Soldiers Out of Time

by Steve White

  “This time, I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Jason remarked.

  “Sir, we’d better get going,” said Mondrago. “Remember what he said about the fighters.”

  Jason nodded. He turned to McCready and Hazeltine and, with a sudden inspiration for which he despised himself, pointed at Carver. “You and your men stay here and take care of him. We’ll bring the shuttle back here for you.”

  “Right,” said McCready, although his eyes held a puzzled look. Jason could not meet them.

  The first hint of light, behind the mountains, was starting to turn the eastern horizon pale as Jason, Mondrago, Rojas, Armasova and Bermudez left the compound behind and headed east. Jason raised the shuttle pilot on his communicator and spoke in Teloi. “We’re on the way. I’ll leave this communicator on. Home in on it.”

  The long-range communicator had a tiny vision screen. The pilot’s face wore the standard Tuova’Zhonglu expression as he said, “Acknowledged.”

  Presently, the shuttle appeared over the low ridge to the east, visible against the half-light. As it approached, Rojas stared. “Jason, what—?”

  “It’s a Teloi surface-to-orbit shuttle.” As her mouth fell open, he hastened on. “I told you it’s a long story. For now, suffice it to say that we’ve got an arrangement of sorts with a warship of the Teloi. They’re going to destroy the Transhumanist colony for us, and this shuttle will get us up to orbit. Our next problem is going to be getting you aboard De Ruyter so I can activate the TRDs. That’s going to take some improvisation.”

  As he spoke, the shuttle drifted down on grav repulsion and hovered just high enough to allow its lowered landing ramp to touch the ground. Weak with relief, they staggered toward it.

  It continued to hover. Nothing happened.

  “Go ahead!” Jason snapped into his communicator to the pilot. “Lower the ramp! Let us aboard!”

  There was no response. The ramp remained sealed.

  Then the shuttle rose, swung about, and swooped away. The apertures of its photon thrusters came alight and it accelerated rapidly, seeking the sky.

  “Stop!” yelled Jason. Silence answered him.

  They stood staring as the glow of the reaction drive dwindled overhead and vanished.

  “Sir . . .” said Mondrago. He pointed behind them.

  From where they stood, the lights of the Transhumanist settlement and its spacefield were visible in the distance to the northwest. The fighters were rising aloft.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Teloi ship and De Ruyter were above this hemisphere in their common orbit—it had been one factor in the timing of the raid—and Jason was frantically trying to raise Odin when the formation of fighters came overhead. Ignoring the small group on the ground, they rose at a steep angle of attack and soared spaceward.

  “That’s one small favor,” said Rojas. “They spotted the shuttle and are pursuing it.”

  Jason was in no mood to be encouraged. “They’ll be back,” he predicted. Ceasing his futile efforts to reach the Teloi, he switched frequencies and raised De Ruyter.

  Palanivel appeared in the communicator’s vision screen, with Chantal behind him. “What’s happening up there?” Jason demanded.

  “Why, nothing, Commander,” the young captain replied. “They’re still tractoring us, and—”

  The image and the voice vanished, replaced by snow and a screech of static. Then, after a moment, an image came back into focus . . . but it was the face of Odin, against the backdrop of his bridge. Some kind of override feature, Jason told himself. The Teloi face wore an expression that caused Jason to recall a snatch of poetry: “sneer of cold command.”

  “Send your shuttle back down here!” Jason snapped. “For some reason the pilot—”

  “Silence, you presumptuous ape! Do not attempt to deceive a higher form of life, your creators and natural masters! Our shuttle pilot saw that your group consisted only of humans. So obviously you either lied about Teloi prisoners or failed in your efforts to rescue them. Either way, you are of no further moment to us. The pilot was, of course, under instructions to leave you and return to orbit in this not entirely unforeseen event. The fighters pursuing the shuttle are even now coming into range of our antishipping weapons . . .”

