David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

"So where does all this fit into time travel?" Aston asked, but a gleam in his weary eyes suggested that he saw where she was headed.

"There are three main theories as to what happens in a Takeshita Translation," Ludmilla said. "One says that the whole thing is impossible; anyone who tries one simply goes acoherent and stays there. It's neat, at least, but my survival is empirical evidence that it doesn't work.

"Theory number two is Takeshita's First Hypothesis, and it says that anyone making a Takeshita Translation travels backward along the single reality stem of the Classic School. There are some problems with it, but, essentially, it says that when the traveler stops moving-drops back into phase with reality, as it were-he becomes an event which has been superimposed upon the reality stem. He, personally, exists, wherever he came from and however he got there. But since he exists, he can affect the universe, which will inevitably affect the nature of reality 'downstream' from him, with the result that-as Commander Morris put it-you really could murder your grandfather without erasing yourself. Your existence is pegged to a reality which preexists the one in which you were never born.

"Takeshita spent years on the math to support that theory, but in the last years of his life he became convinced that the Revisionists had been right all along, which created a furor amongst his followers, I can tell you! Anyway, he propounded his Second Hypothesis, which says, essentially, that the classic arguments against paradox are valid after all-that it's impossible for an individual to move into his own past. By the act of moving backward in time, he does, indeed, superimpose his existence on events, but, in the process, he causes the stream of reality to split off another tributary. In effect, he avoids paradox by forcing a divergence of 'his' subsequent personal reality line from the one which created him.

"The problem, of course," she ended with a whimsical smile, "is that no hard experimental data was ever available. Until now, that is."

Silence threatened to stretch out indefinitely until Jayne Hastings finally broke it.

"So which theory's correct?" she asked softly.

"Let's start with the basics," Ludmilla suggested. "I am here-and so is the Troll. Task Force Twenty-Three was attacked and did shoot down two Troll fighters. Those facts seem to prove that whatever happened is possible, and, further, that the Troll can do whatever it intends to do unless we stop it. Those are the pragmatic considerations. Agreed?"

Three heads nodded, and she went on.

"All right. My own feeling is that Takeshita's Second Hypothesis applies, which means that the Revisionists were right, of course. And it also means that I'm not in my past, which neatly explains the absence of any recorded nuclear attack on a US Navy task force in 2007. It didn't happen in my reality-it happened in yours."

"You mean ... you're not just from the future, you're from someone else's future?" Aston sounded a bit shaken.

"Why not? Nick Miyagi could have explained it a lot better-he always did support the Second Hypothesis." Ludmilla smiled sadly. "He almost took time to argue the point with me when we saw it happening. But, yes, that's right. I'm not from your reality-your 'universe'-at all, Dick."

"But ..." Hastings frowned as she worked through the implications. "Excuse me again, but you seem to be saying you more than half-expected the Kangas to wind up in somebody else's past."

"I did."

"Then why try to stop them?" Hastings asked very quietly. "You say your battle division was totally destroyed, along with thousands and thousands of your people. Your own fighter squadron was destroyed-in fact, you're the only survivor from your entire force. Why in God's name take such losses when these 'Kangas' couldn't even hurt your time line at all?"

"Two reasons, really, I suppose," Ludmilla said after a moment. "First, of course, we couldn't be certain. Remember, Takeshita offered two hypotheses, and neither had ever been tested. What if he'd been right the first time, and the Kangas had changed our own history?" Hastings nodded slowly, but the question remained in her eyes, and Ludmilla smiled sadly.

"Then there was the second reason," she said softly. "Whoever's past they wound up in, we knew there was going to be a human race in it. Not our own ancestors, perhaps, but still an entire planet full of human beings. Commodore Santander and I never actually discussed it, but we didn't have to. We know what Kangas and Trolls are like. There was no way we could have lived with ourselves if we'd let them murder our entire race in any time line."

Silence hovered in the compartment, and Aston reached out to clasp her hand. She returned his grip tightly enough to hurt-tightly enough to give the lie to her calm expression-and his heart ached for her. She wasn't simply adrift in time; she was adrift in a totally different, utterly alien universe, where none of the worlds she'd known would ever even come into existence. And she was the one-and only-creature of her kind who would ever exist here.

She looked at him for a moment, then smiled. He recognized the courage behind that bright, cheerful expression, but no hint of her total aloneness showed in her voice as she looked back at Hastings.

"And wherever I am, and however I got here, Commander, you've got a Troll on your hands, don't you?" Hastings nodded, and Ludmilla shrugged. "Well, that's something I understand in anyone's universe, and killing Trolls is what I do. So what do you say we put our heads together and figure out how to kill this one."

deception n. 1. The use of deceit. 2. State or fact of being deceived. 3. Ruse; trickery; imposture. [Middle English decepcioun, from Latin decipere, to deceive.]

-Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers

2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

The office of Vice Admiral Anson McLain, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet, was almost stark. Furniture was sparse, and the walls bore none of the usual outsized portraits of sailing ships or World War Two carriers fighting off kamikazes. Instead, they were adorned with framed photos of the sleek, high-tech warships of Admiral McLain's early twenty-first-century fleet, although a beautiful painting of two of the Iowa-class battleships which had recently been stricken at last to become memorial ships held pride of place behind his oversized desk.

McLain was tough as nails, young for his rank, and black. Regarded by some as the most brilliant naval officer of his generation, he'd paid his dues to crack the traditionally white ranks of the Navy's senior flag officers by being, quite simply, the best there was, of any color. He was a carrier man, a highly decorated pilot with four kills over the Persian Gulf, who had outraged big-ship aviators by supporting construction of Seawolf attack subs and supersonic V/STOL fighters at the expense of a thirteenth Nimitz-class carrier. That was typical of him, Commander Morris thought; Anson McLain did what he thought right, whatever the cost and without a trace of hesitation.

But at the moment, CINCLANT wore a definitely harassed look. Roosevelt was in for repairs, reducing his total deployable flight decks by a sixth, and two more CVNs had been diverted to watch the extremely nasty Falklands situation. Which left McLain's carriers understrength by half for normal deployments at a moment when the Balkans were heating up again. The fact that the People's Republic of China had just commissioned its second carrier didn't help matters one bit, but McLain, the CNO, and the JCS had twisted CINCPAC's arm hard enough to get the newest Nimitz, USS Midway, transferred from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic. She was en route to reinforce him now, but for the present, he was stretched thin, indeed.