Ghosts of Time (15 page)

Something—Jason would never know what—alerted Stoneman. He whirled, and for a frozen fraction of a second stared at Logan across a few yards. “Behind us!” he shouted, and simultaneously brought his revolver around and fired. Logan went over with a groan, clutching his abdomen.

The two goons also turned. The one in front of Jason tried to fire, but Jason delivered a circular kick that sent the revolver spinning out of his hand. The follow-through on the kick brought him close enough for a killing solar plexus punch. As the goon went down, he saw out of the corner of his left eye that Mondrago had kicked the other goon in the crotch and, as he doubled over with a shrieking grunt, brought both fists down on the back of his head while bringing his knee up into his face.

Then, out of the corner of his other eye, he saw Stoneman drawing a bead on him. He dropped, trying to use the body of the goon as a shield.

Dabney’s revolver cracked. He missed, but his bullet hit a tree beside Stoneman, sending a shower of splinters into his face. With a cry, the Transhumanist fired three ill-aimed shots that caused them all to flatten. Then he dashed away into the woods.

“Don’t follow him,” Jason commanded, getting to his feet. “He’s still got a gun. We’ll have to let him go.”

“I’d like to see the look on his face when he goes back to his cabin and sees what’s happened to all his high-tech goodies,” said Mondrago wolfishly.

Jason didn’t comment. He rushed over to the fallen Logan, who was moaning with the agony of a gut shot, the most painful of all bullet wounds. The others all gathered around. Nesbit was already trying to stanch the blood flow with a piece of cloth torn from Logan’s shirt.

“Irving, you’re good at first aid. Keep him alive for a little while, will you?” Jason summoned up his clock display, then leaned over the writhing figure. “Adam, just stay with us until retrieval.” If there was a breath of life left in Logan when they arrived on the displacer stage in the twenty-fourth century, the medical team that was always standing by for retrievals would be able to save him.

“I’m sorry I missed, Commander,” said Dabney.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Jason, although it tended to confirm his earlier thoughts about the difference between a combat situation and unhurried target shooting.

“Commander!” came a familiar voice from behind the fallen tree up ahead. “Is that you?”

“It is, Angus,” he called out in reply, recognizing Aiken’s red head as he and Gracchus stood up. He noted the puzzled look on the two men’s faces. Then it came to him.

Of course. After more than three months of
my
time, with no opportunity to shave, I must look like Robinson Crusoe, with this beard that, as far as they’re concerned, I haven’t had time to grow.

“It really is me, Angus,” he repeated. “It’s all of us. And it’s damned good to see you.” He stepped forward and shook hands.

“And it’s
really
good to see you, sir. I don’t know how much longer Gracchus and I could have held out.”

“Angus, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and not much time to do it in.” Jason consulted his clock display again. “Not much time at all,” he added, to Aiken’s obvious puzzlement. “So give me a quick report. Tell me about that explosion on the other side of the ridge. Was that what I hope it was?”

“Yes, sir. Thanks to Gracchus here, we destroyed one cache of nanobots.”

“For which,” Gracchus added grimly, “two of my men died.” For the first time, Jason noticed the body of a black man lying behind the tree trunk, the top of his head removed by a soft-nosed slug. “I hope it was worth it.”

“Believe me, it was,” Jason sighed. “Thanks. And good work, Angus. And now, tell me: what date is today?”

Aiken blinked. “Why . . . it’s February 1, 1865, sir.”

“I see.” Jason did a quick mental calculation.
The ratio was 2.45 to 1, to be exact.
“Angus, while about forty days have passed for you, ninety-eight days have passed for us.” He succinctly explained the Transhumanists’ reverse-stasis field to the stunned Aiken and the uncomprehending Gracchus. “So as far as we—and our TRDs—are concerned, this is April 5.”

Aiken grew goggle-eyed. “April 5? But sir, that’s—”

“—Our retrieval date. That’s right. In a few moments, we’re going back to our time. You, on the other hand, are going to remain in this era for another two months and five days. Now,” Jason continued, overriding Aiken’s stammered protests, “it is imperative that you be in Richmond a few days before that date, because I am going to meet you there.”
Assuming that the displacer stage is empty at this particular point in the linear present, so that I don’t die,
he mentally hedged. “Remember, we’re going to have to clean up what Pauline Da Cunha learned about—
after
she learned about it. But we don’t know for certain that that cache is the only one left. So in the meantime, your first priority is to try and locate any others. Did you see that man who got away?”

