The New World

Book 0: TimeBomb Trilogy

by Scott K. Andrews

Genres: Historical Fiction; Science Fiction; Time Travel

Synopsis

The epic, thrilling conclusion to the most mind-bending, time-warping series since Doctor Who. Kaz, Dora and Jana - three people from three different time periods, brought together by forces they don't understand, given powers they can barely comprehend. Their powers have brought them together. And nothing - not war, not betrayal, and not even death - has been able to tear them apart. And now, after everything they've been through, they're about to find the bonds of their friendship tested in ways they could never have imagined. This is the stunning, epic conclusion to the incredible story begun in TimeBomb and continued in Second Lives: a story of friendship, of love, and of learning what it means to be extraordinary. *~*Readers love the TimeBomb series!*~* 'A fast-paced, time-hopping thriller' SciFiNow 'Tremendous fun... a riveting series opener... I finished the book in one sitting. If you enjoy fast-paced, action-driven time travel stories, this book is for you' A Fantastical Librarian 'A rip roaring roller coaster ride of a read that keeps you on your toes and is a WHOLE lot of fun' Liz Loves Books 'I was sucked into this book from the beginning and found it extremely hard to put down' Escapades of a Bookworm 'Impeccably unique and mesmerising, Andrews takes an astoundingly interesting take on time travel' Once Upon a Moonlight Review 'Executed perfectly, with likeable, intelligent and witty characters thrust into the mix of things' The Book Bag 'Well-written, funny, sad and exciting... a rocket of a timeslip adventure, designed to appeal to adults young and old and it most certainly succeeds' For Winter's Nights

Release date: July 27, 2017

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Three teenagers – Dora Predennick from the 1640s, Kazic Cecka from the early twenty-first century, and Jana Patel from the mid twenty-second century – have somehow acquired the ability to travel through time using the power of thought. They have been on many adventures …

In 2014 they were kidnapped by another time traveller, Henry Sweetclover, lord of Sweetclover Hall in Dora’s time. After being interrogated about their roles in future events, they were freed by the intervention of a mysterious person from their future, who they only know as Steve.

Following Sweetclover’s trail back to 1645, they encountered his wife, Quil, the badly injured leader of an army engaged in a terrible war in the twenty-second century. Quil was assembling an army in the cavern that lay beneath Sweetclover Hall, a cavern that also contained a mysterious, glowing rock. The three young people barely escaped with their lives.

Next they travelled into the future where they met Professor Kairos, a physicist who was waiting for them in a quantum bubble – a safe place outside the flow of time – that he had created for them below Sweetclover Hall in 2158. The quantum bubble existed in the second before Sweetclover Hall was destroyed by the timebomb – a temporally unstable asteroid that Quil had discovered in mysterious circumstances years earlier and fashioned into a weapon.

Our heroes then tried to change history by saving Kaz’s mother from a car bomb in 2010, but they were thwarted by Sweetclover and Quil, and Kaz’s mother was lost in time.

They next travelled to a peace conference in the capital city of Mars, Barrettown, in 2158, where Quil and her army of clone soldiers were meeting to discuss peace with a unified Earth government. Kaz, Dora and Jana believed that by preventing an assassination attempt on Quil’s life they could change history and prevent her becoming their enemy.

But things went terribly wrong on Mars – Barrettown was completely destroyed, and Quil was taken prisoner by the Earth president, who was revealed to be Quil’s mother. Jana and the others were then horrified to learn that Quil was a clone of Jana, created after Jana first jumped into time.

Deciding that they could still salvage events, Kaz, Dora and Jana staged a daring attack on Sweetclover Hall, now a top-secret holding facility where Quil was being held. They were successful, and together with Kairos, they created the quantum bubble that their younger selves had once sought refuge in.

They discovered that Quil had been poisoned by an Earth spy, so as to make her paranoid and unpredictable and trigger her downfall, weakening her army. After receiving the antidote, Quil turned out to be surprisingly reasonable. She took Jana, Kaz and Dora on a journey through time to show them her life and explain her war.

We do not yet know what secrets Quil revealed to them during this time-trip, only that they returned to the quantum bubble determined to stop the Earth president, Jana and Quil’s mother, at all costs.

However, time had played a cruel trick. Jana believed that by giving Quil the antidote to the poison they had changed history, preventing her travelling back in time to become their enemy. In fact, their creation of the quantum bubble had split Quil in two. One version of her, still poisoned and still mad, had travelled back in time to marry Sweetclover and become their enemy; the other, reasonable one had remained in the quantum bubble to become their friend.

