TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome Read Online Free PDF Page A

softly. Not that he knew or cared who Jennifer Carmel had been. His frustration was more to do with the fact that unless they could find a replacement candidate with a close enough build and mass index, he was going to have to work through a lot of tedious number crunching and recalibration for this one square.
    He looked up at the other ten human silhouettes dotted randomly across the hangar floor, outlines glowing red, candidates who for one reason or another were no longer going to be able to join Exodus in six months’ time.
    Six months to go. Six months until T-Day. Transmission Day.
    So much could happen in six months.
    The world seemed to be utterly determined to destroy itself in the meantime. The Pacific War between Japan and North Korea seemed to be flaring up to a new level of intensity. While neither of them had any nuclear weapons left to use, there were far worse things they could unleash on each other.
    The rest of the world seemed no less bent on its own demise. Rashim’s own country, Iran, had led the charge there and destroyed itself thirty years ago in a war that started as a dispute with the Arabian Coalition. A war over fresh water no less. Not even oil.
    Water. Drinking water.
    Iran, Iraq, Israel … were now three countries that were too irradiated for anyone to live in even thirty years after the exchange of tactical nuclear missiles. Even if they weren’t irradiated, the few mountainous areas that hadn’t been flooded by the rising waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas and the Persian Gulf would be far too arid to support life. The millionsthat died in that one-day exchange of tit-for-tat warheads perhaps were the lucky ones, weren’t they? Death in the blink of an eye instead of this long, slow, global death.
    ‘Skippa?’
    He looked up. SpongeBubba had waddled across the large grid-crossed floor to join him.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Dr Yatsushita has sent a message. He’s on his way into the facility and wants to run a transmission simulation this morning.’
    ‘Well, he’ll have to wait until I rework the figures without these candidates!’ Rashim snapped irritably.
    ‘Shall I send that message to Dr Yatsushita, skippa?’
    He stood up. ‘No, I’d better talk to him when he gets in.’
    ‘Aye aye,’ his unit replied and waddled back across the hangar floor.
    He sighed. There was so little margin for error. A miscalculation on the total mass index even by the tiniest percentage could send them out of the receiver station’s snap range. Not for the first time he was amazed at the foolhardy courage of that incredible man Waldstein.
    The reluctant father of time travel.
    Twenty-six years ago now, wasn’t it? The very first successful demonstration of time displacement. There and back again. Of course the man had never spoken about where or
when
he went. But he’d done it. More importantly he’d
survived
it. He’d come back in one piece and not turned inside out like burger meat.
    Their own initial experiments here in the Cheyenne Mountain facility had turned a succession of animals small and large, genetically engineered human prototypes, even several real human volunteers into the equivalent of
living
pâté.
    Living … for a few ghastly moments … actually
alive
.
    Rashim marvelled at Waldstein’s incredible genius. Dr Yatsushita was a brilliant man, but even with billions of dollars of funding and almost limitless resources at his disposal, Project Exodus still felt horribly like a large scary exercise in trial and error. Guesswork.
    Waldstein, though … Waldstein had built his machine on his own. In his own garage, for Chrissake!
    Or so the legend supposedly went.
    Rashim often wondered what happened to that man. He’d been such a prominent figure for so many years. Meeting with world leaders, the very last guest speaker at the United Nations before it was finally dissolved in 2049. Then he seemed to disappear. Became something of a recluse. Rashim wasn’t even sure if