Chapter 75: The Silent Decades, III
France, 1915.
The lab was disguised as a collapsed signal tower—just another scar on the western edge of the Marne line. Camouflaged with sandbags and broken timber, it rose three stories high, built into the edge of a ridge barely a kilometer from the front.
To anyone passing by, it was a communications relic. A ruin.
But beneath its shell, Lucien stood at the top level, behind a reinforced viewing port and a wall of instruments—half of which had never existed before. The glass was laced with thread filaments, connected to a precision magnification scope mounted in the center.
Through it, he could see everything.
Below, French soldiers moved across a cratered field between collapsed trenches. Chronos personnel—disguised and hidden from view—had embedded the last machines along a thin corridor of mud, blood, and rusted wire. The soldiers didn't know. They were never told.
Twelve men. One medic.
They advanced. The lead soldier crossed the activation point.
The field engaged.
Time shivered.
Lucien watched the sequence in clinical silence.