The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  “Well.” He cocked his head to one side mockingly. “I don’t hear anyone. Could it have something to do with the mutiny? I made a deal with them: I left the captain’s cabin unlocked, and they left you to me. And before you ask—” he rushed on, “I can trust them. My fathers’ pride and joy was my telepathic ability. I expect I’m the strongest telepath on the planet.”

  That explained my attack of telepathic virus: Harros had tried to kill me from a distance. He had nearly succeeded, if not for the reasons he expected.

  “And since our brain structures are so similar,” he continued, “I can read your mind even though these other simpletons can’t.” Suddenly he was right in front of me. “I also have faster reflexes, greater strength, and far better night vision than you.”

  “And a bigger mouth to go with it,” Timash rumbled. Harros spun just in time to intercept a massive paw with his chin. He fell back against me, twisted, and seized my face in one hand.

  The world exploded in smells of color and shapes of sound. Far away all the voices I had ever heard in my life twirled away down a drain. Scenes from my childhood burst like balloons before my eyes. My mother and my father towered far overhead, but when they looked down each wore Harros’ face.

  “I told you to play nice,” Mother/Harros scolded. “You wouldn’t stay in your own time, and now you must be punished.”

  “What’s that you’ve been playing with?” Father/Harros asked sternly. “Good heavens, who ever gave a database like that to a moron like you? That’s like giving a loaded gun to a five-year-old. I’ll have to take it away from you. You can have it back when you’re older. Oh, wait, you’re not going to get any older!” I shrank back from their titanic laughter, retreated into the far back closet of my own mind.

  “No, no, Charles,” Mother/Harros tutted. She reached down with fingers the size of sofas. “Come along, it’s—it’s—”

  And suddenly she was screaming and he was screaming and Harros was screaming and a faint, cold, and familiar fuzziness was rising at the fringes of my mind. I threw all my energy into rebuilding my mental blocks so fast that my knees buckled, but the fuzziness melted away.

  Timash helped me to my feet. Harros lay dead on the deck.

  “He grabbed you, and then he just started screaming…”

  “It was the virus,” I choked out. “He activated it. It almost killed us both.” I pointed to the stairs. “Maire’s cabin—that’s where they’ll be. Once they kill her the rest of us are finished.” Leaning heavily on my hairy friend, I directed him to the captain’s cabin, where he had never been. I chafed at our progress, but I was still too unsteady to mount the stairs and my directions might not be good enough to send him ahead by himself.

  Before climbing up to the last level, we peeked through the trapdoor. Another mutineer stood outside of Maire’s cabin. Timash set me aside and finished climbing the ladder alone.

  “Hey, buddy,” I heard him greet the startled sailor. “Is this where I join up?” There was a sudden shuffling, abruptly ended, and then the luckless sentry slid head-first down the ladder. I stepped over him on my way up.

  A small test proved Maire’s cabin door was unlocked. We looked at each other, girding our courage. Barehanded, we were about to burst into a room whose layout only I knew, holding an unknown number of armed and hostile killers, to rescue a woman who in all probability had already had her throat slit. Timash grinned.

  “Uncle Balu is gonna love this story.”

  And we went.

  At the last instant, my normally phantasmal sense of survival erected a frantic barricade in my forebrain, and instead of crashing through, I inched the door open until I could peek inside. My eyes flew wide.

  “My God,” I whispered. “It’s just like the Vulsteen.”

  Only in this case, it was but four against one: Maire had them outnumbered. Backed against the far wall, her sword waving tauntingly at the quartet of savages arrayed before her, her torn nightshirt told the story: She was a beautiful woman, and they had planned to take her by surprise in her sleep. They carried no sidearms—they had wanted her alive. The blood on her shirt and on one man’s tunic revealed the outcome of that scheme.

  I slammed the door open wide. All of them jumped, but Maire held the advantage of facing the sound; when the others instinctively glanced backward she reduced their numbers to three.

