Soldiers Out of Time (16 page)

“
That
is the goal toward which you will be toiling, Commander Thanou. And that is why I’m telling you all this. I want you to know that you’re not just a slave, but a slave whose labor is contributing to the destruction of your own people. And there is more.” Stoneman approached closer, so close Jason could smell the hate. “One of the things we learned from the good Major Rojas is that you have one of the Authority’s ‘control’ TRDs implanted in you. So I know you can escape back to our own time whenever you wish, with the knowledge I’ve just imparted to you. Except that you won’t, will you? You can’t. In addition to Major Rojas, you would leave your ship and its crew stranded.”

Including Chantal
. Jason looked at Mondrago, then looked away. He had seldom seen such a stricken look on a human face.

“Now you understand why I removed this Pug’s TRD while he was obligingly unconscious.” Stoneman nudged Hamner with a toe. “It complicates matters still further, doesn’t it? If you activate your party’s TRDs, you’ll be leaving him behind as well.

“Actually, I had originally considered rendering you unconscious and having the ‘control’ TRD cut out of you, which would be the obvious way of solving the problem. But I think I’ll leave it in you, at least for now, and let you be tantalized by the knowledge, and tormented by the dilemma.”

Stoneman whirled around and departed, followed by his guards. The hatch slid shut on Jason and the others and the horror with which they now lived.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

At the transport’s pseudovelocity, the 63.7-light-year voyage from HC+31 8213 to Sol took twenty-two and a half standard days. That was how long they had to endure the squalor and discomfort of the slave quarters, with the chill gradually biting deeper and deeper into them, periodically driven by sheer, gnawing hunger to eat the nauseating swill that flowed into the trough on a regular schedule.

An attempt to escape and take over the ship was never a real option. The hatch was very seldom opened to admit any of their captors, and on those occasions the guards were very watchful and armed with laser carbines and worse—much worse: the highly illegal nerve-lash batons that could, at a touch, reduce the victim’s nervous system to nothing more than a carrier of unendurable, sickening agony.

Those batons were very much in evidence when guards came and their leering leader hooked a finger for Armasova to accompany them. Slowly and with great dignity, she stood up and gave the six men in the compartment a look that said
Don’t try anything foolish
more clearly than words could have—for which Jason was thankful, for he hadn’t been certain he would have been able to restrain Mondrago if Stoneman carried through on his threat to use her to service the Transhumanists sexually in the brutish way Rojas had been forced to undergo. Then she turned and allowed herself to be marched through the hatch. For a time that seemed longer than it was, they were left with their seething frustration at their helplessness. Finally, the hatch opened again and a guard shoved Armasova through it with an expression of disgusted disappointment. Without a word, she went to a corner and sat crosslegged, her face turned toward the bulkhead. For a time, no one disturbed her. Then Rojas settled down beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. She went into convulsive shudders and gasping, sobbing sounds. None of the men could think of anything to say, and they all kept their distance.

At least Armasova was never removed from the compartment again. Nor was Rojas summoned for more of the same. Jason suspected that it was a matter of the usual iron Transhumanist discipline while the ship was actually underway. At any rate, he was glad of it—and not just for the obvious reason. He wasn’t certain he would have been able maintain discipline—including self-discipline—if it had happened again.

Jason, however, was taken away after a time, and interrogated. Stoneman had brought along a supply of truth drugs, so torture wasn’t necessary. Nor was it used . . . during the interrogation itself. It was only after Jason had been wrung dry that Stoneman indulged himself with the nerve-lash. Over and over again.

“I don’t want to use physical methods that would damage you and depreciate your value as a slave,” he explained in a soft voice during one of his pauses. Jason heard him as though from a vast distance away as he lay shuddering with aftershocks of agony, the ocean of pain receding a little for the time being. “I also don’t want to use this for very long at a stretch. There’s always the danger that it might drive you into outright insanity. That too would make you useless as a slave. Even worse, it would be a form of escape for you. And we can’t have that.” By now Stoneman’s voice was rising, his breath was becoming uneven, and his eyes were glowing with hate. “No. I want you to feel some fraction of what I endured!” He thrust the baton home again, and once again Jason was nothing more than a mindless vessel of torment.

