Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “Thank you, Dr. Grenfell,” said Rutherford. “You will, of course, get a much more detailed historical orientation over the course of the next week or so, but that will suffice for now. Commander Thanou, would you like to add any closing remarks?”

  “Just a couple of points that can’t be emphasized enough. One is that this expedition is somewhat more narrowly focused than has normally been the case in the past. We certainly welcome any historical enlightenment that you two gentlemen’s research can provide. But our primary objective is to obtain evidence of illicit extratemporal activity by the Transhumanist underground we now know continues to exist. This is why we have been granted certain limited exemptions from the usual prohibition on taking advanced technology into the past. It also means you will potentially be facing extraordinary hazards. You already know this from your preliminary briefings, and have signed the Articles of Agreement releasing the Authority from liability. I merely reiterate it now.

  “The second point is that we are going into a milieu which was, by the standards of our modern civilization, an almost grotesquely violent and brutal one. Actually, quite a lot of human history was like that, but the seventeenth-century Spanish Main was exceptional for a couple of reasons. For one thing, that century was a period of genocidal religious warfare, which tends to be sort of desensitizing. Some rules of civilized warfare still obtained in Europe, but in the New World—‘beyond the line’ as they called it—even those went by the boards. The Spaniards were justly notorious for ruthlessness and cruelty, and their buccaneer enemies reciprocated with interest. Now, if things go according to plan, you won’t actually be exposed to the more extreme manifestations of this sort of thing. In other words, we’re not expected to be pirates; that’s just our cover story. But you may find the small, everyday things difficult to adjust to . . . the absence of a great deal that we take for granted in the way of amenities.”

  “Oh, surely, Commander,” said Nesbit brightly, “it can’t be all that bad. After all, those were people then, just like ourselves, so surely the basic fundamental must be essentially—”

  “Toilet paper,” Jason cut in succinctly.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Just a very minor example. Toilet paper, like so many things, was a Chinese invention. It wasn’t introduced into the West until the nineteenth century.” Seeing Nesbit’s blank look, Jason explained patiently. “We’re going to be in the seventeenth century.”

  “But . . . er, that is . . . what does one, well, do?”

  “One does without,” said Mondrago with a grin that was wicked even for him.

  “Thank you, Commander Thanou,” said Rutherford firmly. “I believe that’s all the orientation we need for now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Now this,” said Alexandre Mondrago admiringly, “is one good-looking gun!”

  “Somewhat more to the point, it was a state-of-the-art firearm for its time,” said Grenfell rather didactically. “One of the reasons why the buccaneers were so successful against the Spaniards was that they were, quite simply, better armed.” His expression softened a trifle. “But there is no denying that it is almost a Baroque work of art, in its way.”

  They all stood in the armory, just inside the wide doors that led to the firing range, and admired the five-foot-long, broad-butted musket Mondrago held. It had been produced by the Authority’s workshops to the exacting standard of authenticity time travel required. In this case, that had been harder than usual. Grenfell was explaining why.

  “Each of these muskets was one of a kind. Remember, mass production of firearms using interchangeable parts didn’t come in until the mid-eighteenth century. This is a reproduction of the kind of musket crafted by the great French gunsmiths of Normandy like Brachere of Dieppe and Galin of Nantes—the best in the world. Each one required a whole staff in addition to the designer: specialists in stockmaking, barrelsmithing, metal carving, engraving and inlaying.”

  “I believe it,” said Jason. The four-foot-long blued barrel had an almost porcelainlike gleam, and was decorated with mythological scenes. “Did they work all this artwork into the cold metal?”

  “Yes. The craftsman was also a metallurgist.”

  “Again, I believe it.” Jason took the weapon from Mondrago and hefted it. It had an odd look, with its spade-shaped stock, but it balanced beautifully. “It’s a lot lighter than it looks.”

