Ghosts of Time

by Steve White

  “I’ve been expecting you to travel that road for some time!” Richards shouted back with a laugh, as he spurred his horse to catch up.

  They were at the outer perimeter of the encampment when Richards caught Hern’s horse. As he did so, Aiken saw, out of the corner of his eye, a Union trooper between the huts and the tree line, drawing a bead on Richards. Reining in his excited mount with his left hand, he aimed his Colt with the help of its laser target designator. But even that was insufficient as the horse bucked again, and he missed. He aimed and fired again … but he had come to the end of his six-round cylinder. Cursing, he fumbled for his second revolver, knowing it would be too late.

  There was the crack of a Sharps carbine, and the Yankee doubled over and collapsed. Richards, unaware of how close he had come to death, rode on, leading Hern’s horse. Aiken, left behind, looked at the tree line, from which the shot had come. Gracchus was lowering the carbine. He looked amazed at himself.

  Aiken trotted over to him. “Do you know whose life you just saved?” he asked with a grin.

  “I thought he was aiming at you,” said Gracchus gruffly, with an air of wanting to make that perfectly clear. Then he got down to business. “Let’s go. They’ll assume you got killed back here.”

  “Right. This is our chance.”

  They slipped into the woods, where Gracchus’s horse was tied to a tree. Behind them, the noise diminished. They rode quietly away. It was a clear night, and Aiken could tell from the stars that Gracchus was leading him on a south-southwesterly heading. “You say we’re headed for Ashby’s Gap? Richards’ men will be leaving the Valley by way of Snicker’s Gap, so for the first fifteen miles or so we’ll be paralleling their route. And, like them, we’ll have to avoid Charlestown—there’s a major Union concentration there.”

  “I know. We’ll swing a little to the west. Ready for some hard riding?”

  They had gone only about three miles, and were crossing the rails of the Winchester & Potomac Railroad only a mile west of Charlestown, when they heard shooting to the east. “That must be Richards skirmishing with the Yankees,” said Aiken. For the barest instant, he pulled up on the reins and hesitated. Gracchus looked back over his shoulder and glared. Aiken shrugged, and they rode on.

  “What if someone sees us riding together after daybreak,” Aiken asked after a while. “I mean, my uniform and your—”

  “Don’t worry,” said Gracchus expressionlessly. “Our story will be that I’m your slave.”

  Southwest of Charlestown it at least was safe to follow the road to Berryville south of that, they had to strike out across open country again, toward Millwood, before taking the Ashby’s Gap Turnpike east. All in all, it was almost a thirty mile ride to Berry’s Ferry on the Shenandoah.

  Aiken had grown accustomed to all-night operations, for that was the way Mosby’s men operated. But by the time they crossed the Shenandoah it was late morning, even though Gracchus had allowed only brief stops for rest, and he was swaying in the saddle. But he forced his fatigue-dulled mind to concentrate on the problem at hand.

  “Gracchus, we’re going to need explosives. What have you got along those lines?” He thought he recalled Dabney mentioning that dynamite wouldn’t be invented until 1867. Here and now, black powder was still as good as it got.

  “You may be surprised,” said Gracchus with the first smile Aiken had seen on him in quite a while.

  Beyond of the river, with the Blue Ridge looming ahead to the east, they turned off the road and worked their way upward through rough, wooded country just to the north of Ashby’s Gap, their horses often struggling for footing.

  “Where are we going?” asked Aiken.

  “To meet some of my men, who should already be there. They’re full members of the Order of the Three-Legged Horse, so you can speak freely around them—except, of course, about time travel.”

  Presently the grade flattened as they entered a swale, and a small meadow opened out before them. Two roughly dressed black men waited there, encamped beside their horses. There was also a pack mule, with a cylindrical burden wrapped in a rubber covering.

  Gracchus must have told the men what to expect, for they looked only slightly uncomfortable at the sight of Aiken’s Confederate uniform as Gracchus introduced him. He introduced them to him by the obvious pseudonyms of Gaius and Tiberius, presumably on the theory that one cannot be made to reveal what one does not know.

