by Chuck Dixon
A group of men walked from the gate to meet them at the foot of the bridge. They were armed but weren’t holding their weapons as if they expected a fight. They wore armored cuirasses on their chests similar to what a conquistador might have worn. Leather pants and boots and tunics of woven material. Wool, probably. A few wore helmets, conical style steel with cheek guards and a curved flange at the back to protect the wearer’s neck. On their belts were swords and daggers; big flat-bladed swords with long handles. Along with the bladed weapons, they each wore one or more flintlock pistols either hanging from lanyards or stuffed into cloth sashes. One of them cradled a long flintlock musket with an octagon barrel, the wood stock inlaid with ivory or pearl. And each wore either powder horns or brass gunpowder flasks on slings about their shoulders. The man with the musket wore a leather bandolier hung with paper cartridges.
And each man was tall. At least the same height as Dwayne. Some were taller. They wore their hair long, some in complex braids, and beards were the order of the day. Blondes and redheads mostly with light colored eyes. The man with the fine musket, a one-eyed pirate-looking guy with a patch made from a large silver coin, stepped to the old Indian. The greeting was cordial and the two men, the one towering over the other, shook hands before One-Eye stepped past him to have a good look at Dwayne.
One-Eye spoke directly to Dwayne. A more gruffly phrased version of the singsong the old man had tried on him. It was plainly a question.
“I’m not getting any of that. Sorry, bro,” Dwayne said. The man took Dwayne’s hand and tapped the silver brace-let on the Ranger’s arm. He asked a question, lowering his head to study Dwayne’s face for a reply.
“Yeah. It’s mine. Maybe you know how it works. I haven’t had much luck.”
The other man’s brow knitted, and his mouth turned down in a frown. He directed another question at Dwayne; eyes narrowed to study the Ranger’s face for recognition. It was a European language, for sure. Dwayne tried German.
“Es tut uns leid. Ich verstehe das nichts, Bruder.” His grasp of the language got him through well enough to order meals, drinks, and pick up women back when he was posted at Ramstein. One-Eye cocked his head and clucked a bit.
One-Eye flexed his fingers, bidding Dwayne to say more. “Schau Freund, entweder füttere mich, fick mich oder kämp-fe gegen mich. Ich bin müde. Ich bin einen langen Weg gegangen. Und deine Scheiße langweilt mich,” Dwayne said.
The first part of his response he’d learned from a specialist from the 82nd. “Either feed me, fuck me, or fight me.” He thought it was worth trying out on the musketeer. He eye-balled One-Eye in the man’s remaining orb.
One-Eye’s brows shot up. Yellow teeth showed through his beard.
“Allamani. Südländer,” he said.
“Yeah. Ja. German. Deutsche,” Dwayne said. The Roenbachs came from the Fatherland way back.
One-Eye gripped Dwayne by the arm and turned to the other armored men.
“Südländer. Tyskmann,” he said and pointed at the Ranger. The others nodded.
One-Eye turned back to the old Indian. They entered into a back and forth discussion with lots of gesturing. Dwayne knew he was the main topic from their glances and gestures. They came to an agreement. Hands were clasped again with much nodding and reassurances. One-Eye dipped a hand into a leather pouch on his belt and dropped a pile of silver coins into the old Indian’s cupped hands.
One consolation to being sold into slavery for the second time, Dwayne’s price was going up.
28
Snipe Hunt
“First thing we need to know,” Lee Hammond said. “Are these widgets weaponized?”
“Not in a directly destructive way,” Morris Tauber said. “What the hell’s that mean, Doc?” Jimbo said.
Morris looked up from the worktable where he’d further disassembled what was left of the mini-drone intruder caught in a hail of buckshot. He had the guts of the thing laid out under a magnifying light. Wiring, diodes, transistors, and a solid fuel power source as well as battery back-up.
“It’s a surveillance device. The threat it represents is in the data it streamed back through this transmitter. Our temporal address. It’s got scanners of all kinds on board. The two remaining widgets were more than enough to send back everything they wanted to know about us. That’s my best guess anyway.” Morris idly tapped the tabletop with a screwdriver handle.