“Yes, sir, I got a look.”

“He calls himself Stoneman, and he’s a particularly dangerous high-caste Transhumanist. Always be on the alert for him, because you’re going to have to stick it out on your own.”

“Not altogether on my own,” said Aiken with a smile. “I’ve made some good friends.” Jason assumed he meant Gracchus. He turned to the black man.

“Gracchus, it’s been a privilege to know you.”

“Oh, I think you just may see me again, Commander. As I already told Angus, here, I want to be in Richmond at a certain time—April 4, to be exact.” He smiled, then turned serious. “And it sounds like you’re going to take another trip to this era, and be there on that date.”

“That’s right. But first I have to keep a promise and take a trip to a different time and place. An earlier time.”

Their eyes met, and Gracchus nodded with understanding. He seemed to want to say something—to want it badly, in fact—but his jaw clamped down on whatever it was.

But there was no time to try to draw him out. “Stand by!” said Jason to the others. “Angus, goodbye and good luck. Gracchus, don’t be too surprised by what you’re about to see.”

“Oh, not much surprises me, Commander. In fact—”

But then he was talking to no one, and there was a faint popping as air rushed in to fill the holes left by five men who were no longer there.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Even an old hand like Jason, forewarned to the second, could never entirely avoid the dizzying disorientation of temporal retrieval, when the disturbingly unnatural phenomenon of temporal displacement seized him and the world around him vanished, to be instantly replaced by the glaringly lighted, instrument-crowded interior of the displacer dome.

He now discovered that it was even worse when a Waffen SS
obersturmführer
just missed colliding with him.

Admittedly, the man with the death’s-head emblem on his peaked cap seemed even more startled than Jason was. With a yelp, he recoiled backwards from the filthy, wildly bearded apparition who had so impossibly sprung into being in front of him, bumping into a woman dressed in an early-1940s-style dress and hat. She screamed, and the pair of enlisted SS types behind her stood paralyzed with shock.

“Murray, it’s me!” shouted Jason, recognizing the officer, as pandemonium broke loose under the dome.

“Jason?” said Superintendent Murray Waxman, eyes bugging out incredulously. But Jason had no time for him. He rushed to the edge of the stage and yelled at the medical response team, who stood in ineffectual bewilderment.

“Get up here! We’ve got an injured man.”

That galvanized them. They rushed to Logan’s side, pushing Mondrago, Nesbit and Dabney out of the way. Behind them hastened Kyle Rutherford.

“Superintendent Waxman, I believe we will have to slightly reschedule your expedition’s displacement,” Rutherford said with desperate primness. Then he turned to Jason, face to face with the unprecedented and the inexplicable, both of which were anathema to his orderly soul. “Jason, how . . . why . . . ?”

“Wait a minute!” Jason snapped, and turned to the medics, kneeling over Logan. Their expressions told him all he needed to know, even before their chief looked up and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Commander. The stress of displacement must have been too much, given the seriousness of his wound.”

“Uh-huh.” Jason looked down into the still face of one of the most solidly dependable men he had ever known. One more score to settle. He turned back to Rutherford, who he imagined was probably counting the shaggy heads and noticing that none of them was red.

“Constable Aiken should be returning at the scheduled time,” he answered Rutherford’s unspoken question. “Hopefully he’ll return alive, as he was when I last saw him.”

“But Jason, the rest of you . . . How . . . Jason?
Jason?
”

“I’m all right.” But Jason had to steady himself, and shake his head to clear it. He knew his concentration was wavering, and his legs growing rubbery. The cumulative effects of his months-long captivity, which the adrenaline rush of his escape had held at bay until now, were catching up with him. And, although it should have been the last thing on his mind, he was abruptly aware that he could smell himself, and recalled Benjamin Franklin’s witticism. He forced himself to think and speak clearly. “Look, Kyle, I’ll give you an informal report in your office. This involves Transhumanists, so Chantal Frey ought to be brought in. But first, let me take a shower and change clothes. And have a medic standing by to give me some kind of stimulant. And it wouldn’t hurt if you could order up some coffee.”

