CHAPTER SEVEN
One of the three pursuers was a length ahead of the others. Jason rushed in front of him, to Boyer’s left, and as he moved he unslung his musket. Gripping it like a quarterstaff, he brought it around and slammed the butt into the man’s midriff, doubling him over.
“Get her out of here, Henri!” he shouted at Boyer. Not daring to turn and see if he was being obeyed, he brought the musket back up and backed off a step, as the other two men approached more cautiously, drawing their cutlasses. Off to the side, the man the black woman had kicked was getting to his feet, sooner than Jason would ordinarily have thought possible. But then, looking into their faces, he recognized some of the indicia of the Transhumanist strong-arm castes—“goons” as Special Ops people called them. It was nothing blatant—the Transhumanist underground naturally couldn’t send any of their grotesquely gene-modified varieties, or obvious cyborgs, back in time to milieus in which they would have stood out. But you could always tell if you knew what to look for in those mass-produced faces. Jason had no idea of the nature of their concealed bionics—his sensor couldn’t tell him that, only that they were present—but they wouldn’t be able to openly use anything too flashy.
Mondrago, Da Cunha and Grenfell had now joined him, cutlasses in hand. The Transhumanists hesitated, seeing themselves outnumbered as Nesbit took his place with the others. (If only they knew! he gibed to himself.) It was a tense momentary standoff, and he risked a glance over his shoulder at the woman. “Stay there!” he told her.
“I don’t want your help!” she snarled in an accent he couldn’t place. She was still trying to get up, her feet tangled in the rope. Boyer extended a hand to help her up. She angrily struck it away. Then her eyes met his for an instant, and she took his hand. He hauled her up. Then, with a swift judo-like motion, she swung his arm back around behind him and sent him sprawling face-down. Before Jason had time to react, she had burst through the ring of spectators and was sprinting along the dock.
For a fractional second, Jason stood frozen in unaccustomed indecision. Then he saw two more men emerge from the alley, holding pistols as though they were already loaded. He couldn’t be sure these were more Transhumanists, but if they were the balance had suddenly shifted.
And he badly wanted to know why Transhumanists were in pursuit of that spectacular-looking black woman. The first step was to find out who she was. And she was getting further away every second.
Then the two new arrivals took their place with the Transhumanists. The standoff clearly couldn’t last more than another couple of heartbeats.
“After her!” Jason yelled. He turned and broke through the crowd, eliciting bellows of outrage.
Before the Transhumanists could recover from their surprise, the others followed him, with Mondrago in the lead. Da Cunha grasped the arm of Nesbit, who stood gaping, and yanked him along. They all set out at a run, in the direction the black woman had taken.
The Transhumanists broke free of their paralysis and started out in pursuit. But the spectators had also recovered, and with Jason and his followers now gone they vented their indignation on the Transhumanists trying to break through the press. Glancing back over his shoulder, Jason saw that a full-fledged brawl had erupted. It would doubtless take the Transhumanists time to break free of it, time on which Jason was counting.
“Up ahead!” he shouted as he saw the woman turn left into another of the alleys leading south, away from the waterfront. They pounded after her, emerging from the vile-smelling mud alley onto a street running parallel with the water. At the intersection the street widened into a kind of square.
In the middle of the square sat a large cask. It had been broached, and gathered around it were a group of obvious buccaneers, holding out drinking jacks for refills from a man who was haranguing them in a booming voice as he passed out drinks, pausing only to take deep gulps of his own.
Jason didn’t immediately take all of it in, for at first he could only stare at that man.
He was sweating freely under the kind of three-piece suit that, thanks to the influence of King Charles II, had begun to replace the older jerkin-and-doublet as the dress of a gentleman. But around his waist was a wide, flamboyant scarlet sash, and over his right shoulder was a baldric from which a cutlass hung. An equally scarlet kerchief was tied around his head, and a purple plume was stuck in the cocked hat he wore over it. But Jason noticed none of this. It was the man himself he stared at. He had encountered a very few men who, for no reason that could be put into words, made it impossible to look anywhere else when they were present. This man was one.
He was moderately tall for this milieu, but one couldn’t help thinking of him as a very big man because the overwhelming impression was one of broad-shouldered, stocky power. One also got the impression, looking at the waist his red sash encompassed, that as he got older—he appeared to be in his mid-thirties—he might well develop a weight problem if he didn’t exercise a moderation which, Jason strongly suspected, was foreign to his nature.
