Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  He felt a sickening sensation of mental free fall as his accustomed structure of assumptions seemed to crumble away from beneath his feet, leaving him plunging into a chaos that did not bear contemplating.

  So perhaps I know how Morgan feels right now.

  But Morgan recovered before he did. The buccaneer admiral stood slowly up. He instinctively started to draw the cutlass at his side, but then dropped his hand as though recognizing the gesture’s futility. He looked around slowly in the dim electric light. He seemed to take in the background hum, a type of sound that had never been heard on Earth in 1669. His eyes—quite black in that illumination—were wide as they stared at surroundings that held not a single familiar or even comprehensible reference point. Those eyes took in the composite plasteel of the decks and bulkheads, which his world could never have cast in metal. They blinked at the lights that shone without fire. Then they finally came to rest on his three companions . . . and particularly on Zenobia.

  I was wrong, Jason decided. I can’t know what he’s feeling. He’s a highly intelligent man—a bleeding genius in a low kind of way—but he’s still a product of a society that hasn’t entirely left the Middle Ages behind. His eyes—the eyes of a man who fears very little—hold a kind of fear I can never feel, because I grew up in a society that accepts rationalism as unquestioningly as the Middle Ages accepted the supernatural.

  Sooner than Jason would have thought possible, Morgan found his voice. “So,” he said slowly to Zenobia, “you really are a—”

  Zenobia shook her head. “No, Captain Morgan. It’s not what you think. This has nothing to do with the powers of darkness. We’re in a vessel that can fly through the air—but not by sorcery. The people who command it are very evil, but they’re not witches or warlocks. Their evil is of the ordinary human sort—and we all know the kinds of things we’re capable of doing to each other without any help from Satan.”

  “And these people who’ve captured us are our enemies,” Jason put in. “Actually, some of them aren’t human. But even those are not demons, even though Zenobia’s Maroon followers believe they are.”

  “And the Maroons really aren’t all that far wrong,” Mondrago muttered. Jason reflected that it was just as well that Irving Nesbit was still aboard Soledad. He probably would have been going into cardiac arrest at this point, listening to the frankness with which they were speaking to Morgan, who had no right to be here at all.

  Once again, Morgan stared at the three of them in turn. An average human of this century would, Jason thought, have been gibbering by now, or else too deeply in shock even to gibber. But if there was one adjective which did not describe Henry Morgan, it was “average.” He drew himself up into an unconscious stance of command, and his features hardened into a mask of iron.

  “Who are you three?” he demanded. “What are you?”

  For a moment, Jason considered telling him they were from the Moon. That was something the seventeenth-century mind could at least fantasize about—Cyrano de Bergerac was currently fourteen years in his grave—whereas time travel didn’t yet exist even as a fictional device. But he considered it only to reject it. The time for game-playing was past. He met Zenobia’s eyes; she nodded, and he proceeded.

  “We’re from the future, Captain. A little over seven hundred years in the future, to be exact. I don’t ask you to understand it. Just take my word that we can, within limits, voyage on the stream of time—as can the evil men who now have us imprisoned in their flying ship.”

  “‘Flying ship’? Yes, so Zenobia said. But . . . but I saw no ‘ship.’ Only a square hole in the sky, in a part of the sky that seemed to flicker, or . . .” Morgan trailed to a bewildered halt.

  “This ship can make itself invisible. And,” Jason continued hastily as Morgan’s jaw dropped, “this also has nothing to do with any black arts. Zenobia has told you the truth: these enemies of ours are very powerful, but their power is only that of mechanical and warlike skills that your world doesn’t yet possess, just as . . .” Jason sought for an example Morgan would understand, for the concept of technological advancement did not come naturally in a world where the way things were done never changed noticeably over the course of any one individual’s lifetime. “Just as your own ancestors in the days of Richard the Lionhearted didn’t have guns, or astrolabe and sextant for navigating their ships.”

