The Eternal War tr-4

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘What are they?’ asked Liam.

  The officer looked at him, surprised. ‘You don’t know?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I thought they were …’ He didn’t know where to begin. Monsters? Demons? He ended up offering a confused, harried shrug. ‘Me and Bob … we’re sort of new here.’

  McManus looked up at Bob, acknowledging him for the first time. ‘Good grief, you’re a big chap!’ He turned back to Liam. ‘Jolly big, isn’t he?’

  Liam nodded impatiently — like he needed to be told that. ‘Those things? Those creatures?’

  ‘Well now … yes, I suppose you must have at least read about this in the papers. That we’re using some more experimental types of genics to work on the plantations over here.’ He shook his head. ‘The Evening Times and the other newspapers were ranting about that when we were shipping out from London. We’ve had simple-minded eugenics working in factories and farms back home for ages, but these recent innovations — the dextrous hands with thumbs, and the larger brains; awfully clever stuff, if you ask me — well, that’s become a heated issue. They don’t like it, the idea of genics being smart enough to change the oil on an auto-locomotion engine, or being able to write their name.’

  McManus looked at them. ‘But you must know about that, of course?’

  Liam nodded convincingly. ‘Sure … yeah, of course.’

  ‘So,’ the officer continued, ‘we’re trying out these more advanced types over here in the southern states. Generally these smarter genics are really jolly good. Very impressive, actually. But we do get problems every now and then. They can flip out occasionally and turn exceedingly nasty.’

  The officer suddenly shook his head with disgust at himself. ‘I’m sorry, awfully rude … I didn’t manage to get your names?’

  ‘I’m Liam, Liam O’Connor. And the big fella here is Bob.’

  McManus offered Bob his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Bob and Liam. Now look … we’re going to try and run these genics down before they get to the city’s outskirts. We’ll do what we can to get your friends back … but — I’m not going to tell you a lie — they can be very unpredictable.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Liam.

  McManus shook his head. ‘They can be gentle, tender, loving even. Then without any warning at all, without any reason, they can turn on you. Be quite deadly, in fact. There’s no knowing what sets them off.’ He looked at the trickle of drying blood running down from Liam’s temple and gestured at the gigantic vessel looming over them. ‘There’s a regimental surgeon aboard the ship type. I suggest you go aboard and let him have a look at you. And we shall go and — ’

  Liam shook his head. ‘No … I need to find her! Please! I have to come along!’

  Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Enough time has already been wasted. We cannot lose them.’

  The officer looked at them both, silently.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ said Liam finally, desperately. He tossed a hooded glance at Bob. ‘Both of our … sister. Isn’t she?’

  Bob acknowledged that with an unconvincing nod. ‘Yes. We are … family.’

  ‘Your sister?’ McManus frowned circumspectly. ‘Hmm … I shouldn’t really do this, allow civilians along.’ He stroked his chin. ‘But … well, yes … missing family, you want to do all that you can to find them, don’t you?’

  Liam nodded. ‘We won’t get in your way. We just want to find her! And our friend.’

  McManus summoned one of his men. ‘Sergeant Cope? These two civvies shall be joining us. Clear some saddle space for them, will you?’

  The sergeant, eyes dark beneath the brim of his helmet, and the rest of his face lost behind a large walrus moustache, nodded briskly. ‘Right you are, sir!’

  McManus turned back to Liam and Bob. ‘You’ve ridden a huff?’

  ‘Huff?’

  ‘A huffalo?’ He shook his head. ‘Not to worry, you’ll be riding rear-saddle.’ He glanced at Bob. ‘Going to need to pick a jolly big one for you, though.’

  At that moment the Indian tracker — White Bear — emerged from the farmhouse and jogged across to Captain McManus.

  ‘They go north-east.’ He gestured past the building towards the gravel road on which Liam and the others had entered the hamlet earlier that day. ‘Tracks go that way.’

  ‘How many do you think, White Bear?’

  ‘Fifty. Maybe more. Many different ones. Some big. Some small.’ He glanced quickly at Liam and Bob then back at his commanding officer. ‘Only one human track. Man, I think.’

