The Eternal War

Sergeant Wainwright turned to look at him. ‘A beard?’ His face cracked with a cavalier grin. ‘Beard? You kiddin’ me? You’d look a total idiot with a beard.’

Devereau nodded. He checked his face in the wing mirror. Yes, he probably would at that.

‘You’re gettin’ too old to be on the beat, Bill, seriously … If you got to be catchin’ sleep like that on duty.’

‘Was up late last night, that’s all.’

Wainwright nodded thoughtfully. His gaze rested on a bundle of newspapers dropped off outside a corner store. Tomorrow’s papers. Tomorrow’s headlines.

There was going to be only one story in every paper tomorrow.

‘Guess there’s gonna be a lot more sleepless nights for everyone.’

Devereau nodded. The dream had gone. Blown away like morning mist along a riverbank. All that was left was a nagging sense of trouble lying ahead. A storm coming.

‘You got that right, partner.’

CHAPTER 94

2001, New York

Maddy opened her eyes. She must have blacked out for a moment there. Her glasses were askew on her forehead and there was drool on her chin. She adjusted her spectacles, wiped her mouth and sat back down in the office chair.

‘Sheesh,’ she whispered.

The corner of her desk she’d been standing on was still covered in a thick coat of rust-coloured brick dust, but it ended suddenly, sharply. A curve of dust … then none. Beyond that her desk was as normal. Dr Pepper cans, pizza boxes, scraps of paper and pens, sweet wrappers and magazines. But none of the debris that had cascaded from above during the artillery bombardment earlier.

She looked down at the floor. No longer a crazy paving of fractured concrete, littered with the broken bodies of men. It was restored to how it had been a week ago. The archway was no longer a crumbling ruin.

She looked down at Becks’s still face. Her hair tangled with drying blood. There was a job yet to do, but not now. Not yet. She gently placed the head on the cabinet beside the desk, turning Becks’s pale death-mask face away from her so she didn’t have to look at it.

The monitors were all on, several of them playing live news feeds.

‘Bob? You there?’

› Hello, Maddy. Just a moment …

She heard the hard drives on each of the linked PCs begin to whir and click.

› I am detecting multiple timeline continuity errors.

Yes, of course … Bob had extended a preservation field around her alone. The rest of the archway, including computer-Bob, had not experienced the trauma of the last week.

› Information: external date is registering as 18 September. We appear to be seven days outside our time envelope.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, a bunch of stuff happened, Bob. You recall Abraham Lincoln running out on us?’

› Of course. According to my internal clock, we sent Liam and the others to retrieve Abraham Lincoln two hours and sixteen minutes ago.

‘Yeah … well, you’re now out of sync. We need to reset the archway field and go back to our normal deployment time. You need to do that now.’

› Affirmative, Maddy.

‘Then we’ve got to open a window for Liam and the others to bring them back.’

› I do not have a reliable data stamp for them. My last data stamp is …

‘They’re not down in Quantico, Virginia, any more. We’ll need to use the data stamp before that one. You should still have that sitting in your memory cache.’

› New Orleans, 1831? This does not make sense. How did they get there?

She smiled wearily at the webcam. ‘It’s a long story, Bob. I’ll talk you through it later, OK?’

CHAPTER 95

1831, New Orleans

The man’s bloodshot eyes focused on Sal.

‘My … my God! It’s … it’s … you!’ he gasped. His mouth flapped open and closed. A thick gout of blood oozed out from between his lips.

Sal leaned close to him, grabbed one of his hands and held it tightly. ‘You … you’re going to be fine!’

No, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. She looked at the awful turned-inside-out remains of two horses and one man. One of the horses was still kicking, the other already dead. And so would this poor man be, very soon. He was so very far from fine.

Bob knelt down beside her. ‘This was a density overlap error. This man will not last …’

‘I know!’ she hissed, glaring at Bob to shut up.

Liam’s face looked grey, like he was going to heave, but he somehow managed to hold the churning contents of his guts in check as he hunkered down beside them. ‘I’ve seen this before. It’s a time-window mistake!’ He shot a glance at the dying man’s face. ‘Maybe he’s a …’ His eyes widened. ‘Jay-zus! Maybe he’s a TimeRider? One of us?’

‘Listen … listen to me,’ gasped the man. Struggling to find his breath between mouthfuls of blood. ‘I … I … tried … warn … you …’

‘Warn us? What do you mean?’

‘P-Pandora … it … was me …’

Pandora? Liam looked at Sal. Back at the man. ‘You left that note? In San Francisco? That was you?’

‘Y-yes … I … my name … J-Joseph …’ The man’s eyes started to glaze, to roll. He was going into shock.

‘What is Pandora?’ asked Sal.

His mouth gushed blood. His hand began to spasm, flexing and squeezing hers.

‘Pandora! What is it? Please!’

His gaze focused back on her. ‘… W-Waldstein … the … end … he knows …’ His voice was little more than a rustling whisper.

Sal leaned in closer till she could feel the tickle of his dying breath against her cheek. ‘You’ll be OK,’ she whispered to him pointlessly, squeezing his hand again, as if that was going to help. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

‘You! … S-Sal … Saleena …’

She looked at him, their faces inches apart, intimately close. ‘You know me?’ she whispered.

‘You … y-you are …’ His hand began to spasm again, gripping hers tightly, painfully. ‘… are … n-not … who you th-think … y-you … are …’

His eyes rolled until only the whites were showing, his hand crushing her. Then suddenly he released her hand with a lurch. Out of his nose came a fine spray of blood.

‘I … know … a-about … the … th-the …’ His mouth gushed blood on to his chin. And he sighed. Not so much a death rattle, just a simple and protracted sigh of relief at escaping the agony.

But it came with words, two very faint words. She could have sworn that’s what she heard him mutter as the