Sunset of the Gods (30 page)

He emerged from the labyrinth of alleys and buildings into the open area where the unfinished temple stood, just in time to see Franco drag Chantal between two of the topless columns. He followed, circling around and passing through the colonnades at another point. Franco had mounted the open-topped aircar and was pulling Chantal up onto it.

“But you said you’d let me go!” she protested, struggling to resist.

“Don’t be even stupider than you have to be. I lied, of course. No, I think I’ll take you with me. I can amuse myself with you in various ways before my TRD activates. By then, you’ll be begging me to kill you. But I probably won’t. No, I believe I’ll just leave you permanently stranded . . . an unattached woman with no family, in this society . . . maimed and disfigured, as you’ll be by then after what I’ll have done to you . . . yes.” With a final heave of his good arm, Franco hauled her up onto the aircar.

Jason stepped out from behind his concealing column. “Hi!” he called out with a jaunty wave. In his hand was a small black object: the remote control unit Pan had given him.

Franco and Chantal, standing on the aircar’s edge, both stared.

Jason pressed the stud.

The autopilot awoke, and under its control the aircar lurched aloft.

Chantal lost her balance and fell a few feet. The impact, landing on her burned left arm, brought a gasping shriek of pain.

But Jason’s attention was fixed on the swiftly rising aircar. Franco was windmilling his arms, frantically trying to regain his balance. But he toppled over the side. He managed to catch the rim and hold on as the aircar rose still higher and began to swing into a southward course.

Jason took careful aim with his disguised laser carbine and burned Franco in his good right shoulder. With a cry of pain, the Transhumanist lost his grip and fell. He hit the stump of an unfinished column face-first with bone-cracking force, then fell the rest of the way to the ground and lay still. The aircar continued on its way, and would plunge into the sea, vanishing from an era in which it did not belong.

Jason walked over to Franco. The Transhumanist’s ribcage was crushed, and when he tried to speak only a feeble, gurgling hiss of agony emerged from between his splintered teeth, along with a froth of blood.

Jason drew his dagger, but then stopped.
Why bother
? He sheathed the dagger, turned away and went to examine Chantal. Her breathing was shallow, and aside from her laser burn, she had broken her right leg. But she would live. Franco’s noise had ceased by the time she regained consciousness.

“Lie still,” he told her. “You’re safe. Franco’s dead.”

“Jason,” she whispered weakly, “I’ve been a fool. I wish I could make amends, but I know I can’t, ever. I deserve to stay in this century and die.”

“You’re not going to. We’re going to take you back.”

“
What?
But how—?”

“Never mind. Just lie still,” Jason repeated. He heard footsteps behind him. It was his team.

“All done, sir,” Mondrago reported. “The charge is set. In fact, it ought to be—”

From the direction of the Acropolis, Jason thought he heard an extremely faint
crump
, but he knew it was probably his imagination. The explosive device they had used generated a momentary sound-deadening field at the instant of its detonation, rendering it effectively inaudible to Athens’ preoccupied citizens. If he’d heard anything, it must have been the rumble as the subterranean tunnel collapsed.

“We left Pan in there as ordered, sir,” Da Cunha added.

“Good. It’s a fitting tomb for him.” Jason smiled. “No one will ever know who’s lying under the Acropolis.”

“When the Athenians offer their annual sacrifices to Pan at the grotto,” mused Logan in the thoughtfully deliberate way he always seemed to speak, on the rare occasions when he did it at all, “they’ll never dream that the real thing is entombed inside it.”

“Interesting point.” Jason handed his “walking stick” to Mondrago and, with great care, put one arm under Chantal’s knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her up. She gasped with pain but clung to his neck. He focused his mind, preparatory to giving a neural command. “All right. Is everybody ready? Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The great domed displacer chamber
was almost exactly as they had left it a couple of hours earlier. Rutherford had to all appearances never moved. After his initial startlement at their appearance, he brusquely motioned forward the waiting medical team. Jason handed Chantal over to them.

“How is she?” he asked as soon as they had laid her on a stretcher and brought their medical sensors to bear.

