The Eternal War by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page B

you can bear to listen to his howling.’ She started to descend the ladder. ‘Right, we should get going, guys. We’ve been more than lucky with only small ripples so far. Let’s not push our luck.’
    At the bottom she checked to confirm the displacement machine was green right across the board, then called across to Becks. ‘Punch in a thirty-second countdown.’
    ‘Yes, Maddy. Thirty seconds … as of now.’
    ‘Return window at seven in the evening!’ she reminded them. ‘And, remember, the usual back-up windows after that if you miss it!’
    She could see Sal’s face through the scuffed plastic, wide-eyed with growing panic. Beside her, kicking water and still holding on to the top of the tube was Liam, saying something encouraging to her. And then Bob, keeping afloat with strong, powerful kicks. All three of them holding Ziploc plastic bags containing their clothes.
    ‘It’ll be fun, Sal!’ she called out over the increasing hum of the displacement machine. ‘Enjoy seeing 1831 with your own eyes!’
    Sal flashed her an uncertain smile and a wave.
    She stepped back into the middle of the floor as Becks’s countdown reached ten .
    ‘Right! Hands off, everyone!’ she shouted.
    Liam reluctantly let go and began thrashing furiously and ineffectually to keep his head above water. The other two let go and managed to tread water calmly. On five seconds, Maddy bellowed over the rising pitch of the machine for them all to grab some air and duck their heads under the water.
    And on one they were all completely submerged.
    A crescendo of channelled and suddenly released energy merged with the boom of flexing perspex, and in the blink of an eye the three of them were gone.

CHAPTER 10
    1831, New Orleans

    They were standing on Powder Street nearly a whole hour before six watching the dock workers industriously unloading boats of all different sizes, watching horse-drawn carts clattering up the busy thoroughfare. Although that snippet of digitally archived news from a long-dead New Orleans newspaper had claimed the event had occurred ‘in the evening’, it would be foolish to assume that meant for certain it happened after 6 p.m. Liam told them that in his time people still generally didn’t carry clocks or watches. Time was less specific. You’d arrange to meet someone in the afternoon, not ‘at 2.35 p.m. precisely’ as he noticed most modern New Yorkers seemed to do.
    ‘Just keep looking,’ said Liam, craning his neck to look up and down the busy street. ‘Tall grumpy-looking fella.’
    ‘Affirmative.’
    Sal nodded. But then it was far too easy to be distracted by the sights and sounds going on around her.
    Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like, Sal … actually standing in the middle of a piece of history. That’s what Maddy had told her after her trip to San Francisco, 1906. And she was right.
    She and Dadda had once gone along to a technology expo, while they’d been in Shanghai on one of her Pikodu tournaments. One of the last as it happened; international relations between China and India were beginning to chill then. A sign of the troubled times ahead. At the expo she had tried out a prototype of a thing they were calling a Reality Hat. It looked like a shower cap with marbles stuck all over it. She’d put it on and almost instantly she found herself smelling things, hearing things that weren’t there, and then finally seeing herself in a Roman street. Of course nothing was quite right. The scene was computer graphics, very realistic, but still there were little jerks in the animation here and there that gave it away. The visuals, the smells, the sounds were being transmitted into her head, stimulating the senses. She had been stunned by how convincing an experience it had been.
    But standing here, now, in history, for real … the Reality Hat seemed like a shallow experience by comparison.
    ‘Hold your horses …’ muttered Liam, ‘look at that fella over there,’ he said,