Soldiers Out of Time

by Steve White

  “But why?” McCready’s face wore a look of pained incomprehension. “We and our men and these Pathan women have got nothing to do with the games you and these, uh, Transhumanists are playing with each other. Why are they taking us to this Drakar planet?”

  “As slaves,” said Jason bluntly.

  It seemed to stun the trio even more than everything else he had said.

  “Did you say, ‘slaves’?” asked McCready in a dangerous voice.

  The bhisti, squatting nearby, overheard it and got to his feet, drawing himself up indignantly. “Who is slave? I am soldier!” Then, wilting under McCready’s glare, he amended in a small voice, “Well, regimental bhisti.”

  “They’re starting a colony on Drakar, so that over the next five hundred years it can grow in secret into a powerful ally for them,” Jason explained. “But their numbers are very limited. They need a labor force. So they’ve kidnapped people—some from our own era, and taken them back in time. But you’re not the first from late-nineteenth-century India.”

  He wasn’t sure they were even listening. McCready just continued to glare. “Slaves?” blurted Carver. “Slaves? See ’ere, I’m an Englishman! What do they think I am? A nigger?”

  “To them,” said Jason, “we’re all ‘niggers.’ Except that the word they use is ‘Pugs.’”

  “Slaves,” was all Hazeltine said, in a dull dead voice.

  “Not if I can help it,” said Jason firmly. “I have a ship waiting for us in the planetary system of Drakar. Once we arrive, we have a chance if we can make contact with it.”

  “How are we going to do that?” asked Hazeltine, sounding more alive.

  “I have no idea. We’ll just have to improvise. But . . . well, I’m not one to give up.”

  “Neither are we,” growled McCready.

  “And as for our men,” said Carver, “well, just let me tell you about Sikhs . . .”

  Stoneman had gotten greedy. The compartment was hideously overcrowded, and there were more prisoners than there were bunks. They organized a system of shifts, and segregated the sexes, with Rojas and Armasova taking charge of the women.

  At first, the Pathans refused to eat the mess in the trough, lest it contain any unclean items. But then, one by one, they began to consume it with no more distaste than that occasioned by its repulsiveness. And after a while, the women’s improvised veils began to come off. It was as though verities dissolved in the face of incomprehensibly alien horror.

  They tried to occupy their minds, simply to hold the stultifying boredom and discomfort and hunger at bay. The IDRF Commandos learned to communicate in nineteenth-century English, and all the time travelers picked up some Urdu. The Sikhs and Pathans, after they had gotten past ancestral antipathy, began to evolve a patois synthesized from Urdu and Pushtu, with a lot of English words. One way or another, they all came to be able to communicate after a fashion.

  Occasionally, at odd intervals, guards with the dread batons entered on surprise inspections. Otherwise, the only times they saw their captors were the two occasions of which the guards came to bear away one of the women. It took McCready’s best parade-ground roar to keep the Sikhs from trying to intervene, Muslims though the women were. Afterwards, when the desolately sobbing women were flung back in, all the men gave them as much space as possible while Rojas administered what comfort she could.

  One “day,” Jason was sitting with his back to a bulkhead. Carver settled down beside him. “Listen, mate, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “These Transhumanists . . .” The sergeant paused to organize his thoughts. “You’ve never really told us much about them, except that they’re your enemies. But why are you fighting them? I mean, besides their bein’ a lot of bloody slavers.”

  “Well . . . for about a hundred years, in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries, they ruled the world. A revolution overthrew them, and they went into hiding. Now, in my time, they want to rule the world again.”

  “Oh.” Carver nodded sagely. “Like Bonaparte.”

  “Worse. Much worse.” Jason paused. How do you explain genetic engineering and bionics and nanotechnology and all the rest? “They don’t just want rule the human race—they want to change it into something that’s no longer even human. A ruling caste of supermen would dominate specialized castes that were more machine than man—in fact, that would blend machine and man in ways you can’t imagine. They would be slaves that couldn’t even object to their slavery, for they would be bred to it by the means of perverted science.”