But it was his face that really held the attention: broad, sun-bronzed to a shade even darker than its normal swarthiness. He sported a short pointed beard, neatly shaped but merging into a dense dark shadowing, for he was overdue for a shave. Under level black brows, his large dark-brown eyes twinkled and, Jason thought, missed very little. It was a mobile, expressive face, and, underneath the roistering, gargantuan laughter, an almost frighteningly intelligent one. Above all, it was a face that was full of life…more life, it seemed, than a single body ought to hold. This, Jason was sure, was a man who would not reach a great age; he would die early from having lived too much.
The black woman caught the man’s attention as she ran across the square. “Zenobia!” he bellowed. “Haven’t seen you in much too long. Here, have some rum! All who pass here must pause for a drink while I tell them of the expedition I’m planning—one that’ll make Portobello look like nothing, by God!” His deep voice held a kind of lilt that Jason, from various experiences in the past, recognized as the worn-down remnants of a Welsh accent.
The woman skidded to a halt. She looked back over her shoulder at Jason and his following. Then, coming to a sudden decision, she turned to the big, flamboyantly dressed man. “Aye, Captain, so I’ve heard. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to sign on with you.” He gave Jason another look, this time one of mocking triumph.
“Then come here and drink, girl!” The big man thrust a brimming jack into her hands. “Glad I am to have you and your crew of Maroon throat-cutters. And,” he added with a significant glance around, “if I hear any old women in breeks repeating any of those silly stories about you, I’ll hand them their balls, if they’ve got any.”
Mondrago came up alongside Jason. “What now, sir?” he muttered. “We’re following her because those were Transhumanists chasing her, right?”
“Right. And I want to know why they were. But we’d better play it cautiously for now. She’s obviously among friends.”
At that moment, the six Transhumanists burst into the square and headed toward Zenobia. She immediately flung aside her half-full drinking jack and turned to face them with a glare.
“What’s this?” demanded the big man, clearly appalled at the waste of rum.
“Ahoy, Captain!” The Transhumanist who seemed to be the leader swaggered forward and pointed theatrically at Zenobia. Jason felt the man was slightly overplaying the pirate role, but on further reflection he decided that such a thing was probably impossible. “We want this black-assed bitch. She cheated us of part of our shares on our last voyage.”
“He’s a lying bastard, Captain,” she snapped.
“Shut up, you stinking nigger cunt!” The Transhumanist grabbed at her again. She struck his hand aside.
The big man thrust himself forward, in front of Zenobia, seeming to expand beyond his natural size. “She’s just become part of my company,” he said in what Jason imagined passed for a mild tone of voice with him. “If you want her, you’ll have to take it up with me.”
“This is none of your affair, Captain.” The Transhumanist shifted his tone to one of bogus reasonableness. “Just turn her over to us and we’ll settle this nice and peaceably. After all, why should a black gash come between two gentlemen, eh?”
“Two gentlemen?” the big man purred, and his eyes narrowed. “It seems we’re short one of those!” All at once his voice rose to a roar that could have been heard over a storm at sea. “Get out of my sight, you sons of worm-eaten whores!”
“Then we’ll take her, damn you!” snapped the Transhumanist. At the same time, he gave what Jason recognized as a hand-signal to one of his men—one of the two with loaded pistols. He inconspicuously cocked the pistol and moved toward the big man’s side where he would have an unobstructed shot.
Jason lunged forward, but Mondrago was ahead of him. The Corsican dropped to his hands and brought his legs around in the sweeping savate move Jason knew all too well from practice sessions, and knocked the Transhumanist’s feet out from under him. The pistol went off, firing into the air. Jason landed on top of the prone figure, grasped his right wrist, and yanked the arm up behind him, forcing the pistol from his fingers.
It was the signal for a general brawl. Evidently the discharge of a firearm in the streets in broad daylight got attention even in Port Royal. The big man’s adherents, enraged, surged from around the rum cask faster than Jason would have imagined, given their condition. Jason heard the other pistol also fire wildly as its owner went down under a crush of assailants. Whatever implanted high-tech weapons the Transhumanists had, they dared not use them publicly, nor did they dare openly display the full capabilities of their genetic upgrades. They were promptly overwhelmed by sheer numbers and held. The big man had pinned the Transhumanist leader face-down on the cobblestones, and had drawn his cutlass.
