by Steve White
The flicker guttered, but did not entirely go out.
Night had fallen when, with a blaze of headlights, the entire fleet of grav carriers came gliding in and offloaded their passengers, staggering and reeling with exhaustion. Then loudspeakers commanded the slaves to come out of the barracks into the open, and baton-wielding guards, covered from behind by others with laser carbines, began to shove their way into the compound.
Jason looked around anxiously, trying to locate all his people. Rojas and Armasova were away, helping the Pathan women, who were encountering a good many of their fellows. (Not a great help, as those others were more likely than not to belong to tribes that were hereditary enemies of the Yusufzai.) Bermudez had gone with them to lend any aid he could. Otherwise, the commandos were not too far away, as were the three British sergeants. “Let’s try to stay together!” he called out.
But that proved impossible in the shoving, terrified crowd, roiled by the guards whose batons everyone feared to touch. One of the Sikhs, along with Ayub Khan, were caught up in the mob being herded toward the carriers. And in the middle distance, Jason glimpsed Rojas, Armasova and Bermudez moving away, trapped in the press, until they too vanished into one of the carriers.
As soon as all the carriers were fully loaded, they swung about and departed, leaving Jason staring after them.
“They’ll be back in about twelve hours, sir,” Hamner tried to reassure him.
“Right,” Jason nodded. “We’d better hope nothing else happens before then.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The vicious crack of a weapon-grade laser in atmosphere and the roar of a collapsing guard tower shattered the night.
Jason came bolt upright from the stinking mat on which he had been fitfully asleep. Flashes of light through the slave barracks’ windows illuminated the packed interior, and the crowd of sleepers awoke in shrieking panic.
“Come on!” he yelled over the uproar. Mondrago, Hamner and Bakiyev, who had bunked down as close to him as possible, responded at once. The three British sergeants, not far away, followed, their men scrambling after them with the bhisti in the lead. They struggled through the milling mob jamming the building’s one door, and emerged into pandemonium.
De Ruyter hung overhead on gravs, its waist turrets spitting crackling laser bolts at the guards around the compound’s periphery while trying to avoid the frenzied crowds pouring from the barracks buildings. The collapsed tower lay on its side, shattered and burning. The other towers were firing at the attacker, but the same electromagnetic shielding that protected the crew from cosmic radiation in deep space could handle such relatively low-energy antipersonnel laser fire. As they watched, one of De Ruyter’s lasers lashed out at the powerhouse. With a buzzing roar and a spectacular shower of sparks, the electrified fence short-circuited and died.
Yelling madly, the crowd started to surge toward the area where part of the no-longer-lethal fence had been pulled down by the falling guard tower. It was a mad rush for freedom, heedless of whatever laser fire the guards could bring to bear.
As though sensing an opportunity, De Ruyter dropped lower and her ventral hatch began to swing down, forming a ramp that neared the ground. Palanivel must, Jason thought, must be glued to a viewscreen turned to full magnification and light enhancement, searching the crowd for familiar faces, because all at once a lateral thrust of her grav repulsion sent the ship gliding in their direction.
“Let’s go!” he called to his group. They broke free of the press, and all that separated them from the descending ship was an open area . . .
Then a file of goons appeared, deploying across the space between them and the ship, laser carbines levelled.
They must be under orders to take us—or, at least, me—alive, if possible, thought Jason. Or else we’d be dead. Which we will be if we try to rush that line. And there was nothing Palanivel could do about it. De Ruyter’s starboard waist turret could be brought to bear, and its high-energy laser would vaporize the goons . . . and also consume Jason and the others, just beyond them.
For a moment that seemed longer than it was, the tableau held.
Jason became aware that the bhisti was standing beside him. In the flickering light of the fires, the sweaty brown face looked up and their eyes met.
“Sahib, I do not understand any of this. But this much I know: you must get away, for only you can defeat the evil ones. And I am nothing.”
“No—” began Jason, who had never felt so unworthy in his life.
“Here, what’s this, you?” demanded McCready, who had overheard.
