by Simon Hawke
It was the first time any of them had ever heard gunfire. The Council Security Force had not appreciated Steiger's demonstration, either. None of them had any familiarity with lead projectile weapons and the gunshots gave them a bad turn.
"What you don't know can kill you," Steiger had said into the stunned silence occasioned by his blasting away at the ceiling. He held up the nickel-plated gun for all to see. "This is a Smith & Wesson 25-dash-5 .45 caliber revolver chambered for the "Long Colt" cartridge. It fires a hollowpoint lead projectile with a copper jacket, propelled by gases generated by the explosion of the powder in the shell casing. This projectile, called a bullet, expands on impact and tears through everything in its path, shredding organs and pulverizing bone. It's a primitive weapon, centuries out of date. But that doesn't make it any less effective.
"As a covert operative of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, I've had to face weapons such as this one and others even more primitive, though no less deadly. You people were the ones who put me there. Well, now that I've got your attention, I'm going to tell you what the result of that has been and why I don't think you're qualified to make any operational decisions concerning the resolution of this crisis. I know what I'm talking about. I suggest you listen carefully."
They had heard the explanations and the theories of the scientists, but Steiger went over it again, presenting the situation to them in simple, laymen's terms, without technical asides and theoretical conjectures. Another universe had come into congruence with their own and the convergence of two separate timelines had resulted in a confluence effect which rippled through both timestreams, causing them to intertwine like a double helix strand of DNA. The integrity of each depended on the disruption and possibly even the complete destruction of the other.
No one knew the exact cause of the phenomenon, whether it was a result of temporal contamination brought about by the actions of the Time Wars or chronophysical misalignment caused by clocking massive amounts of energy through warps in timespace known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges. The fabric of time and space had ruptured or shifted in some way and reality now had an alternative-one that was no less real.
The congruence of two separate timelines was causing an instability in the flow of temporal inertia. The timelines were apparently not dissimilar enough to set up crosscurrents in the timeflow which would manifest themselves in temporal discontinuities. Instead, the result was a surge in the inertial flow at points of confluence, where the separate timestreams converged like two powerful rivers. The Laws of Temporal Relativity attempted to compensate for the instability. The greater the number of confluence points, the stronger the inertial flow. Eventually, if unchecked, the increased flow in temporal inertia would overcome the rippling effect caused by the congruence and cause both timestreams to merge into one timeline. The only way to keep that from happening, it seemed, was to maintain the temporal instability caused by the congruence, to keep working against the surge in the inertia flow. Yet, maintaining temporal instability meant almost certain temporal disruptions. To avoid a catastrophe, they had to invite disaster. It was a Hobson's Choice of the lesser of two evils.
The Council could no longer afford the expedience of using time travel to resolve international conflicts. It had been a convenient form of warfare. It had absolved the world powers of facing the harsh realities of war in their own time. It was so convenient and so beneficial to international economy that the least little disagreements were often quickly escalated into fullscale "arbitration actions" with temporal soldiers being clocked back to fight and die in ancient wars. Now fear had finally done what reason previously failed to accomplish. A ceasefire in the arbitration actions had been called and the Council's member nations were forced into uneasy unity against a common enemy-their doppelgangers in the congruent universe.
Now they want to listen to the soldiers, Steiger thought. Tell us how to fight the war, they said. Tell us how to win. The best answer he had to give them was that he did not know. His best advice was more direct. "Leave it to the professionals," he said. "Stay the hell out of our way. You can't legislate temporal combat. More wars than you can count have been lost by inept politicians telling experienced generals what to do." Diplomacy had never been his strong suit, but then it was a bit late for diplomatic answers.
As the robot shuttle crossed the plaza of the Pendleton Base Departure Station, Steiger sat silently, lost in thought. The soldiers he had chosen to accompany him had been content to let him do most of the talking. When questioned, they had answered briefly and politely, but they were veterans of the Temporal Corps and felt it was a waste of time trying to educate a bunch of politicians. Steiger hoped it wasn't. Time was a valuable commodity.
As the shuttle crossed the plaza, Steiger saw soldiers in every type of costume imaginable milling about in the Departure Station, waiting to clock out to their assignments. A ceasefire had been called, but at Pendleton Base-as at other military bases-things seemed not to have changed at all.
In fact, there were profound changes, though they were not readily apparent. These soldiers were not clocking out to fight in arbitration actions. They were being sent back to other time periods as scouts. Those about to leave had already been retrained for their new duties by the Observer Corps and there were thousands more in the process of retraining.
Their mission was twofold-to be on the alert for temporal disruptions and to find points of convergence where the time-stream intersected that of the congruent universe and a confluence existed. The confluence effect was unstable. A convergence could occur and a confluence point exist for a timespan as brief as several seconds or as long as-no one knew for certain. The result was massive temporal instability. Both timestreams were rippling, although not in any manner that was immediately noticeable-unless one stumbled into a confluence point and crossed over from one universe into another. If these points of confluence, however ephemeral, could be pinpointed and logged, then it was possible for them to be patrolled. At least, that was the theory they were operating on.
