Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “We don’t know that for certain. All we have to go on are rumors of it, which may only reflect old fears. Besides, even if you can’t actually scotch it in the seventeenth century, perhaps you can gather new intelligence on Transhumanist operations in general. And on further reflection I believe that, given the potential danger involved, we can allow certain compromises in the matter of high technology, as long as it is very subtle and well-concealed.”

  Jason’s eyes narrowed. Rutherford was being suspiciously accommodating. “I still don’t know why you want me. I can’t exactly pass as an African.”

  “Nor will you need to. The pirates of the milieu in question were a remarkably heterogeneous group. Anyone whose ancestors came from anywhere around the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins will blend in with them easily. Which reminds me: since this will involve a displacement of only slightly over seven hundred years, you’ll be able to take a larger group than was the case on your last two expeditions, which went back millennia.” Jason nodded automatically; the highly expensive energy requirement for temporal displacement was a function of the total mass displaced and the span of time into the past it was to be sent. “Therefore,” Rutherford continued, beaming, “in addition to Dr. Boyer and one other researcher, you can be allowed two Temporal Service personnel, whom you can choose yourself—from the Special Operations Section, if you like.”

  “Hmmm . . .” Yes, Jason thought darkly, altogether too accommodating. Still . . . “I’ll want Mondrago. And Pauline Da Cunha is back by now, isn’t she?”

  “She is indeed. Excellent choices; you can have both of them.”

  “Well . . . All right. I’ll do it.”

  “Splendid! Oh . . . by the way, Jason, there’s just one small matter I neglected to mention.”

  All at once, Jason’s suspicions came roaring back in full force. “Yes?”

  “As you know, certain members of the governing council have expressed concern over the latitude the Special Operations Section has, of necessity, been granted—some of the departures from the Authority’s traditional guidelines and procedures. Councilor Kung in particular—”

  “Get to the point, Kyle!”

  “Ahem! Well, the long and short of it is this. In order to obtain authorization for this expedition, I had to make one concession. Councilor Kung insisted that your group include a representative of the Authority, to exercise oversight and, ah, advise the mission leader on observance of, shall we say, the proprieties.”

  In short, a political commissar, thought Jason grimly, recalling the term from his experiences in the twentieth century. “And who might this individual be?”

  “As it happens, he is here now.” Rutherford touched a button on his desk. A side door opened and Jason looked up as the new arrival entered.

  No, he thought, from the depths of a desolation too abysmal for mere despair. No. This can’t be happening. Please, God, tell me this isn’t happening.

  “Hello, Commander Thanou,” said Irving Nesbit, his rabbitlike face looking rather like he was anticipating a carrot. “We meet again!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alexandre Mondrago stared at Jason aghast. “This is a joke, right?”

  “No,” Jason sighed. “Jokes are supposed to be funny.”

  They sat at a table in the station’s rather nicely appointed lounge, which Jason had decided was the best place to break the news to the two Service people. He took another pull on his Scotch, sans his usual soda. It occurred to him that he ought to start getting used to rum. Mondrago, who was already doing so with enthusiasm, gulped some of his Appleton’s and continued to stare. Pauline Da Cunha simply stared, visibly fuming. The intriguing mention of the possible spaceship wreck had been just barely enough to overcome her initial resentment at being tapped for this mission so soon after returning from the Confederate States of America’s final cataclysm. And now this.

  Chantal Frey hunched over and gazed miserably into her Chablis. “I swear I had nothing to do with it!”

  “Of course you didn’t. It’s just council politics.”

  “How could you let them get away with it?” Mondrago demanded. “You could have protested, explained to them that—”

  “Don’t you think I did? I argued myself purple in the face. I told Rutherford that Nesbit isn’t up to it. But, believe it or not, he’s met all the health and fitness requirements, and passed the course in low-tech survival.” Privately, Jason wondered if Kung’s heavy finger might have tilted the scales of the test-scoring process just a bit despite the Authority’s vaunted incorruptibility, but he saw no purpose to be served by sharing his suspicions with the others. “He was motivated, you see. It seems he has delusions of being a swashbuckling adventurer.”

