Memoirs of a Timelord (28 page)

       

       

       Branson Freeh had never been a courageous being.  In fact it was his cowardice that had gotten him into the fix he was in.  

       Fearing combat, he had enlisted in the Covert Ministry when war broke out between Elsor and Dar.  After months of training as a deep-penetration operative, and injected with an experimental morphic serum, he was sent to infiltrate the enemy infrastructure at Dombursk.

       But a frightening thought occurred to Branson Freeh as he piloted the small craft towards his first assignment: spies were executed.  If he were captured there was no hope of being held as a POW, he would be summarily hanged for his crime.  Such a detail made him reduce speed as he considered that with his newfound morphic abilities he could go anywhere he wanted and blend in.  So like a bullet, he turned that shuttle around and headed for neutral space.

       But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and his flight through open space did not go unnoticed.  Both the Elsorian and Darian fleets noticed the tiny craft slipping away at top speed.  Once the Dar saw their spy fleeing, they moved to intercept.  But when Elsorian commanders saw their enemy pursuing one of their own craft they could not help but be intrigued.  If this little shuttle was so important to the Dar then it was bound to be valuable to their enemy, right?  Ordering their own ships forward, the Elsonians engaged the Dar en masse.

       Branson was sure he would be captured by one side or the other.  Either faction would execute him.  The only difference was that the Dar would torture him first, and the Elsor would dissect him.  Both prospects terrified the cowardly little mammal.

       But just when the fighters were almost within weapons range, the Elsor commanders detonated their latest weapon; Gomus47.  The simple device created a powerful shockwave that expanded outwards at nearly .7L.  The effect was magnificent as the weapon essentially used harmonic distortion to shred everything in its wake, including battleships.

       Fleeing as fast as the tiny craft would go, Branson was fortunate that the shockwave had slowed to .4L by the time it snapped his tiny craft about and tossed it towards deep space.  Spinning out of control, he was quickly rendered unconscious by the inertial forces.  

       While a human from Earth thinks of interstellar travel in terms of great distances, the same cannot be said for the residents of globular clusters.  In these dense environments the distance between star systems can be surprisingly small.  There may be thousands of stars within a lifetime's travel at sub-light speeds.  Densely packed, stellar and globular clusters are exciting places to live.  Sort of the galactic version of Hell's Kitchen.

       What had started out as an old fashioned military desertion quickly turned into a long and frigid plunge into unknown space. The automated systems had managed to stabilize the ship but expended significant energy in the process.  Add to that the fact that he was still hurtling through space at an astounding rate, much faster than the ship was designed to travel.  Already he was outside of anything covered by his charts.  It terrified him, the thought of dying there in space all alone.  As the cowardly former spy worked his way through the six stages of grief, he discovered a small religious book in the glove compartment.  Reading through the pages of scripture, he desperately tried to reach out to the god he had never really believed in.  But like many facing death, he offered more than a few bargains to the eternal deity.  Sure, he would change his ways, stop drinking, stop smoking Mota, be a better citizen...the usual promises.

       As the ship's energy reserves were slowly depleted, Branson sat praying in the frigid cockpit as he finally accepted his fate.  As difficult as it had been to face his true self, he knew that he was here because of his own cowardice.  In essence, he deserved his fate and he knew it.  It was here in these last few seconds of life support that he accepted death.  As the last of the nitrogen ran out, he offered the Gods one last deal; he would willingly become an instrument of the Lord, spreading the word just as MaraGono had done in the first era.  Surrendering his fate to the ethereal, he was about to blackout when the dim glow of a solar disk became visible. 

       It was sheer luck that allowed Branson to set down in one piece on a small planetoid orbiting one of the binary stars in the Testis system.  Even more amazing had been that his morphic body had been able to adapt to the harsh environment.  

       Having come down in a streak of light, his arrival had attracted more than a little attention from the locals.  He'd barely had a chance to stagger out of the craft before he saw them coming in the distance.  Adapting quickly, he hoped the shadows would conceal imperfections in his morph.  It was difficult to replicate a species you had only seen at a distance.  

