Caitlin rolled her eyes as if he’d just opened a can of worms.
‘Yes, I believe there are. Although I seemed to be the only one,’ the colonel replied, looking at Caitlin cryptically. ‘I call them the Fatalists, or Fates for short, and I believe these renegades are working against the Order.’
‘To do what exactly?’
‘From the little I can ascertain, I believe the Fates want the Order to stop interfering in the timeline altogether, to leave the future to pure chance — they are throwing curveballs at the continuum.’ The colonel tossed an olive stone out of the window. ‘I have no idea what their real agenda is — there have been more than a couple of incidents, ones that cannot be explained away as coincidence — a word that one should never use in front of a Copernican by the way.’
‘So you needed to find this computer?’ Caitlin interrupted.
‘Actually, I think I am the one who has to sink it. There will be nothing like this technology for another fourteen hundred years, not until the Renaissance. I want to make sure it doesn’t reach Rome, and more importantly find out who made it.’
‘Why?’ Josh asked naively.
Caitlin coughed into her drink. ‘Er. Because the advancement of technology breaks our prime directive, and would probably result in the extinction of the human race!’ She turned back to the colonel and added, ‘surely the Council know about this?’
‘Well if they do — they’re not doing anything about it. Not that they would admit to the existence of a secret organisation of anarchists — it would undermine their stochastic ideals and play directly into the hands of the Determinist Party. They’ve have been pushing for tighter controls for years — we would end up in a police state.’
Josh grimaced at the word ‘Police.’
‘Do you think my parents might have known?’ Caitlin asked quietly.
‘I don’t know my dear,’ the colonel said, taking her hand, ‘they were the bravest and brightest Draconians I’ve ever met, and they ranged far off of the map, who can say what they would have seen.’
Josh could see how much the colonel meant to her. He’d missed the old man too, and he had no idea how he was going to explain about getting kicked out of the Order yet, so he asked the next most obvious question.
‘So, how exactly are we going to sink it?’
‘For that,’ the colonel said with a smile, ‘we’re going to need a Pirate.’
47
Selephin
Silent waves lapped at the sides of the boat as they rowed their way out into the bay. Josh fought back the impulse to throw up every time the water hit the prow. It wasn’t going to be long before he lost control, but he was going to hang on to it as long as he could.
The dark shapes of the colonel and the two oarsmen sat in front of him, their sinewed arms carving the oars through the water at a rapid pace. Caitlin sat behind Josh looking up at the canopy of stars, which were magnificent, but not something he could really appreciate properly while trying to focus on keeping his down his last meal.
‘Do you ever wonder if there’s another boat out there somewhere on a sea just like this?’ Caitlin asked as she trailed her hand through the water.
‘No,’ replied Josh, feeling his stomach lurch again.
‘The chances are slim I know. According to the Drake equation, maybe less than one in a hundred million, but I like to think there is someone looking up at our sun and wondering the same.’ She moved and the boat rocked. ‘Just look at Cassiopeia. When did you ever get to see the Milky Way so clearly in your time?’
Josh was having trouble concentrating on what she was saying through the rising nausea. His skin had gone clammy, and his tongue felt too big for his mouth.
‘Caitlin, stop teasing the boy. Josh, for God’s sake, get it over with,’ the colonel interrupted.
Josh let physiology take over. It was beyond his control and he surrendered to it, venting the contents of his stomach into the sea.
‘It’s all right,’ he heard the colonel say. ‘I’m sure somewhere in the infinite vastness of space someone else is suffering from mal de mer at this very moment.’ He passed Josh a small flask. ‘Here, I find this helps on such occasions.’
It was a sweet, citrus spirit that instantly made Josh feel a hell of a lot better
An hour later they reached the ship. It was anchored far out in the bay, a large wooden vessel with three rows of long oars on each side and two huge masts with their sails furled. The hull was a vast hulking wall of barnacle-encrusted wood and tar that dwarfed their boat as it rose and fell in front of them like a floating castle. Suddenly a rope ladder was cast down from the deck, and voices called out in various languages for them to climb aboard.
In the dark, cold night it seemed suicidal for Josh to leave the relative safety of the small boat and climb up the side of the heaving wall, but the colonel jumped up and pulled them towards the ladder with a boat hook. Then, with Caitlin following close behind, the colonel climbed up the swaying ropes. Josh came last. The two oarsmen were keen to leave and virtually threw him out on to the ladder as their boat pitched and dipped in the ship’s wake.
He climbed the wet rungs slowly, trying not to look down between his feet, but stinging salt water ran off the bulkhead and into his eyes when he looked up. There was nothing below him but the dark, brooding sea and he closed his eyes and forced himself to keep moving upwards — with only the sound of Caitlin shouting at him to ‘move your arse’ barely audible over the boom of the waves.
There was nothing more satisfying than the feeling of the deck beneath his feet when he was finally dragged over the gunwale by one of the crew. Josh felt like a complete idiot for being so pathetic. He wanted to explain to Caitlin that he’d never been this close to the sea — other than the time at the beach when he was six, the largest body of water he’d ever seen was the local swimming pool. But then she would realise that he’d never been anywhere and he didn’t want to admit to that.
