Simon Hawke - The Dracula Caper

Neilson was keeping them steadily posted on the progress of Grayson's investigation. Grayson was an unexpected blessing. He was doing much of their legwork for them. And Neilson's clandestine examination of Grayson's notes and files had produced an address for the missing Tony Hesketh. Rizzo had been pulled off the search for Drakov's hideout and he was now staked out in Bow Street, near Covent Garden, watching Hesketh's rooms. They were rotating their posts as best they could, shifting manpower where it was needed most, but they were still spread very thin. With the Temporal Crisis rendering the timestream unstable, the entire Temporal Corps was being spread thin. It was an insane. impossible task, trying to monitor all of history for temporal confluence points, where their timestream intersected that of the alternate timeline from which Moreau had come.

Ever since Delaney had studied Mensinger's Theories of Temporal Relativity back in Referee Corps School, he had been haunted by the feeling that irreparable damage to the timestream was inevitable. It was one of the chief factors responsible for his washing out of RCS, that and his inability to grasp the subtler concepts of temporal physics, or ten physics as the cadets in RCS had called it. Only a few could pass the stringent entrance examinations required for admission to RCS and of those only a handful ever made it through, those whose minds were capable of the intricate gymnastics necessary to arbitrate temporal conflicts as members of the Referee Corps. Delaney had not been up to the mental discipline required of temporal physicists and he had not been cold enough to maneuver battalions of temporal soldiers through historical scenarios, considering them as nothing more than factors in a point spread which determined the arbitration of international disputes. Deep down inside, Delaney had always known that he could never function as a referee, a temporal strategist; he knew he would never be able to escape the feeling that he'd he like the proverbial Dutch boy with one finger plugging up a hole in the dyke while with his other hand, planting a limpet mine to blow it open. And yet, at the same time, even while he had been frightened of the consequences of the Time Wars, he had found participation in them intoxicating. It was a life of unparalleled adventure and unprecedented risk. Once he had experienced it, he could never go back to being a civilian.

He had been among the first selected for the First Division, the elite unit of time commandos led by Moses Forester. Until then, he had been like an anti- personnel mine, buried just beneath the surface and forgotten until some hapless individual, usually an officer, strayed too close and triggered him off, making him explode. If not for Forrester, Delaney knew he would have wound up in a stockade o, still worse, cashiered from the service. A military prison, even cybernetic re-education therapy, would have been preferable to being drummed out of the Temporal Corps. There was nothing for him in civilian life. Like an attack dog trained to kill, he could not be redomesticated without a complete change in his personality. He simply knew too much. And his personality was such that he could not take any direction front inferiors. A mundane civilian job would have been out of the question. What was left? A life of crime? His ethics would not have permitted that. What then? He would have wound up as a derelict, a drunk, no doubt, or worse, a drug addict or a cybernetic dreamer, fleeing from an unacceptable reality until his body gave up on a life of desperate fantasy and surrendered to the reality of death.

Delaney had few illusions about himself. There was no place for him in the structure of society except as a soldier and even then, it took an unusual commander who would know how best to use a man such as himself. Forrester was such a man. He didn't bother with pointless military protocol and senior officers outside his unit never fully understood his methods, although they respected Forester's results. To the average officer in the Temporal Corps. Forester's First Division seemed like a cadre of mavericks and screw-ups. From the strictly military point of view, that which governed the parade ground, the First Division had no discipline. They were a group of roughnecks, most of them completely lacking spit-and-polish, devoid of even the rudiments of military courtesy. They held themselves above the other units in the service, most of them had a disdain for regulations, they were often sloppy and insubordinate and given to using their fists too readily. But out in the field, on the Minus Side of time, they were a model of efficiency. The necessity of forming a unit to deal with temporal disruptions gave rise to a need for a different breed of soldier-one who could improvise and think fast on his feet, one who did not go by the book, because the book did not cover all contingencies, and one who was more than a little crazy. It called for the sort of soldier who was too smart, too aggressive, too independent and too much of a nonconformist to fit in well with any other unit in the service.

One of the first things Forrester had done when he began to form his unit was to check through the dossiers of those soldiers in the Corps who had the worst disciplinary records in their respective units. He had known what he was looking for and he had known that, in certain cases, the difference between a man confined to a military prison and an outstanding combat soldier was an officer who knew how best to utilize the unique abilities of those placed under his command.

The fact that Delaney, who held the record in the entire Temporal Army for the most promotions and consequent reductions in grade, had finally become an officer in the First Division, and a captain, no less, was one of the bizarre ironies of his career. Another irony was that he had now become not only a soldier, but a temporal agent, an operative of the TIA, which had been brought under the same umbrella with the First Division, both combined into one unit under General Forrester's command. Delaney had never liked what he referred to as "the spooks." the quasi-military operatives of the Temporal Intelligence Agency, who seemed to be recruited primarily from among psycopaths and paranoids. And now he was one of them. Part soldier, part spy, part assassin, part counterterrorist. His worst nightmares had come true-the timestrearm had been split and now they were at war with an alternate universe. A war which was, perhaps, impossible for either side to win.

Theoretically, Delaney knew, it was possible for there to be any number of universes existing at the same time, in different dimensions or planes of reality. Neither Time nor Space was a rigid concept. Mensinger's Theories of Temporal Relativity were, like Einstein's revolutionary concepts, only theories, after all. The fact that nothing had come along to disprove them categorically only supported the theories, it did not "prove" them in the conventional sense as "laws."

The Theory of Temporal Inertia held that the "current" (a word Mensinger used loosely. primarily as an analogue) of the timestream tended to resist the disruptive influence of temporal discontinuities. According to the "father of temporal physics," the degree of this resistance was dependent upon the coefficient of the magnitude of the disruption and the Uncertainty Principle.

The element of uncertainty in temporal relativity, expressed as a coefficient of temporal inertia, represented the unknown factor in the continuity of time. Professor Mensinger had stated that in a temporal event-location which had been disrupted, it was impossible to determine the degree of deviation from the original, undisrupted historical scenario due to the lack of total accuracy in historical documentation and due to the presence of historical anomalies as a result either of temporal discontinuities or their adjustments. In other words, if something happened to influence or alter an historical event. Mensinger maintained that it was impossible to tell exactly how the original event had taken place-because there was no way of knowing exactly what all the details of the original historical event were. Historical records were never absolutely accurate and there was no way of knowing the extent to which a disruption could affect an historical scenario. Consequently, if the historical event were adjusted to compensate for a disruption, there was no way of knowing if the adjustment itself had not introduced a disruptive influence, something that might not have a noticeable effect until years later.