by Steve White
“Need you?” Odin seemed to find the notion insulting. “Unlike the commander of the battlestation, who must have been an egregious fool, I will not be deceived by the Transhumanists’ lies. And if your ship is a fair sample, the defenses of Drakar should give us little trouble. We will simply reduce the colony to radioactive ashes. Why do we need you for this?”
“Because,” said Jason, slowly and distinctly, “we know where the Teloi prisoners are being held. If you go in without that knowledge, you will kill them along with everyone else.”
This was a crucial moment, and a gamble on Jason’s part. It was possible that the Tuova’Zhonglu ethos included a samurailike indifference to the lives of its own personnel; in fact, something of the sort would have seemed in character. But Jason was inclined to doubt it. The same species modification that had, ages ago, given the Teloi near-immortality had also—almost of necessity, if one thought about it—reduced their fertility to the point where they hardly ever reproduced. It was, Jason had often thought, one of the sources of their racial insanity. And it meant that they surely couldn’t view losses with complete equanimity. He paused as though giving Odin an opportunity for a response. But none was forthcoming, and with an inward sigh of relief he resumed.
“Here’s my proposal. Let our ship go. It has very sophisticated stealth, and unlike you we can infiltrate on Drakar. We’ll get the Teloi aboard and out of danger. Then you can come in and destroy the Transhumanist installations at your leisure.”
“Why do you want to do us any favors?”
Jason restrained himself from declaring he had seen the light and come to properly revere humanity’s creators, or anything along those lines. It probably would have worked with Zeus in his decline; Odin, on the other hand, might be crazy but he wasn’t stupid. “Isn’t it obvious? You have us. This is all we can offer you in exchange for letting us go.”
Odin seemed to reflect a moment. “Very well. Agreed—with one exception. You will take this ship’s shuttle. Your ship will remain in orbit, covered by our weapons, as a . . . surety for your good behavior.”
“But I told you, our ship can—”
“Our shuttle has a full stealth suite.” Jason recalled that the Teloi did not possess the invisibility field, but he had no reason to doubt that otherwise their ECM capabilities were commensurate with the rest of their technology. “It can insert you and a landing party a safe distance from your objective, then retrieve you and the freed Teloi prisoners.” Jason opened his mouth to speak, but Odin cut him off with an imperious gesture. “Enough! I demean myself by offering explanations to a lesser life-form. It is for us, the universe’s natural masters, to give commands, and for all others to obey. Obey this command, or die.”
“Very well,” sighed Jason, out of options. “We’ll do it your way.”
It was a subdued conference that met aboard De Ruyter after Jason’s return.
“This changes things,” said Palanivel glumly after Jason had finished his account.
“That’s one way to put it,” agreed Mondrago.
“What are we going to do, Jason?” asked Chantal.
Good question, he thought. Their plan had been very straightforward. They would land De Ruyter, break into the slave compound, and find Rojas. As soon as she—along with any of the other twenty-fourth century people they could manage to snatch—was aboard the ship, and the three IDRF commandos in the compound at least within range of Jason’s control TRD, he would immediately activate it and they would all snap back to their own time and another world, leaving the duped Teloi to vent their rage on the Transhumanists.
All very neat . . . except for the problem of the five Indian Army men. They had been forced to consider the option of simply leaving them on Drakar with the rest of the slaves, to hopefully survive the destruction of the Transhumanist colony and make do in its absence. The alternative was to keep them aboard De Ruyter and whisk them to the incomprehensible world of the twenty-fourth century, from whence they could never return. They had concluded that the latter was the lesser evil—they owed a debt to these men, and Jason’s entire being rebelled at the thought of simply abandoning them. He had decided he would get them back aboard De Ruyter in time if at all possible—that is, if the press of events permitted it. That “if at all possible” was, he admitted to himself, something of an evasion—a way of putting off the final decision until circumstances took the matter out of his hands. But it was the best he could do.
Now, it seemed, some rethinking was called for.
