by Steve White
“Just about there, sir.”
Then the plasma jet vanished, leaving a cooling hole in the door. An obscenely serpentlike probe entered, with an exhaust vent at its forward point. There was a hissing sound, and a scent reached Jason’s nose. He recognized it.
Knockout gas! It was, he reflected in a calm corner of his mind, the obvious tactic.
“Got it, sir!” Bakiyev called out, his voice beginning to slur toward the end. It was the last thing Jason heard before he slumped into unconsciousness among the equally inert bodies of the others.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jason awoke in misery. His stomach churned and his head throbbed with the nausea and headache that were the invariable aftereffects of knockout gas. The rancid stench of the slave quarters didn’t help. Neither did the moans from men still recovering from the neural stimulation of nerve-lash.
He felt blessed coolness on his forehead as a Pathan woman held a damp cloth to it. Mumbling his thanks, he sat up and slowly opened his eyes—agony even in the dim lighting. He lay alongside a bulkhead with the other twenty-fourth-century people, who were at varying stages of returning consciousness. Having verified that they were all present, he looked around the compartment.
The deck was littered with men, Hazeltine and Gurdev Singh among them, who lay twitching feebly and emitting the moans Jason had first heard. Others, including McCready and Carver and the bhisti, moved among them, helping the women dispense whatever comfort they could.
Jason was puzzled. If enough time had passed for him and the others who had inhaled knockout gas to regain consciousness, then everyone here should have more or less recovered from the experience of neural stimulation.
Carver came to his side. “I see you’re awake, mate.”
Jason nodded, which sent stabs of pain through his skull. “But what about these men . . .?”
“Ah. Well, the buggers somehow sent an alarm, because others arrived in a jiffy. Since you chaps had already gotten away clean, we stopped fighting and backed off.”
“Yes. That was the plan,” said Jason. There had been no need to prolong their exposure to unendurable pain.
“But you see, we had given a pretty good account of ourselves—”
“Yes, by Allah!” enthused Ayub Khan, who had appeared at Jason’s other side. “We killed one of Shaitan’s bum-boys, after McCready sahib broke his jaw!”
“—so they turned ugly. The leader—Stoneman, didn’t you say his name is?—said they wouldn’t kill us because they can’t afford to waste slaves. But they picked some of us at random to make an example of. Held them down and kept those bloody batons on them for what seemed forever. The screaming went on and on, while the rest of us watched, helpless, with those carbines that you say kill with light held on us.” Carver’s expression turned even more grim. “One of the Sikhs died under it.”
“Aye, cursing his tormentors with his last breath.” Ayub Khan paused, then spoke as though the effort cost him a great deal. “That unbeliever was a brave man.”
Jason nodded slowly. No one with any kind of latent cardiac malfunction could hope to survive prolonged neural stimulation. He was surprised they had only lost one man.
McCready joined them and addressed Jason without preamble. “Well? Did you—?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.” Jason turned to Bakiyev, who was holding his head in his hands as though to keep it from flying apart. “Right, Corporal?”
“Right, sir. I sent the message. Of course, I couldn’t receive any acknowledgment.”
“Of course,” Jason echoed.
“Why not?” McCready demanded. Then understanding seemed to dawn, and he nodded. “Oh. You were put to sleep with gas as soon as the message went out.”
“That’s right.” It was true as far as it went, and Jason decided to leave it at that, without trying to explain a time lag that might be as much as several minutes, depending on De Ruyter’s location relative to this ship. In fact, he confidently hoped that Captain Palanivel had had the good sense not to put Stoneman on alert by replying.
“So,” said Carver, “you don’t know for sure whether your ship got the message.”
“Or even,” McCready added heavily, “if your ship is still here after all this time.”
“I’m reasonably sure the ship has waited. You see, I’m the only one who can return it to its own time. But I won’t lie to you: there’s no absolute certainty.”
