Time is the only god, p.1
Time Is the Only God, page 1
Time Is the Only God
The Fight for the Continuum Has Begun
by
Chris James
www.chrisjamesauthor.com
Also by Chris James
Science fiction novels:
Class Action
Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064
Short story collections:
Stories of Genesis, Vol. 1
Stories of Genesis, Vol. 2
Stories of Genesis, Vol. 3
Available as Kindle e-books and paperbacks from Amazon and Lulu
Copyright © Chris James, 2017. All rights reserved.
Chris James asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Apart from factual historical references, all characters and events portrayed in this novel are a figment of the author’s imagination.
ISBN: 978-1-326-91787-6
For Zofia Victoria, the apple of my weak imagination’s eye
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Stranger Appears
Chapter 2: A New Problem
Chapter 3: Emilia Featherstone
Chapter 4: The First Rogue Juncture
Chapter 5: Finding the Source
Chapter 6: A Further Juncture
Chapter 7: An Unexpected Visit
Chapter 8: Exploring a Different Past
Chapter 9: A Further Complication
Chapter 10: The First Confrontation
Chapter 11: Kane Returns
Chapter 12: Actions and Omissions
Chapter 13: A Brief Respite
Chapter 14: The First Attack
Chapter 15: A Difficult Choice
Chapter 16: Flanders
Chapter 17: The American Attacks
Chapter 18: The Greater Risk
Chapter 19: The Cascade Annihilator
Chapter 20: Escaping the Battle
Chapter 21: A New Wave of Collapses
Chapter 22: Counting the Cost
Chapter 23: A Task for Probabilities
Chapter 24: A New Theory
Chapter 25: Taking Chances
Chapter 26: The Threat from Inside
Chapter 27: The Next Juncture
Chapter 28: The Man in the Monolith
Chapter 29: Another Rogue Juncture
Chapter 30: Misunderstanding
Chapter 31: Dogfight
Chapter 32: Recovery
Chapter 33: Anthony Belgard
Chapter 34: A New Plan
Chapter 35: Emilia’s Travelling
Chapter 36: The Where and the When
Chapter 37: A Stressful Briefing
Chapter 38: An Inauspicious Beginning
Chapter 39: Mortality
Chapter 40: The Recruiting Station
Chapter 41: An Impossible Rogue
Chapter 42: Mr. Llews
Chapter 43: The Pressure from CERN Increases
Chapter 44: The Disabler
Chapter 45: The Artillery Shell
Chapter 46: The Echo
Chapter 47: A Late Return
Chapter 48: The Debrief
Chapter 49: A New Attack
Chapter 50: Finding the Enemy
Chapter 51: Preparing for the Confrontation
Chapter 52: Hans Mueller
Chapter 53: Quarentine
Chapter 54: Complications
Chapter 55: A Minor Delay
Chapter 56: A Change of Plan
Chapter 57: Sabatoge
Chapter 58: Searching
Chapter 59: Evacuation
Chapter 60: An Unwelcome Surprise
Chapter 61: Options Diminish
Chapter 62: Stranded
Chapter 63: The Boson Gun
Chapter 64: Holding Ground
Chapter 65: One Shot
Chapter 66: A Last Stand
Chapter 67: Double-Checking
Chapter 68: The Furthest Juncture
Chapter 1
The Stranger Appears
KANE HUNTER DIDN’T expect to witness Winston Churchill’s assassination. He pushed hard against the crowd which surged along Downing Street. Over the sea of hats he glimpsed Churchill stagger out of his Bentley like a man defeated. Two dark figures grabbed Churchill’s arms and guided him towards the door of Number 10.
Voices in the crowd bawled out: “Give over, Winnie!”
“Better red than dead!”
Kane used his height advantage to shoulder past people, but still they came on. A gunshot rang out above the tumult, and Kane glimpsed a bloodied Churchill stagger before a reactionary surge in the crowd forced Kane to turn his body to keep his footing. A few celebratory cheers rose above the din. Fedoras and porkpies sheltering angry faces squeezed him as he pushed them aside, but their owners took no notice. From behind him came the distinct sound of crashing glass, and a louder roar went up.
“Give over, Winnie!”
“Better red than dead!”
Fury rippled through the horde when Kane saw the police begin breaking heads. His concern rose as more constables waded into the crowd in front of him, truncheons whirling. One copper, with a beak nose in a violent face, hit Kane on the shoulder. He stumbled to the ground and boots kicked and turned him over. Above him, an agitated female voice shrieked: “Bastards! Bastards!”
The rucksack on Kane’s back stopped him turning further, while close by more people fell to the ground beneath the policemen’s truncheons. One man rolled over Kane, his coat smelling of rotting cabbage. Kane managed to force his legs up and gain his feet. He pushed his way out of Downing Street and emerged abruptly into Whitehall, the broader area relieving the pressure at once.
“Bastards! Bastards!” the woman’s shriek continued amid the uproar.
“Better red than dead!”
