Pirates of the Timestream (21 page)

As he turned to go below to his cabin, he happened to glance northward, at the sky over the Gulf of Venezuela.
There!
He blinked and it was gone.

It wasn’t the first time he had thought he glimpsed it: a little area of sky that somehow rippled or wavered, as though something was there and yet not there, hovering above the waters.

Ridiculous!
he chided himself. Everyone knew that the eyes could play tricks in the dazzling sunlight of the tropics. He shook his head as though to clear it of nonsense and descended the ladder to his cabin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“All right, everyone,” said a grim Henry Morgan to the assembled captains and the
Lilly
’s crewmen who crowded around the quarterdeck. “The boat has returned. And what the old Spaniard told us is true.”

There was a dead silence, broken only by a more than usually eloquent grunt from Roche Braziliano.

They had arrived at Maracaibo the day before, after a four-day voyage up the lake from Gibraltar. They had found the town deserted save for one sick old man who—perhaps resentful at his fellows for leaving him behind—had told them that three Spanish ships lay in wait at the narrowest point of the channel, where the fort was now fully manned and armed, and could have commanded the passage by itself. Morgan had immediately sent his fastest boat to investigate. It had returned today with confirmation.

“And it’s even worse than we thought,” Morgan continued inexorably. “These aren’t just any Spanish ships. They’re war galleons, with forty-eight, thirty-eight and twenty-four guns. There’s no question—it’s got to be the Armada de Barlovento. And they have us trapped.”

“How did they know we were here?” Roche Braziliano wondered, furrowing his brow so intensely it practically disappeared.

“How else?” said Zenobia scornfully. “Loose talk by some of our men back in Hispaniola.”

“Naturally,” said Mondrago in a sneering undertone, and even at this moment Jason had to smile. The Corsican was what might be called a security snob. He was firmly convinced—not altogether without reason—that no one in past eras had had any inkling of counterintelligence.

Everyone else broke into a babble of nervous muttering, knowing that the least of those three Spanish ships was more than a match for their entire fleet. Morgan was uncharacteristically silent, seemingly lost in thought, which added to the general nervousness. If
he
was discouraged . . .

Suddenly, Morgan stood up and the hubbub stilled. All eyes were riveted on him. The brooding silence stretched.

“Well, there’s only one thing to do,” he said slowly. “I’ll send a letter to the Spanish admiral—”

What’s this? He’s going to surrender?
thought Jason incredulously.
That can’t be . . . can it?

“—demanding that he pay us a hefty ransom, and telling him that otherwise we’ll burn Maracaibo to a cinder.”

For a couple of heartbeats, everyone goggled in absolute silence. Then an explosion of laughter and cheering burst forth, with an unmistakable undertone of relief. This was still Henry Morgan.

Jason was certain that his lower jaw must be touching the deck.

Morgan must have noticed his expression, for he turned to him with a smile and spoke as though explaining something that ought to be self-evident. “Remember, Jason: always behave as though you have the upper hand.”

“Even when you don’t?”

Morgan’s smile widened. “
Especially
when you don’t!”

* * *

The captain of
Magdalena
looked like he was in danger of having a stroke.

“Morgan’s insolence is beyond belief! Is there no limit to the effrontery of this scoundrel? Surely he must be possessed by the Devil. With your permission,
Almirante
, I will immediately order the hanging of the pirate scum who brought us this insultingly preposterous demand.”

Don Alonzo gestured his flag captain to silence. He turned back to the heavy oaken table in his cabin and ran his eyes over Morgan’s letter one more time. He shook his head.

“No. For one thing, I must reluctantly admire this messenger’s boldness. And besides, I intend to use him to convey my reply to Morgan.”

“
What?
But . . . but surely,
Almirante
, you do not mean to dignify this letter with a response!”

“But I do. I will make Morgan a counterproposal. If he will off-load his captives and all his loot and slaves, and return to Jamaica peaceably, I will offer to allow him to pass unmolested.”

The flag captain tried several times to speak. When he finally succeeded, it was in a voice choked by the conflict between his indignation and his fear of straying over the line into insubordination. “
Almirante
, you would demean yourself by negotiating with this Lutheran pig! And your orders are to exterminate piracy in these waters. Surely you cannot intend to disregard those orders by letting him go!”

