chapter nine
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Department of Temporal Investigation
Admin, 2980 CE
“Those blighted idiots proposed what?” Csaba Shigeki shouted.
Dahvid Kloss, DTI Under-Director of Espionage, and Katja Hinnerkopf, Under-Director of Technology, winced in unison. Special Agent James “Nox” Noxon stood a few paces from the group, his gray skin and yellow eyes as inexpressive as ever, and never even blinked.
He’d been with Shigeki longer than any of the others, of course.
“Immunizing the entire sixth-century population against the Black Death,” Jonas Shigeki repeated matter-of-factly.
“We’re dealing with lunatics. I swear.”
The senior Shigeki put a hand to his forehead and turned away, his long black braid, streaked with silver, swinging out behind him. He took a deep breath, clasped his hands tightly behind his back, and gazed out the monitoring room’s wide, wall-height window.
The interior of Hangar Three, deep underneath the DTI tower, was a flurry of activity as drones danced around the partially dissected Hammerhead chronoport. The long main body and flared head remained mostly intact, but the impeller spike had been pulled out and raised high above the craft.
Kloss took off his peaked cap and ran fingers through dark hair that looked as if it had been grazed on by a field animal.
He fitted the cap back on.
“Did the request gain any traction?”
“No,” Jonas said. “It looks like that one won’t even come to a vote.”
“I should hope not!” Shigeki spat. “Good grief! SysGov must be full of people who prance through the rain thinking they won’t get wet. The Gordian Protocol is their law!”
“How’s Muntero working out?” Kloss asked.
“About as well as can be expected.” Jonas stepped up next to his father. “She’s a firecracker, all right.”
“There’s nothing I can do about her,” Shigeki said. “The chief executor insisted on a hardline Restrictionist for the post.”
“Well, he got one.” Jonas gave him a lopsided smile. “Still strikes me as an odd choice. Wasn’t his campaign all about ushering in a ‘kinder and gentler’ Admin?”
“True, but the fast and loose way SysGov plays with AIs has a lot of people scared, him included.” Shigeki shook his head. “Their elected head of government is an AI, for God’s sake! That alone makes Muntero almost seem like a good choice!”
“Well, for all the fire and brimstone she brings to the room, she knows which one of us is the expert. She’ll defer to me if I want to jump in.”
“That’s something, at least.”
“You said there were two proposals,” Hinnerkopf noted. The short, compact woman joined them by the window. “What about the second one?”
“Right. That’s where the real problem lies,” Jonas said. “They want to take one of their abducted indigenes and return him to the central cord variant they plucked him from. A man by the name of Samuel Pepys, in this case.”
Shigeki blinked.
“Who?”
“A prominent British official from the seventeenth century.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Me neither, until now,” Jonas admitted with a shrug.
“I have,” Hinnerkopf chimed in. “I read excerpts from his diary a while back.”
All three flesh-and-blood men turned to face her, and even Nox stirred slightly.
“What?” she asked. “Why the surprised faces?”
“Sorry,” Shigeki said. “It just doesn’t sound like something you’d be interested in.”
“His diary provides a vivid window into the day-to-day life of that period. Definitely worth your time, if you’re interested. Plus it’s where I learned fun new slang for female body parts. Pepys had trouble keeping his hands to himself.”
“And they want to put this guy back?” Kloss asked.
“That’s what ART’s proposing,” Jonas said.
“Why?”
“Mostly as an experiment to study what will happen.”
“Which way do you think Lamont will swing?” Shigeki asked.
“In favor,” Jonas said.
“Yanluo’s burning hells,” Shigeki swore quietly, but with feeling.
“The Living Legend is approaching it more cautiously,” his son offered.
“Well, of course he would.”
“I suspect he’ll come out on ART’s side in the end, though. He’s uncomfortable with how in-the-dark we all are when it comes to the underlying sciences.”
“That’s not unreasonable,” Hinnerkopf said. “If we can better quantify the danger, we can more easily avoid it in the future. I may not like their readiness to take risks, but as somebody trying to understand this new dimension of chronometric physics, I’m in favor of all the data we can find.”
“Which is why I think the Legend will support it.”
“Living Legend” was Jonas’s nickname for Vice-Commissioner Schröder, and Shigeki could see why he’d chosen it. Schröder might be a man out of history, but he was from the Admin’s history, not SysGov’s, and he had indeed left his mark upon the twentieth century.
First time I ever had to open a history book while researching an opponent, Shigeki mused. Though, I suppose being the head of the Department of Temporal Investigation requires a certain openness to the unusual and unexpected.
