‘Why?’
He doesn’t know, does he? He hasn’t looked into a mirror. He hasn’t realized how much damage going so far back in time has already done to him. She wondered why he hadn’t yet noted the condition of the girl and Chan. Both looked like people suffering from advanced radiation sickness. But then… from his time, Liam wouldn’t know anything about radiation sickness. Perhaps he attributed the bleeding noses, the pallid complexion to shock. Perhaps he was too much in shock himself to have noticed.
‘Because you’re too valuable to lose, Liam. We need you here.’
‘We need you,’ added Sal, ‘and…’ Her face dipped out of range of the soft peach glow and in the darkness they heard movement, a scrape, the heavy thud of something metallic and the rattle and tinkle of a buckle. Her face returned and she held up something that glinted in the dull light. ‘And she’d have this gun, Liam. Not just a bamboo stick.’
Maddy nodded. ‘You saw how good it was earlier.’
‘High-calibre MP15 assault rifle,’ said Cartwright. ‘It’ll mince those monsters up no problem.’
‘We’ll give her a few hours to rebuild herself. OK?’
‘I’ll uhh… I’ll go and see how many clips of ammo Forby has… had,’ said Cartwright.
Maddy pressed out a smile, and nodded. ‘You do that.’
She turned back to Liam, watching the floating body of Becks. She could see he felt something for the support unit, that they’d bonded in the past… that this time, unlike last time, if the support unit fell, there’d be no one to retrieve its AI, no one to dig the computer out of its cranium and bring it back.
Be the leader, Maddy. There’s no discussion here. It’s decided.
‘Sorry, Liam, she has to go,’ she said forcefully. ‘That’s how it is. She has to do this. We need New York back; we need our power feed back before we run out of fuel. Anyway…’ She glanced at the silhouette of Cartwright shuffling cautiously out through the doorway by the light of a wind-up torch. She lowered her voice. ‘Anyway, there’s going to be one more job for you to do before we’ve dug ourselves out of this whole freakin’ hole.’
CHAPTER 73
2001, New York
Liam watched the sun setting across the river, picking out thin skeins of smoke from the settlement perched on the muddy banks on the far side. He saw several pinpricks of light in the middle of the round huts.
Fire. One of the earliest markers of intelligence. He wondered how many aeons ago this descendant species had learned they could control it, use it. A far cry from the primitive animal fear for it demonstrated by their ancestors.
He heard the shutter rattle as Maddy stooped under it and joined him outside. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Tired.’ Squatting against the outside brick wall of their archway, watching the jungle turn dark and the sky’s rich palette change from crimson to violet, he realized how utterly spent he felt. Finally, after two weeks of nervous tension, two weeks of fearing something primal, savage and hungry could snatch him away at any time
… here he was, somewhere safe at last. Somewhere he could close his eyes for a moment and actually, properly, rest.
‘She’s nearly ready,’ said Maddy. ‘We’re prepping the portal to take her back to one minute after we closed the last one. Those creatures should still all be gathered there, scratching their heads and wondering where you went.’
‘How is she?’
‘The arm looks like it’s begun repairing itself. I noticed there’s some new muscle tissue. No skin yet. I presume that regrows at some point. Anyway, Sal’s bound her arm and hand in bandages to protect it.’
‘How is she?’ he asked again. ‘Can she do it?’
‘She says she can operate to forty-seven per cent functional capacity.’ Maddy smirked. ‘And she’s really rather pleased about the weapon.’
Liam laughed softly. ‘Just like Bob.’
‘They could be brother and sister.’
‘Well, they are… I suppose.’
‘True.’
Liam nodded towards the village. ‘It feels wrong, in a way.’
‘What?’
‘What we’re doing… killing the rest of that pack. I mean, look what they became.’ He shook his head and laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I’m almost proud of them, so I am. They’re like, I suppose… I feel like they’re sort of my creation. We showed them how to build a bridge, how to use a spear. And, after Lord knows how many thousands of years…’
‘Millions actually.’
‘… millions of years, they’ve become this. A brand-new intelligent race and here we are, going to wipe them all out. What’s that word for it?’
‘Genocide?’
‘Aye, that’s it… like that Hitler tried to do to the Jews. And we’re going to do it to those things. They’re not just dumb animals, Maddy. They were clever back in the jungle, you could see that. Very clever, and now here they are just as smart as us humans.’
‘No, Liam, they’re not. Something that old man, Cartwright, said
…’
‘What?’
‘Ask yourself this: just how long have they been at this stage of development? Hmm? They could have got this far — canoes, spear, huts an’ all — millions of years ago and yet… and yet this is as far as they ever got.’ She gazed at the distant village. ‘Otherwise, why aren’t they walking around in smart suits and talking on cell phones?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe they did once. Maybe millions of years ago they were that smart, and this place was a big city like New York.’
‘And what? They chose to become savages again?’
‘Who knows? Maybe they had some sort of war? Maybe they once had an incredible civilization that eventually collapsed into ruins. Or some doomsday weapon wiped them out but for a few poor bloody survivors.’
Maddy nodded. ‘It’s possible, I guess. A lot can happen in sixty-five million years.’
‘Aye, and who’s to say it doesn’t one day happen to us too, eh? And soon.’
She looked at him. ‘Kramer’s time?’
‘Foster’s time, perhaps. You remember the things he told us about the future? The dark times ahead. All that global warming, the flooding, pollution and the poisoned seas… the starving billions?’
She did. It was a future she’d thought she was beginning to see in her lifetime. That big meeting in Copenhagen that was supposed to be the last best chance for the world to agree on how to stop global warming — it had failed miserably. She wondered whether historians from midway through the twenty-first century would point to that day as the very beginning of the end.
‘Well… that’s the future whether we like it or not, Liam. And it’s our job to fight to keep it that way.’
He nodded. ‘Hmm… but do you ever wonder, Maddy?’
‘Wonder what?’
He looked at her, with his bloodshot eye and thin shock of snow-white hair, and for a moment he looked both old and young at the same time. ‘Do you wonder whether that future, the one Foster told us all about, whether that’s the right future to fight for?’
‘I dunno. I suppose we just have to trust him that it is.’
