The "paradox" is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be."

-Richard Fenyman

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Prologue

Then

 

May 12th, 2099. Ancient Era.

The moonless night hovered over Lemac Lake, and the group of ten soldiers of the Blackbird-C Squadron advanced at a rapid pace through the thick trees of the Lugrin Forest.

The night vision of the tactical helmets gave them more than enough vision to move easily, although they had to avoid obstacles from time to time. Their bodies were protected with exoskeletons from head to toe, which helped to lessen the weight of the heavy equipment they carried. The weapons, of recent manufacture, achieved by retro-engineering, were quite heavy, but it was the type of weapons they would need in the operation. The tactical helmets they wore, more like masks, since they even covered their faces, had a system that transmitted images instantly.

Under any other circumstances it would have been illegal to deploy armed forces in an area that, until a few years ago, had been a hive of tourists and families living near the lake.

That had changed though, and there were no longer families, or tourists, wandering around the area. Considering the situation, it was more likely that, in recent times, the native fauna had returned to the place, but that was not the case either. At least, not in that part of the lake.

It took quite some time for the Blackbird-C Squadron to make its way through the debris of houses, ancient castles, half-ruined palaces and trees blocking the way. The route, which the operations commanders had traced from the base forty kilometers away, had forgotten to tell them that they would encounter so many obstacles along the path.

But that no longer mattered. With so much fighting occurring across the globe, and with the collapse of most satellites months ago, it was not uncommon for map updates to be inaccurate, even with the use of drones. Entire areas of the world had changed in the last five years.

They landed a few hundred meters away from the place where they were supposed to deploy. All because of some damned sudden gusts of wind, which dragged the whole group a little further away from the target. Two alternative routes were planned, but with a failure range of a few hundred meters and they had reached a part that was farther away than planned.

At that point they could have used the support of an aeon, but most of the conscious artificial intelligences were working in the theater of operations in Siberia, or maneuvering space stations to send supplies to the colonies on the Moon and Mars. There was no luck for a group of cleaners soldiers that night, even though there were rumors that the operation had been listed as a target of high importance for some instances across the pond.

It wasn't asking too much. Just more support. But such was the chaotic state of the world.

Special forces teams, better equipped and supported, were on operations to retake control of the larger cities, which were still repelling hundreds of enemy forces that were close to evacuation zones.

Jeanne, captain of the Blackbird-C squadron, repressed the urge to let out an angry sigh, and glanced at her soldiers in the unit.

They should have at least sent one of those feys, she thought.

They could only hope that the surprise factor hadn't been ruined yet, or the whole mission would fail.

Jeanne looked at the smart screen on her left arm, and saw how the compass had just started spinning around pointlessly, while an alert window was activated, with a star moving irregularly over the map, marked with the legend [Anomaly nD. KALUZA-KLEIN metric tensor within visible range. SK-K in 3D].

They must have been too close by now.

Jeanne signaled to one of the soldiers, and he deployed a small drone, whose image was transmitted to the internal display of the mask, in a small window in the left side. A few moments passed until, above the trees, near over the small beach, and very close to the waters of the lake, the drone offered an image of a strange shape of what appeared to be a cube, tilted on one of its vertices. It was at least three meters in diameter, floating one meter above the surface of the ground.

Although it was a dark night, through the drone they could see how the surface of the faces of the strange object reflected the surrounding image as if it were a perfect reflective surface.

It simply looked as if someone had put some levitation mechanism inside a gigantic cubic mirror. Nothing more. But everyone knew, that nondescript appearance was deceptive.

It's really one, just one, Jeanne thought, and motioned to the second in command. [C-5-Bravo-4. Right,] she said over the Pointer comm.

The second in command nodded, and signaled the four behind him.

