Time Lines - The Doc Justice Files: Prologue
by Direwolf

August 1962

Mentor fought for the life of his ship. Through the cybernetic linkage, he felt systems falling with each passing moment. The Domain missile had missed him but not by enough. The aft stabilizers were out, the drive system fluctuating wildly, and the on board diagnostics couldn't keep up with the blowing circuits. As of this moment, he wondered if the mortally wounded ship would survive reentry. But there was no other choice. The blue and white planet below was the only refuge left to him.

The ship nearly shattered as he encountered the planetary atmosphere. He couldn't risk skipping off back into to space, the craft would never survive, so Mentor bore down on the nearest land mass. An explosion rocked the craft as one of the engines disintegrated into shards of twisted metal and ceramic.

Trailing a stream of superheated debris like a trailing meteoroid shower, the ship plunged deeper into the Earth's atmosphere. Braking thrusters fired in pulsed waves to slow the huge craft. Moving from west to east, the ship sped across the North American night sky. It seemed assured it would overshoot and crash into the North Atlantic, but over the Great Lakes, the thrusters began to fire in earnest. Now less then four miles above the ground, traveling at several times the speed of sound and glowing like an ember, the ship began to slow. Over New York State, it had dropped to less then a mile high and just under mach speed. Mentor decided that fate had handed him a statistical miracle when a deep shudder ran through the ruined ship. The cargo hold ruptured over Patriot City, scattering the precious load.

Canisters rained down on the unaware city, making the start of events unprecedented in human history...

But not all the canisters fell to earth that day. Patriot City was to become a nexus point of great events and draw the attention and ire of one who was a master of the dimension known as time. He would bend time to his own uses, distorting the time lines at will. This would create rifts to the past and future that even he wouldn't always control. Triggered by chance, these distortions would play havoc across the ages. One such rift or temporal whirlpool spun into existence as the cylinders fell. Over a dozen of the alien batteries charged with the mysterious energy X passed into the rift, falling into the past where upsurges in human emotions such as fear, rage or panic would draw them like iron fillings to a loadstone.

April 18, 1906

San Francisco lay in ruins. A pall of smoke and dust hung over the city as fires burned out of control. The water system was shattered so the fire department could do little to quell the blazes started by the great earthquake. Heaps of debris covered countless bodies while the grind of settling rubble and crackle of hungry flames masked the desperate cries of the trapped and wounded. Fate struck the city hard, laying waste to thousands of lives.

The scale of the disaster is staggering, numbing the senses of those still standing. There is too much to see, too much carnage, too many in need of assistance, too many beyond help. So we turn our attention to a single life.

A five-year-old boy wanders the street, alone, dazed and frightened. Blood masks the left side of his face from the edge of his roan brown hair to his chin. His dark gray eyes are wide with incomprehension. His stumbling footsteps across the broken pavement leave bloody prints in the tick dust. Unaware of his injuries, he wants to call for his mother, father or nurse, but brick dust clogs his throat. And there are no tears left to wash the grime form his face.

He stops and looks blankly at a pile of rubble little different countless others. Though open, his eyes are unfocused until a spot of color seems to take form in the field of gray and black. Red threads appear by a ruined wall and he hears a soft sound, rather like a sigh of breath. He stumbled forward, mesmerized. It looks as if a tunnel extends through the rubble back into a dark sky. He reaches out as to touch the puzzle.

Torn through space and time, the Energy X canisters have ruptured in transit. The mutegenic energy has been Doppler shifted, attenuated to a fraction of its former potentency. But it hasn't dissipated completely, not quite, on it's torturous journey from 1962. At dozens of places down the time stream, these tendrils of energy find targets. One imbues a sword that a man named Roland will use in the defense of Spain. Another finds refuge in a young Greek philosopher named Pythagoras. Another touches a warlord of the Hun tribes who the world will call Attila. Yet another finds a great Sperm Whale, bleaches its skin white and maddens it, even while imbuing the creature with more then normal intelligence. And here, in the devastation of this great city, a nearly invisible spark of violet energy leaps across the decades to play across the boy's hand.

He stops as if frozen. A look of calm understanding comes over his face as his eyes focus, loosing the million-mile away stare. He looks along the street, truly seeing it for the first time. Realization of the magnitude of the disaster tries to again over whelm his senses, drive him back towards the brink of madness. But this time, he will not allow it. There is so much he cannot to. But there is some he can. He notices a faint plea for help from a near by pile of shattered bricks. A man is trapped, his leg pinned by the rubble.

"I'm coming to help," the little boy says and true to his word. Carefully, he begins to remove the chunks of brick. Once enough of them are gone, he finds a stick to use as a lever and the injured man slides free. The boy doesn't stop then. There is more to do.

The five-year-old boy is named Justin Colleens and his story is just beginning...

To be continued...