845
01:46 (Berlin Time)
Wednesday, June 25, 1941 ‘B’
Applied physics laboratory
H.M.I.S. ROYAL SOVEREIGN
High altitude station over Berlin
“Where is Private Tonen?” Raged King Stan, staring at the viewing screen where the trooper had just disappeared after firing her pistol at Laplante’s head.
Incredibly, Laplante was still alive, even though the muzzle of Tonen’s pistol had been nearly touching her head. Tonen could not possibly have missed such a shot, as much as Laplante should not have survived it. Yet, Laplante was still moving, while Tonen had disappeared in the middle of a weird visual effect. Stan turned his head towards Leitrim, who was apparently transfixed at his controls.
“Doctor Leitrim, where is Private Tonen?”
“The…the timeline: it has just split!” Replied weakly the scientist, stunned.
“WHAT?”
“For a moment, all my instruments went crazy, overcome by a surging wave of spacetime distortion. It can only mean one thing, Your Majesty: your trooper’s action of firing at Laplante somehow caused a split in the timeline, in essence creating another timeline parallel to this one. Your trooper is probably now in that new timeline.”
“How could that be, Doctor? How could the act of killing one woman split the timeline?”
“Your Majesty, if your son Len was right, that woman was not just any woman.
She created this timeline unconsciously by her actions, thus making herself a critical node in spacetime for this timeline. It would be the same case if one would change history by killing prematurely a historically important person in the primordial timeline, like Hitler, Napoleon or Julius Caesar. Also, Private Tonen, who did the act that caused the split, does not belong to this time period, which must have been the catalyst in this event. If my theory is right, then Laplante is probably dead in another timeline, with your Private Tonen besides her.”
“But we have to retrieve our trooper.” Objected Major Kossov. “We can’t abandon her in this barbaric time period.”
“I agree.” Said firmly Stan. “Doctor, can you isolate the frequency of that new timeline, which we will call timeline ‘C’ for convenience sake?”
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“It will take some time, Your Majesty: I have to go through a jumble of signals and distortions. It will take a few hours, at the least.”
“Make it quick, Doctor: a young woman may be in big trouble right now.”
02:11 (Berlin time)
Wednesday, June 25, 1941 ‘C’
Interrogation room, Gestapo center
Berlin
Rina Tonen woke up with a sharp, continuous pain to her chin and jaw. She tried to feel her jaw but realized then that she was tied down to a sort of X-frame and lying on her back. She was also naked. Panic nearly overcame her when she remembered where she was. What was Major Kossov waiting to show up and take her out of this hellhole? The voice of the man who had been questioning Nancy Laplante then made her look towards her feet, where she saw the small man standing between her spread legs.
“Do you realize how much damage you caused by killing Brigadier Laplante, miss? Now, I will have to get the answers from you, whoever you are. First, who are you and where do you come from?”
Having seen that man and his assistant torture Laplante for hours, Rina had nothing but pure hatred for him and nearly spat her answer.
“Go to hell, you cowardly sadist!”
The man did not reply to that, instead extending his arms and applying two electrodes to her genitals. The pain was horrible, making Rina’s body arch convulsively. She however barely managed not to scream, attracting a nod from the interrogator.
“Another tough woman, albeit much bigger than even Brigadier Laplante. You are obviously from the future, if I look at your size and equipment. Those six fingers per hands are also an interesting evolutionary step. By the way, whatever you had strapped to your belly saved your life. The bullets barely had enough strength left after passing through that box to break your skin. As a qualified doctor, I was able to extract them in minutes without difficulty. Now, those slight wounds won’t impede my work one bit.
Karl, raise the voltage.”
Rina steeled herself as the man approached again the electrodes towards her genitals.
This time she screamed.
847
07:49 (Berlin Time)
Wednesday, June 25, 1941 ‘B’
Applied physics laboratory
H.M.I.S. ROYAL SOVEREIGN
Leitrim rubbed his tired eyes, taking a short pause from fixing the signals analysis screen. He and his team had been working non-stop for over six hours now and he was feeling the fatigue in his old bones. They however had a crucial task to complete as quickly as possible.
“Alright, Lita, enhance the Kd spectrum of the spacetime signal and replay the sequence…that’s it… FREEZE!”