When the mad version of Quil tried to return to the future, she was pulled into the quantum bubble and the good version of her was erased from the timeline. Even worse, Kaz’s mother appeared in the quantum bubble at exactly the wrong moment, and died as Quil made her escape.

The quantum bubble then collapsed and the timebomb destroyed Sweetclover Hall, with our heroes still inside it …

Now there is only one Quil left, our heroes’ implacable foe who, together with her husband, has returned to 2158, unleashed her army from the ground beneath the ruins of Sweetclover Hall and ordered them to kill everything …

The crowd appeared quickly, quietly and with no warning. A thousand men and women, all dressed in plain black clothes, wearing white porcelain masks, filed into Independence Park and stood in a block, facing Independence Hall, their featureless faces a silent rebuke.

Security was tight around the Hall because the president was visiting to inaugurate the new mayor, a close political ally. There were snipers on the roof, Secret Service guards at all the entrances, drones and helicopters in the sky.

So at first, the security teams, although alarmed by the mysterious protestors, did not believe there to be a real and present danger. But then all the agents with embedded ENL chips went into a fugue state. Those agents not affected panicked, drew their weapons and began shouting and calling for backup.

The crowd stood motionless while these events unfolded.

When the chipped agents regained control of themselves five minutes later – insofar as they were able, given the vomiting, the crying, the shock of what they had experienced during those minutes – attention quickly turned to the protestors, who had begun chanting, ‘We’re not monsters.’

The panicked agents put the call out for tactical support.

Those police with chips had also experienced the fugue, so the response time was poor. It took fifteen minutes for them to secure all the exits to the square, and in that time a large, angry mob of ordinary people had joined the mysterious masked protestors. The crowd was now louder and less predictable. The agents called for the National Guard, but they did not arrive in time to have much impact on the chain of events.

The police were heavily armed but budget cuts meant they did not carry the latest laser weapons. They aimed their old-fashioned projectile weapons at the crowd and waited.

The stand-off lasted for about ten minutes. The crowd were defiant, but peaceful. The police and secret service were afraid and twitchy.

Then someone in the crowd fired a gun into the air. A laser gun. The beam lanced into the sky and began sweeping down towards the roof of Independence Hall.

This gave the police and secret service the excuse they needed.

They opened fire.

The massacre began.

The first thing Jana became aware of was the keening.

From far, far away the long, slow, desperate howl of pain sliced through the post-explosion deafness that muffled all other sound. It was hardly a human noise; it was more primal than that. Animal. The sound of a fox caught in a trap, realising that it would have to gnaw its own leg off to survive.

Or of a boy who’d just seen his mother sliced in two.

The sound tugged at Jana, pulling her back towards consciousness.

She was lying on her stomach.

Smell returned – the earthy scent of the mud that caked her face.

She blinked her eyes, which teared up as they washed the mud away; the grit lacerated her eyeballs as she blinked. She could make out only an impression of light; a hot, orange glow that surrounded her. Her nose was blocked. Her mouth was full of blood.

She pushed herself up, bringing her knees forward, planting her feet in the mud and attempting to stand. She had only risen to a half-crouch before the ground seemed to crumble beneath her and she felt herself falling, arms and legs flailing as she crashed and tumbled down a slope.

She fought unconsciousness, even as she knew she would lose.

The first thing Jana became aware of was movement.

She was shaking from side to side, like a passenger on a rickety old bus navigating a potholed side street. It took a moment for her memory to return, but then she gasped in alarm as she remembered the explosion and the fall.

The keening sound had stopped. She did not know whether that was a good or a bad sign.

She felt sick, nauseated; her head was swimming with dizzy abandon, and when she opened her eyes all she saw were strobing patterns of light, zigzagging left and right.

There was a muffled sound that accompanied the shaking; a repeated throb of white noise nagging her back to life. As she once again reclaimed her limbs, the noise gained clarity – someone was calling her name.

As soon as she realised that, she understood that someone was shaking her, trying to rouse her.

She again pushed herself up with trembling arms, and tried to get to her feet. The blurred world swayed and rocked, but this time Jana felt hands beneath her arms, helping her, lifting her. When she was upright, an arm snaked around her waist, and she felt herself being propped up and forced to walk. She allowed herself to be steered, completely helpless, aware that if the person helping her were to step away she would collapse in a heap.

