Sixty feet above the smooth surface of the North Atlantic, next to the forward rail of the Titanic s main deck, a rippling slit opened in the darkness of the night. A scintillant orange mist swirled through the slit, and the three Time Commandos stepped through onto the deck of the luxury liner.

Even before he had emerged completely from riptime Sgt. Ratliff was complaining. “Why me? Why is it always me? Why the hell don’t one of you smartapples ever volunteer? Just once! Why’s it always me has to do the dangerous stuff?”

It was 11:27 p.m. on April 14, 1912. The orange mist sucked itself back into the slit, the egress into riptime vanished, and the raiding patrol from the far future stood in the darkness.

The Titanic rode a surface of saintly calm. That millennium’s Oberstgruppenfuhrer of Time Commandos, “Blackjack” Alec de la Ree, fished among the shaped charges in a bandolier pocket, came up with a nasty stub of cigar, wetted it and wedged it in the left corner of his mouth. “Because, Ratlips,” he said, grinding Ratliff’s gears with the hated nickname, “you know damned well you’ve got the highest probability distribution quotient of anybody on the team.”

The words probability, distribution, and quotient were almost unintelligible around the cigar butt. He lit up with a wooden kitchen match endemic to the phenomenological year in which this raid was being staged. “Just once is there a chance we can pull off a patrol without you piss and moan? Try to fix your pea-brain on the idea, Sergeant: we’re here in service of humanity! Bernoulli equations picked you, chum, not us. You’re the one stays behind so the rest of us get back through riptime. That’s what you draw your pay for.”

The third Time Commando, Corporal Cicero, chimed in with agreement and annoyance that Ratliff was sturmdranging again. “You’re a fast pain in the fundament, y’know that?”

“Okay, okay,” Ratliff said. “But I’m gonna register a beef when we get back to Chronobase.”

“Let’s just correct this node in the Phenom Flow, save the future again, and go home,” de la Ree said. “Then you can squeal all you want.”

He glanced down at the fingernail of his left thumb, where the subjective hour of this year in the Phenom Flow strobed crimson in digital readout. They were crossing the Grand Banks. “It’s eleven-forty their time.” He stared off the starboard bow. “There it is!”

A gigantic, menacing hulk of ice loomed up fifty feet from the flat surface of the sea.

“Move fast!” de la Ree hissed. The trio of Time Commandos rushed to complete their assigned tasks. Within two minutes they were back at the bow rail.

“Everything set?” de la Ree asked. The cigar was out; he was winded from his activities. Ratliff and Cicero nodded it was all set. De la Ree smiled. “In thirty seconds the future’ll be set right, humanity will be okay for another thousand years, and we get some relief time.”

He opened the slit into riptime, shooed Cicero into the pulsing orange mist, and took a step toward the egress. “I still think it’s chicken-doo,” Ratliff said. “What if I get caught in the Flow?”

De la Ree gave him one last look of disgust as he relit the cigar stub, blew a cloud of noxious smoke at the noncom, and said, “Up yours, Ratlips. Just save humanity and we’ll see ya at Chronobase.” As he placed one foot into the mist, he looked back and added, “An’ try not to drag a decade along with ya, y’wanna listen to me?” Then he was gone.

At that moment, still doing twenty-two knots, the great liner began slipping to port as the First Officer yelled to the Wheelman that a berg was drifting in on their starboard side. The Wheelman reacted instantly. The ship slid slowly toward safety.

So Ratlips ensured the future of humanity by triggering the charges as he leaped into the orange mist of the riptime, and sank the Titanic.

Thinking, crankily, There s gotta be an easier way to make a living. A guy could get hurt like this!