by Simon Hawke
The Nautilus Sanction
( Time Wars - 5 )
Simon Hawke
Simon Hawke
The Nautilus Sanction
PROLOGUE
The lookout in the crow’s nest of the H.M.S. Avenger had been the first to spot him, clinging to a floating piece of wreckage off the port bow. They sent a boat out and discovered he had lashed himself to a large section of what had once been the mainmast of a ship. He was half dead from thirst and badly burned, both by fire and by the sun. His lips were cracked and parched and his skin, where it had not been blackened by flames, was red and blistered, oozing with infection. They feared they would lose him. Admiral Lord Hood, anxious to learn the fate of whichever ship it was the poor devil had come from, gave strict orders to the Avenger’s surgeon to call him at once should the man regain the power of speech. No such summons proved necessary. The entire ship’s company heard it when, on the second day following his rescue, the man began to scream.
They had managed to calm him down somewhat by the time Hood arrived in the sick bay. The man was thrashing on the surgeon’s table, and for all that he was little more than skin and bones, it took two men to hold him down. He was struggling against them, his eyes rolling wildly, while Dr. Graves attempted to administer some laudanum.
“Belay that!” Hood said firmly, though without raising his voice. “The man is of no use to me drugged.”
Something in Hood’s voice penetrated through the shipwreck victim’s terror and he ceased to struggle against the two sailors. His eyes became fixed upon Hood, who met his gaze steadily and nodded reassuringly.
“You’re safe, man,” he told the shipwreck victim. “You’re aboard the A venger, bound for Bristol.”
“Thank God,” the man whispered, his voice now barely audible. “Thank the Almighty God!”
“What happened to your ship?” Hood said gently.
“Destroyed,” the man said, shutting his eyes. His chest rose and fell unevenly as he breathed laboriously. “It was the beast,” he said, with a shiver.
Hood frowned. “The Beast? I know of no such ship.”
“A sea beast!” said the man, opening his eyes wide and staring at Hood with the gaze of a lunatic. “The Covenant was destroyed by a monster from the depths!”
“Monster?” Hood said, glancing at the doctor. “What monster?”
“Perhaps he means a whale, Your Lordship,” said Dr. Graves.
“No!” The man struggled to rise, finally managing to prop himself up slightly on his elbow. “No, not a whale!” he said, fervently. “A beast, I tell you! A veritable leviathan! A great, horrid, monstrous thing from the very jaws of hell!”
“Come, man, what nonsense is this?” said Hood. “We are not children to believe in sea dragons. Even schoolboys know such creatures do not exist.”
“I saw it, I tell you!” said the man, his voice rising. “It churned the sea all round as it thrashed its mighty tail. It sounded and we heard it scream! I will hear that dreadful sound for all the days and nights left in my miserable life!”
“The man’s a lubber,” Dr. Graves said. “It must have been a whale he saw.”
“Not this one,” said the first mate, who had helped hold him down. “There’s tar in his hair and those were good seaman’s knots he lashed himself to the mast with.” He glanced up nervously at Hood. “No seaman gets himself frightened senseless by a whale, Your Lordship.”
“Lubber, am I?” said the sailor, his voice rising in pitch as he neared hysteria. “Whale, was it? Aye, you show me the whale that can hole a man-o’-war and then spit fire into its hull! Aye, the very flames of hell! One instant, there was a mighty ship, the next, there was nought but flaming splinters! The creature spat at us and we were consumed! Not a man jack left alive to tell the tale save me!”
“The poor man’s daft,” said Dr. Graves. “He’s lost his mind.”
“Aye, call me mad! Any sane man would. But I know what I saw, and I only pray to God I never lay eyes on it again!”
“Steady, now,” said Hood, bending down close to the man. “You have been through an ordeal enough to make any man half-mad. Try to remember. Think, could it be that a whale struck your ship or was struck by it? Perhaps the shock caused a lantern to fall and ignite the powder magazine?”