“Of course, of course,” mumbled Rutherford as Jason, followed by Mondrago and Dabney, staggered away, oblivious to the stares of the technicians.

What Rutherford had sent to his office was more along the lines of a high tea. Jason told his story between bites of marmalade-laden toast and gulps of scalding coffee.

Rutherford went into something resembling a low-grade state of shock at the news of the Transhumanists’ reverse-stasis field, and was some time coming out of it. Jason could hardly blame him. One of the fundamental, unquestioned assumptions on which the Authority’s operational doctrines were based was that time travelers’ TRDs would activate on schedule. The only exception to date had been Jason’s tardy return from the Bronze Age after his imprisonment in the Teloi “pocket universe.” But that had been an unrepeatable fluke, for the pocket universe’s only interface with the normal universe had been atomized by the volcanic explosion of Santorini; the genie-lamp could no longer be rubbed. The Authority had heaved a sigh of relief. But now that sigh turned out to have been premature. The old comfortable certainty was gone.

“Well,” said Rutherford briskly, hastening to move on to another subject, “at least Constable Aiken was able to destroy the cache of nanobots.”

“
A
cache,” Jason corrected. “We know of at least one other: the one in Richmond of which Pauline Da Cunha became aware, and which we’re going to have to go back there to deal with at a time when the Observer Effect will let us. But yes, Angus did take care of one, with the help of Gracchus.”

“Ah, yes . . . Gracchus. Tell me again about him and his organization—this, uh, Order of the Three-Legged Horse.”

“Yes!” Chantal Frey spoke up. “You say the Order had its origin in the ‘counter-cult’ started by Zenobia in seventeenth-century Jamaica after she went renegade?”

“Right. They looked back on her as their founder.” Jason smiled. “I use the past tense. But for all I know the Order still exists today in the twenty-fourth century, as secret as ever.” Rutherford and Chantal both blinked; they clearly hadn’t thought of this. “But there must have been someone else involved in the Order’s origin. You see, there’s one thing I didn’t tell you. I told you we made contact with Gracchus and his people, but I didn’t add that they were expecting me.”

“I beg your pardon?” Rutherford looked blank. “I must have misunderstood—”

“No, you didn’t. And Gracchus explained why. He showed me a copy of a letter some unknown party wrote around or just after Zenobia’s time, setting forth my actual name, and accurately predicting the exact time and place I would show up.”

Chantal simply stared. Rutherford, as he often did at moments like this, took refuge in understatement. “Clearly we are dealing with something out of the ordinary here.”

“It gets even better,” Jason continued. “The letter went on to say that I must go back in time to a certain date—June 3, 1692, to be exact—in Jamaica, and meet Zenobia. It didn’t say why, but it stressed its importance. And,” he added firmly, before Rutherford could find his tongue, “Gracchus made me promise to do it, as a condition of helping me. I agreed. And he kept his side of the bargain. I intend to keep mine.”

“Do you mean to say,” Rutherford finally managed, “that you want the Authority to send you back to seventeenth-century Jamaica a second time?”

“I do. And I see no reasonable objection to it.” Jason began ticking points off on his fingers. “First of all, as you yourself have indicated, we’re faced with a deep mystery here—one which clearly involves time travel in some fashion, and therefore is worth our while to solve. Secondly, we’re talking about a target date twenty-three and a half years after I was there before, so there’s no danger of any messy situations such as me encountering myself. Thirdly, it should require minimal preparation; I’ve already acquired the local version of English, and received orientation—not to mention a great deal of experience—in the general period.”

“But, but,” stammered Rutherford, “it would require authorization by the council!”

“Why? Fourthly, as I was about to point out, you have ample authority as operations director, using your discretionary funds, to authorize Special Ops missions. Especially considering that, fifthly, displacing a single individual less than six hundred and ninety years shouldn’t involve a huge expenditure.”

“And sixthly,” stated Chantal, with the determination that often surprised people when expressed in her quiet voice, “it will involve a second encounter with that fascinating Transhumanist renegade Zenobia. For which reason, Jason, I am going with you.”

Both men gaped at her.

