The Empire of Time (The Chronoplane Wars Book 1) Read online

  “Not very friendly, are they?”

  “They usually aren’t. Stupid not to include tranquilizers in our drug kits—but nobody expects a rendezvous to be missed.”

  “Well, they’ll be little lambs after we get them back to camp.”

  Pierce liked Carmody a lot. She was a tall, slender Irish girl with brains as well as Trainability; she had been sleeping with him since the mission began, and he was beginning to think she might be a long-term partner.

  “Well, let’s get going,” he said.

  “Oooh!” Carmody gasped. She crumpled, the shaft of a spear drooping from her belly. Pierce spun around and saw a tall, one-eyed Black man less than twenty meters away, crouched in the waist-high yellow grass, his arm already drawn back to launch another spear. The endo children cried out in relief and fright.

  Automatically, Pierce thumbed his rifle to Impact 10 and fired. The spearman howled and fell back, his blood vivid against his skin in the pure morning light.

  Pierce and Cherois found cover and awaited any other attackers, but there were none. The children became hysterical, and Cherois’s cuffs and shouts only upset them more. One of the girls finally broke away and ran to the body of the spearman; the other two followed her. They embraced the blood-streaked corpse, shrieking and sobbing.

  Carmody was dying. An antishock drug kept her conscious, but she was obviously finished.

  “The sky is so blue, Jerry,” Carmody whispered. “The sky is so blue. The sky.” She turned her head toward Pierce, her eyes bright with the elation of some ultimate, all-revealing discovery. “Look at the sky.” Then she was dead, though her eyes were as bright as ever.

  Cherois stood ineffectually beside the screaming children.

  “What now?” he called.

  “We wait for the copter.”

  In a scorching noon it finally appeared, the pilot waving blithely to them through the bubble. The children huddled together, eyes blank with terror. Flies had been crawling for hours over the bodies of Carmody and the endo. Pierce had to carry each child into the copter. Cherois brought in Carmody’s body.

  “What about the endo?” he asked.

  Pierce was strapping the children down. “We don’t have time to bury him. A gift to the ecosystem of the Sahara.”

  The copter lifted in a whirlwind of dust. The children, looking out the open door, saw the spearman’s body dwindle; they began to rock back and forth, faces in their hands.

  *

  The deck of HMS Trident was a welter of shattered wood, broken iron, and smoldering canvas. A dozen dead men had been dragged into a tidy row along the starboard gunwale, and Pierce trod on one as he boarded the vanquished warship. A squad of Agency marines followed him, rifles at port arms. Pierce made his way to the afterdeck, where the ship’s surviving officers stood in a formal cluster.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” Pierce said, feeling foolish in his Napoleonic admiral’s uniform. His eyes stung from the tear gas.

  A young officer, his face pale, stepped forward.

  “Lieutenant George Dunstable, sir. I am the senior officer; Captain Wheeler is dead.”

  “Gerald Pierce—your servant, sir. I am acting on behalf of the French government, although I am a citizen of the International Federation.”

  “We deduced as much, sir, from the nature of your craft.” A hundred meters to starboard, the combat hovercraft Waltzing Matilda rode the swell. She looked absurdly small next to the vast, smelly bulk of the Trident. “Your weaponry has carried the day, Admiral Pierce. It is my duty to surrender this vessel—”

  “Permit me, Lieutenant Dunstable, to interrupt. I have no desire to seize your ship, sir, nor to make captives of you or your crew. In fact, I wish to see you all safely back in England as soon as possible.”

  “Sir, I beg your forgiveness, but I fail to understand.”

  “Lieutenant, my superiors wish to see the blockade of the French coast lifted forthwith, and the resumption of French maritime commerce. My superiors are not interested in local politics. I am sending you back to Plymouth with a videotape of this morning’s engagement. I sincerely hope, sir, that your superiors will thereby understand that we are quite capable of destroying the entire British Navy in short order. In a day, sir! And we will, unless this war against Napoleon ceases at once.”

  “Sir, before I can do as you suggest, I must advise Admiral Fletcher. I believe his ship is presently off Le Havre—it will be some days—”

  “Admiral Fletcher has already been advised by radio.”

