TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 83. 2001, New York

Maddy looked at the monitor in front of her. Another fuzzy, low-resolution, blocky image of what appeared to be a muddy field full of long wooden sheds. She could see a few trees, and a sky growing dark.

Computer-Bob was sending a narrow-thread signal to the rendezvous location, briefly checking every ten minutes for any density fluctuations and grabbing a pinhole image of the location at the same time. It was slowly eating into the full charge they’d had on the displacement machine; of the twelve green charge-LEDs, three of them were dark now.

Another dozen glimpses and they were going to be eating into stored energy they’d need to get Liam and the others back to 1831 and bring them home.

Come on, Liam! Where the hell are you?

He could make out six more landing rafts slowly chugging their way across the river. Devereau watched with growing unease as the soldiers still holding a position on the shingle behind their panel-barriers began to edge away from the middle of the landing area — where the six boats seemed to be heading towards.

‘James …’ he said in the gathering gloom. Wainwright was somewhere nearby. ‘Wainwright!’

He heard Wainwright make his way along the trench, a hasty word of encouragement and a pat on the shoulder for each man he passed. Presently he was beside Devereau.

‘What is it?’

Devereau pointed and handed him his field glasses. ‘Reinforcements coming.’

Wainwright squinted into the lenses, adjusting the focus as he panned up along the box-like hull of one of them. The protective panels were up, hiding whatever troops were inside. He thought he caught the bobbing of a head over the top — some sort of movement from within. He adjusted the binoculars on the flag fluttering lifelessly at the back of the craft, beside the helmsman’s position.

‘If I could just see the regimental banner … I can tell …’ His words faded.

‘What? What is it?’

Wainwright lowered the glasses. ‘Black Watch.’

Devereau knew them: one of the British army’s very best regiments. He puffed his cheeks and forced a smile. ‘Well then, we shall have a more even-handed fight this time round.’

Wainwright shook his head warily. ‘No … William,’ his voice a whisper for Devereau’s ears alone. ‘This isn’t good. The Black Watch are the regiment they have been trialling experimental units with.’

‘Experimental units?’

The haunted look on Wainwright’s face told him more than he wanted to hear. ‘Good God … you don’t mean …?’

‘Eugenics … yes.’

Devereau turned to look back at the river. The six high-panel-sided rafts were nearly all the way across, the sound of their motors chugging and spitting in the stillness that had settled over this contested patch of cratered and weed-strewn wasteland.

He stroked his beard absently, insistently. ‘Then … we must be sure to concentrate all our fire on those rafts. On whatever monsters are inside.’

Wainwright nodded.

Because whatever creatures are in there … if they get into the trench …

‘The men should know this,’ he added.

‘Agreed.’

Devereau cupped hands round his mouth. ‘Listen … men!’

The soft murmur of voices along the trench, a hundred different whispered conversations, ceased.

‘The rafts approaching … those vessels out there contain eugenic units!’

He’d expected a roar of panic, perhaps even the clatter of weapons dropping and the first of his men clambering out of the trench and making a run for it. Instead he was met with absolute silence and several hundred grime-encrusted faces along the line of the trench turned his way, faces absorbing the meaning of what he’d just said.

‘Understand, we CANNOT afford to let these monsters reach us! Is this clear?’

Frozen faces, frozen expressions, mouths hanging open … yet silence still.

‘Is this CLEAR?’

Sergeant Freeman took the lead. ‘Aye, sir.’

‘Whatever creatures step down from those rafts, we will kill every last one of them! We will gun them down before they even step foot on the shingle!’

Some of the men cheered unconvincingly.

‘Check your weapons, check your ammo! And make ready!’ He turned to look back down at the river.

Of the six landing rafts he’d spotted approaching, the two on the left and two on the right had pulled slightly ahead, beaching themselves in the spaces between the first wave of vessels. The middle two were holding back.

What are they up to?

The panels dropped on the four flanking rafts, and British troops wasted no time spilling down the ramps into the water. Some of his men began firing. An uncertain ripple of gunfire.

The middle two … whatever monsters they have for us are in those.

‘HOLD YOUR FIRE!’

Freeman and several other NCOs carried the order up the line and the firing ceased. The last thing they needed to be doing as the panels dropped on the last two rafts was swapping out empty cartridges.

The Black Watch waded quickly ashore and found the covered positions on the shingle vacated by the first wave of men. Devereau found himself getting impatient, cursing at the panels to drop, anxious to see what horrors the eugenologists back in Britain had conjured out of the coded chemistry of nature.

He heard a British officer barking an order. And then a moment later saw several dozen small round grenades tossed on to the shingle. They began to hiss as they spewed thick mustard-coloured columns of smoke. His first thought was that it was a poisoned gas, but then the men down there were not wearing masks and surely they would have tossed their grenades up the slope towards the trench.

