Pirates of the Timestream (8 page)

And what, I wonder, was that about “silly stories” concerning her?

I’ve
got
to get to the bottom of this, whatever it takes. Which means we have to stay with her, even if it involves following this character wherever he leads.

“Aye, Captain!” he exclaimed without another instant’s hesitation. “In fact, it was to join you that we came here, as soon as we heard you were planning a new venture and had put out a call.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zenobia’s disgusted look. But then her eyes met Boyer’s, and her expression seemed to soften just a trifle.

“Splendid!” The big man slapped Jason on the back, nearly sending him sprawling, and quaffed the last of his rum in a gulp the very sight of which made Jason’s hair stand on end. Then he thrust his jack back into the cask and brought it up brimming. “Let’s drink to that! And you won’t regret it, by God! I’ll show you treasure such as you’ve never dreamed existed in all of the Main, or my name’s not Henry Morgan!”

Grenfell stared, goggle-eyed, and then tossed back a slug of kill-devil that Jason doubted he himself could have survived.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“All right, Roderick,” said Jason. “Let’s have the full background on Henry Morgan.”

They sat in the main room of the inn where they had found what courtesy dictated must be called “lodgings.” Their rooms were too small and cramped for six people to squeeze in, so they had appropriated one of the heavy wooden tables on the main room’s dirt floor and paid the landlord a coin for privacy. Now they huddled together and spoke in low tones—except Nesbit, who had passed out from the effects of the rum he had consumed and was snoring face-down on the table. Boyer looked to be in very little better case. Jason and the other two Service people had more resistance, for they were used to those past eras—most past eras, actually—when failure to drink heavily was considered unsociable. Their current setting was an extreme example. Centuries before W. C. Fields, the buccaneers were firmly convinced that one should never trust a man who didn’t drink. Jason hoped Boyer and Nesbit would develop a higher tolerance.

As for Grenfell, he was too excited to show the effects of alcohol.

“Well, to begin with, by strict legal definition he isn’t a pirate at all, but rather a privateer; he’s always careful to have commissions from Sir Thomas Modyford, the royal governor of Jamaica. Modyford, you see, is a good bureaucrat.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” asked Mondrago skeptically.

“Not always. Modyford works tirelessly to get the privateers all the latitude he can, using them to keep Jamaica from being reconquered by Spain while navigating a path through the constantly changing game of war and diplomacy in Europe. Remember an enemy whose cities you’ve been looting can become an ally months before anybody on this side of the Atlantic heard about it. That will get Morgan in trouble later. But to the extent he can be, he’s scrupulous about observing the legal niceties.

“Nor does he think of himself as a pirate. In fact he
hates
being called one, and I earnestly advise everyone not to do so in his hearing. As far as he’s concerned, he’s a patriotic soldier of the king. No, really,” Grenfell insisted, seeing the looks on his listeners’ faces. “He’s a sincere royalist. He just sees no incompatibility between that and gaining what he most wants—riches and respect—by grabbing anything that’s loose at one end. The Morgans are an old Welsh military family of the so-called
uchelwyr
class. He was only seven when the first English Civil War began in 1642, and it split the family. He had two favorite uncles, one of whom, Thomas, joined the Parliamentary side while the other, Edward, remained loyal to Charles I. It’s pretty clear which side young Henry came down on. He was sixteen when the Civil Wars ended and Cromwell’s Commonwealth was established, and what he was up to for the next four years is a mystery I hope we can solve. But, one way or another, he ended up signing on with the expedition Penn and Venables led to Jamaica—the exact circumstances are something else I’d like to clear up.

“Again, there’s a gap of a few years. But in 1559 he was with Christopher Mings, the Port Royal buccaneers’ first great leader, on an expedition that pillaged one Spanish town after another on the mainland of Venezuela. By 1661, at the age of twenty-six, he was a captain of one of Mings’s ships when they took Santiago de Cuba, which was supposed to be impregnable, and Campeche in Yucatan.

