Ghosts of Time (21 page)

“Yes, sir. I’ll begin organizing that at once. But let me raise one matter first. You recall Captain Landrieu of the Jeff Davis Legion?”

“I do indeed! Just after the incident of my wounding at the Lake house, he departed on his original mission for General Lee. Is he here now?”

“Unfortunately, he and his men vanished into the Valley. Since that was almost two months ago, they are presumed dead or captured.”

Mosby’s face fell. “That is unwelcome news. I owe Captain Landrieu a great debt.”

“Yes, sir. But one of his men, Private Angus Aiken, became separated from his detachment and later linked up with us. Under the circumstances, Bill Chapman and I allowed him to attach himself to the Rangers.” Richards motioned Aiken forward. “He’s done good service, and now he has a request to make of you.”

“Certainly.” With the characteristic informality of the Partisan Rangers, Mosby drew Aiken aside. “What can I do for you, Angus?”

“Well, sir, it concerns Captain Landrieu’s mission, to which Major Richards just alluded, and concerning which I’m still not permitted to speak. You see, through certain sources of information—of which I’m also not permitted to speak—I have reason to believe Captain Landrieu is still alive.” Mosby’s eyes became blue lasers of intensity, and his thin, sharp face took on the hawklike look that could be chilling, but he said nothing. “And it is imperative that I be in Richmond the first few days of April, in order to meet him.”

“I see. Well, Captain Landrieu saved my life. The least I can do is see to it that you arrive in Richmond by that date. I wish you and the captain good fortune in the mission you pursue, whatever that mission is . . . and whatever good it may do now.”

With the last words, Mosby’s expression changed to one that Aiken was sure his Rangers were never permitted to see. It was the face of a man too intelligent to conceal the truth from himself. He stood undefeated, and was constitutionally incapable of giving in, but he knew nothing he and his men could do could stave off the doom that stalked across the ashen landscape of the South’s blighted dream. Putting a hundred Union troops out of action, such as Dolly Richards had just done, counted for nothing along the titanic clash of scores of thousands at Petersburg and in the Carolinas. The Partisan Rangers could not prevail; they could only endure, and leave a legend.

The moment passed. They walked back to where Richards awaited. Mosby turned briskly to organizing the struggle he could not abandon any more than he could pretend he could win it. Aiken went off to see if there was any word from Gracchus.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“All right, let’s review the sequence of events that brought us here,” said Jason, running his eyes over the three members of his team. Besides Mondrago and Carlos Dabney, he had been allowed one additional Special Operations officer. He had asked for Constable Tom Corbett, who had been with him on his first incursion to April, 1865 and had sustained a non-serious wound, arguing that if three men were to be contemporaneous with their earlier selves on this expedition a fourth could hardly make much difference. And, this being the case, it made sense to take advantage of Corbett’s previous exposure to the target milieu, thus maximizing the team’s chances of success. But Rutherford had made this his sticking point; three were more than enough already, thank you very much. So Jason had settled for Constable Basil Novak. This briefing was largely for his benefit.

“As we all know,” Jason continued, “I and Alexandre led a Special Ops mission to Richmond in April, 1865, in response to a message drop from Pauline Da Cunha, whose research expedition—including you, Carlos—had turned up evidence of Transhumanist activity. By the time I arrived—or, for convenience, let’s say
Jason Mk I
arrived—on April 1, she had investigated further and determined the exact nature of the threat by means of the detection feature of her brain implant. This expedited my investigation, and we destroyed the nanobot cache in the course of the following night, and departed on April 3. Afterwards, with the threat seemingly removed, Pauline saw no need to monitor that function of her implant for the remainder of her stay.

“After her retrieval—I was off-world at the time, en route to and from Hesperia, before our expedition to the seventeenth century Caribbean—Pauline was of course debriefed, and her implant’s records downloaded. But, again, there was no sense of urgency about reviewing them. And there had been some sort of malfunction after April 3 that resulted in their being fuzzy. So they just sat until after I had returned from the Caribbean expedition on which Pauline was killed.” Jason said this last expressionlessly, not meeting Mondrago’s eyes, for Dabney and Novak were still not privy to the details. “But there were some bothersome anomalies amid the fuzziness, which finally led to an in-depth examination while I was again off-world. It turned out that on April 4 the detector had revealed the existence of a cache of nanobots which had been emplaced earlier than the one we destroyed . . . and which hadn’t been there before.”

There was dead silence, and not just from Novak, to whom this was new. None of them had to have the implications spelled out. It was the sort of contingency everyone knew was possible but preferred not to think about.

