by Simon Hawke
Since she had returned from that mission, Andre had suffered from recurring nightmares in which she kept reliving that awful moment, when Lucas Priest had died before her very eyes, shot through the chest by a. 50 calibre ball from a jezail rifle. She had borne her grief stoically, as a soldier should. She had never mentioned the nightmares to anyone, not even Finn Delaney, who was her closest friend. He had been Lucas's best friend as well, and he had understood her loss and shared her grief; yet still, she had never told him about the nightmares.
In time, she thought the dreams would go away. Time, it was said, could heal all wounds. Only this wound refused to heal. Instead, like a suppurating sore, it grew worse and worse. Nothing she did would make it go away. She could put it out of her mind for a time while she was on a mission. She could forget herself in the furious pace of her muscle-stunning workouts and, on occasion, she could drink herself into oblivion and dun her mind to the point where she no longer felt anything. But it always came back afterwards. She dreaded the quiet times, alone at night, in bed. No amount of alcohol could keep away the nightmares. In dreams, it all came flooding back to her.
She and Lucas Priest standing once again with General Blood and his staff up on the newly captured ridge, watching from the heights as the British troops below pressed home their advantage. Watching the infantry fix bayonets and advance into the Ghazi ranks. The Ghazis panicking and fleeing, breaking ranks and running, their snipers scrambling down from the rocks where, with the sun coming up, they were suddenly vulnerable to fire from the British troops up on captured ridge.
Ghazis taking flight down the graded road, running ahead of the infantry, fighting with one another to escape being trapped by their own numbers in the narrow mountain pass.
"We've done it, General!" cried Surgeon-Lieutenant Hugo, standing beside Blood and watching the enemy in full flight. "We've broken through! We can post pickets in the pass and reinforce our position. Now we can-..
"No," said General Blood, grimly. "I will not allow them to escape so they can join with the rebel tribesmen at Chakdarra and warn them. We'll finish this here and now. They'll be on the plain once they have retreated through the pass. Fully exposed and on foot. Order forth the lancers. No prisoners. No survivors.
The signal was given and the four squadrons of Calvary charged. Finn Delaney, leading the second squadron of Bengal Lancers, couched his lance and leaned forward slightly, bearing down upon the fleeing Ghazis before him. It was going to be a slaughter.
The tribesmen still trapped in the pass were run down and trampled by the lancers as they thundered through. Then the cavalry formed a line upon the plain and charged the fleeing.. enemy. There was no escape. The Ghazis died in the rice fields, run through by the lances and struck down by the cavalry sabres. Bodies fell everywhere as the lancers descended on the running Ghazis and butchered them.
"Christ," said Hugo, turning away from the carnage down below. "I'm sorry, General, but that's more than I can stand to watch. I've seen enough of death."
Churchill was riveted by the spectacle. "They shall not forget this," he said. "It's probably the first time any of them have seen what cavalry can do, given room to deploy their strength. Henceforth, the very words 'Bengal Lancers' shall strike terror into their hearts."
As he spoke, a lone Ghazi sniper, who had remained undiscovered, hidden behind the rocks of his crumbled sangar, rose to a kneeling position and brought his jezail rifle to bear upon the surgeon, Hugo, whom he mistakenly took to be the commander of the British forces. As he raised his rifle, Lucas spotted him.
He yelled, "Hugo look out!"
Instinctively, after so much time spent under enemy fire,
Hugo reacted by throwing himself down flat upon the ground. In an instant, Lucas saw that Hugo's combat-quick response had placed Churchill directly in the line of fire. In an instant of white bot, adrenaline-charged clarity, he saw it all and made a running dive for Churchill, knocking him out of the way. And in that same moment, the Ghazi sniper fired. The. 50 calibre ball slammed into Lucas's chest, ploughing through the thorax and tearing everything in its path. Too late, Andre fired her revolver, shooting the Ghazi sniper right between the eyes.
Churchill stood there, stricken, staring at the limp body at their feet. Lucas Priest was face down on the ground, blood draining from the gaping hole in his chest.
"My God," said Churchill.
He crouched over the body and gently turned it over. The others gathered round.
"Doctor, can't you do something?" Churchill said in an agonised tone.
"I'm sorry, son," said Hugo, looking down and shaking his head. "There's nothing to be done."
Andre knelt over Lucas, staring down at him with shocked disbelief. His sightless eyes stared up at the sky.
“Andre..?” someone said. she reached out to close his eyes.
“Andre…”
Her hand came away wet with his blood.
"Andre!'
She awoke with a start. She took a deep breath and let it out in a weary sigh, running her fingers through her thick blond hair, brushing it back away from her face. Another nightmare. Would they never end?
"Andre?”
She sat up quickly, grabbing for her plasma pistol and thumbing off the safety as she aimed it-There was a dark. figure standing silhouetted by the window of her bedroom.
"Andre, don't shoot! It's me."
Her eyes went wide as she stared at the shadowy figure.
"Lucas?"
It was impossible. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and then opened them again.
