Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “All done,” Jason reported. “That’s just a scratch that Corbett has got, and it’s from a local weapon—we did a clean job on the Transhumanists before they had a chance to use any of their out-of-period stuff. Pauline had done an outstanding job of getting all the relevant information into the message drop, and of course she was a great help after we made contact with her.”

  He was referring to Pauline da Cunha, one of the charter members of the Special Operations Section, who was now (in terms of the linear present, of course) leading a research expedition to Virginia, North America, in February through early April of 1865 to study the last days of the Confederacy. It was unusual for such an expedition to have a Special Ops officer as mission leader, but this one was out of the ordinary. In addition to its ostensible purpose, it was also charged with pursuing certain leads from certain sources (including Chantal Frey’s debriefing) that pointed toward Transhumanist activity amid the collapsing South.

  A short, dark, wiry man with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve and an impressive nose on his face grinned wickedly. “Yeah. It was worth it just to see Pauline having to pass as a Creole belle!”

  “You always did have a sadistic streak,” Jason reproved, giving Alexandre Mondrago a look of bogus sternness. The Corsican-descended ex-mercenary had been with Jason in fifth century B.C. Greece, saving his life on one occasion. “And as I recall, she was some little help to you, getting across that bridge over the James River near the Tredegar Iron Works while Richmond burned.” Mondrago had the grace to look abashed. “It’s true, though, that after sustaining that role for two and a half months, I imagine she’ll come back here in a very bad mood, even though she’ll have gotten to witness Lincoln’s visit to the ruins of Richmond.” Abruptly, Jason sobered. “But the point is, she was absolutely right. What we found was worse than what we thought we were looking for. In fact, it was worse than she thought.”

  Rutherford went pale. They had believed the Transhumanists were planting the seeds of one of their secret societies—a kind of sociological supervirus developing undetectably within the relatively harmless (if repellent) historically attested Ku Klux Klan, much as they had attempted to plant one within the cult of Pan in ancient Greece. Da Cunha had thought they were really planting something far more insidious.

  “I know what she thought,” Rutherford said. “She thought they were planting one of their retroactive plagues.” Now Kung also went pale, for he knew of the Transhumanist technique of spreading mutagens containing a genetic time clock over the plant life of an area they wished to turn toxic on or just before The Day. The Authority’s only countermeasure was the expensive one of sending an expedition back to spread anti-mutagens. “But . . . Jason, did I understand you to say worse than that?”

  “You did. This was a nanotechnological time bomb. Nanobots in huge numbers, timed to begin corroding metal, turning plastics to goo, infecting computer systems, interfering with connections and whatever. Evidently, the Transhumanists’ strategy calls for large expanses of North America to revert to a pretechnological level on The Day.” Jason surveyed his listeners. Rutherford had gone an even paler shade. Kung seemed to be experiencing difficulty breathing. Chantal, who had heard of such things, simply looked grim. “Don’t worry,” he assured them hastily. “We were able to abort this at an early stage and destroy the stockpiles before the actual process had commenced.”

  Kung found his voice. “But how could you be so incompetent as to fail to bring any of these, er, nanobots back with you for study? Perhaps their time sequence could have led us to inferences concerning The Day!”

  Rutherford held his breath. Jason Thanou’s relationship with the Authority had always had its ups and downs, and more of the latter than of the former—unsurprisingly considering that he had never troubled to conceal his opinion of the governing council. But now he kept his face expressionless and spoke with a mildness Rutherford knew him well enough to recognize as deceptive.

  “Aside from the dangers involved—built-in booby traps whose consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about—there would be no point. We’ve learned of the extreme care the Transhumanists put into security. I assure you that any such attempt would have caused the nanobots to instantly go permanently inert.”

  “Er, yes, I seem to recall reading about this sort of thing. But surely—”

  “The same philosophy extends even to their personnel, Alistair,” Rutherford reminded him. “As you are aware, the few Transhumanists who have been apprehended in the present day have had implants which killed them—destroyed their brains, in fact—upon capture.”

  Kung subsided, for he was indeed aware of it. Law enforcement agencies were naturally engaged in a planetwide search for the Transhumanists and—especially—their temporal displacer. But the investigation was hampered by bureaucratic insistence that it be carried on in strict secrecy, to avoid alarming the populace, and the results had been disappointing. They would undoubtedly have been even more disappointing without the leads provided by Chantal Frey.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “After more than a century of operating underground, secrecy has become compulsive with them. You all know how little of any real value Franco revealed to me, not just while he was planning to let me return as a ‘mole’ but even afterwards, when my TRD was gone and he had absolutely no reason to think I would ever be able to return to the present.”

