The Eternal War

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 …’

‘That is not a sensible course of action, Madelaine.’

Maddy looked at her. Becks, quite impassive and calm. Almost childlike in the way she was squatting on the bricks, like some wartime child playing tea party with her broken dolls amid the rubble of her own home, oblivious to her fate.

‘Don’t you see, Becks? We’re all done here. We’re finished.’

She stood up, and clattered her way slowly across the bricks towards the doorway leading back into the main arch. She left Becks still squatting on her haunches patiently awaiting further instructions.

‘Madelaine?’

Maddy looked around the mess of the archway. The airborne dust that had filled the place half an hour ago had now settled, leaving a light, pale coating of powder on everything.

‘Madelaine?’ Becks called again from the back room. Her voice, normally so commanding, surprisingly deep for her feminine frame, right now sounded almost like the forlorn bleating of a lamb.

Maddy made her way across the floor, over the wide crack in the concrete, and ducked under the open shutter to look out again at the grey ruins of New York. Smudges of smoke marked the horizon to the north — Queens — where the bombing raid had taken place earlier. And the salmon-pink sun, now settling behind the tortured skeletons of Manhattan’s once fine and proud buildings, cast dappled paintbrush strokes of meagre warmth across the no-man’s land. The only colour on this colourless landscape.

Becks’s faint voice echoed out of the archway after her once more. ‘Madelaine! What are my orders?’

She ignored the support unit, left her sitting in the gathering darkness among the bricks, abandoned like an orphaned child.

‘Madelaine?’

One step in front of the other in the gathering twilight … each one easier than the last. She realized she could leave. Walk away from it all. Walk away from the responsibilities she’d never asked for, walk away from secrets she didn’t ask to know about. If all their field office was now was a crumbling archway and a bunch of machines that didn’t work any more, what difference would it make if she stayed or left?

She realized something. I can go.

She turned her back on the East River, Manhattan and the sun setting beyond, and faced north-east towards the ruins of Brooklyn, towards Boston …

Home.

Perhaps even in this alternate timeline the same people had met, fallen in love and made the same babies and somewhere north-east of here, in her home city, there was a little girl with glasses and frizzy strawberry-red hair who liked messing around with her father’s electronics toolset rather than playing with Barbie dolls. Perhaps that home was there. Perhaps her mom and dad were the same two people and she could explain to them who she was, get them to understand she was their daughter, but ten years older. For them it would be like having an older sister for their only child. A sister who could understand her in a way no normal sister could: a mentor, a guide, a friend.

Her faltering steps across the rubble-strewn landscape quickened.

A part of her argued the case that she still had responsibilities and obligations here. Liam and Sal, they too were stuck in this … whatever this world was. But what could she do for them? Sit on her bunk and wait for them in the dark? Wait until some bombing raid came here and decided to give this portion of the city another pounding?

Maddy shook the nagging voice away. She really hadn’t needed Becks to catalogue to her how complete and catastrophic the damage was to their equipment.

In the absence of a plan, or anything left of their field office for which she had to be responsible, there was only one small voice that made sense. A childlike voice.

I want to go home.