Soldiers Out of Time

by Steve White

  EVA procedures were a matter of routine. Hanson bled the air from the sealed cargo bay and, after it was in vacuum, opened its ventral hatch. The seven-member party then drifted out, using the EVA packs. The latter were small grav repulsion units, unable to provide much in the way of propulsion this far from Planet B’s surface, where they only had a gravity field of less than 0.1 G to work with. But it sufficed, given that they were in free fall and at any rate had no desire to build up a possibly uncontrollable velocity. And returning to the gig would be no problem; it mounted a small tractor beam projector in the cargo bay, so Hansen could simply pull them in one by one. Jason, wanting to keep radio communications to a minimum, gave a hand signal and they moved slowly toward the darkened transport, tightly grouped for safety.

  They were about halfway there, with the gig growing tiny in the distance, when it happened.

  Without warning, lights awakened up and down the transport. And a retractable ventral turret began to extrude itself. In the light of the planet, Jason instantly recognized that turret for what it was. Horrified, he watched it swivel in the direction of the gig.

  In the vacuum of space there is, of course, no sound. And laser beams—even those in the visible-light wavelengths, much less the X-ray lasers of space combat—are invisible. The only manifestation of the energies that turret released was the glare as explosive energy transfer tore the gig apart.

  It had all taken little more than a heartbeat. Jason hadn’t even had a chance to break radio silence. Now it was broken for him, and a harsh voice crashed into his earphones.

  “Attention! Your craft has been destroyed. If you do not wish to be left in orbit to die slowly, you will discard your weapons and stand by to be tractored aboard. Anyone found in possession of weapons afterwards will be killed. This is your only warning.”

  Jason, Mondrago and Hamner looked at each other through the transparent nanoplastic hoods of their suits. No words were necessary. It was hopeless. Odinga’s missile launcher could probably damage that hull, but then the laser turret the transport wasn’t supposed to have would be turned on them. Or the transport could simply accelerate away at the rates possible to negative mass drive inside the Secondary Limit, leaving them adrift.

  “Do as he says,” said Jason in a dull voice, still trying to deal with Hansen’s death. Their weapons drifted away into infinity.

  A crack of light appeared on the transport’s side, and widened as a cargo port slid aside. Jason felt the rubbery grip of a tractor beam, and was drawn irresistibly inside a harshly illuminated cargo bay when he fell to the deck under the sudden force of an artificial gravity field. The others followed, and the port rumbled shut. Jason felt the pressure as the bay filled with air.

  “Out of your suits!” came a command from a loudspeaker. They obeyed, stripping to the body-stocking-like liners worn under the combat environment suits.

  “They were waiting for us,” Mondrago muttered as they stripped.

  Jason nodded. Not knowing what kind of audio pickups might be focused on them, he said nothing about the one positive feature of their circumstances: that De Ruyter was safe, and would remain so if Palanivel followed his orders.

  Hamner seemed to be thinking along similar lines about audio surveillance, for he muttered low in Jason’s ear. “Uh, sir, as I understand it, you can get us out of this any time you want to, just by mentally commanding our TRDs to activate so we’re snatched back to Zirankhu in our own time. Right?”

  “Right . . . except for one little thing. De Ruyter is outside the range of my TRD’s command function. If I activated our TRDs now, then the ship would be permanently stranded here in the past, as would everybody aboard her . . . including Dr. Frey,” he added, with a glance in Mondrago’s direction.

  Mondrago’s face was frozen into an expressionless mask.

  A hatch opened, and a squad of goon-caste Transhumanists filed in, armed with laser carbines, safely usable inside a spacecraft but deadly against soft targets. “Come!” the chief goon commanded. They were herded out of the cargo bay, along a passageway, and then down to a lower deck.

  As they went, Jason activated the map-display function of his brain implant. For a normal extratemporal expedition, it was programmed for the area in which Jason expected to be, and showed the locations of his team members’ TRDs as red dots. In this case, with an unpredictable destination, no such programming had been done. But in its absence the implant built up a map on the basis of Jason’s. The further they were marched, the more the ship’s layout grew, seemingly floating in mid-air a few inches in front of his eyes.

