GODS OF TIME

by DG SIDNA

  Sometimes your old foundations, your old identity, have to come down in order to build yourself back up again, as the better version of yourself. Could the same be true for society? Did the Valeyard have to be destroyed in order for her people to have a better life? And isn't that exactly what Patmos promised to do? Tear down the old world to create a better one?

  Was this his plan all along?

  No. A man like that doesn't stop at just one colony. And saving the Valeyard didn't require three hundred jumpvests, regardless. Whatever he's planning is bigger. If Careena is right, that a lot of people are going to die before rescue can arrive, then all Patmos has shown us is that he's willing to sacrifice thousands in pursuit of his utopia. But what are those aims? Why this distraction?

  "Careena," I ask. "How many ships will Tegana send here?"

  The old woman pays little attention to my question. She's busy waving her hand over the jumpvests on the floor. She's destroying them. I see smoke and smell burnt plastic rising from their internal controls. But it's less than a dozen vests. I doubt this shortage will be enough to foil Patmos's plans. Without looking up, Careena answers, "Every ship she's got, deary. And then some."

  I nod and let her get on with her work.

  Looking over, I notice Rhoda has left the room. I can't hear anything over the alarm klaxons, but that doesn't mean the Kheltic girl didn't. I exit the conference room to find her. Careena is going to be a few more minutes and she hardly needs my help. Maybe Rhoda found something of interest.

  She's not in the hallway, which means she must be around the next intersection. I walk down the hall, turn, and that's when I see her. It's also when I see him.

  He comes out of an office at the end of the hall, unaware of our presence. Having seen him once before, he's a figure I could never forget, a titan among mortals, a near mythic figure, with the air of a silverback gorilla in the prime of his life.

  Like last time I saw him, he's wearing that long, black trench coat with the shoulders of red fur, all pomp and show. His orange-red beard, pulled into tight curls, may as well have been forged from steel. In his hand is a satchel, something important, no doubt.

  Rhoda slides down the hall as silent as a shadow, short sword in hand. He still hasn't turned to see us. His head is cocked to the side; he must be talking to someone, someone who isn't there, like when I speak with Story.

  I know I should do something, that I shouldn't just stand here. I should go back and get Careena. But I'm frozen. It's the sight of this red monster. This is the moment I feared, where I lock up, a help to no one.

  Rhoda's almost upon the Red Man when another mercenary comes out of a doorway behind her. He's armed with a pistol and now that the city is in turmoil, he's likely not afraid to use it. Rhoda's too focused on her target; she doesn't realize he's right behind her.

  "Rhoda!"

  I manage to get the words out, I only hope it was in time.

  She spins around. With two slices, she takes off the mercenary's arm, followed by his head. She's back facing the Red Man before either body part hits the floor. But he's seen both of us now.

  Rhoda shows no fear. "Red Man," she says. "It's over."

  Their eyes lock in that moment, fierce gazes, either of which would have struck terror into the hearts of ordinary mortals. They certainly do me. But neither Rhoda nor the Red Man are ordinary mortals.

  Indeed, the Red Man seems to welcome this challenge. For too long had he felt without equal in the universe. His quest for purpose and meaning could no longer be satiated by simple heists and thievery alone. He needed something more. I see it his eyes.

  A god among peasants, the truth is he desires, as we all desire, to know his limits, to test his ambitions, to understand his role in the galactic puzzle of existence. It's the question that secretly burns deep in the hearts of all human souls—is this all that I am, is there nothing more?

  He tosses down his satchel and pulls free a sidearm. I'm worried Rhoda won't be fast enough to reach him before he fires. But then I understand that he is bound by a code of honor that his compatriots lack. He is the product of an origin story, epic and sorrowful. He casts the pistol to the floor and pulls out a long knife from his belt. This is to be a battle of equals. The way the cosmic filaments always intended this moment to be.

