Pirates of the Timestream (25 page)

Romain gave a scornful snort of laughter. The others felt something akin to pity.

“Captain,” said Jason slowly, keeping it simple in deference to the limitations of a seventeenth-century mind, “this is a very small ship, as such vessels go, and lightly armed. And its invisibility device would be no help, as the Teloi ship has . . . means other than sight for detecting it. And besides, what I’ve been calling the Teloi ship is really more like a flying fortress, armed with weapons more destructive than anything you can imagine.”

“Ah, but its crew are expecting this ship to meet them, and have no reason to expect an attack. We’d catch them with their breeks down around their ankles!”

“Well, er, yes. I suppose that might be true. But—”

“And besides . . . Jason, I don’t pretend to understand all the whys and wherefores of what you’ve told me about aerial seamanship. But from what I
do
understand, this fat-arsed Teloi hulk is simply drifting, or gliding, at the mercy of some kind of celestial currents. It won’t be able to maneuver.
Our
ship will!”

Jason opened his mouth to reply—but nothing came. Without closing it, he turned to Mondrago and Zenobia, whose mouths were also open.

Romain wasn’t laughing anymore.

“You know, come to think of it, while they’re in free fall within the Primary Limit . . .” Jason finally managed, before trailing off.

“I never thought of . . .” Mondrago began before likewise falling into silence.

The two of them turned slowly and stared at Morgan. Then they looked at each other again.

“What would Nesbit think?” asked Jason.

“What would Rutherford think?” countered Mondrago. There was another silence.

“
Let’s do it!
” they both blurted simultaneously.

“Then it’s settled! You two are buccaneers at heart after all!” Morgan beamed, then looked around and scowled. “Isn’t there any rum aboard this ship?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The lack of perceptible motion didn’t prevent Morgan from uttering a startled exclamation and reaching for something to grab hold of when Mondrago took the Kestrel aloft and the ground seemed to drop rapidly away beneath them. The goons burst from the outskirts of the clearing, firing their laser carbines at the swiftly rising gunship without effect. Jason, seated at the weapons console which brief instructions from Mondrago and his own experience with similar models had enabled him to operate, sent them scattering with a few staccato bolts from the Kestrel’s laser turret. They paused to open the cargo hold’s doors and dump the bodies that had been unceremoniously heaped in it. Then Mondrago gave her full power.

The grav repulsors’ lateral propulsion capability fell off with altitude, but by providing enough lift to effectively cancel the Kestrel’s weight they enabled it to reach orbit—or, for that matter, escape velocity—under photon drive easily and quickly. Morgan muttered horrid oaths as the landscape of Hispaniola receded and the outline of the island began to appear. Then he fell silent and simply gawked as the sky darkened to ultramarine and violet and finally velvet black, spangled with even more stars than could be seen on a clear and moonless night at sea—the unwinking stars of airless space—even though the Sun glowed in the sky. The Earth became a cloud-swirling blue curve, then a sphere as they passed that subjective boundary of human perception beyond which a planet ceases to be the world below and becomes an astronomical object hanging in the void.

“I never dreamed such wonders could be,” breathed Morgan, in a tone Jason had never heard on his lips. “No one will ever believe me!”

They’d better not!
The press of events had held Jason’s long-term concerns at bay for a while. But now he had, for the moment, not much to do, and he could no longer push to the back of his mind the outrage that had been inflicted on all his comfortable assumptions about the immutability of recorded history. Henry Morgan, a fairly well-documented historical figure of some importance, quite simply had no business aboard this ship, going into space.

I can’t let myself dwell on it
, he thought sternly.
I’ve got to keep repeating to myself two stock phrases I always use with neophyte time travelers: “There are no paradoxes,” and “Reality protects itself.” They must be true. They must. I can’t let myself consider the alternative, because to do so is to unlock a door beyond which lies madness, and for now I have to be able to function.

So he concentrated on the viewscreen as Mondrago activated the superimposed “tactical” display, eliciting a new string of blasphemies from Morgan. From his position at the weapons station, Jason could see it over the shoulder of Romain, who sat bound and stonily silent in the copilot/communicator’s seat. Zenobia stood behind the Transhumanist, holding a knife which she occasionally allowed to lightly touch the back of his neck, causing him to flinch. Morgan stood to her left, behind Mondrago, staring at the colored lights and data readouts that seemed to crawl across the stars in the screen. “How—?” he began, then shook his head and subsided, apparently deciding against even trying to understand, and satisfied himself with, “Is this how you’ll sight the Teloi flying fort?”

“Yes,” Mondrago nodded, hesitating only slightly at the word
sight
. “It won’t be long now.”

“Because of the course that was somehow set into the ship itself?”

