With the gun angrily clicking in his hands, he finally eased his finger off the trigger and peered through the gunsmoke at the inert body of the other creature. Now a shredded mess.
‘Jesus,’ whispered the old man, his croaky voice shaking.
CHAPTER 72
2001, New York
They stared at the naked body floating amid the pink-red soup of liquid in the plastic cylinder.
‘Will the support unit survive?’ asked Sal.
‘Becks,’ said Liam quietly. His voice little more than a gentle croak. ‘Her name is Becks.’
The soft glow of red light coming from the base of the birthing tube was the only illumination in the back room. It was enough for Maddy to see the lost expression of post-traumatic stress on Liam’s face. ‘She’ll live,’ said Maddy with the hesitant smile of someone not really sure. ‘Bob said their combat frames can sustain roughly a seventy-five per cent blood loss and still be able to recover from that, given enough time.’ She glanced at the shredded remnants of the female unit’s left lower arm. Almost all the soft tissue had been clawed away leaving a skeletal forearm surrounded by tatters of skin and tendon that floated and swayed in the gloop like so many ends of frayed rope.
‘Unlike Forby,’ said Cartwright sombrely.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Maddy. ‘He seemed, like, you know… like a good guy.’
The old man nodded thoughtfully. ‘The best. The very best.’ He sighed. ‘Family man too.’
The only sound in the back room was the gentle purring of the tube’s filtration system. Maddy had shut down the generator to conserve the half a tank of fuel they had left. There was no need for the generator to be chugging away right now; a row of steady green LEDs showed the displacement machinery was fully charged and ready to use again. She’d shut everything else down, the computer systems, the lights, the other birthing tubes and the fridge containing the other embryos… they’d keep in their cryo-tubes for a few more hours without refrigeration.
‘So how long?’ asked Laura, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. ‘You know? Until she’s all better again?’
Maddy looked up at the girl. She could imagine her in another time, confident and popular in her high school, a baton-twiddling cheerleader, everyone’s favourite, always invited to parties, always surrounded by friends and acolytes. That Texan accent — the confident bray of someone who’d never need to question her place in the world… Well, she didn’t look quite so much like a future Homecoming Queen now. Even in this muted light Maddy could see how badly affected she was by the portal’s corrosion effect. Her face looked ghostly pale, the flesh around her eyes dark and it seemed her nose was still leaking a steady trickle of blood: a ruptured blood vessel somewhere inside that quite possibly might never heal.
The boy, Edward Chan, seemed to have fared only slightly better.
Apparently, according to Chan, there’d been another girl with them, but she’d been jumped by one of those things just before she could reach the portal. If she’d suffered the same fate as Forby, then Maddy could only hope her death had been as mercifully quick. Although, after what she’d witnessed only half an hour ago, merciful felt entirely like the wrong word to use. She watched Chan’s large round eyes staring at the mush of organic soup, at the foggy figure of the support unit inside. Both these two, Chan and the girl, seemed to be in a deep state of shock, well beyond grieving for a lost classmate. Liam said there’d been others, sixteen of them had survived the blast back in time. Only these two plus Liam and Becks had made it.
God knows what they’ve been through.
‘How long?’ asked Chan again.
‘About four and a half hours,’ Maddy replied. ‘Four and a half hours and her condition should be stable. She’ll have replenished enough blood to function again.’
‘What about her arm?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether this healing thing actually regrows limbs and stuff. Bob, our computer system, just told me she’d be able to repopulate blood cells. We’ll see, I guess.’
Liam’s eyes came back from far away and met hers. ‘You said… function again?’
She nodded. ‘She has to go back, Liam. You know that. There are loose ends that need fixing.’
The others looked at her. It was clear to her that she was the only one doing any strategic thinking here, thinking beyond the moment.
That’s your job, Maddy. Team strategist… remember?
‘She has to go back and correct what happened… what it is that’s made the present the way it is.’
‘It’s those creatures, isn’t it?’ said Cartwright. ‘The ones that came through your portal… they’re the thing that’s different?’
Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Liam, is that — ?’
Oh my God.
She hadn’t noticed it before. In fact, she had, but she’d thought it was a streak of dust, or perhaps a dusting of some exotic jungle pollen. Looking at Liam right now, even in the dim crimson glow of the birthing tube, she could see a shock of white hair on his left temple. And his left eye… the white of it mottled with the web-like blur of a burst blood vessel.
‘Yes…’ he said after a few moments, not registering the look on her face. ‘Yes… those things, they learned a few tricks from us.’
‘There’s more?’ asked Sal.
He nodded. ‘Yeah… thirty or forty, I suppose. A pack of them.’ His eyes remained on the outline of Becks’s form, curled up like a foetus. In her sleep, vulnerable-looking — just a teenage girl. ‘She managed to kill some of them, but the rest are back there.’
Maddy looked at Sal and Cartwright. ‘Then those hunters across the river, they must be distant ancestors. They’re somehow linked, right? The long heads?’
Cartwright nodded. ‘It’s an unusual configuration.’ He stroked his chin. ‘No… it’s a unique configuration.’
Maddy had lifted the shutter door briefly after they’d seen to Becks and shown Liam and the other two the jungle that now replaced New York. The hunters were no longer probing the riverbank for mud creatures and had returned to the settlement on the far side of the broad river.
‘They’re descendants, Liam,’ she said. ‘Distant… very distant descendants.’
‘And their ancestors,’ cut in Cartwright, ‘must have learned something from you… something that enabled them to survive and prosper. Something, some sort of skill, that helped them survive the K-T event, whatever wiped out the dinosaurs.’
Liam nodded slowly. She could see he’d worked that much out already. ‘So… someone has to go back and kill the whole pack.’
‘Yes,’ said Maddy, reaching a hand out and holding his arm gently. ‘They can’t be allowed to live and develop any sort of intelligence that could save them. They should have died out with all the other dinosaurs.’
‘OK.’ He took a deep breath. ‘OK… I’ll go — ’
‘No,’ she said, a little too quickly. She tried not to let her stare at his bloodshot eye linger. ‘Not you, Liam. You need rest.’
‘If not me, then who? No one else — ’
‘The support unit.’
‘Becks?’ He shook his head. ‘No. She’ll take days to recover, surely. And she’ll not be able to face them all on her own. They’ll kill her, to be sure.’
Her? She?
She held his arm. ‘Listen to me, Liam.’ She nodded at the birthing tube. ‘I know you’ve been through a lot together, but remember… it’s just a support unit in there. A meat robot. A tool for the job. That’s all it is. It’s expendable.’
‘I’ll go with her,’ he said.
‘No.’ Maddy shook her head firmly. ‘No. You can’t go back there again.’
