Soldiers Out of Time (20 page)

“Here, wot’s this?” demanded Carver.

“Just to demonstrate . . .” Stoneman glanced at the two wounded sepoys. “More trouble than they’re worth,” he said casually. This time he used his laser carbine.

The three sergeants stared, inarticulate with helpless fury. McCready was clearly exerting all his massive strength to hold himself in check. The sepoys were marbled in uncomprehending shock. The
bhisti
tried to make himself as small as possible.

“You murdering bastard,” hissed Jason.

“Now what kind of attitude is that? We just saved your lives. Waste not, want not, as an old saying goes. Unfortunately, we had to paralyze those few of your attackers we didn’t kill, so given their inability to move under their own power I’ve summoned the ship. It should arrive at any moment.”

“I’ve had enough of this!” roared McCready, infuriated beyond caution. He glared at Jason and Stoneman alike. “Stop talking in that silly way, damn your eyes! ‘Business competitors’ my arse! Who are you? What’s this codswallop about a ‘ship’ in the middle of these bloody mountains? What—?”

“
Sahib! Sahib!
” cried the
bhisti
, who was staring skyward with huge round eyes. “Look!” Something in his tone made McCready stop and look up. Then, one by one, they all looked up. No one spoke, as shadow engulfed them.

The transport was sliding overhead on grav repulsion, filling the sky over the defile, blocking the sun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The sepoys moaned, and the sergeants muttered curses, as the paralyzed man was lifted up through the cargo port by tractor beam, followed by the equally paralyzed surviving Pathans. Then the transport settled onto its landing jacks on a flat expanse above the defile, and they were marched up to the still-open port, through the cargo bay and along the passageways, flanked by guards bearing nerve-lash batons. All the locals—British no less than Indian—stared with round eyes and open mouths at their surroundings. The sergeants, at least, would have heard of electric lighting, which had been invented almost two decades earlier although it still was far from widespread. But the materials—plastics and composites—were utterly unnatural to them, as were the humming, beeping, clicking background sounds.

All at once, it became too much for one of the sepoys. With a scream, he turned and sought to fight his way back out of the belly of this flying monster. One of the goons, looking barely interested, jabbed him with his nerve-lash baton. The Sikh’s scream turned to one of agony, and he collapsed to the deck.

“Here, you!” roared McCready indignantly, rounding on the guard. Evidently, no one
else
was allowed to mistreat his native troops. Before Jason could warn him to back off, the goon brushed the baton against his elbow. He went rigid but, astonishingly, didn’t scream. With a gasp, followed by a low moan through tightly clenched teeth, he sank shuddering to his knees.

The other two sergeants went to their knees beside him. “Buck up, Mac old boy!” Carver urged, grasping the big man by the shoulders.

“Don’t try anything,” Jason pleaded with them. “All you can do is get hurt.” Carver and Hazeltine both glared at him, but they restrained themselves from doing anything more than helping McCready to his feet. The sepoys did the same for their whimpering comrade, and the dismal procession continued.

When the hatch opened on the slave quarters, a cacophony of female screams arose. The compartment was half-full, mostly with women and children.
Taken from some nearby village
, Jason thought,
where the men were wiped out. Important to maintain the sex ratio among the breeding stock.
But four paralyzed tribesmen had already been brought in—presumably all that had survived. The women were helping them restore their muscle control. Now, with these new arrivals—especially the white ones—the women panicked and tried to veil their faces with whatever rags they had available. One hawk-faced, black-bearded Pathan, more recovered than the others and seeming to be their leader, struggled to his feet and glared at the intended victims of his ambush. The Sikhs glared back.

“Any brawling among the slaves will be punished with neural stimulation,” came Stoneman’s voice like a whipcrack from the hatch behind them. “Or, if that proves unavailing, with a few exemplary executions. You’d better make that clear to all, Commander Thanou. And by the way, we’ll be departing directly.” Then he was gone, and the hatch clanged shut.

It took only an instant to make it pretty clear to the sergeants, and through the
naik
they made it equally clear in Urdu to the sepoys. And enough of the latter spoke a little Pushtu to get it across to their erstwhile attackers. The tension in the overcrowded compartment subsided, leaving nothing but uncomprehending despair.