Wainwright cursed. ‘Another wretched smokescreen.’

‘HOLD YOUR AIM!’ shouted Devereau.

We’ll hear the splash.

‘FIRE ON MY COMMAND!’

Several moments passed in a prolonged, agonizing silence as the yellow mist thickened and spread along the shingle, effectively shrouding the middle two rafts, beginning to hide the other rafts as well.

Then he heard it, the clank of latches being released in unison somewhere in the smoke and the first splash of a ramp landing in the water.

‘FIRE!’

The entire length of the trench was fringed with a ribbon of grey-blue cordite smoke, carbines firing rapidly one shot after another, several machine guns spitting muzzle flash and stuttering a steady stream of bullets, all of them into the yellow mist.

Above the cacophany of gunfire he could hear the rattle and clang of rounds impacting on metal and something heavy splashing into the water.

Something big.

The yellow mist was slowly thinning and spreading, drifting up the slope towards them, hiding what was in there for longer than was fair.

He squinted into the yellow, managing to just about pick out the stump of the brick smokestack. The head and shoulders of a soldier holding aloft a regimental flag, too foolishly confident to keep down while the volley fire was still going on. The edge of the left-most raft … and looming above the battlefield the ghostly outline of the bridge.

Then something, darker, much closer than anything else … more defined as it scrambled uphill towards them.

‘God help us,’ he whispered as it emerged out of the last curling skeins of mist rolling uphill.

CHAPTER 84

2001, New York

Human-like, in that it had two arms and two legs, but that was the end of any anthropomorphous resemblance. It towered over them, almost as tall as a double-decker tram, almost as wide as a house. As it emerged from the smoke, Devereau noted that it seemed to have no head; however, where a ridge of muscle and bone linked one shoulder to the other, there seemed to be nothing but the slightest bump with pinhole dots for eyes and a tube where a mouth might have been.

Closer, as it charged up the last dozen yards of the gentle slope, the creature looked more like some sort of machine, a mechanical automaton covered in linking plates of thick metal that clanked together noisily as it lumbered forward.

He realized his men had stopped firing, like him. They were frozen in a state of horrified fascination.

‘FIRE!’ he screamed.

The sparks of impacting bullets showered the ground around it; the giant’s loping run faltered and finally ceased. Its enormous arms flailed angrily, and Devereau saw, beneath the overlapping plates of metal, glimpses of pale grey flesh spattered with dark droplets of blood.

The leviathan stumbled one final step forward before finally flopping heavily down on to its knees, and then, still shedding a shower of sparks from the gunfire concentrated on it, it slowly keeled over like a felled tree lying across the trench, one thick arm flopping down into the trench and crushing a man.

My God … it took our entire regiment to bring it down.

Out of the smoke emerged eleven more. This time only half the men managed to concentrate fire on them; the other half were already having to eject and replace empty cartridges. The giants were on them in mere seconds, standing over the borderline trench, one or two of them even standing astride it, swinging their huge metal-plated arms down into the trench works.

Their fists — the size of beer kegs — were enclosed in a variety of different experimental attachments. Some of them had iron cages from which foot-long spikes protruded. A couple of them had blades that looked like Devereau’s sabre, welded to iron bands round their three fingers, like impossibly long claws. One of them even had a rotating saw blade powered by a chugging engine strapped to the creature’s upper arm.

The men standing beneath them stood no chance.

Gunfire from further along the line resumed; one of the Confederate machine-gun teams managed to bring a second of the creatures down, concentrating their stuttering fire on its chest. As it collapsed, Devereau got a closer glimpse of a small head almost completely recessed into the chest: two small dark eyes, a mere gash for a nose and a pipe emerging from where a mouth should be, curling round under the left shoulder armour plate to a pair of cylinders strapped to its back.

Ten of these things still … ten! Sweeping their spiked and bladed fists into the trench, dismembering, crushing, eviscerating every poor soul within easy reach.

‘They’re killing us!’

Wainwright nodded. ‘We should fall back!’

He was right … remaining here within range of their brutal bladed arms was utter madness. The trench was already lost. At least, with more open ground to cross to reach the horseshoe trench, there was a chance the men deployed there could bring down a few more of them.

‘Fall back!’ Devereau cried, his voice lost amid the cacophony of screams, metal on metal, the clatter of guns, the pebble-dash clang of bullets sparking off iron plates.

He tried again, cupping his mouth. ‘FALL BACK!’

‘THE HORSESHOE!’ added Wainwright.

A bugle sounded the retreat and those men still alive, still with arms and legs, began to scramble out of the trench like startled crows from a field.

‘What’s happening out there, Becks?’

