The Eternal War (47 page)

Her chip
.

She looked around, found a carbine with a bayonet fixed to the end. She reached for it, expecting the guard or the orderly to bark a warning at her. Instead their eyes and everyone else’s were locked on the sky.

Panicking, fumbling, she tried to get the bayonet off, tugging at it with a growing frustration.

How does it come off?

She tried twisting it, and the fixing unlocked with a dull scrape. She wrenched it off the barrel, dropped the carbine and looked down at Becks.

Do it!

She would have to thrust the tip of the blade into her skull and dig around inside for that silicon wafer, not much bigger than a memory stick, a sim card.

She pressed the bayonet’s tip against Becks’s forehead, just above her brow line.

Do it! Now!

She tried to push down, but couldn’t.

If you can’t do it … then take the head – take the whole head!

She moved the tip down to the soft flesh beneath her jawline.

Cut! Cut! CUT!

‘I can’t … I can’t!’ she whimpered under her breath. She looked up. The time wave had rolled in from the Atlantic, and was now twisting and contorting Manhattan, like clay on a potter’s wheel, moulded and remoulded, like molten wax in a lava lamp.

And now it was crossing the East River.

Maddy closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and did what needed to be done. Then she got to her feet and started to run. Her feet slapped the ground noisily as she pushed her way past men staring listlessly up at the approaching wave.

So quiet!

So perfectly still.

Just the sound of her panting breath, her feet on rubble and a deep, deep rumble that sounded like the earth itself was preparing to split open.

She dropped down into the trench, slipping and falling in the blood-soaked dirt on to her hands and knees. She scrambled to her feet, pounding down the last dozen yards, past a young British officer who barely seemed to notice her, his eyes glazed with wonder.

‘Good Lord, quite beautiful,’ she heard him whisper as she brushed past him, past a pair of orderlies carrying a loaded stretcher between them, like everyone else standing utterly motionless, transfixed, their task for the moment completely forgotten.

Maddy reached the crumbling archway and cast a quick glance back at the sky. The front of the reality wave was across the East River, taking the armada of landing rafts and turning them into a million different things: Viking longboats, Roman triremes, Spanish galleons, sea monsters …

She ducked under the shutter. The floor was still littered with bodies. A few of them barely alive and moaning deliriously from gunshot and bayonet wounds … hands reaching up to her, pleading for water.

Across the archway she could see the computer system was still up and running, that tank – that beautiful old reliable Mark IV rust-bucket from an older time of this endless war – was
still
running, still feeding the archway with power.

‘Bob!’ she screamed as she picked her way over the splayed limbs of the dead and wounded men.

She saw a dialogue box appear on one of the screens, although she was too far away to read the response.

‘It’s Maddy!’ she gasped. ‘Activate a field! NOW!’

She collapsed against the computer desk, gasping, wheezing, close enough now to read computer-Bob’s response.

> Information: insufficient power to include the entire field office.

‘Then … then do it just around me!’

The cursor began to shift across the dialogue box.

> Caution: there will be obstructions within the radius …

Of course, the archway had dropped by several feet. ‘In the air, Bob. A portal mid-air! I need to jump into it as the time wave arrives!’

For a full second, perhaps two, the cursor blinked without a response. Then finally began to jitter to the right.

> Affirmative.

Outside the shutter she saw loose dirt being scooped up by the air pressure just ahead of the wave. She reached out for Becks’s head, cradling it in her arms. Maddy climbed up on to the computer desk. ‘NOW, BOB … DO IT NOW!’

In front of her a portal shimmered open, suspended three feet above the floor. There was no knowing if that was high enough, whether she was going to emerge into the unchanged archway, reappearing up to her waist in the concrete floor. Undoubtedly fatal. Horribly fatal.

She jumped for the portal just as the wave arrived and tore the archway into a million different possibilities.

CHAPTER 93

11.31 p.m. 11 September 2001, Police Precinct 5, New York

The police sergeant lurched violently in his seat, the squad car rocking on its suspension.

‘Whoa! Hey! Bill! You nearly spilled my darned coffee!’

Police Sergeant Bill Devereau turned to look at his partner. ‘Uh? Sorry. Must’ve dropped off for a moment there.’

His partner nodded. ‘You can say that – you were muttering like some juiced-up crackpot.’

Bill Devereau shook his head. Wide awake now. ‘I … Crazy, I just had the weirdest dream.’

‘Yeah?’

Devereau narrowed his eyes, stroked his chin thoughtfully. The memory of it was fading fast, blurring; the clear definition of it vanishing, like cream stirred into coffee. ‘A war … or somethin’ like that. New York was all just ruins … like, I dunno, like Stalingrad.’

Sergeant Wainwright sighed. ‘I’m sure you ain’t the only one havin’ nightmares, buddy.’ Their precinct had lost some men earlier today when the Twin Towers came down, good men. And they’d be lucky to find anything of them in those smouldering ruins. They were going to be burying empty coffins for weeks to come.

Devereau stopped stroking his clean-shaven chin. ‘It was weird … In the dream, I had a beard, would you believe? Big bushy thing.’

Sergeant Wainwright turned to look at him. ‘
A beard?
’ His face cracked with a cavalier grin. ‘Beard? You kiddin’ me? You’d look a total idiot with a beard.’

Devereau nodded. He checked his face in the wing mirror. Yes, he probably would at that.

‘You’re gettin’ too old to be on the beat, Bill, seriously … If you got to be catchin’ sleep like that on duty.’

‘Was up late last night, that’s all.’

Wainwright nodded thoughtfully. His gaze rested on a bundle of newspapers dropped off outside a corner store. Tomorrow’s papers. Tomorrow’s headlines.

