Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 66

AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome

Maddy reached for a tallow candle and stepped inside the dark room. The candle’s guttering flame picked out little detail. A vast room that echoed like a cavern. She could see a ceiling above, faintly. Frescos and decoration left for so many years in complete darkness. Bob and Cato entered behind her, another two candles marginally increasing the light in the room.

She took a dozen steps in until finally the candlelight glinted on piles of objects on the floor, laid out on several wooden tables. She went over to the nearest table and set her candle down on it.

‘Bob! Over here!’

The support unit and tribune joined her. Bob studied the items on the table. ‘Hydrogen cell powered pulse rifles,’ he said drily.

‘What are these devices?’ asked Cato.

‘Weapons,’ Maddy replied. ‘Weapons from the future.’

Cato’s eyes widened. ‘The stories of the Visitors… Cicero once mentioned they had “spears that roared”.’ He looked at them. ‘These?’

‘I doubt they’ll “roar” any more,’ replied Maddy, picking one of them up, blowing the dust off it and inspecting the weapon more closely.

‘Information: without maintenance, the hydrogen cells will be dead by now.’

Maddy looked across the wooden table. There were other things, supplies of all sorts: medicines, emergency food packs, tools. ‘This wasn’t just a field trip…’ She gasped. ‘Those Visitors came here to stay! Do you think? To… to colonize Roman times?’

Bob nodded. ‘That appears to be a plausible conclusion.’

She picked up her candle and wandered towards a pile of objects on the floor nearby. She squatted down and inspected them. Clothes. Shoes. Glasses. Some of them spattered with faded bloodstains. By the look of the mound of items of clothing there must have been a lot of them, perhaps hundreds. And all of them massacred?

‘And this, then,’ uttered Cato almost reverentially. ‘This must have been one of the chariots they arrived in.’

Maddy turned to look. He was on the other side of the room now, holding his candle up to inspect something large that glinted dully in the gloom. She and Bob hurried over and a moment later, the three of them were inspecting the dusty, slanted metal sides of a large vehicle. To Maddy’s eyes it looked like a cross between a Humvee and a hovercraft.

‘Multi-terrain personnel carrier. With anti-grav thrusters for a limited-altitude vtol capability,’ said Bob. ‘This appears to be a more advanced model than the prototypes being field-tested by the US military in 2054.’

Maddy shook her head. ‘This is completely crazy! The scale of time contamination… I mean this is insane. What the hell were they thinking?’

‘Maddy?’ It was Sal.

She turned round and saw her silhouette in the doorway. ‘How is he?’

‘Macro’s bound him up.’ She managed a relieved smile. ‘Not serious, he said. Just a flesh wound.’

‘OK… OK.’ She sighed. ‘That’s good.’ She looked round the room. There were plenty of other things to inspect. Perhaps, somewhere in this room, please God, a time machine of some sort. Something to get them back home. Now.

‘Bob, if they’ve brought with them some sort of a time-displacement device, and it’s in here somewhere, we need to find it.’

‘Affirmative. But there is unlikely to be a viable source of power still.’

Bob clambered up on to the slanted metal hull of the vehicle. ‘I will look inside the personnel carrier.’

‘You do that.’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’re going to find a way home, Sal. I promise. Stay with Liam, OK?’

Sal nodded and quickly disappeared out of the doorway.

A time machine. Please tell me you idiots brought with you a means to get back home. Please. You guys can’t have been that stupid. Right?

Perhaps they weren’t stupid. Just desperate.

She returned to the tables stacked with guns and ammunition cartridges and webbing and field equipment, hoping to find some first-aid packs. Anaesthetic for Liam, more importantly something antiseptic to cleanse the wound. Antibiotics to fight any potential infection. He wasn’t going to make it if that sword wasn’t clean. In this pre-penicillin time even a paper cut could finish you off if you got unlucky. She found a first-aid pack, unzipped it. It was fully stocked.

‘Sal!’

Sal came back in. ‘Here… unwrap Liam. There’s an antibiotic spray in here. Use that and use these bandages; at least they’re clean.’

Sal took the first-aid pack and hurried back outside. Maddy resumed looking round the vast room. Her candle picked out a large object in the middle. A box, a crate of some kind.

Crate? A protective crate?

She made her way quickly towards it, doing her best to stifle the growing hope it might actually contain a machine eagerly waiting to be switched on and ready to conveniently whisk them back home to 2001.

Life doesn’t actually work that way, does it, Mads? Not for them at any rate.

Closer, she could see it looked less like a packing crate and more like the kind of travel cage you’d transport a wild animal in. She’d once watched a show on cable TV, a ‘day-in-the-life-of’ kind of show based on LaGuardia Airport. There’d been an episode with a sedated Indian tiger in a crate in the back of an aeroplane. Last of its kind or something. Anyway, the crate had looked not unlike this one. She stepped warily closer to it… expecting at any moment to hear the enraged snarl of a roused tiger or a lion coming from inside. She noticed a sliding trapdoor on one side of the crate.

Lion, tiger… or time machine. This crate, reinforced with iron brackets on the corners, had to contain something important. Gently she eased the trapdoor to the side, revealing a hatchway eighteen inches wide and six high. A viewing slot? A feeding slot?

She wrinkled her nose. There was an awful stench spilling out of it. Like sewage. Slurry. No, even worse. Decay.

A feeding slot, then. It had to be there was some kind of animal being kept in there. Or one that had died and was quietly decomposing. Slowly she raised her candle, its flickering glow beginning to pick out a few slats of wood on the inside.

‘Hello?’ she uttered softly. ‘Anything in there?’

She heard a sudden scratching sound, the scramble of movement inside the box. Then a pair of eyes suddenly lurched into view.

Oh my God!

Eyes. Wide and milky. Almost human. Or perhaps human, but entirely insane, animal-crazy. Completely feral. The eyes were accompanied by a shrill, frantic, gurgling, whinnying cry. Its face — yes, a human face, she could see that now — was hidden from the bridge of the nose down to the chin by some sort of leather and iron mask strapped round the head and caked in scum and dirt.

‘Oh God! Over here!’ she cried. ‘There’s someone alive in here!’