Pilot X

by Tom Merritt

  Pilot X shook his head. “Even if this is true, why would the Guardians not know of it? They would send people like me to combat and defuse it. It’s what we do. We maintain the timeline.”

  Aelreda looked extraordinarily sad. “It is what the Guardians did. Our records show in earlier ages they still thought as you. But now they are complicit. Elements hide the truth from others in the Committee. They believe there is only one final solution. One way out and they cannot find another way. They have gone from maintaining the timeline to preserving the parts that are untouched. Like a museum.”

  Pilot X shook his head. “No. I know you believe this, and I respect your belief, but it can’t be true. I’ve been shown . . . things. I’ve taken part in agreements. I’m just . . . well, if you’d seen and done what I’ve seen and done, I don’t think you could accept the inevitability of this so easily.”

  Aelreda seemed satisfied at this. “Of course. I would prefer if you believed me, but you told me you wouldn’t.” She grinned slyly. “You’ll tell me of your part, and I will barely have believed you. So take this.” She gave the display generator to Pilot X.

  “Peruse it or not as you will, but do not destroy it. I can say with some certainty that it will come in handy someday. More I cannot say. For I would not let you tell me.”

  Pilot X chuckled. “Well, that does sound like me. I should take this to the Secretary, though,” he said.

  “If you must,” she answered. “But every person you tell risks that person’s life and all our efforts. We would prefer you tell no one.”

  “All right.” He took the display. “But one thing. Why me? What do you think I can do about any of this if it’s already fixed in time?”

  “We know there are ropes. Threads. Variations between the fixed points.” Aelreda looked desperate. She grabbed Pilot X’s arm. “You among all have the talent to weave them. You can choose which variations are strengthened and become reality. You among all have the clarity to see how it must be done. When you begin to believe I may be right, do as your superiors tell you, but do not trust them. Do not believe them. And remember. You have this!” She pointed at the generator and then let Pilot X’s arm go.

  “Pilot X,” she said somberly, “you are the last hope of the universe.”

  THE REVIEW

  Pilot X plugged the display generator into the Verity. It was quite bulky, much bigger than it should have been. He wrote this off to the technical constraints of the Core’s linear development.

  There were more controls and inputs than strictly necessary, but he found the ones he needed and soon had Verity displaying the items the Core wanted him to review.

  He was stunned.

  For hours he reviewed recordings of Alendan generals giving orders to the Alendan army to devastate whole systems and hide Alendan involvement. He saw briefings ordering the escalation of the Dimensional War and requests for supplies. He saw page after page of battle reports and casualties. He read through thousands of words of justifications in response to questions from the Guardians. They had known about this at all times and mostly supported it.

  He found a file referring to a plan to nullify “a threat” by duping the subject into believing they were in control of a doomsday device. That certainly sounded familiar. Then he found a twenty-page report on an agent’s attempt to “modify interferist leanings” in Pilot X by redirecting him to the diplomatic core. Not only had the Guardians exempted the agent from the legal provisions against such timeline manipulation, but they wholly endorsed it.

  “This individual, time and again has proved to contain the potential to undermine our war effort. He will be stopped,” wrote Guardian Lau in her response supporting the plan.

  Another file documented a program to train dictators. It felt familiar somehow. The despots had come from all over the universe and trained in ancient Alenda. The idea had been to seed multiple worlds with strong leaders—Masters—to unify planets and engage the Sensaurians and Progons, draining their energy. They had mostly turned out to be genocidal dictators unable to maintain control or unite their civilizations. The Progons and Sensaurians had only arrived at a handful of their worlds, all of which had been unable to rally a response. The Masters were usually cruel and unloved. The majority of the planets eventually overthrew and killed the Masters if the Masters didn’t commit suicide first. It was disastrous. The unnamed agent had reported it in a two-sentence update to the Guardians: “Project nonoptimal. Will not repeat.”

  Then Pilot X found a file called “Evidence disposal and storage on Hermitage.” It described the routine need to dispose of battle remnants in space-time so certain battles would not be discovered. This was considered essential to the effort. The Hermitage was chosen for its lack of tourism and the generally quiescent population. One Guardian regretted the eventual harm to the hermits but most ignored it. A report stated, “Inhabitants of the planet that may suffer will not speak out or cause any impediment. Losses are inconsequential.”

  An addendum recommended sending Ambassador X to the planet to investigate the effects at a particular point early enough in his subjective timeline to prevent him from having enough information to discover the whole truth. A further addendum reported on the success of this maneuver.

  The document in general showed that the Guardians of Alenda believed that the Sensaurians and Progons would seek nothing less than the annihilation of all other civilizations and that this justified the Alendans’ attempt to annihilate the Sensaurian and Progon civilizations in return—no matter what collateral damage might be suffered by lesser civilizations or the rest of the universe.

  Guardian Het wrote, “Even the heat death of the universe without chance of extension is preferable than allowing these two warlike civilizations to wipe us clean from space-time.”

  None of them used the term civicide. But that was the policy, along with the greatest cover-up ever conceived of in history.

