The Eternal War

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?’