by Simon Hawke
“Hear, hear!” said someone in the crowd, and others joined in with similar supporting comments.
“He actually did that all in one breath, didn’t he?” Steele said in an aside to Addision.
“Mmmm.” Addison murmured. “You ought to hear him when he really gets his wind up.”
“Oh, very well,” Pontack said, relenting as he saw that the prevailing opinion stood against him. “But can’t you at least prop him up and wipe his chin or something? Tidy him up a bit, can’t you?”
“No, I shan’t,” said Swift. “Dr. Gulliver should not, even in his unfortunate condition, stay a moment longer where his presence is not wanted. We shall take our leave and dine elsewhere.”
This elicited a storm of protest, though Swift showed no sign of leaving.
“Perhaps, sir, I could offer a small compromise,” said the fair-haired young man, stepping forward. “Surely Dr. Gulliver would be more comfortable sleeping it off—uh, taking his ease in a coach rather than atop a hard wooden table or in a refuse-strewn alleyway. I would be pleased to let him rest a while in mine. “
“You, sir, are a gentleman,” said Swift, rising to his feet to shake the young man’s hand. “May I have the honor of knowing your name?”
“Steiger,” said the fair-haired young man. “Alexander Steiger, at your service, sir.”
“Well, Mr. Steiger, it is a genuine pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Swift. “Allow me to buy you drink?”
“Thank you, that would be most kind,” said Steiger. “I will join you as soon as I have seen to the comfort of your friend. Perhaps one of these gentlemen would be so kind as to assist me?”
A man stepped forward and together they took the unconscious Gulliver and lifted him up, holding his arms across their shoulders. They took him outside, dragging him along to Steiger’s coach. The driver jumped down and opened the door, then moved to help Steiger with Gulliver, laying him out upon the cushioned seat.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Steiger said to the man who’d helped him. “Please tell Mr. Swift that I will merely see to this man’s comfort and then I will be back inside directly.”
Steiger watched the man go back inside, then he turned to the driver and said, “Threadneedle Street, quickly.” He got inside the coach and the driver whipped up the horses. The coachman drove quickly to Steiger’s rooms in Threadneedle Street, and by the time they arrived, Dr. Gulliver had come around, though he was still groggy and hungover.
“What… where am I? Who are you?”
“A friend,” said Steiger, helping him inside and up the stairs. “A friend who believes your story, Dr. Gulliver.”
“You…. you believe me?” Gulliver said, astonished.
“Yes,” said Steiger, helping him into the bedroom and easing him down onto the bed. “Yes, I believe you. Here, lie down. Rest a moment.”
He went over to his desk, sat down and started writing quickly.
“Wh—What are you doing?” Gulliver said.
“I’m making out a report,” said Steiger, writing furiously. “A report?” said Gulliver, frowning.
“Never mind, I’ll explain later. I want to make certain that I have all this written down, and then I’m going to read it back to you and I want you to tell me if I’ve got it all right. Are you sober enough to do that?”
“I ...” Gulliver sat up in bed, felt suddenly dizzy, leaned back and closed his eyes. “I am not very sober, I’m afraid, but I think I can manage. “
“Good.” Steiger tossed a tiny snuffbox to Gulliver. It landed on the bed. Gulliver picked it up.
“What’s this? Snuff? No, thank you, I don’t—”
“Just swallow two of them. It will make you feel better.”
Gulliver opened the box and glanced inside. “What… what is it?”
“Aspirin,” Steiger said, distractedly, concentrating on his writing. He was trying to recall every element of Gulliver’s story and note it down in shorthand.
“Ass-prin?” said Gulliver, staring at the pills dubiously. “What… I don’t understand. What manner of—”
“Just swallow two of them, all right? Don’t chew, just swallow them quickly. Trust me, it’ll make you feel better. It’s… it’s an old family remedy. It’s quite safe, I promise you.”
“Safe? Gulliver snorted. “No one is safe. Nothing and no one.” He took two of the pills and swallowed them. He made a face. “Ugh. Bitter.”
“You didn’t chew them, did you? I told you not to chew them.”
“Who are you? Are you an apothecary?”
“My name is Alexander Steiger,” he said, still writing quickly in the precise characters of shorthand. “My friends call... me Sandy.”
Gulliver leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes once more. “Mine call me Lem. You are very kind, Sandy. I don’t know why. Why should you believe me? Even I would never have believed it had I not seen it all with my own eyes. I would have thought anyone telling such a tale quite mad.” He swallowed hard and brought his hands up to his face. “Ohh, my head is splitting. Sandy, tell me truthfully, do you think I’m mad’?”
