"Drop the gun."

I smiled and held on tight to the weapon. "I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sheriff."

Sheriff Boggs was not the bravest of men. He was an overweight, undertrained coward with a badge. It was a wonder that criminals and outlaws hadn’t taken control of his little town. Of course, no one in their right mind would ever want anything to do with Boggsville. Yes that’s right, the town was even named after the beloved Sheriff.

"Listen here, you drop that gun now, or I’m gunna shoot." He bellowed. There was no hint of strength in his voice. In fact, he seemed downright terrified.

"My dear Sheriff," I explained. "I cannot drop the gun. Do you realize what would happen if I were to set this weapon down and allow you to take me under your custody?" Boggs gulped.

"Well my dear Sheriff," I began. "This is a fully automatic glock. I’m afraid it hasn’t been invented yet. If I were to set it down, you would have possession of it and the entire universe would be blown of course. It would be a catastrophe. Time and space would be disrupted forever!" I let the drama pour into my every word.

"What you talkin’ bout?" Boggs managed. "You’d better drop that there gun."

I shook my head. "Sheriff, you must be deaf." His hand began to shake.

"Drop it!"

I allowed an evil grin to spread across my face, "No." There was a brief moment of silence and indecision on the good Sheriff’s part. The sweat trickled down the side of his face. He opened his mouth as if to repeat his order and then closed it quickly.

"Now listen to me Sheriff." I growled. "I can put twenty bullets into your head before you have the time to squeeze off even one shot. You have two choices now. You can either leave and live or stay and die."

The man was a problem. Killing him would prove to be an even larger hassle than letting him arrest me. I would have to pluck each bullet from his corpse so as not to leave anything from the future behind. It would not be fun. Yet he did not seem too eager to leave. He thought that he was protecting the innocent life of Martha Willis.

Martha lay in an unconscious heap several feet behind me. Her face was beaten in pretty badly and I have to admit that it was I who caused the damage. Of course, what the Sheriff did not know was that Martha Willis was not Martha Willis. As a matter a fact, she was not even human. I had been sent to the past to take out alien pests such as her.

We did not really know what race these aliens were, or even when they started their infiltration of human history. But they were everywhere. Taking human form in various towns in assorted decades and centuries, attempting to influence human history to meet their ends.

We had grown into quite a powerful race with these aliens inserted into our society. The most noticeable ones were taken out first. Ninety percent of the presidents assassinated in the twentieth century were aliens, and were eliminated by our agents. JFK for instance was an alien operative; in our time he lived long enough to inspire a second more deadly civil war. We fixed that little problem.

There were dozens of famous men and women that were eliminated because of their alien origins and the damage they did to our world. Perhaps one of the strangest cases was with Adolf Hitler. He was set to be one of our first targets. Everyone was quite sure that the man was an alien operative. Yet when the agents arrived to take out a ten year old Adolf, the bioscan showed that he was completely human. Many powerful figures voted to have him removed anyway, but since he was human the Senate could not vote for his murder. Strange how things worked out.

All of the noticeable alien operatives had long ago been removed. We had been working on small timers for years now, women like Martha Willis, who let their tiny influence drag humanity a little further from it’s natural course.

Sheriff Boggs had stepped in halfway through my execution. It was customary to beat information out of the aliens before eliminating them, though no one had gotten anything from them yet, it was crucial to try.

"Sheriff," I shouted. "If you do not leave now you will die! Now go!"

He flinched. "I caint let you kill Ms. Willis."

"You cannot stop me. If you by some chance manage to kill me, ten more men just like me will burst through that door behind you and fill your body with lead." I replied sharply. "Your only chance at seeing the next sunrise is to leave now." By some miracle, Boggs backed out the door.

I whirled around to face Martha Willis. She was out cold. No information this time. I leveled the revolver and put a single bullet in her head. There was no blood, no explosion of brains and bone fragments. Instead, the body simply vanished into thin air. Mission complete.

I took the back door. Had this been some time travel action movie, I would have been able to open a portal back to the future with the flip of a switch. This was reality, however, and the only way home was to find the rendezvous point where dozens of my fellow operatives waited. From there we would board a shuttle that would take us up into space. The time portal was a natural anomaly located several kilometers behind the moon.

Commonly known as black holes, these time portals were very dangerous. A ship without the proper programming would be crushed. Various entry angles and speeds affected just where, or should I say when, the ship went. Government shuttles were all programmed with a time portal database, giving the operatives on board access to any point in time. Of course, we all knew better than to take side trips.

Runaway agents, as we called them, were disposed of immediately. These were men who wanted to go to some remote time in history and live an unnoticed life, etc., etc.. They were usually taken apart before they even landed.

Roswell was the biggest and most famous incident along these lines. A group of agents decided that they would retire early. They successfully landed and started new lives. However, after years of research, we discovered where and when they had landed. A fighter was immediately sent back to shoot them down minutes before the landing. It was quite a mess. Yet there was no effort made by the government to clean it up. Roswell was there for men who dared to think about sneaking away in time. A constant reminder that the government left no loose ends.

