Time Echo

by Lionel Roberts, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera; Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The Eurasian world of the 24th Century is in the grip of Rajak the Magnificent, one of the most efficiently ruthless totalitarian tyrants ever produced by history. The dreaded security guards are everywhere. The only escape is the time dimension. But what if the Time Vortex breaks down? To what unknown realms - of past, future or probability - will the travellers be transported?

Mike Grafton, on the run from the security forces, finds himself changing places with Benjamin Bathurst, the true life Missing Diplomat of the early 19th Century, who vanished and was never seen again.

What happens to these men, torn from their environments, into unknown realms? Will the Liberationist forces succeed in destroying Rajak the Magnificent? But perhaps the greatest question of all is the possibility of Time Travel: will man ultimately conquer time as he is even know conquering space?

Release date: July 31, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE November wind bit with cold, savage intensity, as it whistled round the ancient houses—houses so old that their very style of architecture was lost in the mists of antiquity.

Within the boundary of what had been the prehistoric Brandenburg, the tiny townships fifty miles to the northwest of the ancient German capital of Berlin, had been largely passed by. The savage, soulless armies of Rajak the Magnificent, dictator of Eurasia, had found little in that historic corner that was considered worthy of plunder. From Perleberg to Pritzwalk, from Whitstock to Kyritz, and Havelberg, life continued in much the same pattern as the last thousand years. Governments had changed, dictators had come and gone, the ghastly three-cornered fight between the major powers had raged, with and without atomic interludes, for nearly twenty years—but that was two centuries ago. Now there was peace, if such a subsistence could be called ‘peace’, as had clamped itself down over the whole area….

Rajak himself was a strange individual—a giant, austere demi-god or demi-devil, depending upon a man’s political convictions. By his own inner party of supporters, this strange, aloof, thinking machine of a man was regarded as a saviour, who’s excellence exceeded even that of Jesus of Nazareth. To the vast majority of his ‘saved’ subjects, Rajak was delineated as something out of the pit of hell. He was the great Beast, the aggressive, murderous monster.

A very remote observer would, perhaps, have found something in favour of his legislation. It had terminated anything in the nature of inter-State rivalry in Eurasia, in the same way that the coming of the Norman Kings and the production of the Domesday Book, had ended the petty Anglo-Saxon rivalries of prehistoric England, but in that north-west corner of Brandenburg at 53.5 degrees N by 12 degrees E there existed a kind of transient paradise, a corner of an ancient civilization, like a living monument to the past. And yet, a few thousand simple townsfolk, and outlying rustics, who inhabited the land between the little townships, knew, deep down within themselves, how precarious their existence was, and all the time there hung over them, like the sword of Damocles, a great fear that the full attentions of Rajak the Magnificent, would be focused on to this tiny, partially explored corner of his multi-million square-mile Empire.

There were strange doings beneath the streets of Perleberg. Ancient cellars had been enlarged into a network of honeycombed secret passages that would have done justice to the long-dead denizens of the catacombs. And if there was any shape or form of organised resistance to Rajak, it was here, beneath these ancient cobbled streets, that that resistance was concentrated.

Whispers spread, even through the great Eurasian empire, and if any of Rajak’s victims ever escaped from the dreaded security guards, it was to Perleberg that they fled….

The jet was old. To be precise it was nearly three centuries old. Mike Grafton had found it purely by chance in a hangar that had miraculously escaped bomb damage of a prehistoric war. Vast piles of dusty rubble had covered the hangar, and there, in that isolation of manmade wilderness, Grafton, fleeing desperately from the pursuing security men, had stumbled across the entrance to the hangar….

Despite their super-electronic probes, their stellar vision intercoms, and the thousand-and-one relentless devices by which the security forces ferretted out Rajak’s enemies, Grafton had gone temporarily undiscovered. He lay low, surviving on a few scraps of food that he had brought with him, until hours turned into days, and days into a week. He felt certain that the Security men had temporarily called off the pursuit….

