by Amber Savage
He would be the first leader of the clan not named Magnahul.
The elders had one enemy to think of. Adelstan had two. The moment for contemplation had ended with the last Act. It was now time for a decisive encounter.
Magnahul summoned his messenger while he withdrew his scroll and seal. He scribbled a decree and placed his seal on it, handing it to the waiting messenger. The young man received it and bent forward to place his ear a breath's distance away from his lord's lips.
Nodding to signify comprehension, the young messenger ran like the wind to do his master's bidding. Kendric failed at his attempt to contain his true intentions and let a smile at the corner of his despicable lips show.
"So, we go to war?" he bellowed.
Magnahul said nothing. He despised those who valued wealth, especially when it was traded for blood.
Chapter 4
Clarissa was at the gym as Hagan took his time getting into gear that morning. He was not on the flight roster and had the day off. The jump that morning was the twelfth and the last of the recovery flights that were sent to adjust the changes that Hagan's Crash of '87 had caused.
He had sat this one out.
He was resigned to just monitoring the news and the effects that would come to pass. Hagan was out of the loop on the pre-jump calculations Gray had been making in the run-up to the mission.
He had no insight or input on the jump, but he did have access to temporal changelogs that were there to keep track of the trillions of tiny changes that would occur each time a jump was made and history changed. No one really went through every line of it. It was there just as a matter of record for those in Time Force.
As arrogant as he was on the outside, Hagan knew he had screwed up. He was rooting for the pilots who jumped to fix his mess.
Today's last jump happened in the predawn hours while Clarissa and he were asleep. Like all those in the Time Force, he had his epiphysis cerebri shielded.
The shield protected him from the alteration to his memory whenever history changed. Everyone who did not have epiphysis cerebri protection would remember only what was in their new timeline.
Hagan and others in Time Force would remember both - altered and unaltered history. Gray, the time-independent quantum-organic computer, kept track of normal and altered timelines and fed that information to members of the Time Force.
Even with all this, pilots had to have strong mental fortitude to manage both streams of history. It was one of the reasons personalities like Hagan were so abrasive. They were arrogant and unyielding. They had powerful minds but no heart to temper the imbalance. Clarissa had changed that.
It was almost noon when Hagan finally got out from under the covers. He remembered that Clarissa would be at the gym and that he had to fend for himself in the kitchen.
Of course, he was more than capable of handling the food replicator, but food somehow tasted wholesome when Clarissa brought it to him and they shared a meal. Six years after they first met, he still smiled when he thought of her. No matter how ignorant men behaved externally, the right girl always seemed to shatter the exterior facade to reveal the gentle fathers men eventually become.
They had met a few days following his return to the present, after being the cause of the catastrophic Crash of '87 jump. He was down in the dumps and she needed someone to rescue. It was a perfect match. She had just moved into town and was working as a personal valet for one of the wealthy families in Pittsburgh, capital of the North American territories. The east coast of 2430 was what was left after the eastern seaboard had been wiped away by the rising tides of complacency and ignorance more than 300 years earlier.
Almost no one in the current generation knew or cared that the waters in the east held a secret in their bellies. Towns form Boston to Washington DC, the capital of Old America, all the way down to Houston lay under more than fifty feet of ocean.
The good news was that there was no longer any risk of coastal flooding. There were no longer any sheets of glaciers or icebergs anywhere in the world. The Himalayas in the winter looked like the Grand Tetons in the summer. Sharp and jagged granite that seemed to scour the sky had displaced the previous cooler occupants who had melted into the Indus in the east and the Gangga in the west while breaking up the subcontinent of India into a dozen islands by flooding the valleys.
Hagan got into his running attire and headed to the roof. It was one of the tallest buildings in Pittsburgh and overlooked the jade-colored Atlantic. He loved to run the three-mile track. It gave him views of the ocean and the islands that dotted it.
His grandfather had told him how they had once been part of the terrain of central Pennsylvania. Only the peaks of the tallest rises remained and they peaked out of the water to form a necklace of islands. To the north, the shoreline ran straight up to meet the shores of Lake Erie, now just part of the Atlantic.
He wore his Gray Lens - regular contact lenses that lay on his cornea while scanning the faces of whoever he was looking at. It gave him data on who they were in the current timeline and who they had been in the original timeline.
He made it a habit to wear those every time a jump was made. His memory was shielded from changes in the effects of time alterations, but the others were not.
He didn't want to ask someone about a spouse that no longer existed or a life they were not living after the time change. Since there was a jump that morning, he knew that there would be some who had mild changes made to their lives.
He was right.
As he jogged he could see very few green halos that sat atop those who had no alteration and the shades of red that sat atop those whose lives were not what they were before the jump. The darker the shade of red, the more acute the change.
There were several people with green halos, but there were many more with crimson - the ones who had significant changes in their lives. He knew all of them personally.