  Liam looked alarmed and the young officer raised a hand to calm him. ‘That may just mean they’re carrying your sister. To move along faster, you see?’ McManus turned to his men. ‘Platoon! Ready your mounts!’ And then he tugged something down from the side of his helmet, a padded leather pouch that settled over his ear. From that he pulled out a thick telescopic brass arm that curved round his jawline and ended with a brass mouthpiece.

  He tapped it once. ‘Captain McManus to duty officer. We have some very reliable tracks down here. We’re going to follow them on foot.’

  He nodded to a response coming through his earpiece. ‘Right you are … we’ll call you if we need you.’

  He smiled at Liam. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes! We need to go now, before we lose them!’

  The officer nodded over towards the two huffs that had had rear saddles cleared of field kit. ‘Of course. Let’s find your friend and that sister of yours.’

  CHAPTER 41

  2001, somewhere in Virginia

  They moved through the darkness silently, across the seemingly endless cornfield. Sal was bouncing uncomfortably over the shoulder of some huge lumbering beast. She might have said ‘man’, but she’d only caught the briefest glimpse of it. It stood on two legs and had two arms, that much she knew, and that was about as much of a comparison as she could make to a human.

  The group of them — ‘pack’ seemed like a better word — moved swiftly through the corn stalks, leaves and cobs swiping at her face. She tried to call out to Lincoln, not sure whether he too was somewhere among the pack — behind her, ahead maybe, draped like her over the large meaty shoulder of one of these things. But a hand, the oddest-shaped hand she’d ever seen — two fat fingers as big as aubergines and a thumb like a marrow — clumsily smothered her mouth, mashing her lips painfully against her teeth.

  It seemed like almost an hour before the group emerged from the edge of the field and hesitated by the side of a tarmac road, the very same road, she suspected, they’d been driven along by the Chinese man.

  It was fully dark now and a gibbous moon had emerged into the sky to bathe the night a quicksilver blue. Upside-down, she could see these creatures more clearly. They were all ‘human-like’ in so far as they stood erect on legs and their arms swung free. But their size and shape varied immensely. She saw that about a dozen of them were as large as the one carrying her. They teetered on small legs, incredibly top-heavy, with a muscle mass that put Bob to shame. They vaguely reminded her of silverback gorillas, except there wasn’t a single hair on them. Bald from head to toe, skin pale, almost translucent in the moonlight.

  Their heads didn’t look anything like a gorilla’s head either: loaf-shaped skulls, smaller in fact than a regular adult human’s skull, with tiny, almost delicate, faces. Eyes so small they almost looked like mere pinholes. Beneath those, a gash. No nose, just an open flap of flesh, a hole. And beneath the non-nose, a simple lipless slit for a mouth.

  Sal twisted her head and saw others, much smaller, agile-looking. They had slender torsos with a narrow ribcage that reminded her vaguely of a salamander. She noticed their hands were the same kind: two fingers and an opposable thumb. But these were long and thin with bony knuckles and fingernails that were more like claws. Their heads were similar, but the eyes much bigger. She glimpsed all-black eyes, wide and round, that blinked in the moonlight like those of an owl.

  She saw one of a third type, the smallest, the size of
a child, with a head disproportionately large. It must have been that one which had burst into the kitchen and stolen the shotgun. She wondered where that gun was. Whether this creature had dispensed with it … not knowing what it was or how to make use of it.

  Are they that stupid?

  She suspected not. They’d cleverly outflanked them in the farmhouse, bottling them up in the hallway. At the very least they seemed to know a house tended to have a back door and a front door.

  This smallest creature, the ‘child’, had the same hand configuration, but the two fingers and the thumb on each looked completely human. The hands could easily have been those of some machine-worker who’d lost the little finger and the next one along of both hands in some unfortunate industrial accident. Its face looked odd in the light; she thought she saw some scarring around its lipless mouth.