I holstered my revolver and darted off into the forest. The rendezvous was to be made in exactly three hours. If I did not arrive then they would send a second operative back to find me. Usually wages were cut in half if such lengths had to be taken. I barely made enough as it was.

I ran for a total of two hours.

There was an explosion several yards north. I came to an abrupt stop and pulled my revolver from it’s holster. In the distance I could make out the sound of gunshots. Not the thunderclaps of the pistols and muskets used by the men of this age, but the sharp cracks of automatic weaponry. The gunfight lasted several minutes and soon silence returned.

I crept through the underbrush, my eyes darting left and right. I knew that something had gone wrong. It almost sounded like an ambush had taken out the operatives and the shuttle. If so, then there was a big problem at the government headquarters. A bullet whizzed past me.

I instinctively dove for cover, scanning the area as I fell. I caught sight of two men garbed in black. Three more bullets soared past me. I fired blindly as I crawled away from my attackers. As I moved, I started putting things together. These men carried silenced weapons, which meant that they were sent to take us out quickly and quietly without warning. They had destroyed our only way home, which meant that they had their own shuttle nearby. They moved like hunters, which meant that they were highly trained. Foreign operatives? Perhaps the government database had been infiltrated. A bullet struck me in the leg. I held my breath and pushed forward.

Five second later I broke into a clearing. Wincing with pain, I rolled over on my back and fired a volley of bullets into the forest behind me. I was determined to take at least one of them with me. I continued firing until the clip was empty.

I did not have time to reload, so I relented and pulled out my JF12 laser pistol. It was a weapon only to be used in emergencies such as this. The energy beam was so powerful that it could easily cut through one hundred feet of pure steel before dying down. Such a weapon left evidence of our presence behind. I leveled the pistol at the edge of the forest and waited.

The two men suddenly stepped out into view. Their eyes fell upon me just as I squeezed the trigger. The first man was cut nearly in half by the beam; his body fell to the ground and vanished into thin air. I fired a second shot into the last man and watched as his body disappeared. They were aliens. Things were suddenly bad. The aliens had never fought back, they only showed their faces in our history books, never in face to face combat. I grimaced and climbed to my feet. The wound in my leg was spurting blood and the pain was severe, but I had to move quickly. I held my breath and pulled a recorder from my pocket.

I pressed the activate button, "Alien operatives ambushed the rendezvous. I’ve been shot in the leg and there is no way home. I’m following standard termination procedure, save me if you can."

Standard procedure was better known to the real world as suicide. If an agent found himself in a dead end situation, he would end his life and hope to God that the government would rescue him before the trigger was pulled.

Usually, agents were rescued hours before suicide was implemented. Once aboard a rescue ship, the memories from their deceased body were implanted into their brains. This way they could be questioned about the events surrounding the suicide even though it truly never happened. Such agents remembered both killing themselves and being rescued just before, or in some cases hours before, their lives ended. It was a chance I had to take.

I put the laser pistol to my head and squeezed the trigger.

* * *

"Agent Cullin, can you hear me?"

My eyes fluttered open. Several government operatives stood around me. The air was stale and thin, and it did not take a genius to figure out that I was in a shuttle. "Where am I?"

"On board the rescue shuttle Sammy Five." Answered one of them. "We located your recorder sometime in the late twenty-first century. Research was done and we were sent back to get you just before the ambush."

"Did you get the other agents out?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied. "We picked them all up individually right after they made their kills. The ambush was prevented."

"What about the aliens?" I asked.

"We set up a decoy shuttle. They never showed." He replied grimly. "We watched the actual ambush through a spy sat several times, however. They seemed to appear out of thin air just before the attack."

I nodded. "Why did they strike? They’ve never showed any aggression before."

"We don’t know." He replied. "Studies are underway."

"Any other incidents?"

"Nope." He patted me on the back. "Good work, though. You’ll get a medal for this one."

"A raise would be nicer." I mumbled.

He smiled, "Well, we’re almost to the portal. You can bring it up to the boss when we land."

* * *

"Welcome home, Cullin." Boris said emphatically. "We are glad to see you alive."

I did not reply. There was nothing to say. Boris would continue to pour out compliments and kind words that he himself did not believe and then he would send me out on another mission. It always went the same way.

"Well Cullin," he smiled. "I’m not going to waste time inflating your ego. We need you back out there right away. I’m not sending you on another assassination, though. I’m giving you command of a ship."

I remained silent.

"Yes that’s right, Cullin." He explained, "A ship. We’ve spent so much energy cleaning up the past, searching the history books for the enemy. Well now we’re going in a new direction. To the future."

"Whoa." I interrupted. "You can’t do that. The future isn’t plotted out yet. How can we send a shuttle through the portal if we don’t have the correct headings?"

"Well that’s a common misconception. We’ve got it plotted out. But we don’t generally allow our shuttles to access the database. You see," He crossed his arms. "every ship that has gone into the future has been shot down. Most likely by us. But new breakthroughs show that it may be the aliens."

"You’re saying that they exist in the future?" I asked.

