The Eternal War (44 page)

‘I am quite fine,’ she said to him. ‘You must sit down and recover now.’ She reached out for him and Wainwright and pushed them down until they were squatting on the floor, wheezing for air. She knelt down beside them. ‘Rest. Your soldiers will need you to be combat-ready.’

Wainwright looked up, slumped beside Devereau against the dirt wall. ‘Did you say … 
combat-ready
?’ he wheezed.

‘Affirmative.’

He turned to look at Devereau and managed a grin. ‘What a –’ he huffed and panted – ‘what a remarkable young lady this one is, uh?’

Devereau nodded. ‘A real trooper.’

CHAPTER 85

2001, New Chelmsford

‘Information: the rendezvous location is two hundred and fifty-seven yards ahead of us.’

Liam stared over the wooden fence at the muddy field beyond. ‘You’re joking! … Maddy chose a pig farm?’

Bob shook his head. ‘I am not making a joke at this time.’

‘She must really hate us.’ Sal was almost retching from the overpowering odour of pig manure. ‘They are filthy animals.’

‘It’s just mud and some pigs. Come on.’

He pulled himself over the fence and landed with a glutinous splat on the other side. ‘Ah … now, it’s a bit deeper than I thought.’

The others clambered over one by one and joined him, Sal last, muttering under her breath with each sinking step through the foul-smelling mud. By the failing light of dusk they could see that the pigs in the field seemed to be congregated in a far corner – feeding time, presumably. Or perhaps it was some porcine social event going on.

‘Which direction, Bob?’

Bob pointed a finger towards a space between two long and low pig huts.

Liam led the way, squelching, until they hit some drier, firmer ground.

‘I am detecting particles.’

‘She’s probing for us,’ said Liam. ‘Hurry! She needs to know we’re here!’ He sprinted forward into the gloom towards the space between the huts. Finally there, he jumped up and down and flapped his arms about. ‘This it?’ he called back to Bob. ‘Am I in the right place?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘What on earth is the fool doing now?’ asked Lincoln, shaking his foot free of slop.

‘Motion,’ said Sal. ‘He’s trying to register on their density probe.’

They joined him between the huts a moment later as the last rays of waning light from the sun faded beyond a horizon of gently rolling hills.

‘Hey! Yoo-hoo! We’re here, Maddy!’ Liam hopped excitedly. ‘Come get us!’

Bob cocked an eyebrow. ‘You are aware she cannot hear us, Liam?’

‘I know … I’m just …’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m just ready to go home, is all.’

Lincoln sat down on the edge of a water trough, undid the laces of his boots and took them off. He picked up one and began shaking out the gunk that had got inside it. ‘So, we shall be returning to the year of 1831?’

Sal nodded. ‘Taking you back home, Mr Lincoln.’

‘I see,’ he grunted. There seemed to be a shade of disappointment in that. ‘It will be an odd thing, returning to New Orleans. Returning to work as a flatboat crewman.’

She picked up his other boot, and with a stalk of hay began digging at and flicking out the mud. ‘But that is not what you’re going back to, is it?’ She offered him a friendly smile. ‘Not any more, right?’

He looked up at her. ‘You are talking about this destiny you say I have?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was a poorly educated woodsman with no money before all of this … this misadventure. When I return, I shall still be a poorly educated woodsman with no money, but one that is now smelling of pigs.’

‘No –’ she grasped his hand – ‘no, Abraham … you have seen what I have seen. Right?’

Their eyes met for a moment.

‘This is all wrong,’ she whispered. ‘This world and … and those poor creatures, intelligent creatures, treated like objects, machines, tools. Your country, fighting itself for over a century? For what? For other countries’ goals? You … 
you
are the reason all of this has happened.’

‘And only I can change that?’

She nodded.

‘What am I,’ he sighed, ‘but a penniless vagrant? How am I to find my way from
that
to president?’

‘You managed to do it,’ said Sal. She frowned. ‘Or
will manage
to do it. After all, you are quite stubborn, aren’t you?’

‘And quite rude, so you are,’ added Liam. ‘That’s always a help.’