Clarissa and he were good friends with most of them. He had the information engine set to lite mode so he only knew that there were alterations but not what they were. He didn't need that information at this point. He was out for a run and just wanted to keep to himself that morning.
The salty air, three hundred feet up was therapeutic. It cleared his head and elevated his heart.
After ninety minutes of alternating between jogging, running, and sprinting, he was ready to get home and start his day. He would be just in time for a quick shower before Clarissa returned.
They planned on spending the day together. Many decisions that needed to made for the upcoming wedding, loomed.
The couple also had a meeting with the drone operators for the photography.
"Never thought this would happen," he thought to himself as he rode the elevator down.
Not only was it happening, but something in him was looking forward to the whole nine yards. From the wedding ceremony to the honeymoon, even the planning, and the shopping.
It was as though he was a new person and someone had altered his DNA and mental programming. No one had, though. It was just that he had found his soulmate and couldn't wait to live the rest of his life with her. She felt the same way.
This was not a feeling that one reads about in books and advice columns. It had the earmarking of something deeper. There was a connection between them he could not explain.
He walked in the front door telling Clarissa about how good he felt after his run and that there were quite a few "crims" in his lens today, but he wasn't in the mood to engage in banter.
"How was Yoga?" he inquired. The silence that returned told him that Clarissa was not back yet.
He jumped into the shower, which didn't take long. As he toweled, he heard the apartment door and smiled. "She’s back," he thought, "Good, I'm famished." He walked out to greet her. Passing the bedroom, something in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Hagan stopped cold in his tracks. He was a man of strong constitution, but the sight of this chilled him to his spine.
Chapter 5
The messenger mounted his steed and thundered to Port Halahhan. It was a three-hour ride.
He was to meet with the commander of the battle fleet stationed at the port. Magnahul's ships had been repositioned there three days earlier when he had gotten word that the ships in Glasgow were being prepared to take to the sea. His spies across Scotland were reliable and loyal.
The messenger reached Magnahul's fleet and delivered his lord's missive which prompted immediate action. Preparations had already been made to set sail on a moment's notice.
The moment to execute the plan was at hand. The messenger was dispatched back to his lord with updates.
With a fresh horse and a refreshed gullet, the messenger galloped back. The moonlit night aided in his speed and he was back in the tent at the same time the Magnahul ships came up silently behind the Anstruthers fleet just beyond the horizon.
When the messenger entered the council's tent, they were in the midst of concluding their deliberations. Magnahul had told the council that he would deploy a single garrison to the inlet but he was not ready to launch an attack. He did, however, command that the war council accompany him and the garrison. Kendric began to protest but was quickly waved down by his lord.
"You have nothing to worry about. I will have armed escorts protect the council's return to safety if war should ensue."
With that the council was served a hearty meal while Magnahul returned to his tent. Commander Heagantrout stood outside the lord's humble pavilion.
"Me lord."
"How goes preparations, Commander?"
"All is ready m'lord. The prisoners have been caged and are on their way. The guards outside the Council tent have been instructed to not let anyone leave and all the horses are ready for the Council members to be on their way to the shore."
With that Lord Magnahul entered his tent and made his way to his private enclave. He donned his military garb and added his ceremonial blade to his retinue, then bent a knee in front of the shrine that housed his ancestors' relics.
He asked for wisdom of the ages and strength of Gods.
"Act through me, for the glory of your name."
With a clenched fist, he pounded his chest and swiftly made flight to the tent's main entrance and his awaiting horse. First light was now just an hour away. The advancing ships would be within reach soon.
With absolute command in his chest, and certainty of actions in his mind, Magnahul took his place at the head of ten thousand men and the Council of War, and they rode hard for the coast.
They arrived in time to see the masts of the ships with the pol-ax banners waving in the morning breeze as they anchored. He left the garrison behind the rise, beyond sight of the ships, and commanded the members of the war council to follow him along with the guards.
As they reached the apex of the rise, twelve poles standing erect in the white sands of the shore came into view. From the top of each pole hung one member of Kendric's family.
The command ship of the Anstruthers fleet did not know what to make of it. Each of the fifteen ships carrying fifty men in full gear then saw the garrison mount the apex of the rise. Ten thousand men looked down on the fifteen ships and saw thirty more pierce the horizon. They were not carrying men, they carried cannons and flew the Magnahul banner.
Chapter 6
Dripping wet from his shower, he stood in the middle of his bedroom. From where stood he could see a figure entering the bedroom door on his left, but on his right, he saw a figure with a crimson halo. He had forgotten to remove his Gray Lens. For a minute nothing made sense.
"Honey, I'm home" came the voice from the bedroom door as it opened. Something wasn't right. He glanced at the opening door and then glanced at the mirror to see both images come into focus. Then it all came crashing down. Clarity had struck a blow, from which he had no way of recovering. The blond that entered the room was not Clarissa and the crimson halo that appeared on his lens hovered over the reflection of him in the mirror. His life had been changed by the last jump.