  Finally they were shoved through a hatch into a large dimly lit chamber filled to capacity with rows of narrow triple-level bunks stretching away into the darkness. The hatch slid shut behind them, leaving them alone with their despondent misery.

  Jason heard gagging noises from behind him. He himself fought not to retch. The chamber was filthy, and the ventilation system fought in vain against a sour stench. The chilliness of the air probably helped.

  “What the hell is this?” demanded Hamner.

  “‘Hell’ is exactly the right word—it’s slave quarters,” came a dull, apathetic voice, and Jason saw they weren’t really alone after all. The voice came from one of the bunks, where a raggedly clad female figure lay on her side, turned away from them, showing no inclination to get up or to look at the new arrivals.

  Jason strode to the bunk. He grasped the woman by the shoulder, turned her over . . . and stopped dead.

  “Yes, it’s me,” said Elena Rojas.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There was only ominous silence from their captors, save for a bell that Rojas said meant feeding time. A greasy, lumpy mess flowed into a trough beside a water spigot. They tried it, and unanimously decided they weren’t that hungry yet. All excretory functions had to be performed at a hole in one corner of the deck. Otherwise they had nothing to occupy their time except listen to Rojas’ story, which she told in a toneless voice.

  “It was a matter of luck. The flechettes that went through me missed all vital organs. They picked me up and took me to that hangar of theirs, where they have a dispensary with field regen equipment. They patched me up. They . . .” Suddenly she seemed unable to continue.

  “They must have interrogated you,” Jason prompted. “Torture . . .?”

  “No,” she said—a little too emphatically, Jason thought. She shook her head, and then took a deep breath. When she resumed, her voice finally held an emotion. The emotion was self-loathing. “No, they didn’t bother with that. They didn’t have any mind-probe equipment available, but they pumped me full of babble juice.”

  And so, Jason silently added for her, you spilled the details of our plan. Which was why they knew when to be in wait for us here. Neither of them had to say it out loud. Her haunted eyes said all that was needed.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he assured her.

  “Hell, no!” Mondrago chimed in, understanding without being told just exactly what wasn’t her fault. “Nobody can withhold information when under truth drugs. You’re only human, damn it! Don’t presume to hold yourself to a higher standard than God does.”

  Jason shot a sharp glance at the Corsican, who he had never suspected of being even remotely religious. Then he turned back to Rojas, needing to extract all possible information. “So then they put you on this transport and went to Planet A. And there, as you must know—”

  “—They performed a temporal displacement,” she finished for him, and the dead hopelessness was back.

  Without a TRD. Once again, Jason felt no need to verbalize what they both knew.

  “So,” she continued in the same monotone, “I’m stuck here in the past, permanently.”

  “Like hell you are! De Ruyter has a TRD of its own, in addition to our individual ones. All we have to do is get you, and the rest of us, aboard her.”

  “Oh, is that all?” The humor was wry if not bitter, but it was the first flicker of it she
had shown. It died out at once. “So the ship is all right?”

  “Yes. The gig and its pilot were lost, but Captain Palanivel has orders to lay low if he loses contact with us. If we can just get away from this ship—”

  “An extravagant hope,” came a new voice.

  Crouching in a semicircle around Rojas and intent on her story, they hadn’t noticed the hatch opening. Now, at the sound of that cold, oddly distorted voice, they sprang to their feet and whirled around. Four armed goons had filed in and taken position flanking the hatch, in which stood the source of the voice.

  “Stoneman!” gasped Jason.

  “I suppose you may as well go on calling me that, Commander Thanou.” He stepped forward under one of the dim lighting fixtures, which revealed him to be even more disfigured than Jason had thought from the glimpses he had gotten. And it was easy to see why his voice was odd, for his mouth was down-twisted to the left. But, if anything, it further enhanced his sneer. “I trust the accommodations meet with your approval.”

