The transition was a complete disaster. Half of his unit was lost in the dead zone coming through. Many came in too low and splattered before they could recover from the effects of the transition and activate their floater-paks. The survivors were widely scattered and, eventually, they managed to get back, but it was one hell of a mess. He came through alone.
He had never made transition before and there he was, on his first hitch, in free fall with a malfunctioning floater-pak. He came in way too low and way too fast. He barely had enough time to realize that he would splatter unless he gained some altitude in one heck of a hurry, so he kicked in his jets and that lousy, misbegotten piece of army ordnance shot him right at the ground instead of boosting him higher. It was all he could do to reduce his speed and try to alter his flightpath so that he didn’t corkscrew into the Russian countryside.
He was over a field, traveling at a high rate of speed with a floater-pak that was virtually out of control. He resigned himself to death. He saw the old wooden barn looming up before him and, helpless to alter his direction, he plowed right into it. The barn was old, abandoned. It had seen a great deal of weathering and neglect. Sections of its roof were missing. He went through an exposed latticework of beams and cross-members, managing somehow to turn as he hit so that the pak absorbed most of the impact. It was torn right off him, damaged beyond all hope of repair. He sustained several broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, a broken arm, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, numerous lacerations, and a concussion. Considering the circumstances, it was a miracle he wasn’t killed.
He came to in a hayloft. He could still recall the smell. The hay was old and decomposing. It had rained recently and, with the gaping holes in the roof, much of it was wet. A young woman was kneeling over him, a beautiful young woman with green eyes and long, wavy black hair. She was using a kerchief to wipe the blood away from his face. Her hair was brushing his cheeks.
She spoke to him in Russian. He may have mumbled something back, he did not recall. She remained with him, caring for him as best she could, trying to set his bones and ease his pain. Her name was Vanna Drakova and she was a nineteen-year-old gypsy, a runaway serf. They were both very young, both lost, both scared.
It took Search amp; Retrieve a long time to sort the whole mess out. When no one came after him, he concluded that his implant must have been damaged in the crash through the barn roof. He assumed that he was stranded, marooned in the 19th century.
As the days dragged into weeks and weeks turned into months, he recovered slowly. His bones began to knit, but without proper medical attention, they did not heal properly. Thanks to the drug treatments he had received in the 27th century, he healed with astonishing rapidity, but he would be a cripple-functional, but twisted out of shape. There would be no going back or, in his case, forward to the time from which he came. In his despair, he told Vanna everything.
At first, she did not believe him. Eventually, however, he was able to convince her and more was the pity. He should have kept his mouth shut, but he believed that he would never get back to his own time, much less have his deformity corrected. It seemed important to him that she should know the truth, because by then she was pregnant with their child.
It never should have happened. Strict precautions were observed to prevent just such an occurrence, but Forrester did not react well to the pills they issued in those days. Rather than take the trouble of getting a temporary sterilization, he simply hadn’t bothered taking them. It would have taken a mere couple of days of medical leave, but it would have caused him to miss out on his first mission, and he had been too eager to go out to wait until the next one. He had not counted on being intimate with anyone in Minus Time. The possibility had simply not occurred to him. He had not counted on being separated, thinking he was stranded, or falling in love. When S amp; R finally tracked him down, he didn’t tell them that Vanna was pregnant. They would have aborted the fetus. It would have been the best thing all around, but he could not bring himself to go along with it. Leaving her would be hard enough.
He tried to explain things to her before they took him back. They were kind enough to give him the time. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He could not take her with him and he had no idea what would become of her and of their child. But there was nothing to be done. There were a lot of tears, both hers and his. She gave him a lock of her hair in remembrance and like a fool, he told her that he would come back for her. He never saw her again.
As if what he had done had not been bad enough, there was yet a further complication, something that never even occurred to him at the time. His family had not been well off and it was always taken for granted that he would go into the service. As a result, they had spared themselves the expense of procuring antiaging treatments for him. As an inducement for recruiting, the Temporal Corps provided antiagathic drug treatments for those unable to afford them during indoctrination processing. The drugs were very volatile. It took a long time for them to stabilize. When Vanna became pregnant, they were still active in his system and were passed on to her in his sperm.
Forrester tipped the unauthorized bottle of Glenlivet back and took a long pull from it. He had a son. Falcon took great pleasure in telling him about him in her letter. His name was Nikolai Drakov and, by now, he’d be 79 years old. She wrote that he appeared to be in his late twenties. She ran into him in London, purely by accident-he thought of Delaney and his fated coincidences. He had made a good life for himself. He was a very rich man, a playboy with a well-known reputation, especially for his astonishingly youthful appearance. She even joked about it. In the circles that he moved in, she wrote, he probably knew Oscar Wilde, which raised the intriguing possibility that he might have been the model for Dorian Grey. The fact that he looked so young had suggested another possibility to her. She thought at first that he was a member of the underground, a deserter from the Temporal Corps. In order to find out the truth, she had seduced him and found out a great deal more than she had bargained for.
He never knew his father, but he knew that his father’s name was Moses Forrester and he knew who and what Moses Forrester was. His mother had told him all about his father before she died. She had been raped and killed when Nikolai was just 15. Falcon took him to Plus Time with her. She obtained an implant for him, educated him up to the standards of the 27th century, and indoctrinated him into the Timekeepers. Now things had come full circle.
He was back in his own time again, with her. It was he who had murdered Rudolf Rassendyll, causing the disruption. Drakov was motivated by a hatred which Falcon had fed-a hatred for his father. Forrester could hardly blame him.
Time had bent back in upon itself like some sort of double helix. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, with the Fate Factor tying the whole thing together. Forrester was sure that Finn Delaney would appreciate this little problem in zen physics. He imagined that Finn would be just thrilled to find out who got him into all of this, as would Andre and Lucas be. What could he tell them, that he was sorry?
Nikolai shouldn’t be alive, he thought. He’s a paradox. At the time he was conceived, I wouldn’t have been born for another six hundred years. He should not exist, but he does. And I have to kill him. Or maybe he’ll kill me. One way or another, it all ends here.