TIMEGATE

Time stretches before and behind
me in century long strands measur-
ing the age of the stars, the age of
men, but irrelevant to me. I am lost
down the years, stuck in a limbo
where I am unique: A man without
age, an anachronism of the future
thrown into the past. My ship
is carrying me faster than light
through the stars at a speed with no
meaning; stars swirl around me,
sometimes I feel I could reach out
and touch them; other times I feel
alone and lost, their light twinkling
with malicious laughter. At these
speeds lost in the distant past the
only other beings I have any contact
with are the Enemy. With the Enemy,
their ships as fast as mine, I engage
in macabre dances of death firing
out energies at them until they are
with me no more; their debris
scattered and receding from me in
time and space.

That is my mission, to travel back
along the trail of ravaged planets,
following the Enemy back through
the millenia to where their ag-
gression was given birth and they
first reached out to grasp and
strangle the peoples of the Uni-
verse, for the Enemy must be
stopped. Stopped before the first

blow was struck, before blood and
tears flowed together under the
hand of the Enemy.

I search back through time by
passing through the TIME-GATES,
portals scattered throughout the
fabric of time and space which link
the future with the past. The
TIME-GATES are the key to my
mission. The TIME-GATES, enigmas
which only lightly brush at the edges
of reality, the bulk of their mechan-
isms lost in some distant dimension.
Through these I travel, flung this way
and that by the capricious currents
of Time. Spat out into a new sector
of space, in a different era I can
always be sure of the Enemy, they
are constant, returning to attempt
my destruction again and again. I
fight my way through them to
planets where I can rest briefly
before continuing my mission. Each
planet different, an adventure in
itself if I only had more of that thing
which has so little meaning for me:

Time. Each planet unique but almost
invariably scarred by the Enemy. I
cannot rest when surrounded by
the bitter fruits of the Enemy's
conquest, I must force myself on in
search of the Brood of the Enemy.

I am confident that I will complete
my mission and find peace at some
time in the past, but until then I
am one man against an empire, one
man adrift in an ocean of time
punctuated by the enigmatic TIME-
GATES.