Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “Aye, Captain!” someone called out. “I’ve worked with such things before. We have all the materials we need.”

  “Good! You’ll show everyone what to do. Can anybody think of any problems?”

  “That Cuban tub doesn’t have many gunports,” Captain Lawrence Prince pointed out.

  “So we’ll cut new ones,” said the first speaker.

  Not for the first time, Jason couldn’t help being struck by the rude, crude but democratic way the buccaneers reached decisions and then brainstormed the best way of implementing them—so different from the rigidly top-down management style of the Spaniards and, indeed, of everyone in this century. Cruel, greedy and debauched the Brethren of the Coast might be, but they were a straw in the wind of the future—a wind that was going to blow away the last lingering cobwebs of feudalism.

  “The people who fled from this town are still hiding in the surrounding hills,” observed Captain John Morris, always a voice of caution. “They’ll be able to spy on us, and get word to the Spanish admiral of what we’re up to.”

  To Jason’s surprise Mondrago piped up. “I might be able to help with that, Captain. I know something about, well, keeping things you’re doing secret and maybe making the enemy think you’re doing something else.” The current language held no such word as disinformation.

  “Splendid! What do you suggest?”

  “Well,” said the Corscian, ignoring Nesbit’s obvious disapproval of his potential impropriety, “first of all, the prisoners and the slaves must be kept shut away in isolation, so they can see nothing of what’s going on, and carefully guarded so they can’t escape.”

  “Excellent idea.” Morgan beamed. “All right, everyone, let’s get busy. Meanwhile, I’ll send the Spanish admiral another letter to gain us a little time.”

  * * *

  “So,” said Don Alonzo, looking up from Morgan’s new letter, “it appears that he’s dropped his demand for ransom for Maracaibo. And he’ll free his prisoners and hostages and half of the slaves. But he makes no mention of the loot—they’ll keep that.”

  “Then Morgan’s impertinence is unabated,” declared Magdalena’s captain. “This is intolerable! Almirante, I can remain silent no longer: it is beneath you to haggle with this common-born pirate! Let us have an end to offers and counter-offers! It is degrading—as though we were . . .” He swallowed hard. “Forgive me, but I have to say it: as though we were in trade!”

  The admiral ignored the dramatics. “He’s obviously playing for time. But why? What does he hope to accomplish?”

  The flag captain turned matter-of-fact. “I think I may know. The townspeople in the hills have been observing the harbor as best they can, and sending informants to us. None of the hostages or slaves have escaped—”

  “Odd,” Don Alonzo interjected. Whenever pirates stayed in one place for long, they tended to grow lax.

  “—but from what they’ve seen they report that the pirates have been feverishly at work on the Cuban trading ship they captured. They seem to be adding more gun ports, and shipwrights keep going in and out of the hold. Also, Morgan’s flag has been transferred to her.”

  “Aha! So that’s it. Morgan is actually going to try to fight his way out. And that Cuban ship is the largest one he’s got. So he’s trying to convert her into a man-of-war, to use as his flagship.”

  “No matter what they do to her, she can never be a match for even our smallest ship.”

  “No. But now that we know he plans to try to break out, we’ll be ready. I want a close watch kept on the channel. I also want poles emplaced, extending from our ships’ sides, and the men drilled intensely in repelling boarders and, in fact, counterattacking. Morgan knows he has no hope of winning in a gun-duel, so he’ll naturally attempt to board us, relying on the pirates’ savagery at hand-to-hand fighting. And I, for my part, will try to hurry him along by sending another letter, giving him two days to surrender or die.”

  In fact, it was just before dark on April 30, six days after he had written his first letter to Morgan, when Don Alonzo looked through his spyglass and saw the pirate flotilla, complete with the Cuban merchantman flying Morgan’s flag, appear in the channel and anchor just out of range of his guns.

  * * *

  It was daybreak of the following morning, and Jason crouched on the deck of the Cuban trade ship Morgan had ironically renamed Satisfaction.

