Sunset of the Gods (18 page)

“Logistics,” Jason nodded. “It’s the most important part of war, and the part that historians and novelists are most likely to forget.”

“Something they’re even more likely to forget about than food is what comes out the other end,” said Mondrago with a nasty grin. “Can you imagine what that camp must be like, with that many men crammed into it? Ours is bad enough!”

Jason gave a grimace of agreement. With the exception of the as-yet-unborn Roman legions, camp sanitation had not been the strong suit of ancient armies. He, with his experience of past eras, and Mondrago with his military background, could endure it—barely.

“Right,” Jason said. “No large army in this era can sit encamped in one place for long. It’s only a matter of time—and not much of it—before disease, the real killer in ancient warfare, is going to hit, starting with intestinal ailments.”

“And then they’ll have tens of thousands of men with diarrhea packed in there.” Even Mondrago, hardly the most fastidious of men, shuddered at the thought. “No doubt about it: time is on our side. Hence this miserable standoff we’re in. Why should Callimachus seek battle when he can just watch the Persian army rot?”

“Besides,” Jason reminded him, “Callimachus expects the Spartans to come. Why rush things when you’re waiting to be reinforced by an army of full-time professional killers?” He was about to say something else, when, at the outermost left-hand corner of his field of vision, a tiny blue light began blinking for attention.

At first it didn’t even register on Jason. His implant had a number of standard features which had often come in handy in the Hesperian Colonial Rangers but which were irrelevant in past eras of history. He therefore never used them on extratemporal expeditions, and it was easy to forget they were there. So it took him a heartbeat or two to remember this one, from his time with the Hesperian Colonial Rangers, when it had been useful to have a sensor that detected the space-distorting effects of grav-repulsion technology. In retrospect, he could have used it in the Bronze Age; but, as he recalled, the Teloi “chariots” had always been upon him before such use had occurred to him.

Now, however, that blinking light told him that an aircar or some such vehicle was being used in the near vicinity.

Mondrago seemed to notice his distracted look. “What—?”

“Quiet!” Jason concentrated furiously, attaining the mental focus necessary for direct neural activation of the sensor’s directional feature. He had barely done so before the blue light winked out.

“Something to do with your implant, right?” said Mondrago after a moment of silence.

Jason took a deep breath. “Yes. Somebody around here is operating a grav vehicle.”

This got Mondrago’s undivided attention. “The Teloi?”

“Presumably. But whoever it is, they just switched it off—” he turned to the left and pointed to the hill to the northwest “—up there, on Mount Kotroni.”

Mondrago’s gaze followed his pointing finger. It wasn’t really a mountain, at seven hundred and eighty feet. Like the rest of the hills defining the plain of Marathon, it was forested in this era. “We’ve got to check this out.”

“No,
I’ve
got to check it out. My implant will enable me to zero in on it if it’s reactivated. I’m going up there.” He instinctively reached for his waist and confirmed that he still had his leaf-shaped sword.

Mondrago looked around. “I have a feeling these guys don’t exactly approve of people going AWOL. Least of all now.”

“So you have to stay here and cover for me. If anybody wonders where I am, make up some excuse.”

“Like what?”

Jason started to try to think of one . . . and then came to the realization that he trusted Mondrago fully to handle it on his own. And, in fact, the further realization that he was glad to have the Corsican at his back in general.

“You’ll think of something.” Without waiting for a reply to this gem of brilliance, Jason turned away and headed for the camp’s eastern perimeter. At least everyone seemed too relieved to be out of armor to notice him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In the early afternoon August heat,
Jason was grateful for the shade of the foliage as he scrambled up the slopes of Mount Kotroni.

As he neared the crest, a level clearing opened out before him. At that moment, the tiny blue light began flashing again.

He looked around and saw nothing where the sensor assured him he should. But experience-honed instinct caused him to take cover behind a boulder and take a fighting grip on his short sword. No sooner had he done so when he heard a faint, whining hum. And he saw dust swirling upward from the clearing, as though from the ground-pressure effect of grav repulsion.