  Mondrago and Da Cunha groaned loudly enough to draw glances from the other tables. Jason decided he’d better try to put the best possible face on things. “Hey, he probably won’t be too much more useless than some of the academics we’ve had to deal with.”

  “Like me,” Chantal put in ruefully.

  “But,” said Da Cunha with disagreeable realism, “in their case there’s never been any question about who was in charge. The mission leader’s authority has always been absolute.”

  “I was able to get a definite statement on that out of Rutherford,” Jason hastened to reassure her. “The relevant provisions of the Temporal Precautionary Act are still good. As mission leader, I’ll have the same legal powers as always.”

  “But,” Da Cunha persisted, “this time you’ll have to exercise those powers with someone looking over your shoulder. Someone who can come back and report over your head directly to Kung and the other fatheads on the council.”

  Jason made no reply, for he could think of none that wouldn’t deepen the general gloom. Instead, he chugged what was left of his Scotch and stood up. “Well, it’s time. Chantal, you’ll have to excuse us. Let’s drink up and head for the conference center.”

  Rutherford wouldn’t approve of us getting oiled just before reporting for this meeting, he reflected. To hell with him.

  * * *

  Looking around the large oval table in the conference center, Jason reflected that if it hadn’t been for Nesbit—who was looking insufferably, fatuously cheerful—he wouldn’t have been unhappy with this expedition’s personnel.

  Dr. Henri Boyer was their expert on the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions. He had already passed all the Authority’s requirements to qualify for a position on Asamoa’s expedition, before losing out to a slightly younger competitor for that position. He regarded this as a second chance, and Jason didn’t anticipate any problems with him. And it had turned out he had a hobby of carpentry, which would stand him in very good stead where they were going.

  Dr. Roderick Grenfell had, of course, also met the requirements. He was of nondescript predominantly European appearance, which as Rutherford had pointed out was all that was needed to fit into the target milieu. He was a specialist in Caribbean history, with an emphasis on the buccaneers of the seventeenth century. By birth, he was the only off-worlder present besides Jason himself, hailing from New Albion, Kappa Reticuli II. In his youth on that frontier world, he had been exposed to some compulsory paramilitary basic training, which afforded Jason a degree of comfort.

  “You’ve all been through the preliminary procedures,” Jason began, “including the biological ‘cleansing’ procedure that is necessary to prevent you from endangering the peoples of the past by introducing more highly evolved disease microorganisms to which they would lack immunity.”

  “Rather like the natives of the Caribbean islands when the Europeans arrived,” Grenfell remarked.

  “That’s the general idea,” Jason nodded. “You have also had your TRDs implanted.” Their expressions told him that they had found the operation distasteful, not because it was painful—which it wasn’t, save for a slight sting on the inner side of the upper left arm—but because it violated their culture’s taboo against implants in general, even passive o
nes. As usual, it had been explained to them that it made the tiny device impossible to lose. And—also as usual—this had helped, once they had grasped the fact that without the TRD to restore their temporal energy potential they would be stranded in the seventeenth century permanently. Jason saw no reason to go into the one exception he had engineered in the case of Chantal Frey, which was hardly likely to apply in their cases.

  “As you have been told,” Jason continued, “Your TRDs will activate at a preset moment, timed by atomic decay, at which you will return to the linear present, here at the displacer stage. This is always the case, except for Special Operations missions, which are brief and have very specific targets. You may have worried—people always do—that the sudden, unexpected transition will be a little disorienting. Don’t be concerned. I’ll give you warning. As mission leader I have, by grace of an exemption from the Human Integrity Act, a neurally interfaced brain implant which, among other things, will provide a digital countdown to the moment of activation.” He observed, as always, the quickly smoothed-over shudders at a far more extreme taboo violation. “The countdown is projected directly onto my optic nerve. A map of our surroundings can be similarly projected. I’m sure you can all see how useful that can be.”