  While the two gladiators face one another, I sneak ahead and grab the pistol from the dead mercenary's hand. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I'm not above firing at the bastard and ending this duel the old-fashioned way, but I'm worried I might hit Rhoda. All I can do at this moment is watch.

  They charge. The rules of the match are simple, kill or be killed. The blades move with such speed I can't even follow them. There's a lot of blocking and deflection.

  I'm worried for Rhoda, she's so svelte and willowy compared to the monster she faces, yet in only two or three moves she's disarmed him. His long knife goes skidding down the hallway.

  My relief, however, is short-lived. Though he is not entirely synthetic as she is, his enhancements are still legion, and they are centuries more advanced than hers. He sidesteps one of her swings and slams her against the wall, pounding on her with fists that land like blocks of stone.

  She loses her own blade; I see it fall and stick upright in the floor. Thankfully, she manages to break away and return her own swings. Though her arms are lithe, her punches are no less punishing than his. In quick moments each are covered in blood and violent bruises. It's an eerily silent confrontation, all I can hear are the bone-cracking blows. Neither screams nor grunts. Even their breathing is superbly measured.

  Just as I think Rhoda might have the upper hand, the Red Man forces her back against the wall again. I watch in horror as he knocks her sideways for a moment, giving himself enough time to pull her sword free from the floor and skewer her through the chest with it, pinning her against the wall. He leaves her hanging there, a few inches above the ground, the blade plunged to its hilt, her body hanging like a decoration.

  Her head has dropped.

  She's unmoving.

  I scream.

  Whatever fear froze me before is gone. Not even the sight of the Red Man hovering only a few dozen feet away can paralyze me. I stand with the pistol in hand. He turns to look at me; it's unclear if he recognizes me from the Stellar Pearl.

  I really don't fucking care.

  I pull the trigger.

  The blast should have torn him apart, should have blown his rip cage across the hallway. But he vanishes and all that happens is the back wall explodes into a smoldering hole.

  He had a jumpvest, I realize, one more sophisticated than the others. His he can trigger with a thought, much like Careena does with her ring. He's escaped to safety.

  I've failed.

  I'm overtaken by such rage that I hurl the useless pistol into the poster of a smiling farmer.

  I then run to Rhoda's hanging body.

  Careena comes around the corner, Old Bessie in hand. She must have heard me screaming.

  "What's happened?"

  I don't know what to say. I'm crying.

  Then I tell her. "He's killed Rhoda."

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Careena is about to say something. Whether it's meant to be comforting, I'll never know—because she trails off and ignores me completely once she sees the satchel the Red Man was forced to leave behind during the scuffle. She runs over to the abandoned bag, dumping the contents out onto the floor. First, I could hardly contain my tears. Now I can hardly hold back my anger.

  "Did you hear me? He killed her!"

  She's on her knees, going through the mess she's created, and hardly looks up. "What? Oh, her? I'm sure she'll be fine."

  I scream. "Careena, he staked her through the heart!"

  She snaps back. "Then it's a bloody good thing she's not a vampire, ain't it? Now do you mind?"

  I want to punch the old lady's eyes out.

  "Pull her down if you're so worried about her," she says while rooting around.
She holds up what looks to me like a silver torpedo, about as long as a wine bottle. "I was right, you devil," she whispers to herself.

  I ignore whatever she's doing. I pull the sword out of Rhoda. It slides free easily. The Kheltic girl falls to the floor. I kneel beside her and cradle her head. There's very little blood, but her body is limp and lifeless. I didn't know her that long, but I still considered her my friend. We were both outcasts—she and I. And she saved our lives, more than once.

  I hold her hand in my own and think of a prayer to say, a way to thank her. Yet before I can start, I feel tiny spasms in her palm, like beats, faint, nearly imperceptible, but rhythmic—one every minute or so. "I think her heart is still beating," I say in astonishment.

  Careena doesn't seem surprised. "The injustice."

  "But how can that be?"