“I can see only one viable alternative plan,” he said slowly. “We get Rojas, Bakiyev, Armasova and Bermudez aboard the Teloi shuttle, and then, while its pilot is wondering where the ‘Teloi prisoners’ are, we overpower him—hopefully he’s the only Teloi aboard—and force him to take off and go into orbit. There, while we rendezvous, I put Odin off with some story about how the Teloi slaves had already been killed. While I’m still sweet-talking him, we hastily get Rojas aboard De Ruyter—and at that moment I activate the TRDs.”
“You realize, Jason,” said Chantal, “that this means we can’t even try to rescue any of the other people from our own time, because we can’t possibly have time to get them inside De Ruyter.”
“No,” said Mondrago. “And if we pop out of existence with them still in that shuttle, I don’t even want to think about what this Odin would do to them afterwards. They’ll be better off trying to survive on the surface.”
“It also means,” said Jason grimly, “that we can forget about all our soul-searching where our five nineteenth-century guests are concerned. For exactly the same reason—over and above all ethical questions about taking them into the twenty-fourth century—they have to stay behind.”
“We and they have been through a lot together,” Mondrago reminded him. “And they’ve stood by us. I don’t like the thought of just . . . ditching them.”
“Do you think I do?” Jason reined in his temper. “Look, I’m not any happier with this than any of you. But this is a situation where there are no good alternatives. Does anybody have another plan to offer?”
None of them did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
To Jason’s relief, at least one of his working assumptions proved accurate. The Teloi shuttle’s crew consisted only of the pilot, who looked on with the expression of an Easter Island statue as they filed aboard from De Ruyter.
Chantal stood beside the airlock as Jason, Mondrago, and the five Indian Army men departed. She and Mondrago had had a little time together earlier, and now they parted with only a silent touch of hands. She wore the same expression she had when she had seen him off on their ill-fated reconnaissance of the Transhumanist transport . . . but, it seemed to Jason, not exactly the same. This time it seemed to hold an element of fatalism that bothered him in a way he could not define. But he didn’t have time to let himself worry about it, as he led the way into the shuttle.
Jason had done his best to prepare the nineteenth-century men for the sight of a Teloi. The Sikhs muttered to each other and made certain signs, and the British sergeants maintained stiff upper lips with an effort. But that was all, and they settled silently into the outsize Teloi-designed couches, arranging their weapons.
Their choice of the latter had, of course, been limited to what was left in De Ruyter’s small armory after the losses when they and the commandos had been captured seemingly so long ago. For one thing, they had lost all of their strength-enhancing combat environment suits, without which not even McCready could have handled the spare Mark XI plasma gun. But they had three spare gauss battle rifles, and the sergeants carried these. There had, of course, been no opportunity for live practice; Mondrago had barely had time to put them through dry runs. Jason hoped their overall familiarity with projectile weapons would stand them in good stead, even though they had been astonished to learn that electromagnetic impulse, not gunpowder, propelled the slugs. Jason and Mondrago carried the laser carbines intended for in-ship action, as did the sepoys
, whose instruction hadn’t included any attempt to explain how they worked. Jason and Mondrago also had gauss needle pistols as sidearms, and Mondrago had been delighted to find a vicious-looking combat knife that must have been a private possession of one of the commandos. He and Jason also had, hanging from their utility belts, hand grenades somewhat larger than the thimble-sized ones fired by the battle rifles’ integral launchers. Jason’s belt also supported a fairly bulky communicator with orbital range.
Jason looked everyone over. Carver gave him a cocky wink. He looked away. He wasn’t finding it easy to meet the eyes of these men to whom he was lying. He had assured them that the plan was to get everyone back aboard De Ruyter, which would then fly away in accordance with a foolproof plan he had to escape the Teloi. Their unquestioning acceptance of his assurances made it even worse.
He turned to the pilot and spoke curtly in Teloi. “Take us down.”
Under cover of darkness and the shuttle’s ECM, they descended from orbit and settled down just beyond a low range of hills to the east of the slave compound. It was a fairly long walk to the compound, but Drakar had a long night. And it was mostly downhill.