His mouth tightened at that thought, and he turned back to the window as he remembered the VR briefing Raibert Kaminski had dropped on him and all the Admin at their first meeting. He knew he wasn’t the Shigeki in the perfect sounds and images SysGov had pulled from Kaminski’s memories as part of that briefing. He wasn’t the Shigeki who’d chosen to doom sixteen universes in an effort to buy his own thirteen hundred more years of existence. But he understood how that Shigeki might have decided to do just that. SysGov’s briefing, pulled from Kaminski’s memories, from those of his AI “companion,” from the data files of the TTV Kleio, and from the memories of Elzbietá Abramowski—once she’d acquired SysGov wetware of her own—was as real as being there himself.
The Admin’s psychologists and cyberneticists had analyzed every photon of that briefing, and they’d come to the somewhat grudging conclusion that the events it contained had actually happened—actually been experienced—exactly the way they were reported. That didn’t mean they were complete, however. In fact, the Admin knew they weren’t, because critical details of the final, massive temporal dogfight over 1940 Germany had been omitted. But it did mean that what they had shared was the truth, so far as they knew it, and in some cases SysGov’s efforts to mute or erase emotional overtones had been . . . less than perfect.
Shigeki hadn’t enjoyed that briefing. He didn’t like knowing that somewhere another Csaba Shigeki and all the people he’d known and loved had ceased to exist. And he didn’t like knowing that somewhere that other Csaba Shigeki had put the preservation of his own universe, his own loved ones, over the existence of sixteen other universes.
But that wasn’t me, damn it! he told himself. It wasn’t!
No, it wasn’t. But it could have been. It very well might have been, and he didn’t like that thought very much, either.
But for all his mixed emotions where that briefing was concerned, the thing he hated most about it was that apparently memories could not be saved, not clearly, without the wetware Agent Abramowski—only she was Agent Schröder now, of course—had received after the other Admin had mortally wounded her in a restaurant parking lot. That meant that neither Benjamin Schröder’s nor Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder’s personal memories had been part of the briefing. Given the elder Schröder’s pivotal position as the commander of the new Gordian Division, that left Csaba Shigeki with an itch he couldn’t scratch.
He’d pored over every scrap of the impressive historical record about his own universe’s Graf von Schröder, and the more he’d read, the more impressed he’d been. The man had been a force of nature, unstoppable. Shigeki had yet to find a single major task to which he’d set his hand that hadn’t been completed in the end.
Besides the historical literature and documentaries, he’d viewed three old movies featuring the man’s life, two decent and one terrible. Unfortunately, all three had been so overly dramatized they’d proved useless as an insight into the man behind the legend, although the battle scenes in Operation Oz possessed real grit.
The one thing he was confident of was that making Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder into an enemy would be . . . poor strategy.
And according to what SysGov tells us, his wife and daughters were all killed during the struggle between Idiot Me and Kaminski and Crew. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
“I meet with the chief executor in two hours,” he said, turning back to the others. “Hinnerkopf? Any progress to report?”
“Nothing substantial.”
“What’s taking so long?” Kloss demanded. She gave him a moderately severe glance, and he smiled. “I thought you’d have this problem beat in under a week!”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Hinnerkopf shook her head. “Unfortunately, the trick to modifying our impellers for transdimensional flight’s proven . . . elusive. I have nine boxed AIs crunching through different models as we speak.”
“You’re taking the necessary precautions?” Nox asked, speaking up for the first time since he and Jonas had entered the monitoring room.
“Of course,” she assured him. “We carefully review any data we provide the AIs, especially anything we’re transferring from one to the other.”
“I’m sure you do.” Shigeki nodded in approval. “So what’s the thrust of the problem?”
“Our current impellers work along a simple principle of selective chronoton permeation. By adjusting the permeability, we allow temporal pressure to build up, pushing the craft forward or backward in time. On its surface, transdimensional flight works on a similar principle. However, it represents a new axis upon which we have no empirical data, so we’re having to discover the correct vector approach from scratch.”
Shigeki bowed his head and pressed both palms against his temples.
“We do know there’s, for a lack of a better phrase, a side-to-side wiggle that chronotons exhibit,” Hinnerkopf continued. “This is a known, measurable phenomenon, and our impeller stabilizers are designed to cancel out that wiggle because it’s hazardous. You may recall that one of our earliest prototypes was lost to exactly that right-angle pressure. Transdimensional flight appears to use that very pressure to impart motion lateral to the main temporal axis, which means our current impellers are specifically designed to prevent what we need to do. But it’s even worse than that. Even if we disable the safety features in the impellers, it’s still like going from one axis of motion all the way to four. All while blindfolded.”
Shigeki exhaled a low, almost—almost—inaudible groan.