  Mondrago touched Jason’s arm and pointed up toward the sky, where a number of stars still shone. All at once those stars were joined by a cluster of fireflies that immediately winked out of existence. The fighters, Jason thought, must have vanished like moths in a flame at the touch of that ship’s gigawatt laser beams.

  “And now,” Odin’s relentless voice continued, “I will deal with the Transhumanist colony here. Since this world may turn out to be of use later, I will not use nuclear weapons. Nor will they be necessary. Kinetic energy weapons should suffice.” Then, as an afterthought: “But first I will rid myself of the nuisance of having to spare your ship a certain amount of attention.” And then, abruptly, Odin cut the connection.

  It took some fraction of a second for what Odin had said to register on Jason. Then, with trembling fingers, he raised De Ruyter.

  “Commander, I’m glad to see you again.” Palanivel’s face looked troubled, as did Chantal’s, looking over his shoulder. Beyond them, the bridge’s viewscreen was visible. The Teloi ship, too near to require magnification but tiny despite its size, floated in it. “Something’s going on up here. They just fired on some small craft coming up from the planet, and now their ship is precessing as if it’s turning toward us, and—”

  “Go to full boost with your photon thrusters!” yelled Jason, horribly aware of the futility of what he was ordering. “Break free of that tractor beam if you possibly can!”

  Palanivel opened his mouth to reply. As he did, something flashed on the flank of the Teloi ship.

  The image in the vision screen shuddered sickeningly, and through the audio came a deafening roar, and the indescribable sound of tearing metal. As Jason watch in horror-stricken helplessness, the bridge filled with smoke and showers of sparks from cut, flailing electrical lines. A structural member collapsed with a crash behind Palanivel and he fell forward and collapsed atop the pickup, so nothing could be seen of Chantal.

  “Chantal!” shouted Mondrago desolately.

  Then the snow and the static returned, followed by the image of Odin. The Teloi did not gloat, any more than a man would gloat for having squashed an insect.

  “I have disabled your ship,” he stated, “so I no longer need expend any energy on a tractor beam to hold it.”

  Mondrago shoved past Jason’s shoulder, grasping the communicator. “You goddamned soulless butcher!”

  Odin ignored him. “I will now proceed with the elimination of the human presence on this planet. Afterwards, we will examine the wreckage of your ship for any information it may yield. And then I believe I will continue on to Earth. It is evident that your species has advanced to the point where it can pose a significant inconvenience to us. It should therefore be cut off at its source. This ship will undoubtedly be insufficient in itself to deal with the problem. But we can reconnoiter, and subsequently an adequate force can be dispatched.” All at once madness flickered in the strange alien eye and quivered in the disturbing alien voice. “Creating you was a mistake of those decadent fools of the Oratioi’Zhonglu. Now we of the Tuova’Zhonglu will correct that mistake.” And with that the screen went black.

  Jason started to try to reestablish the connection, but then halted. What’s the point? He turned and met the stunned faces of his companions. Mondrago’s eyes had glazed over; he had gone beyond fury into shock.

  With nothing better to do, they looked back the way they had come. Downslope to the northwest, the fire-illuminated slave compound was like a disturbed hive as the escapees swarmed away, seeking places to hide. Some of them went in the grav carriers, doubtless driven by twenty-fourth-century people. Still further northwest, visible by virtue of their somewhat higher elevation, were the lights of the spacefield and the Transhumanis
t town.

  For several moments, nothing happened.

  Then, overhead in the slowly lightening sky, Jason glimpsed a rapidly descending star.

  He only had time for that glimpse before it became a straight, eye-dazzling lightning bar that impaled the town.

  Kinetic energy weapon, he thought automatically, recalling Odin’s words. Once referred to, four hundred years ago when the idea was first thought of, as a flying crowbar.

  A small object of super-dense metal, descending at orbital velocity and blazing with air friction, resembled what late-twentieth-century people had thought, mistakenly, a laser weapon would look like when it hit a planetary surface. And at that velocity, an explosive warhead would have been superfluous.

