Jack Morgan hunkered down in an ice cave at the base of an Antarctic glacier.  The cold gnawed at him, despite the heated survival suits Conduit had supplied.  Conduit himself seemed perfectly comfortable.  Probably got himself a better suit, Jack thought.

"Tell me again how you know where it'll come down," Conduit asked.

"I didn't tell you the first time," Jack answered.  "Let's just say I have a crystal ball."

The trip to Antarctica had been uneventful, except for Conduit's questions.  The man was good, and Jack needed his skill to get into what was left of the Celestial Keep.   But the man was also intelligent, and seemed to be putting two and two together.   There would come a time, Jack thought, when he'd either have to fully recruit Conduit or eliminate him.

From the mouth of the ice cave, both men could see down onto a snow plain.  The deceptively smooth surface of the plain masked the true terrain; hidden crevasses and pits would await anyone foolhardy enough to try to cross the snow.  Jack knew that the greater portion of the Celestial Keep would come down on that plain, materializing as it's guidance systems desperately tried to land it.  The damage it had sustained during the attack on the Royal Elite had disrupted its drives.  The margin between the Keep landing safely and exploding in transit had been extremely small.

Abruptly, a sound like a billion cheese graters filled the air.  Jack and Conduit both covered their ears, without effect.  The sound grew louder, conducting through their bones, a shaking of space-time more felt than heard.  Bits of snow and ice rained down from the roof of the cave, and the snow on the plain fell into the pits and crevasses.  The noise became shriller and more painful.

As suddenly as it started, the noise stopped.  In the middle of the plain below them sat the Celestial Keep.  Well, at least half of it.  The Keep looked like a monstrous ellipse held in place by the ice and compacted snow, a gargantuan Fabergé egg resting on nature's crystalline mantle.  Through the crevasses, Jack and Conduit could see that the Keep continued into the ground, somehow having materialized within the ground.   The outer surface of the Keep was studded with weapons and sensors and other devices whose purpose could only be guessed at.  Jack had known the super-fortress was huge, but he wasn't prepared for the sheer scale of the thing.  It easily dwarfed the mountainous glacier that towered over their ice cave.

"We're going in there?" Conduit asked, trying to appear casual.

Jack nodded.  "The main systems are all off-line, but we will have to worry about some of the internal defenses.  I shouldn't think it'll be much of a challenge for you."

Conduit nodded, agreeing rather dubiously.  "Yeah, you're probably right."

Jack stood just outside the Keep, close enough to touch the metal surface.   Conduit worked on the surface, using small devices to probe inside the metal.  From this vantage point, the Keep's surface seemed to be a vertical wall stretching into the sky.  Jack knew the curvature existed, but the damned thing was too huge to show it this close up.

"There's a hollow space just behind here," Conduit said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how to open the hatch, if there is one."  Jack frowned, thinking a query at his recall bracelet.

Pass codes not in memory, it told him.  Historical records show that this hatch had been blasted open by the time the Celestial Keep was found by conventional forces.

Jack shook his head.  Having foreknowledge was great, but you had to remember to ask the questions.

"Blow it open," he told Conduit.

Still looking dubious, Conduit placed several shaped charges of Semtex onto the hull.  Personally, he felt the explosives had less chance of scratching this hull than a paint scraper had with a tank, but Morgan was the boss and his information had been good so far.

The two men moved back a considerable distance, sheltering behind some rocks.   Conduit pressed the remote control for the detonator.  The explosion was terrific; Jack looked out expecting to see the hatch blown.  The hull of the Keep was intact.  As history diverged from his timeline, these sorts of things would no doubt happen more frequently.  If only they would happen at a more convenient time!

"Damn," Conduit muttered.  "That was enough plastique to punch a serious hole in any destroyer-class ship.  What exactly is this fortress made out of?"

Jack frowned once again.  Records show that Celestial Keep to be constructed from an alien alloy, his recall bracelet informed him.  Its composite elements are not registered on the Periodic Table.

"Let's look for another entrance," Jack said, leading the way along the outside of the Keep.

"Duck!"

Jack ducked just as a laser fired through where his head had been.  He snapped off a shot with his plasma pistol, and ducked back into the side corridor.

"Can you turn those things off?"

"Give me a few seconds," Conduit answered, working with a small computer screen he'd spliced into wiring exposed from a jagged gash along one wall.  To Jack, it looked like the gash had been made with a bolt of lightning.  No doubt collateral damage from the fight that had taken place.

"It should be okay now."

Jack tossed his jacket into the hallway and waited.  When nothing shot it, he risked moving into the hallway himself.  Picking up his jacket, he made his way down the corridor, Conduit following.  The corridor ended at a set of large doors laying askew.  Jack ducked beneath the corner of one door and into the room beyond.