  “And now,” said Gracchus, “you were wondering about explosives …” With some effort, he lifted the cylinder off the mule’s back and very carefully set it down on the ground. He then peeled off the waterproof wrapping.

  It was a large can made of thin sheet metal. Gracchus removed the lid, revealing the can to be full of black powder. “Twenty-five pounds of it,” Gracchus explained. “And this is what makes it work.” He pointed to a small box attached to the underside of the lid. It contained what Aiken recognized as a clock mechanism of this era … except that in place of the clock’s striker was a gun lock.

  “A timing mechanism,” Aiken breathed. “Gracchus, where did you people get this bomb?” Gracchus gave him an odd look, and he remembered that in current parlance “bomb” meant an explosive shell fired by a mortar. Something like this was known as an “infernal machine.”

  “Well, the fact of the matter is, we stole it from the Rebels.” Gracchus seemed to decide a little background was in order. “About a year ago, Union General Judson Kilpatrick led a cavalry raid on Richmond, intended to free the Union prisoners there. It was a miserable failure. One of his officers, a Colonel Dahlgren, was killed. Papers were found on his body by the Rebels, who claimed they included instructions to kill Jefferson Davis and his entire cabinet. I don’t know if they really said that, or if the Rebels forged that part to get their own people good and mad. If so it worked, and the Rebels started hatching plots with Copperheads in the North to assassinate President Lincoln.” Aiken recognized the term for Southern sympathizers. “We learned of one of these plots, involving an actor named Booth. The idea was to plant one of these machines under the part of the State Dining Room of the White House where the president sits for formal occasions, set to explode when he was there and collapse the floor under him.”

  “How did you find out about this?”

  “We sort of blundered onto it, thinking we were dealing with some Transhumanist trick. Anyway, it turned out the Rebels had a spare, which we were able to avail ourselves of. Of course, they can still try it—or try something else.” Gracchus gave Aiken a look that could have meant any number of things. “From what you’ve told me, I don’t suppose they’ll succeed,” he prompted, and then paused expectantly, but Aiken said nothing. He had already said too much.

  After a moment’s silence, Gracchus sighed. “Well, anyway, will this do?”

  “Yes, I think it just might. Now where is this cache?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The stultifying months dragged on, varied only by sessions under the mind probe.

  Finally Stoneman had wrung all of them dry of the information their minds held—information he could record but lacked the equipment to review. Now he told them, with unconcealed gloating, the he was prepared to wipe that information—and everything else—from their brains, a process that would take only a few minutes. But he kept putting it off, wanting to give them time to contemplate the impending expungement of their memories and their very personalities.

  Jason had never been religious, but he prayed Stoneman would continue putting it off just a little longer, after which it would be too late.

  They had entered this prison of distorted time on December 23, and—as Jason knew precisely, from the digital countdown he could summon at will—they had been in it for ninety-seven days. He had no way of knowing what date that translated to in the outside universe, although it must be somewhere around the end of January since Stoneman had said that time was speeded up by a factor of around two and a half, a figure Jason had confirmed by observing
the unnaturally slow passage of the sun through the cracks in the boarded-up window. But as far as the microscopic atomic clocks in their TRDs were concerned, it was now April 4.

  If Stoneman would only continue playing his sadistic little game one day longer, they would vanish from his enraged sight with their minds still intact. To be sure, they would then face the harrowing uncertainties of materializing on an unprepared displacer stage, but at least they would be free of this chill, stimulus-deprived hell.

  They all knew it, for Jason had kept their spirit from guttering out altogether by giving them periodic whispered updates on just how close the light at the end of this nightmarish tunnel was. He knew he was running the risk that one of them would crack under the strain and blurt the information to their captors, precipitating the immediate commencement of the mindwipe. But he also knew that the repeated reminders were necessary for their morale, and none of them, not even Nesbit, had broken silence. This, despite the fact that on top of everything else they now had to cope with the nerve-wracking suspense of wondering which would come first: their retrieval, or the end of Stoneman’s patience.