  Jason didn’t add that their TRDs contained minute tracking devices that caused their locations to appear on that map. Mondrago and Da Cunha already knew it, of course. And as for the others—especially Nesbit—he didn’t believe in upsetting people with things they didn’t need to know.

  He also didn’t mention that Da Cunha had an identical computer implant, by virtue of having qualified as a mission leader. There was no point, inasmuch as hers had been temporarily deactivated. It was typical of the Authority’s niggling adherence to the letter of the rules: only the current mission leader could make a case for such a flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the Human Integrity Act.

  “Another area in which the Authority has been able to make a case for a special exemption is that of language. There would be no point to sending people into the past unable to communicate. So we imprint the language of the target milieu onto the speech centers by direct neural induction. This time the process will be less lengthy and stressful than usual, because the language in question—seventeenth-century English—is closely related to today’s Standard International English.”

  “They could almost be regarded as different dialects of the same language,” interjected Rutherford from his position at the opposite end of the conference table from Jason, “although our modern speech contains a multitude of loan words and neologisms which you will have to remember not to use.”

  “Furthermore,” Jason resumed reassuringly, “the procedure will be done slowly and carefully, to avoid disorientation and other unpleasant mental side effects.” A shadow crossed his mind as he recalled having the utterly alien Teloi language brutally rammed into his unprepared brain.

  “But,” said Grenfell, “surely this doesn’t magically enable one to speak the language like a native.”

  “Of course not,” Jason admitted. “The Service has a standard solution to that problem: no matter where you are, you always claim to be from somewhere else. Besides which, the piratical population of Jamaica in the 1660s was so polyglot that oddities of speech must have had to be pretty extreme to attract notice. And that brings me to the primary purpose of this meeting, which is to acquaint you with our ‘cover story.’

  “Our date of arrival will be December 20, 1668, and we will remain for five months. We will appear—just after dawn, as per standard procedure—near the eastern end of the harbor whose northern shore is now the site of Kingston, Jamaica but was pretty much uninhabited then.” Jason manipulated a remote. The wall behind him flickered and became a screen displaying a map. “We will make our way westward along this narrow spit of land that encloses the harbor on the south—the Palisadoes, it’s called—to the town of Port Royal at the harbor’s entrance. It was the capital of Jamaica at that time, and also the unofficial capital of the pirates, who poured their loot into its taverns and whorehouses like . . . well, like drunken sailors. It was known as the ‘richest and wickedest city in the world.’ We will be pirates down on their luck and looking to sign up for a new raid on the Spaniards.” He smiled. “We’ll even be able to use our own names and ethnicities, for a change. I’ll be a renegade from Sicily, which was then a Spanish possession, part-Greek as were quite a few people there. Alexandre will be a Frenchman, of whom there were a lot in the pirates’ ranks. Pauline will be from Brazil, and pose as my mistress.” Jason’s voice held no apology, and Da Cunha’s expression held nothing but equanimity. She was used to this sort of thing. It was typical of the sort of dodges that had to be used to account for female members of extratemporal expeditions in the long ages of sexism. “This will not be incompatible with her being very handy in a fight; there were actually such cases in the history of piracy.”

  “Calico Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny,” Grenfell murmured with a smile.

  “Dr. Grenfell, you will be an English former merchant seaman whose ship was taken by pirates and who accepted their offer to join them—a common occurrence. Dr. Boyer, you will be a runaway slave from Saint Domingue, the new French colony on Hispaniola.” Again, Jason’s tone was expressionless, and Boyer did not react. “Your hobby will stand you in good stead, because carpenters were highly prized personnel among pirate crews—they got an extra share of the prize money. In fact, sometimes pirates would stop and board a merchant ship just to kidnap the carpenter and force him to join them! The carpenter and one other.” Jason turned to Nesbit with a carefully neutral expression. “The only specialists more valued than carpenters were surgeons. You will be English, and a ship’s surgeon’s mate who was forced into piracy by the process I just described.”

