The dropclock is skating smoothly across the membrane of the Timesphere, locked on target, when we hit a minefield. Ancient, probably; when it's been laid, it will have been there forever. Not meant for us, or not us personally.
Semantic monopole straight through the port foretop vane, and everything shudders; a lighter craft might corkscrew and skip onto the head of a more nihilistic timethread, but we build craft tough, and stay glued to the continuity that contextualises us, not becoming nudged toward having always culturally agreed with our therefore-never-having-actually-been-enemies.
Just in case, Mother sets her throbnail boots firmer against the deck, fist tight on her fighting staff, and crisply leads the six of us in prayer, feeding the stabilisers as much specific cultural resonance as possible: I am a daughter of the river, my hands are thine to lay the bricks. Look thou for the helpers—
"Coming in hot!" Joey says from up front, wrestling us in on target, the clock's fuselage whining with stress from the damaged vane. "Brace for membrake—"
We dive through the boundary effects and dump time-orbital velocity in a series of rock-skipping kisses on the membrane surface. The interference pattern of our ripples will wash up in normaltime, readable to those in the know: a centuries-long smear of lights in the sky, weeping statues and churches nimbused in rose-gold light as spillover from the stabilisers, and then we flip across, snapped under the membrane as we shed too much orbital momentum to stay clear of normaltime, and the dropclock hits atmosphere like we just invented turbulence and it's taking it personally. The thrusters shriek, the ramp drops, the undercarriage kisses ground; we sway in place, not missing a beat, not stumbling over a word, throbnails gnawing divots into the deckplates.
"So be it!" Mother finishes.
"So be it," we chorus, slam the butts of our staffs into the deck, and stride out in perfect marching synchrony; Joey winding the ramp in and peeling the clock off the deck almost before we clear the tailvane.
Fighting time travellers is a hell of a thing, because it's so hard to get them to stop dicking about and fight in any conventional fashion. You cannot meaningfully field an army against a lone man with the technology to hip-check the world's pinball table and flip the outcome of a different battle a millenium earlier, so that the specific nation states that ultimately arise are entirely different ones, and nobody is practically or ideologically prepared to fight him at all.
Four-nines of the fight lies in denying the bastards the opportunity to show up on anything but your terms. And strange wars breed specialists.
Independent monastic time-travel combat engineering corps, for example.
This is not the battlefield. It's a battlefield, right enough; but we're here as a surgically pinpoint reflector, bouncing somebody else's wave of time disruption, turning its eventual Timesphere-resonating coherence pattern to moiré and fuzz. We march, lockstep and hymnal through smoke and shouting, and our reputation precedes us: combatants of both inscrutable sides throwing down their arms and routing at the sight of us. For we are the hand of the Mother Church, and we deliver the touch of its hand, in gentleness and ferocity both.
Routine deployment this may be; small in the grand design it may be. But we're doing the Good Work.
"Orders are to make visible to the historical record that the Mother Church fought on this battlefield, and to see it end with the blue-on-white flag flying over yonder castle," Mother says. "Pick up the pace and we'll be done by teatime," so we double-time it across the emptied fields and let ourselves into the fort. Good structure; local stone. Solid enough to have been here a long time, and to be here for a long time more, and for future builders to reuse it as a basis; a landmark for the shallower end of deep time. You pat the stones of the wall approvingly as you go by.
The resonance trail of our pilot wave must have made quite some impact; the locals' awe of us borders on creepy. We meet neither resistance nor anyone willing to hold out a hand and say, "Thanks for clearing that battlefield for us!" We find the flagpole, correct colours already flying. Job done, then; it's all over, and the right side of history remains uninverted.
"Does anyone else think," you say, shading your eyes and giving the landscape a dubious once-over from the ramparts as everyone's counters head for synchrony and the dropclock heads back in for pickup, "that this was almost weirdly easy?"
"Six Unionist's Prayers and one Stations of the Hour, for jinxing it," Casimir jokes, leaning casually against the flagpole, as the dropclock bursts through the meniscus into local sky; but there's something wrong, its outline flickering, as if it's an unstable superposed outcome of competing schools of design, vanes jittering between hull configurations.
"Joey? Joey!" Mother barks into the radio, as the clock slews and staggers in the air — and we can see the full toll of the weapons broadside it's taken, the port side's sixfourninesix? vanes smoking and threatening to shear as the wind catches the red-hot rips in the hull, and as the drive containment fails it
will
always
have
been
too
late