Sal nodded. ‘Taking you back home, Mr Lincoln.’
‘I see,’ he grunted. There seemed to be a shade of disappointment in that. ‘It will be an odd thing, returning to New Orleans. Returning to work as a flatboat crewman.’
She picked up his other boot, and with a stalk of hay began digging at and flicking out the mud. ‘But that is not what you’re going back to, is it?’ She offered him a friendly smile. ‘Not any more, right?’
He looked up at her. ‘You are talking about this destiny you say I have?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was a poorly educated woodsman with no money before all of this … this misadventure. When I return, I shall still be a poorly educated woodsman with no money, but one that is now smelling of pigs.’
‘No –’ she grasped his hand – ‘no, Abraham … you have seen what I have seen. Right?’
Their eyes met for a moment.
‘This is all wrong,’ she whispered. ‘This world and … and those poor creatures, intelligent creatures, treated like objects, machines, tools. Your country, fighting itself for over a century? For what? For other countries’ goals? You … you are the reason all of this has happened.’
‘And only I can change that?’
She nodded.
‘What am I,’ he sighed, ‘but a penniless vagrant? How am I to find my way from that to president?’
‘You managed to do it,’ said Sal. She frowned. ‘Or will manage to do it. After all, you are quite stubborn, aren’t you?’
‘And quite rude, so you are,’ added Liam. ‘That’s always a help.’
‘And,’ she said, squeezing his hand, ‘you know what the right thing to do is. The right course to take with your life … no one normally has the luxury of knowing which way their life should go.’
‘You have acquired privileged knowledge of your future,’ said Bob. ‘This is a tactical advantage that you will be able to use to –’ He stopped talking and held an arm out. ‘Liam, you should step back. I am detecting particles.’
Liam sat down on the trough beside Lincoln. ‘And not everyone gets to see all that you’ve seen, Mr Lincoln, and still get to go back to live their lives.’ He shrugged sadly. ‘Me and Sal don’t have that.’
She nodded. ‘This is what we do now. This is what we’ll always do, I suppose.’
In front of them, a portion of the darkening blue sky, dotted with the first early stars, began to tremble and squirm.
‘Oh, look,’ said Liam, brightening, ‘here’s our lift home.’
CHAPTER 86
2001, New York
Maddy could hear the fighting had resumed; this time the crack and rattle of gunfire was much closer.
She was worried that something, or someone, would knock or damage the antennae array above. It would take just one stray bullet, that’s all, just one … then this effort, the sacrifice, the bodies she’d seen lying side by side like sardines in a tin, all of that would have been for nothing.
Becks was outside fighting alongside the men. She could imagine the support unit was quite at home, content, covered in blood and mud, doing what she did best.
She heard someone bellowing orders, Devereau she guessed, followed by the deep throbbing burr of one of their heavy machine guns. She turned to look out of the entrance. She could see boots and drooping belts of ammo beneath the shutter: the machine-gun teams emerging from the fort and redeploying along the horseshoe.
It’s getting real close.
Both colonels had insisted the three machine-gun teams would be the last line of defence, the fort would be their Alamo.
Clearly these plans were now fluid.
Oh crud … Get a move on, Liam … for God’s –
> Maddy?
‘What?’
> The density probe has just picked up some movement.
‘Repetitive … not random?’
> Correct.
‘Grab an image!’
> Affirmative.
She saw the light-meter on the displacement machine flicker as energy was discharged, despatched along the heavy-duty insulated cables up through the jagged hole in the roof to be targeted by the array outside: space-time being discreetly teased open, an unfathomable spatial dimension punctured with a pin hole.
She watched the monitor on the right as a blocky low-resolution image appeared. The same image as last time: a muddy field, some sort of low hut, a darkening sky. But this time she could just about make out the blurred silhouette of some stupid fool caught mid-air doing star jumps.
Liam.
‘That’s them!’
> Affirmative. Activate the window?
