Thermopylae Protocol

Book : Gordian Division

by David Weber, Jacob Holo

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction; Time Travel

Synopsis

NEW NOVEL IN THE BEST-SELLING GORDIAN DIVISION SERIES FROM NYT BEST-SELLING AUTHOR DAVID WEBER AND JACOB HOLO: When a ship from an uncharted universe explodes, it soon becomes apparent that someone is building a massive weapon away from the watchful eyes of the Gordian Division. Agent Cho and Detective Cantrell are deployed to get to the bottom of the mystery. If they don’t it, means destruction on a universal scale.

A Time Storm is Brewing.

After an industrial ship carrying advanced self-replicating machines explodes on its way to Mercury, analysis of the wreckage reveals it to be forty years too old. Raibert Kaminski, the Gordian Division’s top agent, and his crew on the TransTemporal Vehicle Kleio soon discover the ship was transported to an uncharted universe, one with temporarily accelerated time. Forty years passed for the ship’s industrial machines while everyone else experienced only a few short days. Raibert is certain a powerful weapon of some nature has been built out in the unexplored reaches of the multiverse, but where and by whom remains unknown.

The search is on, and the Gordian Division musters its fleet of time machines at Providence, a massive transdimensional station under construction. They call upon their allies from the militaristic Admin for aid in their search—but before plans can be formalized, the leader of the Admin’s Department of Temporal Investigation is murdered while visiting Providence, and the joint operation is thrown into chaos.

Accusations fly and tensions mount between the two organizations. Detectives Isaac Cho and Susan Cantrell—both fast becoming experts in transdimensional crime—are dispatched to Providence. But the clock is ticking for the detectives and Raibert’s crew. A vast, powerful conspiracy has shuddered into motion, and the two teams may be all that stand between it and destruction on a universal scale.

Praise for The Gordian Protocol:

“Tom Clancy-esque exposition of technical details . . . absurd humor and bloody action. Echoes of Robert Heinlein . . . lots of exploding temporal spaceships and bodies . . . action-packed . . .” —Booklist

“[A] fun and thrilling standalone from Weber and Holo. . . . Time travel enthusiasts will enjoy the moral dilemmas, nonstop action, and crisp writing.” —Publishers Weekly

Praise for David Weber:
“[A] balanced mix of interstellar intrigue, counterespionage, and epic fleet action . . . with all the hard- and software details and tactical proficiency that Weber delivers like no one else; along with a large cast of well-developed, believable characters, giving each clash of fleets emotional weight.” —Booklist

“Compelling combat combined with engaging characters for a great space opera adventure.” —Locus

Praise for Jacob Holo:

“An entertaining sci-fi action novel with light overtones of dystopian and political thrillers.” —Kirkus Reviews on The Dragons of Jupiter

“Thrilling . . . sci-fi adventure.” —Kirkus Reviews on Time Reavers

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 384

Sample

PROLOGUE

SourceCode Industrial Carrier Grand Sculptor

SysGov, 2981 CE

 

“Look at it this way. It could be worse.”

Antoni Ruckman, lead engineer of the Dyson Realization Project, turned to face his brother with the slow, deliberate motion of a man who refused to believe the nonsense assaulting his ears.

“Excuse me?” he replied.

“It could be worse,” Bradley Ruckman repeated. And then, as if realizing his statement hadn’t been well received, flashed a defensive, almost apologetic smile.

“How, exactly?” Antoni asked.

“Well, we could have been on board when the ship blew up.”

Antoni let out a noncommittal harrumph, then turned back to face the source of his ire.

A false color image of Reality Flux hovered above the bridge’s command table. Or rather, a projection of the ship’s expanding debris cloud. A trio of labeled icons swam about the periphery: two Consolidated System Police corvettes and the Grand Sculptor, which SourceCode’s upper management had detached from their construction fleet to assist SysPol.

Reality Flux had been one of SourceCode’s older autonomous constructors. Perhaps not as well maintained as the rest of the construction fleet—its departure from SourceCode HQ’s Saturnian orbit had been delayed due to a reactor imbalance—but to have exploded on the way to Mercury? Accidents happened, but what were the odds the reactor would fail so spectacularly after receiving additional maintenance?

Not very high.

Antoni shook his head, his eyes locked forward, jawline tense, almost to the point of forming a snarl.

“Hey.” Bradley placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be fine.”

“This screws up our whole timetable. We’re going to lose months because of this fiasco. Months!”

