Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “—was the result of mischance and hostile action,” Rutherford reminded him.

  “Perhaps. But compounding the problem by taking Morgan into space was Commander Thanou’s own unilateral, unauthorized decision. Entirely on his own initiative he went charging off and attacked the Teloi battlestation, at the urging of a primitive scalawag like Morgan.”

  “Thereby preventing the Transhumanist underground from obtaining Teloi military technology, which would have been a calamity of imponderable proportions.”

  “Er . . . that’s beside the point, Kyle! Correct doctrine and proper procedure: those are the important things, not mere results!” Kung’s tone suggested that there was something faintly vulgar about results, or at least about people who got them. “Furthermore, it is clear from Commander Thanou’s report that he also committed other, lesser improprieties and indiscretions, including various gratuitous heroics. Fortunately, I had the foresight to insist that a person of sound attitudes accompany the expedition, to rein in Commander Thanou’s enthusiasms if possible or, failing that, to report on them to the council.” He shone the light of his countenance on Nesbit. “You were with Commander Thanou at all times, save for the very end. I now invite you to share with the committee your observations on his conduct—observations which I am confident will confirm my misgivings about the Special Operations Section in general and Commander Thanou in particular. You have the floor.”

  This is it, thought Jason with a sinking feeling. He’s heard his master’s voice.

  Nesbit stood up. A few days hadn’t sufficed to erase the effects of months of tropical sun and often inadequate food, and the rabbit semblance that had always struck Jason was somewhat in abeyance. His eyes made the circuit of the table, finally coming to rest to meet Jason’s for an instant. Then he turned and faced Kung squarely.

  “Yes, councilor, I accompanied Commander Thanou for the entire course of the expedition up to the storm off Maracaibo. During which time he saved my life, and the lives of other members of the expedition, repeatedly. And during which time he was forced to make numerous decisions, without any possibility of recourse to higher authority, entirely on his own. And those decisions were invariably the correct ones.”

  At first it didn’t seem to register on Kung. Then he started to open his mouth, but Nesbit continued on without a break, overriding him.

  “We all owe a debt of gratitude to Commander Thanou for his willingness to exercise an effectively independent command on the basis of the information available to him in the field, and without regard for any second-guessing he might encounter on his return. I fully endorse all his actions.”

  Kung now seemed to be experiencing difficulty breathing.

  Well, well! thought Jason, awestruck. Somewhere in the jungles of Hispaniola, he grew a backbone.

  “Furthermore,” Nesbit went on, “we have no choice but to approve Commander Thanou’s plan, simply because we know that he will in fact carry it out. We know this not only from the evidence of his visual recording, but also from the demonstrable fact that we live today in a world in which neither Henry Morgan nor anyone else in the seventeenth century disseminated knowledge of the future.”

  “Very true,” said Rutherford gravely. “We like to say that ‘reality protects itself.’ In this case, an element of conscious human decision-making has been introduced into the process of its doing so. And yes, I am aware of the disturbing philosophical implications of all this for the concept of free will. But the fact remains that, as Mr. Nesbit put it, we have no choice.”

  None of them looked happy. But there really was no alternative. And Nesbit’s testimony clearly made an impression on everyone, coming as it did from one generally regarded as Kung’s lapdog. There was very little further discussion.

  * * *

  Afterwards, Jason stopped Nesbit in the hallway. “Irving . . . I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you surprised the hell out of me.”

  Nesbit’s expression was rueful. “I think I surprised a number of people—notably Councilor Kung.”

  “Yeah. I hope there won’t be any adverse consequences for you.” The lapdog that stood up and barked, Jason thought.

  Nesbit shrugged, then smiled. “It will have been worth it. You see . . . I also surprised myself.” He paused. “I suppose you’ll be departing soon.”

  “Right. There’s not much that needs to be done in the way of preparation. I’ve already got the language, and the bio cleansing is still current, and . . .” Jason rubbed his face, which he hadn’t shaved since his return. “So it’s just a matter of fabricating one piece of equipment.”