‘Yes! Do it!’
The light-meter, bars of LEDs like a graphic equalizer, fluttered excitedly with the sudden expenditure of accrued energy. Two remote windows being opened simultaneously: one a hundred miles south of here, another in New Orleans, 1831. That was going to drain their charge completely. The rest then … was going to be up to them.
She listened to the displacement machine’s circuitry hum, saw the green charge display silently wink to red, one light after the other.
And the rest was going to be just waiting. And hoping.
Yet again.
Another of the leviathans slowly collapsed to its knees, the thick armour plating over its chest misshapen and twisted under the battering of a steady sputtering stream of high-calibre rounds. Blood was pouring down its front from numerous ragged wounds. It flailed its huge blade-tipped fists pitifully, angrily.
‘Got us another one!’ roared Sergeant Freeman, punching the air.
‘Come along! Here! This is good. Right here!’ Wainwright waved the other machine-gun teams into position against the trench wall. ‘Fire on those eugenics! Upper chest area … there are gaps in the armour! Do you see?’
Devereau was studying the slope below, illuminated now by crimson flares being shot into the night sky from their landing raft – bathing the whole mud-churned and cratered battlefield with a flickering blood-red light. Beyond the six remaining eugenics clanking slowly uphill bearing the weight of their armour – surely several tons of it each, he guessed – British soldiers were amassing in the borderline. He could see officers moving among knots of men, poised to step over the top and support the eugenics with a rush. And there, sitting astride sandbags, a British officer calmly observing the events uphill from him through a pair of field glasses.
CHAPTER 87
2001, New York
Becks watched with detached fascination at the brutal ruthlessness of these enormous beasts. Their arms swung tirelessly, scooping out of the trench and into the air bloody parts of men and divots of dirt alike. There were no moments of hesitation, no doubts, no confusion of morals or ethics – as much thought devoted to the process of killing as an electric band-saw might give to a plank of wood.
She could identify with that: a world simplified down to the barest essentials, to mission parameters. And that’s where her empathy, her sense of kindred-spirit, with these curious monsters ended. She too had her own mission parameters to fulfil.
One of the machine-gun teams lay in tatters just beyond the nearest leviathan, the thick barrel of the gun still smoking and aimed skyward on its tripod legs. She ducked down low, scrambling over the writhing bodies of the wounded, between the giant’s thick legs. At the same time that the genic sensed her movement below it she reached the machine gun, pulled it off its mount and swung its aim up.
No armour plating beneath it, the high-calibre bullets found plenty of soft flesh to rip through. The genic flailed, enraged, the feed-pipe that protruded from its small face flapping from side to side. She heard a deep moan coming from its chest, its throat; a cry of rage and agony locked behind a sealed mouth.
The gun’s stuttering fire ceased as the over-heated barrel choked on the ammunition belt. But she’d done enough damage. Blood rained down on her as the leviathan took several staggered steps, finally flopping on to the downhill side of the trench. She felt th
e ground vibrate with the impact of several tons of iron and flesh.
As another fresh flare exploded above the trench, bathing them in an artificial crimson dawn, she took in the state of play of the battle with one snapshot blink of her eyes. Two eugenics remained, the last of them, wreaking havoc further along the horseshoe. She saw arcs of dirt and glistening wet viscera spinning up into the night sky. The few men not maimed, dismembered or dying were beginning to break and scramble out of the trench and run for their lives. And two hundred yards downhill of all this, the British soldiers were now advancing in three ordered and steady lines on their position.
Colonel Devereau was up and out of the trench, attempting to rally the fleeing men. Wainwright was busy firing a carbine down the slope at the advancing British.
Their bunker of sandbags and piled dirt – the fort – their last line of defence right outside the archway, was sitting empty. A mistake.
‘Devereau!’ she yelled. Her voice – she chose a slightly deeper register than a normal human female, almost masculine, though not quite – carried across the noise of battle. Devereau looked her way. She pointed towards the fort and tossed the machine gun out of the trench towards him.
