The Eternal War (22 page)

‘LIAM!’ Bob bellowed into the house.

He heard nothing now. The sound of struggling and screaming had ended at some point in the last thirty seconds.

‘SALEENA!’ he tried again, stepping into the hallway, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.

He could see scratch and scrape marks across the floor, along the walls … up the stairs. Quickly, urgently, he clambered up them, the old wooden steps groaning and creaking under the burden of his weight.

He turned right at the top of the stairs. A door at the end, scratched, battered and split with a deep crack down the middle, hung wide open. And into the room beyond he could see the frame of a bed on its side, an overturned chair. A last stand had taken place there. No bodies, though. Gone.

In the space of only minutes, seconds, the humans it was his duty to protect had been snatched away from him.

He took another few steps into the room and saw more signs of the struggle. A chair leg, wrenched from its seat, perhaps used as a club. One end of it was spattered with blood – black in this waning dusk light. There were splashes and dots of it on the pale walls.

The logical part of his mind berated him with a simple message.

[Mission status: FAIL]

The organic part was prepared to express its assessment of the situation with a flood of feelings he was unable, or unwilling, to find appropriate labels for right now. He backed out of the room and slumped against the landing wall, sliding down until he was a hunched mass of dejected muscle at the bottom of it.

‘You have failed,’ his deep voice rumbled softly, like a gas boiler switching on, a subway train passing through a subterranean tunnel.

‘You failed,’ he said again, this time his voice trembling slightly. He supposed, if Becks had been right here, she would have found that intriguing, impressive even, that his voice was unintentionally conveying an emotion.

The computer in his skull was nagging him to make a judgement call on a growing list of new mission-priority suggestions: to continue making his way north-east to New York? After all, Madelaine Carter was still there and still needed protecting. To attempt to locate the bodies of Liam O’Connor, Saleena Vikram and Abraham Lincoln? Because there was always the chance, a possibility, one or more of them might still be alive.

To self-terminate … out of sheer shame. Perhaps his AI was now unreliable, faulty. He had made a poor judgement that had resulted in this. An all-too-obvious ploy to lure him outside.

Subconsciously he balled a giant fist, angry with himself for being so … 
stupid
. Perhaps another support unit uploaded with freshly installed software and not burdened with many months’ worth of memories of kinship, adventures, jokes even … would turn out to do a far more efficient job than he.

He was giving self-termination some serious thought, even though the software was advising him quite strongly that it was an illogical conclusion and achieved nothing useful … when he heard the scrape of a footfall beside him. He turned quickly to look along the almost pitch-black landing, quite ready to tear something,
someone
, apart, limb from limb, for no other reason than mere revenge.

And he saw Liam, standing there, wide-eyed, exhibiting post-traumatic stress behavioural indicators.

He was in shock.

‘LIAM O’CONNOR!’ his voice boomed.

Liam took a shuffling step forward, clutching his head. ‘Bob … Jeeez, I … don’t know what … I just …’

Bob lurched to his feet, closed the gap between them, and before his computer brain could cringe with disapproval, distaste and embarrassment at the behaviour of its host body, Bob’s huge muscular arms were wrapped round Liam’s narrow frame and squeezing him hard.

‘You are alive!’ he rumbled unnecessarily.

‘Bob … I … think they took Sal … and Lincoln.’

‘They are alive?’

Liam was struggling to breathe, his nose and mouth crushed against the wall of Bob’s sweaty shoulder. He pushed the support unit back and Bob loosened his hug.

‘I think so. I think they took them –’

His words were suddenly drowned out by a deafening roar that made the landing, the whole farmhouse, vibrate like the head of a snare drum. White light flickered into the building, dazzlingly bright, finding holes and cracks in the ceiling above them, sending pin-sharp blades of light down on to them that swept across their skin, across the wooden floor.

Light from above … the roar too. Directly above them. They tumbled down the stairs before either of them had discussed whether it might be a good idea to actually remain hidden somewhere inside. They stepped through the shattered remains of the front door and out on to the porch, looking up at the brilliant white light. Liam shaded his eyes; it was as intense and uncomfortable as looking directly at the sun. A false dawn of artificial sunlight trained down on them.

