Our delta ship dropped into atmosphere, engine shrilling into a scream as the air thickened. At ninety thousand feet, Jim and I leapt into icy air, leaving the delta’s warm fuselage above us. Oxygen systems whispering, we plummeted. The lights of Occupied France glittered below us like diamonds on black velvet.

I couldn’t see Jim.

I sub-vocalized, and my implants converted lip movements to words. “Jim, where are you?”

His reply sounded crisp in my head. “Right behind you.”

Splayed out on the uprushing air, I moved my fingertips and spun. He drifted into view. I moved sixty degrees off a shared center point, into our traditional triangle position.

“Randy?”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna use the correct drop formation?”

Heat crept along my neck, but I moved until we were head-to-head, falling through night. Daphne was supposed to occupy the third point.

“I miss her too, buddy.” Jim’s voice softened my oversight.

The ground swelled, a slowly inflating balloon.

Moonlight spilled silver across France, from the dark Pyrenees to the rocky coasts along the English Channel. Although the Germans demanded complete blackout, several lights winked at us anyway, bright sentinels of anarchy.

Somewhere, in the soft darkness beneath us, the Newets conspired to change our history and, by extension, our future. We intended to stop them.

Almost too late, I deployed my webcloth chute. We glided to perfectly silent landings between dark rows of trees, stripped off our chutes, then sprayed them with solvent. They dissolved into sticky puddles of goo that the first rains would wash away.

I’d joined the Time Corps with the best of intentions: repel the Newets, save humanity, and make the world free of alien intervention. Any justification to kill had been fine with me, because death wasn’t real to me back then. A vivid memory of Daphne’s body, twisted and broken, flashed in my mind. Death was forever, I now knew.

     I followed Jim to the back of a barn, its rough-hewn planks visible in the stark moonlight. Somewhere, across the vast Atlantic, my great-great grandparents slept, unaware of my presence in France.

“Anything?”

He shook his head. “We’re three klicks from our rendezvous point.”

“Good.” I checked my gear: mag rifle, six clips of shards and four stickynades. “Do you know who we are meeting?”

“Nope.”

Fifteen years my senior, Jim had carried me through dozens of battles with his calm demeanor and quiet leadership. Whenever he was nearby, everything worked out fine. Until Daphne died.

“Let’s move,” he said.

He skulked ahead and I let him get fifty meters of distance between us. His position glowed greenly in my display, and medical data scrolled alongside. Heartbeat steady, O2 concentration ninety-nine percent.

We walked in silence while around us frogs chirped sullenly.

Jim stopped moving. “We’re here.”

I scampered forward and crawled under a wagon.

Jim crept in and lay along my right side. “What’s the skybird say?”

I closed my eyes, which activated different implant software. Thirty-five thousand kilometers up, one of our cloaked satellites, geostationary and vigilant, spat a stream of data into my implants. A real-time map painted itself on the insides of my eyelids, our heat signatures circled in green, a single white dot circled in red. A hundred meters away, it moved closer.

“One coming from the north,” I whispered.

We settled into the soft ground beneath the wagon. I kept my eyes shut as the heat signature crept toward us. When it was close enough, I opened my eyes.

I dialed the mag rifle for a single shard, shouldered it, and waited. My heart hammered, the thick taste of iron filling my mouth.

In the moonlight, a young woman stepped out of shadows. She glanced behind, hunched in the moonlight, and scurried nearer. She carried something in her arms, two somethings.

I sighted the rifle’s red dot on her forehead and tightened my finger on the trigger.

“Monsieur?” her voice drifted along the ground.

“What the hell, Jim?” I dropped my rifle’s muzzle.

“Monsieur, s’il vous plaît?” she repeated, a little louder.

“Psst,” I hissed. Her head swiveled my way. She hurried over, then kneeled and peered at us.

“Why are you under there?” she asked in French.

“Hiding!” I growled, not in French.

She laughed and replied in English. “Follow me.”

She led us to a nearby barn, got us safely inside, and shut the enormous door. The woman handed Jim a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine.

“Help me.” She dragged a cloth from behind a pile of hay. We arranged it along the top of the barn door, then weighted the corners with rocks, tucking the fabric around the door’s edges. She lit a kerosene lantern, which threw dancing shadows around the interior. Jim dragged a barrel into the light and set the wine on top, then broke the bread into three pieces.

I tore into mine, not having eaten since morning, or four hundred years in the future, however one chose to look at it.

