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Prologue

Lucas Priest, Sergeant Major, United States Arure out how to stop a charging bull elephant with nothing but a Roiven the order to advance and Lucas wondered if the legion commander really believed that Rome's famed phalanx for foot soldiers against his pachyder to stop a Panzer column with tricycles

Lucas was a bundle of raw nerves A short while ago, he would have given alle a few back with hi one by a tribune and it had given him such a bad turn that he had thrown the others away So to an ancient Ro leaves into his otten all about his nervous urge for a cigarette and was instead wishing for a few pyrogel grenades or an auto-pulser Unfortunately, all he had was his short sword, a shield and a spear

He threw the spear and, of course, it didn't help his situation any He decided that it was lunacy to go up against a herd of elephants with nothing but an oversized dagger, so he thren his shield and ran Not a few centurions came to the sanified, albeit prudent, retreat

"Today's Army has Time for You!"

It was an effective recruiting slogan, but the army never stressed the manner in which that time was measured A week's enlistment period didn't sound too difficult to take, but it was one army week, measured not by the time spent in the field on the Minus side, but by Plus Time Present time

On his first hitch, or assignment in the field, Lucas had clocked out on the fourteenth of Septe and raping with Attila and his Huns When he clocked back in, it was still the fourteenth of September, 0705 Nine months of sheer hell and only five minutes of Plus Time counted toward the co that if ti fun, it positively crahen you're in the Temporal Corps

He had less cause to complain than most soldiers He had enlisted voluntarily There had been much better options available; no one had twisted his arm He had scored fairly well on his Service Aptitude Tests, a mandatory battery of exams that everyone had to take when they turned seventeen His score had enabled hiathics, doing research on how to add yet another hundred years to the human lifespan The job had paid well, but it had bored hi and pony show, he had fallen for it hook, line and sinker

The recruiters really laid it on The presentation took up most of the work day and since the company still paid for the time, the attendance was close to one hundred percent The army spokesman had been a civilian from the Ministry of Defense He had been dressed very casually in a suit in peach and woodsy brown He had a terrific tan and a marvelous voice His official title was Director of Service Administration That meant he was a salesman His introductory remarks had been well laced with jokes and homilies and after he spoke, there came the testimonials People "just like you" who had worked in "dull and unde" jobs came out and spoke about what a wonderful experience the army was for them They always made sure, Lucas later discovered, that at least one of the speakers was "a former employee at your own place of business"

After the speeches, there was the Parade of Unifor in it for everyone The soldiers who hboys, Apaches, Belt Coave off a robust glow of health and vitality The woot around to explaining just what life was like for wo back on it, Lucas didn't believe that any of them had ever spent so ht out of Official Social Courtesies directly into the recruiting program

Following the fashion show, there came the part of the presentation they called Historical Orientation It was a brilliant raphic effects, all about how history had proved that nations always prospered when they were on a wartime economic standard, hoas an inevitable fact of human nature and how the advent of time travel had made it possible to avoid the "inconvenience" of the physical presence of a war in present tie of information about how international disputes were settled by evaluating the performance of soldiers of the present in conflicts of the past, a tour de force that looked and sounded very glamorous, even if the information did flash by so quickly that it was impossible to absorb it all At the end, there had been a short speech about hoas possible to apply to the Referee Corps upon completion of your tour of duty It ell known that the refs had the highest pay scale in existence and enjoyed a standard of living on a par with heads of state, to who body, they did not have to answer

However, the fact of thein the top five percent of the SATs could qualify for the Referee Corps School selection process Even so, it was still necessary to achieve degrees in Temporal Physics, Trans-historical Adjuste to scuttlebutt, there wasn't a single person in the refs under the age of one hundred There were younger personnel in the Observer Corps, the lower echelon of that vaunted cadre, but few soldiers were able to succeed in rising through the ranks and surviving the selection process, to say nothing of h RCS, which was, by all accounts, a real horror Lucas Priest had no illusions about ever being anythingsoldier

Jesse Fain's case was more run-of-the-mill She had done poorly on her SATs, as most everybody who could not afford implant education did, and she had been presented with a truly enviable proposition She had been given a choice betorking in the radioactive waste disposal and recla in the asteroid belt—or service in the arh decision

They had just met and already they knew each other fairly well Soldiers made friends quickly They had no other choice Jesse was a young corporal who had just clocked in fro a hitch under Alexander Nevsky It was not uncommon for Russian women of that time to join their men upon the field of battle and Jesse had been out there on the frozen surface of the N

eva, swinging a broadsith the best of thee of pace for her, since in ancient tiun fodder or on the receiving end of a rape Jesse, accustomed to modern equality between the sexes, hated the army with a passion

"I can't tell you how good it felt," she said, "being in the thick of battle and splitting ht I could be so bloodthirsty, but after all that I'd been through"