“It was possible that all the members of the first team and the agents we sent after them had died, but it was also possible that, having caused the split, they then tried to clock back to Plus Time. It would have explained their having disappeared. They clocked forward several centuries, but they arrived in the 27th century of the alternate timeline.
“We began playing with scenarios for what might have happened. If the 27th century they arrived in was significantly, which is to say, obviously different from the one that they had left, they might have realized what had occurred. They might have had the presence of mind to keep their mouths shut and try to find a place for themselves, if that was possible. On the other hand, suppose they did not immediately recognize that they were in a different timeline? What if there was an alternate Darrow heading an alternate TIA and so forth? We could not afford to dismiss that possibility, because the moment that they reported in, our counterparts in the alternate timeline would realize that they were the result of a timestream split. We had to ask ourselves how we would react if we were in their place.
“Once the shock wore off, we would realize that we’d have to take steps to protect our own existence. We’d have to send people back to make certain that events in that particular scenario occurred exactly according to our history. And we would have the advantage in that the people in the original timeline would have no way of knowing what our history was.”
He paused to take a drink and there was dead silence in the room.
“If it was me, living in the alternate timeline,” Mongoose said, “I would have put that TIA team through an exhaustive interrogation. I would have wrung them dry. I would have had to know everything they knew, because my existence would depend upon that information. As it turned out, that was exactly what Cobra must have done. He was good. He was really good. He knew who our top field operative was, yours truly, and he realized that the people in the original timeline would bring in their best people. What he didn’t learn from our agents, he inferred. What he didn’t infer, he got straight from the source. Meaning, he came to us.
“Finn, you arrived somewhat earlier than you thought you did. You presented a slight problem. Andre and Lucas were clocked back and immediately sent on to Richmond, which got them out of the way. You had to be stalled long enough for us to make certain of several things. The moment you materialized, I had to get to you fast, before the aftereffects wore off and you were fully cognizant of your surroundings. Fortunately, I was able to time it just right. Just as you materialized, I injected you with a tranquilizing drug similar to the one we used on Lady Blakeney. Then, while you were out, I clocked you about an hour into the past with a fugue program sequence.”
Finn nodded. “Clever. I was in limbo for an hour, which allowed the disruption to occur and gave you time to do what you had to do. You must have timed the dose real well, because I materialized just as I was coming out of it, thinking I had just arrived. Nice piece of work.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Andre, “is that if we were all clocked back to a point prior to the disruption, then that means that the team you had originally sent back would have been arriving after us. What happened to them?”
“Fitzroy and I killed them,” Mongoose said.
“Your own people?”
“We had no choice. During the hour that Finn was in fugue, Blakeney died, our first team arrived to make their substitution and as they arrived, we had to take them out so Finn could then step into the role of Blakeney. It was the only way. They had to die back in that time period.”
“But…but then if you killed them,” said Andre, “how could they possibly have gone on to cause the split in the first place? It just doesn’t make sense!”
Mongoose smiled. “It does, but it’s a bit of a brain-bender for a rookie. No offense meant.”
“They disrupted the adjustment of a disruption,” Lucas said to Andre. She looked at him blankly.
“Blakeney died,” said Lucas. “That was the disruption. The TIA team went back to adjust for it, taking advantage of temporal inertia to substitute another Blakeney for the real one. At some point thereafter, temporal inertia was overcome and the split occurred. In order to negate that, they had to go back and cause yet another disruption. However, in this case, the people who would have to adjust that second disruption would come from the alternate timeline, since it was now their history that was disrupted. We thought that we were adjusting a disruption, which we were, but while we were doing that, we were being a disruption ourselves. All things considered,” he said to Mongoose, “you were putting one hell of a strain on temporal inertia.”
“They had no choice, considering what was at stake,” said Forrester.
“The real game began when Finn stepped into the role of Percy Blakeney,” Mongoose said. “Since we had no way of knowing what event had caused the split, Fitzroy and I had to make certain that events proceeded according to our history. We couldn’t clock back to see what had caused the split because we didn’t know when that happened. We might have clocked back beyond the point at which it happened and disappeared just like the others. So we had to replay the whole scenario with a different cast of characters and make sure that we controlled the plot. The moment Cobra showed up, we knew he was the agent from the alternate timeline, sent back to make certain that the split occurred.”
“How did you know?” said Andre.
“We knew because Cobra, our Cobra, couldn’t possibly have clocked back to join us. I had been removed from active temporal field duty for a time while Cobra stayed on as a field agent. During that time, he was sent on a mission from which he never returned. He was killed by Indians in the American Revolutionary War and his death was witnessed. Unless he had somehow come back from the dead, this Cobra had to be from an alternate timeline in which events had proceeded almost exactly parallel to ours. Who knows, perhaps in the alternate timeline, I was the one who was killed instead of Cobra. He certainly knew ‘me’ well enough.”
“But if you knew he was from the other timeline, why couldn’t you move against him?” Andre said. “Why couldn’t you tell us?”
“Because we were meant to be the Judas goats,” said Finn, grimly.
“That’s part of it,” said Mongoose. “The other part is the fact that I couldn’t do anything against him because he was the only one I knew about. I had no idea how many other people from that timeline came back with him. At least I knew who Cobra was. At first, I was so paranoid that I began to think that there was a possibility that he could have pulled a substitution of his own and brought in an alternate Finn Delaney. However, Finn disproved that for me most emphatically.” He smiled and felt his left side, where Delaney’s sword had grazed him. “It was necessary for you to think that it was nothing more than an ordinary temporal adjustment mission. Knowing the truth about Cobra would certainly have affected your performance.”
“But he had plenty of opportunities to move against us,” said Andre. “Why didn’t he?”
Mongoose glanced at Finn.
“Because he couldn’t,” Finn said. “He didn’t dare to act until the actual split point. His timeline came about as a result of the first adjustment team’s interaction with an historical event. That’s why Mongoose had to snatch all the aristocrats away from us. He didn’t know when the actual split point was and he had to protect the historical events of our timeline.”
“Exactly,” Mongoose said. “Fortunately, the Cobra from the other timeline didn’t know that our Cobra had died prior to this mission. However, he figured that out quickly enough. It took a lot of nerve to play it the way he did. He had to improvise like crazy, but he really had you going. We might have been stalemated if I hadn’t doubled Fitzroy. That’s the one thing he didn’t anticipate. Just the same, it was pretty close right there at the end.”