by Amber Savage
Kendric felt weak and slumped to the sand. His family stood beyond sight, behind him, but it didn't make a difference. They could have been right in front of him and he would not have been able to see them. His shattered pride and overwhelming fear had consumed every last ounce of mental ability.
Magnahul had no qualms with the sanctity of what he was about to do. As the sole protector of his clan and something larger on the horizon, the responsibility rested on his shoulders. But it went beyond that. He was building something bigger than a clan. He was building a legacy that would transcend the petty desires of small men like Kendric.
He dismounted his giant black Clydesdale and unsheathed his ceremonial sword.
Not a word was spoken by the men on the beach or the men watching from their ships. It seemed as though the heavens had turned silent with the grief of the impending consequences. The Council members arrayed behind their lord as one soldier took up position behind each member of the shamed family. All eyes were on Magnahul.
He stood over the cowering Kendric who had resorted to what sounded like a plea for his life. It was unintelligible. His uncontrollable sobs muffled his meek voice and his undisciplined mind shrouded his sensibility. Tears gushed from his eyes as spit mixed with the wretch that flowed freely, fueled by the cowardice of a weak man.
Magnahul placed his sword gently over the nape of the cowering man's neck. The cold steel seemed to act as a lightning rod and froze the wailing.
"For the crime of treason against your lord and clan, you are hereby deemed unworthy of God and breath." Each man on land heard the words with crystal clarity as Magnahul boomed over the otherwise serene morning.
With these words, the heavy sword that was resting on the atlas where Kendric's head attached to his spine was commanded to advance. The effortless passage severed every fiber in the spinal cord. Almost no blood spilled that morning as the brain lost control of the muscles of the body as the man keeled over. Little life remained as the muscle memory of his lungs attempted to inhale.
He could hear the sound of twelve blades crashing on the necks of his kin. They had not been given kind passage to the afterlife. The crashing of their bodies, men and women, adults and children - was the last sound he heard. There was no seed of his or his father's before him that survived. Their names were wiped away from the records of the clan.
Chapter 8
He'd made the trip more than any man alive, but today it was different. The astral horologe had reset itself three times on its own and the space-time dampers were piquing above their design tolerances. If it weren't critical, he would have shut the transporter pod down, and returned home for some sorely missed sleep.
Rylen Hagan was the best time pilot in the fleet and his numbers were 302 to zero. His closest rival stood at 148 to 8. Three hundred and two time jumps in just ten years was a feat by any standard. It had never been achieved since time travel had become possible, just fifteen standard years ago. With so much successful experience, Hagan had learned to operate on his instincts.
Like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and Lois Francois breaking the light barrier, Hagan was the first to successfully break the speed of time.
His fellow terrestrial and space pilots who came before him in the 20th and 22nd centuries had it easy compared to what he had to put up with. Flying through the air was cool; flying across space was amazing, but flying across time - that was the final frontier.
The speed of time, or the Pietre effect, postulated by physicist Kravitz Pietre had done what no man thought possible - overcome the effects of the Grandfather Paradox. Hagan, a physicist himself, had studied under Pietre and understood the theory like it was his own.
Both men were close.
Time travel was still in its early days. It was the equivalent of flying biplanes in the early 1900s. But it got the job done. The planes or jumpers, as they were called, never left the special hangers they were built in. These hangers stood two hundred feet tall and stretched out across twenty football fields. They had a few limitations, chief among them was that they could only go back in time, and return, but never forward.
Hagan was good at what he did - very good. It was, however, diminished by his hubris. If it weren't for his attitude he could have made it much further in the chain of command and made a lot of coin in the process. His price for hubris was the value of his coin account - depleted and showing no signs of promise.
Hagan had been as far back as 1987, which was a bit of a fluke. When Hagan made the jump the furthest calibrated distance they could go was 2017, but Hagan had designed an unsanctioned modification, inserting his own astral horologe with the hopes of taking it back to 1887 - just for fun.
But the attempt had failed to get that far back and he landed in 1987 instead. He lost his place in line for promotion for three straight years after that. Not only had he made the jump to 1987, but he had also broken a cardinal rule of time travel while he was there and interacted with the locals beyond acceptable tolerances.
His return to the present - 2423, was not without consequences. The unsanctioned trip had triggered a cascade of consequences like a wave rippling from the center of a pond protesting the collision with a pebble. His irresponsible actions, four hundred and fifty-five years earlier, resulted in changes to large swaths of the western world and required twelve additional jumps over three years to correct.
And that was after it took Gray, the super time computer, three years to calculate the jump.
The Pietre system, on which time travel was based on at the time, was a function of energy conversion or generation. The more energy they could generate, the further back they could travel. Right now they used significant amounts of energy.
Today he was making another unsanctioned jump. This time not just by dialing in the wrong year, but by jumping without permission and using a vehicle that was not tested and certainly not sanctioned.