She could not find the words to warn her carer before she vomited, so she threw up while hobbling, violent and wrenching, her bile spattering her clothes and probably also those of the person helping her.

That person did not pause as Jana was racked by heaves and her stomach did its very best to pull itself up and out of her throat. They kept shambling forward into the hot orange murk.

When she was done vomiting, Jana spat and coughed and blinked her eyes over and over, willing herself to ignore the grains of dirt that ground between eyeball and eyelid. She forced out tears in a hurried bid for some kind of sensory input she could use to anchor herself.

Everything was the colour of fire. No, not fire – lava. Something hot but not flaming. It was bright and painful and it obscured details. Oddly, there was no heat to help her locate the source of the glow. Whatever it was, it wasn’t hot.

The ground beneath her changed as she and her helper began climbing up a slope. Dirt and stones shifted beneath Jana’s feet, threatening to unbalance her and send her tumbling again, but together she and her unseen companion were able to find a rhythm and maintain it. They were obviously working their way up the slope she’d fallen down the first time she’d regained consciousness. Thankfully, it was not too steep.

As she climbed her vision gradually sharpened. She was climbing up a slope of recently overturned earth, and the orange glow was coming from behind her. She did not think it wise to risk looking back over her shoulder – it would most likely send them both tumbling again. She glanced to her right and recognised the person aiding her. It was Professor Kairos, the temporal physicist who had helped her and her friends Dora and Kaz in their struggle against Quil, Jana’s unhinged clone.

No, that was where they had got it wrong, she reminded herself. Their real enemy hadn’t been Quil; it had been the relentless inevitability of time itself.

Which is why they had lost so completely.

Kairos was covered in dirt, and there were red streaks of drying blood running from his ears and nose, but he otherwise seemed in better shape than Jana. He guided her to the top of the slope and helped her steady herself. His mouth moved but all she heard was a buzz of static. She was wobbly on her feet, but she risked turning to look back at where they had been, and her bleeding eyes opened wide in surprise.

She was looking down into a vast crater, at the middle of which sat a glowing orange rock she had seen before. It was the warhead of the timebomb, shaped from an asteroid found in the far future and then launched at the Earth government’s secret holding centre in England by Quil’s clone army. It lay, burning bright orange, in the wound left by its explosive journey backwards through time from the moment of its impact, in 2158.

As if that were not staggering enough, Jana became aware of the landscape beyond the crater. She knew this piece of ground would eventually become the site of Sweetclover Hall, that she was standing on what would one day be Cornwall. But those days were far away judging by the lush, almost tropical forest that surrounded her.

How far back in time had they been blown?

She flinched as she felt hands on her head, pulling away from Kairos in alarm to see him brandishing a handkerchief. He mimed wiping out his ears and handed it to Jana, who did as she was bid. The white cotton square came away caked with fresh red blood mixed with dark chunks of coagulation. She gagged briefly, before evacuating her other ear. There was still a dull, ever-present whine, and Kairos’s voice sounded like it was softly echoing to her down a hundred metres of metal tubing, but she could make out his words now; he was asking if she could hear him.

‘Thank you,’ she said, offering him the bloodstained hankie and then, when he waved it away, shrugging and dropping it on the ground. She winced at how her voice sounded when heard mostly though her skull. ‘Yes, I can. Where are Kaz and Dora?’

Kairos pointed over her shoulder and Jana turned – too quickly; she wobbled, almost fell, reached out to grasp Kairos’s hand and right herself – to see Dora sitting at the crater’s edge, cradling Kaz’s head in her lap. He was curled up, foetal, his body shaking as though he were sobbing. Not an unreasonable response to seeing your mother murdered, thought Jana. Dora was stroking his hair, looking up at Jana, her face a dirt- and blood-streaked vision of helpless fury.

A flash of movement beyond Dora and Kaz caught Jana’s eye and she refocused as best she could on the treeline. There was something there, the shadows of the trees shaded orange by the glow from the warhead. She squinted, craned forward, trying to make out what it was.

She took a step closer, then another, trying to extract meaning from the interplay of light and shadow in the dense foliage.

When she realised she was looking into a large yellow eye, she felt a jolt of fear that rooted her to the spot.

Was she …?

She was.

She was sharing a moment with a dinosaur.

Being careful to move slowly so as not to startle her new acquaintance (as if she could move quickly anyway, the state she was in), Jana reached her hand out behind her, beckoning Kairos forward as she tottered towards her two friends. The professor knelt beside her and she took his hand as she crouched beside her wounded friends and placed her other hand gently over Dora’s.

