The Empire of Time

by Crawford Kilian

  From the hunters’ vantage point, he should at least be able to see the Sherlock missile if it was still on the ground; if it wasn’t, there would be no point in going farther. And if the Gurkhas did arrive in time after all, he would have to disappear very quietly.

  —And do what? he asked himself.

  —Go endo for a while. With the Grasslanders, perhaps, if I can talk them into accepting me, or with the mountain tribes in the Panamints. Do some hunting, some thinking. A lot of thinking.

  “Let us go, then.”

  They turned and moved silently through the smoke. For about a kilometer they walked single-file over increasingly stony terrain. Abruptly they stood on the edge of a steep-sided ravine. At the bottom, a stream pounded over rocks; halfway down the slope, four horses lay dead or crippled.

  Klasayat smiled. “You bring us luck.” Some of the hunters scrambled down to butcher the horses. They took the livers and tongues, and left the rest to rot.

  “A waste of meat,” Pierce remarked as they resumed their path.

  “There are plenty of horses,” Klasayat said. “Why should we not eat well when we can?”

  “You speak well,” Pierce replied. Why expect economy from the hunters who were driving dozens of species to extinction? And who was he, after all, to criticize?

  Both they and the wind changed direction, and they could breathe pure air again. It was a beautiful day: the sun hung in the clear April sky, and the hills were fresh with new green. They were in open forest now, moving at an easy, steady pace under good cover. The endos noted the plentiful spoor of horse, camel, and deer, and with irony praised the blue-eyes for driving tigers and wolves out of the region.

  Pierce liked them. They had been the scourge of the whole Mojave once, incorrigible thieves and woman-stealers, and quick to master the weapons they stole. But they had refused to let the blue-eyes sweep them away, had taken the invaders seriously but not fatalistically, and had made a spirited fight of it. To have lost as terribly as they had (Pierce had made a point of leaving the women’s and children’s corpses in their camps) and still stay alive and together was not a small achievement.

  At last they crossed a wooded ridge and found themselves looking down at Mojave Verde. As Klasayat had said, the guards were very close. Fifty meters downslope, a high barbed-wire fence ran east and west. Beyond it was a strip of bare earth perhaps three hundred meters wide and then the nearest buildings. A sentry patrolled inside the fence in a jeep with an armorglass dome.

  Pierce looked beyond, to the gantries rising above the next ridge. And there it was, glowing in the late-afternoon sun: a tall, blunt-nosed missile, still plugged into its umbilicals but obviously almost ready for liftoff.

  “What now, Jerry-missanan’kaa?”

  “I must go to the big round house on the ridge. Once I am through the fence and across the empty strip, I will have no trouble. But I will need a guide through the wire, and a distraction to lure the guards away.”

  “And what will you do in the round house, Jerry-missanan’kaa?”

  Pierce looked into Klasayat’s eyes. “I will set fire to the firetree, burn it to ashes while its roots are still in earth. When that is done, those who have displeased me will be overthrown, for that is no firetree like the others that grow there. Other men are coming at my bidding; they will seize my enemies, and all will leave. Then you will possess this land again.”

  “When you came to us before, you promised to destroy us, and you kept your promise. Now keep this one, Jerry-missanan’kaa.”

  Pierce laughed softly.

  The sun went down. The Grasslanders ate raw horse liver and tongue, and exchanged hunting boasts. The lights of Mojave Verde gleamed like a carpet of stars, while the missile stood like a cathedral spire in floodlit splendor. The bare strip beyond the wire was not illuminated, though darkened floodlights were spaced along the fence. At unpredictable intervals, the sentry jeep passed back and forth.

  “There is a path,” Klasayat murmured. “To step away from it is to die. The great lights blaze forth, and the men inside come firing their guns. Each must step in the proper place, or all will be lost.”

  A sensor array, clearly, had been dug into the bare strip. Total interdiction would cause false alarms and inhibit the guards; this way, they could move quickly through clear lanes.

  “How is it that you know where to step, Klasayat?”

  “A strange question. We have eyes, we have noses. The path is clear to us.”

  “Even as you see where water-root lies buried in the dry season?”

