… home – place – time …’ He shrugged the end of the sentence away. He was still struggling with the terminology of time travel.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much,’ said Sal, ‘we’ve got Big Bad Bob. He’ll look after us.’
‘Affirmative. I am a support unit. Your safety, Mr Lincoln, is a primary mission parameter. You are to be safely escorted to the New York field office, and from there returned to 1831.’
‘Anyway –’ Sal put on a cheery smile – ‘I’m sure Maddy’s going to get things up and running and open that portal any time soon, right, Liam?’
He tried to wear the same breezy optimism on his face. But it didn’t take. Instead he cocked a sceptical eyebrow at her. ‘I presume you’re talking about some other team there, Sal? Right?’
‘Uh? Why?’
‘Well, to be sure, and I’d hate to think I sound as grumpy as our new lanky friend here, but –’ he shrugged – ‘it never bleedin’ well seems to go quite that smoothly for us.’
CHAPTER 29
2001, New York
Maddy stared, heartbroken, at the small mound of debris in the back room. A portion of the ceiling had completely collapsed. Through a jagged hole in the brickwork above she could see shards of sunlight poking through. The bricks had cascaded down on to two of the growth tubes, shattering the plastic and spilling the protein solution and foetuses on to the floor. There was nothing that could be done for either of the growth candidates – one of each: a baby Bob and a baby Becks – they were quite dead.
‘Oh God … oh no, this is awful.’
Their relatively new generator was damaged as well, the casing battered and dented. A panel on one side had been knocked away and dangled from the frayed remains of several cables.
All the damage had been caused when the archway had appeared in this alternate reality, hovering several feet above the ground where the crater was. The whole archway had dropped by almost a yard. Enough of a shock for the old brickwork, held together by crumbling cement, prayer and gravity, that it had failed them.
‘I have evaluated the damage, Madelaine. The general structure of the archway is severely compromised.’
She nodded silently.
‘The generator is not functional at the moment although it is possible that I might be able to repair it. I will need to first dig away the bricks to assess the level of damage.’ Becks pointed to the shattered tubes. ‘Those two tubes cannot be repaired. The other three growth tubes are undamaged; however, the foetuses inside them will be viable for only another forty-eight hours without power.’
‘Just gets better and better,’ Maddy replied. The sound of her voice scared her. It was small, defeated, barely more than a whisper.
Becks looked at her, missing the irony entirely. ‘No. There is worse news, Madelaine.’
Maddy nodded at Becks to go on.
‘The tachyon transmission array is completely destroyed.’
Maddy cursed under her breath. The transmission array was an important piece of equipment, a relatively small but efficiently crafted signal transfer dish that had sat quietly in the far corner of the back room and until now never ever warranted her specific attention. It did its job, had never required any maintenance. The only reason she knew of its existence at all was because she’d recently – out of sheer boredom – read through a manifest of the technical components in the archway.
But now there it was, smashed to bits, nothing more than a twisted mesh of fine wires and shattered eggshell silicon.
Maddy had a fair idea what that meant. ‘We can’t signal Bob, can we?’
‘Correct. More importantly, even if we had an adequate source of electricity, we will be unable to open or close any displacement windows.’
Those words failed to fully register with her.
‘What did you say?’
‘We use the same array to target signals as we do to target tachyon stream pulses to open a portal, Madelaine. Without the transmission array, we are completely unable to open any portals. We are unable to operate in any meaningful way. This field office is no longer able to function.’
Maddy felt her legs wobble and give way, and before she knew it she was slumped on her knees among the pile of red bricks and cement powder. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her dust-covered face, leaving clean tracks on her cheeks in their wake.
‘Madelaine? Are you OK?’
‘No, not really,’ Maddy burbled. She buried her face in her hands.
Bricks shifted and slid as Becks stepped round carefully and squatted