  “The French gunsmiths were able to achieve that lightness by a combination of superb metallurgy and certain design innovations. It was one of the things that gave them an edge over their competitors and enabled them to charge the high prices they commanded. This particular example is—or, to be precise, would have been—even more expensive than average. Most of the muskets were still matchlocks, in which a moveable clamp called a serpentine connected to the trigger held a burning taper, which was dipped into a tiny pan of gunpowder. It was old technology—it had been around for more than two and a half centuries before our target date—and was not noted for either convenience or reliability.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” said Jason, recalling his experiences in the Thirty Years’ War.

  “But it was cheap, which was why it was still the standard ignition system for infantry weapons. This one, on the other hand, is a wheel lock.” Grenfell pointed at the little roughened steel wheel set just under the pan. In front of it was a serpentine, crafted to resemble a leaping dolphin, whose clamp held an iron pyrites, resting against the pan cover. “When the trigger is pressed,” he explained, “it sets the wheel spinning and also pushes back the pan cover and allows the pyrites to come in contact with it, causing sparks to fly. This system was superbly reliable, but its complex clockwork mechanism made it very expensive.”

  Jason held the stock against his right shoulder and sighted along the barrel. “It isn’t rifled, of course.”

  “No. Rifling had been known for some time, and was used for some specialized hunting weapons. But aside from the added expense, it was hard to get a ball down the barrel of a muzzle-loader when the inside of the barrel was grooved.”

  “But how accurate was a smoothbore musket like this? I seem to recall reading that the flintlock versions of the following century—the ‘Brown Bess’ type muskets—could consistently hit a foot-square target at up to forty yards but fell off drastically beyond that and couldn’t hit anything much smaller than an elephant at a hundred yards.”

  “Which was why the tactics of that era emphasized massed volley fire by dense formations of infantry,” Grenfell nodded. “No individual soldier was expected to hit an individual target. But the tests we’ve performed indicate that the kind of musket you’re holding, although of earlier vintage, could do considerably better. For one thing, it has a somewhat longer barrel, always an aid to range and accuracy. For another, compared to standard infantry weapons it is, as you will have gathered, very well-made.”

  Jason passed the musket around. When it came to Nesbit, he handled it as he might have a dead animal. “Dr. Grenfell, I don’t understand. You’ve intimated that one of these guns cost a small fortune. And in our history orientation you explained that, in terms of their social origins, most of the pirates could best be described as . . . well . . .”

  “Lowlifes,” Mondrago suggested helpfully.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Grenfell nodded.

  “Then how on Earth did they afford these very high-priced weapons?”

  “Any way it took,” stated Grenfell succinctly. “When someone went into piracy, his first order of business was to obtain a good musket from the Dutch traders who handled their distribution. The original buccaneers in Hispaniola had traded hides for them—twenty hides per musket—because they needed them to bring down the wild pigs and cattle. And they needed to do so without ruining the hides, so they became crack shots. In our target period, aspiring pirates would either use whatever they had saved from their wages as indentured servants—if that was what they had been, as was often the case—
or else borrow the money against their future shares of loot. It was an essential initial investment, because of the advantage it gave them over the Spaniards.”

  “Who were armed with what?” Pauline Da Cunha inquired.

  “Arquebuses, for the most part. They were the earliest kind of practical matchlock shoulder-fired arms, and had been around for almost two hundred years by the 1660s. They were obsolete, and inferior in every way. But they were cheap, which was why the Spanish government still equipped its solders with them—often shoddy ones.”

  “Typical!” sniffed Mondrago.

  “Then why didn’t the Spanish colonials buy good weapons from the Dutch traders for themselves, like the pirates did?” Da Cunha persisted.

  “They couldn’t, without dealing with smugglers—a serious offense. Remember, trade with the Spanish colonies was a royal monopoly. Neither the Dutch nor any other foreign merchants were allowed in. And the Spanish mercantile network, if you could call it that, was hopeless. The colonials had a saying: ‘If death came from Madrid, we would all live to a great age.’”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” said Boyer after the chuckles had subsided, “why the Spanish empire, which looks so vast and mighty on a map, was so unsuccessful in coping with a relative handful of . . . lowlifes.”