  Rage darkened Durrn’s normally ruddy face. “Take them!” he screamed at the others. “They’re just rowers! They’re unarmed!”

  He was right, and his men knew they had us as they rushed the door and we fell back into the corridor, but in the moment that they came through the door and tried to change direction to follow us, they found we had not run far. In those close quarters we were on top of them before they could bring their swords to bear, and seconds later we were both armed and running to Maire’s aid.

  She needed none. Durrn’s anger and strength availed him nothing in the use of the Nuum sword, at which she was clearly his master. But she could not press in close to finish him, and only belatedly I saw that some of the blood on her nightshirt was her own.

  “Keryl,” she panted. “Block that tapestry!” I looked, but I didn’t know which one she meant, and Durrn took his opportunity to break free and run. Flinging aside one of the hangings, he banged the wall and it opened for him. He vanished through the hidden door and we heard him bolt it from the other side.

  “That was supposed to be my escape route if I ever needed it,” Maire explained wryly, dropping her sword. She put a hand to her side and hissed.

  “Let me look at that,” I ordered, but as I gently peeled the material away I realized that under her nightshirt she wore nothing. Embarrassed, I froze.

  “Well, hurry up. We’ve got to get after him.”

  I could not move, but once again Timash came to my rescue.

  “Let me do it, Keryl. My mother’s a doctor, after all.” I backed up and turned away as he lifted the nightshirt. I heard Maire whisper a question to him and he answered in the same tone.

  “Great,” she said aloud. “I’ve been stabbed, my crew’s in mutiny, and he’s shy.”

  “It doesn’t look bad,” Timash reported. “Just a scrape along the ribs. I’ll slap some plasm on it and you’ll be good as new.”

  “Thank God,” Maire replied from behind my back. “If I had to depend on Dr. Do-nothing I could bleed to death.”

  “We’re wasting time,” I snapped, though I refused to turn about. “Where will Durrn go? Are there any weapons he can get to?”

  She did not answer for a few moments—I almost turned to see what was the matter—and when she spoke, her voice was uncertain.

  “No—they can’t use energy weapons on a sky-barge. It could interfere with the anti-gravity fields. Uh—he may go down to the generator bay, try to hold the ship hostage until we agree to let him out somewhere. I don’t know—ouch—it may depend on how many of the crew he has with him.”

  “Not as many as he had when he started,” Timash muttered. “All done. You can get dressed now.”

  I was about to object—although I did not want Maire running about the ship in her present state of dishabille, we hardly had time to choose outfits—when she announced herself ready. She had tucked her nightshirt into a pair of trousers and grabbed her sword once more. Barefoot, she was ready to take back what was hers.

  “Out the front way,” she directed. “He could be waiting for us in the passage through the bulkheads. I could open it, but there’s not much light in there.”

  I followed her down the ladder as swiftly as caution allowed.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “To the anti-gravity generator bay. It’s the most likely place to run, and it’s all the way on the other side of the ship. If he’s hiding out anywhere else, we’ll see him on the way.” By unspoken agreement, we hurried our steps, sacrificing stealth for speed.

  “What do we do if we find him?” Timash queried, rather unnecessarily, it seemed
to me in light of the night’s events.

  “Then it’s going to be him and me.”

  We opened the last hatchway and emerged into the night.

  “Or…maybe not…”

  Maire’s words trailed away as we stood on the afterdeck bathed in the light of the ship’s full complement of floodlights—floodlights glinting off the barrels of a dozen guns Durrn, Garm, and their followers were pointing unwaveringly in our direction.

  The captain of the Dark Lady recovered quickly.

  “You can’t use those, Durrn. You know that as well as I do.”

  Durrn shrugged. “Way I see it, it really makes no difference. Die now, die later…dead’s dead and that’s an end to drinkin’.” He assumed a mournful air. The penalty for mutiny was, naturally, death. The more things change, the more they stay the same. “Of course,” Durrn resumed, “there might be a way out of this.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Lay down your weapons and surrender, and we won’t shoot you.”