“Of course we will. But look at the bright side. All we lost is equipment. No one died when Reality Flux blew; it was catching up to the fleet on full auto. And besides, no one’s going to blame you for this.”

“That’s not why I’m upset,” Antoni growled under his breath, fingertips resting on the command table.

“Then why?”

“It’s…” Antoni paused and regarded his brother once more.

The two men looked identical, with dark skin and trim heads of black hair that extended down into generous, curling sideburns. They even wore matching black business suits, though the more complex green tracery on Antoni’s served as a subtle nod to his position as lead engineer. Either man could have changed his appearance at any time to create greater visual separation; they were both abstract citizens, after all. Their appearances were purely virtual, even if the avatars were modeled on Antoni’s original organic body before he’d transitioned to a virtual existence.

The round bridge they stood in was equally abstract, the environment running within Grand Sculptor’s infostructure. SourceCode employed very few organic citizens, and Grand Sculptor lacked a physical bridge entirely.

Bradley waited beside him, a patient question in his eyes.

“It’s…” Antoni turned away once more and gritted his teeth together. “I thought we were past this sort of crap!”

“You think it’s sabotage?”

“What else could it be? Take your pick who it might be this time! Maybe the nuts over at the Mercury Historical Preservation Society! Or perhaps our competitors over at Atlas again, trying one last time to undermine us! Never mind what happened to you—”

He paused, his open hand pointed toward Bradley. He lowered it and frowned.

“Sorry,” he apologized softly. “I didn’t mean to dig up bad memories.”

“It’s all right.” Bradley paused, then shrugged. “I’ve been doing a lot better recently."

“I know you have, and I’m proud of you for that. I know it hasn’t been easy.”

Bradley smiled and glanced away bashfully.

Bradley Ruckman had started his existence as an illegal copy of Antoni’s connectome—the neural map of his mind—which criminals had then modified to make him more docile and easier to extract information from. The damage had been extensive—almost irreversible—by the time SysPol rescued him from the copy-kidnappers. Doctors at Saturn’s Connectome Wellness Center had worked a small miracle piecing his mutilated mind back together, but the aftershocks of the trauma lingered on, even five months after the incident. Both men still transmitted over to the CWC for weekly therapy sessions.

“It’s just…I’ve had it with people messing with our lives!” Antoni brought a horizontal hand up to his throat. “I’ve had it up to here!”

“It might still be an accident.”

“Not likely!”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. If anything survived intact, it should be the black box.”

Antoni let out a long, calming exhale, then nodded in agreement.

Even though he was an abstract being, his connectome didn’t exist in isolation. A biochemical simulation ran in parallel with his neural map, which allowed certain acts—such as releasing a deep breath—to affect his mood.

“I suppose you’re right.”

Antoni pulled up a schematic of the pre-explosion Reality Flux.

The design resembled a line of five fat spheres joined together by thick bracketing. The ship’s hot singularity reactor had been housed in Sphere Five while the black box and control systems had been part of Sphere One. Not only was the black box designed to survive most of the violent ends that could befall spacecraft, it was also located at the farthest point from the explosion’s source.

Antoni switched the image back to the debris cloud.

Judging by the chunks SysPol’s already tracked down, he thought, a good portion of the ship survived the explosion. Just…not in one piece.

“Chief Engineer Ruckman,” said the ship’s nonsentient attendant program, “Executive Xian would like to speak with you.”

“Of course he would,” Antoni grumbled. “Should I transfer over to his ship?”

“No, Chief Engineer. Executive Xian plans to transmit from Radical Architect to this ship a few minutes from now. I am sorry, but he was not more specific about his departure time.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll wait here.”

Six minutes later, a man in a black-and-green suit appeared on the far side of the command

table. His pale skin resembled wax paper, and the soft glow in his white eyes wavered, giving the impression of candle flames flickering within his head.

“How bad is it?” Junior Executive Xian asked, clasping origami hands behind his back.

“If you’re looking for reassurances, look elsewhere,” Antoni said. “All I can give you is honesty with a light garnish of shattered dreams.”

“I would expect nothing less,” Xian replied neutrally, then glanced over the false-color debris field. “That looks bad.”

“Because it is. The ship exploded.”

“Hmm.” Xian took in the display. “So it would seem. Casualties?”

“None, thankfully. The ship was on auto.”

“At least there’s that.” Xian sighed, and his shoulders lost some of their rigidity. “Do we know what destroyed it?”

