My short story “Salvation of the Innocents” is now available in Issue 127 of On Spec. I made my first submission to On Spec in early 1996, so yes, it took 28 years to see my name on On Spec’s cover! It’s a good thing I’m not in a rush. The issue has already been reviewed by R. Graeme Cameron on Amazing Stories and by Victoria Silverwolf on Tangent Online.
In her editorial, Diane L. Walton writes: “[Salvation of the Innocents] really reached our editorial hearts. In a future where humans are plagued by infertility, time travel provides a solution to maintaining the human population … but comes with its own unique dangers and catastrophic risks.”
Here’s a sneak peek:
Salvation of the Innocents
by Karl El-Koura
If this one goes badly, Dolan thought as he stepped into the decontamination pod, then I’m done. I’ll quit.
The pod blasted him with streams of cold, stale, irradiated air. When the strobing red light turned green, he took a deep breath, placed a hand on his waist, and twisted the brass belt buckle.
A moment later he’d been transferred over twenty-two hundred years into his past. And he needed to move. He had less than five minutes.
Tassa had placed him well, in an alley between two buildings like the script described. The sounds of men and women yelling, begging, desperately negotiating, and babies and children screaming, bandits barking and shouting, filled the night air like demented birdsong. He’d heard the cacophony of anguish so many times before that he kept expecting to get used to it, to stop hearing it even; but the pleas for help and mercy pierced into his consciousness every time, so that he’d been losing precious moments to this initial sense of disorientation.
Following the script, he began running in the uncomfortable sandals, along the side of the whitewalled building and around to the wooden door. He pushed it open, peered into the dark house, found the main floor empty.
He dashed up the stone stairs to the roof, steeled himself for the blow. His ears rang and his vision blurred as he reached the top step. It took him a moment to recover and he was almost struck again and sent toppling back down; the script, recording the experiences of the hired sword whose steps Dolan was now retracing (but several minutes before they’d originally happened) indicated that he’d “immediately” blocked the second swing, but maybe that man’s skull was made of harder stuff or he was more used to having his brain knocked around inside his head. Dolan barely managed to recover in time to bring up his arm, block the blow, then tear the bludgeon out of his assailant’s hands. He brought the weapon down on the short man’s head, enough to knock him out but no worse.
He always held his breath in the morning when the day’s script appeared in his terminal. Sometimes the bandit really beat up one or both of the parents trying to keep their children out of his grasp, and Dolan had to do the same. Those were the second-worst days. Knowing that these first-century peasants had always been bloodied by the butt of a sword didn’t make performing the action any easier. But as much as those scripts turned his insides to concrete, the worst days were when something went wrong and he didn’t come back with a child, closing off that possibility forever. One more of those days, he thought again but knew he was lying to himself, and I’ll quit.
A woman crouched at the back of the exposed room, hiding in the shadows, facing away from him, as if he were a dark spirit who couldn’t harm her or the child she held tightly against her chest, wrapped in her robes, if she didn’t acknowledge its presence.
He only dealt with babies for now—it made everything, including the child’s own integration in Dolan’s world, much easier. But once he ran out of babies, would the Authority decide he needed to move on to older children? And how much harder would his job become if he had to fight off, not only desperate parents, but children themselves?
As much as he’d steeled himself for the blow to his head, this next part was much worse. In a harsh, barking Aramaic, he said, “Give it to me.” He took three steps towards the woman.
