Ghosts of Engines Past (18 page)

Another book was on the table, this one a bound printout of a carefully selected suite of science and technology lessons. It had been tailored to skirt superseded theories and inventions, and the experts hoped that it would advance the English kingdom to powered flight and machine guns by 1500, and laser cannons a half century after that. Some educational theorists felt that they would have a working stardrive by the end of that century, but to me that seemed rather too ambitious.

And what of me? Since I had been a little girl I had fantasised about building a time machine into a spacecraft, plucking William Tynedale out of Fifteenth Century London, and spending the rest of our lives touring the worlds of the solar system. He and his brother were the twin pillars on which the human interstellar empire were founded, they were the wellsprings of the torrent of science and invention that had taken humanity out into space in 1761. They were giants, and we were all standing on their shoulders, yet for me there was something more personal. William Tynedale never married, although Edward had fathered eleven children. While at school I had written a story in which William had invented a teletemporal viewer, looked into the future and fallen in love with me. That little piece had earned me a credit, but brought so much derision from my classmates that I never again mentioned my true feelings for the younger of the Tynedale brothers.

I was to read from a carefully prepared text, but there were cue areas where I was allowed to interpolate personal messages. The experts felt that I should continue to show the affection for the first and greatest of modern scientists that the earlier, alternative Michelle Watsons had expressed. I had an audience of four, however, and that was not at all conducive to expressions of affection. Flicking the switch to the transmitter, I began the transmission.

“William Tynedale, I am your fond and constant admirer from the distant future, Michelle. I am about to give you yet more principles of natural philosophy that are true in all guise, and inventions within your wit and skill to construct. Other inventions and principles will be for those who follow you, however, because they will be very advanced, and for a time when the scholarship of your world has advanced quite considerably. This may be hard to comprehend, but try to believe what I now say. By my messages to you, your brother and you keep changing the future. Once I read to you as a tutor of children, but in this future I command a mighty vessel that flies between stars. If laid upon London it would reach from Moorgate to the Thames, and the smallest of its bombards could have wiped out both armies at the Battle of Poitiers with a single shot. In spite of having such immense power under my direction, my heart is yours, and I yearn to please you and help you to advance.”

The baron smirked as I spoke these words. I fought down a pang of annoyance. Had he known that I meant everything that I was saying, it would have been considerably worse.

“William, even the most brilliant of scholars of my time do not understand the Don Alverin sword. Some say it is a freak of nature, others think it might be a strange gift from a people millions of years more advanced than humans. Whatever the truth, it allows me to speak with you. Each time the future changes, and each time I change, yet what is between us can never change. Through the sword's voice of steel I have spoken to you for the first time on three occasions. This is the fourth. Will I love you next time, after you change the future? It seems so. It has happened every other time. I am now going to give you some more principles of what you call natural philosophies. The more basic of them are Earthly in origin. The rest were discovered in ruined cities on a world unimaginably distant from where you stand. Now listen carefully and write quickly, my brave and brilliant soulmate.”

As I read I wondered if William Tynedale was going to be able to transcribe such advanced learning with any sort of precision. True, the authors had repeated the key ideas in a number of different ways, as a sort of fail-safe precaution, but I still had my doubts. When I had finished, I picked up the Tynedale Journal to check the six hundred year old version of what I had just read. Bishop Chester sat glowering at me. Without doubt this was because I had removed my veil, but I knew that he had little choice other than to humour me. He was frightened. Everyone was frightened.

Far out in space, humanity's headlong expansion had suddenly gone terribly wrong. There were rumours, but nothing more.

“Can you not read faster than that?” the bishop muttered. “A man could read twice as fast.”

“I am reading each page four times,” I pointed out, without looking up.

“You have no need for comprehension, Sister Michelle.”

“Oh, but I do, Bishop Chester. I strongly suspect that you have tried using other readers to send messages to the Tynedales, and that William and his brother have ignored them. They probably did too much preaching about hellfire and their duty as Christians to obey absolutely. The Tynedales appear to have been men of free thought and liberal attitudes.”