“I tell you, it was no whale!” the man shouted. “Think you I do not know a whale when I see one? We thought at first it was a whale when we glimpsed it on the surface, but no whale could swim with such unholy speed or give vent to such a cry! No whale spits fire at a ship!” He reached out and grasped the lapels of Hood’s seacoat with shaking hands. “Pray!” he said, his eyes glazing over, staring not at Hood, but at something else that none of them could see. “Pray you do not cross this creature’s path! Tell your lookouts to keep watch! Tell your men to keep their eyes upon the sea! If they should sight a dark shape in the water with a fin very like a shark’s, but larger than any shark that ever swam the ocean, tell them to make their peace with God! For you can turn your ship; you can put up every foot of sail in the strongest wind and flee, but it will avail you nought! The hell-spawn swims with a speed beyond belief! You shall hear its awful cry and it will sound and the sea will roil with its passage!”
The man began to laugh hysterically.
“Aye, a whale, you say. A whale!”
Hood firmly grasped the man’s wrists and pried himself loose from his hold. He stood, watching sorrowfully as the shipwreck victim alternately laughed and sobbed.
“Do what you can for him, Graves,” he said. “Poor wretch. I fear he is beyond your help.”
“Aye,” said the doctor, shaking his head. “Sea monsters.” The mate looked up at Graves and Hood, then glanced back down at the shipwreck victim and quickly crossed himself.
Later in the day, they lost him. That evening, Hood himself said the words as they put the poor man’s weighted body over the side. By then, there was not a man aboard who had not heard the story. When the Avenger made port, the tale began to spread throughout the pubs of Bristol, a tale of a leviathan that had risen from the deep. Sailors prayed and watched the sea with fear.
The entire division had been called in for the briefing. Every single temporal adjustment team was in attendance save the ones clocked out to Minus Time on missions. The briefing room on the sixty-third floor of the Temporal Army Headquarters Building at Pendleton Base was packed and buzzing with an undertone of conversation rife with rumors. Moses Forrester was not the sort of division commander who routinely called the troops out for mass briefings, so there was a great deal of speculation about the reason for the muster. Rumors circulated about everything from a new security evaluations program to a battery of proficiency examinations for the Time Commandos ordered by the Referee Corps. In the Temporal Army, such things were known as “mickey-mouse,” a term whose origins were lost in military antiquity.
Lucas Priest, Forrester’s exec with the rank of major, spotted Finn Delaney near the front of the briefing room and made his way to him. Slender, very fit and elegantly handsome, Priest walked with a slight limp, favoring his left leg. The plasma burns he had received on his last mission to Minus Time had completely healed, but there was still considerable soreness there. He wore a black patch over his right eye. His real eye had been melted right out of its socket by the heat wave from an auto-pulser blast. He was fortunate. He had only lost an eye and sustained serious burns upon his face. A direct hit from an auto-pulser would have cooked his head off. Cosmetic surgery had restored his features to their original appearance and the doctors had replaced the hair he lost, but Lucas had chosen a bionic optic unit instead of an organic eye replacement. It was superior to a natural eye in a number of ways, but he
had not yet had it long enough to grow accustomed to it. Using it together with his natural left eye for more than half an hour gave him a slight headache.
“Finn,” he said, touching Delaney on the arm, “you know what this is all about?”
Sergeant Major Finn Delaney turned to face him with a frown. Massively built, the red-haired Irishman somehow always managed to look less like a non-corn than like a technician in his uniform. No matter how sharply creased, and they rarely were, his black base fatigues always looked like workmen’s coveralls when he wore them. He never buttoned up his blouse all the way, and more than one officer had learned the hard way that Sergeant Delaney had a tendency to back up his recalcitrance with his fists. In any other outfit, Finn would long since have become a casualty of military regulations, but Forrester valued a soldier’s performance in the field above all else. His frequent, grudging intercessions on Finn’s behalf kept him from being drummed out of the corps, although they did not prevent his being busted down to private time and time again. It was a never-ending cycle. Finn would return from a hitch in Minus Time and his exemplary performance would result in a promotion, but sooner or later, he would run across some officer who had not been advised to steer clear of him. The result was usually an injured officer and Finn’s being busted down to private once again. He was still a sergeant major only because the members of the Temporal Army officers’ corps, in the interests of self-preservation, were learning to give him a wide berth. In that respect, Finn Delaney epitomized the nature of the Time Commandos. The regular troops respected them tremendously, but rarely socialized with them. Forrester’s people had a reputation for being mavericks, more than a little crazed.
