by Steve White
“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.
At the same instant, Mondrago wrenched the Kestrel sideways and away with a force that would have broken all their bones without the inertial compensators. Even with them, Zenobia and Morgan both lost their footing and tumbled to the deck, and the others slewed in their couches.
It was just in time. As the Kestrel pulled away they caught sight of the hangar bay’s interior as its dim electric lighting turned to something resembling the surface of the sun. Then, just barely astern of them, the atmosphere screen went down and a jet of superheated gas like a titanic blowtorch shot out of the bay into the space the Kestrel had occupied less than a second before.
Mondrago gave the photon drive full power and they shot away. Jason had worried that the battlestation might mount a tractor beam powerful enough to grip and hold the Kestrel against the power of its own drive. Evidently it didn’t, or if it did the controls for such a beam had been wrecked . . . or, perhaps, its operators were in a state of shock at the thermonuclear evisceration of their great vessel’s interior.
Not everything aboard the battlestation was paralyzed, however. A heavy laser weapon turret swiveled, seeking them out. It fired a bolt, but the Kestrel’s wild maneuvers, at such short range, made any sort of targeting solution impossible. Mondrago flipped the Kestrel over and reversed direction, using the limited power of the grav repulsors to help overcome inertia and also to introduce a confusing wobble. With anti-ship laser bolts stabbing through space just astern of them, they shot past the battlestation, which was now beginning to show fissures of flame as secondary explosions rippled through its massive bulk. Jason just barely had time to launch two more missiles before they were away. The point-defense lasers that might have stopped those missiles even at this range were no longer functioning.
Mondrago switched the screen to view-aft just in time for them to see the last two missiles impact the receding battlestation. Then the secondary explosions began coming at closer intervals, rising to an almost stroboscopic crescendo and then seeming to merge together, suddenly coalescing into one great, sunlike glare that filled the screen and dazzled their eyes. Then that glow died down, revealing an expanding cloud of glowing gas and debris. The vacuum of space could not carry a shock wave, but the Kestrel shuddered when the wave front of superheated gas reached them.
Morgan hauled himself to his feet and stared at the screen. “Sweet Jesus!” he gasped.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“What are our orbital elements like?” Jason demanded anxiously.
“Believe it or not, I spared that a little bit of thought, there at the end,” Mondrago assured him. He returned the viewscreen to view-forward, in which the great blue curve of Earth waxed.
Jason let out a sigh of relief. If they had been thrown into an outward orbital path, not even the technology at their command would have saved them from a long-drawn-out struggle back to Earth. And that was something they could not afford at the moment.
“So,” said Morgan, staring at the screen, “we’re on our way back. Maybe the fleet is out of the storm by now.”
“Hopefully.” Jason consulted his implant; it had only been a few hours. “We’ll have no trouble finding them. Once we get in the same general area, I have . . . means by which I can locate my two men who’re still aboard Soledad.”
“And what a story we’ll have to tell everyone!” Morgan’s eyes were alight. “They’ll have to believe us—not even old John Mandeville himself would have dared
make up such a lie. And they’ll wet themselves when we appear from out of the sky in this flying ship!”
“Well, er . . . maybe.” Once again, Jason found himself face to face with the impossible, unthinkable but inescapable fact that he was talking to Henry Morgan aboard a spaceship. Now what the hell am I going to do? he thought desperately. I can’t evade the issue any longer.
“And,” Morgan went on with oblivious happiness, “before you return to your own time . . . Jason, do you have any idea what we can do with this ship and its weapons? Why, nothing can stop us! All the treasures of the Spanish Main are ours for the taking. And India . . . and the Orient . . .” His eyes glazed over. He seemed to be going into an ecstasy of greed.
“For now, though,” said Zenobia drily, “what about this offal?” She indicated Romain, who was groaning as he returned to consciousness.
“Oh.” Morgan blinked as he returned to immediate practicalities. “I forgot about him. Shall I cut his throat now or later?”
“Later,” said Jason, without quite knowing why. He could never be comfortable with cold-blooded killing, even of a creature like this.
