Timeshadow 02

"Critical?" Greg Stinson asked. "How so?"

It was Higgins, the historian, who spoke up. "Well, consider that Texas, in the mid-1830s anyway, didn't look a whole lot like the state we know now. It stretched far to the north, almost to Montana, and included a lot of territory to the west, places like New Mexico and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas too. Only the Louisiana Purchase resulted in a larger increase in the size of the country, at least until Alaska came along, and if Santa Anna had beaten Sam Houston at San Jacinto, it's not too big a stretch to say that Mexico might still own the entire southwestern part of the country, maybe even California..."

Okay," Aronson said, interrupting Higgins, "let's consider something off the wall. Say someone, or something, brought us here for a purpose. Let's ignore all the obvious implications of that for the time being, too. Like who brought us here, or why. Let's ask ourselves one question. They have, for whatever reason, left us here under circumstances that lead me to believe they want us to do something."

"Do something? Like what?"

"Well," Aronson continued, "maybe it's a test. Maybe they want to see what we do. How we act. Maybe they want to measure our moral and intellectual development."

Higgins chuckled.

"What's so funny about that?" she asked, clearly offended.

"Occam's razor," Higgins said. "What's the simplest explanation, given your hypothesis about us being here for some reason, for our being in San Antonio in 1836? For being at the Alamo right before the defenders get wiped out?"

Aronson looked at Higgins, shrugged her shoulders.

"Because," Higgins said, "they want us to kick their asses all the way back to Mexico City!"

"Oh come off it!" she said. "Why on earth would they want us to..."

"Well, think about it," Higgins replied. "They, whoever the hell they are, want us to change time, to change history. You've all watched those old Star Trek shows, seen all the time travel movies. You know about the paradox of time, you know, you go back in time and kill your grandfather so how could you be born to go back and kill your grandfather? Well, what if someone wants us to, in effect, go back and kill our grandparents? To change the entire matrix of causality that led to 21^st century?"

"Well, if that's true," Carlos Chavez said, "if we change the sequence of time, if we kill our grandparents, won't we cease to exist?"

"That would be my guess," Higgins said. "At least, it's a possibility. Another might be, if we fulfill our task, their objective, they might return us to our time."

"That's a pretty big assumption," Patty McKaig, one of the weapons officers said. "Like number one, what if this was some sort of natural phenomenon. Two, we're making unwarranted assumptions about motives. Assuming there is someone doing this. And why wouldn't they do it themselves?"

"Maybe they can't?" Higgins said. "Or maybe they don't want to? We're trying to guess with no information to go on!"

"But," Aronson interrupted, "we have made one assumption. Someone wants us here. Can we agree on that?"

"I can't," McKaig said. "This could be an entirely random, naturally occurring event..."

"Preposterous," Higgins added. "The odds are..."

"I agree," Aronson said, "and this isn't a democracy. So, what do we do, now that we're here? Defend the Alamo, or bug out and preserve the order of history as we know it?"

"But if we change history, we die," Chavez repeated.

"Maybe," Higgins said. "And I don't think we'd die, per se. It's more likely we'd simply cease to exist."

"What's the difference!" Chavez cried. "This is f-ing loco, man!"

"Everything about this situation is insane," Aronson said. "Nothing makes sense. Look around you, for God's sake! There're grass and trees here, the temperature's in the 80s. It hasn't been below 120 in Texas for over ten years. All the trees died, what? Eight years ago? The events at the Alamo happened two hundred years ago! Tell me what's sane about this!"

Higgins looked at her closely. "Lieutenant? You're in command. Assuming we still consider ourselves Army aviators, that is."

Aronson bristled. "Stop it. Right now. As long as we're alive, right here, right now, we will conduct ourselves as members of the United States Army. Period. As far as I'm concerned, the only question confronting us is simply this: do we defend the Alamo or do we retreat. If we retreat, it's likely we'll remain here. We'll be stuck here. If we defend the Mission, it's likely we'll change history in such a profound way we could, as Higgins puts it, simply cease to exist. Immediately."

"Lieutenant, if you're in charge we follow your orders. It's as simple as that," Higgins said, and most everyone agreed.

"Alright. It's my opinion that we were brought here to defend this place. As far as I'm concerned, that's what we're going to do. I'm equally troubled by the idea of disrupting the flow of history as I am with the idea that this may all be occurring in some sort of alternate reality, or some other dimension. Still, if we've stumbled across a being capable of doing this to us, I don't want to piss it off."