Finally it was over. Jason, unable to walk or otherwise use his convulsively twitching limbs—but still observing everything he saw and letting his implant process that input—was dragged back to the slave quarters and flung through the hatch. His companions did their best to make him comfortable. As they did so, he saw that Mondrago was having difficulty meeting his eyes.

He was fairly sure he knew why.

For the entire voyage so far they had, like people avoiding talking about the elephant in the room, skirted the one subject on all their minds: the fact that Jason could get them all out of this at any time but at the same time could not. And not just because of Rojas and Hamner, both of whom would have insisted that Jason not let it influence his decision. And Mondrago had seemed even more awkward than the others, feeling that he, in particular, was to blame for Jason’s intolerable dilemma simply because Chantal was aboard the ship that would be left stranded half a millennium in the past.

Now, knowing what Jason had endured and declined to escape from, his misery was complete.

And it suddenly came to Jason that this was one of the very reasons Stoneman had tortured him.

“Alexandre,” he said as soon as he could talk in an unshaken voice, “it’s just a part of the sick little psychological game Stoneman is playing.”

“I know,” said Mondrago. The Corsican’s expression told Jason that no elaboration was necessary. He finally looked Jason straight in the eye, and spoke with uncharacteristic formality. “Sir, the decision has to be yours. None of us can make it for you. But in making your decision, don’t let any . . . considerations involving me influence you. And I think Chantal would tell you the same thing, if she could.”

“I think she just might,” said Jason.
But would everybody aboard
De Ruyter
?
he didn’t add. “But I’m not ready yet to give up on the possibility of getting
all
of us back.” He saw the commandos’ expressions—they obviously wondered if torture had affected his mind—and he managed a grin. “Hey, people, in the Temporal Service I used to have a reputation for never losing any member of an expedition of which I was mission leader. Now that we’ve discovered the existence of the Teloi and the Transhumanist Underground, I’ve had to adjust to losses.”
Sidney Nagel. Bryan Landry. Henri Boyer
.
Pauline Da Cunha.
The never-forgotten litany ran through his mind as always.
And, of course, Deirdre Sadaka-Ramiriz, who wasn’t killed, just stranded in the Bronze Age—admittedly by her own choice.
“But I’ve never learned to like it. If it happens, it happens—but I refuse to accept it until it actually does.” He tried to wring from his torture-ravaged brain something to say other than
Where there’s life there’s hope
or some such cliché. “Remember, Stoneman plans to bring us back to Drakar, as I suppose we have to call Planet B. So maybe a chance will present itself for us to be back within control range of
De Ruyter
.” He didn’t add what they all knew: that Rojas and Hamner would have to actually get aboard
De Ruyter
, adding a further complication that they didn’t need.

“But how can you be sure
De Ruyter
will still be there after we’ve been to Earth and back in this tub?” asked Bakiyev.

“I can’t be. But remember, I’m the only one who can activate the ship’s TRD. Besides, I told Captain Palanivel to wait for us. Unless I’m very mistaken in my assessment of his character, he’ll do just that, for as long as his supplies hold out. And they should hold out for quite a while.” He smiled wryly and gestured toward the trough. “After all, the Transhumanists are feeding us.”

“If you can call it that,” quipped Bermudez, who Jason had spotted early as the unit smartass.

The grim snorts of non-laughter that ran around the squad were exactly what Jason had hoped to hear. Any military outfit that could still gripe about the food was still in business.

In one respect, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Jason and Rojas knew the transport’s capabilities from their previous experience of following it, and also knew the distance to Sol. So they had no difficulty calculating their ETA. It therefore came as no surprise when their nervous systems registered the very slight subliminal sensation that always accompanied the activation or deactivation of a drive field. Shortly thereafter the hatch slid open to admit Stoneman, preceded by a double file of guards.

As he met Stoneman’s eyes, Jason decided his earlier impression had been correct. The Transhumanist, who on their previous acquaintance had been merely an ideologue and a sadist, was now insane. A sane man—even, perhaps especially, a sane sadistic ideologue—would never have spilled the Transhumanists’ master plan for the Drakar colony without afterwards killing Jason or at least cutting his control TRD out of his flesh, thereby slamming the door on any possibility that the information could ever be transmitted uptime. Instead, he had sacrificed absolute security for the sheer joy of watching Jason squirm on the horns of a moral dilemma.

