Another War

Chapter Three

He took his knife and cut himself free. His hands were trembling, out of fear, out of cold. He had to make especially sure that he was slicing the tape that had held him still, and not the suit that could well be keeping him alive.

He cut by his neck, and sat up. He twisted around on the wheeled board and looked back through the forcefield to the life beyond. There was nothing to see. The estate extended on, all grey grass and skeletal trees. The end of the board stretched away, and grew indistinct.

Everything was wrong, and Thacker knew it, even as he freed his legs from the last bindings. The whiteboard was under him. He drew two letters on it, ‘OK’, and left it in the dust. He had to hurry, really hurry. It had occurred to him, far too late to do anything about it, that time moved differently inside the field. Even allowing for a year to have passed for Henbury Hall, he had about five minutes real time before…

Before what? He still didn’t know. He had to find out. He picked up his rifle and feeling less brave than at any time in his life, he started jogging towards the buildings.

There was a torch strapped to the top of his weapon. He tried it. The beam was momentarily bright, then it just faded away to a pale glimmer. Thacker hit the torch once, twice, and the glow died.

It was cold and dark. He knew where the sun should be in the sky, and it just wasn’t there anymore. There was a faint greyness to the sky, enough to see shapes, too little to see detail. It would have to do.

As he ran, he kicked up spurts of dust that hung in the air like fog.

The stables were off to his left, along with the workshop. Ahead of him was the hall itself, a fat shadow with tall chimneys like teeth. It was only gothic revival architecture, but in the gloom it looked plain evil.

Thacker made it to the front door, a heavy wooden portal studded with iron nails. The door was ajar, the latch operated by the heavy ring seemingly frozen in the open position.

He put his shoulder to it. The hinges creaked like gunshots, and he immediately desisted. There was no one there. They’d all gone, all been lost, all he’d find were corpses. He pushed again, and slowly, reluctantly, the door crawled open. He took a few moments at the threshold for his eyes to adjust, then raised his rifle and stepped in.

He listened very carefully. The only sound was his own heart. The entrance hall was on a grand scale, with a staircase directly ahead of him leading up to a balcony that led both left◦– west◦– and right◦– east. According to Emily Foster’s testimony, the household lived in the east wing. The phenomenon was centred on the other side of the house.

West it was, then. He climbed the stairs two at a time, glancing behind him every so often at the pale rectangle of the open front door. How nice it would be to just cut and run, except the retreating field would have left his body board behind like the retreating tide. There was only one way out now.

He was on the landing. The doors everywhere were open, gaping mouths of darkness that led into the rooms beyond. The world beyond the windows was barely visible. He turned, checked his back again, and went through into the west wing of the house.

A carpet, a runner that didn’t stretch to the edges of the corridor, seemed to crumble with each step he took. The passage stretched almost the whole length of the wing. There were lots of doors, all open, and the occasional table with a vase of sticks and paintings too dark to determine the subject matter. And something underfoot, like stones. He checked above him for fallen plaster, but found none.

He worked his way down, checking each room with a kick and a crouch and a pan of his rifle sights. By the time he reached the last room, his nerves were in shreds and gripping his rifle would have been impossible if not for his rubber gauntlets: his whole body was swimming with cold sweat.

This room was different. Every other room had been bare, stripped out: no curtains or carpets or furniture. This at least had a writing desk and a chair, and in the corner, a naked iron bedstead. He had to assume it was significant. There was also another door in the west wall. Open, of course.

He used the wall for cover, noting briefly that there were papers, a notebook perhaps, on the desk. He’d come back for those later. His back pressed against the plasterwork, he edged around the room. How much time did he have, if any at all? He stood next to the door frame, and then turned, kicked and crouched.

There it was. It had to be the reason. Thacker looked all around the room, checking the shadows for movement, then moved closer.

It was just taller than he, and as broad at the base as it was high, a brass cone knotted with pipes and coils that danced through and out without meaning. Its surface was hammered with shapes, strangely familiar yet utterly alien. There was a control panel of sorts, too, with heavy levers.

And it was humming with power.

He circled it twice, and realised that there were no cables to trip over. Poor on history, he wasn’t sure whether houses in 1919 had electricity, and how it could have been hooked up to the National Grid for the past eighty years. He reached out and touched it. He could feel a soft vibration in his palm.

The thing itself was alive.

He backed out through the door, reluctant to turn his back on it, and collided with the desk. He jumped, cursed himself for being stupid and cowardly, and bent to retrieve some of the papers that had fallen to the floor.

They were thick with writing, and Thacker could barely make out the fine, copperplate script. But there were diagrams, more drawings of symbols◦– abstract designs, stylised people and birds◦– and a huge folded sheet like a map, except that it was a wiring diagram the likes of which he had never seen.