‘You okay?’ Caitlin asked, as the ship lurched and he fell against her.
‘Yeah. Just need to get my sea legs.’
‘It will be easier when we get under way,’ she said, trying to reassure him.
‘Do the waves get smaller then?’
‘No, but we get faster.’
‘Great.’
A few minutes later the colonel returned with an unusual-looking man dressed in a baroque chest plate and what Josh could only describe as a skirt.
‘Caitlin, Josh, I would like to introduce you to a very old friend of mine — this is Selephin Maltraders, former Draconian Commander of the Ninth and the especially excellent captain of this marvellous vessel.
Selephin had a broad smile that exposed many of his pearly white teeth and what appeared to be jewels embedded within them. The scars across his face were deep and old and only mildly less distracting than the tattoos that covered the rest of his entirely hairless head.
‘Welcome to my humble vessel!’ Selephin said in a clipped English accent, holding out a hand that was covered in rings and bracelets. ‘A fine evening for a fight, don’t you think?’
Josh shook his hand, and then watched as the captain took Caitlin’s hand and kissed it very gently.
‘We are blessed to have such beauty aboard. Your fairness doth outshine the moon.’
Josh tried not to laugh, but when he saw how flattered she was, he changed his mind.
‘Now the tide is about to turn,’ Selephin observed, and barked out a series of orders to the crew in something that sounded like Arabic. It was pretty obvious from the way the crew responded that he’d just told them to make sail: a troupe of men appeared from various hatches on the deck and clambered up and down the rigging, hauling thick ropes, and unfurling the sails. Within a matter of minutes, the ship was ploughing through the water at speed, the night winds pushing them forward into the darkness.
Selephin took them to his cabin: a small, cosy space at the stern of the ship. It was full of charts and chests
, but in the centre a space had been cleared for a table, where a map of the surrounding seas had been laid out.
The colonel consulted his almanac and then picked up some small coins that lay discarded on top of the map. ‘So this is us,’ he said, placing the first coin down near the island marked Ogylos. Then he took another coin and put it near the island labelled Kretes. ‘The ship in question left Crete approximately two hours ago.’
‘She will be fighting the wind,’ commented Selephin. ‘We have the advantage.’
‘Good,’ said the colonel, ‘she is also heavily laden, full of prizes for the patricians.’
‘Ha,’ spat Selephin. ‘Damn the senate and their accursed patricians! My men will be only too happy to relieve them of one of their prizes. Their ships have been very bad for business lately — this war never seems to end!’
Selephin took an unusual-looking bottle and a handful of glasses out of a cupboard. ‘We have a three hours before the dawn and much to discuss.’
Caitlin and Josh made themselves comfortable on the captain’s couch and whiled away the next few hours listening to Selephin’s and the colonel’s stories. Caitlin grew tired and slowly nestled down against Josh’s shoulder and dozed off. Josh was too intrigued by their anecdotes to notice. The two veterans recounted one adventure after another as the rum flowed, each one became more daring and outrageous than the last.
‘Do you remember Thebes?’ the colonel asked with a drunken chuckle.
‘The time you broke Nefertiti’s heart? How could I forget? We were only supposed to locate her tomb, and you took it upon yourself to bed the wench before we’d even found the architect, let alone the temple he was building for her!’
‘Nothing compared to that time you wagered Hannibal that he couldn’t ride a troop of elephants over the Alps.’
‘Well, someone had to,’ Selephin said with a knowing smile.
The colonel conceded and raised his bottle to the old pirate. ‘We’ve had some interesting times you and I, but I’ve never quite understood why you took early retirement.’
Selephin reflected over the answer for a few moments. Josh thought he saw a flicker of sadness in the man’s face as he replied.
‘There have been many times when I have asked myself the same question. I am Draconian, always have been, always will be. It is my calling, my reason to live, but when you watch too many of your friends disappear —’ he looked over at the sleeping Caitlin — ‘you begin to question why we do this, and then, when you can’t find a good enough answer any more, you know it is time to stop.’
The colonel nodded. ‘This life does takes its toll, of that there is no doubt. But why here, why this era?’
‘Ah, my friend, we each have our own special milieu, do we not? A favourite century to while away a few hours when time — and the damn clackers — allow. This is mine, aboard my own ship in the middle of a great war. I have no desire to die in my sleep.’
They both drank then to ‘an interesting death’ and sank into quiet contemplation of their own mortality and those they had lost. Josh found himself thinking about Gossy and wondering what it would have been like if he hadn’t died. With his new abilities, it should be a simple exercise to go back and change it, but it was forbidden — the colonel was very clear on that point, and Josh was in enough trouble already.
Selephin’s snigger broke his reverie.
‘Do you remember that time we had to inspire Newton?’ he asked, wrapping air quotes around ‘inspire’.
‘How many apples did you have to drop on him in the end?’
‘Fourteen. He was never the sharpest knife in the drawer.’