  Dunstable nodded. Most civilized Beulan endos knew something of radio and television, though few had encountered them personally.

  “Sir, I beg leave to make a request of you. Your surgeons are by repute the finest in the world. I would deem it an act of charity were you kind enough to minister to our men. Almost forty are wounded; not half will live to see England, unless you condescend to help.”

  Pierce raised his eyebrows. “Have you enough men to sail for home?”

  “Yes, sir—”

  “Then, sir, that is all I am concerned about. We are not in the business of nursing our opponents back to health. If you lose twenty men, thank your pigheaded Sea Lords and their pigheaded masters for it. If they are not utterly lost to reason, they will see in those bodies some measure of our sincerity. Good day, Lieutenant—gentlemen—and bon voyage.”

  *

  The evening was warm and humid, full of the promise of the monsoon. In the garden of the Agency compound, Pierce and Dr. Chatterjee strolled back and forth. They had enjoyed a splendid dinner, and the servants had withdrawn.

  “I understand your position, Mr. Pierce, but I am afraid I must refuse to cooperate. In fact, cooperation would destroy the Freedom Party’s credibility with the masses, and you would be no better off than you are now.”

  “You underestimate your influence.” Pierce smiled. “We are quite confident that a properly worded statement by you would reconcile ninety percent of the emigrants to their move downtime.”

  Dr. Chatterjee laughed, an oddly pleasant laugh in a man so serious. “The remaining ten percent are three hundred thousand people. How will you move anyone if three hundred thousand choose to resist you?”

  Pierce stopped walking, and looked into Dr. Chatterjee’s deep-set eyes.

  “We are prepared to incur an attrition rate of substantially more than ten percent in effecting this movement”

  “An attrition rate?”

  “As you know, I’m sure, our projections indicate a minimum of four hundred thousand deaths above normal in the Greater Calcutta region in the next two years—from disease, civil disorders, and famine. We are quite prepared to lose that many, and more, to accomplish the move. In fact, there is a rather bloody-minded group within the Agency who would prefer a good fight. They feel we would eliminate what they call socially volatile elements.”

  Dr. Chatterjee began walking again. “I expected to hear some such threat. But actually to hear it is terribly upsetting.”

  “Actually to say it is also upsetting. There is no need for anyone to die, if only people will cooperate.”

  “Mr. Pierce—put yourself in our place. We are not consulted; we have no say in when or how we shall be moved; we have no assurance that we shall be safe from native diseases—or, for that matter, from the natives. Our culture is being irreparably distorted. And why? Because we are . . . unTrainable. Yet surely we have some rights, some freedoms.”

  “There is no such thing as freedom,” murmured Pierce. “Consider this, Dr. Chatterjee. I wish to pluck this flower. If I do, my actions are determined by what I must do to obtain the flower. I must reach, grasp, pluck—” The small white blossom disintegrated at his touch.

  “They are very delicate,” Dr. Chatterjee observed.

  “Then my next attempt will be still less free. I must, after all, consider the consequences of my actions, and therefore I must limit my actions. In any case, how did I come to choose to pluck a flower at all, let alone
that particular one? What made me choose to discuss this subject with you? The impulses came unbidden into my mind, did they not?”

  “Then you do not believe in freedom at all?”

  “I do not perceive freedom at all. I perceive people obeying compulsion, internal or external. Freedom is something only God can enjoy—and then only if He does not care about the consequences of His actions. Which may very well be the case.”

  “Then, to use your own facile terms, I obey my own internal compulsion to remain here in Calcutta, on Earth; I reject your Agency’s external compulsion. We shall resist this deportation with every means at our disposal.” He extended his hand. “I bear you no personal ill will, Mr. Pierce. You are a likable man, for a slave. Thank you, and good night.”

  Pierce shook his hand. “Good-bye, Dr. Chatterjee.”

  As the tall, graying Indian turned to leave the garden, Pierce drew his Mallory .15 and fired. Dr. Chatterjee, knocked forward by the impact, fell heavily into a flower bed.

