by Chuck Dixon
“What’s the order of battle? How many troops are deployed in this siege?” Chaz asked.
“Hundreds of thousands on either side,” Fong said. “Maybe as many as a million men under arms. The Taipings themselves within the walls. The emperor’s army is outside with artillery, cavalry, infantry, and sappers. They also have a slave army to build earthworks, trenches, and mines. You’ll see Mongol and Tartar cavalry, Sikh lancers, and endless bannermen, musketeers, jingal men, and swordsmen.”
“Cool,” Jimbo said and then grinned when he realized he’d said it aloud.
“What are the city’s defenders like?” Lee said.
“They are a formidable army. Well trained and disciplined with fifteen years of war behind them. They will be weary and starving after long months of siege but don’t expect them to be demoralized. They are fanatics and will fight for every inch of the city.”
“And we’re expected to go downrange into that with a smile on our faces? Why’re we deploying into the shittiest situation? Why not before or after?” Boats spoke up for the first time to say what was on all their minds.
Fong took a sip of coffee before answering.
“We have a historical record of the siege written by a scribe of a Taiping general known as the Shield King, one of the many kings within the Taiping hierarchy. He places the object you’re being sent to find in a very specific place within the walls of Nanking and during a very specific period of time. We know where the object is and when it will be there. Before and after that, the object’s whereabouts are unknown.”
“Taan’s spending a buttload of cash on this operation. What’s this object we’re talking about? What makes it worth all this?” Lee said. The others nodded.
“That information is not necessary at this point. I am told you have a lot of prep work to do in the meantime. Mr. Taan asked me to withhold the nature of the object you’ll be retrieving until closer to the start of your mission,” Dr. Fong said with a shrug.
“We’re like mushrooms,” Boats said with a smirk.
“Excuse me?” Fong said, looking to the others for clarification.
“Kept in the dark and fed shit,” Chaz said.
“Well,” Fong said, “I can provide you a clearer picture of the fall of Nanking along with a timetable of the battles and you gentlemen, and lady, can weigh your options for success. I’m no tactician. I can only offer you as much historical data as I can. And I’m not lying when I say that this the most complete, most diligent collection of research on the places, personalities, conditions, and events in question that you will find anywhere.”
“Let’s let the doc finish his presentation. He has the intel we need, and we need to listen,” Lee said to the table.
Dr. Fong returned to his lecture and was pleased to see each of his students were rapt with attention, and most were taking notes. He thought that this was the most attentive class he’d ever spoken to. Of course, his usual students only thought of grades and transcripts and course requirements. None of his classes would ever rely on his tutelage to determine their chances of living or dying.
After several hours, they agreed to take a break. Bat hung back as the others hurried out of the hatch into the fresh salt air. Wesley Fong was closing his laptop at the head of the table.
“Is this period of history your main area of study?” Bat asked.
“I read and teach on a broader area of study of China and European influence in the early Nineteenth Century. The Opium Wars up to the fall of the Taipings,” he said, visibly pleased to have the attention of an attractive young woman.
“And Jason Taan found you how?”
“I wrote some papers based on journals written at the time of the Taipings. Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, and his officials produced mountains of texts, proclamations, and detailed inventories of treasures they looted on their march down from the north. Mr. Taan took an interest and funded my research.”
“Funded? You’re on his payroll?”
“It’s more than that. These texts are not easy to come by. A lot of them are locked away in stacks or in private collections. To find the prize that Taan is looking for, he spent millions of dollars and a great deal of influence so that I could read and collate thousands of documents written by the Taipings.”
“It all seems so dry, right? Just reading lists and regulations and red tape from a century and a half ago?” Bat said.
“I find it fascinating,” Fong said with a smile. “It’s like peering into the past, capturing a moment in time revealed by the minutia of a long-ago day.”
“Then you must envy us, Doctor. We’re going back to see, to experience, a time you can only read about,” she said.
His smile broadened, and he shook his head with vigor.
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t go there for all the money in the world. You will be traveling back to hell on earth, my dear.”
Chaz put on cross-trainers and went for his evening run. Twenty laps around the deck. He needed it after that afternoon’s lecture. A lot to take in.
Boats joined him on his third lap. The pair usually found themselves jogging in tandem or joined by others. There was little to do on board but wait for the day the mission dropped. The daily runs were a welcome part of the routine.
“Sounds like we’re inserting into a world of shit, brother,” Boats said, trotting easily beside Chaz.
“It’s a fucked up deployment, that’s for sure. But it’s not our fight. We just need to get the goods and get gone.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It’ll all work out the way it’s supposed to, or it won’t. Most likely, it won’t. But it’s all in the Big Man’s hands in the end.”
Boats said nothing to that but for a grunt of assent.
“Got me thinking, though. We might have an edge in this,” Chaz said as they rounded the broad curve of the Raj’s aft deck.
“Yeah?”
“This Hong Shoo-juan dude said he’s Jesus’ brother. He’s a lying motherfucker. We’ve probably been close enough to Jesus to touch him, you know. In real time,” Chaz said.
“So?”