There was no one there. The window was bright with the reflected glare from the lights of Pendleton Base. No one was silhouetted against it. And no one could have come in through that window. It was on the forty seventh floor and sealed so that it couldn't open.
She exhaled heavily and lowered the gun, being careful to put the safety back on.
Sleeping with a plasma weapon under her pillow was hazardous to the point of being suicidal, especially after she’d been drinking. It wouldn't do to incin 14
Simon Hawke erate herself in the middle of the night or wake up and start blasting away at hallucinations left over from a nightmare, but she had never learned to be comfortable without having a weapon within easy reach, whether it was a plasma pistol or a broadsword. She was a temporal agent and, as such, she was an expert with a wide variety of weapons. Control was so firmly ingrained that it was a matter of instinct. Still, her hand was shaking as she put the pistol down.
She swallowed hard, took another deep breath and leaned back against the wall.
"Damn,” she said to herself. "It's got to stop. I'm starting to lose it."
A soft red light suddenly came on above her comscreen and an electronic buzzer sounded three times in rapid succession, paused, then sounded again. General
Forrester's face appeared upon the screen.
“Lt. Cross?"
"Here sir," she said.
"Come up to my quarters, on the double."
"Sir!"
She rolled out of bed and quickly slipped into her black base fatigues. Moses Forrester was not in the habit of calling the people under his command in the middle of the night and summoning them "on the double" unless there was a dammed good reason for it. She was dressed in moments and out the door, running down the corridor toward the lift tubes.
Brigadier General Moses Forrester was an unusual commander. He was entitled to a full complement of personal security and staff at his quarters and offices atop the Headquarters Building of Pendleton Base, but he bad only four guards working two shifts, which meant that there were only two guards on duty at anyone time, plus an orderly who doubled as a secretary. Rather than wear full dress uniforms or even the less formal duty greens, Forrester insisted that his guards dress in the infinitely less impressive and more comfortable black base fatigues, which he himself preferred. No ribbons, no decorations, no insignia other than division pin and rank. This gave him the
impression, he said, that he was surrounded by soldiers, rather than hotel doormen.
Formerly the commander of the elite First Division, the Time Commandos,
Forrester had been promoted and was now the director of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, which had absorbed the First Division. Although Forrester was entitled to wear civilian clothing if he chose to, he never did, except for the 19th century, green, brocade smoking jacket he liked wearing during evenings in his quarters, when he was fond of settling down with one of his cherished Dunhill or Upshall pipes and a good book. Forrester had been in the service all his life. He had enlisted straight out of high school and risen through the ranks, taking advantage of military benefits to secure an education for himself along the way. He had earned a doctorate in history, one in political science, and one in temporal physics, though he often professed to know less about the intricacies of what was more commonly called "Zen physics" than he really did.
Few people knew his exact age. He never spoke of it and no one ever had the temerity to ask. He looked positively ancient. His face was deeply lined and his hair might have been white if he had any, but Moses Forrester had shaved his head for as long as anyone could remember. However old he looked, and he looked like an old grizzly bear with haemorrhoids, he was in remarkable physical condition.
He was well over six feet tall and ramrod straight, with shoulders that filled a doorway. He had a chest like a bull and he could effortlessly curl an eighty pound dumbbell with one hand.
When he led the First Division, he knew every soldier under his command by name. He had handpicked them all. He had not had the same luxury with his new command, since he had inherited all the agents of the T.I.A. in a lump sum, but he was rapidly "weeding out the deadwood," as he put it, which had led to some resentment on the part of many of the T.I.A. personnel. Forrester didn't give a damn. The ones who would resent him were precisely the ones he wanted to get rid of. He'd get to all of them eventually.
When they had been two separate branches of government service, there had been no love lost between the First Division and the T.I.A..
There had been an intense rivalry between them. Now they were all together under one command, and it was an uneasy marriage. Forrester allowed the former soldiers of the First Division to wear their old commando insignia, a stylised number one bisected by the symbol for infinity, while the agents of the T.I.A. continued to wear their own official insignia, which consisted of the symbol for pi. (Forrester himself wore both, one on each side of his collar.) The T.I.A. insignia had always been something of an agency in-joke, as it represented a transcendental number, infinitely repeating, therefore suggesting the true nature of the Temporal Intelligence Agency-an organisation whose reach and whose agents were infinite. However, it wasn't until recently that Forrester had realised the true nature of that sly "Company" joke.
A former agency director had once requested complete data on all agency personnel and he'd been told that his request was impossible to grant. When the director had-asked why, he was told that it was because no one in the agency knew exactly how many T.I.A. agents there were. Headquarters staff was one thing, but section chiefs out in the field had virtually complete autonomy to function on their own, to pick and choose their own personnel, either recruiting from other units or from civilians in the field, and they had literal carte blanche in their budgets. requesting whatever they thought they needed to maintain their sections. Usually, they got their allocations with no questions asked.