  “Another one!” said Rojas, pointing upward. Instead of following her gesture, Jason put his goggles back on and set them for maximum magnification. He focused on the town just in time to see one of the weapon emplacements consumed by the strike. Another was burning.

  Precision strikes, he thought. As he watched, he saw the Transhumanists’ slave transport lift off in an attempt to get away. It was barely aloft when a line of unbearably intense light speared it and it erupted in a holocaust of flame, its debris showering the field in a rain of fire.

  Staring at the death agonies of the Transhumanist colony, Jason barely noticed when the communicator beeped for attention.

  What the hell does Odin want now? he wondered as he pressed “Receive.”

  But the face that looked out of the vision screen was the soot-smudged, blood-streaked one of Chantal Frey, against the backdrop of De Ruyter’s bridge, half-ruined but with its viewscreen still showing the Teloi ship.

  “Chantal!” Jason yelped. At that sound, Modrago practically leapt from despairing lethargy to sudden wild hope, rushing to Jason’s side and looking over one of his shoulders as Rojas looked over the other one. All three of them started to speak, but she cut them off.

  “Listen! There isn’t much time. Palanivel is dead, as is almost all the crew. Life support is going fast. The drive is wrecked, and the weapons are inoperable. But,” she added, her eyes flashing with a strange light, “somebody is still alive back in the engineering spaces. And he says he can give me power in the photon thrusters. And remember, I’ve learned the rudiments of piloting this ship.”

  Afterwards, Jason was always certain that at first he genuinely didn’t understand. “Chantal, what are you talking about? You can’t possibly get away on photon thrusters. Where would you go? And besides, the Teloi would blast you apart before you could get—”

  Then, with almost physical force, understanding crashed home. And from the stiffening of the bodies to right and left of him, he knew Mondrago and Rojas also understood.

  “Chantal,” he resumed in a voice charged with urgency, “you mustn’t to this. There’s no point—it can’t work. Their weapons can—”

  “Maybe not.” She was strapping herself into the pilot’s couch and punching buttons even as she spoke. “They think they’ve totally crippled this ship, so they’re probably not paying any attention to it. This will be so unexpected that there’ll be a delay before they fire. Hopefully, the element of surprise will be enough.” She paused in her preparations and turned to face the pickup directly. “And besides, I have to do it. This Teloi ship can’t be allowed to get away. Now that they know what we humans are capable of, they won’t stop here. They’ll continue on to Earth. And if they report that Earth is a potential threat, God knows what the Tuova’Zhonglu will do.”

  She wasn’t listening to Odin, when he said the same thing, Jason thought. And she knows they won’t attack Earth now, in the nineteenth century—the Observer Effect prohibits that. But it doesn’t preclude a reconnaissance that nobody on 1897 Earth notices and records. And it also won’t stop the Tuova’Zhonglu from subsequently sending an expedition, on their centuries-long movement schedules, that arrives at Earth after our time. She figured it all out on her own. Why am I not surprised?

  Mondrago leaned forward, as though to power the sheer force of his will into and through the communicator. “Chantal, no! Don’t try it—just lay low!”

  To Jason’s astonishment, Rojas added her voice. “Chantal, please don’t! We’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” asked Chantal, wiping the blood from a scalp cut out of her eyes. “You have no way to come up here and get me. And my TRD and the ship’s are out of range of Jason’s control function. Anyway, as I said, the life support won’t last much longer.” Her expression changed, and she spoke to Mondrago alone. “So you see, Alexandre dear, I’m already dead. Think of me that way. And remember that I loved you.”

  And with that she turned away from the communicator to the control board and punched more buttons. All at once, her small frail body was visibly pressed back into her chair by acceleration. The inertial compensators must be dead, thought Jason in the midst of his swirling maelstrom of emotions. And in the viewscreen in front of her, the Teloi ship swung into line, dead ahead.

  She’ll never make it, Jason thought desolately. She’ll be vaporized by their defenses first. She’ll have died for nothing.

  Unless . . . maybe a brief distraction . . .