Kane turned left and, through hurrying bodies, saw soldiers approaching, rifles by their sides. Pushing past other civilians, he made some distance in the opposite direction. He kept close to the deep, block-dashed grey stonework of the buildings but a few running people collided with him. Policemen darted among the mob waving truncheons at any head that came within reach, and there seemed no order anywhere. The arrival of Home Guard soldiers didn’t worry Kane as much as it should have, as he believed that British soldiers would not fire on unarmed civilians.
A sudden volley of shots corrected him. To the south, over the heads of a hundred frightened people, he saw a cloud of blue smoke float up into the early evening air. There came a pause, an eddy of shocked silence which rippled over everyone, then as one the mob turned around and shifted its mass in the opposite direction, not knowing that more soldiers awaited it there.
He crouched down and shrugged the straps of the rucksack from his back as more screams and shouts filled Whitehall. He untied the cords and tucked the rough canvas cover into the left-hand panel of the three-sided machine. Grasping it in one hand, with the other he reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out his defensive solution device, a small silver tube the length of his hand.
He glanced up at the civilians shouting and running in all directions, and his eye alighted on the only individual who stood motionless. Oddly, Kane appeared to be the subject of this figure’s interest. Kane caught his breath, because no local should take any notice of a visiting dimensionologist. Kane wore appropriate clothes for the era, as did the man on the other side of the broad street.
He stopped and stared back, trying to decide if he really were the object of this man’s attention among the running, terrified people. Then the man, his lean, angular face pointing at Kane, raised something in his right hand and pointed it at Kane. The soldiers on the north side of Whitehall opened fire on the mob and a volley of loud cracks rang out. A bullet hit the man and his body gave off a green flash. The force of the impact threw him down. But while others hit by the fusillade lay still, the stranger rolled over and came up smartly on his feet. In the shocked silence after the volley, the truncated yet unmistakable American curse, “Sonofab-” came to Kane’s ears.
The American glanced back at Kane before disappearing into Richmond Terrace, the tails of his long trench coat flapping behind him. Kane realised that the green flash indicated some kind of force-field, a luxury which Kane did not enjoy.
“Disperse! Disperse!” shouted a mounted policeman who had appeared from the south. Soldiers followed him, stepping over bodies. Many other people had entered Richmond Terrace as well, so Kane put his defensive solution device away and pursued the American, carrying his exposed lifebuoy in his right hand. As the mob reverted to a panicked crowd, the sense of chaos receded with the shouts and Kane heard no more gunfire.
He reached Victoria Embankment without finding the American. The flow of people had thinned and Kane turned back and forth to see if he were close by. His brain tried to process how on earth an American with advanced technology could be here, and how he could be aware of Kane’s presence. This London, this Earth, this universe, had diverged from the history of Reality One nearly three years earlier, and the facility had sent him back over seventy years in time from its own present. It didn’t make sense.
He took out his comm-scan pack and checked its readings for any abnormality. Deep within the small screen, it reminded him of when the juncture would reopen and he realised he’d have to break facility protocol to reach the juncture in time. He moved closer to the embankment and saw the Thames gliding silently by in the fading light. Boats and barges dotted the water, the wind carrying the smell of watery oil and flotsam and defeat for the British Empire.
&nbs
His lifebuoy chimed and the three black panels uniformly extended, doubling in length. On the underside, stabilising brackets snapped into place and leveller jets inside them brought the machine horizontal. As though climbing on a motorbike, Kane straddled the middle panel and touched a locator on the control stick. The lifebuoy rose up two metres above the ground. On seeing this, a pair of coppers looked over and started jogging towards him with, “Oi, you there!”
Kane clamped his thighs to the side panels and pressed another locator on the stick. A light-blue force-field surrounded the machine, an oblate ellipsoid which protected him and countered the g-forces caused by travelling at high speed. He fired up the main power unit, pulled back on the stick, and rose above the policemen and civilians and buildings and streets. London lay in ruins beneath him. All around the smoke of fires drifted in columns and clouds, like slovenly drunks staggering home after a heavy session.
As the last blood-red streaks of the sunset faded, Kane sensed the fear in the remaining populace. Churchill had been brave to address the House of Commons today: the MPs who remained in London had displayed their contempt for his tired rhetoric in a similar manner to the mob in Downing Street. But now he’d been shot, likely killed, and Britain’s future darkened further.
Kane pulled on the stick and the lifebuoy accelerated and climbed. In moments, he sped out over the Thames estuary and turned south-east to skirt the north coast of Kent. He crossed the English Channel and saw the waves cresting on the choppy water. Once over the European mainland, he changed his heading further south, to avoid the massed Soviet forces preparing to invade Britain. Nineteen forty-eight was turning out to be a bad year for the last bastion of democracy in Europe.
Chapter 2
A New Problem
AN HOUR LATER, Kane arrived in the forest where the juncture would reopen. The navigation visual on his lifebuoy’s display took him to the same clearing in which he’d arrived twenty-four hours earlier. He lowered the machine close to the ground and deactivated the force-field when it rustled the long grass beneath him. He shut down the main power unit and slid off the middle panel. With another touch on the joystick, the small leveller jets shut off and the three panels retracted to their storage size.
