Simon Hawke: Lilliput Legion

She exhaled heavily and lowered the gun, being careful to put the safety back on.

Sleeping with a plasma weapon under her pillow was hazardous to the point of being suicidal, especially after she’d been drinking. It wouldn't do to incin 14

Simon Hawke erate herself in the middle of the night or wake up and start blasting away at hallucinations left over from a nightmare, but she had never learned to be comfortable without having a weapon within easy reach, whether it was a plasma pistol or a broadsword. She was a temporal agent and, as such, she was an expert with a wide variety of weapons. Control was so firmly ingrained that it was a matter of instinct. Still, her hand was shaking as she put the pistol down.

She swallowed hard, took another deep breath and leaned back against the wall.

"Damn,” she said to herself. "It's got to stop. I'm starting to lose it."

A soft red light suddenly came on above her comscreen and an electronic buzzer sounded three times in rapid succession, paused, then sounded again. General

Forrester's face appeared upon the screen.

“Lt. Cross?"

"Here sir," she said.

"Come up to my quarters, on the double."

"Sir!"

She rolled out of bed and quickly slipped into her black base fatigues. Moses Forrester was not in the habit of calling the people under his command in the middle of the night and summoning them "on the double" unless there was a dammed good reason for it. She was dressed in moments and out the door, running down the corridor toward the lift tubes.

Brigadier General Moses Forrester was an unusual commander. He was entitled to a full complement of personal security and staff at his quarters and offices atop the Headquarters Building of Pendleton Base, but he bad only four guards working two shifts, which meant that there were only two guards on duty at anyone time, plus an orderly who doubled as a secretary. Rather than wear full dress uniforms or even the less formal duty greens, Forrester insisted that his guards dress in the infinitely less impressive and more comfortable black base fatigues, which he himself preferred. No ribbons, no decorations, no insignia other than division pin and rank. This gave him the impression, he said, that he was surrounded by soldiers, rather than hotel doormen.

Formerly the commander of the elite First Division, the Time Commandos,

Forrester had been promoted and was now the director of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, which had absorbed the First Division. Although Forrester was entitled to wear civilian clothing if he chose to, he never did, except for the 19th century, green, brocade smoking jacket he liked wearing during evenings in his quarters, when he was fond of settling down with one of his cherished Dunhill or Upshall pipes and a good book. Forrester had been in the service all his life. He had enlisted straight out of high school and risen through the ranks, taking advantage of military benefits to secure an education for himself along the way. He had earned a doctorate in history, one in political science, and one in temporal physics, though he often professed to know less about the intricacies of what was more commonly called "Zen physics" than he really did.

Few people knew his exact age. He never spoke of it and no one ever had the temerity to ask. He looked positively ancient. His face was deeply lined and his hair might have been white if he had any, but Moses Forrester had shaved his head for as long as anyone could remember. However old he looked, and he looked like an old grizzly bear with haemorrhoids, he was in remarkable physical condition.

He was well over six feet tall and ramrod straight, with shoulders that filled a doorway. He had a chest like a bull and he could effortlessly curl an eighty pound dumbbell with one hand.

When he led the First Division, he knew every soldier under his command by name. He had handpicked them all. He had not had the same luxury with his new command, since he had inherited all the agents of the T.I.A. in a lump sum, but he was rapidly "weeding out the deadwood," as he put it, which had led to some resentment on the part of many of the T.I.A. personnel. Forrester didn't give a damn. The ones who would resent him were precisely the ones he wanted to get rid of. He'd get to all of them eventually.

When they had been two separate branches of government service, there had been no love lost between the First Division and the T.I.A..

There had been an intense rivalry between them. Now they were all together under one command, and it was an uneasy marriage. Forrester allowed the former soldiers of the First Division to wear their old commando insignia, a stylised number one bisected by the symbol for infinity, while the agents of the T.I.A. continued to wear their own official insignia, which consisted of the symbol for pi. (Forrester himself wore both, one on each side of his collar.) The T.I.A. insignia had always been something of an agency in-joke, as it represented a transcendental number, infinitely repeating, therefore suggesting the true nature of the Temporal Intelligence Agency-an organisation whose reach and whose agents were infinite. However, it wasn't until recently that Forrester had realised the true nature of that sly "Company" joke.

A former agency director had once requested complete data on all agency personnel and he'd been told that his request was impossible to grant. When the director had-asked why, he was told that it was because no one in the agency knew exactly how many T.I.A. agents there were. Headquarters staff was one thing, but section chiefs out in the field had virtually complete autonomy to function on their own, to pick and choose their own personnel, either recruiting from other units or from civilians in the field, and they had literal carte blanche in their budgets. requesting whatever they thought they needed to maintain their sections. Usually, they got their allocations with no questions asked.

When Forrester reviewed the budget of the T.I.A., which was among the agency's most closely guarded secrets, he had been absolutely staggered. Not only did the T.I.A. command the single largest budget among all the government services, but it appeared that many of its operatives generated their own supplementary budget on the side, as well. A large number of individual field agents, section chiefs and even department heads were covertly involved in everything from legitimate businesses to organised crime, including such unsavoury pursuits as gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, Contract assassination and using time travel to conduct stock manipulations.

Forrester was aghast. He had previously encountered the Temporal Underground, a loosely connected organisation of deserters from the future who had managed to set up a sort of transtemporal underground society, but now it turned out that the

T.I.A. had its own version of the Underground, known as the "Network," and that over the years, these renegade covert field agents had set up an entire transtemporal economy. Forrester's investigations had only revealed the very tip of the iceberg.

There was even a rumour that an entire 21st century American crime family was, in fact, a Network operation, funnelling profits into the past in what had to be the most elaborate laundering scheme in history. Wealth generated by organised crime in one time period financed complex operations in earlier centuries that were aimed at placing Network agents in key positions in governments and in the private sector, thereby enabling them to skim profits and set up complicated secret trust funds and numbered accounts that would, over the years, mature and be passed on to individuals designated as "Network affiliates" — people in the past who looked after Network interests in exchange for wealth and power. The end result was a cyclical economy that fed upon itself and grew by exponential leaps and bounds.