She smiled. “I’m Michelle, Fifth Regiment.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jim said.

“Randy,” I said. “And Jim.”

“The Time Corps recruited me for this assignment,” she said, “dragged me into the future, trained me, and then returned me a minute after I left.”

That was standard operating procedure.

“They told me to buy well-positioned property,” she said, “something the Newets would find useful. I bought a barn, three klicks from here.”

Jim glanced at me, chewing his bread. The same barn we’d passed on our way in.

“Three months later, their leader, Tar-Tar, came to me with an offer to buy the barn.”

Jim swallowed, then coughed. “Excuse me. Did you say his name was Tar-Tar?”

Michelle stared at him for a long moment. “Yes, do you know him?”

Jim waved a dismissive hand and went back to eating his bread, hiding a grin. I didn’t get the joke.

“Anyway, I acted afraid when he first spoke to me. I mean, who wouldn’t be surprised when a cow speaks in French?”

I took another bite of bread. Sure, they may look like cows, but they are murderous bastards. They had killed my Daphne in Greece.

“The Newet was suspicious. Had I not reacted well, he would have killed me on the spot. I allowed him to win my confidence, and eventually agreed to takes his money. They’ve been occupying the barn for three weeks.”

Jim cleared his throat. “The barn looks old.”

She shook her head. “I rebuilt the inside, soundproofed the walls and added refrigeration to make it a comfortable nest. What they didn’t notice was the passive surveillance equipment I installed. They assumed I am a simple French peasant girl, and didn’t check as thoroughly as they might have.”

I finished my bread and wiped my hands on my jump suit. “What kind of data were you able to gather?”

She dug a datastick from her apron pocket. “Here is everything they’ve said and transmitted in the last three weeks. Numbers, communication transcripts, the works.”

A tendril of hair brushed Michelle’s cheek and she blew it away. I looked away, reminded of Daphne, of her sightless eyes staring into infinity.

“They usually sleep until six in the morning,” she continued. “You have only a couple hours to get back to your extraction point. Try not to make too much noise.” She extinguished the lantern and pulled the cloth from the door. “Good luck, gentlemen. Godspeed.”

She slipped from the barn and disappeared into the night.

Jim shoved the wine bottle into his rucksack. “Let’s save this for later, shall we?”

We walked down the road, planning to attack the Newet barn, then get back to our extraction point. I slipped the datastick into my vest, behind the armor.

The sun was due to rise in an hour. We crept along the barn’s exterior. I let my fingers trail along the rough-splintered wood. Inside, I knew, Newets slept.

A black shadow loomed beneath a tree. A plaintive bellow erupted as the Newet on guard stepped into a pool of fading moonlight. It unfolded its manipulating arms from within their protective sheaths alongside its inner front legs, and it aimed a beam rifle at us.

“Shit,” mumbled Jim. He dove to the ground.

I dropped to one knee, dialed my weapon to single-shard and centered the red dot on the Newet’s forehead.

The Newet fired and a beam lanced out, hitting the broad side of the barn, narrowly missing Jim. The smell of lightning filled the air.

I pulled the trigger and a shard struck the Newet. It crashed to the ground, shaking the leaves on a nearby tree.

“Jim, hurry!” I tossed him two stickynades. Inside the barn, I heard movement.

We sprinted to opposite ends of the barn.

Two doors stood at either end, each wide enough to allow two Newets to exit at the same time. I attached two stickynades on each doorway, aiming the blast patterns in and down. We moved back a hundred meters, each covering our respective doors. Jim triggered a flash-bang and threw it against the barn. A bright, actinic glare split the night.

A mighty lowing sounded and the doors burst open. Newets stumbled out, eyes rolling in panic. I put a shard through the lead Newet’s skull. Jim activated all four stickynades and they blew, shredding the Newets as they shouldered through the doors. Warm blood splashed the new boards and the air grew thick and still. I approached slowly, counting the bodies.

“Jim. I’ve got five. How many did you get?”

His green dot flickered and turned red. His O2 levels ticked downward. He was bleeding badly. A cold fist rammed my gut.

“Jim!” I ran the length of the barn, skidding to a halt at the corner.

“Stop,” his voice came to me, weakly. He was conscious. Maybe his injuries were light. “There’s one more in the barn, inside the doorway. He’s waiting for you.”

I scrabbled in my pack for another stickynade, but only found a flashbang. “Which side of the door? Which side?”