‘You must redeploy this in your final defensive position!’ she bellowed.
Devereau nodded. A last stand from the fort, perhaps that was already his intention with the half a dozen men he’d managed to stop from running away. The heavy machine gun and several yards of belted ammunition lying on the ground would help.
There were a few other men still alive in the trench, gathered around another silent smoking machine gun, trapped between the two leviathans, cowering from the sweeping arc of gore-covered spikes, and the growling, spinning blade of the motorized circular-saw blade.
[Assessment: heavy machine gun – tactical value = HIGH]
Acquiring a second heavy machine gun to fire out from their final position was worth the calculated hazard. She pulled a sabre from the hands of one of the dead. She vaguely recognized the man’s dark face; the grey flecks of coiled hair, the beard. His glazed sightless eyes gave her permission to take it and make good use of it.
Becks pulled herself up out of the trench and began to make her way towards the last two leviathans, skipping along the stacked sandbags like they were stepping stones across a babbling brook. Finally within striking range of the nearest of them, she pulled the sabre back and, using every fibre of muscle in her body to execute a low, sweeping, roundhouse blow, the blade arced round, biting through the coarse hide-like skin, the muscle and bone of the creature’s shin, as thick as a human torso. The bare foot, a yard long with flexing toes as big as cooking apples, flopped into the trench like a side of beef. The genic, missing everything beneath the cut, lost its balance and fell over, the thick plates of iron armour scraping and clanking as if a dumper truck had emptied a full load of salvaged metal on to a scrapheap.
Already exhausted under the burden of its armour, the leviathan struggled like an elephant with a broken spine, desperate to right itself once more.
Becks appeared over its small head, looking down at two beady black eyes, moist, glistening, by the light of the descending flare above them. Its eyes, without whites, looked as expressionless and void as the eyes of some giant insect … and, yet, the glistening moisture around them …
Tears?
She processed that observation in the few nanoseconds of a single computer cycle. Tears of anger, she wondered … or was it relief?
The spider-eyes slowly closed as if knowing, accepting even, what was coming. She thrust the sword down into the soft flesh beneath its feed-pipe and the genic lurched, giant ribbons of muscle all over its body flexing one last time, then it sagged – quite dead.
She turned in time to see the last leviathan collapse, finally weakened from the blood loss of dozens of gunshot wounds.
Again, she eye-snapped an overall appraisal of the battlefield. The British were only a hundred yards downhill. She estimated no more than a couple of dozen men left alive in the horseshoe trench, some of them firing sporadic, opportunistic shots down the slope, most frozen in shock.
And behind them, out of the trench, rushing past the still-chugging tank, fifty, sixty men fleeing, limping, scrambling for the distant safety of the ruins of Brooklyn. Devereau seemed to have gathered a kernel of a dozen men, most looking too badly wounded to make a run for it anyway. They had the heavy machine gun at least.
Wainwright joined her. Nodded at Devereau, herding the men towards the fort.
‘We must buy them enough time to set up the gun in there!’ cried Wainwright.
‘Affirmative.’ She pointed to the few other men along the trench. ‘I will delay the enemy. Order these men to redeploy in the fort and the archway. This must be protected for as long as possible!’
Wainwright nodded. He picked his way along the trench and started tapping the remaining few on their shoulders, gesturing towards the archway.
Becks stepped forward, reached down for the still-smoking heavy machine gun and hefted it up off its tripod with casual strength to rest it on her hip.
She aimed it downhill at the British, now only fifty yards from her, and began to fire.
CHAPTER 88
1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln stared at the street in front of him. Early evening. It was busy with dock workers finishing for the day, trappers and traders stowing bales of beaver pelts and Indian-friendly trade goods aboard their flatboats. Raucous voices exchanged greetings and farewells in pidgin English and French, the street clattering with the sound of metal-rimmed cartwheels and shoed horses.
