The horizon pivoted to lie flat, dancing in the heat-ripples, sinking out of sight as a rising bulwark of worn and sunbleached wood rose to cut off my view. Above me, the masts, spars, and cordage of a sailing ship thrust up, swaying, against a lush blue sky. Hypnobriefed data popped into focus: I recognized the typical rigging of a sixteenth-century Portuguese galleass.
But not a real galleass, I knew somehow. A replica, probably from the Revival, circa A.D. 2220; a fine reproduction, artfully carved and fitted and weather-scarred, probably with a small reactor below decks, steel armor under the near-oak hull planking, and luxury accommodations for an operator and a dozen holiday-makers.
I became aware of background sounds; the creak of ropes and timbers, a mutter of talk, a shout, heavy rumblings. Something thudded on deck. The ship heeled sharply; stinging salt spray came over the weather rail and made me gasp. I blinked it away and saw another ship out there, half a mile away across the water, a heavy two-decker, with three masts, flying a long green pennant with a gray-white Maltese cross. Little white puffs appeared all along her side, with bright flashes at their centers. A moment later, a row of water spouts appeared in the sea, marching in a row across our bows. Then the baroom—om! came rolling after, like distant thunder.
My ideas underwent a sudden and drastic change. The picture of a party of holiday-makers cruising the Caribbean in their make-believe pirate ship vanished like the splashes made by the cannon-balls fired by the galleon. They were shooting real guns, firing real ammunition, that could make a real hole in the deck right where I was lying.
I rolled to my feet and looked aft. A knot of men were there, grouped around a small deck gun they seemed to be having trouble wrestling into position. They were dressed in sixteenth-century costumes, worn, soiled, and sweat-stained. One of them was bleeding from a cut on the face. The wound looked much too authentic to be part of a game.
I dropped down behind a large crate lashed to the deck, containing a live turtle with a chipped and faded shell a yard in diameter. He looked as old and tired and unhappy as I felt.
Shouts, and something came fluttering down from aloft to slap against the deck not far from me: a tattered banner, coarse cloth, crudely dyed, sunfaded, with a device of an elongated green chicken with horns writhing on a dirty yellow background. Heraldry was never my strong suit; but I didn’t need further clues to deduce that I was in the middle of a sea fight that my side seemed to be losing. The galleon was noticeably bigger now, coming across on the other tack. More smoke blossomed and there was a whistle and a crash up for’ard like an oil stove blowing up, and splinters rained down all around me. One of the men at the fantail went down gushing scarlet and thrashing like a boated carp. More yells, running feet. Somebody dashed past my hiding place, shouted something, maybe at me. I stayed put, waiting for an inspiration to come along and tell me what to do.
I got it in the form of a squat swarthy man in bare brown feet, faded pinkish leggings, baggy breeches of a yellowish black, a broad hand-hacked leather belt supporting a cutlass that looked as if it had been hammered out of an old oil barrel. He stood over me and yelled, waving a short, thick arm. I got to my feet and he yelled again, waved aft, and dashed off that way.
He hadn’t seemed very surprised to see me; and I had almost understood what he was yelling about. That fool Gonzalo had been idiot pig enough to get himself a gutful of taffrail, it seemed he’d said. My presence was urgently desired to assist in manning the four-pounder.
The damned fool, I heard myself snarling. Dump the cannon over the side to lighten ship; our only chance is to outrun them, and even that’s impossible. . . .
Something screamed through the air like a rocket and a length of rope came coiling at me and caught me across the face and threw me across the deck. Somebody jumped over me; a piece of spar the size of my thigh slammed the deck and bounced high over the side. The ship was heeling again, coming around; things were sliding across the deck; then the sails were slatting, taken aback. Wind swept across the deck, cool and sweet. More thunder, more crashes, more yells, more running feet. I found a sheltered spot in the scuppers, not too fastidious now about the pinkish scum sloshing there, and watched the mainmast lean, making noises like pistol shots, and go crashing over the windward side, trailing a ballooning tent of cloth that split and settled over the stern and was pulled over the side by the current, taking along a man or two who were trapped under it. Things were falling from above like the aftermath of a dynamite blast. Something dark loomed and suddenly spars and sails were sliding across up above, and then an impact threw me on my face and went on and on, grinding splinters, snapping lines, tilting the deck. . . .
I slipped and slithered, caught a rope, held on, jammed against the side of the small cabin. The galleon was still scraping alongside, looking enormous. Men were in her rigging and lined up along her waist ten feet above our deck, shouting and waving fists and swords. I was looking down the black muzzles of cannons that slipped past, staring from dark square windows with smoke-blackened faces grinning behind them. Grappling hooks came down, slid and caught in the splintered decking. Then men were leaping down, spilling over the rail, overrunning the deck. The seaman who had yelled at me ran forward and a saber swung at his head; it didn’t seem like much of a blow, but he went down, very bloody, and the boarders crowded past, fanning out, yelling like demons. I hugged the deck and tried to look hors de combat. A big barrel-chested fellow swinging a machete with a badly bent blade came bounding my way; I rolled far enough to get a hand on my Mauser and got it up in time and put two through his broad, sweat-gleaming, hair-matted chest and kicked aside as he fell hard on the spot where I’d been lying. In the mêlée the shots hadn’t been audible.
A little fellow with bare, monkeylike legs was trying to climb the foremast; someone jumped after him, caught him, pulled him back down. Someone went over the rail, alive or dead I wasn’t sure. Then they were just milling around, yelling as loud as ever, but waving their cutlasses instead of hacking with them—except for the few who were lying here and there like broken toys, ignored, out of it, holding their wounds together with their hands and mumbling the final Hail Mary’s.
Then I saw the Karg.
10
There was no doubt of his identity. To the untrained eye a Class-One Karg—the only kind ever used in Timesweep work—was indistinguishable from any other citizen. But my eye wasn’t untrained. Besides which, I knew him personally.
He was the same Karg I’d left in the hotel room back in Buffalo, defunct, with a soft-nosed slug in the left zygomatic arch.
Now here he was, pre-Buffalo, with no hole in his head, climbing down onto the deck as neat and cool as if it had all been in fun. From the draggled gold lace on his cuffs and the tarnished brass hilt on his sword, I gathered that he was a person of importance among the victors. Possibly the captain; or maybe officer in charge of the marines. They were listening to him, falling into ragged ranks, quieting down.
The next step would be the telling off of details for a systematic looting of the ship, with a side-order of mercy killing for anyone unlucky enough to have survived the assault.
From what I remembered of conditions in the holds of Spanish ships of the time, a fast demise was far preferable to the long voyage home, with the galleys at the end of it. I was just beginning to form a hopeless plan for creeping out of sight and waiting for something that looked like an opportunity to turn up, when the door I was lying against opened. Tried to open, that is. I was blocking it, so that it moved about two inches and jammed tight. Somebody inside gave it a hearty shove and started through. I saw a booted leg and an arm in a blue sleeve with gold buttons. He got that far and stuck. Something on his belt seemed to be caught in the door hardware. The Karg’s head had turned at the first sound. He stared for a long, long time that was probably less than a second, then whipped up a handsome pearl-mounted wheel-lock pistol, raised it deliberately, aimed—