The Eternal War (16 page)

Devereau balled up the communiqué and tossed it on to his small desk. Few of the troops spoke a word of French anyway; he could just as well tell them anything he wanted. French was the language of high echelons of command. The Union’s generals were mostly imported. Most of them well-connected, Paris-based sons of billionaires who fancied carving out a few years of military glory for themselves before settling down to a cosy life back in mainland Europe.

The troops, on the other hand, the poor wretches cowering in their bunkers right now and hoping today’s bombing raid wasn’t going to drift further south, were all local boys. Lads from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ohio. Sons of soldiers,
grandsons
of soldiers who’d held the line here for the Union for the last hundred and thirty-odd years.

He laughed dryly at that. Once upon a time it was the Union of Northern American States. But not any more. The ‘Union’ by name, perhaps, but no longer run by American generals and presidents.

He sighed. Long ago he’d given up trying to explain to the lads under his command that the French and their other European allies weren’t over here bank-rolling this war for them, for their dream of a united nation of free men. They were doing it for all their own reasons.
Political
reasons,
complicated
reasons, that were hard to explain to young men who could barely read and write.

Anyway, careless talk like that about their French benefactors could end up with him smoking one of these Gitanes in front of a hastily assembled firing squad.

Ah well, do your duty, come what may.
Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.

On the wall of his small bunker room, damp concrete sweated in patches. Among the patches hung an old sepia photograph in a wooden frame. A collector’s item now.

Devereau stood in front of it and studied the row of generals in camp chairs smiling for the photographer as they held their ceremonial sabres to one side. Generals from the old, old times, the very first period of the civil war. Generals, all of them proud sons of America: Meade, Sherman, Grant, Hancock, thick whiskers and proud smiles beneath their soft felt hats.

A soldier could fight and die for men like that. For a cause like that … a united America. For freedom. He shook his head sadly. But not for
this
, not for what this stale war had become: generation after generation of American boys dying on one side for the French …

The room vibrated from the sonic boom of far-off ordnance.

… and on the other side for the
British
.

CHAPTER 28

2001, Quantico, Virginia

The inside of the derelict barn smelled of compost, the afternoon light spearing in between the loose wooden slats and catching sluggish airborne motes of dust.

‘Here this’ll do us for now,’ said Liam, catching his breath.

Lincoln sat down on a desiccated bale of hay. ‘Young lady,’ he began, still out of breath himself, ‘and gentlemen … we meet again, third time to my counting.’ He frowned. ‘Liam. Liam O’Connor? If memory serves me?’

‘Aye.’

‘Please now … please tell me my timely escape from that under-bridge dungeon of yours is not the cause of all this … this
alteration
?’

Liam laughed desperately. ‘I’m afraid that … and your
untimely
jumping into our window home from New Orleans, Mr Lincoln. That’s what’s caused this, all right. A bit reckless and … not too clever of you, truth be told.’

‘You have become a timeline anachronism,’ rumbled Bob. ‘Until you are safely returned to your original time-stamp, history will remain contaminated and this timeline will persist.’

Sal handed him a worn smile. ‘You’ve been a very naughty boy.’

‘So it would seem.’ Lincoln looked down at his feet, sombre. ‘I believe I owe you all an apology.’

Liam, getting warm inside the barn, unzipped and took off his jacket, one of a bunch of hooded sweatshirts branded with various sports team names splayed across them that Sal had purchased for him from Walmart some time ago. He wore them without knowing – without particularly caring – who the Yankees, Redsocks or the Bulls were.

‘Bob, what do you suggest we do now?’

‘Recommendation: we should remain here for the moment, Liam, and await a tachyon signal. They know our location. Madelaine will attempt to open a return window for us.’

‘If she can,’ said Liam.

Bob nodded. ‘Correct. If she can.’

Lincoln looked up. ‘Your time-travelling machinery is broken?’

‘The displacement machine requires a lot of power, so it does. We draw it in from the city’s supply … a lot of it,’ Liam said, unfastening the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘If New York has changed and we’re not getting any energy, then we have a bit of a problem.’