“We need better than guesses,” Lee said.
“Well, that’s all I have to offer right now,” Morris said. “There’s a lot of tech I don’t recognize. Some of it, like this here, is adapted from the transmitter I came up with. It’s inter-temporal capable. It was sending back data through the field until it was disabled.”
“What kind of data?” Jimbo said.
“Beyond our exact location? Number of crewmembers. Radiation levels. Presence of fissionable material. The dimensions of the ship. And when we are. Like I said, I’m guessing here. This tech is sophisticated beyond the current state of the science. Some of it is theoretical. This fuel they used for the jets is frankly unknown to me. The battery is one I’ve never seen before. Its energy capacity is way beyond what something this size should be able to hold. And the level of miniaturization alone brings me to some very uncomfortable suppositions.”
“And?” Lee said.
Morris poked through the tangle of components with a needle-nose pliers and came up with a gray ovoid the size of a Tylenol tablet. He held it up for the Rangers to see.
“This is a combined hard drive and processor. That’s its function. But that’s clearly impossible. This little pill has two hundred gigs of RAM and holds thirty terabytes of data.”
“That’s a lot?” Chaz said.
“Not if it’s in a much larger box. In a package this size, it’s currently not doable. It requires quantum computing and storage, and that’s only theoretical at this point. Government and tech companies are in a race to make quantum processing a reality. It’s the next leap in computing and AI. No one’s had much luck. DARPA built a model program that fails catastrophically half the time after spending billions on the project.”
“It’s from the future,” Jimbo said.
“Okay. We’re in the future. Could these theories be realities in that time?” Lee said.
“It is from a future but not our future,” Morris said.
“You see anything yet, Bruce?” Boats said into the walkie.
A squawk and hiss came back as his only answer.
“You press the button to talk and release it to listen.” The SEAL shouted up into the vent opening over his head.
“Nothing. I see nothing.” Byrus’ voice sounded strained and far away.
And no wonder. He was wedged into the vent cowling, squirming his way forward inch-by-inch. One hand before him to aim a pen light down the long, aluminum tunnel running along the underside of the crew decks. His other hand was jammed against his side, the handheld radio in his palm. The Macedonian was volunteered for the job because of his small stature. Even Bat Jaffe was taller. After years spent as a slave in Roman mines, Byrus had a total lack of claustrophobia. He was already black with grease from the years of built-up grime on the vent’s walls. The edges of unfinished joins and the points of sheet screws gouged bleeding tears on his arms and legs. He came across a number of rat carcasses as well, desiccated hair-bags of tiny bones.
Somewhere in the dark before him, he could hear the metallic whirring noise that was not a fan or pump noise. It was a whining sound, rising and falling in timber and tone. The channel he was squeezed into came to a T-intersection thirty feet ahead. The mechanical noise grew louder as he neared the intersection.
At the end of the channel, he used his free hand to pull himself forward until he could see down the crossing section. The sound came from the vent shaft to the right. Byrus twisted and squirmed until he was on his side. He was then able to aim the penlight toward the source of the whirring sound.
The beam of light found
the mini-drone hovering in the shaft where the vent ended twenty feet to starboard.
“I found one of them,” Byrus shouted. His fingers pressed the button on the walkie held against his thigh.
“Say again, Bruce.” Boats’ voice echoed in the shaft behind him.
“I found one! One of the metal birds! What am I to do, Boots?”
“Kick your feet! Let us hear where you are!”
“I am kicking!”
Mimicking a brisk walking pace, Byrus banged his bare feet on the top and bottom of the shaft creating a kettle drum boom. As he trotted in place, he kept the penlight beam on the drone, ready to wriggle back if it should approach.
“We hear you! Keep it up!” The SEAL’s voice from the radio reached him over the sound of his kicking.
