Another War

Chapter Five

‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Dickson. ‘Gloves are off, and we want some straight talking from you two. I’ve a list of questions here, and you’ll damn well answer each and every one of them.’

Adams bristled. ‘Lord Henbury is a peer of the realm…’

‘Which amounts to bugger all here. If you want to complain to Her Majesty◦– yes, I said Her Majesty◦– you can do so when and if I let you go.’

‘Queen Elizabeth the Second,’ said Thacker helpfully. ‘George the Fifth’s granddaughter. Succession has been maintained while you were away.’

Henbury looked pale and tired. He shifted constantly in his seat, trying to get comfortable on a backside that was lacking both fat and flesh. ‘I’ll trade you. Answers for some narcotic. My stump’s giving me hell.’

‘I can arrange that,’ said Thacker. He stepped away to the tent flap and talked to the guard outside. ‘It’ll be here in a minute or two. In the meantime, where’s Jack?’

‘Jack is,’ Henbury hesitated, ‘probably dead. He was dying the last time we saw him.’

‘And when was that?’ asked Dickson.

‘Time has no meaning where we’ve been. Everything is different there.’

‘Before or after the house disappeared?’

‘After.’ He rubbed his too-large eyes. ‘We tried to save him, just as we tried to save ourselves.’

‘Robert, did you kill Jack?’ Dickson spoke very quietly.

‘No. I wish I had now. But it wasn’t us. We did nothing. Part of the problem. Doing nothing until it was too late to do anything.’

Dickson looked up at Thacker, who returned his questioning gaze with his own. The man wasn’t making any sense.

‘Where did the machine come from? The one on the first floor of the west wing, far end.’

‘Jack built it. He brought it from Egypt with him.’

‘Archaeologist?’

‘He thought so. Perhaps he was.’

‘Do you know what it does?’

‘It eats. That’s what it does. It eats.’

‘And what does it eat, Robert?’

‘Everything. It consumes the vital energy from anything and kills it dead.’

Dickson tapped his pen on his clipboard. ‘So why aren’t you dead? And Adams?’

‘How alive do we look?’ snorted Adams. ‘Do you think I was always like this skeleton I am now?’

‘Where’s Jack?’

‘He’s dead. He must be dead by now.’

‘Where did you last see him?’

‘He was…’

‘Every time you stop to think, I worry that you’re about to lie to me.’ Dickson leaned back. ‘This is not the time for lies.’

Henbury screwed his face up. ‘I’m in pain.’

‘I understand that. What was Jack doing when you saw him last? What makes you think he’s dead?’

‘He was being crucified, embedded in a metal wall. It was pulling him apart, a fraction of an inch at a time.’ Henbury took gulps of air to steady himself. ‘He didn’t want our help, even though he was in agony. He thought they would turn him into a god, when all they were doing was sucking the very last drops of life from him. We tried to get him out, but there was no way of freeing him. He was the only one who knew how to work the machine.’ And he collapsed sobbing on the tabletop, the effort of explaining too great for him.

Adams rested his hand on Henbury’s shoulder and looked mutinous.

‘Adams?’ asked Thacker. ‘Who are ‘they’?’

‘If we could swap places, you wouldn’t believe me. So why should I waste my breath?’

‘Try us. We’ve seen things you could only dream of.’

‘They’re called Ankhani. Least, that’s what Jack called them. They live on a dead world at the other side of the machine. He let some of them through… to feed. That wasn’t enough, so they took everything, including us.’

Dickson took out a fresh sheet of paper from his clipboard. ‘These Ankhani? Do they look like us? Do they look like you?’

‘No. Not like us.’ Adams shuddered. ‘Dull, cold things. They walk on tentacles. Big head like a half-inflated balloon. Eyes are black and hard. They die like us, mind.’

‘Oh. You’ve killed one.’ Dickson was sketching.

‘More than one. Aim for the head. They burst.’

‘How gratifying.’ He turned the clipboard around. ‘Anything like that?’

‘No.’ Adams snatched the board and Dickson’s pen. ‘Tall, upright. Two eyes on the side of the head. Ugly as sin itself. Walks on its tentacles, I said. Like legs, long like snakes. Here.’

Thacker looked over the table. If it was true, they were ghastly.

‘And what do they want with us?’ Dickson contemplated the monstrosity in front of him.

‘Nothing. We’re like cows. They use some of us for meat, and some of us for milk.’

‘They’re farming us?’

‘If we let them. The whole world could be like the Hall.’

Thacker rubbed his chin under the surgeon’s mask. ‘Why didn’t you tell us all this earlier? First opportunity you had?’

