‘It doesn’t need to be that precise, then,’ said Sal, ‘you know, aiming the signal?’
‘Well, the more precisely you can aim the particles, the fewer particles you need to send, which means you need less energy. If we knew exactly where they were standing, it would take a lot less energy. So, if we keep the message nice and short and spread the beam wide… it amounts to just about the same power burn.’
Maddy nodded. ‘I think I get it. It’d cost the same energy if we had a longer message but used a narrower beam.’
‘You got it.’
They walked in silence for a little while, accompanied only by the sloshing of the jerry cans in the pram and the clatter of its wheels over the rubble-strewn pavement.
‘I hope Liam’s all right,’ said Sal. ‘I know it’s been only a few days since he went back, but it feels like he’s been gone for ages.’
‘He has… from his point of view nearly six months has passed.’
She frowned. ‘That’s just so weird.’
They walked in silence for a while as she struggled with the idea that Liam’s experience of this crisis had stretched over nearly half a year. ‘So… so how long have you been a TimeRider?’ asked Sal. ‘You’re pretty old, so I guess you must have been doing it for a while?’
‘Long enough, Sal,’ he replied, ‘long enough.’
‘Does it all make sense to you, yet?’
Foster shook his head and snorted dismissively. ‘Does it heck. It still messes with my mind.’
CHAPTER 59
1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey
Liam was exhausted. Barely an hour into the morning shift digging the ditch alongside the camp’s wire perimeter and he felt drained, barely able to lift his spade. Nearly six months of poor food, little more than a starvation diet, had left him feeling weak and unable to sustain any sort of physical exertion for long.
He leaned on the spade, trying to catch his breath, giving his aching muscles a moment to recover. Sweat rolled down the small of his back, soaking his shirt. Clouds of his hot breath puffed out into the crisp winter air in front of him.
‘You better not let Kohl see you,’ whispered Wallace in the ditch beside him.
Kohl was one of the more ruthless guards. Last week he’d pulled a man from the defensive ditches being dug around the camp and beaten him repeatedly with the butt of his pulse carbine for stopping and taking a rest. News was the man had died later on from his injuries.
It was from one of the guards that Liam had learned why they were digging these defensive ditches around the wire-fence perimeter. There’d been some raids, successful raids, by a small band of resistance fighters. Several camps had been overrun, the prisoners freed and most of the soldiers who’d been guarding them killed. There was a rumour spreading among the guards that these fighters were being led by some demonic entity. There were varying descriptions of this thing; some of the guards who’d survived described a giant, eight or nine feet tall, with the horns of a devil protruding from its head. Another eye-witness described this demon as being made of iron, yet able to move at a terrifying speed with the agility of a tiger.
They even had a nickname for this thing.
Der Eisenmann. The Iron Man.
One of the guards further down the line spotted Liam resting on his spade and barked a shrill order at him.
‘Weiterarbeiten, Du Amerikanischer Haufen Scheiβe!’
He started digging again, relieved that it hadn’t been Kohl.
‘O’Connor, you’re going to get yourself killed if they see you slacking like that again,’ hissed Wallace.
He’s right.
The rumours of Der Eisenmann had put these soldiers on edge. Liam could see fear in their eyes as they scanned the distant treeline, unhappy with being outside the wire fence of the camp.
The Iron Man.
So much time had passed in here that Liam had almost begun to believe his short time as a TimeRider had just been a figment of his imagination. That time travel was just a fairytale… perhaps his life even, his childhood in Ireland, his working a passage on the Titanic; all those things had been some dream. And in fact this dreary camp, his fellow starving prisoners in their grey rags, the long low wooden huts – that was his real world. His real life.
But then he’d heard those rumours about Der Eisenmann. A desperate hope had surfaced, a long-discarded possibility, that Bob was behind this Iron Man story somehow. He hated himself for allowing that hope to momentarily flicker to life. Common sense tried telling him that this Iron Man nonsense was nothing more than the superstitious prattle of spooked soldiers completely unused to being on the losing side of any kind of a fight.
You’re here for good, Liam. Now, just you bloody well get used to it.
It was hard, though. Hard not to hope that one day, totally without warning, a shimmering sphere might suddenly pop up beside him, and Foster and Bob and the girls would appear and take him back.
Stop it! No one’s coming for you now. It’s been nearly six months. No one is coming.
Five months and three weeks. A hundred and seventy-five days. He knew exactly how long now… One of the prisoners worked as a cleaner in the kommandant’s office and had spotted a calendar on his desk. The prisoners kept track of time – marked the endless, identical days passed inside here – through him.
‘You all right there?’ whispered Wallace. ‘You mustn’t give up hope, kid. You give up… you die.’
He was right. It was the thin sliver of hope that came in the form of whispered rumours, overheard conversations between guards, that was keeping them going. Keeping them alive.
Liam turned to Wallace and gave him a thin, weary smile. ‘I’m all right.’
