Soldiers Out of Time

by Steve White

  Palanivel stared at Jason. “And this is all they’ve done for four thousand years?”

  “Remember, the Teloi gengineered themselves into near-immortality ages ago. The first generation of the Oratioi’Zhonglu were at least a hundred thousand years old when I made their acquaintance in the Bronze Age, although for some reason the lifespans of the younger, Earth-born generation were drastically reduced. They simply have a different time scale from ours. And the need to find something to fill their interminable, empty lives drove the Teloi insane, at least by our standards. I believe living beings simply aren’t intended for immortality—evolution hasn’t fitted them for it. But the Tuova’Zhonglu take the madness to another level. They are to the Teloi what people like the Nazis and the Transhumanists are to humanity.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “While in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, we were captured by Transhumanists who had made contact with a wandering Tuova’Zhonglu battlestation and, by making false promises involving time travel, tricked the Teloi into helping them found a cult by posing as gods. The battlestation was also going to share Teloi military technology with them.” Jason saw the effect that had on Palanivel. “Now you’re beginning to see why we’ve kept this from the public. No need to create panic and hysteria. Especially inasmuch as we managed to destroy the battlestation and scotch the Transhumanist scheme.” With the help of that brilliant bastard Henry Morgan, he mentally added.

  “But now here they are again, and they’ve got us,” observed Palanivel glumly. “What are they doing here, in this system?”

  “Who knows why they’re ever in any particular place at any particular time?” Jason shook his head. “They wander the spaceways on the kind of incredibly extended schedules you’d expect, especially since they use suspended animation to prolong their lives even further I gather they’re only occasionally in contact with each other or with their hidden base, wherever it is.”

  “I think you may have come up with the answer to your own question, Jason,” said Chantal.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jason, giving her a sharp look. It belatedly occurred to him to wonder why Palanivel didn’t object to a civilian on his bridge.

  “Well, the battlestation you and Alexandre destroyed came through the Solar system in the 1660s, almost exactly two hundred and thirty years ago. Given the long independent cruises you’ve described, many years probably went by before the others became aware it was missing. But then they naturally wanted to find out what happened to it, and where—”

  “Of course!” Mondrago snapped his fingers. “Right. Remember, their movement schedules are very long-term—and, for something as big as the battlestation, probably pretty inflexible. So they knew what course it was supposed to follow.”

  “And so they sent ships to scour the systems along that course,” Jason continued the thought.

  “In the direction of Earth,” said Chantal very quietly.

  “And now,” Palanivel added, gesturing at the magnified image in the viewscreen, “one of them has got us.” He sagged in his seat, and for the first time Jason noticed how exhausted he looked. “I need a short break. Chantal, will you take the con?”

  “Sure,” she affirmed, then turned to meet Jason’s and Mondrago’s astonished stares. “Well, I had to find something to occupy my mind while waiting out here in the outer system all that time. So I got interested, and asked if I could have the controls explained to me, and—”

  “She’s turned into a pretty useful second relief pilot,” said Palanivel. Then the realization seemed to penetrate his weariness-dulled brain that he had just admitted to a flagrant breach of any number of regulations. “Er . . . you won’t . . .?”

  “Relax,” Jason assured him. “Extraordinary circumstances, and all that. We won’t turn you in.”

  “Somehow,” said Mondrago dourly, eyeing the viewscreen, “I have a feeling that getting in trouble when you get back to Earth is the least of your worries.”

  The Teloi reeled them in very slowly and carefully, lest undue haste cause the tractor beam’s hold to waver and enable them to break loose. It gave them time to stare at the gradually waxing magnified image in the viewscreen and contemplate its implications.

