Yeah so obviously the first thing I tried after seeing Fahsteth in front of me, accompanied by all those armed guards, was to teleport away. Which would’ve been a really fun way of giving the finger to that bastard. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Of course it didn’t. I wasn’t on Earth. I had to be somewhere on the planet before I could teleport to somewhere else on it. My fancy ability to go anywhere on Earth was completely useless if I wasn’t actually on Earth anymore. Which was just completely fantastic. What I had really, oh-so-desperately needed was to be ripped away from Gaia, Percy, and Cerberus, taken off the planet, and put in front of fucking Fahsteth of all people. This whole trip into the past wouldn’t have been complete without that.
Oh and it was obviously even worse than simply being face to face with this piece of shit. I couldn’t even actually do anything too bad or permanent to him, because that would change the future. I absolutely could not kill this fucker, or it would irrevocably alter everything. He had to survive long enough to almost kill Avalon as a child. And how fucked up was that? I couldn’t actually kill him, no matter how much I wanted to, because I had to let this asshole survive long enough to almost kill my girlfriend while she was a kid. Which was just–god damn it I really hated this sometimes.
The thought of how the others were reacting to my sudden disappearance flashed through my mind, but I didn’t have time to focus on that. Oh wait, yes I did. Or at the very least, I could let them know what was going on if I could buy myself a second. Which I did by simply making a show of brushing dust off my pants. Imaginary dust, anyway. Dirty didn’t really stick to these pants. They and my shirt were both gifts I’d received from Percy when we’d started this whole training in the past thing. They looked like ordinary clothes that would have been worn back in these days, but they were a good bit more durable and tended to repel any dirt.
And speaking of Percy, while dusting myself off, I used that new power I had to send the Revenant girl the image and sound of what Fahsteth had just said.
Flick?! I felt her presence in a partial recall. Do you need—
Stay with Gaia, I sent back. Help her figure out how to get up here. There has to be a transportation control thing, and we already know she can control those.
“Ahem.” That was Fahsteth himself, arching an eyebrow as he stared at me. “If you’re trying to come up with a fake story, it’s taking too long.”
Right, he was still there and expected me to respond. I had to get through the next few minutes without screwing anything up. And without dying, preferably. I really wasn’t in the mood to die at all right now, let alone to this fucker. Thankfully, at least the disguise I’d changed myself into in order to interact with Gaia meant I hadn’t already changed the future by letting Fahsteth see me back in this time period. I wasn’t Flick right now. I was Jacob. This wasn’t going to change anything.
I just had to hope that part of ‘not changing anything’ included Jacob getting out of this situation in one piece. If I ended up dying in the past to this guy, Avalon would kill me.
Still, I had to take a deep breath before forcing myself to respond as casually as possible. “I suppose this means you’re the captain of these pirates that I’ve heard so much about.” Looking him up and down, I pointedly ignored the rest of the armed soldiers surrounding me, “Eh, so far I’m not impressed. I was expecting someone bigger. Or at least someone who could fight their own battles instead of recruiting a pack of helpers to cower behind.” Finally, I let my gaze visibly move to take in and acknowledge the others. The whole time, I was busy calculating angles and looking for any way out of this place. I could steal one of those starfighters, but I had no idea how to fly it. Let alone land it. Besides, they would blow me out of the sky, or rather, space, before I got anywhere. I was just going to have to deal with the larger situation here before I could escape. And reaching out with my Necromancy to try to summon all those ghosts I’d left back on Earth wasn’t working. At least not right now. I couldn’t devote enough attention, focus, and power to it to reach that far. All those ghosts were on their own for now. Everyone who hadn’t been out making a big scary show for the pirates outside had been helping us track down the prisoners inside. And now they were all down there on Earth. Given a minute to focus, I could pull them to me even from this far. But I didn’t have that. Not yet. Not while I was surrounded by Fahsteth and all his troops. I had a feeling that the second it looked like I might be focusing to use any sort of power, the assembled armed soldiers would use those guns they had. They did seem kind of twitchy.
