The Empire Read online

“Which General Craig are you?” Kyle asked.

  A flash of confusion crossed General Craig’s face. “I’m the General Craig who’s going to kick your insubordinate ass!” he said.

  Kyle looked around the mission control amphitheater. At the mission director station stood Gus Ferrer.

  We’re in Time Tunnel 1! he realized.

  “How…” Kyle began.

  “How did we catch you?” the general finished. “Our Zhang was able to repair the damage her double caused. Strangelove used your graviton trick to track your transponder. We figured out how to activate it remotely.”

  The temporal variance alarm sounded. The pink TVA cube flashed on. Roger Summit, Aysha Voong, and their team dove into their computers to learn how time had changed. In moments, they looked at each other in disbelief. Roger raised a hand to his chest.

  “Guard them,” the general said to the soldiers as he descended the steps to the historians’ hive. The history team was shouting at each other as they pointed at each other’s computer screens.

  “What is it?” the general asked Roger.

  Roger was hyperventilating.

  “I…can’t…breathe,” he said.

  The general signaled to Lara Meredith to tend to Roger. He turned to Aysha.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Aysha swiveled her chair to face the general. She took a breath.

  “General,” Aysha began, “where and when was the first atomic bomb used in battle?”

  The general looked confused. “Hiroshima, Japan. 1945.”

  “No,” Aysha said. “Try Chicago. 1938.”

  The general’s jaw dropped.

  Aysha swiveled her chair back to her keyboard and began typing. On the colossal mission control screen, a grainy black and white image of the ruins of Chicago appeared. The limestone Chicago Water Tower, one of the few surviving structures of the great 1871 Chicago fire, also somehow managed to survive the 1938 nuclear cataclysm.

  “There’s more,” Aysha said.

  She continued typing on her keyboard. A globe map appeared on the big screen. It rotated to the western hemisphere. The United States was colored blue.

  “This is where the United States is supposed to be,” Aysha said.

  She clicked a button. A red hourglass on a black background washed over North and Central America, replacing the blue.

  “There is no more United States,” Aysha said.

  “This,” she said, “is called the ‘Annikan Empire.’”

  “Annikan…as in Annika Wise?” the general asked.

  Aysha nodded. “There’s more.”

  She typed on her keyboard. The globe spun to the opposite hemisphere. A swastika covered all of Europe, the United Kingdom, and North Africa. The red circle and rays of the Japanese rising sun flag spread across Asia and Australia.

  Stunned silence. The general dropped into a chair.

  “My God.”

  Roswell, NM

  July 5, 1947

  22:49 hours

  Hundreds of soldiers stood in the New Mexico desert looking up at the partly clouded night sky. Lightning flicked from cloud to cloud. The blue-white bolts lit up the soldiers and the desert landscape dotted with scrub and yucca. The soldiers wore charcoal gray uniforms, tall black boots, and tunics with a row of gleaming silver buttons running up the left breast. Dozens of tanks were parked nearby, along with trucks and earthmoving equipment at the ready to collect the wreckage of a strange craft that was prophesized to fall from the sky in the coming moments. The black vehicles bore the same emblem that waved on a large flag that flapped lazily in the breeze—a red hourglass against a black background.

  A tiny woman in a wheelchair looked up at the sky expectantly. The woman, in her nineties, wore the same charcoal gray tunic as the others. Five gleaming silver discs on her left shoulder distinguished her superior rank. Her white hair was worn in bangs, with a ponytail down her back.

  The woman had waited over half a century for this moment.

  The catastrophic accident that caused the crash of a UFO in Roswell had happened long before the woman was born. Abandoned in the past, she had lived just long enough to witness history.

  A brilliant blue-white explosion erupted in the sky, momentarily blinding the soldiers as it lit up the desert. Two lights and smoke trails descended from the blast point in the sky.

  Annika Wise clapped and cackled excitedly as she watched the wreckage of a time machine from the future hurtle toward earth.

  — End of Book 2 —

  Annika Wise will return

  About the author

  Richard Todd is an entrepreneur, author, and inventor. As a contributor to the Huffington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, he has written on a variety of subjects, including climate change, education, and economics.

  His interview subjects include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group Sir Richard Branson, economist and EU advisor Jeremy Rifkin, astrophysicist Brian Greene, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, IBM “Watson” supercomputer team leader David Ferrucci, and Who Killed the Electric Car’s Chelsea Sexton.

  Richard Todd holds four patents in the field of information technology. He lives on a ranch in Carmel Valley with his wife, Laura, and the many rescue animals under their care.