The Eternal War

smoke and the first splash of a ramp landing in the water.

‘FIRE!’

The entire length of the trench was fringed with a ribbon of grey-blue cordite smoke, carbines firing rapidly one shot after another, several machine guns spitting muzzle flash and stuttering a steady stream of bullets, all of them into the yellow mist.

Above the cacophany of gunfire he could hear the rattle and clang of rounds impacting on metal and something heavy splashing into the water.

Something big.

The yellow mist was slowly thinning and spreading, drifting up the slope towards them, hiding what was in there for longer than was fair.

He squinted into the yellow, managing to just about pick out the stump of the brick smokestack. The head and shoulders of a soldier holding aloft a regimental flag, too foolishly confident to keep down while the volley fire was still going on. The edge of the left-most raft … and looming above the battlefield the ghostly outline of the bridge.

Then something, darker, much closer than anything else … more defined as it scrambled uphill towards them.

‘God help us,’ he whispered as it emerged out of the last curling skeins of mist rolling uphill.

CHAPTER 84

2001, New York

Human-like, in that it had two arms and two legs, but that was the end of any anthropomorphous resemblance. It towered over them, almost as tall as a double-decker tram, almost as wide as a house. As it emerged from the smoke, Devereau noted that it seemed to have no head; however, where a ridge of muscle and bone linked one shoulder to the other, there seemed to be nothing but the slightest bump with pinhole dots for eyes and a tube where a mouth might have been.

Closer, as it charged up the last dozen yards of the gentle slope, the creature looked more like some sort of machine, a mechanical automaton covered in linking plates of thick metal that clanked together noisily as it lumbered forward.

He realized his men had stopped firing, like him. They were frozen in a state of horrified fascination.

‘FIRE!’ he screamed.

The sparks of impacting bullets showered the ground around it; the giant’s loping run faltered and finally ceased. Its enormous arms flailed angrily, and Devereau saw, beneath the overlapping plates of metal, glimpses of pale grey flesh spattered with dark droplets of blood.

The leviathan stumbled one final step forward before finally flopping heavily down on to its knees, and then, still shedding a shower of sparks from the gunfire concentrated on it, it slowly keeled over like a felled tree lying across the trench, one thick arm flopping down into the trench and crushing a man.

My God … it took our entire regiment to bring it down.

Out of the smoke emerged eleven more. This time only half the men managed to concentrate fire on them; the other half were already having to eject and replace empty cartridges. The giants were on them in mere seconds, standing over the borderline trench, one or two of them even standing astride it, swinging their huge metal-plated arms down into the trench works.

Their fists — the size of beer kegs — were enclosed in a variety of different experimental attachments. Some of them had iron cages from which foot-long spikes protruded. A couple of them had blades that looked like Devereau’s sabre, welded to iron bands round their three fingers, like impossibly long claws. One of them even had a rotating saw blade powered by a chugging engine strapped to the creature’s upper arm.

The men standing beneath them stood no chance.

Gunfire from further along the line resumed; one of the Confederate machine-gun teams managed to bring a second of the creatures down, concentrating their stuttering fire on its chest. As it collapsed, Devereau got a closer glimpse of a small head almost completely recessed into the chest: two small dark eyes, a mere gash for a nose and a pipe emerging from where a mouth should be, curling round under the left shoulder armour plate to a pair of cylinders strapped to its back.

Ten of these things still … ten! Sweeping their spiked and bladed fists into the trench, dismembering, crushing, eviscerating every poor soul within easy reach.

‘They’re killing us!’

Wainwright nodded. ‘We should fall back!’

He was right … remaining here within range of their brutal bladed arms was utter madness. The trench was already lost. At least, with more open ground to cross to reach the horseshoe trench, there was a chance the men deployed there could bring down a few more of them.

‘Fall back!’ Devereau cried, his voice lost amid the cacophony of screams, metal on metal, the clatter of guns, the pebble-dash clang of bullets sparking off iron plates.

He tried again, cupping his mouth. ‘FALL BACK!’

‘THE HORSESHOE!’ added Wainwright.

A bugle sounded the retreat and those men still alive, still with arms and legs, began to scramble out of the trench like startled crows from a field.

‘What’s happening out there, Becks?’

‘I will observe,’ she said, heading towards the shutter door.

From the distant noises Maddy could hear it sounded like the British were trying their luck again on that first trench. But this time round the nature of the battle sounded different: less gunfire, more voices. She’d heard the regiment’s bugler sound some signal. She had no clue what that meant, but could guess it probably wasn’t good news.

‘Oh God … they’re coming!’ she uttered. She realized her whole body was trembling. She hated the sound of her voice, shrill and warbling, like a little girl, like a child.

Why am I such a freakin’ dork?

She envied the colonels, both of them cut from the same cloth — leather-faced veterans with the very same manner — a dignified calm about them, a gentlemanly formality. What the British called a stiff upper lip.

And here I am trembling like some pampered chihuahua on a park bench.

‘Bob? Do another probe.’

› Maddy, the last one was only seven minutes ago.

‘I know! I know! Do it anyway!’

› Information: if we increase the number of times that we check for them, we will drain the stored energy more quickly.

‘Jesus! I know that already! Just do it!’

› Affirmative. Activating density probe.

Becks squeezed past the entrance to the machine-gun bunker and into the horseshoe trench that looped around the archway.

The men lining the dirt wall, reinforced with sandbags and slats of wood, waiting for the battle to reach them, looked at her with bemusement.

‘It ain’t safe out here, miss,’ said one of them. ‘Best get back inside.’

‘I will be fine,’ said Becks, shrugging off the comment. ‘Thank you for your concern.’ She found a space between two soldiers and stepped up on an ammo crate to get a look over the rim of the trench.

The rubble-strewn ground sloping down to the borderline was thick with men staggering uphill towards them. Many of them bloody. Beyond them she could see a pall of thinning yellow mist over the front trench and other men spilling out of it. She could see several large silhouettes looming over the trench. She counted nine of them.

‘What are those?’ she asked the man beside her.