“Director?” Hinnerkopf tilted her head. “Are you all right?”
“Katja?”
“Yes, Director?”
“For the moment, please imagine I’m nothing more than a dumb bureaucrat.”
“Sir, I would never think of you that way.”
“Just humor me. Please. For the sake of my sanity.”
Hinnerkopf sighed.
“All right, sir. If you say so.”
“And keep in mind that I need to explain why we’re not making progress to the chief executor. So the dumber the better.”
“Okay.”
She lowered her head, obviously thinking for a long moment, then looked back up.
“Imagine a line,” she said.
“A line. Got it.”
“The line is our universe.”
“Our universe. Got it.”
“That’s the path of travel our impellers are restricted to. Now imagine a second line that runs parallel to the first. That’s SysGov.”
“Second line is SysGov. Got it.”
“Now picture a third line drawn between the two. That’s the path through the transverse their TTVs use.”
“Is the third line perpendicular to the other two?”
“Not quite, sir. You see, the difference in True Present coordinates from departure to arrival makes the—”
Shigeki glared at her.
“Yes, Director,” she corrected herself with a frown. “It’s perpendicular.”
“Third line is perpendicular. Got it.”
“Figuring out how to travel down that third line is . . . difficult.”
“Okay.” Shigeki nodded. “So in summary, our impellers can go back and forth but not side to side and we’re still trying to establish how to make them do that.”
“It’s . . . ” Hinnerkopf sighed and put on a brave face. “Yes, Director. That’s a perfectly good way to describe the situation.”
“You sound a little doubtful.”
“It’s all right. I’ll get over it.”
“Our problems aren’t just technical,” Kloss pointed out. “Not by a long shot. This technology allows SysGov to come and go whenever they please. I don’t think I need to remind everyone of the intelligence-gathering advantage they have right now.”
“Militarily, too,” Jonas added in a darker tone. “They can pop in anywhere without warning, fire Restricted weapons with abandon, and then blip away before we get out of bed.”
“It’s chilling when you think about it,” Hinnerkopf said. “Especially since they used just that sort of weapon back in 1940.”
Shigeki and his son looked at one another, remembering the vivid images, taken from Kaminski’s own memories, as he launched weaponized nanotech against his enemies. If the idiots had screwed up just the tiniest bit, failed to properly program the generational stop, or if the stop had failed and the nanotech had gone right on self-replicating and devouring anything it touched, they could literally have wiped out an entire world.
Of course, they’d done that in the end, anyway, hadn’t they?
And fair’s fair, Shigeki told himself. It wasn’t their weaponized nanotech to begin with, it was ours. Or made by those idiots on Mars before they got crushed, anyway. And the man was fighting not just for his own universe’s life but for the lives of fifteen other universes. In a situation like that, you do what you have to do. Still, Katja’s right. It is chilling, because it’s absolute proof of how far these people are willing to go if they think their backs are against the wall. I may not be the Shigeki who tried to stop Kaminski, but he and his SysGov are damned well the people who used those weapons!
“All the more reason to push forward with development as aggressively as possible,” he said out loud. “I want to avoid a war as much as anyone else, but if a fight does break out, I intend for us to win it.” He faced Hinnerkopf. “Do you want any additional resources? If you do, now’s the time to ask, given who I’m meeting with.”
“I believe my team’s appropriately staffed and supported. Time is what I need most right now, not more people or equipment.”
“Time . . . ” Shigeki mused. “It slips by so fast. You’d think we of all people would have enough of it.”
“Actually,” Jonas offered, “there may be a way to make SysGov feel safer around us.”
“Oh? What’s on your mind?”
“Just thinking out loud here, but we all know that, as Dahvid says, SysGov is keeping a close eye on us. That means they know we’re building up our chronoport fleet and improving its armament. Hell, they probably know about our wargames! Now, whatever else we may think, they aren’t idiots. They know we’d have to be doing this even if we were of a completely peaceful turn of mind, now that we’ve realized there’s a potential threat. But even granting that they understand that up here”—he tapped his temple with an index finger—“understanding it here”—he tapped his chest with the same index finger—“is another matter. So right now, they’re worrying about us at least as much as we’re worrying about them.”
“And your point?” his father asked.
“I’m just thinking that perhaps a change in tactics would benefit us. We know we don’t have any real voice on the committee. If SysGov wants to override us, they will. Given that foregone conclusion, what if we approached the matter a little differently?”
“How do you mean?”
“We need time to develop the drive, right?” Jonas grinned. “And we need to avoid antagonizing SysGov, at least until we’ve closed the tech gap. So, what if we give them exactly what they want from us?”