Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

We don’t want to be stuck here.

She glanced back at the archway, looking like a pile of bricks salvaged, recycled, from some old tenement block pulled down to be replaced with something else; a mound of broken masonry at the edge of a building site. She supposed back inside — while it was still managing to hold itself up — the news wasn’t going to be any better. Sensitive equipment, computers, motherboards … how any of that could have survived that impact …

‘We’d better go back inside and see if anything’s working,’ she said eventually.

2001, New York

Colonel William Devereau could feel the vibrations of the distant bombing raid through the floor. It felt like they were giving the front line further north, up near Queens, a pounding. They liked to do that every few days. A reminder that they had air superiority and could deliver destruction on any stretch of the front line that they chose.

Not that it achieved a whole great deal.

Their carpet bombing would create another hundred new craters, shift rubble around from one place to another and maybe inflict a few dozen casualties, but that was about the size of it. All the way along the New York sector, they were dug in deep as ticks. The damage was psychological if anything.

Devereau pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes: Gitanes, French made. They were as bitter as bile, but far better than the American-made lung-shredders. He lit up, took a pull and hacked a gobful of thick phlegm on to the floor. He might have bothered to quit smoking except for the fact that, statistically speaking, a sniper’s bullet or a sky-navy bomb would probably get him first anyway.

Quicker than cancer.

He took this morning’s high-command communique and swiped open the sealed envelope with the tip of his bayonet. His French was just about passable. He could read it even if he struggled to speak it. A page of telegraphed pronouncements … the usual rubbish. The war was going well, the Sheridan-DeGrise Line, running from the Atlantic, west across America, was holding true. The troops were to be congratulated and to be told keep up the good work.

Devereau balled up the communique and tossed it on to his small desk. Few of the troops spoke a word of French anyway; he could just as well tell them anything he wanted. French was the language of high echelons of command. The Union’s generals were mostly imported. Most of them well-connected, Paris-based sons of billionaires who fancied carving out a few years of military glory for themselves before settling down to a cosy life back in mainland Europe.

The troops, on the other hand, the poor wretches cowering in their bunkers right now and hoping today’s bombing raid wasn’t going to drift further south, were all local boys. Lads from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ohio. Sons of soldiers, grandsons of soldiers who’d held the line here for the Union for the last hundred and thirty-odd years.

He laughed dryly at that. Once upon a time it was the Union of Northern American States. But not any more. The ‘Union’ by name, perhaps, but no longer run by American generals and presidents.

He sighed. Long ago he’d given up trying to explain to the lads under his command that the French and their other European allies weren’t over here bank-rolling this war for them, for their dream of a united nation of free men. They were doing it for all their own reasons. Political reasons, complicated reasons, that were hard to explain to young men who could barely read and write.

Anyway, careless talk like that about their French benefactors could end up with him smoking one of these Gitanes in front of a hastily assembled firing squad.

Ah well, do your duty, come what may. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.

On the wall of his small bunker room, damp concrete sweated in patches. Among the patches hung an old sepia photograph in a wooden frame. A collector’s item now.

Devereau stood in front of it and studied the row of generals in camp chairs smiling for the photographer as they held their ceremonial sabres to one side. Generals from the old, old times, the very first period of the civil war. Generals, all of them proud sons of America: Meade, Sherman, Grant, Hancock, thick whiskers and proud smiles beneath their soft felt hats.

A soldier could fight and die for men like that. For a cause like that … a united America. For freedom. He shook his head sadly. But not for this , not for what this stale war had become: generation after generation of American boys dying on one side for the French …

The room vibrated from the sonic boom of far-off ordnance.

… and on the other side for the British .

2001, Quantico, Virginia

The inside of the derelict barn smelled of compost, the afternoon light spearing in between the loose wooden slats and catching sluggish airborne motes of dust.

‘Here this’ll do us for now,’ said Liam, catching his breath.

Lincoln sat down on a desiccated bale of hay. ‘Young lady,’ he began, still out of breath himself, ‘and gentlemen … we meet again, third time to my counting.’ He frowned. ‘Liam. Liam O’Connor? If memory serves me?’

‘Aye.’

‘Please now … please tell me my timely escape from that under-bridge dungeon of yours is not the cause of all this … this alteration ?’

Liam laughed desperately. ‘I’m afraid that … and your untimely jumping into our window home from New Orleans, Mr Lincoln. That’s what’s caused this, all right. A bit reckless and … not too clever of you, truth be told.’

‘You have become a timeline anachronism,’ rumbled Bob. ‘Until you are safely returned to your original time-stamp, history will remain contaminated and this timeline will persist.’

Sal handed him a worn smile. ‘You’ve been a very naughty boy.’

‘So it would seem.’ Lincoln looked down at his feet, sombre. ‘I believe I owe you all an apology.’

Liam, getting warm inside the barn, unzipped and took off his jacket, one of a bunch of hooded sweatshirts branded with various sports team names splayed across them that Sal had purchased for him from Walmart some time ago. He wore them without knowing — without particularly caring — who the Yankees, Redsocks or the Bulls were.

‘Bob, what do you suggest we do now?’

‘Recommendation: we should remain here for the moment, Liam, and await a tachyon signal. They know our location. Madelaine will attempt to open a return window for us.’

‘If she can,’ said Liam.

Bob nodded. ‘Correct. If she can.’

Lincoln looked up. ‘Your time-travelling machinery is broken?’

‘The displacement machine requires a lot of power, so it does. We draw it in from the city’s supply … a lot of it,’ Liam said, unfastening the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘If New York has changed and we’re not getting any energy, then we have a bit of a problem.’

‘We have a generator, though,’ said Sal.

‘Aye. For what good the thing does.’

‘Maddy’ll be running it by now,’ she replied. ‘It just takes a little while to charge up the machine.’

‘This is only a positional translation,’ said Bob, ‘the energy requirement for the return portal will be small. I estimate only three per cent of capacity charge would be required.’

Sal peered out between the wooden slats. ‘There then … shouldn’t be too long for us to wait.’

‘What if this “portal” of yours … does not appear?’ asked Lincoln. ‘What then? Are we stuck in this place?’

‘Jahulla.’ Sal made a face. ‘Are you always this pessimistic?’