Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “No, Almirante,” protested one man, bolder than the rest. “We speak not for Morgan but for our families and friends he is holding as hostages. They will be at Morgan’s mercy if you do not let his fleet go unmolested.”

  “He can hang the lot for all I care! You have no one but your own craven selves to blame. Creep back to Morgan and tell him that I know my duty to my king, and that no threats to unworthy subjects like you will prevent me for carrying it out. Now get out of my sight! You disgust me.”

  As the soldiers hustled the delegation out, Don Alonzo got his breathing under control and turned to the castellan. “Are my orders concerning the landward approaches to the fort being carried out?”

  “Yes, Almirante. New trenches and earthworks have been prepared in those positions, and procedures for moving our artillery there on short notice have been put in place and practiced.”

  “Good. We’ve repulsed Morgan when he attacked from the sea; he won’t try that again. And remember what happened at Portobello. He put his men ashore with those canoes of his and took the great fortresses guarding that city by assault from the land side, where they were most vulnerable. It’s a weakness of all our works, including this one—they’re designed to control sea approaches. But I don’t intend for that to happen here.”

  “It won’t, Almirante,” the castellan stated emphatically. “You have my word: this fort will not be taken by a land assault.”

  He turned out to be right.

  * * *

  “Well,” said Henry Morgan philosophically to the group on Soledad’s quarterdeck, “it was worth a try. And the time hasn’t been wasted. We’ve finished getting all we can out of Magdalena.” His eyes held an avaricious gleam. “Fifteen or twenty thousand pieces of eight—it’s hard to say exactly, since some of it was melted into globs of silver by the fire.” The gleam died, and he gave a disappointed headshake. “According to my friend the pilot, there was a total of forty thousand aboard. But that’s all the divers can reach.”

  Mondrago leaned over and whispered in Jason’s ear. “He’s being awfully nonchalant for somebody who’s still bottled up here.”

  “And who knows that time is against him,” Jason whispered back. “He must have something up his sleeve.”

  Grenfell spoke hesitantly. “I think I’m beginning to remember . . .” But his voice trailed vaguely off.

  “So what does that bring our total up to?” Zenobia wanted to know.

  “Ah, yes!” Morgan’s eyes lit up again. “Counting that and also the ransom from the townspeople, it comes to at least 250,000 pieces of eight.” There was a collective gasp. “And that’s just the money and jewels; it doesn’t count the merchandise—of which there’s quite a lot—and the slaves.”

  “That’s more than we got at Portobello,” someone breathed in a tone of what could only be called reverence.

  “And more than L’Ollonais got when he came here,” rumbled Roche Braziliano, almost forgetting to scowl. Everyone else was speechless. This was a haul of legendary proportions.

  “We’ll make the division now,” Morgan continued. “Each ship will carry its own crew’s share. Putting it all aboard one ship would be risky.” He didn’t elaborate on whether the risk was of storms at sea or of the one ship’s captain getting funny ideas.

  Jason could keep silent no longer. “Ah, Captain . . . I hate to mention it, but this treasure won’t do us much good unless we can get home with it.” There was a general muttering as everyone came down from the clouds of cupidity with a bump.

  “Oh, that,” said Morgan, as though voicing an afterthought with a Welsh lilt. “Well, I think I might have an idea. You see, I’ve been talking to the Spanish pilot about Don Alonzo. He’s told me quite a lot. For example, he’s confirmed that Don Alonzo never had any intention of honoring his promise of free passage.” He shook his head sadly, as though disillusioned to the core of his sensitive soul by the depths of human perfidy. “Anyway, between things he’s told me, and what our scouting boats have reported about the work the Spaniards have been doing on the landward side of the fort, it’s clear to me that they expect us to attack from that direction, the way we did at Portobello.”

  “Makes sense,” nodded Zenobia. “Too bad their artillery would blow us to bloody rags.”

  “Still,” Morgan mused, “it seems a shame to disappoint them. Here’s my plan . . .”

  As he spoke, Grenfell’s eyes cleared and he began nodding excitedly.

  * * *

  Don Alonzo stood on the battlements in the afternoon sun and watched the parade of canoes through his spyglass.

