To Win or Lose It All

(Conquistadors III)

Christopher G. Nuttall

Cover By Tan Ho Sim
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Contents
Cover Blurb
Author’s Note
Prologue I
Prologue II: Timeline A (Protectorate Homeworld)
Chapter One: Outside New York, Timeline F (OTL)
Chapter Two: Castle Treathwick, Texas, Timeline F (OTL)
Chapter Three: Nuclear Shelter (Repurposed), Near Washington, Timeline F (OTL)
Chapter Four: Castle Treathwick, Texas, Timeline F (OTL)
Chapter Five: Training Centre, Colorado, Timeline F (OTL)
Chapter Six: Washington DC, USA, Timeline F (OTL)

Cover Blurb

The Protectorate – an interdimensional empire that has conquered five timelines so far – has set its sights on ours. Led by a man willing to risk everything for power and conquest, armed with technology a hundred years ahead of ours – technology promising salvation to its allies and doom to its enemies – and drawing on a far deeper military history, the Protectorate Expeditionary Force has arrived to invade and incorporate our world into the greatest empire the multiverse has ever known, or die trying.

The war between the United States and the Protectorate has stalemated, with both sides reeling from their wounds, but neither one can afford to abandon the war. With the odds tipping against him, Captain-General Montrose embarks on a desperate plan to bring the United States to its knees, expanding the war across the world in a final desperate bid for glory. And as both sides move towards a final cataclysmic confrontation, with the fate of the entire world in the balance, they know that only one side can win ...

And the other will lose it all.

Author’s Note

He either fears his fate too much, or his desserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all!
James Graham, 5th Earl of Montrose, 1612-1650

I started writing this trilogy in early 2024, after the Ukraine and Gaza Wars were well underway but before Donald Trump’s return to the White House and Keir Starmer became the most unpopular British leader since King John. A number of things have changed since then, from minor issues such as Fort Cavazos being renamed Fort Hood (although a different Hood) to practically the entire global geopolitical situation. My projections of how near-future history would go were rather flawed, to say the least, and this posed an interesting challenge. The less ‘near future’ a near-future technothriller seems, the less convincing it becomes.

After some thought, I decided to more or less stick with the version of history I plotted out in 2023-24. I don’t have the time to go back and edit the previous two books to bring them up to date - and even if I did, I would then have to edit them again in a year or two. I apologise for any confusion this may cause. If you want to pretend this takes place in an alternate timeline, my guest <wink>.

In my defence, a great many other people got it wrong too. The future is never certain.

CGN.

Prologue I

From: The United States and the Protectorate War. Baen Historical Press. 2070.

It cannot be denied that the United States of the early twenty-thirties was a deeply divided society, in a world that was increasingly fragmented, hostile and/or fundamentally opposed to American values. The recent election had brought many of the tensions threatening American stability into the open and the victory of President Hamlin, a well-meaning and decent but ultimately ineffectual politician unwilling or unable to confront the problems facing the United States, did nothing to calm the roiling fury under the surface. Prone to dithering, lacking any real power base, it seemed likely his first term would be his last. Indeed, even his own party was preparing to primary him rather than take the risk of letting him seek re-election.

Political deadlock in Washington owed much, it should be acknowledged, to the fact that the United States was not in any physical danger. Chaos along the Mexican border and turmoil in the Caribbean did not post any significant threat, certainly not one that threatened the political or bureaucratic elites in Washington. Simmering tensions in both the Ukraine and the South China Sea – and, of course, the Middle East – might draw attention briefly, only to be dismissed as the United States returned to contemplating its internal problems. Talk of civil war, never far from the surface, seemed to ebb and flow with the tides. The paralysis in Washington seemed to do much the same thing.

It was the worst possible time for the United States to face an Outside Context problem, an invasion from another world. But there was no choice.

The Protectorate knew nothing of America’s problems when they transposed their assault force into our dimension. Through sheer luck, the Protectorate Expeditionary Force arrived right on top of a small town in Texas – Flint – and rapidly secured the area, while probing the surrounding region and hacking the internet to download as much data as possible. They had assumed theirs was the only timeline that had enjoyed an industrial revolution and it was a surprise to discover that our world was a technological civilisation, if one nearly a century behind their own. Their commander - Captain-General James Montrose – had no intention of retreating, let alone opening peaceful contact and developing diplomatic relationships. He had come to make his name through conquest and was determined to do so. His brief attempts at diplomatic outreach were nothing more than a bid to buy time. 

President Hamlin dithered, as was his wont. Flint was surrounded and sealed off by the United States Army, but there was no attempt to demand access to the occupied town or seek confirmation of the tale the diplomats had been told. Unsure of what he was dealing with, Hamlin ignored the advice of his Vice President - Felix Hernandez – and his military officials, refusing to countenance either a more aggressive approach or a pre-emptive strike. It was not until a refugee fleeing the town accidentally started a brief engagement that rapidly spiralled out of control that the military was permitted to take a harder line, but it was too late. The PEF attacked with a fury and technological edge the defenders couldn’t match, rapidly overrunning the army positions and expanding into Texas. A combination of computer hacks and cruise missiles strikes further weakened the United States, making it difficult to coordinate any response.

On paper, the PEF was greatly outnumbered. In practice, their advanced technology and cold-blooded ruthlessness allowed them to crush resistance, eventually seizing Austin and threatening nearby states before America learnt how to fight them. The sheer force of their attack weakened both the United States and its global allies, while their diplomatic contacts with hostile states – and covert operations within America – raised the promise of reinforcements and even American surrender. Their ability to land almost anywhere – showing off their power by attacking New York – cowed Hamlin. Believing the war to be lost, with the arrival of a second invasion force in the Middle East, he made overtures to Montrose.

This was too much for Felix Hernandez and his growing cabal. They started making urgent preparations to remove President Hamlin from power via the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, preparations that were ironically detected by the PEF and used to justify a strike on Washington itself. With only limited understanding of how the American government worked, the PEF moved to seize the White House and the President, intending to use him as a puppet. The plan misfired. The assault force found itself trapped in Washington, and the relief force was forced to fight its way through the city in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to save it. Casualties were heavy on both sides, including Hamlin himself, but the PEF suffered its first real defeat.

As Felix Hernandez took the Oath of Office, and James Montrose secured his position by scapegoating another officer, they both knew the outcome of the war remained in the balance.

Accordingly, they developed new strategies. The United States attempted, unsuccessfully, to liberate New York. Montrose, believing conventional victory to be impossible, attempted to build and launch an orbital weapons platform that would allow him to dominate the world and bomb any nation that tried to resist back to the Stone Age. Both sides attempted to exploit weaknesses within the other’s political-military framework, making use of infiltrators as they plotted knock-out blows.

It all came to a head when the United States realised the PEF’s orbital weapons platform was within days of being launched. The United States launched a massive attack, conventional and nuclear, on both occupied territory within America and the Middle East, destroying the orbital weapons platform and crippling the Protectorate base in Saudi Arabia. It was a great and yet costly victory, buying time for the United States to gird her loins for the final battle ...

But both sides knew the war was far from over.

Prologue II: Timeline A (Protectorate Homeworld)

“It’s confirmed, then?”

“Yes,” Protector John Hotham said, bluntly. “There was a gate in Timeline F … and that gate was destroyed.”

Protector Julianne Rigby sucked in her breath. The Protectorate rarely lost battles and never lost wars. It had fought and won two global conflicts and gone on to wage war on both degenerate states on its homeworld and four other timelines, the latter posing almost no challenge. Timeline F was unusual in that it was a technological civilisation – the Protectorate had assumed up until then that it was the only human civilisation that had developed steam-powered technology and beyond – but the natives were still at least a hundred years behind the Protectorate. The techs had dug through the remains of the enemy town that had been rotated into the home timeline, interrogating the captured natives, and discovered they were unbelievably degenerate. It was hard to believe they could pose any threat at all. 

But they clearly did, if the report was to be believed.

She scowled. It was never easy to communicate across the interdimensional barrier. The Protectorate Expeditionary Force was effectively on its own, at least until a gate was set up to allow regular transit between the two timelines, and that meant the Protectorate Council had no way to know what was really going on. It took immense power and desperation to send even a simple signal without a gate and communicating anything beyond the bare fact of the signal’s existence was impossible. It was only permitted if the assault force had run into something it couldn’t handle and … that should have been impossible. The natives weren’t spear-wielding barbarians, true, but they were hardly a match for the invaders. They should have been crushed by now.

Protector Horace Jarvis put her thoughts into words. “Either Montrose has been defeated – or he’s playing games.”

It was a vain hope, Julianne knew. Montrose was almost terrifyingly ambitious – and most of his captains equally so – and he intended to make use of the conquest to build an unassailable political position, but cutting himself off permanently from the home timeline would be a step too far. His captains would never go along with it and even if they did, there’d never be any guarantee a new Protectorate Expeditionary Force wouldn’t be dispatched. Nor would it suit their ambitions to be cut off permanently. How could they compete for power and status in the home timeline if they could no longer travel there? Beating up the natives was nothing in comparison.

No, she told herself, grimly. He’s run into something he can’t handle.

She studied the holographic map without quite seeing it. The captured natives had been depressingly ignorant as well as degenerate. Some hadn’t known simple details of how their government worked, others hadn’t been able to point to countries on maps or had a truly fantastical idea of what their timeline could do. It was lucky the ruined town had included a library and a great many computer databases, although the latter were crammed with contradictory information when they weren’t crammed with truly degenerate pornographic material. Julianne had had a misspent youth – it was common amongst the toweringly ambitious; the risk of losing everything was just part of the thrill – and yet, she hadn’t seen anything like the horrors the investigators had found in the files. Children! Animals! It was just disgusting.

We should put the entire timeline out of its misery, she thought. She dreaded to think what would become of any child growing up in such an environment. And not just because it might manage to beat us.

She shook her head. Montrose was dangerously ambitious, true, but he wasn’t incompetent. His captains would have knifed him in the back, perhaps literally, if he’d lost his iron grip on the invasion force. The fact he’d been beaten – or at least that the gates he’d been trying to set up had been destroyed, violently enough for the emissions to be detected from a whole other timeline – was deeply worrying. It suggested they were facing an incredibly capable foe.

Perhaps we invaded their version of a degenerate state, she mused. It wasn’t impossible. Texas had been a backwater when the Spanish had invaded and it hadn’t really changed under the Protectorate. The invasion force had been assembled there at least partly because it was a long way from the known and extrapolated power centres. There might be other, more advanced, countries in Timeline F.

“We have two choices,” Hotham said, bluntly. “We send reinforcements – or we don’t.”

“The risk is considerable,” Jarvis said. “What are we facing?”

“Risks are manageable,” Hotham pointed out. “We cannot abandon our troops to their fate.”

“They knew the risks,” Jarvis countered. “And we have to consider the safety of our homeworld.”

“There’s nothing in the investigation reports to suggest our enemies know anything about interdimensional travel,” Hotham said. “They can’t get to us.”

“They have the concept,” Julianne said, quietly. “Alternate versions of their heroes, goatee-stroking evil counterparts ... they have the concept, if not the technology, and given time they will have the technology too.”

“Decades, at least,” Hotham said.

“Perhaps less,” Julianne said. “For all we know, their ... America ... may be a degenerate state.”

“The data suggests otherwise,” Jarvis said.

“They could easily have written lies into the databases,” Julianne pointed out. “The Tsars did that ...”

“Yes,” Hotham agreed. “And look what happened to them.”

Julianne smiled. She’d been raised to accept that the truth needed to be accepted even if the truth wasn’t something she wanted to accept. There was nothing to be gained from lying to one’s own people, even if the truth was unflattering or dangerous. She could cite a dozen cases where hiding from the truth had only made the situation worse ... but the Tsars had disagreed. They’d lied to their people, lied to their military officers, lied even to themselves ... they wouldn’t have lost the war, perhaps, if they’d been more honest about the balance of power. Perhaps there was a timeline somewhere where they had.

“And the truth here is that we have lost contact with Timeline F,” she said. “Do we risk sending a third invasion force?”

She ground her teeth in frustration. If she knew what was happening ... it would be easy to make the final call. But she didn’t and she couldn’t ...