"Lieutenant, there's someone in those trees, listening to us," Chavez whispered, and Aronson thought for a moment, then stood and walked towards a small grove of live oaks and mesquite twenty yards away, Chavez and Higgins by her side, their service pistols drawn.

"How y'all doin'?" The man said as stepped out from behind a tree, fumbling with the laces on his buckskin pants, then he looked down and seemed embarrassed.

"How long have you been listening?" Aronson said as she closed the distance to the man, but she stopped short when the smell hit her nostrils.

"Sorry. I like takin' a shit out here instead of in the privy back there in the fort. Stinks to high heaven," the man said, shaking his head.

Aronson craned her head, saw the man wasn't lying and she sighed, then turned to look back at her men and the campsite. "How long have you been listening to us," she repeated as she looked at the man again.

"Long enough. Sounds like y'all are in a little bit of a pickle. Where y'all from, anyway?"

Aronson didn't say a word...she just looked at him, not sure what to say or do, then it hit her. She was in command here, not Captain Davis or Colonel Lewiston back at Fort Hood. They weren't here now, she was, and 'command' was all on her. She'd never had to make decisions like this before. No one had, and that old saying about the loneliness of command had never seemed so true, or so remote sounding. She looked around again, feeling not just alone, but lonely...

"What's your name?" the man asked, curious about what he saw in the girl's eyes.

"What?"

"You name? You do have one, don't you?"

Aronson grew stern, looked him in the eye. "Come with me." She turned and started back to the campsite, Higgins and Chavez walked behind the man, who she now thought seemed perpetually good natured and unconcerned.

"Take a seat," Aronson said, pointing to her chair.

"That's yours. I'm not taking your chair," he said as he picked the flimsy looking chair up and looked it over -- carefully. "What the hell is this, anyway?" He looked at a fat log in the trees and went to pick it up, then stopped and kicked it -- hard, and a copperhead poked it's head out of the rotten part resting on the ground and looked around, then retreated back into the log. "Not that one!" he said, then he settled on another one and hauled it back to the others. He sat on the log and looked at Aronson. "Well, what can I do you for?" he said, smiling.

"What's you're name?" Aronson asked.

"I asked you first."

"Lieutenant Aronson," she said, "and this is my squadron. Beagle Group."

"What's a beagle?" he said, chuckling. "Y'all look like beagles, or somethin'?"

"Your name?" Aronson repeated.

"Oh, Crockett. David Crockett. Late of Tennessee, now residing over yonder," he said, pointing at the Mission.

"Davey Crockett?" Higgins said. "Bear fighter and Congressman?"

"One and the same, boy," he said, clearly pleased he'd been recognized.

"Mr Crockett," Aronson said. "You listened to what's been said. Where do you think we came from?"

"Well, if I heard what y'all said right, the future. You've come from the future. Now, normally I'd say that kinda talk is pure hog shit, but I've seen those machines of yours, so I guess that changes everything, don't it?"

"Mr Crockett..."

"David, please, Lieutenant Aronson."

"Alright, David, my name's Judy."

"Judy. I like that. Now, you're going to ask me what I think you should do, right?"

"Almost," Aronson said. "What would you do if you were in our position?"

He chuckled again. "Well, hell, you got the benefit of hindsight, don't you? You already know what's gonna happen, and then what happened as a result, all the way to time you lived in. Like you said, if you change what happens tomorrow, you no longer have any idea what happens the day after tomorrow. And if that's true, how the devil could you possibly know what's right, or wrong, for that matter."

"True," she said. "But..."

"Yeah, but. What interested me most," Crockett said, "was one of you saying you've been brought here for a purpose. And I'm just guessin' here, but I don't think you had God in mind when that came up. So, the question is not who brought you here, as interesting as that might be, but why." He paused, looked at Aronson for a moment. "You know? You got really nice eyes. Kind of hard, but real cute, too."

Aronson blushed, shook her head while a few of the pilots laughed -- quietly.

"Anyway. Why. The question is why. To change time somehow, that's what you said," Crockett said, pointing at Higgins. "Why would someone want to change time unless time has led to an unsolvable dilemma. Unless those folks think there's no other way out of the dilemma."

"Right!" Higgins said, "If we alter time then we would have to alter their past and future too, maybe even they will cease to exist!"

