TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 42. 2001, New York

‘All right, then, young lady,’ said Devereau. He puffed out a foul-smelling cloud of cigarette smoke that Maddy subtly wafted away from her face with the gentle flap of her hand. The colonel didn’t seem to notice that. ‘You’ll have whatever help I can offer you. But I’ll wager we have nothing of your sort of technology in our bunkers.’

‘Thank you.’

He shrugged. ‘If these gadgets, contraptions and devices of yours do what you say they’ll do, then perhaps it should be us thanking you …’ He hesitated, frowned and then slapped a hand over his tired eyes and shook his head. ‘But yes … no! Arghh! The logic of this time travel is confusing.’ He sighed. ‘Of course, if you’re successful and change history back to your version of events, I would not know any different, would I? We would know nothing of … of what has been done?’

Maddy nodded.

‘Affirmative,’ said Becks.

‘Good God, this time-travelling nonsense plays the devil with your mind,’ he muttered. ‘I should think it must drive you to madness dwelling on such things all the time.’

‘It gives me a headache,’ Maddy conceded. ‘But I think I’m beginning to get the hang of it now.’

It was dark in the archway. The generator had been turned off to conserve what fuel was left in the tank and the glow of a candle flickered across Maddy’s messy desk, reflected in the dark screens of the computer monitors. Outside the archway she could hear Devereau’s men talking in whispers, could see the glow of their cigarettes in the night as they kept watch for the Southern sky navy.

‘So … this travelling through time, what is it for you, Miss Carter, a profession?’ He wheezed a smoker’s laugh. ‘A hobby, is it?’

Maddy looked down at the mess across her desk, caught in the dancing glow of the candle light.

‘More a duty, really,’ she replied. ‘Not one I chose exactly. It just sort of happened, ended up being me and a couple of other poor suckers who have to do it.’

‘And you, Miss Becks? What about you?’

Becks looked at Maddy questioningly.

‘Hell, why not?’ Maddy smiled casually. ‘Go on, you might as well tell him the truth about what you are. None of it’s going to make any difference when … if … we can fix this mess.’

Becks nodded slowly. ‘That is true, Madelaine.’

‘What you are?’ Devereau looked confused. ‘You said “what” just then, didn’t you? Not “who”!’

‘I am a support unit,’ said Becks. ‘That is to say, an artificially engineered life form. My organic frame has been genetically edited and designed for combat and reconnaissance roles by a military DNA-software contractor.’

‘She’s also a real barrel of laughs,’ added Maddy.

Becks frowned, disgruntled at that. ‘I have developed basic humour files.’

‘Genetic?’ said Devereau. ‘Is that the word you just used?’

Becks nodded. ‘Yes.’

Devereau stroked his beard. ‘The Anglo-Confederates have been experimenting with a similar-sounding invention. Eugenology I believe they call it, playing with the bricks and mortar of nature itself. Playing in God’s very own laboratory. Is this a similar thing to what you just said?’

‘Affirmative. The manipulation of genetic data. Altering the growth instruction code of stem cells to produce an organic life form that meets specified criteria. In my case, I have physical strength that is approximately four hundred per cent greater than a normal female of similar build. I also have a hyper-reactive immune system capable of repairing extreme body damage.’

‘Which means you can shoot her and she’ll pretty much just shrug it off like a bee sting.’ Maddy took her glasses off and rubbed tired eyes. ‘Although that doesn’t stop her kvetching about it.’

‘I can feel pain. That is necessary damage feedback data,’ said Becks. She looked at Maddy. ‘Kvetching? What does this word mean?’

She shook her head. ‘Moaning. Don’t worry about it … I was trying to be funny.’

Becks cocked her head momentarily and filed something. She turned back to Devereau. ‘It is possible to destroy this body,’ she continued. ‘It is possible for the reactive-immune system to be overwhelmed. If too much blood is lost, for instance, this body’s organs would systemically fail like those of a normal human body.’

