Free Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

grave marker bears the inscription Panton in suus vicis , or "Everything in its time."
    Culain's ideas garnered renewed appreciation by the inventors of early mechanical computing machines, and on December 31, 1899, he was canonized as the result of a software glitch at the Vatican.
    Christine Temetri had never heard of St. Culain the Indifferent, but she was about to experience the sort of absurdly unlikely string of events that he would have appreciated. Observe:
    Christine awoke in what appeared to be a hospital bed. The clock on the nightstand next to the bed said 5:36 p.m. The oversized gown she was wearing read, "Property of Tel Aviv Medical Center." An oxygen mask was strapped to her face.
    She pulled off the mask, brushing a cloud of dust from her hair in the process. Her throat was dry and scratchy and her eyes burned, but other than a few minor scratches and bruises, she seemed to be uninjured.
    Her escape from the collapsed house was the sort of event that even secular journalists tended to describe as "miraculous." Christine, having a firmer grasp on the precise meaning of that word than most secular journalists, however, reserved judgment. She had to admit, though, that she was amazed to be alive.
    Isaacson, she had to assume, was not so lucky. He must be dead, crushed to death under the weight of broken cinder blocks and timbers. She wasn't sure how to feel about this. It was, of course, horrific to see another human being die like that. On the other hand, that sort of death wasn't entirely unexpected for someone in Isaacson's position. He had been, she supposed, one of the good guys—to the extent that there were any good guys in this sort of conflict—but how many deaths had he himself caused? Would his death, in fact, save lives? Or would it cause the Israelis to retaliate brutally, escalating the conflict even further? She wished she understood the politics of the situation better. Fights over land and national sovereignty she could understand, but the players in this war seemed to be acting out a script that had been handed down to them, without sufficient direction, from prior generations. And then there were people like Harry, who seemed to be pulling strings from somewhere offstage.
    The war itself had been an exercise in fateful escalation, each side reacting predictably to the real or perceived offenses of the other. It began when a group of Palestinian teenagers, reacting to a recent crackdown on demonstrations in the West Bank, had started pelting Israeli soldiers with rocks. A lucky shot knocked a soldier unconscious, and in a desperate attempt to rescue their fallen comrade, the Israelis opened fire, killing several of the teens. One of the Palestinians, a ten-year-old boy, had been carrying a makeshift cane—or a sword, depending on the source—fashioned from a branch of a nearby tree, which happened to be of the species Olea europaea . This imparted the otherwise inconsequential skirmish with symbolic significance and led to a series of escalations resulting ultimately in the outbreak of the Olive Branch War.
    As she pondered these things, a nurse opened the door to her room.
    "Oh, good, you're awake," said the nurse, a solidly built, matronly-looking woman. "I was starting to get concerned." Her English was good, although it slouched uncomfortably toward Yiddish.
    "I think I'm all right," said Christine. "Just a little banged up. And of course, I inhaled a lot of—"
    "We're running out of rooms," clarified the nurse. "There's a war going on, you know."
    Christine wasn't sure what to make of this. Was she being accused of deliberately occupying a room that could have been given to someone more deserving? "Yes," she responded flatly. "I was in it."
    "Mmm," said the nurse. "If you could clear out by six, that would be very helpful."
    "Really," insisted Christine, feeling that she wasn't getting due consideration for the ordeal she had just been through. "The house I was in was hit by a rocket.