Adams raised himself on his hands. He leaned across the table. ‘We’re not bloody mad. You wouldn’t have believed us then, and you don’t believe us now. I can see it in his face.’ He jabbed a finger at Dickson. ‘He thinks we’re spinning some sort of yarn, either covering up what we really did, or that we’re mental with talk of monsters and doors to other worlds.’

‘And what about me?’ asked Thacker. ‘What sort of look do I have?’

‘You? You’re more ready to believe. You’ve seen what it was like, and you can imagine it worse, trapped in your own little bubble, having every last ounce of effort drained from you until even your blood starts to run slow.’

‘Sit yourself down, Mr. Adams,’ said Dickson. He looked at his list. ‘You were going to burn the Hall down.’

Henbury wearily raised his head. ‘We were going to try one last thing. Raise the energy levels back to what they were before we were cut off. We assumed we were going to die, but any chance of escaping that hell was worth it.’

‘But you never got the chance to set the fire.’

‘No.’

‘So how did you get back?’

‘We don’t know.’ Henbury ground out the words. ‘This is what is destroying us. We don’t know why, and we are afraid. We have made not one jot of difference to that machine. It does what it does and without Jack we can’t understand it.’

Thacker was distracted by the guard returning with the painkillers, a little brown bottle half-full with white pills. He heard Dickson ask: ‘You said something before about a door to other worlds?’

Henbury didn’t answer. He waited until Thacker had shaken out two of the pills into the palm of his hand and nudged them across the table.

‘Destroy it,’ he said to Thacker. ‘You must have some way of annihilating matter by now, some death ray, that will make sure that thing can never be used again. If you don’t destroy it, it will destroy you. Do you understand, Major?’

‘I understand. It’s not my call.’

‘The Ankhani will come and they will take what they want and they will want to take everything.’

‘I get the idea. Dickson, a word.’

As Dickson got up, Adams started cursing again. ‘They don’t believe us. They don’t. They’re not going to do anything. They’re bloody well not going to do anything. They’re going to try and control the blasted thing.’

Thacker closed the tent flap on the pair.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Ancient Egyptian monsters sucking the life out of people? Can you imagine the Home Secretary’s expression?’

‘I can imagine it if they turn out to be right.’

‘Thacker!’

‘What reason do they have to lie? However long they’ve had to concoct a story, be it years or months, they ought to have come up with something better than that preposterous nonsense. And we have the unalterable fact that two days ago, Henbury Hall wasn’t even on the map. So far, they’ve given us the only coherent explanation of what happened, fantastical though it may be.’

‘Sherlock Holmes,’ said Dickson.

‘Sorry?’

‘Sherlock Holmes. When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’

‘So is what they’ve said improbable or impossible?’

‘I’d say it was impossible. That’s what I’m going to tell my Lords and Masters.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to go down to London, give a briefing and get some shut-eye. I suggest you do the same. You’re all washed out. I’ll be back in the morning, and we can start making some plans. Like what we’re going to tell the Americans, and when.’

‘What’s happening with the documents we brought out?’

‘I’m personally taking them to the British Museum in the morning. See if they can decipher anything. It’s too important to entrust to someone else.’

‘I’ll pack those two off to bed.’

‘Don’t let anyone talk to them. Or let them talk to anyone. I don’t want any unilateral action. That machine is not to be touched.’

Thacker thought that last warning was directed more than a little at himself. ‘I’ll make sure.’

He was woken from his fitful sleep by the sound of rain on canvas. Outside, down in the valley, dust was turning to mud and sluicing away into the stream, staining it black and coating everything from there to London Bridge with a fine layer of death.

Shapeless, nameless creatures rose up from the bed of the Thames and shambled along the Embankment, through Parliament Square and up the Mall to rot the gates of the Palace and crown themselves kings.

Then Thacker woke up for the second time. The rain was real. The rest was not.

He lay for a moment, shivering and sweating, on his camp bed, before throwing the covers to one side and dressing quickly. The floodlights outside cast shadows on the tent and gave him enough light to see by.

He strapped on his sidearm and threw on a poncho. He stepped out into the rain, the trampled grass already slick with mud, and navigated the maze of guy ropes and iron pegs to the quarantine tent where Henbury and Adams were kept.

The guards, cold and miserable, gave a half-hearted challenge, and Thacker waved them aside. He pulled the hood of his poncho back and knelt next to Henbury’s bed.

The man was curled up tightly in his blankets, his face twitching with dreams.

‘Henbury, wake up.’

In an instant, Henbury had gasped, shrank back, and covered his face with his hands. He peeped out through his fingers.