  Jason glanced around at the filthy bunkroom. “I can’t say much for your standards of shipboard sanitation.”

  “In general they are quite high. But this compartment is good enough for Pugs and other animals.” Stoneman stepped closer, and Jason saw a gleam in his eyes, which as he recalled never held anything but coldness. He recognized it for what it was: a gleam of sheer, unspeakable hate. But hate held under iron control. “Perhaps it will have more occupants after we locate your ship.”

  “You won’t.” Jason took on the irritating tone he did so well, hoping to goad Stoneman into revealing useful information. “A ship in cold orbit in deep space is practically impossible to find, unless you know where to look for it.”

  “As I will know after questioning you.”

  “Wrong again. Her captain is under orders to alter his orbit in these circumstances—but I left the details up to him. So you see, it doesn’t matter what you shoot into me. Truth drugs can’t extract information the subject doesn’t possess.”

  The gleam in Stoneman’s eyes seemed to intensify, but it immediately died down and almost vanished, and the Transhumanist spoke in level tones, with the closest his half-ruined face could come to a mocking smile.

  “A pity. You won’t be as useful as Major Rojas was. She was a cornucopia of information. For one thing, she revealed your plan to be here at a later date than our earlier supply runs to this system. In accordance with her revelations, we displaced this ship less far back in the past by about a decade . . . and, as it turned out, we arrived at precisely the right time to lay our trap. In addition, she identified you by name. I thought I had glimpsed you, across that drainage ditch in Khankhazh, but I couldn’t be sure. And I had been so wanting to renew our acquaintance.” The gleam flared up again for the barest instant, and Stoneman leered at Rojas. “And she made herself useful in other ways as well.”

  Jason looked into her face. And all at once he understood her dull, beaten apathy, so unlike her. He understood it even before Stoneman spoke on.

  “To be sure, she was not precisely willing. Resisted quite violently in fact. In the end, we had to strip her and tie her down, spread-eagled. Which made it somewhat boring. But I had the full use of her, and then placed her at the disposal of my subordinates.”

  Rojas had by now gone into fetal position, and was making small, whimpering noises.

  “Some of those subordinates,” Stoneman continued, openly gloating, “have, ah, particular tastes. For them we had to turn her over so she was prone rather than supine, so that—”

  With an inarticulate roar, Hamner lunged. One of the guards, with the almost invisible speed of his genetically upgraded reflexes, smashed him in the knee with the butt of his laser carbine, then clubbed him on the back of his head as he collapsed. He fell to the deck, unconscious. All the rest of them remained rock-still.

  “In the end, though,” Stoneman went on as though nothing had happened, “there was no longer any satisfaction even in hurting her. But I see you have a female among you,” he added with a glance at Armasova. “An ugly one, unfortunately. But beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes.”

  Jason held his hand up, horizontally, in a gesture he hoped Mondrago and the commandos would understand. They did, for no one, not even Armasova, rose to Stoneman’s goading. He forced himself to speak in level tones.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t kill her after she had ceased to be . . . satisfying.”

  “That would have been wasteful, Commander. She can still serve a purpose—as can you. A purpose that will make you wish I had killed you. Wish it every conscious moment of the rest of your life!” The gleam in Stoneman’s eyes was practically incandescent now, and the snide mockery in his voice was washed away by madness. “Killing you would be too merciful, after what you did to me! Do you have any conception of what I suffered? And now look—!” With a convulsive effort he fought his voice down from the scream to which it had risen, and brought his breathing under control. “No I won’t grant you death. Instead, I grant you slavery, here on Drakar.”

  “Uh . . . Drakar?”

  “The planet we are orbiting. According to Major Rojas, you call it ‘Planet B.’ We named it after Armin Drakar. He was one of the founders of our movement.”

  “I know who he was.”

  “You should! His name towers in history alongside such great men as Shi Huang Di, Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot—forerunners of his, within the limitations of their eras’ technologies. His was the great insight that nanotechnology and genetic engineering and bionics had finally provided the means to fully realize magnificent dreams like theirs, but only if those means were used without limits and without regard for obsolete sentimentalities like freedom and individuality.”

