Kovar swept his rifle from right to left, clearing a small alcove off of the main hallway as he and the remaining members of Charlie Team made their way to the landing pad that served as the primary exfil point. The hallway was deserted, and the entire High Council compound was eerily silent, which only added to Kovar’s tension. After making their way out of the Council Chambers, Charlie team had not seen so much as movement, let alone opposition forces. The closer they came to the exfil point, the more nervous the team got, convinced an ambush was waiting.
“Sir, this is not good. There is no way we infiltrate the Council Chambers, kill half the High Council, then just waltz out of here,” Haskins whispered.
Kovar’s eyes narrowed, “I can’t help but feel like this is on purpose, like someone is just letting us leave.”
“Well, shit, that’s even worse,” Haskins said, “That means they knew we were coming, and they knew what we had planned.”
“The knowing what we had planned isn’t hard. Why break into the Council Chambers unless we were coming for Ecthelion? It’s the knowing we were coming that bothers me. If they knew we were coming then how the hell did we get in?”
“Someone wanted us to get in? You think Ecthelion sacrificed half the council to, what, distract us while he escaped?”
“No. Ecthelion is a tactical genius, if he let us in it was for something much more important than escaping,” Kovar said, his brow furrowing, “The question is, what is worth that level of sacrifice? Vestenor and Ecthelion have been friends since they were children, even if sacrificing himself was Vestenor’s idea, and it almost certainly was, Ecthelion wouldn’t lose him just to run away.”
Haskins flinched at the mention of Vestenor, and Kovar turned his head to look at her, “Just ask, Sarah.”
“He said... Vestenor called you nephew,” Haskins said, her voice quiet.
“That doesn’t sound like a question, lieutenant.”
“You don’t think that maybe it was pertinent information that your mother’s brother was a member of the fucking High Council? Uh, sir,” She added hastily.
Kovar stopped, turned, and fixed Haskins with a glare, “No, lieutenant, I didn’t think it was pertinent. If I had, I would have mentioned it,” he snapped. Then his face softened, and he spoke softly, “No, Sarah. I didn’t see how it might be.”
“You’d better hope command doesn’t think it was,” Haskins said, “I’m not sure Colonel Baxter can protect you from them, if General Wills thinks differently.”
“General Wills and Colonel Baxter both know my mother. And her family.”
It was Haskins’ turn to frown, “They know, and they followed your mother’s plan anyway?”
“Easy there, lieutenant, be careful how you speak about my mother. She would never betray my trust, especially if it was going to cost me my life.”
“Of course not, sir,” Haskins said, her face flushing, “But think about what Vestenor said, that Ecthelion could ‘take it back,’ if he had enough faith in Ecthelion somehow changing the fate of the Orlesians, who else might share his conviction?”
Kovar opened his mouth to reply, then closed it, shaking his head. He walked down the hallway, his rifle still at his shoulder, but his eyes distant in thought. After several minutes, he felt a tap on his shoulder that brought him back to where he was.
“Sir,” Haskins whispered, “This hall ends in a T-junction in about 200 meters, from there we go left, and the landing pad is about three hundred meters out.”
Kovar squinted into the twilit darkness of the hallway and saw the junction. He nodded, “What is the status on comms? Have the effects of the flare dissipated enough that we can risk powering up the equipment?”
“It has been three hours since the start of the event, I’ll power up mine and see if I can raise the shuttle crew.”
Kovar crouched and signaled for the rest of Charlie Team to do the same, “Go ahead, lieutenant.”
Haskins pulled her radio from her bag and inserted a power cell, keying in a series of digits as the screen sprang to life, “So far so good,” she activated the radio’s transmitter, “Delta 7-1, this is delta 3-3, over.”
“Delta 3-3, this is 7-1, it is good to hear your voice, over.”
“Roger that 7-1, we are on the move, five hundred meters from exfil point,” Haskins said, a grin splitting her face.
“Copy 3-3, we are on station for exfil. The way is clear from what I can see.”
“Copy that, 7-1, moving,” Haskins said, and powered the radio down. She looked at Kovar, “Let’s get the fuck off this rock, sir.