Devereau seemed to draw back from her into his chair, putting a few inches more space between himself and Becks.

He eyed her warily. ‘The South has experimented with eugenic creatures on the battlefield before. They’ve been fooling around with that ungodly science for the last thirty years. Twenty-three years ago at the Battle of Preston Peak, when our boys were making a push along the Sheridan-Saint Germain section of the front line, they put on to the battlefield an experimental company of those devils.’ Devereau shook his head, recalling old headlines. ‘The press at the time called them “The Almost-Men”.’

He ran a hand through dark hair, threaded with silver-grey at the temples. ‘It was a massacre. The rumours of the time, the stories in the press, were truly horrendous. Three thousand men holding the town of Preston Peak, most of them recent draftees from the state of Ohio. Just boys, really … We lost every last one of them. When the North counter-attacked with a tank regiment and steam-walkers and retook the town, they found only parts of bodies.’

He tossed his Gitane on to the floor and crushed it with the heel of his boot. ‘They found a …’ He looked at Maddy. ‘This isn’t very nice, Miss Carter.’

‘Well … I guess you’ve started now,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘You might as well go on.’

‘As you wish. They found a body mounted on a wooden crossbar. A head, arms, torso, legs, all from different men. As if these creatures had been mocking man, parodying the Southern science, trying to make their very own creature. The soldiers entering the town found very few of the creatures alive … They’d turned on each other, you know? As if killing every human in the town hadn’t been enough. But before turning on each other they’d turned on the Southern officers who’d been assigned to lead them. Trust me, Miss Carter, you really wouldn’t want to hear what they did to them.’

Maddy looked at his face. ‘No, I guess you’re probably right.’

‘Since then, they’ve not experimented with military eugenic units. But we know they have eugenic workers. Hundreds — thousands — of them working the plantations. They must have a better understanding these days of how to control them, how to design obedience into their minds.’

‘In my time, that’s basically the same technology as genetic engineering.’ Maddy looked out of the open shutter at the moonlit ruins of Brooklyn. ‘You know, when we arrived here, I didn’t think things looked that, you know, that advanced in this timeline.’

‘Scientific development is not necessarily symmetrical,’ replied Becks.

She nodded. Becks was right. War, in this case a permanent state of war, seemed to have had the effect of accelerating some sciences and retarding others. For example, those bombers, the South’s sky navy that Bill had mentioned, seemed to be using a lighter-than-air technology far more advanced than was available in the normal 2001. While, on the other hand, it seemed that there was no sign of any computer technology, or, if there was, it was rudimentary.

‘The Anglo-Confederates have invested much in these modern sciences,’ said Devereau. ‘The British seem to have access to the finest scientific minds, the laboratories and, of course, they certainly have the money.’

Maddy made a face. ‘Well, they’re not doing so great in our time.’

‘I find that difficult to believe.’ He laughed drily. ‘The British Empire encompasses half the world.’ Devereau fiddled with the frayed cuff of his uniform tunic. ‘Whereas our government —’ he lowered his voice — ‘useless self-serving politicians, the lot of them … rely on technology that is decades old. Tanks and steam-walkers that stall and fail in the middle of a battle. Rotor-flyers that drop out of the sky at the first touch of a bullet. But,’ he sighed, ‘so long as the Union High Command has an endless supply of men to throw into the meat-grinder, so long as this cursed eternal war remains a stalemate, there are businessmen, industrialists, weapons manufacturers who remain powerful, and very rich.’

Maddy noticed his voice had become almost a whisper. ‘You wouldn’t say those things in front of your men, would you?’

He shrugged. ‘I suspect they all feel the same cynicism as I do. But it would take only one of them to report my words to the High Command and I would be facing a firing squad. So —’ he offered her a fatalistic smile — ‘I keep my grumblings to myself and I do my job … and hold my part of the front line.’

His tone changed, his expression changed, a little more hopeful. ‘So tell me, then, what piece of mysterious machinery is it that you need to fix this time-travelling device of yours?’