Soldiers Out of Time (28 page)

For the barest instant, as the Teloi ship expanded to fill the viewscreen, Chantal turned her head with an effort and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes and Mondrago’s met. And then the communicator’s screen went black.

“No!
”
Mondrago repeated, shaking the communicator frantically.

Did the ship’s communicator give out?
Jason wondered.
Or did she switch it off, not wanting Alexandre to see?

He was still wondering when a light overhead caught his eye. An intensely bright new star appeared in the sky, instantly growing into a dazzling mini-sun, and a glowing halo of superheated gas and debris expanded swiftly outward from it before dissipating into nothingness. Then the new celestial intruder guttered and went out.

With a barely human wail, Mondrago sank to the ground, a heap of despair and grief, heaving convulsively. Rojas and the commandos knelt around him. Rojas’ face was wet with tears.

Was she still conscious at the end?
Jason asked himself.
Or had she already passed out from the G forces? I will never know. So I will believe the latter.

I must believe it.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Dawn was laying salmon-colored streaks across the pale blue sky when they stumbled back into the wrecked, largely abandoned slave compound and sought out the British and Sikhs. As Bermudez tended Carver, the others confronted Jason.

“What’s happening?” McCready demanded. “First those lightning bolts, or whatever they were, started coming down, and then we saw that bloody great blaze of light in the sky, and then the bolts stopped, and . . . well, anyway, where’s the shuttle?”

Jason felt drained of everything, including the capacity to lie. “It’s been destroyed,” he said in a dull voice. “So has our ship. So has the Teloi ship. I’ll tell you the details later.”

Their reactions varied. Carver, in his pain, blinked with bewilderment. McCready frowned intensely as the implications of what Jason had said slowly sank home. Hazeltine already grasped those implications, judging from the look of grave comprehension with which he met Jason’s eyes. Gurdev Singh was unreadable.

Before any of them could speak, a grav carrier approached and came to a halt. Ari Kamen got out, looking relieved.

“Commander Thanou! I’m glad I found you. What’s happened? What were those . . . missiles from space? Did your ship fire them?”

Kamen, Jason recalled, was no military man. “They were kinetic projectiles. And no, it wasn’t our ship that carried out the strike. It was the Teloi.”

Kamen’s jaw fell. “The
Teloi
? But . . . but . . . I’ve heard of them, of course, but I thought they were long since—”

“No. I’ll tell you—I’ll tell everyone—all about it later. But right now we don’t have time.”

“That’s right,” said Rojas, stepping up to Kamen. “Give us a sitrep . . . that is, tell us what the situation is here.”

Kamen seemed to stand up a trifle straighter. “Well, the Transhumanists’ fighters flew away and never came back. And those, uh, kinetic projectiles destroyed all the weapon emplacements and other military targets—barracks and so forth. But they had only destroyed a few other targets before they stopped falling.”

“That makes sense,” Jason said to Rojas. “The late Odin’s precision strike hit the high-priority targets first. After that, had they been allowed to, they would have proceeded to systematically obliterate the town, and then every trace of human presence on this planet.”

“Yes,” said Rojas, almost too softly to be heard. “Chantal stopped that.” She turned brisk again. “So the Transhumanist survivors must be mostly unarmed civilian types.”

“That’s the impression we’ve gotten. We gathered up weapons from the dead guards here, and are getting organized to take the town.” Kamen looked pointedly at the group’s weapons.

Carver waved Bermudez aside and got unsteadily to his feet. “Just give me one of those pistols, mate,” he said to Jason with his old raffish smile. “I’ve still got one good arm.”

Jason looked around at the faces of humans from two different centuries—the soldiers of Queen Victoria and the soldiers of the Confederal Republic of Earth—and saw nothing to discourage him. Even Mondrago was functioning—maybe as a robot for now, but, Jason was certain, a deadly robot.

He shook off his physical and emotional exhaustion and hefted his battle rifle. “What are we waiting for?”