Across the rutted dirt thoroughfare was the inn, the very same inn he’d squandered the last of his money drowning his woes in the bottom of a tankard. It seemed to him to be more than a lifetime ago that he’d staggered out on to that porch.
‘I am where you first found me,’ he said.
Sal nodded. ‘And this is where you have to be.’
‘New Orleans,’ he smiled. ‘It seems to me to be a much smaller place now.’
‘I guess so.’ She looked up at him. ‘After all that you and me have seen I suppose it must do.’
He laughed. ‘And what incredible things. I shall, I’m sure, be the victim of sleepless nights until my dying day.’
‘It must remain secret. All of it,’ she said. ‘You know you can’t tell anyone about any of those things that happened?’
‘If I am to one day be a president, young lady, I would be a fool talking of flying ships and animals that speak and machines that transport a person through time. I would never stand a chance of being elected. The people in this new country would not tolerate a deranged lunatic for a leader.’
Sal shrugged. ‘Well …’
Lincoln scratched at his dark beard. ‘But I shall caution any man who will listen to me that this country will not prosper unless it is a united one.’ He looked at her. ‘That at least is something I am permitted to say?’
She looked at Liam. He was talking quietly with Bob a few yards away. She turned back to Lincoln and shrugged. ‘I think you were always destined to say something like that anyway. At least now you know why America can’t go splitting itself up into pieces, right?’
They watched a portly businessman and his wife cross the street, followed by several slaves carrying their baggage between them. A small black boy tagged along in their wake, barefooted and wearing little more than threads of clothing – the last item in a procession of one man’s property.
She found herself thinking of Samuel. Looked up at Lincoln’s dark, hooded eyes and suspected he was thinking the same.
‘I believe there is much in this time to put right,’ muttered Lincoln, ‘before we can be the nation our forefathers dreamed of.’
It was right then they heard the first sound of thundering hooves approaching. Cries of warning from further up the street, the crash of barrels of whisky and ale rolling off the back of the runaway cart and thudding on t
o the hard dirt strip, the spray of yeast-excited foam through split kegs.
Liam and Bob joined them, standing back from the thoroughfare as the cart approached. Six wild-eyed horses careened in a manic zigzag towards them. They roared past, shedding more barrels from the back of the cart in their wake. They watched the horses and cart weave uncontrolled through the congestion ahead until, finally, the cart rocked over and shed the last of its load. One of the cartwheels collapsed under the burden. Splinters of wood and shattered spokes arced into the sky; a twisted metal wheel rim spun off on its own tangent. They watched the cart still dragged along on its axle by the panicking horses until it was lost from sight.
‘The cart that killed you,’ said Liam. He cheerfully patted Lincoln’s back. ‘Well, not this time, anyway, Mr Lincoln.’
Bob nudged Liam. ‘Remember the secondary objective,’ his voice rumbled quietly.
Liam nodded. He offered Lincoln his hand. ‘Been a pleasure to meet a future president, so it has.’
Lincoln nodded and grasped his hand firmly. ‘I shall … endeavour to do my best, Mr O’Connor. Good Lord willing.’
‘You’ll do your country proud,’ he smiled. ‘I know you will.’
Bob leaned forward. ‘Secondary objective?’
‘Right … right.’ He looked at Sal. ‘We have to go. Something else we need to take a look at.’ He shook Lincoln’s hand and smiled. ‘Look after yourself, Mr Lincoln.’
‘I will that, sir.’
‘Sal –’ Liam gestured up the street – ‘we need to check that out, right now.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll catch up.’
A final farewell from Liam and a terse nod from Bob and they were striding swiftly up Powder Street following the trail of chaos to find its cause.
Sal and Lincoln looked at each other. ‘It’s been a funny old week, hasn’t it?’ she said.
The tall young man’s laugh sounded like a growl. ‘To say the very least, ma’am.’