She turned her deceptively mild gaze on Rutherford. “You’ve been assuring me that you’re finally prepared to give me the chance to prove myself, but that the right opportunity has never quite arisen. Well, if this isn’t the right opportunity, what is?”

“But,” Jason protested, “this is going to be a Special Ops mission! You’re not a member of the Special Ops Section—or even of the Temporal Service, for that matter!”

“I am, however, the nearest thing to an expert on the Transhumanists you’ve got. I realize I’m not combat–trained, but this is one Special Operations expedition on which you’re not expecting to do any fighting, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Besides, the very fact that you’re using Special Operations procedures will mean a mission of short duration, so I shouldn’t require really extensive period orientation—I won’t need to ‘blend’ for any length of time.”

And you’d really like to meet Zenobia,
Jason thought.
That’s been clear ever since I told you about her.
“This may not be one of our search-and-destroy Special Ops raids, but I can’t guarantee your safety.”

“Understood.”

“Well . . . Kyle, maybe she could get more meaningful information out of Zenobia than I did. Let’s make that two people, not one.”

Rutherford looked at the two of them somberly. “I believe we are dealing here with private imperatives—to which the Authority does not normally cater. However, these would seem to be very exigent ones. And your points are cogent ones, Jason. The first one is particularly compelling.” He turned briskly to a speaker on his desk and spoke to his secretary. “Find out if Dr. Roderick Grenfell is still on Earth. If so, ask him to call me as soon as possible.” He turned back to Jason. “If Dr. Grenfell hasn’t already departed for his home system—Kappa Reticuli, isn’t it?—he may be able to provide valuable insights concerning the target milieu.”

“Thank you, Kyle.” Roderick Grenfell, an authority on Caribbean history, had been with Jason in the 1660s. He had experienced mental trauma from the horrors he had witnessed, but was now completely recovered and had recently been guest-lecturing at various Earth universities. (Time-traveling historians were always very much in demand for that sort of thing.)

“And now,” Rutherford continued, seemingly embarrassed by Jason’s gratitude, “there’s another matter to consider. Don’t you want to return to April, 1865 to finish what you began before undertaking this, rather than afterwards? If by chance you should come to grief in Jamaica—”

“—Then Mondrago could do the job in Richmond. So could any experienced Special Ops man, properly briefed. No, Kyle, I have to be sure of fulfilling my promise to Gracchus.”

“I see. Well, then, we’ll make that
three
people. I’m sending Superintendent Mondrago with you.”

“What? But Kyle, that’s not necessary. This is a personal commitment of mine.”

“True. But I want to make as sure as possible of getting you back alive.”

Before Jason could think of anything to say, the speaker buzzed. “Director, I have Dr. Grenfell on the line.”

“Splendid. Put him on.” They all turned to the comm screen as Roderick Grenfell’s face appeared against the backdrop of an academic office.

“Director Rutherford, I was told you wanted me to. . . .” Grenfell gave Jason a puzzled look. “Commander Thanou, isn’t it? I didn’t recognize you at first. But it is a pleasure to see you again.”

“Likewise, Doctor. We wouldn’t have disturbed you, but we need to ask you to give us the benefit of your expertise.”

“Certainly. I’ll be glad to help in any way I can. Do I gather that you’re planning another expedition into the Caribbean past?”

“Correct. Specifically, I’m going back to Port Royal, Jamaica, with an arrival date of June 3, 1692. That’s almost twenty-four years later than we were there, and I would be grateful for any advice you could provide. For example, any changes that might have occurred in the intervening time . . .” Jason trailed off, seeing that Grenfell was staring at him, and had been ever since he had pronounced the date.

“Well,” the historian said slowly, “I can certainly see why that time-frame would hold a certain, er, interest. And I can only admire your courage and wish you luck.”

“What are you talking about, Doctor? That sounds a bit ominous.”

Grenfell’s stare intensified. “You mean you don’t
know
?”

“Evidently not. I’m afraid you’ll have to spell it out for me.”

“Well, the fact of the matter is, four days after your projected arrival date Port Royal ceased to exist. One of the most devastating earthquakes in the history of the Western Hemisphere, together with its accompanying tsunami, sank two thirds of it beneath the sea forever.”