  They didn’t? said Morgan’s expression. With what seemed almost a physical effort, he sought to come to terms with all of this. “If you haven’t been born yet, and won’t be born for seven centuries, then how can you be here now? By God, time isn’t a sea to be voyaged on! It just . . . is. Once a moment has passed, it’s over and done with. This is madness! It would make a chaos of all creation!”

  “Believe me, you’re not the only one to have thought that,” said Jason with a smile. “But you know I must be speaking the truth, for you know that no one of your time could build this flying ship.”

  “Flying . . . But this deck is steady under my feet.”

  How do you explain inertial compensators? thought Jason with an inner groan. Or grav repulsion? When Isaac Newton is twenty-seven and only just becoming a professor at Cambridge! “The lack of a sensation of motion has to do with the same force that allows the ship to fly, and which brought us up through the air,” was the best he could manage. “And remember, it’s not magic. Nor is . . . that which allows us to leave our own time and visit other times.”

  “Hmm . . .” With a swiftness Jason knew he shouldn’t find surprising, Morgan accepted the situation and began to think out its implications. “If you came from your own time, then surely you can return to it.” The dark eyes gleamed with sudden avidity. “And perhaps take me with you? By God, I think I might like to see a world that builds invisible flying ships! I can imagine many possible uses for them.”

  I’ll just bet you can. “I’m sorry, Captain. It doesn’t work that way. We are all . . . anchored to the times we are born into. You are of this time, and must remain in it. We are in it for a set period, and must remain until a prearranged date only a couple of weeks from now.”

  “Unless our mission leader has one of the Special Ops gizmos implanted in his brain,” was Mondrago’s muttered qualifier in Standard International English. “Too bad we can’t use that to get out of this right now.”

  “And it is impossible for me to return at all,” interjected Zenobia. “I did what was necessary to make it impossible.”

  “So you marooned yourself in time,” said Morgan wonderingly. “Why?”

  “Because I was once one of the evil ones who now hold us captive,” she stated boldly. “I could no longer stomach being used by them, for they seek to found a demon-worshiping cult of unspeakable foulness, for their own twisted purposes.”

  “And what are those purposes? Do they wish to plunder the past? Is that possible?”

  “No, that’s not their aim. They seek to prepare the way for their own planned conquest of all the Earth. And even that is only a means to their real goal, which is to distort the very nature of Man as God created him, making themselves into gods ruling over monsters. They would even blur the line God ordained between that which lives and that which does not.”

  There was nothing in Morgan’s biography, nor in anything they themselves had seen of him, to suggest that he was noticeably religious. But his swarthy face paled. “This isn’t simple, honest plundering. It’s blasphemy. No, it is beyond the boundaries of blasphemy, or of madness. These men must be stopped!”

  “That’s why we’ve been sent into our past,” Jason told him. “Stopping them is our duty.”

  “A war fought across time, in defiance of the proper order of events . . .” Morgan looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s in my mind that you people, and not just your enemies, are arrogating to yourselves the powers of gods.”

  “Maybe. But what other choice have we, if we don’t wish to simply lie down and accept defeat—a defeat that would mean the end of humanity as God inten
ded?”

  “None. And if what you say is true, I’m with you.” Abruptly, Morgan turned to practicalities. “But they don’t know that. Why did they seize me?”

  “I don’t believe they meant to. You just happened to be standing close to Zenobia and me, whose presence they can detect at a distance, by means you wouldn’t understand. And I don’t understand how it could have happened. It’s not supposed to. Our histories—and yes, you’re remembered in them—tell us it shouldn’t.”

  “Well, be that as it may, they’ve got us all now. Where are they taking us in their flying ship?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I imagine Hispaniola. If so, we ought to be arriving there any time now.”

  Morgan’s eyes widened at the thought of the speed Jason’s statement implied. “Why haven’t they come to put us to the question, instead of leaving us locked in this hold?”

  “They probably think they can break our spirit by leaving us alone to stew in our own fears and despair.”

  “Well, then, they don’t know Henry Morgan! And . . . I don’t think they know the three of you either.”

