Soldiers Out of Time (23 page)

“Well, we’ll have to get you settled in.” Kamen looked around at the shacks and the barrackslike buildings beyond. “Like everything else inside the fence, they leave that up to us. And they don’t provide enough accommodations. We’ve cannibalized enough wood and other things from the buildings to put together the shacks. They’re for people with children.”

“Yes,” said Rojas. “I was wondering about that. There seem to be a lot of children around . . .”

Kaemen answered her unspoken question. “Early on, we decided it would be wrong to bring children into this world. But the Transhumanists want to expand the slave population. So periodically, they come in here, stun some men and women and take them away—we’ve learned better than to resist. They impregnate the women by artificial insemination and throw them back in here. We have a few people with some sort of medical training. But a lot of the children die in childbirth. They don’t care. They can always make more.” He said all this in a toneless voice, as though outrage had worn away under the erosion of the years. “After live children are born, their mothers almost always keep them. Otherwise, some other woman takes them. Usually they pair off with some man. We’ve occasionally talked about killing the infants. But we can’t bring ourselves to do it, even though we probably should.”

Kamen stopped abruptly, his last word falling into a well of silence. After a moment, Jason spoke. “What’s going to happen to us next?”

“Soon they’ll come for the third shift, and you’ll be in the same position as everyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“They divide the day into three shifts.” (
Nearly twelve-hour shifts
, thought Jason, recalling this planet’s rotation period.) “At any given time, a third of us are working—in the city, or in the fields around it, or in the mines up there in the mountains. They don’t even try to regularize it; at the end of a shift they just bring back the workers and then take away another third of the adult population, they don’t give damn who. So sometimes you’ll end up working two shifts out of three. That’s bad. But nobody resists them. They use those nerve-lash batons a lot. They like to use them. If you give them enough trouble, they keep on using it until you die.”

Jason looked around. There was no one in earshot except Kamen and Southwick. “Tell me, what kind of defenses have they got here?”

“Well,” said Kamen, “the guard towers around this compound have laser weapons—they’ve killed a few of our people who’ve cracked and tried to rush the fence. Don’t know why they bothered; the fence would have electrocuted them.”

Those lasers will be merely antipersonnel models,
Jason thought. “But what about the town over there? I could identify fixed weapon positions of some kind. Have they got any combat aircraft, or armed spacefcaft?”

Kamen look vague. “Well, I’m no military man. But they’ve got what look like some sort of weapon emplacements. And there are some small craft that that have a military look to them. I’m sorry, I can’t be any more specific than that.”

“And of course I know nothing about these confounded devices,” added Southwick.

“Listen,” Jason said in a low voice, “keep this to yourselves, because I don’t want to raise possibly false hopes in these people. But there’s a ship of ours in this system.” (
I think
, he mentally hedged.) “And we think we’ve succeeded in signaling it. If so, it may be able to take some kind of action.” He decided against sharing with these people the agonizing dilemma that prevented him from returning himself and his immediate companions to the twenty-fourth century.

The two men’s eyes held a flicker of something that hadn’t been there before. “What kind of action?” Kamen asked.

“And what can we do to help?” Southwick added.

“The answer to both is, I don’t know. The ship’s captain will have to use his judgment. But I have confidence in him.”

The flicker guttered, but did not entirely go out.

Night had fallen when, with a blaze of headlights, the entire fleet of grav carriers came gliding in and offloaded their passengers, staggering and reeling with exhaustion. Then loudspeakers commanded the slaves to come out of the barracks into the open, and baton-wielding guards, covered from behind by others with laser carbines, began to shove their way into the compound.

Jason looked around anxiously, trying to locate all his people. Rojas and Armasova were away, helping the Pathan women, who were encountering a good many of their fellows. (Not a great help, as those others were more likely than not to belong to tribes that were hereditary enemies of the Yusufzai.) Bermudez had gone with them to lend any aid he could. Otherwise, the commandos were not too far away, as were the three British sergeants. “Let’s try to stay together!” he called out.