"Then they're desperate," Crockett said. "Their backs have been pushed into a corner, and like you said, my guess is they're counting on you doing this based on their knowledge of history."

Aronson nodded her head. "That's what my gut tells me," she said. "So, he'll be here on the 23^rd, right, Sam?"

Higgins nodded. "Midday, I think."

"That's in the history books, eh?" Crockett said. "So, what happens, here, uh, happened here?"

Higgins looked at Aronson. She nodded: "Tell him."

"They get here and lay siege to the Mission. After several skirmishes, Santa Anna attacks on March 6^th, just before dawn. The final battle lasted 90 minutes, and everyone died. A few women and a slave named Joe were spared."

"Shit. So you're telling me in a few weeks I'm gonna be dead?"

"Yessir."

"Well then, you can't ask me what you should do. I don't want to die -- be killed here. I got my family back in Tennessee, Elizabeth and my girls. I promised I'd bring 'em out here as soon as I could, as soon as I'd settled in somewhere." He turned and looked at the 12 Apaches tied down in the meadow. "Those things," he said, pointing at the helicopters, "could stop Santa Anna, couldn't they?"

Aronson nodded. "My guess, David, is that just one of them could destroy his force. Twelve of them could destroy any army on earth right now, but we have one limitation. Fuel."

"Fuel? You mean..."

"They're machines, David. They need energy to run on, to operate, and once the fuel we have is expended, that's it. These machines can't do a thing without fuel. We could salvage the guns, perhaps, but that's about it."

"I think you're missing the basic point I tried to make earlier," Higgins said. "Once Santa Anna is defeated the timeline is destroyed. I think in that moment we'll simply cease to exist. We'll just wink out...disappear."

Crockett looked at Aronson. "Dear God. How could you even consider..."

"If what we hypothesize is true," Higgins interrupted, "that someone far in the future has come up against an insurmountable future, and that as a result humanity fails, how could we not act?"

"Because we don't know that!" McKaig said again. "You're just guessing! We don't have the facts to make such an assumption!"

"Facts and circumstances, dear girl," Crockett replied. "Together they make up the truth. Absent one, you must rely on the other."

"My mind's made up," Aronson said. "As far as I'm concerned, the only thing left to do is devise appropriate tactics."

"Yeah," Chavez asked, "do we attack straight away, or demonstrate our capabilities, give them a chance to surrender?"

"If you let Santa Anna slip away," Colonel Travis said, emerging from a dense clump of cedars, "he'll just come back. With a much bigger army next time, and you'll have tipped your hand."

"Well, William, I wondered when you'd show up. How's Colonel Bowie?"

"Fever, flat on his back. When I saw you hadn't come back..."

"We're having an interesting discussion, William. Did you forget the whiskey? As usual?"

Higgins watched the conflicting egos emerge, wary swordsmen circling for best advantage, but decided they couldn't afford to let this discussion devolve into such a dispute. "Colonel Travis? Have you met the General? This Santa Anna?"

"No. By reputation only do I know the man, but he seems to me a scoundrel. Completely untrustworthy."

"So," Aronson asked, "a surrender by him would be meaningless?"

"A tactic, Lieutenant. A delay. That would be his reaction to intimidation. Then he would seek an advantage. Fuel, did you say, is your achilles heel?"

"Yes. We have about two to three hours of operational time. We could extend that by grounding some of our machines, using their fuel and weapons to give us more time in the air, but to what end?"

"We could end this in two minutes," Higgins said, "once and for all time. Let Santa Anna's army arrive and encamp. Let the General and his lieutenants gather and demand your surrender," he said to Travis, "and then we attack."

"Not without provocation," Aronson said. "Let Santa Anna approach. Let him demand your surrender, but refuse, or tell him to leave, do anything that commits him to make the first move.

"And then you'll kill him?" Crockett said. "And what if he attacks before you do? What if he kills twenty of our men in that time? Easily preventable deaths, wouldn't you say, considering you'll be killing Santa Anna and all his army, in any event."

"I won't attack with provocation. That's final. Get your men under cover, do what you can to protect them. Tomorrow morning at first light I'm going up to locate them..."

"Lieutenant," Higgins said, "don't do it! We know when they'll be here, and how many men are in his force. If he spots an aircraft who knows what changes that might cause? He could retreat immediately, or change objectives, leaving us powerless to intervene. Let's just sit back and wait, do what we can to prepare the aircraft."

"Do you know where is?" Travis asked.