  Nesbit looked panic-stricken. “But I’m not a doctor!”

  “No, you’re not. But you passed the first-aid portion of the survival course you took to qualify for this expedition. Believe me, that limited knowledge puts you at least on a par with most seventeenth-century physicians, especially nautical ones.” And it was the only thing we could think of that might possibly justify your presence, Jason forced himself not to add.

  “Thank you, Commander Thanou,” Rutherford said with a nod, then addressed the meeting at large. “Over the next several days, you will receive instruction in the background of this historical milieu . . . by traditional teaching methods,” he hastened to add. “Dr. Grenfell, who is one of the leading authorities on the subject, will naturally play an integral part in this. But at this time, I wonder if he might give us a brief overview of the piratical culture into which you will find yourselves.”

  “The Spaniards,” Grenfell began, “really brought the problem on themselves. They were determined to maintain the monopoly on the Americas—exclusive of Portuguese Brazil—that the Pope had granted them. They tried to wipe out the English, French and Dutch settlements in the Lesser Antilles—tiny islands they themselves had never bothered with.” Nesbit looked bewildered. Jason touched the controls, and the map changed to one of the entire Caribbean. He ran a cursor over the crescent of tiny islands curving southeastward from Puerto Rico to Trinidad just off the northern coast of South America.

  “This caused refugees to follow the prevailing southeasterly trade winds from there to the Greater Antilles—Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and, especially, Hispaniola,” Grenfell continued. “The Spanish settlements there were restricted to the areas around the port cities, so the newcomers—who also included runaway indentured servants and others—were able to settle on the wide stretches of unoccupied coast and live off the wild cattle and pigs, whose meat they smoked on a grill called a boucan, so they were known by the French word boucaniers, which came to be Anglicized as buccaneers. In addition to selling meat to passing ships, they also lived by raiding Spanish shipping. Here, again, the Spanish inflicted it on themselves. They refused to allow other nations’ merchants free access to t
heir colonies, which was really what the English and Dutch wanted. As a result many seamen, who would otherwise have been legitimately employed in a free-trade economy, joined the buccaneers and went into smuggling and piracy. By the 1640s they were calling themselves the ‘Brethren of the Coast,’ and they had a stronghold on Tortuga, of the northwest tip of Hispaniola, which came to be dominated by the French element.

  “But they really came into their own after the English takeover of Jamaica in 1655. Oliver Cromwell, then Lord Protector, had sent a fleet to conquer Hispaniola. It was an ignominious fiasco. Cromwell was not a man to whom you wanted to go back and report failure! So Admiral Penn and General Venables, the leaders of the expedition, cast about for a consolation prize, as it were. Jamaica, which the Spaniards had never strongly held, was the obvious candidate. The conquest was easy, although a vicious guerilla war of extermination against Spanish holdouts and their surprisingly loyal former slaves went on for three years thereafter.

  “The new English possession, lying across the southern approaches to the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, was a perfect base for raids. And the colonial administrators and merchants actually welcomed the buccaneers as protectors, as the English crown was too cheap to provide adequate defense. In fact, in 1657, Governor Edward D’Oley invited the Brethren of the Coast to make Port Royal their home port.”

  “Sort of like townspeople in the nineteenth-century American West bringing in gunslingers to protect then,” observed Da Cunha, who in the course of her last expedition had heard about what was happening on the frontier even as the Civil War raged in the East.

  “Somewhat similar. And all they had to do to obtain this protection was issue letters of marque—or ‘commissions,’ as they were more commonly called in the seventeenth century—to legitimize piracy against the Spaniards, who were the buccaneers’ mortal enemies.” Grenfell chuckled. “And if England happened to be at peace with Spain, all the buccaneers had to do was sail off to the nearest French or Dutch island and get commissions there. Somebody was always at war with Spain.”