Pirates of the Timestream (24 page)

“Unless our mission leader has one of the Special Ops gizmos implanted in his brain,” was Mondrago’s muttered qualifier in Standard International English. “Too bad we can’t use that to get out of this right now.”

“And it is impossible for me to return at all,” interjected Zenobia. “I did what was necessary to make it impossible.”

“So you marooned yourself in time,” said Morgan wonderingly. “Why?”

“Because I was once one of the evil ones who now hold us captive,” she stated boldly. “I could no longer stomach being used by them, for they seek to found a demon-worshiping cult of unspeakable foulness, for their own twisted purposes.”

“And what are those purposes? Do they wish to plunder the past? Is that possible?”

“No, that’s not their aim. They seek to prepare the way for their own planned conquest of all the Earth. And even that is only a means to their real goal, which is to distort the very nature of Man as God created him, making themselves into gods ruling over monsters. They would even blur the line God ordained between that which lives and that which does not.”

There was nothing in Morgan’s biography, nor in anything they themselves had seen of him, to suggest that he was noticeably religious. But his swarthy face paled. “This isn’t simple, honest plundering. It’s blasphemy. No, it is beyond the boundaries of blasphemy, or of madness. These men must be stopped!”

“That’s why we’ve been sent into our past,” Jason told him. “Stopping them is our duty.”

“A war fought across time, in defiance of the proper order of events . . .” Morgan looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s in my mind that you people, and not just your enemies, are arrogating to yourselves the powers of gods.”

“Maybe. But what other choice have we, if we don’t wish to simply lie down and accept defeat—a defeat that would mean the end of humanity as God intended?”

“None. And if what you say is true, I’m with you.” Abruptly, Morgan turned to practicalities. “But they don’t know that. Why did they seize me?”

“I don’t believe they meant to. You just happened to be standing close to Zenobia and me, whose presence they can detect at a distance, by means you wouldn’t understand. And
I
don’t understand how it could have happened. It’s not supposed to. Our histories—and yes, you’re remembered in them—tell us it shouldn’t.”

“Well, be that as it may, they’ve got us all now. Where are they taking us in their flying ship?”

“I don’t know for certain, but I imagine Hispaniola. If so, we ought to be arriving there any time now.”

Morgan’s eyes widened at the thought of the speed Jason’s statement implied. “Why haven’t they come to put us to the question, instead of leaving us locked in this hold?”

“They probably think they can break our spirit by leaving us alone to stew in our own fears and despair.”

“Well, then, they don’t know Henry Morgan! And . . . I don’t think they know the three of you either.”

All at once, the humming died down to silence and there was a slight bump as the Kestrel landed. The doors in the forward bulkhead slid aside, momentarily dazzling their eyes with the brighter illumination beyond. Two goon-caste guards entered the hold warily, holding laser carbines at which Morgan stared.

“They’re a kind of guns,” Jason murmured to him. “Very deadly ones.” Morgan nodded shortly, and made no resistance when one of the goons took his cutlass and the other three’s knives.

The goons deployed to the sides of the door and two other figures came forward. The first was Romain, wearing a self-satisfied smile—which vanished from his face when he saw Morgan.

“Surprise,” said Jason with a slight smile of his own.

But then the second figure entered . . . and Morgan’s eyes bulged. Never mind what Jason and Zenobia had told him; he knew the supernatural when he saw it.

Ahriman disregarded him and turned to Romain, whose discomfiture was obvious. “What is the matter?” he demanded. “Yes, we have one unplanned captive, but what difference does one primitive local human make?”

Romain opened his mouth as though to reply, then closed it again.

Jason hoped his smile was infuriating. “You can’t very well explain it to him, can you?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

For a moment a kind of impasse held, as Romain stood gripped by indecision.