‘It’s Thacker,’ he whispered. ‘We need to talk.’

‘Now? Yes, now, why not? The other man’s gone, hasn’t he?’ Henbury sat up, his bed creaking.

‘Dickson. He’ll be back tomorrow. Listen. I’m going to ask you this once and once only. Is what you told us true?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh crap.’ Thacker sat on the bed next to Henbury, and regarded Adams’ sleeping form. ‘I still don’t get this business with Jack. He brought this thing with him from Egypt, and installed it in your house, and you didn’t ask any questions?’

‘It wasn’t like that. I didn’t know what he was doing. No one did, until it was too late.’

‘Everybody lived in the east wing. Except Jack. Didn’t you go and see him, see what he was up to?’

Henbury lowered his head. ‘When Jack came to live at the Hall, it was an act of charity. He had nowhere else to go. His father, my father’s younger brother, had all but cut him off. He had an allowance that wouldn’t have let him even eat in this country. Jack had been in Egypt. He came with crates of curios and artefacts. He was supposed to be writing a book about the ancients, so everything was carried to the rooms in the west wing to keep his clutter out of the way. And him.’

‘You didn’t get on.’

‘We’d never got on. He bullied me when I was young. Until I knocked him down. Bloody noblesse oblige. I should have told him no.’

‘Can’t choose your family, can you?’

‘I don’t do stairs very well, with my leg missing. And… oh Christ, this is hard. I was engaged to my nurse, Emily. She started seeing Jack. I knew about it, but didn’t want to think about it. Blocked it out. That was why I never went to his rooms, in case I found the two of them together. I would have had to have done something then, and it would have been all very unseemly.’

‘He sounds a right bastard.’ Thacker took a deep breath. ‘By the way… Emily says she’s sorry.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I saw her yesterday. She said she was sorry for hurting you.’

‘Emily?’ There was hope in his voice that was entirely misplaced. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s a hundred and five years old, Robert.’ He caught the look in his eye. ‘Not a good idea. You are, quite literally, from two different worlds now. It would break both your hearts. If it’s any consolation at all, she missed you all her life.’

‘Oh dear God, what a mess. I’m marooned in the future, and there’s no way to go back.’

‘We can do amazing things. We’ve walked on the Moon, we can talk to anyone anywhere at anytime, we’ve cured diseases that used to kill millions. We’re busy unravelling the secrets of life itself, and we still have to live one second at a time. I’m sorry, too. What are we going to do about the machine?’

Henbury wiped his nose on his sleeve and sniffed. ‘Can you destroy it?’

‘I don’t know. Does it come apart?’

‘I think it must do. Jack must have assembled it in his rooms, thinking about the number of boxes that came with him.’

‘Perhaps we can take one vital part, and get rid of that.’ Thacker slapped himself on the forehead. ‘Dickson’s got all the paperwork: diagrams, journal, everything.’

‘There’s always brute force.’

‘I’ve seen it. It looks pretty solid.’

‘Explosives?’

‘I don’t know what it was like in your day, but they don’t hand out the C4 like sweeties anymore.’ Thacker silently considered for a moment. ‘This would cost me everything, you realise that? Dickson has dreams of a protective shield over London, and he can sell that dream to the politicians. Who wouldn’t jump at it? Every city safe from missiles and bombs, skipping into a future moments after the explosion and ready to fight back.’

‘It’s a trap,’ hissed Henbury. ‘It caught Jack. Now it’s caught your friend. The Ankhani will betray him, just as they betrayed Jack. You can’t use it. It’s theirs.’

Thacker thought hard. ‘I still don’t know. What if Dickson’s right? I think you’re mad, but are you telling me the truth?’

‘You said you were only going to ask me that once.’

‘So I did.’

He heard distant gunfire, echoing through the night. Rifle, fully automatic, one long burst until the magazine was empty. Adams sat up abruptly, crying out in alarm.

‘Stay here,’ said Thacker. Of course they would stay. They had no choice.

In the dark and the rain, the guards at the main gate were scanning the Hall and the wasteland around it with night sights.

‘Who fired?’

‘Someone down at the house. We’ve lost radio contact with the men by the kitchen door.’

‘Tell everyone else to stay in position. No one’s going off half-cocked.’ More soldiers came up behind him, struggling to put on pieces of kit as they ran. He waited until he had collected half a dozen of them, then stepped through the barrier and started down the drive.

‘Sir? What about your suit?’

‘I think the creeping plague is the least of our worries. Keep trying on the radio. Tell me if you get through. Right, you lot. Double time down to the Hall. Stay together, keep your eyes peeled. If you see anything that’s not human, kill it.’