  Presently, details could yet be made out. The alien ship was bumpy with a variety of weapon blisters, external sensor components and superstructures of less readily obvious function. And it had the apertures that denoted a reaction drive. The battlestation had not possessed one. It had been purely a creature of deep space, and Henry Morgan, visualizing it as a hulk drifting at the mercy of the currents, had insightfully grasped its vulnerability as it approached Earth in free fall. This ship, on the other hand, would be able to maneuver within a planet’s Primary Limit, although it wouldn’t be exactly nimble, and it obviously wasn’t designed to land on the surface and therefore wouldn’t incorporate grav repulsion. Instead, it carried what looked like a fair-sized surface-to-orbit shuttle partly recessed into a ventral housing.

  They made no attempt to communicate with their captors. Jason was certain any such attempt would be met with dead silence, knowing the supreme arrogance of the Tuova’Zhonglu Teloi. And besides, he wasn’t ready to reveal the fact that he could understand and haltingly speak their language, having had it rammed into his brain by unsubtle direct neural induction during his captivity in 1628 B.C. So they could only stew.

  Jason took advantage of their enforced idleness to go aft and give their nineteenth-century passengers an explanation of what was happening. It was extremely abbreviated but true as far as it went: their ship had been grappled by a ship crewed by beings from another planet. After all they had already been through, they took it surprisingly well. “I knew it had to come to that!” said Hazeltine with a weary smile. McCready merely grunted. The Sikhs’ fatalism was unruffled. Carver gave Jason a hopeful look.

  “See ’ere, mate, if there’s going to be a fight, you know you can count on us. What do you want us to do?”

  “We’re working on that,” Jason assured him, wincing inwardly at his own dishonesty. “Just wait here.” He hurried back to the bridge, where Mondrago, Palanivel and Chantal were indeed hashing over plans. It didn’t take long, given their extremely limited options.

  “We can’t fight them,” said Palanivel, summing up the consensus. “Our weapons might be able to do them some damage, but this ship simply isn’t intended to fight a major space combatant like that. They’d reduce us to our component atoms.”

  “They could have done that already,” said Mondrago glumly. “The reason they haven’t must be because they want information from us.”

  Palanivel turned to Jason and spoke like a man who didn’t want to be the one to bring something up and didn’t want his motivations to be misunderstood. “Sir . . . I know it’s not my place to remind you of this, but you do have the capability to get us out of this and leave the Teloi wondering where we went.”

  “I’ll well aware of that,” said Jason, feeling all three pairs of eyes on him. Yes, get us out of this and back to twenty-fourth-century Zirankhu. Us . . . and five nineteenth-century people. While leaving Rojas, Armasova and Bermudez permanently stranded on nineteenth-century Drakar as slaves.

  Once again, I’m face to face with my ethical dilemma.

  And this time I may not be able to afford the luxury of ethics.

  He was still thinking about it when Chantal spoke hesitantly. “Jason . . . there may be another way. In fact, we could even turn this situation to our advantage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . are we agreed that they’re probably here to find out what happened to the battlestation?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And didn’t you tell me once that, for all their mutual contempt, the Oratioi’Zhonglu and the Tuova’Zhonglu did very occasionally communicate with each other?”

  “Right. That’s how the Transhumanists—through their Oratioi’Zhonglu contacts in the fifth century B
.C.—learned that the battlestation was due to pass through the Solar System in 1669. Remember those extremely long-term movement schedules.”

  “Very well, then. Perhaps we could . . .” She spoke on for a few moments, improvising as she went. Jason listened with gradually decreasing skepticism. By the time she was done, he was nodding slowly.

  “It might work,” said Mondrago.

  “At least it’s worth a try,” said Jason with a final, emphatic nod.

  They spent the few minutes remaining to them brainstorming the plan.

  By the time the tractor beam brought them to a halt relative to the Teloi ship, that ship was close enough that magnification was no longer required. It filled the viewscreen in all its ugly, massive functionality, so different from the mannered, almost overdecorated look the Oratioi’Zhonglu had imparted to Teloi engineering.

