This Is How You Lose the Time War

Red

* * *

Commandant summons Red to a field office.

Blood, as usual, is everywhere. Mostly frozen, this time, which smells better.

The Agency has chosen a Russian front close to the main braid, where the Nazis have some trick of raising the dead—nothing supernatural, but nature has strange forms C20 scientists rarely guess. The gnawing corpses have a sharp, fungal odor when Red draws close enough, which suggests downthread intervention, the great adversary at work. The sky is mostly white, but the snow has stopped for now, and clear blue opens high up and far away.

The Soviet soldiers are scared and cold and hungry. They will die here. They will hold their post just long enough for Zhukov to reinforce another, more critical position behind them. They are brave boys and more than a few girls. They share their last spirits—songs, jokes from home, whatever they carry in their flasks. Bravery won’t save them. Neither will the gallows-grim gravity their officers’ faces wear.

Other operatives appear and disappear, carrying reports or cases of weaponry or their comrades’ blanched, drained bodies. They bear trophies and tribute. Everyone looks scared. They fit right in.

Altogether, a well-chosen office.

Usually Commandant operates upthread from some gleaming crystal citadel or other. At times the Agency has called Red to report to a bare platform orbiting an unfamiliar star, forgetting even to produce a humanlike superior she can address. The stars alone listen.

Commandant must have been decanted once—all her agents had. But she retreated to her pod long ago and now roams time and space as a disembodied mind, wedded to, webbed through, the Agency’s great hyperspace machines. She takes form only when sh

e must, and when she does, she chooses any form that lies to hand, or none. Mostly she contemplates abstracts and calculates trajectories in time, considers her many agents as multidimensional vectors and knots. Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple. All knots can be untied with a few deaths, or ten thousand.

Such remove has its place when the fight goes well. Decisions made far from the front are secure against insurgence, infiltration.

Passing corpses, Red wraps herself more tightly in her coat. Not to guard her flesh—she is barely cold, even in this death freeze—but to guard the small blue flame inside her.

Loss begs immediate response. Decisions lose the luxury of distance. Commandant remains downthread, of course, but she’s made a local copy for moment-to-moment operations, damage containment, scouting, and that copy has climbed the braid into the past to chart the new threads Garden’s spun, the strands it has shifted, the knots it has tied.

Field offices are vulnerable, however. So they are built in bubbles of time, fortified against causes and effects.

Red walks past three men struggling to restrain their fallen, infected comrade, past the doctor trying to stitch a cold-numbed wound with freezing fingers, and she knows that whatever happens here, all this will pass, and all these people die.

Fitting.

Red ducks through the flap of the command tent.

Commandant stands before her, in the form of a big woman in an army uniform, wearing an apron, with bloody pliers in one hand. She holds them as if she is not used to holding things. Adjutants cluster near, bearing their reports on clumsy period tech: paper, mimeograph, map. A man sits unconscious, tied to a wooden chair, naked, bleeding from the mouth. The tent is warmer than outside, but it is not warm enough. His half-open eyes are lapis deep.

Red salutes.

“Get out,” Commandant tells her staff, and out they go. The man remains. He does not make a sound. Perhaps he does not notice, or he hopes they will not notice him.

For all practical purposes, they are alone. Red waits. Commandant paces. Her hands are bloody, and she does not seem to notice or care. Stolen worry lines her face. Those lines belong to the woman whose body Commandant now rides, but they suit her. The war has turned hard. Red imagines how those pliers would feel in her own mouth, closing around her own molars or canines, and decides: If that’s how this goes, fine. She keeps the flame inside her safe.

“We’re in bad shape,” Commandant says. “Long, careful work on the adversary’s part, traps upthread and down, all executed by a single operative, triggering a cascade. I’d call it brilliant if it hadn’t put us so far on the back foot. But we count our blessings: Their new braid is weak. We can unpick it. And we will.” Commandant glances over, seems surprised. “At ease. Didn’t I say, at ease?”

Red stands at ease. Commandant’s uncertainty on so small a point as this worries her. Should she be worried? Isn’t she a traitor now?

“We’ve plotted a solution, through math and cruder methods.” She sets the pliers on a table, takes up a piece of paper, and offers it to Red. “Do you recognize this woman?”

It is not easy to remain at ease. She takes the paper and makes herself look at the charcoal drawing the way someone would if searching their memory for a face glimpsed across a battlefield, then forgotten. It occurs to Red, as she ponders the face that dwells within her dreams, that this is longer than she has ever dared to watch this particular face, in person—or even to linger on her memory.

The man in the chair whimpers.

Red doesn’t blame him. What does Commandant know? Is this a trap? If they knew, wouldn’t they kill her? Or do their plans run deeper?

“I recognize her,” she says, at last. “From the field. I saw this face in the battle at Abrogast-882. She has others.” But always there’s a similar stillness about the eyes and a cruel, clever twist to the mouth. She shines through. Red does not say that last part.

“That’s where our observers took this likeness.”