48
Dawn
Dawn broke as they stood at the prow, lighting a dark thunderhead of clouds that stretched across the horizon — bruising the sky with the purple shades of storms. Josh could smell the rain on the wind that raced toward them. The sails flapped idly above him, their lines swinging loose, untied from the wooden belaying pins. The ship was deathly silent, ghost-faced men with vicious knives and axes crouched on the deck, their faces painted white to resemble skulls.
This is the real ghost squad, Josh thought.
The colonel surveyed the widening dawn through an archaic leather telescope. Like the others, he too was wearing armour: a sturdy-looking chest plate and bracers as well as a heavy bronze sword that hung from his waist. The colonel had been adamant that Josh and Caitlin were not going to be joining the boarding party, and inwardly Josh was relieved — Caitlin was still fast asleep in the captain’s cabin and he didn’t fancy his chances in a sword fight with the Roman navy.
‘So this device would change the future — I mean the present?’ Josh asked.
‘It would accelerate the advancement of the human race,’ the colonel replied without taking his eyes off the sea.
‘And that’s a bad thing? What if it could help find new treatments — you know, like for MS?’
The colonel sighed and lowered the eyeglass. ‘Invention is a powerful agent of change. Your own millennia is proof that the human race is only just capable of controlling its self-destructive tendencies. Civilisation needs time to mature before it is ready for such technological advances — this is like handing a loaded gun to a six-year-old.’
‘So if we don’t stop this ship?’
‘Rome would conquer the known world in under a century, creating an empire unlike anything we have ever known. Science would develop exponentially based on their new calculus engines and within another three hundred years weapons of extinction-level destruction would have decimated the planet — give or take fifty years or so. Humanity would never make it out of the Middle Ages.’
‘Shit.’
‘Exactly. A time for everything and everything in good time.’
Suddenly a sail broke over the line of the horizon, distorting the edge of the world for a moment. The colonel snapped the telescope up to his eye once more as the first rumble of thunder rolled across the dark seas.
‘Go back to the cabin and don’t come out again until I say. She will fight you every minute she’s locked up in there — so you’ll have your work cut out for you.’
Josh watched the ship try to outrun them for a while. It was obvious from the way she sat so low in the water that she was far too heavy to get away.
He went down the hatch as the grappling hooks and lines sprang across the gap between the two boats. They were so close now that he could make out the faces of the Roman crewmen as they frantically tried to chop through the ropes.
Caitlin was still fast asleep, curled up under the furs that Selephin had given them. Josh watched her for a while. There was a contentment in her sleeping face that he never saw when she was awake. A stillness in the way she breathed that warmed his heart. Her skin was perfect, the faintest sprinkling of freckles brought about by the Greek sun across her cheekbones.
The sound of the two hulls scraping together resonated throughout the ship, and she sat bolt upright.
‘What are you doing?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing,’ he said shyly.
‘Were you watching me while I was asleep?’
‘No. That would be weird.’
She threw off the furs and stood up and stretched. ‘You totally were. Weirdo.’
The conversation was suddenly drowned out by the howls of Selephin’s crew as they began to board the Roman Galley.
‘Shit. Has it started?’ she asked, hurrying to one of the windows. ‘Come on, Josh! We’re missing it!’
‘It’s not safe. The colonel told me to keep you down here,’ he said, moving in front of the door.
‘Did he now? Why do you care?’ she scoffed. ‘Not because I’m a girl? Get real. I can kick your ass any day.’
There were screams from above and sounds of clashing metal as the hand-to-hand combat got underway.
‘There are people getting killed up there! It’s not like you have some kind of magic force field — this IS real, you could die.’
/> ‘And you think I don’t know that?’ She had a steely look in her eyes, and there was a flush of red in her cheeks. ‘I don’t need a protector — you’re not some kind of knight in shining armour. You’re just . . .’
‘Just what exactly?’ He too could feel the anger building as he asked her. It was a question he’d been mulling over for weeks.
‘A complete pain in the backside!’ she declared. ‘You never think things through properly! You just jump in with both feet, and you have that stupid idiotic smile that you think makes everything all right!’
He tried not to smile as she said it.
‘Don’t!’ she said, raising one finger. ‘Do not say a word. Just get the hell out of my way.’
‘I will if you just answer one question,’ he said, wearing his best poker face.
Her eyes glared into his like lasers. ‘What?’
‘Do you ever wonder what happened to us back in the cave?’
‘No,’ she said, averting her eyes.
‘Well, I do. The Draconians wouldn’t tell me anything, but we must have survived! We must have had some kind of life! It took them forty years before they could locate us.’
She turned away from him, and he could feel the tension draining away.
‘Well, I probably saved your butt back then too,’ she said, looking around the room.
‘Yeah. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you. Probably had to marry the daughter of some Neanderthal chieftain.’
She smirked as she turned back towards him. ‘Unlikely. They died out a long time before the Mesolithic.’
‘Okay, so maybe I shacked up with a polar bear, or something equally large and hairy.’
She smiled knowingly.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Did the Draconians tell you what happened?’
She tried not to look too smug.
‘They did, didn’t they?’
Her smile grew wider, and her eyes flashed.
‘Tell me!’ He wanted to shake her, hold her, kiss her. His mind was going over all the things they must have got up to in that cave.
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