It made Jason wonder why the Transhumanist Underground’s hierarchy would tolerate him. But then, the answer was obvious: they wouldn’t have to worry about his stability, given his self-exile into the past. They had adopted his plan for Drakar, put their resources behind it, and based their strategy on it . . . and then let him indulge his martyr complex by going back in time so they wouldn’t have to risk the consequences of his insanity anymore. The best of both worlds.

And at any rate, Stoneman’s probable long-term future was of no help to them at the moment.

“We have passed Sol’s Secondary Limit,” Stoneman announced. “Naturally we have no need for caution in approaching Earth, in this era. After our landing, we will round up as many Pugs as possible. So,” he added with a twisted smirk on his half-ruined face, “the luxurious spaciousness to which you have become accustomed is about to come to an end. We intend to fill this compartment to capacity for our final slaving run.”

“But where are you landing?” As always, Jason knew he could keep Stoneman talking by asking the questions his flunkies never would. “You said something about an out-of-the-way area.”

“Yes. The region has other advantages as well. The dominant group speaks English, as it is spoken in this era. It is ancestral to our own language, so its speakers can learn to understand us promptly, given . . . proper stimulus.” Stoneman smiled and twirled the baton in his hand. “And they can pass on our commands to their non-English-speaking subordinates.”

“And of course it helps that you had nineteenth-century English neurally imprinted on your brain’s speech centers when you were sent back to the American Civil War, just a little over three decades earlier than this,” said Jason. He didn’t remind Stoneman that the same applied to Mondrago and himself. “Come to think of it, I vaguely recall that in the United States there was a rash of reported sightings of mysterious ‘airships’ in the late 1890s, rather like a lower-tech precursor of the ‘flying saucer’ craze of the 1950s. Is that where we’re going—North America?”

“No. We’ve previously conducted operations there, among other places. But we never like to arouse suspicions—or risk running up against the Observer Effect—by operating too intensively in any one milieu. We’ve found a better harvesting ground: the North-West Frontier of the British Indian Empire. It’s sparsely populated, so we can easily come and go unnoticed. And it’s a fairly wild, lawless area. In fact, many of our activities get blamed on Pathan tribesmen from across the border in Afghanistan. We once tried gathering slaves from those tribesmen, in Afghanistan, but they’re simply too wild to be tamed. So we carefully take our pickings among the British and their Indian troops, and from villages in the region, where we usually kill most of the males but take the females. The Indians have a long history of subjugation to foreign masters in any case; once we break the British and the Indian noncommissioned officers—the linguistic go-betweens—the rest generally give us no trouble.” All at once, Stoneman looked annoyed at himself for his verbosity. He turned businesslike. “At any rate, I may use you and your subordinate here as assistants, since like me you speak nineteenth-century English, if only the American variety.”

“Why should we want to assist you?”

“You know perfectly well.” Stoneman juggled his baton again. “And you will, of course, be very carefully watched at all times.” Abruptly, he turned and departed, followed by his guards.

They all looked at each other. Mondrago was the first to speak. “Do you think maybe . . .?”

“We’ll just have to be alert to any possibilities that may come our way,” said Jason. “But there’s one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Whenever we’ve gone into the past before, we’ve always received an orientation on the target milieu, and taken along a specialized academic historian who could tell us more or less what was going to happen next. This time we’re being thrown in off the deep end without either. And it’s for damned sure I don’t know anything about late-Victorian British India.” Jason ran his eyes over the IDRF people.
Naturally there’s nobody here whose ethno-cultural background is Indian or British
, he thought grumpily.
That would be too convenient.
But then he recalled Mondrago’s interest in military history. “I don’t suppose you—?”

“Uh . . . I recall a little about the British Indian Army. It was an unusual organization. Unique, in fact.”

Jason smiled. “Well, then, Professor Mondrago, you’re now our resident historian.”

“Just don’t assign us any term papers,” Bermudez cautioned.

Mondrago made a rude noise with his mouth.