She had only just met her second-in-command a few weeks ago, and the same went for the other soldiers accompanying her. They were three women, seven men in all. All of different nationalities. All chosen from those who had survived the fighting in recent years, and the ten had been selected from the Laren Brigade, due to their success in the Black Forest mission in Germany. They had been completing sweep missions in which all had been successful. The sweep missions were to take out small groups of enemies that could roam alone away from the larger clusters. They weren't very dangerous at all.

Or at least, they shouldn't be.

And they weren't a bad team at all either but, even so, Jeanne couldn't shake the feeling that something could go terribly wrong that night.

The Blackbird-C squadron split in two. Jeanne took the left with four soldiers, while the other team with the second in command took the right.

Several techniques of approaching the target had been considered, but a pincer attack might be the only one that could really take effect. Because of the enemy's capabilities it was vital to approach in radio silence so as not to put him on alert. Staying silent meant that they could not count on support from the operations center, they could only count on their equipment, the limited encrypted Pointer communication, and that teamwork would have the effect they hoped for.

They had trained for two days in scenario simulations, changing different formations and under different weather conditions. It had been proposed to use the night because the enemy seemed to be less active in the dark. Of course... it was all just guesswork.

Who could be sure of that if it had barely been five years since they arrived. Five years might be an enormous amount of time, but the truth was that the enemy was quite different from what could be expected. How to fight against an enemy whose biology was almost an enigma in all its dimensions?

And with respect to this particular enemy there was hardly any data. Mere suppositions. Everything was based on the fact that, somewhere in the Kuril Islands, one of them quite similar, had been defeated a year ago. In fact, there was not enough data about that operation. The form of the enemy was similar to others that had been defeated in South America, although it seemed less active than the others. Given that almost all of them had differences in their attack capabilities, they could not be entirely sure.

Be that as it may, they were only interested in the fact that this enemy had to be defeated, since it was one of the few remaining in the area.

The lake itself was of no importance, other than strategic, because it was at the point that divided France from Switzerland. The populations had been evacuated years ago, and only one of them had been in place for weeks. The long distance drones had picked it up floating over the lake many times, without any other activity.

The weapons they carried had an ergonomic assault rifle design, although their ammunition was non-explosive. It had been given the name FLBolt-M2 and was designed and modified in the last few months. The weight, of almost ten kilos each, was due to the fact that they had several instrumental parts that had been practically experimental and there had not been enough time to make the components smaller, without having to reduce the range capacity and power of the weapon. Since this type of weapon, with electric arc gun function by PTHP, had been designed solely for the purpose of delivering direct hits to Category 3 Fractus, Type Numinous.

Numinous. The exact type they had only a few meters away. Although within the classification types, which had been created to designate the enemy, Numinous was one of the most dangerous, Category 3 was not one of the worst. It was simply to designate that their attack capability was minimal, although within a range still ignored.

Electric arc weapons had proven to be the best for many of the types of enemies that other assault corps had been encountering. Although, for Numinous category 5, and above, they had proven to require better weapons. Luckily, for them, those were in Siberia and on the edge of India and Pakistan.

Compared to what they had ahead of them, it should be a quick strike and return to base with the core. Still, Jeanne could not get the feeling of discomfort out of her body.

But it was too late to think of another tactic.

Jeanne had the huge polyhedron only a few meters away, and the only thing separating them were the bushes where they were hiding.

[C-5 Bravo, we have visual contact,] Jeanne communicated to Franco.

The second team slowed down and, hidden in the bushes, they searched around with their eyes. But they could see nothing.

[Please, ---- please, ------ please, save him.]

C-5, Franco Bicini, frowned. What had he just heard? It certainly didn't sound like the team leader's voice, it was a male voice, and it almost sounded like radio interference, but it couldn't be possible.

[C-6 Bravo, repeat?]

[C-5... it wasn't us,] Jeanne said.

At that moment the second team saw a bluish flash to their left, accompanied by a sound difficult to describe, it sounded like the echo of rusty metal clashing together rapidly.