  Carver’s dark eyes were round as he stared nightmare in the face—a nightmare beyond the imagination of his time. When he spoke, it was in a tone Jason had never heard from him. “Tell me something else. Tell me about your . . . well, your country. I mean, your people. Your time. You haven’t said much about that.”

  “Where to begin?” sighed Jason. “How can I tell you about a whole world? Could you tell me all about England—what it means? But I can tell you this much. We learned something from the time when the Transhumanists ruled. And what we learned was: never again! We’ve learned that Man must be kept Man.”

  “Well, I was with you anyway, but now I think I really see why I should be with you.”

  “As am I,” said Hazeltine, who had overheard them.

  “I don’t want you men to be under any illusions,” said Jason, prompted by his conscience. “I have nothing to offer you but a forlorn hope. The chances are excellent that we’ll be killed.”

  Hazeltine smiled and stroked his fair mustache. “I still remember a few Latin tags from my school days. Here’s one of them, from Seneca: Qui mori didicit servire dedidicit. ‘He who has learned how to die has learned how not to be a slave.’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  By the time Jason’s digital clock display showed that they must be nearing the Drakar system, a kind of standing committee had formed—a council of war.

  It included Jason, Rojas, Mondrago, Hamner, the three British sergeants, and two others. One was the naik, whose name was Gurdev Singh. The other, to Singh’s obvious lack of delight, was the Pathan leader, a certain Ayub Khan. McCready, Carver and Hazeltine had at first also had reservations about the mountain brigand’s presence in their counsels. But Jason and Rojas had wanted every element of their ill-assorted band represented. And after a while the Pathan had earned the Sikh’s grudging respect by holding his own in the exchanges of insults that Hazeltine assured Jason were the way their peoples expressed themselves. And he understood just enough of what Jason told him, through translation, of the Transhumanists to recognize them as servants of Shaitan.

  “Before long, we will be nearing the sun of the planet Drakar,” Jason told them, as they sat in a tight circle on the deck. He didn’t mention how he knew the time so precisely, seeing no need to burden them with unnecessary shocks to their already-overburdened sense of reality. “When we approach it to within a certain distance, the . . . force which has been driving the ship very swiftly between the stars must shift into a different mode, moving much more slowly, so it can maneuver among that sun’s worlds.” He wasn’t sure how much of this was getting through the murmured translations and translations of translations, but all the nineteenth-century people at least seemed to be accepting it at face value. “We’ll know when that shift occurs, because there’s a very slight sensation of . . . wrongness. People usually don’t even feel it, when they’re aboard a ship and have other ways of knowing what’s happening. But down here in this hole—”

  “Yes,” Hazeltine nodded. “I seem to recall feeling something that couldn’t quite be described, not long after we left Earth. It must work in both directions.”

  “Precisely. Anyway, after that it will be possible to communicate with the ship of ours that I told you about.” Assuming it’s still there, Jason did not add. He told himself that Palanivel must have stuck it out for over six weeks, because without him, Jason, to activate its TRD the ship would be stranded in th
e nineteenth century. But the deeply buried worry refused to stop gnawing away at the back of his mind.

  For the first time, they all looked blank. “‘Communicate’? How?” McCready wanted to know.

  “Signal flags?” Carver speculated.

  “No. Electronically.”

  “What?” McCready wore an uncomprehending look. “You mean telegraph? Or telephone? But how—?”

  “Where are the bloody wires?” Carver blurted.

  “No, wait a minute,” said Hazeltine, waving him to silence. “I’ve heard that people have been experimenting with a wireless telegraph. Chap named Tesla, and another named Marconi . . .”

  “That’s the idea,” said Jason with a nod. “Only this is voice, not Morse code—like a wireless telephone. It’s called radio.” He saw no point in trying to explain about different wavelengths.

