The Eternal War (27 page)

He turned to look at the map for a moment, then back to them. ‘That would mean taking it by force,
attacking it
.’ He let those words ring off the hard walls of the room. Eventually he shook his head and sighed. ‘I’m sorry. That is the only communications equipment we have along this section of the line. Is there no other way to fix your machine?’

‘Negative,’ said Becks.

Wainwright looked at them, at the magazines open on the table, at the small glowing screen of the device the girl had called an ‘iPhone’. The evidence of another world was there. He was more than certain the North didn’t have this kind of technology, or the knowledge, the imagination, the ability to produce the images in those magazines. And he was doubly certain they could never have constructed such a device.

‘What you’re asking … is for me to carry out an act of treason.’

‘Being here, talking to you now, James, I too am guilty of treason,’ said Devereau. ‘We are both already guilty enough to face a firing squad.’

Wainwright nodded, accepting the point. ‘But this … taking that bunker, exchanging fire with British soldiers –’ he bit his lip – ‘you do understand what that means?’

‘An act of mutiny … yes.’

The words had a sobering effect on both officers.

Maddy picked up on that. ‘Look … maybe there’s another way.’

‘Negative,’ said Becks again. ‘A radio communication transmission dish is the component we require. Modification would have to be made to –’

Maddy raised her hand to hush her. ‘You guys’ll never face a firing squad, because as soon as we’re done fixing your dish to our technology we can change this world back.’

Devereau turned to her. ‘But, should this plan fail for whatever reason, then the consequences for our men as well as ourselves would be … 
dire
to say the least.’

Wainwright sat down at his table. ‘Colonel Devereau and I being guilty of treason is one thing. We would both face our firing squads. But a
mutiny
 …?’ He poured himself the dregs of cooling coffee from the chipped jug between them. ‘Every man of the regiment would be punished whether they took part or not.’

Devereau nodded slowly.

‘I can’t ask my men to do that.’

‘We could show them all what we just showed you,’ said Maddy.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No. I fear not many of them would fully understand. And, not understanding, they would not dare risk facing charges of mutiny.’

There was a knock on the door to his room.

‘Enter.’

A young man’s face with a grey forage cap perched on a thatch of ginger-coloured hair looked round the door. ‘Sir?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘You asked me to warn you when the British were coming … Well, they are, sir.’

‘Thank you, Lawrence. Instruct the men to prepare for an inspection.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The door closed behind him.

‘You’ll need to leave immediately,’ said Wainwright. ‘It should take them ten minutes to make their way down here. Best you’re long gone by then.’

‘Please!’ said Maddy. ‘Please … think about it!’

‘Here, ma’am … you should take your things with you,’ he said, gathering up her magazines.

Becks grabbed the magazines and the iPhone and placed them in a shoulder bag.

‘Well, just think about it. We have to fix this history!’ begged Maddy. ‘You think this war is bad enough? … 
It could get worse!
’

Wainwright stiffened, ignoring her pleas. ‘Colonel Devereau, will you please take these ladies with you back to your lines?’

Devereau nodded. ‘Of course.’ He offered Wainwright a salute which the Southern officer returned crisply. He turned on a boot heel, opened the door and stepped into the concrete corridor outside.

‘Come on, Miss Carter,’ he said, grasping Maddy’s arm, ‘we have to leave right now.’

‘But …’ She gripped the edge of the table to stop him ushering her out. ‘But … he’s our only freakin’ hope! We have to –’

‘Sergeant Freeman!’

Freeman’s head appeared in the doorway.

‘A little help here, please!’

Becks, surprisingly, agreed with the colonel. ‘It is advisable to leave now, Madelaine. We should recalculate our options back at the archway.’

Five minutes later they were on the launch chugging sluggishly back across the East River. Maddy stared at the slowly approaching rubble-and-ruin landscape of Brooklyn and wondered if their only hope was to try to convince Colonel Devereau and his men to launch their own attack to capture this communications bunker.

Looking at him, looking at Sergeant Freeman, the other soldiers, old and young alike, sitting in their threadbare uniforms with the same patient look of defeat etched on each face, she realized they weren’t fighting men. They were draftees … men serving whatever period they were required to serve, counting away days until they might one day see their homes again.

