Ghosts of Time (22 page)

“Thank you, sir.” Aiken met those extraordinary blue eyes, and felt a sense of impending loss. He also felt an almost uncontrollable urge to tell Mosby he was going to survive the war, and eventually be memorialized in countless ways. But of course he couldn’t.

The rain was falling, and they had donned their rubber ponchos, when a rider trotted out of the stormy darkness, off to the side in thin woods. By now, Aiken could recognize Gracchus even in these conditions. He inconspicuously detached himself from the column—easy to do, given the Rangers’ informal marching order, especially at night—and approached the black man.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said, as softly as he could and still make himself heard over the rain.

“I’ve been busy, trying to learn if there are any more caches.”

“Are there?”

“Not that I’ve been able to find out about. But . . . I know where the one in Richmond is.”

Aiken was instantly alert. “You can’t come to Richmond with me. We’ll have to meet there. How will I find you?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll find you. And,” Gracchus added in a tone Aiken could not interpret, “I’ll
definitely
find Commander Thanou.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Now I see why they put the POW camp on the north side,” said Mondrago as he stepped gingerly from one wet boulder to another. “Too easy to get off the island here.”

They had materialized—at dawn of April 2, as per standard procedures—in an out-of-the-way location south of the James River, as close to the Richmond & Danville railroad bridge as they had dared. But walking across the bridge to Belle Isle would have been too conspicuous even this early in the day. Fortunately, as Dabney had explained, getting across the relatively narrow strip of water separating the island from the south shore was a matter of fairly easy boulder-hopping as long as the water level wasn’t exceptionally high. Today it wasn’t. So they were working their way under the bridge, unnoticed, proceeding carefully in the early morning light and a dissipating fog.

Only part of Jason’s mind was on the effort of keeping his footing. The rest contemplated the fact that he was about to witness the fall of Richmond a second time.

Once had been more than enough.

At least the weather was more comfortable than the winter conditions from which he had departed on his last excursion into 1865 Virginia. The fog burned off to reveal a somewhat hazy and humid day, but there was a slight breeze. That breeze muffled the sound of distant shelling to the south, the direction of Petersburg. Richmonders had long become accustomed to such sounds from that direction. But this had been going on since just after midnight.

Dabney had explained what that sound meant today. Yesterday, the Union armies had finally crumpled Lee’s right flank in the Battle of Five Forks, to the west. Grant, sensing his opportunity, had finally ordered a frontal assault on the Petersburg lines. Hundreds of guns had shelled the Rebel trenches unmercifully for hours. Then, at 4:45, with the fog still thick, the Union infantry had advanced in the predawn darkness and eighteen hours of continuous fighting had commenced.

But as yet Richmond knew nothing of its onrushing doom, as it prepared for communion services on this Sunday morning. Not until 10:45 would the War Office receive Lee’s message that this time the Yankee juggernaut could not be stopped, that he was retreating westward in an effort to join Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina, and that the Confederate government should evacuate its capital.

Yes, Jason had seen all this before.

Or, rather, I
am seeing
it all before,
he thought with the sense of dizzying unreality that often accompanied time travel. For even as he splashed ashore on the southern side of Belle Isle, Jason Mk I was north of the James, in the city, where he had made contact with Pauline Da Cunha yesterday. And later today, amid the chaos of the Confederacy’s Gotterdammerung, that same Jason Mk I would come to this island after crossing the Mayo Bridge, making his way through Manchester, and crossing the Richmond & Danville railroad bridge that no one was bothering to watch. But he would never encounter himself, so Jason (Jason Mk III, as he decided he must think of himself, even though as Jason Mk II he had never made it to this point in spacetime) would surely be gone from Belle Isle by then.

Jason sternly dismissed such thoughts from his mind, for his immediate concern was the whereabouts of Angus Aiken. The red dot denoting the young Service man’s TRD was worryingly absent from his neurally projected map of Bell Isle’s immediate environs. So he expanded the map’s scope.

There! North of Richmond, moving slowly south. At least Aiken was alive.

Angus Aiken waved goodbye to the two Rangers who had been accompanying him, and turned his horse’s head southward, riding parallel to the railroad tracks toward Richmond.

