Soldiers Out of Time (17 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

There was never any sense of motion when the negative mass drive was operating, even in its slower-than-light mode within the Secondary Limit. But subtle fluctuation of the artificial gravity let them know, even in the dim depths of the slave compartment, when the Primary Limit had been entered and the transport was maneuvering under reaction drive.

By then, they had decided on their basic strategy, although they had no idea how to execute it.

“After we land, we’ve got to take any chance we get to escape,” Jason stated.

“But sir,” said Hamner, “that doesn’t get us any closer to the Drakar system, and
De Ruyter.
What can we accomplish here on nineteenth-century Earth, in what I gather was a pretty godforsaken area?”

“We can search for allies. We’re going to be among some very warlike people.” Jason looked at Mondrago, who nodded. “If we can get enough of them on our side, we can start thinking about seizing this ship and taking it back to Drakar.”

“Even assuming that we can take this ship,” said Rojas, in a tone that said she didn’t consider it a very high-probability assumption, “how do we operate it? Even if we capture some of the crew alive and force them to work for us, I wouldn’t trust them not to do something suicidal. We know how fanatical they can be.”

“Still, it may come to that. And even if we can’t go that route, Superintendent Mondrago, in his former life as a mercenary, checked out on combat craft. And I’ve had some familiarization with the same kind of vessels in the Hesperian Colonial Rangers. Alexandre, remember that Kestrel when we were being pirates in the seventeenth-century Caribbean?”

“Yeah,” said Mondrago dourly. “But that was a very small craft—as small as interstellar-capable vessels get. This tub is something else again. And besides, all I ever actually did with a Kestrel was atmospheric and orbital work—never an interstellar hop.”

“Something else, Commander,” said PFC Odinga, his dark face very serious. He seldom spoke, but when he did he invariably made sense. “About these local allies you hope to find . . .”

“Yes?” Jason prompted.

“Well, sir, from what little I understand about this ‘Observer Effect’ you people talk about, aren’t we asking for trouble? There’s no record of people in northwestern India seizing a spaceship in the late 1890s. And what if they were to go home afterwards and start talking about what they’ve seen?”

“They’d be laughed at as liars,” Bermudez scoffed. “Or else everybody would think they’d been on drugs.”

“But what if they collect some souvenirs to corroborate their story?” countered Odinga.

“You’ve raised a very real concern, Private Odinga,” Jason admitted. “The lack of any recorded mention of any such incident does seem to suggest no local people transmit any such story. Which in turn may mean that we may have to take measures to see that they don’t.” He recalled what he had done to Henry Morgan because reality had required it.
Only this time I don’t have any fancy memory-erasure device
, he reminded himself.

“You mean, sir . . .?”

“Yes, Private Odinga. It might mean that we end up having to take locals back to the Drakar system with us. In a lawless, primitive area like the one we’re headed for, missing persons won’t raise any eyebrows or suggest any abnormal causes.”

He didn’t mention what else it might mean. He didn’t know whether any of these people had already thought that through on their own. If so, they kept quiet about it. And he himself didn’t want to think about the possibly necessary nature of those “measures.”

I’ve killed a number of people,
he thought.
But I’ve never killed anyone in cold blood without what I considered a sufficient reason. This may put that to the test.

Rojas interrupted his thoughts. “It could also simply mean that we’re going to fail.”

That could just as happily have been left unsaid, Major.
But, Jason reflected, it at least had the virtue of taking everyone’s minds off whatever choices they might have to make.

Then their weight seemed to momentarily waver and there was a very brief surge of acceleration before the inertial compensators took over. The transport was approaching an Earth that could never have imagined such a visitor.

“So, Alexandre,” said Jason, “tell us all you can about the area where we’re going to be landing. Stoneman said something about the ‘North-West Frontier.’ What does that mean?”

“It was the area on both sides of the border between the British Indian Empire and Afghanistan. The border was pretty vague, but I think that sometime shortly before this it was marked out in accordance with an agreement the British made with the Russians.”

“With the Russians?” queried Hamner. “What about the Afghans themselves?”

“They weren’t consulted. Abdur Rahman, the amir, just had to sign on the dotted line. Afghanistan was pretty anarchic, and part of the reason it kept its independence was because neither the British nor the Russians wanted the other to have it. They were always intriguing over it—‘The Great Game,’ they called it.”

“What was the other part of the reason?”

“The fact that the tribes that inhabited it were simply too wild to be permanently conquered—the British have tried, a couple of times in this century and failed, as other people, including the Russians, will at different times.”

“Stoneman called them ‘Pathans,’ I think.”

“Right. They live on both sides of the border. They have no sense of nationalism—their loyalties are only to their tribes, or more likely to their clans, septs and extended families. These people are barbarians—savages, really. They’re nominally Muslims, but with them that just means going on a
jihad
whenever some mullah gets them pumped up. The rest of the time they’re fighting blood-feuds among themselves, or raiding the Indian plains and valleys to the south. But those on the Indian side of the Frontier are perfectly willing to fight for the British against their fellow Pathans—no nationalism, remember. In fact, they make up some of the best recruits for the British Indian Army, as opposed to the British Army in India.”

“Uh . . . what’s the difference?” asked Hamner.

“The British Army in India is simply the British units stationed in India, and it consists entirely of Brits. The Indian Army is a separate organization, recruited locally. All its enlisted men—or ‘other ranks’ as the British call them—are Indians, called
sepoys
, or
sowars
if they’re in the cavalry. But British Army warrant officers and NCOs are sometimes seconded to the Indian Army for limited terms. All of the Indian Army’s officers are Brits . . . except for a special category of ‘Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers’ or ‘VCOs’ who command units but all of whom, even the most senior, rank below the most junior British officer.”

