The Lord of the Sands of Time

by Hubbert, Jim

  “Yes. We destroyed their Jupiter bases.” Orville’s voice contained no trace of optimism. Even if the Messengers and the ET managed to wipe each other out, there would be no victory. The ET were merely weapons, they were not the conquerors themselves. But the Messengers had to fight while exposing flesh and blood humanity to danger, and humanity had sustained a blow from which it would never recover.Cutty spoke again. “The unit defending Sherwood Evacuation Station in the North Sea has ceased to exist, apparently due to the attack on Mars.”

  “The attack on Mars?” asked Chan wearily. Chan was the human officer sitting opposite Orville. He had been dispatched by the government of Shanghai to assist Orville and was coordinating the evacuation of civilians to this floating city. Orville answered for Cutty.

  “We came from the future. The Messengers in the unit that disappeared were created by someone in that future. That someone had an ancestor in this era. That ancestor was probably on Mars.”

  “Wait, so that means those Messengers were never created? How is it possible that we knew of their existence? I get it…this is one of those time paradoxes,” said Chan.

  “Our research scientists believe it’s possible for us to know those Messengers existed because their existence was imprinted on this timestream when it branched off from the original stream,” replied Orville. “Upstreaming time travelers are hybrids—they have attributes of the new timestream and their original timestream—and the relative strength of events and experience in each stream influences how the new stream plays out. You’d have to do a probability analysis based on upstream theory. Don’t ask me more, I’m not an expert.”

  “Don’t tell me more, because I didn’t understand a word you just said,” replied Chan. They laughed cynically. Chan was one of the few from Earth who had been willing to help.

  Cutty broke in: “We have the upper hand in space, but the depletion of our units due to interstream interference effects is starting to have an influence. It’s touch and go whether we will eradicate the enemy, or whether the reduction in our forces will tip the balance and allow the enemy to replicate back up to strength.”

  “And even if we do prevail offworld,” said Chan, “we can’t do a thing about the enemy here on the surface. Correct?” Cutty did not respond. No answer was needed.

  Orville downed his tea and stood up. “I’d better get moving. The landing stage at Ningpo should be coming under attack right about now.”

  “Mr. O, uhm, Orville. I have a favor to ask you.”

  Orville turned. This was only the second time Chan had used his real name instead of his code name in the month since they had first met. Chan gripped his teacup and spoke in a low voice:

  “Is there room for a human passenger aboard one of those ships of yours?”

  Orville’s eyes narrowed. “I never thought I’d hear that from you,” he said stiffly.

  “Not me. My wife. She’s with child.”

  Orville froze. Chan stood and grabbed him by the arm with enough strength to make even cyborg bones creak.

  “You have room, don’t you? Room for one. Some of the ships were fitted out for human officers. For pity’s sake…!”

  “Protecting your wife is your responsibility,” said Orville, his tone reluctant, officious.

  “There’s no way. It’s impossible. We all know that. We can’t stop them. This city can’t stand up to a sustained attack from their air units. We’ll be wiped out. But isn’t your mission to prevent that? To save humanity, no matter what? To protect someone carrying new life is consistent with your mission, even if she is my wife. Am I wrong?”

  “And if we do take her aboard? What then?” Orville’s voice was barely audible. “Where could we take her? Is any place safe? Mars is under attack too. There’s nowhere to go. We can’t take passengers like Noah’s Ark.”

  “Take her to the past.”

  Orville reflexively shook himself free. He’d heard enough. He didn’t want to be any more coldhearted than he had to be. But as he fled out the door, Chan called after him, his voice full of wretchedness, like some vengeful ghost. “Please, take her with you! Take her to the past, where they can’t follow! You can do it. I know you want to!”

  As he ran through the streets of this floating city of refugees who squatted, exhausted, in the streets with nothing but the clothes they had escaped in, Orville suppressed the urge to cry out. Yes, that’s right, we’re going further into the past, to make amends for this debacle, to start over from scratch. In other words, we’re going to turn tail and run. And we’re leaving humanity behind.