He had to think. His mind was shielded from the changes that took place and his new memories had not yet caught up to him - he only possessed his old ones.
The changes in his life were just now taking place but for Jessica, the blonde standing at the door, there was certainly a longer history. He smiled at her in his practiced suave demeanor. She hadn't been to the gym - she was out shopping. Gray Lens gave him her name and history.
People like Clarissa and Jessica were collateral damage in time jumps. But there was a difference. Jessica was who was supposed to be in his life if he had not messed up in the Crash of 87. Clarissa was who he did meet when he got back and fell in love with. Clarissa was the error and was erased when the cleanup crew had finished the last jump that morning.
As his memory caught up and the lens backed him up, he knew what he needed to do. He took his leave of the giddy and bubbly Jessica who was still happy with the shopping she had been doing since dawn. She didn't mind him going to the office. She would be going out shopping in a little while anyway.
The crew that had jumped had already returned.
The mission that spanned six years was deemed a success with the completion of this last jump. All the changes that were needed to keep the world on track and with the least amount of changes had been accomplished.
Rylen Hagan didn't waste any time. He made his way to the jump complex and rushed to his mentor's office. Pietre, who always had his lens on, looked up at him, did a double-take, then saw the look on his face. Something had gone wrong.
"What happened," he asked.
Rylen told him.
"Your soulmate was erased," Pietre said solemnly. "I liked her. Gray wouldn't have accounted for that in the pre-jump calculus, we didn't ask it to include changes to those who were results of the error."
"Why not?" bellowed Rylen, half knowing the answer.
"Well, because, they would be erased and most people's memory of them would be erased. They were not supposed to be here in the first place."
It took Gray, the AI framework that calculated the complex calculations of jumps and kept track of the different times, three years to find the changes that needed to be made to correct Hagan's Crash of '87. Putting in parameters to factor out collateral damage would have taken longer.
Rylen didn't bother asking about bringing Clarissa back.
He knew that no one would sanction it. He wouldn't either if he was in charge. Instead, he wanted to know about his design.
"Had Gray run the simulations on the new modifications for the mobile jumpers."
"Indeed," Pietre replied. "We got the initial calculations. It looks plausible for short-hauls. Less than fifty-year leaps according to Gray."
Beyond fifty years and the circuitry of the astral horologe attempts to reset itself. They spent the rest of the afternoon working on the modifications.
Hagan didn't say a word about Clarissa. Pietre didn't ask.
He figured Rylen needed to take his mind off things and focus them on the invention that would get him his Nobel. Pietre had already won the Nobel for the equation.
This time, Hagan would certainly get it for the portable jumper, or what they had come to call it, "the pod."
The portable jumper was untethered from Gray. It was not something that Gray would track if it was used to jump. Hagan had already figured that he would do one of two things. He would either return to the fork in time that erased Clarissa from the present, or he will find her in a different timeline and stay there with her.
Even though she wouldn't know who he was in her timeline, he was confident that they were soul mates and that she would still fall in love with him in that timeline as she did in this one.
The plan was set in motion.
He poured over the temporal logs looking for Clarissa's last ancestors that shared the common timeline. He knew that he could go back far enough he would find a common point where the timelines were the same. He was willing to go back a
s far as he needed but found that it was just three generations earlier. Clarissa was a pure fruit of error.
She did not exist in any timeline except one - the one that emanated from the Crash.
The Hagan Crash of '87 had caused a ripple effect that brought about Amelia Balfour to marry Clarissa's great great grandfather. If the Crash did not happen, Amelia Balfour would not even come close to meeting him and give rise to Clarissa's line. Hagan narrowed it down to 2313, just over a hundred years from his own time. There he could get to Amelia and put her in contact with the man she should marry so that Clarissa could be born. The pod would not be able to make it in it's current design.
But he had a booster - the same one that boosted his regular jump to 1987. He was confident that he could push his portable jumper to 2313. It was a gamble.
Chapter 7
The guards relieved Kendric of his horse and valuables. Family members who were tied to the top of poles were lowered.
The look of fear glossed over each of them. A sudden sense of regret at the greed they had allowed to invade their good fortunes stood front and center. It was easy to let ambition run wile when times are good. It's altogether another matter when the bill comes due.
Kendric's tunic was ripped off his shoulder and the lion-head pin that signified the highest honor of a clan member - his passport to privileges within the clan and across the land was ignominiously unseated. He stood on the shore bare, with just his white billowy shirt. A scrawny figure reduced to the heap of history as a traitor. Custom demanded death.
There had been no time for a trial and none was needed. The lord of the Clan, especially one who carried the blood of his forefathers, had absolute authority over who lived and who perished. No one would argue with that. Slaying a man from his grips on life was a solemn responsibility and one, now, that was being witnessed by ten-thousand men. The shores of the Loch had momentarily transformed into gallows.
