The Marches of Edonis

by G. R. Cooper

  At stake was the integrity of the timeline.

  "Gosta?" He heard the call from the Gokstad. Whatever his role in this mission, he was always going to be subservient to the controllers above.

  "Yes?"

  "Checking in. All readings are nominal."

  Then why in Valhalla's name do you bother me with it?

  As much as he wanted to grumble out loud, to ask why if they trusted him with this mission then why didn't they trust in him to complete the mission as dictated. He knew, however, and understood. This was not a normal mission. The fact that he'd been picked for this role at all gave him all of the reassurance he needed about his value within the hierarchy.

  He might be only a soldier, but he was a valued soldier. A soldier that had just passed the area of the atmosphere that caused an ionized envelope of air to surround him, creating a temporary blackout in radio communications between himself and the Temporal Scoutship above.

  "Understood Gokstad control," he paused. "All readings nominal."

  He reveled in the feeling that the approaching ground gave him. As it expanded from the point in space it had been when he'd left the Gokstad to fill the entirety of his view, his internal sense of scale struggled and stretched to adapt to the vista. He felt his lower abdomen - his balls - tingle and contract delightfully as the planet rushed upward.

  The planet. His planet. Eventually.

  He would be born to the northwest of this location, thousands of years into the future.

  He would be born into the role he presently fulfilled. He was a temporal soldier, tasked with keeping the timeline he was born into, and those timelines adjacent to his own, from being derailed. Ever since the old, staid, ideas of time and space had been rewritten in the early twenty-second century, the powers that be had endeavored, mostly successfully, to keep the status quo from being derailed by inadvertent, or in this case, suspected deliberate, attempts to change the cast path of history.

  Every anomaly detected within the time-stream was investigated by the Temporal Guard. Typically, those anomalies were detected within recorded history. That allowed the team tasked with redemption to easily locate the anomaly and eradicate it. Gosta had been on dozens of those missions. He was, by far, the most experienced operative within the group.

  Now he was, however, operating, as the briefing put it, extra-extant the known time-stream.

  Gosta was operating outside of recorded history. He was working in a time of legends. A time of mythology.

  In each of the other missions he'd been assigned the group had been able to identify, within a small margin of error, exactly when, where, who, and how the timeline had been subverted. It had always been simply a case of predetermining exactly the difference between the known and recently perceived changes. It was almost mathematical in is precision.

  Go when. Go where. Kill who. Problem solved.

  This was different. There was nothing except a vague exclamation point of error. A red flash, insinuating itself within whatever hardware or software monitored the stream. Gosta didn't know; didn't need to know. He was a guided missile and he'd been launched.

  Gosta tore himself away from the thrill ride filling his view and reviewed his mission briefing.

  He was being dropped into a prehistorical plot of mountains between the target and the ocean that the Etruscans had named the Middle-sea. An anomaly had been detected, one that correlated with a very high likelihood that a modern personage was attempting to subvert the timeline to his own purpose.

  It was believed that several operatives had, as the saying went, gone Loki and left the present to establish themselves within the past. Usually, it was thought, this really didn't affect the timeline in a way that activated whatever monitoring devices that read the past. This time, however, a severe spike had attracted the attention of the authorities.

  The problem - one that was far above Gosta's pay grade - was determining whether the spike grew from the disease or the cure. If left alone was the problem likely to even out and disappear over the course of time or was the cure in itself the reason for the spike? If they chose incorrectly, the worst could conceivably happen; a history altering event of such magnitude that it caused a ripple effect that could create an alternative timeline. Gosta didn't understand why that was a bad thing, but the smart people, the scientists, assured him that it was. Something about the ripple effect between the old and new streams creating a harmonic resonance that could shake and disrupt both timelines. For reasons he also didn't understand, they had one opportunity to address the problem. Mission failure or success was permanent.

  The decisions on how to proceed, thankfully, had been made long before Gosta had been tasked with this assignment.

  He only had to go where he was told, when he was told, and target who he was was told.

  The summation of those decisions was now rapidly approaching him from below.

  Gosta landed, softly as though he'd jumped from a low stool, onto the peak of Jebel Usdum. That was the ancient name of the mountain. The current, twenty-third century, name of the mountain didn't matter. Gosta didn't know it anyway. This part of the world wasn't really that important in the grand scheme of things. To the south of where he fell to Earth the local tribes had made a splash of importance in the twentieth when nonrenewable fossil fuels predominated for a short period. Since then the area had fallen back into irrelevance.

  Gosta raised a pair of goggles to his eyes. He looked through them to the cities - villages, really, to his eyes - that lay paired in the distance. He pressed and held a button on the side of the headset that measured the current levels of temporal divergence present within the scene. The numbers came back overwhelming but not specific - something within this area was almost certainly affecting the time-stream. He couldn't, however, narrow the occlusion to within the field of view.