  “Just so. Can you not see such things?”

  “Sometimes. But tonight I will follow where your feet go.”

  “Good. When shall we go? All are eager.”

  “Not until the firetree is ready to grow. It will not be long.”

  If the Gurkhas got in first, though, he would be in trouble.

  The hours passed. The Moon rose, and the men talked softly, uneasily, about its terrible new scar. In the town there was still some traffic, though most houses were dark.

  At 2:00 a.m., the umbilicals were detached.

  At 2:30, lights began to go on in many of the houses.

  “It’s time,” Pierce said. “Let us go.”

  They drifted down the slope as silently as mist, paused, and watched the sentry. Once the jeep had passed, Klasayat rose and slipped through the wire; he moved with the grace and control of a ballet dancer. Pierce followed, enjoying the test of muscle and nerve.

  The Moon had already passed the zenith, casting plenty of light; if the sentry returned in time, they would stand out like totem poles. Klasayat scanned the featureless gravel, took a step, then another, paused, and turned right; they were advancing into an invisible labyrinth. Pierce stepped gently into the endo’s tracks, reflecting on the moronic cleverness of the defenses. They would work only if the intruder made a mistake—a dangerously complacent assumption, especially about endos whose life had equipped them all with senses like Klasayat’s.

  In a very short time, the entire group was across the strip and comfortably huddled in the shadows between two storage sheds, watching the jeep go past.

  “Now,” Pierce murmured, “attend me well, or never see the sun rise over the grasslands again. You are to take no captives, nor slay anyone, unless they attack you. Go into the wide street of many lights; break the great windows of the stores. Take loot if you wish, but no more than a man can carry when he is running for his life. Make yourselves heard and seen, then get back across the wire. Can this be done?”

  “Hai,” the men whispered, like wind in leaves.

  “Good. Klasayat will stay with me and pretend he is my captive. Now go.”

  They went away, so smoothly that Pierce had to look hard to follow them toward the main street four blocks away. The hunters moved from shadow to shadow, never quite visible as more than a shift in light. He felt a professional admiration: their stealth had been just as good when he was hunting them years ago. That had been a short operation only because he had quickly switched from search-and-destroy tactics to biological warfare. Typhus in a waterhole will find the stealthiest enemy.

  “Give me your rifle,” Pierce ordered. Klasayat looked alarmed, and gripped it more firmly. “Do not argue, Klasayat. They will not believe you a captive, and me a captor, if you still carry the rifle.”

  “I obey you, Jerry-missanan’kaa.”

  Pierce took the rifle, astonished at its weight. Where on earth could he have found such an antique—some trapper’s shack? “Put your hands behind your head. Good. Now, let us go.”

  They walked rapidly through the empty streets, Pierce a few steps behind the endo. Glass broke musically in the distance, and the trilled war cry of the Grasslanders cut through the darkness. With almost comic suddenness, lights went on in many windows, then went out again. Pierce glimpsed anxious faces peering through curtains, heard dogs barking.

  “Keep going, you endo son of a bitch!” Pierce roared in Engl
ish. They were jogging down a residential street, paralleling the main street and moving away from the disturbance, toward the ridge where the Mission Control blockhouse stood.

  A jeep screeched around a corner, catching them in its headlights. The driver braked hard; his voice roared from the jeep’s loudspeaker.

  “Halt! Identify yourselves.”

  “Helmut Thiess, Physicist 6, 1701 D Street, ID number 67–671–1904.”

  “Who’s the other individual?”

  Pierce snarled in exasperation. “How the hell should I know? He’s an endo, for God’s sake. I found him sneaking through our yard, got his gun away from him—now I’m taking him to Security.”

  “I’ll take him. Get him over here.”

  “Christ, man, never mind—they’re running wild just a few blocks from here! Dozens of ’em! The people down there need every guard in town.”

  “Bring your prisoner over here, Dr. Thiess.”

  “Shit,” Pierce muttered. He tapped Klasayat’s shoulder with the barrel of the AK-47. “Get in the back of the jeep,” he whispered.

