Free TimeSplash by Graham Storrs

pier.”
     
    “This is Waterloo. Hold your positions. And keep your eyes peeled.”
     
    Overman would be handing over control to the assault unit commander now, Jay thought. The fighting would start any second.
     
    And it did. Several loud percussions with bright flashes came from the direction of Pier Three. Jay saw two trucks, clearly visible for a moment, with people around them in a frozen tableau. He heard shouting and running and three shots fired in rapid succession. The assault team was using live rounds, Jay remembered. Someone had just died. Out in the Channel, powerful engines whined into life as the boat made a run for it, pursued by friendlies. A shout. Another three shots.
     
    After that, silence rolled back like a black tide out of the night. Seconds ticked past. Jay watched the pier through his night-sight. He saw soldiers moving around the trucks but there seemed to be no other activity.
     
    “All right, everybody. Mission accomplished. Let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”
     
    Jay let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The assault was over, done so expertly it was almost bloodless. His relief was immense. If there had been serious trouble, he and his team would have been the reserves. He grabbed a torch and ran for the pier, feeling profoundly grateful for the skill of the unit that had spared him the terrifying prospect of a gun battle. Several vehicles had pulled onto the pier by the time he got there, and two boats with searchlights illuminated the scene. People lay on the ground, cuffed at wrists and ankles. Soldiers stood among them, looking confident and relaxed.
     
    Jay went straight to the nearest truck and opened the back. Inside were four crates, each a cube over a metre high. Printed on the side of each was a manufacturer’s name, a model name and number, and the words “Made in India.” Jay pulled a tag-reader from his pocket and scanned one of the crates.
     
    “Well?” It was Overman, standing outside the truck, looking in. Jay checked the display. “They’re F-Twos all right, sir. State-of-the-art stuff.”
     
    “Enough for what we think they need?”
     
    “No, sir. But two shipments like this would be about right.”
     
    “Ah, well. Our friends elsewhere ought to be grateful we stopped this lot, anyway, don’t you think?”
     
    “I suppose.” Jay wasn’t too confident that the raid had done much to prevent the catastrophe they were all so worried about.
     
    The rumour was that a new kind of timesplash technology had emerged. Groups around the world were now racing one another to use it to make a splash so huge that whole cities would be caught in the backwash. Police and intelligence agencies everywhere were trying to stop them, but it looked hopeless. The best chance seemed to be in tracking F2s and other necessary technologies. F2s were focus fusion generators. A timesplash of the kind rumoured would need unbelievable amounts of energy. The kind of energy a large town would consume. The kind for which you would need twenty F2s wired together.
     
    But collecting so many F2s was not all that hard. When oil production began its rapid decline, back in 2015, it plunged the world into a global depression that lasted until the end of the 2020s. It was the development of focus fusion that dragged the world out of the Great Adjustment, a cycle of inflation, resource wars and infrastructure collapse that was threatening to destroy everything. Those early reactors were about the size of a garden shed but could produce enough electricity to power a large neighbourhood, using plentiful, cheap boron and hydrogen as fuel. By the end of the 2030s, focus fusion reactors were being mass-produced and installed by the millions. Clean, efficient and almost-free electricity transformed the world’s economies, and the 2040s were a global boom time.
     
    Now F2s were the size of a filing cabinet and the very latest models could produce 20
     
    megawatts of power. The