“That’s got to count for something, right? I figure the Big Man owes us one,” Chaz said and kicked up his speed to sprint down the long starboard rail with the SEAL huffing after.
6
Visiting Hours
“That’s the last thing I need,” Caroline Tauber said, her hand covering her coffee cup when Dwayne made to pour from the steaming carafe.
“Still shook up from last night?” he said and poured a mug for himself before sitting down at the table on the veranda of their rented house.
“You’re not? What was that?” she said, trying to spoon cereal into Stephen’s mouth. Their son was seated by her in a high chair. He seemed to be enjoying having breakfast on his face more than in his mouth this morning.
“A projection. Like I said last night. Samuel’s come to us that way before as a hologram projection.”
“It was like an old television set. Like when they would get stuck between channels or a plane flew over.”
“So, they have glitches where Samuel comes from. He’ll make contact again when conditions are better,” Dwayne said.
“I don’t know. I had the feeling something was deliberately interfering with him transmitting himself.” She looked past Dwayne to see green trees, white sand, and a turquoise ocean spreading out beyond.
“He was trying to talk to you. He was looking at you, not me. You make anything out?”
“He was warning us. Why else appear to us?”
“Warn us of what? We’re away from the team, away from the Tube. Off the grid. No one knows we’re here.”
“I don’t know,” she said and looked to the giggling baby, cheeks smeared with goop, beaming back at her with eyes crinkled in simple amusement.
“All we can do is keep our eyes open,” Dwayne said.
N’itha bounced out onto the veranda, a flower-patterned dress swirling about
her legs, beaded bracelets jangling on her wrists. Her shock of black hair was held back by a strip of red cloth that looked suspiciously as if it may have been cut from the bed sheets in her room.
“We go see Ricky?” she said, face aglow with anticipation. She plucked a mango from atop a pile of fruit in a bowl in the middle of the table.
“Sure, right after breakfast,” Dwayne said.
“Hurry, please. Ricky is missing me. I am missing him,” N’itha said around a mouthful of fruit, juice running down her chin. She took a banana from the bowl as well.
“Okay, get your sandals, and I’ll take you over now. Soon as I’ve had my coffee,” Dwayne said.
“Fucking A,” she squealed, took an apple from the bowl and raced back inside.
“I wish I had half her energy. I’m not even thirty, and she makes me feel like an old lady,” Caroline said with a shake of her head.
“Must be that caveman diet she’s on.” Dwayne grinned.
Both were surprised at how well N’itha was adjusting to a world a hundred thousand years in her future. She arrived on board the Raj out of the manifestation field, too consumed with Rick Renzi’s condition to pay attention to the world around her. In the days coming down to the sea off Baja, she explored the container ship, eyes wide with wonder. But nothing she saw seemed to scare her. Not being on a ship that was ten times the size of her home village back in prehistoric Nevada. Not the wonders of electricity or the strange clothes and customs. Even her first sight of a commercial jet flying high above ahead of a white contrail streak was greeted with childlike glee.
N’itha accepted that this was the world of her beloved Rick Renzi. No matter how alien it was to her, she would learn to live here with him. Since her people back in The Then were annihilated, she had no home in any place or any time. This would be her world too, beside her mate.
“Call if you need anything, okay?” Dwayne said, sweeping a burner cell and key ring for the rental off the table.
“Sure,” Caroline said, looking far out at the sunlight glittering silver off the Pacific but seeing the pleading face of Samuel speaking across the gulf of time in words she could not hear.
At the clinic, Dwayne let Rick know that their situation might not be as secure as they thought.
“What the hell does that mean?” Rick asked from his bed, where he was propped up with N’itha seated beside him, her fingers idly caressing his arm. Rick’s leg was raised at the ankle and knee inside a heavy cast. A pin went through his knee, with cables attached to the pulley rig. His foot rested in a cloth loop. A morphine drip was slung up by him, the line run into the back of his left hand.
“Maybe this Taan asshole. Maybe Sir Nigel. I don’t know. We might need to relocate,” Dwayne said.
“Well, give me time to get my sneakers on, and I’ll be right behind you,” Ricky scoffed, gesturing to the traction rig he was entrapped in.
“It might be nothing. But I need you to keep your eyes open.”
“Check it out, bro. I’m tied up here in this one room for the next sixty days. What the hell am I going to see from here but Mexican soap operas?” Rick’s hand swept the room. It looked more like a hotel room than a hospital room, with a view of the sea, big screen tv, and kitchenette.
“I’m doing my best here. Just keep an edge on, Ricky.”
“Yeah, yeah. Who am I to bitch? You reentered hell to save my sorry ass.”
“You’d have done it for me.”
“As far as you know,” Rick said, a grin spreading across his face.
“Fuck you,” Dwayne said, grinning also.
“So, where’d you get word we might be compromised?”
Dwayne hadn’t told Rick about his son. Neither that a son had been born to him nor that Samuel, as a grown man, had helped the Rangers out of one corner after another. Not that Rick’s son led them to rescue his father from the primordial past. He’d made a promise to Lynn, Renzi’s estranged wife, never to tell Rick that they had a third child. That promise didn’t mean as much to Dwayne as the reluctance to tell Rick that he had a son who existed across multiple timelines. News like that could fuck with a man’s mind.
