The Past Sucks, page 1
TIM C. TAYLOR
TimeDogz
—Book1—
TimeDogz Book 1: The Past Sucks
Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2024
Cover image and logo by Vincent Sammy
Published by Human Legion Publications
All Rights Reserved
Also available in paperback
HumanLegion.com
The author wishes to thank all those who supported the making of the TimeDogz series. In particular, Squadron Leader Boss, Melissa, Vincent for bringing the characters to visual life, Messrs Greene and King and their most excellent libations served at the Bromham Swan (especially the Abbot Reserve), the real Stiletto Caldwell for permission to borrow his name, and the loyal supporters on humanlegion.com.
Visit the Human Legion website for the latest news. You can also Join the Legion there and receive insider secrets and a downloadable free starter library of stories for all my book series.
For Dad, who read my books until the end
and whose ‘awkward Taylor gene’ was surely inherited by Stiletto.
Table of Contents
1 — Everybody Wants to Punch a Nazi
2 — The Communist Confusion
3 — 1848 Part Two
4 — Seeing Triple
Yes, there’s more…
TimeDogz#2: And So Does the Future
TimeDogz#3: Time Travel in Rock: 1984
About the author
Selected books by Tim C. Taylor
JOIN THE LEGION!
—— 1 ——
Everybody Wants to
Punch a Nazi
Chapter 01
“Yesterday, I woke up dead. Today? Only the Devil knows what’s happening. I think I preferred being dead. At least I knew where I stood.”
“Cease talking! You will be late.” The irritating little droid bounced on its springy legs for emphasis. “Follow me. Now!”
I glowered at the dented metal ball as it continually extruded new appendages and retracted others. Those configured for manipulation were covered with suckers while the limbs intended for locomotion terminated in lines of roller balls. As annoying as the machine was, I couldn’t help but find these random changes fascinating.
I clenched my fist, wishing the droid would stop playing with its limbs and sprout a face for me to yell at. If it had one, I would have punched a new dent into its stupid casing.
The droid had appeared ten minutes ago in what it laughingly called my quarters — cell was a more accurate term. From the moment it arrived, it had started giving me instructions.
And I don’t take well to being told what to do.
Worse, it wouldn’t answer my questions, and by the Devil I had a stack of those.
For once in my life, my questions were perfectly reasonable. Where was I? What did they want me to do here? What was this appointment the droid was so worked up about? And where was the Ox who’d brought me here?
The droid had remained resolutely tightlipped through my questioning.
Technically, I’ll admit it didn’t actually possess lips, but I could still sense an aura of superiority in its smug refusal to answer. This machine clearly regarded me as worthless toe dross.
And if there’s one thing I dislike more than people giving me orders, it’s arrogant toss rags doing the ordering.
I hated the droid on principle.
And I can be a very principled blowka at times.
“This is important,” the droid scolded in an electronic whine. “You will dress and follow me without delay.”
I gave it my best smile and walked to my bed. The droid had deposited a folded outfit there when it had first entered. I had been given underwear, rust-colored coveralls, and heavy black boots that looked my size.
Maybe I was getting early-onset Stockholm syndrome, because it crossed my mind that maybe I should get dressed.
When I’d woken up in the cell a few hours earlier, I had been naked. I’m not a shy man, and I was interested to discover how the Ox would react to getting a good eyeful. In fact, looking back over my life, much of my sharpest thinking has occurred when I’ve been naked.
Admittedly, it’s also true that my worst ideas have come to me with my clothes off, but at least they were never dull ones.
The thoughts circling in my head – did they fit into the wise or the calamitous category? I had no idea, but I did know that following them up with action would make me feel better.
So I grabbed one of my boots. Keeping a good grip on the heel, I returned to the droid, lifting my make-do club high.
I hesitated, suddenly worried what the Ox would think.
In case anyone thinks I have an unsavory bovine fixation, I should probably have pointed out earlier that the Ox who was never far from my thoughts wasn’t some kind of industrial cow.
True, she had broad shoulders and hips, and muscular thighs that drew the eye. Well, they had certainly drawn my eye. However, although she looked to have impressive horsepower for a human, she was far too pleasing in shape and sheen to be named after a plodding beast.
The Ox didn’t just look good. She had two stand-out attributes that impressed me mightily.
First, she had come to me like a wingless angel on the battlefield at Essen, offering me the promise of an afterlife. Secondly, she had said nice things about the knife tattoo emblazoned upon my chest.
That ink means more to me than artistic pigments hammered into my skin. It’s who I am. Literally. I’m called Stiletto, which for the uninitiated is a wicked kind of long thrusting dagger.
Despite her other fine qualities, the Ox had been as reluctant to answer my questions as this damned droid. Now that I found myself in a cell being ordered around by this tin bucket on changeable legs, I realized she was probably long gone. Likely she was press ganging more broken soldiers, although none of them would have ink as impressive as mine.
It came to me that I was even more angry at the Ox than with the droid. How could she drag me off the battlefield and then just abandon me?