This had been one of the communications centers for the Celestial Keep.  Banks of equipment tied into all the Keep's central systems lined the walls.  According to his recall bracelet, this would be the center most suitable for Jack's needs.

"Okay, here's the deal," Jack told Conduit.  "You wire into this equipment, and download everything you can find that relates to high energy physics, warp gates, time travel, dimensional travel, etc.  I'm especially interested in the settings on the warp gate that Abbatoir and Autocrat went through.  Once you have the information, wipe it and sabotage the systems so nobody else can get to it."

"Where will you be?" Conduit asked.

"Souvenir hunting."

Using his recall bracelet's map as a guide, Jack moved through the remains of the Keep.  The map had been drawn from historical records of the first group to uncover the Keep; actually, they'd be the second, now.  The discovery of Autocrat's technical store rooms had been a huge boost to the fledgling field of time travel science.   Even without the original discovery of the theory, Autocrat's stores would allow the general discovery of time travel.  Not only of the theory, but of practical working models.

Jack found the first store room he wanted.  The room was filled with spare parts for the warp gates Autocrat used to travel between universes.  Jack reduced everything in the room to slag using his pistol, then moved on.

Jack passed through a huge garden, pausing briefly to admire the foliage.   The roof of the room was lost in a mist.  Droplets of water started to condense out of the mist into rain as Jack moved on.  He didn't know why Autocrat wanted a garden in the Keep, but you had to give the man points for style.  The room was large enough that Autocrat could have fed the subjects of a small nation if he'd planted wheat.

Just out of the garden room, the corridors resumed a more normal size.   Normal for the Keep, that is, which would still be large anywhere else on Earth except in the odd royal palace or two.  The corridor opened into a room that was unmistakably a museum.  Glass cases lined the walls.  Jack stepped up to the nearest glass case.  It seemed to contain a bone of some sort, thick and heavy on one end.  Jack examined the plaque near the base of the case.

"First weapon used in anger," it read.

Jack shook his head.  He knew that Autocrat planned over the long term, but this was hard to swallow.  Then again, Jack had seen personally the devastated remains of that other Earth in the far future.  This explained why the temporal police had never had any inkling of the scope of Autocrat's plan.  Autocrat wasn't changing history, in a very large part, he was part and parcel of history.   The villain had obviously taken pains to keep his involvement secret until recently.

Jack moved to the another case that contained a brass shield.  The shield was beaten around the edges and dented in the middle.  The plaque on this case read, "Shield of Achilles."  Farther down the line was a glass case containing a medal of some sort.  Engraved upon the medal was a swastika.  No plaque adorned that case.

Jack left the room, his mind full of unpleasant possibilities.  Was Autocrat actually behind much of history?  What would be the gain to him, to engineer history for conflict?  Was this all a game to Autocrat, ensuring a history of conflict to produce a human race that would provide him with a suitable challenge at some point in the distant future?  Had he become tired of too easily conquering other Earths?

Or perhaps the museum room was simply a shrine of sorts, to the implements of war and hatred that Autocrat admired most.  Either way, Autocrat was clearly not someone to be underestimated.  Jack continued on, his mood subdued.

The next store room contained equipment more advanced than even in Jack's time.  As far as he could tell, one of the devices looked like a portable time machine.  Damn, Jack thought, he'd never have figured they could solve the power source problems.  The temporal police's machine had been stationary in his own time because of the power needs.  Jack raised his plasma pistol.

Then he paused.  He knew that Maximillian Powers would be getting time travel eventually.  Who knew what might happen farther in the future?  He could only live one lifetime; at most, he'd be able to make sure the twenty-first century was free of time travel.  And what if Powers got time travel before Jack could stop him, and made changes?

The answer was clear.  Only one person could be trusted with time travel, and that person was Jack.  He swiftly looted the room of useful equipment, then turned the rest of it into slag.

  Jack met with Conduit in the hallway outside the communications center.  Jack was loaded down with miscellaneous equipment.  Conduit looked interestedly at the bits and pieces hanging from Jack's shoulders.

"Find anything interesting?"

"Just the odd ultra-advanced technological gizmo," Jack answered.  "How about you?"

Conduit held up a carrying case of DVDs he'd burned.  "It's all on here, and the computer's toast, along with their secondary storage and whatever backups were on record."

"Good enough," Jack said, "let's get out of here."

Jack smiled as they made their way out of the Keep.  He'd forgotten what it was like to work with a competent partner.  He'd have to remember to use Conduit more often.

Conduit smiled as he and Jack trudged back across the snowfield.   There'd been something not quite right about Jack's motives in all this.  The lure of high technology was certainly a motivation, but to Jack it almost seemed as if he'd been picking up household appliances.  No, the technology itself wasn't the reason for this raid.

The man had an unusual interest in time travel.  One of these days, Conduit would get the entire story out of him.
 

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