The Khyber Connection (TimeWars 6)

Formation of the Referee Corps, brought into being by the Council of Nations as an extranational arbitrating body with sole control over temporal technology and authority to stage temporal conflicts as ‘Limited warfare” to resolve international disputes.

April 21, 2493:

On the recommendation of the Referee Corps, a subordinate body named the Observer Corps is formed, taking over most of the functions of the Committee for Temporal Intelligence, which is redesigned as the Temporal Intelligence Agency. Under the aegis of the Council of nations and the Referee Corps, the TIA absorbs the intelligence agencies of the world’s governments and is made solely answerable to the Referee Corps. Dr. Mensinger resigns his post to found the Temporal Preservation League, a group dedicated to the abolition of temporal conflict.

June, 2497-March, 2502:

Referee Corps presides over initial temporal confrontation campaigns, accepting “grievances” from disputing nations, selecting historical conflicts of the past as “staging grounds” and supervising the infiltration of modern troops into the so-called “cannon fodder” ranks of ancient warring armies. Initial numbers of temporal combatants are kept small, with Infiltration facilitated by cosmetic surgery and implant conditioning of soldiers. The results are calculated based upon successful return rate and a complicated “point spread.” Soldiers are monitored via cerebral implants, enabling Search & Retrieve teams to follow their movements and monitor mortality rate. The media dubs temporal conflicts the “Time Wars. “

2500-2510:

Extremely rapid growth of massive support industry catering to the exacting art and science of temporal conflict. Rapid improvement in international economic climate follows, with significant growth in productivity and rapid decline in unemployment and inflation rate. There is a gradual escalation of the Time Wars with the majority of the world’s armed services converting to temporal duty status. Growth of the Temporal Preservation League as a peace movement with an intensive lobby effort and mass demonstrations against the Time Wars. Mensinger cautions against an imbalance in temporal continuity due to the increasing activity of the Time Wars.

September 2, 2514:

Mensinger publishes his “Theories of Temporal Relativity,” incorporating his solution to the Grandfather Paradox and calling once again for a ceasefire in the Time Wars. The result is an upheaval in the scientific community and a hastily reconvened Council of Nations to discuss his findings, leading to the Temporal Strategic Arms Limitations Talks of 2515.

March 15, 2515:

T-SALT held in New York City. Mensinger appears before June 1, 2515: the representatives at the sessions and petitions for an end to the Time Wars. A ceasefire resolution is framed, but tabled due to lack of agreement among the members of the Council of Nations. Mensinger leaves the T-SALT a broken man.

November 18, 2516:

Dr. Albrecht Mensinger experiences total nervous collapse shortly after being awarded the Benford Prize.

December 25, 2516:

Dr. Albrecht Mensinger commits suicide. Violent demonstrations by members of the Temporal Preservation League.

January 1, 2517:

Militant members of the Temporal Preservation League band together to form the Timekeepers, a terrorist off-shoot of the League, dedicated to the complete destruction of the war machine. They announce their presence to the world by assassinating three members of the Referee Corps and bombing the Council of Nations meeting in Buenos Aires, killing several beads of state and injuring many others.

September 17, 2613:

Formation of the First Division of the U.S. Army Temporal Corps as a crack commando unit following the successful completion of a “temporal adjustment” involving the first serious threat of a timestream split. The First Division, assigned excl

usively to deal with threats to temporal continuity, is designated as “the Time Commandos.”

PROLOGUE

When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,

An’ the women come out to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rife an’ blow out your brains,

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Rudyard Kipling

The name Hindu Kush meant “Hindu Killer.” To the foreigner who had grown up with the myth that Hell was located far beneath the surface of the earth, the Hindu Kush was proof it could be found at the top of the world as well. The 700-mile-long wall of rock that bordered Afghanistan on the north lay to the west of the impassable Himalayas. The terrain was otherworldly, both in its savage beauty and in its foreboding deadliness, a rockstrewn, broken landscape which looked as if it had been carved out of the earth with Vulcan’s chisel. For six months out of every year a banshee winter wind known as the shamal screamed down ice encrusted slopes that made the Grand Canyon look like a small Arizona drywash. During the summer months, the heat defied belief. Here and there could be found a small oasis, lush and verdant, a valley rich with fig palms and walnut groves, but for the most part it was a trackless wasteland of sheer rock which ripped holes in the sky.

The country had defied the armies of Darius the Great and Alexander. The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had stormed through its mountain passes, but had never truly conquered it. The British Raj had floundered here for years, arrogantly claiming it as part of its empire, yet never taming it. The country, and the wild people who inhabited its inhospitable heights, endured and would not be subjugated. The Hindu Kush killed all those who did not belong there. It was a cold and lonely place to die.

Huddled behind an outcropping of rock in one of the countless hairpin turns of the Khyber Pass, Sergeant Thomas Court struggled to hold on to life and prayed the Ghazis would not find him. His body was pierced by three jezail bullets, but he did not tear dying of his wounds so much as he feared the ministrations of the Ghazis. He could hear the screams of other wounded soldiers as the Afridi tribesmen found them and proceeded with the vivisection. The throat-rending screams echoed off the rock walls of the Khyber like the ululation of the damned in Dante’s final circle. The mountain tribes showed no mercy to the firinghi invader.

Court had managed to half crawl, half drag himself up into the rocks, where he had taken refuge in a small stone sangar, an improvised fortification of piled boulders which tribesmen constructed for use as sniper’s nests. There were hundreds of them in the pass, at varying elevations, and from these primitive stone bunkers the Pathans would fire down at those below them with their jezails—the long-barrelled matchlock rifles they employed with devastating accuracy, able to drop a British soldier at a distance of 1000 yards. Their skill with the primitive jezails made them that much more formidable with captured British MartiniHenry and Snider rifles, superior firearms which the tribesmen turned against their original owners with unholy glee.