TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW (2 page)

"And I'm sure it's the word of a gentleman," said Steiger, turning back to his report. "I must complete this, Lem. Please, be patient with me for a few moments and I will try to explain later, after I have—"

Gulliver cried out suddenly. The terror in his cry made Sandy spin around. He felt a sharp, searing pain across his cheek, as if an extremely fine filament of superheated wire had been drawn across it. As he cried out with pain and brought his hand up to his face, he saw his attacker firing once more—a
tiny man, no more
than six or seven inches tall, firing a miniature laser pistol.

The beam struck him in his left eye, and Sandy screamed in agony as his eyeball was cooked right out of its socket. More tiny people were materializing out of thin air. They were equipped with floater paks and firing tiny weapons. The air in the room was filled with a crisscrossing web work of brilliant light. Sandy grabbed his chair and hurled it at the miniature invaders, then grabbed his report and dove onto the bed, Covering the terrified Gulliver's body with his own. He stuffed the report into Gulliver's pocket and then snapped a small metallic bracelet around his wrist.

"General Forrester!"
he shouted. “
Get that report
to
General Moses Forrester!"

He felt a barrage of tiny laser beams slicing through his flesh. Dozens upon dozens of them. He screamed agony and activated the warp disc.

Gulliver disappeared.

As the first light of dawn washed over the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, General Blood gave the order to advance. The pipes and drums struck up and the main body of the expeditionary force moved off down the graded road in perfect fours formation. At the same time, an assault team of three hundred picked men, taking advantage of the dim light and the early morning mist, silently crept up the slopes toward the stone sangars, snipers' nests of piled rock that the Ghazis had erected on the cliffs above the fort. The Ghazi sentries were taken completely by surprise.

They were busy watching the crazy British
firinghi
assembling below them and marching to their apparent doom when all of a sudden the assault team was upon them. The troopers charged, spreading out and moving in from opposing flanks, scrambling up the rocks and firing at will, engaging the Ghazis at bayonet point. Surprised, and with no one to direct their movements, the Ghazis gave ground before the furious assault and the ridge was captured completely without losses.

Andre Cross had seen it all before. She had experienced it all before, and she was reliving it again as she tossed in bed, moaning in her sleep. She had relived this scene countless times in the recurring nightmares that had plagued her ever since she had returned from that assignment. The Year had been 1897, and the place was the Malakand Pass on the northwest frontier of the British Raj, in the high country of Afghanistan.

The fanatic Ghazis, led by their insane holy man, Sadullah, had risen up to drive the infidel
firinghi
(their word for foreigner) out of their desolate land forever. The blood lust was upon them as the tribes all joined in the jehad, the holy war against the British. For the 19th Century British Raj, at stake was the security of their northwest frontier. For the Time Commandos from the 27th Century, at stake was the entire future.

A young subaltern in the 4th Hussars had obtained temporary leave from his regiment to join the Malakand Field Force and cover the uprising for the London
Daily Telegraph.
His name was Winston Churchill.

Fate had brought him to that savage place at the top of the world, where a British fort was under siege, surrounded on all sides by screaming Ghazis, and fate had brought the Time Commandos to there as well, to locate a temporal confluence point where two separate timelines intersected and the direction that the future took became as hazy as the mountain mist.

When the crossbow was invented, people had predicted that the world would end, that civilization could never survive such a devastating weapon. But the world survived and became even more civilized. They said much the same thing with the advent of the machine gun, and the atomic bomb, and plasma weapons, and the warp grenade, yet still the world survived. Somewhat the worse for wear, but it nevertheless survived. And Prof. Albrecht Mensinger, whose father had invented time travel, had predicted that the world would end if governments insisted upon traveling through time to fight their wars, but the world still managed to survive.

Just barely. Only now the Time Was had escalated to unprecedented heights. The chronophysical alignment of the universe had shifted, Einstein somersaulted in his grave and two parallel universes had come into congruence with each other, their timelines rippling like undulating snakes—and, at times, they intersected.

