TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 25. 2001, Quantico, Virginia

Liam and Sal stood up together and emerged from beneath the low branches of the cedar tree to get a better look at the rapidly advancing wall of reality, chasing its way towards them across the Virginian countryside.

At first it looked like a whole continental shelf was filling the blue sky, as if the earth’s crust had split and broken and one half of North America was sliding across and engulfing the other. But it wasn’t solid. It churned and changed like a liquid reality as it raced towards them. Like brewing storm-cloud formations filmed and then played in fast forward.

In among the looming darkness faint watermarks of fleeting possibility appeared: fantastic buildings that had never been, twisted creatures that had no place on this earth and a sea of tormented faces — lives glimpsed momentarily, people that could have been, but never would be.

‘Oh boy,’ gulped Liam. ‘It’s going to be a big one, right?’

Sal nodded. ‘Yes … a big one.’

Then it was upon them. The slam of a tornado moment. A maelstrom of thrashing energy and darkness. Liam kept his eyes open, absolutely determined to witness it all, this his first time to see a time wave up close, to be outside the archway and see for himself what reality replacing reality actually looked like. In the few seconds of it he thought he glimpsed a Roman soldier morph into something half human half mechanical; the screaming tormented face of a newborn baby become a girl, a woman, an old woman, a decaying skull — a complete life lived in no more than a second.

Then it had passed over them.

Liam turned to watch it go. A twisting, undulating, serpent-like ribbon of black across the sky receding away from them like a freight train.

‘Jay-zus …’ Breath failed him. He sucked in a lungful and tried again. ‘Jay-zus-Mary-’n’-Joseph! Did you … did you ever see anything like that?’ he gasped. He looked beside him. Sal was on the ground, all of a sudden kneeling amid rows of shin-high stalks of something: a harvested crop of wheat or corn maybe.

Liam helped her up.

‘That … was … incredible!’ He grinned manically at her.

Sal looked around them. ‘This is very different, Liam.’

Liam hadn’t even bothered to take the new reality in yet — his mind was still on the infinite possibilities he’d glimpsed in the time wave. He turned round to look where Bob and the van and the guard hut had been only moments ago.

They were in a large rolling field. The woodland behind them was gone. Fifty yards away, he was relieved to see Bob standing perfectly still, nonchalantly studying the new world around them, and then, a moment later, the tousled brush hair of Lincoln’s head emerging from the stalks as he began to sit up.

‘Come on,’ said Liam. They wandered over towards Bob and Lincoln. Lincoln was on his feet now. He saw Liam approaching.

‘That … that storm? That hurricane we … we …’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘That’s the sort of thing you get when you remove something from history that shouldn’t be removed.’

‘You … you are talking about me, are you not?’

‘Aye.’

Lincoln looked around at the field, goggle-eyed. ‘I … Are you telling me, sir, that I make this much difference to the world?’

‘So it seems.’

‘Good God!’

‘Liam,’ said Bob quietly.

‘I cannot conceive of … of …’ Lincoln continued to bluster, ‘of … of anything I might do in my life that could so alter a world as much as this!’ He looked down at his big hands. ‘What could these do that could change a world so?’

‘Liam,’ said Bob again, his eyes on the sky.

‘Yeah,’ said Sal. ‘Liam …’ Her eyes were on the same thing as Bob’s. She patted his arm insistently as a shadow fell across the field. Liam turned round and looked up.

‘Oh …’ was all that rolled out of his mouth.

Lincoln managed more. ‘GOD’S TEETH!’ he boomed. ‘What in tarnation is that?’

A gigantic copper boiler hung in the sky, slowly drifting across the fields. Perhaps three hundred, four hundred feet long. The afternoon sun glinted warmly on its copperplated side. Slung beneath it was what appeared to be a building of some sort: a confusion of pipes and chimneys, silos, ladders and gantries, round portholes and hatch-like doorways on several floors. It seemed to be held beneath the copper behemoth by four immense crane-like arms, holding the building like a mother cradling a child.

They watched it slowly drift above them, across their field of ragged stalks to another field rolling over a hill in front of them. It moved silently, no roar of engines, just the sound of wind rustling through the gaps in the ‘building’ suspended beneath, thrumming taut cables, clinking chains, loose and swinging.

Eventually it began to settle down to earth a quarter of a mile away from them.

Nearing the ground, the large crane arms hissed steam from their ‘elbows’ and gently flexed, lowering the building between them to the ground. It settled on thick stilts that adjusted to the uneven tilt with the audible hiss and thud of compressed air until it was level.

‘Shadd-yah! Now that —’ Sal nodded — ‘that … is really, really cool.’

The enormous airship rose slowly, its crane arms retracting to leave the building standing free in the middle of the field. After a few moments they began to see some activity. A large door opening and a wide ramp emerging, extending down to the ground. Then finally, something that looked vaguely familiar to Liam … a tractor belching steam rumbled out on caterpillar tracks and down the ramp, followed by another, and another, and finally a stream of figures.

The building’s chimney stacks started puffing tendrils of smoke and they heard the clunk and whir of machinery starting up in the field.

‘It’s a portable farm! That’s what it is!’ Liam laughed. ‘A bleedin’ pick-me-up and put-me-down farm!’

Lincoln shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Am I to presume such a fantastic construction as this is not normal to your time?’

‘This is our time, Mr Lincoln,’ said Sal. ‘Just a very different version of it. Everything changed.’

‘Yet we did not?’ Lincoln looked confused. ‘How is that?’

‘It’s because none of us should be here now anyway, right?’ Liam looked at Bob.

‘Correct. None of you should be alive in, or be part of, 2001, therefore you are not affected by the causal change of the time wave.’

Liam looked at the slowly ascending airship. ‘I think it might be advisable we find somewhere to hide until we know exactly what sort of a world we’re in right now. Everyone agree?’

Heads nodded.

Liam looked around and spotted what appeared to be a derelict barn across the far side of the already harvested field. ‘Off we go, then,’ he said.

Sal glanced one more time at the ascending sky vessel. She noticed it was segmented and as it gracefully gathered height its segments began to stretch and spread, gradually telescoping along its length until it looked like the sleek hull of an antique submarine.

‘Come on, Sal!’ Liam called after her.

She looked once more at the recently deposited building; to her eyes it looked more like a factory than a farm. And at the small figures descending the ramp, emerging into the field, disappearing into the distant crop of wheat or barley, or whatever it was. There was something peculiar about the way they moved, a shuffling inelegant gait that made them look strangely top-heavy, strangely ape-like.

‘Sal?’

‘I’m coming … I’m coming.’