TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page B

reddish-brown liquid and a bundle of empty clothes.
    He’d watched with increasing horror as the puddle had grown slight protrusions, like humps, almost mushroom-like, that eventually opened to reveal fluffy spore heads like those of dandelions.
    A fresh breeze had carried those away long ago.
    Somewhere in a refugee camp in Kazakhstan, his parents most probably looked like the girl now. A tangle of clothes and a puddle of liquid.
    ‘Rashim!’
    It had all happened too quickly. The city lockdowns, quarantine. The complete shutdown of transportation systems. None of it had managed to stop the Kosong-ni virus.
    ‘Dr Anwar!’ He looked away from the holo-projection above his desk. Dr Yatsushita was leaning over the top of his cubicle partition. His tie loose and his top shirt button undone, his sleeves were rolled up and his lab coat dispensed with days ago. He’d taken to sleeping on a camp bed among the cubicles. As all of them had, working in ceaseless shifts to get things ready for T-Day.
    ‘I must have those figures now!’
    Rashim felt disengaged from the hustle and noise of activity going on around him. The hangar floor was now filled with people, equipment and machinery being brought in. He could see on one side of the concrete floor some famous faces herecognized: the vice-president, Greg Stilson, and the defence secretary. A few dozen yards away a Saudi prince and his family; next to him the bulk of some Central African dictator whose name he couldn’t quite remember and his three young wives. Rashim suspected he must have spent the last of his nation’s wealth to buy a place for himself on Exodus.
    There were other faces he vaguely recognized: old men with young wives. The rich and powerful.
    ‘The figures! Rashim!’
    Rashim nodded slowly, and palmed the data off his screen and floated it on to Yatsushita’s infopad. ‘It’s not even close to accurate,’ he muttered absently.
    ‘We have no more time,’ Yatsushita said, lowering his voice. ‘They will have to take their chances.’
    So many of the carefully selected and vetted candidates for Exodus had not made it to the Cheyenne Mountain facility. Some of the B-list candidates had managed to be flown in, but there were many grid spots now either empty or filled with last-minute replacements. No longer the great and the brilliant, rocket scientists and geneticists. But a motley random collection of people – army truck drivers, clerical officers, project technicians – and, of course, a handful of politicians, billionaires, dictators; the well-connected who’d caught wind of Project Exodus’s last-minute chance to negotiate themselves on to the transportation grid.
    Not exactly the best representation of twenty-first-century society to send back into the past to make a new start.
    Rashim looked up at Dr Yatsushita. ‘You said “they”. They will have to take their –’
    ‘I am not going.’
    ‘Why?’
    The old man shook his head sadly. ‘I cannot … not without my family.’
    ‘Still no news?’
    Yatsushita shook his head. He had managed to get his wife and daughter on a flight from Tokyo to Vancouver. But there they’d been stuck. No commercial or military flights left. Not even using leverage as the senior technician on Exodus was going to get them over here.
    The old man looked over his shoulder at the chaos on the grid. ‘Anyway, this is not the project I signed up to lead.’
    Rashim knew exactly what he meant by that. This frenetic, undignified scramble away from the sudden and messy end of mankind was not what Project Exodus had been about. Even though it was a flagrant breach of ILA Ruling 234, known informally as Waldstein’s Law, there was something worthy to it. The idea of rebooting civilization back in a time before man had begun to suck the world dry; the idea of bringing back twenty-first-century knowledge and enlightenment to an ignorant world that believed in gods and omens, repression and slavery. There was a germ of