‘Good start,’ she said, stemming the flow in self-defence. ‘It’s been done before but there’s no harm following in other people’s footsteps. Obviously, you’ll need a control. A time-slip-free period for comparison. Have you given that any thought?’
Matthew stared at his blank screen, apparently thinking deeply. ‘Well, there’s nothing happening at the moment, time-slip-wise, so how about the here and now? Easy to monitor as well.’
She nodded. ‘Makes sense. Connor – replicate and remove the appropriate sections and send to Farrell’s console.’ She turned to Matthew. ‘Your console is receive-only, Farrell. You’ll be able to tinker to your heart’s content but you won’t be able to damage the real Map.’ She scowled at him. ‘This time.’
Matthew ducked his head. It would seem that wrecking the Time Map was, for the Map Master anyway, the defining moment of his life. On the other hand, the memory of the Map slowly darkening, the silver lines coming adrift and waving aimlessly as it slowly disintegrated around him was not something he ever wanted to repeat. Besides, work on time-slips wasn’t the real reason he was here. Bold Street and Versailles were only for show. It was the present that interested him most. Luke and Jane were out there somewhere. In the here and now.
The Map Master was continuing. ‘I’ll check on you regularly and I’ll want a short update on your progress at the end of every day.’
Matthew nodded obediently, fired up his console and got to work.
In response to a request from Major Ellis, the Map Master was able to report that Farrell appeared to have settled in well and was taking an innovative and unorthodox approach to time-slip study. Since innovative and unorthodox was Time Police-speak for downright weird, Ellis grinned and left him to it.
Inasmuch as Matthew could be while his teammates were out there – as Luke had put it, encountering peril during their every waking moment – he was enjoying himself. The Map towered high above him, glowing silver in the semi-darkness of the Map Room, and he found its continual hum quite soothing.
While his time-slip C&C program was running as camouflage, he had . . . let’s go with the word acquired . . . a program very similar to the planet-hunting software employed by the European Space Agency. This program was designed to take a series of rapid images of a complex subject – the Time Map, for example – and compare them, looking for minute changes undetectable to the human eye, and use these to locate possible planets. Or in Matthew’s case – minute irregularities with the Time Map. Because if Luke Parrish was out there and anywhere near a pod, there would be irregularities, he was convinced of it.
With his perfectly legitimate C&C program chugging away in the background and knowingly in direct contravention of Commander Hay’s instructions, he initiated his third program, the one he and Jane had set up to monitor all email addressed to an entirely legitimate rehab unit. Or the Tall Trees Clinic for Rich Inadequates Perpetually Bombed Out of Their Brains, as Luke referred to it. Any email from Jane with a particular line of code would immediately be intercepted and rerouted to Matthew’s scratchpad, currently located in a bag under his console. All he had to do now was wait.
Each day he would report for duty at the allotted time, fire up his console, and from that moment onwards, no one, not even the Map Master herself, could get a word out of him as he sat hunched, his face illuminated by screen light, fingers flying, not even taking a few minutes to ease his eyes and chat with his neighbour. On the other hand, it was well known that many social skills still eluded him – and at least he wasn’t doing any harm – so he was left alone.
True to her word, the Map Master dropped by at irregular intervals to monitor his work. He knew better than to try to conceal anything from her, laying ninety per cent of his work out in front of her and talking her through his progress, step by step, confident she would cut him short before her ears started to bleed. But to be fair to her, she was encouraging for the most part.
‘Interesting approach, Farrell. Keep it up. I’m just over there if you want me. Or talk to Officer Connor if I’m not around.’
Matthew would nod, his attention already back on his work.
There were regular messages from Jane – ostensibly to her supervisor. The one reporting a prospective job offer for Luke was interesting. Reading the sting between the lines, he grinned – so typically Jane – and deleted it immediately. He was surprised to find he missed her. He even missed Luke.
His childhood had been non-existent. No one employed as a chimney boy in 19th-century London had had that luxury. No games. None of them ever had enough strength left at the end of the day when they were locked in their shed with a crust between them. And between the hunger, the cold and the rats, not much sleep either. No one ever spoke to the boys – commands were relayed by boot or fist – so none of them had a vocabulary of more than a few words.
And then his dad had taken him away and he’d lived at St Mary’s. It was good there. He’d liked it but they were all adults. There had been very few opportunities to mix with people his own age.
Now, however, there was a place for him here, however small that place was. There were people his own age. Whatever that age was. No one was quite sure. He had friends. Jane and Luke were his friends. They were away from the safety of TPHQ and he was covering their backs. Disobeying his instructions, of course, but Matthew was his mother’s son. He’d often seen her shrug and ask why she should care. They weren’t her rules. Well, these weren’t his rules. His part was to keep his friends safe and, so far, things were going well.
28
While Matthew was beavering away back at TPHQ, Jane and Luke were up to their necks in illegal time travel and rather enjoying every moment of it. Luke was steadily working his way through an entire tray of canapés and wondering if similar refreshments couldn’t be introduced on future Time Police jumps.
Jane, slightly more focused on the job in hand, was doing her best to memorise details of the pod interior and who was doing what, when suddenly, the screens began to break up. Someone gasped in the dark. Jane just had time to be reluctantly impressed at the softness of the jump – really, when you thought about the many things that could go wrong in the hands of amateurs, this had been as smooth as silk – when the screens suddenly cleared, showing a night sky. The brilliant Milky Way was just about to disappear beneath the horizon. Something black and solid reared up in front of them. A darker hole in the dark sky.
The captain spoke from directly behind her.
‘Every day – every single day since Amun created the world – the great Sun God Ra sails his solar barge across the sky, to bring light and warmth into the world. And every night – every single night since Amun created the world – he does battle with the giant serpent Apophis, God of Evil, Chaos and Darkness. And unless the Sun God wins that fight – every single night – the giant serpent will consume the sun. It will not rise in the morning. Not this morning. Not any morning. Ever again.