Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [147]
Her partially healed stomach wound had ripped open as she’d laboured on the funeral pyre, but a dark plug of congealing scab prevented any further valuable blood leaking out of her. The dressing on her arm had also unwound earlier, revealing red-raw muscle tissue and bone. A layer of skin over the top of that would have offered her damaged limb some protection – instead the fragile workings of her arm were now clogged with dirt and twigs and leaves and all manner of bugs.
An infection advisory flashed quietly in the background of her mind, along with several others that warned her that her biological combat chassis had suffered enough damage to warrant immediate medical attention. As she watched tongues of orange lash up into the Cretaceous night sky towards a moon a hat size too big, she detected the first precursor particles of the scheduled window and stepped towards the open ground where it was due to open.
She looked back one last time at the fire and picked out the dark twisted limbs of the hominid species amid the flames. For a moment she felt something she couldn’t identify: sadness, was it? Guilt? All she knew was that it came from a part of her mind that didn’t organize thoughts into mission priorities and strategic options.
A sphere of churning air suddenly winked into existence in front of her and calmly, impassively, she stepped forward through sixty-five million years into a dimly lit brick archway.
The first face her eyes registered through the shimmering was Liam O’Connor’s. He smiled tiredly and she momentarily wondered if his mind was flashing the human equivalent set of damage advisory warnings.
‘Welcome home, Becks,’ he said softly and then, without any warning, he clasped his arms around her. ‘We did it!’ he muttered into her ear.
She processed the curious gesture and her silicon swiftly came back with the recommendation that returning the demonstration of affection would be an acceptably appropriate response. Her good arm closed around his narrow shoulders.
‘Affirmative, Liam … we did it.’
CHAPTER 80
2001, New York
Monday (time cycle 50)
They stayed for a few days, Edward and Laura. Maddy said they were probably suffering some sort of radiation sickness from the lab explosion and needed some rest and recuperation. It was nice to have some new faces around here for a while, anyway. But Maddy said they had to go. She was right, of course. They had things to do, lives to go and lead.
But not long lives … not Edward, anyway.
I read his file on our computer. This is so sad. He will write his great maths paper in 2029 that will change the world, and he’ll be just twenty-two when he does that. But then he’ll be dead from cancer before his twenty-seventh birthday.
Cancer at twenty-seven?
That seems so unfair. Twenty-seven years isn’t a life. It’s just a taster of life, isn’t it? I know I couldn’t have told him that and, even if I could, would it have been fair to tell him? Would anyone want to know the exact day they were going to die? I know I wouldn’t.
We were going to send them back to 2015; that was the original plan. But Maddy figured that wasn’t going to work: they’ve both seen too much; they both know too much. Maybe that’s not so important for the girl Laura. Maybe her life isn’t ever going to affect the world that much. But Chan … he’s everything the future’s going to be. It all kind of starts with what he’s going to one day write in a paper.
So what did we do? We left them outside when the field reset. We watched with the shutter open. We watched time come and take them away. Reality just erased them, like someone deleting files off a computer. Maddy says she’s pretty sure that’s going to make things all right again. Reality will bring them back. They’ll be born once more, like all the other kids who died; they’ll be born … be babies, toddlers, kids, teenagers a second time. Only this time they’ll visit some energy lab in 2015 and then get to go home and tell their mums and dads what a totally boring day trip they had.
Well, at least that