He placed the penlight in his mouth and pressed his hand against the far wall of the intersecting vent for better purchase. His feet drummed the sides of the main vent now in a rapid staccato. In the bobbing pool of light, he saw the mini-drone’s tiny jet engines go cold. The little craft dropped to the floor of the vent and came to rest.
The Macedonian wondered if the steel bird was dead or if it was ever alive. His new friends aboard the Raj assured him that machines were soulless creations made to serve men. They were not animals. Not alive. And yet these men cursed and praised the instruments they insisted were devoid of any divine spark. Sometimes they even named them. Maybe no one knew the truth.
A single red light came to life on the mechanism. To Byrus, it looked like a malevolent eye, blinking at him from the dark. The pace of its flashes picked up until it was throwing off a strobing glare that turned the steel cave surrounding it crimson.
Byrus didn’t care for this sudden change. He stopped kicking and started squeezing himself back the way he came when the blast shook the walls around him, making them crinkle and pop with the sudden concussive force.
Though he did not lose consciousness, the vent went dark.
It was silent also. Like a tomb.
“It was an EMP,” Morris said. “The second one went off at the same time. The detonator must have been damaged when Chaz shot that first one.”
“You’re welcome,” Chaz said.
“Other than Bruce, what damage was done?” Lee said. They stood in a passageway outside the ship’s infirmary. Boats and Jimbo were inside with the Macedonian.
“Minimal. The bridge and most of the telemetrics on board are shielded from pulses already. We made most of the areas with electronics into Faraday boxes. Geteye says there’s some circuit breakers and fuses that need replacing. But we got off light.”
“The objective was obvious,” Bat said.
“Only after they confirmed our chronal location,” Morris said.
Jimbo swung the infirmary door open to join them. “How’s your boy?” Chaz said.
“He’ll have ringing in his ears and God’s own migraine for a while. Mild concussion, maybe,” the Pima said. “But he’s one tough little monkey.”
“Mo says it was an EMP,” Lee said. “Whoever sent those birds knows when and where we are and expects to find us dead in the water.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t disappoint them,” Jimbo said.
29
The Refuge
Dwayne was beckoned to follow the bearded men into the fortress.
“You want me to walk with you?” he said.
“Ja. Gå med meg,” One-Eye said, waving him forward. Inside the walls of upright timbers, the place was obviously a military camp. Raised firing platforms ran the length of the walls all around. There were cannons with ornately decorated brass barrels set in earthen embrasures. A pair of neat rows of log huts roofed with canvas tent tops led to a two-story lodge house with a stone first floor and timber upper. The roof was wood shakes. A more permanent, older structure that the newer fortifications were constructed to defend. The largest building inside the walls was a long stable of rough wood planks. A crew of shirtless men was digging muck from the stalls. Hefty steel-shod war horses stood in a row on a hitch line. Bays and dappled grays with grooms running curry combs over them.
Only One-Eye and his entourage were in full armored getup. Probably to present a martial presence in their meeting with the locals. The men in the fort were mostly dressed in belted tunics and leggings. All wore bladed weapons or pistols. There were neat stacks of muskets at hand everywhere. It all reminded Dwayne of a forward operating base, ready for a fight but no imminent threat on the radar. On a war footing but still away from the fighting.
Dwayne followed One-Eye and his men up the steps onto a broad deck that ran around the lodge house on three sides. They expected him to accompany them inside. Whatever his new status was with these guys, he wasn’t a slave.
The inside of the lodge house was dark and smoky. Beams of sunlight sliced down through the gloom from vent holes in the roof. The floorboards creaked under the heavy tread of the armed men as they strode deeper into the vaulted great room.
Once his eyes adjusted, Dwayne could see that the rafters were hung with painted shields. Strictly decorative, as the firearms would have made them obsolete as protection. Some were round in shape and some teardrop. Iron rimmed and leather covered, painted, or embossed in fading colors with ornate images of dragons, bears, wolves, and eagles.