“Initial assessment from SysPol is a catastrophic failure in the hot singularity reactor.”

“And your thoughts on their theory?”

“Barring an external device, I don’t see how it couldn’t be the reactor. We’re hoping they’ll recover the black box. Once we have our hands on the flight data, we should know more. SysPol’s already requested our assistance in the investigation. We’ll have access to the raw data roughly in sync with their forensics teams, and we’ll have the opportunity to provide input before they file any reports.”

Xian didn’t so much as bat an eye at the mention of an “external device.” Not with the long history of criminals and malcontents working to undermine the Dyson Realization Project and SourceCode’s involvement in it.

“Anything unusual leading up to the incident?” the executive asked.

“Just one minor inconsistency,” Antoni said. “Bradley noticed a gap in the Flux’s reporting. In automatic, the ship sends an hourly log to its command vessel, which is Grand Sculptor. Most of the logs look perfectly normal, but one from about a day ago was received late.”

“And we didn’t notice?”

“Grand Sculptor’s attendant did, but it was flagged as a low-priority warning, and a resend request was transmitted automatically to Reality Flux. The ships were about twenty-four light-minutes apart at the time, and the second log was received with the expected transmission delay, so the alarm was cleared automatically and never brought to our attention. The attendant would have notified us if there’d been a prolonged communication blackout.”

“I see,” Xian said. “Why wasn’t Reality Flux with the rest of the fleet?”

“It left HQ late due to a reactor issue.”

“Enough of an issue to cause this?” Xian indicated the display.

“I don’t see how, but I suppose it’s possible. After the reactor was rebalanced, the ship was placed on a full-thrust course for Mercury to make up for lost time.”

Xian raised a paper eyebrow. “We maxed out the ship with the dodgy reactor?”

“Don’t look at me,” Antoni defended stiffly. “Maintenance certified the craft ready for deployment with no restrictions. If you have a problem with me trying to keep to our original schedule, take it up with them.”

“Just asking the questions the other execs will ask me,” Xian replied, his tone lacking any edge of confrontation. “What sort of impact are we looking at?”

“This is going to shift the whole blasted schedule.”

“By how much?”

“The Flux’s reservoirs were carrying half our self-replicator seed volume for this job. Without those microbots, we either need to manufacture replacements back at HQ and haul them over here or use the ones we do have to replicate additional swarms. Both options will be time intensive. You’re looking at two months minimum. Maybe three.”

“Is any of the lost volume recoverable?”

“I don’t see how. What wasn’t vaporized is scattered all over the place.”

“Hmm.” Xian pursed his lips. “Anything else to add?”

“Not until SysPol finds our black box.”

“All right. Keep me informed of any developments. In the meantime”—Xian’s frown creased his paper face—“I now need to make my own report to the rest of the board.”

“Good luck with that.”

Xian grunted and vanished.

* * *

It took SysPol a little over five hours to track down the piece of wreckage containing the black box and another twenty minutes to pull the log files and transmit them to Grand Sculptor. Antoni and Bradley spent the next few hours poring over the logs.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Antoni asked his brother after a long period of silence. The two men stood on either side of the bridge command table, reports and diagrams cluttering the space between them.

“Well, we do come from the same mental stock.” Bradley shrugged. “So, probably?”

“Fair enough.” Antoni permitted himself a humorless smile. “If you ask me, this whole mess paints a rather unflattering picture of our maintenance department. Sure, they addressed the imbalance that took the ship off-line, but they missed a subtler secondary problem, and it looks like their repairs made that one worse. Then, to compound matters, we pushed the reactor hard for a few days so the ship

could catch up, and then”—he spread his hands grandly—“boom.”

“I agree with you to a point.” Bradley held up a finger. “But the problem I have with that scenario is the reactor’s own diagnostics should have caught this problem before it became critical. Instead, the logs show normal operations up until a few seconds before the shell blew open.”

“Overly normal, if you ask me. All those sensors had to be yanked out when they worked on the reactor. Some of them could have been reinstalled incorrectly, causing us to miss the impending disaster.”

“Maybe, but that seems like a lot of shoddy maintenance work.”

“What are you suggesting, then? That someone deliberately botched the repairs?”

“I…” Bradley hesitated, then frowned. “I don’t know what I’m saying yet, other than I’m not ready to buy the maintenance angle.” He lowered his head and added a new tab to one of his reports.