Wherever such a confluence point occurred, it was possible to cross over from one universe into another. And such a point had occurred somewhere in the the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the year 1897. Soldiers from the future of the other timeline had crossed over, intending to interfere with history and create a temporal split. The Time Commandos stopped them, but at a terrible cost. During the mission, their team leader, Col. Lucas Priest, had died.

Since she had returned from that mission, Andre had suffered from recurring nightmares in which she kept reliving that awful moment, when Lucas Priest had died before her very eyes, shot through the chest by a .50 caliber ball from a jezail rifle. She had borne her grief stoically, as a soldier should. She had never mentioned the nightmares to anyone, not even Finn Delaney, who was her closest friend. He had been Lucas's best friend as well, and he had understood her loss and shared her grief; yet still, she had never told him about the nightmares.

In time, she thought the dreams would go away. Time, it was said, could heal all wounds. Only this wound refused to heal. Instead, like a suppurating sore, it grew worse and worse. Nothing she did would make it go away. She could put it out of her mind for a time while she was on a mission. She could forget herself in the furious pace of her muscle-straining workouts and, on occasion, she could drink herself into oblivion and dull her mind to the point where she no longer felt anything. But it always came back afterwards. She dreaded the quiet times, alone at night, in bed. No amount of alcohol could keep away the nightmares. In dreams, it all came flooding back to her.

She and Lucas Priest standing once again with General Blood and his staff up on the newly captured ridge, watching from the heights as the British troops below pressed home their advantage. Watching the infantry fix bayonets and advance into the Ghazi ranks. The Ghazis panicking and fleeing, breaking ranks and running, their snipers scrambling down from the rocks where, with the sun coming up, they were suddenly vulnerable to fire from the British troops up on captured ridge. Ghazis taking flight down the graded road, running ahead of the infantry, fighting with one another to escape being trapped by their own numbers in the narrow mountain pass.

"We've done it, General!" cried Surgeon-Lieutenant Hugo, standing beside Blood and watching the enemy in full flight. "We've broken through! We can post pickets in the pass and reinforce our position. Now we can—"

”No," said General Blood, grimly. "I will not allow them to escape so they can join with the rebel tribesmen at Chakdarra and warn them. We'll finish this here and now. They'll be on the plain once they have retreated through the pass. Fully exposed and on foot. Order forth the lancers. No prisoners. No survivors."

The signal was given and the four squadrons of cavalry charged. Finn Delaney, leading the second squadron of Bengal Lancers, couched his lance and leaned forward slightly, bearing down upon the fleeing Ghazis before him. It was going to be a slaughter.

The tribesmen still trapped in the pass were run down and trampled by the lancers as they thundered through. Then the cavalry formed a line upon the plain and charged the fleeing enemy. There was no escape. The Ghazis died in the rice fields, run through by the lances and struck down by the cavalry sabres. Bodies fell everywhere as the lancers descended on the running Ghazis and butchered them.

"Christ," said Hugo, turning away from the carnage down below. "I'm sorry, General, but that's more than I can stand to watch. I've seen enough of death."

Churchill was riveted by the spectacle. "They shall not forget this," he said. "It's probably the first time any of them have seen what cavalry can do, given room to deploy their strength. Henceforth, the very words 'Bengal Lancers' shall strike terror into their hearts."

As he spoke, a lone Ghazi sniper, who had remained undiscovered, hidden behind the rocks of his crumbled sangar, rose to a kneeling position and brought his jezail rifle to bear upon the surgeon, Hugo, whom he mistakenly took to be the commander of the British forces. As he raised his rifle, Lucas spotted him.

He yelled, "Hugo look out!"

Instinctively, after so much time spent under enemy fire, Hugo reacted by throwing himself down flat upon the ground. In an instant, Lucas saw that Hugo's combat-quick response had placed Churchill directly in the line of fire. In an instant of white hot, adrenalin charged clarity, he saw it all and made a running dive for Churchill, knocking him out of the way. And in that same moment, the Ghazi sniper fired. The .50 caliber ball slammed into Lucas's chest, ploughing through the thorax and tearing everything in its path. Too late, Andre fired her revolver, shooting the Ghazi sniper right between the eyes.