“Afterwards, Mings went respectable—he was knighted and became an admiral in the Royal Navy, and was killed fighting the Dutch. In the meantime, Morgan came into his own. He led a small fleet that, from 1663 to 1665, ravaged Yucatan and Central America. It was an adventure no novelist would dare make up; they traveled over thirty-seven hundred miles in the space of eighteen months before returning to Port Royal laden with plunder. By that time, his old uncle Edward—the royalist—had been appointed Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica under Modyford. He had brought his daughters over with him, and Morgan proceeded to marry the eldest, Mary Elizabeth.”

“Uh . . .” Da Cunha’s brow furrowed with thought. “Wouldn’t that have made her his—”

“—First cousin,” Grenfell nodded. “That sort of thing is considered acceptable in this era. And even though she never gave him the heir he wanted, it seems to have been a happy marriage. Morgan’s worst enemies never accused him of cheating on her . . . at least not as cheating on your wife is defined in this era.”

“What does that mean?” Da Cunha wanted to know.

“Well, it doesn’t include raping female enemy captives—”

“—And it definitely doesn’t include sex with one’s own female slaves,” Boyer finished for Grenfell. “That’s just making legitimate use of one’s property.”

“Yes,” Grenfell confirmed. “Quite a few Jamaicans in our era claim descent from him. In the meantime, he was appointed head of Port Royal’s militia—he supervised the building of Fort Charles—and also elected their admiral by the Brethren of the Coast. Then, early this year after a not very lucrative raid on El Puerto del Principe, Cuba, the French contingent of the Brethren deserted him and followed one of their own: Francois L’Ollonais, one of the most bloodthirsty psychopaths in the history of piracy, which is saying a great deal. Far from being discouraged, Morgan talked his remaining men into following him against an unknown target—quite a deviation from buccaneer custom—which turned out to be Portobello on the Isthmus of Panama, whose defenses had defeated Sir Francis Drake. Morgan took it. It was his most brilliant—and profitable—stroke to date.” Grenfell hesitated. “It also established his reputation as a ruthless bastard. There’s no reasonable doubt that he used some, ah, controversial methods there.”

“Such as . . . ?” Mondrago sounded intrigued.

“Such as using monks and nuns as human shields, driving them in front of his men so that the Spaniards, good Catholics all, would hesitate just long enough before opening fire. But some of the lurid stories of grotesque tortures used to extract ransom from the townspeople are almost certainly exaggerated. They derive from a bestselling book entitled
The Buccaneers of America,
which a former Dutch or French buccaneer named John Esquemeling will write in 1678.” Grenfell chuckled. “Morgan will sue the publishers for libel, and win an out-of-court settlement. But some of the mud will stick. Perhaps we’ll be in a position find out how much of what Esquemeling said about Morgan was deserved.”

“Are you sure you
want
to be in that position?” inquired Da Cunha. Grenfell’s expression changed abruptly. Evidently he hadn’t thought through the implications.

“Anyway,” Jason prompted him, “what about Morgan’s current plans? What are we getting ourselves into?”

“Oh, yes. Remember what he said about the
Oxford
? She’s a thirty-four gun frigate which the English government recently sent to Governor Modyford with tongue-in-cheek instructions that she was to be used to suppress piracy. Naturally, she’s ended up as Morgan’s flagship. He’s going to assemble his fleet off Cow Island, just southwest of Hispaniola, and talk the captains into taking advantage of the
Oxford
’s firepower to attack Cartagena, in what was later to become Colombia, the greatest port in the Spanish empire. But then a somewhat mysterious event will occur.” Grenfell frowned. “As they’re drinking toasts—lots of toasts—to the success of their venture, the
Oxford
will blow up with a loss of about two hundred men. There’ll be only ten survivors, including Morgan.”

“It doesn’t sound so mysterious to me,” Mondrago opined. “A bunch of armed drunks running around on a ship made out of flammable materials and loaded with black powder . . .”

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it? But nobody will be sure afterwards. There will be a lot of theories—including sabotage by malcontents, which doesn’t seem too plausible, since they would have gone down with the ship. Maybe that’s something else we can clear up.”

“But let’s try to not be aboard the
Oxford
when she’s due to go up,” Mondrago cautioned anxiously.

Grenfell looked sheepish. “Yes, intellectual curiosity
does
have its limits. At any rate, after that Morgan will—”

“That’s fine for now, Roderick,” Jason cut in. “I think you’ve given us an idea of what’s coming next. Now let’s talk about that woman, Zenobia.”

