Drakas!

  One of the great things about a multiverse of alternate timelines is that if anything possible happens, virtually everything will, somewhere.

  So Mark Strang takes time off from the war against the Closers—sadistic descendants of the Carthaginians who rule a million timelines, all of them badly—to meet the gene-engineered Draka.

  The Closers love to torment their helpless, hating slaves. To the Draka, that would seem crude; they consider making their subjects love them the ultimate domination. Mark Strang isn't enchanted with either approach, and shows it . . .

  UPON THEIR BACKS, TO

  BITE 'EM

  John Barnes

  John Barnes is known for his SF novels and stories. Kaleidescope Century, Finity, and many more. He lives in Gunnison, Colorado, and teaches theatre at Western State College—and practices what he teaches. How he finds the energy to do all this mystifies me. It must be the extra oxygen in the lowland air. (I live at 7,200 feet, myself.)

  John has also written a series of alternate-history, crosstime-travel romps featuring his hero Mark Strang, the art-historian turned gun for hire and interdimensional scourge of tyrants: Washington's Dirigible, Caesar's Bicycle, and Patton's Spaceship.

  One of the great things about a multiverse of alternate timelines is that if anything possible happens, virtually everything will, somewhere.

  So Mark Strang takes time off from the war against the Closers—sadistic descendants of the Carthaginians who rule a million timelines, all of them badly—to meet the gene-engineered Draka.

  The Closers love to torment their helpless, hating slaves. To the Draka, that would seem crude; they consider making their subjects love them the ultimate domination. Mark Strang isn't enchanted with either approach, and shows it . . .

  "Admit it, Mark, you're bored," Chrysamen said.

  "I have no problem with admitting it." I poured myself another cup of coffee from the maker in our kitchen and took an absent-minded sip. "I just have problems with any possible way out of it, is all. Now, if you'll excuse me, our son is waiting patiently for his chance at checkmate, which I think he'll get in about ten moves."

  "Six," Perry said from the other room.

  I went back out into the living-dining room. Perry had moved the chessboard a little to the side. He was reading some comic that had both Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk on the cover. His feet, gigantic in proportion to the skinny rest of him, were up on the table, next to the chessboard. He looked the picture of eleven-year-old contentment.

  I gently lifted his feet to the side with one hand, and set my coffee cup down on the table. Perry sat upright, grumbling that there was no place around here where a guy could get comfortable.

  I remembered making the same grumble to my own father, so I used his line. "If being comfortable means destroying good furniture, then you're right. There's no place here where you can get comfortable. Better start saving to move out."

  "Aw, Pop. That's Grandpa's line."

  "Uh-huh. And that's your grandmother's table. Which means, as I don't really have to tell you, Perry, that it means a lot to Grandpa Strang." I looked at my son intently for half a minute; then he shrugged and nodded. My mother, Perry's grandmother, was murdered in front of Dad and me, years before Perry was born, just before I went into my present line of work. Dad's as recovered as he's going to get, but he'll never be over it. If Perry had scratched the table that Mother had once found at a yard sale and spent those summer hours refinishing, Dad would never have said a hard word to either of us about it—but all the same, it would have been an addition to the heap of pain inside him, and neither Perry nor I could shrug that off.

  Salvaging a little pride, Perry said, "Anyway, I wasn't going to scratch the table or hurt it, Pop. And besides, it will be out of danger in no time—I've got mate in six."

  "I'm afraid he's right, Mark," a familiar voice said behind and above me; I felt the friendly hand on my shoulder even as I was saying "Walks!"

  "Yep."

  I turned around and stood up to greet him with a hug. Walks in His Shadow Caldwell is about six foot two, with what I think is an exceptionally handsome face—high-ridged nose, cheekbones wide and high, dark eyes, skin a copper-beige color. At least he was handsome by the standards of America in the early 2000s. I had no idea what they thought of him a few thousand timelines over, where he came from—a timeline where the assassination of Andrew Jackson prevented the Trail of Tears, the German Fever devastated the North, and Napoleon fils cut off European emigration for more than forty years. I'd been there once, on a training trip; the USA of 1960 had less than a hundred million people, and they were about one-third Native, one-third Euro, and one-third African in ancestry. Pretty country, but empty.