But that proved impossible in the shoving, terrified crowd, roiled by the guards whose batons everyone feared to touch. One of the Sikhs, along with Ayub Khan, were caught up in the mob being herded toward the carriers. And in the middle distance, Jason glimpsed Rojas, Armasova and Bermudez moving away, trapped in the press, until they too vanished into one of the carriers.

As soon as all the carriers were fully loaded, they swung about and departed, leaving Jason staring after them.

“They’ll be back in about twelve hours, sir,” Hamner tried to reassure him.

“Right,” Jason nodded. “We’d better hope nothing else happens before then.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The vicious crack of a weapon-grade laser in atmosphere and the roar of a collapsing guard tower shattered the night.

Jason came bolt upright from the stinking mat on which he had been fitfully asleep. Flashes of light through the slave barracks’ windows illuminated the packed interior, and the crowd of sleepers awoke in shrieking panic.

“Come on!” he yelled over the uproar. Mondrago, Hamner and Bakiyev, who had bunked down as close to him as possible, responded at once. The three British sergeants, not far away, followed, their men scrambling after them with the
bhisti
in the lead. They struggled through the milling mob jamming the building’s one door, and emerged into pandemonium.

De Ruyter
hung overhead on gravs, its waist turrets spitting crackling laser bolts at the guards around the compound’s periphery while trying to avoid the frenzied crowds pouring from the barracks buildings. The collapsed tower lay on its side, shattered and burning. The other towers were firing at the attacker, but the same electromagnetic shielding that protected the crew from cosmic radiation in deep space could handle such relatively low-energy antipersonnel laser fire. As they watched, one of
De Ruyter
’s lasers lashed out at the powerhouse. With a buzzing roar and a spectacular shower of sparks, the electrified fence short-circuited and died.

Yelling madly, the crowd started to surge toward the area where part of the no-longer-lethal fence had been pulled down by the falling guard tower. It was a mad rush for freedom, heedless of whatever laser fire the guards could bring to bear.

As though sensing an opportunity,
De Ruyter
dropped lower and her ventral hatch began to swing down, forming a ramp that neared the ground. Palanivel must, Jason thought, must be glued to a viewscreen turned to full magnification and light enhancement, searching the crowd for familiar faces, because all at once a lateral thrust of her grav repulsion sent the ship gliding in their direction.

“Let’s go!” he called to his group. They broke free of the press, and all that separated them from the descending ship was an open area . . .

Then a file of goons appeared, deploying across the space between them and the ship, laser carbines levelled.

They must be under orders to take us—or, at least, me—alive, if possible
, thought Jason.
Or else we’d be dead. Which we will be if we try to rush that line.
And there was nothing Palanivel could do about it.
De Ruyter
’s starboard waist turret could be brought to bear, and its high-energy laser would vaporize the goons . . . and also consume Jason and the others, just beyond them.

For a moment that seemed longer than it was, the tableau held.

Jason became aware that the
bhisti
was standing beside him. In the flickering light of the fires, the sweaty brown face looked up and their eyes met.

“
Sahib
, I do not understand any of this. But this much I know: you must get away, for only you can defeat the evil ones. And I am nothing.”

“No—” began Jason, who had never felt so unworthy in his life.

“Here, what’s this, you?” demanded McCready, who had overheard.

The
bhisti
didn’t answer him. Instead he hurled his water sack at the goons and, with an eerie scream, plunged toward them.

Startled by the sheerly unexpected, three of the goons obliterated the goatskin sack in mid-air with laser pulses. But the instant it took them to do it allowed the
bhisti
to reach them. Arms spread wide, he practically dove into their line, dragging the three lasers down. The other goons, to right and left, turned on him and fired. Steam exploded from his body as laser pulse burned their way through him.

But then a furious wave of bodies crashed into them. Jason had given no command; this was no carefully planned operation, as when they had rushed the guards aboard the transport. It was spontaneous. A couple of the goons got off shots, and Hamner and one of the Pathans died. Then the others were on top of them, punching and strangling and tearing. Jason grabbed a dropped laser carbine and used it as a bludgeon for beating the face on the goon he was straddling into bloody, broken pulp.