She looked up and winked at the creature observing them curiously from a distance, then, connected to her three companions, sparks dancing around the small areas of personal intersection, Jana closed her eyes and dreamed of safety.

Jana’s head was still ringing from the detonation three days after they left the Jurassic.

Those three days had been spent recuperating in the Kinshasa medical centre that was swiftly becoming her home from home. The injuries that had landed her here the first time had been more severe, but conversely easier to fix; surgery to repair a knife wound, it turned out, was simplicity itself compared to fixing the variety of injuries she and her friends had suffered when blown back through history by the timebomb.

She totted up her new aches, pains and encumbrances as she sat in the dining area sipping her tea, waiting for Professor Kairos to debrief them.

Worst was her hearing – she had lost sixty per cent in her right ear and seventy per cent in her left. Kaz, Dora and Kairos were similarly affected. The consultant told them they would have to wait at least a week for their individually tailored gene therapies to be programmed and prepared; until then, all three were wearing custom-moulded in-ear hearing aids to compensate for the damage. Even after the gene therapy, there was a good chance they would still have to wear them, because one hundred per cent restoration was unlikely.

Less dramatic, but more noticeable, was the damage to her eyesight. Whereas her hearing was just absent – no tinnitus, happily – her sight was a mess. Her cornea had been flash-burnt, leaving her in constant pain, hiding behind shades because light made her wince, squinting to make out details with her blurry vision. As with her hearing, another few days would be required to prepare corrective treatment, but happily this was likely to effect a perfect recovery. She thought she and her friends looked comical in their dark glasses, sitting in the half-light of the dining area with the curtains drawn against the sunlight.

The permanent headache was ongoing, rising and falling from uncomfortable to unbearable and back again depending upon how many painkillers she could safely take. She’d exceeded the dose twice already, and was probably going to do so again in another hour if the intense pressure behind her eyes continued to build. This would probably self-correct once her eyesight was mended. Probably.

There had also been some weirder side-effects, like the way her bones ached. Kairos had proposed a theoretical explanation involving the effects of time dilation on calcium, which had made no sense to her at all. Whatever the cause, the upshot was that she and her friends were temporarily arthritic, creaking around the clinic like septuagenarians.

Finally, her sense of smell had completely gone, and everything tasted like porridge.

Turns out, it was no fun being blown up.

‘Well,’ said Professor Yasunori Kairos, taking his customary verbal run-up to an explanation, causing Jana’s hearing aid to whine and make her jump as if someone had shoved a hot skewer through her frontal lobe.

‘Shh, Professor,’ whispered Dora, beating Jana to it.

Kairos was wincing too, as if he had startled himself with the volume of his pronouncement.

‘Sorry. Yes,’ he continued, softly. ‘When the Godless fired the timebomb at Sweetclover Hall they could not have known exactly what effect it would have. By its nature it was a one-off, and had not been tested outside of mathematical projections. As Quil herself told you when she took you back into her timeline, she developed it as a weapon of last resort, a threat she could use to subdue resistance once her fleet had encircled Earth.

‘In the event, the projections were useless, because the warhead did not hit stone and earth and concrete, as they expected. Instead, it blew down through Sweetclover Hall into the cavern below and smashed straight into its older self. This magnified the explosion tenfold, but also focused most of the energy backwards in time.

‘The resultant temporal explosion had two immediate effects. One, the “older” warhead was destroyed.’ Kairos used his fingers to draw air quotes as he spoke.

‘Two, the “younger” warhead was blown back in time, fracturing the structure of causality as it spiralled back into the distant past. The explosion finally burnt itself out in the Jurassic and the warhead came to rest in what would one day become Cornwall. And there it sat for thousands of years, waiting for its younger self to come along and destroy it.’

‘And that’s where we woke up?’ asked Dora. ‘Jurassic Cornwall?’

Kairos nodded. ‘Because of your unique abilities, you were swept backwards in time on the shockwave of the temporal explosion. And because you had the presence of mind to grab my hand, Dora, I was also pulled along safely.’ He smiled and nodded his thanks to Dora.

Jana was surprised to see genuine affection in the smile Dora flashed back at the ageing professor. Another welcome chink in her ninja-façade.

‘You said the “older” warhead was destroyed,’ said Jana, sifting through the possible implications as she spoke.

‘That is so,’ confirmed Kairos.

‘And it was the warhead that acted as a lodestone, preventing us from arriving in deep space, pulling us to Earth when we jump through time.’