“Right. You see, that course is linked to the track the target is following. So this ship knows where it’s going to be at any given time—”

“‘This ship knows,’” Morgan echoed hollowly, shaking his head.

“—and adjusts its course accordingly. After we . . . well, sight the target, I’ll take over for the actual rendezvous.” Actually, Jason thought, Mondrago could have done it himself—a doubly tangent trajectory—given the known orbit elements of the battlestation.

Morgan shook his head again. “So in your future time, you even have machines that
think
for you! I hope you haven’t forgotten how to do it for yourselves.”

“So do I,” said Jason.
Although,
he added mentally, recalling some of the members of the Authority’s governing council,
I sometimes wonder
.

Then, interrupting his thoughts, a light began to flash on the viewscreen.

“That’s it,” said Mondrago tensely. His hands flew over the board and he assumed manual control.

“But I see no ship,” Morgan objected.

“It’s not close enough yet. Although . . .” He turned and looked over his shoulder at Jason and spoke in twenty-fourth-century language. “Judging from the mass reading I’m getting, it won’t be long now before we can see it. That thing is
big.
”

Jason studied the readouts. “It’s also not moving very fast. It must not have built up much in the way of intrinsic velocity before going into negative-mass drive pseudovelocity.”

“Especially relative to Earth’s almost-nineteen-miles-per-second orbital velocity,” Mondrago nodded. “It must have some sort of thrusters, or else it would still have the intrinsic vector of the orbit in which it was originally built, whenever that was, in some far-off system. But those thrusters must be unsuitable for any kind of maneuvering, and be very weak relative to that enormous mass. Just enough to slow down and speed up a little, as they evidently did in the last system they visited.”

And,
Jason wondered,
what did they slow down to do? What were these deluded fanatics up to in that system, and in God knows how many others before that? I don’t think I want to know.

Before he had completed the thought, the battlestation appeared on visual, and began to grow.

Mondrago deactivated the tactical display and adjusted the visual for magnification. Morgan started as the battlestation abruptly appeared closer, but recovered quickly—he was familiar with spyglasses—and simply stared. So did Jason.

The battlestation was very roughly spheroidal, but with the addition on its underside of two squat cylinders—the drive nacelles—and some associated superstructure that gave it a more or less recognizable fore-and-aft configuration. But it had none of the esthetic satisfaction of normal interstellar ships, designed with hull configurations that optimized their drive-field geometry while affording a degree of aerodynamic streamlining. Its maximum pseudovelocity must surely be low, Jason thought, as he studied its ugly, brutal massiveness, accentuated by the intricacy of its external components. It held none of the overdecorated, almost
art nouveau
-reminiscent look of the Teloi technology he recalled from the Bronze Age. But that, he reminded himself, had belonged to an altogether different Teloi subculture.

“She’s a whopper!” breathed Morgan. A calculating light awoke in his eyes. “She must hold a lot of plunder! You know, it’s too bad we have to sink her, or whatever it is you do out here. If we could only take her as a prize . . . !”

Jason goggled at him. “You’re actually serious, aren’t you?”

“Well . . .” Morgan saw the expressions with which everyone was regarding him, and sighed regretfully. “Yes, I know. It was just a passing fancy. We don’t have the men—no offense, Zenobia—to board her.”

The battlestation continued to wax in the screen. On its side was a horizontal rectangular opening, glowing with interior lighting from behind the atmosphere curtain.

Romain spoke up in a tone of vicious gloating. “That is a hangar bay. It can easily admit a vessel twice as large as this one.” Morgan, who still hadn’t entirely grasped the size of the battlestation, stared at him. Sensing an advantage, Romain altered his tone to one of wheedling. “Surely you can see the hopelessness of this quixotic venture. If you surrender now and turn control of this ship over to me, I’ll intercede for you with the Teloi. I promise I’ll persuade them to spare your—
uh!
”

“Shut up, you lying piece of pig shit,” said Zenobia, who had cuffed him across the back of the head. “Just do as you’ve been told.”

The Kestrel swung around as Mondrago began to match vectors with the battlestation. The grav repuslors’ efficiency was minimal at this distance from Earth’s surface, but it was still measurable, and nudges with it, in conjunction with the photon drive, afforded a degree of maneuverability beyond the dreams of the pioneering astronauts of the early space age with their chemical-fuel rockets. They began to jockey into position for rendezvous.

The communicator in front of Romain beeped and flashed for attention. Zenobia cut Romain’s bonds and stood back out of the video pickup, knife held ready. “All right,” said Jason. “Answer it as you’ve been instructed. And you’d better be convincing. Remember, I understand the Teloi language. If you betray us, you’ll die before we do—and
our
deaths will be quick and clean.”

