Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

He shrugged. ‘No woodsman ever felled a tree by smiling like a fool at it.’

Liam pursed his lips. ‘Very poetic.’ He joined Sal in looking out at the distant farm-cum-refinery and the fleet of smoke-belching tractors and combines buzzing around in the field. The first of the vehicles was returning up the ramp and into the cavernous dark entrance of some sort of delivery bay with a payload of harvested crop. It reminded him, bizarrely, of termites feeding their queen. He shuddered at the unpleasant comparison.

‘If Maddy’s got technical problems her end …’ he began.

Jay-zus, now, when does she ever not?

‘… then I suppose we’ll not be getting a portal back home,’ said Liam.

‘Hang on!’ said Sal. ‘It’s worth a go, I guess.’ She pulled the mobile phone out of the pouch of her hoody, flipped it open, selected Maddy’s phone on quick dial and held it up to her ear. A moment later, she shook her head. ‘No signal.’

Liam looked back outside, up at the sky, blue and cloudless, just like the normal 11 September had been. The sun had dipped past midday an hour ago and glinted with a bronze warmth off the hull of the airborne vessel hovering several miles away and yet still looking impossibly large.

‘If there’s nothing from Maddy by the time it gets dark, it means she’s got problems. No power most likely.’ He shucked his shoulders. ‘Which means we’ve got good news and bad news.’

Sal turned to look at him. ‘Bad news first, Liam. You should always do bad news first.’

‘All right … bad news is it means we’re walking home. The good news is that if Maddy’s got no power, the archway field won’t be on, which means it won’t reset without us.’ He looked at Bob. ‘I suggest tonight we start making our way north-east, back to New York. What do you think?’

‘Affirmative. That is a valid plan. If we maintain a direct true-line route back to New York, I will be able to detect any narrow-beam tachyon signal she might attempt to send.’

‘Tonight? Night , sir?’ said Lincoln. ‘Night? Why on earth would you want to choose the night to walk home? It’s when all manner of scoundrels and thieves emerge for their nefarious purposes.’

Liam continued to study the distant airborne object. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m a little nervous about all that stuff out there. That’s pretty advanced technology, isn’t it, Bob?’

The support unit joined him beside the wall of the barn and peered out. ‘The airborne vessel may be using lighter-than-air technology.’

‘You mean … like a balloon? Like them Nazi airships?’

‘Affirmative. The ground vehicles appear to be using conventional combustion engine technology. Comparable to the normal timeline.’ He turned to Liam. ‘With closer inspection we could determine more precisely what technology levels exist in this alternate timeline.’

‘Uhh … how about we don’t make a closer inspection?’ He slapped Bob gently on his back. ‘Nice idea an’ all, Bob, but to be entirely honest I’d rather we just made our way back home as quickly and as quietly as we can.’

‘I agree,’ said Sal. She was going to say something about being a little perturbed by the workers she’d glimpsed emerging from the refinery and shuffling down the ramp. Barely more than dots at that distance, but there’d been something unsettling, almost inhuman about the way they moved.

‘Night-time I suggest, Mr Lincoln,’ said Liam. ‘Given these people have big floaty air vessels, we’d be far more easily spotted in the day.’

‘Night-time,’ Lincoln grumbled. ‘Well now, Mr O’Connor, we shall just have to hope this is a safer world by night than my … home — place — time …’ He shrugged the end of the sentence away. He was still struggling with the terminology of time travel.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much,’ said Sal, ‘we’ve got Big Bad Bob. He’ll look after us.’

‘Affirmative. I am a support unit. Your safety, Mr Lincoln, is a primary mission parameter. You are to be safely escorted to the New York field office, and from there returned to 1831.’

‘Anyway — ’ Sal put on a cheery smile — ‘I’m sure Maddy’s going to get things up and running and open that portal any time soon, right, Liam?’

He tried to wear the same breezy optimism on his face. But it didn’t take. Instead he cocked a sceptical eyebrow at her. ‘I presume you’re talking about some other team there, Sal? Right?’

‘Uh? Why?’

‘Well, to be sure, and I’d hate to think I sound as grumpy as our new lanky friend here, but — ’ he shrugged — ‘it never bleedin’ well seems to go quite that smoothly for us .’

2001, New York

Maddy stared, heartbroken, at the small mound of debris in the back room. A portion of the ceiling had completely collapsed. Through a jagged hole in the brickwork above she could see shards of sunlight poking through. The bricks had cascaded down on to two of the growth tubes, shattering the plastic and spilling the protein solution and foetuses on to the floor. There was nothing that could be done for either of the growth candidates — one of each: a baby Bob and a baby Becks — they were quite dead.

‘Oh God … oh no, this is awful.’

Their relatively new generator was damaged as well, the casing battered and dented. A panel on one side had been knocked away and dangled from the frayed remains of several cables.

All the damage had been caused when the archway had appeared in this alternate reality, hovering several feet above the ground where the crater was. The whole archway had dropped by almost a yard. Enough of a shock for the old brickwork, held together by crumbling cement, prayer and gravity, that it had failed them.

‘I have evaluated the damage, Madelaine. The general structure of the archway is severely compromised.’

She nodded silently.

‘The generator is not functional at the moment although it is possible that I might be able to repair it. I will need to first dig away the bricks to assess the level of damage.’ Becks pointed to the shattered tubes. ‘Those two tubes cannot be repaired. The other three growth tubes are undamaged; however, the foetuses inside them will be viable for only another forty-eight hours without power.’

‘Just gets better and better,’ Maddy replied. The sound of her voice scared her. It was small, defeated, barely more than a whisper.

Becks looked at her, missing the irony entirely. ‘No. There is worse news, Madelaine.’

Maddy nodded at Becks to go on.

‘The tachyon transmission array is completely destroyed.’

Maddy cursed under her breath. The transmission array was an important piece of equipment, a relatively small but efficiently crafted signal transfer dish that had sat quietly in the far corner of the back room and until now never ever warranted her specific attention. It did its job, had never required any maintenance. The only reason she knew of its existence at all was because she’d recently — out of sheer boredom — read through a manifest of the technical components in the archway.

But now there it was, smashed to bits, nothing more than a twisted mesh of fine wires and shattered eggshell silicon.

Maddy had a fair idea what that meant. ‘We can’t signal Bob, can we?’

‘Correct. More importantly, even if we had an adequate source of electricity, we will be unable to open or close any displacement windows .’

Those words failed to fully register with her.

‘What did you say?’

‘We use the same array to target signals as we do to target tachyon stream pulses to open a portal, Madelaine. Without the transmission array, we are completely unable to open any portals. We are unable to operate in any meaningful way. This field office is no longer able to function.’