Don Alonzo shot him an irritated look. “Don’t be absurd. As you yourself have repeatedly pointed out, Morgan is both a heretic and a pirate.”

“Ah!” The flag captain’s features smoothed themselves out into a smile as understanding dawned. “And either would suffice to release you from any promises to him.”

“You’ve grasped it. Now please summon my secretary so I can dictate a letter.”

* * *

“Well,” said Morgan two days later, “I’ll say this for Don Alonzo. At least the tone of his letter is appropriately courteous, as one gentleman to another. Not like Don Agustín de Bracamonte, the governor of Panama.” Blood rushed to his face and he scowled at the recollection. “After I captured Portobello last year I sent him a letter demanding ransom for the city. Do you know what he wrote in reply? He called me a
pirate!
Me! A pirate! Can you imagine? When I had a perfectly legal commission from Governor Modyford, with everything in order. A
pirate!
Ha!” Morgan got himself under control with an effort, and soothed his injured feelings with a slug of rum. After a year, he was obviously still seething about it.

They sat in the desecrated church near the square, which Morgan had been using for his headquarters. Several of the captains were there, as were some members of
Lilly
’s crew, including Jason. Zenobia spoke up as soon as Morgan had regained his composure.

“Courteous or not, do you really believe his offer of free passage?”

“No. I believe he wants to lure us into the channel and sink us without the treasure going to the bottom in deep water. But I owe it to the men to put this before them fairly.” Morgan finished his rum and stood up. “Come on. They all ought to be gathered in the square by now.”

They walked the short distance to the marketplace, which was packed with almost the entire personnel of the fleet, waiting in uncharacteristic silence. Morgan hitched himself up on a cart and waved Don Alonzo’s letter.

“We have the Spanish admiral’s reply,” he began, then proceeded to read them the letter. Afterwards he handed it to a French buccaneer to translate for the benefit of his countrymen in the crowd. Then he stepped forward and addressed the still-silent assembly.

“You’ve heard Don Alonzo’s offer: we can go back to Jamaica in safety if we go empty-handed. You’ve also heard his warning that he’ll put every one of us to the sword if we refuse. So what is our choice to be?”

An indignant roar arose.

“Trust a Spaniard?” someone jeered over the din.

“Those men on Providence Island did,” shouted someone else. “And we saw what happened to them, in the dungeons at Portobello!”

The roar grew ugly.

“But,” came a hesitant demurer, “this Don
might
be a man of his word. And—” Whatever else the speaker was going to say was drowned in catcalls. One bellowing voice rose over them.

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn if he
is
being honest! Are we to meekly give up all we’ve fought for and slink back to Port Royal as beggars, to starve or maybe sell ourselves into indenture so we can at least eat slops?”

Now the roar rose to a unanimous thunder of
No! No!

Morgan stepped forward and raised his arms. The noise instantly subsided.

“All right. We’re agreed. We’ll fight rather than accept the Spaniard’s offer. So we’re back to the question of
how
to fight when we stand no chance at all.”

This brought them back down to Earth. A gloomy silence settled over the square. Morgan, with his usual uncanny sense of timing, let it last just long enough.

“No, we stand no chance in the kind of fight they expect—that is, if we do it their way, which is the only way they know. But there’s another way.” Again, Morgan paused for a precisely calibrated moment. “I’m thinking of that big Cuban merchant ship we captured at Gibraltar. Here’s my idea.” He outlined it in a few swift sentences, and as he spoke the buccaneers’ silence turned to one of excited eagerness.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jason noticed Grenfell stirring. The historian blinked several times, and his eyes seemed to clear. “
Yes!
I remember now. How could I have forgotten?” Nesbit clasped his shoulder, then turned and met Jason’s eyes. They exchanged a nod.

“Now,” Morgan concluded, “that’s just a rough idea. To make it work, I need everyone’s ideas. The first question is:
can
it work?”

“Aye, Captain!” someone called out. “I’ve worked with such things before. We have all the materials we need.”

“Good! You’ll show everyone what to do. Can anybody think of any problems?”

“That Cuban tub doesn’t have many gunports,” Captain Lawrence Prince pointed out.

“So we’ll cut new ones,” said the first speaker.