“Yes,” Jason continued in the Teloi language, pressing his advantage, “as soon as your sensors told you I’d been washed over the side in the chaos of the storm and hauled aboard Zenobia’s ship, you thought you had your perfect chance to grab the two of us despite the Observer Effect. And as soon as you detected my bionics and hers within a few feet of each other on
Rolling-Calf
’s poop, you
knew
you had that chance. So you seized it. But you forgot that even the most tightly focused tractor beam has a significant spread. So now you’ve got Henry Morgan—and no, I don’t understand how that can be possible any more than you do. But it’s not as much of an immediate problem for me as it is for you, because you’ve led Ahriman to believe that observed history, including the history of human extrasolar colonization, can be changed, and—”

“
Quiet!
” Romain came out of his paralysis, strode forward, and slapped Jason across the mouth with a force that brought the taste of blood from a cut lip. But Jason saw Ahriman’s puzzled look.

“What is he talking about?” the Teloi demanded. “What is this ‘Observer Effect’?”

“Nothing,” Romain hastily assured him. “It’s just the babbling of a mere unmodified human. And,” he continued to Jason, shifting to the Standard International English Ahriman could not understand, “do you recall what I told you before about the consequences of displeasing me? You’ve already displeased me by escaping, so I might devise something even worse, when we resume our long-postponed schedule of ceremonies here.”

Jason remembered those ceremonies only too well, as he stared into the face he had once seen shining with grease and wearing a look of dreamy satiety. But he forced himself to speak levelly, seeking to extract any and all information he could.
Keep him talking!
“So we’re back in Hispaniola?”

“Yes—and while I’m gone there’ll be no slackness like that of the idiot I left in charge last time. He has been . . . disciplined.”

Jason wasn’t about to shed any tears for One-Ear, but he was glumly certain that that worthy’s successor had taken his predecessor’s “discipline” to heart. There would be no escape this time. But then the words
while I’m gone
registered. “So you’re depriving us of your company?”

“Only for a short time. You may be interested to learn that the Teloi battlestation is even now approaching Earth. Indeed, it has passed within the Primary Limit and has gone into free fall.”

Jason unconsciously nodded. The battlestation was presumably a pure deep-space construct, and as such lacked a photon drive for maneuvering in a planetary gravity well where its negative-mass drive could not function. It had simply killed the pseudo-velocity it had accumulated, resumed its intrinsic velocity, and was now passing through Earth’s Primary Limit on a hyperbolic solar orbit. But of course none of that was his primary concern just now.

“So,” Romain continued, “you and this traitor will have a little time to contemplate what is going to happen to you. Perhaps unfortunately, it won’t be a very long time. Ahriman and I must leave immediately to rendezvous with the station. It was good fortune that I was able to tidy up matters by recapturing you just before our departure.”

“You haven’t entirely tidied things up,” Jason reminded him. “There are, as you may recall, two other members of my team, who know everything I know about what you and Ahriman are up to. You don’t know where they are—and they have no bionics for you to detect. Remember, you don’t know how soon our party is due for retrieval.”

“As to their location, they are, of course, with Morgan’s fleet. And while locating them admittedly won’t be as simple as it was in your case, it shouldn’t take long to track them down and kill them. I saw enough of them to conclude that they’ll be fairly helpless without you.” Romain’s façade of suave self-satisfaction slid off with its usual abruptness, revealing that which lay beneath. “Enough of this. Come.”

Through all of this, Jason had been observing Morgan out of the corner of his eye. After his initial stupefaction at the sight of Ahriman the buccaneer had, with his usual adaptability, settled into watchfulness, listening carefully to the byplay. The Teloi language was, of course, purest gibberish to him. But Standard International English undoubtedly held a certain haunting familiarity—there must even be tantalizing stretches of recognizable vocabulary. It was, Jason imagined, probably not too much more difficult than Jamaican Creole would have been for a speaker of twentieth- or twenty-first-century American English. Once Morgan fell into the rhythm of it, he would be able to catch a great deal of the sense of what was being said.

