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FREE TIME

by Sarah A. Hoyt & Robert A. Hoyt



Technology has been decisive in battles, going back to when someone realized that a pointed stick might beat out fists, or even thrown rocks. That lasted until the guy with the pointed stick went up against the state-of-the-art bow and arrow. If high tech loses to higher tech, R&D is essential, and if a bunch of promising tech types could be living at a faster time rate than the outside world experienced, they might make the government that put them there invincible in war. Except that living in isolation at a different time rate might make them feel unconnected to that government. And even more so for their descendants . . .


stars


The dull thump descended into the subsonic as the metronome in the breacher fell into line with the big metronome inside the rologium. The grinding wheels shrieked around in a perfect arc, ripping the side open with geometric precision. Then they stopped. In a breathless moment, time inside the breacher snapped into synchrony—and with little fanfare, time was passing at seven hundred times the rate that prevailed in the world outside. A plug of steel and concrete wheeled aside weightlessly on automated servos.

The men charged inside. Or rather, twelve men charged—one walked in. Clad in mechanical armor, rifles raised, their feet shattered the tile and their servos made the air buzz. Forward Alliance was not taking chances this time.

They entered the living quarters of the rologium.

The plan was simple. Make a mess, take some hostages, get the attention of whomever was in charge of the rologium, and start making some demands. The Forward Alliance had already sent in a group of men via the front door. They hadn’t come back out. The Central Committee was getting extremely impatient with their errant research staff.

There was the expected disarray when their party entered the compound. They’d evidently caught the researchers during the rologium’s night cycle. Nevertheless, there were people about in the common area, dressed in unfamiliar and garish styles of sleepware.

The Central Committee of the Forward Alliance had some time ago deemed brightly colored clothing to be an unnecessary and garish extravagance. It meant extra dye factories of varying kinds, not to mention that it disturbed the unity of the people to have so many ways of differentiating themselves from one another. It was a shock to Adam Swessinger to see supposed citizens dressed up as garishly as a sunset in spring.

Merril Greyland, the team leader, a great bear of a man who it seemed impossible to imagine smiling even when he was not dressed in a meshwork of mechanical parts, was up at the fore of the group shouting orders. He fired his gun in the air just to keep the locals baffled. The group started methodically cornering people, forcing them up against the wall, restraining them in a prone position with their arms behind them. They gained control of a corner and worked their way outward. The common areas led by a series of large hallways out through a honeycomb of rooms, but the place they had targeted faced directly onto “Main Street” and had only one angle of approach.

Then, to their great surprise, there was an all too recognizable ping.

Adam, not himself a military man by training, turned white, and ducked behind a wall. The rebels were armed! That was unthinkable. He had no idea what they armed themselves with. Although, then again, hadn’t they been locked in here with fine fabrication facilities and ample supplies? Hah! What had they been thinking? Making weapons had probably been entirely trivial to these dissenters.

Adam looked around the corner in time to see a device clatter to the ground in front of them.

“Grenade!” someone shouted. The device popped open.

And then there was a terrible sensation of slowness. Suddenly the rebels down the hallway seemed to be moving much faster toward them.

“What the hell?”

“It’s some kind of—time bomb. I don’t know. Lay down suppressive fire. The bullets move fast enough it won’t make any difference,” said Merril.

It would be wrong to say that the actual soldiers in the group didn’t bat an eye, because nobody is entirely sanguine when being shot at by people who can take three shots to their one. But the few bullets that connected bounced harmlessly off the mechanical carapaces. Still, they took cover.

Merril shouted back at Adam.

“Dammit Swessinger, earn your keep.”

This startled Adam enough to shock him into action. Keeping himself well away from the corner, where a hail of bullets was even now raining for the hallway, he started casting for the Q-Net channels looking for a network that he could connect with, using the Forward Alliance protocol as his basis. He reasoned that even if the rebels had reprogrammed the machines, there was no particular reason for them to develop entirely new protocols.

