Soldiers Out of Time Read Free

look of them—burst in. One of them sprinted frantically for a control board which, Jason was coldly certain, contained a self-destruction switch.
    “Stop him!” Jason yelled.
    But even as he spoke, another IDRF squad emerged from the far door and proceeded to blast down the Transhumanists they had been pursuing. One man, not content to have killed the running technician, fired a second plasma bolt into the control board, which fairly exploded in a shower of sparks and a cloud of smoke.
    “Cease firing!” Jason called out. “We want to take all this stuff intact.”
    “That’s affirmative,” said Major Rojas, who had just entered the chamber. She walked across the stage looking around curiously, and stepped up to Jason. They both removed the hoodlike flexible helmets of their combat environment suits and took deep breaths of the ozone-shot air.
    “Everything under control, Major?” asked Jason, running a hand through his sweat-drenched hair.
    “Pretty much. We’re mopping up. A good thing surprise was total. As it is, we lost too many men. And some of the things we lost them to . . .” The major couldn’t continue. She was a hardened combat veteran, but she was also, inescapably, a product of her culture.
    “Yeah, I know. I saw.” Jason hoped the medics, following along behind the advancing squads, had gotten to Wei in time. “But take my word: it was worth it.”
    “So we’ve all been told.” Rojas looked around the chamber again. “So this is it?”
    “Yes. This is the Transhumanists’ temporal displacer.”

CHAPTER TWO

    “Well,” said Kyle Rutherford, gusting a sigh of relief and leaning back in his chair with a smile, “that’s that!”
    “Is it?” asked Jason expressionlessly.
    Rutherford’s brows knitted, and he gave the three people across his desk a sharp look.
    They sat in Rutherford’s office, deep in the Temporal Regulatory Authority’s vast displacer facility in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The Authority was a quasi-public agency, and its organizational structure was corporate; Rutherford, as its operations director, was the equivalent of its chief executive officer, reporting to the governing council that answered to a board of directors. As such, he rated a large office, although he kept (and actually preferred) a smaller one on the other side of the globe, in Athens practically in the shadow of the Acropolis. But his inner sanctum was less opulent than most people expected, largely bare of ornamentation that might have distracted the eye from the display case along the wall behind the desk and the literally priceless objects from the past that it contained. It was against this backdrop that Rutherford now sat, stroking his neat gray Van Dyke, not in his usual insufferably self-satisfied manner but in a nervous way that suggested reawakened worry.
    “Whatever do you mean, Jason? You’ve made a report favorable on all points. Yes, I know,” he hastily added, raising a hand against interruptions. “There are still many Transhumanist cells to be located and rooted out. Indeed, the evidence turned up after the raid suggests that their top leadership is still at large. But now it is just a matter for ordinary law enforcement. We’ve taken their temporal displacer, so the past is secure from their subversion.”
    “Can we be certain of that?” asked Superintendent Alexandre Mondrago, Jason’s second-in-command in the Special Operations Section. Like a number of Special Ops personnel, he was an ex-mercenary, and Jason could amply attest to his deadliness. Indeed, it almost lay in his genes, for he was a Corsican who came of a long and violent tradition— not necessarily always a criminal one, as he was at pains to point out. He had once told Jason that he numbered among his ancestors a member of the “Action Service” of the French Secret Service—predominantly Corsican, and with shadowy links to the Union Corse —in the mid-twentieth-century when the French state had