Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  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!”

  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 d
idn’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.”