Unless there was some other option, some other course of action, they were well and truly stuck in this mess. Forget helping Liam and Sal. Forget worrying about handwritten warnings from the future … she and Becks were nothing more than two civilians stuck in the ruined and contested wasteland of an eternal war.

CHAPTER 49

2001, outside Dead City

Liam gazed out of the forward observation windows of the carrier’s bridge, a long horseshoe array of glass panels that allowed the late summer sun to flood in, and bathed the place with warmth and light. Passing beneath them was a patchwork of fields that had seemed so much larger on the ground, and just ahead the fields gave way to the outskirts of the Dead City. Ordered rows of suburban homes with gardens long ago gone to seed giving way to smaller, more tightly packed homes and those giving way to drab brick-built tenement blocks. Further ahead, the apartment blocks grew taller and shared standing room with factories and warehouses and office blocks. All as dead and still as gravestones in a cemetery.

‘We’ll be landing shortly,’ said Captain McManus. He nodded at a thickset man in his forties, with silver-grey hair and mutton-chop sideburns that flared out generously. ‘Colonel Donohue is sending us in with three companies of men and some of our experimentals.’

‘Experimentals? Please explain,’ said Bob.

McManus smiled. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’

The drone of the carrier’s engines changed in tone and the vessel began a gentle descent. Liam saw tendrils of mist waft up beside the bridge windows and remembered the bizarre sight of a sky suddenly filling with a blizzard.

‘What’s with all the snow?’

‘The carrier uses lighter-than-air gases and vacuum voids to create lift. But it’s still not quite enough to make a ship this size entirely buoyant. So from the bottom of her hull we vent a cloud of nitrogen, which chills the air, causing it to become more dense … which of course provides us with additional lift. We are in effect creating a bed of thicker air on which we sit … and we just carry that bed along with us.’

‘But the snow?’

‘Well, if the air’s humid, then the moisture in the air becomes snow, you see?’

‘Captain McManus?’ called out the colonel.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Best ready your men for disembarking.’

‘Right you are, sir.’ He tapped Liam’s arm. ‘This way.’

McManus led them out of the bridge on to the quarterdeck outside and down a ladder to the spar deck below. As he descended the steep steps, Liam made the mistake of looking out past the brass handrail at the slowly looming cityscape below.

‘Oh Jay-zus,’ he said queasily. ‘I didn’t want to go and do that.’

‘Vertigo. Some of my chaps suffer from it,’ said McManus, grinning. ‘Just don’t look down.’

Liam and Bob joined him on the deck at the bottom, and then, to Liam’s relief, they were led inside again past several soldiers who politely stepped aside for them as they descended another ladder into a large equipment hangar.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps. ‘My God,’ he whispered.

The hangar looked to be about fifty to seventy-five feet wide and three or four times that in length, roughly, the size of a small football pitch. The space was filled with three hundred men mustering, forming up, checking each other’s backpacks and webbing, several dozen of the huffaloes corralled in one corner. It was cold, chilled by the artificial arctic mist being generated outside the hull. Plumes of breath lifted from every man.

Despite the wretched churning concern for Sal’s perilous circumstances – his hope that somewhere in the city below she was still alive – Liam experienced a moment of wonder at the bustling activity before him.

Across the hangar deck he saw several dozen dog-like animals. But not dogs, not like any dogs he’d ever seen. Larger, almost as big as lions, but lithe and thin like greyhounds. They had oddly human-like heads, baboon-like, in fact, with keen human eyes that seemed to convey intelligence.

‘What are those?’

‘Hunter-seekers. Eugenics, of course. We used them to great effect in Afghanistan and northern India. They’re very good at sniffing out insurgents, squeezing their way into caves and tunnels and what-have-you, then calling in their position and describing the troop strength.’

‘“Calling in”? You mean they can …’

‘Talk? Yes, of course. Be ruddy useless to us otherwise.’ He raised an eyebrow and chuckled at Liam’s wide-eyed gawp. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t expect anything too deep and profound to come out of their mouths. You’ll not get
Hamlet
out of them, I’m afraid. They’re really no smarter than small children.’

‘What? Seriously, did you just say … 
small children
?’