‘I will observe,’ she said, heading towards the shutter door.

From the distant noises Maddy could hear it sounded like the British were trying their luck again on that first trench. But this time round the nature of the battle sounded different: less gunfire, more voices. She’d heard the regiment’s bugler sound some signal. She had no clue what that meant, but could guess it probably wasn’t good news.

‘Oh God … they’re coming!’ she uttered. She realized her whole body was trembling. She hated the sound of her voice, shrill and warbling, like a little girl, like a child.

Why am I such a freakin’ dork?

She envied the colonels, both of them cut from the same cloth — leather-faced veterans with the very same manner — a dignified calm about them, a gentlemanly formality. What the British called a stiff upper lip.

And here I am trembling like some pampered chihuahua on a park bench.

‘Bob? Do another probe.’

> Maddy, the last one was only seven minutes ago.

‘I know! I know! Do it anyway!’

> Information: if we increase the number of times that we check for them, we will drain the stored energy more quickly.

‘Jesus! I know that already! Just do it!’

> Affirmative. Activating density probe.

Becks squeezed past the entrance to the machine-gun bunker and into the horseshoe trench that looped around the archway.

The men lining the dirt wall, reinforced with sandbags and slats of wood, waiting for the battle to reach them, looked at her with bemusement.

‘It ain’t safe out here, miss,’ said one of them. ‘Best get back inside.’

‘I will be fine,’ said Becks, shrugging off the comment. ‘Thank you for your concern.’ She found a space between two soldiers and stepped up on an ammo crate to get a look over the rim of the trench.

The rubble-strewn ground sloping down to the borderline was thick with men staggering uphill towards them. Many of them bloody. Beyond them she could see a pall of thinning yellow mist over the front trench and other men spilling out of it. She could see several large silhouettes looming over the trench. She counted nine of them.

‘What are those?’ she asked the man beside her.

‘M-monsters! Called up from Hell itself by them British.’

‘They genics, ma’am,’ said the other. ‘Grown from blood an’ body parts.’ The man shook his head at the other. ‘Ain’t no devils or demons from no Hell. Tha’s all jus’ voodoo crock.’ He sighed. ‘Worse than that anyhow … it’s nature all messed up in a way it should’na be.’

She nodded. Guessing what the soldier was saying.

Genetically engineered units.

The first of the retreating men flopped down into the horseshoe further along, wide-eyed and gasping for breath. ‘Jesus! You can’t … y-you can’t do nothin’! Can’t do … nothin’ to stop … them!’

Others collapsed over the edge and rolled down into the mud beside him. ‘They genics! Goddamn British is usin’ genics on us again!’

She could recognize fear spreading among the men, spreading like flames across a summer-dry field of wheat.

These soldiers are exhibiting extreme stress reactions.

She calculated their ability to fight as severely impaired. In fact, she was almost certain by the looks on their faces that this defensive position was in danger of being abandoned. She took a step up on to an ammo box so that she was standing head and shoulders above them.

‘ATTENTION!’ she barked loudly.

Faces, pale and blood-spattered, turned towards her.

‘Information: the large units ahead of us are genetically engineered combat units. They are designed to withstand significant damage … but they can be terminated!’

‘They’re demons! We can’t beat what the devil sends!’

‘No, goddammit! She … she’s right!’ shouted one of the bloodied men. ‘We got us two of ’em! I think. I saw two of ’em go down!’

‘Concentrate your fire specifically on vulnerable locations!’ said Becks. ‘The circulatory system, the nervous system. Chest and head.’ She looked down at them sternly. ‘Is this clear?’

The men eyed her silently.

‘A single correctly targeted projectile will kill these units! You will concentrate your fire on heads and chests!’

She turned to look down the slope and saw Devereau and Wainwright staggering towards them. She pointed at them. ‘Look! Your commanding officers! They will confirm what I have just said!’

They huffed up towards them, gasping, wheezing, among the last of the men making their way back from the borderline. Devereau spotted her standing out in the open. ‘What the hell are you doing, woman? Get down!’

She ignored his outburst as both men clambered over the sandbags and flopped to the ground beside her. Devereau stood up, panting, almost doubling over to get his breath.

‘I am quite fine,’ she said to him. ‘You must sit down and recover now.’ She reached out for him and Wainwright and pushed them down until they were squatting on the floor, wheezing for air. She knelt down beside them. ‘Rest. Your soldiers will need you to be combat-ready.’

Wainwright looked up, slumped beside Devereau against the dirt wall. ‘Did you say … combat-ready?’ he wheezed.

‘Affirmative.’

He turned to look at Devereau and managed a grin. ‘What a —’ he huffed and panted — ‘what a remarkable young lady this one is, uh?’

Devereau nodded. ‘A real trooper.’