At the Narrow Passage (6 page)

And there the message ended. That was all there was of it. And it was
the only message ever received.
The station is still in operation to this day -- assuming it's all true --
beaming its power into the Moon, and I suppose that it will continue to
operate until the day two thousand years from now when it is destroyed --
if the future is not changed.
But that one message came through. The aliens are coming to destroy us,
mankind and Kriths together.
Across the Lines six more stations were built, beaming their power into
the future. And each one received substantially the same message, asking
for help from the past.
Crazy, isn't it?
The first time I was told the story I went out and got myself senseless
drunk and got laid by the ugliest old whore in North New Ardhea.
But, to go on -- the final analysis was this: All across the Lines
there exists this same menace two thousand years away. A menace that
will totally destroy everything human and Krithian unless something
is done to stop it. That's when the Kriths really got started. They
decided to do something about it. They decided to change the future,
to change the message being beamed backward in time.
Using the sociodynamics of the Haldian Lines, they be- gan to move across
the Timelines, mostly to the West where men could, perhaps, someday be
strong enough to fight the invaders, and began to build worlds that could
meet and withstand the aliens.
They would move into a Line, the Kriths and the Haldian sociodynamicists,
and analyze where the current trends would lead in two thousand years,
what kind of world would be there to meet the invaders. Then they set
about making the necessary changes to meet the countless invasions of
the future.
Guided by their own strange logic and the sociodynamics of the Haldian
Timelines, the Kriths would bring in what forces were necessary to make
the changes, aiming the Lines in the direction of maximum strength in
the distant future. They used sociologists, anthropologists, scientists
of a hundred kinds to add, to subtract, to build, and to change, and
they used mercenary soldiers where necessary.
Mercenary soldiers like me.
Now the world in which the British and the Holy Roman Empires battled was
a fair example of how they worked. Haldian sociodynamicists said that
without outside help the Holy Roman Empire would defeat the British
within a decade. Before the century was out, it would consolidate
its hold on the Western Hemisphere and then turn to face the growing
Nipponese Empire. The twenty-first century, by local reckoning, would
be devoted to another war between the Holy Romans and the Nippons,
which would ultimately lead to nuclear warfare that would destroy both
empires and most of the rest of civilization.
It would take a thousand years for even a primitive agricultural society
to redevelop and at the end of the two-thousand-year span allotted to
us the inhabitants of this Line would probably have barely reached the
level of ancient Rome, local history. Hardly a match for the invaders.
On the other hand Haldian sociodynamics indicated that a victory by the
British would ultimately lead to a mutual coexistence with the Nipponese,
the eventual rise of republican forms of government within the next three
hundred years, a falling apart of the old empires, and the gradual rise
of a peaceful, united world with a high degree of technology.
By the end of the two thousand years this culture would have colonized
a good chunk of the galaxy and be in position to more than take care of
itself against the invaders.
So there Tracy and I and a few hundred other Timeliners were, with a handful
of Kriths, helping the British defeat the Holy Romans and create this better
world.
That's the sort of thing I believed then, and that's what I thought about
as I waited for the sun to set and for Kar-hinter to return and prepare us
for our mission -- the kidnapping of Count Albert von Heinen and his wife.
I had no idea what else was going to happen before that mission was over.
6
Up the Loire
The moon had set early that night, and had it not been for the flashing
of cannon along the British right and the answering flashes of Imperial
German artillery and the red glow in the east where the city had already
begun to burn, it would have been a night of pitch blackness, unbroken
even by stars, for a low cloud covering had moved in shortly before
nightfall, forewarning us of the rainstorms that the meteorologists had
predicted for tomorrow's dawn.
At times we could see airships moving in and out of the clouds to the
east, their bellies lighted by the glow of the city burning under them,
by the flames of their own bombs exploding, and by the fainter flashes
of Imperial cannon and antiairship weapons. And once or twice as we
watched we saw an airship burst into flames, its catalyzed hydrogen,
impervious to flame most of the time, but still unstable and liable
to explode when the proper degree of heat was reached, bursting out,
lighting the undersides of the clouds with a brilliant glow. Then the
fireball would begin to fall apart as the hydrogen was consumed. And
I wondered how soon the Kriths were going to help the British "invent"
heavier-than-air craft.
But we had little time to watch what was happening or to wonder about
things. We were in the boats, in the dark river, in the shadows of the
willows and the popiars, and we were quietly paddling toward the cables
and chains that the Imperials had laid across the river to prevent just
such a venture as ours.
The lead boat held three British soldiers: a sergeant and two privates,
dressed in rubber swimming garments, equipped with cutters and saws
to hack a path for us through the cables and chains. Those three were
really what they appeared to be -- simple British soldiers given an
assignment that they didn't fully understand, but about which they asked
no questions. Not of us, at least, we officers.
I was in the second boat, sitting in the front position, a paddle
in my hands dipping softly, quietly into the dark water, moving us
forward, while we listened. My own senses, augmented by artificial
electrobiological systems, were at their peak and more acute than those
of other human beings who did not have the Timeliner modifications.
Behind me sat General Sir Gerald Asbury, dressed now in the uniform of
a common soldier, with only a glint of metal on his collar to betray
his rank. He too held a paddle and alternately dipped it right and then
left and then back to the right again. Behind him sat Ronald Kearns,
our skudder pilot, showing no emotion at all. Though he was a Timeliner
like myself, I could not fathom what was going on in his head, though
that is not strange in itself, for Kearns or whatever his real name was
was probably from a world as different from mine as mine was from the
one in which we both now found ourselves.
The third boat held Tracy and the two corporals who had been guarding
the house in which we had met with Kar-hinter.