There was going to be only one story in every paper tomorrow.

‘Guess there’s gonna be a lot more sleepless nights for everyone.’

Devereau nodded. The dream had gone. Blown away like morning mist along a riverbank. All that was left was a nagging sense of trouble lying ahead. A storm coming.

‘You got that right, partner.’

CHAPTER 94

2001, New York

Maddy opened her eyes. She must have blacked out for a moment there. Her glasses were askew on her forehead and there was drool on her chin. She adjusted her spectacles, wiped her mouth and sat back down in the office chair.

‘Sheesh,’ she whispered.

The corner of her desk she’d been standing on was still covered in a thick coat of rust-coloured brick dust, but it ended suddenly, sharply. A curve of dust … then none. Beyond that her desk was as normal. Dr Pepper cans, pizza boxes, scraps of paper and pens, sweet wrappers and magazines. But none of the debris that had cascaded from above during the artillery bombardment earlier.

She looked down at the floor. No longer a crazy paving of fractured concrete, littered with the broken bodies of men. It was restored to how it had been a week ago. The archway was no longer a crumbling ruin.

She looked down at Becks’s still face. Her hair tangled with drying blood. There was a job yet to do, but not now. Not yet. She gently placed the head on the cabinet beside the desk, turning Becks’s pale death-mask face away from her so she didn’t have to look at it.

The monitors were all on, several of them playing live news feeds.

‘Bob? You there?’

> Hello, Maddy. Just a moment …

She heard the hard drives on each of the linked PCs begin to whir and click.

> I am detecting multiple timeline continuity errors.

Yes, of course … Bob had extended a preservation field around her alone. The rest of the archway, including computer-Bob, had not experienced the trauma of the last week.

> Information: external date is registering as 18 September. We appear to be seven days outside our time envelope.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, a bunch of stuff happened, Bob. You recall Abraham Lincoln running out on us?’

> Of course. According to my internal clock, we sent Liam and the others to retrieve Abraham Lincoln two hours and sixteen minutes ago.

‘Yeah … well, you’re now out of sync. We need to reset the archway field and go back to our normal deployment time. You need to do that now.’

> Affirmative, Maddy.

‘Then we’ve got to open a window for Liam and the others to bring them back.’

> I do not have a reliable data stamp for them. My last data stamp is …

‘They’re not down in Quantico, Virginia, any more. We’ll need to use the data stamp before that one. You should still have that sitting in your memory cache.’

> New Orleans, 1831? This does not make sense. How did they get there?

She smiled wearily at the webcam. ‘It’s a long story, Bob. I’ll talk you through it later, OK?’

CHAPTER 95

1831, New Orleans

The man’s bloodshot eyes focused on Sal.

‘My … my God! It’s … it’s … 
you
!’ he gasped. His mouth flapped open and closed. A thick gout of blood oozed out from between his lips.

Sal leaned close to him, grabbed one of his hands and held it tightly. ‘You … you’re going to be fine!’

No, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. She looked at the awful turned-inside-out remains of two horses and one man. One of the horses was still kicking, the other already dead. And so would this poor man be, very soon. He was so very far from fine.

Bob knelt down beside her. ‘This was a density overlap error. This man will not last …’

‘I know!’ she hissed, glaring at Bob to shut up.

Liam’s face looked grey, like he was going to heave, but he somehow managed to hold the churning contents of his guts in check as he hunkered down beside them. ‘I’ve seen this before. It’s a time-window mistake!’ He shot a glance at the dying man’s face. ‘Maybe he’s a …’ His eyes widened. ‘Jay-zus! Maybe he’s a TimeRider? One of us?’

‘Listen … listen to me,’ gasped the man. Struggling to find his breath between mouthfuls of blood. ‘I … I … tried … warn … you …’

‘Warn us? What do you mean?’

‘P-Pandora … it … was me …’

Pandora?
Liam looked at Sal. Back at the man. ‘You left that note? In San Francisco? That was you?’

‘Y-yes … I … my name … J-Joseph …’ The man’s eyes started to glaze, to roll. He was going into shock.

‘What is Pandora?’ asked Sal.

His mouth gushed blood. His hand began to spasm, flexing and squeezing hers.

‘Pandora! What is it? Please!’

His gaze focused back on her. ‘… W-Waldstein … the … end … he knows …’ His voice was little more than a rustling whisper.

Sal leaned in closer till she could feel the tickle of his dying breath against her cheek. ‘You’ll be OK,’ she whispered to him pointlessly, squeezing his hand again, as if that was going to help. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

‘
You!
 … 
S-Sal
 … 
Saleena
 …’

She looked at him, their faces inches apart, intimately close. ‘You
know
me?’ she whispered.

‘
You
 … 
y-you are
 …’ His hand began to spasm again, gripping hers tightly, painfully. ‘… 
are
 … 
n-not
 … 
who you th-think
 … 
y-you
 … 
are
 …’

His eyes rolled until only the whites were showing, his hand crushing her. Then suddenly he released her hand with a lurch. Out of his nose came a fine spray of blood.

‘I … know … a-about … the … th-the …’ His mouth gushed blood on to his chin. And he sighed. Not so much a death rattle, just a simple and protracted sigh of relief at escaping the agony.

But it came with words, two very faint words. She could have sworn that’s what she heard him mutter as the poor man died – it wasn’t her mis-hearing him. It wasn’t a random contortion of mouth and tongue. She was almost certain she’d heard two distinct words. A message for her alone.

The bear.

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First published 2011

Copyright © Alex Scarrow, 2011
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