Time’s Eye

In such an atmosphere, no wonder that men like Casey Othic went slightly crazy, she thought.

Bisesa herself kept out of the fray. She could cope with the likes of Casey easily enough—even now, the British army was hardly a haven of sexual equality and decorum. She had even deflected the polite interest of Abdikadir. After all, she had her daughter: Myra, eight years old, a quiet, serious, very loving little girl, thousands of klicks away under the care of a nanny in Bisesa’s London flat. Bisesa wasn’t interested in games or complicated sexual politics to keep herself sane; she had Myra to do that for her.

Anyhow the importance of the mission here kept her motivated.

In the year 2037, the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan was a center of tension, as it had been for centuries. For one thing the place was a focus of the continuing worldwide standoff between Christianity and Islam. To the relief of everybody but the hotheads and agitators on both sides, the final “war of civilizations” had never quite come to pass. But still, in a place like this, where troops from mostly Christian nations policed a mostly Muslim area, there was always somebody ready to call a crusade, or a jihad.

There were lethal local tensions too. The standoff between India and Pakistan had not been eased by the war of 2020 that had resulted in the nuclear destruction of the city of Lahore, even though the parties involved, and their international backers, had pulled back from the brink of more widespread devastation. And added to that complicated mix, of course, were the passions, aspirations and plight of the local people: the proud Pashtuns who, although they had been drawn into the civilized discourse of the world, still clung to their traditions, and would still defend their homeland to the last drop of blood.

In addition to such ancient disputes, now there was oil, which kept the rest of the world drawn into this combustible place. Although the long-term possibilities offered by cold fusion, the most promising of the new technologies, were startling, its industrial-scale practicality was still unproven—and the world’s store of rich hydrocarbons continued to be burned as fast as they could be dug out of the ground. So, where once the British Empire and Tsarist Russia had faced each other here over the wealth of India, now the United States, China, the African Alliance, and the Eurasian Union, all crucially dependent on the oil reserves of Central Asia, were locked in a tense, mutually dependent standoff.

The UN’s mission here was to keep the peace by surveillance and policing. The area was said to be the most heavily scrutinized of any territory on Earth. The peacekeeping mission was an imperfect, heavy-handed regime that, Bisesa sometimes thought, created as much tension and resentment as it resolved. But it worked after a fashion, and had done so for decades. Perhaps it was the best mere human beings, and the complicated, flawed but enduring political lash-up of the UN, could do.

Everybody at Clavius knew the importance of the job. But there were few things more boring for a young soldier than peacekeeping.

Suddenly the ride got a lot more bumpy. Bisesa felt her pulse rate rise; maybe this mission wasn’t quite so routine after all.

***

As the chopper continued to circle, despite the turbulence, Casey and Abdikadir were both working, both talking at once. Abdikadir was trying to raise the base. “Alpha Four Three, this is Primo Five One, over. Alpha Four Three …” Casey was swearing, something to do with losing the positioning satellite contact, and Bisesa surmised he was flying the chopper by hand through the unexpected turbulence.

“Ouch,” said her phone plaintively.

She raised it to her face. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I lost signal.” Its screen showed various diagnostics. “It never happened to me before,” it said. “It feels—odd.”

Abdikadir glanced back at her. “Our comms is on the fritz too. We have lost the command net.”

Belatedly Bisesa checked her own gear. She had lost contact with her own command center, both uplink and downlink. “Looks like we lost the intel net too.”

“So,” Abdikadir said. “Military and civilian networks, both out.”

“What do you think—electric storm?”

Casey growled, “Not according to what those assholes in meteorology predicted. Anyhow, I’ve flown in storms, and none of them had an effect like this.”

“Then what could it be?”

For a couple of seconds they were all silent. This was, after all, an area where a nuclear weapon had been used in anger only a couple of hundred kilometers away, and the center of a city had been turned to a plain of melted glass. Communications knocked out, winds out of nowhere; it was hard not to assume the worst.

“At the very least,” Abdikadir said, “we have to assume this is jamming.”

“ Ow ,” said the phone insistently.