  Nesbit had spoken to him about it. “Commander, I simply cannot countenance your volunteering for this mission! Title V, Chapter Three, Section 7 of the Revised Temporal Precautionary Act of 2364 is quite explicit. The potential for possible violations of the Observer Effect—”

  “I’ve had experiences like this before, Irving,” he had said, recalling the time he had disrupted a debate in the Athenian assembly at what might have been an historically crucial moment. “It’s been exhaustively discussed, and the consensus seems to be that anything we do that turns out to be part of history was always part of history, if you catch my drift.”

  “All well and good,” Nesbit had persisted. “But what about you, personally? Our escape from the Transhumanists has left us in possession of absolutely priceless information about them and their Teloi allies. It is essential that we remain alive until our retrieval date—especially you, with the imagery on your recorder implant. It would be irresponsible to risk your life in the pursuit of mere adventure!”

  “Why, Irving!” Jason had grinned. “I thought you were the one lusting for adventure.”

  Nesbit had had the grace to look abashed. “I’ve come to understand the classic literary definition of ‘adventure’: someone else having a horrible time hundreds of years ago and thousands of miles away.”

  “With you sitting in an easy chair, reading about it and sipping a tall cool one,” Jason had finished for him. “But more to the point, Roderick has been able to assure us that the crew of Satisfaction got away alive. So for once, adventure should be risk-free.”

  Nesbit had had no answer for that. So now Jason and the other eleven volunteers who crewed Satisfaction gazed ahead in the dawn as a strong wind out of the lagoon filled their sails and swept their ship and two others alongside it—including Lilly, with Morgan aboard—toward the waiting galleons. The smaller vessels, Rolling-Calf among them, followed slightly behind.

  As they came into range, fiery broadsides belched from the Spanish ships, followed a second later by the crashing report of the guns. Cannonballs whistled overhead, punching through the canvass of the sails. Morgan’s ships returned fire, but the sound of their guns seemed weak and futile against the thunder of the Spanish broadsides. Nevertheless, they continued on down the wind, drawing closer and closer, even though deadly splinters were starting to fly as the Spanish scored hits.

  As they approached, Jason allowed himself to feel relief. Despite all their precautions, a black captive who may have had knowledge of what they were about had escaped. (Mondrago was still fulminating about it, declaring that these people were unteachable.) But evidently the escapee hadn’t made it to the Spanish fleet, or if he had his warning had gone unheeded.

  “It’s time!” Jason called out to the others as the Spanish flagship loomed ahead. No further steering was needed now; the wind could do it all. “Abandon ship!”

  He scurried across the deck, amid the smell of tar, pitch and brimstone smeared over palm leaves. Men ran about, lighting the fuses of the “cannons”—logs filled with gunpowder—that jutted from the new gunports. Other men emerged from the hold, where the shipwrights had removed all superfluous partitions. They waited just long enough to hurl grappling hooks at the galleon Satisfaction was now almost touching, catching its rigging. Then, one by one, everyone jumped over the stern, out of sight of the Spaniards. Jason paused a second, smiling, and wished godspeed to the “crewmen” who were remaining aboard—the ones made out of combustible materials on wooden frames, with soft montera hats atop their heads and cutlasses propped at their sides. Then he went over the side into t
he water and swam to one of the canoes that Satisfaction had been towing at a distance.

  Behind him, the two ships collided.

  * * *

  Don Alonzo watched through his spyglass with growing amazement as the pirate ships continued to bear down on Magdalena, making no attempt to draw away. His gunners had repeatedly lowered the muzzles of their guns as the range closed, and now they were firing point-blank. He could see the cutlass-wielding figures aboard Morgan’s new flagship, and even though they were heretics he had to admire their unmoving steadiness under fire. Yes, he had been right; they were going for a boarding action.

  On and on the ship came, propelled by the stiff morning wind, heedless of the cannonade, until with a grinding crash it rammed into Magdalena, entangling the two ships’ rigging with the help of grappling hooks. The Spanish infantry, drilled to a high pitch of anticipation, didn’t wait for the pirates to board but swarmed forward with a shout, scrambling over the side onto the pirate ship’s deck . . . where they stood, bewildered.

