The Well of Time

by Robert I. Katz

  Over a thousand men and women were engaged in a war game in a simulated jungle: tall trees, dense undergrowth, hot, wet and humid. There were two teams of 500 each. It was difficult to spot them, as their armor changed color to blend into the background.

  “What’s the game?” Michael asked.

  “Capture the hill.”

  A small hill rose out of the jungle, almost in the chamber’s center.

  Both teams had by now taken simulated casualties. Flash bangs had incapacitated about a tenth of the combatants, their armor dutifully turning off when struck. Hand to hand combat had eliminated another tenth. Each team had flankers out, who silently crept through the jungle, trying to evade detection and sometimes succeeding. As they moved, the terrain changed in front of them, turning from flat, sandy terrain to swamp and then into a wall of creeper vines, then back into sand.

  “Anything special about this hill?”

  Dustin glanced at him. “Nah. Just a hill.”

  A simple game. Both teams knew what they were doing. They moved with smooth efficiency, silent, swift and sure. It wasn’t long before a small group broke through an earthen embankment, scrambled up a decaying wooden stockade and established possession of the hill, digging in behind a swiftly erected barricade. A few minutes later, the first edge of the opposite team also arrived.

  “Time,” Dustin called. His voice echoed throughout the enormous arena.

  The marines stopped. Their camouflage dropped away and all thousand could suddenly be seen.

  “Report to the auditorium,” Dustin announced. “Debriefing will take place in fifteen minutes.”

  “Nice,” Michael commented.

  Dustin nodded. “Not much to criticize, on either side. They’re good.”

  They were good, Michael reflected, and under Dustin Nye’s expert tutelage, they were getting better all the time.

  “You want to come along?” Dustin asked.

  “No,” Michael said. “You take care of it.”

  Dustin looked at him. “Any idea what we’re getting into?”

  Michael shook his head. “Duval was just a world, way back when. Nothing special about it. Who knows what it’s like now?”

  Dustin grinned at him. “I guess we’ll see.”

  “I guess we will.”

  “Holy shit,” Curly muttered.

  There was a lot of traffic in the Duval system, none of it involving the world itself, because Duval-3 was in flames. Smoke rose from nearly a thousand smoldering craters that used to be cities. The forests and grasslands surrounding these craters were still burning, soot and ashes roiling upward into the sky. A smoky haze blanketed the entire world.

  Five spy satellites orbit the world, presumably transmitting to whoever had caused this, keeping an eye on things, just in case.

  Michael shook his head. He had seen destruction like this too many times, thousands of years ago, during the war with the Hirrill. He had hoped to never see it again. As individuals and as a race, the Hirrill could not be bargained with, could not be reasoned with. To the Hirrill, humanity was meat, pure and simple.

  And now here he was, again, looking at a world on fire.

  “Romulus,” he said, “take us down.”

  There would be survivors. There always were, hidden in deep underground bunkers or on islands far out at sea, or those few who preferred an isolated life in the wilderness. Even the survivors, however, would need help, because the climate was going to be colder than normal for quite a few years. Crops would be failing and game scarce.

  Left alone, there was a good chance that humanity on Duval-3 would soon tumble toward extinction.

  A lot of activity in the belt, Michael noted, with three large asteroids turned into busy habitats. Ships came and went in a steady stream to and from the transport points at the edges of the system, many of them very large, well armed ships.

  “I think we’ve come to the right place,” Michael said.

  “Where do we even begin?” Richard said.

  Michael sighed. “Underground.”

  Once, Tetsuo Collier would have been tall and well built, by the standards of these rather small people. Now, he slumped. His hands trembled. His skin was pale, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in many months. He seemed malnourished.

  And he was old. Michael wasn’t used to that. Old people were not rare in the Empire, but those who looked old, were.

  Gehenna’s sensors had no difficulty in penetrating through the rocks and the dirt. They had mapped seven underground installations, two on each of the larger continents, one on the smallest.

  “They all have signs of life,” Romulus said. “The largest is under a mountain range in the center of the Eastern continent.”

  “That’s where we’ll start,” Michael said.

  Apparently, the survivors had sensors, and at least minimal ability to screen their emissions. As they approached, electrical activity appeared to cease. Nothing moved on the mountain except a small pile of ash stirred by a breeze.

  “They’re afraid,” Frankie said.

  “They have reason to be,” Matthew said.

  A forest of pine trees had once covered the mountain. Now, it was covered by ashes. A few green shoots poked their way through the devastation, however, life slowly returning. Michael had seen this many times before. Wipe out the native population, wait a century or so for nature to take its course, then move your own people into a verdant, fallow world.

  “We’ll have to go in person,” Michael said. “They won’t trust a drone.”

  “Why would they trust a person?” Marissa said.

  “They might not. They probably won’t, not at first. We’ll have to convince them that we come in peace.”

  “For the good of all mankind?” Rosanna said.

  Michael sighed. “Yeah.”