Speaking of those troops, one of them spoke up sharply, his tone making it clear that he was accustomed to being listened to. “Sir, we should grab the others and bring them here before they have a chance to recover and guard against it.”
Fathsteth, for his response, simply pulled a pistol from his holster. Before I could react, he shot that guy in the leg. Which, judging from the fact that none of his other troops objected too much while the man himself collapsed to the deck with a cry, didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Wonder of wonders, he wasn’t a great boss.
“Yes, genius idea,” Fahsteth retorted out loud after holstering his pistol once more. “Let’s grab the technopath and put her in the middle of our highly advanced spaceship. That sounds like a pinnacle of brilliant tactical decisions that can only end in riches for all of us. You’re demoted to being a janitor until I decide you’ve learned your lesson. Get the fuck out of my sight before I decide you’re on their side.” To me, he added, “Sorry, I like to make a good first impression, but it’s so hard these days. Not that–well, never mind, that’s too complicated to get into. But you…” He showed me his multiple rows of very impressive-looking teeth. “You I want to get to know. I’ve got a friend out there somewhere who would be… interested in meeting a Necromancer as strong as you.”
Oh. Right, shit, he knew Fossor. No fucking way did I want to run into that bastard. It was hard enough to stop myself from doing anything stupid with Fahsteth here, knowing what I knew about him. If I found myself face to face with Fossor, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep it together. And that would absolutely change the future. There was no way I could handle being in the same room as him. But I also couldn’t afford to let Fahsteth see any reaction. Somehow, I kept my expression reasonably flat. “You know, something tells me I’m not interested in meeting any of your friends.” My hand rose to indicate the guys with the guns all around me. “After all, isn’t this enough of them? It’ll already take me ages to shake everyone’s hand.”
Fahsteth, in response, gave a soft and slightly amused chuckle. “Oh, you’re an interesting one, you are. So’s the redhead down there, but I’d rather not get us all expelled from this ship just because I’m stupid enough to let the idiots here bring her up.” He smirked to himself before adding, “But you. You’re the one I want to talk to. We can do some pretty great things together, and make some damn good money out of the deal.”
Well that–uh, that wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. Not in the least. Before I could catch myself, my mouth blurted, “Hang on, are you trying to offer me a job?”
Instead of responding right away, Fahsteth pivoted and started to walk away from me. “Come on then, let’s have a little chat about your future.” Again, he chuckled audibly.
I had no interest in going anywhere with the guy, to say the least. But he didn’t exactly give me a choice. As soon as I hesitated slightly, thinking this might be a good time to focus on my ghosts a bit more, one of the armed soldiers gestured with his weapon and cleared his throat. “Just so you know, we have scanners on our ship thanks to the new captain. Every time you start with the Necromancy, we know about it. You set off the detector a minute ago, but it wasn’t enough to do anything. You were just testing. Do anything more than that, reach out to cause any actual problems and that’ll be when we start shooting. Only we won’t just be shooting ghosts. Though we can.” To demonstrate, he raised his rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger once. The bullet slammed into the distant wall, and I saw a flicker of ghost-fire flames. Their weapons fired ghost-fire bullets? How was that–fuck, great, I had to run into the pirates who were prepared to deal with ghosts. Of course I did, that was just my luck, wasn’t it?
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So, with a sigh, I just started to walk after Fahsteth after sending a couple more moments from that conversation to Percy. There wasn’t much else I could do, until I had a better idea of–well–everything that was going on. I needed to plan out how to get away from this bastard without killing him. He had to survive long enough to do everything he was supposed to do in the future so I didn’t end up changing the–gah. Yeah, one thing was for sure, I wasn’t a fan of being stuck in the past and unable to actually do anything that might change the timeline. It left me feeling trapped even more than having a couple dozen guys pointing ghost-killing guns at me did.