Unlike the stationary cockpits they jumped from at the complex, this was a pod. No calculations had been made, and no support team was in place.
He was alone.
With the astral horologe malfunctioning, his chance of hitting the time and place he planned on was only a 66.6% probability. Final jump authorization is only given if jump certainty is at least 99.8% under normal conditions. Today he had no time to fix or do anything about the discrepancy. He was operating within a small window of opportunity.
If he waited to fix the problem, he would be discovered. He had to make the jump now.
"I can make this work," he thought, as he pushed the override button and moved his hand, placing it on the launch button that was blinking red. It would turn green momentarily as the system processed his override command.
Green.
He launched. Destination: 2313.
Chapter 9
The Anstruthers fleet floated dead in the water. They couldn't dock on land.
Ten thousand men stood ready to turn the cove crimson. The fleet couldn't turn, the morning wind had died down. It would be later in the morning until the winds were in their favor once more. Even if they had the wind or they re-tasked their soldiers to the oars, the return passage was blocked by thirty ships with cannons ready.
The commander of the Anstruthers fleet had no choice but to surrender. It was a surrender that Magnahul expected.
"Take the skiff to the commander's vessel and bring him to me," Magnahul commanded.
There was a renewed sense of obedience up and down the ranks. Too much peace tends to whither the chains of command in men who wield swords for a living.
When the commander came ashore, bent down on one knee, raising his sword with both hands to the giant who now sat mounted atop his warhorse.
"My men and I pledge our allegiance to you my lord. Please accept our surrender."
"Why should I trust you?" Magnahul responded.
"You have my allegiance and I will fight with you as the leading edge of your force when the Anstruthers army arrives."
Magnahul wa
s hearing about this for the first time. His spies had not harvested any information of an advancing force from Glasgow. "Was this a ruse," he thought.
"How many men?"
"Twenty-thousand men from the south, and ten thousand from the east. They will be here by nightfall."
Magnahul turned to his heir, his oldest child.
"What do you think, Bronia?"
"We should proceed as if the worst possibility is true. Fortify the southern and eastern ridges and send troops to the southeast. Once the southern and eastern troops arrive at the ridge, enclose them from behind."
"I shall command the garrisons to do that."
Then he whispered something to his most trusted warrior and heir to his seat at the head of the clan. Bronia Magnahul was not as tall or broad as Adelstan. Built sleek and quick, Bronia had practiced scaling the north ridge at the age of twelve and had become one of the ablest close-combat fighters in the clan.
Adelstan issued this test to Bronia.
"Meet with Clive Anstruthers. They have a thin force protecting his flamboyant castle. Carry his head to the commander of the army attacking in the south and show him the error of his ways. Then do the same to the commander approaching from the east."
Chapter 10
His gamble did not pay off. Somehow, sitting now in the lap of consequence, he knew that 66.7% really meant zero. There was a reason the certainty had to be almost absolute before launch was initiated. Now, he was in a place that he did not recognize. The landing zone was not what he had studied before his departure. The skyline felt different. It was more natural forest and snow than urban jungle and smoke.
His position on a ridge gave him good vantage of two valleys on either side. The tallest structure in his field of vision was due west and about a mile.
A place of worship of some sort.
He tried to get his astral horologe to give him time and date but the damned device that was already on the fritz before the trip was now dead weight.
Two things occurred to him aside from the fact that he had no idea what time he was in. The second thing that dawned on him was that he had no way of getting back. Plotting a return trajectory without an astral horologe would be like navigating a submarine under the Arctic sheet at night without a map and sonar. It would be impossible.
For now, that didn't matter. What mattered was the mission he was on.
He kept out of sight until he could get a handle on where and when he was. That was his first priority. His second, and the reason he came on this trip, was to find Amelia Balfour.
However, the more he looked around, the more he began to get a sinking feeling that he had missed his time mark. From the lack of technology, it looked like it was quite a bit. It had been two hours since he arrived and he had yet to lay eyes on a single person. There were no sky vehicles of any sort and he had seen evidence of outdoor farming - something that had gone extinct two hundred years before his time.
He guessed that this may be the late 1900s.
He was wrong.
Chapter 11
"What had Kendric done?"
It was clear to Magnahul that the vulnerabilities of the clan would have been revealed to the enemy. The weaknesses and higher strengths would be what the advancing enemies would have planned on.
Thirty thousand men descending on them and not a word had made it back to Magnahul means that the plans were well laid out. Thirty thousand men were more than what the Anstruthers had with them. They would have formed an alliance to march against him.
That would be the only reason the spies that had been planted along the coast all the way down to the Welsh lowlands and the English channel had been compromised.
The only ones who knew of the impending attack were Magnahul and the surrendering sailors. Lord Magnahul had to move swiftly if he wished to upset their element of surprise.
He had three-quarters of a day before they were at the city gates. The Magnahuls had 10,000 men at the shore and another fifty thousand at camp.