He turned out to be correct. As he scanned through channel 2687, suddenly his sensors let up. His occipital screen began displaying a set of readouts which would’ve been meaningless to the layperson, but which to him lay open all of the inner workings of the rologium.

With the skill of a trained technician, he identified power relays on the fire doors in this area. Being fire doors, their failure mode was to close. If, then, someone were to systematically overload them with electricity, causing all the fuses inside them to burst, they would slam shut.

They did so. One of them slammed on the little device and crushed it. Normal time came back.

The hail of fire from the hallway ceased.

The men emerged from cover, keeping their guns trained on the door. Merril circled back and dragged one of the hostages up by his shirt collar.

“I will only say this once,” he said. “Who’s leading this place?”

The man looked confused.

“Comrade, answer the question,” Merril growled, practically shoving a rifle up the man’s nose.

“Nobody is leading this place,” the man said.

Merril stared.

“Are you deaf, or stupid? Who is in charge? Who gives the orders?”

It is very hard to draw oneself up, while being held by the shirt collar, and with all one’s limbs restrained. Nevertheless, the man somehow managed it.

“Nobody, sir. Nobody gives us orders.”

Merril growled, and tossed the man backwards. Then, as an apparent afterthought, he shot him.

“Listen up!” he shouted at the arrayed bodies prone on the floor. “We are here to dictate terms to the ringleaders of this place. Do we understand each other? Give me a name.”

He kicked one of the hostages. The mechanical suit amplified the movement. The helpless man rolled across the room and into a wall. Nobody said anything.

Then, a small voice came from the side of the group.

“If you’re going to shoot us for not declaring our leaders, you might as well get started.”

It was an alto voice, although it nevertheless was colored with a dusky timbre that Adam found immediately intriguing. He looked for its source. It turned out to be a redheaded woman in a green nightgown made of slightly silken material. She had rolled upright and was addressing the ceiling.

“You volunteering, miss?” said Merril threateningly.

“Just between the eyes, dirtbag. Make it quick.”

Merril started to raise his gun. Without quite knowing why, Adam stepped into his path. Merril swore.

“Sir, just a second, please,” he said. He turned to the woman.

“You seem very sure that nobody will betray your leaders even on pain of death, comrade,” he looked over at the body and shuddered. “Demonstrated pain of death. Why is that?” he asked.

The woman looked at him. A chill ran down Adam’s spine. It seemed for a moment that the woman was reading his life story off the back of his skull. She didn’t seem that impressed.

“You can’t betray what does not exist. The man spoke truthfully. We have no leaders.”

“The hell you don’t. You swore an oath to the Forward Alliance, comrade!” shouted one of the soldiers.

The woman eyed him levelly.

“Then call up your Central Committee and dictate your terms to them. Anyway, comrade, I am twenty-three years old,” she said, the word dripping with sarcasm. “My grandfather swore loyalty to the Forward Alliance, and only because of what you’d do if he didn’t.”

Merril swept Adam aside and hit her with his rifle butt.

“Enough,” he said. He took aim with his rifle.

Once again, not feeling entirely under his own control, Adam moved to push the rifle aside.

Merril raised the weapon to point at him. Adam’s blood ran cold. He was armored, but these were armor-piercing rounds. The Forward Alliance had no idea what the threat would be inside the rologium, so they’d prepared for the worst.

“I will kill you if you interfere again,” he said coldly.

“Sir, the hostages are our leverage. We don’t have anything to bargain with if you kill them all,” he said, his voice shaking.

Merril stared at Adam for a moment through his helmet. Then he stepped smartly forward, grabbed him by the head and threw him face-first into the ground.

“Take that as a warning,” he said, quietly. “For the last time, who is leading this rabble?” he roared at the group.

There was laughter, from someone who clearly didn’t want to laugh but couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Merril turned around in rage, but before he had identified who it was, all the hostages were laughing.

Another voice in the group of prone people shouted defiantly.

“I reckon the gunfire made ’em deaf. One more time with feeling, guys? Three, two, one—”

“We have no leader!” the group of hostages shouted in almost-chorus.