“Best case, Montrose has been hammered, but remains unbowed,” she said, into the silence. “In that case, he can put together a whole new tech base and eventually reopen contact with us. Worst case, Montrose and his entire force has been destroyed. In that case ... our enemies may well have captured enough information and technology to make them actively dangerous to our home timeline too.”

She let the words hang in the air for a long moment. Montrose had strict orders to keep their technology and databases from falling into enemy hands, but if he’d run into something he couldn’t handle it might have proved impossible. There were limits to how much the censors could keep out of the databases without crippling the PEF and if one had been captured ... she gritted her teeth. The natives of Timeline C simply hadn’t been able to accept technology as anything other than magic. They knew nothing about how the world really worked. But Timeline F was different. They wouldn’t bow down and worship a random piece of technology because it was beyond their understanding. They’d try to understand. And they would succeed. Eventually.

“If the best case, reinforcements will swing the war in his favour,” Jarvis said. “If the worst, we’ll be giving the enemy another chance to find our timeline.”

Julianne grimaced. It wasn’t easy to locate one specific timeline in an infinity of possible timelines. It had taken decades to work out how to tune the gates to allow passage and even then ... there were scientists who insisted the gates weren’t linked to one timeline so much as they were linked to a multitude of assorted timelines. Julianne didn’t pretend to understand the math or follow the arguments, but ... given time, the enemy timeline could home in on her timeline. And then all hell would break loose.

Hotham leaned forward. “Abandoning Montrose and his army would be dishonourable.”

“They knew the risks,” Jarvis said. “What price honour if it puts the homeworld in danger?”

“We have orbital battlestations and troops ready to be dropped on any target from orbit the moment we give the word,” Hotham pointed out. “Let them poke their nose into our world. We’ll burn it off instantly.”

“Unless they have some way to counter it,” Julianne said. “We know little about their capabilities.”

“Their tech is at least a century behind ours,” Hotham said.

“The tech we captured is,” Julianne agreed. “But what about the rest of it?”

She rubbed her forehead. They just didn’t know.

“We need to consider the safety of the home timeline first,” she added, quietly. There was no point in prolonging the argument. Anything that needed to be said had already been said. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, and it would cost them when the news was announced, but there was no choice. Better to sacrifice their reputations than the homeworld. “And that means we must not poke this bear any further.”

Hotham scowled. “And you would abandon the entire invasion force?”

“We must,” Jarvis said. “The safety of our timeline comes first.”

“Yes,” Julianne agreed. She felt guilty even saying it, but it had to be said. “Whatever the dangers in Timeline F, Montrose and his troops must face them alone.”

Chapter One: Outside New York, Timeline F (OTL)

This is America, Julia Burnside thought, as the jeep rattled to a halt. This is our world now.

She swallowed, hard, and looked around. The suburb had been a nice place to live once, if one happened to be white and reasonably well off, but now it looked like a war zone. No, it was a war zone. Simple cookie-cutter houses, seemingly untouched by the fighting, contrasted oddly with blackened ruins or piles of debris; larger apartment blocks looked shattered and broken, rubble strewn everywhere as if it had been picked up and tossed by an angry god. An unpleasant scent hung in the air as she clambered out of the jeep, a mixture of fire and dead bodies and things that haunted her nightmares. She’d seen horrors in her short career as a roving reporter but this …? This was America. 

It just didn’t seem right.

“Wait,” the driver said. He was a grim-faced young man, neither talkative nor flirty. More proof, if any were needed, that something was terribly wrong. “The MPs will be along in a moment.”

“Thanks,” Julia said. She’d done some dumb things in her career too – she’d gone to jail for a feature article and crossed the Rio Grande with illegal immigrants for another – but this took the cake. She was starting to have second thoughts about the whole affair. It wouldn’t be that bad, surely, if she jumped back into the jeep and demanded to be taken to safety? “If I …”

She shook her head and looked around. The street was eerily quiet and still. Smoke rose in the distance … from Manhattan? It was certainly in the right direction. The homes looked deserted, some locked up nicely and others open to the elements … they’d probably been looted, she guessed. The whole region was under martial law, and the police and military patrols had orders to shoot looters on sight, but there were too many demands on their time for them to mount more than basic patrols so far from the front lines. Anyone with nerve could get in, spend a few hours searching for valuables, then get out again without being caught.

“Keep your hands where we can see them, if you don’t mind.”

Julia jumped, then spun around. Two female MPs were standing behind her … how the hell had they crept up on her? Julia prided herself on her situational awareness – it was a survival skill for anyone in her career – and yet the MPs had caught her completely by surprise. It was … she put the thought aside and studied the two women. They both looked young, in their mid-twenties, yet they had the thousand-yard stares of combat veterans. They probably were. There were no true front lines in this war. The simple fact the enemy had managed to invade and occupy New York City was proof enough of that.

“We’re going to search you now,” the leader said. Her voice was drained, as if she no longer cared about what she was doing. “If you have any electronic devices, this is your last chance to leave them behind.”

“I left them all at the hotel before I got into the jeep,” Julia said, although she didn’t expect them to take her word for it. She’d known, intellectually, that hostile forces could peer through her laptop’s webcam or turn her cellphone into a surveillance device, but she hadn’t really believed it until it was too late. “I’ve just got pen, paper, a clockwork watch and an old-style camera.”

She gritted her teeth as the MP patted her down, inspecting every last inch of her body. The prison staff at Riker’s Island hadn’t searched her so thoroughly and they’d had orders to treat her like a regular inmate. The other watched carefully, one hand near her holster. Julia didn’t blame her for being paranoid. The invaders had turned everything on its head, rewriting computer databases and digging up information they’d used to blackmail people into doing their bidding. She was loyal and yet … how could they be sure? All the old certainties were collapsing everywhere.

Her lips twisted. “You are going to buy me lunch after this, aren’t you?”

The MP’s voice didn’t change. “If only you were as funny as you think you are.”

Julia smiled, despite everything. “Sorry,” she said. “How many times have you heard that joke?”

“Hah. Hah.” The MP straightened up. “Listen very carefully. You are entering a combat zone. If we give you orders, follow them without question. Keep your head down. If you see any drones, hit the ground first and check afterwards. You got me?”

“Yes,” Julia said. “I’m ready.”

The MP shrugged, then motioned for Julia to follow as she made her way up the road. Her companion brought up the rear. Julia felt cold as the town shifted, abandoned buildings slowly giving way to sandbagged houses and makeshift trenches being dug by a number of soldiers, militiamen and volunteers. They walked past a burned-out tank – she guessed it was American; the remains of an enemy vehicle would be removed and studied as quickly as possible – and several IFVs in various states of repair. A dozen technicians swarmed over the vehicles … she guessed they were fixing what they could and cannibalising the vehicles that couldn’t be repaired. They barely looked up from their work as she passed.

She felt sick as the urban landscape became more desolate. The buildings were being woven into a much larger network of trenches, fortified strongpoints and supply depots that looked like photographs she’d seen of the First World War. There were cables everywhere, some half-buried in the muddy terrain; she swallowed, hard, as she saw piles of rubble concealing tanks and firing positions. Something moved ahead of her ... she flinched, despite herself, before realising it was a soldier wearing a camouflage outfit. He blended in so well she would never have seen him if he hadn’t moved.

A dull whine echoed through the air. The lead MP threw herself to the ground. Julia followed suit, wincing as she landed hard enough to hurt. The whining grew louder, the sound chilling Julia to the bone as a drone flashed over the trenches and vanished; she heard gunfire behind her, shots tailing off a moment later. She hoped the shooter had hit the drone. If the horror stories were true, failing to take out the drone would only draw its attention.

“It’s not the whiny drones you need to worry about,” her escort muttered. She rose slowly, glancing from side to side. “It’s the ones that make no noise at all.”

Julia shuddered. It was bad enough hearing the drone.

She scrambled to her feet and kept walking, glancing from side to side. Mortars and other heavy guns were carefully positioned within the trenches, some tended by soldiers and others seemingly controlled remotely or not controlled at all. Some looked oddly absurd ... she wondered, suddenly, if they were fakes, mock-ups designed to draw enemy fire and make them think they were hitting something important. She made a mental note to leave it out of her report when she wrote it. The big news agencies might have reluctantly switched back to paper editions – the enemy had already proven they could hack the internet at will – but there was no way to be sure a copy wouldn’t cross the lines. If she’d been gathering information for the enemy, she’d want to keep an eye on the newspapers too.

“In here,” her escort said, as they stopped outside a half-ruined building. “Good luck.”

Julia felt claustrophobic as she stepped into the semi-darkness. The hallway was wide, but it was lined with blast-resistant materials that limited her freedom to move. The windows were covered with plastic, making it impossible for anyone to see inside. One room had a handful of very basic beds; she guessed the staff slept there, when they weren’t rotated back to the rear areas. She’d seen the military camps twenty miles to the south. They weren’t much, compared to the summer camps she’d attended as a child, but they were so vastly superior to the trenches there was just no comparison.

“Miss Burnside?”

“Yes,” Julia said. A middle-aged man in a military uniform – no nametag, no stripes – was standing by a door. “That’s me.”

The officer pushed open the door to reveal a simple office. “Come inside,” he said. He sounded as tired as the MPs. “I’m Major Lincoln. I’ll give you a briefing and then we’ll move on.”

Julia followed him inside, looking around with interest. The office was strikingly simple; a folded table, a pair of folding chairs, a handful of maps on the walls ... she blinked in surprise, torn between amusement and horror, as she saw the old-style rotary phones on a cabinet by the wall, linked to cables that ran through holes that had been opened and then hastily plastered closed. A poster hung above the telephones, showing a gormless middle-aged man with glasses striking a Lord Kitchener pose and saying THINK BEFORE YOU TWEET. Julia had no idea who he was, or why someone had struck the poster there, but she hated him on sight. The computer on the other side of the room was so primitive it might as well have been a typewriter. Perhaps it was.

Her eyes lingered in the map. Manhattan was coloured red, a grim reminder that the economic heart of the United States was in enemy hands. The lines around the occupied zone looked oddly unsteady, as if the intelligence staff weren’t quite sure where the lines were. Further from the city, large regions were marked with mushroom clouds – Julia had been assured the enemy nukes weren’t real nukes, but it hardly mattered to the soldiers and civilians who’d been caught in the blasts – and surrounded by friendly blue lines. Julia knew how to read a basic military map, but the one on the walls defeated her. The markings were completely unfamiliar.

“We used military notation from a science-fiction RPG,” Major Lincoln said. He stood beside her, close enough to be companionable without being too close. “If the enemy raid the building and snatch the map, they’ll have some trouble deciphering it.”

Julia felt a flicker of alarm. “They do that?”

“They do.” Major Lincoln tapped the map. “They’ve rarely given us more than a few hours of peace. Drones, raids ... sniping ... they have some kind of energy weapon, God alone knows how it works, that is completely invisible until it hits the target. Long-range too, from what we can determine. Longer than our snipers, we think. I saw a man get his head burned off from quite a distance ... we shelled the area, in hopes of killing the bastard, but we don’t know if we did. We have very loose front lines because the bastards are good at finding and killing us. And disturbing us. They hit a barracks with some kind of sonic weapon and the poor bastards who were hit ... well, they had to be pulled out of the lines.”

He glanced at her, his face grim. “If they come boiling out, I don’t know if we can stop them.”

Julia blinked. “Are you supposed to be telling me that?”

Major Lincoln flushed. “Probably not.” His voice was too tired to be teasing or flirty. “But I have made that clear to Washington.”

He drew a line on the map with his finger. “Soldiers, Marines, National Guardsmen, Militiamen ... we have all kinds of defences, all kinds of weapons from simple minefields to advanced technology I can’t tell you about, but ... we’re on the edge. You remember Iraqi Freedom?”

Julia shook her head. “I was born shortly before the war started.”