And with that, Antoni knew the conversation was over. Bradley had a habit of ending conversations unilaterally when he had nothing more to say, and Antoni had found it best to leave him be when that happened.

Antoni returned to his own report. He understood his brother’s hesitancy, but the more he dug through the data, the more corroboration he found that their own maintenance team had screwed up.

“Chief Engineer Ruckman,” said Grand Sculptor’s attendant, “I have a message from Executive Xian. He is requesting an update on your review of the black box data.”

“I figured we were due for a little managerial nagging,” Antoni grumbled.

“Is that the response you would like me to send him?”

“Hell, no! Tell him he can join us at his convenience.”

“Yes, Chief Engineer.”

Xian appeared on the bridge less than a minute later.

“Well? What do we have?”

“Nothing conclusive,” Antoni said, “but the evidence is building that HQ messed up the repair, leading to the reactor blowing.”

“I see.” Xian’s candlelit eyes flicked across the reports, then back to the twin Ruckmans. “Was the reactor one of ours?”

“No. Flux used a custom model designed and built by the Mitchell Group.”

“Why not one of ours? Don’t we make products in that power and performance range?”

“We do nowadays, but Reality Flux was one of our oldest ships. We weren’t as deep into the hot singularity market back then, so we subcontracted the reactors and several other systems.”

“I hadn’t realized that.” Xian looked down and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I wonder if we can use that to deflect some of the blame.”

“I’d be careful before venturing down that road. If you ask me, the ship exploded because our own team messed up.”

“And why did it explode?”

“The reactor was out of balance, and the imbalance grew worse until the outer shell cracked.”

“Which means?”

“Just what I said.” Antoni put a hand on his hip. “How familiar are you with hot singularity reactors?”

“Not terribly. Self-replicators are more my area of expertise.”

“Then would you like a refresher?”

Xian raised his lidded, somewhat suspicious eyes.

“All right, but don’t go overboard,” the executive warned. “I know how you engineers can be.”

“I promise I’ll be gentle.” Antoni flashed a disarming smile. “First, understand that ‘hot singularity’ is a bit of a misnomer. It’s shorthand for what is essentially a fake black hole encased within a shell of exotic matter. The matter inside the core emits Hawking radiation, which is collected by the shell and used to power other systems. Black holes evaporate at a rate inversely proportional to their mass, and these reactors deal with such low mass values—fourteen hundred tons for the Flux—that the energy released by a real black hole of that size would be catastrophically rapid!”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Maybe a little. Anyway, the positive mass inside the reactor’s core and the negative mass in the shell are segregated from basically nothing during construction. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the important point is they form two halves of a balanced nothingness. Also, that’s what they’re supposed to return to during a critical failure. The positive and negative mass-energy components of the system collapse and cancel each other out.”

“Which didn’t happen this time,” Xian said dryly.

“Because the two halves were severely out of balance. Normally, an imbalance isn’t a major concern. As a general rule, hot singularity reactors are stable and resilient, but if a problem like this is allowed to grow, the disparity in the system will eventually reach a critical threshold. To the point where the system collapses in on itself. When that happens, most of the mass-energy cancels out, but any surplus is released.”

“Boom?”

“Boom. That’s why the reactor was being worked on back at HQ.”

“Which should have prevented the boom, not caused it.”

“It seems the repairs were executed poorly.”

“Could the failure have been caused by an outside party?” Xian asked, perhaps a little too hopefully.

“We can’t rule anything out this early, but I haven’t seen any signs of—”

“Aha!” Bradley exclaimed. He looked up with a wide grin, and the other two men faced him.

“Ahh-hah?” Xian

cocked an eyebrow.

“Found something?” Antoni asked, leaving off the please-don’t-embarrass-us-in-front-of-the-boss part. Whatever his brother had found, Antoni would have preferred he and Bradley review it together first before discussing it in front of Xian. Giving half-baked information to a manager was ill-advised at the best of times, and that went double now that Xian was on the hunt for a scapegoat.

“It’s fake,” Bradley declared boldly.

“What’s fake?” Xian asked.

“All of it. The whole thing!”

“I’m sorry,” Antoni said. “You lost me.”

“The black box data!” Bradley smiled, almost gleefully. “Someone tampered with it!”

“What?” Antoni hurried over to his brother’s side. “How can you tell?”

“Here.” Bradley pointed to one of his charts. “See for yourself.”

Antoni joined his brother, and Xian came up behind them, peering at the data between their shoulders.

