by Alex Scarrow
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 trench 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.
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, n
ot 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. Shall 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.
