Yes, today is the day Nightstalkers: Time Patrol is live. This book marks a turning point because the Nighstalkers transition in this story into the Time Patrol and from here on out that will be their mission. The next book will be out in August and it’s Time Patrol: Black Tuesday. I’ve already picked the dates for the next two books after that: Time Patrol: Ides of March and Time Patrol: Valentines Day Massacre.
Time travel has always fascinated me, especially if you accept the premise that if its ever invented, then it exists now. I’m merging the world and theories I invented in my Atlantis series into the Time Patrol:
Hidden deep beneath the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Time Patrol, a secret agency charged with protecting the world’s timeline from the evil forces who wish to alter it. When the Patrol disappears without a trace, only twelve short hours are left before all life on Earth ceases to exist.
Enter: the Nightstalkers. Summoned to find the Time Patrol, the Nightstalkers’ elite covert operatives begin to notice rifts in their own worlds. And when they realize one of their colleagues has vanished into thin air, the mission gets personal.
From battling krakens and Valkyries to breaching the mythical Bermuda Triangle, the Nightstalkers must risk everything to defeat the malicious forces manipulating time itself. But if they lose, it won’t just mean the end of the world—it will mean the total destruction of the past, the present, and the future.
Brimming with sci-fi action, Time Patrol continues bestselling author Bob Mayer’s pulse-pounding Nightstalkers series.
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When It Changed. From Nighstalkers: The Time Patrol published tomorrow!
It had changed for Foreman, closing in on 70 years of service, in February 1945 in an area called the Devils Sea, off the coast of Japan, in the waning days of World War II. The event was after he and his pilot were forced to ditch because of engine trouble. Minutes later the rest of their squadron simply vanished into a strange mist in that enigmatic part of the world. No trace of the other planes or crews were ever found.
Then it was reinforced in December of that same year, the war finally over, on the other side of the world, when he begged off a mission because of the same premonition he’d had before the Devils Sea flight, and watched Flight 19 disappear from the radar in an area called the Bermuda Triangle.
He’d determined then and there, that he had to know the Truth.
So he’d gone from the Marine Corps, into the short-lived pre-cursor to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Group in 1946, then morphed with it into the CIA, where he moved upward, and, much more importantly inward, into the darkness of the most covert parts of various branches whose letters and designations changed over the years, but their missions grew more and more obscure, to the point where he’d outlived and outserved all his contemporaries so no one in the present was quite sure who exactly he worked for any more or what his mission was.
If he worked for anyone at all.
Not that anyone really cared.
He was now known as the Crazy Old Man in the covert bowels of the Pentagon and by some other names, associated with bowel movements.
How crazy he was, some people were about to discover.
Cleopatra’s Needle pierced the sudden downpour with the relative indifference of granite, having faced the many depredations of time in its 3,500 some-odd years of existence. However, just one hundred years in New York City’s weather has done more damage to the hieroglyphics on the four faces of the obelisk, particularly the southwest corner, than over three millennia in Egypt’s much drier climate. It wasn’t the rain as much as the acid pollution rising from the city, some of which came back down in the rain.
Edith Frobish hated the rain, for more than just the damage it did to the Needle. Still, she paused, as she always did, to look at the ancient Egyptian monument set, strangely, in Central Park in the middle of Manhattan, in the middle of New York City, far from its origin. The fact the obelisk had nothing to do with Cleopatra VII (yes, there were six before that one, but none had achieved her fame/infamy so only the historically finicky who added the number—count Edith among those who did) was a trick of historical ‘publicity’, more notoriety, that Edith would never understand. Why name something for someone who had had nothing to do with it, other than ruling briefly a thousand years after the Needle was commissioned by the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh, good old, Thutmose III? He was considered the ‘Napoleon of Egypt”, expanding the Empire to its widest breadths, but did anyone remember his name? Nope. But they remembered Cleopatra, seventh with that name. Plus, few knew or cared there had been six Cleopatra’s before the one who’d bedded mighty Caesar, then not-quite-as-mighty Marc Antony, and then had a date with a snake.
Was it just because she’d snagged and shagged two notable Romans? Edith found such an idea misogynist in the extreme. Which shows that despite her brilliance and degrees, there was much she didn’t know about the real world.
When It Changed for Moms from Time Patrol published in two days, on Tuesday
It changed for Moms by figuratively traveling into her past, both in place and time. She was already in the place, having made the drive of tears back home. She was sitting on the front porch of the abandoned shotgun shack where she’d grown up in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Interstate 80 was to the south, across the flat plains, but so far away that no sound traveled from the eighteen-wheelers racing across the middle of the country.
There was no other house in sight, just slightly undulating miles and miles of fields, and despite all the years since she’d left, Moms still had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It had started when she’d entered Kansas and grown stronger every mile she drew closer to ‘home’. The house was empty, long deserted. Her younger brothers never came out here, smarter than she was, understanding some memories only brought pain.
It seemed Moms was a masochist, going back to her roots in order to remember.
But sometimes, going into the past is necessary in order to move forward.
There are variations on that, such as changing the present in order to move forward, which Moms was soon to be discover.
And what are your thoughts on this possible cover for the next book in the series: Time Patrol: Black Tuesday?