The bhisti didn’t answer him. Instead he hurled his water sack at the goons and, with an eerie scream, plunged toward them.
Startled by the sheerly unexpected, three of the goons obliterated the goatskin sack in mid-air with laser pulses. But the instant it took them to do it allowed the bhisti to reach them. Arms spread wide, he practically dove into their line, dragging the three lasers down. The other goons, to right and left, turned on him and fired. Steam exploded from his body as laser pulse burned their way through him.
But then a furious wave of bodies crashed into them. Jason had given no command; this was no carefully planned operation, as when they had rushed the guards aboard the transport. It was spontaneous. A couple of the goons got off shots, and Hamner and one of the Pathans died. Then the others were on top of them, punching and strangling and tearing. Jason grabbed a dropped laser carbine and used it as a bludgeon for beating the face on the goon he was straddling into bloody, broken pulp.
Abruptly, it was over. Carver and Hazeltine were standing over the corpse of the bhisti, and McCready was kneeling beside it. He spoke in a softer voice than Jason had ever heard him use, or ever thought he was capable of—almost too softly to be heard. “You’re a better man than I am.”
Jason tried to imagine what that admission, spoken of a man of darker skin, had cost someone of McCready’s background. He failed. He put a hand on the big sergeant’s shoulder. “Come on. We’ve got to get aboard.”
McCready nodded and stood up. As he did, Jason looked down at the bhisti. It occurred to him that he had never learned the man’s name. He was about to ask when Mondrago said, “Sir—look!” in a tone that made him look in the direction of the Corsican’s pointing finger, through the darkness and the smoke.
In the distance, over the spacefield beside the Transhuman city, a firefly swarm of lights were rising into the night sky. Kamen had spoken of some sort of military craft based there . . .
“Run!” Jason shouted. And without waiting to see if he was being obeyed, he sprinted for the ramp and pounded up to the main deck, and forward toward the bridge. There was no time to contemplate the loss of Hamner’s steady competence, nor even any time to come up with an acceptable way to give the ship’s captain an order on his own bridge. “Raise ship!” he snapped. “Now!”
“But . . .” Palanivel gestured at the scene in the viewscreen. A fresh wave of panicked slaves, desperately trying to reach the fence, had surged into his party, sweeping them apart, forcing them to struggle to reach the ship. “Some of your men are still out there!”
“We’ll have to leave them,” Jason forced himself to say. It was one more thing he might have time to try to come to terms with later. “There are fighters of some kind on the way. I don’t know whether they’re purely atmospheric or have space capability. But either way, if you don’t move fast none of us are going to get away.”
Palanivel needed no further urging. He rapped out a series of orders and slapped controls. Even as the ramp was retracting, the ship rose, rotated, and swept up and away. As soon as it had risen high enough to do so safely, Palanivel activated the photon thrusters, and under the combined thrust of that and grav repulsion De Ruyter soared aloft. In the view-aft the chaotic slave compound below, still illuminated by flames, shrank rapidly.
In that same viewscreen the fighters had also engaged their reaction drives. Behind them a larger shape was visible: Sto
neman’s transport. Jason wasn’t worried about that; De Ruyter was faster and better armed. As for the fighters . . . Jason knew he could do no good here. He departed the bridge, leaving Palanivel to seek the Primary Limit, and went below to see to his men.
Mondrago had made it, as had the three British sergeants and two Sikhs. Neither Gurdev Singh nor Bakiyev had; they, along with the rest of the Sikhs, were either dead or recaptured.
“Did you see what happened to the others?” Jason asked Mondrago. The nineteenth-century men, British and Indian alike, were sprawled on the deck in the throes of reaction and strangeness.
“No . . . I was a little busy. In fact I barely got away—jumped for it and grabbed the end of the ramp just as it was swinging shut, and rolled inside just before it closed. In fact . . .” Mondrago’s voice trailed off, and he stared past Jason’s shoulder. Jason turned, and saw a small slender figure silhouetted in the hatch.
