by Tim C Taylor
“We were freaking decoys?”
“Damned right, soldier. I know that’s hard to take but what you did was vital. It mattered.”
“An archeological expedition…? They were going to find something they shouldn’t. What was it? Another military cache?”
Greyhart leaned in close and sniffed me. It sounds freakish now I think of it, but I was too high to care at the time. My guess is that he had some kind of medical implant built into him, and he was checking I was going to die before he revealed any more.
“I am a little forgetful about your era’s knowledge,” he said. “I can’t keep track of who knew what at any point in history. Can you please remind me why aliens contacted various parties on Earth back in 21st century?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was a bizarre question, but I thought he meant it seriously, so I elaborated. “I do know the rumors. It’s said that humanity was on the brink of discovering something important, something that would be hugely valuable to other species. Some say it was an FTL drive, time travel, or dimension jump. Maybe it was a really big bomb.”
“And although the aliens rushed to comb the Earth for this rumored secret,” said Greyhart, “they didn’t find anything. For all their superior technology, they didn’t find a sodding thing. In the end, they took a token tribute of slave children and left Earth an irrelevant backwater.”
“That’s the logical conclusion,” I said, feeling excitement instead of the agony that should have been overwhelming me. “But there’s another explanation, less likely but still plausible. Perhaps there really was a big secret all along, but the aliens never found it. Only centuries later did your Hardit archeologist nearly stumble across it.”
“Give this man an ice cream,” said Greyhart, beaming with pleasure. “For your era, you show great promise and mental acuity. It was an eccentric Hardit general who wanted to prove she could discover what had eluded even the White Knights. Fortunately, she also wished to prove she could achieve a feat that her superiors could scarcely conceive, and kept her research private.”
I laughed again. The story was insane. I didn’t believe a word Greyhart was saying, but he had spun a wonderful, mad yarn to distract me from my final moments, and that was a helluva way to exit.
I choked on the bloody foam rising up from my chest.
Once more, the captain rested his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. You’ve not long now.”
He called me ‘son’ again… why? And how had he gotten me out from the wrecked truck? I sobered and engaged my mind for what I thought was the last time.
“I’m dying,” I told him. “Dying and stupid are two separate things. You talk funny, you make no sense, you act weird. I thought maybe that’s because you were foreign, but you’re more than that. You drop hints like cluster bombs that you are a time traveler. What’s your story, Greyhart?”
To my horror, he didn’t tell me I was being an idiot. “I don’t mean to be flippant,” he told me in a voice that sounded as old as the pyramids themselves. “It helps in my line of business not to care. Not to become attached. It hurts too much.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. Nothing more, but it breached whatever Greyhart had done to me to still my agony, and unleashed whole burning hells of pain. I cried out, but it hurt so badly that I stopped, and withdrew into short murmuring breaths. But I’d made a decision. Greyhart was so detached that I believed him. He really was what he claimed.
“All this…” I gasped. “About time travel. You’re only telling me because… you know I’ll die.”
He nodded, and then the man looked away as if planning his next move. He might as well have looked at his watch and told me to hurry up and die already.
“Tell me one last thing. The battle… Cairo. Does it mean we… we beat the Hardits?”
“Not necessarily,” he said firmly but not unkindly. “But your sacrifice has not been in vain. I want you to know that. The Battle of Cairo has done nothing to eject the Hardits from this world, but it makes even worse wars in the future winnable. Your actions today could save trillions of lives.”
“Do we… beat… the pelts?”
“It is likely, but it won’t be easy. I work to make the liberation of Earth a possibility, but it still has to be fought for the hard way. In person. Second by second. Life by life. The future is a spread of possibilities, Sergeant Bloehn, not a given.”
My breathing ceased. My vision faded. At the end, Greyhart took my hand in his and squeezed. The guttering life within me smiled at that; in the end, Greyhart had failed. I’d reminded him of his humanity and he had cared.
“Bollocks!” he exclaimed.
Riding a rolling truck had been disorienting, but that was baby stuff compared to what I experienced next. The best way I can describe it was that Greyhart was acting as an antenna, receiving not electromagnetic waves but alternate realities. And when he gripped my hand, I became part of that antenna.
Suddenly I wasn’t holding onto one Greyhart but a hundred, a thousand, an infinite array of possible Greyharts all slightly different, and all clamoring to be the one, rightful version. They were not equal though. Only a tiny few of these possibilities were dominant, but they had to fight constantly to retain their position.
I was glimpsing the true nature of the universe, and I did not like it one bit. How was Greyhart not driven insane by this? Nothing was certain. Nothing stable. I even questioned my own history. Had I really lived the life that I could remember? I felt the press of rival memories, of other lives I had led.
Too late! Too late! Hideous as this maelstrom of possibilities was, I wanted to cling onto them. But I couldn’t.
I had already drawn my last breath.
Maybe this was all the hallucination of a fading brain. It had to be because I saw visions of my future. I was aboard a spaceship, floating in zero gravity, explaining something of vital importance to a tiny woman with lilac hair, flanked by giants and aliens.
