Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

She nodded, her teeth chattering. ‘Guess I’m g-getting a bit nervous n-now.’

‘You’ll be just fine. Remember you’ve done this before. It’s no big deal.’

‘It’s the white s-stuff that s-scares m-me …’

‘Chaos space?’ Liam shook his head. ‘Ahh, you’ll be through it in a heartbeat, so you will. Nothing to it.’

‘Could you h-hold m-my hand?’

Liam nodded. ‘I s’pose. Sure, if you like.’

‘Uhh … it’s probably best if you don’t,’ said Maddy. Her eyes quickly met Liam’s and after a few seconds he nodded. He knew what she was thinking. After all, he was the one who’d seen it up close: fused bodies, bodies turned completely inside out. Very messy. He’d told Maddy about it, but not Sal. It was a grisly detail she didn’t really need to hear and, anyway, it only happened rarely. Maddy had no idea what caused it, but when Foster had insisted Liam had to float on his own first time round … well, there was almost certainly a very good reason for that.

‘Works best if you’re all floating freely, Sal. But look,’ she said before Sal could ask why , ‘you’re going together. The other two will be right next to you. And as Liam said, it’s, like, a second, no more.’

‘I’ll sing you a ditty,’ said Liam, ‘so you’ll hear me in there … in the chaos soup.’

‘There you go.’ Maddy smiled. ‘That is, if you can bear to listen to his howling.’ She started to descend the ladder. ‘Right, we should get going, guys. We’ve been more than lucky with only small ripples so far. Let’s not push our luck.’

At the bottom she checked to confirm the displacement machine was green right across the board, then called across to Becks. ‘Punch in a thirty-second countdown.’

‘Yes, Maddy. Thirty seconds … as of now.’

‘Return window at seven in the evening!’ she reminded them. ‘And, remember, the usual back-up windows after that if you miss it!’

She could see Sal’s face through the scuffed plastic, wide-eyed with growing panic. Beside her, kicking water and still holding on to the top of the tube was Liam, saying something encouraging to her. And then Bob, keeping afloat with strong, powerful kicks. All three of them holding Ziploc plastic bags containing their clothes.

‘It’ll be fun, Sal!’ she called out over the increasing hum of the displacement machine. ‘Enjoy seeing 1831 with your own eyes!’

Sal flashed her an uncertain smile and a wave.

She stepped back into the middle of the floor as Becks’s countdown reached ten .

‘Right! Hands off, everyone!’ she shouted.

Liam reluctantly let go and began thrashing furiously and ineffectually to keep his head above water. The other two let go and managed to tread water calmly. On five seconds, Maddy bellowed over the rising pitch of the machine for them all to grab some air and duck their heads under the water.

And on one they were all completely submerged.

A crescendo of channelled and suddenly released energy merged with the boom of flexing perspex, and in the blink of an eye the three of them were gone.

1831, New Orleans

They were standing on Powder Street nearly a whole hour before six watching the dock workers industriously unloading boats of all different sizes, watching horse-drawn carts clattering up the busy thoroughfare. Although that snippet of digitally archived news from a long-dead New Orleans newspaper had claimed the event had occurred ‘in the evening’, it would be foolish to assume that meant for certain it happened after 6 p.m. Liam told them that in his time people still generally didn’t carry clocks or watches. Time was less specific. You’d arrange to meet someone in the afternoon, not ‘at 2.35 p.m. precisely’ as he noticed most modern New Yorkers seemed to do.

‘Just keep looking,’ said Liam, craning his neck to look up and down the busy street. ‘Tall grumpy-looking fella.’

‘Affirmative.’

Sal nodded. But then it was far too easy to be distracted by the sights and sounds going on around her.

Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like, Sal … actually standing in the middle of a piece of history. That’s what Maddy had told her after her trip to San Francisco, 1906. And she was right.

She and Dadda had once gone along to a technology expo, while they’d been in Shanghai on one of her Pikodu tournaments. One of the last as it happened; international relations between China and India were beginning to chill then. A sign of the troubled times ahead. At the expo she had tried out a prototype of a thing they were calling a Reality Hat. It looked like a shower cap with marbles stuck all over it. She’d put it on and almost instantly she found herself smelling things, hearing things that weren’t there, and then finally seeing herself in a Roman street. Of course nothing was quite right. The scene was computer graphics, very realistic, but still there were little jerks in the animation here and there that gave it away. The visuals, the smells, the sounds were being transmitted into her head, stimulating the senses. She had been stunned by how convincing an experience it had been.

But standing here, now, in history, for real … the Reality Hat seemed like a shallow experience by comparison.

‘Hold your horses …’ muttered Liam, ‘look at that fella over there,’ he said, pointing along the street on the far side. Bob and Sal turned to look. Across the thoroughfare they could make out a tall thin man in a scruffy threadbare coat, a battered felt hat stuffed thoughtlessly askew on a mop of dark unruly hair. He had emerged from a tavern, quite clearly the worse for wear. He stood, or more accurately swayed, outside the door, surveying the busy street in front of him.

‘Jayzus … he’s had a few!’ Liam turned to Bob. ‘Do you think that’s our fella?’

Bob’s eyes narrowed for a moment. ‘I have an approximate height match.’

‘And he does look a bit like the Lincoln in the painting,’ said Sal.

He certainly had the thunderous scowl, the dark brooding eyes hooded by a frown that all but hid them in the fading light of the afternoon.

‘Right, good enough for me,’ said Liam. ‘Let’s go grab him before he does something foolish.’

Liam hopped off the store-front porch they’d been standing on. He waited until there was a gap in the horse-drawn traffic before leading them cautiously across the muddy street.

Lincoln hitched up his trousers, hanging loose round his waist. He should have spent his money on some decent food, not on drink. He shrugged at that. He could find something to steal to eat. The docksides were an easy place to forage for food; there was usually a dropped sack here or there. A man could always work for a cooked meal even if he couldn’t find paid work. A man might find himself sleeping rough, under the stars here in New Orleans, but he’d never find himself starving.

Lincoln belched. A real howler that turned heads up and down the street and solicited tuts and muttered disgust from a portly gentleman and his sour-faced wife as they walked past him.

He tipped his hat and grinned at them before congratulating himself on a world-class burp. He ambled drunkenly into the street, his long legs feeling as unstable beneath him as a pair of circus stilts.

He was just about to take another stride forward when he felt something grasp the back of his coat collar and suddenly found himself lurching backwards, flying through the air and landing heavily on the ground.

It took him several moments to comprehend the fact that he was lying on his back in the dirt and looking up at salmon-pink clouds lit by the setting sun and three silhouetted heads peering curiously down at him.