  The pirate fleet lay beyond gunshot, and there its ships loaded men into canoes—about twenty men per canoe. Then the canoes were rowed ashore to a spot toward the island’s far end, beyond a line of mangroves. Then they would return to the ships—slowly, for on the return trip they carried only a couple of oarsmen—to pick up another load of men. It had been going on for hours. Now it appeared that the last of the canoes were headed back to the ships.

  “Have you kept a tally of canoes and men as I instructed?” Don Alonzo demanded of the castellan.

  “I have, Almirante. The total number of men who have gone ashore and remained there comes to more than half of Morgan’s entire force.”

  “And now they wait concealed behind those mangroves, from which they will undoubtedly emerge and attack us tonight,” said Don Alonzo with a satisfied nod, pleased at the confirmation of his prediction. “But we are ready for them.”

  “Indeed, Almirante.” The two men looked down over the parapet, where the last of the great cannon, on its cumbersome four-wheeled garrison carriage, was being laboriously trundled along the ramp prepared for the purpose, and emplaced in its new position on the landward earthworks, to join all its fellows. It had been an exhausting task, and the men now rested beside their guns. Behind them were neat stacks of ammunition—not the ship-smashing round shot, but case shot whose spreading pattern of musket balls and scrap metal could shred whole squads of advancing infantry at short range. Companies of musketeers also rested at their stations along the line of fortifications. All that firepower was perfectly positioned to cover the cleared area that the attackers must cross.

  “We will slaughter them when they advance beyond the mangroves into the open,” the castellan stated confidently. “The darkness won’t shield them—there’ll be enough of a moon, and as you can see we have an ample supply of torches prepared.” Then, with the barest hesitation: “Er, Almirante, it is of course unnecessary to point out that we now have no guns pointing seaward.”

  “Nor do we need them. This is the one time when we can be absolutely certain that Morgan is not going to try to run the channel.” Don Alonzo waved in the direction of the mangroves. “Not even a godless pirate would sail away and leave the majority of his own men stranded.”

  “Ah.” The castellan nodded. “I understand.”

  * * *

  Jason couldn’t decide which was more unpleasant: the brackish bilge-water in which he lay flat on his back, or the highly aromatic buccaneers pressed tightly against him, sardinelike, in the bottom of the canoe.

  None too soon, the seemingly empty canoe scraped against the side of Soledad—the side hidden from the view of the fort, naturally. The concealed men in the canoe got stiffly up and climbed aboard using ropes hanging from the rail. They hastened below, out of sight.

  The gun deck was crowded with other wet, tired but grinning men who had gone ashore sitting up in the canoes, fully armed and conspicuous, and then, concealed by the mangroves, laid down behind the gunwales and returned to the ships, supine and invisible. One of them was Mondrago.

  “Well,” he greeted Jason, “yours was one of the last canoes. I heard Morgan say we mustn’t overdo it; the Spaniards will never believe that we’ve landed any more men than those that have already shuttled back and forth between ships and shore.” He gave his head an incredulous shake. He had still not gotten over his awe at Morgan’s prepo
sterously simple but brilliant ploy.

  Morgan came down the ladder, greeting men by name and cracking jokes. “When do you plan to set sail, Captain?” asked Jason.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll set sail at all, at least at first. It would make us more conspicuous. No, I believe that after nightfall I’ll simply weigh anchor and let the ebbing tide carry us out of the channel. With all the sails furled, we’ll be almost invisible at night. When we draw level with the fort, then we’ll pile on all the canvas we’ve got.”

  * * *

  “Hasn’t the patrol been heard from yet?” demanded Don Alonzo irritably, staring into the darkness beyond the landward fortifications.

  The sun had set and no attack had come. Finally, in a fit of impatience, he had ordered a patrol to be sent out to probe beyond the mangrove barrier and, perhaps, prick the pirates into some reaction—or at least find out what they were up to, and why the expected attack hadn’t materialized.

  “No, Almirante,” the castellan reported. “They should have made some kind of contact with the pirates by now. But—”

  “Ships in the channel!” screamed a lookout from the seaward battlements.