He looked again at the pictures. They seemed Egyptian: hieroglyphs.

Then two things: he realised that it was growing lighter outside, and there was a creak of floorboards in the corridor. He’d been standing there, with his back to the door. He dropped to his knee and aimed. Something moved, and was gone. Footsteps, running.

He turned the corner in time to see nothing more than a shadow at the far end of the corridor. Distracted by the sight of the light coming in from the windows, he missed his chance to call out a warning, or even snap off a shot.

Sunlight streamed across the blasted parkland turned grey, and beyond he could see green trees and fields of unripe wheat. There was blue sky. The forcefield had collapsed, and he hadn’t even noticed.

Now, when his radio would work, he didn’t have it. He had to assume that soldiers would now be coming down the main drive, fanning out through the building, and that he could quite easily be shot by someone on his own side. Very easily, assuming they were as spooked as he was.

He didn’t run. He stalked. Whoever◦– whatever◦– he was chasing would know the hall intimately. Every hiding place, every twist and turn, every concealed passageway. Thacker had trained for this; not recently, but often enough in the past for the training to have stuck. Weapon out in front, finger on the trigger, and slowly.

He gained the balcony overlooking the entrance, and barely recognised it. The light, previously denied, showed plain wooden panelling, yellowing whitewash walls and dusty boards. Nothing to be scared of, really.

Coming down the stairs, he listened. Outside, he could hear in the distance the sound of a large engine revving. The Warrior would be advancing, with a column of soldiers behind it. Inside, there was the scraping of something heavy across the floor, dragged in short steps. He quickened his pace, crossed the entrance hall, and touched one of the big double doors.

He caught a glimpse of a huge banqueting room, big leaded windows, massive stone fireplace, and a towering, teetering bonfire of broken wood in the very centre of the space. In the corner was an upturned table, and on top of the edge was the barrel of a shotgun aimed at him.

As he stepped back, the gun fired, booming in the confined space. The door quivered as buckshot punctured the dense wood. He was through the door, rolling, looking for cover, even as he fired a burst of three into the corner. The shotgun boomed again. Plaster dust trailed the chalk-white chunks of wall as they arced to the floor.

Thacker had put the wood-pile between him and the table. He kept it in line as he moved cautiously forward. A shot hit the fireplace off to his right. Sharp shards of stone zipped through the air. Several hit Thacker, hard enough to hurt, not enough to cut his suit. That hadn’t been a shot gun; a rifle instead.

He cleared his throat.

‘My name is Major Thacker, of the British Army. You have one chance to lay down your weapons and come out. I have reinforcements arriving as I speak, and we will use deadly force without hesitation. Surrender now.’

There were more noises outside, feet on gravel, the front door being charged aside. Any second now, someone was going to come barging through behind him, straight into the line of fire. Thacker aimed at the windows and shot them out.

Victorian glass shattered in a waterfall of crystal that caught the sunlight just so. The cannon on the armoured car returned fire, and everything that was still standing disintegrated, along with most of the back wall. When the turret had finished its rake, there was silence for a moment, only punctuated by the sound of falling masonry.

Thacker looked at the door, saw the facemask of a respirator looking in at him. He raised two fingers, pointed to the corner of the room. He got a thumbs-up sign in return and the instruction to cover his face.

Three black disks skidded across the floor, and as Thacker pressed his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes tight shut, there was an echoing explosion of light and sound.

Abruptly, there were soldiers pouring into the room, firing staccato bursts at the corner, running forward, lying down, covering their comrades as they leap-frogged over them and gained more ground.

Thacker was up and running, too, outflanking the tabletop and gaining a clear shot behind it.

‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. Some heard him. Others, intent on reducing the table to matchwood, carried on.

‘Cease fire!’ It was a bellow, muffled by his respirator, but he moved forward as well. Fingers left triggers, and the last shellcase span to a stop.

He enunciated as clearly as he could.

‘Put your weapons down now, and stand up.’

Two men, pale and filthy, clambered to their feet. Rather one of them did, and helped the other up. This second man was missing a leg.

‘Stand down, everyone. Shooting’s over.’ He beckoned to the men. ‘Come on, out. Slowly does it.’

They shuffled out. Their clothes were ragged, torn. Their cheeks were concave and their eyes were white and bulging. They were terrified of him.

‘Are you Robert Henbury?’

At this, the one-legged man started to cry. He leaned all the harder against the other man and buried his head in his chest.

‘And you are?’

‘Adams,’ he said, in a voice not used to speaking.

‘George Adams?’

‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you human?’

The question sent a thrill of fright down Thacker’s spine.

‘I was last time I looked. My name’s Thacker. I’m a Major in the British Army. Welcome back, gentlemen.’