Already, there had been a brief and furious battle between the commandos of the First Division and soldiers of the Special Operations Group from the congruent universe. The greatest threat was that a force from the congruent universe would locate an undiscovered confluence point and cross over undetected to create a temporal disruption, as they had attempted to do in the Khyber Pass in the year 1897. The enemy was operating on the theory that increased temporal instability would serve to diminish the confluence effect or even eliminate it by creating a timestream split. Chaos, thought Steiger, was an understatement for what was going down.
The tension was evident on the faces of the soldiers in the plaza. In the Time Wars, the mortality rate had always been very high. Death could come from a spear thrust or a bullet. Oblivion could arrive with the rupture of a spacesuit or the explosion of a land mine. For a soldier of the Temporal Corps, there were a thousand ways to die. Now there was one more.
None of these soldiers about to clock out on long term assignments in the past, in Minus Time, knew what to expect. They had been briefed as fully as possible, programmed through their cybernetic implants with the languages, customs and histories of the periods to which they were assigned, but if by chance they happened to clock back into the past at the exact location of a confluence, the odds against their ever coming back were astronomical.
No one had yet crossed over into the congruent universe. The theory was that if a confluence point could be discovered and a crossover achieved, then returning would be a "simple" matter of retracing one's steps exactly. Turn a corner, Steiger thought, and you're in another universe. But if you were to clock directly into a convergence, with no physical reference for the confluence point, how would you find the corner? Once in the congruent universe, clocking backwards or forwards would only result in time travel within that universe. Because of the confluence effect, every temporal transition would now be even more uncertain.
Until now, Steiger had f
ound his duties as a T.I.A. agent challenging enough. Now, General Forrester was considering a new type of mission for them. If a confluence point could be located, one the people in the congruent universe were unaware of, then Forrester meant for them to attempt a crossover. The object of such a mission would be to disrupt the temporal continuity of the congruent timestream. Their job had always been to prevent historical disruptions. Now, they would be trying to create them.
"We've got to do it to them before they do it to us," Forrester had said during one of their regular briefings. "It's as simple as that. They're apparently working on the assumption that if they create a massive temporal disruption in our time-line, the resulting timestream split will overcome the confluence effect at our expense. For all anybody knows, they may be right."
"Dr. Darkness doesn't think so," Steiger had said, referring to the scientist whose experiments with tachyon transition had altered his subatomic structure, making him the only human who was faster than the speed of light. Dr. Darkness believed it was equally possible for a timestream split to compound the confluence effect, resulting in multiple timestreams intersecting, but the only way to prove that was the hard way, something no one was anxious to do.
"I know what Darkness thinks," Forrester had said, "and I'm inclined to listen to him. However, the trouble is we have no choice. The alternative would be fighting a purely defensive action, something we just can't afford to do. If we disrupt their timestream, then our counterparts in the congruent universe will have to conduct their own historical adjustment missions to compensate for what we've done. If we can keep them busy doing that, they'll have less time to interfere with our history."
"So we cause disruptions in their timestream which they'll have to adjust and they'll do it right back to us," Capt. Finn Delaney said. "It's madness. Where does it all end?"
"Who knows?" Forrester said, wearily. "The Time Wars have been escalated into a new dimension. Literally. Nobody knows how it will end. We'll just have to ride it out."
The shuttle arrived at the entrance to the Headquarters Building of the Temporal Army Command. As Steiger entered the spacious lobby, he paused before the Wall of Honor, which listed the names of soldiers of the First Division who had died in action. Steiger stared at the most recent name added to the wall, that of his predecessor, Lt. Col. Lucas Priest.
Before the Temporal Intelligence Agency had been merged with the Temporal Army Corps, Steiger had been the T.I.A.'s senior field agent, code named Phoenix. Lucas Priest had been his counterpart in the First Division of the Temporal Corps, the elite commando unit assigned to deal with temporal disruptions. The temporal adjustment team of Lt. Col. Lucas Priest, Lt. Andre Cross and Capt. Finn Delaney had the most impressive record in the corps. Now that the First Division and the T.I.A. had merged, Steiger was the ranking officer after Moses Forrester, replacing the late Lt. Col. Priest as the exec. It was a large pair of boots to fill.
He snapped to attention and saluted the wall, according to tradition. Priest had given his life to preserve the past. Now those left living in the present would have to risk their lives to save the future.
1
The mission team sat in the darkened briefing room, watching the holographic presentation. The three-dimensional laser image of the centaur slowly revolved before them as the recorded voice of Dr. Hazen dispassionately described the examination procedure. At the appropriate moment in the briefing, the image of the centaur dissolved to the scanner graph recording, showing the interior organs and the skeletal structure. At the point where the recording switched to the psych team's debriefing session, Forrester allowed it to continue for a few moments, so the agents could have an opportunity to see the centaur, in its conditioned state, responding to the questions put to it in ancient Greek. The he switched the projection off and brought the lights back up.