  He climbed a metal ladder to the top of the wall surrounding the city. A ship jammed with refugees was docking. Another vessel bristling with antiaircraft guns passed on its way out to sea. Far off, a solid wall of black cloud stretched across the western horizon like the peaks of a mountain range. The cities of China’s maritime provinces were burning. The low-quality materials used by the land-based ET prevented them from operating in water, but as Chan had said, it was only a matter of time before they overwhelmed the floating cities with mass-produced airborne FET.

  Orville noticed he was grinding his teeth. Why were the ET so bent on destruction? What in the world were they?

  “Assignments for the next Upstreamer detachment have been issued. You’re on the list, Orville. Please report to the assembly point. I will accompany you and leave this world to the subunits.” In other words, Cutty had also abandoned hope for this Earth. She knew there was no future for this timestream.

  Orville murmured mechanically, “Chan’s wife, could we take her?”

  “Transporting a human into the past is of no utility for humanity. I can’t agree to it.”

  “No utility, but no harm either,” said Orville.

  “She’s not Sayaka. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Cutty, you—” A howl of fury died in his throat. Orville fell to one knee and began to weep.

  CHAPTER 5

  STAGE 448JAPAN A.D. 248

  Eeeyaaah!

  A dozen warriors yelled in unison and charged, a log with a heavy stone lashed to the end carried between them. The ram struck the huge Reaper in the midsection, toppling it end over end. The men drew their swords and pounced, caving in its insectoid eyes and severing the tendons in its legs. Its blue-white metallic body was the first of its type the soldiers had seen. The thing thrashed wildly as it died.Once it was clear that the beast would never again be a threat, the men turned to seek their next target. Child soldiers, too young to wield the rams, approached cautiously and severed every tendon they could find, one by one.

  “A Jumper!”

  A single-legged ET the size of a little girl bounded wildly out of the woods, brandishing a thin blade like it was a strip of swirling silk. The blade dismembered men amid fountains of blood. The air filled with howls and screams. A group of soldiers with wooden shields surrounded the ET and hemmed it in. The Jumper kept moving, waiting for its chance, then tried to escape the circle with one tremendous leap, but a toughened warrior seized its leg. The men surrounded the fallen Jumper and killed it with a frenzied hacking of swords.

  A call for help floated up to the ridge from below. A group of warriors were in full flight up the slope. Gaps in the trees behind them revealed another full-grown Reaper. Takahaya called out to them, in a voice loud enough to shake the leaves, “Make for the stockade! We’re dropping the sledge!”

  The soldiers reached the ridge, stumbling over each other into the stockade. Waiting troops ran past them and cut the rope holding back a huge sledge made of logs, planed flat and lashed together. The sledge skidded down the mountain, sweeping the Reaper with it.

  From all directions, bamboo war trumpets had been sounding from watchtowers along the ridges, warning of attacks. Now, one by one, the trumpets fell silent, a sign of successful clashes with the enemy. As Miyo listened from her quarters inside the stockade, Takahaya entered, drenched with sweat. “The enemy is nearly routed in the third valley,” he sai
d.

  Miyo had stopped using Kan to communicate with her senior commanders. It wasted precious time; moreover, it was no longer necessary to maintain Miyo’s aura of dignity.

  “Good work. Send reinforcements to North Point and the Tama Cliffs. Help is needed there,” said Miyo.

  “I sent forty to the cliffs this morning.”

  “They’ve been repulsed. Send a hundred more.”

  “As you command,” said Takahaya. Since the beginning of the fighting, Miyo’s orders had been prescient. Takahaya left with an air of complete confidence. But her directives were not the result of divination but were instead due to Cutty’s comprehensive grasp of the evolving battle lines, and to the Messenger, who fought ceaselessly on the front lines.

  When the mononoké made their first incursion onto the plain of Iga, the Messenger went out alone and returned with a small specimen he had captured alive. He bound it to a tree with heavy rope and summoned Miyo’s captains. At first, they feared to approach this creature they had only heard about in legend. The Messenger walked up to it boldly, striking and touching it with his bare hands. Even the mononoké were not invulnerable, and their bodies were subject to decay. With the right technique they could be restrained, immobilized, and killed.