  Jason wished he could risk telling them how proud he was of them.

  The mule, with its vital and dangerous load, could barely keep its footing as they scrambled uphill in the direction of Ashby’s Gap.

  A short ride had brought them to the base of a trail, where they had left their horses tethered to trees and Gracchus had slung Aiken’s Sharps over his shoulder. Now Gracchus led the way along the rough trail, with Gaius leading the mule and Tiberius coaxing it. Aiken brought up the rear. The air grew chillier as they ascended the slope, but at least the day was clear and the winter sun gave some warmth as they emerged into its wan light in a clear area. Across a shallow valley, Aiken glimpsed a crag overhanging a rough, largish log building on a level ledge. But he had no time for the scenery, for Gracchus was motioning him toward a kind of cairn—really, just a heap of rough stones which only a second look revealed to be unnaturally symmetrical.

  They set to work, using a pickaxe and a shovel strapped to the mule’s harness to dislodge the stones and then dig in the freshly-turned dirt beneath. They had not far to dig. Presently the shovel clanged against something solid. Tiberius, who had been wielding the shovel, brushed the dirt away … and then recoiled slightly as though at the sight of something unnatural—something that had no business in his world.

  As, in fact, it doesn’t, thought Aiken as he stared at the top of what he recognized as a containment vessel for delayed-action nanobots. The dully gleaming synthetic composite material of which it was made, obviously nothing of this era, caught the sunlight. It was, he knew, very long-lasting—indeed, practically imperishable to the slow forces of nature. But it did not have, and normally did not need, much in the way of resistance to sudden explosive forces. Aiken turned to Gracchus and his men, who were gazing round-eyed.

  “We don’t need to dig any deeper. Just lower the b … the infernal machine down on top of it. Then pile the dirt around it. After we’ve set the timer and closed it up, we’ll heap the stones over it, to further contain the force of the explosion.”

  They set the clock mechanism for half an hour, giving them ample time to descend the trail to their horses and put some distance between themselves and the blast. “All right,” said Aiken, picking up a stone, “let’s—”

  At that moment, a man in a Confederate uniform appeared on the ridge. With an insect-like swiftness that Aiken knew to be the product of genetic upgrade, he brought up his carbine—which probably incorporated an inconspicuous laser sight—and fired. At the same instant the crack reached their ears, Gaius staggered backwards as a soft-nosed slug blew a teacup-sized exit wound out his back with a shower of gore that included the shreds of his heart. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Aiken and Tiberius went flat, Aiken simultaneously drawing his Colt. Gracchus went to one knee and fired back with Aiken’s Sharps, but missed. The Transhumanist—doubtless smiling coldly, Aiken supposed—chambered another round.

  Yours isn’t the only laser sight around here, thought Aiken, aiming his Colt and watching the little pink dot. He squeezed the trigger, and the Transhumanist toppled over. Gracchus—who had just witnessed what was, by his world’s standards, an extraordinary pistol shot, stared at him.

  “Forget the rocks!” Aiken snapped, scrambling to his feet. “The dirt will have to do. Let’s go now! There’ll be others.”

  “Why?” Gracchus wanted to know. “You got him before he could—”

  “Just take my word that he was able to raise an alarm.” There was, of course, no time to try to explain about implant communicators. “Let’s get out of here. But first, reset the timer so there’s just enough time for us to get out of danger before it blows.”

  He smacked the mule on the rump, hoping the animal would run away in time.

  Oh God, he’s not going to wait any longer! The despairing thought stabbed through Jason’s mind as the heavy door was flung open and Stoneman stalked through, flanked by two goons who took up their usual watchful flanking positions beside the door like the automata they were.

  But then he saw that the Transhumanist’s face was contorted with fury.

  “So,” Stoneman spat, “you think you’re very clever, don’t you?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Jason in a tone of insultingly bogus innocence on which he got a lot of practice with Rutherford.

