The Radiant Warrior

Prologue

She unloaded the temporal canister, glanced quickly at her new subordinate, loaded it with her last superior, and sent it two and a half million years uptime. One contact every fifty years and that for only a few seconds. Life this far back was a bitch.

The new arrival was biosculpted into a male version of herself, a type twenty-seven protohuman. He was barely four feet tall, skinny and with dark brown skin. He was also naked, since clothing wouldn't be invented for millions of years.

She switched off his stasis field.

He looked up at the stalactites hanging above him from the cave roof. Confused, he looked over at her.

"Surprise! You son of a bitch!" she shouted. "Welcome to two and a half million B.C.! Welcome to a hundred years of dodging leopards and eating grubs and shivering up in a tree all night, you bastard, because it's all your fault!"

"What? Where am I?"

"The where is eastern Africa, you lucky boy, but the fun part is the when! You're in the Anthropological Corps now and you get to do the exciting work of tracking protohuman migration patterns!"

"This must be some sort of a joke! And you are the rudest and the ugliest woman I've ever seen!"

"Watch your language, buster! I'm your boss and will be for the next fifty years. And if you think I'm ugly, just wait until you see yourself in a mirror, not that we have one."

"What is going on here? None of this makes sense! I was in twentieth-century Poland, doing my paperwork, when the monitors came in and I woke up here. And I look like you?"

"Yeah, minus the floppy tits, ugly."

"But… why?"

"Your file says it's a punishment detail for gross incompetence. You completely failed to brief a new subordinate on security procedures! She left the wrong door open. And the Owner's own cousin, who had never heard of time travel, got transported back to Poland's thirteenth century, ten years before the Mongol invasions. Then the Owner himself found his cousin in the battle lines during the invasion. The man had been there for ten years before he was discovered! There was nothing they could do about it without violating causality. When you screw up, you don't fart around!"

"But… without notification, without trial?"

"You mess with the Owner's family, you're in deep shit, boy!"

"Well… what are you doing here, then?"

"You don't recognize me? I suppose I should be crushed, you bastard, but I'm not. I'm the woman that you failed to brief, you shithead! I've been in this lousy pest hole for fifty years because of you, and now I've got fifty more to get you back for it!"

"Surely, madam, there's no reason to be vindictive about it. After all, if we're both in the same boat-"

"A boat wouldn't be this bad, bastard! We are in the middle of a bloody wilderness with nothing to eat but carrion and grubs! There's nothing to do but wander around after a tribe with less brains than a bunch of morons, and nobody to talk to that has a vocabulary of over forty words except each other."

"Hell yes, I'm vindictive! And I'm going to stay that way for the next fifty years!"

He rolled over and groaned.

She looked at him. "Well, in fifty years, my replacement will be the dolt at the thirteenth-century portal who should have caught your screw-up. Then you get to be his boss. It gives you something to look forward to." He groaned again.