The Eternal War

CHAPTER 92

2001, New York

Maddy and the other prisoners were seated on the ground fifty yards away from the horseshoe trench, guarded by only a handful of British soldiers. It was clear to them that there was no fight left in the small ragged huddle of Union and Confederate soldiers.

She watched them processing the bodies of their own first. Checking for signs of life before pulling regimental collar tags from their necks and carrying the corpses down towards the river’s edge where they were being loaded aboard the landing rafts.

She noticed nearby a particularly dense mound of bodies with crimson tunics, busy with orderlies squatting among them feeling for signs of life. And there — as a body was disentangled and carried away by a couple of them — she saw Becks.

She got to her feet and started to pick her way across the battlefield.

‘Hey! Miss! Sit back down!’ shouted one of the British soldiers guarding them.

Maddy ignored him, drawn to the pale face staring up through its own nest of bodies. She pushed her way past an orderly and squatted down on the ground beside Becks’s cold, still face. Dark blood caked the right side of her face, trickling down from a gunshot wound to her temple.

‘Becks?’

The orderly, a young man with freckles and jutting ears, looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know this woman, miss?’

She said nothing.

‘By the look of it, whoever she was, she put up one hell of a fight.’

His voice sounded far away. She barely heard it. Instead she gazed curiously at the spatter of a tear on Becks’s left cheek, for a moment wondering whether a support unit could actually cry. Then she realized it was one of her own. She wiped her eyes beneath her glasses and sniffed.

I’m crying for a freakin’ meat robot. She scowled, angry with herself for being so pathetic and weak. It’s a machine … a tool. That’s all, you moron!

‘Becks?’ she whispered. ‘Becks … I’m so sorry.’

Sorry for what? Sorry that I never bothered to get to know you … like Liam did?

Maybe. Maybe she was sorry about that. But then again wasn’t it better not to treat these things as human, as friends?

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered again, stroking one of Becks’s dark eyebrows. The one she’d made a habit of raising every time she had a question she wanted to ask.

She was vaguely aware that the orderly was remonstrating with the guard who’d come after her, to give her some space, that she wasn’t about to run anywhere, escape.

‘Becks, I’m sorry that we never just … you know, never just talked.’

Like Liam did, like Sal did. Both of them quite comfortable with the idea of hanging out with Bob and Becks as if they were just like them, human.

She traced a line down Becks’s cold cheek. Quite dead. Beneath the bodies lying across her were injuries she didn’t need to see — didn’t want to see. Obviously too much catastrophic damage at once, for her body’s self-repair system to cope with.

The raised voices in the background were a million miles away. Muted. Some other place. This moment was hers alone. A chance to say goodbye. Her own time and space.

But the voices increased in number, and raised in pitch and urgency. Voices all around her.

‘Good God!’

‘What is THAT?’

She looked up at the orderly and the soldier, both now silently staring into the sky. The other orderlies too, gazing open-mouthed at the night sky above Manhattan. Curious, she turned to look in the same direction.

A horizon that twisted, undulated — a liquid reality of impossible possibilities.

The time wave.

Everyone — every soldier, every officer, every prisoner — was now frozen in place, looking at the roiling sky. Bewildered, transfixed, frightened and dumb-struck.

Maddy … you’ve got to move! You have to be inside! You have to be protected!

She looked towards the archway. She could see orderlies stepping out of the shutter entrance to see what the commotion was all about.

Run! Maddy, run!

She was about to get to her feet when she suddenly realized she couldn’t leave Becks’s body there. That message, locked away inside the support unit’s mind … There was a way to retrieve it and the memories that would preserve who she was. A way to do it … Liam once did it for Bob.

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.