  “Yes,” Jason agreed expressionlessly, “he is certainly remembered in those men’s company.”

  “And this world beneath us will be his eternal monument,” continued Stoneman, with the imperviousness to irony of the true ideologue. Then, with a madman’s abruptness, he turned practical. “But our underground movement’s personnel are limited. They cannot be spared for routine, unskilled labor . . . and machines can’t do everything. For such purposes, we use Pug slaves.”

  “You mean you’ve been kidnapping people of our era and bringing them back in time?”

  “We did at first. But then we decided it is more cost-effective to obtain our slaves in this era and bring them across space to Drakar, thus reducing the need for expensive temporal displacements. It also frees us from the security concerns we have to deal with in the twenty-fourth century; no one on Earth in the late 1800s suspects our presence. And in this era Earth has primitive, out-of-the-way places where people can vanish without being much missed. There’s one area, in particular, that we find useful. However,” Stoneman continued with a return of his earlier mockery, “we’ll take Pugs wherever we can conveniently pick them up. Major Rojas, for example. I had intended to drop her off here on Drakar. However, that would require another trip by the shuttle. So I believe I’ll just take her along with us on this, our final slave run to Earth. Along with the rest of you, and then bring you back here with the rest of the slaves. We’ll be departing directly.”

  “Wait a minute!” said Jason. He had to wring as much intel as possible out of Stoneman, on the chance that he would ever be in a position to use it. “One thing I don’t understand. I gather you’re starting a colony here on, uh, Drakar. Does this mean you’ve given up your dream of restoring the Transhuman Dispensation on Earth? And if so, what about all the various time bombs you’ve planted? I can’t believe we’ve found all of them.”

  Stoneman smiled. “You really don’t understand, do you? And why should I explain it to you?” He turned on his heel to leave . . . and then paused. He turned back to face Jason, and his smile broadened. “On second thought, I think I will explain it to you. I’ll tell you why presently. And when I do, it will also become apparent why I’m doing this.”

  A
s they watched, with the goons’ weapons and watchful eyes on them, Stoneman knelt beside the still-unconscious Hamner and reached into a tool-pouch on his belt. He took out a small knife, with which he cut off the sergeant’s left sleeve. He then took out a sensor device and ran it over the inside of the arm until it gave a tiny beep.

  “Secure him,” Stoneman ordered one of the goons. He then used the knife to make a shallow incision. Pain brought Hamner awake with a groan, but he was immobilized in the goon’s unbreakable wresting hold. The groan became a gasp when Stoneman probed inside the opening in the flesh and withdrew a tiny object. It became a scream when the Transhumanist took out miniature soldering iron and cauterized the wound, before he slipped back into unconsciousness.

  “You are correct that we have planted a small settlement here,” Stoneman told the horrified but helpless Jason as he stood up and wiped the blood from his hand with Hamner’s sleeve. “The colonists were voluntarily displaced without TRDs, such is their dedication—they are the true heroes of our movement. And yet, haven’t you wondered why we’ve gone to the trouble and expense of sending them back in time five hundred years? The three-hundred-year minimum would have been easier. But five hundred years—actually, a trifle more—is how long our extremely sophisticated sociological, economic and demographic projections tell us it will take the very small colony we’ve planted to develop into a major military power, if driven by single-minded dedication.

  “And I am one of those heroes!” Stoneman’s voice rose almost to a scream. “I, too, have volunteered to be temporally displaced without a TRD! I am to be the founding leader of this colony, which I conceived, and persuaded our leadership to place the underground’s resources solidly behind it. Now it is the cornerstone of our grand plan to reconquer Earth. I will be remembered for all time! My name will stand beside Drakar’s!”

  I suppose I can stop wondering why the Transhumanist leadership trusted you after your failure in 1865, Jason thought. You’ve redeemed yourself in their eyes by exiling yourself into the past.