  Maire, bless her, smiled as if she really were enjoying herself.

  “And then what? We retire to my cabin so you can pick up where you left off? No, thanks.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work,” Durrn sighed. “We’d have to tie you up so tight it’d defeat the whole purpose. But look at it this way: If we start shooting, everybody on this boat dies. If you surrender, the rest of your crew and the rowers—don’t.”

  From where I stood two paces behind her, I felt the tremor in Maire’s thoughts. Gathered in a ragged bunch ten feet from the bottom of the steps, the mutineers were probably too far away to notice it, and even in the bright glare she did not evince the slightest outer twinge.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Wait…!” Backing up, I held out a hand as if to ward off her words. All eyes turned to me. “You don’t have the right!”

  “Keryl—!”

  “You don’t have the right!” I screamed again, and rushed at her—then past her straight into the crowd of mutineers!

  I should have died then, even with the grace of the single instant when the mob was caught off-guard—too astonished to use the guns they had never really wanted to fire—before I was among them. What I had hoped to accomplish heaven only knew, but at that moment the doors behind the mutineers burst open and Skull and the rowers flooded the deck!

  Instantly guns and swords were reduced to nothing but clubs. Borne down to the deck, I flailed with fists and feet, kicking and punching at anything that moved. Friend and foe were indistinguishable from where I lay, only a morass of shadowy bodies kicking and punching and falling on me in return.

  The ending was as inevitable as the sunrise. Outnumbering their former masters five-to-one, bodies hardened by months and years of labor and hardship and the whip, the rowers literally tore the mutineers to pieces. I learned later that, thinking quickly, Timash had seized Maire when she would have plunged into the fighting and both restrained and shielded her until the tumult was spent. Had he not, I am certain she would have suffered Durrn and Garm’s fate.

  When it was done, Skull himself helped me to my feet. “They locked the crew away, but they didn’t bother with us.” He shivered involuntarily in a sudden gust of wind. “With all the noise topside, I snuck up here to see what was going on. The idea of Durrn as captain… I grabbed as many of the boys as could help and waited for a chance.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself; it was getting cold. “I’m sure the captain will take this all into account. Something can be done.”

  He looked at me strangely, as if he were going to say something, then paused, looking into the sky.

  “Storm coming.”

  I nodded. “It’s getting cold.”

  “No, you don’t understand. They’ve cut the force field! If that storm hits us without it, we could all go over the edge!” I turned to hail Maire, but Skull was ahead of me. “Brants! Go below and free the crew! Hanick! Check the field generators! Captain—” Maire had arrived, her face saying she didn’t need to be told what he knew. “Who’s your field tech?” He jabbed a thumb at the mess he and the others had left. “Tell me it wasn’t one of them.”

  “It’s not,” she answered curtly. “It’s me.”

  I blinked. She had not lied about that, in any case.

  “They’ve cut the shields,” Skull said. “I’ve got a man checking the generators. We need them up fast—there’s a storm coming.”

  Maire vanished without another word. The boat pitched violently. I was thrown off my feet, but Skull took it in stride, knees bent, riding the deck like a barrel roller.

  “Stay down,” he advised me without taking his eyes off a hundred different tasks at once. “It’s the safest place.”

  And then it was over, an abrupt calm descending like the eye of a hurricane, save that we were riding through an electrical storm high in the air on a ship that felt like it was anchored to a mountain. As I slowly stood again, untrusting of my footing, the storm blazed to life around us, jagged lighting pulsing across the clouds in mile-long tongues of fire, thunders passing over and around us like the bass of the largest drum ever devised by God. I jumped as lightning struck the outer shields, outshining the floodlights and casting fantastic shadows across the deck.

  “Don’t worry, it’s fuel for the generators.” Skull stood relaxed now, the crisis over. The men drifted back to him, drawn like iron filings to his leadership. It was natural, I thought. He had ruled them long before I arrived, and he had led them tonight in their long-overdue vengeance. Perhaps I should have felt anxious, but I did not.