  Yes. That might offer her a chance.

  I must give her that chance.

  These thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant. In appreciably the same instant, he cut her off.

  “What?” Mondrago blurted into his ear. Before the Corsican could say or do anything more, he raised Odin.

  He had feared the Teloi would simply disdain to answer. But the arrogant alien face appeared on the screen, wearing a look of exasperated irritation.

  “There’s something you need to know,” said Jason without preamble.

  “What could an animal such as yourself possibly have to say that I need to know?”

  Behind Odin, across the control center, Jason could see another Teloi gesturing for his captain’s attention. Odin, facing the comm screen, didn’t see the gestures.

  “There’s . . . there’s another Transhumanist installation on the other side of the planet,” Jason desperately improvised. “It holds most of their military capability. You can expect retaliation from it shortly.”

  The lower-ranking Teloi’s gestures had now grown frantic. But he was behind and to the right of Odin, who of course had no peripheral vision in that direction.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Odin seemed amused.

  “If you’ll agree to pick us up, I’ll tell you where it is.”

  Odin sank back into his chair, exuding complacent contempt. “This is a pathetic lie. And at any rate, why would you—”

  But now the subordinate was committing what had to be a major breach of discipline by shouting, and pointing at what must be a vision screen outside the comm pickup. Odin, his attention finally engaged, turned, and his gaze followed that pointing finger. He froze with stunned realization, and swung back to face Jason. His look of horror was almost human.

  Jason laughed in his face.

  “Die, you miserable piece of filth!” he snarled, and with a savage gesture switched Odin off and Chantal back on. In De Ruyter’s viewscreen, the Teloi ship was swelling with soul-shaking rapidity.

  Mondrago snatched the communicator from Jason’s hands. “No, Chantal!” he screamed.

  For the barest instant, as the Teloi ship expanded to fill the viewscreen, Chantal turned her head with an effort and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes and Mondrago’s met. And then the communicator’s screen went black.

  “No!” Mondrago repeated, shaking the communicator frantically.

  Did the ship’s communicator give out? Jason wondered. Or did she switch it off, not wanting Alexandre to see?

  He was still wondering when a light overhead caught his eye. An intensely bright new star appeared in the sky, instantly growing into a dazzling mini-sun, and a glowing halo of superheated gas and debris expanded swiftly outward from it before dissipating into nothingness. Then the n
ew celestial intruder guttered and went out.

  With a barely human wail, Mondrago sank to the ground, a heap of despair and grief, heaving convulsively. Rojas and the commandos knelt around him. Rojas’ face was wet with tears.

  Was she still conscious at the end? Jason asked himself. Or had she already passed out from the G forces? I will never know. So I will believe the latter.

  I must believe it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Dawn was laying salmon-colored streaks across the pale blue sky when they stumbled back into the wrecked, largely abandoned slave compound and sought out the British and Sikhs. As Bermudez tended Carver, the others confronted Jason.

  “What’s happening?” McCready demanded. “First those lightning bolts, or whatever they were, started coming down, and then we saw that bloody great blaze of light in the sky, and then the bolts stopped, and . . . well, anyway, where’s the shuttle?”

  Jason felt drained of everything, including the capacity to lie. “It’s been destroyed,” he said in a dull voice. “So has our ship. So has the Teloi ship. I’ll tell you the details later.”

  Their reactions varied. Carver, in his pain, blinked with bewilderment. McCready frowned intensely as the implications of what Jason had said slowly sank home. Hazeltine already grasped those implications, judging from the look of grave comprehension with which he met Jason’s eyes. Gurdev Singh was unreadable.

  Before any of them could speak, a grav carrier approached and came to a halt. Ari Kamen got out, looking relieved.

  “Commander Thanou! I’m glad I found you. What’s happened? What were those . . . missiles from space? Did your ship fire them?”

  Kamen, Jason recalled, was no military man. “They were kinetic projectiles. And no, it wasn’t our ship that carried out the strike. It was the Teloi.”