  *

  The Hutterite community was a cluster of barns, silos, and houses in a shallow valley. It was brutally cold, and a little snow sifted down out of the pale January sky.

  Pierce had no real business being here in this minor deportation, but, having been in Calgary, he had decided to make the short helicopter flight north to witness the move. This particular Hutterite Gemein, unlike most of them, had chosen to fight deportation in the courts, and had nearly won. The Agency, alarmed, had exerted considerable influence on the Canadian Supreme Court as well as initiating a media fog on the whole case. As a punitive step, the Gemein would be shipped to a bleak, uninhabited area in central Texas on Tharmas; the other Hutterite communities had been allowed to settle together in the relatively benign climate of Durango on Vala.

  The buses were drawn up in a row outside the compound, their engines rumbling. A bell clanged somewhere, and the adults slowly emerged from their meeting hall. The women wore heavy coats over their long skirts, and their bonnets were incongruously colorful. The men wore sheepskin jackets, black cowboy hats, close-trimmed beards. Many wore glasses; centuries of inbreeding had made the Hutterites nearsighted.

  When the children emerged from the Klein-Schul, Pierce recalled that fertility was another inbred Hutterite quality, and one which would have made them candidates for deportation even if they had not resisted recruitment of their Trainable children. There were many children, nine or ten in the average family. They dressed like their parents, and their faces were clear and rosy in the cold air. An old woman supervised them; she had little to do, for they were quiet and well behaved.

  As the adults began loading their luggage into the buses, Pierce walked over to the children. A girl of ten or eleven regarded him tranquilly.

  Pierce smiled. “Guten Tag.”

  “Guten Tag, mein Herr.” Her German was oddly accented, a fossil dialect preserved far from its sixteenth-century Bohemian homeland, but Pierce followed it well enough.

  “What is your name?”

  “Anna.”

  “That is a very pretty name. My name is Jerry.”

  She said nothing. The old woman watched him uneasily.

  “Would you like some chocolate?” He took a candy bar from the pocket of his overcoat.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Are you sure? It’s very good.”

  “No, thank you. Sir, why do you hate us so?”

  Pierce was taken aback. “I do not hate you, Anna. Not at all.”

  “Then that is even worse.”

  Pierce pressed the chocolate bar into her hand. She threw it away and ran to the old woman.

  “Okay, folks, let’s get a move on! Got a date with an I-Screen in Vancouver tomorrow morning.” The move officer, a nervous fat man, began herding the people onto the buses. The children followed the old woman across the crusty snow, trampling the chocolate into brown fragments.

  Pierce walked back across the snow to his waiting helicopter. “Let’s get the hell out of this dump!” he barked at the pilot.

  *

  The town was called Garibaldi; it reposed at the bottom of a lush green Sicilian valley on Urthona. Its ten thousand inhabitants were mostly Radical Catholics, and the southern European states of Earth were heartily glad to be rid of them. At dawn, standing on a ridge four kilometers from the town, Pierce admired what their industry had accomplished in just six years: orchards, vineyards, whitewashed houses, kitchen gardens, an austere cathedral beginning to rise above the red-tiled roofs. It looked like an ideal example of a successful cultie settlement.

  Unfortunately, Garibaldi also supplied the local separatist movement with food, money, and recruits; over a thousand guerillas were operating in Sicily and North Africa, and doing much too well. Garibaldi was to become a lesson and a warning.

  Pierce turned to the major of Agency artillery who had accompanied him to this vantage point. The major was a tall, tanned Afrikaner exile, one of many who had found good careers in the Agency’s service.

  “Major, you may proceed.”

  “Very good, sir.” The major muttered nasally into his ringmike; three seconds later, a dozen columns of white smoke rose into the sky from all around the town. They curved gently, then steeply, converging on the houses and shops around the cathedral.

  The operation was mercifully swift. Half the town was pulverized, the other half merely ruined. More rockets fell: the orchards exploded in flames, the houses erupted and collapsed into piles of broken bricks, the cathedral vanished. Smoke and dust enveloped the ruins.