“This war is just like Iraqi Freedom, except we’re the Iraqis and our enemy is far more ruthless,” Major Lincoln said, bluntly. “They don’t go out of their way to commit atrocities – I’ll give them that much – but they don’t shy away from committing them either. They can go where they please, as long as they’ll willing to commit the forces required, and they are very good at finding us and hitting where it hurts. I’ve got hardened men suffering from shellshock because the bastards keep the pressure on, even when they’re not actually hammering us. We’re lucky we’re able to rotate the troops in and out of the trenches or we’d really be in the shit.”

And you’re acting erratically too, Julia thought, numbly. Are you suffering from shellshock too?

Major Lincoln sat down, motioning for her to sit facing him. “What are you going to write?”

“The truth, or as much of it as they’ll let me,” Julia said. She knew the rules. The price for access was having the military censors going through everything she wrote, hacking out anything that might give aid and comfort to the enemy. Her superiors wouldn’t try to fight if the censors asked her to cut out anything, no matter how mundane. The days in which the media could get away with broadcasting whatever it wanted had ended when the invasion force had materialised in Texas. “I can’t promise anything else.”

“Tell them we’re being ground down,” Major Lincoln said. He looked older, suddenly. “We all are.”

He stood, motioning for Julia to follow him through a series of makeshift tunnels and into the open air. The trench network looked thicker here, deep gashes in the ground walled by piles of rubble, concrete and sandbags, the latter looking oddly primitive and yet effective. A handful of sniper traps were scattered along the trenches, human cut-outs rigged to look real to someone who was too far away to see them clearly. She guessed they were meant to look warm to anyone looking through an infrared sensor. It was hard to tell if they drew enemy fire.

Major Lincoln nodded to a pair of outdated cannons. “Those date back to the War Between the States,” he said. “Pathetic, compared to modern artillery, but surprisingly effective. We’ve discovered that we can catch them by surprise by using gunpowder, where modern explosives are far less likely to get past their sniffers. We’re lucky they don’t have decent counterbattery weapons” – he smirked, nastily – “and we taught them the dangers of using their aircraft as roving artillery. And …”

He broke off as a dull whine echoed through the air. “Get down!”

Julia threw herself to the ground as a swarm of drones swooped overhead. A dull unpleasant sensation ran through her body, a sound she could feel and yet not quite hear, making her uncomfortable before the automatic guns opened fire. She saw a drone disintegrate, tiny fragments scattering everywhere, before the rest of the swarm threw themselves onto the guns and exploded. A wave of heat rushed over her; she glanced up just in time to see the final drone blossom into a white-hot fireball, strangely constrained despite being in the open air. She had no idea what it was, but it was effective. The target had been completely destroyed.

“Keep your head down,” Major Lincoln ordered. The dull boom of guns echoed in the distance ... she saw a streak of light, a small missile, heading towards the enemy lines. “They might not be done yet ...”

He staggered upright and peered into a makeshift periscope. Julia stared in surprise, then realised it would allow him to look north without being spotted and shot by enemy snipers. She forced herself to climb to her feet and stand beside him, waiting for a turn. Major Lincoln glanced at her, then shrugged and stepped aside. Julia gave him a grateful smile and pressed her eyes to the periscope. The scene before her was ...

She shuddered. Row upon row of destroyed buildings, little more than piles of rubble; burned out cars and trucks and tanks and even the remains of an aircraft ... friendly or hostile, she couldn’t tell. Nothing moved, not even an insect. New York’s skyline was visible in the distance, but a number of familiar skyscrapers were missing ... she tried to tell herself she didn’t know which buildings should be there, but she couldn’t convince herself. The towers were just rubble now. She hoped the inhabitants had gotten out before the hammer came down, although she feared the worst. The war was nearly seven months old and yet there were still people who couldn’t quite wrap their head around the country being invaded. Julia wanted to make fun of them, but she knew better. She couldn’t quite believe it either.

“You see now?” Major Lincoln turned and walked down the trench, careful to stay in the shadows. “This is the reality of war now.”

Julia followed, glancing from side to side. The trench network looked deserted ... she picked out a couple of men, nesting within heavy camouflage, and hoped there were others. The sound of distant gunfire was slowly fading, leaving behind an eerie quiet that was somehow worse than the shooting. Someone fired a shot ... Major Lincoln showed no reaction. Julia suspected he was as worn down as the rest of his men, facing a high-intensity war in their own backyard. He really needed a break.

We all do, she thought, numbly. We ...

Something flickered, at the corner of her eye. She looked and saw the drone, swooping down on her ... no, on Major Lincoln. She opened her mouth to scream, but it was already too late. The drone sliced right through the Major’s head, leaving blood spurting everywhere, then seemed to flicker and vanish into the clear blue sky. Julia stared at the remains of a man’s life, as Major Lincoln’s body crumpled to the ground, then threw up. She’d thought she’d seen horrors, gruesome sights that proved man’s inhumanity to man ...

But she hadn’t been prepared for this nightmare. No one had.

Chapter Two: Castle Treathwick, Texas, Timeline F (OTL)

Captain-General James Montrose stood naked by the window and peered out over Flint.

The town looked battered. There was no denying the Americans had proven themselves to be hellishly effective, when they’d gambled everything on a desperate bid to stop Project Orion. The pile of twisted metal outside the barricades was a stark reminder of their success … he ground his teeth in frustration, cursing the luck in a manner he would never have shown outside his private quarters. There had been no time to put together a proper orbital weapons platform, with heavy weapons and antimissile defences; no time to craft anything beyond a ramshackle structure that should still have been immune to enemy weapons, once it was outside the atmosphere. The enemy had struck when it was most vulnerable and won. He had to give the Americans credit. They’d played the game very well.

Perhaps too well.

His thoughts, cold and hard, strayed towards the possibility of betrayal. The Protectorate’s officers competed for power, building themselves up and tearing their rivals down in a manner that resembled a snake pit more than a government for all humanity. James was no stranger to ambition and he knew ambition could lead to terrible things, yet … had one of his captains betrayed him? It wasn’t impossible, but … unlikely. There was no such thing as a proper and acceptable way to commit treason and betraying James’s plans to the enemy would be nothing less than outright treason. His officers might plot against him; they wouldn’t betray the Protectorate. They were smart enough to understand they were all in the same boat.

James closed his eyes for a long moment. He was honest enough to admit that his fundamental goal was to build his own power and reputation, to rise to the very highest level. If he successfully conquered Timeline F, either directly or indirectly, he would be unstoppable. His nomination for a seat on the Protectorate Council would be a formality. His patronage would stretch out over the timeline, bringing untold thousands upon thousands under his banner; the simple fact they were from a technological society made them far more useful, to him and his government, than any number of people from the other timelines. He would do well for himself by doing good, for his own people as well as the locals. Timeline F was infested with degeneracy. It needed a purge.

And I cannot possibly concede that I might have bitten off more than I can chew, he reflected, thoughtfully. The two societies were locked in a death grip now, advanced technology and sheer righteousness competing with numbers and degeneracy. There was no way to back off, no way to come to terms … not when it was just a matter of time before Timeline F developed its own crosstime technology. They might not be able to duplicate a simple antigravity generator, not yet, but they didn’t see it as magic either. We have to win or lose it all.

He heard Sally Luanne shifting in the blankets and turned to look at her, the blonde local who’d been the first to collaborate with the invaders. She’d been very helpful, in and out of his bed, even though he’d had trouble believing some of what she’d told him. The United States was a sick and dying society, a corpse rotting from the head … a people sinking into a filthy swamp of sheer degeneracy. James had studied America’s history and found it hard to believe that such a people, with such great heroes, had fallen so far they were trying to destroy their own history and erase their own memories. To him, Christopher Columbus was a hero; to them, he was a thief of stolen land. It was all the more absurd that they whined about people living on stolen land and yet somehow, somehow, they never went home. But where was their home?

James rolled his eyes. The United States had forgotten the simplest rule of all. Might made right. It didn’t matter how just your cause, if you couldn’t fight for it. Slavers didn’t magically blink out of existence because slavery was wrong, dictators didn’t suffer heart attacks and die because dictatorships were fundamentally evil. They had to be torn down, either from the inside or the outside; the United States had forgotten that too. He didn’t pretend to understand why the Americans had tolerated the Mullahs of Iran, the Kings of Saudi Arabia, or even why they’d given their client states so much latitude … not that it mattered. Their weakness was his opportunity. And he’d already done so much for the common man, if only he could see it.

Sally sat upright, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. James tried not to stare. He’d patronized the brothels everyone pretended didn’t exist, from the lower-class hovels offering girls from client states to the upper-class establishments featuring courtesans rather than just sex, but Sally was ... different. She held herself so freely, in a manner that should have been disgusting and yet was strikingly sensual. His eyes traced her firm, small breasts, his fingers yearning to touch them again ... she’d done things, with him, that only a lower-class prostitute would do back home, things that he’d be mocked or shunned for wanting, things he knew he should be ashamed of himself for demanding. And yet ... he wasn’t sure what to make of it. Sally wasn’t just the sum of her body. She was a person ...

And a person who needed to be loyal to him and him personally. She had nowhere else to go.

“James,” Sally managed. “Are you coming back to bed?”

“I can’t,” James said, reluctantly. The meeting had been called for 0900 and it was 0820 now. He poured two cups of coffee and put one on the table next to her. “You go back to sleep, or you could drink some coffee and go to your office. I have to deal with my captains.”

Sally cocked her head. “You don’t want me there?”

James shook his head. The forthcoming discussion was going to be hard enough even without her. His captains would never stand for bringing a foreigner into the council meeting and they’d make their feelings known, perhaps even try to push for his removal from command. Sally was trusted and yet ... you couldn’t trust foreigners. Not completely. Not ever. Who knew what really lurked behind their painted smiles and grovelling submission?

The foreigner is either at your knees or at your throat, he reminded himself. It was never easy to be sure what any foreigner was thinking. They came from very different societies ... Sally from a society more different than most. It was odd that she’d switched sides so easily, although it wasn’t unprecedented. The United States needed the loyalty of its people and yet it was actively throwing it away. One might as well shoot a man in the head and complain when he could no longer walk. We’re dealing with human aliens here ...

His lips twisted. They must feel the same way too.

He put the thought aside as he stepped into the shower, washed and dried himself quickly and got dressed. The uniform was light, designed for the high temperatures of the region, but it felt like a suit of armour as he walked into his office, making sure to lock the door behind him before running a bug check. It was unlikely his rivals had managed to slip anything into his chambers, and the idea of the locals getting one of their clunky devices into the fortress was absurd, but there was no point in taking chances. He had too many enemies readying themselves to take a shot at him to gamble with his political survival. The thrill of besting his enemies was something he enjoyed, but it couldn’t be indulged. Not now.

His terminal bleeped, a dozen reports opening up in front of him. James scanned them quickly – a handful of incident reports, a pair of diplomatic messages from the envoys he’d sent to Russia and China, a disciplinary report waiting for his approval – and put most of them aside for later contemplation. The endless skirmishes along the front lines, vague in the real world no matter how crisp and clean they looked on the map displays, were of little importance. His captains and their subordinates could handle them. The disciplinary report was far more important. He sucked in his breath as he read it, then tapped his terminal. The minibrain connected him to the Military Guardsman, the man’s face appearing in front of him. James had to school his face into a blank mask. Military Guardsmen were important, and he was mature enough to know it, but ...

I could never be a guardsman, he thought, the old joke darting through his head. I knew my father’s name.

“Sir,” Captain (MG) Leonard Cadiz said.

“Captain,” James said. “The report you sent me – is it accurate?”

“Yes, sir,” Cadiz said. With a name like that, he was probably a second or third-generation immigrant ... one stubborn enough not to change his name. Good. A man who was not easily intimidated was someone who could be relied upon to give an accurate assessment, even to a Captain-General. “Rifleman Michael Quigley was caught in the act of raping an underage local girl. The whole affair was recorded and ... sir, the girl was nine.”

James shuddered. Rape was bad enough, particularly when the civil affairs teams had quietly set up a number of brothels for the men. Raping a girl too young to give consent, a girl too young to pass for a grown woman ... his stomach churned in disgust. It was more than just a criminal act. It was a severe breach of unit discipline. And if word got out, it could cost the Protectorate the war.