"Yes, that’s right. Earth is most likely controlled by these aliens. And we are sending one our ships into the future to take them out. War has been declared, Cullin, and only now have we the proper tools to fight it."

"With one ship?" I asked mockingly.

"Time travel, Cullin, opens many doors." He grinned. "You will pilot one ship. Yet thousands of duplicate ships will come through with you."

I nodded. They would send me through all alone. Yet they would use the time portal to go back just before the launch and retrieve my ship again and again. It would be a very large and complicated chain reaction. In the end, thousands of identical fighters piloted by thousands of identical me’s would pop through the portal and take out the enemy.

"Won’t this cause a paradox?" I asked.

"As long as you do not collide with any of the other ships everything will be fine. But if you do happen to even bump one of your ships, then time and space will probably go to hell in a hand basket." He shrugged. "If this happens then we never existed. The aliens never existed and I guess that’s victory."

"In a very twisted way." I mumbled.

* * *

The fighter ship was state of the art. A top of the line piece of government junk. Laser cannons, missile turrets and even a nuclear weapons cache. I was never much of a pilot, but judging by the control array, this ship did everything for itself. All I had to do was pull the trigger and steer.

The ship launched itself and headed to the time portal at an alarming speed. Within five minutes, I found myself sitting just outside the portal.

"Come in, Cullin." Came a scratchy voice.

"This is Cullin." I replied. "What can I do for you?"

"Admiral Boris here. The ship is going to jump into the portal in exactly thirty seconds. Good luck. Oh, and make sure you keep the flight recorder on at all times. If your ship is destroyed it will return to the portal and we’ll pick it up."

"Righto." I switched off the communications and took a deep breath.

The ship began moving towards the swirling anomaly. I took hold of the control stick and closed my eyes. There was an acceleration burst and I entered the portal.

Laser fire filled the air the minute I entered normal space. All around me, identical fighters loaded with identical pilots were engaged in combat with alien ships. We outnumbered them by more than double, and our ships were still coming through. I laughed and gunned the throttle. My doubles were all quite busy tearing the enemy to pieces, which gave me more than enough time to investigate earth. I sped away from the battle and watched as earth grew larger on my view screen.

My ship began running detailed scans the very instant I was in range. The planet was quite different from our own earth. It no longer held any natural beauty. The oceans were completely gone.

My thoughts were scattered to the wind. The ship was caught in a magnetic field. I cursed my foolishness. I had drifted too close to a capital ship. They were pulling me in.

"Have a seat." Commanded the officer. He appeared to be human. Though my instincts told me otherwise. If earth was controlled by aliens, then no human would have access to a battleship. I took a seat.

"Do you realize what you are doing?" Asked the man.

I nodded. "We are wiping away the aliens that seek to control our fate."

The man laughed. "Do I look so alien to you?"

"No." I replied. "Nor did any of your operatives."

"You speak of our brave time travelers. The ones you insist on killing." He growled. "These men are human."

"The bioscans show-"

"Your bioscans are irrelevant." He cut me off. "Do you think that our biology remained exactly the same as yours over the past thousand years?" he shook his head. "We evolve, my friend. We change. To you we may be alien. But we are still no less human."

"Then why are you trying to destroy earth in the past?" I shot back.

"I am quite sure you had a good look at earth before we pulled you in." He frowned. "It is dead. The men we send back are strategically placed to ensure that earth survives another century or two. And each time we succeed, you send your silly assassins back and we are put right back to where we started."

I did not say a word.

"I brought you on board to talk some sense into you." He flipped a switch. A holographic image appeared on the wall behind him. It showed the space battle in full detail. It was clear that we were winning. "You are about to destroy humanity. These ships house the last of our dying civilization. How ironic that our ancestors should be the ones to wipe us out."

I swallowed.

"Here is what you can do if you want to save humanity." He sat down. "Get back in your ship and fly to the past. Destroy your time travel base. Only then will humanity be saved."

I took a deep breath. It had to be a trick. These aliens were clever. They were going to try and use me as a weapon. I could not let that happen. "Very well." I replied. "Get me to my ship and I shall do as you ask."

The man smiled. "Thank you."

I powered up the fighter and launched back into freespace. The battle raged on, though it seemed as though we would emerge victorious within the next several minutes. The enemy ships were badly hurt and there did not seem to be any more dog fights. Only a few capital ships remained. I made my decision.

Without a hint of hesitation, I launched a volley of nuclear torpedoes at the capital ship that had just released me. It tried in vain to shoot down the torpedoes; all but one hit home. I watched as the ship tore apart and plunged into earth’s atmosphere.

The battle ended only minutes later. A rescue ship entered the portal and made it’s way to earth where it would search for any human refugees. None were found. It was then that I realized my mistake. The man had been telling the truth after all. I alone was responsible for wiping out humanity. Of course, time travel could remedy the situation. We could go back and stop the invasion before it happened.

"No." They would never listen. They would never believe that they made a mistake in ordering this attack. I stared blankly as thousands of identical fighters poured back through the portal.

There was one way I could undo everything.

I picked out the nearest fighter and cranked the throttle.

Copyright (1999) by David Allen