  All at once, the humming died down to silence and there was a slight bump as the Kestrel landed. The doors in the forward bulkhead slid aside, momentarily dazzling their eyes with the brighter illumination beyond. Two goon-caste guards entered the hold warily, holding laser carbines at which Morgan stared.

  “They’re a kind of guns,” Jason murmured to him. “Very deadly ones.” Morgan nodded shortly, and made no resistance when one of the goons took his cutlass and the other three’s knives.

  The goons deployed to the sides of the door and two other figures came forward. The first was Romain, wearing a self-satisfied smile—which vanished from his face when he saw Morgan.

  “Surprise,” said Jason with a slight smile of his own.

  But then the second figure entered . . . and Morgan’s eyes bulged. Never mind what Jason and Zenobia had told him; he knew the supernatural when he saw it.

  Ahriman disregarded him and turned to Romain, whose discomfiture was obvious. “What is the matter?” he demanded. “Yes, we have one unplanned captive, but what difference does one primitive local human make?”

  Romain opened his mouth as though to reply, then closed it again.

  Jason hoped his smile was infuriating. “You can’t very well explain it to him, can you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  For a moment a kind of impasse held, as Romain stood gripped by indecision.

  “Yes,” Jason continued in the Teloi language, pressing his advantage, “as soon as your sensors told you I’d been washed over the side in the chaos of the storm and hauled aboard Zenobia’s ship, you thought you had your perfect chance to grab the two of us despite the Observer Effect. And as soon as you detected my bionics and hers within a few feet of each other on Rolling-Calf’s poop, you knew you had that chance. So you seized it. But you forgot that even the most tightly focused tractor beam has a significant spread. So now you’ve got Henry Morgan—and no, I don’t understand how that can be possible any more than you do. But it’s not as much of an immediate problem for me as it is for you, because you’ve led Ahriman to believe that observed history, including the history of human extrasolar colonization, can be changed, and—”

  “Quiet!” Romain came out of his paralysis, strode forward, and slapped Jason across the mouth with a force that brought the taste of blood from a cut lip. But Jason saw Ahriman’s puzzled look.

  “What is he talking about?” the Teloi demanded. “What is this ‘Observer Effect’?”

  “Nothing,” Romain hastily assured him. “It’s just the babbling of a mere unmodified human. And,” he continued to Jason, shifting to the Standard International English Ahriman could not understand, “do you recall what I told you before about the consequences of displeasing me? You’ve already displeased me by escaping, so I might devise something even worse, when we resume our long-postponed schedule of ceremonies here.”

  Jason remembered those ceremonies only too well, as he stared into the face he had once seen shining with grease and wearing a look of dreamy satiety. But he forced himself to speak levelly, seeking to extract any and all information he could. Keep him talking! “So we’re back in Hispaniola?”

  “Yes—and while I’m gone there’ll be no slackness like that of the idiot I left in charge last time. He has been . . . disciplined.”

  Jason wasn’t about to shed any tears for One-Ear, but he was glumly certain that that worthy’s successor had taken his predecessor’s “discipline” to heart. There would be no escape this time. But then the words while I’m gone registered. “So you’re depriving us of your company?”

  “Only for a short time. You may be interested to learn that the Teloi battlestation is even now approaching Earth. Indeed, it has passed within the Primary Limit and has gone into free fall.”

  Jason unconsciously nodded. The battlestation was presumably a pure deep-space construct, and as such lacked a photon drive for maneuvering in a planetary gravity well where its negative-mass drive could not function. It had simply killed the pseudo-velocity it had accumulated, resumed its intrinsic velocity, and was now passing through Earth’s Primary Limit on a hyperbolic solar orbit. But of course none of that was his primary concern just now.

  “So,” Romain continued, “you and this traitor will have a little time to contemplate what is going to happen to you. Perhaps unfortunately, it won’t be a very long time. Ahriman and I must leave immediately to rendezvous with the station. It was good fortune that I was able to tidy up matters by recapturing you just before our departure.”

  “You haven’t entirely tidied things up,” Jason reminded him. “There are, as you may recall, two other members of my team, who know everything I know about what you and Ahriman are up to. You don’t know where they are—and they have no bionics for you to detect. Remember, you don’t know how soon our party is due for retrieval.”

