by John Barnes
“Our other big advantage has been in our diversity; because we don’t make every timeline alike and run it from the top down, we discover more things. Thus ever so slowly, due to the cross-fertilization of so many different ideas, we have been pulling abreast of them, and in a few areas we are now definitely ahead.”
She paused and nodded at all of us. “Now, no doubt some of you are impatiently waiting for the status report to be over so that you can hear the news. But I’ll have to explain one more part of what we’ve been doing first.
“When a crux is embattled—when there are Closer and ATN agents fighting there—quite often all the timelines from which it is descended become inaccessible. Our signals and cargo won’t travel crosstime to them because it’s not settled whether they exist or not. Eventually, the embattled timelines open up again, or they vanish forever. Sometimes they’re just somewhere else in time, somewhere that we can’t find because there are so many or somewhere that is simply inaccessible because the volume of paradox we’d have to tolerate to contact it is just too high. Either things settle down, and we can then reach that timeline, or they don’t.
“Well, for the last eighteen months, everywhere in the ATN more than twenty years in the future has been out of reach in just that way. And, in fact, the distance into the future we could reach has been steadily shrinking. We are down to being able to contact our own timelines only about fifty days into the future.”
A buzz ran through the room, but when Citizen-teacher Zouck raised her hand, we fell silent again.
“This might be taken as bad news, but instead, what we are finding is that the opposing timelines seem to be in a very different state. Everywhere, where we know the addresses of the Closer timelines, our agents have been able to penetrate with little difficulty, and universally we’ve found that those timelines are up in rebellion. In many of them the Closers have already been slaughtered and—because they tend to keep time travel and cross-timeline technologies only in their own hands—the gates are closed. The armies left in those timelines have generally mutinied and shot their Closer officers. Sometimes democratic revolutions are under way, sometimes civil wars, sometimes the army is taking over and trying to keep things going without the Closers, sometimes you have ‘warlordism’—all the military units fighting each other for control. Nowhere did we find an intact Closer society.
“So, tentatively, our conclusion is this—whatever is about to happen apparently involves destroying the Closers entirely, but it also involves changing the societies of the ATN so completely that we are unable to reach them from where we stand. And just to complicate matters, way out at the fringe of what we can detect, we seem to be seeing many, many more timelines than have ever arrived before—we have probes under way to a few of them even as we speak, but the effort and expense in locating and landing in them are enormous. We don’t even know if those are ours, theirs, some third force’s, or what.
“But still and all—I believe I bring you good news. The overthrow of the Closers, at least in the hundred thousand or so of their timelines we know about, is right around the corner. I cannot believe a great victory of that kind is causing anything bad to happen to us, however strange it may be.”
There was a round of applause when she sat, though it was sort of strange applause since only about half of us were from cultures that applauded speakers, and maybe half the ones who applauded clapped their hands—there was also whistling, barking like dogs, shouts that sounded like “Oh—wah!”, and people making the “bibibibi” sound with fingers on lips. I was pretty sure we all approved anyway. Citizen-teacher Zouck nodded politely, acknowledging our approval, and sat down.
General Malecela stepped back to the podium and gestured for quiet. As the room fell silent, he said, “To complete your background information, here is Citizen-senator Thebenides.”
Thebenides was a small, dark-haired man with light brown skin—which is what just about half of humanity looks like across all the timelines, palefaces like me being fairly scarce—who seemed just a little nervous, as if he wasn’t quite sure he should be up there. I suppose standing in front of a room filled with the most lethal people in millions of universes will do that to a guy.
“Well,” he began, “Citizen-teacher Zouck’s news, as you might guess, has caused quite a stir in government circles. We, too, find it very hopeful that the Closer timelines seem to be disrupted and destroyed by whatever is just ahead of us in the future, but naturally, to us these concerns are something more than just academic.”
I did not like the way he said “just academic.” Now, I knew I was a bit sensitive on the point, because way, way back, when I had no idea that I would ever end up as a professional killer, when the world was a happy playground for people like me and my first wife Marie, I had been headed into the academic life as an art historian, which is about the most unemployable thing you can be outside of academia. So the notion that professors and academic issues are somehow less important than “the real world” always irritates me a little in the first place.
But in the second place, it sounded like he had just patted the previous speaker on the head and told the silly little dear that now that she was done, the government man was going to straighten matters out for everybody. The lack of respect shown for someone with considerable knowledge bothered me, especially coming from a politician. She was trained to think; he was trained to smile. I knew who I trusted more.
And then, too … something about the way he did it. When people paint their opponents as theoretical dreamers, and themselves as hardheaded realists … well, at least, whenever I had done that, it was because I was about to do something brutal. And brutality is something governments tend to do, especially when they’re nervous and don’t know what’s going on. I had a deep, deep feeling that whatever he was about to propose wasn’t going to be anything I would feel good about.
Somehow all of that crystallized into feeling that this guy was whiny and devious and not to be trusted. That at least activated my Crux Op instincts—I leaned forward to listen and watch more carefully.
