by John Barnes
Washington’s Dirigible
The Timeline Wars
John Barnes
This one’s for Nathan Hurwitz and
for Ron Richards.
God, won’t they be embarrassed.
-1-
Chrysamen ja N’wook has big, dark eyes it’s real easy to get lost in, cheekbones high enough for an elf, wavy hair black as coal, and skin the color of fresh coffee with a lot of cream. At the moment she was looking into my eyes and smiling, and what she was saying was, “Remember how happy we were when we got this assignment?”
I did my best to grin back at her. “Remember who said she’d rather ski than swim?”
We shook hands and got into the doors of our separate dropwings. Back where I come from there would have been hundreds of technicians clicking around behind us, reading boards and checking lights, and somebody called Mission Control would be drawling instructions to us. Here, at ATN Crux Operations Training Area (COTA, or at least that’s how most of us pronounced it), shots into orbit were so routine that they were handled automatically, like getting a Coke from a machine. They figured, I suppose, that if you were dumb enough to get into a spacecraft unprepared, you were probably too dumb to be a Crux Op anyway.
My gear was already in my pack, strapped to my chest, balancing my parachute; between all that and the winter-weather coverall, I had about fifty pounds of gear on me. It’s a good thing that the little throwaway ships are so reliable that you don’t bother with a space suit. The only special requirement is that, since a dropwing’s boost is in the direction of your feet, if you’re male you’d better be wearing a jockstrap. (I didn’t know what special equipment Chrys might have to wear under her coverall, but even now, with a lot on my mind, I would have been happy to investigate.)
I stretched out in the coffinlike slot in the dropwing, facedown, so that my chest pack fit into the depression. There was a window in front of me but right now all I could see through it was the side of the booster, a scant couple of inches away, and dark because the lander was tied on with a fairing to prevent the wind from shearing it off. I grasped the overhead handles and pulled the trigger to close and seal the bubble doors above me.
Chrys’s voice came over the speakers. “So, ready to zoom-bang?”
The autotranslators embedded as chips in our heads were a constant source of amusement; they allowed her to speak her native Arabo-Polynesian, and me to speak English, and us to understand each other—but words and expressions that didn’t exist in the other’s language tended to come through in a very strange fashion. From talking with her before, I knew what she had said was the equivalent of “Ready to party?” so I said, “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, dudette.” From the shriek of laughter I figured her translator had come up with something interesting.
“All right, enough silliness, we have the Dalai Lama to rescue,” she said. “Cuing to go … now.”
Acceleration slammed into me as if the floor had leaped up to hit me in the soles of the feet. It yanked my guts downward and seemed to press the air in my lungs against my diaphragm; I felt for an instant as if my face would run down the front of my skull like molten wax. Then it steadied down to about two and a half g’s, and I became aware of sounds again—mostly the thunder of the engines, mixed with Chrys going “Whoooo!” through the speakers. All right, she wasn’t quite perfect. She wasn’t decently scared out of her mind like I was. I’d taken four dropwing flights in training and never gotten to like it one bit.
A long three minutes clocked by as we shot on up and out of the atmosphere, and then finally the booster stage blew clear, as the explosive bolts in the fairing kicked it away. I blinked hard, saw Chrys’s dropwing fall off to the side and roll away, and looked at the display projected on my window. Beyond the display, the Earth rolled by, as it did in billions of other timelines.
This was an Earth without human beings—I had seen the herds of woolly mammoth in Kansas and the blue whales in the Gulf of California to prove it—and thus a perfect training ground. For two years, we and the rest of our class of cadet Crux Ops had climbed untamed mountains, sailed empty seas, trekked across empty deserts—and practiced with every weapon invented in a million timelines, from the SHARK of the High Athenians, to the boomerang and atl-atl; driven and flown everything from Piper Cubs and Stanley Steamers to spaceships and chariots; ridden on horses, camels, elephants, killer whales, and moas. It had been a little like military basic (or so the vets in the group assured me), a little like fraternity hazing, and a lot like every kid’s fantasy of the perfect summer camp.
Now we were two weeks from graduation, and I was looking down on that empty world, where no lines of highways showed and no cities burned like jewels in the darkness, and found myself thinking a just slightly sentimental good-bye at it.
For that matter, it was also the world on which I had met Chrys, and she was the first woman I’d cared about at all since my wife had been murdered, back in my home timeline.
I suppose I could have gotten much more choked up if I hadn’t had that terrifying feeling you get, of falling forever, in orbit. I’ve heard all the old lines, and I don’t care. I know that in orbit you’re falling around the planet, and not into it, and that after all the fall doesn’t hurt, the landing does, and all that. I’m scared of the falling, thank you very much, and that’s that.
But being scared doesn’t mean you get out of doing your job. I watched the green vector line till it hit the target point, then triggered the burn. At once I felt more comfortable—I had half a g pushing me—and in parallel with Chrys, off to my port side and below me, I rose into a higher and more inclined orbit. We were to come in from the southwest, which meant getting an inclination of almost fifty degrees; there were to be two more burns after this.