He glanced at the report again. Video evidence? Check. Medical report? Check. DNA test? Check. Quigley had made a statement insisting the girl had told him she was old enough for sex ... James glanced at the picture and shook his head. The girl didn’t even begin to pass for a grown adult. Quigley was either as dumb as a bag of rocks or lying. James would bet on the latter. The bastard had made it through basic training. His file was short, but there was no suggestion he’d had real trouble passing the course.

“Hang him,” he ordered, curtly. He brought up the form, filled out Quigley’s death warrant and signed it with a thumbprint. Quigley had the right to appeal to the captains, but James was certain none would go out on a limb for a child rapist. There was no worse crime. “Ask the girl’s parents if they wish to witness, allow them to do so ... make sure the rest of his unit attends.”

“Yes, sir,” Cadiz said. “I’ll see to it personally.”

James nodded. “Good.”

He tapped his console, closing the connection, then sat back in his chair. What was happening to them on this strange new world? Quigley’s file didn’t raise any obvious red flags. Was he a perverted monster who had somehow gone unnoticed until he’d finally been caught in the act or had he been contaminated by the local degeneracy? Not that the latter mattered, James told himself, with a sudden savage flicker of anger. Quigley was the product of a superior civilisation. He knew better. Or he damn well should.

He’ll be dead before the end of the day, James told himself. Perhaps he should attend the hanging personally, to apologise to the poor girl’s family and remind the rest of his unit that certain behaviours would result in nothing more than a quick trip to the gallows. The girl would need compensation ... he keyed his console again, authorising medical treatment and first call on Quigley’s possessions, such as they were. It was a shame he couldn’t fly them out of the occupied zone, but that was a step too far. The incident would become anti-Protectorate propaganda very quickly. And after we purged all the child rapists, we’ll look bad for having one of our very own.

He ground his teeth in frustration. Quigley was one of his men. James didn’t know the bastard personally, but he was under James’s command and ... oh, it was maddening. He wanted to go down to the cells and snap the fool’s neck himself, perhaps after asking just why he’d gone so far off the rails. It was ...

The door buzzer sounded. James sighed. “Come in.”

Captain (Civil Affairs) Gillian Rhapsody stepped into the office, the door closing behind her. “Do you have a moment, sir?”

“Ten minutes,” James said. No one would say anything, not openly, if the Captain-General was late to a meeting he himself had called. “What can I do for you?”

“We’ve finished the preliminary steps of the clean-up,” Gillian said. She was surprisingly soft for a PEF officer, her outfit designed to make her look kind and friendly instead of firm and commanding. It struck James as jarring, even though he understood the reasoning behind it. The PEF needed to win hearts and minds and being unfriendly, at least to people who didn’t deserve it, made that a great deal harder. “We had to relocate several hundred thousand locals to get them away from the radiation.”

James grimaced. The enemy had nuked their own territory to get at him, a display of sheer ruthlessness that would have impressed him a little more if the missiles hadn’t ruined his plans to win the war overnight. Their weapons were cleaner than the filthy bombs that had won the Second Global War, but cleaner was relative when nukes were involved. The American government had condemned thousands upon thousands of its own people to death and poisoned more, simply because they’d had little choice. They were lucky the Protectorate was prepared to offer a little assistance to the poor bastards caught in the middle.

He leaned forward. “Just how bad is it?”

Gillian made a face. “Most of the radiation damage and other injuries can be fixed, if the resources are available. We’ve had a lot of help from local doctors and nurses, caught in the middle of the war zone. The few who can’t be helped ... we’ll need to put them out of their misery. It’s relocating them all that will pose problems, sir. There’s not much enthusiasm amongst the locals for taking refugees into their homes.”

“Charming,” James said, although he understood the problem. The local government had never seemed willing to evict refugees who were also criminals, or who acted in a criminal way after being allowed to stay in the country; the locals, quite reasonably, had responded by refusing to offer any assistance to refugees. A handful of bad apples spoilt the whole batch. “Inform them that they have to take the refugees, but we’ll hang any refugee who takes advantage of the situation.”

“Yes, sir,” Gillian said. “I should warn you it will provoke resentment.”

James scowled. The Americans were strikingly individualistic, even if they were often individualistic in a conformist sort of way. They didn’t like being told what to do and yet they tolerated it ... he shook his head. The locals in the occupied zone were no longer Americans, but Protectorate civilians. They would learn to act like civilians. And if they were unwilling to help ...

“We’ll cope,” he said. “It was their government that dropped the nukes.”

“Yes, sir,” Gillian said. “We’ll make that clear to them.”

“Make it clear that any mistreatment will result in severe punishment,” he added. “We cannot afford to show weakness now.”

“Yes, sir,” Gillian said.

Because all the jackals will rise up, if they think they can get away with it, James thought. He studied the map, keeping his face carefully blank. The locals from the other conquered timelines hadn’t had any real sense of their national identity. They hadn’t cared which emperor parked his rump on the throne, or which king’s men collected their taxes. It made no difference to their lives, because they rarely travelled more than few miles from their hometowns. The Americans were different. They had a sense of their own national identity that rivalled his own, forged in the fires of a revolutionary war. It would require long and patient work to convince the locals to join the Protectorate. And we really don’t have the time to deal with it.

He looked at Gillian. “Is there anything else?”

“Recruitment of local troopers has not shown any significant drop over the last few days,” Gillian said. “However, I suspect there will be a drop shortly. The nuclear strikes have alarmed local governments, as well as their people.”

James snorted. “They’re just bigger bangs,” he said, sarcastically. He knew that wasn’t wholly true, but ... nukes weren’t all destroying superweapons. Castle Treathwick would have been blown off the face of the planet if nuclear-tipped missiles couldn’t be stopped. “Does it matter to the dead if they die through a bullet or a nuclear bomb?”

“They have cultural reasons for fearing nukes more than conventional bombs,” Gillian pointed out. “And that fear is very common even amongst those who should know better.”

“So it seems,” James said. Really. At what point had the United States moved from worshipping technology to fearing it? The Protectorate had colonised half the solar system with inferior space-rocket technology, while the locals had gone to the moon a handful of times and then ... stopped. Pathetic. Technology was the great liberator and the United States seemed to have decided to enslave itself. Again. “We’ll cure them of that ...”

His terminal bleeped. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll speak to you later.”

Gillian saluted, then left the room. James barely noticed. He had other concerns.

The most important meeting of his life was about to begin.

Chapter Three: Nuclear Shelter (Repurposed), Near Washington, Timeline F (OTL)

It was funny and disconcerting, Footman Martín Cortés reflected, to read local history books and contrast them to the history he’d learned as a young volunteer for the PEF. It was history seen through a funhouse mirror, the great heroes of one timeline little more than zeroes in the other … if they existed at all. He had problems believing that Oliver Cromwell’s death had led to his son’s brief assumption of the protectorship, before the return of King Charles II; he suspected his hosts found it equally hard to believe that George Washington had lived and died a Protectorate loyalist and Abraham Lincoln had simply never been born. Presumably. He certainly hadn’t made any mark on history. 

He sat in his comfortable chair, reading a volume about World War II. It was eerie to see a global conflict so similar to the Second Global War and yet so different; the idea that a united Germany, of all places, could conquer much of Europe was just absurd. The German states had never been united in his timeline, the petty princelings bickering amongst themselves and backstabbing their friends and enemies alike until the French, then the Russians and finally the Protectorate had knocked some sense into them, far too late to save their states from anything more than client status within the Protectorate. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler … had any of them existed in his world? He didn’t think so. He’d certainly never heard of them.

The doorbell rang. Martín sat upright, bracing himself. His hosts were treating him like a guest, rather than a prisoner, but he had no illusions. He might not be a prisoner of war in the formal sense of the word, yet he was in protective custody and … he shook his head. He had no illusions about his fate if the PEF stormed the base and recaptured him. The intelligence staff would go through everything he’d ever told his hosts, until they were sure they’d extracted every last detail, and then they’d shoot whatever was left for desertion, not to mention treason. His old squad, if there was anything left of it, would shoot him themselves. They’d see him as a traitor and, by their lights, they’d be right.

“Hi,” he said. He had no illusions he wasn’t under surveillance either. His hosts hadn’t even tried to hide the cameras. He didn’t mind. He’d rarely had any privacy in his entire life. “Come in!”

Colin Cozort stepped into the room, nodding politely. Martín looked back at him with undisguised interest. Cozort was … odd, a man who had authority and yet didn’t seem to have really seen the elephant. It was something that both baffled and reassured Martín: baffled him because it was all too easy to make mistakes if you didn’t have actual experience to back up your theories; reassured him because it suggested Americans lacked the naked ambition of their counterparts or the willingness to make use of people it created. Martín wouldn’t have given a single dinar for his chances if he’d fallen into their hands instead. They’d use him, praise him and then discard him. Perhaps they wouldn’t have even bothered with the praise.

“Martín,” Cozort said. His tone was polite. They could easily be two friends discussing last night’s football game. “How are you?”

“I can’t complain,” Martín said. The underground apartment was starting to wear on him – it was gilded, yet still a cage – but there was little anyone could do about it. Getting outside and walking around raised the spectre of being spotted by a prowling recon drone. Martín had no illusions about their capabilities. He’d used them often enough. The underground bunker was supposed to be completely off the books, but there was no way to be sure. The spooks had accessed every government database by now or he was a degenerate beyond all hope of redemption. “What can I do for you?”

Cozort cocked his head. “Is there something we can do to make your stay more comfortable? Better food? Or drink?”

“I’m very well fed,” Martín assured him. It was true. The sheer variety staggered him. Hamburgers and fries, pizzas and curries and grilled meats and … he thought he’d eaten something different, every day of his stay, yet his hosts showed no sign of running out of ideas for meals. “Do you treat all your guests this well?”

“It depends on the guest,” Cozort said. Martín silently gave him points for honesty. “We see no reason to mistreat you.”

“Glad to hear it,” Martín said, wryly. “And now, I suppose it is time to sing for my supper?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Cozort said. “You’ve been briefed on recent developments?”

“Yes.” Martín had been given detailed outlines of everything that had happened, although they were a little lacking in specifics. He wasn’t sure if his hosts didn’t trust him – they’d be fools to trust him completely – or if they were just too used to writing documents for military or technological illiterates. It was hard to watch local politicians on television and take them seriously. “You won, at great cost.”

Cozort nodded. “Their space weapons platform has been destroyed,” he said. “Their base in Saudi Arabia has been badly battered. We’ve tracked their heavy-lift aircraft leaving Saudi and making their way over the ocean … our networks have been badly degraded, but we’re fairly sure they’ve been moving supplies to Texas. Do you agree with that conclusion?”

“It seems likely,” Martín agreed. “I couldn’t say for sure, of course, but Montrose might have decided to effectively abandon Saudi Arabia to concentrate on America.”

“Smart move, from his point of view.” Cozort sounded disgusted. “What do you think he’ll do now?”

Martín hesitated. “Montrose is the product of a very different society,” he said, finally. The locals had produced a great many books on applied sociology, something practically unknown in the Protectorate. There was little interest in studying other cultures when other cultures could either adapt to the Protectorate or get hammered until they either adapted or went effectively extinct. “The fact he speaks a very similar language should not convince you otherwise.”

Cozort nodded, curtly. “I know.”

“Montrose was raised to be ambitious,” Martín added. “He grew up in a world where you had to start climbing to the top, or step aside and allow yourself to be stepped on. It isn’t enough to be the foremost man in his world, he wants – he needs – to be acknowledged as the foremost man. He thirsts to prove himself by besting his rivals and forcing them to admit his superiority.”

Cozort cocked his head. “I thought you didn’t know him personally.”

“I don’t,” Martín said. “But I know the type all too well. It doesn’t matter just who was granted command of the invasion force. They’d all be the same type.”

He paused. “And Montrose will have gambled everything on victory,” he added. “Failure is simply not an option.”

“I see,” Cozort said, slowly.

Martín would be surprised if Cozort did. The American sociologists had written about America itself, as well as the rest of the world, and their conclusions had surprised him. The United States simply wasn’t that interested in other societies. It was certainly largely unaware of the realities of their lives. He didn’t pretend to understand the symbolism of women wearing handmaid costumes while protesting in favour of despotic regimes – regimes that didn’t bother to pay lip service to women’s rights – but it made a certain kind of sense. If you didn’t live in such a society, you would never truly understand it until you did. Nor would you grasp that you simply couldn’t get away.