  I realize that without her heart, Rhoda's muscles are constricting in unison to continue pumping blood to her brain. The pores on her face have widened as well, possibly taking in oxygen. In re-engineering the human form, her people considered every contingency. Neither evolution nor God could compete with the intelligent designers on Kheltaris. I should be grateful for this, and I am, I truly am, yet somehow I understand everything Careena has told me.

  Why does Rhoda even have a heart? Why is her brain localized in her head? The truth is, these choices were made only because her generation felt some nostalgia for their ancestral form, nothing more. Her parents had grown up in Iran before immigrating to Kheltaris, I remember her telling me that the night we were singing karaoke. No one among their generation would have wanted a child completely alien to them. But a little alien? A little better? That was fine. And so it would go for each successive generation, until one day the Khelts would be something else, something other than human, without ever realizing it.

  I wipe away strands of Rhoda's dark hair, happy that she's still on our side of that great coming divide.

  She opens her eyes. "Isabel," she whispers.

  "I thought we lost you."

  "I couldn't stop him."

  Surprisingly, it's Careena that responds. "You did just fine, hotcakes." She holds up the silver torpedo. "You got us this. Without this, that bastard's plan is deader than the hedgehogs."

  I'm still angry at her earlier callousness. "Yeah, well, it looks like a dildo."

  "Hardly, freckles. This here is a—"

  It vanishes from her hand, blinking out of existence.

  The old woman screeches. "Is there no pity sitting in the clouds!"

  "Where'd it go?"

  She's too busy cursing. "Dammit, dammit, dammit. The jump mechanism was remote controlled. He's just sent it off."

  "It's a weapon?"

  She nods. "Of a sort. It's the Tinker's handiwork. Ingenious really. It's how he's stayed ahead of us all these years. He calls it a time-shot. He sends it back four hundred years, just before the blackout dates. There it buries itself into the planetary crust, deep enough to avoid detection or being disturbed by any future construction. Then it waits, hundreds of years, until a timer goes off and it sends a quick message. He can communicate with himself from the future this way, sending himself warnings, stock prices, anything he wants. He used it sparingly because he knew it might draw the attention of the ministry. And it did. I was sent to investigate. But when I saw what he had built..."

  I understand immediately. "You realized you could use it to save Samus."

  There's a pause before she answers. "Aye. My moment of weakness, I suppose. I tried sending her a message to avoid going in to work that day. But we were having a fight and she never read it. Not in time, anyway. Obviously, I made sure the message couldn't be traced back to me, and as I was the agent assigned to the Valeyard, I thought I could cover up all the evidence. No one had to know. But Soolin's investigation was more thorough than I expected. This new sort of technology, capable of influencing events within the blackout dates, was particularly troubling to the ministry. I should have realized that, but I was too blinded by the possibilities to think critically. I was taken off the case once my relationship with the intended target was discovered. I never had the opportunity to try again."

  "I'm so sorry, Careena."

  "Well, it doesn't matter now. What matters is Patmos. And I think I know what he's planning."

  "A message to himself?"

  "No, that time-shot was a different. It wasn't equipped with a transmitter. It has an explosive charge on its head powerful enough to knock out a planetary field generator. Those generators are buried miles down under the earth precisely so they can't be easily taken out. If you tried to access one, you'd trip a hundred alarms."

  I see where this is going. "Unless your bomb was already there. Before those alarms were ever installed. Then it just sits there for hundreds of years, waiting for the right time to go off. No one will have thought to look for a bomb that's even older than the colony itself. But how does this help us? We don't which planet he's going after." My first concern is Earth. After all, if you wanted to create a new human civilization from the ashes of the old, that seems the most likely target.

  But Careena confirms my other suspicion.

  "Don't we?" she asks.

  She's right. I do know. And it's not Earth. It's no coincidence that the Valeyard is in Tegana's backyard. He's orchestrated this act of terrorism not to save the residents of this world, but to draw Tegana's forces away from theirs, to leave the planet vulnerable and open to attack. With no wars, no enemies to speak of, the Tegans won't hesitate to send every available ship they have, along with a relief force of thousands of soldiers. The planet will be left virtually undefended when Patmos arrives with the Red Man and a small army of jumpers.