For an instant, Chantal Frey gazed wide-eyed at the ragged, wildly bearded men. “I had almost given up hope,” she whispered. Then she and Mondrago were in each other’s arms. For a time, no one disturbed them.
After a while Mondrago, still holding her, turned to Jason, for her presence had reminded him of something. “Sir . . . I know you had other things on your mind at the time. But when this ship was down there in the compound, wasn’t there a brief period when you could have activated our TRDs, and the ship’s—” (a glance at Chantal) “—and sent us all back to Zirankhu in the linear present?” He paused thoughtfully. “Of course, I don’t know the range of the ‘control’ function of your TRD, so I don’t know if . . .” Then his expression went blank as the implications hit him.
“You’ve grasped it,” said Jason with a bitter smile. “Depending on how far it is to these mines and agricultural plantations where they’ve been taken, I might or might not have been able to retrieve Armasova and Bermudez. But what about Rojas?”
“Rojas?” exclaimed Chantal.
“Yes. She’s alive. It’s a long story. But the point is, she has no TRD. The only way to retrieve her is to get her inside this ship.” Jason decided not to burden Chantal with the knowledge that the fact that a similar consideration, applied to her, had been a major factor in keeping them in this time for this long.
“Well, sir . . .” Mondrago let the thought go unspoken.
“No,” said Jason firmly. “I won’t leave her stranded as a slave in this time unless I’m convinced there’s no hope whatsoever of getting her back. Not to mention the fact that we’re really out of range for Armasova and Bermudez by now.” He reflected that Hamner’s death had slightly simplified his problems, only to reject the thought with a spasm of self-disgust for having thought it. He dropped his voice and spoke to Mondrago and Chantal alone. “And besides, there’s the little matter of . . .” He gestured at the British sergeants and the Sikhs.
“I was meaning to ask about these people,” said Chantal with a puzzled look.
“Again, it’s a long story. But the point is, there are some very real ethical issues involved in taking them into the twenty-fourth century with us. They’d be stuck there unless we returned them to their own time—which we could hardly do, with all they now know.” Jason let them chew on that for a moment, while reflecting that this barely scratched the surface of the ethical issues. “And at any rate, I’m not yet prepared to give up on the possibility of doing some good here and now. Speaking of which, I need to get back to the bridge and find out if that possibility still exists. Alexandre, you handle the introductions.” And he hurried out.
“We left the fighters behind just after going into stealth,” Palanivel told him. “Maybe they couldn’t reacquire us. Or maybe they don’t have long-range deep-space capability. Either way, they’re returning to the surface.”
“Good,” sighed Jason, gazing at the receding globe of Drakar in the view-aft. “But let’s not rely exclusively on those possibilities. After we pass the Primary Limit, take us further out and put us into an orbit in the outer system where we can plan our next move.”
“Right.”
They had their first decent meal in what seemed like forever, and badly needed showers, shaves and haircuts. The British and Sikhs, who had been flabbergasted by the showers, had been assigned to the commando squad’s now-vacant quarters, and were adjusting to the unfamiliar amenities, when Jason received an urgent call to come to the bridge.
Palanivel wore a grim look. “Our sensors are picking up something entering this system—something big.”
“Another of those Transhumanist transports?” Jason was perplexed, for Stoneman had said his was the final delivery here.
“No, it’s much too big for that. We’re not close enough to get any detailed sensor readings, much less a visual, but we can infer how massive it must be.”
Jason looked at the figure, and emitted a low whistle. Then he and Palanivel studied the newcomer’s course.
“It’s not headed for Planet B,” said Palanivel.
“Or Drakar, as the Transhumanists call it,” said Jason absently. “No, it seems to be following a search pattern. Let’s get into an intercept course, so we can get more data.”
De Ruyter eased out of its orbit under full stealth. As the gap between her and the mystery ship narrowed, it became clear that the latter’s inferred mass was, if anything, on the conservative side. More details were hard to come by, for the target had some heavy-duty ECM . . . but not, it seemed, an invisibility field. Jason was puzzling over that lack, which seemed to remind him of something . . .