Melancholy pervaded Kane. His first trip to an alternate reality had been a dismal business, and the memories of the newspapers he’d read made him feel desperately sorry for the people in this dimension. But before he could imagine some miraculous recovery for Britain, an orange orb materialised in front of him, three metres above the grass. There came a truncated crack of thunder. From the orb a bright orange blade cut down vertically, almost to the ground, and two dilators resolved in the middle. At once, the small dilators spun and pulled the juncture open to form an orange diamond. The lower half buckled back to a vanishing point, while across the middle appeared a horizontal black platform.
Grasping his lifebuoy, Kane leapt up onto the platform and crouched down. The juncture hissed as it swept closed behind him. He stood up and faced the two medics who waited for him.
“Return juncture recorded open for four-point-one seconds. Good,” announced an engineer standing at the console outside the platform.
The nearest medic lifted up a small device, shaped like a boomerang with lobes at each end, and waved it up and down Kane’s body. She checked the readout on the spine, looked over to the two engineers, and nodded. The blue force-field which encased the platform vanished. Just as Kane felt relief that he hadn’t brought back any contaminants with him, the medic announced: “He’s clean, but he hasn’t got his copier with him.”
Kane’s mouth fell open, and in reflex he patted the empty pocket which should have held his copier. Outside the platform, his factory floor manager, Darach Sterling, folded his arms and threw Kane a disbelieving look. The two medics stepped off of the dais, and then took the three steps up to exit the platform and ambled away across the factory floor.
Darach unfolded his thick arms and gripped the perimeter frame around the platform. “What did you do with your copier then, laddie? You remember you’re supposed to bring all the equipment back with you, don’t you?”
Kane made no reply as he exited the platform, feeling the amused stares from the engineers at the control console. He faced Darach, whose bullet head looked up at Kane and his grey eyes narrowed, “Well? What happened there?”
“I’m not sure. I got caught up in a riot near the end of the trip. I could’ve lost it then,” Kane said, trying to keep a feeble note out of his voice.
Darach shook his head and walked over to the console to sign off the return. He came back and said: “We’d better find out. Come on.”
Darach led Kane away from platform eight and they strode towards the lifts. Kane glanced around at the sixteen identical platforms which circled the vast area.
Darach spoke in a dark tone: “Your first juncture as a dimensionologist and you lose your copier.”
“I didn’t lose it on purpose, boss.”
“Aye, I’m sure of that. But you can imagine Odette’s reaction.”
“I’d rather not.”
The glass doors in front of them slid open. They turned left and entered one of a bank of glass-fronted lifts. They descended in silence past the massive boson guns under the factory floor and reached the underground heart of the facility. In silence they exited and proceeded along a broad, stark white corridor without adornments. The third door on the left slid open and they entered the briefing room. When the door closed, Darach took Kane’s lifebuoy. “How did this perform?”
“Fine, no problems.”
He hefted the lifebuoy up on to a shelf in the rear wall. “DSD?”
Kane took his defensive solution device out and handed it to Darach. “Unused.”
Darach turned the silver tube over in his hand before slotting it in a port in the same wall as the lifebuoy. “Emergency recall switch?”
Kane passed him the concave device, the size of large button, from another pocket, and Darach also put that back in its storage location close to the DSD.
Darach sighed and then said: “And since there’s no copier, you’d better give me your comm-scan pack and we’ll see if we can sort this out.”
“There was one other problem.”
“Oh?”
Kane had to choke down a feeling of irrationality. “Yeah. In the riot just before I left, I think another non-local was there.”
“Another non-local?” Darach’s face creased in disbelief. “You must be out of your mind, laddie.”
“Can we check it?”
Darach took the comm-scan pack and slid it into a groove on the left wall. A large screen came to life with data blocks which contained all of the information Kane’s secondary equipment had recorded.
“Maybe there’ll be enough in here to keep Publishing happy?” Kane asked without enthusiasm.
Darach indicated a chair. “Sit down. When was the riot?”
Kane sat. “Around ninety minutes before I returned.”
Darach picked up a remote control and searched the images on the screen. The comm-scan pack contained video recorded from pinhead cameras embedded in Kane’s clothing. On the screen, fractured thumbnails in multiple frames of the preceding twenty-four hours flashed past. Darach poked and prodded the remote, refining the range of images. The audio came up and tinny shouts and screams floated around the briefing room. Darach slowed one image as a truncheon angled down towards Kane, as seen from the pinhead camera in the front of his jacket. Kane’s body collapsed in slow motion and turned over.
Darach pointed at the screen, “There it is, see?”
Kane sat forward in the chair. “Where?”
“Under that local’s back.” Darach froze and enhanced the image. As it grew, Kane recognised the black, slim handheld form of his copier, the dimensionologist’s most important tool.
“That’s four seconds after you went down,” Darach said, and then looked at Kane and tutted. “You really should’ve checked before you left, laddie.”