  Walks was an old friend, but still, it was hardly usual for him to turn up in my house on July third. Nobody crosses timelines other than by necessity, because every crossing is detectable and could give away the position of both the starting and the ending timeline to the bad guys. ATN protocol restricts crossings to emergencies; ATN is the outfit that Walks, Chrysamen, and I all work for. Just think of us as "the good guys."

  Chrysamen came out with a tray of iced tea—oddly, one of the few common tastes between Walks's timeline and mine. One of the iced teas was in a paper cup, which she handed to Perry and said, "Perry, if it actually is certain that you have mate in six moves, maybe you can spare your father total humiliation and let us get on with the adult business by, er—"

  "Leaving," Perry finished for her, getting up, taking a gulp that half-emptied the glass, and starting for the door. He stopped, turned, and said, "Hey, could I have gotten mate in four?"

  Walks beamed. "Great question, but no. See, you'd have to expose yourself to check to do it." As he talked, his hands played over the chessboard, showing things to Perry much too fast for me to follow. "That would happen in any of the three ways that were otherwise possible, so no, there's not a legal way to do it. That leaves two more moves you always have to go through—either an exchange for his white bishop, so that your king can move, or a jump around the problem with this knight. Either way, six moves is your minimum."

  I did my best to pretend I had any idea what Walks was showing him. Perry seemed to get it at once, however, thanked "Mr. Walks," and was out the door just fast enough so that I couldn't tell him not to slam the screen door.

  After we'd all jumped at the bang, and settled back down, I said, "Kids," and Walks said "Bless'em," and the ever-practical Chrysamen said, "All right, so what's the proposed job?"

  Walks chuckled. "Well, it's a job for Mark, rather than for you two as a team. So if you want to decline it because you wouldn't be working together, I'll certainly understand that. In fact, to sweeten the deal a little, Mark, we've authorized a short-term exchange for this mission, so you'll be gone only about a half day here, but it might be as much as six months over in the timeline we'd be going to. I told Lao and Malecela and the other brass that giving you a short time exchange would be more likely to get you to take the job."

  "Well, you might be right," I said, "if you would just tell me what the job is."

  "Be my bodyguard on a diplomatic mission. If you don't mind being flattered a little bit, I requested you specifically, because I needed a senior crux op with clearance for all kinds of security, and with some bodyguarding experience—and it needed to be someone I was sure I could trust, because for this job, especially, I wanted someone with a proven record of saving my life, which each of you had."

  "Then why not both of us as a team? That's how we usually work, and we can get somebody to look after Perry on ten minutes' notice—"

  Walks shook his head and said, "This is not just diplomatic bodyguarding. This isn't even just dangerous diplomatic bodyguarding. We're going to go put our heads in the lion's mouth—and the lion says that it only wants two of us. Now, if you'll take the deal, Mark, we'll just open a gate into your bedroom and get going. I'm sorry to sound impatient but I'd like to start. You'll be bac
k for supper—if you're back at all."

  That last reference was what told me that this job was really dangerous, not just the usual dangers of being a crux op. Usually crux ops don't talk about dying, and one reason is because when we do, we get maudlin about it, generally while drunk or right after sex. I suppose that's the way life gets in an excessively romantic job.

  I'd have thought, many years ago, that I had become a realist, probably too much of a realist. Most of my family had been killed in what appeared to be a pointless political murder. I'd gone through a deep depression and come out the other end as a professional bodyguard, dedicated to keeping assholes away from nice people, which not at all incidentally gave me an excuse to occasionally beat up people that needed beating up. I spent much of my time keeping scum at bay. I thought I was facing the real world, which was gritty and "realist."

