At 1300 hours on the eleventh of November, 1987 AD (Year of the Empress 150), the Last Post rang out on the deck of Her Imperial Majesty’s colonial vessel Bucephalas as its mighty engines propelled it through the darkness on its way to the new world.

A crewman was dead, and they had come to bury him as was the sailor’s way.

“And the sea shall give up her dead. Amen.”

The airlock opened and his corpse began to drift out, quickly snared by the gravity field of the gas giant below.

“Go now with her Majesty, son of England!”

A wave of his hand, and the honour guard took their rifles to their shoulders.

A drop, and the salute was fired.

Turning sharply on his heel, the captain walked away.

This was not the first death on the Bucephalas, but it would hopefully be the last as they approached their destination.

 

On his path to his private quarters, he passed by the engine room: Such a marvel of British engineering! Ever since the crash of the meteor off the coast of Old London (Or just London, as it was in those days) Her Majesty’s (may she live forever) technicians had been designing better and better machines to make use of the almost magical gravity-warping metal that they had dubbed “Brunelium” after the first man to discover its properties.

Indeed, it was hard to imagine a world without the benefits of Brunelium!

 

At 0010 hours on the first of January, 13,000,000,000 BC (Research Year One) the eerie silence of deep space surrounded the Universal Science Directorate’s time probe Chronos-1, the pilot hearing nothing but his breathing as he waited for the Ansible link to HQ.

These were the best missions, he thought, laying on his padded couch down the length of the ship, the early ones (Although finding out who really killed JFK had been a revelation.)

His headset chattered, grappling for a signal in the torrent of cosmic noise, then the voice of command cut in to his reverie, the sure voice that had been with him as long as he’d been making hops.

The sure voice, tinged with fear, over high background noise.

“What’s going on down there, control?”

“We’ve got intruders, Chronos-1! Fundamentalists, trying to stop the mission -~ZZZT~- Jump back! Jump back NOW, before they destroy the Probability Shield!”

And the rest, as they say, was silence.