Cozort leaned forward. “What do you think he’ll do now?”

“It depends,” Martín admitted. “On paper, his captains can vote to remove him from his post. If they feel he’s made too many mistakes to be trusted, they can replace him. But whoever replaces him will face the same problem, so they may not come up with any better answers.”

“Will he be overthrown?”

Martín hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. He barely knew his former commanding officer and that worthy was probably dead, if he wasn’t a prisoner himself. He didn’t think many riflemen had made it out of Washington before it was too late. “It depends. Anyone who puts together a challenge and loses will be in deep shit, so …”

He shrugged. “I can’t make any predictions. Not with any degree of certainty.”

Cozort nodded. “Assuming he remains in control, what do you think he’ll do?”

“He won’t give up.” Martín was sure of that, if nothing else. “He’ll try to find some way to bring you down before it’s too late.”

“Like what?”

Martín shrugged, again. “There aren’t many options. He needs a complete victory. Nothing less will suffice. Even if you agree to concede Texas in exchange for peace ...”

“President Hernandez has already ruled out any sort of major territorial concessions,” Cozort said. 

“Good for him,” Martín said. “But even if you did, it would leave Montrose in a very precarious position. And …”

He hesitated. “I can’t say this for sure, so don’t take it for granted. Alright?”

Cozort nodded. “Go ahead.”

Martín leaned forward. “They were trying to open a gate in Saudi Arabia, right? That gate was destroyed. Depending on how far along the construction was when you attacked it, there is a very real chance there would have been a flash of interdimensional energies that could have been detected in the home timeline. If that happened, they know something went terribly wrong.”

Cozort scowled. “What’ll they do?”

“I don’t know,” Martín admitted. “The emergency protocols don’t cover this exact situation. There’s no way to be sure what they’ll do.”

“This gets worse and worse,” Cozort muttered. “What protocols do they follow?”

Martín frowned. “I only know the generalities,” he said. “As I understand it, the planners came up with four separate scenarios for when we rotated into this timeline; no humans, primitive humans, equal humans, or more advanced humans. Or something completely inexplicable. If we found no humans or primitives, we could take over easily; if we found equals or our superiors, we were supposed to try to enter into diplomatic negotiations instead. Something beyond us … Montrose was supposed to destroy the base, triggering a warning. It’s at least possible the Protectorate Council will decide to wait and see, rather than send more reinforcements.”

“Right …” Cozort said nothing for a long moment. “What’s stopping them from rotating a fortress into our timeline, having a good look around and then rotating back out again?”

“As I understand it” – Martín hadn’t been told more than the bare minimum about the Crosstime Transpositioner, for fear he’d fall into enemy hands – “the technology is very expensive, very power-intensive and very fragile. You’d need two Crosstime Transpositioners to rotate in and then out again, which would work on paper but ... there’d be no guarantee the concept would work in the real world. The first Crosstime Transpositioner might accidentally destroy the second.”

Cozort chuckled. “That would be embarrassing.”

“Quite,” Martín agreed. “Technically, it’s feasible; practically, I can’t see anyone actually trying.”

Cozort sobered. “If you were in Montrose’s shoes, what would you do?”

“The smartest thing to do would be to rebuild the orbital weapons platform and try again,” Martín said, after a moment. “I don’t know if Montrose has the resources to put it back together again. He must have pushed his fabbers to the limits to meet the demand for space-capable components as well as fuelling the war effort. Now that you know what he’s doing, you might be able to impede him from obtaining locally produced components too. But if it worked, he’d have you bent over a desk. You’d be at his mercy.”

“I see,” Cozort said. “Anything else?”

“Work with foreigners, I suspect,” Martín said. “You have a lot of enemies. Montrose has plenty to offer anyone who wants to join him. It’s probably his best bet if he wants to take the United States largely intact.”

“That would never work,” Cozort said. “We would never stand for it.”

“That’s not the important point,” Martín said. “The point is, does Montrose think it would work?”

***

“What do you make of it?”

The analyst’s chamber within the underground bunker was a far cry from Martín’s quarters, Colin Cozort thought, as he sat on one of the folding chairs. It had the strange aura of a military establishment that was both temporary and permanent; folding chairs and tables, a handful of primitive devices pressed against the far wall … mostly too primitive, he hoped, to be found and raided by a prowling enemy hacker. You couldn’t rely on anything in the computers these days, not when the enemy could not only breeze through the toughest defences but also insert deepfakes that were good enough to fool every AI detector ever invented. The paranoia it caused made it very difficult to get anything done ...

Colin leaned back in his chair. “There are limits to what our friend knows.”

Gabby Pasqual raised her eyebrows. “Do you trust him?”

“I trust he’s not intentionally misleading us,” Colin said. They’d had the same discussion several times in a row, something he’d found irritating even though he understood the reasoning behind it. “I don’t think he was told anything he didn’t need to know.”

He scowled as he accepted a cup of black coffee. The days in which prisoners were treated with some degree of care were long over, at least outside the civilised world. Captured military personnel could look forward to being tortured, if they weren’t brutally raped and murdered for snuff videos. Military training revolved around misleading captors, encouraging captives to dole out information as slowly as possible, rather than trying to resist torture. More practically, there were limits to what soldiers were allowed to know. There was just no way to guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to talk. The Protectorate, it seemed, agreed. Footman Martín Cortés was pretty much on the bottom rung, as far as his society was concerned. He knew very little beyond the basics.

And he certainly can’t build a Crosstime Transpositioner for us out of stone knives and bearskins, Colin mused. That would be impossible even if they’d taught him everything he needs to know to do it.

He looked at Gabby, who seemed thoughtful. “What about the other prisoners?”

“They say much the same,” Gabby said. “The ones willing to cooperate, at least. It’s a shame we can’t tell them we have other prisoners.”

Colin nodded. As far as each of the prisoners was concerned, they were the only prisoners. The smarter ones had probably worked out that wasn’t true, but ... they knew nothing about where the others were held or what they’d revealed to their captors. There was no choice. The Protectorate had to be looking for their missing people – Colin dared not assume their enemy had written all the prisoners off as dead; their bodies had certainly never been recovered – and if they found one they might find others. One security breach, even something as simple as sending a text message on a cellphone, might unleash hell. He’d caught himself reaching for his cellphone from time to time and someone else might easily forget ...

He sipped his coffee. “Desperate men do desperate things,” he muttered. “And Montrose is a very desperate man.”

“So our profilers agree,” Gabby said. “But ...”

She shrugged, expressively. Colin couldn’t disagree. The profilers were trying to put together a profile on a man they’d never met, a man they’d seen on a handful of live broadcasts and through prisoner interrogations. That struck him as dangerously limited as well as technically against medical ethics, raising the spectre – no, the certainty – of the psychologists getting something wrong. Colin had never liked his first bosses, when he’d been a junior, and he hadn’t thought very highly of their decisions; as an older official, he’d come to understand their decisions had made a certain amount of sense. Did the prisoners feel the same way?

And we have trouble understanding what our enemies in the Middle East and Russia will do, Colin reminded himself. The Russo-Ukraine War had been insane by Western standards, he’d been told, but it made perfect sense if you took Russian historical geopolitics into account. It didn’t mean the Russians were in the right, as Colin was certain they were in the wrong, yet it did make their actions a little more understandable. At least we don’t have idiots here insisting that trying to explain is trying to excuse.

He finished his coffee and put the cup on the table. “I need to return to Washington,” he said, flatly. “The President needs to be briefed. In person.”

“My sympathies,” Gabby said. “There’s supposed to be a secure line from the safehouse two miles away ...”

Colin shook his head. The safehouse wasn’t safe. He’d seen the enemy hackers take control of a conversation and really fuck things up. They were damn lucky American troops weren’t taught to follow orders without question. That could really have messed things up. As it was ... an invasion force that couldn’t be more than a million-strong, if that, was beating the crap out of a country with a population nearing three hundred and fifty million. A few more decades, with the internet growing ever more present and AI stinking it up ... the Protectorate might have won without a shot being fired. As it was, the matter still hung in the balance.

He stood, brushing down his suit. “It can’t be trusted,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to him in person.”

“Good luck,” Gabby said. “And don’t forget to put in a good word for us.”

“The President has too many demands on his time,” Colin pointed out. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

Chapter Four: Castle Treathwick, Texas, Timeline F (OTL)

There was no point in holding the meeting in person, not when their enemies might consider it a suitable target. The Protectorate had few qualms about trying to assassinate enemy commanders and expected no better from its opponents, particularly opponents who knew enough about technology to be dangerous. James had no reason to think the Americans had managed to insert anyone into the fortress, and the only natives permitted within the structure were those who had nowhere else to go, but there was no point in taking chances. What the locals lacked in modern technology they more than made up for in imagination. They’d come up with uses for all kind of technologies they hadn’t yet managed to invent. 

He leaned back in his chair as the holograms flickered into existence, the minibrains checking and rechecking the encrypted communications links to ensure the enemy – within and without – hadn’t managed to hack the network. Subtly taking control of a hostile communications network was very difficult, but far from impossible; the Americans might not have the technology to hack the network directly, as far as he knew, yet they could easily have captured a network access terminal or datanode and turned it against its former masters. It was difficult to say how much had been lost in the chaotic retreat from Washington and there was no way to be sure the missing were dead rather than prisoners. James’s men were trained to resist interrogation, but he dared not assume any prisoners hadn’t been forced to talk. It was what he would do, if he was on the other side of the hill. 

And we don’t know what happened to far too many missing footmen, he thought, grimly. The spooks had turned up nothing, nothing at all. It proved nothing. What are they telling their captors, if they’re still alive?

The Americas knew their computer networks weren’t secure, after they’d been hacked and used to confuse any response to the invasion. Pen and paper might be slow and unwieldy, but it had the great advantage of being impossible to hack. It made his job harder.

He took a moment to survey the holograms as the minibrains completed their checks. Some loyalists, for a given value of the word. Their ambitions were almost as towering as his own and if they thought he was dragging them down they wouldn’t hesitate to move against him. Others were more openly opposed or at least neutral, their honesty galling and yet something of a relief compared to the opponents who pretended otherwise until the time came to bury a knife in their target’s back. Three from the second invasion force ... they weren’t his friends, not in any real sense of the word, but their presence was refreshing. Their mere presence might galvanise James’s captains to stick with him. Might.

“We have suffered a setback,” he said, with the brutal honesty he’d been taught to use. Local politicians spoke in euphemisms or tried to pretend problems didn’t exist because they were politically embarrassing; the Protectorate knew better. The blackened and charred landscape only a few short miles from Flint was a clear reminder they’d taken a beating. “The loss of the men and materiel is bad enough, but the loss of the gate is a great deal worse. The explosion may well have been detected back home.”

There was a long awkward pause. There wasn’t a single idiot amongst the council of war. They knew what might have happened, when the gate had been destroyed. If the interdimensional energies had been detected, the Protectorate might assume the worst and refrain from sending reinforcements. If that happened ... his lips twitched. It was dangerous, to say the least, but it was also reassuring. There wouldn’t be any new arrival with the power to remove him from command.

“We must assume there will be no more reinforcements, at least until we can reopen a gate,” he continued. “That pits us, alone, against an entire world. I trust you all realise that surrender is not an option? Nor can we come to terms with our new opponents.”

His lips twisted. In some ways, losing the base in America would have been preferable to nearly losing the base in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and their neighbours were military incompetents, their armies organised to prevent coups rather than fight wars, and they’d proved no match for them. The Jihadists who’d given the United States such trouble were too foolish to realise the only reason they’d survived was that their opponents didn’t want to take the gloves off and just stamp them flat, an inexplicable reluctance the PEF didn’t share. The insurgency hadn’t been more than a minor irritation. And if that base had survived, the Protectorate could punch out all its neighbours, seize the oil fields and negotiate from a position of strength.

There’s no point in wishing things had been different, he told himself, sharply. Besides, if this base had been destroyed, you would have been destroyed with it.