Romain and Ahriman turned and left the hold. The goons motioned with their laser carbines for the prisoners to follow them . . . a little awkwardly in the case of the one to the left, who was burdened with a cutlass and three knives. They passed directly into the Kestrel’s cabin—unoccupied save for a man sitting in the pilot’s seat on the raised bridge—and proceeded forward along the central aisle with the air lock to the right and a row of passenger seats to the left. As they approached the bridge, Morgan’s eyes grew round again, for he was entering a realm of technology so far advanced beyond his own as to be meaningless—the famous adage of the twentieth-century sage Clarke crossed Jason’s mind. But once again his features closed up quickly into a mask of alertness. Perhaps, Jason thought, it helped that here he had at least one comforting glimpse of familiarity, for the bridge’s viewscreen showed a clearing in Hispaniola’s jungle-clothed uplands, with mountains looming in the background. And, as Jason watched, he began to very inconspicuously sidle a little closer to the goon who was holding his laser carbine in one hand as he cradled the confiscated cutlery in his other arm.

Romain stepped up onto the bridge. “Key in the figures for our rendezvous with the battlestation,” he ordered the pilot. “We must depart as soon as the prisoners have been offloaded.” The pilot obeyed, and the course instructions went into the Kestrel’s computer. Romain turned around and addressed the goons. “Remove them.”

The goons gestured them toward the airlock, and the one to the right began to reach for the switch that would open it. As the other one turned, he muttered with annoyance and paused to readjust the blades under his arm.

At that moment, Henry Morgan roared out an inarticulate bellow and swept one arm around, knocking the barrel of the goon’s laser carbine downward. The goon got off a shot, which singed the deck between Morgan’s feet, as the blades went clattering and scattered.

A twenty-fourth-century man would almost certainly not have done it, Jason reflected—later, when he had leisure for reflection—because such a man
knew
how viciously lethal weapon-grade lasers were, and that knowledge tended to immobilize him in the presence of one of those whiplashes of instantaneous death. But Morgan was conditioned to think in terms of the clumsy firearms of his own era. Now he shoved the goon back, to topple over against a passenger seat, and simultaneously scooped up his cutlass. With another roar, he raised the cutlass and brought it down in a diagonal slash through the goon’s shoulder and chest, cutting open his heart. A gout of blood spurted across the cabin, splattering onto the deck.

For some very small fraction of a second, surprise held everyone else motionless. Then the second goon raised his laser carbine. Mondrago grasped it by its barrel with his right hand and shoved it upward, exposing the goon’s solar plexus, to which he delivered a paralyzing punch with his left. Zenobia, in what amounted to a single movement of superhuman speed and fluidity, dropped to one knee on the deck, snatched a knife, brought it up, and hurled it. There was a faint
thunk!
, and Ahriman was standing with a surprised expression on his face and the knife’s hilt protruding from the center of his forehead . . . but standing only for an instant, before his lifeless legs collapsed under him.

By then Romain, his features contorted with rage, was springing forward. But in his fury he forgot that he was on a raised bridge, and lost his balance as he stepped over the ledge. As he tried to right himself, he presented a perfect target for Jason’s swift, powerful kick to his crotch. With a strangled, gasping scream, he crashed to the deck. Behind him, the pilot was only just standing up. He toppled back into his seat with a puff of superheated steam as Mondrago speared him with a crackling bolt from the laser carbine he had appropriated.

It was all over in a couple of seconds. The silent air of the cabin was heavy with the odors of death, including the subtly different Teloi ones.

Jason knelt over Romain, who was groaning in fetal position. He placed one knee in the small of the Transhumanist’s back and locked his right arm around his throat, not quite tightly enough to choke him. With his left he twisted Romain’s head around just enough so that their eyes could meet—and so that Romain would know that an additional, sharper twist would suffice to break his neck. The Transhumanist froze into immobility and licked his lips . . . much as Jason had once seen him lick grease from them.

“Now,” said Jason said in a conversational tone of voice, “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is to
not
kill you . . . or, better still, let Mondrago do it. You don’t know about Corsicans and vendetta, do you? I’d love to let you find out. But I think I can—with great difficulty—continue to restrain myself if you do exactly as you’re told. First of all, order your men outside to back off and take no action with respect to this vessel. Blink your eyes twice if you understand.”