Leitrim and his primary assistant looked at the wave shapes displayed on the screen with growing enthusiasm.
“We have it!” Said softly Leitrim before shouting. “WE HAVE IT! WE HAVE THE
FREQUENCY FOR TIMELINE ‘C’!”
That attracted his other assistants at a run to the screen, where they stared at the waveform pointed by Leitrim. As most of them congratulated the old scientist, a young assistant pointed at another waveform near the edge of the screen.
“What’s that, Doctor? It looks like a ghost reflection of timeline ‘C’.”
Leitrim and the others looked at it as well: it was effectively at the opposite of timeline ‘C’
compared to the frequency of timeline ‘B’, where they were actually. The truth then dawned on Leitrim like a ton of bricks.
“The primordial timeline! We found it as well! Quick, someone notifies the King!”
King Stan, having been awaken from a deep sleep, was in the laboratory fifteen minutes later and listened carefully to Leitrim’s explanations, Major Kossov listening besides him as well. Stan finally patted the shoulder of the old scientist.
“Well done, Doctor! Record both frequencies in the ship’s computer and adapt the ship’s time distorter drive to make it able to jump to either timeline, then do the same with your portable units: we have one of our troopers to save.”
It took another hour to prepare everything, at the end of which King Stan ordered a jump to the same date-time in timeline ‘C’. Next, a new spy probe was launched, 848
jumping directly to the Gestapo interrogation room while Stan and Kossov stood ready to jump themselves. The King was now holding a big machine gun fed by a linked belt of cartridges connected to an ammunition backpack. The first pictures sent by the probe made both Stan and Kossov swear.
“The bastards!” Growled Kossov as he watched a German who was
methodically roasting Rina Tonen’s breasts with a welding lamp. The young trooper, solidly tied to the same steel torture chair than Laplante had been, could do nothing but scream continuously. The German stopped for a few seconds, only to ask a brief question to Rina. When she shook her head while crying, the German resumed the torture, making her scream again. Stan looked resolutely at Kossov.
“You grab Tonen and her equipment. I will cover you. We jump at my count.
One, two, three, GO!”
The two Imperium men materialized in the back of the Germans present in the interrogation room and were not noticed immediately. Using that to full effect, they shot dead the two Germans closest to Tonen, then King Stan swept his fire to kill the two other Germans present as Kossov ran to his trooper. Going to the door, Stan stood in it and opened fire as soon as three SS guards turned a corner at a run, chewing them down mercilessly. Having plenty of ammunition with him, he fired short bursts every time a SS guard dared show up, forcing them to stay behind the cover of the hallway corner. A shout from Kossov then told him that the officer had Tonen. Looking back for a second, he saw Kossov standing, with Tonen thrown across his shoulders in a classic fireman’s carry. Tonen’s vital equipment, including the shot up portable time distorter, was also in his hands.
“Jump now, Major! I will follow you in a few seconds.”
Stan then closed the door and locked it. Seeing a shape covered by a blanket in one corner of the interrogation room, he went to it and lifted a corner of the blanket. What he saw was the mutilated and battered head and upper torso of a dead Nancy Laplante.
The sight made a hard lump appear in his throat.
“Goodbye, Brigadier Laplante. I hope that they will honor you the way you deserve in London.”
He caressed her hair one last time, then got up on his feet and pressed the green button of his time distorter unit. To his immense relief, he did materialize as planned in Leitrim’s lab on the ROYAL SOVEREIGN. Taking off his ammunition backpack and time 849
distorter unit, he then rushed to Rina Tonen, who had been laid hurriedly on top of a lab coat spread on the floor.
“How is she?” He asked to Kossov, who was holding her head.
“In a horrible state and suffering a lot, Your Majesty. I have already ordered a medical team to the lab.”
Tonen, still conscious but shaking continuously, managed to whisper a few words.
“Didn’t…talk…sir.”
“I know, Private Tonen. You did a splendid job.”
“Is…Imperium…alright?”
Stan hesitated for a second, then lied to her, not wanting to make her suffering look pointless.
“The Imperium will live on, Private. Now, shut up and rest.”
A medical team showed up at a run with an anti-gravity gurney two minutes later and quickly loaded Tonen on it, then departed for the ship’s infirmary as quickly as they had come with Major Kossov in tow. Stan then turned towards Doctor Leitrim, who had been watching on from his control station.
