Temple's Tale

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

Warp fatigue! The words flashed through my mind as the timeglider before me literally dissolved, collapsing into a cloud of disassociated particles and energy. As Borodin spun free, his mouth opening in a scream of terror I could no longer hear, I switched to manual override and plotted an intercept course. Subjectively, I had scant seconds to act before the temporal field his glider had been maintaining collapsed around him and he aged to death, though even now charged chronons were leaking through, scouring years off his life.

Warp fatigue occurs as the result of the temporal field generated by a timeglider slipping out of phase, allowing small clusters of positively and negatively charged chronons into the machine's pocket reality. Over time the chronon density within the gliders structure reaches a sort of critical mass, so that the machine can suddenly gain several million years in age, reducing it to a subatomic mist in seconds. It's almost impossible to tell whether a glider is at risk from warp fatigue until it's too late, and it's every field agent's nightmare.

I could hear Wulf's startled voice across the commlink as I swooped forward, leaning as far out of the glider's saddle as I dared. By voice control I ordered the AI to disable the security lock on the temporal field; a precaution designed to negate the possibility of a collision in phase space. There was a sudden arcing and Borodin was within my reach. Working desperately I yanked his limp form across the glider in front of me, and checked his pulse. It was almost non-existent. We had to get him back to the Citadel.

Using an open channel, I told Cressida, Chun and Wulf that we had to turn back. To do so meant dropping out of phase space long enough to get our bearings. Without waiting for their agreement I instructed my glider to initiate an emergency landing.

Wulf was still yelling at me as we rotated suddenly back into normal space time, but the torrent of words was rapidly cut off as he succumbed to that old friend of the time traveller; time sickness. Cressida had it bad too, and for a few seconds the commlink was full of the delightful sound of two stomachs giving up their last meal.

Time sickness is a form of psionic vertigo, caused by the sudden changes in psychic pressure associated with time travel. I've never suffered from it myself, but I've had it described to me as the mental equivalent of bungy-jumping from four thousand feet. It figured that Cressida would suffer, as your chances of developing the symptoms increase with your degree of psionic ability, but Wulf tossing his cookies was unexpected. There was obviously more to the Norseman than met the eye.

I took advantage of the time they were puking to study our surroundings. The gliders had clocked in at a height of ten thousand feet; S.O.P. for any landing where you don't know the area. The AI reported that the date was 1914, and that we were located over this reality's equivalent of the English Channel. Sensors probing beyond the timeglider's secure environment bubble reported the presence of complex hydrocarbons and radioactives in the air, indicative of the burning of fossil fuels and some form of heavy industry. All very interesting, but since we were going to clock right back out again, of very little use. I allowed myself a small smile as I accessed the navigational system for the jump home. I'd only been in the Corps a year, and I hadn't realised just how everyday the idea of parallel worlds and time travel had become.

I stared at the holoplate, but the inch high scarlet words didn't go away. Damn! Borodin must have been unable to transfer full navigational control to my glider before his disintegrated. Either that, a nasty voice in my mind whispered, or he didn't trust us enough to allow us unsupervised time travel.

While Cressida and Wulf were regaining their psychic equilibrium, I tried to rouse Borodin, but it was no use. His mind and body had shut down almost totally, reeling from the shock of his brush with eternal non-existence. When we'd set out he'd had the appearance of a man in his mid-thirties. Now his liver-spotted, papery skin and rheumy eyes declared him to be in his dotage. I tried to speak to him, but I doubt if he even knew who I was.

Without him, we were trapped.
 
 

Two days later, we were comfortable, if not very happy. Having come to terms with the possibility that we could be spending the rest of our days in a timeline that we dare not change, we had set about discovering what we could about our new home. Alvarez had analysed the full spectrum scans taken by her specialised equipment, and had announced that the history we were in appeared to have diverged from the standard some time in the late 15th Century. Rather than denouncing technology, an enlightened Pope had declared it to be the manifestation of the divine urge to create, in man. Church sponsored universities had ensured the early arrival of the industrial revolution, though the plagues had slowed the technological rush down somewhat. In this year of 1914, mankind had access to computers, crude cybernetic limbs, cloning, primitive fusion power, and in the form of the Incorporated British Empire, had established permanent bases on the inner worlds. Here, both Gallieo and Leonardo were saints.

It was a time of peace. The combination of Lord Kelvin's discovery of atomic fission and the linking of the national economies through computer networks meant that this world could no longer afford the luxury of mass conflict. Chun's database told us that this Earth would never have a world war.

I was both pissed and pleased. Pleased because one of the first things they taught us at the Academy was that it's always easier to hide amongst the masses of a technologically advanced people, and pissed because this world's eggheads could probably duplicate a timeglider in nothing flat, given a working example. We had to get out of here before someone found us out.

Using information from the long-range scans, we reprogrammed our mission suits to replicate the fashions of the age, set the gliders to cloak, and went in search of lodgings. This world had dispensed with cash twenty years ago, and all transactions were executed through smartchits, so Alvarez and her computers found little difficulty in assigning funds to our party. Eventually, we found a small house in Bloomsbury, London, that was ideal for our purposes, and moved in.
 
 

I was reading the morning papers and enjoying a pipe with my morning tea, when Alvarez, resplendent in a hooped crinoline dress, swept into the room and said "Mr. Temple, a word if you please". Since it was the code-phrase we'd agreed to use when private matters needed to be discussed, I nodded to Sara the maid, whom we had hired as camouflage. Having her and the other servants around meant we had to keep up the act all day, but the local intelligence they provided for us was invaluable. Sara left the room and closed the door behind her. Alvarez slid a small scanner from inside her sleeve and studied it until she was sure Sara had gone. Then she turned to me.

"I've got some good news and some bad news."

"Good news first."

"I've identified the parallel and we have a period base here."

"Thank Christ! Good work." I paused, tapping out my pipe. "So what's the bad news?"

"We don't establish it for another ten years, local time."

"Can't we clock forward and meet them?" Alvarez and I jumped. Looking around, I saw Cressida watching us both from the window seat. Neither of us had even noticed she was in the room.

"Negative. Borodin only managed to transfer landing control to my AI before his glider fell apart. Without his control code, everyone's gliders are slaved to mine, and I can't access my nav system without his password." I turned to Alvarez. "How is he?"

Chun's composure cracked, and her eyes filled with tears. I guess it was only then that I realised how much strain she had been under. "He's not getting any better John. The ageing has stopped but he's just getting weaker and weaker. Wulf has got the medpac providing full life support, but if he doesn't start to improve soon we're going to have to put him into stasis."

Stasis was an option I didn't want to consider right now. Erecting a null-time field around Borodin would prevent his condition from worsening, but he was a powerful chronal sensitive, and getting him out of the field could put enough psychic stress on his already weakened system to kill him. Plus it would reduce the team's mobility even more, since you can't move a stasis field by any means other than a chronal jump once it's up.

We were still considering the courses of action open to us when the door flew open and Wulf charged in. His face was flushed with excitement and his hair, usually so neatly combed, was awry.

"Wulf?" asked Cressida.

Still fighting to regain his breath, Wulf held up the palm-sized holoplate of a time scanner. On it I could see pulsing green telltales, indicating three temporal disturbances in close spatial proximity.

"Somebody's here," panted Wulf. "We've got company."