“What am I looking at?” Xian asked.

“Some of the black box metadata,” Antoni said. “Time stamps, file sizes, access logs. That sort of thing.”

“Now take a look at this!” Bradley jabbed a line near the bottom.

“That’s…a date,” Xian observed blandly.

“Exactly!”

“I don’t see the significance. What’s got you so excited?”

“Wait a second.” Antoni leaned closer. “Did that date come from the box’s atomic clock?”

“You’ve got it!” Bradley beamed at him.

“But then…how can that be?”

“Care to explain?” Xian asked.

“Bradley spotted a discrepancy in the time stamps.” Antoni scrolled through metadata. Sure enough, all the other dates looked normal.

But then, Antoni thought, all of those are generated by software, and software is malleable by definition. A skilled individual with the time and access could have hacked these records. But the date from the atomic clock comes from hardware. A hacker couldn’t touch that without physical access to the black box, and even then, it’s an easy feature to miss.

“What sort of discrepancy?” Xian asked.

“Well, according to this,” Antoni began, then paused to lick his lips, “the ship was forty years older than it should have been when it exploded.”

 

CHAPTER ONE

Argus Station

SysGov, 2981 CE

 

Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder sat across from the reporter, back straight, eyes alert, his feldgrau Gordian Division uniform immaculate in the studio lighting. The reporter’s garb was equally sharp, his dark blue business suit accented with a scarf bedazzled with shifting stars and colorful nebulae.

The reporter smiled toothily at him, an expression that held all the warmth of a reactor’s cryogenic plant.

Klaus-Wilhelm kept his jawline still, suppressing any outward expression of his discomfort through sheer force of will. He was not looking forward to this.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen and abstracts. This is LNN’s Live Wire, and I’m your host, Sergei Radulov. Today, we have a rare interview with one of the biggest names in SysGov. He’s a man plucked from an alternate version of 1958, a commander who’s earned the moniker ‘living legend’ from friend and foe alike. He served as a graf of imperial Germany, a four-star general over an entire Panzer army, the leader of the campaign to liberate Ukraine from the clutches of Joseph Stalin, the provisional governor of said nation, and then finally as the commissioner of our very own Gordian Division. I am, of course, talking about Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder.”

Radulov shifted in his seat, facing Klaus-Wilhelm with another one of those fake smiles.

“Commissioner, a pleasure to have you on the program.”

“Sergei.” He gave the reporter a neutral nod.

“It’s hard to believe you’ve only been with us for fourteen months. How has life in the thirtieth century been treating you?”

“It’s kept me busy more than anything else. Every day brings a new set of challenges.”

“I’ll bet. Do you ever find living in the True Present overwhelming?”

“No, not especially.”

“Come now, Commissioner. Surely there’s something that’s given you trouble. You skipped a thousand years of history. Modern SysGov must have come as quite the shock to you.”

“The technology certainly had its share of surprises for me, time travel included. But ultimately, tech is simply a set of tools. The ones we have now are far more powerful than those available in my native time, but they’re still tools that can be wielded for good or ill. It’s the people wielding them that matter most.”

“And what of those people? Surely, our society startled you at least a little.”

“Not really. Again, I’d say I was surprised more than anything. Yes, the ability to virtualize consciousness is truly remarkable. But people are still people, whether they’re organic, synthetic, or abstract. The vessel holding the mind doesn’t matter to me; only the quality of the individual.”

“A commendable perspective. One I’m sure we all wished more people held.”

Radulov paused to smile again.

Here it comes, Klaus-Wilhelm thought.

“Commissioner, as you know, we’re fast approaching the one-year anniversary of the Dynasty Crisis, which saw the Gordian Division take center stage for the first time. Now, no one would dispute that your division was instrumental in pulling our collective feet out of the fire, but the fact remains that over seventy-one thousand people suffered permanent death from the Dynasty’s attack on the L5 Hub. There are some who say the Gordian Division hasn’t done enough to remedy that loss of life.”

“Who?”

Radulov paused ever so slightly, perhaps taken aback by the sudden question.

“I’m sorry, Commissioner?”

“Who says we haven’t done enough?”

“Why, concerned citizens, of course.”

“How many of them?

 Are we talking about three people griping on a forum or a political movement three million strong? And, more importantly, what are their backgrounds when it comes to understanding and appreciating how dangerous time travel is?”

“Commissioner, I believe you’re getting distracted from the issue. People are merely asking why Gordian Division, as the temporal arm of SysPol, hasn’t undone the greatest tragedy of this century.”