“She’s in a great deal of pain,” a doctor replied as he gave her a hypospray injection against that same pain. “And she’s in mild shock. But none of her injuries are life-threatening. She’s going to be fine.” He gestured, and his orderlies lifted the stretcher.

Chantal turned her head to meet Jason’s eyes, and spoke weakly. “Jason . . . thank you. I’m—”

“Hush. Don’t try to talk.”

“No, let me finish. I already knew I was wrong. But you’ve shown me just how very wrong I was, because what you’ve done has reminded me of what it is to be truly
human.
So now I know why—whatever humanity’s imperfections—we must always
remain
human. That is too precious a thing to be gambled away against the chance of something ‘superior’.” The effort of speaking seemed to exhaust her. The doctor gave a more peremptory gesture, and she was borne away. Only when she was out of sight did Jason turn to face Rutherford.

“Mission accomplished,” he reported wearily, “in all particulars. I’ll tell you the details later, in private. But the Transhumanist operation has been scotched, and their leader was killed. And I don’t think Dr. Frey’s loyalties are going to be in any question after this.”

“And the, uh, ‘cleanup’ aspects of the plan?” asked Rutherford anxiously.

“All done. The tunnel under the Acropolis behind the grotto was sealed, and no anachronistic hardware was left lying around.”

“Good.” Rutherford’s relief was palpable.

“Also, the being ‘Pan’ was killed by his own Transhumanist master.”

“Just as well,” said Rutherford offhandedly.

Jason glared at him. So, he noticed to his surprise, did Mondrago. “I suppose it could be regarded that way, from the standpoint of ‘cleanup.’ But . . . well, he kept his bargain with me, and he died trying to aid us. I think he’s entitled to just a little respect.”

“I meant no offense.” Rutherford seemed genuinely contrite, and Jason’s annoyance ebbed.

“None taken. And before we head for your office, there’s one other thing you’ll want to know, because it relates directly to one of the questions the original expedition sought to answer. As we learned then, the Olympian ‘gods’ were still alive and active in the flesh—at least the Teloi flesh—up to 490 b.c. But after that, for the most part, they became just what they’ve always been assumed to have been: myths.”

Rutherford’s eyes kept going to the sword that was his private office’s prize exhibit. Jason wasn’t sure why.

Finally Rutherford swung around to face Jason and Mondrago. “So not all of the Teloi were wiped out in this final confrontation with the Transhumanists?”

“No. Zeus, before he died, mentioned Aphrodite—or whatever names she was known by in the other Indo-European cultures—as being the pilot of the aircar that had dropped them off. So she and various others must have lived on afterwards; I can’t account for Athena or Artemis or Apollo, for example. And they could have continued to play the god game with the help of the self-repairing Teloi techno-magic devices. But remember, they were all members of the youngest Earth-born generation, which Oannes assured me suffered from a drastic reduction in life expectancy. They must have died off, and even before they did, the literal belief in their pantheon began to dissipate, leaving a void that was filled by various Eastern mystery religions and, finally, by Christianity.” Jason chuckled. “Knowing the Teloi, I have a feeling that the loss of human belief in them helped hasten their end.”

“Quite likely.” Rutherford turned brisk. “But, more to the point, about the Transhumanists. . . .”

“Yes. That’s the real problem. At least one of them survived, as we knew from the first was going to happen, since we didn’t have time to hunt down whoever sent the signal from Mount Pentelikon. So one or more of them were retrieved on schedule, as were the corpses of Franco and the others. The survivor or survivors didn’t know the details of Franco’s death, but they
did
know in general about our discovery of their presence. And they knew that Alexandre and I may have gotten back with that knowledge, even though we were earmarked for assassination down there on the battlefield.

“Incidentally, I’ve been using the past tense deliberately, because as you know, their expedition came from, and therefore returned to, a time somewhat prior to ours. So their linear present lies in our past—”

“I know,” interjected Rutherford bleakly, for he understood the implications.

“—and therefore by now they know that their scheme for a Pan cult was foiled, although they don’t know how. And they must regard it as at least a possibility that, as of a point slightly in their own future, we know about their underground and its extratemporal activities, so they’ll be on their guard. One good thing: when we went back we killed all the ones who actually saw us, so just exactly what happened on Mount Kotroni and at the grotto in Athens must be a mystery to them.”