[It's changing! Repeat, it's changing!] Jeanne shouted.

There was no further communication from Jeanne's team, but there was no need. The screams heard not far from their location were more than enough to figure out what was going on.

The surprise factor was ruined. But what had happened? That kind of Fractus was not supposed to change so fast. The Category 3 took almost twenty seconds to acquire a new form.

The second team took about fifteeen seconds to reach the location of the first, while they could hear the sound of metal rising.

The huge cube had changed and transformed into something else.

Everything turned into chaos in a matter of seconds. There were glares from the electric arc weapons being fired, whose fine discharges barely illuminated the stage, as if it were a lightning storm. Flashes of a cloud of what looked like a dark cloud of iron filings producing blue sparks. In the cloud there was larger pieces of metal, that looked more like flying broken glass, and those produced the sound of metal pieces colliding with each other, moving among the soldiers at impossible-to-follow speed, accompanied by the screams of pain from Jeanne's team. The members of the Blackbird-C squad were falling like flies. One after another.

One of the soldiers of Jeanne's group fell to his knees, as the cloud passed through him. Screaming, he took off his helmet and mask. His face, as well as his hands, were undergoing a change. What up to a few moments ago had been a burly, battle-hardened, man was suddenly becoming an old man, whose skin was drying and sticking to his bones, as if he were undergoing an instantaneous mummification process. When his body finally hit the ground he was already dead, and his skeleton had been transformed into a cloud of ashes, that the wind scattered among the sand of the beach bordering the lake.

Another soldier simply lost sight of what was happening, as he felt his bones and muscles changing at an impossible speed, while a whirlwind of memories of his life flooded his entire brain, in a raging clonic storm. He did not have to endure it for long. Only a few seconds later, his brain stopped being able to process the memories, and his suit lay empty on the sand, while his body shrunk to the size of a baby, then a fetus and then completely disappeared into absolute nothingness, as if it had never been there.

Corrosion. That couldn't be a Category 3.

The second in command tried to give orders to his soldiers, but had to replace his words with a cry of surprise, when he saw his world turned upside down. Something had lifted him several meters above the ground and sent him flying into the trees. He landed in the grass and felt some of the tactical plates of his helmet come off. He took a long breath, feeling almost as if his lungs had been crushed and, unable to speak, began to crawl. He had lost his weapon in the blow, and only had a pair of pistols which, for that matter, would be of little use to him.

He crawled through the grass and lay against a tree while he caught his breath. He felt a stabbing pain in his right side, it was likely that he had broken a couple of ribs. The medical control system in his clothing had stopped working, or maybe it was just the power supply going to his visor and the screen on his arm that had suffered some kind of malfunction. For the moment, he was thankful that the adrenaline was still pumping through his nervous system, as it was inhibiting the pain.

Suddenly he heard a strange explosion, behind the tree where he was hiding, that eclipsed his senses. He had never heard anything like it before. It had been a kind of explosion that made his eardrums reberberate, accompanied by a flash of light that was extinguished as quickly as it had appeared.

What had happened? What until a few moments ago had been an inferno had become an overwhelming silence, broken only by the rustling of the night wind in the branches. Franco Bicini, leader of the second team, let several seconds pass that seemed like hours before he began to move slowly.

Had the thing been standing still, waiting to take him by surprise? Or was it waiting to hear him, to deal him a final blow as it had done with the other members of the squad? But he couldn't stay hidden there for eternity. He had to come out at some point, even if it meant ending up like the others. Would death be quick? He squeezed his eyes shut, remembering the screams of horror he had heard from the others. Whatever that thing was doing, it didn't seem painless.

His thoughts about the lightness of life didn't go too deep, because he was noticing something else. The night vision was becoming distorted. It didn't make any sense. He was pretty sure that there was no other equipment in the area, and there was no moon that night so, given the time of night, everything should be dark and no external light source should be producing any extra effects on his vision.