“Doctor, what are the chances that an Imperium as we know it will eventually appear in the future of timeline ‘C’?”
“I would say quite good, Your Majesty. I have been thinking over that for a few minutes and all the conditions for the future appearance of the Imperium are in place in timeline ‘C’. Nancy Laplante is now officially dead; she had time to transfer most of her knowledge to the British and Great Britain is in a good position to dominate the world in the years to come, at the detriment of the United States and of the Soviet Union.
However, the same cannot be said of timeline ‘B’: we cannot try to kill Nancy Laplante in 1941 without splitting further the timelines and she will thus be able to eventually found her Time Patrol, with the consequences we know for our Imperium. In fact, as long as the Time Patrol remains a threat to us, it can still find timeline ‘C’ and manipulate it in order to kill in the egg any Imperium due to see the day in the future.”
That depressed Stan to no small degree.
“Then, I have no choice but to destroy the Time Patrol in its nest, in the 34th century of timeline ‘A’.”
850
13:30 (North America Central Time)
Monday, July 10, 3386 ‘A’
Time Patrol headquarters
New Lake City University campus
American Great Lakes area
Dana Mulano, Chief Supervisor of the Time Patrol surveillance center, was positively fuming by now. It had been over seven hours now since they had detected the formation of a new timeline that had split from timeline ‘B’. Her crew had even been able to isolate and measure the frequency of that new timeline ‘C’ but had been unable to transmit that vital information downtime to the rest of the Time Patrol due to a faulty circuit module in the time wave transceiver unit. Even worse, because of that same equipment failure, they had been unable to monitor the signals from their surveillance satellite network for more that fourteen hours now, and that at a time when an Imperium battleship was on the loose in the past. As bad luck went, they didn’t have a spare circuit module and had to repair the faulty module instead, a job that was proving to be extensive and complicated. Dana was about to have one of her technicians jump in a time scooter to bring the information on the new timeline to 1942 ‘B’ when a sensors operator monitoring the civilian air traffic network gestured to get her attention. Walking to the man’s control station, she looked at the big radar picture screen showing the air traffic over North America.
“What’s
up,
Lenny?”
“The continental air traffic control center is in an uproar because of a contact that is refusing to identify itself and is now crossing the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River. It previously was first detected over the middle of the Atlantic, where it loitered for about an hour before moving West.”
Dana suddenly felt dread at those words, as an awful possibility formed up in her mind.
“Quick, Lenny, override the controls of the G-3 orbital space telescope and point it at that unidentified contact.”
“But, the Astronomical Council will skin us alive for diverting one of its best telescopes like this.”
“I don’t give a damn about them! Consider this a Code Red Situation.”
“Uh, as you wish, Dana.”
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It took a minute for the operator to override the usual control authority of the space telescope and have it pointed down towards the correct spot. A high definition color picture then filled the view screen of Lenny’s control station. The huge ship visible in the cross hairs made Dana and Lenny freeze with instant fear.
“The ROYAL SOVEREIGN!” Shouted Dana, her face pale. “It is heading our way.”
Trying to combat the panic about to overtake her, Dana reviewed quickly what could be done. One thing however appeared obvious: get help!
“Karla, forget your control station and come here on the double.”
Dana grabbed an electronic notepad and wrote down a short message on it before giving it to the waiting technician with an urgent order.
“Karla, run to the scooter hall, take a scooter and jump to Northolt on June 4 of 1942 ‘B’. Give this message to our people there and tell them that the Imperium battleship ROYAL SOVEREIGN is here and heading our way and that we need help, fast! Now go!”
As Karla left the center at a run, Dana shouted orders around at various operators and technicians.
“Jay, activate now the defensive shield generator at maximum power! We are about to be attacked. Then sound the air raid siren and alert the University Administration to have its students and staff take shelter. Tell them that this is not a drill.
Rana, warn all the personnel not on active shift to evacuate the area right now: I am not sure that our shields will withstand the fire from such a behemoth.”
“What about our various robots stored in hangar number one?” Asked Rana.
“They represent a lot of valuable and very costly equipment.”