Evening had fallen by the time the fighting was over. As expected, resistance had been light, for few armed and trained Transhumanist soldier-caste types had survived the orbital strikes. For the most part, it had been more a matter of trying to prevent the unarmed ones from escaping into the countryside. In this, they hadn’t been altogether successful. But now the town was theirs, and the ex-slaves wandered the now-quiet streets in a daze, still adjusting to the fact that they really were
ex-
slaves.

A large building in the town’s center must have been the governmental headquarters, for it held a conference room whose wall featured the symbol of the Transhuman Dispensation: a hand holding aloft a sword whose blade impaled the DNA double helix. Or rather it
had
featured it, for the rampaging liberated slaves had smashed the bas-relief into unrecognizability. The entire chamber was pockmarked by laser burns and marred by bloodstains but it was still usable. And now an
ad hoc
organizing committee met there. Besides Jason and Rojas, the three British sergeants were present, and so was Ari Kamen and two assistants—a twenty-fourth-century archaeologist and an 1880s North American rancher—he had co-opted to help him now in the absence of Captain Southwick, who had been his right-hand man.

Mondrago was also there. He was, to all appearances, functioning normally. Indeed, anyone who knew him less well than Jason did would not have noticed that there was anything missing in his eyes. The wiseass was dead.

By now, Jason had related the entire story, and explained everything. He came to the end, hoarse and in need of Scotch. At first, there was silence around the table.

“So,” Kamen finally said, “now that you and all your people—all the surviving ones, that is—are together here, you can flick your group back to the twenty-fourth century at any time?”

“Just by
thinking
it,” muttered Carver to no one in particular, shaking his head.

“Right. As I’ve told you, my original intention had been to get you and as many of your people as possible aboard our ship, which had its own TRD.”
Although God knows how we would have made the selection
, Jason reflected. “But now, of course, with the ship gone . . .”

“And by the same token,” said Hazeltine, “you can’t get us back to Earth.” It was a statement, not a question.

“And not us, neither,” added the rancher.

“No, I can’t. In addition to our ship, the Transhumanist slave transport was destroyed. They were the only deep-space vessels here.”
And therefore,
Jason thought drearily,
they
had
to be destroyed, because history does not include any people returning to late nineteenth-century Earth with the knowledge you now possess. As always, reality protects itself—no matter who has to get hurt or die in the process.
“So you people from the nineteenth century are also here for good. And . . .” Before he could stop himself, his eyes went to Rojas, and instantly slid away.

But she smiled. “Don’t look embarrassed, Jason. I understand. I know you tried—
how
you tried!—but my fate was sealed the moment Stoneman brought me back to this time without a TRD. I know I’m stranded here. But that’s all right. In fact . . .” She turned to Kamen. “We’re all stuck here on this planet together. We have to start our own colony. I’ll do all I can to help. And thanks to Chantal we’ve got something left here to work with.”

“That’s true,” said Kamen, nodding. “The utilities here are still more or less functioning—we’ve got drinking water, and electric power in most areas, and I think it can be restored in the others. And the mines and the agricultural fields are untouched.”

“And we have something more important than that. We have a purpose!” Rojas’ voice grew vibrant. “We know what the Transhumanists intended to do by planting this colony: create an ally that would seem to appear out of nowhere from beyond the frontier sometime shortly in the future that we came from. Well, we can do exactly the same thing!” She turned to Jason, her dark eyes blazing. “So sometime after your time in the linear present, Jason—it has to be afterwards, the Observer Effect requires that—a new civilization is indeed going to appear. But that civilization—the whole culture that we and our descendants build here—will have a tradition of hatred for the Transhumanists! Its foundation-myth will tell it that it is descended from people enslaved by them. It will be an ally for the true humans of Earth.” She turned back to Kamen and the others. “We can lay the foundation for that. The Transhumanists planted the seeds of their own destruction by bringing us here. We can do it!”

Yes, I believe you can do it,
thought Jason, staring at her.
And I think I have a pretty good idea who is going to end up as leader here.