Above the ground, now that he knew what to look for, he recognized the shimmering effect of a refraction field, which achieved invisibility by disrupting the frequencies of light and causing them to “bend” or “slip” around the field and whatever was within it. It was cutting-edge technology in Jason’s world.

And I never saw the Teloi using it
, he thought, puzzled.

Then the dust settled, and the field evidently was switched off, for an aircar appeared out of nowhere, settling to the ground—and Jason’s puzzlement turned to shock.

It was a small model, little more than a flying platform with a transparent bubble and two seats, for the pilot and one passenger. This one held only the pilot—a human, who proceeded to raise the canopy and emerge. And it was not one of the overdecorated, somehow Art Deco-reminiscent Teloi designs Jason remembered. He recognized it as a Roszmenko-Krishnamurti model, a few years old as his own consciousness measured time.

Until this instant, he had been able to tell himself that Franco’s claims of radically superior time-travel technology were mere braggadocio, or perhaps an attempt at disinformation. Now he knew he could no longer take shelter in that comfortable assumption. The Transhumanists had temporally displaced this aircar—along with all their personnel and God knew what else—almost twenty-nine centuries. The Authority couldn’t have done that without an appropriation request that would have precipitated an all-out political crisis. The Transhumanists had done it using a displacer so compact, and drawing so little power, that it could be concealed somewhere on Earth’s surface.

Rutherford
has
to be told about this!
He cursed himself for not having somehow managed to leave word at the message-drop on Mount Pentelikon.

The pilot stepped to the ground and, with his back to Jason, fumbled for a hand communicator. Jason suddenly realized that, after the man reported in, his own window of opportunity to take any action would vanish. Without pausing for further thought, he bunched his legs and launched himself over the boulder.

It was fairly artless. Jason hit the totally surprised Transhumanist from behind, smashed him over prone. His sword-holding right arm went around the man’s neck, while his left hand grasped his left wrist and pulled that arm up behind his back.

But this Transhumanist was one of the genetic upgrades designed for, among other things, strength. His free right arm went up behind Jason’s neck while his legs sent both of them surging upwards until he had Jason practically piggy-back. Then, with a further surge, he threw Jason over his right shoulder.

Jason’s trained reflexes took over for him. He kept his grip on his sword, and hit the ground in a roll which brought him back up to his feet even as he whirled to face his enemy. The Transhumanist was already rushing him, hands outstretched in what Jason recognized as one of the positions of combat karate.

Jason’s options suddenly became very simple. He had hoped to take the man alive, but he had no desire to have blade-stiffened hands smash through his rib cage and pull out his lungs. With a twisting motion, he evaded those hands while driving his sword into the Transhumanist’s midriff. Then he dropped to his knees, wrenched the sword point-upward inside the guts in which it was lodged, and rammed it straight up. Blood gushed from the Transhumanist’s mouth as he fell to his knees and toppled forward, pulling the sword out of Jason’s hand by his sheer weight.

Jason retrieved his sword, wiped off the blade, and used the pommel to smash the communicator the Transhumanist had never had a chance to use. Then he examined the aircar. It was, as he had thought, a standard model aside from the decidedly non-standard invisibility field. He activated its nav computer and brought up its last departure point on the tiny map display.

It was a point in the heights just east of Tegea, just over ninety miles to the southeast as the crow or the aircar flies.

Just about where Pheidippides swore that Pan appeared to him
, came the thought, bringing with it a flash of understanding.

Jason summoned up his implant’s clock display. He really needed to be getting back to camp. But at the aircar’s best speed he could cover the distance in less than half an hour. And this had to be looked into.

He had neither time nor tools to bury the Transhumanist’s body, but he didn’t want to leave it to be found. With difficulty, he hauled it into the passenger seat and tied a heavy stone to it. Then he set the computer to retrace its last course, lowered the canopy, activated the invisibility field, and took to the air.

