The Doomsday Code

The old man absently stroked the ridged scar down across his cheek. ‘Some Saracens I met did talk of such things. Of numbers and such, of things that can’t be held, weighed, bought or sold. Ideas … ideas our church would consider heresy.’ His face creased with a grin. ‘Would ye believe — many Saracen scholars say we live on a giant ball!’

Liam nodded.

‘Aye!’ Cabot’s loud cackle filled the quiet wood. ‘Would ye believe such foolishness? A ball!’

‘They’re right, though. The world is shaped like a ball.’

Cabot’s laugh choked, the smile wiped from his face in an instant. ‘A man could burn at the stake for saying such as that in the wrong company!’

‘But it’s true, Mr Cabot. The world is a ball, and there are other balls; we call them planets — millions of them up there in space. And they rotate around other suns in what are called solar systems.’

‘Our world … goes … about … the sun?’

‘Aye.’

‘Ye say there is more than one sun?’

‘Aye. That’s what the stars are. Suns.’

Cabot looked up at the sky. He could see none tonight. His face seemed undecided between creasing with another good-natured cackle of laughter, or folding into a stern scowl of scorning disbelief. Finally, cautiously, he looked back down at Liam and shook his head.

‘Ye are a strange young man, Liam of Connor, with an odd way about ye and the way that ye talk.’ He smiled. ‘And ’tis a fanciful tale ye tell. Despite my better judgement warning me otherwise, ye are a young man I like. But I would strongly caution ye to keep such tales of coming from tomorrows-yet-to-be, and ball-shaped worlds and many suns, to yerself!’

Liam shrugged. Maybe Cabot was right. He’d read enough history books to know medieval Europe was a couple of centuries away from accepting ideas like these. To them the world was a flat plain, and the sun moved obediently across it from one side to the other simply because God willed it. And there were no other worlds, just this one. And no other suns. Trying to explain time travel to him, trying to explain how a history yet to happen already exists and — just to make things even more complicated — could even be rewritten, well, even Liam struggled with that sometimes.

‘Anyway — ’ Liam tossed a branch on the fire — ‘all that aside, we came back to learn a bit more about what the secret of Pandora … the Grail … is. But now we know it’s been stolen by someone, our mission has changed. Now, I suppose, we’ve got to get it back first.’

‘Aye.’ Cabot gazed at the fire. ‘There will be a terrible reckoning if ’tis not returned before — ’

‘SILENCE!’ barked Bob, waving an arm to quieten them both.

Cabot hushed and for a long minute they listened to the soft hiss of wind stirring branches and the far-off hoot of an owl, until finally Liam heard something, very quiet, but close by: the metallic jangle of a harness or a buckle.

‘Ye hear?’ whispered Cabot. ‘We are no longer alone.’

Then they all heard it — the almost musical note of a released drawstring, followed by the whistle of something arcing through the air. Liam heard the smack of impact and saw Bob recoil a step backwards. By the light of the fire he could see the glint of something metal protruding from between his shoulders. The support unit turned round to face Liam and he could now see a pale wooden shaft and the white fletching of an arrow embedded deep in his chest.

‘DANGER,’ his barrel-deep voice boomed and echoed into the forest.

Several more arrows whistled out of the darkness, another finding Bob’s right hip, a third hissing past Liam’s head so close he could feel the rush of air on his ear.

‘Bandits!’ shouted Cabot, scrambling to his feet and heading for the open back of his cart.

Into the pale dancing light of the fire, a dozen shapes in rags emerged, all of them armed with bows and long double-edged swords that glinted and flickered. By the look of them, Liam guessed their intention wasn’t to demand they hand over their valuables, but to kill them all first, then to pick through their cart for what might be worth taking.

Bob and Becks moved at exactly the same moment, identical AI routines calculating risk and available courses of action in precisely the same number of micro-seconds. Bob sprinted towards the nearest man, ducking down swiftly at the last moment to dodge the careless swing of his sword. He sprang up again and crushed the man’s throat with the bullet-hard jab of his oversized fingers just beneath his jaw. As the man dropped to his knees, gasping and spraying blood from his mouth and nose, Bob grabbed hold of his sword, flipped it blade-over- hilt and caught it, then finished the bandit with a lightning-quick thrust into his chest.

Becks meanwhile had effortlessly relieved another man of his bow and, using it like a quarterstaff, had scooped him off his feet and on to his back. She dropped down on to him, knees on his chest, and grabbed his head, twisting it sharply until cartilage and bone cracked.

Bob’s blade clattered with a heavy ring as a second man stepped forward and swung at him. Sword pommels locked, Bob pulled his sharply, yanking the other man’s sword out of his hand. It flew through the air, still humming like a tuning fork, and clattered off the trunk of a nearby tree. The man, older than the others, a florid face framed with wisps of dirty white hair, screamed, ‘I yield!’

He raised both his hands in surrender, a gesture entirely wasted on Bob. His next swing severed both of the upraised hands, sending them spinning to the snow-covered ground. The man screamed in agony, turned and ran into the darkness, waving bloody stumps before him.

Liam heard the twanging release of another drawstring and saw Becks had retrieved some arrows from the corpse at her feet. A grunt on the far side of their crackling fire, and a man, who had been sneaking around to take Liam and Cabot from behind, staggered slow baby-steps forward, sporting a tuft of fletching from his forehead and a yard of bloody shaft out of the back. He toppled over on to the fire, sending a shower of sparks up into the dark sky.

The remaining bandits had already seen enough and turned and fled like startled hares, boot soles and swinging arrow quivers disappearing into the darkness. Someone’s agonized drawn-out wailing — presumably the unfortunate handless old man — quickly receded to an indistinct echo that merged with the other frightened calls of the remaining bandits as they tried to find each other in the darkness of the woods.

In those few seconds — little more than the time it had taken Cabot to retrieve his trusty campaign sword from the back of the cart and adopt the once-learned-never-forgotten on-guard stance of an experienced swordsman — four of their attackers lay dead.

‘Good God!’ gasped Cabot.

Bob walked over towards Liam. ‘Are you all right, Liam O’Connor?’ he asked casually.

‘I’m fine, Bob. But you might want to take care of those,’ he replied, pointing at the arrow shafts protruding from Bob’s chest and hip.

‘Affirmative.’

Becks joined them. ‘I will assist you, Bob,’ she said, calmly reaching for the barbed tip of the arrowhead poking out from between his shoulders. She snapped it off with a flick of her wrist. She reached around in front of Bob and pulled the shaft out of his chest with the sucking sound of puckered flesh.

Cabot watched in goggle-eyed silence as she snapped the second tip off and pulled the arrow out of Bob’s hip without even a flicker of reaction on his face.

‘Blood is congealing from the two wounds already,’ she said. ‘I would estimate your combat functionality to be no less than ninety-five per cent of full capacity.’

‘Agreed,’ said Bob.

‘What in the saints’ names are ye?’ hissed Cabot.

Bob glanced at him. ‘Very tough human being, serr,’ he replied unconvincingly.

‘And ye,’ Cabot said to Becks. ‘No lady have I ever seen fight like that!’

‘I am also a very tough — ’

Liam laughed a little shakily, still adrenaline-pumped from the attack. ‘It’s all right, I told him we’re from the future already. You can drop the old English now.’