  Given that these were the only cities within a days walk was enough to render other possibilities statistically improbable. Whatever was causing the temporal spike, it was likely within view.

  He brought up the intelligence on the area and scanned it. The names of the villages meant nothing to him. There was nothing in the write-up to suggest that they had been or would be in any way important within the time-stream.

  Something was happening or was shortly going to happen that was going to make this area spike. It was going to make this point in space-time very important in the grand scheme of things.

  What Gosta did know, what had been presented him in the intelligence gathering before he'd dropped, was that someone was down there, likely in one of those tiny cities, that would cause a split in the continuum. He wasn't concerned with exactly who. Or exactly where. He was only on the ground to ensure that the intelligence gathered and presented above was focused enough to ensure that there wasn't some mistake being made.

  Gosta was there to ensure that the last two percent of certainty was ensured. He was there to make a ninety-seven percent certitude raise to ninety-nine-point-nine.

  The reticle on his goggles rotated around his field of view as he watched. As he watched, the certainty raised from almost certain to within a shadow of a doubt.

  Gosta was where he was supposed to be.

  He looked down to where his feet had impacted with the ground on the peak of the mountain. Loose scree in small mounds had spread around his feet as he'd established his balance like little ridge-lines surrounding a giant. He smiled, confidant in his puissant abilities. Whatever this land and time presented him, he was more than prepared. He was a twenty-third century god in the land of people who lived four thousand years before his people had established dominance of this world. These people were a mash of unfocused beliefs. An amalgam of direction-less nothings.

  He strode to the edge of the mountain's face, looking into the valley stretching below, sure in his place. Sure in his rightness. Sure in his place in space and time.

  Gosta pulled the scope from his eyes.

  "Anomaly located within ninety-ninth
percentile."

  The reason he, and the Gokstad, had been tasked with this particular part of space-time was somewhere within his view; within a ninety-nine percent chance. He scanned the valleys around the peak. Nothing of import showed. That didn't narrow the percentage empirically, but it meant that for any thinking creature, the anomaly narrowed to the valley that contained the twin villages. That was enough for the algorithms that directed his mission. Enough for his superiors that were directed by those algorithms. That was enough for him.

  Gosta put the scope back within its case. He stretched, satisfied with his mission; easy though it was. All he had to do was confirm the predisposed assumptions. He was nothing more, in this mission, than the scope on a rifle. Nothing more than the focused confirmation of the assumptions that the chain of command had determined. He had, so far, succeeded in his mission.

  He turned, looking to the west. To the valley that stretched to the Middle-sea. There was nothing that drew his attention in the view. Nothing, until a small swarthy man, fear in his eyes, peaked over the edge of the ridge.

  Gosta froze.

  "What the fuck?" sizzled the radio.

  Gosta remained frozen.

  This was outside of the dictates of the mission. There was supposed to be nothing that noticed the operative. Nothing that noticed Gosta. The man, underneath dark, heavy eyebrows, unmistakably noticed Gosta. He mumbled something incomprehensible.

  "Talk to me," Gosta spurted hurriedly, panicked. "What did it say?"

  "He said something about the three of you."

  "Three of us?"

  "Yeah, we're running an algorithm that camouflages you. It makes you look like three versions of yourself."

  Gosta frowned.

  Why not just make me harder to see instead of multiplying me?

  The multiplication algorithm was to be used in combat situations. He had no idea why they'd chosen it.

  Someone was going to have to explain that decision.

  The little man mumbled something else.

  "Can you literally translate?" Gosta was feeling panic rising - not because he feared for his life, but because this wasn't supposed to happen. There wasn't supposed to be any interaction with himself and the local fauna.

  "Yeah. Hold on."

  Gosta waited impatiently.

  "Yeah," came the radio, "the guy said," there was a pause, "Dammit, hold on a second."

  The radio operator spoke. More confidently than before.

  "Yeah, it said this. 'Lord, if I have now found favor in thy sight, go not, I pray thee, from thy servant. Let a little water, I pray you, be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree."

  "What the living Loki is that supposed to mean?" squeaked Gosta.

  "There's more," came the exasperated voice over the radio, "it said, 'I will bring a morsel of bread, that you may comfort your hearts, afterward ye shall go your ways: for therefore are you come to your servant'. I have no idea what the idiomatic translation implies. I understand the words but I don't know what he means."

  Gosta looked to the little man, bowing his face into the dirt at his feet. He felt panic rising, felt bile rising in his throat. Nothing in his training dealt with how he should handle this situation. He'd been trained to avoid, not to interact. There was nothing foreseen that covered this eventuality. He was on his own.

  "I'm here," he began, stumbling, as his voice was translated and piped through a small speaker at his throat, "to wipe wickedness from these cities." He swept his hand across the valley to the east, encompassing the villages.

  The little man looked to the cities. He pressed his head into the dirt and mumbled.

  "What?" asked Gosta into the air.