  Michael, Frankie and Henrik Anson made the first approach, wearing small and inoffensive bodies. They stood at the base of the mountain, gave a prepared speech into what appeared to be thin air and waited. Nothing happened. They set up camp, pitched tents, heated pre-packaged meals over a campfire and went to sleep. The next day, they repeated their message. After three days, a rock wall in the side of the mountain opened wide and twenty soldiers swarmed out. The soldiers pointed their rifles at Michael and his small group. One of them stepped forward. “Come with us,” he said.

  “Of course,” Michael said.

  The installation was clean but spartan, the floor and walls unadorned rock. Fluorescent lights were set into the ceiling. They walked down a corridor until they came to a branch. They turned right. The corridor branched again, then again. They saw people, furtive, small, scurrying away. Finally, they arrived at a large cavern, it’s walls lined with monitor screens displaying scenes from all around the mountain. More soldiers clustered here, surrounding three women and two men, who seemed to be in charge. One of these, a man, stepped forward. “Who are you?” he said.

  An hour later, they sat in a conference room, Michael, Frankie, Anson, the five who had first met them and seven others wearing military fatigues, four men and three women. All of them were small by Empire standards, but the seven were younger and well built. They moved like athletes, or like the soldiers they were. All of them regarded Michael and his people with open suspicion.

  Food had been offered. It seemed only polite to accept. The food was basic but plain, and there wasn’t much of it. Probably, they had little to spare.

  Outside, in the cavern, Tetsuo Collier had listened to Michael’s explanation of their presence. He had shrugged, introduced his colleagues and then himself. “I am the President of the United Republic of Takahara, such as it is.” He frowned, and waved a hand at the four people who flanked him, all of whom stared at Michael with a mixture of hope and suspicion. “The surviving members of my cabinet.” Tetsuo Collier drew a deep sigh and shook his head. “Not so long ago, Takahara was the second largest nation on Duval, and by far the most prosperous.”

  The story he told was
much as they had expected. One clear day in the Springtime, nearly four years ago, with no warning, death had rained down from the skies. There had been no calls for surrender, no demands for negotiation and no contact with the enemy. Bombs fell. Cities vanished. People died.

  “We still don’t know who they are,” Tetsuo Collier said. “At first, we thought we were under attack from other nations on this world, not all of whom were our allies.” He smiled bitterly. “We finally realized that this was a mistake, but not before we sent off a few missiles of our own.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael said. “I don’t think the people who did this cared in the slightest what you were doing. They had their own plan and they stuck to it. Your missiles may have landed, but theirs did, too. Every city on this world is gone. Nothing you could do would have changed that.”

  Tetsuo Collier sighed. “A small consolation,” he said, “but we’ll take it.” He shook his head and looked at them all. “And so you are from the Empire: the long vanished, fabled Empire.”

  “So they say.”

  There was always at least one, Michael reflected. Always at least one bitter, angry, suspicious and resentful idiot. This one was the Head of Internal Security, not that there was much left to secure. His name was Alban Briggs. He was grizzled, middle-aged and balding, but he stood straight and he seemed less beaten down than most of the others.

  Tetsuo Collier looked at him and audibly sighed. The former Secretary of State, a woman named Natalie Arroyo, gave an almost invisible roll of her eyes.

  “Sit down, Alban,” Tetsuo Collier said. He straightened his rounded shoulders and for a moment, he resembled the forceful, decisive leader he used to be. “Are you really deluding yourself, even for an instant, that our unseen enemies couldn’t destroy us if they wanted to?” Tetsuo Colliers lips firmed. “No. They’ve left us alone because they don’t care. We’re no threat to anyone. We are totally and completely irrelevant, the last, pitiful remnants of a nearly extinct species on this world.”

  For a long moment, nobody spoke. Alban Brigg’s face seemed to crumble. He shook his head and sat heavily into his seat.

  “Anybody else?” Tetsuo Collier said. No one spoke. He turned to Michael. “Please,” he said. “Talk to us. Tell us why you’re here…”

  “So, that’s it,” Michael concluded. “The Duval system has been invested with a very large force, presumably the vanguard of some currently unknown power. They’ve occupied your asteroid belt and constructed habitats. They’ve dug in for the long haul.

  “Presumably, once the dust clears and the environment has stabilized, they’ll begin to colonize Duval.”

  “And at that point,” Natalie Arroyo said, “finish wiping us out.”

  Michael shrugged. “I hope to disrupt their plans. We’ve sent scout ships back to Dancy and Reliance. By now, the Empire knows what’s happened here. Relief ships will be on their way. They will no doubt be accompanied by a fleet of warships.

  “You have a few choices. You are not quite the last people left on this world. There are six other installations similar to yours. There are also small populations on fertile, isolated islands. You could evacuate this base and we could take you to those islands. Life would be easier there, but we would advise against it. There are spy satellites in orbit. The more people assembled in one place, the more attractive a target you would become.

  “You could stay here. The Imperial fleets will supply you with whatever you need to survive, but make no mistake—this system is going to become a warzone. My advice is to evacuate Duval. Once the war is over, you can return.” Michael shrugged. “If there is anything left to return to.”

  Tetsuo Collier drew a long sigh. “And assuming that you win.” His people looked down at the table, their expressions morose. “In the meantime,” he said, “what are you going to do?”