“Do I know what this is all about?” said Finn, looking at Lucas with surprise. “Hell, I was going to ask you. You’re the exec, I figured you would know.”
Lucas shook his head. “Not me. You seen Andre?”
“Right here,” she said, from behind him. “What’s going on?”
Biologically, Andre Cross was the youngest member of the First Division, with the rank of corporal. Chronologically, however, she was by far the oldest, having been born in the 12th century, where she once held the rank of mercenary knight. She was not pretty. Her features were plain and some what on the sharp side, yet there was something about them that was very striking. Her hair was straw-blond and she paid an absolute minimum of attention to it, less than most men. She wore it a bit longer than most soldiers did, partly because she had worn it short for many years to aid in her passing as a male in the time from which she came. She filled out her uniform quite well, but with muscle rather than soft, feminine curves. Her shoulders were quite broad and her biceps, when flexed, had a surprising peak to them. Her legs were long and shapely, but with mass and definition that a triathlete would have envied. Her breasts, though small, appeared somewhat larger than they were due to her pectoral development. Her waist and hips were narrow, without an ounce of surplus fat. She had the poise of complete self-assurance and the animal sexuality that came with being in peak physical condition, though her deltoids had still not quite recovered from the wound she received when a nysteel rappelling dart had been fired into her shoulder, severing muscle and shattering bone. Their last mission had been a bad one. Lucas had been seriously injured. Finn had also been hurt, nearly killed, when a thrown dagger struck him in the chest, coming perilously close to his heart and pulmonary artery. Only the density of his muscle mass had saved him. All three of them were walking wounded, but the army doctors had pronounced them fit enough to return to active duty. Civilian doctors would have been a great deal more conservative in their decisions.
“I heard something about a new battery of psych tests,” Andre said.
“Who the hell knows?” Finn grumbled. “I guess we’ll find out soon. Here comes the old man. Better get the rabble in some sort of order, Major.”
Lucas turned to face the room. “Ten-hut!”
Several hundred boot heels cracked in unison as the soldiers of the First Division snapped to. Lucas about-faced and climbed up the steps to the rostrum, saluting the old man smartly.
“First Division all present or accounted for, sir!”
The craggy Colonel Forrester returned his salute. “Thank you, Major. You may step down. At ease, people. Please be seated.”
He waited a moment for them to take their seats.
“I am in receipt of a Priority One, Code Red directive from the Referee Corps,” he said without preamble.
They all tensed. This wasn’t mickey-mouse. A Priority One, Code Red meant very serious trouble. It was an order for total mobilization.
“About three weeks ago,” said Forrester, “a portion of a shipment destined for the Temporal Army P.O. was stolen from the warehouses of Amalgamated Techtronics, in spite of the most rigid security precautions. In all, some five thousand temporal transponders, ranging in classification from P-1 to V-20, were stolen by persons unknown.”
The reaction was instantaneous and tumultuous. “As you were!” shouted Lucas, surprised to hear his own voice crack. Five thousand temporal transponders! It was a crime of unprecedented and staggering proportions with consequences that could be cataclysmic.
The transponders, or warp discs in soldiers’ parlance, were the most recent development in military applications of Einstein-Rosen Bridge technology. Not all temporal units had them yet, but every temporal army in the world-and on other worlds-was in the process of converting to them to supplant the already obsolete chronoplates.
Originally, Einstein-Rosen Bridge technology had been developed in the latter half of the 26th century, based on the theory developed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935, in which they postulated the existence of a “corridor” in space-time. It took the discovery of white holes, cosmic gushers of pure energy exploding into the universe, and the technological advances of some seven hundred years before their corridor in space-time, or “worm hole,” became accepted as a reality. In 2645, Bell Laboratories developed the first working model of the Einstein-Rosen Generator at their Bradbury facility on Mars. Using particle-level chips, the device was still of mammoth size, much like the earliest computers. It was designed to tap into the energy field of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge between two universes. The Einstein-Rosen Generator, or ERG, was in fact misnamed. It did not actually generate power. Rather, it acted as a power dilator, in a manner similar to how a black hole “dilated” the universe in the vicinity which it was located, with a gravitational field so great that not only could light waves not escape from it, but the fabric of space-time itself was torn, disrupted in that region to open up into another universe as a white hole. The purpose of the ERGs was to tap into that maelstrom of power and then “feed” the energy to appropriate the transponders, in this way providing free energy for everything from powering orbital colonies to turning on a light switch in a New York conapt.
