Ghosts of Time (10 page)

Jason nodded without really hearing him. He sat down on a stool and examined the letter. It had the look of having been copied and recopied by people who were determined to preserve every detail, however meaningless—and much of it must have been meaningless even to those copyists who had been literate. It was in a typical seventeenth-century hand, and equally typical seventeenth-century English. But with practiced ease, he mentally edited out the peculiarities of spelling and grammar, and read it as twenty-fourth century Standard International English.

“This concerns the events of December 21st, Anno Domini 1864, as dates shall be reckoned then,”
it began. Jason was puzzled at the last six words, but then he remembered that in the seventeenth-century England and its colonies had still been clinging to the Julian calendar, and would not go Gregorian until 1752. He read on.
“In the colony of Virginia, which shall no longer be a colony then, a great war will be raging. A captain of horse in that war, who shall go by the name of Captain Landrieu, shall. . . .”
Jason read a detailed description of this night, starting with the removal of the wounded Mosby from “Lakeland” and the presence of the slave boy who would send Captain Landrieu and his men to the hamlet of Rectortown, where the members of the Order must succor them. But then, abruptly, Jason knew he had entered into that part of the narrative that had always been restricted to Zenobia’s successors.

“But in truth, Captain Landrieu will be Commander Jason Thanou, a man from the future, as your founder has explained to you is possible, not by sorcery but merely by mechanic arts yet unknown. And lest all that the Order seeks be in vain, he must be told—”

Jason read the next four sentences—the last in the letter—then blinked, assumed that fatigue had caught up with him, and read them over again. But, stubbornly and perversely, they still said the same incredible thing.

“—he must be told that it is necessary that he journey into his own past again. This time he must return to Port Royal on the third of June, Anno Domini 1692. And there he must seek out Zenobia, the founder, who he already knows well, and who will not have long to live. These things he must do to preserve the right order of creation.”

Jason looked up, dazed, and met Gracchus’s eyes. “’Not have long to live’?” he queried.

The dark man nodded, and spoke with great seriousness. “Yes. We know that she died soon after that date. Now all your questions have been answered. And yes, we will help you against the Transhumanists. But in return you must pledge to do as the letter calls on you to do . . . and which, in any case, I believe your own duty binds you to do.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Sir! Wake up!”

Jason shook loose from a sleep filled with troubled dreams. He blinked and looked up into Mondrago’s face. A pale early-morning winter sun was lightening the windows.

There had been little discussion before exhaustion had finally caught up with them, for they were all struggling to come to terms with the night’s revelations. Logan had been even more taciturn than usual, and Nesbit had been speechless in the face of the staggering last few sentences of Gracchus’s letter. So they had finally allowed sleep to overtake them for a few hours, sprawled on the wood floor and wrapped in malodorous blankets against the chill.

“What is it?” said Jason, sitting up and stretching against agonizing stiffness.

“Angus has just ridden in from ‘Rosenix.’ And he’s wounded.”

“What?” Discomfort forgotten, Jason looked around and saw the redheaded young Service man sitting slumped in a corner. Marcus’s daughter, as Jason assumed her to be, was giving him a steaming cup of the blockaded South’s ersatz coffee, brewed from parched or roasted chicory, beans, acorns, seeds and various other substances. Aiken looked in no mood to complain. He accepted the cup with a shaky right hand as Nesbit wrapped a hopefully clean bandage around his bare, bloodstained left arm. He looked too exhausted to feel pain.

“Angus!” Jason demanded. “What happened? Where’s Dabney?”

“Captured, sir.” Aiken took a gulp of the brew that must have scalded the inside of his mouth.

With a curse, Jason mentally activated his map display. Four of the tiny red dots were clustered at Rectortown. The other was to the northwest. The map didn’t show the farmhouses, of course, but Jason recalled the location of “Rosenix” well enough to know that the dot was on the far side of it.

“When I got to ‘Rosenix’,” Aiken continued, “Chapman and Richards were still in the process of sending our riders to summon the Rangers for a morning attack here at Rectortown, as Mosby had ordered. When I told them about what had happened to him, and where he was being taken, they started out eastward, toward ‘Rockburn.’ I told them you had ordered Dabney and me to rejoin you here in Rectortown, and they gave their permission, so we separated from them. We’d only gone about half a mile when about half a dozen cavalrymen came at us from behind some trees. We tried to run for it, but they came after us shooting. I got this—” he indicated his left arm “—and Carlos’ horse went down. I know he lived—he was struggling to his feet—but they were all around him. Three dismounted and took him, the others came after me. I got away.” The last three words were said in a voice of dull dead self-reproach.