Cutoff—the engine shut down—and I was falling again, frightened again, and my eyes were locked on that green line. The green line entered the circle, and I pulled the trigger again—once again there was gravity, once again I could enjoy the spectacular view as we swung up over empty Europe, looking down across the forests of Italy to those of Lebanon and Syria—man had indeed left no mark here.
There was one more heart-stopping lurch of weightlessness, a short one this time, and then our engines blazed briefly as we got into the right relative positions, about 140 miles above the North Pole, and swung around to face backward. Now it was just twenty minutes till we started the retroburn.
Twenty minutes of falling without end, but scared as I was I did my best to enjoy the view of the Americas and the Antarctic ice cap.
Then the engines roared to life one more time, and there was weight under my feet as we slowed, slowed, started to plunge …
Our dropwings rotated, using their positioning jets, and now we were nose-down into our descents. One each side of me, through my window on the underside, I could see the long white wings curving down under the ship, the steep curve of the Earth beneath us, the Cape and Madagascar spread out before us, with India smeared out near the horizon and the great bumps of the Himalayas—where we were going.
There was the tiniest tug of “gravity,” and I knew the wings were beginning to bite air, and that I was decelerating toward the target. From here on out I would have to trust the machine, until very late in the flight—at these speeds no human pilot could cope with the job.
Abruptly my view of the Indian Ocean was closed off by a bright orange curtain, and I felt a throb in my body. A shock wave—a sort of captured sonic boom—had formed in the enclosure under the dropwing, and the blazing heat of reentry would be directed against that wave, not against the surface of the dropwing. The drag became stronger an
d stronger, the deceleration greater, and the plasma before me glowed a painful white before the window automatically darkened.
This went on for quite a while—seventeen and a half minutes by the clock, to be exact.
It was our final field problem, and the fact that we had had to propose it had not made it any easier. The final exercise before you graduated was to construct a plausible mission that Crux Ops might have to accomplish, carry it out in mock-up, and then write a lengthy critique all about how you could have handled it better, what else might have gone wrong, and what you would have done then. You proposed them in teams of two, and I had been flattered beyond words when Chrys had asked me to partner with her. I didn’t think it was anything romantic … but I wasn’t dead certain it wasn’t, either, and I had looked forward to it because of that.
It was all a daydream, anyway—it would be years, normally, before two Crux Ops would have any say in who they partnered with on missions. Besides that, most missions were solo. And on top of everything, normally they posted us back to our home timelines, and ours diverged somewhere around 500 a.d. I guess we could be pen pals or something.
I realized that I was letting myself get into a mental loop here, and I should know better. Besides, I could also look forward to seeing my father, my sister Carrie, and my ward Porter in just a short while … no, that led to other trains of thought that would take me far away from the mission again …
Repeat to self. Practice drill. Chrys is just my partner for a practice drill. We are going to land at the site of Lhasa, walk northward into China for a pickup, while carrying weapons enough to take on a light division back home. This is to simulate a mission in which we rescue the Dalai Lama and an ATN advisor from a world with a technological level about that of 1890 A.D. That’s all I need to think about. Land, ski, climb, ski some more, climb some more. Nice to have Chrys along for a partner because … because she’s very good at this, of course. Especially she climbs a lot better than I do, and I ski better than she does, so it’s a good combination.
At eighty thousand feet, the plasma in front of my face went from white back to orange, and then disappeared, leaving me with a literally breathtaking view—I had to remind myself to take a breath some seconds later—of the peaks of the Himalayas below and ahead of us. It was a full moonlit night as we plunged over into Tibet.
The high peaks all around reflected so much light that only the ground below us seemed dark. The sky was full of light and stars. I saw Chrys make her eject at seven thousand meters, then ejected myself a moment later; the ice-cold sky leaped into my face, my harness yanked me straight back and up, and I was lost in the job of steering the parawing. The thing is like a big awkward kite, and it swayed from side to side ominously.
At least it usually swayed side to side for me; there were people at COTA for whom they worked a lot better, and some, including Chrys, who even claimed they liked them. For me, the best part of the thing was that I had so much trouble steering and holding on to lunch that I didn’t look down very often, and therefore wasn’t quite as scared by the ground rushing up.
Meanwhile, of course, Chrys was going “Whoooo!” and zooming all over around me for fun. I did kind of hope she wouldn’t do that on a real mission.
The peaks were getting closer, but the sky was still light. The snowy mountains were like high islands around us, as if we sailed just above a great sea of darkness that sank away from our boots as we descended.
The parawings worked more efficiently close to a flat surface, and we leveled off as we approached our drop zone. Finally we came gliding in like immense owls about twenty feet over a wide, flat field of snow. That is, if you can imagine a gorgeous Arabo-Polynesian owl gliding in gracefully going “Whooooo! Come on, Mark, lighten up, this is fun!” and a square-built muscular owl flailing around, swinging from side to side, going “Oops, oops, oops,” under his breath, just before doing a face-plant into a snowdrift.
By the time I had backed out, wiped the snow from my face, and begun to wrestle my parawing into behaving, Chrys had hers furled and was standing by. I gulped hard at my pride, and said, “Er, I could use some help.”