  “Well,” Jason broke the gloomy silence that followed, “I’m going to check on Corbett in sick bay. Afterwards, Kyle, I’ll give you my full report. And after that . . . I could use some R&R. And,” he added, with a hard look at Rutherford, “I believe I’ve got quite a lot of unused leave accumulated.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The “negative mass drive” was actually something of a misnomer. What it really did was wrap a field of negative energy around a spaceship, creating an area of expanding spacetime which, by biasing the field, could be made to move faster than the rest of spacetime, thus enabling the ship within it to get around the lightspeed limit. (Not through it, as the theoretical physicists never tired of assuring themselves and anyone else who would listen.) It had once been believed that achieving this would require an energy expenditure equivalent to the total conversion of the mass of a gas-giant planet—or a planetary system, or a galaxy, depending on which theorist you asked. It was as though the door to the galaxy was unlocked, but no one had the strength to push it open. But then it had been discovered that the energy requirements could be reduced to practical levels by setting up controlled oscillations in the drive field.

  Even so, the field could not form in a significant gravity field. Closer to Sol than just inside the region of the asteroid belt (the “Secondary Limit,” as it was called), the drive could only alter the properties of space to reduce normal gravity on one side of the ship to produce thrust—a great deal of thrust, and with no sensible acceleration, but nonetheless subject to relativistic limitations. And deep in a gravity well—The “Primary Limit,” closer to Earth than a little less than the distance of a geosynchronous orbit—the drive wouldn’t function at all. So for some time after its invention a century and a half earlier there had been a rigid distinction between the interstellar ships, which never touched a planetary surface, and the surface-to-orbit shuttles powered by ordinary reaction drives. But then grav repulsion had effectively erased that inconvenient dichotomy.

  Thus it was that Jason Thanou stood on the observation deck of the Pontic Spaceport’s terminal building and looked out over a vast expanse of the steppes north of the Black Sea, dotted as far as the eye could see with interstellar ships, including the one that was to take him home to Hesperia.

  There were, of course, spaceports far closer to Australia. But this was the only one from which transportation to the fairly out-of-the-way Psi 5 Aurigae system could be booked at a convenient time. So Jason had taken a suborbital transport from Australia over seas and lands with names out of Sinbad the Sailor and the Arabian Nights, and now he waited for his l
iner’s departure, with time to contemplate the conscious archaism of those names and that of this spaceport.

  It was typical of Old Earth, of course. Since saving its roots from being brutally torn up by the Transhuman movement, humanity had sought to nurture those injured roots in every possible way, including revival of arcane place-names. And, Jason reflected, nothing could be more appropriate for this world, where the memory of tens of thousands of years of human pain and pleasure, drama and farce, joy and despair, profundity and bathos, had seeped into the very soil, and layers of history lay in strata, as much a part of the planet’s landscape as its geology. He had always found the pervasive aura of ancientness oppressive, for he came from a world with no past, only a future—a truly new world, not even one of the original colonies settled during the slower-than-light era that had commenced a little less than three centuries before. And now, for the renewal of his soul, he needed to return to that world and breathe air that was not thick with that psychic aura.

  The public address system broke in on his thoughts, announcing the impending departure of the liner Artemis, of the Olympian Line. Jason took an instant to smile at the names Olympian gave its ships, for he had met the Teloi aliens who had been the real Olympian gods, and he had engineered their downfall. Then he turned away from the observation deck’s railing and went to catch one of the grav buses that would take him and his fellow passengers across the miles of spacefield to their ship.

  * * *

  The drive’s speed (or, rather, the elapsed transit time as experienced by the ship’s occupants and also by observers at each end of the trip, as the theoretical physicists always insisted on painstakingly pointing out) was dependent on its power relative to the mass of the ship. At higher levels of power, there was a “diminishing marginal returns” effect due to unavoidable deformation of the drive field, suggesting that sooner or later a limiting factor would be reached at which more power would actually be counterproductive—at least until a new loophole in the math (or at least a way of tweaking the field’s geometry) was found. But so far no one had been able to generate that much power. In the meantime, there was always a tradeoff between speed and payload capacity.

  A liner like Artemis was built for comfort, not for speed. Nevertheless, little more than twenty days passed before Jason could look in the observation lounge’s wraparound viewscreen and see the bluish dot of his homeworld in the light of what had swelled from a star into a sun.

  Psi 5 Aurigae, a single G0V star not unlike Sol, had been recognized early as a likely hearth for a habitable planet. And so it had proved. No gas-giant planet had migrated insystem, becoming a “hot Jupiter” and wiping out any promising planets in the “Goldilocks zone” (not too hot and not too cold, but just right) where liquid water could exist—a zone that had proved to have more elastic boundaries than had once been believed by pessimists using overly simplistic models. But this was a younger sun than Sol, perhaps half a billion years younger, and its third planet reflected that stellar youth. It was remarkably Earthlike in mass and density, and even had a similar rotation period, and abundant life swarmed in its oceans, releasing by photosynthesis the oxygen that made its air breathable. But that life, excepting various local equivalents of seaweed and trilobites, was mostly microbial. Microorganisms had only recently (as such things went) begun to invade the land.