‘And,’ she said, squeezing his hand, ‘you know what the right thing to do is. The right course to take with your life … no one normally has the luxury of knowing which way their life
should
go.’

‘You have acquired privileged knowledge of your future,’ said Bob. ‘This is a tactical advantage that you will be able to use to –’ He stopped talking and held an arm out. ‘Liam, you should step back. I am detecting particles.’

Liam sat down on the trough beside Lincoln. ‘And not everyone gets to see all that you’ve seen, Mr Lincoln, and still get to go back to live their lives.’ He shrugged sadly. ‘Me and Sal don’t have that.’

She nodded. ‘This is what we do now. This is what we’ll
always
do, I suppose.’

In front of them, a portion of the darkening blue sky, dotted with the first early stars, began to tremble and squirm.

‘Oh, look,’ said Liam, brightening, ‘here’s our lift home.’

CHAPTER 86

2001, New York

Maddy could hear the fighting had resumed; this time the crack and rattle of gunfire was much closer.

She was worried that something, or someone, would knock or damage the antennae array above. It would take just one stray bullet, that’s all,
just one
 … then this effort, the sacrifice, the bodies she’d seen lying side by side like sardines in a tin, all of that would have been for nothing.

Becks was outside fighting alongside the men. She could imagine the support unit was quite at home, content, covered in blood and mud, doing what she did best.

She heard someone bellowing orders, Devereau she guessed, followed by the deep throbbing
burr
of one of their heavy machine guns. She turned to look out of the entrance. She could see boots and drooping belts of ammo beneath the shutter: the machine-gun teams emerging from the fort and redeploying along the horseshoe.

It’s getting real close.

Both colonels had insisted the three machine-gun teams would be the last line of defence, the fort would be their Alamo.

Clearly these plans were now fluid.

Oh crud … Get a move on, Liam … for God’s –

> Maddy?

‘What?’

> The density probe has just picked up some movement.

‘Repetitive … not random?’

> Correct.

‘Grab an image!’

> Affirmative.

She saw the light-meter on the displacement machine flicker as energy was discharged, despatched along the heavy-duty insulated cables up through the jagged hole in the roof to be targeted by the array outside: space-time being discreetly teased open, an unfathomable spatial dimension punctured with a pin hole.

She watched the monitor on the right as a blocky low-resolution image appeared. The same image as last time: a muddy field, some sort of low hut, a darkening sky. But this time she could just about make out the blurred silhouette of some stupid fool caught mid-air doing star jumps.

Liam.

‘That’s them!’

> Affirmative. Activate the window?

‘Yes! Do it!’

The light-meter, bars of LEDs like a graphic equalizer, fluttered excitedly with the sudden expenditure of accrued energy. Two remote windows being opened simultaneously: one a hundred miles south of here, another in New Orleans, 1831. That was going to drain their charge completely. The rest then … was going to be up to them.

She listened to the displacement machine’s circuitry hum, saw the green charge display silently wink to red, one light after the other.

And the rest was going to be just waiting. And hoping.

Yet again.

Another of the leviathans slowly collapsed to its knees, the thick armour plating over its chest misshapen and twisted under the battering of a steady sputtering stream of high-calibre rounds. Blood was pouring down its front from numerous ragged wounds. It flailed its huge blade-tipped fists pitifully, angrily.

‘Got us another one!’ roared Sergeant Freeman, punching the air.

‘Come along! Here! This is good. Right here!’ Wainwright waved the other machine-gun teams into position against the trench wall. ‘Fire on those eugenics! Upper chest area … there are gaps in the armour! Do you see?’

Devereau was studying the slope below, illuminated now by crimson flares being shot into the night sky from their landing raft – bathing the whole mud-churned and cratered battlefield with a flickering blood-red light. Beyond the six remaining eugenics clanking slowly uphill bearing the weight of their armour – surely several tons of it each, he guessed – British soldiers were amassing in the borderline. He could see officers moving among knots of men, poised to step over the top and support the eugenics with a rush. And there, sitting astride sandbags, a British officer calmly observing the events uphill from him through a pair of field glasses.

