The Eternal War (35 page)

They had the officers’ mess to themselves.

‘A little situation appears to be developing up north that needs to be dealt with.’ McManus shrugged. ‘Nothing my lads can’t handle.’ It was obvious to Liam the officer wasn’t going to give him any more on that.

Liam stirred a teaspoon in his china cup absently, while Bob looked down at his tea, studying a pattern of leaves floating on the surface.

‘My ordering the disposal of those eugenics …’ said McManus, ‘that’s troubling you, isn’t it?’

‘To be honest … yes.’ Liam picked up a hard-tack biscuit off a plate between them and turned it over and over. Not really hungry. Not really sure why he’d picked it up. Something for his hands to do. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘They were older genics. Ones designed and grown a while back. Some of them were twenty … even thirty years old. They were unreliable, Liam. Dangerous.’ He sighed. ‘Back in the 1970s, they produced tens of thousands of them for all sorts of different roles.’ McManus shook his head. ‘Good grief, even as household workers … cooks, butlers, would you believe? And for those sorts of tasks they needed to be intelligent enough.’

He sipped his tea. ‘We’ve learned a lot about eugenology since then. How it’s far easier to design the shape and musculature of a creature than it is to design how it will behave, what it will think. These days we know better. The eugenics are crafted with far simpler minds.’ McManus shook his head. ‘It was madness, looking back now with hindsight,
madness
to have created eugenics intelligent enough to, for example, read and write. To hope we could grow creatures who would be our engineers, technicians, doctors … and assume they could be controlled like pets.’

‘Those creatures …?’ Liam looked up at him. ‘Are you saying those creatures were smart enough to read and write?’

McManus shrugged. ‘Most of them were the old-class manual labourers. More intelligent than the heavy-lifter genics we produce now … but not by much.’

He studied Liam’s troubled frown. ‘Look, Liam … I think you are making the mistake of thinking of these creatures as some form of
natural life
. They are not. They are organic products, bone and muscle machines … nothing more. And when a machine starts acting unreliably then it is time for it to be dismantled. Otherwise, people get hurt.’

Bob muttered. Something was going through his head. Liam glanced across the table at him. He looked troubled as well. Liam wondered whether his support unit felt some sort of kinship with the eugenics. After all, from what he could guess, they’d all sprung from the same science.

‘They were machines that had gone bad. And quite dangerous.’ He leaned forward across the small table. ‘I shall be honest with you, Liam. I wasn’t quite sure whether we would find your stepsister and friend in one piece. They are really very lucky to be alive.’

‘I s’pose.’

‘Lord knows how many more of those things are still out there. Most of the old-generation genics have been rounded up and processed, but I think there are still quite a few hundred scattered among the Confederate states: runaways living in derelict dwellings, or living wild in woods and mountains. It is a problem that needs to be addressed … and one day, I suppose, we shall have to track down the last of them. But it’s not something we can do right now.’

‘Why not?’

McManus looked like he was going to ignore Liam’s question.

‘Let’s just say the British army is being kept very busy at the moment.’ He changed the subject. ‘You and the others, what are your plans once we have dropped you off? A return to the safety of Ireland, may I suggest?’

Liam shrugged. ‘We
were
going to visit New York –’

‘You know, it really is as if you have arrived from another world entirely.’ McManus studied him intently. ‘Did you really not know that New York has been a war zone for nearly seventy years?’

Liam nodded. ‘Uh? Yes, of course. Maybe me an’ Bob and the others’ll go explore the west instead.’

McManus nodded. ‘It would be a much safer excursion for you. I believe it is still an unspoiled wilderness if you seek the far western mountain states like New Wessex and New Albany. I have heard from White Bear that there are still tribes of Indians living in that wilderness.’

‘Eight hundred and twenty-four,’ said Bob.

The other two looked at him.

‘Uh?’

‘Eight hundred and twenty-four personnel,’ said Bob. ‘You have itemized that number of personnel, but initially you said there was a total of eight hundred and thirty-six personnel. That leaves twelve unaccounted for.’

McManus made a face. ‘Ah well, I am no mathematician …’

A klaxon sounded softly.

McManus looked up. ‘We shall be descending shortly for a pick-up. If you’ll excuse me?’