  One other thing she noticed about all these creatures, the last observation she made before the brute carrying her began to lope forward, and her vision blurred as her head bounced and bumped against his muscular chest, was that every one of them was completely naked except for a solitary item of clothing on them. One of the ‘apes’ had a lady’s straw sunhat on its head, the strap tucked under its chin to hold it on. Another had a threadbare winter scarf wrapped round its neck. One of the ‘salamanders’ even had a lady’s polka-dot summer dress on, far too large for its narrow frame.

  They looked like children playing dress-up, children who’d raided their mother’s wardrobe and each taken a single item they rather fancied.

  The creatures trotted silently along the tarmac road, cautiously watching both ways for signs of an approaching vehicle, even up into the starry sky with wide fearful eyes. They padded several hundred yards up the road. Finally, after a small noise from the ‘child’ — some sort of instruction — the pack of creatures flitted quickly across both lanes and into the enormous field on the far side. The stalks here were shorter, with pommel-like heads of something fluffy that batted against her face as they lumbered through.

  Running beside her, she caught a glimpse of another ‘ape’. Stretched over his shoulders, she saw the dark shape of Lincoln’s long limp body. His head bumped up and down lifelessly against the other creature’s bulging chest … and for a moment she was afraid the man was dead, that she was all alone with these freaks. But then Lincoln flinched at a bump and spat a curse at his ape. A big three-fingered fist smacked the back of his head to shut him up. Lincoln snarled indignantly, cursed and struggled with the creature, landing ineffectual punches with his fists on its enormous shoulder, a heaving powerful elliptical bulge of muscle tissue that flexed and wobbled beneath ghost-pale skin as it continued to lumber with all the grace of a rhino, oblivious to Lincoln’s pitiful and futile attempt to fight back.

  Sal closed her eyes, relieved he was still alive. Relieved she wasn’t alone, and desperately hoping these creatures were leaving a trail that Bob and Liam were going to be able to follow.

  CHAPTER 42

  2001, New York

  ‘All right, then, young lady,’ said Devereau. He puffed out a foul-smelling cloud of cigarette smoke that Maddy subtly wafted away from her face with the gentle flap of her hand. The colonel didn’t seem to notice that. ‘You’ll have whatever help I can offer you. But I’ll wager we have nothing of your sort of technology in our bunkers.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He shrugged. ‘If these gadgets, contraptions and devices of yours do what you say they’ll do, then perhaps it should be us thanking you …’ He hesitated, frowned and then slapped a hand over his tired eyes and shook his head. ‘But yes … no! Arghh! The logic of this time travel is confusing.’ He sighed. ‘Of course, if you’re successful and change history back to your version of events, I would not know any different, would I? We would know nothing of … of what has been done?’

  Maddy nodded.

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Becks.

  ‘Good God, this time-travelling nonsense plays the devil with your mind,’ he muttered. ‘I should think it must drive you to madness dwelling on such things all the time.’

  ‘It gives me a headache,’ Maddy conceded. ‘But I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it now.’

  It was dark in the archway. The generator had been turned off to conserve what fuel was left in the tank and the glow of a candle flickered across Maddy’s messy desk, reflected in the dark screens of the computer monitors. Outside the archway she could hear Devereau’s men talking in whispers, could see the glow of their cigarettes in the night as they kept watch for the Southern sky navy.

  ‘So … this travelling through time, what is it for you, Miss Carter, a profession?’ He wheezed a smoker’s laugh. ‘A hobby, is it?’

  Maddy looked down at the mess across her desk, caught in the dancing glow of the candle light.

  ‘More a duty, really,’ she replied. ‘Not one I chose exactly. It just sort of happened, ended up being me and a couple of other poor suckers who have to do it.’

  ‘And you, Miss Becks? What about you?’

  Becks looked at Maddy questioningly.

  ‘Hell, why not?’ Maddy smiled casually. ‘Go on, you might as well tell him the truth about what you are. None of it’s going to make any difference when … if … we can fix this mess.’

  Becks nodded slowly. ‘That is true, Madelaine.’

  ‘What you are?’ Devereau looked confused. ‘You said “what” just then, didn’t you? Not “who”!’

  ‘I am a support unit,’ said Becks. ‘That is to say, an artificially engineered life form. My organic frame has been genetically edited and designed for combat and reconnaissance roles by a military DNA-software contractor.’