  Something is wrong, thought Don Alonzo, watching from the poop. Why aren’t they fighting? He saw one of his men step up to a motionless pirate and tap his cutlass, which fell to the deck.

  At that moment, the wind blew the smell of tar over palm leaves into his nostrils.

  The day before, one of the informants from shore—a black who had escaped from captivity—had claimed that Morgan wasn’t really turning the Cuban merchantman into his new flagship. But when he had told Don Alonzo what the pirates were doing to it, the admiral had scoffed, for what he had described involved a specialized branch of naval expertise, surely beyond the capabilities of this scruffy rabble of pirates.

  Now he remembered what that black man had told him. And with the recollection came the most dreaded word anyone could hear in the naval warfare of the Age of Sail: Fireship!

  Just as the word flashed through his brain, Hell erupted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Spanish boarders were literally blown aloft as Satisfaction went up in a veritable fireball, and a shower of flaming debris rained down into Magdalena’s flammable sails and rigging. The canvas sails and fat-covered ropes caught fire immediately, and the strong south wind swept the conflagration over the decks and up the masts. Fleeing, screaming men were wrapped in flame before they could jump overboard.

  “Fight the fires!” roared Don Alonzo, who had ordered barrels of water placed on the decks for this very purpose. “Cut the grappling lines and push off! Throw planks overboard for the men in the water!”

  But his orders could not be carried out in the roaring inferno that Magdalena was swiftly becoming. As the fire began to engulf the stern, the flag captain turned to him. “Almirante, you must abandon ship before you are trapped by the flames! I will have a rope ladder lowered for you.”

  Heartsick, Don Alonzo nodded.

  * * *

  From their canoe, Jason and the men with him watched the incredible Spanish debacle unfold as the sun rose higher in the smoky sky.

  They saw the burning Magdalena go down bow-first in a hiss of steam, and as she did, chaos and confusion infected the rest of the Spanish squadron. Soledad, the smallest Spanish ship, tried desperately to break off from the vicinity of the fire, but her rigging grew so tangled that she soon ceased to be navigable. Unable to maneuver, she was soon swarmed by buccaneer craft led by Lilly and a wave of boarders led by Morgan himself poured up her sides as her panic-stricken crew jumped overboard. The third galleon, San Luis, headed for the protection of the fort’s guns, but ran aground. Her crew began to frantically offload as much of her provisions and munitions as possible.

  And, in the same direction, they saw a longboat making for San Carlos, carrying a passenger wearing a splendid, if bedraggled and soot-stained cloak.

  “It must be the Spanish admiral!” someone in another canoe shouted. “After him!”

  Jason and the others grasped their paddles and started in pursuit. But the longboat had too great a head start, and the canoes had to pull away as Don Alonzo stumbled ashore on the beach under the fortress walls. Shortly afterwards, smoke began to rise from San Luis.

  * * *

  “Yes, Almirante,” reported the captain of San Luis, “I scuttled my ship and burned her down to the waterline.”

  “Good,” said Don Alonzo, looking out from the fort’s battlements. “That’s one ship Morgan won’t have.” He could barely force the words out through a throat choked with fury as he saw Morgan’s flag flying from Soledad. He also saw pirate boats clustered where Magdalena had sunk, and divers plunging down into the waters to retrieve loot from the wreck.

  By a supreme effort of will, he forced both rage and depression from his mind, clearing it for what must now be done. He turned and looked down into a courtyard crowded with the crew of San Luis and whatever survivors of the other two ships as had made it ashore, as well as with the garrison. All were milling about, stunned.

  “We must get these men in order immediately,” he told the fort’s castellan, “and prepare for an attack. Morgan will undoubtedly mount one as soon as he is able, for he knows he must take this fort.” He drew himself up and gazed sternly at the semicircle of dejected officers before him. When he spoke, it was as though they heard the ringing voice of the old Spain, the Spain of the Reconquista. “Remember: we still have Morgan trapped! He still must pass through this channel, which our guns command. The messengers we sent out a week ago must have reached Mérida and Caracas and their other destinations, which means that ships and men are on their way. All we have to do is keep Morgan bottled up until they arrive. Time is on our side, gentlemen!”