‘You know, lad… things will get better,’ he replied quietly. His thick, dark beard parted with a smile. ‘The American people won’t stand for this. They’ll fight back. I know they will.’
Liam wondered about that. From what he’d heard, the camps were filled with those people who might have organized or led some sort of a resistance movement: army officers, civic leaders, congressmen, lawyers, teachers, college professors, newspaper editors. The rest… those who’d been spared imprisonment and left to continue their lives so long as they posed no threat to their new masters, were never going to risk their lives, their family’s lives, as long as some semblance of normal life remained for them.
Liam could see this Führer’s plan with stark clarity – lock up all the potential trouble-makers and either starve them or work them to death. Either way they were never going to see the outside world again. Meanwhile, the rest of the population would get used to the new regime, get used to obeying their new masters, until finally they’d forgotten what it was like to be free. Just as long as their new ruler – their Führer – continued to ensure there was food and water and electricity. What was it he heard someone muttering last night in their dormitory hut?
‘… Long as them Krauties keep the trams runnin’, the shops well stocked, the cinemas playing those cowboy movies, the Major League baseball play-offs on schedule and you can still get yer long-boy hot dog covered in mustard an’ ketchup from the vendors ’tween innings, people’ll be content enough to let things go on as they are. They’ll forget all about us in here…’
Those on the outside might resent being lorded-over, but as long as things were kept ticking over, kept comfortable enough, they were never going to rise up.
We’re stuck in here… forever.
WHUMP!
A geyser of muddy soil erupted from the ground a couple of yards away and sprayed down on him.
‘Uh?’
CHAPTER 60
1957, Prison Camp 79, New Jersey
Liam felt it rather than heard it.
Another whump nearby that punched his chest softly.
A geyser of snow and soil was tossed into the air a dozen yards from him. Then another one further away. And another.
‘Mortar shells coming in!’ shouted somebody in the trench.
From the treeline across the field he saw flashes of light amid the undergrowth and moments later heard the distant percussive rattle of gunfire.
The guards reacted swiftly, dropping down into the ditch alongside the prisoners and returning fire on the treeline. An officer quickly issued orders to several of his men to escort the prisoners back inside on the double.
They barked hasty orders at the prisoners, shooing them along with their carbines. ‘Prisoners must go inside, now!’ one of them shouted. ‘Move… MOVE! Schnell!’
Liam did as he was told, keeping his head low as he ran along the ditch towards the open gates at the front of the camp. Div0ts of soil spat into the air just above his head as shots landed home from across the field.
Another half a dozen whumps landed either side of the ditch, showering them with clumps of wet soil. A prisoner in a tattered olive-green marine uniform just in front of Wallace shouted out: ‘Those are US army mortar shells!’
The guards bellowed shrilly at them to move faster and Liam soon found himself climbing up out of the ditch and running into the compound through the open gates, herded in by half a dozen more soldiers.
Wallace, behind him, slapped his shoulder, grinning and gasping at the same time. ‘What did I tell you, kid?’
The guards standing nearby had their eyes on the increasingly intensive exchange of gunfire going on in the field and warily on the jubilant prisoners. Liam could see they were nervous – as much worried about the growing jubilation among the prisoners inside the camp as they were about the attackers in the treeline.
‘Yeah!’ yelled Wallace triumphantly at them. ‘They’re coming for you, you scumbags!’
Several of them turned towards him, eyes darting from Wallace to the growing crowd of prisoners emerging from their huts into the courtyard to see what was going on.
‘Come on!’ Wallace cheered on the distant attackers. ‘Come get these Krauties!’
Liam grabbed his arm. ‘Wallace, hey, keep it down!’
A mortar shell landed amid several of the guards in the ditch outside, blowing them to bloody shreds. Wallace and several other prisoners cheered noisily, punching the air with glee.
The camp kommandant emerged from his hut at a trot, flanked by a dozen more guards. There was a brief, harried conversation barked over the increasing noise of battle. He gestured towards the growing crowd of jeering prisoners. The guards standing around them nodded at his orders and slowly raised their guns.
Liam realized by the calm, ruthless expression on the kommandant’s face that he’d just given the order for them all to be executed on the spot. None of the other prisoners seemed to have noticed, their eyes on the gunfight across the field outside.
I have to run… run now!
Liam began to shoulder his way back through the jeering, defiant prisoners, as the guards silently raised their pulse carbines.
Jay-zus Christ.
The rattle of guns being cocked to fire alerted the rest of the prisoners, their eyes darting back to the line of guards. Before they could react, the kommandant barked a single word. ‘Feuer!’
The guards opened fire.
Suddenly the air about Liam was alive with the hum of passing bullets, the hard thud of rounds impacting bodies, the muffled gasps of those falling and dying, the screams of the wounded and terrified.
He stumbled back through the panicking crowd, expecting at any second to feel a hard, sharp blow between his shoulders, punching the air from his lungs and throwing him down on to the compacted snow and muddy slush.
The opening volley of shots came to a rattling conclusion as ammo clips emptied and the guards began to reload. In the pause the air was filled with moaning and crying and wailing, and the nearing sounds of fighting across the field.
