Collision with Chronos

“Regretfully, no. The Entity is leaving the main stream of Earth’s time untouched. It agrees only to split off rivulets from the main flow, sending each into a different Earth – there are a vast number to choose from, all more or less the same. The people involved in these rivulets will find themselves constituting a small island of life in an otherwise desert planet. But eventually that life will spread to cover the whole globe. In each case a new world will be born.” He nodded to himself, an unselfconscious picture of sagacity. “It is, perhaps, a wiser solution than we would have chosen.”

“Each surviving dev reservation will be given a world of its own,” Ascar explained to Sobrie. “The Oblique Entity is giving every human subspecies its own future, free of interference from any other. A contingent of Titan civilisation, even, is being given its own Earth to rule – an Earth where there will be no alien interventionists, no future-Earth aliens to destroy Titan ambitions. And the same holds for the future-Earth race: they also have various factions and nations, some of which will be saved.”

“And for the rest – annihilation?”

“Yes – almost.” A gleam, as of a vision, came into Ascar’s eyes. “The Armageddon, the great war through time, must take place, as must the collision in time. But even there, there will be survivors. Even now the Titans are drawing up blueprints for protective bunkers, buffered with intense artificial time fields to try to ward off the force of the collision. Some of these bunkers – a few – will probably survive, provided their equipment is rugged enough. So there will be a handful of Titans left alive after it’s all over, to try to rebuild something on an Earth that will be unimaginably devastated.”

“This splitting up of time – when is it going to happen?”

“It already has happened,” Ascar said. “It had happened before the Titans found me in Shiu’s observatory.”

Sobrie wondered if his friends in the Amhrak reservation had noticed their changed circumstances yet. It was good, he thought to himself, to know that Amhrak civilisation would continue.

Titan-Major Brourne flung the array of vidcoms off the table with one sweep of his arm. Nobody was reporting in now.

Brourne was alone in his office; he’d already sent his adjutant outside to help man the barricade. The time had come, he saw, for the last stand.

He strode from the office. As far as he knew his HQ was the only post not yet overrun, and an attack was expected any second.

A long gallery-like concourse stretched ahead of the building he’d chosen for his headquarters. It gave an excellent defensive position: a long avenue, bare of cover, up which an enemy must pass. But that would avail little, he knew, against the tricks of these Chinks.

He’d barely reached the steel barricade set up across this avenue, and was giving a few words of encouragement to his men, when the attack started.

The Chinks were everywhere simultaneously. Several appeared on his side of the barricade and some of his men set to fighting them furiously at close quarters, while others were firing stolidly down the avenue. Once again Brourne observed the dreadful effects of Hoka, but fortunately the Chinks here were outnumbered. Then he directed his eyes down the avenue. There they were: blue-uniformed, broad-helmeted, flitting in and out of existence and advancing down the concourse like shadowy ghosts. He was facing an enemy one could only see half the time.

Suddenly Major Brourne gave a violent, almost joyous roar. He leaped forward to a gun emplacement, pushed the gunner aside, and lifted the heavy machine gun off its tripod. Normally two men were needed to carry it, but Brourne clambered over the barricade, the cartridge belt trailing behind him, and fired a long burst from the hip.

“No use squatting here, men!” he bellowed. “Come on out and get ’em!”

He went lumbering down the concourse, firing intermittently from the big, clumsy weapon, into the crowd of flitting Chinks. This was the way to go, he told himself. To die like a man, fighting to the last breath against a subhuman horde.

He was still firing when a hand touched the back of his neck and he died.

The blue-garbed soldiers thronged the plaza before the balcony where Su-Mueng, Sobrie and Prime Minister Hwen Wu, with members of his cabinet, stood. Su-Mueng licked his lips nervously.

It had been his own idea: he would parade the cabinet of the Leisure Retort before his victorious soldiers. The venerable officials would lose face, would seem human and vulnerable. The workers would see for themselves the men who’d denied them their rights.

Hwen Wu, however, had been unexpectedly in favour of the confrontation. Indeed, he’d seemed not to understand Su-Mueng’s intent, but had thanked him graciously for organising the proceeding. He should have been more forthright with Hwen Wu, Su-Mueng thought.