“East.” Jim’s weak voice floated across the night air like a gossamer spiderweb. I set the flashbang’s delay for one second, swung around the corner, and hurled it into the darkness between the open doors. It blew, and a horrible bellowing erupted inside the barn.  I leapt through the doorway, firing my mag rifle, my finger locked hard on the trigger. Shard after shard pounded into the lone Newet, whose beam rifle fell to the ground. Its manipulating arms were unsheathed and its babylike hands scrabbled in the dirt, clutching at nothing.

Visions of Daphne’s body in the Carthaginian rubble taunted me, and it didn’t matter that this particular Newet had nothing to do with her death. I emptied the clip into the Newet’s steaming carcass. Spent, I collapsed to my knees, finding it hard to breathe. My heart hammered.

“Uh, Randy?” Jim called out, his voice eerily calm. “I think he’s dead?”

I ran outside to check his condition.

He chuckled at his own joke, then coughed, blood bubbling from his mouth. I cut his g-suit apart. A blue-black hole, the edges oozing, had been punched into his chest. I pulled out my aidkit and slapped gel into the open wound, then injected him with plasma builder. He grasped my arm.

Jim coughed again, then closed his eyes. “Damn Newet waited until I was framed in the doorway. I saw him too late. Rookie mistake.”

“Dumb of you.” My voice came out more ragged than I intended.

He gave me a bloody smile. “Hey,” he whispered. “I didn’t know you cared that much.”

I clenched my jaw, watching his oxygen numbers drop.

“Fuckin’ cows.” His voice a faint whisper.

I was in complete agreement.

He died. His body crumpled like a deflating beach ball. Somebody, maybe me, screamed. The moonlit sky swung around and everything went black.

#

I awoke to sunlight streaming through muslin curtains. Michelle came in wearing a yellow dress, her hair in a tight bun.

“You’re awake,” she said. “Good. You left me quite a mess last night.”

I struggled up, leaned on my elbows, and rubbed my eyes. Finding myself naked, I clutched the sheets higher.

She smiled. “You know, Randy, I didn’t think you were the bashful type. There are clothes in the closet. Help yourself.” She turned to go, pausing in the doorway. Her voice grew gentle. “I made breakfast. Come eat if you want.”

I waited until the door clicked shut, then hauled myself out of bed and got dressed.

The kitchen was tiny. Yellow wallpaper brightened the walls, and a kerosene lamp hung above the table. Tins of flour and sugar sat on a wooden shelf high on the wall. An old pump brought water into the sink, and the cabinets held simple dishes, cups and saucers with blue floral patterns.

Outside, white clouds slid across the bright sky. The gentle scent of mown hay breezed through the window.

I reached across the table and took her hand. Her warm calluses felt rough.

“Thanks for covering for me,” I said. “I appreciate your assistance.”

She stared at me for a long moment. “It frightened me when I saw you lying across your friend like that. I thought you were both dead. You moaned when I moved you, but I couldn’t find any wounds. I stripped you down only to see if you were hurt.”

I shook my head and took a swallow of coffee. It scalded my lips and tongue, burned like tracer fire down my throat. “Don’t worry about it.”

I ate, and we smoked in silence after. I coughed, unused to the tobacco’s bite. Forbidden pleasures seem sweeter when death is lurking just around the corner. Life had seemed purposeful with Daphne around; we always knew what we needed done and then did it.

Michelle looked at me across the table and took my hand again. “Do you want to talk about it?”

The memory of Daphne’s broken body lingered: her eyes staring into the great unknown, the way her pale skin contrasted with the Grecian rocks, dark blooddrops like earrings on her earlobes. 

I stubbed out my cigarette. Outside the window, the impossible blue of the clean sky, the unpolluted air, the lack of contrails: these things still amazed me.

“It’s not important,” I growled, finally.  “She’s gone and I have a mission to finish.  Let’s get to it.”

#

She showed me where the Newets had died the night before. I took it all in, looking for something new. I’d toured empty Newet nests before, and they were always the same. We spent the better part of the morning cleaning up, washing the blood away, and dismantling the carcasses. We dug a pit in one of the fields, then used a tractor to drag the bodies to it. They looked forlorn in the pit, dusted like pastries, covered in white dissolution powder.

When we finished burying the Newets, I activated my implants and requested extraction for the following morning, transmitting while Michelle and I walked to some pear trees. Confirmation came as we approached the orchard.

