[Assessment: heavy machine gun — tactical value = HIGH]
Acquiring a second heavy machine gun to fire out from their final position was worth the calculated hazard. She pulled a sabre from the hands of one of the dead. She vaguely recognized the man’s dark face; the grey flecks of coiled hair, the beard. His glazed sightless eyes gave her permission to take it and make good use of it.
Becks pulled herself up out of the trench and began to make her way towards the last two leviathans, skipping along the stacked sandbags like they were stepping stones across a babbling brook. Finally within striking range of the nearest of them, she pulled the sabre back and, using every fibre of muscle in her body to execute a low, sweeping, roundhouse blow, the blade arced round, biting through the coarse hide-like skin, the muscle and bone of the creature’s shin, as thick as a human torso. The bare foot, a yard long with flexing toes as big as cooking apples, flopped into the trench like a side of beef. The genic, missing everything beneath the cut, lost its balance and fell over, the thick plates of iron armour scraping and clanking as if a dumper truck had emptied a full load of salvaged metal on to a scrapheap.
Already exhausted under the burden of its armour, the leviathan struggled like an elephant with a broken spine, desperate to right itself once more.
Becks appeared over its small head, looking down at two beady black eyes, moist, glistening, by the light of the descending flare above them. Its eyes, without whites, looked as expressionless and void as the eyes of some giant insect … and, yet, the glistening moisture around them …
Tears?
She processed that observation in the few nanoseconds of a single computer cycle. Tears of anger, she wondered … or was it relief?
The spider-eyes slowly closed as if knowing, accepting even, what was coming. She thrust the sword down into the soft flesh beneath its feed-pipe and the genic lurched, giant ribbons of muscle all over its body flexing one last time, then it sagged — quite dead.
She turned in time to see the last leviathan collapse, finally weakened from the blood loss of dozens of gunshot wounds.
Again, she eye-snapped an overall appraisal of the battlefield. The British were only a hundred yards downhill. She estimated no more than a couple of dozen men left alive in the horseshoe trench, some of them firing sporadic, opportunistic shots down the slope, most frozen in shock.
And behind them, out of the trench, rushing past the still-chugging tank, fifty, sixty men fleeing, limping, scrambling for the distant safety of the ruins of Brooklyn. Devereau seemed to have gathered a kernel of a dozen men, most looking too badly wounded to make a run for it anyway. They had the heavy machine gun at least.
Wainwright joined her. Nodded at Devereau, herding the men towards the fort.
‘We must buy them enough time to set up the gun in there!’ cried Wainwright.
‘Affirmative.’ She pointed to the few other men along the trench. ‘I will delay the enemy. Order these men to redeploy in the fort and the archway. This must be protected for as long as possible!’
Wainwright nodded. He picked his way along the trench and started tapping the remaining few on their shoulders, gesturing towards the archway.
Becks stepped forward, reached down for the still-smoking heavy machine gun and hefted it up off its tripod with casual strength to rest it on her hip.
She aimed it downhill at the British, now only fifty yards from her, and began to fire.
CHAPTER 88. 1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln stared at the street in front of him. Early evening. It was busy with dock workers finishing for the day, trappers and traders stowing bales of beaver pelts and Indian-friendly trade goods aboard their flatboats. Raucous voices exchanged greetings and farewells in pidgin English and French, the street clattering with the sound of metal-rimmed cartwheels and shoed horses.
Across the rutted dirt thoroughfare was the inn, the very same inn he’d squandered the last of his money drowning his woes in the bottom of a tankard. It seemed to him to be more than a lifetime ago that he’d staggered out on to that porch.
‘I am where you first found me,’ he said.
Sal nodded. ‘And this is where you have to be.’
‘New Orleans,’ he smiled. ‘It seems to me to be a much smaller place now.’
‘I guess so.’ She looked up at him. ‘After all that you and me have seen I suppose it must do.’
He laughed. ‘And what incredible things. I shall, I’m sure, be the victim of sleepless nights until my dying day.’
‘It must remain secret. All of it,’ she said. ‘You know you can’t tell anyone about any of those things that happened?’
‘If I am to one day be a president, young lady, I would be a fool talking of flying ships and animals that speak and machines that transport a person through time. I would never stand a chance of being elected. The people in this new country would not tolerate a deranged lunatic for a leader.’
Sal shrugged. ‘Well …’
Lincoln scratched at his dark beard. ‘But I shall caution any man who will listen to me that this country will not prosper unless it is a united one.’ He looked at her. ‘That at least is something I am permitted to say?’
She looked at Liam. He was talking quietly with Bob a few yards away. She turned back to Lincoln and shrugged. ‘I think you were always destined to say something like that anyway. At least now you know why America can’t go splitting itself up into pieces, right?’
They watched a portly businessman and his wife cross the street, followed by several slaves carrying their baggage between them. A small black boy tagged along in their wake, barefooted and wearing little more than threads of clothing — the last item in a procession of one man’s property.
She found herself thinking of Samuel. Looked up at Lincoln’s dark, hooded eyes and suspected he was thinking the same.
‘I believe there is much in this time to put right,’ muttered Lincoln, ‘before we can be the nation our forefathers dreamed of.’
It was right then they heard the first sound of thundering hooves approaching. Cries of warning from further up the street, the crash of barrels of whisky and ale rolling off the back of the runaway cart and thudding on to the hard dirt strip, the spray of yeast-excited foam through split kegs.
Liam and Bob joined them, standing back from the thoroughfare as the cart approached. Six wild-eyed horses careened in a manic zigzag towards them. They roared past, shedding more barrels from the back of the cart in their wake. They watched the horses and cart weave uncontrolled through the congestion ahead until, finally, the cart rocked over and shed the last of its load. One of the cartwheels collapsed under the burden. Splinters of wood and shattered spokes arced into the sky; a twisted metal wheel rim spun off on its own tangent. They watched the cart still dragged along on its axle by the panicking horses until it was lost from sight.
‘The cart that killed you,’ said Liam. He cheerfully patted Lincoln’s back. ‘Well, not this time, anyway, Mr Lincoln.’
Bob nudged Liam. ‘Remember the secondary objective,’ his voice rumbled quietly.
Liam nodded. He offered Lincoln his hand. ‘Been a pleasure to meet a future president, so it has.’
Lincoln nodded and grasped his hand firmly. ‘I shall … endeavour to do my best, Mr O’Connor. Good Lord willing.’
‘You’ll do your country proud,’ he smiled. ‘I know you will.’
Bob leaned forward. ‘Secondary objective?’
‘Right … right.’ He looked at Sal. ‘We have to go. Something else we need to take a look at.’ He shook Lincoln’s hand and smiled. ‘Look after yourself, Mr Lincoln.’