I gave the droid a smile, because when I get angry, I like to hit things. I find it very therapeutic.
So I whipped the boot through the air, landing a heavy blow against the bot’s body that sent it skidding along the floor. It smacked into the wall with a satisfying metallic ring.
Then it picked itself up and stood in front of me waving a metal limb that was meant to admonish me. Or maybe intimidate me. I wasn’t quite sure. “That will be a ten dollar fine.”
I snapped off a front kick that sent the droid skimming back along the floor.
“Fifty-dollar fine. Plus another ten for the unacceptable delay.”
There must be something here I can throw at the wretched thing. My gaze fell on a device that sat on a little shelf near my bed. I guessed it was a clock, although I hadn’t figured out how to switch it on.
“One hundred dollars of fines and counting.”
I shook my head at the stupid chunk of metal weasel shit. “What you haven’t cottoned onto yet, droid, is that I’m a person caught out of time. I don’t have any of your dollars. So you can keep talking numbers as long as you like, and I’ll keep bashing you until you stop being so annoying.”
“Incorrect.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
“S.Z. Caldwell, preferred name Stiletto, your dollar balance currently stands at six thousand, three hundred and twelve point seven.”
“Money? I have money?” I inhaled deeply of the sweet air. “Keep talking, droid.”
“You work for the Time Dogz. Your remuneration package includes money, hot food and hot bintas, clean toilets, in-service training, medical—”
“Woah! Backup, pal. Did you just say hot bintas? As in babes, girls, alluring women? Persons to be cherished and loved. Ladies with whom to engage in recreational physical and emotional activities of the ohh, baby variety?”
“I have insufficient contextual data to answer your query. I merely repeat the words suggested by Karmela Oxala. She thought they might be effective if you proved recalcitrant.”
“Oxala, eh? Damn!” I had assumed a much cooler reason for a woman like that to be called the Ox. “Well, if your Oxala believes that’s the way to tempt me into playing nice, then she’s got a lot to learn about me.”
“Interesting. Why is that?”
“You should have mentioned the hot food and girls from the start. You would have won me over without all this nonsense.”
I hastily put on my outfit and followed the droid out of the cell. We walked along sterile corridors for about five minutes before we entered a small room. Inside, we were met by a bored man in coveralls like mine, except colored dark blue. He told me to remove all the clothing I’d just put on.
I shrugged. Now I knew I was getting paid, I would do whatever they asked, and do it with a smile on my face.
I stripped off and stood before him, noting the moment when his gaze fell on my tattoo and his interest level spiked from semi-comatose to merely uninterested.
I tapped my heels together and came to attention. “Stiletto Z. Caldwell. I volunteer for the Time Dogz.”
The man rolled his eyes and touched my neck.
Then he withdrew his fingers.
I couldn’t figure it out. There was nothing in his hand, and I hadn’t felt anything against my neck other than the slight brush of his touch.
Then the world closed in on me at lightspeed. It grew dark too, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say the walls closed in at darkspeed.
I was
I was still falling when I lost consciousness.
Chapter 02
Throughout my entire life, WorldSoc had closed its deadening grip on planet Earth, relentlessly coloring the map its severe blue.
Protected by oceans and seas, the blue advance had seemed distant when I was growing up in Odense, a modest city in the Nordic Cooperation Zone of Europa. But even kids understood that WorldSoc’s influence was everywhere. Contradicting their diktats and mocking their inconsistencies were dangerous pastimes, dangers that, naturally, I couldn’t resist. I was young and ignorant enough to feel immortal. People who angered WorldSoc disappeared. Even inside Fortress Europa. But not me.
Odense. The old name for the city I grew up in means Odin’s Sanctuary, but the All-Father could not keep us safe from WorldSoc’s influence any more than the missile hedges, drone armadas, and AI-forts that ringed Fortress Europa.
I had been ten years old when I discovered four corpses laid facedown at one of the entrances to the university. A man, a woman, and two girls – a family, I assumed. They had each taken a bullet to the back of the neck and the entry wounds had been painted WorldSoc blue.
That was the moment I learned that nowhere in the world was safe. My immortality and innocence died that day.
Even the most seemingly harmless everyday occurrences were not safe. If a friend called you on your phone, for example, it could be a WorldSoc software fake brewed up in a faraway Californian disinformation facility. This was low-level warfare designed to screw with your mind or dig up something to blackmail you with, the old Kalifornia kompromat.
You could never be sure what was real and what a trap to snare you. That’s why I never trust anyone unless they’re close enough to poke.
Then, one day, one lazy, sunny day in July when I was enjoying frozen lager cream in the park, I learned that WorldSoc’s gloves had come off.
Most of Portugal had already fallen, and the great enemy’s hovertanks and drone fleets had established a bridgehead in Marseille.
I still get waking nightmares of the moment when electronic pings swept across Saint Jorgen’s Park as the people enjoying their sunny afternoon were issued mobilization orders.
