TW11 The Cleopatra Crisis NEW (5 page)

The conflict was complicated further by the existence of the temporal Underground, a loosely organized confederation of deserters from the future who had fled into the past in order to escape the madness. No one was quite certain what to do about them. Technically, they were criminals, fugitives. It was up to the Temporal Intelligence Agency to track them down and apprehend them, but the particularly the covert field section, had never seriously considered them a priority. In fact, many of the old covert field agents had maintained contacts among the members of the Underground and sometimes called upon them for assistance in their missions. When Forrester had assumed the directorship of the agency, he had put a stop to such practices, as well as to the corruption in the T.I.A. he had discovered that many of the covert field agents, as well as their section chiefs, had been running an extensive trans-temporal black market operation to enrich themselves. The corruption went all the way up to the previous director.

Their immensely profitable and highly illegal sideline was referred to as ‘the Network' and it involved such things as using time travel to manipulate the stock and commodities markets, smuggle rare coins from the past to sell in future time periods, practice piracy on the Spanish Main and sell the booty in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Network had hijacked gold and works of art from the Nazis. They were involved in the East India Company. They used time travel to scam betting operations, and the list went on and on and on. They were the ultimate soldiers of fortune, less interested in their duties as temporal agents than in their Crosstime financial ventures. Forrester had tried to put a stop to their dangerous and illegal activities, but he had not been entirely successful. He had disbanded the covert field section and put every agent he could get his hands on, from the lowliest records clerk to section chiefs and senior administrators, through a scanning procedure in an effort to ferret out the ones who were involved in the Network. However, word got out and many of them simply disappeared, going underground in time and becoming a trans-temporal, Mafia, the ultimate organized crime family. They had put a price on Forrester's head. There had already been several attempts on his life. He had no doubt there would be more.

And what of the man who had started it all? As he walked down the corridor from his quarters to the lift tubes, Forrester thought that perhaps it was unfair to blame it all on Robert Darkness. Darkness had not started the Time Wars. The Time Wars had come about when nations had decided to use time travel to settle their conflicts by having their troops do battle in the past, in order to protect the present from the ravages of war. There was no real evidence to support that it was the invention of the warp grenade, and not the actions of the Time Wars, that had brought about the confluence phenomenon. Yet, Darkness himself seemed to accept responsibility for what had come about.

He was not on Earth when the confluence phenomenon came into being, he had disappeared mysteriously and no one had any idea what had become of him.

Forrester later learned that Darkness had established a research laboratory on some far-off, desolate planet and had gone there to perfect his process of tachyon conversion. Darkness had discovered a way to focus a tachyon beam and send it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which amounted to instantaneous transmission. No time lag whatsoever. Going from Point A to Point B without having to cover the distance in between. His next step was to start working on a process whereby the human body could become converted into tachyons, which would depart at six hundred times the speed of light along the direction of the tachyon beam, through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. His main concern had been that tachyon conversion might violate the Law of Uncertainty. The beam was focused by means of gravitational lenses, but there was no receiver, so in order to insure that what would materialize at the other end would not be some kind of a blob, he had incorporated a timing mechanism into the conversion process, which would reassemble him in the proper order, at the proper time and place, based on the temporal coordinates of transition. What he was seeking was the ultimate form of transportation, something that would surpass even the chronoplate devised by Dr. Mensinger.

Unfortunately, when Darkness tried the process on himself, he had discovered that it was ultimately restrained by a little known law of physics called the Law of Baryon Conservation. When he had arrived at his point of destination, he discovered that he could not move from the spot on which he stood. Something had happened to his subatomic structure. He took on the appearance of a hologram. He had become a ghost with substance. His body had been permanently "tachyonized." He had become faster than the speed of light.

He could move from place to place, traveling through time and space at will, but only by translocating or, as he called it, "taching." He could not walk so much as one step. He could appear to "walk," after a fashion, but it was only a series of incredibly rapid translocations, having the multiple-image effect of high-speed photography.

