by Alex Scarrow
‘Oh? How should it be?’
Maddy leaned forward. ‘Your side won! It won … over a hundred and thirty years ago! The North beat the South! America became one big nation. It became the world’s most powerful nation! Do you know this nation even managed to send a man to the moon?’
‘Miss Carter –’ he smiled wryly – ‘you’ll never know how much I’d love to believe a fanciful story as that, but –’
‘It’s true! Honest to God, it’s –’
‘This nation is a mongrel nation, and that’s all it’ll ever be. Too busy fighting itself, state against state, brother against brother. And now –’ Devereau lowered his voice to a more cautious level – ‘and now we’re all but governed by France and Europe … and the Southern Confederacy is little more than a mere colony of Great Britain.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘No. You’re so wrong! This … is wrong! There’s a correct history, a way it should go. And in the correct history the North wins in 1865. And do you know why? Do you know how it wins?’
‘Go on.’
‘Because it made the issue of slavery – abolishing slaves – a war aim. It decided to make that the main reason for the war. And it worked!’
‘Slavery?’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no slavery. There hasn’t been since, well now … since 1871 when the South signed an alliance with Britain’s King Edward VII.’
‘The South, the Confederates, don’t have slaves?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then … then why are you guys fighting each other?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a question I ask myself every day.’ Devereau sighed. ‘Truth is, we’re underdogs of the British and the French. We’re fighting their war for them.’
‘My God … this is so wrong. This is all to do with Lincoln.’
‘Lincoln?’
‘A man called Abraham Lincoln. He was your president when the civil war started.’
Devereau shook his head. ‘There’s never been a President Lincoln –’
‘Not in this timeline, no. But in mine – in correct history – it was his idea to make it about slavey! He’s the reason the North won the war!’
Devereau stroked his beard. ‘Now what a lovely idea that would be.’ He looked at her. ‘Timeline? What is that?’
‘It’s, uh, sheesh, it’s really hard to explain. It’s the way events in history go. They go in one way or another. We call each possible way in which a history happens a timeline. We have a machine that can transport you from one timeline to another.’ Maddy smiled. ‘You know, in my timeline this war ended in 1865. The North won and the states came together again. The United States will go on to do some incredible things …’ She held herself back from saying and some bad things.
Devereau looked down at the battered enamel mug in his hands and sighed, the deep wistful sigh of someone who wished he could share in this fantasy. Actually believe that it had a shred of truth to it.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I can actually prove all of this to you. I really can.’
He looked up at her. ‘And how could you possibly do that?’
‘I’ve got things I can show you.’
The girl, this Madelaine Carter, supposedly from another time, another place, had walked into this room five minutes ago with a listless, almost defeated way about her. But now it seemed she’d found a spark of something inside; something quite infectious. Something he longed to feel himself.
‘What things?’
She grinned. ‘How would you like to see my time machine?’
CHAPTER 33
2001, New York
Becks stood up the aluminium shelving unit that had been knocked over by falling bricks. Picked up loops of cable on spindles, dusty old motherboards, a box of electrical components, electronic gadgets and gizmos brought back to 2001, all stamped with the W.G. Systems logo.
She set these things back on their shelves, tidy and orderly, just as they had been before the archway had landed in this timeline with a crash.
She found the broom behind the cracked perspex displacement tube and began methodically sweeping the fractured and uneven concrete floor, pushing the fallen bricks and mortar into a pile in the middle. She swept the broom with a rhythmic rasp in the darkness, her eyes adjusted to the faintest glimmer of moonlight that found its way through the cracks in the archway above.
Her eyes dilated in the dark and registered little. They were glazed over. From the outside, looking to all intents and purposes like someone in a deep state of shock. Traumatized. A lost soul seeking solace in the simple task of tidying up.
But inside her head the silicon wafer computer hummed with activity, lines of code chasing each other in tireless loops as she tried desperately to make sense of the situation she was now in.
Alone.
Maddy was gone. There was no strategist. There was no team. There was not even a field office any more. This dark hole was nothing but dust-covered second-hand furniture, an old high-school desk and a row of computers that more than likely were never going to work again.
[DATA]
She shook her head. She didn’t want to acknowledge the data.
[DATA]
She closed a silicon-synaptic data gate, not wanting the machine code to tell her what she already suspected. That somehow this was all her fault. That she had provided inadequate information or, worse, inaccurate information to Madelaine Carter causing her to make an erroneous judgement call. That the team was now no longer operational.
She and Bob had both failed to apprehend the target: Abraham Lincoln. She realized that was perhaps the first error in a string of errors that had led them to this point. And now she was here sweeping bricks in the dark.
[DATA]
The stream of hexadecimal data had found another way through the myriad circuits to get her attention.
[Assessment: end-of-run condition = TRUE]
End-of-run Protocol
Extract hard drives from system computers. Destroy
Retrieve tachyon phase accelerator and displacement attenuation boards from displacement machine. Destroy
Self-terminate
The protocol left no vital technology behind; all the rest, the computers, the growth tubes in the back, the generator, even the rest of the displacement machine, used circuitry that could be assembled from components bought from any electronics store. The question was … was this really an end-of-run condition?