"The centaur's name is Chiron," he said. "A check with Archives Section reveals that the name first appeared in old Greek legends. Its earliest recorded mention is reported in a story told by Apollonius of Rhodes, one of the librarians of Alexandria. According to the story, which was reputedly based upon actual exploits of seamen of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, Chiron was half-man, half-horse; a teacher who lived in a cave on Mount Pelion centuries before the time of Christ. The young boys who were brought to him for instruction became the greatest heroes of the ancient legends, among them Jason, Theseus and Hercules. The centaur confirmed this information during the interrogation session."
"Confirmed it?" said Delaney. "But those are all mythical figures!"
Forrester made a wry face. "Indeed they are, Captain. As are centaurs, I believe."
Under other circumstances, the exchange would have been funny, but no one laughed.
"What we are apparently confronted with," Forrester continued, "is our first example of how the congruent universe differs from ours. The centaur came through a confluence, appearing in our timestream during the year 219 b.c., at the beginning of the Second Punic War. It caused a considerable amount of excitement among some of Hannibal's troops before our Observers on the scene were able to capture the creature and clock back with it. I won't bother speculating whether our happening to have Observers on the scene was pure dumb luck or a manifestation of the Fate Factor, magnified by inertial surge in the presence of a confluence. I'll leave that brain bender to the scientists. Zen physics only gives me headaches. I'll simply concentrate on what this creature's appearance in our timestream means to us.
"The centaur provides us with our first piece of hard evidence supporting the theory that the physical laws of the congruent universe might not be the same as ours. There is also the question of the temporal focus of the centaur's appearance in our timeline. It came through in the year 219 b.c., but according to Archives Section, the story which mentions the creature dates back at least six centuries before the time of Christ. Either the chronology of the congruent universe is radically different from ours or the congruence has caused an even more pronounced ripple in the timestreams than we realized."
"Excuse me, sir," said Andre Cross. "Does this mean a confluence point which occurs at, say, the 18th century in our universe might lead to another time period entirely in the congruent universe?"
"Quite possibly," said Forrester. "We don't know exactly what that means, though. It's possible that crossing over through a confluence point which occurs in our universe during the 18th century, to follow your example, might bring you to the 20th century, in the congruent universe, or the 25th or the 14th or any other century. But we still have no knowledge of what those time periods in the congruent universe are like. We believe the congruent universe is a mirror image of our own, but we now think it's a sort of funhouse mirror. Distorted, by our standards."
"Which means anyone going through would be going in blind," said Finn Delaney. "There would be no temporal reference. And we wouldn't have any idea what time period we might end up in."
"Correct," said Forrester. "However, we've already taken steps to work within those parameters. I've incorporated most of the former T.I.A. field agents now under my command into a new type of Pathfinder unit. This new unit has been designated as the 1st Ranger Pathfinder Division. Their function will be to go through confluence points as advance scouts for a mission team. They will be equipped with full battle kit, with orders to avoid unnecessary contact with locals if possible, but to engage any enemy decisively if they encounter hostility. Their primary responsibility will be to gather intelligence. However, if they are placed at risk, their secondary mission will be to conduct a quick guerrilla strike, inflict as much damage and as many casualties as possible and then get back fast so they can neutralize any hostiles coming through into our own timeline. Obviously, it's preferable to gather intelligence which allow a mission team to go through and conduct a covert operation designed to achieve maximum temporal disruption, but failing that, better to conduct a quick blind strike which may or may not cause significant temporal damage than to lose any of our peopl
e.
"The breakdown for this type of operation will be as follows: one, as soon as a confluence is pinpointed and logged, a commando unit will be clocked back to set up an outpost, providing security on our side of the confluence. A unit has already been dispatched to cover the confluence point through which the centaur came into our timeline. Two, a Ranger unit will effect crossover into the congruent universe for the purpose of gathering intelligence. If they do not encounter immediate resistance, they will utilize available local resources to blend in and gather whatever intelligence they can. If feasible, they may be directed to capture locals and bring them back for interrogation. Three, a mission team of adjustment specialists will effect crossover with instructions, based on intelligence gathered by the Rangers, to conduct a coven operation aimed at creating a significant historical disruption in the congruent universe. Four, units of the newly organized Temporal Counter-Insurgency Strike Force based in Galveston will stand by on alert status in the event hostiles attempt to effect a crossover into our timeline.
"Needless to say, this does not cover all contingencies. We are still vulnerable in the event that hostiles from the congruent universe discover a confluence point we are unaware of and send units through to cause disruptions in our timeline, as they did in the Khyber Pass. We were lucky that time, but we need to guard against something like that happening again. For this reason, all available temporal divisions are being broken up and reorganized, converted to Observer squadrons. We clearly cannot begin to cover all of recorded time. Nevertheless, we have to try. We can only hope that between mobile Observer squadrons looking out for temporal anomalies and members of the Temporal Underground providing unofficial intelligence support, we can spot disruptions and clock out adjustment teams to effect repair before the damage becomes permanent. Word has been unofficially leaked through channels that will reach the Temporal Underground so far as that's concerned. They'll cooperate. They have no choice, since their existence is at stake, as well. So if you want to be optimistic, you might say it's business as usual, only more intensified. Much more. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the overview. Now, we get down to the specifics of this case.