Time troopers, p.34
Time Troopers, page 34
Now he smiled. “Let my other versions worry what they shall do. I am myself; I shall concern myself with me. But I suspect I am not the first of me who has declined your sweet temptation; I deem that you have played this scene before. I cannot think that any words or promises could stay me from my resolve.”
She hid her face behind her hands and wept.
He said, “Be comforted. If I were not the man you so admire, then, perhaps, I would depart with you. But if you love me for my bravery, then do not seek to rob me of this last, brave, final, act.”
She said from behind her hands, “It may be that you will survive; but the future which will come of that shall not have me in it.”
And with these words, she vanished like a dream.
The sun was sinking downward into night. Against the bloody glimmer of its final rays, the warship which held his enemies rose up in gloomy silhouette. Now he raised his weapon to his shoulder, took careful aim, and depressed the trigger. There came a clasp of thunder.
And because he knew not what might come next, his mind was utterly at peace.
AGAINST THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE
by Gene Wolfe
Some say everyone should have a hobby, but this one led to an accidental foray into the past in which no shots were fired, but a wound was taken, the sort of wound that heals slowly, if ever. Grand master Gene Wolfe shows a distinctly Bradburyesque touch in this gentle tale.
I have built a perfect replica of a Fokker triplane, except for the flammable dope. It is five meters, seventy-seven centimeters long and has a wingspan of seven meters, nineteen centimeters, just like the original. The engine is an authentic copy of an Oberursel UR II. I have a lathe and a milling machine and I made most of the parts for the engine myself, but some had to be farmed out to a company in Cleveland, and most of the electrical parts were done in Louisville, Kentucky.
In the beginning I had hoped to get an original engine, and I wrote my first letters to Germany with that in mind, but it just wasn’t possible; there are only a very few left, and as nearly as I could find out none in private hands. The Oberursel Worke is no longer in existence. I was able to secure plans though, through the cooperation of some German hobbyests. I redrew them myself translating the German when they had to be sent to Cleveland. A man from the newspaper came to take pictures when the Fokker was nearly ready to fly, and I estimated then that I had put more than three thousand hours into building it. I did all the airframe and the fabric work myself, and carved the propeller.
Throughout the project I have tried to keep everything as realistic as possible, and I even have two 7.92 mm Maxim “Spandau” machineguns mounted just ahead of the cockpit. They are not loaded of course, but they are coupled to the engine with the Fokker Zentralsteuerung interrupter gear.
The question of dope came up because of a man in Oregon I used to correspond with who lies a Nieuport Scout. The authentic dope, as you’re probably aware, was extremely flammable. He wanted to know if I’d used it, and when I told him I had not he became critical. As I said then, I love the Fokker too much to want to see it burn authentically, and if Antony Fokker and Reinhold Platz had had fireproof dope they would have used it. This didn’t satisfy the Oregon man and he finally became so abusive I stopped replying to his letters. I still believe what I did was correct, and if I had it to do over my decision would be the same.
I have had a trailer specially built to move the Fokker, and I traded my car in on a truck to tow it and carry parts and extra gear, but mostly I leave it at a small field near here where I have rented hangar space, and move it as little as possible on the roads. When I do because of the wide load I have to drive very slowly and only use certain roads. People always stop to look when we pass, and sometimes I can hear them on their front porches calling to others inside to come and see. I think the three wings of the Fokker interest them particularly, and once in a rare while a veteran of the war will see it—almost always a man who smokes a pipe and has a cane. If I can hear what they say it is often pretty foolish, but a light comes into their eyes that I enjoy.
Mostly the Fokker is just in its hangar out at the field and you wouldn’t know me from anyone else as I drive out to fly. There is a black cross painted on the door of my truck, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I suppose it wouldn’t have meant anything even if you had seen me on my way out the day I saw the balloon.
It was one of the earliest days of spring, with a very fresh, really indescribable feeling in the air. Three days before I had gone up for the first time that year, coming after work and Hying in weather that was a little too bad with not quite enough light left; winter flying, really. Now it was Saturday and everything was changed. I remember how my scarf streamed out while I was just standing on the field talking to the mechanic.