  The final document was a list of points in space-time that the Core had identified as worth saving in order to prevent the war from spreading. They wanted someone to visit these points in a last-ditch effort to save some remnants of creation. They wanted to put bandages on the universe.

  Pilot X slumped into his chair. He couldn’t tell the Secretary. He couldn’t tell anyone. The Core was right. It was too risky.

  “It is quite compelling evidence,” Verity remarked.

  “Does all the data seem valid?” Pilot X asked with a shred of hope lingering in the back of his voice.

  “I saw no evidence of tampering.”

  He sighed.

  WAR ZONE

  The Verity shook like a baby’s rattle as it sliced diagonally through space-time. Well, it wasn’t exactly diagonal. When you have more than two dimensions, some of which are rolled up smaller than atoms and others popping into and out of relevancy, diagonal is not the technical term. But the process of bisecting all dimensions at once was difficult to name, especially with the changing number of dimensions at play, so diagonal was a good enough word for the way in which Pilot X was moving.

  Prohibited and dangerous were two other words that could be used to describe what he was doing. While threads of timelines were known to exist, it was not permissible or even a good idea to cut across them. Even worse was the idea of traveling diagonally across all of them.

  Fixed points in space-time made this very dangerous. If a diagonal trajectory was not plotted exactly right, the traveler would bounce off a fixed point like a rubber bullet off a steel wall, damaging space-time and herself in the process.

  Pilot X felt OK risking all this because of what the Alendan Core had told him. The idea that his own people—along with the Progons and the Sensaurians—could hide a raging war across time and space by manipulating the threads of time was rather hard to swallow. But he had swallowed it, thanks to the spoonful of sugar that was the display generator the Core gave him.

  He had also figured out why the generator was so much bigger than it need
ed to be. It served as a guidance system for diagonal space-time trajectories. It had been taken from the office that preserved time-travel artifacts. It was the only way to travel into the war zones without being stopped by the Alendans or destroyed by the Progons and Sensaurians.

  Pilot X placed a lot of trust in the generator. If it failed him—well, he’d hardly be aware, since his essence would be scattered across many millennia and alternate threads of time. An intriguing legacy, but not one he really wanted to leave.

  The rattling subsided into a shuddering, and Verity reported she would drop into fixed-flow space-time shortly. Pilot X relaxed a bit and prepared to get a view of the first alleged war zone. The Core suggested visiting this one first, since it was the least active point in the least active zone. It would give him a chance to observe with minimal risk.

  As the Verity dropped out of time travel, he saw why. Wreckage filled his view from a gargantuan battle. Only salvage operations moved through space. A planet had been destroyed, transformed into a belt of debris. Another one hung split in half, coalescing into two versions of itself.

  Warning alerts came on, but they were all from salvage operators alerting him of their claims. They assumed he was another salvager, making it safe to poke about.

  Among the wreckage, he recognized Alendan ships of all ages and classes, along with Progon warrior bodies and Sensaurian hives.

  The Verity settled into orbit around the fourth planet in the system. It had a wispy atmosphere and smoke still rising from bombings. Its seas were almost all gone. Its small moon had been cracked into pieces.

  “Did that world contain life?” Pilot X asked Verity.

  “Yes. The primitive sentient life was wiped out,” she replied. “Most water vaporized. Chance for recovery minimal.”

  “What about the other worlds?”

  “The first world was non-life-supporting. Second-world presentient life is dying, with runaway volcanic reactions leading to greenhouse ruin. Third-world presentient life was destroyed with catastrophic splitting. Fourth-world sentient life was destroyed, with atmosphere stripped. Fifth-world sentient colonization destroyed, planet destroyed. Outer gas planets minimally affected.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Projections show third and fourth planets minimally salvageable with water addition. Best chance for recovery is third planet—and most important to you.”

  “Why most important to me?”

  “It’s where coffee will come from.”

  “Then we do it. Let’s get some ice rocks from that outer cloud, seed the planet, and hope for the best. After that, we stop this war.”

  REVOLUTION

  It was the last location. Pilot X had successfully repaired, cleaned, and fenced off most of the great conflicts of the Dimensional War. He had never pushed Verity so hard and yet the last location was not going to be easy.

  So much Progon and Alendan firepower had entered the star in this system that it had caused a runaway reaction. Using constant time jumps and manipulations, he was barely able to prevent the star from going prematurely supernova, saving three planets’ worth of life and two sentient species too primitive to realize they’d been saved.

  According to the display generator the Alendan Core had given him, this was the apocalypse. The final battle. He sat down on an uninhabited tropical beach on one of the planets to rest. He had plenty of time. He had nothing but time. He leaned back against Verity’s boxy exterior and listened to the waves as the light warmed him. His exhaustion made the situation perfect.

  A few gulls cooed off in the distance. Then a voice said, “Well-deserved rest, Pilot X.” It was the Secretary.

  Pilot X jumped to his feet. “Sir?”

  The Secretary laughed. “I should call you Savior X. We all thought the revolutionary element of the Core got to you. But I watched and found it quite the contrary. You sir, have done Alenda the greatest service.” The Secretary bowed.

