The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(173)

“Listen, Charles. I, too, have something to tell you,” he said solemnly. “Much has happened during the three days since I last saw you. While you were inside the pyramid, I was in the women’s camp—and I have some news. Important news.”

Charles attempted to interrupt in a thin voice. “Derek, there’s something I have to tell you . . .”

“Hush, my friend! Don’t talk, save your strength, and listen to me,” the captain insisted. “They brought a new batch of women from the Continent. And I was able to speak to some of them, Charles. They told me the Martians are having serious problems over there. Resistance groups have sprung up in France, Italy, Germany, and many other countries. Everyone is talking about a group of strange soldiers armed with powerful weapons. Yes, Charles, weapons no one has ever seen before, weapons almost as technologically advanced as the Martians’. And these soldiers move from camp to camp, freeing the prisoners, arming them, training them. And they are growing in strength and number. It is rumored they will soon arrive in England. And do you know what else they are saying, my friend? That these soldiers are searching for their captain, that they’ve come from the future to rescue him.”

“From the future? Oh, heavens, Captain! But how can that be?” Charles managed to murmur, filled with wonder, afraid of surrendering to this miracle, to the intense joy threatening to engulf him and sweep away his pain.

“I don’t know, Charles. I’m wondering that myself.” Shackleton let out a loud guffaw, still mysteriously fondling the object he was holding. “But clearly these are my men, Charles. They are coming to save me, to save us. How could they have found out what was happening in the past? I don’t know. As I told you, in the future we have time machines that are different from the Cronotilus. The one I used to get here was destroyed, but who knows, maybe there were others I didn’t know about, and maybe other travelers saw the beginning of the invasion and went back to the future to raise the alarm.”

“But if that’s the case,” Charles protested, making a superhuman effort to raise his voice so the captain could hear him, “then why did they take so long? And why did they turn up on the Continent and not here?”

For a few moments Shackleton remained pensive.

“I don’t know, my friend,” he said suddenly, recovering his enthusiasm, “but I can assure you that’s the first thing I’ll ask my brave men when I see them! Oh yes, Charles, you can count on it! I’ll say to them, ‘What the hell have you been doing while I, your captain, was rotting away in here? Baboons! Devil’s spawn! Sodomizing one another? Impregnating your own mothers? Or do you suppose we’ve been enjoying ourselves in here, sons of bitches?’ Yes, that’s what I’ll say. I can hear them laughing already,” declared the captain, and he began to guffaw loudly. Charles felt his own lips forming a smile, exposing his naked gums, as he began to accept as true the captain’s incredible story.

“But . . . are you sure, my dear fellow?” he asked. “Can you trust these women?”

“Of course, Charles. Look at this,” Shackleton said, placing in his friend’s hands the mysterious object he had been holding. Charles fondled it blindly, allowing the captain to guide his fingers. “One of them brought me this. It’s from my time, it’s a . . . well, we call it a marker. I knew what it was as soon as she gave it to me.”

“What is it?” Charles’s voice was scarcely audible now.

“We would use them after the battle to find survivors buried under the rubble. We all wore one around our neck. I took mine off before I traveled here, so as not to arouse suspicion among the people in your time. But now, thanks to that brave woman, I have this one. Many of the women who had escaped from the camps let themselves be recaptured, their mission to smuggle these markers in under their clothing and find me to give me one of them. And now I’m going to activate it and hide it under my clothing, Charles. That means my soldiers will reach me as soon as they land in England. It will only be a matter of months, my friend, possibly even weeks. But they will come, Charles, they will come. And that will be the end of the Martians. We’re going to defeat them, my friend.”

“To defeat them . . . ,” Charles repeated with a groan.

“Yes, Charles, we’re going to defeat them.” The captain stroked his dying friend’s thinning hair, plastered to his brow, then he gently retrieved the object from Charles’s hands, which fell limply to his sides. His breathing was scarcely more than a rapid murmur now. “You were right, my friend. You were right all along. We’re going to defeat them, because we’ve already defeated them.”

Because we’ve already defeated them, Charles heard as he crossed the murky threshold of oblivion. Yes, they were going to reconquer the Earth, he thought feverishly. He had been right all along, the captain had just said so. Yes, of course he’d been right, how could he ever have doubted himself? He had seen the future, he had been to the year 2000, and the brave Captain Shackleton had been there, defeating the king of the automatons, and there were no Martians, no . . . Claire. Charles’s breathing quickened. Claire, he remembered. Claire was in the depths of the pyramid. Yes, she was there, dead, or worse. Floating in that repulsive green liquid. He had seen her, and he had to tell Shackleton, that’s why he’d come to his cell, to free him. But he couldn’t tell him now! he told himself, bewildered. If the captain discovered his wife was dead, it would destroy him. He wouldn’t care about his men or saving the human race. Charles knew this because he had seen him before: Shackleton’s love for his wife had changed him from a hero into a man, a man who wouldn’t want to live in a world without his beloved in it. He would find a way to take his own life, and his men would arrive too late to stop him. And what would happen then? Would the uprising continue without Shackleton? Would his men save the planet without their brave captain, without the man who had rescued the world where they came from in the future? Charles did not know, but he could not risk allowing that to happen. And besides, what if by doing so he changed everything, caused one of those rents in the fabric of time that Murray had warned against? Could that happen?