He also wasn’t entirely clear in his own mind on why he was so concerned with getting Nesbit and Grenfell back. In less than two weeks, their TRDs would automatically activate and they, along with Mondrago and himself, be snatched back to the displacer stage in Australia in the late twenty-fourth century. All they had to do was stay alive until then. And that, of course, was the rub: it was Jason’s job to keep them alive. And besides, he told himself, the transition would hit them quite unexpectedly without him there to give them a countdown. It had only happened a few times in the history of travel, but the people involved had found it disturbing.
As they entered atmosphere and overflew the Caribbean, they could see that it was almost sunset and the tatters of the storm had moved on. At low altitude, Mondrago proceeded on grav repulsion alone. He also activated the refraction field, and they cruised over the still unsettled water, invisible and practically silent. Presently they began to sight the ships of Morgan’s fleet, somewhat scattered but more or less on course through a mass of floating debris. Soledad, the biggest of the lot, was easy to spot. And . . .
“There’s Rolling-Calf, not far away!” exclaimed Zenobia. “I’ve got to get back to her.”
“All right,” said Jason. His thoughts were raging. This was all going to have to be sheer improvisation . . . and at the back of his mind the seemingly insoluble problem of Morgan wouldn’t go away. “All right,” he repeated. “We’ll come over them and hover. It’s still daylight, so If we open the hatch of the cargo bay without the lights on, maybe no one will look up and notice. And we can use the tractor beam to lower ourselves down.”
“Won’t that look kind of funny?” Mondrago inquired. “Us drifting down from the sky? Besides which, the tractor beam requires an operator to remain here at the controls.”
“Well . . . we’ll drop down to really low altitude, just aft of the ships, and simply jump out. There’s plenty of flotsam down there for us to grab hold of. Then we’ll call out for rescue.”
And then what? jibed Jason’s inner critic. He was still evading his basic problems—not just the most important, which was, of course, Morgan, but also a relatively lesser one . . . He looked at Romain, who was now fully conscious.
That last, at least, has an obvious solution. Jason had heard somewhere that drowning was a decent way to die. (Who, exactly, conveyed the information? he couldn’t help wondering.) He stood up, walked over to Romain’s seat, grasped him by his bound arms and hauled him to his feet.
“As you’ve doubtless gathered, given the fact that you’re still alive,” he hissed in the Tranhumanist’s ear, “your little attempt failed. We’ve destroyed the battlestation of your Teloi allies. Your plans have come to nothing. You have come to nothing. Now we’re back in Earth’s atmosphere, at low altitude over the Caribbean. And—God knows why—I’m going to make this as easy as possible.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mondrago’s resentful expression. “Let me—”
“No. We owe him nothing. But we owe it to ourselves. We’re still human!” Jason gave Romain another jerk. “Come on!” He twisted the Transhumanist around to face aft, toward the cargo hold.
Morgan had obviously lost the thread of the Standard International English. “But,” he objected, “aren’t we going to—?”
“No, Captain,” said Zenobia, and Jason could sense the subsonic undercurrent of her vocal implant. “It’s going to be necessary to do it this way. Let’s go.” With out-of-character passivity, Morgan followed her aft, from the cabin into the hold as Mondrago touched the button that caused the cargo hatch to slide open.
Mondrago, at the pilot’s station, manipulated the controls. “All right. We’re just behind Rolling-Calf, with Soledad off to the left, or port or whatever. We’re not much above wavetop level, and lazing along, keeping pace with them.”
“Good,” said Jason abstractedly as he shoved Romain aft. Looking into the hold, he saw Zenobia and Morgan standing on the limited deck space surrounding the now-open cargo hatch, looking down into the water. The overriding concern was still preying on his mind: What about Morgan?
Then, suddenly, like an explosion in his brain, the solution came to him in all its blinding obviousness. Why didn’t I see it before? The staggering realization wiped all else from his mind and caused him to relax his grip.
Which, of course, gave Romain his chance.
