Soldiers Out of Time Read Free Page B

“Just so, Director. We have no evidence for that—or against it, for that matter. And what of Transhumanist expeditions that Commander Thanou and the Special Operations Section have not encountered?”
    The silence returned, more gloomy than before.
    Chantal Frey had been part of Jason’s research expedition to the Athens of the Battle of Marathon. It had been then that he had discovered the existence of the Transhumanist underground and its efforts to plant the seeds of an eventual Transhumanist triumph in the blank spaces of the human past, outside the range of the “Observer Effect” that precluded changing recorded history. And she had been seduced by the Transhumanist leader, genetically upgraded into a kind of charisma to which she had been peculiarly vulnerable.
    Jason had saved her from being cast adrift in the fifth century B.C., and thanks to him she was the first time traveler ever to have been returned to her own time after having her TRD cut out of her body. (And without doubt the last one, given the Authority’s horrified aversion to deviations from established procedures.) Since then she had lived in a kind of limbo, distrusted as a former defector but valued for the insights she could offer about the Transhumanists among whom she had for a time dwelt. Recently, the value had finally overcome the distrust sufficiently for her to be allowed on another extratemporal expedition. She had accompanied Jason and Mondrago briefly to seventeenth-century Jamaica, where Jason had loose ends to tie together with respect to Zenobia, a she-pirate and Transhumanist renegade of his previous acquaintance. The expedition had ended in tragedy amid the cataclysm of earthquake-shattered Port Royal. Zenobia had died as the Observer Effect required, and Jason had learned—or, rather, relearned—the futility of trying to fight it. But his inner wound had been, if not healed, at least salved when he had subsequently learned that she had lived long enough to bear his child. He had, in fact, learned it from one of his own remote descendants.
    As for Chantal, she had justified the Authority’s trust, and was now in somewhat better graces. And what they had gone through in Port Royal had had yet another consequence, intimations of which Jason had noticed while they had been there. Now he noticed it again, as he saw her eyes briefly meet Mondrago’s, and fleeting smiles cross both their lips.
    I know what they say about opposites attracting , thought Jason with a rueful mental headshake. But there must be limits!
    “Well,” said Rutherford after a moment, a little too briskly, “you have undoubtedly raised a disturbing—albeit entirely speculative—point, which I shall certainly bring to the attention of the council when it meets tomorrow. By the way, Jason, I’d like you to accompany me to that meeting, in your capacity as head of the Special Operations Section.”
    Jason wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

    The governing council’s meeting room was a good deal more ornate than Rutherford’s office, in the mannered style of elaborate, history-infused formality typical of an Earth still self-consciously seeking to reestablish the roots that had nearly been torn up by the Transhuman Dispensation of the previous century. Some would have characterized it as elegant. Jason preferred words like “pompous” and “affected.”
    Which, come to think of it, makes it a perfect setting for this bunch , he reflected as he sat beside Rutherford at one end of the long, gleaming-topped table, lined with a quorum of the council. At the other end, Alastair Kung, who currently held the rotating chairmanship, overflowed his chair and peered through small eyes almost hidden between rolls of flesh as Rutherford concluded his report.
    “So, Director,” Kung addressed Rutherford in his unexpectedly high-pitched voice, “now that the threat of Transhumanist meddling with the past is over—”
    “That’s not precisely what I