  * * *

  “Time is on their side,” Henry Morgan admitted that night as he and his captains met under the stars on the quarterdeck of Soledad. (“I’ve had a lot of flagships lately,” he had quipped.) Elsewhere, the buccaneers were celebrating the miraculous annihilation of the Armada de Barlovento. But here the mood was, if not precisely sober—there was too much rum flowing for that—certainly somewhat subdued.

  “We’ve seen that storming the fort from the beach isn’t going to work,” he continued. “Isn’t that right, Jason?”

  “Aye, captain.” Jason had been part of a landing force Morgan had put ashore late that very afternoon, hoping to ride the momentum of his incredible victory at sea and take the fort while its defenders were still demoralized. “The Spanish admiral must have put heart into that garrison. We tried to rush the walls at dusk. But we could do nothing, with only muskets and fire-balls.” The latter, the primitive grenades of the period, were favorite pirate weapons. But they had proven ineffectual against the blistering fire from walls that this time were fully manned and resupplied with artillery. “We lost thirty men dead and a lot more wounded before returning to the ships.”

  “Well,” said Zenobia, “we’ll have to do something about that fort. You know damned well that the Spanish admiral sent for reinforcements as soon as he got here. We’ve got to leave before they arrive, and those guns would play havoc with us as we tried to run the channel.”

  “True,” Morgan nodded, with a thoughtful swallow of rum. “But on the other hand, we have allies.”

  “We do?” Roche Braziliano’s scowl deepened with perplexity. “Who?”

  “Why, the good citizens of Maracaibo!” Morgan grinned. “They want us gone as soon as possible, with their city unburned. That means their interests are closer to ours than to Don Alonzo’s. I’ll send him a letter offering to leave the town standing in exchange for free passage out.”

  “He won’t accept it,” one of the captains predicted. “He’d see a dozen Maracaibos burned rather than let us escape.”

  “Of course he won’t. But at the same time I’ll tell the locals we’ll release the prisoners, spare the city and leave in exchange for a ransom. They’ll pay it—especially after I let them bargain me down a bit. But after they do, I’ll tell them that we can’t leave with the fortress guns commanding the channel, and
that they have to send representatives to Don Alonzo and persuade him to let us go. To encourage them to do their utmost, I’ll keep their fellow townspeople as hostages.”

  Zenobia’s teeth flashed white against her dark face in the light of the ship’s lanterns. “Very clever, Captain. Do you think it will work?”

  “It’s worth a try.” Morgan finished his rum. “And now I have a guest awaiting me in the cabin: the pilot of Magdalena. We fished him out of the water.”

  “Throw him back in,” grunted Roche Braziliano. “With his big toes tied together.”

  “That would hardly be the act of a gentleman,” declared Morgan with a loftiness Jason thought he carried off surprisingly well. “I am treating him as an honored prisoner of war. And besides,” he continued, with a slowly spreading smile, “he’s so grateful for—and probably surprised by—his generous treatment that he’s proving a useful source of information on various things I need to know . . . such as how Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa’s mind works.”

  * * *

  The delegation of Maracaibo’s leading citizens cringed before Don Alonzo’s wrath.

  “You contemptible, pusillanimous cowards!” the admiral roared, standing up behind his desk in the castellan’s office and leaning forward as though to intensify his glare. “You make me ashamed to call myself a Spaniard! Instead of standing and fighting when these pirates first arrived, you fled for your miserable lives. And now you’ve groveled at Morgan’s feet, paying the ransom he demands for sparing your wretched town.”

  “Oh, no, Almirante,” one merchant denied timidly. “Rest assured, we didn’t pay the ransom he wanted. We got him down from thirty thousand pieces of eight to only twenty thousand. Alas, he wouldn’t budge on the five hundred beeves, but—”

  “Silence, clown! I don’t want to hear about the haggling of greasy hucksters. In the end, you paid. And now you come crawling to me, begging me to forget my duty and let Morgan sail away with his loot. Your degradation is so complete that you’re willing to act as this heretic pirate’s spokesmen!”