Free TW11 The Cleopatra Crisis NEW by Simon Hawke Page B

encouraged him and bought him better tools and books. While still in his early teens, Travers had graduated to working in metal. He started small, with handmade knives, but soon moved on to larger blades. By the time he was ready to enter college, he had made quite a bit of money selling replicas of Spanish swords, medieval maces. Viking blades and battle axes. Sinclair-hilted sabers, French rapiers and Scottish basket-billed claymores to collectors and would-be Time Commandos who were happy to pay hundreds of dollars for authentic, exquisitely crafted “souvenirs of campaigns in Minus time."
    Travers entered Harvard on a scholarship and it was there that his area of interest narrowed to a specialization in classical times. He studied Greek and Latin and took graduate degrees in history, now certain of how he planned to spend his life. He intended to apply to the Observer Corps and be commissioned as an L.T.O., with hopes of a long-term posting in ancient Rome.
    His timing could not have been more perfect. He completed his Observer training at the head of his class, just as the Temporal Crisis struck and the focus of the Time Wars shifted from the settling of international disputes to dealing with the new and greater threat from the parallel universe. The majority of the world's temporal forces were being converted to Temporal Observer status, to function under the senior officers of the Observer Corps, and there was a drastic need for personnel with the sort of qualifications Travers had, especially as L.T.O.'s. They were as anxious to get Travers as Travers was to join them and he was able to write his own ticket. Without hesitation, he requested to be assigned to Gaius Julius Caesar.
    Now, the future that he came from seemed less real to him than the time in which he lived. He had become a Roman in almost all respects, except for that certain distance that he always had to keep, to remind himself of who and what he really was and what his task entailed. For over a decade, he had lived the dream. Caesar had become his friend and it was difficult for him to think that in a couple of years, he would be murdered in the Senate, beneath the statue of the very man whom he had driven out of Rome and to his death in Egypt.
    He thought of Casca, striking the first blow, and Brutus, delivering the last. Travers felt the blade of the
parazonium
he wore at his side. Of Macedonian origin, it was the knife worn by almost every male Roman and the secondary weapon of the soldier, a lethal, bottle-shaped blade with a strong central rib, three inches wide at the hilt, narrowing slightly at the midsection and then flaring out once more and tapering to a sharp point. He had seen the horrifying wounds the foot-long blade could make and he shuddered at the thought of having something like that plunged into his body. Caesar would be stabbed a total of twenty-three times by the conspirators, from the neck down to the groin, and he would fall at the foot of Pompey's statue, which he himself had ordered put back up after the mob had torn it down. His blood would splatter on the pedestal, causing all of Rome to talk for years thereafter about the supernatural influence at work in the assassination, as if the spirit of Pompey himself had presided over it in revenge. And part of Travers' job was to see that it happened exactly that way.
    He had come to have a great deal of respect and affection for Caesar, not only as a scholar studying his subject, but as a man and as a friend. It was hard to think that he would have to stand by and watch him die, and in such an awful manner, without being able to do anything to prevent it. But that was precisely what he had to do. If necessary, he would even have to get involved himself to make sure that history wasn't changed. As much as that thought disturbed hint, the thought that forces from the parallel universe could be at work to change that disturbed him even more.
    Over the next few days, Caesar grew more