by John Barnes
Even, dim gray light came in from all directions, brightening, swimming into focus first as dark patches and then as lines and shadows, color adding suddenly. At the same time a low rumble, an octave below a sixty-cycle hum, swelled in my ears, and then cut off abruptly when the colors came back.
The world around us turned into the early-twenty-ninth-century Athenian timeline, in a perfectly ordinary reception room for a gate.
Ariadne Lao was waiting for us. She looked grim, and worried—and not at all like we were about to get reprimanded.
“We’re under some kind of Closer attack,” she said, “and whatever it is, it’s put all our connections to our own future into flux. I’m getting the senior Crux Ops together to try to formulate a plan of action, and it’s a relief every time any of you comes through the gate. There’ve been attacks on Crux Ops in almost every timeline so far.”
“Ours too,” I said. “We think on us, and for sure on Porter Brunreich.”
She nodded grimly. “We’ve lost nineteen Crux Ops that I know of, dead, injured, or seized. Six critical people have died in timelines we were watching. And we can’t contact our own future much beyond the next few weeks. Whatever it is that’s happening, it’s big.”
2
There were more than a thousand Crux Ops in the auditorium for the meeting, and security around us was amazing. Instead of the usual meeting place, the giant space station Hyper Athens, which hangs over the equator on the same line of longitude as the city of Athens, we were on the back side of the moon at the Earth System Defense base. The whole moon was under guard—heavily armed warships orbited it in a complex dance, every ship on red alert, waiting for trouble. The base itself was ringed with robot and human defenses, and the building the auditorium was in was crawling with crack security forces.
And then again, the strongest security of all was what was in the auditorium itself. Crux Ops are deadly in a fight, and there was no nonsense about checking arms at the door—first of all, most Crux Ops would rather check their pants, or kilts or togas or whatever. Secondly, if we weren’t capable of making faster and more accurate decisions about what to shoot and when than anybody else, we wouldn’t be Crux Ops. So if anyone, particularly any Closers, were stupid enough to come in shooting with ground forces, there was going to be a hell of a fight, and they were going to lose.
On the other hand, if they knew our exact location, a gate might pop open and a tactical nuke might take care of the whole thing. Closers have a horror of nuclear weapons in any system they might occupy, but in purely enemy territory that position tends to be flexible.
A few of the Crux Ops filing in were old comrades, people Chrys and I had worked with on one mission or another, but mostly they were strangers. ATN operates across millions of timelines, and for most of them it can only spare the once-in-a-decade or so visit of a Time Scout; an important one might have a Special Agent assigned to it permanently. Crux Ops normally go in only when the regular forces are put out of action, like when expected transmissions from a Special Agent fail to show up. So the half million Time Scouts and fifty thousand Special Agents are backed up by fewer than ten thousand Crux Ops, and since it’s an occupation in which people tend to die, living long enough to get to be a senior Crux Op is rare.
Generally we operate alone or in pairs—Chrys and I had been lucky enough to be assigned as a permanent pair, partly because it seemed like a good idea to Ariadne Lao and mainly because they had owed us a whole lot of favors, and we’d insisted on it.
Even though few of us knew many of the others, all of us knew a few, and the room was buzzing with conversation and little, happy noises as people greeted each other. There were four people there from our class at COTA, the Crux Op training camp, but they were all talking to other people. Over on one side was Roger Buckley, a guy about my age who happened to be from a timeline descended from the very first timeline in which I had intervened, a guy who had at first approached me about the same way I would approach George Washington.
In fact, George Washington was there, from a timeline where we’d recruited him because there was no United States to need a president, and the Empire was at peace, so King George didn’t need a general. I knew him slightly—I waved to him, and he nodded in his usual formal, correct way. He looked to be a bit past fifty, but with ATN’s advanced medicine, he had all his teeth and was as strong and healthy as anyone. Scuttlebutt among the Crux Ops was that now that he wasn’t the father of his country in his own timeline, he’d been fathering a lot of other countries in other timelines, and from the way Chrys muttered, “God, he looks great,” I was inclined to believe rumor.
Over to one side, unsmiling, grim as death (but that was usual), and looking just a little worried (which was new), was General Malecela, Ariadne Lao’s boss whenever he wasn’t personally supervising training, who most of us held in awe.
There was the usual array of social stuff—several hundred flavors of tea, coffee, chicory, maté, chocolate, and tisane, a dozen different kinds of breads, and, for those who wanted them, more kinds of beers and wines than you’d ever have imagined possible. For Chrys and me it was still early morning—we discovered they had grabbed everyone we talked to from sometime shortly after breakfast—so we weren’t particularly inclined to get alcohol, but I noticed that even people from timelines where booze at breakfast is normal were passing it up. People wanted to be alert; this was an unprecedented event.
We found seats. “It’s been a long while since we’ve been back here,” Chrys said. “At least we know they’re not bringing us in here for a chewing-out.”
