This is but a portion of the might of the British army?’ he uttered.
Liam nodded. ‘Aye. More where this lot came from, I’d say.’
‘God …’ His courtroom bawl was robbed of its power and left little more than a fluttering whisper. ‘God’s teeth.’
Six hours after arriving over New Wellington, waiting their turn in a queue of leviathans floating in the sky – enormous, dark and brooding like anvil clouds – their carrier finally got its turn and landed amid its own blizzard of snow, and the first companies of the Black Watch disembarked.
Captain McManus was busy, along with every other officer, organizing their companies on the landing pad. Their men were going to need billeting in the camps around the docks for the duration of the stopover, supplies ordered and secured, shore-leave rota to be arranged for his men, equipment, arms and ammo, damages to be repaired and shortfalls to be requisitioned. A million and one things for him and every other junior officer to attend to. So his farewell was necessarily brief.
‘I should return home to Ireland, if I were you, Liam O’Connor. There’s much afoot … and it’ll all be happening north of here.’
Liam knew better than to question him further. McManus was already saying far too much. The young officer studied him and then Sal, who returned his gaze with a cold glare.
‘I suspect you think of me as a cold-blooded murderer, perhaps?’
She said nothing.
He took her silence as agreement. ‘I have seen what these creatures can do. Not just the runaways … but our very own trained eugenics. If it were my choice, then there’d be none of these aberrations in this world. Man has no business rewriting Nature’s work.’ He tugged the chin strap of his helmet tight. ‘But there it is – the genie is out of the lamp. We are where we are.’
He offered them a crisp salute and a warm smile. ‘I am just relieved you were both unharmed.’ He regarded them one after the other. ‘A rather strange “family” you make, if I may say so.’
He offered Liam his hand. ‘And you, sir … strangest of the lot. If I believed in such things, I would say you had dropped out of the sky from an entirely different century.’
‘Ah well,’ Liam grinned. ‘I’ve always been a bit behind the times, so.’
McManus let his hand go, tipped a nod at them all and turned to head back to his men waiting patiently in the shadow of the carrier’s hull. The time travellers watched the captain go, the afternoon thick with the noise of boots and harnesses, sergeants barking orders like trained Rottweilers and the clank and clatter of supply trolleys rolling down the ramps.
‘What now?’ said Sal.
‘North,’ said Liam. He looked at the others. ‘New York. We’ve got to find a way back home … right? Unless we hear otherwise from Maddy, that is.’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’
‘She’s in trouble,’ said Sal. It was stating the obvious. ‘She needs our help.’
Liam nodded. ‘We need to get there as quickly as we can.’ He glanced up at the sky, still another half a dozen carriers hanging there like storm clouds, waiting to descend and disgorge troops. ‘Before this lot head north and flatten what’s left of New York.’
CHAPTER 67
2001, New York
Maddy hooded her eyes as she looked upwards. Becks and a technician from Wainwright’s regiment, Second Lieutenant Jefferson, were busy securing the antennae array’s motorized platform to the top of their archway’s mound of brick. It needed to be securely fixed, not wobbling in any way. It would have been steadier on the ground beside their crumbling home, but then it would have been too low, and obscured by the crater’s lip.
Jefferson suggested mounting it on the top of the overshadowing stump of the Williamsburg Bridge support. But it would have meant running out a lot of cable … cable that could easily be snagged and severed on the dense nest of twisted, sharp-edged metal above them. More than that, she felt insecure not having the array right beside them.
From the bottom of the platform a trunk of cables looped down the side of the skittering bricks, through a hole in the roof and down into the back room. There it snaked across the grit-covered floor, through the sliding door into the main archway, past the computer desk, over the small scooped crater towards the perspex tube, to the metal rack holding the displacement machine.
Maddy had spent most of yesterday spitting curses as she fiddled