“Why?” Bermudez sounded puzzled.

Jason answered that one, on the basis of his knowledge of the attitudes of European and European-descended people in this era. “Because it’s unthinkable that British troops could ever find themselves commanded by someone with a skin darker than theirs.”

The commandos’ faces looked blank. “What has the color of their skin got to do with it?” Armasova wanted to know.

“Trust me—it’s just the way they think.”

“But apart from that,” said Hamner, looking more perplexed than ever, “how does this army function when the enlisted troops speak a different language from the officers?”

“Languages,” Mondrago corrected. “The Indian troops speak dozens of languages and dialects. But the Mughal Empire that preceded the British had come up for a solution to that: a common language called Urdu, a mixture of Hindi and Persian and various northern Indian languages. All recruits have to learn it—not too difficult for most of them. And so do all the British officers.”

“Still, language must be a problem.”

“Not to mention religion,” said Mondrago—who, Jason had begun to suspect, knew more about this area of military history than he had indicated. “These other ranks are Muslims or Hindus or Sikhs. The Muslims look on the Hindus as pagan idolaters—even worse than Christians and Jews, the ‘People of the Book.’ The Hindus are divided into various castes that can’t stand the thought of physical contact with each other. The Sikhs are the result of an unsuccessful attempt to merge the other two—and since Muslims killed a particular martyr of theirs, they have a reputation for killing any Muslim they can catch, in ways he almost certainly won’t enjoy. And they all have different dietary restrictions—the Muslims think the pig is unclean, and the Hindus think the cow is sacred—so they have to be in separate companies. The failure of the British to remember that helped bring about a nasty mutiny forty years ago. But then, the Brits think the lot of them are a bunch of benighted heathens.”

Hamner shook his head slowly. “How can an army like this possibly work?”

“But it did . . . or I should say it
does
. Ever since the mutiny I mentioned, the Indian Army has been practically a byword for loyalty. And it will stay loyal right up to the time, about sixty years from now, when India will become independent. Somehow, a bond formed between these troops and their British officers.” Mondrago looked thoughtful. “It may have had something to do with the fact that the Brits do their recruiting among what they call the ‘Martial Races’ of India: castes and ethnic groups that have a warrior tradition and consider soldiering an honorable profession. There’s never any problem getting recruits, and they never resort to conscription. During World War II this will be the largest all-volunteer army in history.”

“So,” Jason reflected, “the British are able to put a medieval ethos to work for them in the First Industrial Revolution era.”

“And it’s a tremendous military asset to the British Empire—a pool of military manpower. Indian troops serve in places as far apart as China and Africa, and in the World Wars they’ll fight for the British on all fronts. And when the Indian Army is fighting the kind of wars it’s intended to fight and not playing out of its league—as when they try to put Indian troops into the trenches in World War I—it doesn’t lose very often.”

“So what, exactly, is going on here on the North-West Frontier right now?” asked Rojas.

“I’m sorry, Major, but I don’t have that kind of detailed knowledge. Punitive operations are frequent, but I can’t say what’s happening on a particular date. The British permanently hold the key passes through the Hindu Kush mountains from Afghanistan—especially the Khyber Pass—with the Frontier Scouts, recruited among the Pathans. Well back from the frontier, they have camps where British battalions are brigaded with Indian Army units. In between, the wild Pathans are pretty much left alone.”

“In short, good slave-hunting ground,” said Jason morosely.

At that moment there was a seeming hiccup in their weight as the artificial gravity cut off and the brute pull of Earth’s mass took over. Simultaneously, they felt a slight bump as the transport landed under grav repulsion and settled onto its landing legs. There was no change in their weight, for the ship had been using the standard one G of the world on which they now rested.

After a tense interval, the hatch opened and Stoneman entered with his guards and addressed them. “As you are aware, we have landed. It is late August, 1897, as you are also aware, Commander Thanou, from your computer implant—oh, yes, we know about that. Bit of hypocrisy, isn’t it, for one who claims to abide by the Human Integrity Act? At any rate, the British are conducting one of their innumerable punitive expeditions in this area—it’s known as the Swat River Valley—and we’ve located some isolated detachments of theirs nearby, off the main line of march. I and most of my men are about to depart, to do some collecting. As soon as we’re on our way back, I’ll be sending for you, to perform the function I mentioned before. Hold yourselves in readiness.” He turned on his heel and departed.

They all looked at each other. Mondrago was the first to speak. “So most of them will be gone . . .”

“And I can find the way to the cargo port we were brought in through,” said Jason. “My implant has had a chance to build up a partial deck plan of this ship.”

“But,” said Rojas, “what happens if we get there and it’s closed?”

“I have a hunch they’ll simply leave it open while Stoneman and his slaving party are gone. Why not?”

“What about that laser turret they used to destroy our gig?” asked Hamner. “It could fry us once we’re out in the open.”

“It’s a ventral turret,” Mondrago reminded him. “I doubt if it can protrude when the ship is on the ground. And even if it can . . . from what I recall of its location, I don’t think it can cover the area astern.”

“Besides which,” added Jason, “I’d be surprised if they even have it activated. From their standpoint, these people around here aren’t just Pugs, they’re also primitives—totally beneath contempt.”

“It’s still a long chance,” said Rojas.

“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” Jason reminded her. He gave her a close but surreptitious look. In the course of the voyage she had gradually come out of the shell of despondency in which they had found her, but her personality still hadn’t altogether reasserted itself. While Jason couldn’t pretend that he missed her abrasive assertion of authority, its absence wasn’t entirely reassuring. He could only hope she was up to what they were contemplating.