Timewars 06 The Khyber Connection

by Simon Hawke

  Fixed many spelling errors, paragraph breaks and placed italics to match paperback copy. Needs full proof reading.

  Timewars 06 The Khyber Connection V1.0

  The year was 1897. The Khyber Pass echoed with the sounds of war. Soldiers from Britain, India, and Afghanistan were immersed in a bloody conflict.

  Enter the Time Commandos. Their mission: To foil a plot that has set timelines on a collision course. Only they can save the timestream from destruction—with a little help from a war correspondent named Winston Churchhill…and a waterboy called Gunga Din.

  Timewars– Book 6 of 12

  The Khyber Connection

  By

  Simon Hawke

  Ace Science Fiction Edition/October 1986

  A CHRONOLOGICAL

  HISTORY OF

  THE TIME WARS

  April 1, 2425:

  Dr. Wolfgang Mensinger invents the chronoplate at the age of 115, discovering time travel. Later he would construct a small scale working prototype for use in laboratory experiments specially designed to avoid any possible creation of a temporal paradox. He is hailed as the “Father of Temporal Physics.”

  July 14, 2430:

  Mensinger publishes “There Is No Future,” in which he redefines relativity, proving that there is no such thing as the future, but an infinite number of potential future scenarios which are absolute relative only to their present. He also announces the discovery of “non-specific time” or temporal limbo, later known as “the dead zone.”

  October 21, 2440:

  Wolfgang Mensinger dies. His son, Albrecht, perfects the chronoplate and carries on the work, but loses control of the discovery to political interests.

  June 15, 2460:

  Formation of the international Committee for Temporal Intelligence, with Albrecht Mensinger as director. Specially trained and conditioned “agents” of the committee begin to travel back through time in order to conduct research and field test the chronoplate apparatus. Many become lost in transition, trapped in the limbo of non-specific time known as “the dead zone.”

  Those who return from successful temporal voyages often bring back startling information necessitating the revision of historical records.

  March 22, 2461:

  The Consorti Affair—Cardinal Lodovico Consorti Is excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for proposing that agents travel back through time to obtain empirical evidence that Christ arose following His crucifixion. The Consorti Affair sparks extensive international negotiations amidst a volatile climate of public opinion concerning the proper uses for the new technology. Temporal excursions are severely curtailed. Concurrently, espionage operatives of several nations infiltrate the Committee for Temporal Intelligence.

  May 1, 2461:

  Dr. Albrecht Mensinger appears before a special international conference in Geneva, composed of political leaders and members of the scientific community. He attempts to alleviate fears about the possible misuses of time travel. He further refuses to cooperate with any attempts at militarizing his father’s discovery.

  February 3, 2485:

  The research facilities of the Committee for Temporal Intelligence are seized by troops of the Trans-Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  January 25, 2492:

  The Council of Nations meets in Buenos Aires, capitol of the United Socialist States of South America, to discuss increasing international tensions and economic instability. A proposal for “an end to war in our time” is put forth by the chairman of the Nippon Conglomerate Empire. Dr. Albrecht Mensinger, appearing before the body as nominal director of the Committee for Temporal Intelligence, argues passionately against using temporal technology to resolve international conflicts, but cannot present proof that the past can be affected by temporal voyagers. Prevailing scientific testimony reinforces the conventional wisdom that the past is an immutable absolute.

  December 24, 2492:

  Formation of the Referee Corps, brought into being by the Council of Nations as an extranational arbitrating body with sole control over temporal technology and authority to stage temporal conflicts as ‘Limited warfare” to resolve international disputes.

  April 21, 2493:

  On the recommendation of the Referee Corps, a subordinate body named the Observer Corps is formed, taking over most of the functions of the Committee for Temporal Intelligence, which is redesigned as the Temporal Intelligence Agency. Under the aegis of the Council of nations and the Referee Corps, the TIA absorbs the intelligence agencies of the world’s governments and is made solely answerable to the Referee Corps. Dr. Mensinger resigns his post to found the Temporal Preservation League, a group dedicated to the abolition of temporal conflict.

  June, 2497-March, 2502:

  Referee Corps presides over initial temporal confrontation campaigns, accepting “grievances” from disputing nations, selecting historical conflicts of the past as “staging grounds” and supervising the infiltration of modern troops into the so-called “cannon fodder” ranks of ancient warring armies. Initial numbers of temporal combatants are kept small, with Infiltration facilitated by cosmetic surgery and implant conditioning of soldiers. The results are calculated based upon successful return rate and a complicated “point spread.” Soldiers are monitored via cerebral implants, enabling Search & Retrieve teams to follow their movements and monitor mortality rate. The media dubs temporal conflicts the “Time Wars. “

  2500-2510:

  Extremely rapid growth of massive support industry catering to the exacting art and science of temporal conflict. Rapid improvement in international economic climate follows, with significant growth in productivity and rapid decline in unemployment and inflation rate. There is a gradual escalation of the Time Wars with the majority of the world’s armed services converting to temporal duty status. Growth of the Temporal Preservation League as a peace movement with an intensive lobby effort and mass demonstrations against the Time Wars. Mensinger cautions against an imbalance in temporal continuity due to the increasing activity of the Time Wars.