He was still trying to put his finger on it when De Ruyter shuddered and ominous sounds came from the engineering spaces.
“Tractor beam!” Palanivel gasped.
It was a truism that the long-range focused application of artificial gravity known as a tractor beam had the same effect on the negative mass drive as a planetary gravity field. In other words, if a ship was tractored it was the equivalent of coming within a planet’s Primary Limit with the drive engaged—a sure-fire career ender for a space captain. It resulted in the drive’s immediate shutdown, usually involving damage in varying degrees.
This, clearly, was what had happened to De Ruyter. While Palanivel took a report from his engineering officer, Jason marveled at the range at which it had been done. In addition to being big, the stranger was clearly a purpose-built warship, mounting a massive tractor beam generator and, doubtless, weapons to the same scale.
Palanivel finished his colloquy with the engineer and turned to Jason. “It could be worse. The damage to the drive is repairable. But it will take time.”
“That’s exactly what we haven’t got. Try using photon thrusters to break loose.”
But, as Jason more than half-expected, this proved futile. Inexorably, De Ruyter was drawn toward her captor, which soon became visible in the viewscreen under maximum magnification.
Mondrago and Chantal joined them. Mondrago didn’t even need to ask what had happened. “The Transhumanists?” he queried.
“No,” said Jason. “It can’t be them. I don’t know . . .” His voice trailed to a halt as he stared at the slowly expanding image of the strange ship. It could now be seen to be roughly an oblate spheroid, but with twin drive nacelles on the underside. No details could be made out, but . . .
All at once, Jason did know.
So, evidently, did Mondrago. “Am I losing my mind,” he breathed, “or Is that—?”
“Yes,” Jason nodded, not wanting to believe it, unable to take his eyes off the totally unanticipated horror in the viewscreen.
“What are you two talking about?” Palanivel demanded.
“Superintendent Mondrago and I have seen a ship like that. We saw it in the seventeenth century. It was much bigger than this one—a battlestation rather than a ship, really—but the same design philosophy. That, Captain, is a warship of the Tuova’Zhonglu Teloi.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Palanivel stared uncomprehendingly. “But I thought the Te
loi all died centuries ago, long before this era!”
“So does everyone else, except a select few,” Jason sighed. This was no time for quibbling about security clearances or for wondering what Rutherford would say, and it looked as though Palanivel was going to have a definite need to know. “Since my expedition to Bronze Age Greece, it’s been public knowledge that the Teloi were the reality behind the Olympian gods and all the other versions of the Indo-European pantheon, and that they had created Homo sapiens. But we’ve tried to be as low-keyed as possible about it, and I think most people are still in denial about the second part . . . or maybe it’s just that it still hasn’t registered on the popular consciousness. And we’ve emphasized the fact—and it is a fact—that the last of those ‘gods’ were long dead at least as far back as the seventeenth century.
“What we haven’t made public is something else I learned on that seventeenth-century expedition to the Caribbean. The Teloi who, for their own crazy reasons, marooned themselves on Earth a hundred thousand years ago were the members of the Oratioi’Zhonglu, a . . . well, apparently ‘zhonglu’ is untranslatable. A subculture, or kinship group, or association, or . . . hell, club, for all I know. At any rate, while they were on Earth in their self-imposed exile, playing at being gods, their race entered into its ultimately suicidal war with the Nagommo. The military formed its own ‘zhonglu,’ the Tuova’Zhonglu, lements of which escaped the final cataclysm.
“That was sometime between the fourth and second millennia B.C.—probably a little more than forty-five hundred years before our time, hence four thousand years ago as of now, although we can’t narrow it down any more precisely than that. Ever since, the Tuova’Zhonglu have been prowling the spaceways, stewing in their own hate, telling themselves that they didn’t really lose the war—they were betrayed by the other Teloi, who’d proved themselves unworthy by failing to give the military their unstinting support and unquestioning obedience. As far as they’re concerned, the near-extermination of the Teloi was a good thing, purging decadent, effete types like the Oratioi’Zhonglu and leaving only themselves—the purified and distilled essence of the race.”