A smoldering fire pit lay under an open area in the roof. What remained of a pig carcass hung from a steel spit over the embers. Long tables set about the pit were still littered with clay jars and mugs from a revel the night before. The smell of stale hops and scorched pork hung thick in the air. Dwayne thought the place could use a woman’s touch. There were no women in sight. Only men of military age.
On the other side of the fire pit, a man in a brocaded robe leaned on a table sorting through piles of maps. One-Eye approached him, speaking in low tones. Whoever the guy in the robe was, the tough cyclopean bastard was deferring to him. This guy was an officer or lord or chief or something else. The man in charge.
They spoke in the singsong lingo. Dwayne strained to hear but still needed sub-titles. He knew he’d heard this spoken before, some version of it.
The man in the robe turned to regard the Ranger with eyes the color of a summer pond in a clean-shaven face. Dwayne looked from his face to the man’s wrist. A silver bracelet showed there beneath the sleeve of the robe, a bracelet matching the one Dwayne wore. The man smiled and stepped from the table with a hand extended.
“You’re a long way from home,” Samuel Renzi said.
30
Yo Ho
The drone confirmed what the sonar was picking up.
Eighteen miles north of the Ocean Raj’s position three fast craft were on a direct course for them. The drone showed them as a growing cloud of mist blooming from nothing at the relative location of the Taan installation seventy million years away in The Now.
“Three RHIBs loaded with personnel,” Jimbo said, eyes on the monitor up on the bridge of the Raj.
He adjusted the controls to zoom in on the black shapes bounding over the waves in a loose arrow formation. Twenty-eight-foot rigid hull inflatables. Armed and armored men sat in the crash seats. A man balanced at the bow of each gripped the shoulder rests of 20mm guns mounted on pintels. The crew was military without any insignia. Hired guns. Mercenaries.
“This is Harnesh, has to be,” Lee said.
“That’s right. Taan’s people only recreated the framework I asked for. Whoever’s behind this is using Tube tech to open their own manifestation field,” Morris said.
“That’s over thirty heavily-armed gunhands heading for us,” Chaz said.
“And those cannons could sink us. Punch holes below the waterline from a hundred yards off,” Boats said.
“Harnesh wants his baby back. He didn’t come all this way to send the Raj to the bottom,” Lee said. “They’ll offer us a deal first then try to board us.”
“Either option, they’re going to need to get close. They think our comms are out after tha
t EMP. They’ll come alongside to hail us,” Jimbo said.
“Close is good. I like close,” Boats said.
The cargo ship came in sight of the lead RHIB as evening fell. There were no lights on board, and no wake or bow wave. The ship was not under power and adrift in the prevailing southward current, drawing it further from the Panama coast and into open water.
Maurice Franck gripped the armrests of his jump seat with eyes locked on the growing wedge visible against the orange sky. He was a Taan hire but requested to join this op organized by a man who introduced himself only as Bohrs.
Bohrs, a South African from his accent, was the hire of an outside interest brought in by the board of Taan Enterprises to deal with Jason Taan’s abduction. That stung. The decision to take the recovery operation out of the hands of Maurice and his security unit was a humiliation for the Belgian. It took a great deal of insistence on his part to be allowed on this mission. For him, it was payback. These rogue Americans made him look a fool when they vanished in thin air, taking his boss with them. Maurice used the level of personal trust that Jason Taan had for him to secure himself a place on one of the RHIBs.
The rest of the mercs on board with him looked less than impressed with their surroundings. Maurice wondered where they came from. The world of private security and military contractors was a small one, yet he’d never encountered even one of the thirty-two men in this unit. They were a disparate bunch and obviously hardened professionals. Every attempt to engage any of them in conversation was either ignored or quelled with terse, vague replies.
He couldn’t tamp down his excitement at their current location. Though it looked like any other seascape, he knew, knew in his bones, that this was an alien place. The air itself smelled different, strangely sweeter than any other tropical clime he’d ever been deployed in. And the punishing heat following their trip through the arctic cloud. Nearly unbearable. His clothes were plastered to him under his body armor.