  “Thank you, sir. But . . . what do you mean the Core got to me?” Pilot X asked with a shiver in his voice, far out of place on this sunny beach.

  “You tied up every battle, you never waded into the conflict. And you wiped out all the evidence. You did more to keep the Dimensional War hidden than any other person in all history. We knew someone had done it, but we hadn’t got a chance to look. Imagine my surprise to find it was you.”

  “What are you talking about? I stayed out of the conflict to prevent making it worse. Then I cleaned up the Guardians’ mess and kept the war from spreading. I stopped their wars. I . . .”

  “If that’s how you need to think of it,” the Secretary said in a professorial tone. “One man’s freedom fighter is another’s insurrectionist. Either way the effect is the same and one we like very much. You cauterized the wounds. You didn’t stop the war, but you wiped out its tracks. Those not meant to see it won’t. Sadly, I don’t think you’ve quite preserved the entire universe, though. The Progons and Sensaurians are assuring that.” He shrugged. “But you have preserved the war. Like a ship in a bottle. A war in a time bottle.”

  “Why? We’re on the same side. I’ve achieved what you . . . Secretary, I really don’t understand.”

  “And you never will. That’s always been your problem, Citizen-Ambassador-Instructor-Pilot X. You try to be everything to all people. And because you inspire so many, in all our thread projections you were always the only one who could thwart our plan. To expose us and unravel it.”

  “What plan?” Pilot X yelled.

  “Alendan domination. We hid the war to hide our part in it because people wouldn’t understand. We must defeat the Progons and Sensaurians, no matter the cost. Only Alendans can be trusted to rule time. But you could never see that. You always sympathized with the little civs. The Hermits and the Mersennes and the Pantoons. Oh, you almost royally ruined us at that last one. You almost gave us a peace.”

  “But I thought you wanted peace?”

  “No. Far from it. Some of the Guardians, like Lau and her weak friends, tried to figure out how to carve out a peace. But that won’t work. We need the war. We just need it hidden while we find a thread where we win them all and rule. And that will be good for the universe.”

  “But what of all the people who die? Or the civilizations that can’t grow because of this? What of them?”

  “We must make sacrifices for the good of existence, Pilot X. Someday I hope you’ll see that.”

  Pilot X nodded as if he understood. Which he did, but not in the way the Secretary meant. He understood that the Alendans, his people, were not the good guys. They had the same justification as the Sensaurians. This conversation reminded him of his chess games with the Progons. Each civilization was so sure they knew what was best for the universe, that the universe would be better without the other civilizations around to challenge them. He had always assumed his civilization was an exception. It was not.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Pilot X asked. “Why follow me here?”

  “Oh. Well. Because doing this to any more conflicts would be dangerous. I don’t know what your list looks like, but no matter what else is on there, you’re done.”

  “I was done anyway.”

  “And when you return to Alenda, no action will be taken against you. You can even keep the name Pilot, though you will no longer be in the service of the Guardians, I’m afraid. You’ll need to surrender the Verity.”

  BOOK 3—NOW

  CONFRONTATION

  Outside the Alendan Core’s headquarters, Pilot X watched Alexandra approach. He wanted a confrontation. He wanted to tell her just how angry he was. How much she had cost him. How much he liked her cascading blonde hair and how that made him angrier.

  “Pilot X, I’m glad I found you—”

  He interrupted her sharply. “I am too. I’m glad I could help you and the Core further the ends of the war and tie it up tightly for you.”

  “What do you mean?” Her look of surprise was exquisitely genuine.

&nbs
p; “Oh, that’s beautiful. Maybe they didn’t even tell you? I think not, though. You all knew. Your instructions not to arrive during the conflicts were perfect. I tied up each battle neatly. I thought I was preserving the rest of the universe. Turned out I was keeping the rest of time from ever finding out about the extent of the war that rages behind my shields.”

  “No. I suppose it might seem that way—”

  “It might seem that way, I suppose,” he cut her off savagely, “if the Secretary hadn’t met me in the time of the final battle. Which, by the way, wasn’t the final battle at all but only a convenient place to tell me my work was done. Clever. You should have told him not to spill the beans. I would have come back here anyway to find out what was wrong.”

  “The final battle was not a battle?”

  “No, it wasn’t. But every other one was. And I cleaned them up so well. One had several destroyed planets. I cleaned that one up into a rather implausible moon and an asteroid belt. You’d never know it even happened. Scientists there in later eras are probably puzzled by the moon’s existence, but you know scientists. They always think of something to explain away the odd.”

  “The last battle should have been the apocalypse. That was where you were—” This time she was cut off by Aelreda, who had just arrived.

  “What are you telling her?” Aelreda snapped.

  “The truth,” Pilot X snapped back.

  “What truth?”

  Pilot X told her what the Secretary had said. Aelreda looked crestfallen. This scared Pilot X more than anything else.

  “You didn’t know,” he said.

  Aelreda could only shake her head. Tears came to her eyes.