Temple's Tale

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

I remember an odd feeling of distance as I looked into Frankie's eyes. I knew he was going to kill me, that the others were far too wrapped up in trying to figure out what had happened to notice what he was about to do. But I didn't seem to care. All I could think of, as I met his wide-eyed gaze, was that I was glad things couldn't get any worse, and that - for me at least – things were soon going to be over.

Then the world blew up.

While Frankie and I had been locked in our own little drama, the detonations that I had heard in the distance had slowly been getting closer. Nobody noticed until it was too late.

The explosion shattered what was left of a multi-storey building about fifty metres away, instantly transforming it into a scything tornado of glass, steel and concrete. As I buried my self in the dirt, I saw Wulf tackle Sandy Hair and Bruce, bringing them down in a heap as the dreadful cutting wind swept over us.

Frankie never stood a chance. As I grovelled behind what meager shelter I could find, I heard a wet thud from behind me, oddly distinctive above the roar of the explosion and the impact sounds of debris falling all around. Eventually, the roaring stopped, to be replaced by a terrible silence, as though the world had simply run out of noise. I sat up slowly, half-blinded by dust, brushing the dirt from my clothes and trying not to inhale too deeply. Behind me, I could hear Wulf and the others coughing as they clambered to their feet.

"Od's Blood."

The voice was Wulf's, but it sounded strange somehow, subdued yet almost deafening after the explosion. I looked 'round to check on the others and found them alive, intact and staring at something. I shook my head to clear my vision and wiped a hand across my face. Then I saw him.

It was Frankie, standing exactly were he had been. At first glance he seemed unharmed, miraculously untouched by the destruction that had so very nearly claimed us. But there was something wrong with him, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. When I did, my stomach lurched.

Buried in the ground between Frankie's feet was an enormous sheet of glass, probably from one of the few surviving windows left in the building before it blew. Fully eight feet tall, it neatly bisected him with an almost mathematical precision. There was a pink halo in the air around him, and I watched in horror as his eyes, filled with an awful awareness, rolled from side to side. First one eye, then the other. Then, with the sound of someone dragging a thumb across a wet plate, the two halves of Frankie's body slid greasily off the glass and onto the ground.

Stunned and sickened, I turned away in time to see a circle of light slithering across the wreckage of the destroyed building toward us. Peering upwards through the settling dust, I could make out a vast black shape, almost invisible against the night sky. Tiny specks of light dotted its underside, and I realised with a chill that they were viewports. The thing had to be huge, and yet it just hung there, silent except for a faint, barely perceptible humming; more a vibration than a sound. Then I heard something else.

I turned to the others.

"Run," I said.

Wulf looked sharply at me, took one glance up, then turned and began to sprint for cover, his cuffed hands held close to his chest. Caught totally off-guard, Sandy Hair and Bruce gaped.

Bruce goggled at me. "What...?"

"RUN!" I yelled, hurling myself past them and into the night with as much speed as I could muster. Sandy hair took the hint and took off after me; sharper than his colleague, he'd heard the same thing I had – the whine of something big being powered up. I didn't want to find out what it was.

As we pounded after Wulf, I shot a look over my shoulder, to see Bruce pinned in the middle of that searchlight, peering stupidly up into the beam, his shocked mind simply unable to accept the danger he was in. It didn't last long. As I watched, a bolt of hot, bright green plasma spat out from the underside of the floating giant and ate him alive. For the briefest of moments I saw him suspended in the heart of the fireball, his arms flung wide, his back arched in agony, light pouring from his contorted mouth as though his final scream was so intense it had crossed the spectrum and become visible to us all. Then he was gone. Consumed.

The concussion wave from the detonation slammed me into the dirt, and I let myself go limp to absorb the impact. I felt a hot tide wash over me, and heard the repetitive thud of rubble smacking into the ground around me while Frankie's last moments of life replayed in my mind.

As the noise died away, a strong hand grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me to my feet. It was Wulf.

"Had enough rest?" he asked, smiling grimly. I nodded, my ears still ringing from the blast.

"That's nice." The smile disappeared. "Then let's get out of here before they realise there are more of us."

"Where's the other guy?" I coughed.

"Forget him. It's his fault we're in this mess."

I shook Wulf away, and immediately staggered. Recovering my balance, I stared at him. "Like Hell it is! Those belts were based on Corps technology. It's our fault we're in this mess, and we need him to fix it. Where is he?"

Wulf pointed to my left and I turned to see Sandy Hair, half buried under a pile of loose bricks. Glancing back along our path, I could see the searchlight beam heading our way. We had thirty seconds, maybe less. I scrambled over the debris towards the fallen agent, and started to dig him out as best I could. I looked back at Wulf.

"I swear," I snarled. "If you don't get your stupid nordic ass over here and help me get him out I'm going to punch out every single damn valkyrie that comes looking for you when you're dead. You'll never get to Asgard. Now move it!"

He didn't move.

Cursing, I turned back and continued to uncover the stunned man, brick by brick. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the beam was almost on us. Above me, I could hear the hum of the giant ship, and the whine of that foul weapon building power. I wasn't going to save him, or myself.

Wulf pushed me aside. "That way's going to takes ages," he grumbled, grabbing Sandy Hair by the shoulders. "You want to do it like this." Biceps bulging, he slid the agent out from under the rubble as smoothly as drawing a sword from its sheath. I must have looked pretty funny, because he grinned as he slung Sandy Hair across his massive shoulders, and said "Run, you idiot."

