Free TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW by Simon Hawke

as if he'd moved. He felt dizzy and there was an aching pressure in his chest.
    "I think you'd better sit down," said Dr. Darkness.
    Lucas half sat, half collapsed into a large, leather upholstered reading chair.
    "Jesus, Doc . . . what have you done?"
    "Well, I saved your life, for one thing. You might at least say thank you."
    "No," said Lucas, softly. He swallowed hard and shook his head. "No, I won't thank you. I can't." He closed his eyes. "Oh, Jesus, I'm dead. Or I should be dead. That Ghazi fired his rifle a split second after I leaped and . . and that bullet should have hit me. It
did
hit me! My God, Doc, don't you realize what you've done?
You've caused a timestream split!"
    "I've done no such thing," said Darkness. "I have been monitoring the situation assiduously and my instruments have detected absolutely no evidence of a timestream split. I rather thought there wouldn't be, but I couldn't be absolutely certain." He shrugged. "Occasionally, one must take some risks in order to gain knowledge. Actually, it was quite an interesting experiment. You see, I could easily have deflected that bullet. It wouldn't have taken much, merely matching its speed and giving it a slight nudge would have accomplished the desired result. However, in that event, I would have altered the conditions of the past in a manner that might have affected entire scenario, not only yourself.
    "For one thing, a number of people had already seen you die," Darkness continued as Lucas listened with stunned disbelief. "That in itself might not have been all that significant from a temporal standpoint, but unfortunately, by the time I learned about your untimely demise, you had already been buried and certain significant events had already proceeded from that point, taking the factor of your death into account.”
    Lucas listened to it with a sort of shocked detachment. He simply couldn't take it in. Darkness was calmly talking al his
death,
about his having been
buried,
and yet, incredibly, despite having died, he was alive. His mind reeled as he tried to assimilate it all. The more Darkness told him, the crazier it sounded.
    "I recall standing over your grave and feeling absolutely furious," said Darkness. "You were to have been the vehicle for my greatest achievement, the living prototype of ultimate invention, and you were dead! Well, granted, I always knew there was some risk of that, considering the highly dangerous nature of your occupation, but that was precisely what made you such an ideal candidate. You routinely traveled, throughout different time periods and were exposed to a variety of environments, all of which made for excellent testing conditions. Being a temporal agent, you were equipped with a warp disc, which provided a perfect failsafe system. And finally, I don't think that anyone but a temporal agent would have possessed the necessary abilities to deal with the stresses the field testing would have generated. You were perfect. However, to be on the safe side, I also terminaled Andre Cross and Finn Delaney, in case anything should happened to you. Just my luck, Cross and Delaney's terminals malfunctioned. The symbiotracer functions continue to just fine, but the telempathic chronocircuitry embedded in their particle chips burned out during the process of molecular bonding. I still haven't entirely licked that problem. In case, that left me with only you. Your telempathic chronocuitry survived the bonding process. And then, like an idiot you had to go and get yourself killed. Which meant that my project, the end result of my life's work, was also dead. And
that,
my friend, was simply unacceptable!
    "
I didn't see how I could possibly do anything about it, though," Darkness continued, "until I discovered that among the enemy soldiers who had crossed over from the parallel universe was your alternate self, your mirror image from the other timeline. He was an officer in the Special Operations Group—their counterpart to the Time