  “Actually, there were a lot of reasons. The stultifying centralized bureaucracy made flexible response impossible. The outdated arquebuses were largely wielded by amateur militia, who were up against hardened killers. Those Spaniards who were professional soldiers had little incentive to fight for a government that was often as much a year late in paying them—in fact, they often reverted to the level of part-time militia themselves as they did other jobs to keep body and soul together. Speaking of lack of incentive to fight, remember that the pirates weren’t conquerors who permanently occupied the land and enslaved the inhabitants; they came, plundered, and went away. Under those circumstances, flight was often a more attractive option than fight, especially if you had some advance warning and could hide your valuables.

  “But more fundamental than any of that was the empire’s innate vulnerability. It was totally dependent on the flow of precious metals from the New World to Spain, especially the silver mined at Potosí in Peru and Zacatecas in Mexico. The amounts were fabulous, and the kings of Spain could never understand why they were chronically on the brink of bankruptcy and, in fact, went over the brink numerous times. Nobody in those days, you see, had any concept of inflation. By constantly increasing the quantities of monetary metals they were causing the ‘Price Revolution’ of early-modern Europe and inflating their wealth away. The only solution they could imagine was to bring in still more gold and silver, which of course only perpetuated the vicious cycle.”

  “Junkie behavior,” Mondrago stated shortly.

  “Hmm!” Grenfell gave the Corsican a look of hitherto well-concealed appreciation. “I’d never thought of it in exactly those terms. But that’s not a bad way of looking at it.” Jason suspected he was looking forward to springing Mondrago’s insight on some of his earnest academic colleagues. “The empire was living on borrowed time until someone saw past its imposing façade and realized how vulnerable its lifeline was, how dependent it was on the steady supply of silver that enabled it to . . . support its habit. At the time we’re going to be visiting, that someone had appeared: Henry Morgan.”

  “Yes,” Jason nodded. “You’ve mentioned him several times in the orientation lectures.”

  “The most successful pirate who ever lived. In fact, he was so successful that he ceased to be a pirate. Eventually King Charles II knighted him and appointed him lieutenant governor of Jamaica, with instructions to hunt down his former cronies and suppress piracy—which he did with great efficiency. He died in bed, honored and filthy rich—practically a unique event in the annals of piracy. When they buried someone who had served in a gubernatorial office, it was customary for the Royal Navy ships in port to fire a twenty-one gun salute. They gave Morgan twenty-two.”

  “But all of that still lay well in the future in our target year, right?” asked Jason after a pause.

  “Oh, yes. In late 1668 he was gathering recruits for his greatest raid up to that time. His reputation was already such that buccaneers were swarming in to join him. I think we’ll find Port Royal to be even fuller than usual of, ah, ahem, colorful characters.”

  “Some of us,” Da Cunha commented archly with a sidelong glance at Mondrago, “ought to fit right in.”

  “Well,” said Jason, “let’s get out there on the target range and get some practice, so we can all fit in.”

  The muskets did turn out to be more accurate than expected. Of course, it helped that the Authority’s artisans had been able to embed very tiny laser target designators in the end of the stock just to the rear of the muzzle, activated by a partial squeezing of the trigger. It was one of the concessions Jason had been able to extort from Rutherford, using the argument that they might—perish the thought!—find themselves in a position where they needed to display the level of marksmanship for which the buccaneers were renowned. He had no real worries in the case of himself and the other two Service people, and Grenfell’s training, however rusty, should help. As for Boyer and Nesbit, the target designators should enable them to perform as well as a carpenter and a doctor were expected to.

  “What if somebody notices a tiny little dot of light on someone else just before that person gets shot?” asked Da Cunha dubiously.

