The Eternal War

by Alex Scarrow

  The last detachment of men from the 38th was due to cross the river later on today and join them in digging in on this side. Just under six hundred men and officers in all. Not much to withstand the might of the British army, and quite possibly a regiment or two of Elite French Foreign Legion too.

  He suspected discreet meetings had already occurred between generals at the very top of both sides, agreements made to temporarily work together to crush this little mutiny quickly.

  He looked at the lines of trench works being dug deeper and reinforced with sandbags and timber struts. They extended parallel to the river, from the support stump of the Williamsburg Bridge, towards the cracked and sooted ruins of the Bryson Glue factories as Brooklyn followed the East River up and merged into Queens. Men would be positioned in the factories with perfect enfilade-fire positions down on the shingle and the approach.

  It was here, though, here in this open space, this five hundred yards of bombed-out rubble and craters, flat ground that sloped down to the river, it was here, where there was space for dozens of landing craft to drop their ramps simultaneously, that they were going to have to hit them the hardest.

  And it was dangerously close to this precariously frail dome of bricks in which the supposed time machine was located.

  Their first line of defence was ‘the borderline’, a long straight trench running from the bridge support to the glue factory. The second line of defence was ‘the horseshoe’, a hastily dug trench that followed the perimeter of the large bomb crater in which the brick mound nestled at the very bottom.

  Finally, if and when the horseshoe was overrun, there was the ‘fort’. The entrance to the girls’ archway had been reinforced with a small nest of sandbags and support bars, and topped with a roof of more bags and shovelled dirt. It was a bunker in which three Gatling-gun teams would be stationed, firing out through gunnery slits.

  Where we’ll make our last stand … if it comes to that.

  He buried that thought beneath a reassuring smile. ‘We shall hold this ground long enough for you to activate your machine and write us a brand-new history, Miss Carter. I am quite certain of that. This is a good piece of ground to defend.’

  CHAPTER 68

  2001, New Wellington

  New Wellington’s streets were clogged with vehicles, motorized and horse drawn, refugees all attempting to head south to avoid the coming fight. Word was already spreading. Right now, along the port city’s main street, it was a motionless logjam, a deafening turmoil of raised angry voices, snorting unsettled horses and rattling combustion engines.

  The pavements either side were filled with pedestrians laden with possessions on their shoulders and backs. Liam and the others found themselves standing beneath the porch of a hardware store, watching the tide of foot traffic traipsing past them.

  ‘It’s like everyone’s leaving!’ uttered Liam.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Sal. ‘Did McManus tell you?’ She spat his name out like bad-tasting phlegm.

  ‘There’s something going on in New York,’ said Liam. ‘He said something about a new offensive.’

  ‘More war, is it?’ grumbled Lincoln. ‘Has this corrupted world not had enough of it already?’

  ‘But if the fighting’s going to happen up in New York, why is everyone here running away? This is far enough from the fight, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not far enough,’ answered a gruff voice behind them.

  They turned to see an old man in the store behind them. He’d opened his door without their hearing. ‘You not heard the rumours, then?’

  ‘Rumours?’ Liam shrugged. ‘Aye … it is the British are attacking.’

  The old man wafted his hand like that was old news. ‘That much everyone knows about, lad … No, there’s talk this time they gonna be fightin’ with experimentals once again.’ He nodded at the people streaming past them. ‘News was in the morning papers. Some dock workers down at them landing bays caught sight of a bunch of new-type tube-breeds.’

  Liam looked at Sal and the others, unsure whether the old man was referring to the hunter-seekers, or the huffaloes.

  ‘Stupid fools! They don’t give half a cent what-for about the things they unleash on us over here! Crazy-minded monsters bred to kill? It’s only America, right?’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Bad enough we got tube-breeds all over the country in every farm, every factory … but crazy ones been bred and trained just to kill? It’s no wonder it’s got everyone a-jitter now. They scared there’s gonna be another Preston’s Peak!’