Romain shot him a look of unspeakable hate, but activated the communicator. Morgan, who had been warned to expect voices and images from across a distance, didn’t look too startled when a Teloi appeared on the video screen, wearing a jumpsuit like Ahriman’s with decorative touches that gave it, even across the gulf of races and cultures, the unmistakable look of a military uniform. In the background was a vast, theaterlike control center, teeming with other Teloi.

“This is Romain, Category Three, Eighty-Ninth Degree. I wish to come aboard in accordance with our agreement.”

The Teloi did not deign to directly acknowledge. “Where is he whom you know as ‘Ahriman’?”

“Ah . . . I regret to say that he suffered a fatal accident on the planet’s surface.”

The Teloi’s features barely twitched. “That is unfortunate.”

“Most unfortunate. But . . . well, conditions down there are dangerous and primitive.”

“How could conditions be otherwise, among humans?” the Teloi remarked with a sneer—or, more accurately, with an intensification of his permanent sneer. “I will require a full report on the circumstances of his death later. For now, your vessel’s transponder confirms your identity. You may come ahead and dock in the hangar bay.” Without another word, the Teloi cut the connection.

“Arrogant bastard,” commented Morgan, who of course hadn’t understood a word. He held his cutlass leveled on Romain while Zenobia tied him up again.

Mondrago brought the Kestrel in. The battlestation swelled in the viewscreen, and swelled, and swelled, until it filled the entire screen: a nightmare vision of raw, dystopian technology, a titanic death machine that had for centuries roamed the stars at the service of a demented dream.

Even Morgan seemed taken aback. “Jason, these, er, skyrockets of yours . . . You say they hold an explosive charge of a kind of gunpowder I’ve never heard of?”

“Yes, you might say that. It’s called
deuterium
.” The earliest fission-fusion nuclear explosives had, of necessity, been cataclysmic in their effects. Now, with laser-triggered deuterium fusion, it was possible to produce finely calibrated “dial-a-yield” warheads. There were even such things as nuclear
grenades
, although in practice they hardly ever got issued.

The Firebird missile’s warhead could be set as low as 0.0001 kiloton (using the traditional measure of thousands of tons of a twentieth-century chemical explosive called TNT). It could also be set as high as 0.01 kiloton, destroying any target but a very hardened one at a radius of one hundred yards and inflicting significant damage, especially to electronics and unprotected personnel, at twice that radius.

Mondrago had programmed these for the maximum.

“Deuterium,” Morgan repeated, pronouncing it carefully. “You’re right: I’ve never heard of it.” But he seemed reassured.

They drew closer. The hangar bay gaped to admit them. Its atmosphere screen was a field of gravitics-related force which held the air molecules inside while permitting the passage in and out of large solid objects like spacecraft at slow speeds. Moving at higher speeds, such objects were deflected with a force proportional to their kinetic energy.

Jason turned to Mondrago. “You’re sure you were able to program the missiles’ drives to—”

“Trust me. I worked with these missiles a lot in Shahinian’s Irregulars. They can be powered down. But of course, like any rockets, they’re going to continue to build up velocity as long as they continue to burn. And even at low power, it won’t take them long at all to accelerate to a speed that will cause the atmosphere screen to send them screaming off into space.”

“Which is why we have to get very close for this to work,” Jason nodded.

“Quite right,” said Morgan, who was getting better at following the nontechnical parts of Standard International English. “Close to push of pike, that’s what I always say!”

“It’s also why we’re only going to have time to fire one missile from each of the two launchers,” added Mondrago, unnecessarily. They had been over all this before, of course. They were talking simply to fill the air with something besides tension.

The opening now filled the entire viewscreen. They could clearly see the hangar bay’s cavernous interior, lined with machinery and controls, partially filled with small craft.

Sweat filmed Mondrago’s face as he watched instruments and calculated distances. “Not quite. . . .”

Without warning, Romain surged as far forward in his seat as his bonds would permit and thrust his head at the console, just barely striking it and activating the communicator. “
Open fire
now!
” he roared in Teloi. “It’s a trick! Destroy this—” His shout cut off abruptly as Zenobia struck him above the ear with the pommel of her knife, knocking him unconscious.

He knows we’re not going to let him live, so he’s got nothing to lose,
Jason thought.
And he also knows we’ve reached the point where he’ll die just as quickly as the rest of us.

In a corner of the viewscreen, he saw a defensive laser turret begin to swing toward them. And he knew it had to be now or never.

Without further thought, and without waiting for Mondrago’s signal, Jason jabbed a red button. In both the launchers, the Firebirds’ plasma drives awoke in a blinding blue-white flare, and the two missiles roared away, straight ahead into the hangar bay . . . and through the atmosphere screen, he saw with a rush of relief.