  Then I'd fallen through into the real real world, which is even grittier—but desperately romantic. More than a million timelines held down by the Closers, a whole culture devoted to the joyful practice of slavery. More timelines in a loose alliance called ATN, facing them—about even with the Closers when I started, but we have twice as many timelines now, and in those millions of timelines, every bizarre thing you could think of has happened. Buck Rogers science, storybook settings, desperate quests, mad tyrants, unspeakable crimes, ineffable beauty, all of your childhood heroes—I'd been on one mission with George Washington and Leonardo da Vinci as co-agents, but that's a long and different story . . . well. I learned, a couple of decades ago, that although I'd seen most of the dark corners of my own world, I'd only been living in a bad black and white polaroid of that big bold technicolor reality.

  ATN was still mostly secret in our timeline; the public was being prepared for the news, but it would probably be a generation or so until we were ready to be open about it. It was scheduled for the presidency-to-come, twenty years or so in the future, of my ward Porter Brunreich. (That was the U.S. Presidency . . . that young lady doesn't settle for half measures.)

  Meanwhile, I continued in my occupation as bodyguard for Porter and as part-time crux op. Seven hundred years in the future, time travel remains expensive, even for civilizations that can move whole planets around, and so most of the action involves small numbers of scouts, pioneers, agents, and liaisons; every so often one of those temporal explorers, agents, or diplomats goes missing, in circumstances that might be due to enemy action. When that happens, a crux op goes into the last known time and place location for the missing person, and the crux op is bound by just three rules:

  Rule One: Find the missing person, or the body.

  Rule Two: Make sure the original mission gets completed.

  Rule Three: No other rules apply.

  * * *

  We went back into the bedroom suite, where Chrys and I have a space that is always kept empty so that a gate can be projected there from ATN headquarters at Hyper Athens (a space station that will never exist in our timeline, but is just a few centuries forward and several possibilities to the side). Chrysamen grabbed me for just an instant, gave me a long, deep kiss, and said, "Come back."

  Privately, Chrys and I call that Rule Zero.

  * * *

  A moment later in subjective time, Walks and I were standing in the receiving area at ATN, shaking hands with a whole committee of people. Walks in His Shadow was one of the most valued people ATN has because he'd done so many different things. He'd been spectacularly effective as a time scout, on the mission that had turned the tide of the war and promised to let us eventually rid all the timelines of Closers. He'd worked as a crux op himself. He'd held a bunch of command and staff jobs in everything from pre-imperial Roman legions to a 23rd-century LithuPolish Pentaku, and fought in everything from one-on-one epée quarrels to commanding a regiment of capsuleers in one of the Irish Empire's invasions of Mars. His multiply rebuilt body housed a mind with at least two centuries of adult experience—and much of that was in contact and diplomacy.

  So if the Senate of Citizens had chosen him to make our first contact with this new family of timelines on this mission, it could be no ordinary mission.

  As soon as we arrived, Walks immediately went off for a last-minute briefing. Ariadne Lao, an old friend and my usual boss, took me to a discreet little cafe that we both liked, to do the high level briefing and not incidentally to get reacquainted with the moussaka. "This place is still secure," she explained, as we sat down, near a window tuned to the outside, where we could watch the big, gleaming Earth roll by on one side, and the twinkles of dozens of spacecraft on the other, as Hyper Athens slowly tumbled.

  "All right," I said. "Then tell me everything."

  "We wish we knew more, obviously," she said, "but here's the basics. We've run into a civilization—to use the term very loosely—that has just found the technique of crossing timelines, within the last thirty years, and begun to explore outwards from its home timeline. A timeline fairly close to both yours and Plenipotentiary Caldwell's native timelines—" it took me a moment to realize my built-in translator chip had translated Walks's title from Lao's always-polite speech.