  “Blimey!” Carver shook his head. “What’ll these boffins think of next?” Jason had a feeling that radio was close enough to things of whose capabilities these people thought they knew that it was somehow more impressive than time travel and space flight. Those things were so incomprehensibly far advanced that there was not even a horizon for them to be beyond.

  Ayub Khan continued to simply look blank. But Gurdev Singh spoke. Over the weeks, in the linguistic pressure cooker of the slave quarters, he had picked up enough English and Jason had picked up enough Urdu that the latter was able to process the mixture he was speaking without too much difficulty.

  “Forgive me, sahib from the future, I am only an ignorant soldier. But how does this help us? We do not have this wondrous radio of which you tell us.”

  “Good point,” McCready admitted, giving the naik a surprised look.

  “This ship has one—a long-ranged one.”

  “I don’t fancy the blighters will lend us the use of it,” said Carver dubiously.

  Rojas answered that one. “If any opportunity presents itself—any chance at all, however small—we must try to get control of the ship’s communications station, if only for a short time, and send out a . . .” She paused, even her impressive linguistic adaptability defeated by nondirectional signal. “A cry to our ship for help, in code. Our man Corporal Bakiyev is, among his other talents, the squad’s qualified radio operator—the radio wallah, as you’d say.”

  “Major Rojas and Superintendent Mondrago and I have been aboard a ship of this class before,” Jason added, recalling their incursion on Planet A. “In fact we’ve been all through it. So we’ll be able to find the control room, where the radio is located.” Again, he refrained from trying to explain his brain implant with its map display.

  “Well and good—if we can get out of this compartment.” Hazeltine gave Jason a hopeful look. “You mentioned that you and your people escaped once, just before you met us.”

  “So we did.” Jason told them about Rojas’ performance. “But they’re not going to fall for that again.”

  Gurdev Singh looked him in the eyes. “Then, sahib, if the guards cannot be tricked then they must be overpowered, when they come on one of their inspections. And my men and I are the ones who should do it.”

  “But . . . you know those batons the guards have. One of them was used on one of your men. He can tell you what it’s like.”

  “So can I,” McCready rumbled, barely suppressing a shudder.

  The Sikh’s expression did not change. “I know. But we would be useless in this control room. It is you from the future who must get there, to do what you alone can do. We will do that which we can do.”

  Jason said nothing. He lacked the words.

  “By Allah!” Ayub Khan burst out. “Shall it be said in the mountains that the faithful held back when dogs of misbelievers dared this thing? Shall the others of the Maxdan sept of the Yusufzai tribe hear that Ayub Khan had less courage than a Sikh? No, by Allah! There are only four of us, but we will be in the forefront!” All at once, his villainous face wore a cautious scowl. “Just remember, Sikh, this does not make me thy brother!”

  “Just as well,” grunted Gurdev Singh, “since you undoubtedly bugger all thy brothers, after you tire of sheep.”

  “Nay, you Sikhs have left no sheep available, oh father of lambs.”

  “Nay, we are kept too busy by thy sisters, in the whorehouses of Peshawar—and picking off their lice afterwards.”

  As the exchange continued, Jason turned to Hazeltine and spoke in an undertone. “Are you sure these two are going to be able to work together?”

  “Oh, yes,” replied Hazeltine with a stroke of his by now scraggly mustache. “It’s just the way they are, old man. Natives, don’t y’know?”

  The Secondary Limit was passed, and they waited tensely, but no guards came to inspect the slave quarters. As the time crawled by, Jason began to worry that the Transhumanists were too busy for any further inspections before they reached Drakar.

  The problem was that the surprise inspections were by surprise, so they had to stay in a constant state of readiness to spring into action without warning. The strain began to tell, most of all on the twenty-fourth-century people, least on the nineteenth-century Indians. Nor was Jason’s state of mind improved by the fact that the sensation of the drive field’s shutdown had occurred during the ship’s “day.” He had been hoping that they could make their desperate attempt during the nighttime shift, when there might be only one watch-stander in the control room and, with even more luck, Stoneman might be asleep.

