The Thirty Eight Steps: Fembot Sally, #7

By Samantha Faulkner

"A body is lying in front of the sofa. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there ten minutes ago, when I nipped out to buy a paper."

 

Fembot Sally is adrift in time but she is getting closer to the present day. Arriving in London in 1914, she uncovers a plot to assassinate a visiting Archduke. If the man dies, Europe will be plunged into war. The Black Rock organisation are determined to make it happen. They have already killed one man who uncovered their plans. Will Fembot Sally be next?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samantha Faulkner
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9798201159757

Book preview

The Thirty Eight Steps

There is a man lying in a pool of blood in front of the sofa. I am pretty sure he wasn’t there ten minutes ago when I nipped out to buy a paper. He looks in a pretty bad way. He is about thirty-five, fair-haired and rather attractive, apart from the large bullet hole in the centre of his belly. He regards me in alarm as I step through the doorway. Oops. My trench coat has just come undone. I must find myself some proper clothes. Quickly, I button it up and step across to the dying man.

‘Who...who are you?’ he mumbles, his hands clutching his bloody stomach. I am not sure if he is British or American. His accent is distinctly transatlantic.

‘A friend,’ I tell him, crouching down in front of the sofa. It seems like the right thing to say. I do a quick scan of his wounds. It doesn’t look good. The blood has dribbled down from his lap onto the carpet. ‘Honey, you’re in a bad way.’

The man nods unhappily. His eyes flick past me to the entrance hall. ‘They...they found me,’ he stutters, staring through the open doorway. ‘They’ll come back. And they’ll...they’ll kill you, if they find you here.’

‘Who are they?’ I wonder. ‘Who did this to you?’

He draws in a laboured breath. ‘The...the Black Rock. The man with the missing finger.’

‘The what?’ The missing finger? I think his mind must be going.

‘No...no time to explain. You must...must warn the government. They’ll kill him if you don’t.’ His eyes are flashing about all over the place. I’m not sure if he can even see me any more. ‘Beware...beware the thirty eight steps.’ With these words and a final terrifying shudder, his head slumps back onto the leather upholstery.

I let out a sigh. I have seen my fair share of death but it always saddens me when a good looking bloke breathes his last. Unfortunately, I haven’t got a clue what he was babbling on about. Why do dying men always have to be so cryptic?

I lean over his body to close his eyes and as I do so I notice a small notebook peeping out of his jacket pocket. I grab it and have a quick flick through but all I can see on the crisp white pages are a random selection of letters and numbers. No, actually, it’s not random. It is written in code. A substitution cipher, I think. I have a bit of software somewhere that should be able to decrypt that. I activate the relevant subroutine. It’s good to know my systems are still in decent working order. I have been away from the repair shop for a horribly long time. Though of course, chronologically speaking, the repair shop hasn’t even been built yet.

My time machine – the chronocapsule – popped into existence in the basement of a crumbling apartment block about half an hour ago. The building doesn’t exist in my time. It was pulled down to make way for a department store. Oddly enough, I will be employed in that very store – Burlington’s of Knightsbridge – in about fifty-five years time. I’m not really a shop girl, though. I am a Fembot – a sophisticated humanoid robot – and at the moment I am horribly lost.

I arrived here mid-morning, fresh from 1793, stepping out of the time machine in a rather colourful set of eighteenth century clothes. An