“One other good thing,” Mondrago spoke up. “They know that we got Dr. Frey’s TRD back, so they’ll assume she was left to die in the fifth century b.c.”

“That’s right,” Jason agreed. “I suggest that we keep her presence here strictly under wraps, even to the extent of providing her with a new identity. I’m certain she’ll cooperate. And a debriefing by intelligence specialists ought to be productive.”

“Surely Franco didn’t give her a great deal of detailed and specific data about the Transhumanist underground,” said Rutherford dubiously.

“No, of course not, but he could hardly have avoided dropping some information in the course of her . . . association with him. He was an incorrigible braggart. She may turn out to be an ace in the hole for us.” Jason paused. “I don’t know what the final judicial determination of her case will be, or if it will even come to that. But if she ends up being sentenced to incarceration, I recommend that the time we keep her here be credited against her term.”

“I will pass along your recommendation, with my endorsement. Coming from a man whose death she almost caused, it should carry some weight. And you may quite possibly be right about her usefulness to us. But it goes without saying that she can provide no information on what the Transhumanists have been doing since Franco’s expedition. And as to what they may do in the future, the expeditions they may send back before we find this compact and energy-efficient temporal displacer of theirs, as we
must
find it . . . !” Rutherford shook his head slowly and looked at least his age.

“And,” said Mondrago, “we don’t know how riddled Earth is with these long-term secret organizations of theirs—we only aborted one of them, remember. We also don’t know when ‘The Day’ is scheduled to be, when all their long-term schemes are scheduled to come to fruition. Basically,” he concluded with a kind of pessimistic relish, “we don’t know much of anything at all.”

“One thing we do know,” said Jason grimly, and his eyes held Rutherford’s. “We know that the Temporal Service is going to have to change. The days of us being a sort of glorified tour guides are over. Oh, of course we’ll continue to send historical research expeditions back. But those expeditions are going to have to have more guards—very watchful guards. And above and beyond that, the Service is going to have to have a new unit whose full-time job is hunting down the Transhumanists across time the way we just did—a specialized combat section.”

Rutherford winced. “Perhaps we could call it the ‘Special Operations Section.’”

“Sounds good. Call it whatever you want. But for that section, at least, the old loose-jointed style isn’t going to work anymore. It’s going to have to be a military, or at least paramilitary, outfit—and outfits like that have the kind of organization they do, including a formalized rank structure, for a reason.”

“And I think I know just the man to head it,” Rutherford told him, with a very brief smile. Then his expression grew desolate again, as he contemplated the coming era of time wars. It was the look of an old man seeing his life’s assumptions and verities slipping irretrievably away into the past and vanishing, leaving him face to face with a harsh, unfamiliar, and unfriendly future in which he did not belong.

But then his eyes strayed to the fifteenth-century sword in his display case, the sword that had been borne by she who had come to symbolize the capacity of human beings to fight bravely and die gallantly for something they knew in their souls was worth dying—and killing—for. He seemed to draw strength from it. He turned back to Jason and spoke matter-of-factly.

“You will, of course, need to commence recruiting without delay.”

“Right. Da Cunha and Logan are, of course, obvious candidates. And we’ll need as wide a range of ethnic types as possible.”

“Sir,” Modrago blurted. “I want to be the first to sign up for this Special Ops Section of yours.”

“Satisfactory, Jason?” asked Rutherford with a lift of one eyebrow.

Jason pretended to consider. “Well, he’s an insubordinate wise-ass—”

“I can see how there might be a certain affinity, however reluctantly acknowledged,” Rutherford interjected drily.

“—but he’s an insubordinate wise-ass who is very handy to have around in a fight.” Jason turned to Mondrago. “I just might be able to use you. But I need to be sure you’ve got the right kind of motivation.”

“Well, sir, let me put it this way. Of course I’ve always hated Transhumanists, but mostly just because
everybody
hates them, if you know what I mean. Now I understand why I
ought
to hate them.” Mondrago seemed to seek for words to explain further, but then shook his head and spoke briefly. “It’s just something that has to be done.”