Franco turned off the night vision function and with his normal eyes could see how the scenery around him was indeed illuminated by something coming from behind the tree where he was hiding. It was a faint bluish light shining with different intensities.

He took off his helmet because he wasn't sure if what he was seeing could be a malfunction of the equipment and, as he did so, the remaining extra plates of the mask covering his face came off.

He was a middle-aged man with ash-blond hair, with a deep scar on his forehead, product of his baptism of fire when the war began.

He swallowed, trying to control himself and pulling out one of his automatic pistols, he went out to meet whatever was on the other side.

He expected to find the infernal creature, waiting for him, but his eyes widened when he saw that it was something else.

There, about thirty meters away, was a bluish dot that seemed to be floating in mid-air. It seemed to be emitting a kind of radiation, which produced a series of bluish particles that were fired in all directions and others with somewhat thicker particle streams snaked through the trees and in the direction to the lake too, and vanished after a few meters.

What is that?

After being paralyzed for a few seconds Franco Bicini walked hesitantly towards the bluish spot. It was something that seemed to be attracting every cell of his being, although he could not be sure what exactly it was that produced that sensation. Had he not been in such a horrible situation he could almost have sworn he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It was a ghostly and disturbing scene, but there was something sublime about it as well.

The closer he got, the sharper the spot seemed to become.

Barely five meters away from reaching the luminous point, Franco realized what it was, and also understood the final orders that had been given from the operations center to get hold of it once they managed to defeat the creature.

It was a Fractus core.

Franco remembered having seen several types, and the orders were always the same, after a combat special units were in charge of its collection. Apparently there were intelligence departments that had been developing some kind of weapons with them or something like that, but not much was known.

There were all kinds and colors. He himself remembered how he had been surprised the first time he killed one of those creatures and left behind a kind of stone with smooth pale yellow faces. Different types of Fractus left behind different types of cores.

But he had never seen anything like it before. The energy it gave off gave the scene an unnatural air, but somehow it seemed to him that the glow was slowly beginning to fade. As if the source of its energy was somehow losing intensity. Franco slowly approached it, unable to take his eyes off it, not that it was pretty or anything. There was something about it that he couldn't quite understand. It was almost as if it was calling out to him.

The screams of horror of his companions had been left behind. In fact, it seemed to him that it had never happened. In his mind each of his neurons was simply ordering him to come closer.

With the glow fading, Franco Bicini was finally able to get an idea of its shape. It was a stone the size of a large fist, crystalline in appearance, irregularly shaped and somewhat rough, almost reminding him of the polished stones that in ancient times were used as weapons. Although it seemed to have chromatic capabilities inside, similar to diamond. But at the same time it did not have the solidity of a normal stone, the core faces seemed to move and change shape, although they maintained the general shape of the object.

It was not unusual. After all, cores tended to have similar consistencies to the creatures that carried them. Fractus, was more than a convenient name for creatures that seemed to have fractal-like morphic capabilities, it also explained in part the movements always exhibited by such creatures, whose body seemed to always be in a continuous motion as they changed shape.

With a trembling gesture he reached out his hand toward the core and grasped it in his hand. Through the tactical glove he did not feel it at first but, after a couple of seconds, as he squeezed it in his hand he felt the moving surface of the stone pierce the material of the glove and sink into his flesh few centimeters. Warm blood ran down the moving surface of the stone, but Franco Bicini felt no pain from it. After a few seconds, where the path of the stone had completely soaked into his blood, the movement stopped completely and, with the last bluish flash, the stone changed its surface to a dark color and a smooth rounded shape.

Franco Bicini fell to his knees, but he was no longer looking at the stone. His eyes had risen to the sky and he looked up in horror at the stars.

From that day on, the meaning of his present and future changed forever. It crumbled, as a sand castle does when it is swept by the waves of the sea. But, beyond that, he had one certainty.

He was not going to turn the stone over to the authorities.

The future depended on it.