. . . In synchrony with which, the fire door nearest them burst.


Adam awoke in a cell with a pounding headache.

His last waking moments had been a blur. The rebels, breaking through the door. Merril and his men, countercharging, breaking through the line of advancing men before they knew what was happening. Charging down into the hallway, advancing toward less well-enforced positions.

Leaving Adam alone, and very much surrounded by angry rebels.

The thump on the back of the head, before he could finish standing from where Merril had laid him low.

“Good morning, Corporal. That insignia does mean you’re a corporal, doesn’t it?”

Adam fought to get his eyes to focus.

He looked up into the eyes of a man who looked about forty, except for neatly combed steel gray hair, and watery blue eyes. He was sitting outside—yes, this was a cell. And that meant—

“You are, from our perspective, a prisoner of war, son. Of course we’ll need Forward Alliance to actually recognize our claims of independence first. I guess in the meantime you’re our—guest.”

Adam sat back in his cell and took stock. He’d been stripped of his suit—obviously—and left only with the long underwear he kept on beneath it, for decency’s sake. If the rebels knew their business they’d done a cavity search before letting him wake up, although it wouldn’t avail him if they hadn’t since he didn’t have any life-saving devices secreted away.

Although he felt understandably vulnerable, a small part of him was happy to be out of the metal shell. Unlike the rest of the team he didn’t live and work in it every day. He’d mostly been employed for design work on things like the time rologiums—and the breaching device for the time rologiums, which the Forward Alliance had contracted for in a hurry after the thousand odd individuals in the time-accelerated rologium who were supposed to be designing a superweapon to give them a definitive edge over World Unity unexpectedly declared independence just one year into the project. Of course, that was a hundred and fifty years from the perspective of the people inside. And would quickly become a lot more, since they’d sped up the metronome.

He was only in the military because practically everyone in the Forward Alliance with technical training was in the military. Whereas Greyland and his men were notorious for being sent in, not so much when you wanted to get a job done, as when you wanted to make a point. He had never seen a dead man until—well, he didn’t know how long he’d been out, but recently. And he wasn’t keen to do it again.

“So what happens now?”

The man shrugged “I suppose we interrogate you.”

Adam considered this.

“I’d been hoping to avoid that.”

“You could tell us everything you know in advance, if you like.”

Adam also gave this due consideration. He thought of Ashley, and little Annabelle. Bombs falling in the darkness five hundred miles away from where he labored for the Forward Alliance, designing rologiums so they could gain a research edge on their opponents.

The Forward Alliance said that it had been done by World Unity. Sometimes, at 2:00 am, sitting under the fluorescent lamps and staring at the plans projected through his occipital computer into 3D space in front of them, he needed to believe that. He needed to think that in some small way, his work was helping to avenge their deaths.

He looked up at the man. “I’d like to, but I don’t think that I can.”

The man nodded, understandingly.

“Torture it is, I’m afraid.”

There was a knock at the door.

The man looked over.

“Come in,” he said.

To Adam’s amazement, the person who entered was the woman who had been mouthing off at Merril.

“What are you doing here, Theresa?”

“I asked to see this gentleman, Phillip.”

“It’s a bit of a wrench. We were just about to torture him.”

The woman gave him a look.

“Phillip, have you ever tortured anyone?”

The man shrugged.

“You never know until you try,” he said glibly. “You got a better idea?”

“Give me ten minutes to talk to him.”

“Do you have any experience torturing people?”

She smiled.

“It’s practically in the job description for the female of the species.”

“Theresa—”

“Just trust me, please?” she said.

“Make it quick. We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, standing up. He left.

Theresa sat down across from Adam, demurely sitting with her legs crossed on the stool in front of him.

He smiled grimly.

“Ah, let me see. So that was stick, and you are carrot, I suppose?”

She smiled. It was a surprisingly nice smile. “Should I thank you for the compliment or make a joke about my hair being more a dark red.”

It was a very nice dark red. Glossy too, in a way no one in the outside world had. He wondered why. “I meant the first. You’re supposed to pretend to like me, so I’ll open up?”