  “I will die, Jerry-missanan’kaa, and my soul will wander homeless forever if I am not given to the vultures.”

  “Do as I say, and do not be afraid.”

  The Security man, an impassive young Slav, opened the rear door as they approached. Pierce shoved Klasayat into the screen rear seat; the door clicked shut. Pierce rapped on the driver’s window. The guard rolled it down, and Pierce struck out with the butt of the rifle, grateful now for the rifle’s weight, and hit the guard squarely across his forehead. He slumped against his seatbelt without even looking surprised.

  “Ah, you are quick.” Klasayat chuckled as Pierce reached through the window and unlocked the rear door. They set off again.

  “Could you not use the car yourself?” asked Klasayat.

  “I choose not to.” A masquerade would be too dangerous: he would have to struggle into another uniform, somehow dispose of the guard, and contrive to get past other guards, who would know every one of their colleagues. Better to appear as a courageous, public-spirited citizen with a valuable prisoner.

  The blockhouse was a massive cylinder, two-thirds buried in the ridge and flanked by several outbuildings. A guard, somewhat agitated, paced outside his booth at the main entrance.

  “What’s goin’ on downtown?” he asked.

  “Endo raid,” Pierce replied, closing the distance between them. “I caught this one, but there must be dozens more, all over the place.”

  “Holy shit! Sure picked their time, didn’t they, with McGowan and the Commissioner here.” He surveyed Klasayat with distaste. “Well, better get this schmuck over to Headquarters.”

  “Where’s that?”

  The guard took a step or two closer, pointed down the street. Pierce swung the butt of the rifle and knocked the guard flat on his face. Shots rang out from a machine gun somewhere down in the town. Klasayat began shaking, and Pierce felt pity and admiration for him, for his courage.

  “Quickly.”

  They sprinted across from the booth to the main entrance of the blockhouse; the entry was empty. Through a doorway and up several flights of narrow steps. At the top, another door, which opened slowly, heavily.

  They walked into Mission Control.

  It was a large, low-ceilinged, semicircular room filled with tall green cabinets, the Facility’s computer system. Three Trainable technicians, all teenage girls, monitored the pre-launch information pouring through their flickerscreens; the only other people in the room were Bengt Gersen, Harry McGowan, and Seamus Brown, seated comfortably before a holovision image of the missile. No one had noticed the intruders.

  Pierce detached the clip from Klasayat’s rifle. Six rounds—enough. He snapped the clip back in and handed the AK-47 to Klasayat.

  “Stay here by the door. If I tell you to shoot, shoot only the one I point to.”

  “These are the great ones, Jerry-missanan’kaa?”

  “The greatest in this world. Do not dream of trophies.”

  Obviously dreaming just such a thing, Klasayat clicked his tongue.

  Pierce went softly across the carpeted floor, not toward the observers but toward the technicians. Looking over their shoulders, he saw a small screen flashing out the launch countdown: 11:17; 11:16; 11:15. Close—he had cut it very fine.

  “Excuse me, please,” Pierce said quietly to the senior technician. She looked up in annoyance; then, seeing a stranger, her eyes widened. Pierce patted her shoulder, then reached out across the control board. He flipped the manual override switch, then the launch button, then launch abort.

  Dozens of video and holo screens showed the missile; when it exploded, it was like a perfectly timed fireworks display. The missile’s eight million components vanished in a fireball of orange, yellow, and black, into which the nose of the missile sank with eerie slowness. Thunder echoed from loudspeakers, drowning out the shouts of the technicians and observers, but not the shrill, warbling cry of Klasayat triumphant.

  The observers turned and saw Pierce walking toward them. He sat down in one of the armchairs arranged neatly in front of the holovision, which now resembled a sort of outsize fireplace. A bottle of Fundador Cognac stood open on a little table; Pierce poured himself a drink and sipped it gratefully. Gersen, McGowan, and Brown regarded him in a trance of consternation.

  McGowan, his complexion an unpleasant dark pink, was the first to recover. “W-where the hell did you c-c-come from?”

  “The north side of town. With a friend.” He nodded toward the door, and they turned to see Klasayat beaming at them over his sights.