In the final boat there was another corporal and two privates, at least
that is what their British uniforms said they were, though like the
rest of us, save for the three in the leading, boat and Sir Gerald,
they were men from worlds other than this, men who moved across the
parallel branches of time fighting a war for the Kriths that would not
end for two thousand years.
We Timeliners have a lot of history in front of us.
"How much farther do you think it is?" I heard Kearns ask.
"A good distance," Sir Gerald answered. "We are still a mile or two
short of the German lines, as best I can estimate, and the villa is a
good five miles beyond that."
"Several hours then?" Kearns asked.
"At the rate we're going, yes," Sir Gerald whispered back. "We will be
doing very well for ourselves to have the count in our hands by dawn."
"We'll have him before dawn," I said over my shoulder.
"I hope so, Mathers," said Sir Gerald.
"I know damned well, sir," I replied. "We don't have any other choice."
"It's your show," Sir Gerald whispered, bitterly. "I'm just an observer."
I said nothing, for it was true. This wasn't a British patrol. It was
strictly Krithian and Timeliner. The poor British were only causing a
distraction for us, a bloody, nasty, costly distraction that Sir Gerald
hated with all his guts. I can't say that I blamed him.
It seemed like hours, though it could have been no more than a few
minutes later, when the sergeant in the lead boat held up his arm and
signaled for us to stop. Not that I could really see his arm even with
my augmented retinas; it was only a shade of blackness somehow slightly
distinguishable from the other shades of blackness along the river.
We slowed in midstream and carefully turned our boats toward the shore,
up to the marshy ground, in close to the trees that grew on the water's
edge. And there we stopped and waited, silent, hardly breathing, listening
to the distant sounds of war and the closer sounds of German sentries
marching along the edge of the river.
Then there were two soft, watery sounds, not quite splashes, more like the
sound of two heavy bodies slowly lowering themselves into the river, down
under the water. There was silence as the sergeant and one of the privates
swam underwater up to where the first set of cables lay across the river.
There was nothing to do but wait and wish for a cigarette and know that I
couldn't smoke one and then chew on my lip and recite an old Greek poem
my father had taught me and think about women and wonder what was going
to happen when we finally did get to the villa -- though that sort of
thing, long experience had taught me, was a complete waste of time. I'd do
whatever I had to do when the time came, and that's all there was to it.
We were still a mile or two from Beaugency and the two bridges that
spanned the Loire there, if they were still in,tact, and aerial
photographs hadn't been too clear about one of them; it might be half
lying in the water for all we knew.
Beaugency was an old town, I understood, or rather the name was old.
The present town was relatively new, for this part of France, having been
built from the ground up around the turn of the nineteenth century.
The earlier city by that name had been a few miles farther up the river
but had been burned during the Peasants' Rebellion in the late 1700's
that tried to overthrow the French monarchy and had very nearly succeeded
before the British stepped in on the side of the royalist defenders of
the crown and helped put down the rebellion with the same deadly Ferguson
breechloaders that had stopped the American rebels two decades before.
The old Beaugency had been a stronghold of the rebels during the last
stages of the rebellion. When their main forces had been crushed by the
royalists and their British allies, the shattered armies had somehow
converged on the Touraine and finally retreated into Beaugency. It was
the last major rebel fortress to fall and the angry, victorious king had
ordered that the city, like Carthage nearly two thousand years before,
be leveled and salt sown upon the earth where it had stood.
The survivors of Beaugency, those who weren't beheaded or hanged under
the king's eyes, were allowed to settle along the river a few miles from
the spot where the old city had been. The new Beaugency had gradually
grown up there -- and that is the city toward which we moved or had been
moving before we had stopped to wait for the cutting of the cables.
All this is of absolutely no importance, of course. It was just one of
the bits of information I had picked up while we sat in the trenches
during the long, cold winter.
At last we heard the movement of water again, the soft splashing of
careful, highly trained swimmers returning to their boat. Again I saw
the sergeant, once he had got his dripping body back into the boat,
give me a hand signal; this one for us to follow.
Back out into the river we rowed, though not as far from the shore as
we had been before. From here on we would have to do our best to avoid
being seen, though I doubted that very many Germans were peering down
into the river that night. There was too much going on to the east for
them to worry much about the river.
After a while we passed the trenches and the last of the cables that
had lain across the river. Soon the Germans would discover that they
had been cut, but it would not be soon enough for them to do very much
about it. We hoped.
Then we came to the parts of the city that lay along the river. The main
sections of the city had grown up to the east, away from the river,
and that is where Beaugency's industry had been and that is where the
Imperial forces were camped most thickly and that is where the bombs fell.
I had halfway expected to see refugees streaming toward the river, trying
to cross the bridges or perhaps swimming the river itself, but there were
none. Maybe there were no civilians left in Beaugency and the Germans
who retreated from the battle -- that would only be the wounded now --
would be going north, not west. Kar-hinter had known pretty well what
he was doing when he sent us up the river.
The first bridge showed no sign of damage, though about all I could
really see were the two guardhouses on either end of the bridge and the
two sentries who paced back and forth between them and threw occasional,
disinterested glances down into the water. I doubt that they could see
a thing in the blackness that surrounded us.
We passed the bridge without incident and came to the second about half
a mile up the river, the one that the aerial photographs had indicated
might be damaged. It was.
At one time a blast had struck the bridge on its extreme right, blowing
it completely apart. The spans of twisted, rusted metal drooped down to
the water and rested on the river bottom. Half the river was blocked to
navigation. We were forced to cross over to the left bank and proceed
there along the side.
There were no guards visible there. The Germans must have been fairly
confident that no one would get this far up the river without being
detected, I thought.
Soon the center of the city was behind us and even the glare in the sky
was falling off to our right rear. We were well behind the Imperial lines
-- and without detection.