“Evidently,” Jason resumed, “after April 3, surviving Transhumanists informed their uptime superiors, either by message drop or on their retrieval or both. And a second expedition was sent back—or
will be
, since for all we know it will come from our future. Our own expedition under ‘Jason Mk II’ to counter it was intended to remain until April 5, since we know the second cache in Richmond existed on April 4 and therefore the Observer Effect precludes our destroying it before that date. Basil, as you’ve undoubtedly learned from Rumor Central by now, all of us except Angus Aiken were captured and held prisoner under circumstances resulting in our unprecedented premature retrieval. So there was no ‘Jason Mk II’ in Richmond in early April after all. Angus, however, is still in 1865.” (Everyone understood that his use of the present tense referred to the “linear present.” It was one of the accommodations the language had to make to time travel.) “And he will remain until the scheduled retrieval date, slightly before which he is to meet us in Richmond. Thanks to him, an additional nanobot cache was destroyed in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

Novak gestured for attention. “Commander, something else Rumor Central is handing out is that Aiken did it with the help of some kind of secret organization drawn from the enslaved segment of that era’s North American population—and that this organization somehow knows about, and is opposed to, the Transhumanist underground. How can this be?”

“The organization to which you’re referring is called the Order of the Three-Legged Horse, after a legend from Jamaica, where it originated. The answer to your question is that it was founded in the seventeenth century by a Transhumanist renegade—I won’t say ‘defector,’ because she had no great opinion of our side either—whose acquaintance we had made. The real mystery was that the Order’s leader Gracchus was expecting us, thanks to a letter some unknown party had written in the late seventeenth century, predicting our advent in detail. The letter also stated that it was important that I, personally, go back to the letter-writer’s era.” Jason smiled at Novak’s expression. “Yes, this is the part that’s been kept seriously under wraps. Shortly after our return, Alexandre and I, accompanied by Dr. Chantal Frey, went to 1692 Jamaica as instructed. The results were inconclusive.” Jason left it at that. “So for now, at least, we have to file away Gracchus’s letter under the heading of ‘unexplained’ and concentrate on our immediate objective, which is the destruction of the Transhumanists’ second nanobot cache in Richmond.

“We’ll be operating under Special Ops protocols, including the use of ‘controllable’ TRDs. We will arrive on the morning of April 2, 1865. Basil, you know from the basic historical orientation you’ve already received that this was the date on which the Confederates evacuated and burned the city. I can tell you from personal experience as ‘Jason Mk I’ that it was a harrowing night, which I don’t relish experiencing again. But the confusion should enable us to go about unnoticed locating the cache, especially inasmuch as we know it’s not far from the original one, on the island known as Belle Isle.”

Jason activated the briefing room’s display screen, which showed a map of a short segment of the James River, at the fall line at the western edge of nineteenth-century Richmond. An oblong island lay near the south shore. “Carlos, would you take over the briefing at this point?”

Dabney cleared his throat. “Belle Isle is a fifty-four acre island with a rocky spine. Before the war, it was home to the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works, and was used as a recreation area for Richmonders. You will note,” he added, using a cursor to point to a railroad bridge connecting the island to the southern shore, at a sharp west-to-east angle, “the connection with the Richmond and Danville Railroad. This bridge became known among Union prisoners of war as the ‘bridge of sighs.’ For after the First Battle of Bull Run, when the Confederacy was swamped with more than anticipated numbers of prisoners, the Confederate government purchased the island and established a camp for enlisted prisoners on the north side of the island, in an area formerly used as a racecourse.”

“‘Enlisted’ prisoners?” Novak queried.

“The officers were housed in Libby Prison, in the city of Richmond, north of the river. Conditions there were notoriously bad, but were nothing compared to Belle Isle, where there was a rudimentary hospital for the prisoners, but no barracks—only a tent city. The prisoners baked in the summer and froze in the winter, and suffered disease epidemics and inadequate rations, although the number who actually died is disputed. And the encampment grew seriously overcrowded after the Union army’s frequent defeats. At one point, it held more than twice its theoretical three-thousand-man capacity.

“The island was used for this purpose because of its security advantages—the whitewater rapids on the north side, where the camp was located, discouraged attempts to escape by swimming, although some prisoners became desperate enough to try it—and also for the ready railway access, as it was always intended primarily as a holding facility for prisoners to be transferred further south. By October, 1864 they had all been shipped out and the prison was abandoned.”

Novak looked puzzled. “I don’t quite understand, then. Why don’t we materialize right there on the island after April 5, 1865, find the cache, and destroy it at our leisure?”

Jason answered the question. “Two reasons, in ascending order of importance. First, the Transhumanists will be expecting us to do precisely that, and may plan to have a presence on the island then to prevent us. So we’d better show up earlier than they expect, and deal with them first. Secondly, Angus Aiken is under instructions to be in Richmond around the first of April, and I promised I’d meet him shortly thereafter. I also have reason to believe that Gracchus is going to be there, and we’ve learned how helpful he and his organization can be.”
Although,
the bothersome thought surfaced, only to be dismissed as not immediately relevant,
I don’t know
why
he told me he was so determined to be in Richmond then.

“Also,” Dabney put in, “even though the nail factory wasn’t reopened until after the war, we can’t be certain that the island was completely deserted on April 5.”

“But, Commander,” Novak persisted, “if we arrive on April 2, won’t we overlap in time with Jason Mk I?”