She didn’t even smile, just moved in close, pulled on a line here and a flexrib there, and presto—my parawing was furled neatly. In another minute, I had earned my keep by digging a stash-hole on the windy side of the drift. Our parawings went into the hole, along with a bacteria mix that would destroy them within hours, leaving only a thin water solution of fertilizer.
“The Sierra Club would love this gear,” I mumbled.
“You have a political party devoted to mountains?” Chrys asked. “For or against?”
“Translation problem,” I said. “It used to be a hiking club. Now it puts people out of work.”
The translator chips, as I said, are great, but they’re not perfect. I mentioned a “Baptist Ice Cream Social” once and everyone wondered how you baptize people with ice and what that has to do with public ownership of the dairy industry. It’s a good thing Crux Ops normally only have to say things like “Watch out!” “Behind you!” and “Cover me!”
Not that good a thing. It would have been nice to have a reliable language in common with Chrys …
I told myself to forget those thoughts again, but I took it as a sign of health—I’d been widowed for some years, back in my own timeline, and any interest at all was probably healthy.
Anyway, now that we were down on the ground with our kits intact, the job was to walk from here, about where Lhasa was in many timelines, to a point 160 kilometers away for pickup three days later.
In most ways it was really just an orienteering problem. Crux Ops normally operate alone or with just one partner, and we do our own planning (something like packing your own chute). Most of us are crazy enough to win the fights we get into, but nothing is as likely to cause a mission failure as trying to carry too much or do too much, and nobody is more likely to plan too much than a bunch of overachievers like typical Crux Ops. Thus our final exercise—work out a plan and see if the one you had worked out was one you could do.
With everything under wraps, Chrys and I started the long trip. We unrolled skis and sprayed them with the stuff to make them rigid, then extended the poles, swung our chest packs around into the backpack position, and glided out into the emptiness of Tibet.
An hour later, Chrys said, “It’s very beautiful in the moonlight.”
I agreed, and asked, “What’s Tibet like where you come from?”
She made a face. “Completely overrun with tourists; Lhasa is where everyone goes on their honeymoon. How about yours?”
“A little underpopulated country occupied by a big power,” I said. “Not a good place.”
We skied on in silence, and I had a lot of time to wonder just how different our worlds were. I knew that in hers, Islam had overrun Europe in the 700s A.D., conquered all of Eurasia before 1000 A.D., and then turned Sufi and pacifist; she was from about 2400 A.D. in her timeline, so presumably she was a long way past war (except, of course, the war against the Closers). Had I shocked her with mentioning things like that? Would she hold it against me?
It was like being back in junior high. I desperately wished we had more to do.
It was getting near daylight and time to stop when our earphones crackled. “Provisional agents Strang and ja N’wook—attention. First added problem.”
We rolled our eyes at each other; they were going to complicate it for us, to teach us something about unpredictability, I guess. Considering I had gotten into this line of work, once, by getting into a shoot-out in a parking garage, and later by diving into what looked like a hole in a void, it didn’t seem to me I needed such training, but that wasn’t mine to decide.
“We’re going to simulate two complications in your mission: the Dalai Lama was wounded severely during the escape, and the Special Agent you were rescuing was killed. To simulate this, please dig a shallow grave and refill it; then fill a GP bag with rocks and snow to s
imulate the weight of the Dalai Lama, take it with you, and continue.”
They clicked off. We groaned, but it was their game and their rules. We dug that hole and filled it in, there in the dark, in frozen ground. “At least they said a shallow grave,” I said. “Couldn’t we just agree that the Special Agent was a midget?”
Chrys laughed, but we kept digging. Then when we got all done we filled the hole in.
“I don’t suppose any rule requires us to fill the bag with more dirt than we’ve broken out of the frozen ground,” I pointed out. “Let’s make our Lama out of dirt from the grave.”
“Good idea.”
In short order we had laid out a sled and sprayed it rigid, dropped the Dalai Lama (a very unconvincing sack of rocks) onto it, and started on our way. As the stronger skier, I got to pull it over the level ground until we got to the first bout of climbing, where Chrys was to take over.
The sun was coming up now, the pale sky suddenly turning blue, light blazing off the mountains around us. “Come on, Lama,” I muttered, as we skied the last two hundred meters to the first cliff we would have to climb down.
“Not much of a talker, is he?” Chrys commented. “We’ll need to take a rest break up here, because it’s going to take some time to get the climbing gear in order for this job. So you’ll at least get a breather then.”
“Good,” I said. “Are we running far behind?”
“We already made up most of the time we’d lost—you ski about as fast towing that sled as I do with just my pack, Mark. We might as well stick to the original plan. It’s just not as likely that we’ll get in early, is all. I’ll let you have the honor of dumping out the Lama when we get there—bet you’re looking forward to it.”
“Yep. Hope we don’t have to be politically sensitive to his feelings.”
“Obviously he fainted from wounds. Is there anything we should do differently for the next stretch on the sled, right now while your muscles are telling you about it?”
