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.
CHAPTER 28
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?’
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.’
CHAPTER 29
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.’
Maddy felt her legs wobble and give way, and before she knew it she was slumped on her knees among the pile of red bricks and cement powder. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her dust-covered face, leaving clean tracks on her cheeks in their wake.
‘Madelaine? Are you OK?’
‘No, not really,’ Maddy burbled. She buried her face in her hands.
Bricks shifted and slid as Becks stepped round carefully and squatted down in front of her. She reached out and gently pulled one of Maddy’s hands away from her face. For a moment she studied Maddy’s eyes, screwed up behind the round glasses, red and puffy.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked softly, almost tenderly.
Maddy sniffed, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘What the hell else am I going to do? We’re totally screwed. That’s us finished this time. Might as well just … I dunno … just curl up … and … and …’
‘That is not a sensible course of action, Madelaine.’
Maddy looked at her. Becks, quite impassive and calm. Almost childlike in the way she was squatting on the bricks, like some wartime child playing tea party with her broken dolls amid the rubble of her own home, oblivious to her fate.
‘Don’t you see, Becks? We’re all done here. We’re finished.’
She stood up, and clattered her way slowly across the bricks towards the doorway leading back into the main arch. She left Becks still squatting on her haunches patiently awaiting further instructions.
‘Madelaine?’
Maddy looked around the mess of the archway. The airborne dust that had filled the place half an hour ago had now settled, leaving a light, pale coating of powder on everything.
‘Madelaine?’ Becks called again from the back room. Her voice, normally so commanding, surprisingly deep for her feminine frame, right now sounded almost like the forlorn bleating of a lamb.
Maddy made her way across the floor, over the wide crack in the concrete, and ducked under the open shutter to look out again at the grey ruins of New York. Smudges of smoke marked the horizon to the north – Queens – where the bombing raid had taken place earlier. And the salmon-pink sun, now settling behind the tortured skeletons of Manhattan’s once fine and proud buildings, cast dappled paintbrush strokes of meagre warmth across the no-man’s land. The only colour on this colourless landscape.
Becks’s faint voice echoed out of the archway after her once more. ‘Madelaine! What are my orders?’
She ignored the support unit, left her sitting in the gathering darkness among the bricks, abandoned like an orphaned child.
‘Madelaine?’
One step in front of the other in the gathering twilight … each one easier than the last. She realized she could leave. Walk away from it all. Walk away from the responsibilities she’d never asked for, walk away from secrets she didn’t ask to know about. If all their field office was now was a crumbling archway and a bunch of machines that didn’t work any more, what difference would it make if she stayed or left?
She realized something. I can go.
She turned her back on the East River, Manhattan and the sun setting beyond, and faced north-east towards the ruins of Brooklyn, towards Boston …
Home.
Perhaps even in this alternate timeline the same people had met, fallen in love and made the same babies and somewhere north-east of here, in her home city, there was a little girl with glasses and frizzy strawberry-red hair who liked messing around with her father’s electronics toolset rather than playing with Barbie dolls. Perhaps that home was there. Perhaps her mom and dad were the same two people and she could explain to them who she was, get them to understand she was their daughter, but ten years older. For them it would be like having an older sister for their only child. A sister who could understand her in a way no normal sister could: a mentor, a guide, a friend.
Her faltering steps across the rubble-strewn landscape quickened.
A part of her argued the case that she still had responsibilities and obligations here. Liam and Sal, they too were stuck in this … whatever this world was. But what could she do for them? Sit on her bunk and wait for them in the dark? Wait until some bombing raid came here and decided to give this portion of the city another pounding?
Maddy shook the nagging voice away. She really hadn’t needed Becks to catalogue to her how complete and catastrophic the damage was to their equipment.
In the absence of a plan, or anything left of their field office for which she had to be responsible, there was only one small voice that made sense. A childlike voice.
I want to go home.
CHAPTER 30
2001, somewhere in Virginia
The Chinese man looked down at them, surprised. ‘New York! You wan’ go New York?’
‘That’s right,’ said Liam.
‘You craz-ee.’ He shook his head. ‘I take you far as Dead City. No more.
I goin’ west – New Pittsburgh, maybe Cleveland. You shou’ go west too.’
‘Dead City?’
The man shrugged, said something to his wife sitting beside him in the odd-looking vehicle’s front cabin. He turned back to Liam. ‘Yuh … Dead City, you know? Ol’ times use’ to be call’ Baltimore?’
It was dark and Liam could only see the side of the man’s face, lit by the paper lantern swinging in the fresh breeze. He read the expression as friendly bemusement.
‘You and your friends sit in back … with chickens. I take you north some way.’ The one eye Liam could see glinted in the lantern’s amber light; it was locked suspiciously on him. ‘You no trouble?’
Liam spread his hands, turned to make sure Bob had tucked the shotgun away out of sight. ‘I promise you, sir … we’ll be no trouble.’ He glanced at the side of the man’s vehicle. It reminded him of a traditional Romany gypsy caravan; every surface seemed to be lavishly decorated with intricate Oriental designs, and down along the side a multitude of hooks protruded, from which pots and pans and other kitchen miscellany rattled and clanged softly as the gentle breeze stirred ears of corn either side of the empty road.
‘We’ll just be in the back, then,’ said Liam, ‘keeping your chickens company.’
The Chinese man nodded, satisfied with that. Then turned to his wife and began chattering to her. She didn’t seem quite so pleased to have passengers come aboard.
They made their way to the back of the caravan. It rattled and vibrated from the idling engine beneath, which intermittently spat clouds of vapour out between the spokes of its six wide, wooden cartwheels.
Liam pulled open a wire mesh gate at the rear and stepped up inside to see a cramped space almost completely filled with carefully stacked household possessions. The rest of them followed suit, the vehicle lurching alarmingly as Bob finally pulled himself up inside and slammed the mesh door behind him. There was just about room for the four of them to huddle on the floor, shoulders rubbing shoulders and legs pulled up in front of them.