“A feeling. Radar. Whatever.”
“Okay. Can’t ignore that. You hear from Lee and the rest?” Rick said, a hand cupping one of N’itha’s ass-cheeks. She giggled. Even racked up and drugged, Renzi was still Renzi.
“We agreed to no contact. Better that way. This Taan has a global reach,” Dwayne said.
“Can they trust him?”
“No. But you know Lee, he’ll rework the scenario in his favor, eventually.”
“You don’t need to stick around if you have somewhere else to be,” Rick said, smiling lazily. N’itha pressed against him, her mouth nuzzling his neck.
“I get the hint,” Dwayne said and left the room. A high squeal followed by joint laughter trailed him down the hall to the nurse’s station.
7
Ordnance
The guns arrived.
The crates were marked as engine parts. The invoices and customs forms claimed they were out of a tool-and-die plant in Taiwan. The plant was a steel fabrication factory owned by Jason Taan through a few shell corporations.
The team was anxious to get at the weapons. They had the crates pried open in minutes. The deck of the Raj was littered with strips of bubble wrap. The chemical tang of packing grease and fresh gun oil filled the air. The ship’s crew stopped work to watch. The Raj was down to a skeleton crew of Boats’ loyal Ethiopians led by his first mate Geteye. Their minders, Taan’s security force, stood at a distance on an upper deck and pretended disinterest.
Morris had a very keen special concern in seeing the weapons even though firearms weren’t really his thing. He stood in the blazing sun, watching the load come aboard, and Lee Hammond and the others descending on it.
“Chronal integrity. You considered that, right?” he said to the seven men and one woman unpacking the crates on the main deck of the Raj like kids under a Christmas tree.
“Every step of the way, Mo,” Chaz said. He stripped the greased paper from a rifle with a wooden stock and held it out for Morris to inspect. It appeared to have three barrels and a brass action and buttplate.
“I suppose it looks in period,” Morris said, though he had no idea.
“Check it out,” Chaz said and worked a lever under the rifle’s action. “It’s based on a military version of a Henry rifle with some modifications. It has a longer barrel, full military stock, and this is the best feature.”
Chaz held the rifle up to Morris and worked a brass toggle set before the trigger guard of the lever.
“See the two magazine tubes? This little switch changes the feed from one barrel to the other. Two tubes loading fifteen rounds each for a total capacity of thirty rounds of .44 ammo. That is some badass shit.” Chaz beamed.
“And none of this is anachronistic in 1864?” Morris said, his skepticism growing in parity with Chaz’ enthusiasm.
“All of this technology already exists in the period. The Henry was around seven years at the time we’re jumping to,” Lee Hammond said, looking at the rifle in his hand with deep appreciation. “We just added magazine capacity to it. The mechanism to switch between tubes is based on any double barrel weapon of the period. We just moved the device to the feed tubes.”
“At first glance, it looks like any rifle carried by armies at the same time. We even added a bayonet lug to the end of it,” Bat Jaffe said, working the action of one of the rifles. She was as pleased as the others.
Jimbo put in, “The Imperial Chinese army at the time was in the field with early bolt action rifles. Trust me, that’s way more revolutionary to the period than these babies.”
“But the markings. They’re Chinese?” Morris said, taking a rifle in his own hands. At first touch, a film of grease coated the palms of his hands.
“The Chinese have been knocking stuff off since Marco Polo’s time,” Chaz said. “Any decent forge could have m
ade these. We marked them as coming out of the Hing-Fat factory, Shanghai 1861. Patent pending in the US and Switzerland.”
“We’ll bring them all back or make sure they’re destroyed on site,” Lee said, a hand to Morris’ shoulder. “Even if we left one behind and it was found, it’s just a one-off oddity. Probably go for millions at an auction, but no real questions raised and no connection back to us.”
“And the revolvers?” Morris asked.
Boats was standing on the deck with a long-barreled revolver in each fist.
“Old-school Remingtons in reinforced frames. They’re customized to take the same cartridges as the rifles. We had them fitted with gutta-percha handles for a better grip,” Boats said and twirled the pistols in his hands in imitation of a Western gunfighter. One of them went flying from his finger to skitter over the deck. Morris had to leap aside to dodge the spinning handgun.
“Sorry.” The big former SEAL shrugged with a sloppy grin. “Here’s my baby,” Jimbo said in a mix of awe and delight. He lifted a long rifle from a wooden crate and lovingly peeled away the paper cover. It was four feet in length with a curved butt plate and long brass scope mounted atop it. Steel fittings in a burled walnut stock.
“And that is...” Morris said.
“A Whitworth. English-made. Well, not this one. This one was worked up by one of Taan’s fabricators,” Jimbo said and examined the breech. “It’s modified to be a breech-loader and take a .50 caliber Minié bullet. Effective range is over one thousand yards. This is our overwatch weapon.”
“And I can trust you that none of this is so anachronistic, so out of place or advanced, as to cause some kind of disastrous change in the temporal environment?” Morris said.