With the strength and speed of his genetic upgrades, Romain broke free, gave a desperate heave, and broke his bonds. Afterwards, Jason would conclude that earlier, while conscious, he had been inconspicuously rubbing them against some sharp protrusion of the copilot’s seat, gradually fraying and weakening them. At the moment, though, he had no opportunity for such reflections. With that same adderlike speed, Romain gripped his left wrist with one viselike hand while the other simultaneously snatched the dagger from Jason’s belt-rope and pressed it to his throat just hard enough to break the skin. Jason froze, knowing that any struggles would mean instant death.
Mondrago started to surge to his feet, and Zenobia and Morgan poised to lunge back into the cabin. “Stop right there, or he dies!” Romain shouted. They all stopped cold.
“Now, do exactly as I say,” Romain ordered Mondrago. “Set in a course for Hispaniola—specifically, for the region of the Massif de la Selle, at the eastern base of the island’s southern peninsula. That’s where my men currently are. I’ll keep you with me to handle the final approach.” Romain, Jason thought, must not be a qualified pilot. “In exchange for which, I may decide to kill you quickly. Move!” he barked as Mondrago hesitated. Very slowly, the Corsican sat back down and began to manipulate controls.
“As for you, though,” Romain hissed into Jason’s ear, “I can’t safely keep more than one of you aboard with me. So I can’t take you back to Hispaniola with me, as much as I’d like to. Oh, yes, I’d devise something truly special there! But you’ll have to stay here . . . with a long, freely bleeding cut. There are sharks in these waters.” He was so close that Jason could smell his breath, which caused his gorge to rise, given what he remembered. With a sideways motion, Romain began to prod Jason aft along the short aisle toward the cargo hatch. “You two, jump out first!” he snapped at Morgan and Zenobia.
The buccaneer, one hand on his cutlass hilt, stood glaring for a moment. “Go ahead, Captain,” Jason, told him, speaking carefully as the knife-edge pricked his Adam’s apple. “I . . . think I may see you again.”
Romain gave a derisive snort. Morgan hesitated another instant, then jumped over the edge. “Next you, bitch,” said Romain. “I have to let you go now, but we’ll keep looking for you in Jamaica, and eventually find you. Think about that. Think about what’s going to happen afterwards.”
“Maybe,” said Zenobia with a lazy, feline smile that seemed strangely incongruous. “But there’s one thing you’re overlooking.”
“What’s that?”
She jerked her chin in the direction of the cabin, beyond him. “Mondrago is coming up behind you.”
Romain barked laughter. “You silly cunt! That’s the oldest, most childlike trick—”
Like a projectile propelled by bunched leg muscles, the Corsican crashed into Romain’s back. At the same instant, with an unnatural quickness matching Romain’s, Zenobia grabbed the wrist of his knife-hand, yanking it away from Jason’s throat. They all fell in a tumble toward the edge of the yawning cargo hold. Zenobia lost her balance and toppled over the edge, still holding Romain’s wrist, while Jason and Mondrago grappled with him. Then she lost her grip and fell.
They struggled at the edge of the hatch. For the barest instant, Jason found himself looking down over the edge, at the water below. He spotted Zenobia, swimming through the scattered flotsam toward Rolling-Calf. He also saw Morgan, clinging to a floating yardarm. Then Romain gave a superhuman heave and rolled him over. The Transhumanist was stronger than either of them. But together, Jason and Mondrago wrestled him down into a prone position, each grasping one of his arms. Jason put a knee on Romain’s shoulder blade and pulled up and back on the arm with all his strength, breaking the shoulder. The Transhumanist’s shriek of pain was instantly followed by another as Mondrago followed suit.
They hauled Romain to his feet, oblivious to his cries as they grasped his broken arms, and marched him back toward the cabin. As they turned, Jason paused to look through the cargo hatch again. Zenobia was already being hauled aboard Rolling-Calf by her Maroons. But that wasn’t what riveted Jason’s attention.
Morgan was still holding onto the yardarm . . . but he was no longer alone. There was another man clinging to it with him.
Now who is that, and where did he come from? Jason wondered. Then the man turned around and looked up as though he knew what he would see in the sky.
For a frozen instant in time, Jason looked into that man’s face. Two pairs of eyes locked.