She looked around at the dark corners of the archway. Her memory spooled a million different moments from the last few months of stored data:
The first time she’d made a hot drink for Maddy and added coffee granules, tea leaves and chocolate powder, not realizing the hot drink was meant to be just one of those, not all of them.
The time Liam had got her and Bob to play Mario Kart on the Nintendo and they’d spent seven hours straight playing on the machine, beating Liam to last place every race.
The first time she felt something that was more than the code of her operating system or her AI plug-in. In the prehistoric past, a moment of … affection? When Liam had told her that she wasn’t a mistaken addition to the team. That she’d done well. That the team should have two support units in it. A Bob and a Becks.
Sal teaching her swearwords in Hindi, and Mumbai street slang. She had a whole database of curses and insults she could hurl, could sound as convincing as any other put-put rickshaw driver in the downtown smog.
She even had her ‘borrowed’ memories as Bob; they felt almost as real as her own: duplicated video and sound files of Bob observing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy from the Dallas book depository; Bob making the choice to search every internment camp in the Washington area to find and save Liam.
Hadn’t Bob changed a mission priority then? Actually decided his own mission priority? Rewritten code?
She stopped sweeping. Stood statue-still in the dark, the broom still held tightly in her hands. Her internal clock passed the bett
er part of an hour with her frozen like that before, finally, a string of characters broke the deadlock.
[Assessment: end-of-run condition = FALSE]
She stirred, looked up from the floor.
Mission Priority
Damage assessment, recovery analysis
Locate and retrieve Strategist Madelaine Carter
CHAPTER 34
2001, somewhere in Virginia
‘I’m going to read you what I found,’ said Liam. He shuffled closer to the fire in the middle of the room.
After exploring the deserted hamlet, they decided to settle in the kitchen of a farmhouse. Aside from the chapel, it was the largest building around. They found a pantry full of old dust-covered tins of food. Everything else in there had long ago perished or been scavenged by rats or wild animals.
Now, as the afternoon sun waned and a cool wind began to whip up over a decade’s worth of dead leaves, they had a fire going in a rusting brazier as Sal, Lincoln and Liam hungrily spooned at mouthfuls of a tepid, tasteless stew.
Liam put down his bowl and picked up the old dog-eared child’s school exercise book he’d found in what had clearly once been a young boy’s bedroom. The brittle pages were covered with the untidy pencil scribbles of Liam’s handwriting.
In the farmhouse they’d come across a study lined with shelves full of books and magazines and a stack of old newspapers tied up with twine.
He looked up at Sal and Lincoln, both eager to hear what notes he’d made. Bob, meanwhile, stood in the corner of the kitchen, the shotgun nestling in his thick arms, looking out through a grimy window across a backyard full of weeds.
‘Now, we know in correct history the American Civil War was meant to end in 1865.’ At least Liam did – he’d been reading up on that period of history a few weeks ago. He’d surprised himself with how much of that information was still in his head. Better memory than he thought he had. ‘The deciding battle of the war was the Battle of Gettysburg. In correct history the Confederates lost that battle badly and the army of southern Virginia under General Lee never really recovered. Well …’ He looked down at his notes, flipped through a couple of pages. ‘Well, in this timeline, it seems they managed to win. The Union army retreated back to Washington in disarray. And –’ he looked up at Lincoln – ‘President John Bell’s government made a hasty retreat north to New York to make that city the new seat of government.’
‘You are implying that President Bell, that man … should have been me?’
‘Yup.’
Liam returned to his notes. ‘So, after the Union defeat at Gettysburg, Great Britain finally comes out in open support of the Confederate South.’
‘So they were already on the South’s side?’ asked Sal.
Liam shrugged. ‘Kind of. Not openly, though, just helping a little, discreetly.’
‘Why secretly?’
‘Slavery. The British public were appalled by it. They’d demanded its abolition at home years earlier. And because the South still used slaves Britain couldn’t bring themselves to fully support them. But, on the other hand, the British felt threatened by the growing industrial power and influence of the North, the Union.’
‘All that changed when, after Gettysburg, the British made an offer to Jefferson Davis …’
‘And who’s this Jefferson Davis?’ asked Lincoln.
‘The Confederate’s president. The offer was a clever one …’ Liam fumbled through the pages of notes he’d made this afternoon and finally found the paragraph he was looking for.
‘To … announce the first measures of “a post-slavery economic reformation”.’
Lincoln’s eyes widened. ‘Good God! An end to slavery in the south?’
‘The beginning of the end. It was enough of a gesture,’ said Liam, ‘for the British public to allow their government to openly ally with the South.’
‘And this Confederate President Davis went on to put an end to slavery?’
Liam nodded. ‘So it seems. There was an uproar among all the slave owners in the south, of course. But then when convoys of British ships stuffed with money and food and weapons started arriving, I suppose the poor common people of the South figured out maybe supporting the arguments of the rich slaveholders wasn’t doing them any favours!’