He was a tall, well-built man this Grafton, with dark, penetrating eyes and black curly hair. His muscles were hardened to steely whipcord, by months of rough living. They rippled on his powerfully built frame. His mind was as quick as the brain of a fox. He had learnt his scout-craft in the hard school of do-it-right-or-die. Like an old fox, Grafton knew all the tricks of a pursued man, and like a young fox, he had speed and agility which enabled him to carry out his subterfuge, and fast, daring moves … moves that meant the difference between life and death; between light and darkness; between freedom and extermination.

He felt the wind whistling round him, as he looked from the doorway of his ruined hangar to the south of the ancient rail-town of Rhinow. Less than two miles to the west he could see the broad expanse of an inland lake, and away to the north of him the ruins of an ancient canal crossed the railroad—the iron tracks overgrown and rusted almost beyond recognition. He stepped out into the freezing November air, and from the heavy pack on his back began selecting a bundle of deadly sticks … an essential part of his saboteur’s stock-in-trade. Among his many other nefarious pursuits, Mike Grafton was an explosive expert. In the superb destructive technology of the 24th century, explosives were one of the finest arts practised by man. He looked at the rubble, and he looked at the hangar door. His brilliant mind made a series of rapid calculations. Calculations that took in blast, shock-wave and clearance direction. And as he calculated, he began planting the little, deadly sticks. He checked the time fuses carefully, and then began to walk swiftly to the south. On the brow of a little hill, beneath the rubble of what had once been a very stalwart wall, he lay flat and began counting the seconds before the explosion. Even at that distance, his index fingers pressed firmly into his ears and he crouched, with every muscle tensed, as he waited for the dull reverberation, which would prove to him, whether or not his calculations had been correct. Even as he waited, he knew that that prehistoric jet would be his only chance of reaching Perleberg without being detected, for the Security forces had already thrown their cordon around the area, which was still marked as ‘semi-developed,’ on the huge map in their headquarters…. there was a low rumbling in the distance. A rumbling which grew to a mighty roar, as charge, after charge, picked up its message of exploding violence. And then, there was nothing to be seen but a vast cloud of rubble and dust. He waited a few minutes till the vast cloud settled. Wondering as he waited, whether it would bring the Security forces around his ears, like a pack of angry, and destructive hornets.

That was something that would have to be chanced. The dust was clearing now, and he began running purposefully in the direction of the buried hangar. As the last of the debris floated back to earth, he realised with a wildly beating heart, that his calculations must have been the best he had ever made. The thought crossed his mind that it is very often dark necessity which brings the best out of a man. It tempers his innate abilities and focuses his powers.

The hangar lay wide open before him. In front of it, a rough rubble-strewn track opened out, between an avenue of bomb damaged houses, and mounds of blackened, stunted vegetation. He was reminded of the fantastic stories he had heard of the long-dead city of Pompeii, and of how the volcanic ash had protected and preserved everything within it. Such was the case here. The ancient jet might have been left there only yesterday. Now the way to freedom lay open before him. Whether or not any of its chemical fuel remained, was a matter for conjecture. But then, reflected Grafton, so were so many other things. It was these million-to-one chances that had saved him so often in the past. It was a wild gamble that beat the croupier on the roulette wheel. The staking of everything on one number, with thirty-three chances against it coming up, and yet it had appeared. And it was fortune, not suicide that awaited the gambler. Grafton had a crude stairway of boulders, bricks, packing cases and assorted debris, leading up to the cockpit. He scrambled up it with urgent haste, knowing full well, that the electronic detectors of the security guards, would pick up that tell-tale explosion, all too soon. He reached the cockpit and climbed in. The ancient controls were almost unbelievably simple, to the man whose mind was attuned to the technological complexities of the 24th century. He did a brief calculation, wondering what the date could be. He had been in hiding for over a week. That brought it up to November 25th. He repeated it to himself. “November 25th, 2309.” Strange how dates, almost time itself, were almost meaningless to a man on the run. Yet he liked to keep track of them. It was a tiny shred of normality in a frightening and abnormal environment …