“We are committed now,” he said. There would be recriminations later, charges that he was to blame for their commitment. “There is no way to retreat back to our homeworld. We are locked in a death struggle that can only have two outcomes. Either we are victorious or we are utterly defeated. There is no third option.”

There was a long pause. It was broken by Captain (Armour) Jackson King.

“We are massively outnumbered and outgunned, sir,” he said, his tone one step short of outright disrespect. “How can we possibly win?”

James resisted the urge to accuse him of cowardice, or demand to know if he thought they should surrender on the best terms they could get. It would have been worse than useless. The captains needed hope, not petty charges that would draw more attention to his failures ... not, he supposed, that any sort of charge would make their defeats any more obvious. He had to convince them they could win, under his command, or he would be removed from his post and his successor would either open talks with the Americans or continue the war. It would be galling beyond words if the bastard actually won ...

“On paper, we are both outnumbered and outgunned,” he agreed. “In practice, this is not a united world. We face one nation that is hardly united itself, a nation with enemies that are more than ready to work with us. We have already had some success with recruiting allies and we will have more, once the effects of our invasion start to bite. It may mean promising to share more of our technology than we wish, but it is a small price to pay.

“Second, the United States is uniquely vulnerable. They have expended a sizable portion of their nuclear arsenal and they cannot replace it in a hurry. The global supply network has been badly weakened” – and quite how a so-called hyperpower had managed to get so dependent on supply chains outside its direct control was beyond him – “and it will take them years to recover, even if they throw caution to the winds and push ahead as fast as possible. We can and we will take steps to impede them; we will strike deep into their territory, trying to make it harder for them to rebuild. Our goal will be to break the United States apart and prevent them from mustering the forces they need to destroy us.”

He paused. “And third, their ability to take the war to us is highly limited. They have expended much of their missile stockpiles in the last engagement, along with their nuclear warheads. Their allies are unable to make up the shortfall even if they wish to do so. We control the land for hundreds of miles around our castle and the airspace for hundreds of miles beyond. They can harass us, and they are doing it already, but they cannot hope to actually defeat us.

“In the meantime, we will build up our own forces. We will continue to recruit allies and local soldiers, while reforming and purifying local society. And then we will go forth and conquer.”

The words hung in the air. It was an admission of defeat in some ways, as much as it appeared otherwise. He’d hoped to take control of the United States, to present the Protectorate with a fully functioning civilisation that could be turned into a powerful resource without the long-term technological and educational uplift programs the other invaded timelines needed. It would have served both the Protectorate and his own ambitions very well. But ... battering the United States to pieces, hammering the alien nation until it could fight no longer, would leave the Protectorate with one hell of a reconstruction task. It wouldn’t be wholly a bad thing, but ... it wasn’t what he’d wanted.

“You paint a pretty picture,” Captain Gus Falcone said. The logistics officer had a chip on his shoulder, even though he had genuine combat experience and no one could call him a coward. He was also the officer who had the experience to know just how difficult their task would be. “But it will be difficult to batter them into submission.”

“They did manage to damage Castle Bothwell,” Captain Harris agreed. He’d been ordered to transfer himself and his entire regiment to America, rather than try to expand their grip on Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region. “These are not ordinary foes.”

“No,” James agreed. “But there is nothing else we can do.”

He sighed, inwardly. The techs had been promising antigravity generators that could levitate something the size of Castle Treathwick for years, but so far they hadn’t managed to put theory into practice. There was no way he could move his entire base to another country and with Castle Bothwell heavily damaged there was no way it could host his men as well as its own. And moving his troops there would be an admission he was placing himself under his rival’s command ...

No. He would sooner die.

“We have suffered a setback,” he said, again. “But the war is far from over.”

There was another pause. James studied his captains, wondering if his known enemies would try to strike now ... or if it would be one of the opportunists, cloaking his ambition in a display of concern for the future. No one would be fooled, of course, but if the arguments were good it would hardly matter. Would they support him one last time? Or would they try to move against him? It helped that there really were no better options. Surrender was as unthinkable as retreat.

“The fact remains, we are thrown back on our own resources and those we can extract from the locals,” Falcone said. The logistics officer looked from face to face. “Our fabbers are nearly a hundred years in advance of anything the locals have produced, but there are limits and we’re brushing against them now. We have shortages of everything from hypersonic missiles to spare parts for the tanks and other armoured vehicles, shortages we cannot make up from captured local stockpiles. We have put together a local logistics network to support our operations, true, but extending it north is proving difficult. The terrain does not work in our favour.”

James hid his annoyance with an effort. The locals didn’t have antigravity technology, which meant that knocking down a few bridges would limit their ability to move troops and supplies around the battlefield without hampering his tanks and IFVs in the slightest. He’d managed to trap and destroy a dozen enemy formations by simply crossing rivers in places the locals deemed impossible and attacking from the rear, a trick that was difficult to prevent even if you knew what you were facing. But the local-operated logistics network was dependent on captured local trucks, which also needed bridges ...

“That is true,” he said. There was no point in denying the truth. “What do you suggest?”

“We have the resources to open a gate,” Falcone said. “I propose we start putting together a gate here. Once we open it, we can draw on the resources in our timeline for a swift and certain victory.”

There was a mutter of agreement. James kept his face carefully blank. Texas was a backwater back home, a land of little value ... it was why it had been chosen as a jump-off point for the invasion. The Protectorate had still based a number of military units within the region, just in case the crosstime rotation brought something really dangerous into the home timeline. From Falcone’s point of view, opening a gate and drawing on the resources in their Texas was a guaranteed victory. Sally would call it a no-brainer. From his ...

He ground his teeth in annoyance. The Council would send someone to take his place. He knew it. And the worst of all was that he couldn’t argue against it, not openly. It would unite his captains against him, allies and rivals alike.

“Once we have secured the region, we will do so,” he said. “The enemy did manage to get a small team into Flint.”

“And they clearly have the ability to detect a gate,” General Stuart Essex added. “The moment we start experimenting, they’ll throw everything they have left at us.”

James nodded in agreement. The Americans would seek help from their enemies as well as their allies and that would be risky, if the enemies thought they were better with the devil they knew no matter what agreement they made with the Protectorate. If the Americans and Russians and Chinese and French and British launched every nuclear missile they had at Texas ... they only had to get lucky once. Castle Treathwick was heavily armoured. The gate complex was incredibly flimsy by comparison.

“We will take steps to cripple them first,” he said, as reassuringly as he could. “And then we will open the gate at our leisure.”

Once I am the master of the world, he added, in the privacy of his own mind. The war wasn’t over. Nor was his determination to make his position utterly unchallengeable. The gate construction would have to be slowed, to ensure the program didn’t succeed before it was too late. He’d have a private chat with Essex later, make sure he knew what to do. The man could be relied upon to see matters the right way. The game is very far from over.

“The spooks have put together a list of targets,” he added. “We’ll move to strike them over the next few days, knocking them down while building our own forces up. Unless anyone has any better ideas ...”

The question hung in the air. James allowed himself a tight smile as the silence remained unbroken. They might dislike him, they might hate him, they might have no qualms about shoving him aside if he threatened their own careers and ambitions ... they still needed to come up with a good reason to remove him, one that would stand up to the judgement of history. Mere dislike was not enough. And if they couldn’t come up with a reason that appealed to everyone ... hopefully, it would keep his enemies occupied long enough to allow him to secure his position. He was damned if he was giving up without a fight.

“Very good,” he said. “We’ll keep up the pressure on the enemy, while preparing our knock-out blow. I’ll speak to some of you later to discuss our redeployments. Until then” – he smiled – “tend to your regiments. I expect them ready to move when the time comes.”

He tapped his console, ending the meeting and banishing all but one of the holograms. Essex studied him quizzically, his face almost unreadable. James had selected him as the de facto second-in-command because he lacked regimental command experience, making it hard for him to muster the support to push James aside. It was unfortunate that his ambitions had led him to missteps in Washington – he’d sent an entire regiment into a meatgrinder, where it had been effectively destroyed – and that James had turned him into a scapegoat for the disaster, but ... he was loyal. No one else would give him a second chance. He had nowhere to go.

“Sir?”

“The training program,” James said. Training local soldiers was a good use of Essex’s talents – and it kept him away from their rivals. “How quickly can it be expanded?”

Essex hesitated. “Not by much, unless you want to sacrifice quality for quantity,” he said. “It isn’t easy to train local instructors and our instructors are heavily overworked.”

“And the locals might not be trustworthy,” James agreed. The Americans seemed to both love and hate their soldiers, but there was no denying the fighting arms were very loyal to their country. A handful could be pressured or blackmailed into working against their country, they’d discovered, yet there were limits. They certainly couldn’t be allowed to train new recruits. “Do what you can. We need to expand our forces as quickly as possible.”

“Of course,” Essex said.

“You will also take command of the gate-construction project,” James added. He allowed his tone to harden. “It is not in our interests to have the gate opened too early, is it?”

Essex looked back for a long moment. If their superiors heard about Washington before Essex had the chance to redeem himself, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t assigned to a work camp in the middle of nowhere. The camps needed supervisors as well as inmates and assigning officers who were in the doghouse to take command was an excellent way to make use of them while also getting rid of them. No, it was in Essex’s best interests to ensure the gate remained closed until they were ready. He’d do what James had not quite told him to do.

“Yes, sir,” Essex said, finally. “I understand.”

Chapter Five: Training Centre, Colorado, Timeline F (OTL)

Captain Thomas Anderson frowned, despite himself, as he watched the young men – and not a few young women – being put through their paces in the early morning sun.

The training centre wasn’t a real boot camp in any real sense of the word, at least in the eyes of a man who had gone to Camp Pendleton and then spent nearly a decade in the Marine Corps before taking early retirement and trying to build a new life for himself. It was a summer camp for rich and mostly white kids, with a sports field and gym that would have been the envy of many a school if they’d known it existed; they’d had everything from two dozen horses, to allow the kids to pretend to be cowboys for a few short hours, to kitchens capable of feeding hundreds of campers and staff members every day. It looked isolated, surrounded by forest on three sides and a lake on the fourth, but it wasn’t that far from civilisation. It wouldn’t have been abandoned if the economy hadn’t staggered and was currently teetering on the brink of collapse. The military had taken over, paying the owners a nominal rent, and turned it into a makeshift training centre. It wasn’t much, but it would have to suffice. 

His lips twisted into a scowl. The majority of the raw recruits were effectively refugees from Texas, or the cities that had collapsed into anarchy when the Electronic Benefit Transfer system had been taken down in the opening hours of the war. They’d been offered a flat choice between joining the military, being assigned to work gangs or being denied anything resembling government support, a measure Thomas knew was thoroughly practical and yet something that simply didn’t sit well. The United States hadn’t used conscription in decades and the army had been all the stronger for it, but the United States hadn’t faced a major incursion on her own soil since the Civil War. A friendly neighbour to the north and a containable set of problems to the south ... there had been no reason to think that would change until a threat had appeared out of nowhere. And they were still struggling to catch up.

He gritted his teeth. The training program had been stripped to the bare essentials, churning out men who could shoot and fight as part of a unit, but not much else. They’d be doing a great deal of learning on the job and that was going to cost them, no matter how many trained and experienced men were drawn out of the regular military to take command of the ramshackle units. Discipline was a major problem too, even though the instructors had been granted wider latitude than normal for dealing with troublemakers. But there was no time.

We’ll still learning the lessons from Ukraine, he mused, as he saw a drone flying over the training grounds. The tiny aircraft was little bigger than a bird, but it could call in missile or air strikes or even throw itself on a target, destroying itself to take out an enemy vehicle. The recruits making their way through the foliage would be shown the video afterwards and told just how easily they could be tracked, if they weren’t careful. And now the Puritans are teaching us some more lessons too.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought. The Iraqis had fought hard in 2003, harder than anyone in America had expected, but they’d been in a hopeless position before the first shot had been fired. The insurgents had been a more serious problem, one made worse by political considerations overriding military necessity, yet they’d never come close to driving the Americans out of their country. The United States had been able to go wherever it wanted as long as it was prepared to pay the price. But the Russo-Ukraine War had been very different ...

