Radio. The Exaltationists wouldn’t anticipate something that primitive. Everard hoped.
Now, Pum, boy, are you able to find shelter, protect yourself, the way you were told to? Fear laid fingers around the Patrolman’s gullet. He’d doubtless begotten sons, here and there through the ages, but this was the closest he had ever come to having one.
Words crackled in his earphones. Numbers followed. Instruments a hundred miles apart had precisely found the beleaguered ship. Clocks had already recorded the first split second of reception. “Okay,” Everard said. “Compute spatial coordinates for each vehicle according to our strategy. Troopers, stand by for instructions.”
That required several minutes. He felt a chilly peace welling up within him. His unit was committed. At this exact moment, it was in battle yonder. Let that happen which the Norns willed.
The data came crisply. “Everybody set?” he called. “Advance!”
He himself verniered controls and flipped the main drive toggle. His machine sprang forward through space, backward through time, to the moment when Pum had hailed it.
Wind raved. The hopper rocked and yawed in its antigrav field. Fifty yards below, black in this gloom, waves roared. The spume blown off them was sleet-colored. Everard saw by the light of a great torch some ways off. A resinous mast, fanned by the storm, burned fiercely. Tarry, flaming pieces of the ship were quenched in steam as it broke apart.
Everard tugged down his optical amplifiers. Vision became stark. It showed him that his command had arrived correctly, so as to englobe the half-dozen enemy vehicles everywhere above the billows.
It had not come soon enough to prevent them from starting their butchery. They had done that on the instant of their own appearance. Not knowing where any one of them would be, but knowing that each was lethally well-armed, Everard had perforce caused his group to show up at a distance where it could assess the situation before the killers noticed it.
They would, in a heartbeat or two. “Attack!” Everard roared needlessly. His steed hurtled forward.
A blue-white hell-beam speared through murk. Zigzagging as he flew, he felt it miss him by inches: heat, sting of ozone, crack of air. He didn’t see it, for his goggles had automatically stopped down a glare that would have blinded.
Nor did he shoot back, though he drew his blaster. That wasn’t his business. Heaven was already lurid with such lightnings. The waters reflected them as if also afire.
There was no good way to seize any enemy pilots. Everard’s gunners had orders to kill, at once, before the reavers realized how outnumbered they were and skipped off into space-time. The job of the single-riding Patrolmen was to capture those spies who had been aboard the ship.
He didn’t expect he’d find them clinging to the sections of hull that swung to and fro in the swells and disintegrated. Men would check those, of course, just in case. But likeliest the travelers were afloat by themselves. They’d surely taken the precaution of wearing cartridge-inflatable life jackets under their contemporary kaftans.
Pum could not risk doing so. As a crewboy, he’d have looked wrong in much more than a loincloth. It served to conceal his transmitter, but nothing else. Everard had made certain he learned to swim.
Few Punic sailors could. Everard glimpsed one who gripped a plank. Almost, he went to the rescue. But no, he mustn’t. Baalram and his mariners had gone under – except for Gisgo, whose survival revealed itself to be no accident. The Patrol had pounced in time to save him from being hunted down as he drifted; and he had the strength to keep hold of his heavy sweep till it washed ashore. The rest, his shipmates, his friends – they died and their kin mourned them, as would be the fate of seafarers for the next several thousand years… and afterward spacefarers, timefarers….At least these men perished so that their people, and untold billions of people in the future, might live.
It was a bleak consolation.
Everard’s reheightened vision brought him sight of another head, unmistakable, yes, a man who bobbed about free as a cork – an enemy to take. He swung low. The man looked up out of froth and turmoil. Malignancy wrenched at his mouth. A hand rose from the water. It carried an energy pistol.