Kovar nodded and stood.
***
The shuttle rocketed toward the inky blackness of space, the moon falling away beneath it. Once the shuttle cleared the terraformed atmosphere, the pilots swung the small craft toward Earth, now looming in the front viewscreen. As the shuttle reached maximum acceleration, Kovar’s comm unit beeped.
Kovar tapped the screen and a young female soldier with shoulder length red hair came onscreen, “Colonel Alcorn, this is command, you have an urgent communication from Colonel Baxter. I have him when you are ready.”
“Put him through, Sergeant Arias,” Kovar said.
The comm unit went dark momentarily, then Baxter’s face filled the screen, “Where are you?”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“On the exfil shuttle, we should be dirtside in about 30 minutes, why?”
“There is a massive shitstorm down here, Kovar, and you’re about to be in the epicenter. General Wills wants you in his office as soon as you touch down. Do not stop to recover your gear, do not stop to issue orders, hell, don’t even stop to piss. Just get here.”
“Okay Cal, I hear you. Care to give me a head’s up as to what I’m walking into?”
“A shitstorm, like I said. Get your team squared away before you land and double time it to Wills’ office. Baxter out.”
The screen blinked off and Kovar frowned at it, “What the fuck was that about?” He whispered to himself.
Seargeant Griffon turned to look at him from across the aisle a grimace on his wrecked face, “Say again, sir?”
“Nothing, Griff, I was talking to myself.”
“I always knew you was batshit crazy, Kov,” Griffon said, his laughter turning into a grimace of pain.
“Go fuck yourself, sergeant,” Kovar said, and Griffon laughed harder.
***
“Colonel Alcorn, I need you to tell me every single thing that Vestenor said to you, word for word. Don’t paraphrase or embellish, I need to know his words,” General Wills said, reclining in his desk chair.
“I told you, sir, he said something about Ecthelion taking it all back. He was wounded and rambling, sir, it didn’t make any sense.”
Wills glanced at Baxter and then back to Kovar, “Cal?” Baxter nodded and Wills closed his eyes, a deep sigh escaping his lips, “Colonel Alcorn, what I am about to tell you stays in this room until such time as the information becomes actionable. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
“At approximately the time that your team was making entry into the High Council chambers, there was a security breach at a facility in Europe. Six Orlesians entered a highly secure and classified area and stole a device. They used the credentials of a doctor who worked in the facility, who was found in his quarters eating dinner, completely oblivious that anything was wrong. They also used Colonel Baxter’s credentials. Who knows how the fuck they managed that. Baxter was with me, so I know he wasn’t there, and he passed the inquisitor interview, so we know he didn’t give it to anyone. Doctor," Wills checked his tablet, "Hamachi, has also passed the inquisitor interview. We found two dead technicians near the elevator, but no other casualties."
“What? Where was the facility, sir? What did they take?” Kovar said, his eyes going wide.
“The facility was located about three miles below the surface of the Swiss Alps. As for what they took, well, that is a long story. Suffice it to say, if that device is used it will alter not just our future as a species, but the very fabric of our reality. If one of those six was Ecthelion, and we have strong reason to believe that to be the case, the future of humanity could be at stake, and that is not hyperbole.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following,” Kovar said.
“You’re not following? Colonel, I’m not following. I’m just regurgitating what the science guys said. All I know is that, if what I’m told is true, we need to move. You’re the commander of Charlie Team, the only team I trust to get this done, but I need to know I can trust you, Kovar.”
“Of course you can trust me, sir. What makes you think you can’t?”
“Where is your mother, colonel?” Wills said, brow furrowing.
“My moth-, sir, you can’t seriously think-”
“I don’t know what to think, Kovar. But what I know is your mother offered you a way into the High Council that Morvex Ecthelion would be blind to, and when you got there, he was here stealing a time machine.”
“A what?” Kovar blurted.
“I have no idea, like I said, that’s what the science guys told me. It’s not what’s important right this second. What is important is whether the tip of the spear is compromised. So, I'll say again, Kovar, exactly what did your uncle say?”