When Forrester reviewed the budget of the T.I.A., which was among the agency's most closely guarded secrets, he had been absolutely staggered. Not only did the T.I.A. command the single largest budget among all the government services, but it appeared that many of its operatives generated their own supplementary budget on the side, as well. A large number of individual field agents, section chiefs and even department heads were covertly involved in everything from legitimate businesses to organised crime, including such unsavoury pursuits as gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, Contract assassination and using time travel to conduct stock manipulations.
Forrester was aghast. He had previously encountered the Temporal Underground, a loosely connected organisation of deserters from the future who had managed to set up a sort of transtemporal underground society, but now it turned out that the
T.I.A. had its own version of the Underground, known as the "Network," and that over the years, these renegade covert field agents had set up an entire transtemporal economy. Forrester's investigations had only revealed the very tip of the iceberg.
There was even a rumour that an entire 21st century American crime family was, in fact, a Network operation, funnelling profits into the past in what had to be the most elaborate laundering scheme in history. Wealth generated by organised crime in one time period financed complex operations in earlier centuries that were aimed at placing Network agents in key positions in governments and in the private sector, thereby enabling them to skim profits and set up complicated secret trust funds and numbered accounts that would, over the years, mature and be passed on to individuals designated as "Network affiliates" — people in the past who looked after Network interests in exchange for wealth and power. The end result was a cyclical economy that fed upon itself and grew by exponential leaps and bounds.
Forrester had used some of his crack commando units to infiltrate his own agency and so far he had managed to establish T.I.A. involvement in AI Capone's Chicago crime syndicate, as well as certain clandestine branches of American, Soviet and Israeli intelligence services in the 20th century, a time before advanced mind scanning techniques became available. Over the years, Network agents had been skimming profits from such diverse sources as the British East India Co., United Fruit, 19th century Moroccan slave trade operations, IBM, Bell Telephone, various South African diamond mines, Roman tax. collectors-some section chief had even managed to become appointed the Roman governor of Antioch — casinos in both
Las Vegas and Monte Carlo, and a host of other businesses in a wide variety of time periods into which they had infiltrated.
The money itself was virtually impossible to trace. It was difficult enough to conduct a modern paper chase in an attempt to untangle the complicated finances of corporate bandits, how was it possible to trace money laundering operations that transcended the boundaries of time? Swiss bank accounts? Perhaps, only in which time period? Liquid assets? Maybe, only in what form? Gold dust taken out of
Colorado mine shipment in the 19th century? Jewels pirated from a Spanish treasure fleet in the 1700's? 20th century bearer bonds hijacked from a messenger on Wall Street, which were then converted into cash, transferred to a Panamanian account, wired to Brussels and used to purchase weapons at a discount from an arms dealer who was a Network front operation to begin with, which meant simply taking money from one pocket and putting it right back into another, increasing it along the way? It was absolutely mindboggling and it had been going on for years.
Corrupt T.I.A. section chiefs affiliated with the Network often lived better than heads of state. They had become so involved in their own transtemporal private enterprises that they looked upon the T.I.A. as a sort of part-time job, their official duties merely the cost of doing business.
Forrester had taken it upon himself to put them out of business, every last one of them, but it was a mighty tall order. In the first sweep operation conducted by the newly organised Internal Security Division, no less than twenty-seven section chiefs were clocked back from their posts, ostensibly for “orientation conferences," and placed under arrest. The first attempt on Moses Forrester's life was made the very next day.
There had been several more attempts since then, despite the dramatically increased security. Forrester did not like to be crowded and refused to accept having any more guards around him in his private quarters, so elaborate measures had been taken to protect him without his being aware of the increased protection.
Security throughout the entir
e Headquarters Complex had been beefed up.
Scanning devices and automated defence mechanisms had been installed in all the corridors and lift tubes leading to Forrester's offices and private quarters. Enough security and antipersonnel devices had been installed to hold off an entire battalion, but Forrester had found out about them and ordered them removed., saying that he didn't much care for the idea of computer-controlled autopulsers tracking everybody's movements through the hallways. What would happen if there was a glitch? The antipersonnel devices were removed, but Security had clandestinely re-installed the scanners.
The whole thing had led to a great deal of friction within the agency. Not only had two rival commands been united into one, with all the attendant complications that imposed, but commandos were being used to round up renegade field agents, which only served to exacerbate the problems. What it all came down to was the fact that there was another T.I.A. within the T.I.A., and as if it wasn't bad enough that they were faced with opposition from a parallel timeline, the agency now had to do battle with itself. The urgent summons to Forrester's quarters could have meant anything from another attempt on his life to a new temporal crisis, so Andre wasted no time in getting up there.
Finn Delaney met Andre in the corridor leading to the lift tubes. A bullish, muscular man with dark red hair and wide, good looking, typically Irish features, Delaney was, after Forrester, the most decorated soldier in the Temporal Corps. He might have been command staff rank himself by now if he hadn’t been reduced in' grade so many times for various infractions, ranging from direct disobedience to specific orders to striking superior officers. He had. little patience for such trivialities as hand salutes and uniform regulations and expecting a veteran with his record to adhere to such things was an invitation to have one's teeth loosened.