  With a motion too quick to follow, Stoneman slapped him across the face. “No more lies! One of my men reported, before he apparently was killed, the presence of interlopers where none of the local Pugs would have reason to go. So the five of you here aren’t your entire party—you have other men, still at large. And you never told me!”

  “Should that surprise you?” asked Jason with unabated insolence, rubbing his stinging face. Actually, he was grateful for the slap, for it had brought him out of the numb lethargy bred by his long confinement. All at once, his mind was in high gear again. And he took note of the word men—a misconception of which he wasn’t about to disabuse Stoneman. Nor was he about to reveal the existence of the Order of the Three-legged Horse, whose members must surely account for the plural pronoun, whether or not they were—as he hoped—acting in concert with Aiken.

  The thought of Aiken caused him to consult his optically projected map. Yes, the red dot of Aiken’s TRD was very close. And it was moving at a rate that indicated the reverse-stasis field had been turned off.

  “Not at all,” said Stoneman, taking a deep breath and looking annoyed at himself for letting his self-control slip in the presence of Pugs. “And it’s of no great moment. We will simply track them down and—”

  The floor trembled beneath their feet, and a roar smote their ears. Stoneman, his restored superciliousness forgotten, rushed to the window and peered through a crack between the boards. Then he whirled and gave Jason a glare whose concentrated and distilled venom was new even to Jason’s experience.

  “I will be back shortly,” he hissed. “And when I do, I believe I will dispense with my original plan, which was oversubtle. I will simply kill you … except that it won’t really be ‘simple’ at all. Quite complicated, actually.” He strode out through the door, followed by the goons.

  “What’s happening, Commander?” asked Nesbit.

  “I wish I knew.” Jason went to the window and squinted at the crack. Across a shallow valley, in a clear area on the opposite slope, smoke was still rising from what had clearly been a black-powder explosion. As he watched, four horsemen galloped away from the stable and descended into the small valley, headed in the direction of the smoke.

  Mondrago joined him at the window-crack. They looked at each other.

  “Stoneman said one of his men had been killed …” Mondrago began.

  “Which leaves a total of five,” Jason finished for him. “And four just rode away.” He left unspoken the obvious corollary: Stoneman, in his angry haste, had for the fir
st time left them with only one guard. Instead, he turned to Nesbit. “Irving, here’s what I want you to do …”

  When the guard heard a bloodcurdling scream through the door, followed by a cry of “He’s trying to kill me!” he thought of only one thing. His leader-caste commander had ordered that the prisoners were to be kept alive. Without pausing for the reflection for which his caste was not noted anyway, he drew his revolver and pushed open the door to the inner room.

  Nesbit was supine on the floor, with Jason on top apparently throttling him, and Dabney stood to the side yelling, “Stop him!” The tableau was startling enough to make the guard momentarily forget that there was no one else in his field of vision. As he stepped across the threshold Mondrago, standing behind the door to the right, swung the door sharply into his right arm, knocking the revolver from his hand. Simultaneously Logan grappled him from the left.

  With the strength of his genetic upgrades, the guard flung Logan from him with his left arm, sending him sprawling. But as he did so, Mondrago grasped him around the neck with his right arm while delivering a short, sharp knuckles-first jab to his left temple. He sagged to the floor.

  “Was it necessary to be quite so realistic, Commander?” wheezed Nesbit, rubbing his throat as Jason hauled him to his feet.

  “Had to be convincing, Irving.” Jason scooped up the guard’s revolver and thrust it through his belt. “Now let’s go … after doing one thing.”

  In the outer room, Jason wrenched open the carrying case Stoneman had told him contained explosives. There were a few small, spherical state-of-the-art twenty-fourth century grenades, whose size belied their destructiveness. They could be set for delayed action, but Jason had no leisure to fiddle with timers. He scooped up three of them and handed one each to Mondrago and Logan. Then they all ran outside.

  “Keep running—fast,” Jason ordered Nesbit and Dabney. When the two civilians were well away, he and the two other Service men simultaneously tossed their grenades back through the door and sprinted. They all knew exactly how many seconds they could sprint before dropping to the dirt and making themselves as flat as possible.