For King and Country

Epilogue

In a laboratory tucked away in the Lowlands of Scotland, an aging, white-haired man stepped out of his car and crossed the graveled car park to a heavy steel door. He slid a card through the reader, pulled the door open, stepped inside. He had not been back to this place in many, many years, but the sight which waited for him beyond the bustle of technicians, the scientists and scholars working under close military supervision, brought painful memories rushing back.

There had once been three bodies lying in the quiet little transfer room, hooked into the computers that had sent their minds plunging back through the centuries. Cedric Banning was dead, long since. He had died within weeks of his departure, in fact, suffering a massive coronary and stroke that killed him almost instantly. Ogilvie had not mourned Banning's death. The information they had dug up on his background had turned Ogilvie grey with cold horror. No, he would never mourn that one's death.

But Brenna McEgan and Trevor Stirling...

When Colonel Ogilvie stepped into the transfer room, saw them lying there, still as death, their hair greyed, their faces wrinkled with age, muscles wasted from nearly four decades of coma, tears came to his eyes. They had not come home. Not even when the computers had finally been shut down, a year after their departure. Time had fractured, so the scientists had told him forty years previously, spawning a new timeline in which they were trapped, leaving their bodies in this timeline, to slowly age without them.

Ogilvie stood silent for a long time, just looking at them. The uniform Stirling's body still wore had been decorated, long ago, with a Victoria Cross, an honor Ogilvie himself had placed with trembling hands. Another Victoria Cross shone beneath Brenna McEgan's long, greying hair, awarded by special act of Parliament at the request of His Majesty. No woman, no man could have risked more for king, for country.

Very slowly, with tears in his eyes, Ogilvie saluted them.

Then he turned to leave, his last mission before retirement finally completed.

Wherever they were, he wished them well.