Rojas briskly examined the women, who only momentarily flinched away from her. Then she tried the water spigot. “It’s not on,” she told Jason, “and these women are nearing dehydration.” She turned to the
bhisti
, who had kept his water sack through it all, and spoke in her version of the current form of English. “Give the women water.”

“Yes,
memsahib
.”

The women, as Muslims, objected to his Untouchable status no more than did the Sikhs. Their acceptance of his water seemed a kind of signal, and everyone settled into a formless mass of common misery and apathy. The three sergeants sat on the deck with their backs to a bulkhead.

Presently, there was a slight sensation of movement as the transport went aloft on grav repulsion and the photon thrusters kicked in, then it ceased. “What’s happening?” Hazeltine demanded. “We started to move, but then stopped.”

“No. we haven’t stopped. In fact, we’re moving very fast.” Jason didn’t bother trying to explain inertial compensators. Instead, he sat crosslegged on the deck facing the sergeants and meeting their eyes.
Might as well get this over with.

“All right,” said McCready wearily. “Talk. You’ve been lying to us.”

“Too bloody right!” exclaimed Carver. “If you’re a Canadian prospector, I’m a Bengali
babu
!”

“Bad form, old man,” added Hazeltine with acid irony.

“I’m sorry I had to lie. But if I’d told you the truth, you wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Well, I’d say we’re ready to believe just about anything now,” said Hazeltine. He gave a wave that indicated the ship around them. “This is all like something out of one of Mr. Wells’ stories.”

“So talk,” McCready repeated. “Who
are
you? Who are these blighters who’ve captured us? Where are you from? Where are we going on this great bloody airship?”

“What’s
happening
, for God’s sake?” blurted Carver beseechingly.

Jason turned to Hazeltine. “You mentioned H. G. Wells. Has he already written
The Time Machine
?”

“Why, yes. Year before last, I believe.” Hazeltine frowned, as though he found Jason’s phraseology a trifle odd.

“Good. Then you’ve heard of the idea of time travel.” Jason took a deep breath. “My companions and I are from the future. Nearly five centuries in the future, in fact. So are our captors—the Transhumanists, they’re called. Don’t ask me how it’s done; I couldn’t begin to explain that to you. But ask yourselves this: could this ship, or the weapons you’ve seen, have come from anywhere in
your
time?”

Hazeltine’s expression was one of fascination warring with incredulity. Carver’s was simply blank. McCready’s reflected a struggle to assimilate the outrageous statement he had just heard. He was the first to find his voice.

“See here, Mr. Thanou—or whatever your real name is—”

“That’s one of the two things I didn’t lie about. The other is that the Transhumanists are my enemies, as well as yours. The fact that I and my party are locked up here with you should prove that.”

“I suppose it might. But . . . if what you’re saying is true, what the devil are you doing here?”

“Mondrago and I—that’s also his real name, by the way—are, well, police. The others with me are soldiers. We came back to this time to do our duty, which is to combat the Transhumanists. They captured us. We escaped. That was when we met you. I was hoping to come up with a scheme to take this ship, and persuade you to help us.”

McCready seemed able to take all this in—he didn’t even remark on the fact that the soldiers included two women. But Hazeltine frowned with thought.

“I say, if you people are mucking about in your own past, won’t you . . . well, rather mess things up for the world you came from? Including, I should think, yourselves.”

Jason’s estimation of his intelligence went up another notch. “The possibility of doing that is strictly limited by something we call the ‘Observer Effect.’ But there are ways around it—nooks and cracks in recorded history. That’s why, for example, the Transhumanists can snatch a small, isolated unit like yours in a remote war zone like the North-West Frontier. For all anyone knows, that Pathan ambush today wiped you out. And taking advantage of this to ‘mess things up’ for the future is exactly what the Transhumanists are trying to do. My job is to stop them.”

The three sergeants spent a moment absorbing this. Then McCready shook his head as though to clear it of everything but immediate practicalities. “All right. Let’s say you’re telling the truth. Where are they taking us? Have they got some sort of hideout over the mountains, someplace like Kafiristan?”

Jason had to smile. “I’m afraid we’re going a lot further than that. We’re going to another planet—another world.”

After a moment, Hazeltine broke the silence. “Another planet . . . like Mars, you mean?”