‘
What is it?
’ he all but screamed. He couldn’t even hear himself, let alone hear whether Bob managed to answer.

An icy blast of air swept down on them and he felt something cold and wet settle on his cheeks. In the light he could see a million white fluffy flakes of something slowly descending, swirling in the downdraught, seesawing like feathers, like ash from a forest fire. But they were neither.

My God … it’s snowing!

That’s exactly what it was.

Snow?

The deafening roar that had filled the air, making talking, shouting, an utterly pointless endeavour for the best part of the last minute, suddenly ceased. It left them in a silence filled only with Liam’s rasping breath and the soft whisper of snow falling and settling on the ground around them.

‘What the …?’ uttered Liam, feeling more and more flakes landing on his upturned face, on the back of the hand shading his eyes.

The blinding light swept off Liam and Bob and back on to the farmhouse, then across the other buildings in the small rural hamlet, like a probing eye trying to make quick sense of the scene.

Liam tracked the thick beam of the spotlight all the way up into a dark and completely starless sky. He thought he was looking at a dense bank of snow-laden cloud above them; that might be the best explanation for the unseasonal and surprising arrival of snow. But then a row of smaller lights suddenly appeared. A row of spotlights trained upwards, casting fans of light across a smooth, burnished copper hull.

His mouth was useless, slack and open and doing little more than making a gurgling note of surprise.

CHAPTER 39

2001, New York

Colonel Bill Devereau stared at the images on the computer screens: a slideshow of pictures pulled by computer-Bob off the system’s database at Maddy’s request. Photographs of New York, busy and vibrant. Times Square packed with yellow cabs and tourists, a giant billboard with Shrek’s green face leering out over milling pedestrians. A cowboy in his underpants and stetson and boots busking with acoustic guitar surrounded by grinning Japanese girls. A picture of the Spice Girls posing together in front of the Empire State Building.

‘My God!’ he whispered.

A picture of Lady Liberty, mint-green and undamaged by bombs and small-arms fire, standing proud and tall, holding aloft her beacon of hope.

‘I forgot what she looked like,’ he said.

‘Is the statue damaged in
this
timeline, Colonel Devereau?’ asked Becks.

‘Bill,’ he said softly. ‘I guess you two ladies can call me Bill.’

‘Affirmative, Bill.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘She’s no more than a rusting stump. Bombed by the South back in 1926 during the Second Siege of New York. They blew her up … then used Liberty Island to deploy several artillery batteries. From there they pounded Manhattan to rubble.’

‘Where –
when –
we come from, Bill,’ said Maddy, ‘I mean … it’s today’s date, September the twelfth, 2001, the very same date, but it’s a very different time. Anyway –’ she flapped her hand, dismissing the point – ‘the point is in our time New York’s all there in one piece.’ She smiled sadly.
Well, sort of.
She decided there was no point mentioning the Twin Towers to him. It would only complicate things.

He drew his eyes away from the slideshow of images. They glistened with moisture, tears he was determined not to shed in front of the girls – more importantly, in front of his own men. ‘This is … 
this
is really how our world should be?’

‘Yes.’

He looked back at the nearest monitor to see an image of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair standing side by side behind lecterns, addressing an audience of the press. Then an image of Homer Simpson strangling Bart Simpson.

‘And you, and all these devices of yours –’ he nodded at the tall rack of circuit boards to their left, the displacement machine and the large empty perspex tube – ‘this technology of yours could change my world to how they appear on these … what do you call them?’

‘Computer monitors.’

‘These … 
computer monitors
of yours?’

She nodded. ‘This war should’ve ended in 1865. That’s how history is supposed to go.’

He stroked the thatch of dark bristles on his cheek, deep in thought. ‘This really is quite some story you are asking me to believe.’

Maddy sniffed. ‘Well, it’s the truth. Although, sometimes, you know, I wish it wasn’t.’