Another hour went by as people trickled in, but none of the additions were people we knew. I realized after a while that no one was going to ask anything—“Whatever happened to X” or “Surely Y must be a senior agent by now”—because the likely answer was grim.
That got my mind turning back to the things Chrys had said, either last night or eight hundred plus years ago or however many years that was sideways, depending on how you counted. Look around the room, and you could figure that though there were a few hundred of us here, very few would die peacefully. Most of us would be blown up, burned to death, shot, skewered, poisoned … it was a room full of targets-to-be. Hell, I had killed a version of myself that had gone over to the Closers, stamped on his fingers as he clung to a ladder until the bones broke, and he fell to his death.
Or should I have thought, Until I fell to my death?
It’s the nature of people who face danger regularly that they’re convinced that bad luck is something that always happens to everyone else. They can look at statistics that say that every single person in their line of work dies by violence sooner or later, and shrug and say that after all, I’m still alive, I’m not dead yet, many times I’ve been places where I could have been killed, I could have died a lot of times and I haven’t, and so on and so forth. After all, they’re fighters and adventurers, not insurance actuaries, not statisticians.…
And the thought that came to me then was that I had been thinking “They.” When more accurately it should have been “We.”
I was like that myself, and so was Chrys. If we were rational, we’d have known that the way we lived was more dangerous than skateboarding on freeways. As it was, we both figured that the life-extension drugs would give us our full two hundred-plus years, instead of figuring the obvious thing—that ATN gave us the drugs because that way we could be young, fast, strong, and sharp for as long as we lasted—and that still would be a matter of a decade or two at most.
Most of us senior Crux Ops were like the old people you sometimes run into, heavy smokers and drinkers who are pushing ninety and therefore figure they’re never going to die. The fact is that if you put enough people through a process that only kills most of them, there will be a few that last a long time, just as, if you roll dice long enough, you will come up with any roll you like as many times in a row as you want. You just can’t say when it will happen or how long it will all ta
ke, and you certainly can’t say which it will be. But the lucky dice are not the especially virtuous or smart or strong dice—they’re just lucky.
And the three-pack-a-day man who makes it to ninety-two is just the last one of his group to die, because everyone dies eventually, and his group died early. In a normal group the last guy to die would have been over a hundred.
So a senior Crux Op … I decided I didn’t like the trend of thought, and told myself to give it up.
Now, none of us was a volunteer “for the duration”—at least half the people in the room had enough time in to resign or retire if we wanted to. Chrys and I did, for that matter. But the war with the Closers is a total war, about as total as it gets, and neither side recognizes retirement. You can decide to go off somewhere, even to go across time to some timeline the other side has never discovered—and chances are still pretty good that one day your car blows up, or in your luxury suite on your spaceliner bound for Mars someone barges in and shoots you, or the stirrup cup some groom hands up to you is poisoned.
It doesn’t matter to them that we retire. Why should it? It doesn’t matter to us. If I had known that the other Mark Strang, who worked for the other side, had retired to grow roses and learn the harpsichord, I’d still have been perfectly happy to cut his throat.
The only difference retirement or resignation makes is that nobody is looking out for you. They no longer check to see if you’re okay, and when the inevitable happens there’s no revenge for you, no investigation …
You’re going to die the same way regardless, so you might as well get a few licks in.
Chrys saw an old friend from COTA that I didn’t know very well, and we went over to talk with her. I stood beside them, alone with my thoughts, occasionally distracted by the animated way Chrys was talking and gesturing with Xiao Chu.
My wife was very beautiful. In the time since I had known her, she’d had an eye and two limbs regrown by the advanced ATN medical technology; I’d had the same done for three limbs and a large part of my liver. She was very full of life. In our line of work it was really just a question of time before one or the other of us was blown apart so badly that they couldn’t do anything for us, because although they can practically regrow you from your head and the stump of your neck if they have to, once the enemy bags your brain you’re gone. And sooner or later they get your brain.
She was the mother of my child, and like a second mother to my ward, and chances were excellent that we would never see Porter’s college graduation, or even see Perry enter school. Chances were also that one of us would live out some lonely years as a widow or widower—crazed and living only for revenge. I had done that before, and I didn’t like the thought of doing it again, or of having Chrys do it.
The Closers had made me a widower once before, long before I ever heard of ATN or the Closers. They had killed my wife Marie, brother Jerry, and mother in the same car-bomb blast that had cost my sister both legs and one arm … and very nearly cost me my sanity.
There had been a long time during which I lived only for revenge and pleasure of killing Closers. It had been a time when life seemed pretty simple, if ugly.
Things had changed, a lot. I had a few other interests now … and most of them demanded living longer.
I did not want to see Chrysamen die and have to go on without her, and, for that matter, I did not want to die myself and miss so much of life together.
And as Chrys had pointed out, the war was nowhere near over, hadn’t even reached a point where we could say which side was winning. In all probability there would be many thousands of years more of fighting, and long after I was buried and forgotten in some timeline or other, probably far from home, the fighting would go on. Perry’s grandchildren, for all I knew, might end up as Crux Ops.