The wind was good, coming right down the length of the field to me, getting under the Fokker’s wings and lifting it like a kite before we had gone a hundred feet. I did a slow turn then, getting a good look at the field with all the new, green grass starting to show, and adjusting my goggles.
Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far below. There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a’s of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.
Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it-rising all the time.
It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.
It wasn’t until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She waved to me, and then I understood.
The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser’s Flugzeugmeisterei.
I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and held it out symbolically to me.
Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I could not find her balloon.
I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.
DOCTOR QUIET
by Jacob Holo
Terrorists and time machines make for a deadly combination, and the mastermind calling himself “Doctor Quiet” needs to be taken alive if these criminals are to be brought to justice. The newbie time soldier Susan Cantrell has muffed one chance already, but nothing expands opportunities—and danger—like traveling through time. This story is set in the continuing Gordian Division series created by David Weber and Jacob Holo, featuring the best-selling novels The Gordian Protocol and The Valkyrie Protocol, both from Baen Books.
“Agent Cantrell?” Captain Jason Elifritz asked, appraising the empty space above Susan Cantrell’s shoulders. A space that should have been occupied by her head.
“Yes, sir,” Susan replied through simulated speech across their shared virtual senses. Her current body—a Type-92 combat frame—took the form of a black skeletal humanoid festooned with maneuvering boosters and weaponry. She squared her shoulders and stood at attention within the captain’s office aboard Chronoport Defender-Two. “You wished to speak with me?”
“I did.” The chronoport captain removed the blue peaked cap of his Admin Peacekeeper uniform as he continued to regard Susan’s headless status with barely a tick on his face. “I know I asked to see you immediately after we returned to the True Present, but perhaps our discussion can wait.”
“Why’s that, sir? Is something wrong?”
“Well . . .” The faintest hint of a grimace leaked through his cool professionalism. “I had assumed you’d switch back into your general purpose synthoid before coming here.”
“Oh, right.” Susan nodded in understanding. Or rather, tried to. Instead, the severed power and data cables of her neck trunk wiggled back and forth. “I’m sorry to report I’m unable to switch bodies at the moment.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s my armor.” She gestured with a thumb over her shoulder. “One of the explosions melted the malmetal plates on my back. Fused them together. The operators need to saw me open before they can retrieve my connectome case. I thought you wouldn’t want to wait that long, so I came to see you straight away.”
“I see.” Elifritz glanced down and dusted off the top of his cap. “I suppose I can’t fault your thought process there, though that still leaves the matter of your head.”
“What about it, sir?”
“It appears to have been shot off.”
“You should see the other guy.”
“Yes . . .” Elifritz ran his fingers through long hair tied back in a ponytail, then refitted his cap with the utmost precision and care. He clasped his hands behind his back before continuing. “Funny you should mention that.”
“Sir?”
“Before I continue, a question for you, Agent. How, precisely, are you still getting around without your head?”
“Oh, that’s easy. I’m using the aux camera in my grenade launcher.” She tapped the shoulder-mounted weapon.
Elifritz glanced to the grenade launcher, which gave him a little up-and-down nod as if to say that, yes, she was using it as a backup head.
“I hate to have to inquire, but did you unload that thing before coming to see me?”
“No need.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because I discharged all my ordnance during the mission.”
“Ah.” Elifritz let out a resigned sigh. “I should have guessed.”
“Sir, is something wrong?” Susan asked, genuinely curious and a bit worried at this point. “Am I in trouble?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Elifritz made eye contact with the grenade launcher’s camera. “Do you recall the state of the guy who shot off your head—the ‘other guy,’ as you put it—last you saw him?”
“You mean besides the crater?”
“Yes.” One of his eyes twitched. “Besides the crater.”
“Well, I’m not too sure.” Susan raised a hand to her chin in an attempt to strike a thoughtful pose, but then fumbled around for her missing head and decided to drop the arm back down. “I think some of him may have ended up smeared across the ceiling before I . . .” She trailed off, now acutely aware of where her description was headed.
