TW11 The Cleopatra Crisis NEW by Simon Hawke Read Free Book Online Page A

Honor, among those killed in action.
    There still remained the question—what had actually become of him? And what had he become'?"
    Darkness had gone back into the past and changed something that had already happened. Or had he? Had he actually altered the past or had his actions in fact restored the past to the way it had originally happened? It seemed to Forrester, and to Priest as well, that there had to exist a point in time, somewhere, a moment in which Lucas Priest had actually died.
    Logic would seem to dictate that for Darkness to have gone back and saved him from death, he would have had to have died in the first place, otherwise there would have been no necessity for Darkness to do what he had done. However, when it came to 'Zen physics’, logic frequently broke down.
    After the mission was completed, an S & R team was clocked back to retrieve Lucas Priest's remains. But had Search & Retrieve brought back his body, or that of his twin? Even if the remains had not been cremated, how would it have been possible to tell, since both were identical, right down to their DNA? Had Priest actually died, or had the corpse of his twin taken the bullet? Had Darkness merely caused a temporary "skip" in the time stream's continuity, or had what he had done in saving Priest become a temporal disruption that could have unforeseen consequences further down the timestream? Those questions plagued not only Forester, but Lucas Priest, as well. And there were still more problems that Priest had to contend with, beyond the metaphysical riddle of his own existence.
    By experimenting on himself, Darkness had created an instability in his own subatomic structure, an instability that seemed to be increasing with the passage of time. Darkness believed that, eventually, his tachyonized state would decay into discorporation and he would depart at multiples of light speed in all directions of the universe. Forester shuddered at the thought as he stepped into the lift tube and punched out the restricted code for the penthouse. Knowing that something like that would inevitably happen to you had to have an effect upon your mind.
    He stepped in front of the scanner and a beam of light played on his right eye, reading his retinal pattern. Then the tube started to ascend.
    Priest could be facing the same thing. Although the process he had been exposed to via the particle-level implant in his body was different from that which had tachyonized Darkness, it was based on similar principles. Priest had no idea whether or not it would eventually do the same thing to him. Moreover, he had to contend with the problem of having been turned into a living time machine. It had become necessary for him to learn an entirely new level of mental discipline, because now any stray thought could launch him on a trip through time. It had already happened on a number of occasions. The thought-controlled temporal transponder was unable to differentiate between when he was awake and when he was asleep. Consequently, a dream could launch him on a trip through time as well. As Darkness had typically understated it, the device still "had a few bugs" in it.
    The trouble was, since the transponder had become permanently bonded to Lucas, fused with his atomic structure, there was no way to remove it. Priest would simply "have to adapt," as Darkness had put it. Forrester would have dearly loved to take a swing at Darkness and lay the bastard out, then throw his ass in jail, but how could you hit someone who was faster than the speed of light, much less hope to incarcerate him?
    The tube arrived at the penthouse floor and revolved to let Forrester out. Priest had called him the moment Darkness arrived. He "dropped in" from time to time to check on the progress of his living prototype. Forrester had asked Priest to prevail on Darkness to stay long enough to talk to him, but he had no idea if the man would still be there. Darkness did not wait on generals, or anybody else, for that