  “Of course.” Nesbit hesitated. “Commander, I understood what you said about why this must be a one-man expedition by you. But . . . I wish I could be coming with you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having you along.” To his amazement, Jason found he actually meant it.

  They shook hands and Jason departed, leaving Nesbit looking wistful.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jason was a seasoned veteran of numerous temporal displacements. But on all those occasions, he had arrived in the target milieu with solid ground under his feet. So, despite all his mental preparation, it was disorienting to abruptly find himself in midair a few feet above the waves.

  For a split second he was in free fall, before striking the surface of the water and going under. At least the cold wasn’t shocking, here in the tropics. Nevertheless, sheer startlement caused him to release his carefully held breath. He struggled back up, broke the surface, and spent a moment treading water, coughing salt water out of his lungs and taking deep gasps of the air of the seventeenth century. Only then did he have the leisure to look around him.

  Yes! Not far away, Henry Morgan was swimming toward a floating yardarm. The complex calculations based on his recorder data had proven accurate. But of course they were, flashed through his mind. They had to be. He dismissed the matter, for there was no time for philosophical conundrums just now. He began swimming toward the yardarm which Morgan was now grasping. At this moment, Jason knew, Morgan was being glimpsed from above by what he decided to think of as “Jason Mark I,” who was currently engaged in a struggle with Romain. But Jason was in no position to look skyward at the moment. He was too busy swimming—somewhat awkwardly, with the compact but by no means weightless device in the satchel that was strapped to his back.

  A few strokes brought him to the yardarm, which he caught with his left hand. Morgan, to his left, turned to him with a grin. “Jason! You got off the flying ship after all! Where are the others?”

  “They’re fine, Captain, and we scuppered Romain,” With his right hand, Jason slipped the strap of the satchel around the yardarm so as to leave both his hands free. “I’ll tell you all about it later, after we’ve been picked up.”

  “Right,” said Morgan. “It won’t be long now. They’ve spotted us.” He jerked his chin in the direction of Soledad, on whose deck small, waving figures could be seen. “And afterwards, you must tell me how we can go about retrieving the flying ship!” He called out and waved back.

  With Morgan’s attention thus diverted, Jason turned his head and looked upward. The unnatural rectangular hole in the sky that was the Kestrel’s cargo hatch was overhead, and a face was peering down over its edge. For a brief instant of soul-shaking wrongness, Jason met the eyes of his own very slightly younger self. Then Jason Mark I was no longer visible, and the cargo hold’s interior lights went off, rendering the hatch effectively invisible to anyone who didn’t know where to look for it. And Jason Mark II knew he had only a moment before Soledad drew close enough for its crew to observe what he was about to do.

  With his right hand, he reached behind his shoulder and pulled from the satchel an object shaped vaguely like a fat pistol, and clearly a product of a technology unknown to this century. At the same time, his left arm went around Morgan’s throat in an unbreakable choke hold. The buccaneer admiral gagged, and his eyes bulged in shock, as Jason place
d the “muzzle” of the pistollike device against his right temple.

  “I’m truly sorry, Captain,” Jason whispered. “But remember what you said about ‘making a chaos of creation’? That can’t be permitted.” He squeezed with his left arm, applying pressure in a very precise way, and Morgan passed out momentarily. (For what was about to happen, the subject had to be unconscious, lest severe mental trauma result.) Then he put his finger to a stud . . . and, in spite of himself, hesitated for an instant.

  Selective artificially induced partial amnesia—vulgarly called “mindwipe” to the tight-lipped disapproval of the medical profession—was held by many to violate the spirit if not the letter of the Human Integrity Act. For this reason it was normally restricted to use as a last-resort tool of mental therapy, as a means of removing intolerable memories. Jason had thought at one time that it might have to be used on Grenfell, but traditional methods had proven efficacious. There were persistent rumors—just as persistently denied—that intelligence agencies also found certain uses for it, such as excising highly sensitive knowledge from the minds of personnel who might be captured and interrogated under truth drugs. Either way, it generally required a bulky array of equipment—but most of that consisted of highly sophisticated scanners and their associated computers, for the delicate and complex task of identifying and isolating the particular memories to be erased. The actual generator of the very short-ranged neural beam that did the erasing was quite small . . . and when the objective was to simply eliminate all memories going back a preset length of time, that generator was just about all that was required. This was all the more so when the generator could be engineered for a single-shot pulse that would burn out its tiny energy cell.