Romain blinked. Jason released his head, hauled him to his feet by an arm twisted behind his back, and shoved him up onto the bridge, to the copilot/communications console. Romain activated the outside speaker and spoke as well as he was able. “Stand down! Withdraw to the edge of the clearing and await further orders.” In the viewscreen, several armed and bewildered-looking goons backed away.

Morgan, holding his bloody cutlass in one hand and a laser carbine in the other, joined them on the bridge. With a coarse, jeering laugh, he waved the cutlass at the figures in the viewscreen, which he assumed to be a window even though the invention of plate glass lay two decades in the future. Then, as the fire and fury of combat ebbed from his brain, he turned to Zenobia, who was tearing strips of cloth from Ahriman’s clothing to bind Romain’s wrists together behind him. “Well, lass, you were right. He was no demon. I’ve never heard that demons can be killed as easily as men.”

“What now, sir?” Mondrago asked Jason.

“I haven’t had time to think that through,” Jason admitted. Out of the habit of months, he and Mondrago spoke in seventeenth-century English. “I recall that you can fly Kestrels, but as to where we’re going to take it—”

“Where were
they
going to take it, Jason?” Morgan suddenly asked. “I was able to make out some snatches of what you and this whoreson Romain were saying to each other, but I couldn’t understand much beyond the fact that they were about to leave to meet someone, somewhere. In fact, I can’t fully understand much of
anything.
” He looked around, bewildered, at the incomprehensible control panels.

Partly to organize things in his own mind, Jason did his best to explain. “They were going to meet a . . . well, a great ship of their unhuman allies—the Teloi, as they’re called—out beyond the air.”

“Beyond the . . . ?”

“You see, this ship flies in the way you’ve observed as long as it’s not too far above the Earth. As it rises higher, the . . . propulsive principle weakens.” Jason didn’t even try to explain the grav surface effect. “So above great heights it uses a—” He bumped up against the impossibility of rendering
reaction drive.
“Well, other engines, rather like . . . You’ve seen fireworks. It’s more or less the same thing that makes skyrockets fly.” It was as close as he could come to describing the photon drive.

Morgan looked a trifle uneasy at the thought of riding a giant skyrocket. “Then they were going to use these engines to go up and meet the great ship of the Teloi?”

“Yes, it’s due to coast past the Earth very soon.”

“‘Coast past’?”

Jason decided against making any attempt to explain the negative-mass drive. “There is another means of propelling flying ships, which is very, very fast indeed—as it must be to travel the vast distances between the worlds. But it won’t work at all except at a great distance from Earth or any other world—almost twenty thousand miles, in fact.” Morgan’s eyes, which had widened at the words
between the worlds
, now grew even wider. “The Teloi ship was built purely to travel the deeps of space, without ever coming very near a world, and therefore it needs
only
this kind of engine. So now, approaching Earth closely, it has had to turn that engine off and is now . . . sailing past on a fixed course, until it passes into the outer reaches again. This vessel was to rendezvous with it. In fact, the, er, instructions for that rendezvous have already been . . . Well, take my word that the ship can navigate itself to the rendezvous, if instructed to do so.”

This last clearly meant nothing whatsoever to Morgan, but he seemed to simply accept it and, for a few seconds, think hard. “Jason,” he finally inquired, “is this ship armed? I’ve seen no great guns.”

“Those wouldn’t work in aerial battle—never mind why. But yes, we have weapons,” said Jason, recalling the Firebird missile launchers attached to the hardpoints. “Remember what I said before about skyrockets? These are even more like that.” The focused-plasma drives of the little missiles, designed to burn themselves out in sprint mode, would at least produce a satisfying flare. “And they carry explosive charges of a kind of . . . well, powder that you’ve never seen, but which bursts with a very,
very
great force.”

“Well, then, since the course is already set, I say let’s keep the rendezvous.” All at once, the Devil danced in Morgan’s eyes. “We’ll sail up beyond the clouds and scupper this damned Teloi ship!”