  He nodded out at the congested street. ‘Twenty-four hours from now, this place gonna be a ghost town. An’ I guess I’ll have to board my shop up from looters an’ mebbe head south myself until they made sure they gathered up all their monsters and got ’em back in cages again. God knows … I don’t want to be the only fool in town if they gonna lose control of ’em all over again.’

  ‘Right,’ said Liam, nodding.

  ‘Anyways …’ The old man frowned. ‘You an’ your friends comin’ in to buy some stuff?’

  ‘Ah no, we were just … sort of getting out of the way of the –’

  ‘Well, this ain’t a darned hotel!’ He glanced at Bob’s hulking form, hunched over to fit his bristly head beneath the awning above his porch. ‘You’re blockin’ me up from proper customers! You better scoot off me boards, that or buy somethin’!’

  Liam sighed. ‘All right … all right, we’re going.’

  He led the way down three steps, on to the pavement and into the bustling crowd, against the flow. All manner of people – rich and poor, billycock hats to flat caps, lace bonnets to threadbare shawls – a tide of anxious city people, all grumbling curses and muttering rebukes as Liam waded against the trudging tide.

  An hour later they were standing on the side of a road heading north-east out of New Wellington still choked with vehicles and carts heading southwards, making painfully slow progress, but moving at least.

  ‘Seems like everyone north of here is leaving,’ said Liam.

  He wondered why so many civilians would have bothered living so close to the front line anyway. After all, according to McManus the war was an ongoing struggle, a constant ebbing and flowing of the front line, which stretched westwards across New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, with minor skirmishes here and there every summer that shifted the line half a mile one way, then the other.

  But it was a stalemate war, wasn’t it? A war with which people had grown used to living. Grown used to it rumbling on quietly in the background like a thunderstorm passing by.

  People manage … that’s what they do.

  Except, of course, not now. Not with rumours of a big push going around. Not with rumours of killer eugenics being deployed not too far away from them.

  ‘It’s silly,’ said Sal. ‘The eugenics weren’t dangerous … not the ones that took us, anyway. Were they?’ She looked up at Lincoln.

  ‘Pitiful beings,’ he said. ‘If truth be told, they were quite sad creatures.’

  Liam couldn’t help wondering what to make of the eugenics. Looking at the flood of people going past, he could understand their fear. Back in that farmhouse, the attack had seemed ferocious, quite terrifying at the time. And yet now he realized those creatures had just been a band of runaway workers. Frightened for themselves. Just doing their best to scavenge and survive.

  But, if they’d been a frightening sight, he couldn’t begin to imagine what military eugenic creatures must be like. Mind you, he’d already met some, right? The hunter-seekers. They hadn’t seemed so bad.

  He shuddered with the thought of something.

  There must be other types we’ve not yet seen.

  ‘We should get going. The road looks like it’s clearing up a bit. We should make better time now we’re out of town. How far is New York from here, Bob?’

  ‘Information: a hundred and eleven miles.’

  ‘Ahh, well, that’s all right.’ Liam smiled. ‘That’s not so far to go, then. S
hall we?’

  CHAPTER 69

  2001, New York

  ‘Oh my God!’ cried Maddy. She turned to Becks standing beside her in front of the computer desk. ‘It’s actually working!’

  She could see the soft amber standby light of the four-gang plug socket and spike protector. ‘We’ve got enough amplitude coming in!’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Maddy ducked down and punched on the nearest of the networked PCs beneath the desk. One of the monitors winked on. She switched on the next one and the next, until all nine computers were busy whirring, at different stages of booting up.

  Maddy wanted both of the colonels to see this. Although she knew they more than half believed her story, it would do no harm for them to see this machinery stir to life. She trotted across the floor, skidding on loose grit and skipping over the thick flex of power cable running out through the raised shutter door. It snaked round the low entrance to the ‘fort’, and turned left along a freshly dug trench for twenty yards before rising up over the rear trench wall and across several yards of rubble and weed wasteland towards the opened rear engine hatches of Wainwright’s Mark IV tank. The engine casing, bulky and pitted with rust, juddered unnervingly like a feral cat trapped in a hatbox. It was spewing a thick cloud of smoke from an exhaust pipe at the top of its box-shaped iron turret.