“Also Alexandre Mk I,” Jason admitted. “And even more of an overlap with Carlos Mk I. Believe me, I’m all too well aware of that.” He had to smile, recalling the effort he’d had to expend to soothe Rutherford’s jitters. “But it can’t be helped. And remember, none of us in our ‘Mk I’ manifestations reported any weird encounters with ourselves, so we have the Observer Effect on our side. Something will prevent any such encounters.

“Angus should be in Richmond by April 2, and I should be able to locate him. My computer implant will be set to pick up the tracking device in his TRD as well as the ones in you three’s. Also, in the course of Jason Mk II’s expedition, we located a potential safe house in the city—the Van Lew mansion. We probably won’t be using it, because it will be best if we can get back across the river before dawn on April 3, when the last bridge is destroyed. But if necessary, we will proceed to the mansion after our arrival, and Angus will probably do the same.”

“Assuming,” Mondrago cautioned with unwelcome realism, “that he’ll still be alive.”

“There’s always that,” Jason admitted reluctantly. “All sorts of things could happen to someone riding with Mosby’s Rangers.”

Angus Aiken held his horse’s head, silently waiting with the other hundred and twenty-seven men in the wooded hollow a mile east of the village of Harmony, which in turn was two miles east of Purcellville, awaiting Mosby’s command.

It was now March 22, and the harsh winter was past. Sheridan had departed the valley on February 27, handing command over to General Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero of Gettysburg but a man who did not understand counterinsurgency. He had gone into a static defensive posture, complete with frontier-like stockades, to protect the B&O Railroad, and only sent large, cumbersome patrols into Mosby’s Confederacy. Finally he had organized a massive circular hunt by eighteen hundred infantry, cavalry and artillery to trap Mosby’s two hundred men. While infantry detachments sealed Ashby’s Gap and Snicker’s Ferry against westward escape, and an additional force from Fairfax Court House performed the same function to the east, Custer’s protégé Marcus Reno had moved south from Harper’s Ferry with the main force of a thousand two days before. His ponderous advance had given Mosby plenty of warning. Now he was proceeding from Purcellville toward Leesburg in standard formation, with the infantry marching along the road and the cavalry paralleling its flanks. And Mosby was ready.

As the flanking column of bluecoated cavalry appeared on the edge of Harmony in the distance, Mosby gave a hand signal. Lieutenant Jim Wiltshire acknowledged with equal silence, and led two dozen men of Company A, including Aiken, out of concealment and onto the road. They proceeded west, toward the advancing Federals—the 12th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Mosby’s sources had indicated.

Presently, shouts could be heard from up ahead, followed by a thunder of hooves. The Yankees had taken the bait.

“Back, boys!” yelled Wiltshire, wheeling his horse around.

They fled back down the road, with the Northerners charging in pursuit.

When they drew level with the strip of woods behind which the other hundred-odd Rangers waited under the command of Mosby and Lieutenant Alfred Glascock, they wheeled again, into the faces of their startled pursuers, and began to pour revolver fire into the head of the onrushing Union column, bringing down men and horses in a welter of confusion that caused the column to crumple up into a congested mass on the roadbed . At the same instant, Rebel yells erupted to the left as the Rangers waiting in ambush erupted from the trees, crashing into the flank of the jammed mass of Union cavalry, blazing away with their Colts at point-blank range.

The Pennsylvanians held only momentarily before breaking, their only thought to disentangle themselves from the jam and get back to Harmony and take shelter behind an osage orange hedge where the infantry was deploying. As the pursuing Rangers reached the outskirts of town, fire from behind the hedgerow began to rake them, killing two and breaking the momentum of their charge. But that momentum carried some of them into the town even as Mosby was ordering a retirement.

Aiken was one of them. He saw a Ranger shoot a Union trooper down on the front porch of a house. Some of the men seemed disposed to stop and loot. But then he heard Mosby’s shouted command.

“Come on, men! Let’s skedaddle while we have the chance,” he yelled. The men came around, although he saw one pause to cut a ring-finger off a fallen man’s hand first. Most of them extricated themselves from Harmony and rejoined the withdrawing main body, which Mosby was leading south. The Federals showed no inclination to follow them.

Aiken spurred his horse and drew abreast of Mosby as the latter was receiving a report from Lieutenant Glascock. “I make it nine Yankees killed, twelve wounded and thirteen prisoners. We also got fifteen horses.”

“Good,” Mosby nodded. “We only lost two dead—the ones caught in that infantry volley—and five wounded. Another four were captured—they didn’t get out of the town in time.” He noticed Aiken. “There would have been more of those if it hadn’t been for you, Angus. Good work. And now,” he added, looking at the sky to the west, “Those clouds rolling in from over the mountains portend a rainstorm tonight. We’ll bivouac in southern Loudoun County. But after this, Reno is sure to be reinforced—probably tomorrow or the next day. So we’ll disperse further south, into Fauquier County. And,” he continued, turning to Aiken again, “it’s only a week before you need to be in Richmond. We’ll see about getting you there. But I may not see you again. If not, good luck.”