“Well, then,” said Carver with an attempt at his usual jauntiness, “we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, won’t we?”
“Kismet,” said Ayub Khan serenely. “All things lie in the lap of Allah.”
The women wailed, and the Sikhs and Pathans tried to outdo each other in stoic silence, through all of the sensations of atmospheric maneuvering and finally of landing. These sensations were their only warning that they had arrived at Drakar.
The wails continued, and the male expressions grew alarmed, when the artificial gravity cut off. Even the British sergeants looked nonplussed.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Jason told them. “This planet has a twelve-percent stronger gravity than Earth. In other words, you weigh a little more here.”
“Gained it back, you mean,” remarked Carver with a sour glance at the trough from which they had all eaten the minimum necessary amount.
With the usual lack of notice, the hatch slid open. A double file of goons armed with laser carbines entered, followed by others with batons, who herded the prisoners out and marched them to the cargo bay. There, Stoneman awaited them, twirling a baton lazily.
“Welcome to your new home, Commander Thanou. I regret to have to tell you that your quixotic stunt went for naught. Whatever coded message you sent has elicited no response of any kind, and nothing untoward has occurred.” Stoneman’s affectation of languid facetiousness wavered momentarily, and his eyes glowed with madness. “I considered punishing you for that—rather severely. Then on reflection I realized that what awaits you here is punishment enough, even for you.” He started to turn away, then paused. “But on second thought . . .” With a motion of almost invisible swiftness, he swiped the baton across Jason’s left elbow. In a blaze of sickening pain, he collapsed. Rojas and McCready caught him. Stoneman smirked, and departed the cargo bay.
“I wish I’d been there to see it when that bastard got those burns,” McCready ground out.
“I was there,” Jason gasped, getting shudderingly to his feet. “I was sure he was dead. Unfortunately, Transhumanists aren’t easy to kill.”
The cargo port rumbled open, and the late afternoon sunlight of HC+31 8213 flooded in. The guards prodded them forward and down the ramp.
A G3v star’s light was not perceptibly different from that of Sol—or of Psi 5 Aurigae under which Jason had grown up. And the sky was the familiar blue, with a few fleecy clouds. It might almost have been Earth . . . until one looked up at that blue sky.
Drakar’s two moons, while small, were just massive enough to have been molded into spheres by their own gravity. And they orbited close enough to show discs far larger than that of Luna as viewed from Earth. And at the moment, both were in the sky, pale in the daylight but clearly visible. Their orbital motion of the inner one was quite perceptible, and even the outer one could be seen to move if one looked a few seconds. From somewhere a quote surfaced in Jason’s mind: The hurtling moons of Barsoom.
There was not a sound from any of the nineteenth-century people. No wailing from the women, no curses from the men. Not even anything from Ayub Khan about Allah. Just silence. It was, Jason thought, as though the sight of those two huge swift moons in the sky, though arguably not the strangest thing they had experienced, had brought home to them as nothing else could the reality that they were on a different world, cast adrift on the cosmic ocean, severed by an unthinkable gulf from all the unquestioned assumptions that had formed the bedrock of their prior lives.
After a moment, Jason looked around at their surroundings. In one direct
ion, below and over the top of a forest whose foliage was a bluish-green different from any native to Earth, spread an ocean, with the foreland sloping up from the shore to the forest. It must, he thought, be a west coast, for the afternoon sun hung above the ocean, laying a glistening golden trail on the waves. To the east of the rolling upland on which they had landed, the land rose into a range of mountains, the lower slopes clothed in dense forests, the peaks above gleaming with snow. Beyond loomed ever higher ranges.
Jason drew a deep breath of the moderately cool air. Accustomed to a variety of different worlds, he could tell that this air was, as expected, somewhat denser than that of Earth. But the difference wasn’t a particularly noticeable one, and a higher oxygen content made it invigorating. It held the clarity only to be found on worlds that had never felt the touch of industrialization.
But that, he immediately saw, wouldn’t last.
