by Simon Hawke
Land shook his head. “I’m not sure I’m understanding you.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Why should they care about preserving history? If they’re criminals, deserters-”
“There are many reasons why people join the Underground,” said Finn. “Some of them just couldn’t take being soldiers anymore. Others became soldiers because they thought they’d find adventure, but what they found wasn’t exactly what they had expected, so they deserted to find what they were looking for. Still others prefer living in the past, or in a past, to living in their own time. Just because they’re in the Underground, that doesn’t mean they’re evil or criminals in the sense you mean. I liked Hunter a great deal. And he helped us that one time. He saved our lives.”
“There’s still more to it,” Lucas said. “Suppose, Ned, you got on board a ship heading out of Boston on a whaling expedition. You don’t really expect Boston to change very much in the time you’ll be away. You come back and it’s still the same old Boston, same old streets and houses, same people, nothing’s really changed. But imagine you’re in Boston right now and you decide to take a trip to Boston the way it will be three hundred years in the future. If you’re in the Underground, that wouldn’t be very different from going on your whaling expedition and then coming back. Boston three hundred years from now would still be familiar to you because you know its history. You’ve probably been there before. Only what would happen if someone like Drakov succeeded in altering the course of history somehow? Then the Boston you arrive in might not be the same place you expected you would find. It may no longer even be there. Some interference with the past may have caused a chain of events to take place which would result in a completely different future, a completely different world. In order for the people in the Underground to be able to exist, they need to protect the world they exist in. Do you understand?”
Land exhaled heavily. “I think so. If I’d not seen what I’ve seen, I’d say all this was mad.”
“It is mad,” Finn said. “But we’ve got to live with it.”
“If I take your meaning,” said Land, “these people in the Underground are like the gypsy-folks, except that they travel not only from place to place, but from one century to another?”
“That’s it, exactly,” Lucas said. “That’s a very good way of putting it.”
Land sighed. “Lord, what a life it must be! How many of them do you figure there be?”
“Nobody knows,” said Finn. “Thousands.”
“And there’s no way to tell who they are?”
“Could you tell who we were, Ned?” said Lucas. “We’re just people. Who’d suspect the truth? Who’d believe it? Even after all you’d seen, you didn’t want to believe it. It sounds crazy.”
Land stood up and leaned on the railing of the veranda, staring out to the sea, glinting in the moonlight. “Part of me keeps waiting to wake up and find all this is a dream,” he said. “This beats any tall tale I ever heard. If I ever told anyone about this, I’d be put in a madhouse for sure. From now on, I don’t think I will be so quick to not believe things. If someone tells me he saw a sea monster breathing fire, until I know better, I will think that there just may be a sea monster that breathes fire!” He looked down, then quickly leaned out over the railing and glanced from side to side. “Look here! There are no guards! Quick, now’s our chance!”
He vaulted the railing.
“Ned!” shouted Lucas.
“Hell,” said Finn, jumping to his feet. “We’d better catch him before he gets in trouble.”
They jumped down to the ground, rolled, came up running and caught Land after a hard sprint of about seventy-five yards. Finn grabbed the harpooner and spun him around.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.
Land looked at him as if he had lost his senses. “What do you mean? This is our chance to get away!”
“And go where?” said Andre.
Land looked blank for a moment, then he snapped his fingers. “There are some of Drakov’s crew about,” he said. “A lot of them will be drunk. We can take them and steal those things they use for traveling through time! We’ll find one, knock him senseless, then-”
“Ned, your heart’s in the right place, but you haven’t thought it through,” said Lucas. “Besides, you really don’t understand how it all works.”
“But you said-”
“It wouldn’t be much trouble to knock a couple of Drakov’s crew out and take their warp discs,” Lucas said. “You’re right as far as that goes. But we can’t get back aboard the submarine without knowing where it is. Even if we could, Drakov still has a crew aboard it and they looked pretty capable to me.”
“Couldn’t you go back to your own time and return with more of your people?” Land said. “You could take Drakov and his entire crew-”
“Again, not a bad idea,” said Lucas, “but nothing short of an armed assault would take Drakov here on Barataria. Lafitte and his people would side with Drakov and fight the invasion. We can’t touch Lafitte. The British will be moving on New Orleans before too long and without Lafitte and his men, General Jackson will lose the battle and history will be changed. Drakov’s already interfered with history to a dangerous, perhaps even irreversible extent. You see, we’re the ones concerned with preserving history. Drakov doesn’t care. He has the advantage because of that and he knows it. There’s no way to attack him here and at the same time guarantee that no one on Lafitte’s side will be killed.”
“But if you were to bring back ships,” said Land, “like Drakov’s ships travel through time, so could yours! You could-”
“We could, but it wouldn’t do much good,” said Finn. “Those ships would still have to find the Nautilus. The sub marine is well-armed and difficult to detect. At first sign of pursuit, it could escape to another time. Remember that the Nautilus, the Valkyrie, Drakov and all his men can travel through time independently. They can all escape to his secret base and without knowing where it is or in which time period, there’s no way we could follow.”