  September 2, 2514:

  Mensinger publishes his “Theories of Temporal Relativity,” incorporating his solution to the Grandfather Paradox and calling once again for a ceasefire in the Time Wars. The result is an upheaval in the scientific community and a hastily reconvened Council of Nations to discuss his findings, leading to the Temporal Strategic Arms Limitations Talks of 2515.

  March 15, 2515:

  T-SALT held in New York City. Mensinger appears before June 1, 2515: the representatives at the sessions and petitions for an end to the Time Wars. A ceasefire resolution is framed, but tabled due to lack of agreement among the members of the Council of Nations. Mensinger leaves the T-SALT a broken man.

  November 18, 2516:

  Dr. Albrecht Mensinger experiences total nervous collapse shortly after being awarded the Benford Prize.

  December 25, 2516:

  Dr. Albrecht Mensinger commits suicide. Violent demonstrations by members of the Temporal Preservation League.

  January 1, 2517:

  Militant members of the Temporal Preservation League band together to form the Timekeepers, a terrorist off-shoot of the League, dedicated to the complete destruction of the war machine. They announce their presence to the world by assassinating three members of the Referee Corps and bombing the Council of Nations meeting in Buenos Aires, killing several beads of state and injuring many others.

  September 17, 2613:

  Formation of the First Division of the U.S. Army Temporal Corps as a crack commando unit following the successful completion of a “temporal adjustment” involving the first serious threat of a timestream split. The First Division, assigned excl
usively to deal with threats to temporal continuity, is designated as “the Time Commandos.”

  PROLOGUE

  When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  An’ the women come out to cut up your remains,

  Just roll to your rife an’ blow out your brains,

  An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

  Rudyard Kipling

  The name Hindu Kush meant “Hindu Killer.” To the foreigner who had grown up with the myth that Hell was located far beneath the surface of the earth, the Hindu Kush was proof it could be found at the top of the world as well. The 700-mile-long wall of rock that bordered Afghanistan on the north lay to the west of the impassable Himalayas. The terrain was otherworldly, both in its savage beauty and in its foreboding deadliness, a rockstrewn, broken landscape which looked as if it had been carved out of the earth with Vulcan’s chisel. For six months out of every year a banshee winter wind known as the shamal screamed down ice encrusted slopes that made the Grand Canyon look like a small Arizona drywash. During the summer months, the heat defied belief. Here and there could be found a small oasis, lush and verdant, a valley rich with fig palms and walnut groves, but for the most part it was a trackless wasteland of sheer rock which ripped holes in the sky.

  The country had defied the armies of Darius the Great and Alexander. The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had stormed through its mountain passes, but had never truly conquered it. The British Raj had floundered here for years, arrogantly claiming it as part of its empire, yet never taming it. The country, and the wild people who inhabited its inhospitable heights, endured and would not be subjugated. The Hindu Kush killed all those who did not belong there. It was a cold and lonely place to die.

  Huddled behind an outcropping of rock in one of the countless hairpin turns of the Khyber Pass, Sergeant Thomas Court struggled to hold on to life and prayed the Ghazis would not find him. His body was pierced by three jezail bullets, but he did not tear dying of his wounds so much as he feared the ministrations of the Ghazis. He could hear the screams of other wounded soldiers as the Afridi tribesmen found them and proceeded with the vivisection. The throat-rending screams echoed off the rock walls of the Khyber like the ululation of the damned in Dante’s final circle. The mountain tribes showed no mercy to the firinghi invader.

  Court had managed to half crawl, half drag himself up into the rocks, where he had taken refuge in a small stone sangar, an improvised fortification of piled boulders which tribesmen constructed for use as sniper’s nests. There were hundreds of them in the pass, at varying elevations, and from these primitive stone bunkers the Pathans would fire down at those below them with their jezails—the long-barrelled matchlock rifles they employed with devastating accuracy, able to drop a British soldier at a distance of 1000 yards. Their skill with the primitive jezails made them that much more formidable with captured British MartiniHenry and Snider rifles, superior firearms which the tribesmen turned against their original owners with unholy glee.

  The scene below where Court lay in the sangar, resembled a painting by Heironymous Bosch. Bodies were scattered everywhere. British soldiers and khaki-clad Sikhs of the Indian Army, Gurkhas, kilted Highlanders, corpses torn and bloodied, pack animals wandering about untended, riderless horses, camels oblivious to the death throes all around them; it was a scene of mind-numbing carnage through which the ghostly, white-clad Ghazis moved like wraiths, brandishing their charra knives. The grisly, swordlike blades rose and fell on those luckless enough to have survived. As the hour grew late, the screams became fewer, though no less hideous.