  It was a common enough type of world. Fortunately, the task of terraforming it, which would have been daunting a couple of centuries earlier, had been rendered manageable by nanotechnology and genetic engineering, for both of which it was one of the clearly defined legitimate uses. Larger and larger areas of living soil spread from the original settlements, replacing barren rock and sand, expanding into Hesperia’s often dramatic landscapes and supporting a carefully selected imported ecology. The fringes of the terraformed regions were a true frontier, complete with a degree of lawlessness. This was the jurisdiction of the Hesperian Colonial Rangers, in which Jason had risen to the rank of commander before being temporarily seconded to the Temporal Service. Or at least it was supposed to have been temporary. . . .

  Artemis landed at Port Marshak, and Jason emerged into the afternoon light of Psi 5 Aurigae, not unlike that of Sol but in some indefinable way brighter. It was a fine spring day here in the northern hemisphere. (The axial tilt was only slightly less than Earth’s, resulting in similar seasons.) The gravity was almost exactly one Earth gee, but it seemed impossible not to walk with a jauntier step. He looked around. To the east, the plateau on which the spacefield was located fell away and the low light-tinted structures of Port Marshak could be seen beyond. To the west, the land rose in tree-clothed foothills beyond which the titanic Rampart Mountains piled range upon snow-capped range, the most distant of which were clearly visible in the atmosphere’s preternatural clarity.

  Jason took a deep breath of air that held none of the residual aroma of billions upon billions of humans and their byproducts. He closed his eyes, and a deep contentment suffused his entire being. Home . . .

  “Commander Thanou?”

  Jason’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that nasal voice, and he stared at the slightly plump young man in Earthified clothes. “No,” he moaned softly.

  Irving Nesbit’s face, with its puffy cheeks, receding chin and slightly buck teeth, had always reminded Jason, unpleasantly, of a rabbit’s. His self-satisfied smile heightened the resemblance. “I’m so glad you’ve finally arrived, Commander. I departed Earth almost a week after you did, but I traveled in one of the new Comet-class courier vessels—not particularly comfortable, by the way—and I’ve been waiting in this, uh, city for three days.” His tone said it had seemed longer. “I must say, I’m getting to be quite the old Hesperia hand by now!”

  Jason forced himself to speak mildly. “So you are. After I’d quit the Temporal Service, Rutherford sent you here to inform me that I had been reactivated by virtue of some technicality.” It had been the start of his expedition to the 1628 B.C. Aegean, whose purpose had been to observe the Santorini explosion but which had revealed the alien Teloi who had created homo sapiens to be their slaves and worshipers. Most of the Teloi had been permanently trapped in an extradimensnional cul-de-sac of their own creation, but some—the Indo-European pantheon of various myth-cycles—had remained abroad in the world. That, in turn, had prompted the 490 B.C. expedition which had stumbled onto the Transhumanist time-meddlers and the surviving Teloi who had become their allies, and resulted in the formation of the Special Operations Section. In short, one thing had led to another and this was the first chance Jason had had to return to his homeworld since he’d last seen that rabbitoid face.

  And now . . .

  “Ah, yes,” Nesbit’s irritating voice disrupted his thoughts. “The ‘technicality’ in question was a clause in your early-retirement agreement with the Authority, which perhaps other demands on your time had prevented you from reading. As I recall it was Part VI, Article D, Paragraph 15, Subparagraph—”

  “Yes, yes, I know!” With a physical effort, Jason forced his voice back down. “But the point is, what exactly are you doing here now? I happen to be on leave.” Eagerly: “My leave papers are with my luggage, so let’s go to the terminal and—”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary. I have a copy here.” Nesbit produced a sheaf of paper from his briefcase.

  “Then you must know that everything’s in order.” Jason had made very sure of that.

  “I invite your attention to the ‘Recall’ provision. It’s right here in Section XVII, Item 8, line 31.”

  Jason clasped his hands tightly behind his back, to prevent himself from doing something with them that he knew he would regret later. “Are you telling me that Rutherford is canceling my leave?” he asked, quietly but in a tone and with a look in his eyes to which Nesbit seemed blissfully oblivious.

  “In accordance with the ‘Emergency’ contingency.” Nesbit nodded happily. “As you can see, that’s a little further down, starting with line 37.�
��

  “I won’t do it! This is too much! You get back in your fast but uncomfortable ship, go back to Earth, and tell Rutherford I said he can take his ‘emergency contingency’ and roll it up into a cylinder and shove it up his—”

  “I am authorized to inform you that the contingency in question involves newly discovered evidence of illicit extratemporal activity by the Transhumanist underground.”

  All at once, Jason’s expression went neutral and his eyes grew very focused. “What kind of evidence? What historical period?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. In point of fact, I don’t know. I believe I lack a ‘need to know,’ as it is called.” Nesbit sniffed his disdain of such matters. “All I can say is that you are required to return to Earth immediately.”

  “‘Immediately’? Can I stay here long enough to drop in on my family?”

  “Director Rutherford indicated that your presence was required—”

  “But did he specify a return time?” demanded Jason, who had learned that the way to deal with bureaucrats was to pin them down to specifics.