Kairos nodded.

‘So that means we can only travel in time between two very specific dates,’ concluded Jana. ‘We can’t travel to any time earlier than the moment we arrived in the Jurassic …’

‘And we can’t travel any further forward in time than 8.22 a.m. on the seventh of April 2148,’ said Dora, nodding as she locked into Jana’s line of reasoning.

‘So how do we kill her?’

Jana looked across at Kaz, surprised by his interruption; she had not thought he was listening. Like all of them, he was in bad shape – dark circles under his eyes, a raggedy growth of stubble and bloodshot eyes. But his wounds were more than physical. His gaze lacked any spark of the boy who she’d come to think of as her best friend.

‘Excuse me?’ asked Kairos.

‘Because we can’t change events we’ve been part of, the only time and place left for us to kill Quil is on Earth, after the timebomb exploded,’ said Kaz, his voice toneless and dead. ‘How do we get to her, if we can’t jump there?’

Jana could see that Kairos was both discomfited by Kaz’s bluntness, and confused that he would ask such a simple question.

‘We jump forward to just before the explosion, somewhere outside the blast radius, and wait for time to pass,’ said Jana, trying and failing to avoid a tone that added an implicit ‘you moron’ to the end of her answer.

‘But we have no advantage, if we do that,’ said Dora. ‘We would be three ordinary people in the middle of a war zone, trying to assassinate one of the best-protected people on the planet. We wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘I don’t think we need to kill her,’ said Jana carefully, aware that Kaz was unlikely to be receptive to the alternative plan she was beginning to formulate. ‘We just need to stop her.’

‘How?’ asked Kairos.

‘Why?’ asked Dora.

‘Excuse me?’ said Kaz, sitting upright angrily. ‘Did you ask why?’

Dora leaned forward, hands clasped on her knees, and spoke directly to Kaz.

‘Why have we done any of this?’ she said. ‘Quil and Sweetclover sought us out. They kidnapped us, they interrogated us. They did this partly because Quil was obsessed with accessing Jana’s chip and filling in the missing gaps in her memories. But also because of our role in the events on Mars. We went to Mars to try and save lives, and stop her. But it turned out she wasn’t the villain there. She was poisoned and tricked by Earth’s president.’

‘Or as I call her, Mom,’ interjected Jana dryly.

‘We failed on Mars,’ continued Dora. ‘In fact we became a key part of the events we were trying to prevent. Classic predestination paradox. We made it worse.’

‘So what’s your point?’ said Kaz, impatient.

‘We don’t know what happened after the detonation, but my guess is that Quil’s too busy fighting her war to bother coming after us any more,’ said Dora. ‘She spent twenty years in the past preparing an attack on the future. And it looks like she pulled it off. We were just a side project, a distraction. If we leave her alone now, I doubt we’ll ever see her again. We can just walk away.’

‘She killed my mother,’ said Kaz through gritted teeth.

‘Yes,’ said Dora softly. ‘She did. But she wasn’t in her right mind. The Quil who pursued us through time is suffering the effects of the poison she was given on Mars. She’s paranoid and psychotic. But that’s not her fault.’

‘It’s my mom’s,’ said Jana.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Dora. ‘So we let them deal with each other. If Quil wins her war, she’ll kill the person who drove her mad, the person really responsible for all of this mess.’

‘And if she loses?’ asked Jana. ‘If my mother kills her?’

Dora shrugged. ‘Do we really want to pick a fight with the president of the whole planet? She doesn’t even know we exist. Why paint another target on our backs? Look at us.’ She gestured around the room. ‘We’re wrecked. We’re all damaged nearly beyond repair, it’s a miracle we’re alive at all. We’ve been running ever since we all found ourselves in Sweetclover Hall that night. We can stop now. We can pick a time and a place – any time, any place – and start new lives. None of us have to worry about money, or jobs, or natural disasters. We can live long, happy lives on completely our own terms. If we just walk away, right now.’

Jana felt the pull of Dora’s argument strongly. Would it be too wrong to turn their backs on Quil and her mad crusade and just get on with their lives? She thought again about her plan to travel back through time, writing and researching ancient civilisations. It was a seductive idea.

‘But I feel responsible,’ she said sadly. ‘Quil is a monster, and yes, our mother made her that way. But so did I. She’s my clone. Created to be the better version of me. She only exists because of choices I made. She’s my monster too.’

‘You can’t blame yourself for her actions,’ said Kairos.

‘But I . . .