  “As to their location, they are, of course, with Morgan’s fleet. And while locating them admittedly won’t be as simple as it was in your case, it shouldn’t take long to track them down and kill them. I saw enough of them to conclude that they’ll be fairly helpless without you.” Romain’s façade of suave self-satisfaction slid off with its usual abruptness, revealing that which lay beneath. “Enough of this. Come.”

  Through all of this, Jason had been observing Morgan out of the corner of his eye. After his initial stupefaction at the sight of Ahriman the buccaneer had, with his usual adaptability, settled into watchfulness, listening carefully to the byplay. The Teloi language was, of course, purest gibberish to him. But Standard International English undoubtedly held a certain haunting familiarity—there must even be tantalizing stretches of recognizable vocabulary. It was, Jason imagined, probably not too much more difficult than Jamaican Creole would have been for a speaker of twentieth- or twenty-first-century American English. Once Morgan fell into the rhythm of it, he would be able to catch a great deal of the sense of what was being said.

  Romain and Ahriman turned and left the hold. The goons motioned with their laser carbines for the prisoners to follow them . . . a little awkwardly in the case of the one to the left, who was burdened with a cutlass and three knives. They passed directly into the Kestrel’s cabin—unoccupied save for a man sitting in the pilot’s seat on the raised bridge—and proceeded forward along the central aisle with the air lock to the right and a row of passenger seats to the left. As they approached the bridge, Morgan’s eyes grew round again, for he was entering a realm of technology so far advanced beyond his own as to be meaningless—the famous adage of the twentieth-century sage Clarke crossed Jason’s mind. But once again his features closed up quickly into a mask of alertness. Perhaps, Jason thought, it helped that here he had at least one comforting glimpse of familiarity, for the bridge’s viewscreen showed a clearing in Hispaniola’s jungle-clothed uplands, with mountains looming in the background. And, as Jason watched, he bega
n to very inconspicuously sidle a little closer to the goon who was holding his laser carbine in one hand as he cradled the confiscated cutlery in his other arm.

  Romain stepped up onto the bridge. “Key in the figures for our rendezvous with the battlestation,” he ordered the pilot. “We must depart as soon as the prisoners have been offloaded.” The pilot obeyed, and the course instructions went into the Kestrel’s computer. Romain turned around and addressed the goons. “Remove them.”

  The goons gestured them toward the airlock, and the one to the right began to reach for the switch that would open it. As the other one turned, he muttered with annoyance and paused to readjust the blades under his arm.

  At that moment, Henry Morgan roared out an inarticulate bellow and swept one arm around, knocking the barrel of the goon’s laser carbine downward. The goon got off a shot, which singed the deck between Morgan’s feet, as the blades went clattering and scattered.

  A twenty-fourth-century man would almost certainly not have done it, Jason reflected—later, when he had leisure for reflection—because such a man knew how viciously lethal weapon-grade lasers were, and that knowledge tended to immobilize him in the presence of one of those whiplashes of instantaneous death. But Morgan was conditioned to think in terms of the clumsy firearms of his own era. Now he shoved the goon back, to topple over against a passenger seat, and simultaneously scooped up his cutlass. With another roar, he raised the cutlass and brought it down in a diagonal slash through the goon’s shoulder and chest, cutting open his heart. A gout of blood spurted across the cabin, splattering onto the deck.

  For some very small fraction of a second, surprise held everyone else motionless. Then the second goon raised his laser carbine. Mondrago grasped it by its barrel with his right hand and shoved it upward, exposing the goon’s solar plexus, to which he delivered a paralyzing punch with his left. Zenobia, in what amounted to a single movement of superhuman speed and fluidity, dropped to one knee on the deck, snatched a knife, brought it up, and hurled it. There was a faint thunk!, and Ahriman was standing with a surprised expression on his face and the knife’s hilt protruding from the center of his forehead . . . but standing only for an instant, before his lifeless legs collapsed under him.