Soldiers Out of Time (25 page)

They were armed with heavy handguns which seemed to combine a gauss needler and a laser in an over-and-under configuration. The one who seemed to be the leader used his to give a peremptory “through there” gesture in the direction of the airlock.

Jason didn’t move. “I speak your language,” he said in his best Teloi, and had the satisfaction of seeing the boarders’ sneers collapse into open-mouthed astonishment.

“How—?” began the leader. Jason cut him off, in the tone of one who has better uses for his time than talking to underlings.

“That is not your concern. I wish to speak to your commanding officer—and I believe he will wish to speak to me. You see, I know what happened to your battlestation.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

After a brief radio colloquy with their superiors, the two Teloi had ushered Jason into their gig, leaving Mondrago and Chantal to instruct the British sergeants to sit tight. The gig had crossed over to its mothership amid tight-lipped silence. Now Jason walked, under the guns of his captors, along passageways through a realm of austere functionality, feeling small in surroundings scaled to the Teloi.

Let’s see,
he thought as he walked, adjusting to the somewhat lower gravity to which the Teloi were native.
What was it that Henry Morgan once told me? Oh, yes: “Always behave as though you have the upper hand . . . especially when you don’t.”

A hatch slid aside, and they entered what Jason decided he must call the bridge. Concentric semicircles of control consoles faced a large viewscreen in which
De Ruyter
hung against the backdrop of stars. Overlooking it all was an almost thronelike chair behind a crescent-shaped control desk. The chair swiveled, and Jason found himself face to face with its occupant.

It never occurred to Jason to doubt that this was the captain—and not just because the insignia on his jumpsuit was more than usually elaborate. He had what Jason knew were the indicia of relatively advanced age, which was saying a great deal among a race whose lifespans were measured in tens of thousands of years. He also had the thin beard that characterized some but not all Teloi males, worked into a kind of scanty Vandyke. Most noticeably of all, he wore a patch over his right eye. Jason didn’t know if the Teloi had regeneration technology, but their overall technological level suggested that they should. He wondered if, in the brutally militaristic
Tuova’Zhonglu
subculture, physical evidences of past violence carried the kind of prestige dueling scars had once carried among Prussian Junkers.

“How did you learn our language?” the captain demanded without any sort of preamble. His deep voice held a quality common to all Teloi voices, disturbing in a way that could not be defined.

So you’re not going to deign to introduce yourself,
thought Jason, still looking at the eyepatch.
Well, all the Teloi I’ve ever met have gone by names of mythological gods when dealing with humans. So I think I’ll dub you “Odin.”

And I’m certainly not going to tell you anything that would reveal the existence of time travel, which you probably don’t know about, since the battlestation never got to pass on the information it had acquired from the Transhumanists. In fact, I’m relying on your not knowing about a great many things, because I’m going to be telling you a great many lies.

“That,” he answered, “is bound up with the question of how I know what happened to your battlestation. And I think that’s what you really want to hear about.”

For a moment the single alien eye flickered with fury, and Jason thought he might have gone too far. But Odin’s curiosity won a visible battle with his arrogance, and he spoke in a tightly controlled voice. “Very well. Speak on . . . for now.”

“First of all, I assume you know the origin of us humans.”

“Of course.” Odin’s sneer intensified. “We were occasionally in communication with the effete exquisites of the
Oratioi’Zhonglu.
So we are aware of the subject race they produced on Earth, the planet to which they had exiled themselves, by genetic engineering of a local species.” (
Homo erectus
, Jason mentally interpolated.) “Indeed, that was one of the reasons they chose Earth: the presence of a species which, due to a coincidental resemblance to our own evolutionary ancestors, lent itself to being molded into a kind of sub-Teloi. Thus they could have worshipers to lend a certain spurious substance to their dilettantish pantomime of godhood.” Odin’s contempt was unmistakable even across the gulf of species differences. His entire aspect fairly oozed it. “They evidently are all dead by now. Small loss.”

“But we humans, as you can see, remained. And if you turn your sensors toward the inner system of this star, you will detect the energy emissions of a colony that a human faction called the
Transhumanists
founded here some time ago—more than two hundred and thirty revolutions of Earth around its sun, in fact.”

Odin gave Jason a sharp look, obviously surprised that humans would have been engaged in interstellar colonization as far back as the seventeenth century. And when he got a closer look at Drakar, he might think it odd that a colony so long-established would be so small. But that, thought Jason, was a bridge they would have to cross when they came to it. For now, he hurried on, prevaricating freely.

“Shortly after the colony’s foundation, your battlestation entered this system. The Transhumanists, by a pretense of friendship, tricked its commander into landing many of his personnel on the colony planet—Drakar, they call it. Then, with their usual underhanded treachery, they destroyed the unsuspecting battlestation. Those Teloi who had landed were captured. They are still there now, as slaves.”

For several human or Teloi heartbeats, Odin sat rock-still. He would, Jason thought, find nothing implausible about the continued survival of the imaginary Teloi captives; two hundred and thirty years—or even ten times that—was nothing much in terms of Teloi lifespans.

“I get the impression,” Odin said drily, “that you are no friend of these Transhumanists.”

“Far from it. I belong to another human faction—
zhonglu
, if you will—that is their bitter enemy. They constantly raid us for slaves to ship to their colony planets. That was my fate. Along with many others, I was sent to Drakar, where I met the enslaved Teloi and learned their language. They told me the story of how they came to be there.

“Finally, I and some friends managed to steal a small Transhumanist warship and get away. When we found ourselves tractored before we could escape from this system, I knew at once who it must be. My Teloi fellow-slaves on Drakar had told me that the
Tuova’Zhonglu
would undoubtedly send a ship in search of the missing battlestation. And now you know what happened to it. And,” said Jason in conclusion, “now we are in a position to help each other.”

