by Chuck Dixon
The SEAL stood on the weather deck, sighting a brass sextant on the horizon and the North Star. He ignored the remarks of the two ignorant grunts speaking about him from lawn chairs. Stripped to boxers, the pair of Rangers were on the open deck enjoying a relatively cool westerly breeze. Without taking his eye from the lens, Boats wrote down longitude and latitude figures on a piece of duct tape stuck to the rail.
“How exact is that thing, sailor? Aren’t the stars aligned differently now?” Jimbo said.
“They’re close enough. Astronomical time moves slower than geologic time. Though there are variables.” Boats kept his eye to the scope, making micro-adjustments to the mirrors on the device.
“Like what?”
“Like Mo says that the tilt of the earth’s axis would be different now. The asteroid that fucked up all the dinosaurs knocked the whole damn planet into a different angle.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. I have to make changes to account for index error. And refraction is a factor. The air is a whole lot denser here. That’s why I’m sighting on a star high above the horizon.”
“You know your shit,” Chaz said.
“You think SEALs is just how long they can hold their breath and clench their assholes.” Boats wiped the instrument down with an oiled cloth. He set the sextant back into its padded case with all the reverence of a priest handling a communion vessel.
“So, how close are we?” Jimbo said.
“At this speed, we’ll be off the coast of Panama by morning, give or take a hundred miles.”
That was good news after two weeks on the Pacific, rolling along at half speed. Even in a world where the sea was filled with monsters, the view grew boring in a hurry. The only memorable moment was when they skirted the edge of a storm that raised the seas to forty feet. Everyone held onto something solid as well as their breakfast as Boats and Geteye guided them bow-first down one wave and up another. Twenty straight hours of the worst roller coaster ride in the world. While a break in the monotony, no one wished for another day and night like that one.
“What are the odds that Taan’s people followed his orders?” Chaz said.
“Better than even odds we’re heading into an ambush,” the SEAL said, taking the sextant case with him onto the bridge.
The balloon was run up, the surge from the reactor let loose, and down in the Tube chamber, the field charged up to part the curtain of time.
The full complement of armed men was on hand to watch the field open. The Rangers, Boats, Byrus, and Shan stood with weapons ready and trained into the dense cloud of mist that billowed over the array of carbon steel rings. All but Jimbo, who was busy operating a drone that lifted off from the deck to fly straight into the icy mist for the 21st century. Morris Tauber watched through the observation port above. Bathsheba Jaffe was with him in the control room. The crew was confined to the engine room and the bridge. The Iranians manned the reactor. For the sake of strict security measures, Taan and his bodyguards were locked in the converted cargo container deeper in the hold.
“What can you see?” Lee said.
“It’s night there. I can see lights along the coast,” Jimbo said. He was wearing a VR array. It gave him a live three-sixty view sent back through the Tauber Transmitter across seventy million years.
“Coast of Panama or New Jersey?” Chaz said. “Fuck you, smartass,” Boats growled.
“We’re just over ten miles off Isla Jicarita according to the GPS. You done good, sailor,” Jimbo said.
“You in range of where the cage is supposed to be?” Lee said.
“It’s ten minutes flying time to that position. Battery life to spare,” Jimbo said. He pushed the throttle forward. The dark water rushed by his eyes in high-def, so real he expected to smell the salt air.
The drone climbed to a thousand feet. From that vantage, the massive floating dock came into view. An enormous cage constructed of the same tungsten and carbon steel alloy as the Tube, in effect an industrial-sized version of the Tauber’s creation. This was the same cage that Morris Tauber got Taan’s engineering firm to build for him off the estuary of the Huangpu in China. It had been disassembled and shipped to the Taan’s privately owned port facility on the western end of the Canal Zone. The cage had been reconstructed as per Morris’ specifications and sent forward in time along with the video of Jason Taan.
