Worlds That Weren't

Yolande watched, walking past, trailing behind the team. Children playing football in the remains of Elissa’s chapel. Elissa, called the Wanderer, the Dido; who founded this city from Phoenician Tyre, eons before the Visigoths sailed across from Spain and conquered it. Elissa, who was never a mother, unless to a civilization, so maybe not a good place for a mother’s prayer.

Nothing left of Elissa’s temple now, under this unfamiliar light.

“Is that what I’m here to see?” she asked, not turning to look at the woman’s face as they walked. “Do you think I need telling that everything dies? That everything gets forgotten? That none of us are going to be remembered?”

“Is that what you need?”

The strange woman’s voice was measured, with authority in it, but it was not a spiritual authority; Yolande recognized it.

“Is that it? That you’re a soldier?” Yolande smiled with something between cynicism and relief. “Is that what I’m being shown? That we will be recognized, one day? You’re still disguised as a man.”

The woman looked down at herself, seemingly startled, and then grinned. “Of course. That’s what it would look like, to you. And you’d think my dress blues were indecent, I should think. Skirts at knee-level.”

Yolande, ignoring what the woman was saying in favor of the tone in which it was said, frowned at what she picked up. “You…don’t think I’m here, do you?”

The other woman shook her head. “This is just a head game. Something I do every time we check out the ruins.”

The woman’s strange accent became more pronounced.

“We’re not over here to fight. We’re here to stop people fighting. Or, that’s what it should be. But…”

A shrug, that says-Yolande fears it says-that things are still the same as they ever were. Yolande thought of the “archaeologist,” her hands muddy with digging, her face impassioned with revulsion at the prior behavior of what she unearthed.

“Why are we doing this?” she said.

“You mean: it’s such a shit job, and we don’t even get the recognition?” The woman nodded agreement. “Yeah. Good question. And you can never trust the media.”

A grinding clatter of carts going past sounded on the road at the foot of the hill. No, not carts, Yolande realized abruptly. Iron war wagons, with culverin pointed out of the front, like the Hussites use in battle. No draft beasts drawing them, but then, this is a vision.

“Judges, chapter one, verse nineteen!” Yolande exclaimed, made cheerful. Father Augustine used to read the Holy Word through and through, at his classes with the prostitutes in the baggage train. She remembered some parts word for word. “‘And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron’!”

“K78s.” The other woman grinned back. “Counter-grav tanks. They’re crap. The K81’s much better.”

Yolande peered down toward the road. Dust drifted up so that she could no longer see the pale-painted chariots of iron. “So why not use the-K81-instead?”

The other woman’s tone took on a familiar and comfortable sound. Soldiers’ bitching.

“Oh…because all the tank transporters are built to take the K78. And all the workshops are set up for it, and the technicians trained to repair it. And the aircraft transport bay pods are made to the width of the K78’s tracks. And the manufacturers make the shells and the parts for the K78, and the crew are trained to use the K78, and…”

She grinned at Yolande, teeth white below her strip of dark glass. “Logistics, as always. You’d have to change everything. So we end up with something that’s substandard because that’s what we can support. If we had the K81s, we’d be stuffed the first time one of them stripped its gears…”

Yolande blinked in the amazing Carthaginian sunlight. “To change one thing…you have to change everything?”

The other woman stepped back from the edge of the bluff, automatically scanning the positions of the men in her team. “Yeah. But, be fair: the K78 was state-of-the-art in its day. It just takes decades to get the next version up and running and into the field-”

A black hole appeared on the woman’s shoulder, far to the right, just below the collarbone.

In a split second, Yolande saw the woman’s white face turn whiter and her hand go to her doublet. Saw her scream, her hand pressing a box fixed to her breast. Saw the neat wound flow out and darken all the cloth around it. And heard, in the dry morning, the very muffled crack that was too quiet, but otherwise resembled gunfire.

Soldiers shouted, orders erupting. The woman took three long, comically staggering steps and ended rolling into the shade and cover of one of Elissa’s pillars. There were no children. The slick-surfaced ball remained, perfectly still on the sun-hardened earth.

“Doesn’t anything change?” Yolande demanded. She stood still, not diving for cover. “Why are we doing this?”

The woman shouted at the small box as if it could help her.