CHAPTER 65

2001, New York

‘Well? Can we use it?’

Becks crouched beside the antennae array, a motorized rotating platform two foot in diameter topped with a dozen aerials like bristles from a hairbrush. Above them, a flared, cone-shaped dish of fine aluminium mesh.

Maddy shivered as a fresh breeze whipped across the rooftop. From where they were on top of one of the tallest buildings still standing she could make out most of the shattered remains of New York. A scarred landscape of jagged broken buildings like the stumps of rotting teeth. A landscape of crumbling concrete grey with a dash of green here and there where nature had decided to make an early start reclaiming the land for itself.

Down below, following the twisted trunk of cables over the lip of the roof, was the familiar outline of Times Square … although she’d discovered from Devereau it had been renamed Place D’Libertaire last time the French-run North had held the city this side of the East River. She felt dizzy looking down. She stepped back from the edge and turned to Becks quietly studying the antennae array. ‘So? What do you think?’

The support unit nodded thoughtfully. ‘The dish can be used to project tachyon particles. The antennae platform may also be useful.’

‘Hmmm.’ Maddy pushed her glasses up. ‘I guess I can figure out how to hook up the platform with our computer system. It’s just an electrical motor. Yeah, we should just take the whole thing.’

‘Affirmative.’

She left Becks inspecting the bottom of the platform and crossed the rooftop towards where Wainwright stood with a couple of his men.

‘We
can
make use of it,’ she said. ‘We just need to get it down in one piece.’

Wainwright nodded. ‘Good, I shall have my men help your … uh … your …’ His gaze wandered over her shoulder to the huddled-over form of Becks. His voice trailed to nothing.

Maddy had the distinct impression he was going to say ‘
your eugenic
’.

‘My men are telling me she killed every last man inside. The entire garrison.’

Maddy nodded. She’d arrived in time to see the last of the bodies being carried out of the bunker and Becks standing outside the entrance, her pale face splashed with ribbons and dots of drying blood and a friendly
Did I do good?
smile stretched across her lips.

It had actually made her shudder.

‘Not a single prisoner taken,’ said Wainwright quietly. ‘What on earth is she?’

‘Her mission priority was capturing the antennae
intact.
Not, I’m afraid, to take any prisoners.’

She decided it would be too difficult to explain to Wainwright that the lives she’d just taken with her bare hands were those that never should have been lived anyway. The bloody corpses lying outside the bunker were men who would be living very different lives once more … once history had been corrected.

But her imagination flashed images of the short and brutal struggle that must have gone on inside. It made her shiver at the thought that she, Sal and Liam shared the archway with two creatures, Bob and Becks, who could tear the three of them to ragged shreds if the notion popped into their heads – if a line of computer code decided it was a ‘mission priority’.

‘To answer your question, Colonel … you ask what is she?’ She turned to look at Becks now on her back inspecting the space beneath the array platform, disconnecting the power cables.

‘She’s a killing machine … a combat unit from the future, I suppose… You could think of her as an advanced type of one of your eugenics.’

‘Good God!’ His eyes widened. ‘I would prefer
not
to think of her … 
it
 … as that,’ he uttered.

‘Becks is a
she
 … not an
it
. You’d hurt her feelings if she heard you say that.’ She forced a chuckle. The laugh died in her throat.

‘And you, Miss Carter? What about you?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you some artificial construct? Some sort of super-warrior in disguise? A eugenic?’

‘Once upon a time I was a computer-games programmer. Someone good at sitting down and tapping away at a keyboard. That’s me.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m no one special, I’m afraid.’

A breeze tugged at them, sent dust devils skipping across the rooftop.

‘Have you sent your message, Colonel?’

Wainwright nodded. He’d broadcast a rallying call to the regiments up the line before they dismantled the array. They could only hope his stirring speech would do its job and other Confederate troops further along would signal they intended to join the mutiny. But there’d been nothing so far.

‘We shall hear from them soon,’ he smiled. ‘I’m sure.’

‘Then we should get started dismantling this thing,’ said Maddy. She looked up at the blue sky, then south-west towards the horizon where a distant bank of cloud promised them an overcast day later on. ‘Who knows how long we’ve got until the British come for us.’

