TW07 The Argonaut Affair NEW Read Free Page B

politicians. Steiger hoped it wasn't.
    Time was a valuable commodity.
     
     
    As the shuttle crossed the plaza, Steiger saw soldiers in every type of costume imaginable milling about in the Departure Station, waiting to clock out to their assignments. A ceasefire had been called, but at Pendleton Base-as at other military bases-things seemed not to have changed at all.
    In fact, there were profound changes, though they were not readily apparent. These soldiers were not clocking out to fight in arbitration actions. They were being sent back to other time periods as scouts.
    Those about to leave had already been retrained for their new duties by the Observer Corps and there were thousands more in the process of retraining.
    Their mission was twofold-to be on the alert for temporal disruptions and to find points of convergence where the time-stream intersected that of the congruent universe and a confluence existed. The confluence effect was unstable. A convergence could occur and a confluence point exist for a timespan as brief as several seconds or as long as-no one knew for certain. The result was massive temporal instability. Both timestreams were rippling, although not in any manner that was immediately noticeable-unless one stumbled into a confluence point and crossed over from one universe into another.
    If these points of confluence, however ephemeral, could be pinpointed and logged, then it was possible for them to be patrolled. At least, that was the theory they were operating on.
    Already, there had been a brief and furious battle between the commandos of the First Division and soldiers of the Special Operations Group from the congruent universe. The greatest threat was that a force from the congruent universe would locate an undiscovered confluence point and cross over undetected to create a temporal disruption, as they had attempted to do in the Khyber Pass in the year 1897. The enemy was operating on the theory that increased temporal instability would serve to diminish the confluence effect or even eliminate it by creating a timestream split. Chaos, thought Steiger, was an understatement for what was going down.
    The tension was evident on the faces of the soldiers in the plaza. In the Time Wars, the mortality rate had always been very high. Death could come from a spear thrust or a bullet. Oblivion could arrive with the rupture of a spacesuit or the explosion of a land mine. For a soldier of the Temporal Corps, there were a thousand ways to die. Now there was one more.
    None of these soldiers about to clock out on long term assignments in the past, in Minus Time, knew what to expect. They had been briefed as fully as possible, programmed through their cybernetic implants with the languages, customs and histories of the periods to which they were assigned, but if by chance they happened to clock back into the past at the exact location of a confluence, the odds against their ever coming back were astronomical.
    No one had yet crossed over into the congruent universe. The theory was that if a confluence point could be discovered and a crossover achieved, then returning would be a "simple" matter of retracing one's steps exactly. Turn a corner, Steiger thought, and you're in another universe. But if you were to clock directly into a convergence, with no physical reference for the confluence point, how would you find the corner? Once in the congruent universe, clocking backwards or forwards would only result in time travel
within
that universe. Because of the confluence effect, every temporal transition would now be even more uncertain.
    Until now, Steiger had found his duties as a T.I.A. agent challenging enough. Now, General Forrester was considering a new type of mission for them. If a confluence point could be located, one the people in the congruent universe were unaware of, then Forrester meant for them to attempt a crossover. The object of such a mission would be to disrupt the temporal continuity of the