‘An intelligence designed to be equivalent to that of a five-year-old child,’ he added. ‘We made our mistakes with earlier classes of eugenics … designed some to be far too intelligent for their own good. That’s the trick, you see? Engineer them to be clever enough to carry out the tasks they’re designed for and no more. If they’re kept simple-minded, it’s easier to keep them happy.’

Liam was busy digesting the fact that in this insane world there were baboon-dogs that could talk. Meanwhile, McManus wandered off to locate his junior officers and NCOs.

He turned to look at Bob, who shrugged and gurned a smile at him.

‘This is getting to be far too weird a reality for me,’ whispered Liam.

Bob nodded. ‘We must find them … soon. Before another wave arrives.’

CHAPTER 50

2001, Dead City

Food. There was food, of sorts. Sal watched the eugenic creatures hungrily devouring the scraps they’d scavenged on their raid. She could see several old and rusted cans being passed around, the labels that indicated their contents long ago faded or torn off. Rats, plenty of rats, caught and skinned … cooked over a small fire. Cobs of corn being stripped out of their husks.

She saw Samuel among the muttering cluster of creatures, organizing them, ensuring every creature in his pack had something to eat.

Pack.

That’s the term she’d used for them earlier. But now … now that she knew that at least some of these things could talk just like a human, and the others, well, they might not be able to talk, but they behaved with a clear intelligence … ‘pack’ felt like the wrong word to use.

Samuel came over to her and Lincoln with a handful of food items cradled in his thin arms.

‘You musht eat shomething or you will shtarve.’

He held a rat carcass on a stick. It was still sizzling from the fire. He offered it to them. ‘It’sh very good!’

Sal shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

‘God’s teeth,’ uttered Lincoln. ‘I can’t eat a rat!’

Samuel shrugged. ‘I will have it, then. How about shomething elshe? Corn?’

Sal nodded. It was raw, but then she realized she was starving. ‘Please.’

Lincoln nodded. ‘I have eaten corn raw before.’

Samuel handed them each a cob in its husk and then squatted down on his haunches to consume the rat.

The building’s coal cellar echoed with the sounds of eating, slurping, chewing, the grunting satisfaction of hunger being sated.

‘Samuel …’ said Sal quietly, ‘why … why are we here?’

The eugenic looked up from his carcass. ‘You are both our prishonersh.’

‘Did you say prisoners?’ asked Lincoln.

‘Yesh.’

Sal peeled the last of the husk away and hungrily nibbled some of the ears of corn off the cob. ‘But why?’

‘Sholdiersh … will be coming here shoon.’

‘Soldiers?’

‘One of the other bandsh, they killed shome people. Very shtoopid.’ Samuel looked at them. ‘Killed humansh, like you. That will make the sholdiersh come here. I know thish.’ He shook his head and casually slapped his forehead. ‘That wash
very
shtoopid.’

Shadd-yah … how human a gesture was that?
It was just the sort of daft thing Maddy would do, exasperated and stressed out over something.

‘We are to be hostages?’ asked Lincoln.

Samuel cocked his head. ‘Hosh-tagesh? What doesh that mean?’

‘You will use our lives … to bargain for yours.’

‘Perhapsh.’ He nodded slowly, ideas forming and reforming behind his big eyes. ‘If we give you back, shafe and shound … maybe they leave ush all alone?’ He hunched narrow shoulders. ‘We don’t normally kill humansh. It meansh trouble. Shomething bad musht have happened.’ He carefully tore another chunk from the cooked rat.

Sal saw how carefully he chewed. Careful to keep the loose irregular flaps of his lips free of his teeth. She dared herself to ask.

‘What happened to your mouth?’

Samuel shook his head. ‘I wash
birthed
with a normal mouth. Jush like yoursh, Shaleena. I wash deshigned to work on machinery.’

‘Designed?’

‘Yesh … made by shmart men in a faraway town called Oxford. They grow ush genicsh over there in them big vatsh –’

‘Genics?’ Sal frowned. ‘Do you mean you’re genetically engineered … 
things
?’

‘You say you worked on machinery,’ said Lincoln.

He nodded. ‘Mechanic,’ he said with a hint of pride. ‘A mechanic genic. Very clever, me. My genic type fixesh broken machinery in factoriesh. Make them work very shmooth again. But … me and my big mouth …’