Time: Somewhere around 1985 and 2302. Place: England
He remembered running. Something was behind him, chasing him. He remembered cussing mentally because somewhere in his headlong run, he’d lost his gun. Gun. Why would he carry a gun? Why would he be upset that he had lost one? He lay there in the crisp white room, between crisp white sheets and listened to the beep, beep, beep of the monitor that told him he was alive. He looked around the room again. Nothing. He suspected the monitor was built into the bed.
He took a look under the top sheet. Pajamas. White pajamas. Gingerly, he checked the vital spots he could recall. Everything seemed to be intact and undamaged. He frowned. Then why was he in this bed in what was evidently a hospital? He sat up and discovered that he’d missed a vital spot. He very, very gently lay back against the pillow, his eyes closed against the blinding flash of pain that had whited out everything for a moment. He reached up and discovered a discreet bandage around his head. OK. He’d hurt his head.
So — where was he? In hospital. Why? Because he had a whocking great lump on his head. He looked around for a buzzer to call the nurse. Nothing. He looked around the room again. Not a chair for a visitor. Not a night table. He frowned. Not much of anything except him and the beeping bed. He wondered what happened if he got up. He suited action to thought. Nothing.
He found the door and opened it. He closed it, and his eyes. Must be something to do with the smack on the head. He opened the door again. Outside the sterile feeling room was a corridor. A stone corridor. A very old feeling stone corridor. Somehow, that just did not feel right. He took a step out. Cold! Cold stone! He looked around and spotted a pair of slippers next to the bed. Feeling a bit annoyed, he collected them and looked for a robe. Ah, ha. White robe on white sheet equal invisible.
Feeling a bit more ready to face the world, he stepped into the corridor and looked around for something to block the door open. Something told him that it was not a good idea to let the door close with him on the corridor side of it.
Nothing. Not even a loose stone. He went back in, took the blanket, white, off the bed, wadded it up and left it in the doorway so the door could close but not latch. Relieved that it seemed to work, he took off down the right hand side of the corridor. Thirty feet down was a T-intersection. He went right again. He was feeling a bit like a rat in a maze when the corridor came to an abrupt end. Dead end.
“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. He turned, then turned back slowly. He was right. Just out of the corner of his eye, he could catch changes in the wall. There was some sort of security device on the wall, just to the left of center. He reached and touched. It felt warm. He placed his hand full against it.
“Identity confirmed.” He jumped back at the metallic voice. The well camouflaged door slid to one side to admit him to a gleaming metallic hallway.
He stepped through the doorway, feeling much more at home, if a trifle underdressed, in the new hallway. He still didn’t know where he was, although the walls seemed familiar.
In a darkened room filled with monitors, a quartet of post apocalypse looking warriors was watching him on a screen. They nodded as he stepped into the ancient metal lined corridors. A vaguely oriental looking woman with wide white eyes looked up at the tall, pale haired woman behind her.
“He’s in.”
“Of course, he’s in. I don’t make mistakes like that,” she snapped. The tension, already thick in the room, got worse.
“Roof?”
“Yes. How long until the assault?”
The petite red head next to her consulted her watch. “Twenty minutes, if our information is correct.” She looked up at the sharp voiced woman. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Yeah, we go out with a whimper instead of a bang. We surrender. We -” Duck. The annoying blue-black skinned woman ducked under the backhand aimed her way. “We grab him, have our way with him and leave him for the scum to retrieve organs from. We -”
“Luch. Shut up.”
She looked down at the red head and smiled. “Not if we want to fix what’s wrong we don’t,” she finished softly. She looked back to the white haired one. “Is it a go?”
One curt nod was the answer. The red head and the ebon warrior left the control room.
“What if he denies us?”
“Then there’s no point in putting him back, is there?”
The white eyes came around again. “You would -”
“He’s already dead. He has no say in this world -”
“Unless he agrees to your demands.” She looked back at the monitor, wistful. “He would make strong children.”
“He needs to make a world for strong children,” the other spat. “Good. He’s headed for the roof.”
“Like he had a choice, boss.”
Feral grin to go with the slit pupiled ice blue eyes. “Under my rein, none at all.”
She strode out of the room. The oriental woman watched the monitor as the man took the elevator ride to the roof. He wasn’t going to enjoy this. She snorted. Who did? She unplugged from the monitor bank and they went dead. She slipped silently out of the room, one final look, a sigh and silence marked her passage.
He stepped out of the double steel doors and stopped. He was outside. That was unexpected. But so was the outside. The sky was a boiling mass of clouds. Not the fluffy white things he expected. Not even the gray masses of a storm front. These looked like the purple and red hued clouds out of some artist’s rendition of Dante’s Inferno. Lightening played around the clouds. Thunder rumbled ominously. And the ground below looked as much like a Hieronymous Bosch painting as the sky did a hellish vision.
Thump. Something hit the roof behind him. He whirled to face – he took in the eyes before he got a clear feeling for the rest of the figure. Wide, slightly aslant set eyes, pale blue, pupils like a cat’s. White hair fanned out around a pale face. She had landed on the roof, both feet down, knees flexed, the tips of the fingers of her left hand touching the roof. She straightened from the crouch and looked like some Amazon warrior from a primordial time. Except he could see two modern semi-automatic guns, and some of her armor seemed to be more high tech plastic and Kevlar than iron or steel.