Within an hour, I’d hurried home, said a few goodbyes, and changed into my uniform. Forty minutes later, I was at the depot, having a coilgun and charge packs thrust into my hands and a prepacked ruck hung on my back.
Two hours later, after an exhilarating ride on the underway with all safety protocols turned off, I’d been flung across Europa and deposited in the Rhine-Ruhr fortress zone, the northern lynchpin in the First Stop Line.
I had arrived just in time to be surrounded.
To be fair to the decades of work and trillions of euros spent on the Rhine-Ruhr defenses, WorldSoc considered us a tough nut to crack. So they ignored us and punched through the weaker defenses to either flank. After only a modest delay, WorldSoc continued its advance to the east, and we were left stranded behind enemy lines.
Some in my unit said we should break out while we still could. Maybe some of the bigwigs made the same argument. If so, they lost, because we cowered behind the defenses and did not attempt to impede the WorldSoc advance.
Each day we suffered constant bombardment and drone infiltration. It felt to us as if we were fighting a major battle. My friends started to die. But I guess, in retrospect, WorldSoc was just pinning us down while it was busy elsewhere.
Even worse than the bombardments and attrition was hearing the news of WorldSoc’s relentless push eastward.
The First Stop Line didn’t.
The Second was a pause-to-regroup line.
At the Third Stop Line, we heard of flyweight counterattacks pushing the enemy back. After that, either WorldSoc jammed us, or our commanding general decided it was better we didn’t know what was happening outside of our fortress.
After we had been surrounded for twenty days and nights, WorldSoc turned its attention on us.
* * *
If you look it up in the history books – you know, the big reference ones that nobody reads – you might find a few paragraphs on the reduction of the Rhine-Ruhr pocket.
For me it meant racing from one defensive position to another, always retreating to avoid being overrun. The onslaught was falling on the units to our flanks while my battalion was only on the receiving end of a little light shelling and strafing. Just WorldSoc being polite, really, in case we felt they were ignoring us.
On the fourth day of our reduction, my platoon found itself defending a double berm line just north of Essen.
It been a beauty spot, once. A lake surrounded by trees with that delightful woodland leaflitter springiness underfoot. Defending against attack from the north, I counted myself lucky that I was on the second line of berms. If an attack came in hard, I would get a chance to run away and live a few more hours or even days.
Not for the first time in my life, my expectations proved to be completely ass end up. We faced north, but the assault came from the south, drones swarming over the lake behind us. How they snuck past our sentry posts I’ll never know.
But I wasn’t thinking about that as I flung myself against the dirt and sandbagged cerami-crete of my firing post.
Hypersonic darts thwacked into dirt and flesh, striking sparks off the hardened surfaces. Screams of the wounded and dying drowned out our return fire.
The drones passed overhead, and I looked upon a hardened defensive position transformed into a pincushion.
If I had any sense, I would have ignored the screams and cowered with my nose to the dirt.
I didn’t.
With the drone swarm headed for the first berm line, I got to my feet and charged my coilgun.
War does strange things to people’s heads. Unpredictable things. You can never be sure how you’ll react until it’s you amid the shells and bullets.
We were all reservists. I’d trained with my comrades before the invasion but didn’t know any of them very well. After twenty-four days in the fortress, I’d not only come to know them intimately, but to depend on them too.
Terrified though I was, I couldn’t lie in the dirt while my friends in the front line were being perforated with darts.
I stood up and shot the drones out of the sky.
I’m not proud of that. In fact, I think I was an idiot.
We’d learned that if you could hit the rear turbo fans, the drones would drop like stones. It wasn’t an easy shot, but I was a marksman. I even had a badge stitched into my uniform to prove it.
For a few seconds, I was almost a hero. I was wreaking such devastation that a score of drones saw the threat I was posing and marked me as a priority target. They swung around to take me out.
The few comrades who’d followed my example now sought cover, but a madness had taken me, and I kept firing.
I can’t explain why. Like I said, war screws with your mind. It can make the most unlikely people into heroes. And it can make the already dumb even more stupid.
Both of those applied to me, if you believe what other people tell you.
Ironically, the drones I was firing at never hit me. It was the second drone wave skimming over the lake that did for me, the one I never saw coming.
I felt a line of fire rip across my spine. Then I was falling, rolling down the berm and coming to rest not on that nice springy leaflitter but the needle embrace of a gorse bush.
Despite the wounds ripped from my flesh by the darts, for some reason, the gorse needles were agonizingly worse.
As I lay pinned to the bush, I cursed whoever had planted the damned plant here because I was pretty sure it had no right growing in a wood.
I watched the army of drones rush in. Some were heavier models and landed on the shore where they reconfigured themselves into attack spiders.
I yelled a warning, to let my comrades know the war machines were climbing the berm. But only blood and bubbles emerged from my mouth.
The pain in my back dimmed. I could still feel it, but it felt far away somehow.
Was I about to die?
But I wasn’t ready to die. I wanted to fight on.