He got to work on the control panel with deft, skilful fingers and to his delight and amazement, the engine roared into life. “Three hundred years, almost,” he whispered, “and it works. By thunder they built things to last, in those days.” Whether or not his new-found airship would crash, as the pressure of that November wind cut, and shook its antique fuselage, and ailerons, he had no manner of knowing, but so far the miracle was paying unexpected dividends. There was no time like the present to take the rest of the gamble. Lurching and bumping over the rubble-strewn causeway, the jet lurched out of the hangar. Time after time, as he taxied down that road, he averted disaster by inches alone; and yet, somehow the old airship hung together, and the roar of its engines grew louder, as the throttle opened, and it gathered speed. Straight into the teeth of that biting November gale. The ailerons held. He gave a great sigh of relief as the bumping gave way to the smoothness of flight. He was airborne. Airborne, in a machine that had not seen the light of day for nearly three centuries. But airborne all the same. There was a wonderful feeling of freedom and exhilaration, and just for a few brief seconds his mind escaped from the toils of the knowledge that the Security forces were everywhere. Here, in the air, alone, piloting his own machine, he was safe, and if only for a few seconds, it was a freedom from pursuit more real, than anything he had previously known in the whole of his struggle against Rajak…. Even the ancient compass was still working perfectly, and already he found himself flying in a north-westerly line, leaving the great lake like a shimmering block of rippling silver below him. The ancient canal winding its murky, bomb-blistered way over to his right, and disappearing into the distant east. He opened the throttle still further. North-west, ever northwest, he flew, and almost before he realised it, his airspeed indicator and milometer, told him that he must be within five miles of his destination. He throttled back. So far the sky was still clear … he throttled back still further and began to circle in, looking for a landing. Down … down … down … he took the antique jet, until it cut like a knife the tracery of the low November clouds, and there below him lay the city of Perleberg. Already he could feel his feet pacing those ancient cobble stones. It seemed too good to be true. It seemed that there could not have been such a loophole, in the apparently inescapable network of the Eurasian powers. But here he was, flying over Perleberg, the town of mysteries. The town which, if legend spoke truly, held the secret of escape from that vile totalitarian machine, which Rajak the Magnificent described as his Eurasian Utopia.

The problem was to land. To land as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. To land somewhere within reach of the town, somewhere within the deadly cordon he felt sure must surround it. And as his gaze was concentrated downwards, in his search for a landing strip in that grey November day, one of the huge antigrav warships of Rajak the Magnificent plummeted out of the sky above him, like an eagle descending on its prey. The great warship fell quite silently. There was no roar of engines to give it away. It fell like a descending thunderbolt of Nemesis, and yet, somehow, just before the moment of destructive impact from its huge, reinforced ramming edge, that would shatter his tiny plane into a thousand fragments, Grafton glanced up and saw it. It hung over him like a huge, black, steel cloud … Faster than thought he flung the jet into a screaming power dive. Lower and lower it screeched, as fast as the dropping menace above him. Now faster. The gap was beginning to widen, and suddenly he saw a tiny ray of hope. Surely the commander of that huge, anti-grav warship wasn’t going to make the one fatal mistake which would enable his prisoner to escape … surely he would realise …?

The ground was hurtling up to meet Grafton. Still he kept the stick forward, and still the antique jet screeched its way earthwards in a superb power dive, a breathtaking spectacle of speed and power. Less than a thousand feet separated him from the enormous warship. The huge iron-clad destruction machine above. The ground seemed frighteningly near, he was dropping at terrifying speed. Dropping faster than a bullet. There were only split seconds in which to act … He calculated his own mass, and the mass of the huge juggernaut, trying to crush him out of the sky. He realised that unless some new modification of which he was unaware, had been made in that mighty warship, then, i. . .