Under an old pear tree, a pile of freshly turned dirt covered Jim. My jaw muscles locked up again and my eyes stung. I groped for Michelle and buried my head in her neck. Her scent, like clean linen on a spring day, filled my nose. She clutched me, her strong arms holding me solid against the emotions tearing through me. My body heaved with silent sobs and she kept me upright, not saying a word, until they subsided.

We walked back to the farmhouse at noon. She stayed beside me, her eyes forward, not saying anything.

I went to take a nap, thoughts swirling. I needed time to reconsider my choices, to breathe a bit. Outside the Corps, somewhere, I was sure that a simpler life existed. The French countryside beckoned with simple loveliness. I could run away, I thought. Strip out the implants, wear these peasant clothes, and simply abandon the entire thing. I wasn’t vital to the war; thousands of others fought as well, including Michelle. Each had a part to play, a purpose in the fight. My eyelids grew heavy and I drifted off, thinking about slow-moving waters and rustic fields.

I dreamed of rampaging Newets, of rotting meat and burned hair. My father appeared, stern and angry, still young. He changed, in a flash, to the old man he’d become, and my innate fear of him turned first to pity, then to a desire to protect him, to hold him up against the weight of age bowing his shoulders and clouding his eyes. He morphed into Jim, tall and strong, and he clasped my hand. His clear eyes looked into mine and he smiled in approval and gratitude. Then he faded away.

#

The soft light of early evening streamed through the western windows. I went to the kitchen, grinding my fists into my eyes, and sat at the table. Michelle put a steak sandwich in front of me. I ate, at first without energy, then with gusto. Sleep had made me ravenous.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” I said, my voice harsher than intended. “I’ve scheduled extraction.”

Her eyes brightened, lashes dark against her pale skin. “Okay.”

I helped her with the dishes, and we sat outside on the porch, watching the last rays of sunlight kiss the Pyrenees far to the south. We shared the bottle of wine from Jim’s pack, toasting Jim and Daphne.

Later, alone in my room, I thought about Daphne, gone forever, and locked the door.

In the night, Michelle’s footsteps hesitated outside my room, and the knob turned softly. I held my breath and, after a bit, she shuffled away. Her bedsprings creaked.

I awoke the next morning to harsh sunlight filling the room. I dressed in my black g-suit, making sure the datastick was still there. I stepped off the porch, the steel-clean air fresh and biting in my lungs. The turmoil of yesterday’s emotional outburst seemed distant and irrelevant. Above, sharp-edged clouds glowed against the sky. I signaled readiness and my internal countdown clock set itself to seven minutes. I deployed the antigrav unit, its limp shock cord trailing to a simple black box.

Michelle banged open the farm door, wearing a long nightgown, and ran to me, her bare feet whisking through the dew-misted grass. She held a bottle of wine in her hands, and she stopped in front of me, thrusting it toward me.

“Here.” Her eyes searched my face. “This is a goodbye gift. It’s a nineteen-thirty-five Bordeaux.”

Hesitant, I took it from her. She put her hands on her hips and set her jaw.

“Michelle,” I began, trying to explain, but she shook her head.

The black box beeped and rose from the grass to the length of its shock cord. A minute left.

Thoughts of coming back ran through my mind: the clean country air, the smell of freshly turned earth, and the green of new seedlings.

I knew it was no good for me, and I made my face vacant. “Thanks for the wine. And thanks for helping with Jim.”

She stared at me, searching for something, and finally shrugged her shoulders. “C’est la vie.”

There was nothing left to say.

The antigrav unit lifted me off the ground. I rose, at first slowly, then with increasing speed. Her body dwindled beneath me until she became a dot, lost in the Bordeaux landscape.     

Out of the west, cruising slowly, a delta sliced a clean line through the bright sky. It snagged the shock cord high above me and reeled me in, accelerating when I got into the fuselage.

Safely snugged into a flight harness, I opened the bottle. The first mouthful exploded on my tongue. Rich earth, a tang of grapes, yeast from warm, fresh bread, the scent of country roses, all blended into a bouquet of flavor. I passed the bottle forward to the pilot, who nodded his thanks.

As the sky outside the delta faded from blue to black, the long, languorous curve of Earth’s horizon grew visible.

My home. A place worth fighting for.

I wondered, then, exactly where Michelle had gotten the steak.

The black delta split time and space and we vanished.