Perhaps a mile to the north of the level field on which they stood was the beginning of a small city. Even at this distance, its architecture could be seen to be brutally functional. Around and beyond it spread tilled fields. On the outskirts were what Jason could see even at this distance were weapon emplacements, causing him to mentally curse. He had cherished a hope that the Transhumanists would rely entirely on secrecy as a defense here. But that would have been asking too much.
To the southeast the land fell away somewhat before rising again toward the mountains, and in this lower level was a large fenced-in compound, filled with rows of low buildings and surrounded by a high fence with guard towers at intervals.
There was no doubt in Jason’s mind as to what that compound was.
“Get moving!” a guard snapped, and with frequent prods of laser carbines they were herded toward a row of grav carriers and packed inside. The carriers then glided along a rough dirt road, dust puffing up behind them, down the slope between fields of blue-green grass and occasional clumps of unfamiliar trees with feathery fronds. Jason guessed that the local ecology was almost but not quite as highly evolved as Earth’s.
They passed through a heavily barred gate in the compound’s fence—obviously an electrified fence, judging from the powerhouse near the gate. They came to a stop in an open area around whose fringes were shacks among which largely naked children played in the dirt—quite a lot of children, Jason thought. Adults were also in evidence—raggedly dressed, the men heavily bearded—and more were on the way, evidently curious in a listless sort of way to see the new arrivals. They included people of both Indian and European extraction, as well as various other stocks and mixtures of stocks. A number of the women were conspicuously pregnant. Beyond the shacks, rows of long, low, ramshackle buildings stretched away into the distance.
As soon as they were empty, the grav carriers glided around and departed, without a word from the guards.
“What? No orientation lecture?” said Mondrago in a half-ironic tone.
“No,” said a new voice. “You’ll be summoned whenever they want you. Otherwise, they don’t give a damn.”
The speaker was a strongly built man of medium height, more heavily bearded than most. He spoke in nineteenth-century English, but with an intonation that identified him as a native speaker of the twenty-fourth-century language. He stepped forward like the leader, or at least the official greeter, followed by another man, and introduced himself.
“I’m Ari Kamen. We weren’t expecting any more arrivals—it’s been so long. I gather you people are from India like the last few loads,” he added, gesturing at the uniforms of the Sikhs and the British sergeants. But then he looked at what was left of the attire of Jason and his group, and looked puzzled.
“True, as far as it goes,” said Jason. “But I and my companions are time travelers from your era.” Kamen’s eyes went wide. “I’m Commander Jason Thanou of the Temporal Service.” He introduced the others. “We knew in general that the Transhumanists were up to something on this planet, and went back to 1897 to abort it. That was when we were captured on the North-West Frontier along with these other people.”
“1897!” exclaimed the man with Kamen—an early-middle-aged man wearing what Jason recognized as the last tatters of a British uniform. “By Jove, I told you it’s been nine years. Not easy to keep track, y’know,” he added in an aside to Jason and offered his hand. “Captain Nigel Southwick, 4th Punjab Infantry.”
McCready immediately drew himself up and barked, “Fall in!” As the Sikhs did just that, he went front-and-center before Southwick, saluted, and reported crisply. “Flanking party, 24th Sikhs, sir. Four dead, otherwise all present and correct.” He hesitated, and added, “We were with the Malakand Field Force, sir . . . although I don’t suppose that would mean anything.”
“No, Sergeant. My men and I were with General McQueen’s Black Mountain expedition in 1888 when we were captured. No one else has been brought in since.”
“My group was the first,” said Kamen. “We were working on a power plant in a remote area of Transoxania when they swooped down on us. Afterwards, they blew up the power plant to account for our disappearance. There are also others, all from out-of-the-way places. But after a while they stopped bringing in twenty-fourth-century people. Nineteenth-century ones like Nigel began to arrive.” He wore a haunted look. “That was when we realized we had been sent back in time. We hadn’t known what that unnatural sensation had meant.”