  “It seems the captain owes you twice over, now.”

  He gave me that same strange look that he had before.

  “Do you think she’d free me?”

  I was wary of making promises for another, but in all honesty I saw little choice for her in the matter.

  “I expect so. She certainly owes you that much.”

  “Hm,” he said. “Well, since we’ve already saved her life twice tonight, I guess dumping her now would be pointless. Besides, she’s a good force field tech.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.”

  “Take a look around, Keryl.” The rowers were packed around us four deep. I saw Timash standing on the periphery, watching intently. “It’s our ship now.”

  “And—what are you planning to do with it?”

  “Well, that’s up to you—captain.”

  Chapter 40

  I Do Not Hesitate

  “He who hesitates is lost.” Nowhere is this more true than in the command of men in battle. Win or lose, right or wrong, a leader must act, or forego the confidence, the respect, and ultimately the acceptance of his men.

  I was being offered this ship by those who had recently taken control of her, men who by the Nuum definition of things would be considered, I suppose, pirates. I had no doubt that piracy was a capital crime. For all its scientific advancement, this world in many ways reflected the barbarity of my own bygone era. Had I the luxury of reflection, I might debate within myself the efficacy of imposing a punishment which, even in my own time, had failed to make any appreciable dent in the capacity of men to wreak mortal harm upon their neighbors, but I had not the luxury, only an instant in which to weigh my decision: Should I assume a command for which I had no qualification, exercising dominion through discipline where previously the only supremacy had been attained through fear? Or should I decline this dangerous honor and lay the futures of my friends and myself bare to the tender mercies of the mob?

  “See that the remainder of the crew is freed,” I instructed. “But until we can determine their loyalties, they are to be watched closely. When Captain—when Maire returns, send her to—the captain’s cabin.”

  Skull nodded and detailed a pair of men to liberate the Dark Lady’s crew and acquaint them with the new order of things. His sure manner in relaying my orders and handling the men impressed me, and I said so.

  “Thanks. I was mate on another b
arge, once. Even now, it just comes natural.” As I turned away, he cleared his throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Captain, what about the bodies?”

  Oh, yes. The mutineers—and a few of our own—lay where they had fallen. The deck should have been awash with their blood, but some agent was soaking it out, cleaning the “planks” as I watched. Still, the bodies remained, intermittently lit by the flashes of lightning.

  “Make sure they’re dead.” Judging from their conditions, this was an unnecessary chore, but I would not have it on my conscience that I had failed to make the effort, not if I wanted to sleep at night. “Then dispose of them as you see fit.” I turned again to go.

  “We’re over water,” Skull said to one of his men. “Search the crew’s bodies; we’ll throw them overboard when the storm abates. Put our men into cold storage.” I climbed the ladder to my new quarters. “And start with Durrn,” he ordered.

  “Wait!” I cried with such force that every man on deck stopped in his tracks. A wild surmise had entered my brain with the arresting power of a whisper in the dark, and I twisted in mid-air as I fairly leaped off the ladder. Striding quickly to where Durrn lay, I searched his clothes, and without a word I pocketed what I found there—but not until I was safely behind closed doors did I allow myself to examine my long-lost Library.

  The Librarian himself materialized as I satisfied myself that the polished sphere was unmarked.

  “As I believe I mentioned, I am more than capable of withstanding a significant amount of punishment.”

  I hugged myself with ferocious relief. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I do not find that surprising,” he replied pedantically. “Although I was limited by my circumstances to extremely passive sensors, the passage of events was hardly difficult to follow. I will admit, however,” he went on in a more relaxed tone, “that I was anxious about you, as well.

  “And before you ask, both the mechanical and strategic elements of sky barge piloting were omitted from my program.” He shook his immaterial head. “My, but you do often seem to exceed the parameters the main Librarian selected for you.”