It wasn’t putting me in a very good frame of mind.
The last of us filed in, and after a decent interval so they could get refreshments and find seats, the people up front started to shuffle papers, adjust lighting, and generally do all the things that are the same wherever or whenever you go—hinting strongly that it would be a good idea if we all took our seats.
Chrys slid back into her seat next to me, and I took her hand. She seemed agitated and nervous; a second later she whispered in my ear, “At least half the people I talked to just survived an assassination attempt or a major fight. Everyone is getting pulled in out of very heavy action. A couple of them were badly shot up and just got here from treatment.”
“We already knew that whatever this is, it’s big,” I whispered, and then the room got too quiet to keep talking.
The first person to address us was General Malecela. “Crux Ops,” he began, “I have no doubt that all of you will have figured out six things that this meeting might be about, and rejected all of them as implausible. I won’t keep you in the dark any longer; you are here because we’ve lost touch with a very large number of futures, and because we think we know why and we’re going to need all of you to do something about it.”
There wasn’t a sound from the room. As yet he had not said anything that required any response, and we all wanted to hear what he said next.
Malecela nodded to us, as if he took our silence as a courtesy, and said, “Citizen-teacher Zouck will explain matters further; then Citizen-senator Thebenides will discuss our plan of action. After which there will be time for lunch and questions. But to allay whatever concerns you may have—you have been summoned here, I know, and you have been attacked in many cases, I’m fairly sure, because the news is good. They are hitting back as hard as they can because they are being hit very hard indeed. We have an opportunity to alter the balance of power tremendously, and with a bit of luck, that is just what we shall do.”
“Citizen-teacher” isn’t exactly a title like “Doctor” or “Professor.” The Athenians don’t see much connection between research and teaching, so the title implies only a lot of familiarity with the subject and an ability to explain it clearly. It’s a highly honored title, and the little implants behind everyone’s right ear explained this to us in the quick, abrupt way they usually did—Stand up and bow your head.
I’m used to doing what the implanted gadget tells me; they’re carefully programmed to talk only when they know more than you do, and then only when it’s urgent or you ask a question. Everyone else’s is pretty much the same way, so we all stood as one and bowed our heads.
“Return to your seats, please,” said a soft, gentle, woman’s voice.
We all sat again—with almost no sound, for Crux Ops are all athletes of a high order, and we don’t waste motion. The woman facing us at the podium was just slightly gray at the temples of her crew cut and had small, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones; her smile seemed warm and kind. I figured that she never had very much trouble keeping a class of students in line.
“I am honored that you honor me,” she said; it was a polite phrase used between experts in different fields. “Let me try to take as little of your time as possible.
“You know, better than any of us who merely teach, what a crux is. Timelines don’t naturally divide, or at least not often; whenever they can, they close back up with each other, leaving, perhaps, a few anomalies in the record. You all know a case or two of such things, I suppose—the couple who cannot agree on what evening they first danced together, the police files in which the same person appears to have died in an accident and to have committed a series of crimes afterward, the mysteriously scrambled records that drive historians half-mad trying to find out if a given ship was at a given battle or what rank an officer held, with clear evidence on more than one side.
“Those are cruxes that closed, places where things could have gone two or more different ways, and because finally it didn’t matter, the diverging timelines sealed back together.
“But if the timelines are pushed farther apart—if one of our agents, or one of theirs, intervenes, or a time traveler comes back to force a change—then the crux widens until the
two timelines will no longer reconcile, and at that point a new timeline forms. Such a timeline is always unstable in the great scheme of things, for whatever formed it at the crux can always be altered further, making it disappear, or reconverge, or go somewhere else entirely.
“Now, at first, when we found ourselves at war with the Closers, we were playing catch-up. They had found out how to travel across timelines and forward and backward along timelines. We had not. They had been operating for a long time. We had to invent things quickly.
“But we’ve come to realize that they tripped over their own idea of superiority. It never occurred to them that they might encounter serious resistance, so during the fifty years or so of head start, they didn’t put nearly the effort they needed into developing other timelines to be allies.
“In fact their very nature may have precluded it. We have pretty good evidence that the Closers all come from just one timeline, that the only relation they will tolerate with any other timeline is complete control and subjection. As you all well know, when the Closers take over a timeline, a few hundred of them move there, and the native population is kept as slaves of one kind or another. Thus, as you all have seen, though Closer forces are often well trained, if their officers are killed or they get beyond supervision, they fall apart quickly. Once we realized this, we began to capture them in large numbers, and we’ve learned steadily more about the Closers themselves.
“The biggest revelation is that the Closers proper—the ones who call themselves ‘Masters’—are universally trained from birth as fighters and officers; by the time he’s twenty a typical Closer male has commanded a full division somewhere. Apparently there are many positions for which they won’t use even their most trusted slaves. Thus the war is taking more of a toll on them than on us, even though they began with many more timelines, for they simply can’t mobilize as many forces as we can. That’s part of why we’ve been gaining steadily in strength relative to them.