Boyer looked troubled. “You’ve told us she’s a Transhumanist, Commander. But how can you be sure? Yes, I know, you said she has bionics of some kind. But couldn’t she be one of our own, from further in the future than ourselves?”

“I can’t believe that. The Authority will know, from its own records, of our presence here. Even if they violate their own rules by sending someone else back to the same time and place, she wouldn’t be trying to avoid us. No, she’s got to be a Transhumanist—with other Transhumanists chasing her.”

Da Cunha looked grim. “Are those the only possibilities? What if, at some point in our future, there’s a
third
group practicing time travel?”

For an instant, silence held them. Nesbit had awakened to bleary, head-splitting consciousness, but he was as silent as the rest of them in the face of Da Cunha’s highly unwelcome thought.

“For the present,” said Jason firmly, “I refuse to speculate about that. We’ve got enough problems already. Let’s try to deduce as much as we can from what little we know of her. I heard Morgan say something about her having a crew of ‘Maroons.’” He turned to Grenfell and Boyer. “Does anyone know what those would be?”

“My field,” said Boyer. “When the English conquered this island in 1655, the black slaves of the Spaniards, having no wish to be re-enslaved, fought an unsuccessful guerilla campaign against them and then fled into the mountainous interior of the island, where they amalgamated with the few remaining native Taino people to form the population known as the Jamaican Maroons. They were subsequently reinforced by escaped slaves of the English, mostly of the Akan people of Ghana, who would eventually become the predominant cultural element, a process which I imagine has begun even now. Much later, they will maintain their independence through a series of wars in the eighteenth century, despite mass deportations to Sierra Leone and—of all places—Nova Scotia.”

“Br-r-r-r!” said Mondrago with a mock shiver.

“Finally, they will sign treaties with the British—confirmed later by the national government of Jamaica—granting them self-government in certain locales. But of course all that lies far in the future. At the present time they are surviving by subsistence farming and raiding plantations.”

“Both of which occupations seem to have worn thin for some of them,” Grenfell pointed out. “At least one crew has taken to piracy.”

“Under the command of a woman,” Da Cunha added.

“Well,” Boyer smiled, “there’s a precedent for that—or
will be
a precedent. . . .” He trailed to a perplexed halt.

“Tenses are a problem for all of us in the time travel business,” Jason assured him.

“Thank you. One of the greatest Maroon leaders in the early eighteenth-century wars against the British will be a certain Queen Nanny, a renowned guerilla fighter. She’ll be remembered as one of Jamaica’s national heroes . . . the only female one.”

“The pieces are beginning to fit together,” Jason mused. “Remember, the cult Sam Asamoa’s expedition learned of in 1791 Haiti was supposed to have dated back to the 1660s and been somehow linked with Jamaica.”

“One piece that still doesn’t fit,” said Mondrago dourly, “is that crashed spacecraft Asamoa found in Haiti.”

“We’ll have to leave that for later. We don’t have enough data to even speculate. All we know for certain is that there are Transhumanists operating here and now—which was fairly certain anyway, given the spacecraft wreck. The only real lead we have is this Zenobia.”

“Who doesn’t exactly seem well-disposed toward us,” observed Grenfell.

“No, she doesn’t. Which is where you come in, Henri.” Jason turned to Boyer. “Whenever an opportunity presents itself, I want you to try to approach her and see what you can learn.”

Boyer looked slightly alarmed. “But I’m not a trained police investigator.”

“Of course you’re not. But a couple of times, I’ve gotten the impression that she’s a little more open to you than to the rest of us. I think you’d have a better chance of establishing some kind of relationship with her and obtaining information.”

“Tell me one thing, Commander: we know she’s from the future, but does
she
know that
we
are?”

“I can’t be certain, but I doubt it. Granted, if she has a sensor like mine, she knows about my brain implant. But my guess is that she doesn’t have one. Why should she? There aren’t supposed to be any bionics in the sixteenth century for her to detect. You’re just going to have to stick to our cover story, not reveal what we know about her, and play it by ear. I know it’s not supposed to be your job. But can you do it?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’m sure you will. And while you’re at it . . . try to find out what Morgan meant when he mentioned ‘silly stories’ about her.”