Whether or not Taan’s people had gotten the job done inside, the six-month deadline was moot. The field was currently open to a day, month, and year, ten years after the date mentioned in the list of conditions related by Taan on the video. A decade of inactivity would create a great degree of complacency. Any security still assigned to watch the cage would be minimally staffed and lulled to idleness by now. Jimbo could move in close, virtually, and take a full recon to make sure all was in place.
If everything looked good, they could bring the Raj back to The Now closer to the time they left. They’d manifest back as close to a year after their departure as Morris could manage. He assured them all that he could get them within proximity of that anniversary, within a few weeks either side.
“Only if we pop out back then, wouldn’t Taan’s soldiers remember we’d been there?” Boats asked at the briefing in the chartroom.
“What?” Morris was flummoxed by the SEAL’s question. “We’re gonna visit the twenty-first ten years after we left.
But if we were already there nine years earlier won’t they be expecting us on this recon?”
“We haven’t gone back to a year out yet. That’s in our future.”
“But it’s in their past.” Boats looked around the room at blank stares.
“Not yet it isn’t,” Morris said.
“Shit,” the SEAL said.
Jimbo dropped the drone down level with the roof of the cage. There were lights in the windows of a crew shack. He switched to thermal imagery. Images in the vague shape of people shimmered copper-colored inside the shack. The air-conditioning was on. The unit atop the shack glowed bright orange in the tropical air. Three figures stood out in high-contrast against the cool interior. There were no living heat signatures visible anywhere on the super-structure of the cage. No active patrols. Total tactical unawareness ruled here. From the position of one of the figures in the shack, Jimbo guessed the man was asleep on a sofa.
“How we looking?” Chaz said.
“It’s all in place just like we wanted. Taan’s people made good,” Jimbo said.
“Security?” Lee said.
“Minimal and bored off their asses.”
“Won’t be like that the day we show. A year out, they’ll still be frosty,” Boats said.
“We deal with that when we come to it,” Lee said.
“Hold on,” Jimbo said. He raised his hand.
“What?”
“Hold on.”
Three thermal signatures, glowing red like rubies, rose off a deck atop the cage. They climbed in the air out of sight of the drone’s cameras. Jimbo adjusted the attitude in time to see the three objects, brilliant as stars now, race across the night sky.
“We need to close the field. Now. Shut it down!” Jimbo called.
Morris had tried to explain again and again that, while he could open the manifestation field at will, he had little control over when it closed. All he could do was monitor the levels to see if the field remained open. It collapsed whenever it collapsed. Anywhere from just under thirty to almost forty-five minutes.
Jimbo chose the return option to bring the drone home on auto-pilot. He kept his eye on the three unidentified objects now on a direct course for the Raj. The drone flew back to him at maximum speed but still lost sight of the objects as they accelerated to Mach speed.
“Rig for impact!” Boats shouted when Jimbo told him about the projectiles homing on them.
“How the fuck do we do that?” Lee shouted back.
“Prepare to evac through the Tube!” The SEAL charged up onto the rampway and stood poised at the edge of the icy mi
st. The others gathered at the foot of the ramp, ready to follow. Morris was hammering on the glass of the observation port, mouth working to call mutely through the glass.
A high scream of turbines caused Boats to flatten on his belly on the Tube platform. Three drones, identical to one another and the size of starlings, flew from the clouds of condensation and separated over the Ranger’s heads.
“What the living fuck?” Chaz said.
The drones were a dull black and propelled by four tiny jet engines that moved independently of one another to steer and adjust the miniature crafts’ attitude. The surface of each segmented with a carapace that mimicked an insect. They rose to the highest part of the hold, scuttling across the surface like moths bumping across a porch ceiling.
“They’re looking for a way out!” Lee raised his M4 and sent a stream of fire at the whirling drones. Rounds punched through the ceiling, striking sparks.
Morris pounded on the glass and shouted over the PA to tell them there was no gunfire allowed in the Tube room. Bat had already left the room to add her gun to the others.
