The Eternal War

by Alex Scarrow

  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 wi
th 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.

  ‘I should return home to Ireland, if I were you, Liam O’Connor. There’s much afoot … and it’ll all be happening north of here.’

  Liam knew better than to question him further. McManus was already saying far too much. The young officer studied him and then Sal, who returned his gaze with a cold glare.

  ‘I suspect you think of me as a cold-blooded murderer, perhaps?’

  She said nothing.

  He took her silence as agreement. ‘I have seen what these creatures can do. Not just the runaways … but our very own trained eugenics. If it were my choice, then there’d be none of these aberrations in this world. Man has no business rewriting Nature’s work.’ He tugged the chin strap of his helmet tight. ‘But there it is – the genie is out of the lamp. We are where we are.’

  He offered them a crisp salute and a warm smile. ‘I am just relieved you were both unharmed.’ He regarded them one after the other. ‘A rather strange “family” you make, if I may say so.’

  He offered Liam his hand. ‘And you, sir … strangest of the lot. If I believed in such things, I would say you had dropped out of the sky from an entirely different century.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Liam grinned. ‘I’ve always been a bit behind the times, so.’

  McManus let his hand go, tipped a nod at them all and turned to head back to his men waiting patiently in the shadow of the carrier’s hull. The time travellers watched the captain go, the afternoon thick with the noise of boots and harnesses, sergeants barking orders like trained Rottweilers and the clank and clatter of supply trolleys rolling down the ramps.

  ‘What now?’ said Sal.

  ‘North,’ said Liam. He looked at the others. ‘New York. We’ve got to find a way back home … right? Unless we hear otherwise from Maddy, that is.’

  Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘She’s in trouble,’ said Sal. It was stating the obvious. ‘She needs our help.’

  Liam nodded. ‘We need to get there as quickly as we can.’ He glanced up at the sky, still another half a dozen carriers hanging there like storm clouds, waiting to descend and disgorge troops. ‘Before this lot head north and flatten what’s left of New York.’

  CHAPTER 67

  2001, New York

  Maddy hooded her eyes as she looked upwards. Becks and a technician from Wainwright’s regiment, Second Lieutenant Jefferson, were busy securing the antennae array’s motorized platform to the top of their archway’s mound of brick. It needed to be securely fixed, not wobbling in any way. It would have been steadier on the ground beside their crumbling home, but then it would have been too low, and obscured by the crater’s lip.

  Jefferson suggested mounting it on the top of the overshadowing stump of the Williamsburg Bridge support. But it would have meant running out a lot of cable … cable that could easily be snagged and severed on the dense nest of twisted, sharp-edged metal above them. More than that, she felt insecure not having the array right beside them.

  From the bottom of the platform a trunk of cables looped down the side of the skittering bricks, through a hole in the roof and down into the back room. There it snaked across the grit-covered floor, through the sliding door into the main archway, past the computer desk, over the small scooped crater towards the perspex tube, to the metal rack holding the displacement machine.

  Maddy had spent most of yesterday spitting curses as she fiddled around the back of the rack. Cursing that she suspected had rather taken aback Sergeant Freeman, watching on curiously.

  Half guesswork, half consulting the schematics diagram she’d made a while back, she hooked up the data cable via the computer system, the power cable feeding back via the computer system for computer-Bob to control and fine-tune the orientation of the dish. Of course, computer-Bob wasn’t aware of any of that just yet. The networked computers were offline right now and would remain so until they got the generator turning over – yet another job on the To Do list.

  Their generator was simply finished with. More precisely, the motor. The fuel tank had ruptured when a part of the ceiling collapsed; all they had of their fuel was the dregs sitting in the bottom of the tank. The rest had spilled out and filled the back room with the stink of diesel.

  However, the alternator and the voltage regulator were undamaged and only required an alternative source of mechanical input – another motor – to generate a usable electrical charge. The answer to that problem was straightforward in theory, if not in practice. They needed to jury-rig a motorized vehicle of some sort.

  Devereau’s regiment – an infantry regiment – didn’t have a single truck, jeep, tank to offer. The only two possibilities the colonel could offer to Maddy were to cannibalize their solitary motor launch for its feeble outboard engine, or to try to disassemble and relocate the army’s ageing generator buried deep in their defence bunkers.

  Wainwright had something more promising to offer: one of their older tanks, slowly rusting in the compound between their defence bunkers. ‘One of the Mark IV Georgian models,’ he’d said, and Devereau seemed to know what he was talking about.

  ‘Southern Chicken Friers.’

  ‘Chicken friers?’ Maddy looked at them both.

  Wainwright nodded. ‘Thin armour plating and badly designed. Heat transferred from the engine through the whole vehicle makes it like sitting in an oven.’

  ‘But, also, the fuel tank is poorly positioned and exposed,’ added Devereau. ‘One could aim gunfire to damage the fuel tank knowing the fuel would flood downward into the vehicle … and …’

  ‘Indeed –’ Wainwright nodded – ‘not called the “frier” for nothing.’

  As she watched, Becks and Jefferson finished securing the mounting. On the far side of the East River a swarm of men in blue and grey were already busy with sparking welding torches, working industriously on the makeshift raft that was going to float the old Mark IV tank across to them.

  Colonel Devereau was busy overseeing the repairing of the abandoned trench system. Both he and Wainwright had agreed that to defend the far side of the river, the Confederate side, would be a pointless exercise as the defences were all aimed the wrong way: northwards towards the river. The British would be arriving from the south. So it was to be here on this side that both regiments were going to hold the ground together.

  The abandoned tr
ench works had a commanding position over the flattened ruins that sloped gently down to the river. If the British really were planning an amphibious assault, this was where it was going to land. A kill zone, if they could make proper use of the trenches.

  Maddy had asked why they’d do that – an amphibious landing. Why didn’t they just parachute their men down behind their defence line from one of those big sky navy ships?

  She got two blank stares.

  ‘Para-shoot?’ Devereau frowned. ‘What the devil is that?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  He followed her gaze towards the sparks on the far side of the river. ‘’Tis a heartening sight, is it not? Our men working alongside each other.’

  ‘Yes. I just hope we have enough time.’

  Devereau nodded. A warrant for his own arrest had arrived this morning, delivered by an officer wearing the dark blue, almost black, uniform of the Union Intelligence Division, accompanied by a foot patrol of Foreign Legionnaires. Word had inevitably found its way up his chain of command already.

  He’d been hoping to hear news that the men of the 5th Maine up along the east end of the Sheridan-Saint Germain line were going to be the first to follow suit and join them. But so far he’d heard nothing.

  He looked to his right, down along the sweeping curve of the river. Among the far-off jagged spikes of ruined buildings he imagined his fellow Northern officers must be curiously watching the flurry of activity over here, wondering how long ‘Devereau’s Foolish Mutiny’ was going to last.

  It would last a great deal longer … if you had the spit to make a stand alongside us!

  Matters were no better for Colonel Wainwright. A warrant had arrived from Richmond for his arrest on a charge of mutiny.

  He and Wainwright had spoken briefly this morning on their temporary phone line. The news he’d been hoping for from that side of the river hadn’t materialized. Wainwright’s broadcast inviting the other Confederate regiments up the line to join them had either not been received, or, as he suspected, they had not the will or courage to join their fellows.