Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“Not if a timeshaper is always with each cohort,” said Umbo. “The successful raid already happened in the timestream of the timeshaper, and it can’t be changed by having the next raid take place earlier. Can it?”

Rigg pressed fingers to his forehead. “Just when I think I’m beginning to understand how this works, there’s some crazy new idea that changes everything.”

“It’s simple enough,” said Param. “Do one raid, and then do the next one earlier, and see if it changes the previous-but-later raid.”

“I’m still not in love with raiding, even if it works,” said Rigg. “I’m not really a killer. I only did it once, and I didn’t like it.”

“But that’s the whole point,” said Olivenko. “If it’s always a surprise, you might be able to arrange every raid so that you don’t have to kill anybody. You can look for a time of minimal wariness. Nobody watching. Everybody drunk or half the garrison out of town. Or it could be a herd of cattle being driven to where the meat will be butchered to feed Haddamander’s army.”

Umbo laughed. “Oh, I think we’re going to love trying to move whole herds of cattle through time.”

“We still have to get them across all this country,” said Loaf. “With all the times we’ve used the flyers, you may not understand yet how very big each wallfold is. If you raid on the opposite side, it can take weeks. And the whole country is settled.”

“It’s settled now,” said Rigg. “But we could move the herds or the soldiers or the families or the weapons far in the past. During the years when the colony was new. Nobody would discover us because we’d slice time a little, just enough to disappear.”

“There’d be a stretch of country where all the grass was gone and cow pies were everywhere,” said Loaf. “You’ve never seen the ground behind a military supply herd.”

“By the time any colonists see it,” said Rigg, “it’ll be nothing but meadows with some very fertile patches.”

“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “By shaping time the way you do, you can avoid all the things that make rebels angry and desperate. You can keep killing to a minimum. But it will happen. Somebody will be a hero and you’ll have to kill him. This is war, and no matter how careful we are, people will die. And not always soldiers who oppose us. Besides, plenty of soldiers will wish they could join us, but they’ll still have to fight us when we show up.”

“I’m trying to imagine this,” said Umbo. “Say we’ve done fifty raids, and the most recent one, as far as Haddamander and the queen are concerned, is really the very first one we did. When we did it, we took the garrison completely by surprise, because they didn’t even know there was a rebellion, because they knew of no previous raids. But now it’s the fiftieth raid, so they had to be aware of it—and yet the actual events can’t be changed, because the timeshaper was there and so

the outcome can’t be undone.”

Rigg tried to imagine it. “I wonder if they’ll behave, during the actual raid, exactly as they did when it really happened—with them knowing nothing. But afterward, they’ll remember that they should have been alert against possible raids because there had already been forty-nine. They won’t have any explanation for King Haddamander. ‘I don’t know why the men weren’t on alert, O King-in-the-Tent. I warned them, I posted them, but when the raiders came, nobody was at his post and everybody acted as if there had never been a raid before.’”

“Off with his head,” murmured Param.

“By the fiftieth raid,” said Umbo, “maybe General Citizen will be used to the fact that we always achieve surprise and he’ll stop executing the commanders for their inexplicable lack of preparation.”

“So when our fifth raid turns the first one into the one that Haddamander thinks is fifth, he’ll execute the commanders who let him down. But then when our twentieth raid, much earlier, turns that first one into the twentieth raid, they’ll already know the pattern and that first commander won’t be killed after all.”

“The more raids we do, the more lives we’ll save,” said Param.

“What matters,” said Olivenko, “is that it will be General Citizen who’s executing his own officers and men. He’ll be made to look like a fool, and his soldiers will be frantic with despair, because no matter how much they prepare, they’re always taken by surprise.”

“If the physics of it actually work the way we’re supposing it might,” said Rigg.

“It feels like cheating,” said Leaky.

“It’s war,” said Loaf. “Any time I can find a way to cheat so I win without losing so many of my men, I’ll do it.”

Olivenko smiled at Leaky. “I’ve read a lot of military history, Mistress Leaky.”

“Leaky. No ‘mistress,’” said Leaky.

“The commanders who are called geniuses are the ones who won by maneuver rather than brute force battles. The ones who thought up ways to surprise the enemy and get them to surrender or run away. The ones who ended up with an intact, undamaged army while the other side is captured or dispersed, hopelessly disorganized.”

“So this will save lives on both sides,” said Param.

“It might,” said Olivenko. “And the fact that in the future Umbo visited, they talk about raids all over Stashiland, it suggests that we liked the outcomes enough to keep doing them.”

“This is all good,” said Loaf. “It gets us supplies and demoralizes them, but it doesn’t win the war. In fact, our most experienced raiders will be the ones in the very first raids that Haddamander’s army runs into.”

“This is just a way to build up our strength while we train. To gather supplies, demoralize and confuse the enemy,” said Olivenko. “Remember that those experienced raiders who take part in the raids that Haddamander thinks are the earliest ones don’t come back to the enclave at that earlier time. They always come back after they left. So our soldiers will experience everything in the right order. So at the end of our ten years of raiding and training and building up supplies and weapons, it will have been only a couple of years in Stashiland. That’s when we suddenly show up with a large, well-trained army, only a few weeks after the raid we did first, which they think was most recent.”

“So there’ll still be a battle,” said Param.