"No, not exactly. Just that he'll be here on the 23^rd."

"Then we must prepare," Travis said, standing.

"Why?" Crocket said. "If the Lieutenant's machines do what she says they can do, what's the point?"

"Suppose something happens to the Lieutenant's machines, David? Then what?"

"Then history unfolds as it will, as it, apparently, already has. We will be dust, ashes scattered on the winds of time." He looked at Aronson and winked, and she blushed again. "Travis, you should see to Bowie, and shouldn't we think about dinner tonight, for our guests as well as ourselves?"

Travis looked at Aronson, then at Crockett. "Yes, I think we should. I think we have some fresh venison..."

Aronson looked at her foil-wrapped MRE and decided fresh meat might be better after all, but Higgins looks scowlingly dubious, hoping the antibiotics in their Med-Paks would be up to the challenges of 19^th century hygiene. 'Well,' he thought, 'at least they'll be 19^th century bugs versus 21^st century antibiotics.'

+++++

Courville, Sinclair and Sandusky rode in a Jeep behind General Short's staff car to a cluster of quonset huts in a dry creek bed between Hickam Field and the naval base on Pearl Harbor; when they pulled to a stop Sandusky noted an Admiral's staff car already parked under cover, out of the way of prying eyes, and he told Courville this looked like an 'intel' facility.

Courville grunted his understanding while he watched Short get out of the Buick. "Well, I guess we're on." They walked into the first hut and into a room full of charts on huge tables...charts of the entire Pacific, and smaller charts of all the Hawaiian Islands, as well as Wake and Midway Islands. Three men stood around the large table, the 'Pacific' table, waiting; the Admiral standing by the table looked like he enjoyed eating Navy Lieutenants for breakfast. His fingers were drumming the table, his eyes were red-rimmed and tired, and to Sandusky, the man looked more than perturbed -- he looked angry.

General Short walked over and shook the Admiral's hand. "

"So, what's all the fuss about?" the Admiral said. "Who the hell are you, and where did those aircraft of yours come from?"

"Admiral," Short interrupted, "this is Colonel Courville, United States Air Force, his co-pilot, Captain Sinclair..."

"You're a woman," the admiral said, clearly confused. "Air Force?"

"And I'm Captain Sandusky, Annapolis '28, sir."

"Gentlemen," Short continued, "this is Admiral Kimmel, CnC PacFleet, and those two guys who look like they haven't seen sunlight in a month are Captains Ed Layton and Joe Rochefort, the Admiral's staff intel gurus. Tell them what you told me."

Courville spoke first, and even he was intimidated by Kimmel's four stars. "Sir, about 0930 this morning I was en route from Guam to Pearl..."

"Guam!" Kimmel growled. "What the hell were you doing on Guam!"

Short interrupted. "Admiral, you'd better just relax and listen for a minute."

Kimmel growled again. "Proceed."

"Sir, we were refueling at the time..."

"What? Where?"

"Mid-air, sir. Inflight refueling."

"Uh-huh."

"Sir, Captain Sandusky refueled ahead of my B-2, and while I was tanking a large blue sphere appeared directly overhead and descended on our location. The sphere disappeared almost immediately, but when it had, a lot of our basic navigational facilities went off-line..."

"Off-line? What do you mean?"

"Uh, they failed, sir. I was able to navigate to Pearl using something called INS, an inertial navigation system, and we landed. Admiral, we've been advised that today's date is 6 December, 1941, and the problem, sir, is that when we left Guam this morning the date was 7 July, 2036."

"WHAT!" Kimmel was through growling now. He wanted to eat someone, and his sights appeared set on a colonel in the Army Air Corp. "BULLSHIT!"

"Colonel Courville," Short commanded, "tell the Admiral what you told me! NOW!"

"Admiral, right now, right this minute, five aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy are closing on the Hawaiian Islands, my guess is right not they're approximately four hundred miles due north, and their intentions are to attack the base at Pearl at dawn tomorrow morning, the Philippines at dawn local time as well. There are small Japanese submarines off the harbor entrance right now, and the Japanese attack will begin launch operations about 0400 local time. Within ten days, you and the General will be relieved of command, and Chester Nimitz will succeed you. You'll both be scapegoated, blamed for the failure to adequately prepare the islands."

Layton and Rochefort were already leaning over the chart, plotting vectors, and Layton stood up after a minute. "That pretty much fits one of the possibilities, Admiral."