Eventually, the ERGs made possible the creation of a bridge to neutron stars within the galaxy and a number of on-line ERGs were bridging to Orion. It was not until a research scientist in the Ordnance Section of Temporary Army Headquarters came up with the idea of reversing the process, in 2615, that the principles of Einstein-Rosen were applied to military weaponry. The result was the warp grenade-a combination nuclear device and time machine.
Lucas had used one for the first time on his last mission. Since then, they had already been refined to achieve pinpoint intensity control. The device was called a grenade only because it approximated ancient hand grenades in size and general appearance. A warp grenade could be set manually with a timer or thrown set for air burst. The result was instant holocaust-only, capable of being totally controlled. It could be set to wipe out a city, a city block, a building on that block, a room within that building, or a spot within that room no larger than a fist. The variable factor in the classification of warp grenades was one-to-nine megatons. Lucas had used one of the least powerful ones and the thought of using a nine-megaton grenade made his
knees weak. He could not imagine a situation in which such a necessity could arise. At the instant of detonation, the particle-level chronocircuitry within the device clocked the “surplus” energy of the explosion-that which was not needed to do the job-through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge via transponder link to an on-line ERG. In the case of a nine-megaton grenade, 90 percent of the explosion’s energy could be clocked to the Orion Nebula, safely out of harm’s way. Or, more to the point, to where it could safely do no harm. Nevertheless, the remaining energy would be equal to the blast that had destroyed Hiroshima, and the thought of carrying such power in his pocket was enough to make Lucas break out in a sweat. The blast he had set off on his last mission was nowhere near as powerful, but its results had been frightening just the same. Lucas had caught some residual radiation, though not enough to cause any more damage than prolonged exposure to the sun during a beach vacation in St. Croix. Yet, somewhere in the Orion Nebula at that instant, there had been one whale of a big bang. All Lucas had done was use an infinitesimal part of it.
As the upshot of that flash of insight on that research scientist’s part, the brains in the Army think tanks suddenly realized the obvious possibilities for further temporal-military applications of those same principles. Even while the warp grenades were being perfected, the Temporal Army research scientists at Heinlein University on Dyson were already constructing the prototype temporal transponders to replace the chronoplates. Utilizing the same Einstein-Rosen Generators that provided power for utilities, they made some inspired modifications (the plans for which were immediately classified Top Secret) to enable the power drawn through time and space to provide the energy for travel through time and space via temporal transponders designed on the micro-molecular or particle level. Each soldier of the First Division, chosen as the first to be issued what the commandos quickly nicknamed “warp discs,” now wore a temporal transponder on his wrist. If necessary, the warp disc could be taken off its bracelet and worn on a neck chain, camouflaged as some other piece of jewelry or hidden somewhere on one’s person. Now, instead of a bulky chronoplate and flexible, bimetallic border circuits, all it took to transport a man of approximately six feet and two hundred pounds through time was a wafer-thin transponder disc no larger than an ancient twenty-five-cent piece. The transponders were made correspondingly larger according to their purpose, hence their classification designations. Lucas wore a P-1 disc. An entire battalion of soldiers could be teleported via a field provided by a T-25, a disc no more than eight inches in diameter. The actual power dilator, or ERG, could be anywhere-at Pendleton Base or even in ancient Mesopotamia. Theoretically, since the power supply was limitless to all intents and purposes, the entire planet could be teleported elsewhere with a large enough temporal transponder, though that was a possibility no one seriously entertained. Soldiers joked about it, but the laughter always had a slightly strained note to it. On that scope, it was just a bit too weird to even think about.
