Temple's Tale

A Story of the Time Corps
Copyright © 1997, 1999 Chris Halliday
All Rights Reserved

Chapter 2

My first mission with the Corps was being babysat on a historical observation trip. We - my academy graduate group and I - were supposed to tag along with a senior agent called Manfred Borodin on a jaunt to 14th Century Rome, Parallel T-4. The target was a local wine merchant who frequented a brothel on the outskirts of the city, supposedly the haunt of a minor scion of the Borgia family. Getting any kind of accurate historical data on the Borgias was hard, mainly due to their extreme paranoia. So the plan was to set up near the cathouse and jump the guy when he came out. We'd stun him, download the contents of his memory, and then leave him at his door with a vague implanted recollection of getting laid, hugely drunk and then staggering home.

I was still getting used to life at the Citadel when they told us we were going downtime. The Citadel is vast, bigger than anything I’ve seen before or since. It’s an immense structure, and unique. They told me that it was carved from the dead core of a failed reality; that its substance was pure probability, frozen and condensed. Whatever the truth, living there was strange.

From "outside", if such a term can apply, the Citadel looks like a moon sized cathedral of black marble, a sphere of gothic arches and vast spires that reach beyond the protective shields and into the timeless chaos of phase space. Inside the gothic theme continues, with miles of winding arched corridors leading to high vaulted chambers. The Corps has used the Citadel for thousands of years, and it was old before them, carved by some unknowable race. Whoever they were, there's no trace of them now, apart from the occasional disturbing noise from corridors that no one uses.

I was windsurfing in a holocentre when the call came through. Suddenly the wind and the water vanished, and there were voices around me. Or rather, a voice. It was QAIN; the name given to the Quantum Artificial Intelligence that controls the Citadel. I said voices initially because QAIN's is a polyphony, like a crowd of people all speaking as one. It can be pretty creepy, and though I'm sure it knows this, QAIN doesn't seem to care. QAIN is an artifact of the original Citadel engineers and apparently shares their somewhat ...alien outlook.

I was instructed to join the rest of my team at Vault Seven, where we would be briefed prior to departure. I can remember my heart pounding as the voices died away and I began to pull on my fatigues. It was still pounding when I reached the transmat at the end of the corridor. And then it almost stopped.

I was about to step onto the platform and punch in the coded sequence that would transport me to my destination, when I caught a glimpse of my reflection. I froze, feeling the small hairs across my body stir as one. My reflection stared back at me, its face haggard, its eyes weary. With an expression of profound sadness, it held up its hand, displaying for me a Corps comm-badge, the surface pitted with age. Locked in place, I could only stare. Of course, I'd heard the stories. We all had. Sometimes, someone would see a reflection in the walls, a reflection that shouldn't be there, only to realise it was an image displaced in time. The scuttlebutt was that whatever you saw could never be changed, no matter what. It was rubbish of course. The existence of the Corps was proof enough of the mutable nature of time. Very few things were unchangeable.

But standing there, staring into the eyes of an older, wiser and infinitely sadder future self, I had my doubts.

For a long few minutes we stood there, my reflection and I, staring at each other across the gulf of what might be years, months or merely days. Then he shrugged, turned his back, and walked away, and was swallowed by the darkness of the marble.

"Agent Temple," QAIN said softly from the air next to my shoulder. "Your team is waiting."

Trembling, I stepped into the transmat, punched in the code, and was gone.

The Vaults are where the Corps stores its time machines, and where all arrivals to and departures from the Citadel take place, all under the tightest possible security. The only access to them is through the transmat system (controlled by QAIN) or via a time machine (which is difficult, because QAIN monitors and controls all temporal traffic in the Citadel's immediate vicinity). As I stepped off the transmat plate and waved across the chamber to my team mates I was acutely aware of the level of scrutiny I had been subjected to whilst passing through the system. The very thought made my quarks itch.

I walked past the rows of docked transport capsules and chronopods, pausing now and then to avoid a humming loader or crowd of techs. Though the time machines around me were impressive enough, I had eyes only for the cluster of friends ahead and the glittering devices on the transfer platform behind them. Thoughts of my strange encounter swiftly left my head.

I don't know if you've seen a timeglider yet, but to my mind they're the most beautiful things any technology has ever produced, artifacts of the ultimate freedom. A timeglider is a personal time and space transport, capable of slipping between times, places and parallels with all the ease and grace of a dolphin riding a bow wave. It looks like a cross between a snowmobile and a hovercraft, with a display holoplate between the handlebars and a high, lean-back seat. Below the level of the seat, slim wings curve out and down, supporting the nacelles of the graviton generators that keep the whole thing afloat. Behind the seat rises the smooth circular housing of the time drive itself, studded around the rim with access ports for the polybdenum focus cells essential to the machines function.

I drew level with my colleagues and acknowledged each one in turn. The group was small, only four of us, not counting Borodin. Cressida caught my eye and smiled. She was the closest thing I had to a real friend in the Corps, not because we particularly liked each other, but mainly because we both came from roughly the same time period. When you're almost a hundred thousand years from anyone who shares your cultural heritage, that can cut across most barriers. I can't really remember what Cressida looks like anymore. Its not that she's been gone that long, but she was easily forgettable, something that made her a definite asset to the Corps. Cressida was psionic, and her talents had been activated in her youth by the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her parents. Subconsciously, she generated a subliminal telepathic field that said 'don't notice me, I'm not important'. The Corps therapists had successfully helped her to deal with her trauma, but had never managed to help her consciously control her ability to hide in plain sight.