  ‘She’s also a real barrel of laughs,’ added Maddy.

  Becks frowned, disgruntled at that. ‘I have developed basic humour files.’

  ‘Genetic?’ said Devereau. ‘Is that the word you just used?’

  Becks nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Devereau stroked his beard. ‘The Anglo-Confederates have been experimenting with a similar-sounding invention. Eugenology I believe they call it, playing with the bricks and mortar of nature itself. Playing in God’s very own laboratory. Is this a similar thing to what you just said?’

  ‘Affirmative. The manipulation of genetic data. Altering the growth instruction code of stem cells to produce an organic life form that meets specified criteria. In my case, I have physical strength that is approximately four hundred per cent greater than a normal female of similar build. I also have a hyper-reactive immune system capable of repairing extreme body damage.’

  ‘Which means you can shoot her and she’ll pretty much just shrug it off like a bee sting.’ Maddy took her glasses off and rubbed tired eyes. ‘Although that doesn’t stop her kvetching about it.’

  ‘I can feel pain. That is necessary damage feedback data,’ said Becks. She looked at Maddy. ‘Kvetching? What does this word mean?’

  She shook her head. ‘Moaning. Don’t worry about it … I was trying to be funny.’

  Becks cocked her head momentarily and filed something. She turned back to Devereau. ‘It is possible to destroy this body,’ she continued. ‘It is possible for the reactive-immune system to be overwhelmed. If too much blood is lost, for instance, this body’s organs would systemically fail like those of a normal human body.’

  Devereau seemed to draw back from her into his chair, putting a few inches more space between himself and Becks.

  He eyed her warily. ‘The South has experimented with eugenic creatures on the battlefield before. They’ve been fooling around with that ungodly science for the last thirty years. Twenty-three years ago at the Battle of Preston Peak, when our boys were making a push along the Sheridan-Saint Germain section of the front line, they put on to the battlefield an experimental company of those devils.’ Devereau shook his head, recalling old headlines. ‘The press at the time called them “The Almost-Men”.’

  He ran a hand through dark hair, threaded with silver-grey at t
he temples. ‘It was a massacre. The rumours of the time, the stories in the press, were truly horrendous. Three thousand men holding the town of Preston Peak, most of them recent draftees from the state of Ohio. Just boys, really … We lost every last one of them. When the North counter-attacked with a tank regiment and steam-walkers and retook the town, they found only parts of bodies.’

  He tossed his Gitane on to the floor and crushed it with the heel of his boot. ‘They found a …’ He looked at Maddy. ‘This isn’t very nice, Miss Carter.’

  ‘Well … I guess you’ve started now,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘You might as well go on.’

  ‘As you wish. They found a body mounted on a wooden crossbar. A head, arms, torso, legs, all from different men. As if these creatures had been mocking man, parodying the Southern science, trying to make their very own creature. The soldiers entering the town found very few of the creatures alive … They’d turned on each other, you know? As if killing every human in the town hadn’t been enough. But before turning on each other they’d turned on the Southern officers who’d been assigned to lead them. Trust me, Miss Carter, you really wouldn’t want to hear what they did to them.’

  Maddy looked at his face. ‘No, I guess you’re probably right.’

  ‘Since then, they’ve not experimented with military eugenic units. But we know they have eugenic workers. Hundreds — thousands — of them working the plantations. They must have a better understanding these days of how to control them, how to design obedience into their minds.’

  ‘In my time, that’s basically the same technology as genetic engineering.’ Maddy looked out of the open shutter at the moonlit ruins of Brooklyn. ‘You know, when we arrived here, I didn’t think things looked that, you know, that advanced in this timeline.’

  ‘Scientific development is not necessarily symmetrical,’ replied Becks.

  She nodded. Becks was right. War, in this case a permanent state of war, seemed to have had the effect of accelerating some sciences and retarding others. For example, those bombers, the South’s sky navy that Bill had mentioned, seemed to be using a lighter-than-air technology far more advanced than was available in the normal 2001. While, on the other hand, it seemed that there was no sign of any computer technology, or, if there was, it was rudimentary.