“Good.” Steiger tossed a tiny snuffbox to Gulliver. It landed on the bed. Gulliver picked it up.
“What’s this? Snuff? No, thank you, I don’t—”
“Just swallow two of them. It will make you feel better.”
Gulliver opened the box and glanced inside. “What… what is it?”
“Aspirin,” Steiger said, distractedly, concentrating on his writing. He was trying to recall every element of Gulliver’s story and note it down in shorthand.
“Ass-prin?” said Gulliver, staring at the pills dubiously. “What… I don’t understand. What manner of—”
“Just swallow two of them, all right? Don’t chew, just swallow them quickly. Trust me, it’ll make you feel better. It’s… it’s an old family remedy. It’s quite safe, I promise you.”
“Safe? Gulliver snorted. “No one is safe. Nothing and no one.” He took two of the pills and swallowed them. He made a face. “Ugh. Bitter.”
“You didn’t chew them, did you? I told you not to chew them.”
“Who are you? Are you an apothecary?”
“My name is Alexander Steiger,” he said, still writing quickly in the precise characters of shorthand. “My friends call... me Sandy.”
Gulliver leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes once more. “Mine call me Lem. You are very kind, Sandy. I don’t know why. Why should you believe me? Even I would never have believed it had I not seen it all with my own eyes. I would have thought anyone telling such a tale quite mad.” He swallowed hard and brought his hands up to his face. “Ohh, my head is splitting. Sandy, tell me truthfully, do you think I’m mad’?”
“No,” said Sandy. “In fact, I’m certain that you are absolutely sane.” He glanced up at Gulliver. “Whatever happens now, Lem,” he said, emphatically, “you must promise me that you will not forget that. You are not insane. I have no doubt that you have seen some astonishing things that seem impossible to explain. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. It took a great deal of courage to get through all that. You must hold on to that strength, resist the temptation to drown your memories in wine and keep telling yourself that you have not gone mad.”
“How can you be so certain?” Gulliver said. “You have but my word!”
“And I’m sure it’s the word of a gentleman,” said Steiger, turning back to his report. “I must complete this, Lem. Please, be patient with me for a few moments and I will try to explain later, after I have—”
Gulliver cried out suddenly. The terror in his cry made Sandy spin around. He felt a sharp, searing pain across his cheek, as if an extremely fine filament of superheated wire had been drawn across it. As he cried out with pain and brought his hand up to his face, he saw his attacker firing once more—a tiny man, no more than six or seven inches tall, firing a miniature laser pistol.
The beam struck him in his left eye, and Sandy screamed in agony as his eyeball was cooked right out of its socket. More tiny people were materializing out of thin air. They were equipped with floater paks and firing tiny weapons. The air in the room was filled with a crisscrossing web work of brilliant light. Sandy grabbed his chair and hurled it at the miniature invaders, then grabbed his report and dove onto the bed, covering the terrified Gulliver’s body with his own. He stuffed the report into Gulliver’s pocket and then snapped a small metallic bracelet around his wrist.
“General Forrester!” he shouted. “Get that report to General Moses Forrester!”
He felt a barrage of tiny laser beams slicing through his flesh. Dozens upon dozens of them. He screamed in agony and activated the warp disc.
Gulliver disappeared.
Chapter 1
As the first light of dawn washed over the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, General Blood gave the order to advance. The pipes and drums struck up and the main body of the expeditionary force moved off down the graded road in perfect fours formation. At the same time, an assault team of three hundred picked men, taking advantage of the dim light and the early morning mist, silently crept up the slopes toward the stone sangars, snipers’ nests of piled rock that the Ghazis had erected on the cliffs above the fort. The Ghazi sentries were taken completely by surprise. They were busy watching the crazy British firinghi assembling below them and marching to their apparent doom when all of a sudden the assault team was upon them. The troopers charged, spreading out and moving in from opposing flanks, scrambling up the rocks and firing at will, engaging the Ghazis at bayonet point. Surprised, and with no one to direct
their movements, the Ghazis gave ground before the furious assault and the ridge was captured completely without losses.’
Andre Cross had seen it all before. She had experienced it all before, and she was reliving it again as she tossed in bed, moaning in her sleep. She had relived this scene countless times in the recurring nightmares that had plagued her ever since she had returned from that assignment. The year had been 1897, and the place was the Malakand Pass on the north-west frontier of the British Raj, in the high country of Afghanistan. The fanatic Ghazis, led by their insane holy man, Sadullah, had risen up to drive the infidel firinghi (their word for foreigner) out of their desolate land forever. The blood lust was upon them as the tribes all joined in the jihad, the holy war against the British. For the 19th Century British Raj, at stake was the security of their north-west frontier. For the Time Commandos from the 27th Century, at stake was the entire future.
A young subaltern in the 4th Hussars had obtained temporary leave from his regiment to join the Malakand Field Force and cover the uprising for the London Daily Telegraph. His name was Winston Churchill.
Fate had brought him to that savage place at the top of the world, where a British fort was under siege; surrounded on all sides by screaming Ghazis, and fate had brought the Time Commandos to there as well, to locate a temporal confluence point where two separate timelines intersected and the direction that the future took became as hazy as the mountain mist.
When the crossbow was invented, people had predicted that the world would end, that civilization could never survive such a devastating weapon. But the world survived and became even more civilized. They said much the same thing with the advent of the machine gun, and the atomic bomb, and plasma weapons, and the warp grenade, yet still the world survived. Somewhat the worse for wear, but it nevertheless survived. And Prof. Albrecht Mensinger, whose father had invented time travel, had predicted that the world would end if governments insisted upon travelling through time to fight their wars, but the world still managed to survive. Just barely. Only now the Time Wars had escalated to unprecedented heights. The chronophysical alignment of the universe had shifted, Einstein somersaulted in his grave and two parallel universes had come into congruence with each other, their timelines rippling like undulating spikes—and, at times, they intersected.
Wherever such a confluence point occurred, it was possible to cross over from one universe into another. And such a point had occurred somewhere in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the year 1897. Soldiers from the future of the other timeline had crossed over, intending to interfere with history and create a temporal split. The Time Commandos stopped them, but at a terrible cost. During the mission, their team leader, Col. Lucas Priest, had died.
Since she had returned from that mission, Andre had suffered from recurring nightmares in which she kept reliving that awful moment, when Lucas Priest had died before her very eyes, shot through the chest by a .50 caliber ball from a jezail rifle. She had borne her grief stoically, as a soldier should. She had never mentioned the nightmares to anyone, not even Finn Delaney, who was her closest friend. He had been Lucas’s best friend as well, and he had understood her loss and shared her grief; yet still, she had never told him about the nightmares.
In time, she thought the dreams would go away. Time, it was said, could heal all wounds. Only this wound refused to heal. Instead, like a suppurating sore, it grew worse and worse. Nothing she did would make it go away. She could put it out of her mind for a time while she was on a mission. She could forget herself in the furious pace of her muscle-stunning workouts and, on occasion, she could drink herself into oblivion and dun her mind to the point where she no longer felt anything. But it always came back afterwards. She dreaded the quiet times, alone at night, in bed. No amount of alcohol could keep away the nightmares. In dreams, it all came flooding back to her.