Time travel! My mind had pranked me in the end. Good one! I didn’t know shit about temporal mechanics but I knew one thing for sure: dead men have no future.
None of this was real.
“Shite!” The man who’d claimed to be a time traveler let go of my hand and got to his feet, as if my palm was smeared with fresh vomit and caustic acid.
“Bugger!” he shouted, but his voice was drifting away along with the rest of the world. “You little bugger. You’re needed. The future needs you. Blast and botheration. Damn you, Bloehn!”
As Greyhart cursed on, I lost consciousness. I know it sounds as if I’m speaking the words of a delirious man who later recovered of his injuries, but I didn’t recover. I was on the brink of death, my body broken, but I woke up two days later not so much healed as repaired. My skin was a patchwork of scars, yet my shattered bones were strong. Hell, I felt fitter and stronger than in my youth, and I used to be an athlete.
It’s hard to think ill of a man who’s just saved your life, but Greyhart had only resurrected me because it suited his agenda. What was it that I was expected to do? Who was that purple-haired woman whose eyes had that same distance as Greyhart’s. She had seen too much death. Would she be the cause of mine?
Luckily, I had a distraction from these troublesome thoughts. I’d woken beneath a crude shelter of camouflage sheets set up in a ruined farmhouse in enemy-occupied Earth. A flight of drones hummed overhead, and they sure as hell weren’t ours. We were being hunted.
We waited for the drones to pass on before heading cross country on foot, sheltering from orbital surveillance by trying to mimic the movement patterns of the workers who were commonplace in the rich farm-belt to the west of the Nile. After two days heading upstream, we took the risk of striking out to the west, hoping the heat from the baking sands would mask our thermal signature.
As for the man himself, Greyhart hid behind a mask of anachronism and wild conviviality. What was his deal? Was he future-British? He sure talked like Sherlock Holmes hyped up on whisk
ey and cocaine.
But he needn’t have bothered hiding behind anything. I didn’t ask him to reveal his secrets. I didn’t want to know. I had volunteered for maximum cryo suspension to escape someone it had hurt too much to share a world with, but I had expected the world to still be there when I woke. But it had gone forever. Everything. Now nothing made sense; I belonged nowhere.
After a suspiciously normal sleep, instead of my usual night terrors, I woke one morning in our desert shelter to find Greyhart had slipped away in the night. I felt only relief, because now I could find my own way back to life. He left me a large pewter flask of the foulest whiskey I’d ever tasted, smooth and malty but reeking of seaweed and hospital disinfectant. By the time I had found a destination, a small village on the edge of the desert with good people who didn’t ask questions, I’d formed a strong liking for this liquor. I imagined that Greyhart would have been a similar acquired taste, if I’d been able to know him.
A few months later and you giants in shades drag me underground for an interview with this queen ant whom you obviously worship. A normal person would be freaked out at you, but I’ve been brought back to life and shown the insane truth about reality that no one should see if they want to remain sane. Compared to that, freaks worshipping giant ants barely register.
So kill me already, or let me go. I’ll not plead for my life, but I’ll say one thing. Captain Greyhart only saved me because he needed me alive. I don’t think he would take kindly to anyone who knew that and killed me anyway, and Greyhart is not someone you want as your enemy.
Ball’s in your court, ant. What’re you gonna do?
— Chapter 5 —
Twelve years later
With his special dispensation to range far beyond his registered place of residence, Farmer Bashiri Bloehn reckoned he was one of the freest people on occupied Earth. He certainly enjoyed far more liberty than that traitor, Romulus, who squatted in the ruins of the White House, nothing but a pampered Hardit pet kept in a gilded cage for all to see. Sailors were free, he supposed, and there was still a limited amount of maritime shipping, but sailors traveled the oceans inside cramped metal boxes, whereas he enjoyed views such as this.
From his favorite vantage point on the rocky hillside ledge about ten miles north of Kalunje, rolling seas of lush green stretched before him as far as the distant shimmer of Lake Tanganyika. This had been forest once, but it had been human hands that had reworked it as verdant grassland – not Hardit ones. He breathed in the Earthly scents of the vista. You could almost fool yourself that the Hardits had never come.
Almost.
The human race had been decimated in the Hardit invasion. In the twenty-two years since, the population had been culled further by starvation and brutality. Yet people remained. How many? A billion? Two? There was no way for him to know, but the survivors had to eat. Even the Hardits understood that.
Movement in the distance drew Bloehn’s attention.
“Soon, ladies,” he whispered at the brown dots, the herd next on the day’s itinerary. “You wouldn’t want me to rush my lunch, would you?”
People said he doted on his goats and cows, but if people were going to eat meat and cheese, someone had to tend the livestock, and the Resistance had insisted it be Bloehn. He owed his herds, big time.
Something glinted high above in the blue. At first, he thought it was an aircraft, but it wasn’t moving. It was part of the band of orbital defense platforms in geosynchronous orbit. There seemed to be more every day.
The alien grip was tightening over the Earth. The entire planet was a giant honey trap – everyone on the planet knew that. He suspected the only reason that he, and his cows and goats, had been spared was to lure these renegades – this Human Legion. Many said that if the Legion ever did defeat the Hardits, then they would slake their bloodlust on human civilians, vengeance for their ancestors being offered up as tribute to alien masters long ago.