“Because we can’t.”

“Can’t, Commissioner?” Radulov leaned forward. “Or won’t?”

“Can’t. It is impossible for us to change our own past. Even if we set out to achieve that goal—which would be a fool’s errand for countless reasons—all we would accomplish is the creation of a new universe. Our past and those deaths would still all be there.”

“But those victims would be alive, would they not? The only distinction being they would exist within a branch in the timeline.”

“At what cost? Meddling with the past is what brought about the Gordian Knot and nearly destroyed fifteen universes, including this one. That’s why both we and the Admin signed the Gordian Protocol, along with all its limitations on time travel. We must never again place all of creation at risk. Not for a thousand lives. Or ten thousand or a million or even a billion, because the cost of failure is oblivion for everyone.”

“I understand that, Commissioner. But there are some who’ve suggested an alternative exists for bringing back those people. One that doesn’t spawn a new universe or violate the Gordian Protocol. In fact, it’s a method that’s been used many times in the past.”

“You’re referring to how the Antiquities Rescue Trust used to travel back in time and pluck famous people and artifacts out of history?”

“I am, Commissioner.”

“Temporal replication, as a practice, contributed to the formation of the Gordian Knot, which again leads us to the same problem.”

“But couldn’t temporal replication be used to bring them back? To undo the tragedy? Isn’t it true that changes to the past don’t necessarily result in the creation of a new universe?”

“That much is correct. The change must be substantial enough to overcome time’s natural inertia for a new universe to form. Otherwise, the past rebounds back into its original shape.”

“Then why not use that method to save those lives?”

“Because now we’re talking about violating the Valkyrie Protocol. Need I remind you that the Dynasty’s entire timeline imploded in on itself because of their rampant replication industry. Are these ‘concerned citizens’ suggesting we instigate a similar collapse in our own timeline?”

“Of course not, Commissioner. It’s merely being suggested—”

“And I’m shooting their suggestions down. Both the Gordian and Valkyrie protocols

are there for very good reasons, first and foremost of which is the threat reckless time travel has proven to be.”

“Commissioner, please—”

“If your viewers are still wondering why we in the Gordian Division refuse to bend the timeline into pretzels just to suit our immediate needs, then I suggest they open a screen, run a search on either protocol, and start reading.”

* * *

“His interview is over. Positions, everyone!”

Agent Raibert Kaminski of SysPol’s Gordian Division had timed the ambush perfectly. He had to, for his target was none other than Klaus-Wilhelm von Schröder. Such a foe was not to be underestimated! Especially when he weighed the man’s numerous accomplishments against Raibert’s humble background studying ancient history.

But that difference would make his victory all the sweeter.

Raibert pressed his back against the wall by the executive entrance to Gordian Operations. Abstract data displays covered the walls of the wide, circular room and more hovered within its center while two dozen Gordian agents—both physical and abstract—milled about in a deliberate pantomime of business-as-usual.

Footsteps echoed through the entrance’s programmable-steel shutter, signaling the approach of his quarry.

“Here he comes,” Raibert whispered, raising his chosen weapon to his lips. He waited beside the door with all the patience of an assassin.

The door split open, and Klaus-Wilhelm strode out, back straight, shoulders square, head high, and eyes forward. He wore the grayish green of the Gordian Division with the golden eye and drawn-sword division patch on his shoulder alongside his commissioner insignia.

And then he stopped at the threshold.

Had some small detail caught the Commissioner’s eye? The man’s instincts were unbelievably sharp, despite having been transplanted from the twentieth century to the thirtieth. Or perhaps because of this translated nature his astute eyes could pick out details a native to the True Present might miss.

Raibert began to worry, but then Klaus-Wilhelm gave Operations a small, disproving shake of his head—

—and stepped through the doorway.

“Surprise!” the room chorused.

Confetti poppers rigged on either side of the door burst open, showering Klaus-Wilhelm with sparkling, multicolored squares, and Raibert blew hard into his party favor, which unfurled into a red-with-white-dotted paper tongue and honked obnoxiously in the Commissioner’s ear.

Klaus-Wilhelm paused and regarded the room with narrow eyes, his lips pressed together,

forming a line that threatened to dip into a frown. He casually reached up to one shoulder and brushed the glitter away.

“Raibert?”

“Yes, boss?” he replied, party favor suspended in his lips.