Kovar sighed heavily, “He said he saw my mother’s letter by accident, that she didn’t betray me, and that it was him who told Morvex we would be on the moon during the event. Orlesians don’t lie on their deathbed, sir, they believe it taints the passage into the next world. Also, he spoke the Admission to me.”
“What were his final words?” Wills asked, sitting up straight.
Kovar grimaced, repeating the final words of the Admission was taboo in Orlesian culture, and despite having been raised mostly on Earth by his father, he didn’t like the idea of breaking that trust.
“I know, Kovar,” Baxter said, “But this is important.”
Kovar’s face contorted, but through clenched teeth he said, “He said, ‘It’s finished, Morvex will deliver our people and end this hell.’ I have no idea what that means.”
“Nothing good,” Wills said, then turned to look at Baxter. “You satisfied, Cal?”
Baxter’s eyes narrowed and he nodded, “I told you, Colin, I was never worried about his loyalty. We had better read him in all the way.”
Wills took a deep breath and let it out slowly, “Alright, Kovar, the situation is this. As I said, Ecthelion broke into a lab during the event. One so far underground that the EMP didn’t affect it. The problem is, he never broke out. In fact, once the alarms went off and our teams were able to respond, there was no trace of him. The only thing they found was an empty containment chamber, and a residual spatial anomaly.”
“Spatial anomaly, sir? What does that mean?” Kovar asked.
“It means that he got what he was after. And what that is, is so classified that the Chancellor of the One Earth Federation has no idea it even exists,” Wills said, “How is your One Earth history, Kovar?”
“I’m pretty well versed, sir.”
“Well, here is a minor addition to it, call it a footnote. Before Ecthelion broke into that lab, that’s all it was,” Wills said, “In the mid 22nd century, humanity was still experimenting with the possibilities of faster than light travel. The prevailing theory was that a device could wrap a ship in a space-time bubble and use it to move the ship through normal time and space, thereby eliminating the need for large, powerful, and resource intensive engines.”
“That seems far more dangerous than the current mode of faster than light travel,” Kovar said.
“Not especially, what we do now is create a stable wormhole from the destination to the target ship,” Wills said.
“Don’t you mean from the target ship to the destination, sir?”
“No. But that isn’t the point. The point is that, had the device worked as intended, then interstellar travel would have been nearly instantaneous across distances so vast that Tau Ceti would have been a blip on the screen. The problem is, it didn’t work. What it did was create tears in the fabric of time and space, which sounds terrifying but that is essentially what a jump wormhole is anyway. What they figured out later is the terrifying part,” Wills leaned back and closed his eyes, then continued, “They figured out that the tears could be stabilized. Not big enough to get a ship through, but a kind of spatial doorway could be created.”
“A spatial doorway? Are you telling me that almost 700 years ago, humanity created portals?”
“Yes, the problem is they aren’t just spatial. They are also temporal. Meaning that with coordinates and a date, someone could conceivably travel to any place, at any time in history.”
“I’m sorry, what? That isn’t possible. Even Einstein’s relativity didn’t allow for time travel,” Kovar said.
“No, it didn’t. But Einstein has been dead for almost a millennium and there is a shit ton of stuff in the cosmos his theory didn’t account for. The point is this. Ecthelion has this device, and he knows how to use it, based on the spatial fluctuation in the elevator at the lab.”
“And he knows the interstellar coordinates of Orlesia, and the timeline as well as anyone,” Kovar said, his voice faltering, “Shit, sir, that is a big fucking problem.”
“I knew you were smart, kid, the question is, what the hell are we going to do about it?” Wills said, standing up from his chair, “I need you to call in every resource you can muster and bring me an action plan, yesterday.”
“I’m on it, sir. But you may need to adjust those expectations a bit?”
“Adjust them how, colonel?”
“Well, I’m not the one with the device, so you may need to adjust them forward, sir.”
“Get the fuck out of my office, Alcorn,” Wills said, aiming a withering glare at Kovar.
“Yes, sir.”