“They were filthy atheists, destined for eternal damnation. Your sympathy for them puts your immortal soul in peril.”

“Atheists or not, they are the key to something that you want. I need to know what it is.”

“You need? You
need?
A
woman,
and you presume to
tell
me what you need? I the shepherd charged by God to guide you to eternal salvation!”

My life had been a never ending series of outbursts along those lines. This particular one was nothing special. A nun who has actually been tied to the target frame of a thermonuclear induction laser is hard to intimidate. Death had rested his hand upon my shoulder, then decided not to bother with me. That had been just a month ago, too. The charges of heresy and sentence of the Grand Brittanic Inquisitor had actually been read out. Through the observation screen I had seen the executioner's hand reaching for the ceremonial black lever...

I had not closed my eyes. In theory, being burned at the stake took a micro-millisecond or so. It was a humane way to be executed, pain was out of the question. I had seen a man in a gaudily embroidered uniform enter the observation room and shoot the executioner with a resonance pistol. The executioner had fallen neatly in two pieces. Only someone very senior in the papal admiralty could have had the authority and nerve to do that.

“I have finished reading,” I announced to the bishop. “Now I need to know why William Tynedale is to be given the technology to wipe out entire planetary civilizations.”

“You will be told nothing!”

“Then I shall transmit nothing.”

“You will obey my order!” he screamed, surging out of his chair and striding over.

“Another beating, to stimulate your erotic fantasies?” I managed, sitting still with my arms folded, even though I had a fair idea of what was to come.

Without another word, he seized me by the penitent's cowl and hair beneath it, then began slamming my face into the desk. Bright blue stars of pain flashed before my eyes each time, then a brilliant green nova of light swamped everything else.

I looked up and around. The horrified bishop was staring at an arm severed at the elbow. The same man who had killed the executioner stood holding a gold resonance pistol. Heat shimmered around the barrel vanes, and the impellers were whining softly.

“Get out!” he ordered, his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“Y-yes, Battle-Maestro,” Bishop Chester whimpered, then he sidled away toward the door.

Battle-maestro. There were only three of them, and they were answerable only to the pope. In some matters even the pope could not command them, and they made decisions as a war council. The battle-maestro spoke to some device woven into the sleeve of his jacket. Two orderlies hurried into the room. One snatched up the bishop's severed arm and hurried out, the other swabbed my face with something intensely cold that eased the pain. He then scanned me with a diagnostat.

“Your assessment?” asked the battle-maestro.

“General bruising, three loosened teeth,” the orderly replied as he inserted a probe up my left nostril. There was a brief hiss, and the tang of burning meat. “That will stop the bleeding, sister. Luckily for you the cartilage was not broken.”

“Luckily for Bishop Chester, you mean,” said the battle-maestro. “Leave us.”

The battle-maestro slowly walked to stand about ten feet in front of me, his arms folded and his head bowed. I had not known that people existed who could treat a bishop in that way.

“Doubtless you think me a monster,” he said, suddenly looking up, “yet I did show the bishop mercy. I
could
have split him from the head to the penis. I do apologise for letting your bashing go so far. I was watching you read on a monitor two rooms away, and it took some moments to run here.”

“Lordship, who are you?” I asked, with a boldness that surprised even me.

“I am Battle-Maestro Rodrigarian, Principian of the Papal War Council of Three... but that is unimportant.”

I blinked. Unimportant? The second-most important man in the Papal Supradiom and the most powerful man alive?

“How can I serve the Supradiom?” I asked, spreading my hands in the formal gesture of deference.

“Humanity has encountered the massively superior race mentioned in the Tynedale Journal, Sister Michelle.”

The shock on my face must have been plain. Even though I had spent most of my life defying stupidity wearing the garments of authority, this was beyond what even I could imagine. I said nothing. The battle-maestro continued.