Wainwright followed her gaze. ‘Indeed.’

CHAPTER 66

2001, New Wellington

Liam and the others stood on the gun deck just in front of the forward turret: a dome of plated metal ten feet high and two dozen in diameter, lined with knuckle-sized rivets. Two long artillery barrels protruded from gunnery slits, for the moment covered with a protective tarpaulin.

They watched as the carrier slowly descended towards New Wellington through a ghostly white sky of thinly combed clouds. To their left, the east coast of America; to the right, the surly grey Atlantic Ocean. Ahead of them he could see a grid-like blanket was spread beneath the prow of the carrier: roads, streets, avenues cutting the city into a chessboard of suburban, industrial and business districts.

‘Look,’ said Liam, pointing towards the coast.

The misty sky above New Wellington was haunted by the spectral silhouettes of a dozen elongated sky ships, several of them similar in profile to the carrier on which they were standing.

‘I see … eleven,’ said Lincoln. ‘No … twelve, if I’m not mistaken.’

Sal screwed her eyes up as she spotted faint dark slivers further out above the sea. ‘And more coming in.’ She looked at the other two. ‘Do you think every one of them is full of soldiers?’

‘I guess those are other British regiments.’ Liam tugged at the borrowed duffle-coat. Pulled the hood up against the fresh wind. ‘Something big is under way. That’s for sure.’

Closer to them, close enough to see the detailing of decks and gun turrets and the large segmented central gas-ballast tanks, a carrier almost identical to theirs was settling into a dockside berth. With the echoing of a horn like a distant whale’s song and a faint roar of compressed gas, it blasted the open ground beneath it – a space the size of at least two football pitches end to end – with a blizzard of snow and nitrogen gas. It seemed to settle on its own cloud, a white cushion that slowly billowed outwards and finally faded, revealing the acres of tarmac dusted with snow.

Liam could see four other similar landing strips, each one towered over by a pair of docking cranes hundreds of feet high. As they watched, the freshly landed ship was embraced fore and aft by the cranes, swinging round until they snugly locked on to the vessel, holding it like a babe in arms.

As the last of the nitrogen cloud cleared, the bottom of the ship’s hull began to open and loading ramps emerged. They watched the peppercorn dots of tiny figures disembarking and slowly forming into orderly ranks on the landing strip.

Liam and Sal looked at each other. A wordless exchange that Liam knew meant she was thinking the same thing.
Yet another sight, another amazing sight, that was never meant to be.

He looked out again, leaning his elbows on the brass rail, at the vision, another moment in time that he knew he was never going to forget. Like the inland sea of Cretaceous Texas and that sweeping plain dotted with herds of dinosaurs; or the glistening wall of chain mail and armour of Richard the Lionheart’s advancing army; a horizon of fluttering pennants and waving pikes, the sturdy frames of trebuchets in the distance. Moments etched into his memory as permanently as letters carved into marble.

He realized that, if by chance he died tomorrow, in his short life he’d already seen more things – heard, tasted, smelled, experienced more of history – than any person, any historian could ever dream to hope for.

‘Now that’s quite something, eh, Sal?’

She nodded. Silently picking out her own details to remember.

Lincoln in turn stared wide-eyed and ashen-faced. ‘And this? This is but
a portion
of the might of the British army?’ he uttered.

Liam nodded. ‘Aye. More where this lot came from, I’d say.’

‘God …’ His courtroom bawl was robbed of its power and left little more than a fluttering whisper. ‘God’s teeth.’

Six hours after arriving over New Wellington, waiting their turn in a queue of leviathans floating in the sky – enormous, dark and brooding like anvil clouds – their carrier finally got its turn and landed amid its own blizzard of snow, and the first companies of the Black Watch disembarked.

Captain McManus was busy, along with every other officer, organizing their companies on the landing pad. Their men were going to need billeting in the camps around the docks for the duration of the stopover, supplies ordered and secured, shore-leave rota to be arranged for his men, equipment, arms and ammo, damages to be repaired and shortfalls to be requisitioned. A million and one things for him and every other junior officer to attend to. So his farewell was necessarily brief.