Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

She looked towards the archway. She could see orderlies stepping out of the shutter entrance to see what the commotion was all about.

Run! Maddy, run!

She was about to get to her feet when she suddenly realized she couldn’t leave Becks’s body there. That message, locked away inside the support unit’s mind … There was a way to retrieve it and the memories that would preserve who she was. A way to do it … Liam once did it for Bob.

Her chip .

She looked around, found a carbine with a bayonet fixed to the end. She reached for it, expecting the guard or the orderly to bark a warning at her. Instead their eyes and everyone else’s were locked on the sky.

Panicking, fumbling, she tried to get the bayonet off, tugging at it with a growing frustration.

How does it come off?

She tried twisting it, and the fixing unlocked with a dull scrape. She wrenched it off the barrel, dropped the carbine and looked down at Becks.

Do it!

She would have to thrust the tip of the blade into her skull and dig around inside for that silicon wafer, not much bigger than a memory stick, a sim card.

She pressed the bayonet’s tip against Becks’s forehead, just above her brow line.

Do it! Now!

She tried to push down, but couldn’t.

If you can’t do it … then take the head — take the whole head!

She moved the tip down to the soft flesh beneath her jawline.

Cut! Cut! CUT!

‘I can’t … I can’t!’ she whimpered under her breath. She looked up. The time wave had rolled in from the Atlantic, and was now twisting and contorting Manhattan, like clay on a potter’s wheel, moulded and remoulded, like molten wax in a lava lamp.

And now it was crossing the East River.

Maddy closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and did what needed to be done. Then she got to her feet and started to run. Her feet slapped the ground noisily as she pushed her way past men staring listlessly up at the approaching wave.

So quiet!

So perfectly still.

Just the sound of her panting breath, her feet on rubble and a deep, deep rumble that sounded like the earth itself was preparing to split open.

She dropped down into the trench, slipping and falling in the blood-soaked dirt on to her hands and knees. She scrambled to her feet, pounding down the last dozen yards, past a young British officer who barely seemed to notice her, his eyes glazed with wonder.

‘Good Lord, quite beautiful,’ she heard him whisper as she brushed past him, past a pair of orderlies carrying a loaded stretcher between them, like everyone else standing utterly motionless, transfixed, their task for the moment completely forgotten.

Maddy reached the crumbling archway and cast a quick glance back at the sky. The front of the reality wave was across the East River, taking the armada of landing rafts and turning them into a million different things: Viking longboats, Roman triremes, Spanish galleons, sea monsters …

She ducked under the shutter. The floor was still littered with bodies. A few of them barely alive and moaning deliriously from gunshot and bayonet wounds … hands reaching up to her, pleading for water.

Across the archway she could see the computer system was still up and running, that tank — that beautiful old reliable Mark IV rust-bucket from an older time of this endless war — was still running, still feeding the archway with power.

‘Bob!’ she screamed as she picked her way over the splayed limbs of the dead and wounded men.

She saw a dialogue box appear on one of the screens, although she was too far away to read the response.

‘It’s Maddy!’ she gasped. ‘Activate a field! NOW!’

She collapsed against the computer desk, gasping, wheezing, close enough now to read computer-Bob’s response.

› Information: insufficient power to include the entire field office.

‘Then … then do it just around me!’

The cursor began to shift across the dialogue box.

› Caution: there will be obstructions within the radius …

Of course, the archway had dropped by several feet. ‘In the air, Bob. A portal mid-air! I need to jump into it as the time wave arrives!’

For a full second, perhaps two, the cursor blinked without a response. Then finally began to jitter to the right.

› Affirmative.

Outside the shutter she saw loose dirt being scooped up by the air pressure just ahead of the wave. She reached out for Becks’s head, cradling it in her arms. Maddy climbed up on to the computer desk. ‘NOW, BOB … DO IT NOW!’

In front of her a portal shimmered open, suspended three feet above the floor. There was no knowing if that was high enough, whether she was going to emerge into the unchanged archway, reappearing up to her waist in the concrete floor. Undoubtedly fatal. Horribly fatal.

She jumped for the portal just as the wave arrived and tore the archway into a million different possibilities.

11.31 p.m. 11 September 2001, Police Precinct 5, New York

The police sergeant lurched violently in his seat, the squad car rocking on its suspension.

‘Whoa! Hey! Bill! You nearly spilled my darned coffee!’

Police Sergeant Bill Devereau turned to look at his partner. ‘Uh? Sorry. Must’ve dropped off for a moment there.’

His partner nodded. ‘You can say that — you were muttering like some juiced-up crackpot.’

Bill Devereau shook his head. Wide awake now. ‘I … Crazy, I just had the weirdest dream.’

‘Yeah?’

Devereau narrowed his eyes, stroked his chin thoughtfully. The memory of it was fading fast, blurring; the clear definition of it vanishing, like cream stirred into coffee. ‘A war … or somethin’ like that. New York was all just ruins … like, I dunno, like Stalingrad.’

Sergeant Wainwright sighed. ‘I’m sure you ain’t the only one havin’ nightmares, buddy.’ Their precinct had lost some men earlier today when the Twin Towers came down, good men. And they’d be lucky to find anything of them in those smouldering ruins. They were going to be burying empty coffins for weeks to come.

Devereau stopped stroking his clean-shaven chin. ‘It was weird … In the dream, I had a beard, would you believe? Big bushy thing.’

Sergeant Wainwright turned to look at him. ‘ A beard? ’ His face cracked with a cavalier grin. ‘Beard? You kiddin’ me? You’d look a total idiot with a beard.’

Devereau nodded. He checked his face in the wing mirror. Yes, he probably would at that.

‘You’re gettin’ too old to be on the beat, Bill, seriously … If you got to be catchin’ sleep like that on duty.’

‘Was up late last night, that’s all.’

Wainwright nodded thoughtfully. His gaze rested on a bundle of newspapers dropped off outside a corner store. Tomorrow’s papers. Tomorrow’s headlines.

There was going to be only one story in every paper tomorrow.

‘Guess there’s gonna be a lot more sleepless nights for everyone.’

Devereau nodded. The dream had gone. Blown away like morning mist along a riverbank. All that was left was a nagging sense of trouble lying ahead. A storm coming.

‘You got that right, partner.’

2001, New York

Maddy opened her eyes. She must have blacked out for a moment there. Her glasses were askew on her forehead and there was drool on her chin. She adjusted her spectacles, wiped her mouth and sat back down in the office chair.

‘Sheesh,’ she whispered.

The corner of her desk she’d been standing on was still covered in a thick coat of rust-coloured brick dust, but it ended suddenly, sharply. A curve of dust … then none. Beyond that her desk was as normal. Dr Pepper cans, pizza boxes, scraps of paper and pens, sweet wrappers and magazines. But none of the debris that had cascaded from above during the artillery bombardment earlier.