“Try me, my lord,” answered Pum. A sudden calm had come upon him.
“I will! Let’s go!” Everard strode so fast that the youth must trot to keep up.
Basic indoctrination would take days, assuming Pum could handle it. That was okay, though. It would take a while anyway to collect the necessary intelligence and organize a task force. Besides, meanwhile there would be Bronwen. Everard couldn’t tell if he himself would live through the conflict. Let him first receive whatever joy came his way, and try to give it back.
Captain Baalram was reluctant. “Why should I enroll your son?” he demanded. “I’ve a full crew already, including two apprentices. This one is a landlubber born, small, and scrawny.”
“He’s stronger than he seems,” replied the man who called himself Adiyaton’s father. (A quarter century hence, he would call himself Zakarbaal.) “You’ll find him clever and willing. As for experience, everybody begins with none, true? See here, sir. I’m anxious for him to get into a trading career. For the sake of that, I’ll be happy to… make it worth your while personally.”
“Well, now.” Baalram smiled and stroked his beard. “That’s different. What amount of tuition had you in mind?”
Adiyaton (who, a quarter century hence, would have no precautionary need not to call himself Pummairam) looked gleeful. Inwardly, he shivered, for he gazed upon a man who must soon die.
From where the Patrol squadron waited, high in heaven, the storm was a blue-black mountain range crouched on the northern horizon. Elsewhere the sea reached argent and sapphire across the curve of the planet, save where islands broke the sheen and, eastward, the Syrian coast made a darkling line. Low in the west, the sun shone as cold as the blue around it. Wind whittered in Everard’s ears.
On the front saddle of his time hopper, he huddled into a parka. The rear seat was empty, like those of about “half the two-score vehicles that shared the sky with him. Their pilots hoped to transport prisoners.
The rest were guncraft, eggs of armor wherein fire waited to hatch. Light clanged off metal.
Damn! Everard thought. I’m freezing. How much longer? Has something gone wrong? Did Pum betray himself to the enemy, or has his equipment failed, or what?
A receiver dial secured to the steering bar beeped and winked red. Breath exploded out of him, white vapor that the wind strewed and swallowed. Despite his years as a hunter of men, he must gulp before he could snap into his throat mike: “Signal received by commander. Triangulation stations, report.”
Down ahead, in wrack and spindrift, the enemy band had appeared. They had commenced their evil labors. But Pum had reached inside his garb and pressed the button on a miniature radio transmitter.
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.
Everard was quicker to shoot. A thin beam stabbed. The man’s scream was lost in the gale. Likewise was his weapon. He gaped at seared flesh and naked bone on that wrist.
Here Everard felt no pity. But he had not wanted to slay, in this encounter. Live captives, under painless, harmless, absolute psychointerrogation, could direct the Patrol to the lairs of all sorts of interesting villainies.
Everard lowered his vehicle. Its motor throbbed, holding it in place against the waves that crashed over it, the wind that tore and hooted and chilled. His legs clenched tight on the frame. He leaned from his saddle, got a hold on the semiconscious man, lifted him and laid him across the bow. Okay, let’s get some altitude!
It was sheer chance, but not the less satisfying, that he, Manse Everard, turned out to be the Patrol agent who clapped hands on Merau Varagan.