  Court shivered and cursed the sadists in the Referee Corps who had selected this particular horror as an historical scenario within which to stage a temporal confrontation action. He had survived the trench fighting of the First World War, been wounded in a naval action off the Barbary Coast, and had made it back from the death march at Bataan. He had served as a Roman legionary, an Indian scout in the American southwest, and a Spanish conquistador under Pizarro, but nothing in his career as a soldier in the Temporal Army Corps could compare with this bone-chilling nightmare. Nothing he had ever seen had terrified him as much as the sight of hundreds of screaming Ghazis pouring down out of the rocks, descending upon the regiment like locusts under the black flags of the jehad. Never before had he encountered fighters like the Ghazis. When the Pathan tribes went Ghazi, it made no difference whether they were Afridi or Mohmand or Yusufzai. Any feuds between the Orakzais of Tirah and the Mahsuds of Waziristan became forgotten as they united in jehad and became Chazi, Muslim fanatics in the grip of a religious fever, kamikazes without planes who believed that the slaughter of the infidels would open up the gates of paradise to them. With such an incentive, they knew no fear. They could not be turned. The blessings of the Prophet were upon them, and death in combat was but a passage to Islamic heaven. The British soldiers had fought bravely, but they were outnumbered ten to one. They had been softened up by sniper fire and rock bombardment from the cliffs, and then the human wave engulfed them and they died. And died. And died.

  Court held onto his MartiniHenry as if the rifle were his lover. He had one round left. Only one. If the Ghazis found him, he would write his own name on that bullet. If they didn’t find him, if he could hang on long enough, the Search and Retrieve teams would clock in from the 27th century and home in on his implant. If he was still alive then, they would clock him back to his own time and he would be treated for his wounds in an army hospital. The referees would then add his survival into the point spread that would guide them in reaching a decision in the arbitration action that had sent him back to the year 1897, to fight in a war within a war. If he survived, he would never know who won. He would never know how many other soldiers of the 27th century had died in the Khyber Pass, slaughtered by the Ghazis. He would never even know the details of the events in his own time which had led to the arbitration action. He would only know that he had survived, that he had beaten the odds in a game in which the mortality rate was astronomical. He would know that he had survived to fight again and that the next time, perhaps, the odds would finally catch up to him. Maybe they already had. He thought about his one remaining bullet. His entire life began to revolve around that tiny piece of lead.

  It was growing dark. Vultures wheeled overhead. Court’s teeth were chattering. His wounds no longer pained him. He knew that was a bad sign. There was nothing he could do. There were no longer any screams coming from below him. Nothing lived down there. The Ghazis had melted away into the mountains, taking with them the spoils of the battle—the guns, supplies, and animals. He had been spared death by dismemberment, but now it seemed only a matter of what would kill him first—exposure or his wounds. He thought about that precious bullet. It was a tempting thought, a secure and quick solution. Yet, on the other hand, the instinct to survive was strong within him. The S&R teams would arrive soon, they had to. Like the mythic Valkyries, they would bear away the bodies of the dead soldiers from the future and sweep the battlefield to cheek for possible survivors. All he had to do was stay alive.

  He heard a flutter of wings. Large wings. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating. It seemed entirely too melodramatic to be dying in a mountain pass, in a savage wilderness at the ceiling of the world, and to hear the flapping of the deathbird’s wings approaching. And it was a deathbird, only a prosaic one, a vulture. The ugly bird alighted on the sangar wall not two feet away. Its scrofulous face stared at him indifferently.

  “Beat it, damn you,” Court said. “I’m not dead yet.”

  The ugly bird opened and closed its beak with a snap, as if to say, “That’s okay, I’ll wait.”

  Court pegged a rock at it and missed, but the vulture vacated its perch above him with an irate squawk. He heard the rock bouncing down the slope, starting a brief, miniature avalanche as it dislodged smaller stones which skittered down with a pattering sound, and then all was still again. But only for a moment. Court froze as he hea
rd the sounds of somebody or something climbing up the slope towards him. It could be animal or man. Please, thought Court, let it be an animal, even a hungry tiger, anything but a Ghazi tribesman. He only had one bullet. It might be enough to stop one Ghazi, but its sound could bring others. He lay perfectly still, afraid to move, unable to. He heard the sound of labored breathing.

  His sweaty hands clenched around the stock of his rifle, bringing it around in front of him, bayonet pointed toward the sound. The white-robed figure stepped into view. Court held his breath. The face beneath the turban was in shadow, but as the Ghazi turned toward him, Court gasped involuntarily. The moonlight revealed the dark skin of an Afridi tribesman, but the features were his own. In the same instant, his doppelganger’s breath hissed out and he muttered a most un-Islamic oath.

  “Sweet Jesus!”

  Half convinced he was delirious, Court kept the rifle pointed at the apparition and said, “Who are you?”

  The Ghazi stared at him. “Thomas Court,” he said. “Sergeant, U.S. Army Temporal Corps.”

  “Yes, I’m Court, but how—” and somehow he suddenly knew that the man had not recognised him, but rather had answered his question. Just as suddenly, he realised the man was going to kill him. They both fired at the same time. The echoes of their shots rolled against the rock walls of the Khyber Pass and died away in stillness.