Churchill stood there, stricken, staring at the limp body at their feet.

Lucas Priest was face down on the ground, blood draining from the gaping hole in his chest.

"My God," said Churchill.

He crouched over the body and gently turned it over. The others gathered round.

"Doctor, can't you do something?" Churchill said in an agonized tone.

"I'm sorry, son," said Hugo, looking down and shaking his head. "There's nothing to be done."

Andre knelt over Lucas, staring down at him with shocked disbelief. His sightless eyes stared up at the sky.

"Andre . . ."
someone said.

She reached out to close his eyes.

" Andre . . . "

Her hand came away wet with his blood.

"Andre!"

She awoke with a start. She took a deep breath and let it out in a weary sigh, running her fingers through her thick blond hair, brushing it back away from her face. Another nightmare. Would they never end?

"Andre?"

She sat up quickly, grabbing for her plasma pistol and thumbing off the safety as she aimed it—

There was a dark figure standing silhouetted by the window of her bedroom.

"Andre, don't shoot! It's me."

Her eyes went wide as she stared at the shadowy figure.
"Lucas?"

It was impossible. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and then opened them again. There was no one there. The window was bright with the reflected glare from the lights of Pendleton Base. No one was silhouetted against it. And no one could have come in through that window. It was on the forty-seventh floor and sealed so that it couldn't open.

She exhaled heavily and lowered the gun, being careful to put the safety back on. Sleeping with a plasma weapon under her pillow was hazardous to the point of being suicidal, especially after she'd been drinking. It wouldn't do to incinerate herself in the middle of the night or wake up and start blasting away at hallucinations left over from a nightmare, but she had never learned to be comfortable without having a weapon within easy reach, whether it was a plasma pistol or a broadsword. She was a temporal agent and, as such, she was an expert with a wide variety of weapons. Control was so firmly ingrained that it was a matter of instinct.

Still, her hand was shaking as she put the pistol down.

She swallowed hard, took another deep breath and leaned back against the wall.

"Damn,"
she said to herself. "It's
got
to stop. I'm starting to lose it."

A soft red light suddenly came on above her comscreen and an electronic buzzer sounded three times in rapid succession, paused, then sounded again. General Forrester's face appeared upon the screen.

"Lt. Cross?"

"Here, sir," she said.

"Come up to my quarters, on the double."

"Sir!"

She rolled out of bed and quickly slipped into her black base fatigues. Moses Forrester was not in the habit of calling the people under his command in the middle of the night and summoning them "on the double" unless there was a damned good reason for it. She was dressed in moments and out the door, running down the corridor toward the lift tubes.

Brigadier General Moses Forrester was an unusual commander. He was entitled to a full complement of personal security and staff at his quarters and offices atop the Headquarters Building of Pendleton Base, but he had only four guards working two shifts, which meant that there were only two guards on duty at any one time, plus an orderly who doubled as a secretary. Rather than wear full dress uniforms or even the less formal duty greens, Forrester insisted that his guards dress in the infinitely less impressive and more comfortable black base fatigues, which he himself preferred. No ribbons, no decorations, no insignia other than division pin and rank.

This gave him the impression, he said, that he was surrounded by soldiers, rather than hotel doormen.

Formerly the commander of the elite First Division, the Time Commandos, Forrester had been promoted and was now the director of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, which had absorbed the First Division. Although Forrester was entitled to wear civilian clothing if he chose to, he never did, except for the 19th century, green, brocade smoking jacket he liked wearing during evenings in his quarters, when he was fond of settling down with one of his cherished Dunhill or Upshall pipes and a good book. Forrester had been in the service all his life. He had enlisted straight out of high school and risen through the ranks, taking advantage of military benefits to secure an education for himself along the way.