‘We have a generator, though,’ said Sal.

‘Aye. For what good the thing does.’

‘Maddy’ll be running it by now,’ she replied. ‘It just takes a little while to charge up the machine.’

‘This is only a
positional
translation,’ said Bob, ‘the energy requirement for the return portal will be small. I estimate only three per cent of capacity charge would be required.’

Sal peered out between the wooden slats. ‘There then … shouldn’t be too long for us to wait.’

‘What if this “portal” of yours … 
does not
appear?’ asked Lincoln. ‘What then? Are we stuck in this place?’

‘Jahulla.’ Sal made a face. ‘Are you always this pessimistic?’

He shrugged. ‘No woodsman ever felled a tree by smiling like a fool at it.’

Liam pursed his lips. ‘Very poetic.’ He joined Sal in looking out at the distant farm-cum-refinery and the fleet of smoke-belching tractors and combines buzzing around in the field. The first of the vehicles was returning up the ramp and into the cavernous dark entrance of some sort of delivery bay with a payload of harvested crop. It reminded him, bizarrely, of termites feeding their queen. He shuddered at the unpleasant comparison.

‘If Maddy’s got technical problems her end …’ he began.

Jay-zus, now, when does she ever not?

‘… then I suppose we’ll not be getting a portal back home,’ said Liam.

‘Hang on!’ said Sal. ‘It’s worth a go, I guess.’ She pulled the mobile phone out of the pouch of her hoody, flipped it open, selected Maddy’s phone on quick dial and held it up to her ear. A moment later, she shook her head. ‘No signal.’

Liam looked back outside, up at the sky, blue and cloudless, just like the
normal
11 September had been. The sun had dipped past midday an hour ago and glinted with a bronze warmth off the hull of the airborne vessel hovering several miles away and yet still looking impossibly large.

‘If there’s nothing from Maddy by the time it gets dark, it means she’s got problems. No power most likely.’ He shucked his shoulders. ‘Which means we’ve got good news and bad news.’

Sal turned to look at him. ‘Bad news first, Liam. You should always do bad news first.’

‘All right … bad news is it means we’re walking home. The good news is that if Maddy’s got no power, the archway field won’t be on, which means it won’t reset without us.’ He looked at Bob. ‘I suggest tonight we start making our way north-east, back to New York. What do you think?’

‘Affirmative. That is a valid plan. If we maintain a direct true-line route back to New York, I will be able to detect any narrow-beam tachyon signal she might attempt to send.’

‘Tonight?
Night
, sir?’ said Lincoln. ‘Night? Why on earth would you want to choose the
night
to walk home? It’s when all manner of scoundrels and thieves emerge for their nefarious purposes.’

Liam continued to study the distant airborne object. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m a little nervous about all that stuff out there. That’s pretty advanced technology, isn’t it, Bob?’

The support unit joined him beside the wall of the barn and peered out. ‘The airborne vessel may be using lighter-than-air technology.’

‘You mean … like a balloon? Like them Nazi airships?’

‘Affirmative. The ground vehicles appear to be using conventional combustion engine technology. Comparable to the normal timeline.’ He turned to Liam. ‘With closer inspection we could determine more precisely what technology levels exist in this alternate timeline.’

‘Uhh … how about we
don’t
make a closer inspection?’ He slapped Bob gently on his back. ‘Nice idea an’ all, Bob, but to be entirely honest I’d rather we just made our way back home as quickly and as quietly as we can.’

‘I agree,’ said Sal. She was going to say something about being a little perturbed by the workers she’d glimpsed emerging from the refinery and shuffling down the ramp. Barely more than dots at that distance, but there’d been something unsettling, almost inhuman about the way they moved.

‘Night-time I suggest, Mr Lincoln,’ said Liam. ‘Given these people have big floaty air vessels, we’d be far more easily spotted in the day.’

‘Night-time,’ Lincoln grumbled. ‘Well now, Mr O’Connor, we shall just have to hope this is a safer world by night than my … home – place – time …’ He shrugged the end of the sentence away. He was still struggling with the terminology of time travel.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much,’ said Sal, ‘we’ve got Big Bad Bob. He’ll look after us.’