  For all its hideousness, the Tuova’Zhonglu aesthetic (if it could be called that) at least had the virtue of making it easier to recognize certain things for what they were. Like the point-defense blisters that stood ready to obliterate any missiles De Ruyter might launch in desperation. And like the heavy weapons turrets trained on them, ready to unleash gigawatts of ravening coherent energies.

  As they watched, a gig detached itself from a docking cradle and crossed the space between the two ships. They made no move to resist as it extended a passage tube to De Ruyter’s ventral airlock, in the engineering spaces near the stern. Jason left Palanivel on watch on the bridge and, accompanied by Mondrago and Chantal, both of whom knew Teloi, went aft and opened the inner hatch to admit two boarders.

  This was only Chantal’s second glimpse of Teloi. But by now Jason and Mondrago were almost used to the sight of the seven-to-eight-foot humanoids, with hair shimmering in tones of silver and gold, deathly pale skin, and long narrow faces whose sharp features included upward-slanted cheekbones and brow ridges. Beneath the latter were their most disturbing feature: enormous tilted eyes whose opaque blue irises seemed to have leaked some of their color into the “whites,” which were scarcely less blue.

  These were the characteristics shared by all Teloi, as was arrogance. But in place of the affectedly languid, supercilious arrogance of the Oratioi’Zhonglu of Jason’s Bronze Age acquaintance, the arrogance of these two was of a harsh, stiff, intense kind, their almost nonexistently thin lips set in a permanent sneer. They seemed to belong to a different subspecies, despite the lack of physical divergence. Their clothing accentuated the difference: a kind of jumpsuit that Jason imagined could serve as an emergency light-duty vacuum suit, basically plain in shades of gray and bluish-gray but bedizened with insignia that gave it the unmistakable look of a military uniform.

  They were armed with heavy handguns which seemed to combine a gauss needler and a laser in an over-and-under configuration. The one who seemed to be the leader used his to give a peremptory “through there” gesture in the direction of the airlock.

  Jason didn’t move. “I speak your language,” he said in his best Teloi, and had the satisfaction of seeing the boarders’ sneers collapse into open-mouthed astonishment.

  “How—?” began the leader. Jason cut him off, in the tone of one who has better uses for his time than talking to underlings.

  “That is not your concern. I wish to speak to your commanding officer—and I believe he will wish to speak to me. You see, I know what happened to your battlestation.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  After a brief radio colloquy with their superiors, the two Teloi had ushered Jason into their gig, leaving Mondrago and Chantal to instruct the British sergeants to sit tight. The gig had crossed over to its mothership amid tight-lipped silence. Now Jason walked, under the guns of his captors, along passageways through a realm of austere functionality, feeling small in surroundings scaled to the Teloi.

  Let’s see, he thought as he walked, adjusting to the somewhat lower gravity to which the Teloi were native. What was it that Henry Morgan once told me? Oh, yes: “Always behave as though you have the upper hand . . . especially when you don’t.”

  A hatch slid aside, and they entered what Jason decided he must call the bridge. Concentric semicircles of control consoles faced a large viewscreen in which De Ruyter hung against the backdrop of stars. Overlooking it all was an almost thronelike chair behind a crescent-shaped control desk. The chair swiveled, and Jason found himself face to face with its occupant.

  It never occurred to Jason to doubt that this was the captain—and not just because the insignia on his jumpsuit was more than usually elaborate. He had what Jason knew were the indicia of relatively advanced age, which was saying a great deal among a race whose lifespans were measured in tens of thousands of years. He also had the thin beard that characterized some but not all Teloi males, worked into a kind of scanty Vandyke. Most noticeably of all, he wore a patch over his right eye. Jason didn’t know if the Teloi had regeneration technology, but their overall technological level suggested that they should. He wondered if, in the brutally militaristic Tuova’Zhonglu subculture, physical evidences of past violence carried the kind of prestige dueling scars had once carried among Prussian Junkers.