  On the screen, the missile was now only a pile of glowing rubble on the launch pad, surrounded by ineffectual firefighting crews. Gersen shook his head.

  “Impossible. Impossible. Another fifteen minutes and it would have been in Earth space. Our agents there would have taken over guidance; nothing could have stopped us.”

  “Nothing can stop you, Commissioner.”

  “What do you mean?” barked Seamus Brown, who seemed fully recovered from the shock of losing his greatest creation. He was a thin, sallow man of thirty with hard eyes and, incongruously, a red-lipped mouth like a woman’s.

  “It means that at the worst, you gentlemen will spend a few months in some well-furnished jail, writing your memoirs. You’ll be freed as soon as Earth starts recognizing the Colonies as independent sovereign states. The new governments will demand your release, and off you’ll go, heroes of national liberation.”

  Brown leaned forward, listening intently. Gersen and McGowan began to lose their glazed expressions.

  “You were too clever. You saw what a weapon the Sherlock lens could be, but you didn’t realize that the mere existence of Sherlock meant the death of the IF, of the Agency—everything you wanted to overthrow.”

  “You’re going too fast for me, Mr. Pierce,” Gersen said; he had recovered his irony as well as his composure.

  “No doubt I am, Commissioner.” Pierce smiled. “Look—with no Doomsday, there’s no need for forced political unity, for coercion, for deportations. Separatism is inevitable. Orc will be independent within months—maybe weeks. The Agency is so rotten with incompetence and corruption, it couldn’t stop you even if the IF ordered it to. And it won’t, since—as I believe you know—I spread the word to every chronoplane.”

  “Have some more cognac, Mr. Pierce.” Brown poured him a fresh drink, then glared bitterly across the table at him. “You stupid son of a bitch! Of course we understood what would happen! D’you think we went to all this trouble just to—to Balkanize the chronoplanes? Pierce, Pierce—we were out to unify them. Under our rule, an alliance of Trainables and unTrainables. Not a tyranny of elitists, not a government based on a monstrous false threat.”

  Pierce’s eyebrows rose a little; he laughed inwardly at himself for having, this late in his life, underestimated the perfidy of his opponents. “Ah . . . naive of me. You’d have replaced the false threat
with a real one.”

  “Of course!” Brown snapped. “It would’ve been irresponsible not to use the power we discovered. We’d have kept humanity unified, moving together, not sinking backward into so many German principalities and petty kingdoms.”

  “Irresponsible.” Pierce felt achingly tired, and not at all in the mood for a political argument. He was about to get up when McGowan pointed to the screen.

  “Christ, look at that!”

  In the holovision, a little yellow spark had appeared in the distance.

  “Unidentified aircraft on the radar!” one of the technicians called out.

  The yellow spark grew larger, nearer; pulsed orange; vanished. A few seconds later the screens went white, blacked out, then came on again to show pad and gantry utterly demolished. There was no trace of the firefighters. Parachute flares threw a flat bluish light over the blasted launch site.

  Pierce cleared his throat. “I believe the Agency has arrived at last.”

  Gersen cocked his head, listening to the computer murmuring in his ear. His large, bland face revealed little. He spoke into his ringmike: “Tell Deputy Minister Wigner he can meet with us here in Mission Control.”

  So Eric himself had come along. Pierce wondered what they would have to say to each other.

  Someone switched the video screens to monitor the area in front of the blockhouse. The guard Pierce had knocked out was still lying there, a small pool of blood around his head. Approaching from the street were two or three squads of Gurkhas, Uzis slung under their arms; they looked remarkably like Klasayat’s hunters. As they took up positions near the blockhouse entrance, an armored personnel carrier pulled up. Wigner, looking a bit uncomfortable in a khaki uniform without insignia, got out; three young colonels followed him. Pierce recognized them all, tough Russians with plenty of combat experience.

  “There’d better be more booze than this,” Pierce observed. “Wigner’s friends are all serious drinkers.”

  “Harry,” Gersen said to McGowan, “would you get out the champagne, please? And glasses.” He smiled faintly at Pierce. “We were saving it to celebrate.”