“Have them disperse as well away from the headquarters but pass the warning first to our personnel. Golen, put our Point Defense Robots on full alert, with authority to fire the moment that this Imperium battleship is within range. Have also our PDRs disperse to the maximum extent possible. Make it quick!”
Her heart now beating furiously, Dana looked around her, trying to think of what she should do more. A thought then crossed her mind.
“Lenny, advise the continental air traffic control center that the unidentified contact is an enemy battleship and that all air traffic should avoid this area at all cost.”
“I’m on it.”
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Going to the station controlling the internal security cameras, Dana switched a viewer to the camera showing the inside of the scooter hall. To her relief, she soon saw Karla jump on a time scooter and disappear in a flash of white light. At least they could now hope for help soon. Dana next went to a locked steel locker in one corner of the center and, taking a key she always kept with her, unlocked it. Inside were a row of machine-pistols and assault rifles, along with spare magazines and ammunition. Taking a machine-pistol for herself, she then distributed weapons to her seven technicians remaining on duty in the center. She had just finished doing that when Lenny shouted to her.
“Dana, I’m having trouble convincing the continental air traffic control center that this is a real emergency.”
“What? Give me that videophone line!”
Dana spoke in an angry tone as soon as she heard the voice of the air traffic control supervisor in her own headset.
“Listen up, mister! This is the Time Patrol surveillance center and we are declaring a Code Red Alert Worldwide: there is an armed and hostile Imperium battleship approaching the Great Lakes area.”
“Is this worth disturbing the air traffic over the whole continent, miss? Are you sure that this contact is what you say?”
“Our identification is positive: that ship is the battleship ROYAL SOVEREIGN, flagship of the Imperium Navy, and it is armed with nuclear weapons. Now, stop wasting time and warn all the ships to stay clear!”
“Uh,alright, we will pass the word.”
Just twenty seconds later, Lenny banged his fist in anger on the edge of his control station.
“What the hell? A heavy starliner has just taken off from New Lake City astroport.”
“Are these people all terminally dumb?” Raged Dana. “Contact it and order them to land immediately.”
13:37 (North America Central Time)
Bridge of H.M.I.S. ROYAL SOVEREIGN
853
King Stan, sitting with members of his family and three of his royal guardsmen in the V.I.P. seats situated directly behind and above the command stations on the large bridge of the ROYAL SOVEREIGN, was monitoring closely the events around him when the Sensors Officer spoke up briefly on the command channel.
“Warning! A large ship is taking off now from what must be New Lake City astroport, near our main target area.”
Commodore Nousma didn’t hesitate one second. They already knew from intercepted civilian news channels programming where the Time Patrol headquarters was situated and the battleship must have been detected by now, or else the staff of the Time Patrol were a bunch of incompetents, an unlikely assumption after seeing how it operated.
That ship taking off could only be part of a Time Patrol reaction force.
“Weapons Officer, target that ship with our main plasma battery and fire!”
A quick set of commands pointed the focusing nozzle of the huge weapon installed in the nose of the battleship and charged it with over twenty gigawatts of energy. A bright violet beam of plasma energy then shot out of the nozzle, reaching across 900
kilometers to its intended target.
Over the New Lake City astroport, the luxury astroliner ORION had just taken off, loaded with 1,460 passengers headed towards the Jupiter system, when it got the first warning from the Time Patrol headquarters. Unsure what to think at first, the captain of the ORION decided to contact the air traffic control center to confirm that warning first before taking any action. That delay was fatal. The 400 meter-long astroliner was hit dead center by the fifty meter-diameter beam of plasma from the ROYAL SOVEREIGN.
With its relatively thin hull and lack of protective shields, the astroliner was cut in half like butter under a hot knife within a second, its parts raining down on the astroport and causing additional heavy damage and loss of life.
On the ROYAL SOVEREIGN, the bridge staff did not have much time to enjoy that apparently easy victory. The Sensors Officer’s shout of alarm about multiple missiles being fired from many locations on the ground was cut short by dozens of bone-jarring impacts and explosions on the armored hull of the battleship. As the series of impacts continued in quick succession, an irritated Commodore Nousma shouted at his Weapons Officer.
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“Mister Konik, what are our defensive batteries doing and how come these missiles can penetrate our shields as if they didn’t exist?”