Jason wore light-amplifying goggles, and under the stars and the great swiftly moving moons he led the way in a half-circle around the darkened compound to the location of the powerhouse that De Ruyter’s lasers had fried, near the gate. Taking as much advantage as possible of a thinly wooded area, they slipped through the odd alien trees and Jason switched his goggles to magnification. As he had expected, the powerhouse was under repairs—the work suspended for the night—but the Transhumanists had rigged a portable emergency generator to keep the fence electrified.
He consulted his brain implant for the time. From the one opportunity he had had to observe a change in shifts, he had been able to extrapolate the three-shift schedule. When the night shift returned, for a short while all the slaves would be present in the compound, and the gate would be open. It had been the basis for his timing of their insertion, and he saw with relief that his calculations had worked out. The shift wasn’t due to return for a little while yet. He gave a hand-signal, and they settled in to wait at the edge of the grove, grateful that this hemisphere of Drakar was in a mild season. And, in accordance with their premission briefing, Carver handed his battle rifle to Mondrago.
Dawn was near when the headlights of the grav carriers appeared, gliding along the dirt road. This time, the caravan was led by a large glide car. The gate swung open and the first of them began to glide through into the compound’s open area.
Mondrago, who wore a pair of goggles like Jason’s, used the slide action of the battle rifle’s underslung electromag grenade launcher to ready a grenade for firing. Taking careful aim, he sent the grenade toward the generator and, with a rapid pumping action, followed it with two more while it was still in flight.
The series of explosions shattered the predawn darkness, followed almost instantaneously by a harsh rasping sound as the generator burst into glaring flame. A ripple of sparks ran along the fence as it died.
“Go!” shouted Jason, and they sprinted across the short distance. Transhumanist guards tried to close the gate, but the grav carriers had it blocked. The slaves inside one of the carriers forced its hatch open and came boiling out. The driver jumped to the ground and whipped out a sidearm. McCready cut him in two with a burst from his battle rifle, stopped for a fractional second to stare at his weapon in awe, and then ran on.
Guards were converging from both sides, and the antipersonnel laser atop the nearest guard tower began to spit pulses of energy. Hazeltine pumped grenades at it, missing with the first two from sheer inexperience, but then scoring a hit which caused the weapon mount to explode into flames and a burning guard to fall screaming to the ground like a falling torch.
Jason dashed ahead, through the milling mob of slaves around the grav carriers. He tossed a hand grenade at a file of guards, then dropped to his stomach and speared one of them with a bolt from his laser carbine just before the grenade exploded among the others. Then he sprang to his feet and ran on, the others close behind firing blasts of suppressive fire to right and left whenever they could do so without collateral slaughter. All at once they were through the gate and into the compound, where slaves were pouring from the barracks buildings.
“Elena! Bermudez! Bakiyev! Armasova!” Jason yelled the names at the top of his lungs. He was hoping that the IDRF people were all keeping together in a group. This was no time to be searching them out individually.
“I know where they are!” cried a new voice. It was Captain Southwick. “They’re this way, where Kamen is organizing an attempt to breach the fence.”
“Let’s go!” said Jason. Southwick led them between two buildings to the fence beyond, where a crowd of slaves led by Kamen were using boards ripped from their quarters to press the wires out and down. The ground around a nearby guard tower was littered with laser-burned corpses . . . but now its laser was being used against the nearest tower.
Jason turned to Southwick. “What happened here?”
“Well, these people scaled the tower—”
“In the teeth of laser fire?”
“—and overwhelmed the guard. Good show, actually. That’s your Corporal Bakiyev up there now—handy chap with that weapon.”
But Jason was no longer listening, for he had spotted Rojas. “Elena!”
She waved to him and broke away from the crowd, followed by Armasova and Bermudez. In their wake came Gurdev Singh and a couple of sepoys.
“One of our men was killed scaling the tower, sahib,” Gurdev Singh reported to McCready. “So was Ayub Khan. He led the way up, calling on his Allah even as he was burned by that devil-weapon.” His voice held an admiration Jason would never have expected to hear.