  Don Alonzo and the castellan stared at each other wide-eyed. Then they ran along the ramparts to the seaward side, where they could gaze out over the channel. Even in the moonlight, Don Alonzo could see it was thick with pirate vessels. As he watched, their sails began to blossom out and catch the night breeze, and they swept ahead faster.

  “Get the guns back up here!” he bellowed.

  “Impossible, Almirante,” protested the castellan. And Don Alonzo knew he was right. Manhandling those guns to the landward side had been an afternoon’s work.

  “Almirante,” someone else cried out, “the patrol is back.”

  The young teniente in command of the patrol ran up and dropped to one knee, gasping for breath. “Your pardon, Almirante, but we advanced cautiously to the mangroves and beyond, and encountered no one. So we continued on, which is why I am so late in reporting.” He took another deep breath. “We found nothing, anywhere.”

  “What?” Don Alonzo loomed over the young man, seething with fury. “Idiot! You must have missed them!”

  “As God is my witness, Almirante, there is not a single pirate on this island!”

  And as the pirate ships vanished into the dark of the Gulf of Venezuela, seven guns crashed out in a mocking farewell salute.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When it came to weather, Henry Morgan’s luck had always been as legendary as it was with most other things. In all his expeditions he had never encountered a really dangerous storm at sea.

  But in the Caribbean, no one’s weather-luck can last forever. Morgan’s chose to run out the day after their departure from the Laguna de Maracaibo, when they still had to worry about being driven back onto the shore.

  “Is this technically a hurricane?” shouted Mondrago over the howling of the wind, the crashing of the thunder and the creaking and groaning of the ship’s frame as he and Jason clung to the shrouds and ratlines for dear life, lashed by rain and spray.

  Jason was opening his mouth to reply when Soledad—Morgan hadn’t gotten around to renaming her—plunged down yet another mountainous wave into the trough below. A sheet of water roared the length of the ship, battering the wind from their lungs and almost knocking them off their feet. The ship struggled aright, wallowing, as water poured off the deck into the scuppers through the waterways along the bulwarks. Jason lost his grip but managed to grab a mainmast backstay before he could be swept overboard. He coughed out the salt water that had forced itself in before he had managed to close his mouth, and gasped for breath.

  “This isn’t quite hurricane season,” he finally wheezed. “It generally begins in June. And the normal hurricane area is further north. But this is a damned serious tropical storm.” He’d barely finished the sentence before he had to duck to avoid being brained by a flying piece of broken tackle. The ropes of loose rigging were like whips in the wind.

  Morgan, fearful of finding himself back ashore and at the highly problematical mercy of the Spaniards, had tried anchoring in five- or six-fathom water—about thirty to thirty-six feet deep—and riding out the storm. But the tempest had intensified, and he’d had no choice but to weigh anchor and face into the waves. Jason and Mondrago were part of the shift now laboring topside to keep the ship afloat. Nesbit and Grenfell were both below, manning the pumps. Jason tried to imagine what it must be like aboard the undecked boats.

  “I tell you,” an older than-average buccaneer cried out a few feet from them, “this fleet is cursed! It’s her!” He pointed theatrically across the water. Even in the gloom, Rolling-Calf was close enough to be seen. “Everybody knows a woman at sea is bad luck. She’s bought it on all our ships.”

  A brief lull in the wind allowed another man to make himself heard. “She’s not just a woman—she’s a witch! They can stir up hurricanes by tossing a pinch of sea sand into the air, or by stirring the water in a pot with their bare feet.”

  “And who knows what a black witch can do?” jittered the first man. “That must be it. She wants to sink us all!”

  “But,” Jason pointed out, “she’s caught in this storm with the rest of us.”

  “Ah, have you no wit, mate? The Devil takes care of his own—he’ll pluck her out while the rest of us drown. I once knew a man who said he saw—”

  “Belay that talk!” bellowed Henry Morgan, making his unsteady way toward them along the rolling, lurching deck. “What are you, seamen or frightened children? We’re all in this together—everyone in the fleet. Now put your backs into—”

  Whatever else he was going to say vanished tracelessly in a shrieking roar of renewed wind, and Soledad breasted a wave even more titanic than the last one. This time the helmsman was unable to keep her bow-on, and as she came down she slewed to starboard. So the brutal onrush of foaming seawater went athwartships, causing her to heel over.

