Waging the war with strategic weapons would have been toodangerous. for there was no way of telling if a nuke launched at the opposinguniverse would actually explode there, or if it might become caught in aconfluence and cause untold destruction, and possibly a timestream split, inthe universe that had launched it in the first place. So the war was foughtthrough the means of historical disruption. But there were more than just twosides.
The conflict was complicated further by the existence of the‘temporal Underground. a loosely organized confederation of deserters from thefuture who had fled into the past in order to escape the madness. No one wasquite certain what to do about them. Technically. they were criminals,fugitives. It was up to the Temporal Intelligence Agency to track them down andapprehend them, but the particularly the covert field section. had neverseriously considered them a priority. In fact, many of the old covert fieldagents had maintained contacts among the members of the Underground andsometimes called upon them for assistance in their missions. When Forrester hadassumed the directorship of the agency, he had put a stop to such practices. aswell as to the corruption in the T.I.A. he had discovered that many of thecovert field agents, as well as their section chiefs, had been running an extensivetrans-temporal black market operation to enrich themselves. The corruption wentall the way up to the previous director.
Their immensely profitable and highly illegal sideline was referredto as-the Network’ and it involved such things as using time travel tomanipulate the stock and commodities markets, smuggle rare coins from the pastto sell in future time periods, practice piracy on the Spanish Main and sellthe booty in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Network had hijacked gold andworks of an from the Nazis. They were involved in the East India Company. Theyused time travel to scam betting operations, and the list went on and on andon. They were the ultimate soldiers of fortune. less interested in their dutiesas temporal agents than in their
Crosstime financial ventures. Forrester had tried to put astop to their dangerous and illegal activities, but he had not been entirelysuccessful. He had disbanded the covert field section and put every agent hecould get his hands on, from the lowliest records clerk to section chiefs andsenior administrators, through a scanning procedure in an effort to ferret outthe ones who were involved in the Network. However, word got out and many ofthem simply disappeared, going underground in time and becoming a trans-temporal.Mafia, the ultimate organized crime family. They had put a price on Forrester’shead. There had already been several attempts on his life. He had no doubtthere would be more.
And what of the man who had started it all? As he walkeddown the corridor from his quarters to the lift tubes. Forrester thought thatperhaps it was unfair to blame it all on Robert Darkness. Darkness had notstarted the Time Wars. The Time Wars had come about when nations had decided touse time travel to settle their conflicts by having their troops do battle inthe past, in order to protect the present from the ravages of war. There was noreal evidence to support that it was the invention of the warp grenade. and notthe actions of the Time Wars, that had brought about the confluence phenomenon.Yet. Darkness himself seemed to accept responsibility for what had come about.
He was not on Earth when the confluence phenomenon came intobeing. he had disappeared mysteriously and no one had any idea what had becomeof him. Forrester later learned that Darkness had established a research laboratoryon some far-off, desolate planet and had gone there to perfect his process oftachyon conversion. Darkness had discovered a way to focus a tachyon beam andsend it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which amounted to instantaneoustransmission. No time lag whatsoever. Going from Point A to Point B withouthaving to cover the distance in between. His next step was to start working ona process whereby the human body could become converted into tachyons, whichwould depart at six hundred times the speed of light along the direction of thetachyon beam, through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. His main concern had been thattachyon conversion might violate the Law of Uncertainty. The beam was focusedby means of gravitational lenses, but there was no receiver, so in order toinsure that what would materialize at the other end would not be some kind of ablob, he had incorporated a timing mechanism into the conversion process. whichwould reassemble him in the proper order, at the proper time and place, basedon the temporal coordinates of transition. What he was seeking was the ultimateform of transportation, something that would surpass even the chronoplatedevised by Dr. Mensinger.
Unfortunately, when Darkness tried the process on himself.he had discovered that it was ultimately restrained by a little known law ofphysics called the Law of Baryon Conservation. When he had arrived at his pointof destination, he discovered that he could not move from the spot on which hestood. Something had happened to his subatomic structure. He took on theappearance of a hologram. He had become a ghost with substance. His body hadbeen permanently “tachyonized.” He had become faster than the speed of light.He could move from place to place. traveling through time and space at will,but only by translocating or, as he called it. “taching.” He could not walk somuch as one step. He could appear to “walk.” after a fashion, but it was only aseries of incredibly rapid translocations, having the multiple-image effect ofhigh-speed photography.
Quite possibly, thought Forrester. the tachyonization hadhad an effect upon his mind as well, although with Darkness, it was difficultto tell. The man was incredibly brilliant, light-years ahead of all his peers(both figuratively and literally). They could not even begin to understand hiswork. His personality was, to say the least. idiosyncratic. He was a man ofimmense wealth, holding the controlling interest in Amalgamated Techtronics anda number of other large multinational corporations. he felt himself accountableto no one. What he had done with Lucas Priest was a perfect example.
Lucas should have died. thought Forrester, despite the factthat Col. Priest was his closest friend. He should have died and he should havestayed dead. What Darkness had done was inexcusable. Ever since he’d done it.Forrester had spent many sleepless nights. worrying about the possibleconsequences. As had Lucas Priest himself, on whom the strain was obvious.
It had happened in the year 1897, while Priest. Cross, and Delaneywere clocked out on a mission to Afghanistan, during the Pathan revolt againstthe British. A strike team of the S.O.G.. from the parallel universe, had comethrough a confluence in the Khyber Pass and was working to change the course ofhistory. Priest and Cross had been standing on a bluff with the British commandstaff, watching the fighting that was taking place below them, between theGhazis and the Bengal Lancers. A lone Ghazi sniper who had concealed himself inthe rocks had drawn a bead on the battalion surgeon, mistaking him for theBritish general. Priest had spotted the sniper and, without thinking about thepossible consequences of his interference, had shouted out a warning. Thesurgeon, his instincts honed by combat, had immediately dropped to the ground,but by doing so, he had left the young Winston Churchill, who was present as awar correspondent, directly in the line of fire. Churchill was too slow torespond and Priest. in his cover as a missionary. had not been carrying aweapon. He had done the only thing that he could do-he flung himself atChurchill. knocked him out of the way, and took the bullet meant for him. Or,more accurately, meant for the surgeon with whose destiny Priest had interfered.