“Our missionary zeal has taken us two hundred light years into space. So far we have encountered sixteen species of reasonably intelligent apes on four worlds. We have established missions to educate them, and begun to convert them to the word of the gospel. We have also  conquered two more sentient species whose ancestors were writing books on philosophy while ours were learning to make Earth's first spears. You must know all, this however.”

“Yes, Lordship. Our inquisitors are currently on their worlds, destroying alien temples and religious datacrystals, and burning heretics. We also bombed another world down to the bedrock when they defied our missionaries. I wrote a tract against it—but you probably know all that.”

“Indeed. Now... now there is something else. It is highly advanced, and controls power that defies belief. A missionary cruiser encountered them, whatever they are. It transmitted back some scans from extreme range, then declared that it had activated its weapons and was closing to declare the mercy of the gospels. The next ship in that area of space found a cloud of molecules of the same mass as the cruiser. Drone monitors registered no energy spike in that sector, however. Something vaporised the cruiser without using energy.”

“But that is not possible. How could that be done?”

“Who can say? However, it is clear that we might very quicky have our entire Papal Space Fleet reduced to ionised gas with no more fuss or bother than the candles on an altar being extinguished after mass. Should that happen, the might that backs up the spiritual authority of the church will be gone. There will be unrest, rebellion, schisms.
You
may even lead one.”

“Your lordship, I would never—”

“Do not disappoint me, Sister Michelle. You have immense talent and drive, I have studied your file in detail. We need you, to put it bluntly. We need to advance the power and technology of our fleets and defences, and very, very quickly. As it stands, we can only guess how advanced this new species might be. It could be thousands of years ahead of us, or even more. The scans of its ship show only a twisted warp in space, and motion. Their first gunpowder weapons are probably embedded in sandstone that is millions of years old. The question is, do we stand a chance?”

“With respect, lordship, the question is
do we deserve a chance?”

Instead of flying into a rage, the battle-maestro laughed.

“Probably not, Sister Michelle, but there is yet another and more important question: will we be annihilated for what we have already done? Studies done on the Centaurus worlds have shown evidence of vaporisation without energy blasts.”

“As with our missionary cruiser?”

“Yes. Surviving records indicate that they were a proselytising species, just like we are. Steps have been taken to redress our centuries of religious bullying and bigotry. The pope will die later today, along with selected cardinals. Heretics will be blamed, but a far more liberal set of replacements has been arranged. Already and edict has been sent out to all worlds for everyone with 'Inquisitor' in his title to be executed at once, and for all Christian missions to be abandoned and destroyed, but I fear that none of this will be enough. Five drones have suddenly gone silent, and at least a dozen missionary ships have ceased to report back to their parish stations. We are going to have to fight. Again I ask, do we have a chance?”

The supreme commander of the armed forces of an interstellar empire was asking me if we had a chance against a super-civilization millions of years old. Convent education was not geared to cope with matters like this, but I had a long history of studying forbidden truths and theories.

“Wasps have had an fairly advanced social structure, and have been building elaborate honeycomb nests for millions of years, yet they did not go on to invent laser cannons and starships,” I pointed out. “Just think about it, they had advanced organisation, communication and their versions of cities long before humans evolved—”

I caught myself before uttering the heresy that humans were descended from apes, but Battle-Maestro Rodrigarian just smiled and nodded.

“What you are saying is that a society that was at our level millions of years ago may not have advanced so very far in all the time since. Yes, that is a possibility. Blind chance may also be on our side.”

“I do not follow, Lordship.”

“The Earth-Luna system is the only one known in three thousand worlds that provides a perfect solar eclipse. That is blind chance. Perhaps the Don Alverin sword is a similar act of blind chance. Perhaps no scientist of any species on any world in the history of the galaxy has ever been able to build a transmitter of temporally entangled matter—including those who fly the twist-warp ships. We may have something truly unique.”