Time Riders

She let out a breath. ‘So it’s not the end of the world, then? I thought…you know… I thought we’d lost them forever.’

Foster checked the phase interruption indicator; no sign of any shifting packets of densitywhere the extraction portal was due to open. That was good. The soldiers must have gone.

‘All right… here we go,’ he said.

The displacement machinery began to hum and the lights in the archway dimmed as all powerdiverted towards it. Then, across the floor from them a large sphere suddenly began toshimmer, and through the undulating air Maddy thought she could make out the dancing, twistingform of tree trunks.

‘Come on, Liam,’ whispered Maddy. ‘Move your butt.’

Foster swallowed anxiously. ‘Yes, get a move on.’

If they were there, they should step through immediately. Keeping a portal open unnecessarilywasn’t wise; a window on to chaotic dimensions in which anything could lurk… The sooner it was closed the better.

‘Come on!’ he uttered impatiently.

The sphere hovered, shimmered, glowing a soft blue in the flickering dimness of the archway.Foster glanced at the computer screen. The portal had been open ten seconds and a red cautionmessage had already begun flashing on the screen.

‘I have to close it,’ said Foster. ‘Any longer and we risk attracting aseeker. They’re not there.’

‘No!’ cried Maddy. ‘Let it stay open just a bit — ’

‘They’ve failed the rendezvous,’ snapped Foster. He hit the abort button onthe screen and instantly the sphere vanished, the hum of surging powerdiminished and the dimmed flickering ceiling lights grew bright once more.

‘Dammit, Foster, they might just have been running a bit late!’

‘There’s no running late, Madelaine. You’reeither there or you’re not. The window opens, and either they step through or theydon’t. I’m afraid there’s no leaving it open just to wait andsee.’

They sat in silence for a moment, staring out across the floor at the chalk circle, as ifhoping both Liam and Bob might still magically appear, Liam with a guilty expression on hisface for their rather late arrival.

‘So… OK. It’s not the end of the world, then,’ said Maddy, forcingherself to be businesslike. ‘You mentioned something about sending a message?’

Foster nodded. ‘That’s right. We need to send them details on a newtime-stamp… and perhaps we need to pick another location. Not too far away from thefirst location, but somewhere more discreet, less busy, I think would be better.’

Maddy pursed her lips. ‘And how exactly will they get this message?’

‘Tachyon transmission,’ he replied. ‘I’ll give you the technicalexplanation later… It’s complicated.’

She shrugged. ‘I can wait.’

CHAPTER 48

1956, command ship above Washington DC

Kramer dined alone. He wasn’t in the mood to celebrate the victory withReichsmarschall Karl Haas, the senior divisional commanders and their aides. Several dayssince the surrender, and despite a few minor skirmishes as several individual US states in thewest fought on bitterly, America was now a part of the Greater Reich.

His high command was celebrating right now, no doubt solemnly toasting their absentFuhrer in smart dress uniforms, then sitting down together in the White House’sstate hall to discuss the administrative business of running America. He trusted Karl to keepall those ambitious generals and Gauleiters in line; he suspected they feared him almost asmuch as they did their Fuhrer.

No, tonight he wanted to be alone. Things were troubling him.

That body, that damned body… the unsettling questions itraised. Despite what Karl had said, that was no corpse twisted by a mere incendiary grenade.He’d seen what a time portal could do to a human body once before. He’d neverforget the twisted flesh, organs turned inside out and still somehow managing tofunction… for a while.

‘Someone from the future’s after us,’ he muttered to himself.

He could almost feel that someone probing thepast, finding their way slowly towards him, stalking him. At any moment the air could shimmerbeside the table and an assassin appear, a gun raised and ready to execute him. It wassomething Kramer constantly feared. The recurring nightmare had troubled him almost everynight for the last fifteen years — awakening in his bed in the dark stillness of nightto see an assassin leaning over him and announcing his immediate execution for travellingthrough time.

The body… that body… had made his nightmares athousand-fold worse, and now he spent every waking hour fearing what might be out there. Itwas a struggle to keep this torment from Karl, to keep his composure in front of the man. Hewondered sometimes if there was an easier way out.

A soft voice whispered quietly in his head.

There is a way out for you, you know.

Suicide?

No, another way.

He looked out of the window at a dark city punctuated with sporadic smouldering fires andspeared with the sweeping, searching floodlights coming from his command ship.

Think on it.

His quiet voice. The voice that was always there, had always been with him as long as hecould remember. The voice of… ambition… daring him on, pushing him to do thosethings he wouldn’t normally have the resolve to do. As a child it had helped him achieveacademic success, as a young man driven him to earn a doctorate in quantum physics, to becomea research fellow at the Waldstein Institute. It had given him the confidence to finally puttogether his audacious plan to go back into history and make it his.

You could destroy this world, couldn’t you, Paul? After all,it’s your world now. All yours to do with as you wish.

‘That’s madness,’ he replied, putting down his forksuddenly. It clattered noisily on the plate, filling his large, stately quarters with adiminishing echo.

Madness, is it?

Since going through time, convincing Hitler to accept him into his inner circle and finallybecoming the Fuhrer himself, the voice had become quiet, unneeded by him. Like a childbrooding, sulking. But now — since that body, in fact — it seemed to have found anew energy.

Madness, is it? What would happen if a traveller from the future were toappear right here and put a bullet through your brain?

Kramer closed his eyes. The thought had him trembling. The answer was obvious. This historyhe had worked so hard to create would change.

And what if a traveller learned the exact time and place that youentered history? Those woods, 1941? And killed you there? Before you met Hitler?

‘The world would be as it was,’ he replied aloud. ‘The future would onceagain be the dark and dying one we left behind.’

That’s right. A dying world. Choking on toxic fumes. The seaspoisoned. People slowly starving. In a way, it would be kinder to end it now. Would itnot?

Kinder? Kramer hadn’t thought about the world they’d left behind in a long time.Global warming had become an uncontrollable force. By 2050 the ice-caps had finally vanished.The entire African continent was as sun-blasted and lifeless as the surface of Mars. Andpeople, nine billion of them, crowded into the few tolerable regions of the earth left, mostof them starving migrants living in dust-blown shanty towns outside the few mega-cities. Likealmost every other species on earth, Kramer wondered whether one day mankind would alsoeventually become extinct.

‘Kinder,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps itwould.’