Fahsteth, for his part, seemed content to walk very slowly until I started moving. Then he picked up the pace, forcing me to keep up with the soldiers coming behind. His metal feet clanged loudly against the deck with each motion. I had to say one thing for him, he wasn’t taking any chances or being dismissively arrogant. I knew the man himself was a force to be reckoned with, but he also had all thirty guards trail behind us, their weapons locked on me. He wasn’t just going to assume that I was under control because I was trapped on this ship and take me on a walk by himself. After all, he didn’t know I couldn’t actually kill him.
We left the hangar bay and moved into the corridor beyond before I spoke up as casually as possible. “So what does all this have to do with the Pale Ship?”
Fahsteth glanced over his shoulder at me and showed those teeth again. I honestly wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a threat or not. Either way, he gave a sly wink before remarking, “You really are well informed. Just a good student or what?”
“Or what,” I replied simply. “I pay attention as long as it’s not boring. And this doesn’t seem boring. You said we could make a lot of money. Does that mean you have someone willing to pay for information about that ship? Maybe that friend of yours who wants to meet strong Necromancers?” Had Fossor been interested in finding the Pale Ship back in these days? I had no idea. It never actually came up while he was busy being a massive evil creep at me. I didn’t even know if he knew about the thing or not. Either way, no matter who Fahsteth was interested in trading information on the ship and its mysterious crew to, I wasn’t interested in helping him do it. But I was interested in learning more about them if it helped me get out of this whole situation in one piece.
Fahsteth didn’t respond at first. He just continued walking through that corridor until we reached another doorway. As that slid open, it revealed the bridge of the ship. It was definitely big and opulent enough to suit Fahsteth’s ego. In fact, the whole place was positively enormous for a simple bridge. So much wasted space. The ovular room stretched a good one hundred feet across from left to right, and about sixty feet deep from back to front. And it wasn’t as though they even had a bunch of stuff to fill up the room. There was a single large captain’s chair in the middle of that room, three other seats spread out along the front dash about ten feet ahead of that, and a couple consoles with their own seats to the right. It was all illuminated by faint green lighting that flickered across all the consoles, and the huge, theater-scale viewscreen at the front showed an image of Earth below us. Which only served to remind me of just how far from help I was. Not only physically, but also temporally. Gaia, Percy, and Cerberus were all the way down there, working on finding a way to get up here. Who the hell knew where Ehn was, since as far as I knew, he was still under the impression that I was simply doing innocent training. And… well, everyone else who might help me was still hundreds of years away from knowing me.
Fahsteth gestured for me to enter, then came along behind. Though he only brought about six of those troops while the rest remained in the hall. Part of me wondered if he was getting a little more arrogant, but then I saw a half dozen automated turrets emerge from the ceiling to keep an eye on me. So he didn’t exactly trust me yet.
More importantly, a creature emerged from another doorway to the left within the bridge, which seemed to lead to an office or something. It looked sort of like a raptor from Jurassic Park, except it was purple with white bone plating armor across its chest and stomach, as well as part of its back. It also had a wider face, with a rhino-like horn on the end of its snout. As soon as it saw us, the creature snarled.
“Down boy,” Fahsteth ordered, and the creature immediately stopped snarling before whining a little until the man tossed some sort of meat to him. It scarfed the thing down before lowering itself to perch there by the wall, still staring at me intently the whole time. I was pretty sure it was really hoping that I would be its next treat.
Finally, the Akheilosan mercenary muttered something about taking care of this while stepping over to scratch his pet under the chin. Then he addressed me for the first time since we had entered the bridge. “I don’t know which of our guests down there you were hired to rescue, or maybe which one the wonderful techno-lady convinced you to stick your neck out to save. What I do know is that you’re a damn strong Necromancer. That much was pretty obvious just from what you pulled off outside.” He gave a low, impressed whistle before chuckling again. “You really scared the living hell out of my guys down there, you know that? It was hilarious.” He ignored the way the six troops we’d brought in here with us shifted. “I mean, it also pissed me off because you cost me a lot of money and time, but still. I can recognize an opportunity when I see it. And you, my friend, are an opportunity.”