While I had been thinking, he had been blathering on in vague generalities, about how he was so glad to be among practical people of action who could take the necessary steps. It was a real bad sign as far as I was concerned, and utterly unnecessary—none of us could vote, so we had nothing to give him; we already knew what it was to be the best fighters there are, so he had nothing to give us.
By the time he got down to the meat of his speech, I wanted to frisk him for small arms and toss his room for child pornography. Chrys noticed how I was reacting and glanced at me with a little puzzlement, then turned back to continue watching Thebenides.
“There are several possibilities about what is going on,” Thebenides was saying, “and with all respect to my esteemed academic colleague, she has presented only the most hopeful of them. It is possible that the new timelines coming in are bringing with them some superweapon, some new way of organizing ATN that brings about a swift and sure victory, and we must be open to that possibility. But it is also possible that what they indicate is the appearance of some catastrophe that spans all the timelines we know, including those of the Closers.
“I need hardly remind you that if, for example, there were a rogue planet out there about to smash through the solar system, none of our known timelines would be capable of dealing with it, and so it would arrive in millions of timelines at the same time, and the chaos it caused could well produce these effects. Against such a situation there is naturally little we can do except try to ensure that the methods exist for getting our high-tech resources back on line as quickly as possible.”
It occurred to me that what he meant by that was probably something like “getting the time machines and the crosstime equipment running again,” but the way he had said it would justify almost anything the government might want to do. Zouck might have been academic, but she had managed to talk plain language to people who spoke it; “high-tech resou
rces back on line” was a collection of weasel words to justify any old thing.
He went on. “Another possibility is that the impinging timelines do in fact represent a third force, one that is hostile both to us and to the Closers, and that we have been hit even harder than they have. In such a case, a certain kind of flexibility might be warranted, and toward that end we must explore—”
“Horseshit,” I muttered. People turned and looked at me; Chrys looked embarrassed.
Whatever words he used for what we were supposed to be exploring was lost to me in the little stir around me, but I knew damn well what he was hinting at.
“And still another possibility,” he added, “is that although those timelines are hostile to the Closers and friendly to us, they are in effect so advanced and so alien to us that their advent is like the arrival of a high-technology industrial society into a Stone Age back-water, as has happened in many timelines. It will do us little good to be free of the Closer menace only to end up permanently as the ‘little brother’ in a paternal relationship.”
In the first place, you have a paternal relationship with something that looks like your father, not your big brother, and at least an academic wouldn’t have abused language quite that far. In the second place, while I could see that it would be bad news (as in having to do something useful for a living) for Thebenides and the other citizen-senators, the Citizen-archon, and a whole lot of citizen-bureaucrats, I didn’t exactly see having people who knew what they were doing take over the show as a complete disaster. There were parts of my own timeline where arriving American armed forces had found people in the Stone Age and left them operating airports, universities, hospitals, and all the rest. Even if they came to dislike the Americans, I never heard of any of them saying, “What a relief! Now that the Americans are gone, we can go back to washing clothes by pounding them on a rock, letting every other kid die before the age of five, and worshiping the chief as a god!”
“Thus,” Thebenides was finishing, “we must be aware of the wide range of possible dangers and opportunities and be ready to move in any direction.”
I was a little disgusted that my fellow Crux Ops seemed to applaud him more than they had Citizen-teacher Zouck, but maybe they were just more psychologically ready for it.
“What was that all about?” Chrys whispered to me.
“What was what all about? That speech? Hell if I know except—”
“I’m talking about the way you behaved. People noticed.”
I blinked, hard, and realized my wife was angry at me, and obviously I had embarrassed her. “What did—”
General Malecela was back at the podium, and he was doing the usual things, thanking everybody and assuring us all that we had just heard things we really needed to hear. I did my best to pay polite attention to that, gesturing to Chrys that we would talk in a minute. I figured there would be assignments announced, and if I’d already embarrassed myself somehow, I didn’t want to compound the problem by not knowing where I was supposed to be.
Malecela finished the platitudes and handed things over to Ariadne Lao, who gestured at a large screen that appeared behind her. “As you can see—”
At that moment the screen blew into bits, and a fusillade of projectiles roared into the room. I could see bodies falling over; something or someone was firing on us, and even in this heavily guarded room, we were under attack.
I was firing back at whatever was coming through the space where the screen had been before I even had time to note that so was everyone else; the big auditorium rang with the fire of a thousand weapons.
3
Where the screen had been there was the blank grayness of a gate, and a dozen figures in black uniforms, masked and goggled, each firing a long, spidery gadget that looked more like a broken-off television antenna folded into a child’s idea of an Uzi than anything else. My NIF was aimed and firing before I thought it in words, but I recognized the weapon—Closer standard issue, a gadget something like our own SHAKK—and I sprayed the lot of them with neural induction fléchettes in less than a heartbeat.
So had a lot of other people, I realized, before my finger was entirely off the trigger, and as my eyes probed desperately into the grayness of the gate, watching for whatever might come in next.