“You did the right thing by getting back here to report to me,” Jason assured him. He understood what Aiken was feeling: as a Temporal Service member, he was sworn to protect time-traveling civilians, and he had failed. Being a novice who still had to prove himself surely didn’t help. “You wouldn’t have done anybody any good by getting killed or captured. Now at least we know what happened, and of course I know exactly where Carlos is now.”

“You
what
?” It was Gracchus’s deep voice, rising almost to a kind of basso squeak.

“Remember, the letter said that in our future time we have . . . arts that you don’t. Never mind how, but at any given time I can tell where any of my men are. And this man is being taken in the opposite direction from here.” Jason noted that the dot had moved very slightly since he had looked before, in a northwesterly direction. He expanded the map’s scale to take in most of Mosby’s Confederacy. “These Union cavalrymen seem to be moving toward the town of Paris, and Ashby’s Gap.”

“Except,” said Gracchus somberly, “that I don’t think that’s what they are.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Jason, who was afraid he knew precisely what Gracchus meant.

“Before I tell you, Commander, you must give me the pledge I spoke of last night.”

“All right.” Jason took a deep breath. “I am not a free agent—I can’t simply travel in time at my pleasure. But if I can possibly arrange to do so, I will return to seventeenth century Jamaica as you—or whoever wrote that letter—requested. That is all I can promise. Now tell me what you know . . . however you happen to know it.”

“I have my sources of information, Commander. The Yankee cavalry have moved eastward, to Middleburg.” Jason saw the name at the right-hand edge of his expanded map, on the Little River Turnpike just west of the Bull Run Mountains. “There shouldn’t be any of them around here anymore—and if there were, they wouldn’t be riding west.”

Aiken, who had been slipping into the beckoning arms of exhausted unconsciousness, stirred into renewed awareness of what was being said. “Wait a minute. I never said they were
Union
cavalrymen. Even in the dark, I could tell they were wearing uniforms like ours.”

“That proves it,” said Gracchus grimly. “The only
real
Rebel cavalry in this area are Mosby’s men, and they wouldn’t attack fellow Confederates.”

“I thought they were shooting awfully accurately in the dark,” Aiken mumbled. “Superior night vision through bionic eyes or genetic upgrade would account for it, especially in conjunction with laser target designators.”

Gracchus blinked with incomprehension, but he restrained his curiosity and turned at once to practicalities. “Commander, this way you have of keeping track of your men . . . can the Transhumanists do something like that? I mean, can they recognize you for what you are?”

“They can recognize
me
, and by the same means I can recognize them.” Jason made no attempt to explain the sensor in the handgrip of his pistol by which he could detect bionically enhanced Transhumanists, who naturally had similar devices, often longer-ranged. “But they can’t recognize my men in this way.”

“I don’t understand why they attacked your men, then. It’s a mystery to me,” Gracchus frowned. “I also don’t understand why they’re headed for Ashby’s Gap, wearing gray uniforms. That’s going into the lion’s mouth; Sheridan’s army pretty much owns the Valley now.”

“Well,” said Jason firmly, “solving those mysteries can wait. For now, our first priority is to get Carlos Dabney back. If in the process we can learn what these Transhumanists are up to, so much the better. Angus, you’re in no shape to travel—”

“I can keep up, sir.”

“Like hell you can! We’re going to be riding hard. You stay here. Gracchus, sit on him if you have to.” Jason softened his tone. “I know you want to help, Angus, but you’d just slow us up. When Gracchus thinks you’re up to it, follow us in the direction of Paris, almost exactly due northwest. I’ll be able to keep track of you, of course, so if you can’t find us we’ll find you.”

Not for the first time, Jason mentally cursed the legalistic conservatism of the Authority’s governing council. He had repeatedly urged—practically begged—that Special Operations personnel be given simple implant communicators by which they could subvocalize to each other at fairly long ranges. But even a passive implant involving no direct neural interfacing arguably constituted a technical violation of the Human Integrity Act, and the council had no stomach to fight for yet another special exemption. So they continued to restrict their agents to whatever tedious forms of communications the locals used, while expecting them to combat Transhumanists who were
not
thus limited.

They ate as much of the South’s verminous cornbread as they could stomach, and washed it down with the by-courtesy-so-called coffee. Then, very cautiously lest they be observed by any early risers, they slipped out the door and around to the back of the shack, where Marcus had tied up and blanketed their horses. Once out in the open and away from the shed, they rode openly along the street, acknowledging friendly greetings from the few people abroad, who assumed them to be Mosby’s men. Then they set out on a very secondary road—which, in this time and place was saying a great deal—toward the northwest.