  The tank’s labouring engine was spinning a flywheel. Around the wheel was a cam-belt – a loop of thick leather – taken off the vehicle’s drive shaft and leading instead to their battered and sorry-looking generator. They’d hauled it out earlier and set it up beside the tank. The belt was turning the generator’s own internal rotor and armature.

  Down the slope towards the river she could see Wainwright and Devereau standing above the borderline. Devereau squatted down and talked to someone in the trench, Wainwright smoking his pipe and looking out across the river.

  ‘Hey! You two! Colonels!’ she shouted above the rumble of the tank’s bad-tempered engine.

  They both looked her way and she waved them over. ‘It’s working! We got power!’

  She waited for them to jog over, and then led them back down into the trench, following the cable past the fort and ducking inside the archway across the floor to where the row of computer monitors were all now showing the same desktop wallpaper she’d put on several days ago.

  An image of Homer Simpson.

  ‘Good grief!’ gasped Devereau, unsure what to make of the wall of grinning faces.

  Maddy pulled a seat out and sat down at the desk. ‘Computer-Bob? You there?’

  ‘This … this yellow face,’ said Wainwright, ‘… is the face of your computer?’

  ‘Uh?’ She looked at the monitors. ‘Oh no … He’s just a … a …’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Doesn’t really matter.’

  A dialogue box appeared on the monitor in front of her.

  > Hello, Madelaine. It appears a significant malfunction has occurred.

  He was seeing the wreckage of the archway behind her. That, or he was registering internal problems with one or more of the networked computers.

  > I also detect two unauthorized personnel in the archway.

  ‘That’s OK, Bob … that’s OK. They have my authorization to be here.’

  > Affirmative.

  Wainwright’s jaw hung open. ‘You have a machine that can talk to you?’

  ‘Oh yeah … Bob, he’s … well, computer-Bob. Not, of course, to be confused with Bob, who’s a … well, sort of a guy-shaped computer and a copy of computer-Bob … and some of Becks, actually, who by the way is also a copy of computer-Bob …’ She looked up at the colonels and realized she was losing them. ‘Just think of Becks here and this computer system as family … sort of.’

  ‘Family?’ said Wainwright, looking at Devereau, not really any the wiser.

  ‘Bob, we got hit by a time wave, a big one.’

  > This is apparent.

  ‘The wave was caused by Lincoln being here in 2001 and not back where he should be.’

  > That is the most likely conclusion. What is Lincoln’s location now?

  ‘We do not have that information,’ said Becks.

  > Hello, Becks.

  ‘Hello, computer-Bob.’

  Maddy wrapped her knuckles impatiently on the desk. ‘Save the love-in for later, you two. We need to send them a message right now!’

  ‘The last known location,’ said Becks, ‘was the window opened near the FBI training academy, Quantico, Virginia. That was five days ago.’

  > Correct. I have those coordinates in my event log.

  ‘They’ll have been making their way to us,’ said Maddy. ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Information: two hundred and twenty-six miles.’

  ‘They should’ve made it back by now, then … surely?’ She pouched her lips. ‘Unless they’ve decided to stay put and wait for me to open a window right where we dropped them off?’

  > This is an equally likely possibility.

  Maddy balled her fist and cursed. Both colonels exchanged a bemused look at her colourful choice of words.

  ‘Hang on!’ She held a finger up. ‘I can give them all the time they need … say a whole month if that’s what they need to –’

  ‘We cannot hold the British for a whole –!’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘Relax … relax. This is time displacement. We can open the portal up as soon as the machine’s charged up enough. Say, in about twelve hours’ time. But I could set the time-stamp to open a space one month from now. Do you see … with time displacement, all time – past, present and future – is effectively now … as long as you’ve got enough energy to reach it. Easy as easy peas.’

  A cursor flashed across the dialogue box.