More like the First World War, he reminded himself. We were slow to learn the lessons from that too.

Something flickered, at the corner of his eye. He glanced up, just in time to see a flash of light dart out of the forest and strike a recruit. The man staggered backwards and collapsed, his head practically vaporised by the plasma bolt. Several more followed, one aimed right into the barracks. The building caught fire, the flames spreading rapidly. Thomas cursed as he unholstered his pistol, mentally kicking himself for not having insisted his instructors carried weapons at all times. He’d known military bases were prime targets for terrorist attacks.

“Get down!” he screamed. Making himself a target was risky – snipers were trained to go after officers, assuming that taking them out would hamper any response - but the instructors were likely dead and the recruits were starting to panic. A few weeks of training wasn’t enough to prepare them for a shooting war, not so far from the occupied zone. “Get down!”

He threw himself to the ground as a plasma bolt flashed past, cursing as he heard the dull CRUMP-CRUMP-CRUMP of mortar fire. There were a handful in the armoury, but there hadn’t been any plans to use them ... the enemy had either learnt how to fire them, hardly difficult for a trained soldier, or brought along a handful of turncoats. Explosions shook the ground a moment later, the shells falling around their targets and shattering what little remained of recruit discipline. Thomas crawled forward as fast as he dared, all too aware he couldn’t turn and run. The plasma fire was coming from the treeline ... how the hell had the enemy gotten so close? There were supposed to be patrols around the edge of the grounds ... hell, the camp was supposed to be completely off the books. The recruits had been told to leave all electronic devices behind, just to make sure they didn’t accidentally draw the enemy’s attention. Clearly, something had been missed ...

The guards hurried into view, firing into the foliage in a pattern that looked disturbingly like the spray and pray tactics the insurgents had used. Thomas really blame them as he kept moving, keeping his head as low as he could. The enemy had to be driven back and if that meant expending vast amounts of ammunition ... it was a small price to pay. The office would have called for help, he was sure, but radio signals could be jammed and the landline could be cut ... how long had the enemy been preparing their raid? If they’d found the landline, they might have taken it down well before they’d opened fire. It wasn’t as if he’d been constantly calling his superiors for orders.

He lifted his pistol as the enemy came into view, a handful of men in outfits that blurred into the background so perfectly he wouldn’t have been able to see them if they hadn’t been fighting. They were popping up to shoot as bullets cracked through the trees, making good use of the terrain to keep themselves from being hit. Either they’d gotten very lucky or they’d been operating within the region for several days ... behind the shooters, a pair of mortarmen were loading, firing, and reloading a very familiar 60-millimeter light mortar. They’d clearly taken it from a captured depot, he guessed, if only because the Puritans didn’t seem to have brought any indirect fire support of their own. It was an odd oversight for such a modern army, from what he’d heard through the grapevine. It made no sense.

His pistol barked once, aiming for the nearest trooper. The bullet took the man in the head ... their body armour was good, better than anything America could produce, but Thomas was sure the bastard had felt the impact even if it hadn’t killed him. His comrades whipped around, bringing their rifles to bear; Thomas shot a second, before the third pressed his finger on the trigger and opened fire. The world went white ...

***

Footwoman Constance Hawker scowled as she fired and shot the American officer in the chest. 

The man had sneaked up on them ... somehow. She gave him silent credit as she inched forward to check on her comrades: one shot in the head and killed though his armour had absorbed most of the impact, the other in pain but otherwise fine. The armour had saved his life, but it had still felt like a punch to the gut. It was a shame the camouflage armour wasn’t as tough as regular armour, yet ... she shook her head. Without it, their incursion would have been detected before they’d gotten into position to open fire.

She pushed the thought aside as the enemy shooting intensified. The Americans had gotten over their surprise and were rallying, their recruits being armed to add their firepower to the growing storm. Their accuracy was terrible, but it was only a matter of time before they hit something though sheer luck or properly trained soldiers arrived to trap and destroy the small force. She’d learnt respect for the Americans over the last few months, for all their technological inferiority. Their troops were well-trained and they knew the terrain very well.

Her lips twisted as she opened fire on the training ground once again. The smarter enemy recruits were crawling back, while the dumber ones had frozen in panic or were standing and trying to run. Constance almost felt guilty as she shot them in the back, even though she knew nits bred lice. They’d have few qualms about killing her if they got a clear shot ... or worse. She was a young woman, after all, and degenerates did horrible things to any woman who fell into their clutches. They did horrible things to the men too.

And I had to fight like a demon to get this post, she thought. It was vanishingly rare for a woman to serve in a combat role, even in covert operations units where a female presence was highly desirable. Her mother had been furious, demanding her father forbid Constance from joining the military ... let alone the PEF. Would I have been so willing if I’d known just where I was going?

She shook her head. It was too late now.

“Time to go,” Lieutenant Alistair said. The enemy were trying to advance, moving with the skirmish determination of untried troops trying desperately not to let the side down. One group advanced, the other provided covering fire ... a simple but very effective tactic. “Set the final traps, then move out.”

Constance nodded, placing a mine in a suitably nasty place before turning and heading down the track to the extraction point. The others followed, two men picking up the bodies and carrying them while the mortar team carefully rigged the last mortar shells to explode if it was touched by unwary hands. There was no point in keeping it. There was no shortage of captured enemy weapons in their arsenal. Who knew? Perhaps the explosions would make the enemy a little more careful when it came to following them ... the foliage closed in around them, the path somehow visible and concealed at the same time. Odd, to say the least. She raised her eyebrows as they passed a statue of a man in a feathered headdress, followed by two men in wide-brimmed hats and carrying primitive pistols. It meant nothing to her ...

A dull boom echoed from behind them. “I think we got something,” Footman Crowley said, cheerfully. A second followed, smaller this time. “You think we killed him?”

Constance hoped so. Local medical technology wasn’t as primitive as what passed for medicine in other timelines – the local butchers had considered leeches advanced technology – but it was still pretty bad. A man who lost his limbs couldn’t hope to have them cloned and reattached; a man who was struck blind had little hope of ever having his sight restored. The poor bastard would be lucky if he were struck dead, instead of having to live as a cripple. It would be a living nightmare.

She put the thought out of her mind as she reached the extraction point. The flyer was already descending to meet them, a small craft almost completely invisible to local technology and capable of outrunning the vast majority of fighter jets. The locals would need to be very lucky to get a glimpse of the craft with the naked eye, let alone slam a missile into the hull before it was too late. The flyer could outrun local MANPADs too.

“Objective completed,” Alistair said, as they scrambled into the flyer and slammed the hatch closed behind them. The pilot didn’t wait for orders. He took off the moment the hatch was firmly closed and secured. “At least forty dead, perhaps more.”

Constance nodded, leaning back in her seat as the adrenaline slowly drained away. It wasn’t her first engagement, but ...  it had felt like shooting fish in a barrel. No, worse ... it had been aimed at disrupting the enemy war effort and sowing terror, rather than anything more reasonable. She understood the logic behind it, and she had no qualms about killing enemies in open combat, yet she couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. The young men she’d killed could have joined the Protectorate instead and won citizenship. They hadn’t deserved to die.

But in the end, what they deserved didn’t matter. All that mattered was victory.

***

Major Patrick Wayne cursed under his breath as he saw the remains of the training camp.

The attackers had been thorough, very thorough. Every building had been hit at least twice and some were still on fire, the kitchen and dining halls burning so merrily that he’d ordered the attempts to fight the blaze abandoned. They’d been lucky the armoury hadn’t been hit even worse ... a few more shots and the ammunition stockpiles might have exploded, taking much of the camp with them. The makeshift concrete shelters had held. Barely.

His mood darkened as he saw the bodies. Young men – white, black, brown, yellow – united in death, their corpses burned and blackened when they weren’t horrifically mutilated.  Some were so badly damaged it would be difficult to identify them, at least without a proper forensic unit. Others ... their heads looked strikingly intact, even though their lower bodies were charred, mangled or both. Patrick had seen some horrors in his career, but this ...

Sergeant Luis hurried up to him, his face so grim Patrick knew what he was about to say before he opened his mouth. “They got away clean, sir,” he said. “Their aircraft managed to lift them out before we caught up with them.”

“Fuck.” Patrick took a packet of cigarettes from his mouth, offered one to the sergeant and lit another for himself. “They’ll be back in Texas by now, won’t they?”

He cursed under his breath. The training camp was nearly seven hundred kilometres from the occupied zone. It should have been difficult to spot, let alone attack. The SEALs who’d killed bin Laden had travelled a mere 120 km by comparison. And yet these attackers had gotten in without detection, opened fire with a ruthlessness that chilled him to the bone and gotten out again, seemingly without loss. In hindsight ...

“Fuck,” he muttered again. Hindsight was always more accurate than foresight, true, but if the Puritans had started attacking so far behind the lines there were more targets than could possibly be guarded. They hadn’t gone anywhere near the antiaircraft batteries protecting Dodge City or any of the major military bases in the state ... as far as he knew. There would be plenty of recriminations, once word reached Washington; plenty of advice from backseat drivers on how the atrocity could have been avoided. “How many survived?”

“Two hundred and seven recruits survived uninjured,” Luis told him. “Forty-two suffered injuries, seventeen serious. They’ve already been medevacked to the nearest facility.”

They’ll be saying we should have had more guards on patrol, Patrick thought. Or that we should have set up radar stations and passive sensors, never mind that the former could be detected and the latter largely useless against enemy technology.

He shook his head. That was a problem for a later date.

“Prepare them to move out,” he ordered. Thankfully, the buses parked outside the wire had been left untouched. The recruits should be safe once they were away from the training camp. The military could set up emergency housing somewhere for a week or two, then transfer the poor kids to another camp. “This base will have to be closed down.”

He shook his head as he allowed his gaze to wander over the facility. It was absurdly politically incorrect, so much so that he wondered why it had never been targeted by everyone who thought erasing the past was the key to a better future. The mural of Native Americans welcoming the Europeans alone ... his lips twisted in bitter amusement. He could easily imagine Wednesday Addams calling out the hypocrisy of the whole affair, reminding the world of the grim reality behind the cartoonish facade. He had no idea where the movie had been filmed ...was it here? He didn’t know.

And now we’re being invaded, he reflected. Invasion, conquest and colonisation had been part of human history since Adam and Eve. The West was largely unique in feeling guilty about the sins of their ancestors ... the Protectorate certainly felt no shame. The world never truly changes, does it?

Chapter Six: Washington DC, USA, Timeline F (OTL)

“How many dead?”

“At least three hundred and fifty, Mr. President,” General Grey said. “We’re fortunate most of the targets were defended, even though the defenders were caught by surprise. The enemy were largely beaten off before they managed to complete their task.”

President Felix Hernandez scowled as he glared down at the report. Civilians didn’t think of military bases as gun-free zones, but most soldiers weren’t permitted to carry firearms on base without specific permission, something that had made them vulnerable to a string of terrorist attacks. That policy had been changed after the invasion had begun, after the United States realised it was dealing with a foe that could attack anywhere between El Paso and Seattle, yet it hadn’t been enough to stand off a handful of enemy commando teams. If the Protectorate had wished to remind the Americans they weren’t safe anywhere, they’d succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

“And there was no warning?” Felix gritted his teeth. “No hint there was any trouble until the shooting started?”

“No, Mr. President,” General Grey confirmed. “The radar and passive sensor network detected nothing.”

“Fuck.” Felix shook his head in disbelief. The United States was supposed to be capable of monitoring every last inch of its airspace, as well as hundreds of miles around the country. It was no longer possible, he’d been assured in the halcyon days before the war, for an airliner to be hijacked and effectively vanish from the radar screens. But the Protectorate’s stealth technology was dangerously advanced, making it impossible to track their craft as long as they were careful. “Is there anything we can do to prevent it from happening again?”

“No, Mr. President,” General Grey said, confirming Felix’s worst fears. “There’s no way to guarantee anything.”

“I know,” Felix said. “Do what you can.”

