Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins with a time-retrieval team (consisting of the narrator and his two colleagues) learning that their special assignment will involve taking a Professor Rothman back in time to the “Age of Desolation” to retrieve her brother and three sisters. It materialises that Rothman is a time-probabilist who herself was extracted from the past, and whose exceptional contributions to the work of the Conglomerate have provided her the credit to pay for the journey back in time.
Almost immediately after they arrive at their extraction point it becomes obvious that the plan they have been briefed about is a cover story provided by Rothman, and that she has other ideas. This begins with them having to walk to a nearby railway station at a military camp:
A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier.
The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.
“Not my specialty,” he said.
Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond. These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.
“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.” p. 85
They later find out that they have arrived at this Nazi concentration camp at the beginning of a prisoner revolt and, during the turmoil, they join the fight with their advanced weapons: the team targets the guards and Rothman searches for a sadistic officer called Frenzel, who she kills (a “ghost killing”). During the action the team becomes concerned that this branch timeline they are creating (their own will be “canonical”) may not last long enough for them to complete the mission and they worry that they will become “ghosts”. Rothman reassures them that vortex that took them there will last for “days, months, maybe longer”.
Eventually (spoiler) they find Rothman’s family, and it materialises that she intends to rescue a different group of people:
The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“We—” I began. Rothman cut me off.
“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”
I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.
The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.
Instead, they smiled.
“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.
“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”
The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves. p. 97
As they return to the extraction point the narrator tells Rothman that, if she returns to the future with her younger self, the Conglomerate will kill her and the child for breaching its rules. Rothman says she knows, and that she intends staying behind in this ghost timeline (“Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”). Their problems aren’t over, however, and they then find that even without Rothman they are a hundred kilograms overweight for the return journey. After they all strip off all their clothes and dump their equipment they still have forty kilograms to shed, and the story finishes with the narrator volunteering to stay with Rothman.
The time travel hand-wavium, combat scenes, and Holocaust elements are blended together well, and produce a pretty good story.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Story link.