“Is there nothing we can do?” said Land. “If we can’t act and if we have no weapons, then we’re helpless!”
“Maybe not, Ned,” Lucas said. “But we need to know more before we can act. When we began this, we thought it was just a matter of destroying the submarine, which is difficult enough. We need to know the full extent of Drakov’s power. We need to know his plans. He knows we can’t afford to try anything until we know where his base is. And when he takes us there, his guard will be up. But he may be overconfident. The thing to do now is find Martingale and make him tell us what is going on.”
“How do you know you can trust him?” Land said.
“I don’t,” said Lucas. “I’m still worried about that graft patch he gave me. If it was a listening device, we’ll know soon enough. I’ve got a lot of questions for Mr. Barry Martingale. If this is all part of a ruse by Drakov, I want to know before we reach his base.”
They continued down the path, through the village, toward the boats. In the distance, they could still hear the sounds of revelry on the beach by Lafitte’s house, but now the chirping of the crickets by the sides of the path was louder. As they neared the boats, still louder sounds reached them. Gunshots and men shouting. The sounds not of festivity, but of fighting.
“Come on!” said Lucas, breaking into a run.
The docks were the scene of a pitched battle. Terrified blacks ran past them, others cowered in the boats, still others lay dead among white bodies on the dock. Out on the water, several boats rowing out to the Valkyrie were being attacked by about ten pirogues, and the sounds of the blacks screaming and the shots fired back and forth carried across the bay. On the dock, Martingale was in the thick of it. He had emptied both his pistols and was flailing away with his sword, keeping a small group of men at bay. He was holding one in front of him, as a shield, his arm clamped tightly around the man’s throat. The man he held was
dead, shot several times by his own compatriots in an effort to shoot Martingale, who kept swinging the body around, trying to interpose it between himself and his attackers, able to do so only because he was on a narrow section of dock that would not allow him to be surrounded. Even so, he had been shot. They could see him bleeding from a crease in his scalp and there was blood on his exposed shoulder. It would be all over for him in another moment.
One of his attackers had gone into the water and swam out to the end of the dock, climbing up on it so he could get behind Martingale. Andre pulled out her knife and let fly. The blade whizzed past Martingale’s left ear, missing him by inches, and embedded itself to the hilt in the swimmer’s chest. He cried out and fell back into the water. Ned and Finn drew their swords and ran forward to help Martingale. As Andre charged the men who were attempting to shoot him down, Lucas threw his own dagger, wounding one of them in the shoulder. Then Andre was on them and Lucas followed on her heels, turning the tide of the fight.
The odds had evened out now. Land knocked one man into the water, charging him as he reloaded. Finn disarmed one man, ran another through with his sword and, seeing reinforcements arrive, Martingale dropped the corpse he had been using as a shield and joined them on the offensive. He fought in a style the pirates had never encountered before, saber-fencing combined with martial arts. They were no match for trained commandos and, now that they no longer outnumbered their intended victim, they took flight.
Martingale took a deep breath as he watched them running off down the beach into the darkness. “Thanks,” he said. “I thought I’d bought it for sure.”
“See you’ve used a katana at one time,” said Finn, remarking on his style with the sword. “What happened?”
Out on the water, the pirogues had seized the boats and were now pulling toward the Valkyrie, intent on boarding her.
“Gambi’s men,” said Martingale, ripping a section of cloth from the shirt of one of the dead men and using it to stanch the flow of blood from his shoulder. “They came at me so fast I didn’t have a chance.”
“Here, sit down,” said Lucas. “Let me see that wound.”
“I’ll live,” said Martingale. “I’ve had lots worse. Lucky for me those clowns couldn’t shoot straight. Watch this, they’re in for one hell of a surprise in those pirogues.”
As the canoes drew closer to the Valkyrie, keeping spread out to minimize the effects of cannon fire if the ship opened up on them, there seemed to be no resistance from the ship. Then a sharp, bright beam of coherent light lanced out from the bow of the Valkyrie and hit one of the canoes. A second later, it was followed by a blast of white hot plasma as the auto-pulser, locked in by the laser-tracking circuit, systematically began to pick off the pirogues. One boat became awash in searing light, then it was gone, leaving nothing but smoke and some residual flaming plasma burning out upon the surface of the water. The screams of Gambi’s men echoed across the bay; the remaining pirogues turned and pulled for their lives, but nothing could save them.
“If Gambi’s lucky, he died out there,” said Martingale. “Quicker and cleaner than what Lafitte will do to him if he survived. Guess he saw an opportunity to seize a ship and a nice cargo of slaves, to boot. Too bad he picked the wrong ship.”
“That bullet’s going to have to come out,” said Lucas, examining Martingale’s shoulder. “I can’t do it here.”
“We’ll go out to the ship,” said Martingale. “There are medical supplies aboard. Besides, someone’s got to go out and get that boatload of blacks. It’s drifting.”
One of the other boats containing slaves had been hit by the auto-pulser from the ship. The remaining boat was slowly being carried away by the current, the blacks aboard howling in fear, not knowing what to do.
