Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 34

2001, formerly New York

The shutter door rattled noisily under a hammer-blow impact.

‘They’ve found us already!’ screamed Maddy.

Sal stared at the dented shutter door with bubble-eyed panic. It suddenly jumped again in its running frame and another fist-shaped dent buckled the thick metal slats.

‘They’re trying to break in!’ she screamed.

Maddy turned back towards the webcam. ‘Emergency evacuation, Bob! Activate a portal!’

›Affirmative. You should specify time-stamp.

The shutter door lurched again as another huge dent suddenly appeared.

‘Anywhere! Activate a freakin’ portal!’

›Information: Maddy, it is not advisable to enter a portal without a programmed exit location.

The shutter jumped and rattled again; this time the left side of it clattered out of the top of the running frame and swung inwards. A corner of daylight spilled into the archway.

‘Now, Bob!! Jesus! DO IT NOW!’

She heard the displacement rack start to hum and glanced at the charge display. LEDs flickered one after the other from green, to amber, to red as the reservoir of stored energy began to be discharged into the circuit boards of the machine.

Bob was right, though. If they stepped into that portal when it appeared before them without some coordinates — any coordinates — plotted in, they were stepping into something unknown, unquantifiable. Unthinkable. A place there was no return from.

She didn’t, however, have the time to sit down and tap numbers into the system. Sal was backed up beside her, terrified, hopping from one foot to the other. Screaming something at their pursuers in Hindi.

Maddy couldn’t think clearly. The moment was happening too quickly. She’d planned to set up an emergency evacuation time-stamp: some ‘quick dial’, pre-planned coordinates that she could have Bob pull up and use at a moment’s notice. A precaution. She’d planned to sort that out. It was right at the top of her to-do list. But she hadn’t got round to doing it. Always busy with one thing or another. Always having to clear up after fighting the last fire. Just like everything else, she’d found another way to mess things up again.

‘They’re nearly through!’ screamed Sal. ‘Do something!’

‘Bob… the last time-stamp! Plot in the last time-stamp!’

›Affirmative. Plotting.

The shutter door took another battering, bulging alarmingly on the side that was almost knocked entirely out of its frame. The metal slats there were crumpled and ragged almost like the silver foil wrapper of a chocolate bar.

Sal turned to her. ‘Jahulla! What about Becks?!’

She was in the growth tube in the back room. Last time they’d bothered to go in and check on her progress, to look through that murky gunk at the hairless, pre-birth candidate, she’d had the look of a ten- or eleven-year-old girl.

‘There’s no time!’

The displacement machine suddenly discharged its energy. A gust of displaced air sent the rubbish on Maddy’s desk fluttering in come-chase-me circles. Three yards ahead of them in the middle of the archway, perfectly aligned with the shallow scoop in their concrete floor, an eight-foot-wide sphere of energy popped into existence. Maddy could see in the swirling, oil-on-water pattern an image of the location that had been sitting in computer-Bob’s data buffer: Liam and Bob’s deployment location. She could see hints of a rich summer-blue sky, and the greens and browns of grass or trees.

‘We can’t just leave her!’

Another crash and the misshapen shutter door swung entirely free on the right-hand side. It collapsed heavily on to the floor inside the archway.

Sal was right. It wasn’t just that they owed Becks. Not just a support unit, she was much more than code and meat now. She was a friend. A member of their small family. And it wasn’t only that — the loyalty owed to a friend. Somewhere inside her memory was a packet of data that perhaps was an answer to every question they had. Perhaps also an answer to this — why they were being attacked. Who’d sent the units. What they’d done to deserve this.

Through the semi-opaque portal, she could see three perfectly bald heads, ferociously pushing their way over, untangling themselves from the twisted and jagged metal and entering the archway.

No time now to save the unborn child floating in the growth tube.

‘GO!!’ she yelled at Sal, shoving her roughly in the direction of the portal.

Sal looked back at her, ducked down and picked up the wrench ready to swing it. ‘I’m not leaving without you!’

‘Don’t worry, I’m coming!’ Maddy stretched across her desk and grabbed the small bullet-dented hard drive, wrenching it free of the ribbon data cable attached to it.

‘Go!!’ she screamed. ‘I’ve got Becks! Now GO!’

Sal nodded, understanding that at least they had the ‘essence’ of Becks with them. She ran forward and leaped into the portal.

‘Bob! Close it right after me!’ Maddy yelled over her shoulder as she turned towards the shimmering sphere. Through the semi-opaque, shifting, dancing image of sun-baked countryside, she could see that one of the support units was entirely free of the tangle of metal and was looking her way. It broke into a sprint towards her. Towards the portal.

She leaped forward, gritting her teeth at the terrifying prospect of hitting the sphere of energy at exactly the same time as the support unit entered it from the other side; the pair of them fusing together in chaos space and emerging as some entwined, horrifically arranged and short-lived conjoined twins.

‘NOOOOO-!’ She found herself screaming as her feet left the ground and she leaped into the spherical void, her arms swung up protectively in front of her face, for what little good it was going to do her.