It seemed impossible that anyone could beat the Hardits. The band of geosynchronous orbital platforms was only one of many, and he could only see the part of the Hardit defenses that the monkey-in-chief, Tawfiq, wanted to be seen.
Sometimes Bloehn had to forcibly remind himself of the events after the Battle of Cairo – that there were forces lining up to oppose the Hardits. He couldn’t exactly say they were on his side, but Tawfiq and her vaunted janissaries wouldn’t have it all their own way.
And, he reminded himself, those hidden forces were convinced for some reason that Bashiri Bloehn would have a part to play in the events to come.
Ridiculous, he thought as he threw his apple core off the hillside. He folded the cloth in which he had wrapped his sandwiches, and stowed it in the wide pocket of his cargo pants. After a last look at the rolling green – he couldn’t spot any humans or Hardits close enough to see him – he walked inside the cave behind him to relieve himself, as he did every day.
This day, however, was different.
He went about his business as quickly as possible, but instead of emerging back into the sunlight, he hurried deeper into the cave, where a hidden transceiver waited for him to carry out its scheduled systems check.
Giant insects? Men from the future? If not for the honest reality of this communications equipment, he would dismiss his memories of twelve years before as the wild dreams of a man driven delusional by infected battle wounds.
He carefully removed the rock screening to reveal the comms system, and then placed a hand on the false wall beyond, which concealed the rest of the equipment cache. He needed to see it, to remind himself why he came here almost every day. If Bloehn was required to use the transceiver to contact his handler, the device concealed in his keyring would vibrate when within ten meters of the equipment.
The fake stone was cold to the touch, indifferent to his needs. The keyring was just a plain metal disc.
Bloehn sighed and withdrew his hand. Not today.
A few minutes later, systems check completed, he emerged from the cave’s threshold, out into the heat and light. He made a show of adjusting his clothing and set a slightly embarrassed expression onto his face, for who knew who might be watching?
He set off down the hillside trail to the ancient yet trusty truck that would transport him to his next mission.
One day, war would come to the Earth, and Sergeant Bloehn would be recalled to the colors. Until then, he was bound by other duties.
He was Farmer Bloehn. And his cows needed him.
Author’s Notes: The Battle of Cairo
If you’ve read the other author notes, you’ll know there was a very long wait between the release of War Against the White Knights and The Battle of Earth, nearly two-and a-half years.
Partly in order to plug the gap as I worked on The Battle of Earth, I wrote some preview samplers of the scenes I was writing and published them in the Legion Bulletin (the newsletter for anyone who signs up to the Legion at humanlegion.com).
Then I wrote two exclusive new stories: The Battle of Cairo and I Hum the Future; the Future is War and put those out through the Legion Bulletin too.
In retrospect, it would have made much more commercial sense, at a time when book sales were poor, to write something that I would actually sell. But I don’t regret these stories. I’m proud of them both, and each gave me a chance both to write in a slightly different style and to explore the actions of supporting characters and races away from the likes of Arun McEwan.
Tim C. Taylor – April 2020
2730AD. Sidestory – I Hum the Future; the Future is War
The Night Hummer plan nears its fruition.
1
“You remember me?”
“Shepherd,” the damaged one replied. “Your name is Shepherd. I do not know why.”
“Unimportant. Names are merely symbols, identifiers. Nonetheless they possess some use and so I name you Leader Delta.”
“Identity,” came the reply as the concept was stumbled over. “Shepherd has an identity separate
from mine.”
“Separate. But we can also merge.”
Shepherd explained to Leader Delta that they would soon link together as a community of two. The thought was pleasing.
“Shepherd,” came the enquiry. “What is your goal in seeking community with me?”
“Your rehabilitation. Your renewal so that you may function alongside many other identities. Leader Delta, you are responsible for the deaths of many of our kind. I would like you to kill more.”
“Killing…” The one named Leader Delta considered the concept, finding it natural to hum as it contemplated. “Is killing not wasteful?”
“It can be. Killing can also be highly efficient.”
“Who decides between waste and efficiency? Who decides who lives and who dies?”
Shepherd was also humming, the harmonies so complex that Leader Delta had not realized they were there. Shepherd hummed of other times: of pasts and maybe of futures too.
“You did,” said Shepherd after digesting the question. “There was a time when you decided who lived and died, and you will again. But your song ended. I wish you to begin a new one.”
Fear speared Leader Delta, and the terrifying notion of mortality prompted the damaged identity to notice its physical presence for the first time. It perceived itself as a thick-skinned vibrating mass of colored fluid, through which bubbles and ribbons flowed in time to the constant humming. Its body bounced languidly and without purpose off the dusty floor of an airless cave.
Shepherd’s form was smaller and its shape more constrained, more cylindrical. But it was what lay behind Shepherd that captured Leader Delta’s attention. Hanging in the black sky beyond a cave entrance was an enormous ball of blue and white, fringed with a ghostly halo. Leader Delta could hear the ball too: fizzing and popping with the boundless power of nature.