Various delays had prevented him from reaching Richmond by the first of the month. But finally Mosby had lent him an escort and sent him south. He was sorry to say farewell to those men, beside whom he had fought so often. He lacked Carlos Dabney’s in-depth knowledge of history, and he had no real appreciation of the rights and wrongs of this more-than-five-centuries-old conflict. But he knew good men when he saw them.

And at any rate the war was just about over. He lacked Dr. Dabney’s erudition or Commander Thanou’s experience, but he had received a basic historical orientation. So he knew that the Confederate capital he could now see before him in the dissipating James River morning fog was innocently experiencing its final moments. Later today it would be evacuated by the Confederate government and army, and tonight it would be burned.

He badly needed to make contact with Commander Thanou before any of that happened. For that, he would just have to rely on the commander’s cyberneticized ability to locate him. And, perhaps, on whatever ill-defined help could be provided by Gracchus, who had seemed very emphatic about his desire to be in Richmond around this date.

He wished Gracchus was with him now, for without Commander Thanou’s neutrally displayed map he would have to ask directions to find his way around in the city. With a sigh, he urged his horse onward.

“Well, here it is,” said Jason, standing beside an overhanging crag and staring down at the rather artfully concealed hole where a plug of rock had been removed and then replaced over the nanobot cache below.

From memory, he’d had no trouble locating the cache that Jason Mk I would destroy tonight by the light of burning Richmond from across the river. Naturally, they had left it scrupulously alone, but it had served the purpose of confirming that his implant’s detection feature for such things was functioning properly. Unfortunately, that feature was extremely short-ranged. So it had taken them longer than he would have wished to find this second one, even though it wasn’t far from the first. Both were on the southern side of Belle Isle’s rocky, wooded spine. The opposite side would one day be quarried for rock, leaving a cavity which would fill with water and become a lake that would further enhance the scenic quality of the island’s northern side. But this slope would be practically unfrequented even in the twenty-fourth century, when Belle Isle had once again become a recreation area alongside the falls of the James.

It was, Jason thought, a bit of foxiness of the part of the Transhumanists to emplace this second string to their bow so close to the first—the last place one would normally think to look for it. Also, this was probably the only place where it could lie undisturbed for centuries of change and upheaval in the greater Richmond area. And this area, with its hub location in the eastern North American conurbation of the twenty-fourth century, was a natural target for the initial civilization-destroying effects when the nanobots woke to malevolent life on
The Day.

“Well,” said Mondrago, interrupting his thoughts, “now that we know where it is, we’d better backtrack and get across the river to the city.”

“Right,” Jason nodded. “We need to link up with Angus and find a place—maybe Elizabeth Van Lew’s house, which according to Carlos is outside the area that gets burned—where we can lie low for three days.” But even as he spoke, his somber gaze remained on that inconspicuous circular crack in the flat rock. His left hand, moving by an unconscious impulse, went to the Confederate cavalry canteen that held a small but very powerful explosive device. And he brooded on a subject never far from his mind since his return from Port Royal: the Observer Effect.

Pauline Da Cunha’s implant is going to pick this up two days from now, when she comes here to confirm that Jason MK I succeeded in taking care of the first cache. That’s why we’re here now. And that’s why we have to wait three days before blasting it. But . . . what if I were to simply blast it now? What’s to prevent me—?

At that moment, he noticed a tiny, flashing blue dot at the lower left corner of his field of vision. With a spasmodic motion, he whirled around.

That motion saved his life, for at the same instant a
crack!
was heard and a bullet missed him so closely he could feel the wind of its passage. It smashed into the rock wall behind the spot where his head had been, sending slivers of stone flying into his face.

They all dove for cover behind boulders, as more shots rang out in fairly rapid succession. One of them grazed Dabney’s left upper arm.
He must be using a Henry repeater
, thought Jason, recognizing the sounds as those of a rifle rather than a revolver. They drew their Colts—already loaded, just in case—and returned fire, sending the shooter ducking behind the rock outcropping that had concealed him, on the crest just above them. There was a brief lull in the shooting, and Jason, ignoring the stinging cuts on his face, looked around him. To the left was a declivity that seemed to offer a way to flank the rifleman’s position.

His Colt had only two rounds left, but this was no time to reload. “Alexandre,” he hissed. “Cover me and keep him down.” The Corsican nodded, and fired off a fresh fusillade. While the Transhumanist was sheltering behind his rock, Jason slithered off into the declivity and began scrambling up a steep slope, circling around as fresh rifle shots rang out.