She took a half dozen striding steps and was face to face with him. Exactly face to face. Her wide unblinking gaze fixed on his own. He backed up a step and frowned. “Who are you?”
She grinned. White even teeth behind well-shaped but thick lips. “Good question. What do you think of it?” She gestured to the world behind him.
“I think this is a nightmare.”
“Excellent. So what are you gonna do about it?”
Shock. “Me?”
“You.”
Something large rose to the edge of the roof. The ebon woman was piloting some sort of hover craft, the bubble style top standing open. “Strakah! Get yo ass ovah heah! They’re almost at the gate.”
Two heads turned. His snapped back to look at the woman who was responding to the alert.
“Tell me when they breach,” she yelled.
Her eyes swung back to the man who was staring at her in shock. Damn, but he could see the lines in her face, could see his own lineage staring back at him, except for those damnable eyes. “Who are you?”
Her lips pulled back from her teeth again, not much of a smile, but it wasn’t meant to be one. “Here. Now. I’m you.”
“What??” What kind of insane alien trick was this?
She gestured again. “That is the world as it is now. That is the world you and your kind did not protect.”
His face grew hard at the accusatory words. He’d done his best, dammit. Her voice softened slightly.
“I know. It is not you alone who worked this. It was never your intent. Nor was it the others. Together you might have succeeded. Separate you never did. You never even knew the others existed.”
Others? Other whats? “How can you -”
“Clonal manipulation,” she shouted against the rising howl of the wind.
Clone? Manipulation? Why? This was insane. She could see the thought running through his head.
“Only a fraction of one percent of males survive their first 6 months. After enough failures, a change was made. Then another and another. Improvements to lead us, to continue the fight.”
An explosion rocked the roof. He moved quickly to the edge and looked out. A wall about two hundred feet away rocked back and forth and collapsed.
“Breach!” The ebon one yelled.
“This is crazy.”
“So is your handprint matching mine,” her voice whispered in his ear, her breath tickling the sensitive skin, moving his fine, pale hair.
He looked into her face, nearly nose to nose. “What do you want?”
She gestured to include everything he could see. “Change it.”
“What?”
“Change it! Make it not happen!” It was a demand, not a request.
“How?”
“Find a way!”
The building shook. She grabbed his hand and ran to the vehicle. A leap and she was aboard. She turned to look at him. “Coming?” she yelled.
Oh hell! He leaped as he felt the building beneath him do an impossible shimmy. The vehicle rode up on dust clouds as the building collapsed in on itself. It took many of the invaders with it. He looked down, trying to see through the dust, to see the enemy. Nothing.
The bubble settled into place over them.
“Mortax,” the ebon woman said.
The white one snarled, then laughed. “We sent them to Life Immortal,” she sneered, sitting back in a seat. She looked to him. “Sit.”
He did so, strapping in with the seatbelt. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She sounded like she couldn’t believe her ears. Then she realized he had no knowledge beyond the sight of the world as it was now. She pointed back the way they had come. “Do you know what that was?”
“No.”
“SHADO Citadel. The last stronghold we had. We no longer have the people to hold it. A third of the world population, which is much smaller than it was in your time, is being herded like cattle. One alien faction wants us extinct. One needs spare parts. One needs dinner served on time. And the others just come to hunt.”
He blinked. Hunt. Extinct. Dinner. Parts. This was a nightmare.
“Yes, it is,” she answered his thoughts.
“I tried.”
“I know. You did. They did. But none of you knew about the others.”
“What others?”
“Other organizations fighting aliens. Fighting those who found our world worthwhile, but not us.”
Other organizations. Other – organizations?
He was dead. That was the answer. He was dead and in hell and this was the afterlife getting it’s jollies tormenting him. There were no other aliens. * That * was paranoid fantasy. “What other organizations?”
She smiled. He might think this was hallucinatory, but he was still thinking. “Start with the Blackwood Foundation. And look to the young.”
“Nearing target!”
She nodded her understanding.
“What target?”
She pointed. A nasty tornado whirling in place effect broke up the clouds. Just looking at it hurt his eyes and his head.
“What the —”
“Time vortex. One way.”
“What?” he shouted, trying to make his voice heard over the roar of the vortex. Why was he not surprised when the vehicle dove into the twisting mass? They tumbled over and over and over until he finally came to a stop, fetched up against something hard. It felt like he might have cracked a rib. It hurt to breath.
He opened his eyes and saw grass. Green grass. Very green grass. He rolled onto his back, stifled a groan and stared up at a tree. The tree had stopped his rolling trajectory.
“Ed!”
Familiar voice.
Alec Freeman found his commanding officer and friend lying in the grass staring up at the tree over him. He frowned at the man on the ground. When Straker left the office an hour earlier, he’d been fully clothed in his usual immaculate attire. He seemed to have found time to change into pajamas, robe and slippers in the intervening time.
Straker looked up into Alec’s face and knew a faint feeling of relief. He sat up and gasped. Yep. Broken rib. Then he looked at his own arm. Sleeves. Not his suit coat and shirt. He started to say something as darkness closed in.
“What did he say?”
Alec looked up at Paul Foster’s confused face.
“Blackwood.”
“That’s what I thought.”
They both fervently hoped Ed Straker, Commander of SHADO, would remember what that was all about when he woke up.