• CHAPTER ONE



    Major Steven O’Niel (a.k.a. Viper) sat on a lavish leather sofa in the spacious briefing room of the space station Alpha, a top-secret military facility in the middle of nowhere in space. His ice blue eyes scanned a report of an earlier mission that was scrolling down on the data pad that he held in his bionic hand. Steven sighed and set the data pad aside, “Come on, Mak.” He muttered under his breath, “You’re late again.”

    Mak burst through the double doors of the briefing room seconds later, breathing heavily. “We’ve got a hit!” she exclaimed, “The B.A.T. just confirmed it. We’ve located a Time Crystal!”

    The Time Crystals were the prized possessions of the TimeSplitters, an evil alien race that is able to travel back in time and rewrite civilization’s history in seconds. The TimeSplitters’ most recent piece of technology, called the “Time Portal”, used the Time Crystals to form its power source. Unfortunately, during a human raid on their base, most of the TimeSplitters escaped, taking with them pieces of the core and hid them throughout mankind’s past and future. After the base was retaken, the Bureau of Advanced Technologies (B.A.T.) set up a top-secret organization at the base with a mission to hunt down and retrieve the Time Crystals from the past and future. So far, they had been unable to locate any Crystals, until now.

    “Where?” Steven asked as he jumped off of the sofa.

    “The Wild West era.” Mak (a.k.a. Makoto) answered as she moved a strand of brown hair from in front of her face, “Boss wants us to go in.”

    Steven rolled his eyes, “Of course he does.” He said sarcastically as he strode to the nearby armory door. Steven punched in a code on the door’s keyboard and it hissed open, revealing racks and racks of rifles, pistols, boxes of grenades, and suits of armor. He walked inside, grabbed a suit of armor, and started to gear up. Makoto joined him moments later and retrieved her precious sword from the corner of the armory.

    As Steven slid a clip into his favorite X-44 Assault Rifle, his mind rewound to when his first teammate, John Sanders, was alive. Steven and John were on a standard recon mission on the distant jungle planet of Verana when they walked into a TimeSplitter ambush. The blue bolt that morphed out of the jungle missed Steven by inches. John, however, wasn’t so lucky and took the full force of the bolt and ended up ten feet away, dead. Steven never fully recovered emotionally from that day and it wasn’t until a year afterward that his Commanding Officer (C.O.) told him of his new partner, Makoto Banes. For the past year and a half, Steven and Makoto went on several missions as teammates and survived many encounters with the TimeSplitters, but never a high priority mission like the one that they were about to embark on.

    Steven hastily slipped on his armor and helmet. “Okay,” he said to Makoto, “Let’s go.” Then he walked out of the room and headed for the hangar bay with Makoto close behind.