He sat back in his chair. The only good thing about the crisis was that Congress and the Senate had been scattered all over the country, with the vast majority of congress-critters back in their home states trying to drum up support for the war effort. There wouldn’t be any demands for an immediate investigation into the whole affair, no attempt to score political points by blaming the military for not doing the impossible. That would change, given time, but for the moment they could act without Congress looking over their shoulder. The problem was that there were limits to what they could do.

There was a tap on the open door. “Mr. President, the war cabinet has assembled,” his aide said. “They’re ready for you.”

But am I ready for them? 

Felix stood, feeling a twinge of sympathy for his predecessor. Hamlin had been a thoroughly decent man, the kind of person who would have made an excellent professor or grandfather, but ... he’d been hopelessly out of his depth as a leader, more interested in searching for consensus than acting decisively. If he’d listened to Felix ... Felix shook his head. There was no point in arguing over what might have happened if something had gone differently. You couldn’t change the past.

General Grey followed him as he stepped through a pair of doors, past a checkpoint guarded by armed Marines, and walked into the cabinet office. It was a far cry from the luxurious office they’d enjoyed a year ago, lacking nearly every modern convenience from projectors and videoconference screens to coffee makers and internet servers. The paper maps on the wall weren’t linked to a network of sensors and force trackers – how could they be? The risk of having any piece of modern technology hacked was just too great, according to the technical experts; even something seemingly harmless, such as a networked kettle, could be turned into an unwitting spy by the enemy’s intelligence service. The chaos sweeping across the country bore mute testament to just how much damage unscrupulous hackers could do.

The communists used to say the capitalists would sell them the rope the communists would use to hang the capitalists, he reflected, as his cabinet stood to greet him. And here we practically put our heads in the noose long before the enemy arrived to rub our noses in our folly.

“Please, sit,” he said, as he took his seat at the head of the table. A pair of young women handed out mugs of coffee and retreated as silently as they’d come. “We have much to discuss.”

He allowed his eyes to sweep the table, noting the principals or their representatives. The VP was a long way away, his location unknown to anyone beyond his security staff, in order to guarantee a degree of continuity of government. This underground complex was supposed to be safe, the sheer number of bunkers and installations under Washington making it difficult for anyone to track the President down and hit his location with a bunker-buster, but there was just no way to be sure. The Protectorate had invaded Washington once before and they’d try again, if they thought the prize was worth the risk. 

“General,” he said. “You have a briefing for us?”

General Grey stood, produced a pointer and indicated a map on the wall, covered in red and blue markings. Felix reminded himself, sharply, that the picture it presented might already be out of date. The landlines between the two fronts and Washington DC were supposed to be secure, if only because the enemy couldn’t locate them, but there was just no way to be certain. They’d been reduced to using carrier pigeons in places just to make sure certain messages couldn’t be intercepted. If the Protectorate came boiling out of Texas, or New York, they could be halfway to anywhere before word reached Washington.

And that’s why we’ve given our commanders so much authority, he reminded himself. Modern communications had allowed American leaders to believe they could steer events in real-time. They’d been wrong even before the modern communications network had been hacked and turned against its former masters. Now ... he shook his head. They know what to do if the shit hits the fan. Again.

“The front lines appear to have stabilised,” General Grey said, his pointer drawing out a line on the map. “The operation was a success, in that we destroyed the enemy’s orbital weapons platform before it could get off the ground, but we failed to push the enemy back to any great degree. They have responded well, deploying additional drones to close the gaps in their defences before we could force them wide open. The cost ... has been high.”

Felix nodded, feeling numb. A few years ago, a handful of casualties would have been a political nightmare. Now ... there was no accurate figure of how many Americans, military and civilian, had died in the war, but it was likely in the hundreds of thousands. They might never know for sure, after so many people had been displaced and so many government databases had been erased. Even if the war ended tomorrow, the country would never be the same.

“We used nukes on Texas,” Senator Thaddeus Remington said. “How many Americans did we kill?”

Felix kept his face under tight control. Remington had been a political creature from Day One, a man more interested in promoting himself than serving his constituents ... a man so isolated he was safe from the downsides of the policies he supported. Felix had no qualms about working with him and yet it would be a long time, if ever, before he trusted the man completely. Remington wouldn’t hesitate to put a knife in Felix’s back, hopefully metaphorically, if he thought it suited his personal quest for power. He looked to have aged two decades in the last two months. Perhaps the reality of the war was finally catching up with him.

And a year ago, the idea of having a Senator on the Cabinet would have seemed unthinkable, Felix mused. Now, he has to share the blame for anything that goes wrong.

“Impossible to say, Senator,” General Grey said. “We were careful to avoid population centres and refugee camps as much as possible, but there was no way to guarantee that no civilians would be caught in the blasts.”

“They claim we killed millions,” Remington pointed out. “Can we disprove it?”

“Not easily, Senator,” General Grey admitted. “We have little independent verification of anything.”

Felix grimaced. Deepfakes had been a problem before the war and now ... the Protectorate’s deepfakes, inserted into the internet, were almost impossible to spot. Their early mistakes, born of ignorance rather than technical incapability, had been corrected, allowing them to bombard the American population with an endless series of faked broadcasts and outright nonsense. They’d learned their lessons well, he admitted sourly. The messages had been perfectly pitched to cause trouble. And the entire country was paying the price.

No one trusts anything that comes out of Washington, he thought. We could tell the truth, the complete truth, and yet it would be greeted with both utter suspicion and derision.

General Grey indicated the next map. “We have more hard data from the Middle East,” he continued. “The enemy base has been badly damaged, although we have no solid confirmation of just how badly. From what we have noted and logged, they’ve evacuated large amounts of materiel from Saudi Arabia and shipped it over here. Our general belief is that the Middle Eastern base is unable to go on the offensive again, although that won’t change the general situation across the region to any great extent.”

“Which means the global economy is still fucked,” Remington muttered, loudly enough to be heard. “How many people did we kill over there?”

Felix leaned forward before General Grey could try to answer. “Do you have any better ideas, Senator?”

Remington gave him a sharp look. “With all due respect, Mr. President ...”

Felix cut him off. “Senator, this is not some debating club trying to come up with a perfect answer to a paper problem,” he said, sharply. “We are fighting a war for survival, a war against a technologically advanced opponent who has no qualms about committing any number of atrocities as long as that helps them get what they want. There is no way to fall back into our castle, pull up the drawbridge and let the rest of the world fend for itself. We were committed to total war the moment they arrived!”

He took a breath. “This war can only have two outcomes: victory or defeat. And defeat means the end of the fucking world!”

Remington calmed himself, visibly. “I am aware of that, Mr. President,” he said. “But we will have to answer to the judgement of history.”

“History will record we took the hard decisions when they needed to be taken,” Felix snapped. “General?”

“The region has effectively collapsed,” General Grey said. “Outside Israel, local infrastructure is in ruins. Water supplies have been cut off, millions of refugees have been displaced, civil wars are tearing what remains of society apart. The Protectorate is making no attempt to assist the locals and what remains of the local militaries are unable or unwilling to do so. Our general conclusion is that there will be no return to normalcy. Whatever takes shape after the chaos dies down will be very different.”

“Let the Europeans take care of it,” Remington said. “They’re the ones more dependent on oil supplies from the Middle East.”

“They don’t have the troops or support infrastructure to keep the oil moving,” General Grey said, bluntly. “Even in the best-case scenario, the oil wells are so badly damaged it’ll be years before they can be put back into production. That’s bad news for all of us.”

Felix rubbed his forehead. The Europeans had been far too dependent on oil from the Middle East and Russia for decades, despite warnings from every American President regardless of party from George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump. They hadn’t done anywhere near enough to wean themselves from such unreliable suppliers, despite wars in both regions, and now ... they’d given the Russians all the rope the Russians needed to hang them. He was surprised the Russians hadn’t already started tightening the screws. Perhaps they had. The network of painstakingly cultivated intelligence assets in both Europe and Russia, and the rest of the world, had been practically wiped out. There was no way to rebuild that network in a hurry.

If we can, he thought. The Chinese had made horrific examples of Chinese caught spying for America, executing both the agents and their families to drive the point home. It would be a long time before anyone agreed to take such risks again, if they ever did. How can we blame them for refusing to work for us when they know they could be betrayed at any moment?

“That’s their problem,” Remington said, curtly. “They’re refusing to help us, so ...”

“They can’t,” General Grey pointed out. “They don’t have the troops or the ships they need to help us ... and even if they did, they need them at home. There’s no way to know when and where the next attack will appear, if it does.”

Felix nodded, eying the map. America had always been protected by two vast oceans. The logistical problems of shipping an entire army from Europe or China to America were simply insurmountable by any combination of global powers, be it a reasonable possibility or a paranoid fantasy. Even if the USN were to be taken out by some kind of advanced superweapon, something out of a patriotic future war novel where American soldiers were brave, noble, and true while liberal politicians were traitors and scum, the difficulties of transporting and supplying an army would be nightmarish. The Pentagon had considered the prospect of a full-scale invasion of the Continental United States as something akin to the prospect of an invasion from Mars. There certainly hadn’t been more than vague planning for the possibility.

And yet, that had clearly been an oversight. An invasion force had appeared in Texas. A second in Saudi Arabia. A third ... where would a third manifest? London? Paris? Moscow? Beijing? No one wanted to give up any military hardware, let alone send troops to Texas or the Middle East when they might be needed at home. Hell, they were needed to handle other problems. Both France and Britain appeared to be on the verge of civil war ...

“I see,” Remington said. “What do we do?”

“We keep building up our forces,” Felix said. He pushed as much confidence into his tone as he could. “They are powerful, but they are not gods. We beat them in Washington and we beat them again, just now. We will grind them down and eventually destroy them.”

He sighed inwardly, as the briefing continued. The United States had been going through a rough patch even before the invasion, with commenters screaming about the risk of civil war and activists on both sides openly encouraging it on the grounds their side was certain to win. Idiots. Felix had seen multisided civil wars during his military service and they were utterly disastrous no matter who won or lost. Now ... the country was breaking apart under the stresses and strains of war, long-held bitter resentments coming into the light as Washington lost its grip and all hell threatened to break loose. California was practically fighting a civil war already ... how long until the rest of the states went the same way? It was hard to muster the forces to drive out the invaders when half the police and national guardsmen were tied down dealing with internal problems ...

And all the militias will be a problem too, after the war, he thought, tiredly. They already hate and mistrust us.

“This is a difficult time,” he said, when the briefings finally concluded. “There will be far more difficult days to come. But we will survive. We will prevail.”

He wondered, as the meeting finally broke up, just how many believed him. The country was changing, for better or worse, and nothing would ever be the same again. They’d have one hell of a reconstruction job ahead of them, no matter how much red tape they sliced out of the bureaucracy and how many processes they streamlined. Hell, one particularly nasty piece of black propaganda – all deepfaked – claimed to provide absolute proof that the bureaucrats who’d blocked a number of important construction projects were taking money from Communist China to deindustrialise the United States. There was no truth to the claim, according to the FBI, but far too many people would believe it. They wanted to believe it.

Trust is gone, he mused. And it won’t be coming back.

“Mr. President,” General Grey said. “There’s another matter we have to discuss.”

Felix looked up. “I wanted this fucking job,” he said, more to himself than the general. “What a fool I was ...”

He scowled at his hands. If he’d won the nomination and the election, no sure thing when being Hispanic-American was both an asset and a weakness, he would have acted fast when the Protectorate showed up. He’d told Hamlin their base didn’t look remotely friendly and their actions even less so ... oh, he’d understood Hamlin’s fears, the paralysis caused by not knowing exactly what they were facing, but Hamlin had been wrong. Terrifyingly wrong. If they’d nuked the enemy base from the start, despite the risk ...

Or even forced it to surrender, he thought, grimly. We could have nipped this problem in the bud.

He reminded himself, once again, that there was no way to undo the past. The problem had been left to fester, like so many others, and now it had metastasised into a nightmare that couldn’t be handled without immense loss of life. Remington hadn’t been wrong, damn him, when he’d protested using nukes on American soil. Felix had sentenced countless Americans to death in the name of the greater good, a calculus that would haunt him for the rest of his days. And if he had to do it again ...

“I know,” he said, finally. “What is it?”