  The major handed Pierce a pair of electronic binoculars that brought the town almost close enough to touch. Pierce watched a young woman stumble out of the empty doorway of her home. Her clothes were on fire and her face was destroyed; blood pulsed brightly from her throat. Hands outstretched, she shuffled a few steps into the street and fell. Her clothes continued to burn.

  “Excellent binoculars,” Pierce remarked as he handed them back.

  “Nikon. Cost me a bloody fortune. But they’re worth it. Bloody Japs are bloody clever with optics.”

  “Yes.”

  *

  It was a quiet Tuesday morning, and Pierce sat in the study of his apartment, flicking through hundreds of pages of follow-up memos on recent operations. It was dull but necessary work, and he could at least take frequent breaks.

  The computer-terminal flickerscreen moved at a preset rate of sixteen pages per second, fast but comfortable for Pierce, and he felt jolted when it paused for a moment, flashed restricted memorandum, and resumed its normal speed with the next item. Pierce halted it at once and punched back to the restricted memo. He respected security, of course, but this was something about one of his own operations; he had a right to know.

  His Training was thorough and up-to-date, so it did not take him long to outwit the computer’s security barriers. Five seconds after doing so, he had read and absorbed the memorandum.

  Filed by an epidemiological team on Luvah, it described the flare-up and control of a nasty artificial influenza called Strain Zeta. Pierce, visiting his mother in Puerto Cortines on Luvah, had witnessed an endo raid on the little resort settlement. On his return to Earth, he had recommended the introduction of Zeta to the endo tribes of the Yucatán. That had been just over a month ago.

  Zeta, a usefully plastic virus, had been tailored for use against Luvah’s endos; within a week of its deployment, it had virtually eradicated all the tribes within a hundred kilometers of Puerto Cortines. Then it had mutated—as sometimes happened with artificial viruses—and seventy two hours later everyone in Puerto Cortines was dead. AID had promptly sealed off the whole peninsula, and Strain Zeta died out, a victim of its own virulence.

  Pierce sat quietly for a few minutes. When he lifted his ringmike to his lips, his hand was shaking.

  “Dr. Suad?”

  *

  He was lying on the water bed, screaming, out of his mind, yet somehow aware that Suad was nearby, a dark presence in the sha
dows.

  “It is very hard, Mr. Pierce,” Suad said when Pierce’s voice failed at last. “We sometimes must ask you to do some terrible things—terrible things. They are all in a good cause, but it is hard to take the long view when you are so close, eh? And you must do these things without reflection, without question, as if they were second nature. It is very hard.

  “So we Brief you and condition you, and when you come back we lock away the memories where they won’t bother you. We even give you false memories. Where is your mother now, Mr. Pierce?”

  “Dead. Dead.”

  “Of course not. She is suffering from chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and you have sent her to the Instituto Respiratorio in Nuevo Juárez. You have been writing to her every week for almost three months, ever since she moved from Puerto Cortines. She writes you less often, because she is so weak. But she is happy there, and the treatment she gets is excellent—excellent!”

  “That’s a lie, God damn you.”

  “Lies are only what we do not believe. You will believe me, Mr. Pierce. And when you do, you will feel very, very much better. You always do.” He chuckled. “You come out of here a new man.”

  The injections began.

  *

  Occasionally, Pierce was aware of a little hollow among sand dunes where the sun was warm whenever the wind died down. He was holding a small, hard hand; it was comforting, but not as vivid, not as real, as the memories that burst in his mind like flares over a ravaged battlefield. He could smell the tobacco on the Afrikaner’s breath, feel the deck of the Trident swaying under his feet, see the burning girl fall into the street.

  Somewhere in the middle of the Clearing, Anita dissolved the block on his Briefing. Thickly, with a tongue that seemed swollen, he said: “That’s it. Very, very interesting . . . Keep going.”

  Her hand tightened on his.

  Then it was over. He rubbed his face while Anita dressed; her skin was covered with gooseflesh. About ninety minutes had passed. She huddled next to him, pulling a blanket around them.

  “You look terrible,” he muttered.

  “So do you.”