Abruptly, it was over. Carver and Hazeltine were standing over the corpse of the
bhisti
, and McCready was kneeling beside it. He spoke in a softer voice than Jason had ever heard him use, or ever thought he was capable of—almost too softly to be heard. “You’re a better man than I am.”

Jason tried to imagine what that admission, spoken of a man of darker skin, had cost someone of McCready’s background. He failed. He put a hand on the big sergeant’s shoulder. “Come on. We’ve got to get aboard.”

McCready nodded and stood up. As he did, Jason looked down at the
bhisti
. It occurred to him that he had never learned the man’s name. He was about to ask when Mondrago said, “Sir—look!” in a tone that made him look in the direction of the Corsican’s pointing finger, through the darkness and the smoke.

In the distance, over the spacefield beside the Transhuman city, a firefly swarm of lights were rising into the night sky. Kamen had spoken of some sort of military craft based there . . .

“
Run!
” Jason shouted. And without waiting to see if he was being obeyed, he sprinted for the ramp and pounded up to the main deck, and forward toward the bridge. There was no time to contemplate the loss of Hamner’s steady competence, nor even any time to come up with an acceptable way to give the ship’s captain an order on his own bridge. “Raise ship!” he snapped. “Now!”

“But . . .” Palanivel gestured at the scene in the viewscreen. A fresh wave of panicked slaves, desperately trying to reach the fence, had surged into his party, sweeping them apart, forcing them to struggle to reach the ship. “Some of your men are still out there!”

“We’ll have to leave them,” Jason forced himself to say. It was one more thing he might have time to try to come to terms with later. “There are fighters of some kind on the way. I don’t know whether they’re purely atmospheric or have space capability. But either way, if you don’t move fast
none
of us are going to get away.”

Palanivel needed no further urging. He rapped out a series of orders and slapped controls. Even as the ramp was retracting, the ship rose, rotated, and swept up and away. As soon as it had risen high enough to do so safely, Palanivel activated the photon thrusters, and under the combined thrust of that and grav repulsion
De Ruyter
soared aloft. In the view-aft the chaotic slave compound below, still illuminated by flames, shrank rapidly.

In that same viewscreen the fighters had also engaged their reaction drives. Behind them a larger shape was visible: Stoneman’s transport. Jason wasn’t worried about that;
De Ruyter
was faster and better armed. As for the fighters . . . Jason knew he could do no good here. He departed the bridge, leaving Palanivel to seek the Primary Limit, and went below to see to his men.

Mondrago had made it, as had the three British sergeants and two Sikhs. Neither Gurdev Singh nor Bakiyev had; they, along with the rest of the Sikhs, were either dead or recaptured.

“Did you see what happened to the others?” Jason asked Mondrago. The nineteenth-century men, British and Indian alike, were sprawled on the deck in the throes of reaction and strangeness.

“No . . . I was a little busy. In fact I barely got away—jumped for it and grabbed the end of the ramp just as it was swinging shut, and rolled inside just before it closed. In fact . . .” Mondrago’s voice trailed off, and he stared past Jason’s shoulder. Jason turned, and saw a small slender figure silhouetted in the hatch.

For an instant, Chantal Frey gazed wide-eyed at the ragged, wildly bearded men. “I had almost given up hope,” she whispered. Then she and Mondrago were in each other’s arms. For a time, no one disturbed them.

After a while Mondrago, still holding her, turned to Jason, for her presence had reminded him of something. “Sir . . . I know you had other things on your mind at the time. But when this ship was down there in the compound, wasn’t there a brief period when you could have activated our TRDs, and the ship’s—” (a glance at Chantal) “—and sent us all back to Zirankhu in the linear present?” He paused thoughtfully. “Of course, I don’t know the range of the ‘control’ function of your TRD, so I don’t know if . . .” Then his expression went blank as the implications hit him.

“You’ve grasped it,” said Jason with a bitter smile. “Depending on how far it is to these mines and agricultural plantations where they’ve been taken, I might or might not have been able to retrieve Armasova and Bermudez. But what about Rojas?”