       It all seemed to swirl before him as Branson watched the Croh female in the tall headdress shout and point angrily to him.  All around him there were sharpened spears just inches away, ready to skewer him at any second.  Yet, the warriors stood at the ready as if waiting for a command.  Still shouting obscenities, the female with the big hat shook the collection of trinkets that hung around her neck.  Clearly she wanted Branson dead for some reason.  

       It was when the line of warriors parted for the elder that it all came into focus for Branson.  The little guy was the Chief, and the soldiers answered to him.  The female screaming at him was the local Shaman.  Trained in espionage, he immediately realized that she would view him as a threat.  She had a good thing going on there, and now this stranger appears in a manner commensurate of a God?  No, Branson knew that there would be no living with this woman.  But how did he remove her from the equation without being stabbed a thousand times?

       Looking to the real power, he turned his attention to the Chief.  Pulling a military ID card from his pocket, he presented it to the aging Croh as a gift.

       "That's a real Century-Gate ID card right there.  One of those will get you in the front door." He reassured the elder, knowing that it mattered not what he said, only how he said it.  His tones and inflections would be all the Croh would understand of his language.  In a sense he was really just pantomiming.  But they'd get the general idea.

       Shocked by the shiny card that reflected a colorful spectrum of light, the Chief showed pleasant surprise.  He seemed fascinated by the small rectangle of polycarbonate.

       "I am Branson Freeh." He introduced himself with a bow before turning to the crowd to repeat his name a second time.  There was a murmuring as several tried to repeat the sound unsuccessfully.

       "I have come to you from afar to teach you the scripture of Branson." Slowly, and mindful of the spears, he plucked the small Gurat from his pocket.  Opening it to page seventeen, he showed the Chief an etching of beings worshiping a solar deity.  

       With a smile of agreement, the Chief happily pointed to the glowing orb in the picture and spoke one word; "Clorba!"

       The crowd murmured the name in response, all  but the Shaman, who stood glaring at Branson with daggers in her eyes.

       "I..." Branson gestured to himself, "was sent by Clorba." Gesturing to the sun above, he repeated the motion several times to let them know his origin was their sun. He knew better than to claim to be Clorba himself.  That would be an unsupportable identity.  But Emissary of the Gods was within his wheelhouse.

       Immediately the Shaman screeched and pointed at Branson.

       "Chuma! Ost mae Chuma!" Her sharpened nails were just inches away as she decried him for a demon. 

       Although Branson had little understanding of their language, he knew from contextual use that Chuma was not a good thing to be.  Shaking his head slowly, he took the time to gesture first to himself, then to the heavens above.  Next, he showed the small picture to the warriors that stood with their spears at the ready.  The etching was simple enough that even those behind the soldiers could make out the relatively familiar scene. Like most early races, the Croh worshipped the sun.  

       Really it's not an entirely illogical concept; sun worshiping, that is.  Every molecule in your body exists because of that burning ball of plasma in the sky.  Sol is the furnace in which the complex atomic materials that are our world were originally manufactured.  Additionally, life as we know it could not exist on Earth without the sun. Without Sol to warm the Earth or shower the plants with its solar rays, the whole planet would be a frozen ball of ice.  So if you are looking for your true maker, just look up at noon every day.  But back to the story...

       "Branson Freeh, is sent to you by Clorba above," he stretched his arms out to the sky in an almost theatrical manner before  turning to point at the Shaman.  "Chuma!  By the power of Clorba I vanquish you to hell!" 

       Although the accusation surprised the crowd, it was the energy blast that emanated from Branson's third arm that truly held their attention.  Seeing the beam reach out and vaporize the Shaman removed any further doubt of his divine nature.  In truth, Branson had simply used the standard-issue disruptor strapped to his forearm.  All spies were equipped with one for antiseptic assassinations.  It was the tool that would have facilitated his entire mission; delete his target and take over his life.  After all, there's no messy cleanup with a disruptor. 

