The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 20

1194, Kirklees Priory, Yorkshire

A heavy and wet landing. Liam staggered under the impact, dropping to his knees as the white mist of chaos space quickly evaporated from around him.

‘Ow!’ he yelped as he slowly attempted to get to his bare feet. The ground beneath him was a lumpy dark soil rendered as hard as sharp-edged rock by a thick morning frost. Shivering in just his boxer shorts, he looked up to see the three of them were standing in the middle of a small and empty windswept field. The lifeless light of a pale sun hiding behind featureless scudding clouds made the winter morning seem like a forlorn twilight.

‘L-lovely.’ Liam shuddered, hugging himself.

‘We should get dressed immediately,’ advised Bob.

‘T-t-too r-right,’ he chattered.

He slid back the zip of his plastic bag and pulled out a thick coarse woollen robe of olive green and eagerly pulled it over his head, ignoring the scratching against his skin. Next, a pair of thick cotton leggings. Not technically of the period, but the best they could get at short notice. As a precaution Sal had unpicked the brand label and wash instructions. It looked convincing enough to Liam’s eye and hopefully no one was going to be studying his undergarments too closely. Finally, a pair of soft leather shoes with wooden soles, picked up at the fancy-dress hire store, and a length of braided rope to secure the robe around his waist.

As they dressed in hurried silence he watched a dozen crows circling in the grey-white sky above; their cawing echoed across the stillness like a caution. He listened to the mournful hum of a fresh wind and the dry rustle of dead leaves picked up and tossed from one ploughed furrow into the next.

‘It’s n-not w-what I expected,’ he uttered, his teeth still chattering as he cinched the rope belt tightly round him.

Becks’s head appeared through the neck-hole of a muddy brown dress. ‘What were you expecting, Liam O’Connor?’

He shrugged. ‘Green woods … sunny meadows … may flowers.’

She frowned and cocked her head. ‘Why? It is winter.’

Liam watched a plume of his breath curl, twist and drift away from him. ‘Dunno really. I just — ’

‘Recommendation,’ said Bob, ‘we should dispose of these bags immediately.’

‘Agreed.’

Bob kicked at the ground and dislodged a dark clod of soil. Then squatted down and began digging with his big hands like a dog burrowing for a bone. Liam handed Becks his bag and then took the opportunity to study their surroundings. Ahead of them the field ended at the edge of a wood. He turned. Behind them the field rolled over the gentle brow of a hill, and beyond that he could just make out a thin line of smoke drifting up from the top of a stone chimney.

‘Hey! There’s something over there,’ he said.

‘Affirmative,’ both support units chorused.

Liam tutted at them both. ‘What’ve I told you two about that? The “affirmative” thing sounds wrong, so it does. Even more so now we’re here!’

Bob stood up straight as Becks placed the bags in the hole and began kicking soil in to fill it up. The folds of his grey robe stretching over hard slabs of muscle. ‘We should adopt the vernacular language of 1194 from this point onwards.’

Becks nodded. ‘Affirmative.’ They both froze for a moment, both blinking, both busy retrieving data. Finally they stirred to life once more.

Liam shrugged. ‘Are you two all done?’

Bob nodded. ‘Ay, serrr. We now can speake bothe in Auld Anglishe.’

‘En outra,’ said Becks, finishing the plastic-bag burial and stamping down the dark soil with a wooden-clogged foot, ‘nous sommes en mesure de parler en francais Normand.’

‘Well.’ Liam grinned. ‘I am impressed!’ He nodded towards the thin smudged column coming from the stone chimney, and for the first time his nose detected the inviting odour of wood smoke. ‘Is that the way we need to go, then?’

Becks nodded. ‘Oui. C’est la destination. Continu tu doit, trois cents, cinquante-six pieds dans cette direction.’

‘Ay,’ added Bob. ‘Seeke ye, beyonde yon furlong we sholde find — ’

Liam raised his hands. ‘I can’t understand a thing you’re saying now.’

‘Three hundred and fifty-six feet in that direction,’ said Becks. ‘We should be entering the perimeter of the Kirklees Priory, according to boundary data of that time.’

‘Ahh.’ Liam scratched at his ribs, itching already from the coarse material. ‘Much better. Could I suggest … while it’s just us on our own, you speak normal?’

Bob and Becks looked at each other and exchanged a nod.

‘Shall we?’ He rubbed his cold hands together. ‘And maybe whoever’s over there can rustle us up a nice bacon sandwich or so.’