“No,” said Sandy. “In fact, I’m certain that you are absolutely sane.” He glanced up at Gulliver. “Whatever happens now, Lem,” he said, emphatically, “you must promise me that you will not forget that. You are not insane. I have no doubt that you have seen some astonishing things that seem impossible to explain. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. It took a great deal of courage to get through all that. You must hold on to that strength, resist the temptation to drown your memories in wine and keep telling yourself that you have not gone mad.”
“How can you be so certain?” Gulliver said. “You have but my word!”
“And I’m sure it’s the word of a gentleman,” said Steiger, turning back to his report. “I must complete this, Lem. Please, be patient with me for a few moments and I will try to explain later, after I have—”
Gulliver cried out suddenly. The terror in his cry made Sandy spin around. He felt a sharp, searing pain across his cheek, as if an extremely fine filament of superheated wire had been drawn across it. As he cried out with pain and brought his hand up to his face, he saw his attacker firing once more—a tiny man, no more than six or seven inches tall, firing a miniature laser pistol.
The beam struck him in his left eye, and Sandy screamed in agony as his eyeball was cooked right out of its socket. More tiny people were materializing out of thin air. They were equipped with floater paks and firing tiny weapons. The air in the room was filled with a crisscrossing web work of brilliant light. Sandy grabbed his chair and hurled it at the miniature invaders, then grabbed his report and dove onto the bed, covering the terrified Gulliver’s body with his own. He stuffed the report into Gulliver’s pocket and then snapped a small metallic bracelet around his wrist.
“General Forrester!” he shouted. “Get that report to General Moses Forrester!”
He felt a barrage of tiny laser beams slicing through his flesh. Dozens upon dozens of them. He screamed in agony and activated the warp disc.
Gulliver disappeared.
Chapter 1
As the first light of dawn washed over the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, General Blood gave the order to advance. The pipes and drums struck up and the main body of the expeditionary force moved off down the graded road in perfect fours formation. At the same time, an assault team of three hundred picked men, taking advantage of the dim light and the early morning mist, silently crept up the slopes toward the stone sangars, snipers’ nests of piled rock that the Ghazis had erected on the cliffs above the fort. The Ghazi sentries were taken completely by surprise. They were busy watching the crazy British firinghi assembling below them and marching to their apparent doom when all of a sudden the assault team was upon them. The troopers charged, spreading out and moving in from opposing flanks, scrambling up the rocks and firing at will, engaging the Ghazis at bayonet point. Surprised, and with no one to direct
their movements, the Ghazis gave ground before the furious assault and the ridge was captured completely without losses.’
Andre Cross had seen it all before. She had experienced it all before, and she was reliving it again as she tossed in bed, moaning in her sleep. She had relived this scene countless times in the recurring nightmares that had plagued her ever since she had returned from that assignment. The year had been 1897, and the place was the Malakand Pass on the north-west frontier of the British Raj, in the high country of Afghanistan. The fanatic Ghazis, led by their insane holy man, Sadullah, had risen up to drive the infidel firinghi (their word for foreigner) out of their desolate land forever. The blood lust was upon them as the tribes all joined in the jihad, the holy war against the British. For the 19th Century British Raj, at stake was the security of their north-west frontier. For the Time Commandos from the 27th Century, at stake was the entire future.
A young subaltern in the 4th Hussars had obtained temporary leave from his regiment to join the Malakand Field Force and cover the uprising for the London Daily Telegraph. His name was Winston Churchill.
Fate had brought him to that savage place at the top of the world, where a British fort was under siege; surrounded on all sides by screaming Ghazis, and fate had brought the Time Commandos to there as well, to locate a temporal confluence point where two separate timelines intersected and the direction that the future took became as hazy as the mountain mist.
When the crossbow was invented, people had predicted that the world would end, that civilization could never survive such a devastating weapon. But the world survived and became even more civilized. They said much the same thing with the advent of the machine gun, and the atomic bomb, and plasma weapons, and the warp grenade, yet still the world survived. Somewhat the worse for wear, but it nevertheless survived. And Prof. Albrecht Mensinger, whose father had invented time travel, had predicted that the world would end if governments insisted upon travelling through time to fight their wars, but the world still managed to survive. Just barely. Only now the Time Wars had escalated to unprecedented heights. The chronophysical alignment of the universe had shifted, Einstein somersaulted in his grave and two parallel universes had come into congruence with each other, their timelines rippling like undulating spikes—and, at times, they intersected.
Wherever such a confluence point occurred, it was possible to cross over from one universe into another. And such a point had occurred somewhere in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the year 1897. Soldiers from the future of the other timeline had crossed over, intending to interfere with history and create a temporal split. The Time Commandos stopped them, but at a terrible cost. During the mission, their team leader, Col. Lucas Priest, had died.
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 caliber 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 hot, 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 caliber 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 agonized 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 incinerate 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.
