She smirked and left.
So, that’s what I had to go back to. Promotion, my own office, and an assistant with the world’s biggest collection of knock-knock jokes. I’d need him. I had a big assignment to plan. Last year we had acquired a collection of Shakespeare sonnets and a perfectly genuine, previously-unknown Shakespeare play entitled The Scottish Queen. Unfortunately, in this play, a careless 16th century executed the wrong sovereign and Mary Stuart, the Tartan Trollop, went on to unite Scotland and England, and apparently change the course of History. As soon as I got back and washed the Whitechapel grime from my hair, I’d have to get to grips with that. My future was looking good.
Wrong.
‘Are we all set?’
‘Yes, let’s get back.’
I dropped my muff on the console, smoothed my clothes, and patted my hair tidy. Historians never go back looking scruffy. Sometimes we go back dead, but even then, we always make sure we look good. Kal initiated the countdown, and the world went white.
Moments later, we were back at St Mary’s. There were a few people around the hangar, but I guessed the majority were in the bar. We had a bit of a do planned for her. Kal operated the decontamination system to dispose of any nasty little Victorian germs, and we waited for the blue glow to subside. She was watching the screen and shutting things down.
With probably the only stroke of good luck we had that night, I was looking towards the door, directly at my muff, so I saw it happen. I thought afterwards, it would have been so easy to miss such a tiny thing. We would have blithely opened the door, and who knows what would have been unleashed upon the world, and it would all have been our fault.
The muff moved.
Just slightly.
All by itself – it moved.
I was looking directly at it. Kal, too, had spotted it from the corner of her eye. Just for a second, I couldn’t think at all and then it hit me like a demolition ball. The only explanation possible. I felt my blood drain.
Something else was here. Something was in here with us. Unbelievably, something we couldn’t see was in here with us. Something that was so eager to get out of the door that it had made the tiniest, clumsy mistake. We were not alone in this pod. We’d brought something back with us.
Casually, I turned my head to look at Kal. She was white to the lips. I’d never seen her look like that. She was deathly afraid. And if Kal was afraid, then so was I.
Something was in here with us and no one was getting out alive.
Chapter Three
People think we historians are lightweights. They think we whizz up and down the timeline, document a couple of battles or the odd revolution, swan back to St Mary’s, and spend the night in the bar. To some extent, that’s true. However, when it goes wrong for us, it really goes wrong. I remembered my friend and fellow-trainee, Kevin Grant, killed on his very first mission. Or Anne-Marie Lower sitting on the floor of her pod, blank-eyed and covered in blood, as her partner died in her arms. But this was the worst thing that could happen. Worse than death because our end was not going to be quick and it was not going to be easy.
We were contaminated.
It’s not supposed to happen. Pods are not supposed to be able to jump with any foreign objects on board. If ever we inadvertently brought something into the pod then it just wouldn’t jump. Simple as that. God knows how this had happened. However, happen it had and we were really in the shit. The rules were very clear. No one was getting out of this pod. Ever.
And we couldn’t take him back. History states very clearly that Mary Kelly was his last victim. After tonight, he vanished. And now we knew why. So we couldn’t jump back to Whitechapel and just kick him out to continue his reign of terror. Even if we could, we wouldn’t.
I looked at Kal, who had obviously come to exactly the same conclusion as me. She gave me a small, sad smile, and after only the briefest pause, said lightly, ‘Would you do the honours please, Max?’ and slipped her hands into her muff.
I activated the external speaker together with the internal cameras so they could see what was going on. Whatever was in here with us mustn’t know that we knew, so I said slowly and calmly, ‘Attention, please. This is Pod Five. This is Pod Five. Code Blue. Code Blue. Code Blue. I say again, this is Pod Five declaring a Code Blue. Authorisation Maxwell, five zero alpha nine eight zero four bravo. This is not a drill.’ I sat back leaving the mike open.
‘Balls to the wall, Max,’ said Kal softly and stood up. I got to my feet as well and we both moved casually, oh so casually, to the door, where we turned, to face back into the pod, backs protected, shoulder to shoulder. And much good it would do us.