“That would be a good idea for next time. We’re not as advanced at dealing with prisoners as the Forward Alliance, I’m afraid. I’m just . . . me,” the way she said the last part sounded less brazen, and a bit more uncertain. After a moment she said:

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For keeping me from getting a bullet in the brain. I was raised as a free woman, and expected to die one. There is no freedom without consequences, as my grandfather always said. That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful.”

Adam looked around at his surroundings.

“That hasn’t done me a lot of good.”

She snorted.

“The hell it hasn’t. You almost got your throat slit, do you know?”

“I didn’t.”

That, people have had plenty of practice on. Ever since Forward Alliance sent the first set of bully boys through the front door.”

“Ah, so that would be where Team One went.”

“Yes,” she said, flatly. There was another pause. “I expect you’d do the same if I invaded your home, and rightly so.”

Adam grunted.

“I’m not here to ask you for information”—she looked at his shirt—“Swessinger,” she said.

“Adam is fine.”

“Adam, then. I’m Theresa. Theresa Lamb. I’m here to give you some information.”

Adam cleared his throat. “I can’t imagine what sort of information you’d offer a man in my position.”

“Your team is the devil to kill, did you know that?”

“Only by reputation. I don’t usually work with the likes of them.”

“I suspected that. What was it that made you stick your neck out for me, anyway? I can’t work that out.”

He shrugged. He didn’t know. He felt a pang in the memory of Ashley as he watched Theresa shift positions on the chair, her limbs sliding easily out of and back into her silken clothing. He didn’t know, and he didn’t dare ask.

“Very well, then. Well, let me get you up to speed.”


Merril shouted orders at the group and called them into order.

They’d killed everyone who stood in their way. As far as Merril was concerned, an enemy was an enemy. The rebels had at least learned not to charge in the open. They were taking potshots every so often, which were as inconsequential as mosquitoes, so far. Little flanking groups were turning out, but they were easily dealt with.

“Sir, without Swessinger it’s going to be hard to stop the metronome,” a corporal named Hans pointed out.

“Forget him. There’s another way.”

They brought up the plans of the rologium on their 3D screens and figured out a way down to the power generators.

“They’ll be equally vulnerable if the power goes out. Something has to run the metronome.”

They tried the elevators at first, but found that the rebels had cut the cables. It was inconvenient but not unexpected.

They found the nearest stairwell and began advancing downward.

But, rabble though they were, the soldiers were only able to advance a short way in that direction before someone clearly sussed out their new plan. This place was so honeycombed with hallways—designed to ease logistical flow around an area designed first and foremost with the research and manufacturing of novel technologies in mind—that it was impossible to stop people getting around them.

A door slammed shut in front of them when they were no more than a few stairways down. Not a fire door, either, but a blast door, designed specifically to form a seal in the event that a reactor went critical.

A moment later, the door slammed shut upstream, behind them.

“Shit. And we don’t have anyone who can hack it.”

“Screw hacking it.”

“You want to blow it?”

“I say we see what these suits can do.”

A man named Svenson stepped forward and experimentally flexed his fingers against the metal. There were a few agonizing seconds as the metal protested. Then, it gave way all at once, and he forced his fingers into the gap. Pushing the suit to its limits, he started to draw his hands apart. Giant cogs designed with the idea of keeping the power of the sun at bay fought to the death. Sparks poured out as he wrenched them apart. Beyond them, a kid no more than sixteen years old looked out with frightened eyes from a piece of circuit paneling on the wall which he had just sabotaged. He turned and started to run. Svenson lifted his gun and shot him in the back. His body convulsed, hit the ground, and slid to a halt.

There was a thump in the distance. Further down the hall, another door slid closed. A moment later, there was another pair of thumps to their left and right. And then a series of thumps, duller and duller as they continued on into the distance.

Merril shook his head.

“Idiots. Proceed forward, men. They’re going to run out of doors eventually.