Odin’s sneer was back in full force. “For what conceivable reason would I want to help an inferior being like you? And you are hardly in a position to help anyone.”

“I beg to differ. You need us, if you want to get revenge on the Transhumanists for their destruction of your battlestation.”

“Need
you
?” Odin seemed to find the notion insulting. “Unlike the commander of the battlestation, who must have been an egregious fool, I will not be deceived by the Transhumanists’ lies. And if your ship is a fair sample, the defenses of Drakar should give us little trouble. We will simply reduce the colony to radioactive ashes. Why do we need you for this?”

“Because,” said Jason, slowly and distinctly, “we know where the Teloi prisoners are being held. If you go in without that knowledge, you will kill them along with everyone else.”

This was a crucial moment, and a gamble on Jason’s part. It was possible that the
Tuova’Zhonglu
ethos included a samurailike indifference to the lives of its own personnel; in fact, something of the sort would have seemed in character. But Jason was inclined to doubt it. The same species modification that had, ages ago, given the Teloi near-immortality had also—almost of necessity, if one thought about it—reduced their fertility to the point where they hardly ever reproduced. It was, Jason had often thought, one of the sources of their racial insanity. And it meant that they surely couldn’t view losses with complete equanimity. He paused as though giving Odin an opportunity for a response. But none was forthcoming, and with an inward sigh of relief he resumed.

“Here’s my proposal. Let our ship go. It has very sophisticated stealth, and unlike you we can infiltrate on Drakar. We’ll get the Teloi aboard and out of danger. Then you can come in and destroy the Transhumanist installations at your leisure.”

“Why do you want to do us any favors?”

Jason restrained himself from declaring he had seen the light and come to properly revere humanity’s creators, or anything along those lines. It probably would have worked with Zeus in his decline; Odin, on the other hand, might be crazy but he wasn’t stupid. “Isn’t it obvious? You have us. This is all we can offer you in exchange for letting us go.”

Odin seemed to reflect a moment. “Very well. Agreed—with one exception. You will take this ship’s shuttle. Your ship will remain in orbit, covered by our weapons, as a . . . surety for your good behavior.”

“But I told you, our ship can—”

“Our shuttle has a full stealth suite.” Jason recalled that the Teloi did not possess the invisibility field, but he had no reason to doubt that otherwise their ECM capabilities were commensurate with the rest of their technology. “It can insert you and a landing party a safe distance from your objective, then retrieve you and the freed Teloi prisoners.” Jason opened his mouth to speak, but Odin cut him off with an imperious gesture. “Enough! I demean myself by offering explanations to a lesser life-form. It is for us, the universe’s natural masters, to give commands, and for all others to obey. Obey this command, or die.”

“Very well,” sighed Jason, out of options. “We’ll do it your way.”

It was a subdued conference that met aboard
De Ruyter
after Jason’s return.

“This changes things,” said Palanivel glumly after Jason had finished his account.

“That’s one way to put it,” agreed Mondrago.

“What are we going to do, Jason?” asked Chantal.

Good question
, he thought. Their plan had been very straightforward. They would land
De Ruyter
, break into the slave compound, and find Rojas. As soon as she—along with any of the other twenty-fourth century people they could manage to snatch—was aboard the ship, and the three IDRF commandos in the compound at least within range of Jason’s control TRD, he would immediately activate it and they would all snap back to their own time and another world, leaving the duped Teloi to vent their rage on the Transhumanists.

All very neat . . . except for the problem of the five Indian Army men. They had been forced to consider the option of simply leaving them on Drakar with the rest of the slaves, to hopefully survive the destruction of the Transhumanist colony and make do in its absence. The alternative was to keep them aboard
De Ruyter
and whisk them to the incomprehensible world of the twenty-fourth century, from whence they could never return. They had concluded that the latter was the lesser evil—they owed a debt to these men, and Jason’s entire being rebelled at the thought of simply abandoning them. He had decided he would get them back aboard
De Ruyter
in time if at all possible—that is, if the press of events permitted it. That “if at all possible” was, he admitted to himself, something of an evasion—a way of putting off the final decision until circumstances took the matter out of his hands. But it was the best he could do.

Now, it seemed, some rethinking was called for.

“I can see only one viable alternative plan,” he said slowly. “We get Rojas, Bakiyev, Armasova and Bermudez aboard the Teloi shuttle, and then, while its pilot is wondering where the ‘Teloi prisoners’ are, we overpower him—hopefully he’s the only Teloi aboard—and force him to take off and go into orbit. There, while we rendezvous, I put Odin off with some story about how the Teloi slaves had already been killed. While I’m still sweet-talking him, we hastily get Rojas aboard
De Ruyter
—and at that moment I activate the TRDs.”

“You realize, Jason,” said Chantal, “that this means we can’t even try to rescue any of the other people from our own time, because we can’t possibly have time to get them inside
De Ruyter
.”

“No,” said Mondrago. “And if we pop out of existence with them still in that shuttle, I don’t even want to think about what this Odin would do to them afterwards. They’ll be better off trying to survive on the surface.”

“It also means,” said Jason grimly, “that we can forget about all our soul-searching where our five nineteenth-century guests are concerned. For exactly the same reason—over and above all ethical questions about taking them into the twenty-fourth century—they have to stay behind.”

“We and they have been through a lot together,” Mondrago reminded him. “And they’ve stood by us. I don’t like the thought of just . . . ditching them.”

“Do you think I do?” Jason reined in his temper. “Look, I’m not any happier with this than any of you. But this is a situation where there are no good alternatives. Does anybody have another plan to offer?”

None of them did.