but then Darkness wasn't exactly normal anymore and hadn't been for quite some time. In his own bizarre way, Darkness was reordering his own reality and now he'd pulled Lucas into it, as well. He hadn't done it out of any altruistic motive; he had merely wanted to have his prototype telempathic translocator back. But regard-less of what Darkness had said, there was no denying the fact that something had occurred to 'bump' the timeflow when he had snatched Lucas out of that bullet's path..
If, in fact, there had been no temporal interference as a result, then did that mean that nothing had changed at all? If Lucas went back to 19th century Afghanistan and dug up his own grave, would he find his own body mouldering inside it? Or if the Search amp; Retrieve teams had already brought it back, would they have cremated it according to the instructions in his will and scattered the ashes throughout time? Would he be able to walk into the headquarters building of the
Temporal Army Command and see his own name engraved upon the Wall of
Honour?
But then the fact of his survival meant that there had been a change. Perhaps, since Darkness claimed his sophisticated instruments had not detected any significant temporal fluctuations, the event hadn't been temporally significant, but there was a 'ripple' in the timestream now-a timeframe in which Lucas had died and a timeframe in which he hadn't-and those two timeframes had to somehow become reconciled with each other if there was to be timestream split. Lucas knew there was no guarantee at all that the temporal ripple which Darkness had set in motion by altering his fate would not somehow build momentum in the current of the timestream, setting off a series of seemingly insignificant events that could eventually result in a massive temporal disruption-perhaps even the timestream split that everybody feared. There was only one way that he would ever know for sure. And it didn't matter if he wasn't ready. There was too much at stake and there wasn't any choice. He simply had to risk it.
He had to go back.
Chapter 4
Capt. Reese Hunter had become separated from his unit. In fact, he was about as far separated from his unit as it was possible to get. They were an entire universe apart and Reese Hunter was in the wrong one. The planet he was on was known as
Earth, but it was not the Earth he came from. He was a.~ thoroughly alien here as if he'd been a creature from another' galaxy. Which, in fact, he was. His was a mirror-image galaxy, a parallel universe in a congruent timeline. The same, and yet, profoundly different. Hunter was behind enemy lines.. and there was no way back.
He had been taken prisoner by a team of temporal agents who had crossed over into his universe. He had been unconscious when Andre Cross, Creed Steiger and
Finn Delaney had brought him through the confluence point.. When he had escaped from them, using a stolen warp disc, he hadn't realised that they had brought him back into their own time line. It was only after he had clocked in at Pendleton
Base, at the present transition co-ordinates the warp disc had been programmed with, that he suddenly realised, as Dorothy would have said, that he was not in
Kansas anymore. Fortunately for him, no one at Pendleton Base had expected an escaped prisoner with a stolen warp disc to be clocking in, least of all an officer of the S. O. G. 's Counter Insurgency Section. As a result, he'd been able to bluff his way through, buying himself just enough time to program a new set of transition co- ordinates into the stolen disc. It had been one hell of a big risk.
The discs used by his people were not quite the same and he hadn't really been sure of what he was doing.
He didn't know if they'd be able to trace him through the disc or not, but he had known that he could not afford to wait around and find out. It would have been only a matter of time, perhaps only moments, before the alarm was given and they'd be looking for him. He had no intention of being anywhere near Pendleton
Base when that happened. So he had clocked out once again. Unfortunately, now he had no idea where he was. Which was rather ironic, since he knew exactly where he was.
He knew he was in New York City, but that really wasn't much help at all because this New York City did not correspond exactly to the one in the universe from which he came. He had learned, from picking up a copy of the Daily News, that it was the 20th century, but he could take no comfort in that knowledge, either.
Events in this timeline did not correspond exactly with the events in his. The president of the United States in 1989 was not a woman, as in his timeline. The mayor of New York City wasn't black. And the citizens were apparently not allowed to carry weapons.
Hunter had, at best, only a sketchy knowledge of the history of this timeline, supplied by S.O.G. agents who had crossed over and infiltrated the Temporal Army Archives Section. Their mission had been sabotage and intelligence gathering and they had managed to get a great deal of information through before they had been caught, among which was a detailed explanation of the failsafe systems the
Temporal Corps used on their warp discs. Hunter had benefited from all that, but still, it was nowhere near enough, not when even one slight misstep could get him into trouble. Paranoia had welled up within him. He felt like a bleeding swimmer treading water in the middle of a school of sharks.
There was only one way for Hunter to get home. Some-where, he had to find a confluence point. The trouble was, he didn't even know how to begin to look for one. A confluence point wasn't something you could see. When they were found, they were usually discovered by accident. You simply turned a corner and you were in another universe. If you could keep your head about you and retrace your steps exactly, you could get back home. But Hunter didn't even know where the corner was in this case. Because he had been unconscious when he was brought through, he had no idea where they had crossed over, not even in what country or what time period. Instinctively, the first thing he had done when he had regained his senses was to attempt escape. The attempt had been successful. The only trouble was, now he was trapped in the wrong universe and he had no idea how to get back home.
Part of the problem was that confluence points were completely unpredictable.
There were no scientific principles governing their behaviour that anybody knew of, much less understood. With sophisticated instruments, it was possible to detect the energy field of a confluence, but you had to be practically on top of it. And there was no way of knowing where a confluence point would lead to. They did not correspond in space and time. Hunter knew that a confluence point located in his own universe in the 27th century could intersect with this timeline in such a manner that crossing over would result in entering a completely different century in a completely different geographical location. Conceivably, a confluence point located in Paris, France in one universe could open onto' the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the other. Theoretically, it was entirely possible for a confluence point occurring on Earth in one timeline to open onto deep space in the other, although the vacuum on one side would probably act as a miniature black hole, sucking through everything from the other side where there was an atmosphere, resulting in a devastating temporal whirlpool that would last until the confluence point shifted.
And there was no way of telling when that could occur.
Hunter didn't even want to think about what would happen if he were to cross over at the moment a confluence point shifted. He still remembered the disaster that occurred when S.O.G. troops had launched an invasion of this timeline through a confluence point located in the Khyber Pass. At the crucial moment, the confluence point had shifted without warning in a rippling effect that had continued down the timelines as temporal stability had been restored to that location. An entire battalion of soldiers had been caught in the middle of the shift. None of them were ever seen again. They had been trapped forever in the limbo of non-specific time known as the dead zone.
Or at least that was the theory. No one really knew for sure what happened to them.
The average person, in either universe, had no conception of the danger, no real understanding of the instability brought about by the congruence of two universes, instability that was magnified by the confluence of two separate timelines that intersected at various points in rime and space because of the increasing chronophysical imbalance. It occurred to Hunter that most people had never really understood the fragility of their.
