Two Mercenaries Chase Each Other to the End of Time

Carmen picked herself up from the floor of the Royal Navy captain’s office, watching the body of the officer peel away from the wall across from her, blood leaking from the massive hole blown into his blue coat and torso. At the other end of the room, another hole had been blown into the doorway, where a man cradling a volley gun in his arm stood amongst the settling dust. He took notice of her as she stood up.

“Shit. I missed.”

“No fucking shit you missed Acosta!” she exclaimed, throwing her singular arm into the air.

The volley gun’s explosion had attracted the attention of the other attendants of the Portsmouth Naval Base, and the two could hear the hollering and clamor of hundreds of sailors raising the alarm for an attack. They knew they couldn’t stay too long.

“No reason I can’t try again,” Acosta said, reaching for a display gunpowder horn on one of the two remaining intact walls of the room.

Carmen wasn’t interested in waiting around for him to methodically reload a 19th century shoulder blade-shattering septuple musket only to hastily aim and miss again. She flipped the cover open on the leather bracer she wore and flicked her wrist, spinning the selector like a roulette wheel.

“Hey!” Acosta yelled, dropping the volley gun on the floor. The screen of the device embedded in the bracer flashed a confirmation:

She squeezed her fist tightly shut to confirm and the platter inside the bracer spun with a high pitched whine. A set of actuator heads twitched across its magnetized surface, reading and writing the coordinates of her journey across the map of space and time.

Acosta was still fussing with his bracer as a platoon of Royal Navy sailors busted down the door of the office and aimed their muskets at him. Carmen waved goodbye at her hapless assailant as she disappeared in a blinding flash of light and reappeared a mile outside of the Old West town atop a rocky hill.

She spied a pair of silver miners on horseback down the way, and ambled down towards them. With the flash of a flintlock and an exchange of strong words, she was on her way into the town proper with a horse and some more era-appropriate attire. It wasn’t too long as she walked through the doors of J.T.’s Saloon before she locked eyes with a ragged, but decidedly still alive, Acosta Mann. He looked up from his bottle of lager, glaring daggers, bullets, and bombs at Carmen.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” he muttered.

“Well well, long time no see!” she shouted, drawing the flintlock and aiming.

Acosta threw his bottle in response and drew a revolver. She ducked out of the way as it smashed against the wall behind her and fired the flintlock in Acosta’s direction. The bar erupted into a frenzy, a burly vaquero wrested the flintlock from Carmen’s hand as Acosta slammed the butt of the revolver into the nose of the silver miner attempting to pin him to the table.

Carmen climbed onto the bar, Acosta following suit. She chucked a pint glass at him and it shattered against his head, staggering him. He clutched where the glass had hit, blood seeping through his fingers, and groaned. He whipped the cover open on his Sundial bracer and flicked his wrist to spin the dial.

He squeezed his fist tight to confirm, the disk inside reeling up to a high-pitched whine before he disappeared in a flash of light. Carmen followed suit, the bullet of a sheriff’s pistol flying through the air where she was a couple seconds before.

The two of them appeared as bright flashes of light piercing through the chilled night air, light wisps of smoke curling at their feet. Carmen lunged at Acosta’s backlit silhouette, knocking him to the brick road below. He wriggled free of her grasp, climbing on top of her for leverage while she was down. Acosta brought his arm around her neck and pulled back, she swept his feet out from underneath him.

They wrestled on the cold road, battling for advantage, until Carmen had wrested the revolver from his belt and fired it. It missed, the gunfire turning their hearing to a shrill ring. Nearby, a Soviet landmine buried just underneath the surface of the soil was rigged to detonate if it heard the right frequency of tones. As the bullet ricocheted and sang a rich chord with each bounce, the tuning fork inside the mine vibrated in harmony. The explosion shook the earth and sent debris high into the air and off in the distance, Finnish soldiers began to shout.

The two rolled the wheel on the Sundial again. The slider ran through dates, times and locations before settling once more.