“Jason,” said Rojas urgently, “is De Ruyter here?”
“No, it’s in orbit. It’s a long story, which we don’t have time for. Just take my word that I’ve got transportation out of here. Let’s get you armed.” He and Mondrago drew their pistols. “Unfortunately, we’ve only got two sidearms.”
“Give them to Bermudez and Armasova,” said Rojas. “I’ll take that combat knife.” Mondrago handed it over with no very good grace.
“The fence is down,” Carver called out, pointing to the rush of slaves who were pouring through the breach into the open fields.
“Right,” said McCready. “Let’s step lively.”
And all at once, Jason’s dilemma, temporarily forgotten in the heat of battle, was back in full force, as he faced these men he could not take with him. And it could no longer be evaded.
What am I going to say . . .?
Jason was still trying to decide when he was blinded by headlights and a glide car, the hum of its overdriven grav risen to a harsh buzz, came screaming around the corner of the nearest barracks building in a tight turn that caused it to angle crazily. Their group scattered, save for Southwick, who was caught head-on, the life crushed out of him.
It was, Jason had time to think, the car they had seen leading the procession of grav carriers—and about which they had forgotten. Now they could see that it was a heavily armored military model with a remote-control laser turret mounted on the roof. As the glide car settled to a halt, that laser spat bolts at the guard tower, whose weapon emplacement exploded. And Jason knew Bakiyev was dead.
Then the turret swiveled, turning its rapid-fire laser pulses on them. Carver screamed and went to his knees as the coherent energy grazed his upper left arm. They all fell prone, firing at the glide car. But the light laser carbines couldn’t penetrate its armor, and the grenades that McCready and Hazeltine fired were antipersonnel versions, not shaped-charge armor-piercing ones. They exploded harmlessly.
Then, from behind them, came Stoneman’s voice.
“Drop your weapons or she dies!”
In a calm corner of his mind, it occurred to Jason to wonder what had brought Stoneman to the slave compound on this particular
night. But the question didn’t seem terribly important at the moment. Clearly, he must have gotten out of the glide car before it had attacked, and circled around behind them while it had monopolized their attention.
Very slowly, Jason turned around. Stoneman had surprised Rojas, grasping her from behind, and now held her with both arms pinned to her side, with a gauss needle pistol to her head.
“Do as he says,” Jason ordered in a dead voice.
Weapons were lowered to the ground, and the glide car’s other three occupants emerged, holding laser carbines.
“Very good, Commander,” said Stoneman. “We could, of course, kill all of you. But I prefer to wait. It won’t be long before this disturbance is quelled. Our fighters should be overhead any time. Afterwards, I will deal with you at my leisure. Oh yes, I’ll take my time—”
Rojas suddenly went limp in Stoneman’s grasp, causing that grasp to momentarily loosen. Which freed her left arm just enough to get an overhand grip on the hilt of the combat knife in her belt. With a convulsive movement, she stabbed backwards with it, into Stoneman’s belly just above the crotch. Then, as he released her with a cry of pain, she yanked upward using hysterical strength, slicing his midriff open almost to the solar plexus.
There was nothing human in Stoneman’s scream as he sank to the ground.
His men’s moment of stunned immobility gave Jason and the others their chance. They scooped up their weapons and opened fire. The lasers were infinitesimally faster, but the battle rifles’ hypervelocity slugs tore the Transhumanists apart in a shower of blood.
Jason and Bermudez, the commando squad’s collateral-duty medic went to Carver. “He’ll be all right, Commander,” said Bermudez after a brief examination.
“Good,” said Jason. He picked up Carver’s battle rifle, and walked over to where Stoneman was still squalling as he thrashed about in a tangle of his own guts while Rojas stood over him with her dripping knife. He put one foot on the Transhumanist’s chest to hold him still, placed his weapon’s muzzle against his forehead, and squeezed the firing stud. The top of Stoneman’s head blew out with massive hydrostatic shock, in a gusher of brains and blood, leaving what was left of the skull holding an empty cavity.