  > Negative.

  ‘What?’

  > Diagnostic on the displacement machine indicates the tertiary downstream phase analysis module has failed. We cannot at this time open a window in the future.

  She banged her fist on the desk. ‘Why is it always so freakin’… ? Arghhh!’ She shook her head.

  ‘Does this mean your machine cannot operate?’ asked Devereau.

  Maddy sighed. ‘No … no, it just means we have to wait this out in real-time.’ She shrugged. ‘Stupid me … I was hoping for the easy option.’

  She settled back in her chair. ‘All right … all right, plan B, then. We pick a place roughly halfway between New York and Quantico, and give them, what? Two days … no, three days – time enough to make sure they can get there.’

  ‘From now?’ asked Devereau.

  She nodded. Then noticed the look of concern on both men’s faces. ‘We can hold on here that long, can’t we?’ Her eyes went from one to the other. ‘Right? I mean … you know, if they attacked, say, right now? Your men could hold this ground for three days?’

  The officers’ eyes met. It was Wainwright who broke the long silence. ‘It will depend what force they throw at us … and, of course, how quickly they have decided to respond to news of this mutiny.’

  ‘And how well our men will fight,’ added Devereau.

  Wainwright nodded. ‘The officers in my regiment … I know will fight to the death. As men of rank we all now face firing squads if we were to surrender. The enlisted men? They would face a British military prison.’

  Devereau nodded grimly. ‘A similar fate awaits our officers. But I think my men will fight well because there can be no retreat if the South attack. The Legionnaires will be lined up behind us ready to shoot anyone retreating.’

  ‘So?’ She was still waiting for an answer. ‘Three days, then?’

  Wainwright stroked his chin. ‘To be certain … you can promise us this new history?’

  ‘If I can pick them up and drop them back in 1831, yes.’

  And if Lincoln is still alive.

  She suspected Bob and Liam were probably fine; so far together they seemed to have been able to weather anything. And Sal would probably be fine with them looking after her. But Lincoln … the guy w
as a loose cannon. A big-mouth. A hot-head. Anything could have happened to him over the last week.

  ‘Then our men will give you your three days,’ said Wainwright. ‘What do you say, William?’

  Devereau nodded. ‘This is a good defensive position.’

  Maddy turned back to face the webcam on the desk. ‘OK, computer-Bob. Three days rendezvous from now, we just need to pick some place halfway between here and Quantico. Somewhere relatively quiet and peaceful if possible.’

  > Affirmative.

  ‘We got enough charge to send a broad-range signal?’

  > Affirmative. Information: my diagnostic has also picked up calibration errors on the transmission array.

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Becks. ‘A replacement component – a conventional radio communication dish – has been connected. I can run the recalibration with you, Bob.’

  ‘Well, you two sort that out now.’ She turned to Wainwright and Devereau. ‘Either of you got any relatively up-to-date maps we can look at? We need to pick a place for our guys to get to.’

  CHAPTER 70

  2001, New Wellington

  Sparks danced up into the night sky from their campfire, one of several dozen they could see up and down the side of the roadway. Refugees heading south and those on foot, like them, stopping at the side of the road for the night to rest, eat and perhaps sleep.

  They were cooking cobs of corn they’d plucked from a field earlier this evening over the fire. Somewhere across on the other side of the road, someone was roasting coffee beans over theirs, and someone else, salted bacon.

  ‘It’s cooler tonight,’ said Liam.

  Sal, snuggled beside him, nodded.

  ‘You all right, Sal?’ he said.

  She nodded again, her eyes on the fire, glistening.

  ‘I know,’ he started. ‘Look, I know what happened was hard –’

  ‘Hard?’ she whispered. Hard was a lazy, careless word to use for what they’d witnessed. ‘I … I keep seeing it, Liam. You know?’ She looked up at him. ‘I see Samuel looking at me, looking right at me when they shot him. He was …’ Her voice faded to nothing. Together they stared at the fire in silence, watched the cobs slowly blacken on the edge of the fire.