“God’s holy shit!” he bellowed. “Try to shoot me, will you? What’s this town coming to? I was telling Governor Modyford just the other day that we’re starting to get a bad element in Port Royal. I ought to hand this cutlass to Zenobia and let her cut off your pox-rotten prick! But it happens I’m in a good mood today. So…” He stood up, and brought his cutlass down with a whistle of cloven air. The Transhumanist screamed, and blood spurted from the right side of his head. The big man reached down, picked something up from beside him, and shoved it into his mouth. The Transhumanist gagged and spat blood.
“Like the taste, do you? Now take it with you and fry it for your supper, unless you want me to feed it to the pigs. And get out of here before I become annoyed and forget I’m a gentleman!” The big man gave a final kick to the ribs of the Transhumanist, who staggered to his feet and scrambled away at best speed, trying to stanch the flow of blood. Jason got off the pistolero’s back and sent him on his way with a kick of his own. The rest of the Transhumanist underlings were likewise released and fled after their leader, to the profane jeers of the crowd. Jason wondered if they had brought any twenty-fourth-century tissue-regeneration equipment with them…and if so, how long it would take to regrow an ear. Nesbit looked as though it was just as well that he had recently emptied his stomach.
The big man turned to Jason with an affable smile, as though nothing particularly out of the ordinary had occurred—as, indeed, it might not have, from his perspective. “You and your mate here did me a good turn. Here, have a drink.” He filled another jack with rum and thrust it into Jason’s hands. “What’s your name?”
“Jason, Captain. And this is Alexandre. And many thanks. Fighting’s thirsty work.” Suspecting that sipping and savoring was not the approved drinking style in this social milieu, Jason took a fairly substantial swallow. The top of his head came off and a stream of molten lava flowed down his throat to his stomach, where it caused a small boiler explosion. He managed to suppress a choke. Now I see why this kind of rum was called “kill-devil,” he thought as he gasped for breath, shivering. It’s strong enough to do precisely that. He handed the jack to Mondrago, who read the signs and drank cautiously. Meanwhile, the big man finished his at one swallow, letting it gurgle. Then he got a refill.
How in God’s name can he still be on his feet? Jason wondered, as Mondrago passed the jack along to the others, who handled it with varying degrees of success. Nesbit’s eyes turned red, and he emitted a high-pitched wheeze. Jason fancied he could see steam escaping from his ears.
“I don’t recall seeing you and your crew before, Jason,” said the big man. His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You talk like an educated man. And you look almost Spanish, though somehow not quite.”
“I was born in Sicily, a subject of the King of Spain,” said Jason. “I deserted the god-damned Spaniards, who threw dung in my face because I’m half Greek.”
“What better can you expect of the Dons?” the big man commiserated, to a general chorus of growled agreement.
Jason briefly recounted their cover story and introduced the others. The big man took Da Cunha’s presence in stride. But his eyes lit up at Nesbit and Boyer. “A surgeon’s mate and a carpenter, eh? Well, it’s a shame your last ship was lost, but I can offer you a place on mine—the Oxford, greatest ship in these waters!”
Off to one side, Grenfell seemed to stiffen at the name of that ship. But Jason barely noticed, for his attention was riveted on something else. He had forgotten about his heads-up display when the Transhumanists had fled, assuming that the sensor in the pistol-butt would no longer be of any use. But now he saw that one of the little blue dots was still there. It seemed to be slightly off to the side…
He glanced in that direction, and found himself looking into the suspicious, hostile coal-black eyes of the woman named Zenobia.
I didn’t understand why the Transhumanists were chasing her. And now I understand it even less, for she must be one of their own.
And what, I wonder, was that about “silly stories” concerning her?
I’ve got to get to the bottom of this, whatever it takes. Which means we have to stay with her, even if it involves following this character wherever he leads.
“Aye, Captain!” he exclaimed without another instant’s hesitation. “In fact, it was to join you that we came here, as soon as we heard you were planning a new venture and had put out a call.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Zenobia’s disgusted look. But then her eyes met Boyer’s, and her expression seemed to soften just a trifle.
“Splendid!” The big man slapped Jason on the back, nearly sending him sprawling, and quaffed the last of his rum in a gulp the very sight of which made Jason’s hair stand on end. Then he thrust his jack back into the cask and brought it up brimming. “Let’s drink to that! And you won’t regret it, by God! I’ll show you treasure such as you’ve never dreamed existed in all of the Main, or my name’s not Henry Morgan!”
Grenfell stared, goggle-eyed, and then tossed back a slug of kill-devil that Jason doubted he himself could have survived.