Not for the first time, Jason couldn’t help being struck by the rude, crude but democratic way the buccaneers reached decisions and then brainstormed the best way of implementing them—so different from the rigidly top-down management style of the Spaniards and, indeed, of everyone in this century. Cruel, greedy and debauched the Brethren of the Coast might be, but they were a straw in the wind of the future—a wind that was going to blow away the last lingering cobwebs of feudalism.

“The people who fled from this town are still hiding in the surrounding hills,” observed Captain John Morris, always a voice of caution. “They’ll be able to spy on us, and get word to the Spanish admiral of what we’re up to.”

To Jason’s surprise Mondrago piped up. “I might be able to help with that, Captain. I know something about, well, keeping things you’re doing secret and maybe making the enemy think you’re doing something else.” The current language held no such word as
disinformation
.

“Splendid! What do you suggest?”

“Well,” said the Corscian, ignoring Nesbit’s obvious disapproval of his potential impropriety, “first of all, the prisoners and the slaves must be kept shut away in isolation, so they can see nothing of what’s going on, and carefully guarded so they can’t escape.”

“Excellent idea.” Morgan beamed. “All right, everyone, let’s get busy. Meanwhile, I’ll send the Spanish admiral another letter to gain us a little time.”

* * *

“So,” said Don Alonzo, looking up from Morgan’s new letter, “it appears that he’s dropped his demand for ransom for Maracaibo. And he’ll free his prisoners and hostages and
half
of the slaves. But he makes no mention of the loot—they’ll keep that.”

“Then Morgan’s impertinence is unabated,” declared
Magdalena
’s captain. “This is intolerable!
Almirante
, I can remain silent no longer: it is beneath you to haggle with this common-born pirate! Let us have an end to offers and counter-offers! It is degrading—as though we were . . .” He swallowed hard. “Forgive me, but I have to say it: as though we were
in trade!
”

The admiral ignored the dramatics. “He’s obviously playing for time. But why? What does he hope to accomplish?”

The flag captain turned matter-of-fact. “I think I may know. The townspeople in the hills have been observing the harbor as best they can, and sending informants to us. None of the hostages or slaves have escaped—”

“Odd,” Don Alonzo interjected. Whenever pirates stayed in one place for long, they tended to grow lax.

“—but from what they’ve seen they report that the pirates have been feverishly at work on the Cuban trading ship they captured. They seem to be adding more gun ports, and shipwrights keep going in and out of the hold. Also, Morgan’s flag has been transferred to her.”

“Aha! So that’s it. Morgan is actually going to try to fight his way out. And that Cuban ship is the largest one he’s got. So he’s trying to convert her into a man-of-war, to use as his flagship.”

“No matter what they do to her, she can never be a match for even our smallest ship.”

“No. But now that we know he plans to try to break out, we’ll be ready. I want a close watch kept on the channel. I also want poles emplaced, extending from our ships’ sides, and the men drilled intensely in repelling boarders and, in fact, counterattacking. Morgan knows he has no hope of winning in a gun-duel, so he’ll naturally attempt to board us, relying on the pirates’ savagery at hand-to-hand fighting. And I, for my part, will try to hurry him along by sending another letter, giving him two days to surrender or die.”

In fact, it was just before dark on April 30, six days after he had written his first letter to Morgan, when Don Alonzo looked through his spyglass and saw the pirate flotilla, complete with the Cuban merchantman flying Morgan’s flag, appear in the channel and anchor just out of range of his guns.

* * *

It was daybreak of the following morning, and Jason crouched on the deck of the Cuban trade ship Morgan had ironically renamed
Satisfaction
.

Nesbit had spoken to him about it. “Commander, I simply cannot countenance your volunteering for this mission! Title V, Chapter Three, Section 7 of the Revised Temporal Precautionary Act of 2364 is quite explicit. The potential for possible violations of the Observer Effect—”

“I’ve had experiences like this before, Irving,” he had said, recalling the time he had disrupted a debate in the Athenian assembly at what might have been an historically crucial moment. “It’s been exhaustively discussed, and the consensus seems to be that anything we do that turns out to be part of history was
always
part of history, if you catch my drift.”

“All well and good,” Nesbit had persisted. “But what about you, personally? Our escape from the Transhumanists has left us in possession of absolutely priceless information about them and their Teloi allies. It is essential that we remain alive until our retrieval date—especially you, with the imagery on your recorder implant. It would be irresponsible to risk your life in the pursuit of mere adventure!”