Devereau pulled on his beard with a gloved hand. ‘And you say this technology, this
time displacing
device can send you to any time?’

‘And any place too … yeah.’

Devereau noticed Sergeant Freeman out of the corner of his eye, standing nearby and just as bewitched by the slideshow of images. ‘What’re you thinking, Sergeant Freeman?’

The old NCO shook his head. ‘Seen a lot of things in my time, sir. Perhaps too many things. But this …’ He hunted down the right words to express what he was thinking. ‘These … these here pictures,
if they are
what this city, what this nation was
meant
to be, then I guess I gotta wonder how the hell we been so stupid we ended up makin’ this mess of a world we all livin’ in.’

Devereau nodded thoughtfully.

‘If we can fix our machine, we could change it back,’ said Maddy. ‘It would cause a time wave that would
correct
everything. You’d all live very different lives. Be very different people.’ She wondered whether she ought to add that some of them might not even exist. A different century and a half of history would mean very different family trees for some of these men.

‘And the thing is,’ she added, ‘none of you would have a memory of this war, because … well –’ she shrugged – ‘because it will have never taken place.’

Sergeant Freeman nodded. ‘I say “Amen” to that.’

Devereau adjusted the collar of his tunic. ‘And what, pray tell, is a “time wave”?’

‘A vibration through space-time that leaves behind it a recalibration of reality,’ replied Becks.

‘A wave of reality overwriting reality,’ added Maddy.

Devereau frowned. ‘I would become someone else?’

‘Correct, Bill,’ said Becks. ‘Everything and everyone is recalibrated.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Then surely my allowing you to alter history would be like … well, not to put too fine a point on it, ladies … it would be like killing myself.’

Maddy pursed her lips. He was, of course, in a sense quite right. A time wave would erase Devereau and everyone else and in its wake leave other versions of themselves or, quite possibly, in many cases leave absolutely no version of them at all.

She looked back at the slideshow of images. There were plenty of things wrong with the 2001 she and Becks had come from, but it had to be better than this war-torn Hell. She could see Devereau’s eyes, Freeman’s too, eyes that glistened with a deep melancholy. After all, she guessed they were both men who had spent most of their lives living in concrete bunkers and staring across the rubble and the river at men just like themselves.

These images on the screen were a beacon of hope … of what could have been.

‘Something else I should explain to you,’ said Maddy. ‘There’s no guarantee this reality is stable … that it will hold. Things are unbalanced right now and somewhere at some quantum dimensional level reality is sort of “considering” whether this timeline is stable enough to stick with … or whether it needs to adjust itself again.’

‘Adjust itself? What do you mean?’

‘Another time wave could just as easily come along and wipe this reality away and replace it with something
far
worse.’

Devereau frowned. ‘Worse?’

‘OK …’ She gave it a moment’s thought. ‘For example, a world in which the South has already
won
this war.’

‘Good God! A victory for the Anglo-Confederacy?’

‘Or much much worse,’ she added.

‘Worse!’ He stiffened. ‘Worse than that?’

‘Oh yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Trust me, Bill. You ought to see some of the crazy stuff we’ve seen. It’d turn your hair white.’

CHAPTER 40

2001, somewhere in Virginia

In stunned silence Liam watched the enormous vessel that had loomed above the farmhouse settle lightly on the ground, jets venting blasts of ice-cold nitrogen gas, filling the air around them with an arctic mist and a blizzard of snowflakes. From within the swirling fog he heard the heavy clanking of chains and winches and finally the thud of something smacking the ground heavily. A moment later he heard the clatter of horseshoes on metal, the throaty snort of horses and men’s voices softly calming them.

Presently, something began to emerge from the mist.

Bob shifted position, preparing himself to defend Liam.

‘Easy there, big fella,’ whispered Liam, and patted Bob’s side.

He could just about make out several dozen bulky four-legged beasts … but certainly not horses, as he’d first thought. They seemed to be heavy up front by the look of their faint silhouettes, with much more slender hindquarters. He squinted into the mist and the dancing flakes of snow, beginning to thin now as the sound of venting jets ceased.