The Rangers and SEAL ignored him, firing up at the flitting objects. Jimbo tore off the VR headset and blasted upward with a .45 pistol. Chaz managed to catch a mini-drone in a spread of double-ought from his shotgun. One of its jets popped off to fly away on its own. The crippled drone spun, banging against the walls of the chamber before coming to rest at Byrus’ feet. The Macedonian stomped on it repeatedly until it was still.
The other two mini-drones, moving like bats, vanished up into the forest of conduits and venting in the shadows above the Tube. Morris was out of the control room now and coming down the steps. The usually sedate theoretical engineer was bristling.
“Stop it! Stop it now! Do you assholes have any idea what you’re doing? I said no shooting guns around the Tube!”
A buzzing sound rose from inside the white cloud of the field. Chaz turned to aim down the platform until Lee pulled the barrel of his pump gun down. Jimbo’s drone returned to hover over them, awaiting further directions.
The Pima replaced the VR rig on his head and sent the drone up into the shadows to search for the two remaining invaders. The image that came back to him showed only the labyrinth of intersecting vents, piping and hoses, now peppered in places by shot and bullets.
The two remaining intruders were gone.
27
Wie Gehts?
Pinned under the weight of the four men, Dwayne tried to free himself. The devil-red men were much shorter and lighter than him. But they were expert at keeping a man immobile. The pair on his legs kept him from bending a knee to get a foot flat on the ground. The pair on his arms kept him from rolling his shoulders.
They owned him.
A fifth man, older than the others, with flecks of grey in his bushy hair, leaned close to study Dwayne. He grabbed at Dwayne’s beard. With dirty fingers, he pulled Dwayne’s lips apart to touch the Ranger’s teeth. The man cooed; eyes wide with interest.
The teeth. It was always the teeth.
“I brush and floss. You should try it. And mouthwash, too,” Dwayne said when his beard was released.
The man’s eyebrows shot up. He rose from his crouch, speaking to the others in a language that sounded like a series of groans punctuated with barks. The others turned to him and listened without taking their weight off Dwayne’s limbs. Dwayne could only turn his head. One of the wild, naked men sorted through Dwayne’s few belongings and rejected them. The needle gun and both pistols were tossed away into the dark. He tasted the water in one of the gourds. He examined Snaggletooth’s flint knife and decided it was worth keeping.
The old guy knelt by Dwayne again to examine the silver bracelet. He ran fingers over it, trying to find a catch or release to open it. Dwayne watched; head turned. Maybe the old guy would hit the controls in the right order, and the Ranger would vanish right out from under these assholes. The old guy lost interest in the bracelet and leaned close to speak to Dwayne. He spoke a stream of words in a peculiar sing-song; the words more pronounced than when he spoke to the others. A different language, Dwayne realized. The old bastard was trying to talk to him, tell him something.
The old guy stood again and snapped fingers. The weight of the four men holding Dwayne down was released. The men, seven that he could see, stood around regarding him. They didn’t raise weapons or challenge him as he rose to his feet. The old guy spoke a bit more in the strange language, speaking to Dwayne. The words were unfamiliar, but there was something in the meter and pronunciation. A European language of some kind.
The speech was over. The old guy stood blinking at Dwayne. He was waiting for a response.
“Okay. What now?” he said.
The old guy shrugged then pointed away into the dark. The men around him trotted away. The old guy took a step and turned back to Dwayne. He made a motion with his hand.
“You want me to go with you?”
The old guy tilted his head.
“Why not?” Dwayne followed the red devils out onto the silver sands. He’d considered looking for the needle gun and his pistols but decided it was best not to test these guys’ patience.
Whatever he was to these guys, Dwayne thought, he wasn’t a prisoner. They expected him to come along of his own free will.
These guys liked to move at a run. Even the old guy was a marathon runner. He jogged along, bare feet kicking up sand. Dwayne, a Ranger for life, could still double-time for hour upon hour, but these guys meant to test him. They might be looking to run fifty miles. He was already near exhaustion from being on the move for eighteen straight hours.