McCready spoke up. “You’re going to need a militia. We and our men can help with that.”

“Right,” Carver put in brightly. “We’ll get ’em on parade!” But then he and his two fellow sergeants gave Rojas a slightly odd look, as though they still found something just a bit incongruous about a woman in a leadership role who was not the Queen.

You’ll get used to it,
Jason thought with an inner chuckle.
You’d better!

Through it all, Jason’s brain implant had continued with
idiot savant
single-mindedness to keep the time on Zirankhu for him to summon up at will. So he knew it was now daylight at the longitude of the outdoor displacer stage there, allowing them to arrive there without the psychic disorientation of materialization in darkness. There was no further need for delay.

Jason, Mondrago, Armasova and Bermudez stood in the glare of the lights (this was one of the areas where the electricity worked) and said their final goodbyes. When Jason came to the trio of British sergeants he gave particularly firm handshakes. “Good luck with that militia of yours. You should be kept busy by the surviving Transhumanists who got away. They’ll be skulking up there in the hills. And remember, they’re stranded here too; Stoneman said they were displaced without TRDs.”

Kamen overheard him, and frowned. “That reminds me of something, Commander. I haven’t mentioned it before, but it’s something you might want to know. The colonists here are fanatics who voluntarily stranded themselves in the past. But they told us that it isn’t
always
voluntary.”

“What do you mean?”

“A standard punishment for disloyal or incompetent members of the Transhumanist underground is temporal exile. They’re sent back to some particularly dangerous and unpleasant time and place in Earth’s history with no TRD, to survive as best they can with no preparation, orientation, equipment, or anything except period clothes, and with whatever bionics they possess deactivated.”

“
What?
” Jason stared at him. “You mean the Transhumanists are so irresponsible that they—”

“Their feeling is that the Observer Effect will prevent these exiles from changing history, so there’s no danger.”

“Maybe there’s something to that. But still . . .!”
My God, if
I’m
this shocked, how will Rutherford react when I tell him these exiles are scattered through the past?

Mondrago spoke thoughtfully. “It must be a very effective threat to hold over their underlings. The idea of having to live under primitive conditions, on the same footing as the Pugs around them, with no advantages except those that their genetic upgrades give them, has to be horrifying. And I can just imagine some of the milieus they get dropped into. Nanking just before the Japanese took it, maybe.”

“I can think of a few myself. Remember, I’ve seen the Thirty Years’ War and the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople.” Jason turned to Kamen. “This is something whose implications we’re going to have to think about long and hard. Ari, thank you for the information.” Jason shook hands with him, and finally turned to Rojas. “Elena, I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to look at the night sky without thinking of your descendants here on Drakar.”

“No!” she said sharply. “Not ‘Drakar.’ Don’t ever call it that.”

“You’re right,” he said contritely. “You people will have to come up with a new name for this planet.”

“Yes.” She turned to face Kamen and the other former slaves. “And I intend to urge—as strongly as possible—that we name it ‘Frey.’”

Is this something you need to do—a way of making amends for having unfairly distrusted her?
Jason wondered.
I don’t know. You probably don’t know yourself. But it doesn’t matter. Your motives are irrelevant. The point is, it’s totally right.

“I think that’s very appropriate,” he said aloud. “I also think she’ll figure prominently in that ‘foundation-myth’ you mentioned.” He took one last look around at the people he was leaving behind, then took his position with Mondrago and the two commandos. “Farewell.”

He composed his mind to the state of concentration required to give a mental command.

“Hey,” the irrepressible Bermudez suddenly piped up, “you’ll also need a name for this town. How about naming it after that water-carrier? What
was
his name, anyway?”

McCready opened his mouth to reply. But by then the neural command Jason had given was irreversible. Reality dissolved like a dream and, after an interval that could have been either eternity or instantaneity, reformed. And the four of them stood on a great displacer-circle with HC-4 9701 shining overhead. The Xinkhan Desert of Zirankhu stretched away to the horizon in all directions.