The shooting had paused again when he emerged from behind the boulders and, sheltering behind a tree growing through a crevice in the rock, saw the Confederate-uniformed Transhumanist lying prone, reloading his Henry and talking.

Implant communicators did not require audible speech; subvocalization sufficed, which was very handy for covert operations. But the Transhumanist, unconcerned with concealing his presence under the circumstances, wasn’t bothering with that. He was speaking in a low voice. Jason activated his implant’s recorder function, complete with the same sound amplification feature he had used while sitting in Jefferson Davis’s waiting room.

“. . . and so I have them pinned down,” the goon-caste Transhumanist was saying. “But there are four of them, and . . . Yes, sir. Understood. I’m to slip away, get back across the river, and rejoin you in the city. But what if they . . . ? Oh, I see. Of course. They
can’t
destroy it now . . . No, sir! I never intended to question your orders. I abase myself! . . . Understood, sir. Signing off.” The Transhumanist peered over his rock barrier, fired three shots in rapid succession, then slid backwards down the slope, got to his feet and turned around . . . to find himself squarely facing Jason, who stood with leveled Colt, its hammer drawn back.

With the unnatural quickness of his caste, the goon brought his rifle around. Before he could complete the movement, Jason squeezed his trigger and sent a bullet crashing through the butternut-clad chest and the heart behind it. The Transhumanist swayed and fell face-down, dead before he hit the ground.

“Come on up here!” Jason called out. The others joined him, and Novak, who was particularly skilled in low-tech first aid, tied a bandage of torn cloth around Dabney’s arm. Meanwhile, Jason and Mondrago examined the dead Transhumanist. As expected, he was carrying nothing of any use to them.

“But,” Jason explained, “I overheard him reporting to his boss—Stoneman, I imagine—who is over in Richmond now.”

“If it is Stoneman, I wonder if he’s been here all along, since we last saw him in January,” Mondrago wondered, “or if this is a different ‘mark number’.”

“There’s no way to know. And it’s not something we need to know just now. The point is, he’s expecting this goon to report to him. So that’s one more reason for us to get over to the city before he expects us.” Jason turned to Dabney. “Carlos, are you up to it?”

“I’ll be all right, Commander. It’s just a shallow wound.” Gamely: “In a way, it’s a good thing. There are so many wounded men in Confederate uniforms around here just now that we ought to have at least one.”

“Then let’s go. We have to get back across the shallows to the south bank, then north across the Mayo Bridge.”

Dabney got unsteadily to his feet. “Of course you realize what we’re going to be walking into, don’t you? By the time we enter downtown Richmond, the news of Lee’s message to the War Department will be starting to spread, and—”

“Believe me, Carlos, I know. In fact, I remember.” Jason smiled briefly, as he recalled seventeenth century Port Royal. “I seem to be making a habit of being on hand for the deaths of cities.” Then other recollections of the seventeenth century banished his smile. “And of course we’re going to have to think about the need to avoid any contact with our own previous ‘mark numbers’ . . . and with Pauline Da Cunha . . .” He gave his head a shake. “Let’s go,” he repeated.

Dabney touched his arm. “Commander, let me ask you something. You’ve never told me how Inspector Da Cunha died on your last expedition to the Caribbean. In fact, you’ve been quite reticent about it. May I know the circumstances of her death?”

Jason’s first impulse was a surly refusal. Then he decided that this man had been through enough with him to deserve an answer. He spoke very levelly.

“We were shipwrecked on the southern coast of Hispaniola. Before rejoining Henry Morgan’s men, we were captured by the Transhumanists who had been planting the seeds of one of their hidden cults—in this case a perversion of Voodoo that included, as did the historically attested
Secte Rouge
of later times, ritual cannibalism. They used Pauline as a victim. I watched, bound and unable to do anything about it, as she was butchered alive, cooked, and eaten. Afterwards, when I spoke to the Transhumanist leader, her grease was still on his lips . . . and I could smell his breath . . .” Jason could hear his voice start to waver. He clamped control on himself. “The Transhumaist leader paid. I was able to do that, at least. But now perhaps you understand why I don’t relish the thought of seeing her, still alive, knowing what I know.”

He turned and started toward the island’s south shore, leaving the shock-stunned Dabney to follow him.