“That’s bought us time, but it hasn’t stopped them,” Theresa said. “They’re ripping the doors open one at a time with those damned suits of yours. It’s not fast, but it’s effective. And anyone who tries to flank them is getting cut down.”

“I suppose they’re thinking that once they get in the generator room, they’ll be able to shut down the power which is keeping the metronome ticking,” Adam said, blandly. “You could have worked that out yourself.”

“Was that not the plan all along, then?”

It hadn’t been the plan, Adam thought to himself. The plan had been to make their way directly to the metronome. It was infinitely more accessible from the living quarters than the generator area, precisely because of the doors Theresa had mentioned. But also, without his expertise, Greyland and his team very likely could not disable it. It probably wouldn’t be any deadlier than the clockstopper to disable the metronome haphazardly, but Merril was clearly still thinking he could win this. And he might be right.

He didn’t say any of this aloud, but something in his expression must have given Theresa a clue.

“No, huh? Well, could have fooled us.”

She shook her head, and then looked at the ground.

“People are gathering for a final defense. There are other ways down besides the main stairwell. We’ve been monitoring from the cameras. But, you’ll be pleased to know, your entire team is still alive.”

Theresa was watching him very carefully as she said this. He wasn’t sure what to feel in response to it. Apparently this was noted. She smiled and leaned forward.

“That sentence doesn’t mean anything to you. You already said you don’t usually work with this team, but that’s only half the story, isn’t it? You’re not a soldier, Adam. You’re dressed in a soldier’s uniform, that’s all. We caught you jacked into our Q-Net. You’re a technical specialist of some kind, aren’t you?”

Adam said nothing.

“Do you know why my grandfather renounced his citizenship, Adam?”

“Do you usually do all the talking during your interrogations?” he interjected blandly.

“What can I say, I’m practicing,” she said, “and anyway, getting all the information that I want. Do you know why?”

“No. Why?”

“Because about three years after he started working inside this rologium—which in outside time would have been probably just a week—he got a letter. Communicated over the Q-Net. It told him that his wife and little son had been killed in a bombing by World Unity. He was all alone in the world.”

Adam froze.

“But, you see, in a little rologium like this, they can’t keep the researchers from talking to one another in their spare time.

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Joshua Lamb was, by nature, a neurotic man, with a tendency toward external processing. This usually fatal tendency had not gotten him killed in the Forward Alliance only because he had an exceptional gift for mathematics. Forward Alliance felt that the time rologium was a perfect fit for a man of his excitable temperament. He was the sort to get loose lips when nervous, but if he was bottled up with a bunch of other researchers who were also on a top secret project with him, he remained annoying, but far less actively dangerous.

He was in the lunch room with his closest friend in the rologium, Leonard Stevens, a physicist from Ohio, and made no attempt to hide the fact that he was upset. Eventually Stevens decided to put Lamb out of his misery.

“What’s eating you?” Stevens said, carefully. Though the science fiction stories the Forward Alliance had provided in the hopes of sparking their imaginations had been extensively dampened by a heavy rain of censorship on their journey into the rologium, certain essential ideas had managed to filter through. Joshua Lamb impressed many of his colleagues as a man likely to be a Dr. Ledbetter—the creator of a perfect matter transmutter in one of the old tales—in the flesh, but his roaring engine of a brain heavily overtaxed the two-speed gearbox of his emotions. He was not infrequently at wit’s end, and it was often hard to guess why.

Joshua pulled out the letter that had been delivered over the Q-Net. Translation protocols over the time breach were easier on the way in than the way out. To a quantum network it didn’t matter at all that time went faster in one place than another—the states flipped from one point to another in synchrony with one another no matter where the two sides were. The only issue was that the time was passing one hundred fifty times slower outside, which meant that a message that took a minute to process and decode outside would take over two and a half hours if being transferred inside. This inconvenience notwithstanding, the Forward Alliance found it helpful to have a means of continuing to send directives into the rologium. Sending directives was in fact a primary function of the Forward Alliance, in the same way that swimming is a primary function of fish. They would hardly know what to do with themselves if they could not.