Jason’s route took him over Mount Pentelikon and just north of Athens, but he was in no mood to appreciate the view, and at any rate the outside world appeared in blurry shades of gray when viewed from inside the field. He flew on into the dim-appearing afternoon sun. Soon he was over the island of Salamis, and the waters where ten years from now the navy that was now only a gleam in Themistocles’ eye would scatter the fleets of Xerxes. Then the waters of the Saronic Gulf were beneath him. He stopped, hovered only twenty feet above the waves, and made certain there were no boats nearby whose crews might have noticed a body appear out of nowhere in midair and fall into the sea. He raised the canopy and pushed his deceased passenger out.

Resuming his flight, Jason went feet-dry over the Argolid. He did not permit himself to glance to the right, toward Mycenae and the bones that lay buried there. Instead, he spent the few remaining minutes of flight wondering just what the aircar had been doing landing on Mount Kotroni. No answer came to him, and none would now be forthcoming from the former pilot.

Approaching the end of the route, Jason resumed manual control of the aircar. Zooming the map display to its largest scale, he narrowed the landing site down to a flat area on a ridge overlooking the road from Sparta. He set the aircar down as gently as possible, to minimize the telltale dust-swirl. After satisfying himself that there was no one about, he deactivated the invisibility field and stepped out and walked to the edge of the ridge.

Looking cautiously down, he could see the winding road. On a lower level of the ridge, two humans were observing the road from concealment. Above them, but slightly lower than Jason, Pan crouched behind a boulder.

To Jason’s right was a smooth, gentle slope which allowed easy access to Pan’s position. He slipped very quietly down the slope, taking advantage of the fact that he was facing the sun and therefore casting his shadow behind him. He worked his way close behind the obviously preoccupied Pan and, with an adder-sudden movement, his left arm went around the being’s neck, forcing the chin up. With his right arm, he pressed the edge of his sword against the exposed throat. It wasn’t much of an edge—these swords were primarily for thrusting—but it would do.

“Quiet!” he hissed. The two Transhumanists below, their attention riveted on the road, hadn’t noticed. “Don’t make a sound.”

Pan remained rigid but did not struggle. “What are you going to do with me?” he whispered.

Which, Jason realized, was a very good question. He hadn’t formulated a plan, and when he thought about it he wondered why he hadn’t simply killed Pan outright. Arguably, it would be the rational course—at least Mondrago would have so argued.

“What are you here for?” he whispered back, temporizing.

“I’m waiting for the Athenian runner who is returning from Sparta. He should be passing here soon. I am to accost him and ask him why the Athenians fail to honor me, and promise to aid them nevertheless in the coming battle by causing the Persians to flee in terror. And at the height of the battle, I am to appear to the Athenians, so they will believe they owe me their victory.”

“And are you going to do it.”

“I must!” The whisper held a quavering squeak. “I have been ordered to.”

“Do you always follow orders?”

“I have no choice!” For an instant Pan’s voice rose almost to a full squeak. Jason pressed his sword-edge harder against the hairy throat, and Pan subsided into a dull whisper. “You don’t know what it’s like!”

“You mean they torture you?”

“They don’t need to. My entire existence is torture! Only they have the power to deaden it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you? Franco and his people came to this country fifteen years ago and persuaded the Teloi to help them create me, knowing this was the year they would need me to be available. They used . . . medicines to make me mature faster,” Pan explained, coming as close as fifth-century b.c. Greek could to the concept of artificial growth accelerants. “They needed the help of the Teloi to do all this.”

Jason nodded unconsciously. Of all the perversities forbidden by the Human Integrity Act, species modification—genetic tinkering which introduced genes not native to the original human genome—was the ultimate obscenity. The Transhumanists, of course, had had no compunctions about it. But even they had never developed it to the level that must have been required to create a thing like Pan. Evidently, though, they and the Teloi together had been equal to the task.

“But,” Pan continued, still struggling with the limits of the language, “the parts of me that are not human could not be made to really
fit
. And my forced growth made it worse. Almost everything I do, especially walking, is unendurable . . . or would be without the medicines they constantly give me.”