  After careful explanation and encouragement, the Messenger gave the soldiers swords and cut the ET’s ropes. Then he faced the frenzied beast armed with nothing but a fighting staff. The men mustered their courage, attacked, and succeeded in killing the monster. In truth, this ET was in a greatly weakened state, but the men were heartened by their success and swore to follow the Messenger in battle.

  The Messenger showed them how to use log rams to topple the enemy and shields for defense. He introduced the wheel and the crossbow. Till then, the Yamatai warriors had relied mainly on bronze swords, polearms, and wooden bows. When the soldiers saw firsthand how a crossbow bolt could penetrate a thick tree trunk at a hundred paces, even their armorers were dumbfounded. Nor was engineering neglected; roads were graded, bridges built; forts sprang up and barriers snaked across the mountains and valleys of western Iga.

  The Messenger sent runners to Yamatai, summoning visiting traders and princes from the chiefdoms to observe the conflict, to see how the strange and barbarous mononoké were laying waste to Iga, and how Yamatai’s forces were pressing them back. Back in their homelands, the visitors were likely to exaggerate what they saw to their rulers and headmen. This would create far more impact than if Miyo had sent envoys to describe the events taking place. The war with the mononoké had been raging for two months. They had had to improvise, but Yamatai’s army held firm as it waited for more than just token reinforcements.

  Miyo’s quarters stood on a hill overlooking the plain. All around her was the din of an army camp: shouts of men raising log walls, the shrill voices of women distributing food, the bellowing of captains overseeing the training of green recruits, angry demands for quiet from men trying to steal a few moments’ sleep. From the mountain at their back came the ceaseless ringing of the woodsmen’s axes.

  Miyo was visited by an endless stream of messengers, soldiers, and captains. She had only the briefest periods of rest. As shaman, she was used to compelling obedience behind a screen of silence; never before had she been obliged to deliver immediate responses to question after question. Even with the magatama providing most of the answers, she was tired of talking and mentally worn out.

  When the stream of visitors stopped for a moment, Miyo sent her maidservants outside, sat back, and muttered, “I am weary. I’m beginning to feel light-headed.”

  “If you don’t feel well, I can examine you,” said Cutty through the magatama.

  “You play at healing too?” Miyo shot back, then shook her head. “The problem is my spirit, moreso than my body. Two months ago I’d never have imagined this would be happening. It’s like some awful dream.”

  “Wake up,” said Cutty. “This is not a dream. It really is happening, to you and your country. You can’t just quit. Still, I must say you’re holding up well. Until now there have been so many leaders who were ultimately of little use to us.”

  “‘Of little use’? That’s rather harsh,” said Miyo.

  “Please don’t be offended. O rates you very highly.”

  At that Miyo felt so awkward she could not reply, and when she realized her own awkwardness, she winced. In truth, she’d hoped that cooperating with the Messenger would help her escape from all this. But now she was saddled with a responsibility that sapped her spirit. What a miscalculation. If only this upheaval could somehow end soon…

  Her mind was wandering aimlessly when cheers of welcome came from the stockade gate. Soon the Messenger’s lanky form appeared in the doorway. He sat down, exhausted.

  “Forty men lost,” he said. “I told them not to go forward so quickly, but I couldn’t stop those young soldiers from pursuing the enemy. I should’ve brought more seasoned men.”

  “You held the cliffs alone? The reinforcements were too late?” said Miyo.

  “They helped all the same. Thanks to them, I got some rest before I came back here. I’m thirsty.” One of the maid-servants brought a pot of water. He refused the ladle, stood and raised the pot to his lips, gulping water like a stallion. He said to Miyo, “I’m going to the watchtower.”

  “You’re leaving already?”

  “Come with me. You need to see the overall situation.” They climbed the watchtower on the ridge. The Messenger pointed toward the center of the Iga Plain. “See there? Along the river?”

  “You mean where the sunlight flashes?”