Next to Cressida was Wulf, a recruit from 4th century Norway. Wulf was a curiosity in his own age, born with an unusual degree of mental flexibility that stood him in good stead in the Corps, who normally only recruited from those centuries in which technology was commonplace. He was husky, a dangerous combatant, and sharper than monowire. He could also drink more than any sapient I'd ever met, and always found his way home afterwards.

Finally there was Chun Alvarez. She was our temporal analyst, specialising in the gathering and study of historical data, and the prediction of the effects of temporal disruption. I didn't like Chun, and found it close to impossible to relax when she was around. Though I had tremendous respect for her intellect and raw ability as an analyst, her Japanese genetic heritage reminded me a little too much of the Viet Cong to be comfortable. Stupid, I know, but it wasn't anything I was in a hurry to deal with.

Borodin led us to the briefing room and gave us the low-down on the assignment while the gliders were prepped. He was a handsome man, tall and dark, with the relaxed and quietly capable air of someone who had seen and done everything. Chun had a crush on him a mile wide, and Cressida had told me she thought they were lovers.

The mission was basically a cakewalk, a simple in-and-out to let us get our feet wet. Borodin programmed our mission suits for the local fashions and settled us back in our briefing couches so that QAIN could download the necessary languages and local knowledge into our heads. Its a weird sensation, suddenly knowing how to speak a foreign language, how to behave in different circumstances. Though it's certainly convenient given the vast areas of time agents may be required to visit, I prefer getting my knowledge the old fashioned way. Data implants have a habit of fading after a while, and they often have gaps, being only as complete as QAIN believes they should be. QAIN is smart, but it's not human, and sometimes that difference can land you in real trouble.

Once we'd been fitted with the necessary memories, Borodin broke out our kit. Each of us was issued with a scanner, commlink, medkit and acoustic stunner. Wulf and I were given swords - each with a small powerpack in the hilt, capable of delivering a nasty charge along the blade - while Chun and Cressida were given tiny janglers, devices that used tightly focussed electromagnetic energy to induce a trance like state in the target. Borodin himself carried a few additional items and a plaser, a nasty weapon that throws slugs of energised plasma along the ion trail left by the targeting laser, the standard sidearm of the Corps. "Just in case," he said, winking as I watched him slot it away.

Then we were ready to go. As Borodin performed a few last minute checks on the gliders, we activated our mission suits and felt the mimetic fabric shift into the patterns already programmed in. Borodin looked up from his checklist, appraising us carefully. Then he smiled and waved us forward.

One by one we climbed aboard our assigned timegliders. As I straddled mine and settled back into the seat, it shuddered and shifted slightly beneath me like a live thing, reminding me that this was no mere object. It was a native of the timestream, and it wanted to be free.

The glider's AI greeted me with an option menu on the holoplate, having verified my identity by scanning my quantum signature and comparing it to the ident code pre-programmed by Borodin. For our first flight we were to slave our nav systems to Borodin's glider. I've been told it's standard procedure, since many fresh agents freak out when exposed to the raw violence of phase space, and it's all too easy to get lost.

I remember my gut knotting with tension as Borodin led us through our pre-flight checks. I wanted it to be over, and I don't think I've ever been as scared before or since. Finally Borodin was happy, and we clocked out.

Until you've actually travelled on an open time machine, it's almost impossible to visualise the strangeness of it all. Once we got the OK to go, there was a dull whine as the gliders built up the charge to jump. Then the world around the machines suddenly dulled as the temporal field crackled into being, separating our reality from the universe outside. Finally there was a feeling of motion that wasn't motion, a sudden twisting and falling sensation belied by the fact the gliders hadn't moved. And then we were gone, rotated out of real space and time by the technological magic of the Corps.

Time travel itself is fear, pure and simple. A tremendous g-force punches you back into your seat, while you race headlong down a coruscating tunnel of raw temporal energy. A howling wind rushes past your ears, while bolts of lightning - residuals from terrestrial thunderstorms - arc from wall to wall. Of course the wind and the g-forces are a mental crutch provided by the glider's environmental support systems, and the tunnel is a form of navigational display projected on to the inside wall of the temporal field. Believe me, terrifying as it sounds, it's better than the empty, eternal non-reality of phase space.

We were travelling in a delta formation, Borodin in the lead, Cressida and myself second, with Wulf and Alvarez bringing up the rear. I could hear someone screaming over the commlink, but the general noise made it impossible to tell who. The hypothetical tunnel coiled and twisted before us like a nightmare roller coaster, and through it we plummeted into history.

The first indication I got that anything was wrong was a red telltale flashing insistently on the holoplate. Reaching forward, my fingers brushed the sensitive screen as I interrogated the AI. Borodin was transferring control of the formation to me. Was this some kind of test? I punched his code into the comm system, establishing a secure line between his glider and mine. His face appeared on the screen, and I was shocked to see the fear in his eyes. I was about to ask him what was going on, when his glider came apart at the seams.