  Thus it was that when Jason pressed the stud, everything that had happened since the moment the storm had swept him, Jason and Mondrago overboard—a moment precisely ascertainable from the timer function of Jason’s implant—vanished from Morgan’s memory.

  The technology wasn’t infallible, for the effects did not reach down to the very bedrock of the subconscious. In the coming years Morgan’s dreams might occasionally be troubled by glimpses of outlandish machines, unimagined celestial vistas, and weapons beyond the powers of pagan gods. But then he would awaken and attribute it to the rum, for manifestly it could be nothing else.

  Jason released his grip on the device’s handle and it fell into the water with a splash. Then he held onto Morgan and watched Soledad draw closer.

  Morgan soon regained consciousness, wincing with the headache that always followed memory erasure, and looked around, bewildered. “Jason, it’s you. But . . . the storm . . . ?”

  “It’s over, Captain. We fell over the side together. You must have hit your head on something; you’ve been out for a few hours. I got you to this yardarm. And here comes the flagship—they’ve sighted us.”

  “By God, Jason, you saved my life! I’ll be damned and roasting in Hell before I forget it!” Morgan waved to the figures leaning over Soledad’s rail. “Ahoy, you lubbers! Throw us a line!”

  As Soledad drew alongside, Jason glanced back over his shoulder. He fancied he could see two splashes in the distance, not far from Rolling-Calf: Mondrago and Jason Mark I, hitting the water. But he was looking into the setting sun and he couldn’t be certain.

  They were soon clambering aboard the flagship, surrounded by its vociferously welcoming crew. “What of the fleet?” Morgan demanded.

  “All the ships came through the storm, Captain,” someone declared. “Your good fortune must have rubbed off on all of us!” There was a chorus of profanely awestruck comments on this latest manifestation of Henry Morgan’s famous luck.

  “Here’s my luck!” boomed Morgan, slapping Jason on the back. “If it weren’t for Jason here I’d be shark shit! As it is, I’ve got the worst headache of my life. Let’s get some rum!”

  As the laughing throng moved away, Jason spotted Nesbit and Grenfell, both visibly relieved. After they’d all drunk enough kill-devil to be sociable, and dusk had fallen, Jason led the two away to where they could talk in relative privacy. The stars were starting to come out with tropical rapidity, and as he gazed up at them he smiled at the recollection of what had occurred out there just a short time ago.

  “We were afraid you were lost, Commander,” said Nesbit. “Is Alexandre . . . ?”

  “He’s all right. He’s over there on Rolling-Calf with Zenobia.” Which, Jason reflected, was the truth as far as it went; he just didn’t mention who else was there. “I don’t have much time, so listen carefully. I’m going to have to leave this ship—by which I mean jump over the side. It must appear to be a simple ‘man overboard’ situation, so I’ll need your cooperation.”

  Nesbit looked understandably bewildered. “But . . . Commander, where are you going? And why?”

  “I’m afraid, Irving, that you don’t have a need to know that.” Jason quirked a smile. “Yes, I recall your low opinion of that doctrine. But you’re just going to have to live with it. You’re also going to have to live with being on your own until your retrieval.” Nesbit’s stricken look awoke Jason’s compassion. “It shouldn’t be so bad. Remember, the retrieval date is May 20. By the time this ship gets back to Port Royal, you won’t have long to wait.”

  “Yes!” Grenfell’s eyes lit up. “I seem to recall, now: Morgan returned on May 16.”

  Roughly the same time Zenobia is going to get to Morant Bay with Jason Mark I, Jason reflected. “Right. So you’ll only have to lay low in Port Royal for four days. It shouldn’t be hard. Everybody in that town is going to be concentrating on having a colossal party, with Morgan’s boys back ashore with a ton of loot to spend.” Jason was almost sorry he was going to miss it. “Go back to the inn we stayed at before. If they can’t accommodate you, just sleep outside like so many others do—but be sure to stand watches. It shouldn’t be hard to maintain a low profile.”