  “That’s the spot,” said the Messenger.

  “They look like the scales of a fish,” she said. The banks of the river bisecting the plain were lined with rank upon rank of greenish panels. Probably the height of a man, each appeared tiny in the distance. They resembled a patch of scabies spread across many acres of tranquil, early summer farmland. Miyo felt her skin crawl.

  “Those are solar panels fabricated by the enemy,” O said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Think of them as the mononoké’s paddy field. They draw nourishment from them. I don’t know what they’re doing for energy in Kunu, but it looks like this is the only way they can fill their bellies here. If we can destroy those panels, we can starve them out, in Iga at least.”

  “Destroy them, then.”

  “I can’t do it alone. That looks like more than two thousand panels, and they’re adding more as fast as they can make them. I’d need five hundred soldiers, but we have to protect the borders. We can’t spare that many right now. We’ll destroy them after we build up our strength here. That’s the most urgent objective.”

  “Once you destroy them, will you reinforce the border crossing further on?”

  “No. We can’t stop there. We have to push beyond the borders and keep pressing them. We can’t stop till we’ve destroyed the nest. This isn’t like fighting a human chiefdom, where you can pause once you’ve done a certain amount of damage to the enemy. As long as the mononoké live, they can and will replicate without limit. And they’ll keep trying to kill us.”

  “It’s enough to drive one mad…” Miyo sighed, but the Messenger’s stern expression was unchanged. “Come,” he said, and climbed from the watchtower.

  His destination was the edge of camp. As they passed, soldiers and peasants dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves before their queen. On the outskirts of the camp they came to a small, jumbled mountain of greenish-white metal fragments, the broken and melted bodies of dead mononoké. Miyo grimaced in disgust. The Messenger hefted a fragment in his hand.

  “Right now they’re using zinc. That’s what this metal is called.” The Messenger called to a captain nearby. He handed the soldier the fragment and told him to see if he could shatter it. When the captain placed it on a boulder and struck it with a stone, it broke apart easily.

  “As you see, zinc is not a good material for their purposes.
Fire weakens it. They’re probably using this because they can’t get their hands on anything else.”

  “There are large deposits of this metal in the mountains to the east,” said Miyo.

  “Then we know where the enemy’s stronghold is,” said the Messenger. “We know where Earth’s mineral resources are located as a matter of historical fact. But the enemy has to do their own prospecting. In that sense, we have an advantage.”

  “So the enemy, he is weaker than he appears?” asked Miyo.

  The Messenger shook his head. “Maybe for the moment. If they can find a source of ore, they won’t need to carry out major mining. The ones who need the ore the most will ingest it. The main thing is whether they can reach an ore source. We hold western Japan, with the mines at Izumo, and that gives us the upper hand. But there are huge ore deposits in eastern Japan too, in Emishi territory.”

  “By the time they reach Kamaishi, the enemy’s capabilities will probably be far stronger,” interjected Cutty. But Miyo heard this strange new prophecy as if from somewhere far away. She had never heard of the place Cutty named. How the mononoké’s power might change because of some different material was beyond her understanding. She felt more and more frustrated. Nothing seemed real.

  “Even before they reach Kamaishi, there are small deposits of iron in Chichibu and Osaka. And the other ore fields are not completely devoid of iron. In any case, the longer we wait, the more our advantage slips away. It’s no use wishing we were stronger,” said the Messenger.

  “I see,” said Miyo.

  As they retraced their steps to her quarters, Miyo struggled to understand the Messenger’s words. The mononoké must be destroyed. As long as they drew breath, they would never stop attacking. That they could be destroyed meant they were neither demons nor devils. They were different from the gods of water and wind that the people of Wa had fought for ages without number. They were not like the days, the months, the seasons, which changed and returned in their endless cycles; not like the animals or the insects that might die, yet be reborn from an egg left behind. They were things, things with will, Things That Came. Suddenly, Miyo’s hazy images of her old adversaries seemed robbed of substance. She stopped in her tracks. “Messenger O. What are the mononoké?”