  Gosta's radio spoke, "He said, 'If you find fifty righteous men in the city, will you spare it?'"

  "What?" He shook his head, trying to come to terms with his situation. The radio room in the Gokstad caught up and began translating in real-time.

  The little man, his forehead pressed into the dirt at Gosta's feet, continued pleading, "If you can only find ten worthy men, will you not destroy it?"

  Gosta, flustered, answered, "For the sake of ten good men, I will not destroy it." He was willing to say anything to distract the little man to allow himself the freedom to address the mission, the task, at hand. He turned and looked back to the valley. He selected the area encompassing the villages within his view, selecting them for the targeting computers stationed within the weapons systems in geosynchronous orbit above. Dozens of megatons worth of destruction was now ready, through the thermonuclear rain primed within the Gokstad, to obliterate the two prehistoric cities from the map.

  "I have found no righteous men," he said gravely.

  Gosta turned toward the little man.

  "Whatever you do," he began, "do not look at the destruction that will befall the cities." Gosta didn't want the shepherd to be blinded by the nuclear blast. He looked up from his readouts, taking in the little shepherd. The man was bent over a boy, no more than twelve. He held a knife at the lad's throat. Tears fell from the man's eyes.

  "Father?" asked the boy.

  "Yes, my son," answered the shepherd.

  "Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

  "God himself will provide," answered the man, shuddering and raising his hand, the knife prepared to strike down.

  "Wait," screamed Gosta, "do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him," he pleaded, breathless, surprising himself; something in the earnest look of worship within the little shepherd's eyes moved him.

  The little man looked up to Gosta, fear and gratitude in his eyes. He rose from the boy and walked to a thicket where a ram was caught by its horns in the branches. He pulled it free and walked back to Gosta, his eyes questioning.

  Gosta nodded. The man slit the ram's throat, looking in rapture to the temporal warrior.

  Thank you Odin All-father, Gosta sighed. Please accept this ram as thanks for this mission's success.

  Gosta, happy that he had stopped the human sacrifice when he did, felt relieved; the seers had determined in the nineteenth century that such sacrifice was anathema to the All-father. Odin would be pleased with the ram, however.

  Gosta began to mumble, trying to come up with something that appeased the man and the situation. Something that would be appropriate for this little earnest man who now gazed up in wonder over the dripping ram corpse.

  "I swear by myself," Gosta began, "that because you have done this I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore."

  The little man dropped his forehead into the dirt once again.

  Gosta sighed.

  There was nothing now in this interaction that could change history, just one fewer ram. Nothing that this nameless shepherd, alone with his son on this lonely mountain could do to influence the history of his or any adjacent timelines. Within moments the two small villages - he looked back to the mission write-up and scanned through to the names - of Sodom and Gomorrah would cease to exist.

  All Gosta had to do was return to the ship, strip himself of his gear, and return to the future that was now, surely, sacrosanct.

  The Better Part of Valor

  The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel, "The Better Part of Valor", the first in the upcoming "Valor" series by G.R. Cooper! Coming soon to Amazon's everywhere! Please befriend or follow my GR Cooper author page on Facebook for updates and announcements about this and the Omegaverse series!

  "When we left Earth system, we used the energy from the jump point at Earth's second Lagrangian point to propel ourselves outside of the gravity well of Sol. In a way, it threw us into interstellar space at greater than light-speed."

  I nodded again. I had no idea, at that time, what the Lagrange points were or how how they created a series of null-gravity points in fixed locations relative to the Earth and the Sun (or any two massive bodies in space). I did know, as any school-child di
d, that the jump point for Earth system was at Earth's L2 point.

  "As we leave Sol's gravity well, our velocity increases greatly." He paused for effect, his affable jowls jiggling with the excitement of the lesson, "Now here's the interesting part. When we create a jump point facility within a star-system, we're adding it to our navigational grid in such a way that not only are those jump points used as departure and destination points for travel from and to that specific system," he shook his head, some excited spittle dripped off of his lower lip, "we can use those jump points as we pass through the system to further increase our FTL velocity!"

  "What that means, Mr. Valor, is that every system on the grid that we pass through on our way to Kepler will give us a huge increase in velocity, up to the theoretical maximum," whatever that was, "and since Kepler is on the far end of the grid, we will have several opportunities to drop into grid systems and slingshot back out a higher and higher speed!"

  He almost rose to a shout as he ended his point. I mean, I understand that it was pretty cool for us to be going faster and faster in hyperspace, but we could only see it as a number on the monitors. There was no perceivable difference in how the ship felt, and there was no way to see anything but the deepest black outside of the ship. It was all numbers, but those numbers were of intense interest to the jolly little man.

  "The navigation required means that we're not going in a straight line to Kepler, but rather a series of straight lines. At normal velocities, of course, that would take longer, but with the added boost given by each system transit, this will greatly reduce our travel time."