  Obviously they could never hope to take the entire planet, or even a single city. But that's not what they're after. They're going for the Chronos Imperium, the throne of the temporal gods. Without it, Tegana would just be another colony world, no more or less remarkable than a hundred others.

  But with it, Patmos can time-stay himself, can free himself from the consequences of his actions. He isn't a fool; he doesn't want to create a paradox, one that could inadvertently rip apart space-time. No, he's planned all this precisely to avoid doing such a thing. When he alters history, he wants it to be absolute, unconditional. Final.

  "We have to warn Tegana," I say.

  Our one saving grace is that he can't blow the planetary shield yet. The news of the disaster on the Valeyard is only now reaching Tegana. It will take, what, a day, maybe two, for the planet to organize its relief efforts and send her ships?

  Patmos will have to wait until they've cleared the solar system to make his move, otherwise his jumpers will be forced to confront the Tegan Defense Force. So we have a little time. We can devise a plan to protect the Chronos Imperium. Patmos is going to find himself facing a full battalion of Tegan marines, the bastard.

  I don't want to sound too optimistic, but by anticipating his scheme, we may have out maneuvered our enemy.

  Then Story Beckett appears out of nowhere and everything falls apart.

  Before Careena can berate the girl for being missing-in-action so long, Story raises a hand to stop her, saying only, "Smith, they're here."

  Careena must realize who she's talking about. Without a word, the old woman dives into me, knocking the air from my chest as we both fall on top of Rhoda. But she's not fast enough. Four of Soolin's newly appointed time agents appear all around us. They've been tasked with apprehending the fugitive Careena J. Smith, and I suppose by extension me, her accomplice.

  Knowing their target would attempt to jump away the moment she's found, they've already rehearsed this raid a dozen times. They've appeared with weapons drawn, firing their stun blasts the moment they have visual confirmation on us.

  Story's warning gave Careena just enough time to initiate our jump, but not enough to complete it before we're hit by a distortion wave meant to neutralize Hecate and prevent our escape. We're stuck in the in-between a
s something goes terribly wrong and we blink out of existence. It feels as if my particles have been scattered across the firmament into oblivion.

  There's only blackness and I am sure I'm dead.

  After some moments, the blackness turns to white.

  I'm on my back, exposed. There's a bright and punishing sun above me, presiding over a cloudless sky. I can taste the dry heat in the air. I'm too weak to turn my head, but from the corners of my eye I see miles of dried dirt and cracked soil to my left. To my right is the same. It goes on forever. I'm in a desert, a world burned into a lifeless shell.

  I have to close my eyes to block out the sun. Already my skin is sizzling. Soon I'll become just another barren and scorched husk on this barren and scorched world. After some time, a shadow falls over me—shielding me from the sun. I pray it's Careena, come to shelter me from the brutal heat, but when I open my eyes, there's a silhouette in the bright light. And it's not an old woman.

  It's some foul demon, a squat monster with hoofed feet and a chin beard of harsh bristles. The beard of a trickster. The creature smiles, revealing rows of crooked teeth crammed together in a small and pathetic mouth. It leans in, no doubt to tear out my throat.

  I'm too weak to fight. What does it even matter now, anyway? The Red Man has escaped. Patmos has won. When she finds me, Soolin can throw my half-eaten carcass off the Brooklyn rooftops if she wants. I surrender. I accept my fate.

  Curiously, I find relief in this act, in letting go my obligations to this world, my responsibilities. So many of them, I realize, were foolishly self-imposed, manifesting themselves as anxieties and bad habits. My ego had convinced me I was special, but I'm just an ordinary girl. It was unfair of the universe to ask me to be anything more than that. I let go my ego. And in doing so, I let go my burdens.

  I let it all go.

  I'm ready.

  End me, foul beast.

  I do wonder in these final moments, however—why exactly he smells like juiced celery.