I didn't need telling twice. I scrambled to my feet and sprinted across the rubble, with Wulf close behind. I don't know how long we ran, or how far. All I was aware of was the sound of the plasma weapon spitting green fire into the ground where we had been, over and over.

Eventually we stopped, finding refuge in a cellar cracked open by the bombardments that had levelled the city. On the horizon, green fire lit the sky, and the ground shook with distant detonations. After pausing to gain our breath, I checked on Sandy. He was unconscious, the result of a head-on encounter with a lump of masonry when Bruce had died. Searching him, I found the key to our restraints, one of our commlinks, a medkit and a scanner. I would have preferred to have my plaser, but I counted myself luck to have what I did. I unlocked my cuffs quickly, and threw the keys to Wulf, who caught them with a grunt of thanks. Using the medkit, I treated Sandy Hair's concussion, and dosed him with a light sedative to keep him under while he healed.

While he slept, Wulf and I reviewed our position. It didn't take long.

"So," I said, " let me make sure I've got this straight. We don't know when we are. We don't know where we are. We have almost no equipment, no weapons, and we don't know who was shooting at us back there."

"That's right," Wulf muttered.

"Great. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble." I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Crap."

Wulf laughed; a short barking sound, much like those made by his namesake. He nodded towards Sandy Hair. "Any clues on him?"

I shook my head, and winced; it was still aching from the explosions and the nightmare tumble through time. "Nothing. Everything he's got on him is contemporary to 1914. He's a professional."

"He's also useless to us. I don't know why you're wasting the medkit on him."

For a moment, I just stared at Wulf. With his language implants and his period clothing, it was easy to assume we were the same. But we weren't. He'd spent most of his life in a world were men killed each other with axes, where savagery and death were daily companions. Wulf didn't hold life cheaply, I knew that. If push came to shove, he'd die to protect me without a second thought. But I was part of his adopted tribe. I was family. Nobody else mattered.

For a moment I sat there, silently absorbing this new revelation. Then I leaned forward.

"We need him. This," I pointed to the ruined landscape outside, "isn't the world we arrived in. This is his world, altered somehow. And his world is the result of our error. It's too far removed from what we know for us to figure out what went wrong without help. If we go back and try and hunt down the change it could take us months, maybe years. In that time this whole region of history is going to be generating resonance, affecting every nearby parallel. We'll never be able to set it right."

Wulf nodded. Although he didn't like what he was hearing, he knew that I was right. It was obvious to the pair of us that the world we were in was the result of a timequake; a massive wave of temporal change emanating from a powerful historical disruption. If it was a 'quake, the wave would just keep rolling on up the timeline, gathering speed, until it reached a kind of temporal terminal velocity that we referred to as Terminal Point. Terminal Point meant that the wave would exist at all points in time futureward of the original disruption simultaneously, becoming a new reality, with enough temporal inertia that restoring it could cause even more damage to neighbouring parallels. Eventually the new history would become the baseline for this parallel. When that happened, the original history would be lost forever.

"What are we going to do about him?" Wulf asked.

I blinked. "Sorry?"

"Mr. Temporal Security Service. If we do our job right, it means deleting this history and restoring his, then deleting his to restore the original. Do you really think someone whose job it is to protect his reality is going to sit back and let us retroactively abort it?"

"We'll explain…"

Wulf barked another laugh. "Of course. We'll just say to him 'Sorry, your entire world only came about because we screwed up, but it's OK because we're going to fix it and replace it with another one. If you're the last one out, could you please turn off the lights?' Why didn't I think of that?"

Sandy Hair moaned softly, and shifted his position.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," I said to Wulf.

Turning to my patient, I dabbed at his forehead with a scrap of my jacket soaked in water from a nearby puddle. He opened his eyes and peered blearily up at me.

"Hi," I said. "How're you feeling?"

"Bloody awful, but it's better than being dead." He tried to sit up, but the effort was too much for him and he sank back to the ground. "I take it I have you to thank for my continued existence?"

I shook my head and pointed to Wulf. "Uh-uh. Blame him." I extended a hand. "Since we all appear to be in the same boat, maybe some introductions are in order. I'm John Temple, and this is Wulf Hrolfson."

Sandy Hair smiled weakly, and took my hand. For a guy on the edge of consciousness, his grip was firm and strong. "Pleased to meet you John, Wulf." Maintaining his grip on my hand, he used it to lever himself into a sitting position. This time he made it. "Simon Decker. Major Simon Decker, His Majesty's Temporal Security Service." His glance flickered over my shoulder. "Who're your friends?"

I glanced over at Wulf, who shrugged. Maybe the concussion had been worse than I'd thought. "That's Wulf, Simon. I just introduced you to him."

Simon looked annoyed. "Not him," he said, pointing past Wulf and into the shadows. "Them."

Wulf and I spun around as if pulled by the same string.

Standing in the cellar behind us was a squad of six men, all armed with some kind of light assault weapon. All of them were dressed in charcoal gray urban camouflage suits, with sophisticated looking body armour and protective helmets marked with a triangular insignia that I couldn't see clearly. All of them had the same, grim set to their mouths, and all of them were pointing their guns at us.

"John," Wulf said in a stage whisper, "what was that word you used earlier?"

"Crap?"

"Yeah. That's the one."