“Yes? Please continue.”
“Before I blew up the ceiling.” She paused uncomfortably. “Is that what this is about?”
“No. We had the building tagged as non-vital, so damage to it in service of the mission was acceptable. The occupants, though, were a separate matter.”
“Sir.” Susan tried to stand a little straighter. “Even though I’d suffered damage and was still under fire, I made sure to check my target before retaliating. That terrorist was not listed as a capture priority, and therefore, I was free to respond with lethal force.”
“That may be so, but I think your situational awareness needs some work.”
“Sir?”
“Agent, do you recall our mission parameters?”
“Of course, I do, sir.”
“Then indulge me. What were they?”
“We were executing a standard intelligence grab. Go into the past, crash a terrorist party, and retrieve vital intel, be it people or material. This particular mission took us back to August the twenty-third, 2971—negative sixty days back from the True Present—to a Free Luna cell. The targets were operating out of an automated warehouse just south of the capital’s Block F20.” She paused before continuing. “Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what this is about. As I said, I checked my target before returning fire.”
Elifritz raised his chin ever so slightly. “What about the individual standing next to him?”
“The individual . . . next to him?”
Elifritz held out his palm, and a window opened in their shared virtual vision. Susan recognized the logistical warehouse interior: the nearest wall taken up by multistoried storage racks and robot cranes suspended from the ceiling on rails. A group of terrorists hastily retrieved heavy weapons from a pallet of “food printer cartridges,” and one already had an anti-materiel rail-rifle aimed at her.
The image shuddered as her combat frame took incoming fire. Damage indicators flashed in the window periphery, and the view swung toward her assailant and focused in.
Elifritz paused the video, then slowly panned the image to the side until a second terrorist came into view, partially obscured by the logistical scaffold. He was a tall and somewhat lanky man with sunken cheeks and long, dark hair, gray creeping in at the temples and trim salt-and-pepper goatee. Despite the attack, his dark eyes were focused and cold, fixated on the source of the commotion without a hint of fear in them.
Those chilling eyes belonged to Cameron Nist: Capture Target Priority One.
“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped. “Oh, shit.”
Elifritz raised a chastising eyebrow.
“Shoot,” she corrected hastily. “Sorry, sir.”
“As you can see,” the captain began, “not only did you blow up the unlucky idiot shooting at you, you also reduced our mission objective to a form of abstract art on the warehouse ceiling. Do you see the problem, Agent?”
“Yes, sir. I believe I do. But why didn’t we try again? We could have performed a temporal microjump and reset the local timeline.”
“Because the team on Defender-Prime had markedly more success than we did.” He sighed and shook his head. “They managed to retrieve a copy of Nist from negative fifty-six days, and since their version is older than the one we found, our capture attempt became redundant. So, with us looking at both Defender-Prime’s success and the local version of Nist atomized by your grenade barrage—”
Susan tried to lower her head further, but only succeeded in moving her neck trunk.
“—I made the call to abort and return to base.”
“I see, sir. I think I have a clear understanding of the problem.”
“Anything to say for yourself, Agent?”
“I will . . . endeavor to show more restraint in the future.”
“See that you do,” Elifritz said stiffly. “Dismissed.”
Susan opened her eyes, and they really were her eyes this time. Or at least the eyes she thought of as hers, even though her old organic body had long since been recycled. Her mind could inhabit the combat frame as easily as any other compatible vessel, but she didn’t view the stark, robotic weapon with the same sense of self she bestowed upon her synthoid body.
Sharp hazel eyes stared out of a young oval face framed by red hair in a pixie cut.
Her eyes, and her face, and her hair.
They might all have been as artificial as the combat frame, but the synthoid’s cosmetic layer matched her original body in just about every detail, even while the mechanisms underneath granted her enhanced speed and strength. Not on the same level as the combat frame, but far superior to any natural human.
“You back with us?” Specialist Erika Nishi asked from her seat behind Susan. They both sat in a maintenance bay within the main tower for the Department of Temporal Investigation.
“Yes, thank you.”