They could rely on the Clintocks in the north for another twenty-thousand. Men were not the problem. But, he didn't wish to go to war. He was not afraid of war coming to him, but he wanted a more surgical way to vanquish his enemy.
Magnahul was silent, but wise. His tent was the simplest of all members of the three councils. He had no desire for possession or wealth. He was in search of something greater - a legacy. The impending war - something that he had worked hard to forestall, was now at hand.
He ordered his men to search the commander and bind him. The sailors from all fifteen ships were packed into one of their own. Their sail was stripped, oars removed and rudder destroyed. Two of the Magnahul ships towed it out to the north Atlantic and set it adrift. The remaining 44 ships, thirty of their own and fourteen of the invaders' were loaded with fifty men each, taken from the garrison that had marched to the shore with Magnahul.
This fleet was dispatched to Glasgow.
It was a strategic strike.
Clive Anstruthers had made two grave errors. First, he had placed his trust in the feeble-minded Kendric. Second, he had left himself open in Glasgow. He would pay the price for his poor judgment.
Chapter 12
The boost he had used to take the pod further had malfunctioned and thrown him to a period of time where the fuel to power his flight back did not exist.
It had not even been invented yet. More than half of the technology that went into the pod was not invented and wouldn't be for quite some time from the look of things.
He sat on a grassy patch amidst the snow caps and felt the chill of the season bite into his bones. It was a beautiful sight. The waters of the Loch below were the bluest he had ever seen.
Snow-capped mountains he saw with his own eyes for the first time in his life were a thing of novelty and graphic art in his time. The feeling of seeing pristine nature and breathing the clean air soothed his nerves.
Right now, however, there was no beauty in the world that could wrest the pain in his soul. He had lost Clarissa forever and he was inconsolable. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
After two hours of endless sobbing, he suddenly couldn't feel his thoughts. Nothing made sense to him. He was no longer sure if he was crying because he was lost, or because he lost Clarissa.
Maybe it was both.
The cleanup crew would not know to look for him here. There was no trace of a jump in the system. He had made sure of that, but then again, he was not expecting to be lost in time. His grief ebbed for a moment as he felt the chill grip the ground in the wake of the retreating sun. He needed to find shelter and he had to hide the pod. He cursed himself for spending valuable daylight on the sobs and tears of a child.
The pod could be buried easily in the snow, he thought after some time. That would shield it from prying locals if there were any. Hagan prided himself with facts of history, but right now he had no idea where on earth and when in time he had landed.
As he busily buried the pod in the snow, he considered his options. He heard footsteps running toward him. Before he could turn to see the source of the sound, a heavy club crashed on his head, rendering him unconscious.
Chapter 13
Messengers from different corners of the land were arriving in a steady stream with updates on ground movements.
The Anstruthers had dispatched all their men in an effort to pounce with surprise. They had made an all or nothing gamble and were about to lose severely.
A messenger from the northern ridge arrived with news of a spy. They were lowering him now and would be there in a few minutes. Adelstan was unsure where this spy was from or how long he had been observing movements.
If they had managed to dispatch word to Anstruthers then the forty-four ships now en route would be in danger. The element of surprise was essential to the success of the operation.
He instructed them to take the prisoner to the holding tent and secure him there. He would be along shortly.
With the messenger ou
t of sight.
He stared at the ground for a minute. The weight of the world bore down on Adelstan. "All things were either blessings or curses," he thought. "It is our actions that decide which."
In so reminding himself, he decided to see this is as an opportunity rather than a threat. Adelstan moved resolutely from his tent to the holding tent. The man was bound to the chair and wore strange garb. He was under-dressed for the climate and while everyone was certain he was a spy, Adelstan instantly knew that he was not. No spy would have ascended the ridge to keep an eye on the quarry dressed the way he was.
"Who are you?" Magnahul thundered.
"Rylen Hagan," he answered.
"Which clan?"
"Clan?" Rylen was confused. The bruise on the back of his head made thinking all the more difficult. He wasn't expecting to hear the word, "clan" in 2137. But then again, he wasn't expecting to find a place that had no electricity and men riding horses.
He was obviously in a time that predated the 1900s.
"What year is this?" he asked.
The rest of the guards found it to be insolent that he had not answered their lord's question and posed one of his own instead. As one of the guards moved to strike him, Magnahul intervened.
"Bring him to my tent and put warm clothes on him. He is already turning blue. Bring us both food." He ordered the men who were at a loss. They did as he commanded, nonetheless.
By the time Hagan arrived at his host's tent, his mind had started to clear. The warmth his host had bestowed on him jump-started his thinking. The bump at the back of his head was still considerably larger than a tennis ball by this point, and his migraine was persistent, but it could be worse.
"I am not a man who appreciates being lied to. War is imminent in the valley, and you have been accused of being a spy for the enemy."
The words spoken by the large man, almost twice his size in height, width, and power, shook Rylen to the bone.