Quite possibly, thought Forrester, the tachyonization had had an effect upon his mind as well, although with Darkness, it was difficult to tell. The man was incredibly brilliant, light-years ahead of all his peers (both figuratively and literally). They could not even begin to understand his work.

His personality was, to say the least, idiosyncratic. He was a man of immense wealth, holding the controlling interest in Amalgamated Techtronics and a number of other large multinational corporations. He felt himself accountable to no one. What he had done with Lucas Priest was a perfect example.

Lucas should have died, thought Forrester, despite the fact that Col. Priest was his closest friend. He should have died and he should have stayed dead. What Darkness had done was inexcusable. Ever since he'd done it, Forrester had spent many sleepless nights, worrying about the possible consequences. As had Lucas Priest himself, on whom the strain was obvious.

It had happened in the year 1897, while Priest, Cross, and Delaney were clocked out on a mission to Afghanistan, during the Pathan revolt against the British. A strike team of the S.O.G., from the parallel universe, had come through a confluence in the Khyber Pass and was working to change the course of history. Priest and Cross had been standing on a bluff with the British command staff, watching the fighting that was taking place below them, between the Ghazis and the Bengal Lancers. A lone Ghazi sniper who had concealed himself in the rocks had drawn a bead on the battalion surgeon, mistaking him for the British general. Priest had spotted the sniper and, without thinking about the possible consequences of his interference, had shouted out a warning. The surgeon, his instincts honed by combat, had immediately dropped to the ground, but by doing so, he had left the young Winston Churchill, who was present as a war correspondent, directly in the line of fire. Churchill was too slow to respond and Priest, in his cover as a missionary, had not been carrying a weapon. He had done the only thing that he could do—he flung himself at Churchill, knocked him out of the way, and took the bullet meant for him. Or, more accurately, meant for the surgeon with whose destiny Priest had interfered.

Lucas was killed instantly. They had even buried him. But Dr. Darkness changed all that in a manner that Forester still could not completely comprehend. During a prior mission, Darkness had implanted each of the three commandos, as well as temporal agent Steiger, with a particle-level tracer device of his own design, one that bonded itself to their molecular structure.

It allowed him to find them no matter where they were in space and time. What Darkness had not revealed to them was the fact that these tracer devices were also prototypes of a new invention he was trying to perfect—a new generation warp disc. The original warp disc, the one now issued to all temporal personnel, functioned on the same principle as the warp grenade and had superseded the more cumbersome, obsolete chronoplate of Dr. Mensinger. The new model Darkness had designed was not worn on the person, but was integrated on the particle level, actually bonding itself with the individual. Moreover, it was thought-controlled, an idea that still scared the hell out of Forester.

The prototypes had all malfunctioned. The tracer functions worked perfectly, but the bonding process had damaged the temporal transponders, rendering them useless— all except Priest's. Rather than lose his only working prototype, Darkness had elected to bring Lucas Priest back from the dead.

How he had done it was a Zen physics puzzle. The leader of the S.O.G. strike team from the opposing timeline had been Priest's twin from the parallel universe. A man whose personal history was apparently somewhat different from the Priest that Forester knew, but who was identical to him in every other respect, right down to his genetic code. After Priest had died, Finn Delaney had killed the "twin Priest." Darkness had tached through time and taken the body of the twin Priest, then tached back and, moving faster than the speed of light, had substituted it for their Lucas Priest, snatching him out of the bullet's path at the last nanosecond, pulling him into his tachyon field and taking him back to his headquarters on that unknown planet.

There, he had activated the dormant, tachyon-based, thought-controlled transponder Priest had been implanted with. And now Priest had returned, to see his own name listed on the Wall of Honor, among those killed in action.

There still remained the question—what had actually become of him? And what had he become'?"

Darkness had gone back into the past and changed something that had already happened. Or had he? Had he actually altered the past or had his actions in fact restored the past to the way it had originally happened? It seemed to Forrester, and to Priest as well, that there had to exist a point in time, somewhere, a moment in which Lucas Priest had actually died.