They committed without a second glance, from the Karelian night to the midday French countryside. The clamor of medieval battle engulfed the two, who eagerly joined the bloodshed, drawing swords from between the plates of fallen English and French soldiers to duel with.

Carmen swung her sword downwards, Acosta using his to parry. Taking advantage of her lack of balance, he thrust towards her stomach, slicing apart her jacket as the edge grazed flesh. She winced, swinging out her elbow to meet his wrist and smashing the pommel of the sword into his jaw. The wheel of Acosta’s Sundial freely spun, dialing in a new time and location.

Acosta landed, gripping the sword in his fist hard, registering an affirmative with the Sundial. His body erupted in a flash of light and left a wisp of smoke as a trace. Carmen dialed in the same time and locale.

Two unidentified individuals in strange attire appeared on the fencing stage of the 1988 Summer Olympics, brandishing 15th century swords and fiercely clashing. They disappeared amidst the commotion just as soon as they had arrived, leaving behind the swords embedded in the stage.

Three employees at the Riken Center for Computational Science watched in abject horror as Carmen and Acosta grappled each other in the stadium-sized room housing the Fugaku petascale supercomputer. She slammed Acosta into a rack, he whacked her head with his Sundial, and Senior Researcher Watanabe staggered as the two of them disappeared in a blinding flash.

“Get back here!” Acosta shouted over the roar of a snowstorm at the peak of Mount Elbert. Two flashes of light briefly adorned the peak before it returned to the maelstrom of snow in the darkness.

Carmen leapt over rows of Tibetan monks mid-prayer, spinning the wheel of the Sundial again. Acosta jumped after her through the rift of light.

The two of them plummeted into the ocean with a splash. Carmen coughed up warm saltwater and locked eyes with Acosta. Without saying a word, they agreed to relocate.

Two 9mm pistols mysteriously disappeared from the inventory of a Bass Pro Shops location in Concord, North Carolina. The manager was fired a couple days later.

The Sundial Disks whined as they spun faster and faster, singing the arms of their users. The two of them continued to fight while the wheels on the Sundials spun recklessly. They each fired a round from their pistols in 13th century feudal Japan.

Carmen lost a molar in the midst of one of Plato’s symposiums.

Acosta got his ribs lightly fractured at the Alamo.

The Sundials began to smoke sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire. Carmen took a Neolithic clay pot to the head. The actuator heads of the Sundial Disks started to grind against the palladium platters. The displays struggled to keep up with generating their rapidly changing trajectory in space and time.

The disks spun feverishly, the metal burning hot against their wrists. Each era blended together in a colorful mosaic and the chase continued through time like rogue threads weaving through a braid.

The crashing sound of all of time passing around them screeched to a halt at the bottom of a deep, rocky valley. There they stood, as still as statues, the barrel of a gun pressed against each other’s heads. The whistle of warm wind flushed out the empty valley as they huffed, the only sounds to be heard under the vast, pale orange sky.

“Tired of running?” Acosta said between pants for air and broken teeth.

“Tired of fighting?” Carmen replied, blood dripping down the side of her head.

“I could kill you where you stand,” he snarled.

“So could I,” she countered.

“So why don’t you keep running?”

“Why don’t you?”

They broke their gaze with one another, but the pistols remained firmly fixed at each other’s foreheads. The bracers on their wrists fumed with thin streaks of blue smoke, screens only displaying the following message.

Realization crept up their backs as the barrels dug into their heads. Time only flowed in one direction for them from now on: forwards, from whenever they were.

Tiny wisps of clouds lazily drifted over the pale rocky walls of the empty valley, in no rush to be anywhere or do anything. The two of them either had all the time in the world, or had run out of it long ago. The quiet breeze drifted past the two as they stayed locked in their standoff. As the taste of blood soaked into his tongue and the wind blew dust into her blackened eye, he couldn’t contain himself.

“Go on!” he shouted. “You’ve been waiting for this your whole life haven’t you? Do it, kill me!”

“I think we’re both already dead.”