  Michael smiled. “As you may have gathered, I have some influence with the Imperial authorities. The fleet will arrive, probably within a few weeks, but it will stay hidden until I say otherwise. A lot of ships are coming in and out of this system, some of them warships, some, obviously merchants. We are only beginning to identify the origins of these ships.

  “The Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind has an enemy. That enemy has been working against us for many years. We’ve struck a few recent blows against their proxies but apparently, not enough to seriously interfere with their plans. We need information. We still don’t know what we’re fighting against.”

  Tetsuo Collier nodded. “That makes sense. How much time do we have?”

  “Before our mission here is complete? Months. My ship will probably leave before then, but the fleet will remain. In the meantime, sit tight, and consider your options.”

  Chapter 10

  After the collapse of the First Empire, Duval had fallen into a long dark age, but after a thousand years, civilization had begun to re-assert itself and prior to the sysstem’s invasion, had advanced to the level of the late Twentieth Century. Takahara and a few of their competing nations had possessed limited space-going capacity, enough to place weather and communication satellites in orbit, but they had not yet begun to settle the rest of their system.

  And now, they never would.

  Matthew and Marissa Oliver, and Richard Norlin as well, had spent their early years among the rich and powerful of their respective worlds. Diplomacy was second nature to them all, and Henrik Anson’s position in military intelligence had involved frequent contact with Imperial authorities. Michael assigned all four to head delegations to the scattered remnants of the people of Duval. This was an act of mercy but secondary to their primary mission, almost an afterthought.

  None of the unfortunate survivors of Duval knew anything that could help them.

  That did not disturb Michael. He knew where to get all the information they needed.

  The enemy had established installations on three dwarf planets: Helios, Virgo and Sidon. Helios was the largest, but all three ranged between 900 and 1200 kilometers in diameter. Gravity generators had apparently been placed in their cores and pearly, oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres shimmered against the blackness of space. All were in the process of being terraformed, with lakes, rivers, mountains, a small ocean and numerous cities rising upward. Each possessed a naval base with a fleet of warships, all larger than the Shiloh, sitting on a central tarmac. Each had two other spaceports reserved for civilian craft, surrounded by rapidly growing communities.

  The warships were a type unknown to the Empire. Long, needle-nosed, covered with gunports and missile silos. Their capacities were a mystery. The merchants, however, seemed to be a standard design and were lightly armed. If the enemy possessed stealth technology, they felt secure enough that they saw no need to use it.

  “You know what to do,” Michael said.

  “Of course,” Anson replied.

  A merchant ship emerged from slip-space at the edges of the Duval system and was immediately surrounded by three heavily armed Imperial corvettes, each more than twice its length. The lead ship sent a message. “Heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

  The merchant tried to flee. Its captain reconsidered when a warning shot streaked past the bow. The ship stopped and airlocks opened. Two hundred Imperial Marines in armor floated across to the merchant and entered.

  Anson breathed a sigh of relief. “That went well.”

  “So far, so good. Now we’ll see what they know,” Michael said.

  They had been unable to prevent the merchant ship’s captain from sending a distress signal, but that was of little account. By the time any possible rescue could arrive, Gehenna, and the captured ship, would be long gone.

  The merchant ship’s crew was removed and transported into Gehenna’s expansive confinement bay. Captain Thorenson sent over a prize crew and the merchant ship, renamed the Defiant, set back out into slip-space, headed for Dancy.

  “I suppose it could have been worse,” Michael said an hour later, but it was hard to see how.
/>   Anson glumly nodded. Curly and Richard Norlin looked worried. Rosanna’s feelings were expressed by the force with which she chopped vegetables at the counter. Frankie frowned. Only Matthew and Marissa seemed eager.

  The merchant ship carried a crew of fifty, thirty-two men, eighteen women, all human. They were shareholders of an organization they referred to as the Akadius Corporation, one of seventy-six independent oligarchies, occupying at least two hundred star systems, loosely organized into a Senatorial Board of Directors, all on the other side of the spiral arm from Duval. Their distant ancestors had emigrated from the Caldwell 86 star cluster, shortly after the First Empire’s dissolution. A query of Gehenna’s updated database revealed no information on such an event, but this was not surprising. Civil war and socio-economic collapse do not lend themselves to the keeping of accurate records.

  According to the data they had taken from the re-named Defiant, the Akadius Corporation occupied three systems in addition to Duval. There may have been more. There probably were more. The oligarchs were long known to keep secrets. The size and exact resources of the seventy-six corporations (or Corporate States, as they called themselves) could only be guessed at. All seventy-six contributed ships and personnel to a combined naval police force, the purpose of which was to mediate disputes between the corporations, which seemed to be in perpetual simmering conflict with each other.

  “Reminds me of home,” Marissa remarked. “Meridien, that is.”

  Michael frowned at her. Meridien’s social organization did resemble the unbridled competition that seemed to exist among the Corporate States, and Meridien’s Guild Council bore a superficial resemblance to this Corporate Senatorial Board. The differences though, were significant. The guild system’s purpose was to identify and offer incentives to its members and to give relative immunity to those who chose not to participate.