He studied them as they ran together. They weren’t entirely naked. Each had a small leather bag fixed around their necks on a strip of rawhide. Some of the bags were decorated with stone beads. Dwayne knew from Jimmy Smalls that these were spirit bags; reliquaries for objects precious or sacred to the wearer. Feathers, stones, snake scales, the teeth of ancestors, or whatever might be of significance.
About their waists, they wore belts of twisted leather thongs. They used these to hold their knives or axes when they needed their hands free. Other than that, they were swinging dick naked.
They stopped at dawn at a water tank concealed in some rocks. Each man laid flat on his belly to sip from a shallow pool of water still present from a rainfall maybe months before. The water looked rank and smelled worse, but these guys drank it anyway. Their lives weren’t about comfort. There was no room for anything but bare survival in a place as unforgiving as this.
Dwayne drank from one of his remaining gourds. Not one man asked for a sip from him.
They ran on a bit more until the sun was clear over the flat horizon. Then they found shelter in the shade of a broad arroyo, settling against a wall of the depression out of the morning sun. There the old man distributed strips of dried meat from a bag on his thong belt. They offered Dwayne some, and he took it. It was salted, whatever it was, and tough as leather. But it brought saliva to his mouth and stilled the clenching of his belly.
The men took up places in the shade to lie down. One man was left to crouch, awake, to keep watch. Dwayne lay down himself in the cool sand and was asleep in seconds.
They were up again in the afternoon. Dwayne estimated that he slept five hours or less. He suspected that his companions slept less than that. He had a sneaking suspicion that they waited, allowing him more sleep time than they would ever allow themselves.
In the full daylight, he could see that the red of the men’s skin was from clay or dye rubbed into the flesh. Some kind of war paint or a signal to their enemies. Maybe it was of religious significance. It might even have been practical protection against the sun. It certainly wasn’t for camouflage. Their brick-red hides stood out against the drab hues of the desert.
A sip of water and strip of jerky and they were off again. It went this way for three more days and nights. The desert gave way to grasslands and, at times, cultivated fields. Dwayne’s new friends a
voided the fields, staying to the trees and tall grass. A few times he could see figures far off, hoeing at the dirt or moving along pathways. They were always too far; he could never make out their race or type. They were clothed, he could see that much.
They came to a forest of palms and acacia trees and followed a trail that brought them to an area where the trees were cleared by ax and saw. High deadfalls of trimmed branches lay in heaps. The trail widened to what had to be a timber road. There were long gouges in the dirt where logs had been dragged, and tracks of the hoofed animals used to pull them could be seen.
There were ruts from where wagon wheels recently passed on the road. That struck Dwayne, reminding him that he’d not seen one-wheeled conveyance since arriving in this time and place. The wheel was an unknown development in the Mesoamerica he’d read about. Apparently, that held true here. So, whose carts were these?
Maybe slavers, Dwayne realized. Maybe his new pals were going to sell him into bondage to Mughals like the ones he saw up in San Diego. They’d brought him out of the desert only to sell his ass to the highest bidder. Well, he might not have made it this far without them.
The logging road exited the brush into a broad clearing in the trees. In the center of the clearing was a stockade type structure built from the trees felled locally. It had high walls of logs with watchtowers at each corner. There were some roofed structures inside, and wood smoke rose from chimneys constructed of stacked logs.
A ditch was dug all about and festooned with stakes set facing outward from its inner face. The outer lip of the ditch was a gently sloping glacis meant to expose any attacker to direct fire from the parapets above. The party of Dwayne and his seven escorts approached the end of a wooden bridge that crossed the ditch to a gatehouse. The old man led the way, hands in the air and calling out in the strange sing-song of an adopted language. Men gathered on the ramparts behind the top of the wooden defenses to watch. It was early morning, and the sun was behind them. Dwayne couldn’t make out anything but the occasional gleam off a helmet above the spiked top of the wall.