  "Basically, in this new family of timelines, there's an enormous and frightening great power that never occurred in either your timeline or Walks's." She looked down at her notes; she was from the timeline where ATN had originated, and from her standpoint the whole settlement of North America from Europe was an aberration. "The difference was that after the American Revolution, the Loyalists went to South Africa instead of Canada, and in the fullness of time, grew up to be the nation that conquered the world, enslaved everybody, and bioengineered themselves into a new species. They call themselves Draka, which derives, distantly, from Drake having explored that part of the world."

  I shuddered. "So in their timeline, unmodified human beings are slaves?"

  "Extinct. We think. We know that there's a lot they're not telling us. As far as we can tell, there might be a hundred human-derived species in those timelines. All created entirely for the amusement and convenience of the drakenses."

  "Plural of drakensis?"

  "Right. Anyway, some of them might look like us—the Draka themselves do, superficially—but they're all designed, and the worlds they're designed for are mostly empty, with just a few masters in them."

  I sighed. "They sound more like natural allies of the Closers, but I suppose if we can use them as allies, we'll have to."

  "You know the basic principle. Any timeline that doesn't try to control other timelines is okay, even if their major civilization bakes babies for breakfast." She sighed. "Not that I'm happy about that principle just at the moment. Mark, this is one of those cases where I really wonder if any end can justify the means. Unofficially, yes, the Draka are quite unattractive, but officially, they have potential to help us shorten the war, and that's not something we can afford to pass up the chance at.

  "Now, this next thing is a note of some importance. One aspect of their extraordinarily well-advanced genetic engineering is that they have have modified themselves to have voluntary control of their pheremones. They can make themselves smell like friends, or like dangerous predators, or whatever. They are quite capable, for example, of causing a non-resistant human to fall madly into sexual infatuation with them, at will. That is, at Draka will. The ordinary human doesn't have much in the way of a will, once the Draka get done with him.

  "This is one reason why Plenipotentiary Caldwell is going in with a bodyguard. Part of your job is to watch each other. We think we can give you a shot of nanos that will protect you against Draka control. But if it should fail—if one of you falls under the sway of a Drakon—then the job of the other one is to get you both out of there, right then, before the Draka can gain any more information about ATN, and most especially before you both end up as puppets. Is that clear?"

  "Does Walks know that's my job? Dragging him out of there if needed?"

  "He thinks hiring you was his idea. And it was. But we already had it in
mind, and we contrived a few situations that would reinforce the idea for him, to which, I must say, he responded beautifully. So yes, it was his idea, but it was ours before it was his."

  "These Draka aren't the only people that practice mind control, are they?"

  Lao didn't answer, but she seemed annoyed, and she's a good boss and an old friend I don't want to offend, so I dropped that line of conversation and we got down to business; she gave me the basic reports to have down cold before we left. ATN are good people, but when it comes to talking about means and ends, they can get as touchy as anybody.

  The next day, while I was going over the material, and finding more and more things not to like about the Draka, Ariadne dropped by the guest apartment where I was staying. She apologized for having been abrupt with me the day before, and said it had a great deal to do with how much the ATN leadership had already been arguing about whether to open any kind of relations with the Draka at all; several of the citizen-senators described the Draka as "Super-Closers" and suggested that we should simply shove a planet-wrecking bomb through the gate and be done with them. "So they've thrashed through all the conflicts, and argued and screamed and so on for a long time, and now they've hit on a policy," she said, "which may or may not work, but if it doesn't work, all the ones who didn't favor it will be able to jump on our organization and blame us for it. So I'm afraid that for these last few days I've been hypersensitive."

  "That's understandable," I said, pouring tea for both of us. "But I can't believe you went to the bother of coming in person just to apologize."

  "Well, no, I didn't. I came to bring you a new toy for your expedition—you'll be the first crux op to carry one, ever. It hasn't been used by any agent in any real emergency, but the field tests have been very successful, and it's rated as fully ready to go."