“Sir,” replied the overwhelmed officer, “those missiles disappear from our screens as soon as they are launched, then reappear only just before impacting our hull. Our laser batteries have no chance to even target those missiles.”
“Then target the launchers, dammit! Damage Control, what is our situation with those missile impacts?”
“We are sustaining serious damage to our outer compartments and our hull is starting to look like Swiss cheese, but no vital systems have been affected yet, sir.
Those missiles have heavy explosive warheads but not the nuclear warheads that would be needed to really hurt us.”
“Then evacuate the personnel from the outer compartments towards the armored core of the ship. Weapons Officer, target the headquarters of the Time Patrol with our main plasma battery and fire when ready.”
“Aye,
sir!”
The huge weapon soon fired again, with the Weapons Officer then reporting in a monotone voice.
“Target area destroyed, sir.”
Those simple words could barely describe what had just happened on the ground. Hit by a massive, sustained beam of plasma, the headquarters building of the Time Patrol was vaporized, along with the surveillance center located underneath it, while the other buildings of the Time Patrol complex were either melted down or caught fire. The nearest buildings of the university complex also caught fire, with dozens of students and staff that had been too slow to evacuate them becoming instant human torches from the intense wave of heat radiated by the plasma burst. The surviving university students and staff running away could only watch with panicked dismay the exchange of fire between ground missile launchers dispersed around New Lake City and the still unseen attacking battleship, from which came a rain of laser beams trying to take out the launchers. The two first scoutships to react to the crisis then arrived in the middle of total pandemonium.
13:41 (North America Central Time)
Scoutship TEEN TEAM
855
“Ingrid, I just lost all contact with our headquarters.”
“I know! I’m afraid that they are goners. Do you have that damn battleship in your sights, Tom?”
“I’m ready to rock and roll.”
“Then try to target the laser batteries in the tail of that monster. With the little effect the missiles from our PDRs seems to be doing, we will have to make each of our missiles count.”
“Ingrid, I have a better idea.” Said Tom, then speaking for a few seconds and making Ingrid nod. It was a crazy, most unconventional idea but it could well work.
“Alright, I buy it. Let me advise Sandra Billings first, then we will go for it.”
Replied Ingrid before switching to the air ops channel and contacting the scoutship AMERICA, flying in loose formation with the TEEN TEAM and also under cloak. “TEEN
TEAM to AMERICA, I’m going for a really close flyby of the ass of that monster. Be careful where you shoot for a while.”
“Understood, TEEN TEAM! I will also be flying close to it, but on its back. Stay cloaked as long as you can if you want to stay alive.”
“Will do, AMERICA!”
While speaking on the radio, which was on crypto mode, Ingrid never kept a straight flying path, wiggling her scoutship around all the time. That paid off, as three powerful laser beams burned through the airspace she should have been in a second ago. The young German did another zigzag and blew air in relief.
“Hell, they have some good radio direction-finding equipment on that ship. That’s another lesson: speak as little as needed on the radio from now on.”
Pushing her scoutship to its maximum acceleration rate, Ingrid closed in quickly on the enemy battleship, passing it before performing a loop to line herself behind the ROYAL
SOVEREIGN.
“Alright, Tom: it’s your game now. Where exactly do you want me to land?”
“On the top of the middle upper tail portion. Watch my visual marker on the holosphere.”
“Got it!” Said Ingrid as soon as she saw the red crosshair on the surface of the projection sphere surrounding their seats. Calculating carefully her spacetime jump, she then pressed the jump button. She was ready for what was coming and landed with her landing gear extended the moment her scoutship materialized only fifty meters over the 856
tail of the battleship, then engaged the magnetic clamps incorporated to her landing gear. With their scoutship now firmly glued to its target while still cloaked, Tom fired their heavy ship laser repeatedly, taking out the laser beam directors visible at the surface of the battleship’s hull. Now safe from enemy fire, Tom switched on a very low frequency radar normally used only to map underground soil layers during planetary exploration missions. The radar waves were able to propagate through the hull of the battleship and soon gave Tom an approximate map of the inside of the aft portion of the enemy ship. In the meantime, Ingrid was busy programming new, special orders for the twenty combat robots stored in her cargo bay. Once Tom gave the proper coordinates for her robots, Ingrid ordered them to jump inside the battleship and to