Each of those initial dozen raiders must have been hit by at least a hundred rounds from SHAKKs alone. I could hear the deep bass whoosh from a vast chorus of them—all of those rounds had homed in at Mach 10, found the bodies of the Closers, entered them (with more than enough speed and force to kill with the internal shock wave alone, even if they entered a hand or foot) and then spiraled to a stop within the body. The Closers had simply, instantly, turned into bags of red jam.
There were probably a hundred-plus NIF rounds in all of them, too, but none of them had enough nervous system left to feel them with, and it takes twelve times as long for a NIF round to get there—probably the set of fléchettes arrived an entire eyeblink late.
My thumb found the selector on my NIF—I was still set for temporary unconsciousness, as I had been in New York—and naturally flipped toward instant death before a better thought struck me, and I flipped it to severe convulsion.
Holding the trigger down on full auto, I sprayed a deadly stream of the tiny, gnatlike projectiles directly into the grayness of the gate. Gates are two-way, and if there was any unprotected human flesh on the other side, the fléchettes would find it and burrow in.
I pictured what would happen to the Closer then. The muscles of the body would lock against each other with sudden, brutal force, hard enough to shatter the bones and tear them out through the flesh, the jaw smashing the teeth to red ruins and driving them up into the sinuses, the scalp muscles crushing the skull, arm, and leg bones ripping out through flesh and clothing in great, sharp splinters, hands and feet bursting into shredded meat, all in an instant before the heart locked down and burst from internal pressure, and the chest muscles collapsed the rib cage. The ripping, dissolving figures would emit one unbearable scream as the air and blood from the chest was pushed with enormous force through slammed-shut vocal cords and crushed jaws.
It was a horrible noise and a terrible sight, which is why I was trying to cause it over on the other side. If that starts to happen around you, even the toughest fighters tend to suffer a loss of morale. And if they began to hesitate—
There was a scream from the screen that cut right through everything else—one of the Closers coming through must have stopped one of my rounds, and air-foamed blood sprayed everywhere for an instant before everyone else’s SHAKK rounds tore him apart.
The second rank had managed to arrive in a body, stepping out all at once and diving and scattering, so they returned some of our fire, but now that their surprise was gone, the advantage was all with us—we could see them coming out before they could see to shoot, and they were only coming through one narrow aperture.
They got off a few stray rounds, and because both sides have homing hypersonic ammunition, some of their rounds found targets. Perhaps a dozen more of us died, torn to bloody rags around us. The man in front of me, a tall guy with Oriental features who had been pumping SHAKK rounds at the screen in a steady rhythm, suddenly burst apart backward, his heart and lungs driven out through his rib cage and coat to spray Chrys and me.
I wiped my face, but I kept sending fléchettes into the hole where the screen had been.
Still, even though they scored on us a few times, and much as I was sorry anytime one of us died (or one of them didn’t!), they lasted for only a few seconds before they, too, were mowed down; they looked more like criminals trying to make a break from in front of a firing squad than a body of organized troops. Their bodies flopped around and sprayed blood, and they were still.
Whatever the third rank was supposed to do, all they did was die. I don’t think many of them even made it out of the gate—there was a storm of SHAKK and NIF rounds pouring in there by then, and what it must have been like on the other
side is hard to guess.
I saw General Malecela rise cautiously from the deck up there and toss two things through the gate before he fell down, hugging the dirt again.
A moment later, the surface of the gate—with shadowy figures still half-falling through it—glowed red, and then there was only blank wall where it had been. There was a long moment while we all checked to make sure that all the Closers who had come through were dead; then another burst of activity as people grabbed their fallen comrades, hoping—though with the weapons of that future, it’s hopeless—that someone had somehow survived a hit.
I suppose I should give the Closers some kind of credit—obviously it was a suicide mission, which takes guts, and they certainly kept coming. But after the initial explosion into the room, and the first hail of deadly projectiles that killed sixty of us, they barely managed to get forty fighters through the gate they had opened, and our total deaths were under a hundred. I call that amateurish and sloppy, and since I wasn’t used to seeing either from the Closers, it told me in part how desperate they must be.
Within a minute or so, the ATN staff were back in action and had opened an emergency gate. We all filed through it in quick, silent order; they were popping us to a concealed base deep inside an asteroid in an uninhabited timeline, one of many sanctuaries that ATN maintained for times when absolute security was imperative.
As I stepped through the gate, I glanced back and saw that a detail was taking the bodies out; there were several bodies lying in the aisles or in seats with living Crux Ops kneeling or sitting beside them. I thought of how I might have felt had Chrys died in the attack, and realized I’d have been doing the same thing—saying good-bye, getting it into my brain that she was gone. As we went through the gate, I shuddered.
It got gray, weightless, and soundless; as always, light came back first, color last. At the end of the process we were walking on a seemingly endless steel walkway that curled around over our heads; the asteroid was spinning to provide artificial gravity, and the walkway ran around the outer edge.