  “But, Commander,” Nesbit protested, “we won’t have you to give us a countdown to our retrieval.” He clearly didn’t relish the prospect of having the world around him vanish without warning.

  “No, you won’t. But remember, it’s going to be four days after your arrival at Port Royal. And, like all our retrievals, it’s timed for shortly before local dawn, to minimize the chances of anyone observing us disappearing into thin air. So in the small hours of May 20, get somewhere private and hold yourselves in readiness so it won’t be too much of a shock to the system.”

  They waited a while longer, until it was well and truly dark, before going inconspicuously to the forecastle. No one was about, under the tropical stars.

  “Now,” Jason explained, “I don’t want any unexplained disappearance that will cause people to wonder. This will be a routine accident. Afterwards, tell everyone that I had too much to drink and fell over the side and drowned.”

  “I think Morgan will be genuinely regretful,” Grenfell opined.

  I think I might be too, Jason was honest enough to admit to himself.

  “Very well, Commander, I’ll give the alert as instructed.” Nesbit’s brow furrowed in the moonlight. “How, exactly, are you going to get to wherever it is you’re going, after falling in the water?”

  “‘Need to know,’ Irving,” Jason reminded him with a grin. He shook hands with both of them. “I’ll see you in twenty-fourth-century Australia soon.” Then he hitched himself up on the rail and went over the side feet first, crossing his ankles and folding his arms to make himself a projectile entering the water with minimal resistance.

  He heard Nesbit’s shout of “Man overboard!” a split second before he hit the water and went under. Then, while holding his breath, he thought a command. There was the usual indescribable moment of wrongness, and then he collapsed in a soaking heap on the displacer stage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Yes,” said Roderick Grenfell, “Esquemeling’s The Buccaneers of America, our primary source, says Morgan’s fleet encountered a severe storm the day after departin
g from Maracaibo. It says nothing about Morgan himself being washed overboard. But there is nothing about Morgan being separated from the rest of the fleet for a few hours that is incompatible with the account, which at any rate is very brief and sketchy.”

  “Good!” Kyle Rutherford’s relief was palpable.

  Along with Grenfell and Rutherford, the latter’s private office held Jason and Mondrago. Chantal Frey was also there, for this involved the Transhumanist underground. She had, from the first, been fascinated by Zenobia. At the moment, though, she was occupied with another question.

  “I still don’t quite understand why Asamoa’s expedition in 1791 found the wreck of the Kestrel. After all, the Transhumanists had temporally displaced it, so I assume it had its own TRD. Why didn’t it just snap back to their linear present when . . .” Her brow furrowed. “Oh. I see. The thing was smashed to fragments—including the fragment that contained the TRD. So only that particular fragment was retrieved.”

  “That’s one possibility,” Jason nodded. “Another is that it had no TRD at all. Romain mentioned that they were thinking of leaving it in the seventeenth century and making their Teloi allies a present of it.”

  “Either way,” stated Rutherford with subject-closing firmness, “it is a fact. So it seems as though we have tied all the loose ends together, as people say.”

  “Not quite,” said Jason. “There’s a rather large loose end in the form of the Tuova’Zhonglu Teloi.”

  “But Jason, you destroyed their battlestation.”

  “Yes—one battlestation,” Jason countered. “How do we know there aren’t more of them, still around today, roaming the spacelanes in the manner Ahriman described?”

  Rutherford’s color didn’t look particularly good. “We’ve never found any evidence of surviving Teloi in today’s galaxy.”

  “How much of the galaxy have we explored? Practically none of it. All our colonies are within fifty light-years of Sol. In 1669 they had been wandering the galaxy for a long time, with the patience of lifespans in years best expressed in powers of ten. And you should abandon all your previous ideas about the Teloi character, which are based on the Oratioi’Zhonglu I encountered in ancient Greece. These Teloi are really nasty.”