They helped Martingale into a boat and rowed out after the slaves. Martingale cursed. “We lost several men. Maybe von Kampf, too. Drakov’s going to be furious. Our own fault. We should have been more careful, knowing Gambi was around.”
“What are the slaves for?” Finn said. “Damn it, Martingale, you’d better start leveling with us right now.”
“Same thing slaves have always been for,” Martingale said. “Cheap labor. Drakov needs them at the base.”
“Where is the base?” said Lucas.
“Small island off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, in the early 19th century,” said Martingale. “Visitors are discouraged by the slaves Drakov buys from Lafitte. The area is known for having cannibals and even though Drakov’s slaves aren’t, they play the part real well.”
“If you’ve known where it is all along, why haven’t you done anything?” said Finn. “Why hasn’t the Underground reported it to us?”
“It’s not that simple,” Martingale said. “The timing must be right. The Doctor will explain it all.”
“That’s another thing,” said Lucas. “Who is the doctor?”
“His name is Dr. Robert Darkness,” Martingale said. “He’s the inventor of the warp grenade.”
Martingale sat on the edge of the table while Lucas bandaged him. Two men stood guard on the deck of the Valkyrie while Count Grigori von Kampf, who had been slightly wounded in the battle of the boats, led the others in a search for the slaves who had escaped during the fight. Martingale had been wounded in several places. Two bullets had been lodged in his body and he had sustained several sword cuts, but he carried on as though such injuries were a part of his daily routine. While Lucas worked, only an occasional grimace or grunt from Martingale gave evidence of his feeling any pain.
“So the mysterious inventor of the warp grenade joined the Underground,” said Finn. “Christ, no wonder they’ve classified everything about him, including his name.”
Martingale shook his head. “You’ve got that wrong,” he said. “Darkness isn’t part of the Underground. He isn’t part of anything. Years ago, he just split the scene. Took off for some remote corner of the galaxy. He’s real strange, Delaney. All he ever wanted was to get as far away from people as it was possible to get, but he wanted it both ways. He wanted to be able to deal with people when he felt like it, only on his own terms.”
“Sounds like what a lot of people want,” said Andre.
“True,” said Martingale, “only Darkness did it. He was working on temporal translocation around the same time Mensinger was, only he was going at it from another angle. He started out working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission.”
“That isn’t possible,” said Finn.
“Hey, don’t tell me, I’m no scientist,” said Martingale. “Tell the Doctor. He’s been doing it for years. What he came up with was a means of communication at a speed six hundred times faster than the speed of light. That still meant a delay in transmission, though. A five-second time lag over thirty-six hundred light seconds or a one-year delay in messages at a distance of six hundred light years. He wanted it to be instant. He got involved in some very obscure mathematics, working from the Georg Cantor theory of transfinite numbers. He discovered a solution. He found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Instantaneous transmission. Going from Point A to Point B without having to cover the distance in between. Only he wasn’t satisfied with just having achieved instant tachyon TV communication. He wanted to travel.”
“Wait a minute,” Lucas said, pausing in his ministrations. “You’re telling us he did all this before Mensinger invented the chronoplate?”
“I don’t know if it was before or about the same time,” said Martingale. “It was certainly before the chronoplate was perfected.”
“And no one knew about this?”
“How would anyone know unless Darkness told them?” Martingale said. “He didn’t give a damn. He just took off for deep space like some Flying Dutchman and started living life according to his own rules. But he still wanted to be able to keep in touch, so he started working on a process by which the human body could be turned into tachyons which would
depart at 60 °C along the direction of the tachyon beam through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. His chief concern was that conversion to tachyons would violate the law of uncertainty.”
“How do you mean?” said Finn.
“Well, the way he explained it to me was that if you take one hundred eighty pounds of human being and one hundred eighty pounds of bacteria and put them into a genetic blender, the result would be indistinguishable. His main concern was whether the RNA and DNA would reassemble themselves in the appropriate order at the appropriate time and place.”
“Same thing Mensinger was worried about in terms of chronoplate transition,” Finn said.
“Exactly. Because if they didn’t, what might materialize would be a blob. He was also worried about the reassembly process itself, since there wouldn’t be a receiver. He solved this by incorporating a timing mechanism into the tachyon conversion, which reassembled him at the moment of arrival based on time coordinates of transition. He focused the beam by means of gravitational lenses scattered throughout the galaxy. But while the uncertainty principle didn’t trip the Doctor up, it didn’t turn out as he imagined, that he had invented the ultimate form of transportation. Mensinger did that. Darkness discovered instead that the taching process was ultimately restrained by a little known law of physics, called the law of baryon conservation. While he arrived “in corpus,” he was unable to move. He appeared much like a holographic projection or a distant ghost seen underwater. A figure frozen in time and trapped by the laws of the universe.”
“You mean he’s insubstantial?” Andre said.
“Well, no, though he can be, if he wants to. He can project an image of himself or actually tach himself, but he can’t move from one spot. He’s trying to work on a way to do more than talk and wave his arms and stare at people, but he hasn’t got that one licked yet.”