The Pirate Kings Read online

  ALEX SCARROW

  PUFFIN

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: 2050, Montreal

  Chapter 1: 1889, London

  Chapter 2: 1889, London

  Chapter 3: 1889, London

  Chapter 4: 1889, London

  Chapter 5: 1889, London

  Chapter 6: 1666, London

  Chapter 7: 1666, London

  Chapter 8: 1666, London

  Chapter 9: 1666, London

  Chapter 10: 1666, somewhere in the English Channel

  Chapter 11: 1889, London

  Chapter 12: 1889, London

  Chapter 13: 1666, somewhere off the English coast

  Chapter 14: 1889, London

  Chapter 15: 1889, London

  Chapter 16: 1666, aboard the Clara Jane

  Chapter 17: October 1666, aboard the Clara Jane

  Chapter 18: 1666, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean

  Chapter 19: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 20: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 21: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 22: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 23: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 24: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 25: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 26: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 27: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa

  Chapter 28: 1667, aboard the Clara Jane, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 29: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 30: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 31: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 32: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 33: 1889, London

  Chapter 34: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 35: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 36: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 37: 1667, east of Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 38: 1889, London

  Chapter 39: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 40: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 41: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 42: 1667, the Caribbean Sea

  Chapter 43: 1889, London

  Chapter 44: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 45: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 46: 2025, New York

  Chapter 47: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 48: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 49: 1889, London

  Chapter 50: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 51: 1667, off Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 52: 1667, off the coast of Puerto Bello

  Chapter 53: 1667, San Felipe, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 54: 1667, Castillo Santiago, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 55: 1667, Castillo Santiago, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 56: 2025, New York

  Chapter 57: 1667, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 58: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 59: 1667, San Geronimo, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 60: 2025, New York

  Chapter 61: 1667, San Geronimo, Puerto Bello

  Chapter 62: 1667, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Chapter 63: 2025, New York

  Chapter 64: 1667, Port au Prince, Hispaniola

  Chapter 65: 1889, London

  Chapter 66: 2025, New York

  Chapter 67: 1687, Port au Vikram, Republic of Pandora

  Chapter 68: 1889, London

  Chapter 69: 1687, Port au Vikram, Republic of Pandora

  Chapter 70: 1687, Newgate Prison, London

  Chapter 71: 1889, London

  Chapter 72: 1889, London

  Chapter 73: 1889, London

  Chapter 74: 1687, somewhere off the coast of Florida

  Epilogue: 1889, London Bridge, London

  ALEX SCARROW used to be a graphic artist, then he decided to be a computer games designer. Finally, he grew up and became an author. He has written a number of successful thrillers and several screenplays, but it’s YA fiction that has allowed him to really have fun with the ideas and concepts he was playing around with when designing games.

  He lives in Norwich with his son, Jacob, his wife, Frances, and his Jack Russell, Max.

  Books by Alex Scarrow

  TimeRiders

  TimeRiders: Day of the Predator

  TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code

  TimeRiders: The Eternal War

  TimeRiders: Gates of Rome

  TimeRiders: City of Shadows

  TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings

  Sign up to become a TimeRider at:

  www.time-riders.co.uk

  To Jacob – ‘… boys from the wharf …’

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Praise for TimeRiders:

  ‘A thriller full of spectacular effects’

  – Guardian

  ‘Insanely exciting, nail-biting stuff’

  – Independent on Sunday

  ‘This is a novel that is as addictive as any computer game’

  – Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ‘Promises to be a big hit’

  – Irish News

  ‘A thrilling adventure that hurtles across time and place at breakneck speed’

  – Lovereading4kids.co.uk

  ‘Plenty of fast-paced action … this is a real page-turner’

  – WriteAway.org.uk

  ‘A great read that will appeal to both boys and girls … you’ll find this book addictive!’

  – redhouse.co.uk

  ‘Contender for best science fiction book of the year … an absolute winner’

  – Flipside

  Winner of the Older Readers category,

  Red House Children’s Book Award 2011

  Prologue

  2050, Montreal

  ‘How did we end up here? In this time, in this horrible mess?’