“Refresh my memory. Haven’t we discussed your overly casual approach to our organization?”

“We have.” Raibert withdrew the party favor. “Once or twice, I think.”

“And?”

“I get results, don’t I?”

“I never said you didn’t. Still”—Klaus-Wilhelm brushed confetti off the other shoulder—“perhaps another discussion is in order.”

“You say that now, but did you realize today is a special day?”

Klaus-Wilhelm plucked a silvery square off his breast and gazed into it as if it contained the secrets of the universe—or several universes, as was the case with Gordian Division business—but then he frowned at what was only his distorted reflection and flicked it away.

“The significance seems to have slipped my mind.”

“That’s only because you haven’t heard the news.” Raibert swept an arm across Gordian Operations. “We hit a major milestone!”

An abstract banner unfurled, sagging across the center of the room in everyone’s shared virtual vision. The colorful, paper cutout letters spelled 100 UNIVERSES!! Raibert had insisted on adding the second exclamation point.

“That many already?” Klaus-Wilhelm’s stern face softened ever so slightly.

“Quite a leap since we mapped the Local 15, wouldn’t you say?” Raibert asked, referring to the fifteen universes that survived the Gordian Knot and formed a cluster around SysGov. “The surveys are in all the way up to universe one hundred two, and you know what a milestone means?”

“My body trembles with anticipation.”

“They’re excuses to celebrate!” Raibert threw his arms up in triumph. “Come on, boss! We’ve got cake.”

He guided the Commissioner toward the table tucked off to the side, laden with plates, utensils, glasses, a punch bowl, coffee, tea, and yes, a huge rectangular cake.

“Butterkuchen,” Klaus-Wilhelm observed, his expression warming even more at the sight of the yellowish German butter cake topped with sugar and streusel.

“See? We even printed out your favorite.”

“Well, if you insist.” The hint of an approving smile curled Klaus-Wilhelm’s lips. “I suppose a little festivity now and then won’t hurt anyone.” 

The room exhaled a quiet sigh of relief, and a queue for cake began to form now that they had the boss’s approval. Raibert served the Commissioner the first slice and then joined him off to the side with his own plate.

“Was this your idea?” Klaus-Wilhelm asked, forking in the first bite.

“Not entirely,” Raibert replied. “More of a group effort.”

“Grossvater,” Agent Benjamin Schröder said with a respectful nod, joining them along with his wife, Agent Elzbietá Schröder.

Both Schröder men were tall and broad-shouldered with the same penetrating gray eyes, though the particulars of their first time-hopping adventure—and when each man had been pulled from history—along with access to thirtieth-century medicine, had rendered them visually more like brothers than grandfather and grandson. Or perhaps cousins, given Klaus-Wilhelm’s buzz of blond hair and Benjamin’s much darker coloration inherited from his mother.

Raibert stood taller and broader than both with his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, but that was thanks to the synthoid he and his integrated companion had liberated from the System Cooperative Administration. It had been over a year since he unwillingly transitioned from his original flesh and blood, and he’d grown to consider this larger, more muscular form to be the “true Raibert.” It certainly didn’t hurt to have a durable synthetic body in his line of work!

Elzbietá chewed and swallowed a forkful from her own cake, then cleared her throat.

“We all chipped in,” she said before snagging her second bite off Benjamin’s plate, prompting him to give her some fierce side-eye.

“Excuse me?” Benjamin asked. “Don’t you have your own?”

“But yours looked more delicious.”

“What are you talking about? It all came from the same cake.”

“I know.” Elzbietá stabbed a second moist forkful off his plate.

“Fine.” Benjamin held it out for her. “Help yourself.”

Elzbietá resumed eating her own cake.

“What’s wrong now?” Benjamin asked.

“It’s no fun if you don’t make me work for it.”

Benjamin let out a patient sigh and resumed eating his cake.

“I don’t see Philosophus.” Klaus-Wilhelm glanced around the room. “Is he not coming?”

“In a bit,” Raibert said. “He and a few other agents are covering for us while we celebrate. Wouldn’t you know it, but Themis Division called right before you came in. Something about an exploding spaceship. He should be around once it’s taken care of.”

“I’m beginning to think ‘conspiracy’ might be the best word for what you lot put together,” Klaus-Wilhelm said with a glint of playfulness

in his eyes.

“Something like that,” Elzbietá said. “Though, if you recall, we never properly celebrated your promotion to commissioner, either.”