No, you wouldn’t have, thought Jason. “Yes, they explained it to us. Abducting people on twenty-fourth-century Earth was too difficult and dangerous, and besides, they were having to do too many temporal displacements. So they started doing their kidnappings on contemporary Earth, on the North-West Frontier and North America and other places. They sent their final slaving expedition not quite as far back in time as the others, because they had found out my group was going to appear in 1897.” Jason could almost feel Rojas stiffen with the unjustifiable but nonetheless real self-reproach that she had never entirely overcome. “Their leader, you see, fancies he has a score to settle with me. Then, having captured us, they proceeded on to Earth to complete their quota. That’s why we’re a mixed bag.”
“Well, we’ll have to get you settled in.” Kamen looked around at the shacks and the barrackslike buildings beyond. “Like everything else inside the fence, they leave that up to us. And they don’t provide enough accommodations. We’ve cannibalized enough wood and other things from the buildings to put together the shacks. They’re for people with children.”
“Yes,” said Rojas. “I was wondering about that. There seem to be a lot of children around . . .”
Kaemen answered her unspoken question. “Early on, we decided it would be wrong to bring children into this world. But the Transhumanists want to expand the slave population. So periodically, they come in here, stun some men and women and take them away—we’ve learned better than to resist. They impregnate the women by artificial insemination and throw them back in here. We have a few people with some sort of medical training. But a lot of the children die in childbirth. They don’t care. They can always make more.” He said all this in a toneless voice, as though outrage had worn away under the erosion of the years. “After live children are born, their mothers almost always keep them. Otherwise, some other woman takes them. Usually they pair off with some man. We’ve occasionally talked about killing the infants. But we can’t bring ourselves to do it, even though we probably should.”
Kamen stopped abruptly, his last word falling into a well of silence. After a moment, Jason spoke. “What’s going to happen to us next?”
“Soon they’ll come for the third shift, and you’ll be in the same position as everyone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“They divide the day into three shifts.” (Nearly twelve-hour shifts, thought Jason, recalling this planet’s rotation period.) “At any given time, a third of us are working—in the city, or in the fields around it, or in the mines up there in the mountains. They don’t even try to regularize it; at the en
d of a shift they just bring back the workers and then take away another third of the adult population, they don’t give damn who. So sometimes you’ll end up working two shifts out of three. That’s bad. But nobody resists them. They use those nerve-lash batons a lot. They like to use them. If you give them enough trouble, they keep on using it until you die.”
Jason looked around. There was no one in earshot except Kamen and Southwick. “Tell me, what kind of defenses have they got here?”
“Well,” said Kamen, “the guard towers around this compound have laser weapons—they’ve killed a few of our people who’ve cracked and tried to rush the fence. Don’t know why they bothered; the fence would have electrocuted them.”
Those lasers will be merely antipersonnel models, Jason thought. “But what about the town over there? I could identify fixed weapon positions of some kind. Have they got any combat aircraft, or armed spacefcaft?”
Kamen look vague. “Well, I’m no military man. But they’ve got what look like some sort of weapon emplacements. And there are some small craft that that have a military look to them. I’m sorry, I can’t be any more specific than that.”
“And of course I know nothing about these confounded devices,” added Southwick.
“Listen,” Jason said in a low voice, “keep this to yourselves, because I don’t want to raise possibly false hopes in these people. But there’s a ship of ours in this system.” (I think, he mentally hedged.) “And we think we’ve succeeded in signaling it. If so, it may be able to take some kind of action.” He decided against sharing with these people the agonizing dilemma that prevented him from returning himself and his immediate companions to the twenty-fourth century.
The two men’s eyes held a flicker of something that hadn’t been there before. “What kind of action?” Kamen asked.
“And what can we do to help?” Southwick added.
“The answer to both is, I don’t know. The ship’s captain will have to use his judgment. But I have confidence in him.”