  “How did you learn our language?” the captain demanded without any sort of preamble. His deep voice held a quality common to all Teloi voices, disturbing in a way that could not be defined.

  So you’re not going to deign to introduce yourself, thought Jason, still looking at the eyepatch. Well, all the Teloi I’ve ever met have gone by names of mythological gods when dealing with humans. So I think I’ll dub you “Odin.”

  And I’m certainly not going to tell you anything that would reveal the existence of time travel, which you probably don’t know about, since the battlestation never got to pass on the information it had acquired from the Transhumanists. In fact, I’m relying on your not knowing about a great many things, because I’m going to be telling you a great many lies.

  “That,” he answered, “is bound up with the question of how I know what happened to your battlestation. And I think that’s what you really want to hear about.”

  For a moment the single alien eye flickered with fury, and Jason thought he might have gone too far. But Odin’s curiosity won a visible battle with his arrogance, and he spoke in a tightly controlled voice. “Very well. Speak on . . . for now.”

  “First of all, I assume you know the origin of us humans.”

  “Of course.” Odin’s sneer intensified. “We were occasionally in communication with the effete exquisites of the Oratioi’Zhonglu. So we are aware of the subject race they produced on Earth, the planet to which they had exiled themselves, by genetic engineering of a local species.” (Homo erectus, Jason mentally interpolated.) “Indeed, that was one of the reasons they chose Earth: the presence of a species which, due to a coincidental resemblance to our own evolutionary ancestors, lent itself to being molded into a kind of sub-Teloi. Thus they could have worshipers to lend a certain spurious substance to their dilettantish pantomime of godhood.” Odin’s contempt was unmistakable even across the gulf of species differences. His entire aspect fairly oozed it. “They evidently are all dead by now. Small loss.”

  “But we humans, as you can see, remained. And if you turn your sensors toward the inner system of this star, you will detect the energy emissions of a colony that a human faction called the Transhumanists founded here some time ago—more than two hundred and thirty revolutions of Earth around its sun, in fact.”

  Odin gave Jason a sharp look, obviously surprised that humans would have been engaged in interstellar colonization as far back as the seventeenth century. And when he got a closer look at Drakar, he might think it odd that a colony so long-established would be so small. But that, thought Jason, was a bridge they would have to cross when they came to it. For now, he hurried on, prevaricating freely.

  “Shortly after the colony’s foundation, your battlestation entered this system. The Transhumanists, by a pretense of friendship, tricked its commander into landing many
of his personnel on the colony planet—Drakar, they call it. Then, with their usual underhanded treachery, they destroyed the unsuspecting battlestation. Those Teloi who had landed were captured. They are still there now, as slaves.”

  For several human or Teloi heartbeats, Odin sat rock-still. He would, Jason thought, find nothing implausible about the continued survival of the imaginary Teloi captives; two hundred and thirty years—or even ten times that—was nothing much in terms of Teloi lifespans.

  “I get the impression,” Odin said drily, “that you are no friend of these Transhumanists.”

  “Far from it. I belong to another human faction—zhonglu, if you will—that is their bitter enemy. They constantly raid us for slaves to ship to their colony planets. That was my fate. Along with many others, I was sent to Drakar, where I met the enslaved Teloi and learned their language. They told me the story of how they came to be there.

  “Finally, I and some friends managed to steal a small Transhumanist warship and get away. When we found ourselves tractored before we could escape from this system, I knew at once who it must be. My Teloi fellow-slaves on Drakar had told me that the Tuova’Zhonglu would undoubtedly send a ship in search of the missing battlestation. And now you know what happened to it. And,” said Jason in conclusion, “now we are in a position to help each other.”

  Odin’s sneer was back in full force. “For what conceivable reason would I want to help an inferior being like you? And you are hardly in a position to help anyone.”

  “I beg to differ. You need us, if you want to get revenge on the Transhumanists for their destruction of your battlestation.”