“Well, the way I see it, we’re not exactly friends yet,” I pointed out, trying to keep my voice as even as possible. I still needed to buy time to get through this. As much as I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, I had to be careful here. Unlike me, he wasn’t under any restraints to pull his punches for timeline purposes. “But an opportunity sounds interesting. Maybe you could answer the question I already asked, ‘friend.’”
Taking a moment to feed his raptor pet another treat, Fahsteth regarded me curiously before speaking. “You want to know what we have to do with the Pale Ship? I’m not sure how you found out about that, but I am impressed by your sources. Not many people around here know about that thing these days.” He folded his arms over his broad chest and grunted. “Let’s just say, I’ve got a client out there who wants me to find that ship, and its crew. And no, it ain’t that Necromancer I mentioned before, so you don’t have to get jealous. Actually, I was trying to work out if there was any way I could involve him in this without screwing everything up.”
“You don’t think the Necromancer you already had would get jealous?” I pointed out idly.
“I don’t think she’s good enough to pull off the job. At least not as well as you could. Or him, if there was a way to get him on board without screwing everything up.” His voice had turned musing briefly before he gave me another dangerous smile. “But hey, now we don’t have to worry about it. Something tells me you’ll be a lot easier to work with than him.”
Yeah, I was just so happy that he thought it would be better to make a deal with me than with Fossor. Apparently even the closest thing that piece of shit had to a friend knew he couldn’t be trusted to work with him. Maybe that was why Fossor never mentioned the Pale Ship. Or maybe it was because ‘Jacob’ dealt with this situation before he could find out about it.
While I was thinking about that, Fahsteth continued. “Now, you might be wondering if our client can really make you happy if you play along. But let me just say, he has some very deep pockets. Hell, he had to, for us to make it all the way here. You play your cards right, maybe we’ll even take you with us when we leave. Safer that way, let me tell you.”
Something tickled at my brain then. Actually, it had been tickling at my brain ever since I’d arrived on this ship. Something Fahsteth had said early on. What was it? Technopath. He called Gaia a Technopath. Which, well, fair enough, she was one. And she had been using her power pretty extensively. But then again, he also said… wait, what was it? Expelled. He’d made a crack about Gaia ‘expelling’ them from the ship if they brought her up here. And then he’d chuckled after saying we could talk about ‘my future.’ Not to mention the bit about asking if I was just a ‘good student.’ Then the bit just now about how he’d been trying to figure out if he could bring Fossor in on things ‘without screwing everything up.’ I’d assumed he was talking about Fossor taking over the operation and maybe killing everyone involved, but…
And then there was the cherry on top, the positive proof. That clanging sound as he walked along the metal floor. I hadn’t thought too much about it because of course his feet would be metal, Avalon had cut him in half.
But that hadn’t happened yet. Or it shouldn’t have.
“You’re not from this time period,” I suddenly blurted, straightening a bit. “You know Gaia from the future.”
Fahsteth arched his eyebrows. “Okay, now I really am impressed. Let’s just say my new client sent our ship back here from a time when your new Technopath friend down there is in deep trouble with her bosses. But don’t worry about that. Let’s focus on how we can make this a productive partnership, and a very rewarding one.”
Future. He was from the future. All these people were. This wasn’t Fahsteth from the past. He was from my present, from a time after Gaia had been imprisoned. Which meant… which meant…
Well, Fahsteth had mentioned a reward. Which I hadn’t really thought too much about, given, well, everything. And yet, maybe I shouldn’t have judged so quickly.
After all, finding out that, when the time came, I wouldn’t actually have to hold back because these guys were all from the future anyway was a pretty damn fine prize after all.