2001, New York

‘So what happens now?’ asked Adam.

Maddy pointed to the displacement machinery. ‘We get ready to open up the portal again in about half an hour … it should be fully recharged by then.’

He looked confused. ‘I thought you said we give them anhour before bringing them back?’

‘Time doesn’t run the same,’ said Sal. ‘That sort of confused me at first as well.’

‘For them an hour will pass,’ said Maddy, ‘but doesn’t mean we need to wait an hour. In about thirty minutes we’ll be charged up. I could send you back in time to some point and arrange to bring you back a whole week later. But the moment after I sent you, I could tap in the timestamp for one week later and open up the portal again. For you a week would’ve passed. For us here, just a few seconds. It’s not, like, symmetrical, if you see what I mean?’

He nodded. ‘I get it.’

She turned to the desk mic. ‘Bob, can you set the data for the first return window?’

› Affirmative, Maddy.

She turned back to Adam. ‘Knowing them, they’ll probably miss the first window anyway.’ She huffed a laugh. ‘I don’t know why I bother.’

Adam looked at the desk cluttered with soda cans, pizza boxes and scraps of paper. ‘It’s almost as messy as my apartment.’

Sal sighed. ‘I clean up — Maddy’s the untidy one.’

He sat down beside them and stared at the monitors. ‘So you’re patched into the Internet?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Maddy clicked with a mouse and minimized a couple of dialogue boxes on one of the monitors. ‘Access to pretty much every linked database in the world, I think.’

‘Good God,’ he said, pointing at one of the screens, ‘is that — is that what I think it is?’

‘The White House intranet? Yup.’

‘You’ve actually hacked into it?’

‘I’d like to say I managed to do that myself — ’ she chuckled — ‘but the field office has always had a line in since we joined.’ She clicked the mouse. ‘For a laugh I go rooting around in President Bush’s email inbox.’ She giggled. ‘He likes sending pictures of cats doing funny things to his buddies. Check it out.’

Adam sputtered laughter at an image of a sleeping kitten on a window-sill with a tiny Yankees baseball cap perched on its head.

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ uttered Adam.

She smiled and clicked the mouse to close the president’s inbox; she knew there were emails buried in there that hinted about tomorrow’s events — events a person from the present shouldn’t know about. Not today, anyway. She needn’t have worried, though; Adam’s mind was swimming around elsewhere. He turned to look at the perspex tube and the rack of wires on the floor beside it.

‘So, Maddy, you said we can actually talk to them? While they’re in the past?’

‘Uh-huh. If we know where and when they are, it means we can aim a precise beam of tachyon particles at the point in space they would have been in eight-hundred-and-whatever years ago. The support units are — ’

‘The big ape and the tall girl who nearly broke my finger.’

She laughed. ‘Yes, them … They can both detect tachyon particles. They have embedded tech in their heads. They’re sort of clones with computers for brains.’

‘But they can’t send tachyon beams back to us,’ said Sal.

‘Why not?’

‘The energy it requires,’ said Maddy. ‘And they’d need a transmitter. Can’t fit all of that and a supercomputer in their heads.’

‘So how do they talk back to you?’

‘They can’t. We sort of operate blind on that front. We just have to hope they’re sticking to the plan.’

‘But they can talk to us,’ said Sal. ‘Kind of.’

Maddy winced a little. She really didn’t want Adam knowing too much about the way they did things.

‘Liam did it last time,’ continued Sal. ‘He left a message for us to find all the way back in the late Cret-’

‘Yes,’ Maddy cut in, stepping lightly on Sal’s toes to shut her up. No need for Adam to know just how far back in time their technology could take a person. ‘Yes. We’ve used what we call drop points before. A document or some kind of artefact that we know they can interact with in the past and that we know to closely observe in the present.’

Adam’s face creased thoughtfully for a moment. ‘So … that’s what you think the Voynich Manuscript is? Something somebody’s using to communicate with the future?’

She nodded. ‘Uh-huh. It might be. We just need to know.’

He shook his head silently. ‘I just … this is … I’m struggling here to take this all in.’

Maddy clacked her tongue. ‘It’s a lot. I was kind of the same at first.’

‘Me too,’ said Sal.

Adam grinned. ‘I knew — all this time I knew you were … for real. That I wasn’t mad. But this really is … absolutely — ’

‘Incredible?’

He giggled like an over-sugared toddler. ‘Yes. My God, that’s it. That’s the only word that does this any justice. Incredible.’

Sal sighed. ‘You get used to it after a while.’