This, Jason reminded himself, was the era of Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell. “Not Mars. A planet you’ve never heard of, called Drakar. A planet of another sun—a star so distant that its light takes almost sixty-four years to travel here.”

Carver’s face was a study in rejection. “Light
traveling
? Garn! What does that even
mean
?”

“No, he’s right,” Hazeltine assured him. “Over thirty years ago, a scientist named Foucault measured the speed at which light travels. And recently, I’ve heard of some experiments by a pair of Americans named Michelson and Morley.” Then he seemed to realize the implications, and turned to Jason. “But if it’s
that
far away, how can we possibly get there? How long are we going to be aboard this ship?”

“A little over three weeks.” All three sergeants gaped, although not, Jason suspected, for identical reasons. “Remember, I said we’re moving very fast. We’re going to be moving a
lot
faster.”

“But
why
?” McCready’s face wore a look of pained incomprehension. “We and our men and these Pathan women have got nothing to do with the games you and these, uh, Transhumanists are playing with each other. Why are they taking us to this Drakar planet?”

“As slaves,” said Jason bluntly.

It seemed to stun the trio even more than everything else he had said.

“Did you say, ‘slaves’?” asked McCready in a dangerous voice.

The
bhisti
, squatting nearby, overheard it and got to his feet, drawing himself up indignantly. “Who is slave? I am soldier!” Then, wilting under McCready’s glare, he amended in a small voice, “Well, regimental
bhisti
.”

“They’re starting a colony on Drakar, so that over the next five hundred years it can grow in secret into a powerful ally for them,” Jason explained. “But their numbers are very limited. They need a labor force. So they’ve kidnapped people—some from our own era, and taken them back in time. But you’re not the first from late-nineteenth-century India.”

He wasn’t sure they were even listening. McCready just continued to glare. “Slaves?” blurted Carver. “
Slaves?
See ’ere, I’m an
Englishman!
What do they think I am? A nigger?”

“To them,” said Jason, “we’re all ‘niggers.’ Except that the word they use is ‘Pugs.’”

“Slaves,” was all Hazeltine said, in a dull dead voice.

“Not if I can help it,” said Jason firmly. “I have a ship waiting for us in the planetary system of Drakar. Once we arrive, we have a chance if we can make contact with it.”

“How are we going to do that?” asked Hazeltine, sounding more alive.

“I have no idea. We’ll just have to improvise. But . . . well, I’m not one to give up.”

“Neither are we,” growled McCready.

“And as for our men,” said Carver, “well, just let me tell you about Sikhs . . .”

Stoneman had gotten greedy. The compartment was hideously overcrowded, and there were more prisoners than there were bunks. They organized a system of shifts, and segregated the sexes, with Rojas and Armasova taking charge of the women.

At first, the Pathans refused to eat the mess in the trough, lest it contain any unclean items. But then, one by one, they began to consume it with no more distaste than that occasioned by its repulsiveness. And after a while, the women’s improvised veils began to come off. It was as though verities dissolved in the face of incomprehensibly alien horror.

They tried to occupy their minds, simply to hold the stultifying boredom and discomfort and hunger at bay. The IDRF Commandos learned to communicate in nineteenth-century English, and all the time travelers picked up some Urdu. The Sikhs and Pathans, after they had gotten past ancestral antipathy, began to evolve a patois synthesized from Urdu and Pushtu, with a lot of English words. One way or another, they all came to be able to communicate after a fashion.

Occasionally, at odd intervals, guards with the dread batons entered on surprise inspections. Otherwise, the only times they saw their captors were the two occasions of which the guards came to bear away one of the women. It took McCready’s best parade-ground roar to keep the Sikhs from trying to intervene, Muslims though the women were. Afterwards, when the desolately sobbing women were flung back in, all the men gave them as much space as possible while Rojas administered what comfort she could.

One “day,” Jason was sitting with his back to a bulkhead. Carver settled down beside him. “Listen, mate, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“These Transhumanists . . .” The sergeant paused to organize his thoughts. “You’ve never really told us much about them, except that they’re your enemies. But
why
are you fighting them? I mean, besides their bein’ a lot of bloody slavers.”

“Well . . . for about a hundred years, in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries, they ruled the world. A revolution overthrew them, and they went into hiding. Now, in my time, they want to rule the world again.”