Liam realized he wasn’t running. He was on his knees in the mud surrounded by bodies twitching and flailing.
Run!
He scrambled to his feet, stepping over and on the bodies around him. He glanced back to see the guards finish loading their carbines and begin to level their barrels at the remaining prisoners still on their feet. Many of those still standing were rooted to the spot in shock. Others who’d been towards the back of the crowd were now on the run, scrambling away from the guards towards the open doors of their huts.
The guards began firing again at will, now picking out individual targets with short aimed bursts, mechanically aiming and firing… aiming and firing… like automatons, obeying their orders mindlessly.
Liam rose from a crouch to run for the nearest hut. The lurch of movement caught a guard’s eyes and he swung the barrel of his gun in Liam’s direction. Several shots whistled past him – close, very close – and over his head as he dived, staggered and fell across a writhing carpet of dead and dying towards the open door of the nearest hut.
He fell into the dark interior and scrambled on hands and knees across the rough wooden floor to hide beneath the nearest of the wooden bunks.
Outside the firing continued. Sporadic clusters of shots, short bursts, long bursts and single taps to finish off the wounded as the soldiers stepped forward among the bodies. Meanwhile, the rattle of gunfire in the field outside was coming closer. He heard the muffled thud of more mortar shells landing, this time inside the perimeter of the camp.
He heard the shrill sound of panic in the guards’ voices.
Liam prayed. It wasn’t something he often did. Rarely, in fact. Catholic faith, drummed into his head since birth by his mother, father and every schoolteacher he’d ever had, had never managed to take hold of him. But he certainly was praying now, begging the Virgin Mother of Jesus to make sure that none of those soldiers outside had decided to stick his head in through the open door and finish him off.
He heard heavy jackboots slapping through the mud outside, running past the open door, the guards’ attention now on the approaching attackers. They began taking up defensive positions as the noise of exchanged gunfire seemed to be reaching a new intensity.
It sounded like the fight was now within the camp itself.
A row of jagged holes suddenly stitched its way across the thin plywood walls of his hut, sending a shower of wood splinters on to the floor and leaving a line of pale sunbeams lancing through the air.
Another explosion, deafening this time, amid the mud and bodies right outside the hut, hurled a wet spray of soil inside through the open door.
The guards were screaming in German. Not the barked orders of professional soldiers, but cries of sheer terror.
‘Der Eisenmann! Das ist der Eisenmann!’
‘Töten Sie ihn! Töten Sie ihn!’
Liam heard the appalling sound of a protracted scream, suddenly ending with a fleshy ripping sound. Other cries. Across the compound, faintly, the sound of American voices could be heard.
‘Kill the guards! You kill them all!’
Then the rattle of gunfire and feet splashing the bloodied ground outside. ‘You men! Get those guards… They’re running! Take them down! We’re not taking any of these scum prisoner, understand? Not a single one of them!’
Liam wanted to climb out from beneath the bunk, but fear kept him cowering in the dark. There were plenty of shots still echoing around the camp, snarling angry voices of men appalled at the carnage in the compound.
‘Ahh man… ohh Jesus,’ he heard a man outside crying. ‘They massacred them. Before we could rescue ’em, those scum shot ’
em dead… ain’t never… seen… Oh Jeeez.’
The distant pleading of a German voice… ‘Nein! Nein! Ich… ich habe niemanden erschossen –’… ended with the single crack of a gunshot echoing among the rows of huts. He heard another pleading German voice silenced by a single bullet further away across the compound. And the distant rattle of gunfire as the fight continued somewhere on the far side of the camp.
‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’
A deep and monotone voice without any sense of expression.
‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’
Louder, closer, like a foghorn – without any variation.
‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’
He heard the heavy splatter of boots in mud just outside the door and then the hut was thrown into darkness as a large body stepped into the doorway, blocking out all but the thinnest glimmer of light.
‘Is Liam O’Connor here?’ the voice bellowed deafeningly into the hut.
It was almost too much for him to react. Almost too much. He’d convinced himself that he’d never see that big robotic ape again. The truth took a moment to sink in.
Bob hovered a second longer then stepped out of the doorway.
‘Bob!’ Liam cried out weakly, scrambling on all fours to pull himself out from under the bunk. ‘Bob! Wait! I’m here!’
A pair of broad shoulders and a small head crowned with a tuft of nut-brown hair leaned back into the hut. ‘Liam O’Connor?’
Liam looked up. ‘Oh sweet Jay-zus-’n’-Mary-mother-of-mercy! It’s good to see you again, Bob, so it is.’
The support unit stepped inside and then squatted down on his haunches, studying the frail form of Liam on the floor, his calm grey eyes quickly adapting to the darkness inside.
Liam could have sworn that in that moment of recognition, as Bob’s computer mind confirmed Liam’s visual identity and verified the signature tone of his voice, he saw a tear in those dull, expressionless grey eyes of his.
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