Event Zero

by johnnedwill

And then there is nowhen left to go.

When I volunteered for the mission I knew it was going to be suicide. Not for me - but for the rest of the universe. That's the problem with temporal warfare. If you succeed, then the universe you have known ceases to be. The only person who remembers it is you. But if we could shape reality to the way we wanted it, then we would have won and the enemy would never have existed. Of course, the enemy was trying to do the same to us.

I interface with my cruiser's systems one last time. My vessel is still plunging back through time, pursued by the shredder. It is a race that cannot be won, only lost. There is only one way that my mission can end. The cruiser will keep on its evasive course, heading deeper and deeper into the past until ...

The temporal coordinates had been programmed into my cruiser and I had been given my orders. I was to travel to a point in time approximately a century into the future. By destroying an enemy interdiction beacon, I would allow one of our fleets to carry out a strike in our the enemy's past. Beyond that I knew nothing else - not that I would have understood it. Only the staff at headquarters, concealed in one of the null zones, and the AIs advising them knew the big picture.

The cruiser's survival protocols kick in, and it phases out of real-space and into the grey potentialities of the unreal. I feel space and time twisting around me as we try to shake the shredder, but we cannot. By some fluke of misbegotten chance, it has been dragged into our temporal wake and is following us. No matter what manoeuvres the cruiser puts itself through, the shredder continues to follow us. The cruiser's brain sifts through the quantum timelines, searching for a timeline where we survive. But there are none. And so we flee into the past.

We emerged into real-space, the grey of ghost-space fading into reality. The target was exactly where it was meant to be: a quantum sculpture writ large, subjecting the space around it to the enemy's maxims. I adjusted the cruiser's heading so that I had a clear shot. Then space shifted. Between the cruiser and the target a form materialised. It was a shredder - a weapon designed not just to kill, but to ensure its target was erased from history so that they could never be restored.

Situation N. It is programmed into the systems of every temporal vessel, only for use in the direst of situations. As the shredder closed in on us, the cruiser analyses the situation. In real-space we didn't stand a chance: our destruction is guaranteed. The cruiser flashed the request into my brain: Situation N engage? I give my permission.