They were all suffering from inadequate sleep and even more inadequate food, but the knowledge of Dabney’s plight drove them onward. And at least the weather had turned dry, although still chilly. Half a mile short of ‘Rosenix,’ Jason thought they must be passing near the site of Dabney’s capture. They continued on past the site of yesterday’s wedding and pressed on, trying to overcome their quarry’s long head start. But Jason’s map showed that they were not going to catch up short of Paris. He wondered if they would have to press on over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley.

After they had ridden about seven miles, with the crest of the Blue Ridge looming up ahead, they turned north toward Paris, nestled at the foot of Ashby’s Gap. They rode past estates with names like ‘Belle Grove,’ ‘Mount Bleak’ and ‘Hill-and-Dale,’ whose stately houses undoubtedly served as safe-houses for Mosby’s men. In fact, on a couple of occasions they encountered Rangers heading for the assembly that had been called, and had to pause to explain that they were not doing the same because they weren’t part of Mosby’s command. It wasn’t difficult—most of the Rangers knew each other by sight—but it meant delay.

Paris itself was no larger than Rectortown, and less prepossessing despite its setting. They paused to water their horses, gulp a swift lunch at the one “hotel” and inquire as to the passage of a group of about seven cavalrymen earlier in the day, one of whom seemed to have the aspect of a prisoner. Yes, people had noticed such a cavalcade. All the while, Jason watched the little red dot denoting Dabney’s TRD moving steadily westward.

They bolted their food, mounted up, and began to ascend Ashby’s Gap. Even though it was now later in the day, it grew chillier as they climbed to higher altitudes, with forest-covered, snow-dusted slopes rising all around them, and the air was slightly thinner. Still Jason urged them on, for their cluster of red dots on his neural map seemed to be gaining a little on the westward-moving one.

We have one advantage,
Jason told himself as they rode around a blind curve in the road.
We know their location, and they don’t know ours.

He was still telling himself that when a tiny blue light began blinking urgently at the lower left corner of his field of vision, telling him that bionics which had no business in this century were nearby. Very nearby.

The discrepancy between that fact and the still-distant red dot of Dabney’s TRD had barely registered on his mind when they rounded the curve and saw a man in a Confederate uniform with yellow cavalry facings, standing middle of the road just ahead, smiling an irritating smile.

Jason reined his horse to a halt and opened his mouth to speak.

His mouth stayed open.

Capture field!
flashed through his brain, which could still function although none of his voluntary muscles could.

It was a fairly common security device in Jason’s world, activated either by sensors or remote control, the latter seeming to be the case here. Anyone within it was paralyzed as long as it remained powered. It was normally built into buildings, but Jason had heard of compact, very short-range portable models. And given the Transhumanists’ superior temporal displacement technology, and their utter lack of scruples about using that technology to take anachronistic devices into the past . . .

He could feel a very faint trembling between his thighs as his uncomprehending horse, mad with terror, frantically tried to struggle against its paralysis. He himself knew better.

The man standing in the road gestured and three other seeming Confederate cavalrymen emerged from the trees.
Yeah
, thought Jason with sick self-reproach.
The other two are riding along west of us with Dabney, letting his TRD lure us into this trap.

But how did they know we were coming?

The four Transhumanists, who evidently were wearing the tiny devices that neutralized the capture field, proceeded to walk around them, removing their weapons and then lifting them down from their horses and tossing them on the chill ground in a row like logs, with bruising impact. The one who had been standing in the road looked them over dispassionately. Then he took what looked like a contemporary Bowie knife—although Jason suspected that twenty-fourth-century techniques had given it a monomolecular edge—and without any change of expression proceeded to cut the throats of their horses. Blood gushed forth, steaming, and there was a very faint sound as the animals’ paralyzed vocal apparatus tried to scream. The stench of death filled the air.

The leader gave another gesture, and the capture field switched off. Jason’s entire body felt like a limb that had gone to sleep. He could only twitch feebly as he looked up into the face that looked down at him.

In fifth-century B.C. Athens and seventeenth century Hispaniola, he had seen leader-caste Transhumanists whose appearance had been genetically engineered to fit a local culture’s godlike ideal, the better to found cults. This one, on the other hand, had clearly been designed to blend. He was medium tall and reasonably well-built by local standards, and his features were so nondescript that, in spite of having dark-brown hair and hazel eyes, he could have been taken for a relative of John Mosby. Nevertheless Jason, who knew the subtle signs to look for, knew him for what he was.

And his smile had grown even more irritating.