There were more noises outside, feet on gravel, the front door being charged aside. Any second now, someone was going to come barging through behind him, straight into the line of fire. Thacker aimed at the windows and shot them out.
Victorian glass shattered in a waterfall of crystal that caught the sunlight just so. The cannon on the armoured car returned fire, and everything that was still standing disintegrated, along with most of the back wall. When the turret had finished its rake, there was silence for a moment, only punctuated by the sound of falling masonry.
Thacker looked at the door, saw the facemask of a respirator looking in at him. He raised two fingers, pointed to the corner of the room. He got a thumbs-up sign in return and the instruction to cover his face.
Three black disks skidded across the floor, and as Thacker pressed his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes tight shut, there was an echoing explosion of light and sound.
Abruptly, there were soldiers pouring into the room, firing staccato bursts at the corner, running forward, lying down, covering their comrades as they leap-frogged over them and gained more ground.
Thacker was up and running, too, outflanking the tabletop and gaining a clear shot behind it.
‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. Some heard him. Others, intent on reducing the table to matchwood, carried on.
‘Cease fire!’ It was a bellow, muffled by his respirator, but he moved forward as well. Fingers left triggers, and the last shellcase span to a stop.
He enunciated as clearly as he could.
‘Put your weapons down now, and stand up.’
Two men, pale and filthy, clambered to their feet. Rather one of them did, and helped the other up. This second man was missing a leg.
‘Stand down, everyone. Shooting’s over.’ He beckoned to the men. ‘Come on, out. Slowly does it.’
They shuffled out. Their clothes were ragged, torn. Their cheeks were concave and their eyes were white and bulging. They were terrified of him.
‘Are you Robert Henbury?’
At this, the one-legged man started to cry. He leaned all the harder against the other man and buried his head in his chest.
‘And you are?’
‘Adams,’ he said, in a voice not used to speaking.
‘George Adams?’
‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you human?’
The question sent a thrill of fright down Thacker’s spine.
‘I was last time I looked. My name’s Thacker. I’m a Major in the British Army. Welcome back, gentlemen.’
Adams and Henbury were just about able to walk, but Thacker wouldn’t let them. He called for stretchers and told the men to sit and wait.
He studied them as they slumped on the floor, clinging to each other like frightened children. They looked quite mad: hair grown unchecked and hacked inexpertly back when it had got in the way, beards ragged in the same unkempt way, and that hollow-cheeked, wide-eyed unblinking stare they both had as if they expected something blasphemous to appear at a moment’s notice. Their fingers were bandaged and bloody, their nails cracked and yellow. The clothes they wore were like the carpets, threadbare and shedding matter in clouds of dust.
Thacker’s own appearance couldn’t help either, he realised. Adams and Henbury disappeared in 1919. As far as he could tell, they hadn’t aged a jot. Even allowing for the terrible air of decay that hung about them, they hadn’t experienced so much as a single year. Now they were confronted with camouflaged monsters with a boggling array of weaponry◦– straight out of an HG Wells novel. Chalk one up to Einstein and the theory of relativity.
So Thacker was trying to limit the strangeness these two travellers could see. The radios, they’d probably recognise as telephones without wires, and surmise that Marconi’s little discovery had got a little smaller. The Warrior? They’d had tanks at Cambrai. Even the NBC suit he wore was just a few decades later on from gas masks and urine-soaked cloth wound around the head.
He’d save the medical, digital and genetic revolutions for later, not to mention that the War to end all Wars had been followed by a century of shocking brutality on and off the battlefield.
The stretchers and their bearers arrived, suited up in white coveralls with big red crosses front and back. Something else they’d recognise.
‘Get on,’ said Thacker, ‘and we’ll give you a lift to decontamination. It’ll be undignified, and it may even hurt, but after that we can get a doctor to take a look at you.’
Neither Adams nor Henbury moved.
‘Yes, I will force you. You can’t stay here, and you really have no choice but to do what we tell you.’ Thacker stepped between Adams and the resting shotgun, and pointed his rifle nowhere in particular. ‘I think you could both do with a shower, a shave and a hot meal. What do you say?’
Adams was the first to move. He got up to a crouching position and put his shoulder under Henbury’s arm. One of the orderlies went to help, and Henbury flinched as if he’d been electrocuted. Adams steadied him, and the orderly made another attempt at assistance.
This time, reluctantly, Henbury leaned on him as well, and together they lowered the one-legged man to the plastic stretcher. Adams lay on his, and they were hoisted aloft with surprising ease. Or not so surprising. There was more meat on a scarecrow.
Both were carried away out of the hall and into the blinding sunshine, Thacker following at a discreet distance. He was caught by one of his squad brandishing a radio handset.
‘It’s Mr. Dickson, sir.’
Thacker sighed and took the radio, pressing the earpiece hard against the side of his head.
‘Thacker? Two casualties?’
‘Yes. Rather a pleasant surprise. Lord Robert Henbury and George Adams. I suppose we should call them survivors rather than casualties, but we’re treating them as such.’
‘What shape are they in?’
‘Emaciated. And if not all mad, at least half mad. They tried to kill me when they saw me the first time, but lucid enough not to try it twice. I’ve sent them for full decontamination, and we’ll keep them in isolation until we’re certain their blood is clear.’
‘How old are they?’
‘Ah. Not really any older than when they left. Bit of a mystery, that one. Time moved differently inside the field.’ Thacker looked around. Because of the respirator, he was shouting his replies, and there were things he didn’t want broadcast. ‘I’m going to order the main building sealed. There’s something inside that I don’t want touched by anyone less than an expert.’
‘Are you being enigmatic?’
‘Just for the moment. I’m coming back to the basecamp now, and get out of this damnable suit. And I need to make sure Henbury and Adams are treated properly, not as objects of curiosity or plain-old lab rats. I think they’ve been through more than enough. Adams asked me if I was human.’
‘Did he? Why did he do that?’
‘I have absolutely no idea at all. I rather assumed it was the get-up I’m wearing. Although it did strike me as a little odd.’
Dickson was silent for a while, so long that Thacker assumed that the connection had been cut. He was just handing the radio back when it squawked again.
‘Thacker? Thacker?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘We might have a problem.’
‘Over and above the ones we already have?’
‘Yes. Imagine you’re on guard duty. Someone approaches and asks you if you’re British.’
‘And…’
‘They could be asking you because they’re British, too, and they’re your friend.’
Thacker got the point. ‘And they could be asking because they’re not, and they want to kill you.’ He looked up the hill to where the stretcher party were. They had almost reached the main gates. ‘Get a squad together and meet me at decontamination.’ He thrust the radio into the squaddies’ chest. ‘No one goes in or out of that building until I say so. Check for external doors and post a double-guard on every last one.’