Leonard read over the letter. His mouth quirked into a grim line. He read over it again. Like most people in the Forward Alliance he’d learned not to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Where Lamb had been forced in, he had volunteered out of patriotic duty. But now, years of training were breaking down. Slowly, carefully, he reached into his pocket and picked out a nearly identical letter. He laid it silently on the table besides Joshua’s.

Joshua was from California. He wasn’t much of a military strategist or a geographer but Leonard knew something odd when he saw it. And though he didn’t show it as much as Joshua, he too was grieving.

Over the course of the next few days the men began to make quiet inquiries around the base. And slowly, the terrible truth began to emerge.


“And that, Adam, is how they all found out that all their loved ones, spread ’cross thousands of miles, in every part of the country, had somehow been mysteriously killed in one night by what one has to suppose was World Unity’s most ingeniously coordinated attack yet.”

Adam shut his eyes. It was like being punched in the gut.

There was a heavy silence between the two of them. After a while, Theresa said:

“My grandfather never learned what really happened to his wife and son. Some people think that the Forward Alliance just shot them in order to cut the loose ends. They’d promised people who entered the rologium, knowing they would grow old and die without seeing their loved ones again, that those loved ones would be taken care of forever. And they meant it, Mr. Swessinger.”

“Shut up,” said Adam. Theresa turned her head slightly to the side.

“Now what’s gotten into you?”

He took a deep breath and sat upright. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Shut. Up.”

Theresa gave him a long look. But Adam couldn’t find a trace of gloating in it. There was only pity. After another moment she said:

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“They weren’t killed by our side.”

“Of course. What was I thinking? . . . anyway. Afterwards, you know, my grandfather wasn’t quite the same. He did end up finding a fellow researcher in the rologium who—helped comfort him, I suppose.”

Adam stared at her. Theresa looked back.

“What is the point of telling me all this?” Adam said, at last. He blinked, and tears ran down his cheeks. But he stiffened his jaw and set his face like stone. He was a man like all men, and his heart felt cracked in two. But he was not a weak man.

“I suppose I wanted somebody to know, Adam. You see, once your team makes its way to the generator, I give our people maybe fifty-fifty odds against them.”

“That’s tragically optimistic,” he said bluntly. “I’m not keen to test your bullets myself but the ones that did catch us bounced off. It will be a massacre or a miracle, and I’m betting on the massacre.”

And if they shut it down,” said Theresa, “we’re going to fall back into normal time. There are hundreds of people in here who couldn’t name the Central Committee members on a bet. We certainly don’t think of ourselves as part of the Forward Alliance anymore! But they think of us as part of them, you see. And once they flood in here, they’re going to expand on what your team is doing. I expect they’ll kill us all, and that’s if we get lucky. Stories have gotten passed down, you know?”

“And?”

“They might not kill you. You’re my chance to pass the story on. To get a little piece of what we learned here out. Who knows? It’s all I can do.”

She stood up, and turned toward the door. She took a few steps toward it, and then paused.

“I suppose I shouldn’t say, but—I don’t really think Phillip has it in him to torture you.”

She opened the door. Phillip was nearby. He got up, and looked over her shoulder at Adam, sitting tensely with tears in his eyes.

“What did you do?”

“Interrogated him,” she said, glumly.

She went to close the door.

Adam stood up.

“Wait,” he said. He looked up at Theresa. “I’ll talk.”

stars

Merril and his team had not come in without contingencies. That was the difference between them and Team One.

“They’ve got something with them. It’s called a clockstopper.”

“Ah. That would be that weird device full of Tempux that the first group of you had. We have no idea what it was for but we appreciated the donation toward our metronome. We hoped we’d be able to speed it up enough to buy us some time but, evidently, not enough.”

Adam started.

“That was really your whole plan? Extend your time and hope something shows up?”

“Why not? It was the Forward Alliance’s whole concept for building this place. Really it still is our plan.”

Phillip grabbed her arm.

“Theresa,” he said, warningly.

She looked back at him.

“Do you see any way we’re going to get through this anyway?”