‘Affirmative. I am a support unit. Your safety, Mr Lincoln, is a primary mission parameter. You are to be safely escorted to the New York field office, and from there returned to 1831.’

‘Anyway –’ Sal put on a cheery smile – ‘I’m sure Maddy’s going to get things up and running and open that portal any time soon, right, Liam?’

He tried to wear the same breezy optimism on his face. But it didn’t take. Instead he cocked a sceptical eyebrow at her. ‘I presume you’re talking about some
other
team there, Sal? Right?’

‘Uh? Why?’

‘Well, to be sure, and I’d hate to think I sound as grumpy as our new lanky friend here, but –’ he shrugged – ‘it never bleedin’ well seems to go quite that smoothly for
us
.’

CHAPTER 29

2001, New York

Maddy stared, heartbroken, at the small mound of debris in the back room. A portion of the ceiling had completely collapsed. Through a jagged hole in the brickwork above she could see shards of sunlight poking through. The bricks had cascaded down on to two of the growth tubes, shattering the plastic and spilling the protein solution and foetuses on to the floor. There was nothing that could be done for either of the growth candidates – one of each: a baby Bob and a baby Becks – they were quite dead.

‘Oh God … oh no, this is awful.’

Their relatively new generator was damaged as well, the casing battered and dented. A panel on one side had been knocked away and dangled from the frayed remains of several cables.

All the damage had been caused when the archway had appeared in this alternate reality, hovering several feet above the ground where the crater was. The whole archway had dropped by almost a yard. Enough of a shock for the old brickwork, held together by crumbling cement, prayer and gravity, that it had failed them.

‘I have evaluated the damage, Madelaine. The general structure of the archway is severely compromised.’

She nodded silently.

‘The generator is not functional at the moment although it is possible that I might be able to repair it. I will need to first dig away the bricks to assess the level of damage.’ Becks pointed to the shattered tubes. ‘Those two tubes cannot be repaired. The other three growth tubes are undamaged; however, the foetuses inside them will be viable for only another forty-eight hours without power.’

‘Just gets better and better,’ Maddy replied. The sound of her voice scared her. It was small, defeated, barely more than a whisper.

Becks looked at her, missing the irony entirely. ‘No. There is worse news, Madelaine.’

Maddy nodded at Becks to go on.

‘The tachyon transmission array is completely destroyed.’

Maddy cursed under her breath. The transmission array was an important piece of equipment, a relatively small but efficiently crafted signal transfer dish that had sat quietly in the far corner of the back room and until now never ever warranted her specific attention. It did its job, had never required any maintenance. The only reason she knew of its existence at all was because she’d recently – out of sheer boredom – read through a manifest of the technical components in the archway.

But now there it was, smashed to bits, nothing more than a twisted mesh of fine wires and shattered eggshell silicon.

Maddy had a fair idea what that meant. ‘We can’t signal Bob, can we?’

‘Correct. More importantly, even if we had an adequate source of electricity, we will be unable to open or close
any displacement windows
.’

Those words failed to fully register with her.

‘What did you say?’

‘We use the same array to target signals as we do to target tachyon stream pulses to open a portal, Madelaine. Without the transmission array, we are completely unable to open any portals. We are unable to operate in any meaningful way. This field office is no longer able to function.’

Maddy felt her legs wobble and give way, and before she knew it she was slumped on her knees among the pile of red bricks and cement powder. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her dust-covered face, leaving clean tracks on her cheeks in their wake.

‘Madelaine? Are you OK?’

‘No, not really,’ Maddy burbled. She buried her face in her hands.

Bricks shifted and slid as Becks stepped round carefully and squatted down in front of her. She reached out and gently pulled one of Maddy’s hands away from her face. For a moment she studied Maddy’s eyes, screwed up behind the round glasses, red and puffy.

‘Why are you crying?’ she asked softly, almost tenderly.

Maddy sniffed, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘What the hell else am I going to do? We’re totally screwed. That’s us finished this time. Might as well just … I dunno … just curl up … and … and …’