“We were too busy picking up the pieces after we saved reality from itself.” Benjamin paused and frowned. “Again.”

“Yeah. There wath thah,” Elzbietá muttered around a mouthful of cake.

“Speaking of which”—Raibert set his cake down—“got a question for you, boss.”

“Fire away.”

“It’s about the different versions of Earth we’re cataloguing out there in the transverse. Shouldn’t we be doing something about them?”

“Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know. Some of the Earths—the barren ones with no people—aren’t really an issue. Don’t see any reason why we couldn’t colonize those someday. But there are plenty of others out there with thriving human societies from all across the development spectrum.”

“Or their remnants,” Benjamin pointed out.

“Yes.” Raibert nodded sadly. “Those, too. And that’s part of my point. Would those societies have died out if someone had come along to lend a helping hand? You know, maybe shown them the ropes as they worked their way out of the technological cradle.”

“Someone like us?” Klaus-Wilhelm asked guardedly.

“Maybe. The more we search, the more evidence we find that SysGov and the Admin are outliers. We’re unusual because we survived our first, stumbling steps into the realm of post-scarcity and transtemporal tech. From the looks of it, most societies don’t make it past that point.”

“Probably because sufficiently advanced societies tend to destroy their own universes,” Benjamin said grimly. “Either through ignorance or excessive use of temporal weapons. We’ve certainly found our fair share of permanent chronometric storms out there, and not all of them are natural.”

“Or they end up like one of the Q’s,” Elzbietá added, referring to universes quarantined by their survey ships due to extreme hazards, such as the nanoblight machines of Q3 or the weaponized biohorrors of Q5.

“Exactly,” Raibert said. “Which then brings us back to my question. What should we do about all the Earths out there?”

“We could just leave them alone,” Benjamin suggested. “I’m not saying that’s what we should do, but it’s an option.”

“Even if we stand aside, who’s to say the Admin will?” Elzbietá countered.

“Point taken,” Benjamin said. “And we all know what our team leader thinks of them.”

“Hey now!” Raibert crossed his arms. “I’ve been using the Admin’s ‘traditional’ honorific less and less these days,” he added, referring to his habit of calling SysGov’s multiverse neighbor “the fucking 

Admin.”

“I almost miss hearing you say that,” Benjamin said, raising a bite of butter cake.

“Really?” Elzbietá gave her husband a sour look.

“Almost.”

“We could reach out to the Earths we’re finding,” Raibert continued. “Maybe establish contact with the more advanced societies. The ones getting close to developing dangerous tech, at least. Perhaps even establish ports where our societies can mingle and trade.”

“Which comes with its own share of pitfalls,” Benjamin said.

“Such as?”

“Raibert, you and I were both historians. When’s the last time large-scale contact between two societies—one significantly less advanced than the other—ended well for the little guys?”

“Um…”

“Yeah. My point exactly.”

“I might point out that most of those significantly advanced cultures weren’t exactly making contact for altruistic reasons,” Raibert said. “They weren’t all out to bulldoze the locals intentionally, whatever some of their critics may say, but they weren’t there out of the goodness of their hearts, either. The majority of the damage they did was incidental to their other reasons for being there.”

“Like moving the local citizenry off of their land so the newcomers could look for gold, for example?” Benjamin’s eyes glinted.

“I did say the majority of the damage,” Raibert retorted. “But that actually makes my point stronger, I think. If we came calling expressly to help, not to gain anything from them—except probably mutually beneficial intercourse down the road—that sort of thing would be a lot less likely to happen.”

“‘Mutually beneficial intercourse,’” Benjamin repeated in a musing sort of tone. “Hmmm…One way to describe ‘screwed over with the noblest of intentions.’” Raibert glared at him, and he shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Raibert. I’m just saying that humans are humans, and I guarantee you they could screw up almost any operation like that, whether it’s intentional or accidental. Let’s not forget Doctor Beckett and that bastard Gwon.” His tone turned grim. “Sort of an example of both ways to screw up.”

Raibert’s expression tightened. Teodorà Beckett’s tragic, desperately well-intentioned effort to create a universe in which the Black Death never happened cut especially deep for him, and not just because he and Teodorà had once been lovers. Every time he even thought about the way Lucius Gwon’s narcissistic megalomania had destroyed an entire universe…

“Point,” he said after a moment. “A damned good one, actually. But if not for Gwon, Teodorà and Pepys probably would have pulled it off, even with the temporal replication problem. ...