His mouth worked silently. She turned defiantly toward Adam and continued.

“We’ve been working to manufacture more Tempux to really accelerate the metronome. If we can speed up time arbitrarily fast, Forward Alliance’s opinion won’t matter. We will, de facto, be free, for as long as we wish to be free. I’m happy to hear your team brought another donation to our supply, though I have to ask, why?”

“The clockstopper is designed in such a way that it will cause a catastrophic explosion that propagates in direct proportion to the speed of the time it’s moving through. It will scythe the rologium clean if it goes off.”

“The Forward Alliance is asking their men to commit suicide?”

“Only in extremis. But they’ve learned from Team One. Their clockstopper was designed to need manual activation if things went south. This one’s on a timer, and without my expertise, it will stay on a timer,” said Adam.

“Ah.”

“You aren’t going to outfight them by conventional means,” he said blandly, “and all they have to do is survive long enough for the clockstopper to go. I don’t imagine they relish it but the little I’ve learned of these men suggests they won’t flinch from it either.” He paused. “You don’t happen to have some kind of superweapon that you’ve developed in here, do you? That was supposed to be the whole point. And the Central Committee is convinced that you do.”

“Afraid not.”

“What about that time grenade someone used on us earlier?”

“That? That’s practically a toy. Popular with excitable young boys.”

“Can I see one?”

Phillip balked. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to give weapons to prisoners of war,” he said.”

Adam rolled his eyes.

“You caught me. It’s part of my devious plan to kill both of you. I’m really hoping that the Forward Alliance will give me a medal”—his voice became bitter—“I’ll lay it on my wife’s grave. Assuming I ever learn where it is.” He looked over at Theresa.

Theresa looked at Phillip.

“Find a damned time grenade.”

Grudgingly, Phillip went into the next room. He came back with a little handmade device.

Adam asked for a screwdriver, and disassembled it rapidly. He poked around at its internals for a few moments.

“This wasn’t designed by an engineer,” he said at last.

Theresa nodded.

“More a tinkerer. The design is something that was developed by trial and error, really. It’s basically like our food storage devices, except it radiates out from a point.

“That was a nontrivial achievement, mind you,” Adam admitted. The rologium was designed as it was because shaping an area that was having its tick rate changed by a metronome was difficult. It became infinitely harder without some sort of a rigid frame. Really, as far as the engineers outside the rologium knew, it was impossible. But now that he saw how it was done—simple, but beautiful. He wasn’t sure if it was a piece of genius insight or blind luck, but there was a breakthrough here, in infant form.

“They aren’t very dangerous the way they are. A trained fighting man still reacts fast enough to be able to deal with untrained people taking potshots at him across that time differential. But I think I see the principle at work. If you can find me a couple more of these and a larger power supply, I think I can fix that.”

They could.

“What’s your plan?”


Adam and Theresa made their way down the hall. Giant turbines hummed on either side of them. The rologium was self-contained with nuclear reactors designed for a thousand years of continuous operation. The Forward Alliance felt that if a thousand years of continuous work relative to the outside was not enough for the people in the rologium to come up with a superweapon, probably no superweapon was forthcoming.

Adam made no effort to conceal himself. He stood right by the reactor nearest to the front, directly in the path from the doors. Hundreds of people were milling around.

Theresa passed the message down the line that everyone was to fall back. The rebels did indeed not have any leaders. That did not mean they had no organization. But they didn’t need much additional encouragement to follow common sense.

When Merril and his team arrived at the bottom of the stairs they found Adam, apparently alone in his suit, standing and waiting for them. The overhead lights cast his shadow far in front of him, overlapping the doorway as the men wrenched open the door with their mechanical arms and advanced.

They slowed down as they recognized him.

“Swessinger? How in the hell did you get down here?”

“I walked. These rebels aren’t much good at fighting.”

“You’re a bad liar, you know that?”