Logic would seem to dictate that for Darkness to have gone back and saved him from death, he would have had to have died in the first place, otherwise there would have been no necessity for Darkness to do what he had done. However, when it came to 'Zen physics’, logic frequently broke down.

After the mission was completed, an S & R team was clocked back to retrieve Lucas Priest's remains. But had Search & Retrieve brought back his body, or that of his twin? Even if the remains had not been cremated, how would it have been possible to tell, since both were identical, right down to their DNA? Had Priest actually died, or had the corpse of his twin taken the bullet? Had Darkness merely caused a temporary "skip" in the time stream's continuity, or had what he had done in saving Priest become a temporal disruption that could have unforeseen consequences further down the timestream? Those questions plagued not only Forester, but Lucas Priest, as well. And there were still more problems that Priest had to contend with, beyond the metaphysical riddle of his own existence.

By experimenting on himself, Darkness had created an instability in his own subatomic structure, an instability that seemed to be increasing with the passage of time. Darkness believed that, eventually, his tachyonized state would decay into discorporation and he would depart at multiples of light speed in all directions of the universe. Forester shuddered at the thought as he stepped into the lift tube and punched out the restricted code for the penthouse. Knowing that something like that would inevitably happen to you had to have an effect upon your mind.

He stepped in front of the scanner and a beam of light played on his right eye, reading his retinal pattern. Then the tube started to ascend.

Priest could be facing the same thing. Although the process he had been exposed to via the particle-level implant in his body was different from that which had tachyonized Darkness, it was based on similar principles. Priest had no idea whether or not it would eventually do the same thing to him. Moreover, he had to contend with the problem of having been turned into a living time machine. It had become necessary for him to learn an entirely new level of mental discipline, because now any stray thought could launch him on a trip through time. It had already happened on a number of occasions. The thought-controlled temporal transponder was unable to differentiate between when he was awake and when he was asleep. Consequently, a dream could launch him on a trip through time as well. As Darkness had typically understated it, the device still "had a few bugs" in it.

The trouble was, since the transponder had become permanently bonded to Lucas, fused with his atomic structure, there was no way to remove it. Priest would simply "have to adapt," as Darkness had put it. Forrester would have dearly loved to take a swing at Darkness and lay the bastard out, then throw his ass in jail, but how could you hit someone who was faster than the speed of light, much less hope to incarcerate him?

The tube arrived at the penthouse floor and revolved to let Forrester out. Priest had called him the moment Darkness arrived. He "dropped in" from time to time to check on the progress of his living prototype. Forrester had asked Priest to prevail on Darkness to stay long enough to talk to him, but he had no idea if the man would still be there. Darkness did not wait on generals, or anybody else, for that matter. He could already have left, thought Forester, and arrived back where he had started from before he had departed.

However, when he entered the penthouse, he saw that Darkness was still there. The scientist was standing behind the bar, helping himself to Forrester's twelve-year-old Scotch. Andre Cross was there, as well, along with Finn Delaney and Creed Steiger.

Delaney, a brawny, powerfully built man with a face like an overaged delinquent's, looked, as usual, as if he'd slept in his black base fatigues. His dark red hair was uncombed, his heard scruffy, and his boots unshined, a stark contrast to Steiger, who always looked like a smartly turned-out member of a S.W.A.T. team. Col. Steiger's hair was dusty blond, he was clean-shaven and his hooked nose and cruel mouth gave him a predatory look. Andre Cross sat beside Priest. Her long, ash-blond hair fell to her shoulders and her fatigues were neatly pressed. Her movements denoted a finely honed, athletic muscular control. Her sharp features were striking and attractive. Sitting next to her, Priest looked, as always, like a model military officer. Slim, dark-haired, and handsome, he would have made a perfect model for a recruiting poster. The very vision of an officer and a gentleman.