“Rojas?” exclaimed Chantal.

“Yes. She’s alive. It’s a long story. But the point is, she has no TRD. The only way to retrieve her is to get her inside this ship.” Jason decided not to burden Chantal with the knowledge that the fact that a similar consideration, applied to her, had been a major factor in keeping them in this time for this long.

“Well, sir . . .” Mondrago let the thought go unspoken.

“No,” said Jason firmly. “I won’t leave her stranded as a slave in this time unless I’m convinced there’s no hope whatsoever of getting her back. Not to mention the fact that we’re
really
out of range for Armasova and Bermudez by now.” He reflected that Hamner’s death had slightly simplified his problems, only to reject the thought with a spasm of self-disgust for having thought it. He dropped his voice and spoke to Mondrago and Chantal alone. “And besides, there’s the little matter of . . .” He gestured at the British sergeants and the Sikhs.

“I was meaning to ask about these people,” said Chantal with a puzzled look.

“Again, it’s a long story. But the point is, there are some very real ethical issues involved in taking them into the twenty-fourth century with us. They’d be stuck there unless we returned them to their own time—which we could hardly do, with all they now know.” Jason let them chew on that for a moment, while reflecting that this barely scratched the surface of the ethical issues. “And at any rate, I’m not yet prepared to give up on the possibility of doing some good here and now. Speaking of which, I need to get back to the bridge and find out if that possibility still exists. Alexandre, you handle the introductions.” And he hurried out.

“We left the fighters behind just after going into stealth,” Palanivel told him. “Maybe they couldn’t reacquire us. Or maybe they don’t have long-range deep-space capability. Either way, they’re returning to the surface.”

“Good,” sighed Jason, gazing at the receding globe of Drakar in the view-aft. “But let’s not rely exclusively on those possibilities. After we pass the Primary Limit, take us further out and put us into an orbit in the outer system where we can plan our next move.”

“Right.”

They had their first decent meal in what seemed like forever, and badly needed showers, shaves and haircuts. The British and Sikhs, who had been flabbergasted by the showers, had been assigned to the commando squad’s now-vacant quarters, and were adjusting to the unfamiliar amenities, when Jason received an urgent call to come to the bridge.

Palanivel wore a grim look. “Our sensors are picking up something entering this system—something big.”

“Another of those Transhumanist transports?” Jason was perplexed, for Stoneman had said his was the final delivery here.

“No, it’s much too big for that. We’re not close enough to get any detailed sensor readings, much less a visual, but we can infer how massive it must be.”

Jason looked at the figure, and emitted a low whistle. Then he and Palanivel studied the newcomer’s course.

“It’s not headed for Planet B,” said Palanivel.

“Or Drakar, as the Transhumanists call it,” said Jason absently. “No, it seems to be following a search pattern. Let’s get into an intercept course, so we can get more data.”

De Ruyter
eased out of its orbit under full stealth. As the gap between her and the mystery ship narrowed, it became clear that the latter’s inferred mass was, if anything, on the conservative side. More details were hard to come by, for the target had some heavy-duty ECM . . . but not, it seemed, an invisibility field. Jason was puzzling over that lack, which seemed to remind him of something . . .

He was still trying to put his finger on it when
De Ruyter
shuddered and ominous sounds came from the engineering spaces.

“Tractor beam!” Palanivel gasped.

It was a truism that the long-range focused application of artificial gravity known as a tractor beam had the same effect on the negative mass drive as a planetary gravity field. In other words, if a ship was tractored it was the equivalent of coming within a planet’s Primary Limit with the drive engaged—a sure-fire career ender for a space captain. It resulted in the drive’s immediate shutdown, usually involving damage in varying degrees.

This, clearly, was what had happened to
De Ruyter.
While Palanivel took a report from his engineering officer, Jason marveled at the range at which it had been done. In addition to being big, the stranger was clearly a purpose-built warship, mounting a massive tractor beam generator and, doubtless, weapons to the same scale.