Theresa, prone in the shadows behind them, took aim with an anti-tank gun that had sat in the armory of the rologium for some time. One advantage of defending a place designed explicitly to engineer weaponry was that many experiments had been left lying around. She picked out the man with the pack that Adam had pointed out as the clockstopper. There was a deafening thump as she fired the weapon, catapulting the man out of the group. As the soldiers turned, Adam rolled his modified clockstopper into the midst of the crowd.

It popped open. This time, a purple light flared at the center of the device as it dissolved its entire Tempux load in one go. The group dissolved into dust.

Adam and Theresa took a few deep breaths and walked over to what was left of the man hit by the tank killer. Adam regarded the remains for a second, then turned away. He still hadn’t developed much stomach for dead bodies, especially not such incredibly dead bodies. Nonetheless, he eventually managed to collect himself.

“Well done. If we hadn’t gotten him separated from the group the clockstopper would have run out its clock in nanoseconds.”

“What do we do now?”


The last modifications to the metronome clicked into place. Adam and Theresa looked over the final checks.

The rebels had done a good job by themselves, and had pushed the metronome to limits that nobody had dared before. It had been designed to get one hundred fifty years to the year. They had pushed it to rather more than seven hundred with the Tempux that they had harvested from the first clockstopper. Now—

“This is going to be the fastest metronome in human history.”

“They’ll be making plans to follow up their last mission, you know.”

Theresa shrugged.

“Let them. By the time this thing comes online—and with the design optimizations you contributed—we’re going to be doing ten thousand years in here to one day out there.”

“Even so—do you think there’s a chance—?”

Theresa pulled him close.

“Not in a million years,” she said, and kissed him. Above them, the Republic of Free Time, an hourglass in the blue field of an old-fashioned American flag, was being prepared to be raised up.


General Vonner was having an extremely bad day. He had lost two military incursion teams in the past week, and he had just heard from the people monitoring the rologium that not only had they lost contact with Team Two, but the metronome inside the rologium had actually just sped up considerably. The teams said—well, anyway, the numbers were unbelievable. The instruments had to be broken. There was no way the metronome could be going that fast.

He was on the phone directly to the Central Committee.

“I don’t know what they have in there, but they’ve made two strike teams vanish. Like they weren’t even there.”

“Those strike teams were your direct responsibility, General.”

“I’m fighting one hundred fifty years of technological development. This is as bad as fighting the gun with a bow and arrow. I don’t know what it is, but—”

“It cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of World Unity, you understand that, comrade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Send in a second breacher with just a clockstopper. Take no chances. Perhaps we will be able to work out what this miracle technology was from its slag.”

“I—yes, sir.”

He turned off the Q-Net, and walked out of the forward base to regard the front door of the rologium, when, to his surprise, alarms started going off, and the front door of the rologium started to open.

His mouth dropped open. Could they really be surrendering? Just like that?

Out of the blinding light beyond walked a humanoid figure. It was eight feet tall if it was an inch. It was clad in shining white armor that didn’t show a seam anywhere, yet bent easily, so that at each moment its owner seemed to be a shining alabaster statue in motion. It was carrying some kind of strange device in its right hand and a flag of the old corrupt republic, with an hourglass in the blue field, in its left.

Men fired at it, but the bullets created a brief blue glow and were swallowed up.

The figure gestured casually at the troops, and to the amazement of the general, they turned into gold, and then crumbled into dust. The figure strode toward him and stopped a few feet in front of him. For a moment he got a sense this suit—this thing—was being worn by a petite redheaded woman. He couldn’t tell how because he didn’t precisely see her.

He drew his service pistol and fired, but it had no effect other than pretty blue sparkles. It stopped. It seemed to regard him for a long while. It was hard to tell because he couldn’t tell where the eyes were.

“My name is Jennifer Lamb Swessinger,” it said in a beautiful tone with metallic overtones.

“Millenia ago, my ancestor charged us with delivering a message—”

The figure gestured back to hundreds of similar creatures emerging from the front door of the rologium.

“—message goes—the Republic of Free Time greets you. The invasion begins now.”

She pointed at the luckless general.

And by the power of technologies thousands of years beyond his understanding, he was reduced to a pile of gold.


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Framed