TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 87. 2001, New York

Becks watched with detached fascination at the brutal ruthlessness of these enormous beasts. Their arms swung tirelessly, scooping out of the trench and into the air bloody parts of men and divots of dirt alike. There were no moments of hesitation, no doubts, no confusion of morals or ethics — as much thought devoted to the process of killing as an electric band-saw might give to a plank of wood.

She could identify with that: a world simplified down to the barest essentials, to mission parameters. And that’s where her empathy, her sense of kindred-spirit, with these curious monsters ended. She too had her own mission parameters to fulfil.

One of the machine-gun teams lay in tatters just beyond the nearest leviathan, the thick barrel of the gun still smoking and aimed skyward on its tripod legs. She ducked down low, scrambling over the writhing bodies of the wounded, between the giant’s thick legs. At the same time that the genic sensed her movement below it she reached the machine gun, pulled it off its mount and swung its aim up.

No armour plating beneath it, the high-calibre bullets found plenty of soft flesh to rip through. The genic flailed, enraged, the feed-pipe that protruded from its small face flapping from side to side. She heard a deep moan coming from its chest, its throat; a cry of rage and agony locked behind a sealed mouth.

The gun’s stuttering fire ceased as the overheated barrel choked on the ammunition belt. But she’d done enough damage. Blood rained down on her as the leviathan took several staggered steps, finally flopping on to the downhill side of the trench. She felt the ground vibrate with the impact of several tons of iron and flesh.

As another fresh flare exploded above the trench, bathing them in an artificial crimson dawn, she took in the state of play of the battle with one snapshot blink of her eyes. Two eugenics remained, the last of them, wreaking havoc further along the horseshoe. She saw arcs of dirt and glistening wet viscera spinning up into the night sky. The few men not maimed, dismembered or dying were beginning to break and scramble out of the trench and run for their lives. And two hundred yards downhill of all this, the British soldiers were now advancing in three ordered and steady lines on their position.

Colonel Devereau was up and out of the trench, attempting to rally the fleeing men. Wainwright was busy firing a carbine down the slope at the advancing British.

Their bunker of sandbags and piled dirt — the fort — their last line of defence right outside the archway, was sitting empty. A mistake.

‘Devereau!’ she yelled. Her voice — she chose a slightly deeper register than a normal human female, almost masculine, though not quite — carried across the noise of battle. Devereau looked her way. She pointed towards the fort and tossed the machine gun out of the trench towards him.

‘You must redeploy this in your final defensive position!’ she bellowed.

Devereau nodded. A last stand from the fort, perhaps that was already his intention with the half a dozen men he’d managed to stop from running away. The heavy machine gun and several yards of belted ammunition lying on the ground would help.

There were a few other men still alive in the trench, gathered around another silent smoking machine gun, trapped between the two leviathans, cowering from the sweeping arc of gore-covered spikes, and the growling, spinning blade of the motorized circular-saw blade.

[Assessment: heavy machine gun — tactical value = HIGH]

Acquiring a second heavy machine gun to fire out from their final position was worth the calculated hazard. She pulled a sabre from the hands of one of the dead. She vaguely recognized the man’s dark face; the grey flecks of coiled hair, the beard. His glazed sightless eyes gave her permission to take it and make good use of it.

Becks pulled herself up out of the trench and began to make her way towards the last two leviathans, skipping along the stacked sandbags like they were stepping stones across a babbling brook. Finally within striking range of the nearest of them, she pulled the sabre back and, using every fibre of muscle in her body to execute a low, sweeping, roundhouse blow, the blade arced round, biting through the coarse hide-like skin, the muscle and bone of the creature’s shin, as thick as a human torso. The bare foot, a yard long with flexing toes as big as cooking apples, flopped into the trench like a side of beef. The genic, missing everything beneath the cut, lost its balance and fell over, the thick plates of iron armour scraping and clanking as if a dumper truck had emptied a full load of salvaged metal on to a scrapheap.

Already exhausted under the burden of its armour, the leviathan struggled like an elephant with a broken spine, desperate to right itself once more.

Becks appeared over its small head, looking down at two beady black eyes, moist, glistening, by the light of the descending flare above them. Its eyes, without whites, looked as expressionless and void as the eyes of some giant insect … and, yet, the glistening moisture around them …

Tears?

She processed that observation in the few nanoseconds of a single computer cycle. Tears of anger, she wondered … or was it relief?

The spider-eyes slowly closed as if knowing, accepting even, what was coming. She thrust the sword down into the soft flesh beneath its feed-pipe and the genic lurched, giant ribbons of muscle all over its body flexing one last time, then it sagged — quite dead.

She turned in time to see the last leviathan collapse, finally weakened from the blood loss of dozens of gunshot wounds.

Again, she eye-snapped an overall appraisal of the battlefield. The British were only a hundred yards downhill. She estimated no more than a couple of dozen men left alive in the horseshoe trench, some of them firing sporadic, opportunistic shots down the slope, most frozen in shock.

And behind them, out of the trench, rushing past the still-chugging tank, fifty, sixty men fleeing, limping, scrambling for the distant safety of the ruins of Brooklyn. Devereau seemed to have gathered a kernel of a dozen men, most looking too badly wounded to make a run for it anyway. They had the heavy machine gun at least.

Wainwright joined her. Nodded at Devereau, herding the men towards the fort.

‘We must buy them enough time to set up the gun in there!’ cried Wainwright.

‘Affirmative.’ She pointed to the few other men along the trench. ‘I will delay the enemy. Order these men to redeploy in the fort and the archway. This must be protected for as long as possible!’

Wainwright nodded. He picked his way along the trench and started tapping the remaining few on their shoulders, gesturing towards the archway.

Becks stepped forward, reached down for the still-smoking heavy machine gun and hefted it up off its tripod with casual strength to rest it on her hip.

She aimed it downhill at the British, now only fifty yards from her, and began to fire.