Everyone was staring at Sandra, even the two medics attending to Colbert, even Holbrook as he organised the disposal of Porterhouse’s body, even Nahrees, who said, “Wow, it didn’t look that good when I tried it on.”

Holbrook was the first to regain his composure. “There’s bad news,” he said, addressing Jay.

“You can’t lob until the SAS team returns.”

“What? Why not?”

Nahrees jumped in. “We don’t know if it’s safe. No one has ever tried to send someone back from a lobsite that was already in use. No one can calculate extratemporal trajectories yet. There are theories, of course, Lee Chin Wu just published a paper on supertemporal coordinate systems that looks promising, but it’s all speculation, really. However, there has to be a finite probability that—”

“What she’s saying,” said Holbrook, loudly enough to stop her saying it, “is that the SAS team will be yanked back to where and when we are. Right here.” He nodded toward the platform.

“If we send you from there and they’re being drawn back to the very same spot, there might be a chance you’ll bump into the SAS team on their way back. We don’t know what that would mean, and we can’t take that risk, so we’re going to wait until they arrive.”

“Wait?” Sandra was outraged at the suggestion. “Do you know what the time is? Do you know how long we’ve got?”

“It’s not as bad as it seems,” Nahrees said, almost flinching as Sandra turned to glare at her.

“We don’t need to sync with Sniper’s timeline, we just need to overlap with it. I can send you back to a slightly earlier time so that you can still make it across town and arrive at the museum in time to meet Sniper.”

Sandra tried to puzzle out the various timelines—the one they were in, the one Sniper was in, and the one they would need to be in to get the job done.

“How much earlier?” Jay asked.

“Well, if we assume Sniper will arrive at the museum with a few minutes to spare, we can send you back to anything up to fifty-six minutes before that time and you’d still see him. Of course, it would be better if you got there well before he did in case he gets there early. So we should give you enough time to have, say, twenty minutes at the museum.”

Sandra gave a sharp laugh. “We can’t just hang around outside the British Museum for twenty minutes! Look at us. Can you imagine the splash we’d cause? And if anything is going to give us away to Sniper, it’s a splash happening before he even gets there. Besides, Lenin will be there and we’d put him in danger if we start a splash near him. We might end up doing Sniper’s job for him!”

Holbrook shot an angry glance at Bauchet. “If we’d known in advance what the target was, we could have had maps and plans here, found you a safe place to hide, instead of all this seat-of-the-pants stuff.”

Bauchet scowled back at him. “It is because of your mole that my hands were tied, my friend.”

Holbrook shook his head in frustration and backed down with a groan. “You’re right, Jacques, it was our mess.”

The medics lifted Colbert and carried him out to a waiting police helicopter. Porterhouse’s body still lay bagged on a gurney, attended by police officers. Getting an ambulance to Vauxhall in the middle of a general evacuation had proven impossible. In the end, Bauchet had pulled strings and got the Met to send in a chopper. More would be arriving soon to take away the rest of them once the lob was over.

Holbrook pursed his lips and turned to Nahrees. “Find them a schedule that gets them to the museum ten minutes before Sniper gets there.”

Nahrees nodded. “I’ll aim for forty minutes into Sniper’s lob. Is that okay?”

He nodded, his mind seemed to be elsewhere already. “Jacques, could you make sure we have enough police officers on hand to deal with the SAS team when it returns?”

“It’s taken care of. They’re standing by. And medics too, just in case.” He shrugged, acknowledging what a negligible chance there was that any of them would still be alive when they returned.

They all turned to look at the platform, empty now, but soon to be piled with the bodies of seven unfortunate time travellers.

* * * *

“It should be about…now,” Nahrees said and a moment later, the whole SAS team materialised on the platform. It was more like they’d been tossed into the room by the hand of God. The seven men went sprawling and rolling across the platform, most of them ending up tumbling onto the floor. By a miracle, two of them were still alive, but in a bad way. Police and medics rushed to their aid. One of the living pushed away any attempts to help him, determined to report.

Holbrook glanced at Nahrees. “Get those two on their way,” he said, meaning Jay and Sandra, then went to the stubborn soldier.

“Clear the platform,” Nahrees was shouting. “Everybody behind the yellow line.”

“Sir,” the SAS man said to Holbrook. His voice was faint and his lips were blue with cold. Jay and Sandra jumped onto the platform, watching the man as he struggled to speak. “Something went wrong.”

“We know, lad. Let the medics take care of you.”

“We went back too far. It was so cold. The colonel realised there wouldn’t be enough air to get us all back alive. We drew straws, sir.” Tears ran down his anguished face. “The losers got to keep their helmets and…and another man’s helmet for when his own air ran out. The rest…”

“Lob in ten seconds,” Nahrees said.

Holbrook looked around at the fallen soldiers. Only three had been wearing helmets, he now realised. Yet even one of those had succumbed to the cold. He looked up at Jay and Sandra, tethered together on the platform. They were looking back at him with horror in their eyes.

“Helmets on,” Nahrees said. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

And they were both gone.

Jay hit the ground hard. He thanked the gods that someone in MI5 had had the sense to put their lobsite on the ground floor of the SIS Building. It had occurred to him during the long, silent flight what the consequences might have been of siting it above or below ground. Almost as soon as he hit the ground, he was wrenched sideways by the tether. He slid across a rough, cobbled surface. Anxiously, he looked around for Sandra but couldn’t see her. The tether that was dragging him along disappeared into the ground just a metre or so ahead of him. No, he realised, not into the ground but over an edge. Sandra was dangling over some kind of precipice and pulling him toward it.

He jerked his body round so his feet were ahead of him and managed to dig his heels in hard enough to stop himself sliding forward. Frantically, he looked around for something to hold onto but there was nothing, just the round, smooth cobbles.

He was getting his bearings now. They’d landed in some kind of scruffy dockyard—a series of small inlets along the edge of the Thames. Sandra must have materialised in mid-air and fallen toward the dirty, oily water, while he had landed on the wharf. There was no one around, no ships nearby. An empty berth then. There was a crane about ten metres away, a black tower of criss-crossed wooden beams, sitting on a bogey with steel wheels. He wondered about shouting for help, but he thought that bringing people to him would only make matters worse. If that crane would only roll his way… Then it hit him that the crane was on rails, steel rails that were set into the cobbles. The rails ran right past him, just a little way behind him. If he could somehow reach them without letting himself be dragged over the edge…

The tether began tugging and pulling. He almost lost his tenuous grip on the cobbles. It didn’t help that his fingers were almost numb with cold from the lob.