  Jason, alongside the starboard rail, clung desperately to the backstay. But it snapped free, and he went over the side. Mondrago tried to grasp him by the arm, but failed. At that moment Morgan, who hadn’t been grasping anything secure, slid to starboard and his heavy body crashed into Mondrago’s.

  The three of them hit the water almost together.

  Jason, his lungs almost rupturing with the agony of suffocation, struggled up to the surface. Frantically treading water while sucking in wheezing gasps of breath, he saw that the sudden gust had subsided and they were again between waves. He also saw the bobbing heads of Morgan and Mondrago not far away. And he saw Soledad’s receding stern.

  He knew that crying after her for help would be futile, even had his lungs been up to outshouting the wind. A hopelessness too leaden for panic suffused him.

  Then a female voice came thinly through the wind, crying “Grab the lines!” He looked around and saw Rolling-Calf coming alongside in the relatively calm water. Crewmen were flinging out ropes, one of which splashed into the water nearby. With more strength than he’d thought he had left in him, he swam for it and clutched it, winding it around his midriff. A pair of Maroons hauled him aboard. As he collapsed on the deck and lay there drawing heaving, shuddering breaths, he watched Mondrago being likewise lifted of the gunwale, as was Morgan—with somewhat more difficulty—after another moment.

  “Captain Morgan!” said Zenobia, descending from the poop. “Thank God! And—” She turned to the other two rescued men, and halted as her eyes met Jason’s.

  “Thank you,” he said, inadequately.

  “Well, well!” Her mocking smile was back. “Who would ever have thought I’d save . . .” Her voice trailed off as she remembered Morgan was in earshot. He got laboriously to his feet.

  “Aye, lass, thank you indeed!” Morgan looked at the sky. “What do you think? Is the worst past?”

  “I fear not, Captain. This is just a lull. There’s more yet to come.” Zenobia stepped back up to the poop, a
nd the three men joined her. She pointed over the taffrail. “Look back there. You see—”

  A scream split the air. They whirled and saw one of the Maroons, standing amidships, pointing aloft. He fell to his knees, moaning. His crewmates followed suit.

  Jason and the others looked up. Overhead, an arrowhead-shaped segment of the leaden sky was rippling and wavering in a way that was clearly unnatural. Still more unnatural was the sudden appearance, about midway along that region’s length, of a sharply defined rectangle of dim light seemingly suspended in midair.

  Jason barely had time to recognize what he was seeing when his body was seized in an invisible, rubbery, unbreakable grip. He and the others on the poop began to float upward, toward the rectangle of light.

  A roar of enraged incomprehension burst from Morgan’s lips as his feet lost contact with the deck. It subsided into inarticulate grunts as he struggled and thrashed in midair against the immaterial force holding him. The other three did nothing. They knew too well what was happening to them, and the uselessness of resistance.

  They ascended more and more swiftly, borne aloft by that irresistible force, and the open rectangle—the Kestrel’s cargo hatch—engulfed them. A refraction field was carried by a grid in a vehicle’s surface, and formed mere millimeters from that surface, so that when the hatch slid aside it left a gap in the field. Once inside the partly empty space that was the cargo hold, they hung suspended just under the hemispherical device set in the overhead which projected the remotely focused gravitic effect known as a tractor beam. Then the hatch slid shut below them with a clang, forming a deck onto which they were unceremoniously dumped as the tractor beam was switched off. Through the bulkheads came the hum that told Jason that they were bound somewhere else on the wings of grav repulsion, leaving Morgan’s storm-tossed fleet behind.

  For a moment, they simply lay there in silence. In that moment, Jason had time to stare at Morgan and think, This can’t be right! What happened to the Observer Effect? We’ve been counting on it. Nothing is supposed to happen to Morgan at this point. Something should have prevented them from grabbing him! History says he got back from Maracaibo, pillaged Panama the following year, got knighted and made Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, and so forth.