Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

Looking at him, looking at Sergeant Freeman, the other soldiers, old and young alike, sitting in their threadbare uniforms with the same patient look of defeat etched on each face, she realized they weren’t fighting men. They were draftees … men serving whatever period they were required to serve, counting away days until they might one day see their homes again.

Unless there was some other option, some other course of action, they were well and truly stuck in this mess. Forget helping Liam and Sal. Forget worrying about handwritten warnings from the future … she and Becks were nothing more than two civilians stuck in the ruined and contested wasteland of an eternal war.

2001, outside Dead City

Liam gazed out of the forward observation windows of the carrier’s bridge, a long horseshoe array of glass panels that allowed the late summer sun to flood in, and bathed the place with warmth and light. Passing beneath them was a patchwork of fields that had seemed so much larger on the ground, and just ahead the fields gave way to the outskirts of the Dead City. Ordered rows of suburban homes with gardens long ago gone to seed giving way to smaller, more tightly packed homes and those giving way to drab brick-built tenement blocks. Further ahead, the apartment blocks grew taller and shared standing room with factories and warehouses and office blocks. All as dead and still as gravestones in a cemetery.

‘We’ll be landing shortly,’ said Captain McManus. He nodded at a thickset man in his forties, with silver-grey hair and mutton-chop sideburns that flared out generously. ‘Colonel Donohue is sending us in with three companies of men and some of our experimentals.’

‘Experimentals? Please explain,’ said Bob.

McManus smiled. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’

The drone of the carrier’s engines changed in tone and the vessel began a gentle descent. Liam saw tendrils of mist waft up beside the bridge windows and remembered the bizarre sight of a sky suddenly filling with a blizzard.

‘What’s with all the snow?’

‘The carrier uses lighter-than-air gases and vacuum voids to create lift. But it’s still not quite enough to make a ship this size entirely buoyant. So from the bottom of her hull we vent a cloud of nitrogen, which chills the air, causing it to become more dense … which of course provides us with additional lift. We are in effect creating a bed of thicker air on which we sit … and we just carry that bed along with us.’

‘But the snow?’

‘Well, if the air’s humid, then the moisture in the air becomes snow, you see?’

‘Captain McManus?’ called out the colonel.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Best ready your men for disembarking.’

‘Right you are, sir.’ He tapped Liam’s arm. ‘This way.’

McManus led them out of the bridge on to the quarterdeck outside and down a ladder to the spar deck below. As he descended the steep steps, Liam made the mistake of looking out past the brass handrail at the slowly looming cityscape below.

‘Oh Jay-zus,’ he said queasily. ‘I didn’t want to go and do that.’

‘Vertigo. Some of my chaps suffer from it,’ said McManus, grinning. ‘Just don’t look down.’

Liam and Bob joined him on the deck at the bottom, and then, to Liam’s relief, they were led inside again past several soldiers who politely stepped aside for them as they descended another ladder into a large equipment hangar.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps. ‘My God,’ he whispered.

The hangar looked to be about fifty to seventy-five feet wide and three or four times that in length, roughly, the size of a small football pitch. The space was filled with three hundred men mustering, forming up, checking each other’s backpacks and webbing, several dozen of the huffaloes corralled in one corner. It was cold, chilled by the artificial arctic mist being generated outside the hull. Plumes of breath lifted from every man.

Despite the wretched churning concern for Sal’s perilous circumstances — his hope that somewhere in the city below she was still alive — Liam experienced a moment of wonder at the bustling activity before him.

Across the hangar deck he saw several dozen dog-like animals. But not dogs, not like any dogs he’d ever seen. Larger, almost as big as lions, but lithe and thin like greyhounds. They had oddly human-like heads, baboon-like, in fact, with keen human eyes that seemed to convey intelligence.

‘What are those?’

‘Hunter-seekers. Eugenics, of course. We used them to great effect in Afghanistan and northern India. They’re very good at sniffing out insurgents, squeezing their way into caves and tunnels and what-have-you, then calling in their position and describing the troop strength.’

‘“Calling in”? You mean they can …’

‘Talk? Yes, of course. Be ruddy useless to us otherwise.’ He raised an eyebrow and chuckled at Liam’s wide-eyed gawp. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t expect anything too deep and profound to come out of their mouths. You’ll not get Hamlet out of them, I’m afraid. They’re really no smarter than small children.’

‘What? Seriously, did you just say … small children ?’

‘An intelligence designed to be equivalent to that of a five-year-old child,’ he added. ‘We made our mistakes with earlier classes of eugenics … designed some to be far too intelligent for their own good. That’s the trick, you see? Engineer them to be clever enough to carry out the tasks they’re designed for and no more. If they’re kept simple-minded, it’s easier to keep them happy.’

Liam was busy digesting the fact that in this insane world there were baboon-dogs that could talk. Meanwhile, McManus wandered off to locate his junior officers and NCOs.

He turned to look at Bob, who shrugged and gurned a smile at him.

‘This is getting to be far too weird a reality for me,’ whispered Liam.

Bob nodded. ‘We must find them … soon. Before another wave arrives.’

2001, Dead City

Food. There was food, of sorts. Sal watched the eugenic creatures hungrily devouring the scraps they’d scavenged on their raid. She could see several old and rusted cans being passed around, the labels that indicated their contents long ago faded or torn off. Rats, plenty of rats, caught and skinned … cooked over a small fire. Cobs of corn being stripped out of their husks.

She saw Samuel among the muttering cluster of creatures, organizing them, ensuring every creature in his pack had something to eat.

Pack.

That’s the term she’d used for them earlier. But now … now that she knew that at least some of these things could talk just like a human, and the others, well, they might not be able to talk, but they behaved with a clear intelligence … ‘pack’ felt like the wrong word to use.

Samuel came over to her and Lincoln with a handful of food items cradled in his thin arms.

‘You musht eat shomething or you will shtarve.’

He held a rat carcass on a stick. It was still sizzling from the fire. He offered it to them. ‘It’sh very good!’

Sal shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

‘God’s teeth,’ uttered Lincoln. ‘I can’t eat a rat!’

Samuel shrugged. ‘I will have it, then. How about shomething elshe? Corn?’

Sal nodded. It was raw, but then she realized she was starving. ‘Please.’

Lincoln nodded. ‘I have eaten corn raw before.’

Samuel handed them each a cob in its husk and then squatted down on his haunches to consume the rat.

The building’s coal cellar echoed with the sounds of eating, slurping, chewing, the grunting satisfaction of hunger being sated.

‘Samuel …’ said Sal quietly, ‘why … why are we here?’