  “He’ll blink, feel slightly puzzled for a moment, then shake his head and forget it,” Grenfell asserted confidently. “It simply isn’t part of his reality structure.”

  On Nesbit’s first try, the target designator did him no good. Unprepared for the musket’s kick, he almost fell over backwards and sent the ball flying over the target. Afterwards, he gradually improved, and when he finally managed to put a ball through the target board (though not in the circle) he looked fit to burst with pride. Jason sighed. A surgeon’s mate wouldn’t be expected to be a crack shot, and at any rate the chief concern at the moment was to familiarize everyone with the mechanics of loading and firing: the pouring of the powder down the muzzle, followed by the lead ball with its rammed-in wad of rag. Everyone bitched about the awkwardness and inconvenience, but Grenfell assured them that matchlocks were a lot worse.

  Naturally, single-shot muzzle-loading longarms were no good for boarding actions involving fast and furious close combat. They went back inside the armory to see what a buccaneer typically used for that: a brace of pistols—flintlocks, which for reasons Grenfell was unable to explain, had caught on for handguns before they did for muskets—and a cutlass. The latter was a short, slightly curved sword with a wide single-edged blade and a crude basket hilt like a metal shell protecting the whole sword hand. Mondrago, whose real forte was edged weapons, looked at it somewhat askance.

  “The workshop deliberately made it look crude,” Grenfell explained. “The original ones were pretty low-quality. These, on the other hand, are better than they look, thanks to modern metallurgy.”

  Jason hefted his pistols. One of them differed from all the others, for it incorporated another of the devices that Rutherford had grudgingly allowed. The handgrip concealed a very small sensor whose only function was the short-range detection of active bionic body parts. It was connected with Jason’s brain implant via a hookup the latter possessed for remote linkage with such devices, so its findings automatically appeared on his neural heads-up display—a useful capability whether the hat he was currently wearing was that of the Hesperian Colonial Rangers or the Temporal Service Special Operations Section. He had been able to overcome Rutherford’s jitters by pointing out that they needed a means of recognizing enhanced Transhumanists for what they were.

  They had a few days to practice with the various weapons. They were also issued their clothing: tuniclike shirts of coarse cotton, rawhide breeches, pigskin boots, and the broad-brimmed hats that were a necessity in the tropica
l sun. Da Cunha was dressed pretty much the same as the men, albeit with a shirt of somewhat better quality and even slightly frilly; any unmarried woman in Port Royal’s pirate quarter who dressed in the era’s full-skirted feminine styles was presumed to be a whore. They all acquired the tattoos without which seafarers of the period would have seemed naked—or at least the semblance of such tattoos, by grace of dermal imprint circuitry.

  Nesbit was disappointed in the outfits, having expected something more colorful and flamboyant. It was explained to him that pirates only decked themselves out in gaudy silks, damasks and velvets after plundering a merchant ship laden with such fripperies, which never lasted long. He had other disappointments in store. One was the fact that black flags (with skulls and crossed bones, or full skeletons, or bleeding hearts, or whatever), while not unknown, were not the pirate flags that were truly feared. Such a flag meant that quarter would be given to those who surrendered; a red flag meant no quarter, period.

  Practice in seamanship was—and had to be, considering that they were in the middle of a desert—done by means of virtual-reality technology. Going into it, Nesbit recovered some of his animation. “Will I get to, ah, man the steering wheel?”

  Grenfell rolled his eyes but explained with his usual patience. “The steering wheel was an early eighteenth-century invention. Before that, they used what was called a whipstaff, attached to the tiller, which moved the rudder.” He used a remote control unit to activate a cursor on the holographic ship-image they were studying. “As you can see, it’s below the quarterdeck. The steersman, unable to see outside, was dependent on commands from above.”

  “And at any rate,” Jason added firmly, “that isn’t going to be your job. In fact, while we’re having to acquire certain basic skills, I have no intention of unnecessarily putting us in positions where we’ll have to use those skills. Our guiding principle is going to be just enough to get by.”