  But time continued to pass at the same agonizing pace. The lights dimmed, and Jason began to breathe a little easier about the last consideration, at least.

  He was thinking about it when, with no more than the usual second or so of noise, the hatch slid open to admit two baton-carrying goons.

  This time there was no attempt at subterfuge, and no tactical finesse of any kind. They had long since decided that their only hope lay in instant, furious action in accordance with a prearranged plan. Thus it was that as soon as the goons entered the compartment, no orders needed to be given. The three British sergeants led the Sikhs and Pathans in a sudden, silent, pantherlike rush, a wave of bodies that came as a total surprise to guards accustomed to seeing slaves cringe from their batons.

  The silence lasted less than a second before being shattered by screams. The goons’ enhanced reflexes took over, compensating for their astonishment, and they began to jab and slash with the batons. But the furious press of attackers swept over them and, by sheer weight, pushed them back—in opposite directions, away from the hatch, leaving the opening momentarily clear.

  Knowing the agony he was leaving his allies to, and despising himself for it, Jason led Mondrago and the IDRF people between the two piles of thrashing struggling, bodies and through the hatch. As he went, he noticed the bhisti throwing himself into the scimmage.

  “This way!” he yelled, glancing at his map display. They ran through passageways as empty as Jason had hoped, frantic to reach the control room before the alarm could be sounded.

  That hope was immediately dashed. A wailing, nerve-shattering siren ululated through the bones of the ship.

  Those guards must have implant communicators, thought Jason over the din. We knew they probably would, but there was no help for it. And besides, the alarm they’ve raised will draw the others to the slave compartment, not the control room. He led the way faster. It was all he could do.

  They turned an angle in a passageway, and the control room hatch lay ahead. It was sliding shut, as a Transhumanist just inside manipulated controls beside its frame.

  Without pausing for thought, Jason lunged ahead of the others, through the closing hatch. With the momentum of his body behind the force of his arm, he drove a fist into the Transhumanist’s solar plexus. This one was of a technician caste, not maximized for combat like the goons. With a shrieking grunt, he doubled over. Jason kicked him in the temple, hard. Then he looked around. As he had hoped, the Transhumanist had been alone. He turned to the control box and slapped a switch. The hatc
h reopened, and his companions piled through. When they were all inside, he closed the hatch.

  Mondrago looked around. There were no loose objects in sight. He took off the belt that was part of the Transhumanist’s uniform, wrapped it around his fist as a kind of knuckle-duster, and used it to do the control box as much damage as he could without cutting himself too badly. “Maybe that will make it harder for them to open it from the outside,” he explained.

  Jason turned to the comm station, where Bakiyev had already seated himself. “Can you figure it out?” he demanded.

  “Seems fairly standard,” the stocky Kirghiz muttered. “Just give me a minute or two.”

  “I’m not sure we have that much time,” Jason told him. “Make it snappy.” He went back to the hatch, where Mondrago and the others had arranged themselves flanking the hatch. It was all they could do in the way of a defensive strategy, lacking any weapons. Jason had hoped the watch-stander would have a sidearm, but realism insisted there had been no reason for him to wear one.

  “While we’re waiting,” said Rojas calmly, “should we be smashing things in here? Maybe we could make the ship harder for them to control.”

  Mondrago looked around dubiously at the solid-state-based instrumentation. “I don’t think these things would smash very easily, when all we’ve got is bare hands.” He rubbed his raw and bleeding fingers.

  “Besides,” Jason added, “we don’t know how much of it is integral to the ship’s life support. And I’m not ready just yet to give up on living.”

  Before the discussion could proceed further, an ominous noise came from beyond the door. And a red spot appeared on the door’s surface, then turned orange, and yellow, and white, and then began to spew sparks into the control room, followed by a blinding, narrow jet of flame.

  Plasma torch, Jason knew.

  “Bakiyev!” he called out in a strained voice.