       Wasting no time, the former espionage agent plucked up the Shaman's headdress before placing it on his own head.  Giving them a few seconds to absorb what they had just seen, Branson next stepped forward purposefully as he used a bare hand to slowly push down the tip of a spear.  Gesturing for them to lower their weapons, there was a second of indecision before they obeyed on their own.  Only two of the warriors had even bothered to look to the Chief for permission, the rest simply complied with Branson's order.  

       In the weeks that followed, Branson used his training to thoroughly infiltrate the local scene.  Moving into the Shaman's old house, he quickly threw out her collection of idols and dogmatic scribbling.  The Croh were in their infancy of written text, and it was usually just the ruling classes that had any literacy at all.  Still, it was not difficult for the trained intelligence officer to grasp their simple text and even expand it greatly.

       Within a year he had already begun to unfold his own brand of scripture.  Drawing from multiple religious texts he had harvested from the wrecked shuttle's database, he custom-designed a spiritual system that put him at the top of the organization.  Carefully, he had been recruiting the most liberal-minded of the local youth to his inner circle.  As his influence grew to the surrounding villages, Branson Freeh was on the verge of completely changing the structure of Croh religion when he drew the attention of the Muldiva.  These self-appointed guardians of the old faiths had no intention of permitting his blasphemy.  Think of them as the church's private mob.

       Like any organized thugs, the Muldiva took the direct approach right away.  I was shadowing Branson when I spotted the first assassin, sitting in the third row with a hard look on his face.  I managed a flicker of a smile as I thought about how this guy was about to have the surprise of his life.

       Now lemme pause here and explain something before I go any farther.  I don't want anyone thinking that we Temporal Editors do all this stuff on the fly, making it up as we go like action heroes in a Hollywood movie.  Before that very moment I had been up and down the timeline prolly a hundred times.  The entire landscape was riddled with sensors and scanners, and I had an army of Sociologists and other PHDs scattered throughout the timeline feeding me reports.  Also, I had visited 67 different alternate dimensions and examined the data from those worlds so I had a pretty concrete idea of how this would all work out in the end.   A Timelord doesn't take a crap without thoroughly researching it.  Easily 90% of my work is pure Causation.  Deciding what needs to be changed is really the bulk of my work.  Before I start stomping on butterflies I do years and years of research.

       Back to Branson and his date with death.  I knew that if I didn't intervene the guy would be cut open in front of fifty parishioners gathered under a sacred MulTew tree.  It would utterly end the religious reform movement and set me back fifty years.  But the DuNai have their own way of doing things. My goal today wasn't to just save the guy, but to take the event and turn it to my own devices.

       Fully phased, I was standing next to Branson when the assassin stood, drew a massive bone-dagger, and screamed something about blasphemy.  Most of the people gathered there recognized this guy right away.  Mosa Nol was a notorious enforcer for the Muldiva.  The guy had killed more people than cancer.

       "Brother, our faith respects your religious beliefs.  We do not denigrate your Gods.  Please respect ours." Holding out a hand, Branson felt absolute confidence as I blasted him with happy aural energy to overcome his natural tendency towards cowardice.  I needed homeboy to stand his ground without pissing his diaper.

       Paying no heed, Mosa Nol charged with murderous rage in his optical clusters.  I waited until he was just short of Branson when I diverted some of my energy to halt him.  With just a touch I imparted an image of eternal salvation into Mosa's mind, leaving him stunned mid-attack.  It was quite a scene with the murderer seemingly dumbfounded by Branson's powers.  It only took a few seconds for me to completely saturate the assassin with Emanations of a spiritual nature.  Between the Hollywood movie running in his head, and the aural energy he was being bathed in, Mosa Nol experienced a complete religious revelation.  Using the Guf, I took my time to trigger many of his worst deeds, replaying those memories in his head, but thru the eyes of his victims.  Wrapping him up in a temporally dilated field, I kept him in there for days and days as he was forced to witness horrors of his own making.  To onlookers, his entire ordeal only lasted a few seconds, but to Mosa it was one never-ending nightmare.