Adams and Henbury were just about able to walk, but Thacker wouldn’t let them. He called for stretchers and told the men to sit and wait.

He studied them as they slumped on the floor, clinging to each other like frightened children. They looked quite mad: hair grown unchecked and hacked inexpertly back when it had got in the way, beards ragged in the same unkempt way, and that hollow-cheeked, wide-eyed unblinking stare they both had as if they expected something blasphemous to appear at a moment’s notice. Their fingers were bandaged and bloody, their nails cracked and yellow. The clothes they wore were like the carpets, threadbare and shedding matter in clouds of dust.

Thacker’s own appearance couldn’t help either, he realised. Adams and Henbury disappeared in 1919. As far as he could tell, they hadn’t aged a jot. Even allowing for the terrible air of decay that hung about them, they hadn’t experienced so much as a single year. Now they were confronted with camouflaged monsters with a boggling array of weaponry◦– straight out of an HG Wells novel. Chalk one up to Einstein and the theory of relativity.

So Thacker was trying to limit the strangeness these two travellers could see. The radios, they’d probably recognise as telephones without wires, and surmise that Marconi’s little discovery had got a little smaller. The Warrior? They’d had tanks at Cambrai. Even the NBC suit he wore was just a few decades later on from gas masks and urine-soaked cloth wound around the head.

He’d save the medical, digital and genetic revolutions for later, not to mention that the War to end all Wars had been followed by a century of shocking brutality on and off the battlefield.

The stretchers and their bearers arrived, suited up in white coveralls with big red crosses front and back. Something else they’d recognise.

‘Get on,’ said Thacker, ‘and we’ll give you a lift to decontamination. It’ll be undignified, and it may even hurt, but after that we can get a doctor to take a look at you.’

Neither Adams nor Henbury moved.

‘Yes, I will force you. You can’t stay here, and you really have no choice but to do what we tell you.’ Thacker stepped between Adams and the resting shotgun, and pointed his rifle nowhere in particular. ‘I think you could both do with a shower, a shave and a hot meal. What do you say?’

Adams was the first to move. He got up to a crouching position and put his shoulder under Henbury’s arm. One of the orderlies went to help, and Henbury flinched as if he’d been electrocuted. Adams steadied him, and the orderly made another attempt at assistance.

This time, reluctantly, Henbury leaned on him as well, and together they lowered the one-legged man to the plastic stretcher. Adams lay on his, and they were hoisted aloft with surprising ease. Or not so surprising. There was more meat on a scarecrow.

Both were carried away out of the hall and into the blinding sunshine, Thacker following at a discreet distance. He was caught by one of his squad brandishing a radio handset.

‘It’s Mr. Dickson, sir.’

Thacker sighed and took the radio, pressing the earpiece hard against the side of his head.

‘Thacker? Two casualties?’

‘Yes. Rather a pleasant surprise. Lord Robert Henbury and George Adams. I suppose we should call them survivors rather than casualties, but we’re treating them as such.’

‘What shape are they in?’

‘Emaciated. And if not all mad, at least half mad. They tried to kill me when they saw me the first time, but lucid enough not to try it twice. I’ve sent them for full decontamination, and we’ll keep them in isolation until we’re certain their blood is clear.’

‘How old are they?’

‘Ah. Not really any older than when they left. Bit of a mystery, that one. Time moved differently inside the field.’ Thacker looked around. Because of the respirator, he was shouting his replies, and there were things he didn’t want broadcast. ‘I’m going to order the main building sealed. There’s something inside that I don’t want touched by anyone less than an expert.’

‘Are you being enigmatic?’

‘Just for the moment. I’m coming back to the basecamp now, and get out of this damnable suit. And I need to make sure Henbury and Adams are treated properly, not as objects of curiosity or plain-old lab rats. I think they’ve been through more than enough. Adams asked me if I was human.’

‘Did he? Why did he do that?’

‘I have absolutely no idea at all. I rather assumed it was the get-up I’m wearing. Although it did strike me as a little odd.’

Dickson was silent for a while, so long that Thacker assumed that the connection had been cut. He was just handing the radio back when it squawked again.

‘Thacker? Thacker?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘We might have a problem.’

‘Over and above the ones we already have?’

‘Yes. Imagine you’re on guard duty. Someone approaches and asks you if you’re British.’

‘And…’

‘They could be asking you because they’re British, too, and they’re your friend.’

Thacker got the point. ‘And they could be asking because they’re not, and they want to kill you.’ He looked up the hill to where the stretcher party were. They had almost reached the main gates. ‘Get a squad together and meet me at decontamination.’ He thrust the radio into the squaddies’ chest. ‘No one goes in or out of that building until I say so. Check for external doors and post a double-guard on every last one.’

He started running, hating how the suit slowed him down and made him awkward.