CHAPTER 87

2001, New York

Becks watched with detached fascination at the brutal ruthlessness of these enormous beasts. Their arms swung tirelessly, scooping out of the trench and into the air bloody parts of men and divots of dirt alike. There were no moments of hesitation, no doubts, no confusion of morals or ethics – as much thought devoted to the process of killing as an electric band-saw might give to a plank of wood.

She could identify with that: a world simplified down to the barest essentials, to mission parameters. And that’s where her empathy, her sense of kindred-spirit, with these curious monsters ended. She too had her
own
mission parameters to fulfil.

One of the machine-gun teams lay in tatters just beyond the nearest leviathan, the thick barrel of the gun still smoking and aimed skyward on its tripod legs. She ducked down low, scrambling over the writhing bodies of the wounded, between the giant’s thick legs. At the same time that the genic sensed her movement below it she reached the machine gun, pulled it off its mount and swung its aim up.

No armour plating beneath it, the high-calibre bullets found plenty of soft flesh to rip through. The genic flailed, enraged, the feed-pipe that protruded from its small face flapping from side to side. She heard a deep moan coming from its chest, its throat; a cry of rage and agony locked behind a sealed mouth.

The gun’s stuttering fire ceased as the over-heated barrel choked on the ammunition belt. But she’d done enough damage. Blood rained down on her as the leviathan took several staggered steps, finally flopping on to the downhill side of the trench. She felt the ground vibrate with the impact of several tons of iron and flesh.

As another fresh flare exploded above the trench, bathing them in an artificial crimson dawn, she took in the state of play of the battle with one snapshot blink of her eyes. Two eugenics remained, the last of them, wreaking havoc further along the horseshoe. She saw arcs of dirt and glistening wet viscera spinning up into the night sky. The few men not maimed, dismembered or dying were beginning to break and scramble out of the trench and run for their lives. And two hundred yards downhill of all this, the British soldiers were now advancing in three ordered and steady lines on their position.

Colonel Devereau was up and out of the trench, attempting to rally the fleeing men. Wainwright was busy firing a carbine down the slope at the advancing British.

Their bunker of sandbags and piled dirt – the fort – their last line of defence right outside the archway, was sitting empty. A mistake.

‘Devereau!’ she yelled. Her voice – she chose a slightly deeper register than a normal human female, almost masculine, though not quite – carried across the noise of battle. Devereau looked her way. She pointed towards the fort and tossed the machine gun out of the trench towards him.

‘You must redeploy this in your final defensive position!’ she bellowed.

Devereau nodded. A last stand from the fort, perhaps that was already his intention with the half a dozen men he’d managed to stop from running away. The heavy machine gun and several yards of belted ammunition lying on the ground would help.

There were a few other men still alive in the trench, gathered around another silent smoking machine gun, trapped between the two leviathans, cowering from the sweeping arc of gore-covered spikes, and the growling, spinning blade of the motorized circular-saw blade.

[Assessment: heavy machine gun – tactical value = HIGH]

Acquiring a second heavy machine gun to fire out from their final position was worth the calculated hazard. She pulled a sabre from the hands of one of the dead. She vaguely recognized the man’s dark face; the grey flecks of coiled hair, the beard. His glazed sightless eyes gave her permission to take it and make good use of it.

Becks pulled herself up out of the trench and began to make her way towards the last two leviathans, skipping along the stacked sandbags like they were stepping stones across a babbling brook. Finally within striking range of the nearest of them, she pulled the sabre back and, using every fibre of muscle in her body to execute a low, sweeping, roundhouse blow, the blade arced round, biting through the coarse hide-like skin, the muscle and bone of the creature’s shin, as thick as a human torso. The bare foot, a yard long with flexing toes as big as cooking apples, flopped into the trench like a side of beef. The genic, missing everything beneath the cut, lost its balance and fell over, the thick plates of iron armour scraping and clanking as if a dumper truck had emptied a full load of salvaged metal on to a scrapheap.

Already exhausted under the burden of its armour, the leviathan struggled like an elephant with a broken spine, desperate to right itself once more.