‘1865,’ Liam said, looking down at his notes. ‘Davis announces the Freedom Act. It made it a crime for one man to be owned by another. There were still many who claimed by doing this the southern states’ economy would completely crash. That freed slaves would kill their former masters … run riot in the streets.’
Lincoln raised a shaggy eyebrow. ‘And did they?’
‘No.’ Liam shook his head. ‘It all seems to have worked out well. By then, though, British money and troops and supplies were flooding in. The Confederacy held together and the freeing of slaves was not the end of the world for them … as they’d feared.’
Sal leaned forward. ‘So go on.’
‘The year after, in the north, President Bell made a similar announcement, the Proclamation of Liberty. Which looks like it was almost, word for word, a copy of the South’s one. But it was enough of a gesture to encourage the French and several other European nations to put their support behind the North.’ Liam looked up from his exercise book. ‘And from that point onwards the war wasn’t about slavery any more, because both sides of the struggle had turned their back on it.’
He put his notes down and reached for his bowl of stew. He hungrily spooned in a mouthful.
‘So, that as far as you got?’ asked Sal.
He nodded, his mouth full. ‘I’mnnn goinnnnn to mmmeeeed sommme mooore ’ater ommm,’ he sputtered, juice dribbling down his chin.
Lincoln gazed into the flames in front of him. ‘I have, I must admit, not dwelled a great deal on the notion of slavery. Just that it is the way of things. The order of things. That a white man is better suited to spend his time on matters of the mind, the black man to be merely a beast of burden. Just like a farmyard, every beast has its particular role to –’
‘Chuddah!’ Sal’s jaw hung open. ‘How could you actually believe something like that?’
Lincoln stroked his bearded chin thoughtfully. ‘It is a commonly held perception. After all it is white men who enslaved black men with their superior technology. Is history not the story of more advanced races and civilizations conquering other –’
‘Oh, right! Does that make me a beast of burden?’ she said sharply. ‘Because my skin’s brown?’
‘On the contrary.’ He shrugged casually and offered her a well-intended smile. ‘Despite your brown skin – being a half-negro? A mulatto? – it seems quite clear to me that you are in fact a very bright child. I –’
Liam winced at Lincoln’s choice of words.
‘Ughh! I don’t have to listen to this!’ Sal placed her bowl of stew on the floor and stood up. ‘People like you don’t exist in my time! It may not be such a great time but at least we don’t have to listen to … to ignorant pinchudda like that!’ She turned away and stormed out of the kitchen.
Lincoln looked at Liam, perplexed. ‘What is the matter with the girl?’
‘The way you said what you said. It … well, it could’ve come out sounding better.’
Lincoln’s brow lowered into a dark scowl as his gaze returned to the fire. ‘I meant praise by what I said.’
Liam finished his stew and set his bowl down. ‘We should all get some sleep if we’re to get going again tonight.’ He got up. ‘Bob, how long have we got until it’s dark?’
‘Four hours and fifty-two minutes, Liam.’
‘All right, will you wake us up then?’
‘Affirmative.’
Liam headed out of the kitchen’s back door into the weed-strewn yard to find Sal sitting on a squeaking swing.
‘You all right?’
‘He’s a racist!’
Liam stood beside the frame. He rested his hand on its paint-flecked surface and felt its unsteady sway. ‘He’s from
1831. That’s the way people speak and think back then. They didn’t know any better. He didn’t mean anything nasty by it.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been … never had something like that said to me before!’ She looked up at him. ‘I feel like he’s just rubbished me … my parents … everyone I’ve ever known, just by saying what he said. Judging people by the colour of their skin!’
‘I think he was trying to be kind.’
‘Kind?! Jahulla …’
Liam shrugged. ‘Ah well, I’ve been mistaken for Welsh before, would you believe? I’ve heard many a silly Englishman lump us Irish, north and south, Welsh and Scottish even, altogether in the same pot. Imagine that?’
And many an Irishman confused the Chinese with Japanese, he mused. Quite probably many a Chineseman confused Turks with Persians; and many a Persian confused Celts with Saxons.
He reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘Come on, Sal. Let’s go back inside. We need to get a little rest, so we do … before we start out tonight.’
CHAPTER 35
2001, New York
‘You realize, young lady, that this is the dead zone?’ said Colonel Devereau.
She stopped and turned. ‘Dead zone?’
He pointed across the landscape of ruins leading down towards the East River. Beyond the river’s smooth dark water lay the skeleton of Manhattan. ‘We’re just about within range of their snipers. One of them might try and take a potshot if he’s bored enough.’
‘What?’ Maddy ducked down to the ground, her bound hands crossed over her head. Neither Devereau nor any of the other soldiers moved. A murmur of laughter rippled up and down the patrol line as they watched her fidgeting on her haunches.
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘It’s well beyond accurate range. All the same …’
He took off his forage cap, reached to his side and unclipped a carbine bayonet, popped the hat on the tip and raised his arm, sweeping the hat slowly in a figure of eight.