  Waldstein studied his audience: rows of pale ovals receding into the dimly lit conference hall. A gathering of the brightest minds, innovators, businessmen, entrepreneurs at this, the world’s very last TED Talk. There were going to be no more. Organizing them in this increasingly chaotic and dangerous world was becoming impossible.

  The question he’d just asked, of course, was rhetorical. He was going to tell them.

  ‘Greed. Greed and complacency. Back at the turn of the last century, when we were busy being very excited that we were all entering a new millennium, then … we assumed oil was going to last forever. We now know, of course, with hindsight, that as the clocks and calendars ticked over into the new century and everyone was celebrating at a party somewhere, we quietly hit the “peak oil” moment. The moment when mankind finally reached the halfway mark of this world’s fossil-embedded fuel store.’

  He paused for effect. The holographic autocue waited for him.

  ‘The “tank” was half empty. There were a few geologists back then sounding the alarm, telling all who’d listen that we’d better get a move on and find a substitute for oil. But no one did listen. Why? Because oil was still coming out of the ground easily enough and it was still cheap. Why upset the apple cart, right? Let’s face it … at a fantastic party, who wants to listen to the guy in the corner muttering about the end of the world?

  ‘We did nothing to wean ourselves off oil addiction. And so, fifteen … twenty years into the new century, when the big oil-producing nations started finding their oil wells drying up, one after the other, things started to turn nasty.

  ‘That was the first Big Problem we should’ve fixed … and we didn’t. The second …? Again, back
at the beginning of the century, there were economists calculating what the global population figure was likely to be for the middle of the twenty-first century – ten billion. Ten billion.’

  His audience stirred.

  ‘It turns out their estimate undershot by about a billion and a half. But who’s perfect, eh?’ Waldstein’s laugh sounded dry and hollow. Certainly no laughs were coming back from his audience.

  ‘Once again warnings were given. Ten billion? There’s no way Earth’s ecosystem could be leveraged to feed ten billion mouths indefinitely! But were people listening? Of course not. You’re telling me I can’t have more than two children? How dare you! How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do! So, that problem was never dealt with and not long after “peak oil” we had “peak food”… “peak drinking water”, all symptoms of a resource-exhausted world: a world desperately struggling to provide at least fifteen hundred calories every day to over twelve billion hungry mouths.’

  Waldstein sighed. ‘So, we had two big problems facing us: resource scarcity and a population explosion. Both could have been prevented; neither were. And these two problems were compounded by a third and final one.’

  He thumbed his palm and a giant animated holograph appeared above his head, as large as the round stage he was standing on. An image of Earth playing through fifty years of gathered data: polar ice caps shrinking, the blue of the ocean swelling, expanding, like ink spreading across blotting paper.

  ‘We let this world warm up too damned much. Some of that was down to burning all that oil – that certainly didn’t help things much. But what really did it for Earth’s fragile ecosystem was the sheer number of people on the planet. So … just when we needed as much land as possible to grow enough high-yield crops to feed us all, that lowland, that farming land, was being swallowed up by the advancing oceans. Farmland … and, of course, many of our great cities.’

  He tapped his palm and flicked through shimmering slides: New York, now just the island of Manhattan protected by giant levee walls; New Jersey, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens … all now a mottled patchwork of submerged streets and rotting rooftops. London, a city of tenement blocks crowding each other like weeds straining for sunlight, emerging from a fog of pollution. The Thames, a menacing, swollen river again held at bay by enormous levee walls.

  ‘The first fifty years of this century, we should have devoted to fixing these problems. Instead, what did we do? We fought like children. The First Asian War in the late twenties, over twenty years ago. Then the start of the various Pacific Oil Wars. The ten-year anniversary last week of the Thirty-Day War between the Arabian Coalition and Israel … and, God help us, that one wasn’t even over oil … but something as archaic, as irrelevant as religious ideology! Over what name we should call a God that doesn’t even exist!’

  The hologram above Waldstein played a montage of images: the rusting wrecks of tanks and mech-walkers, the irradiated ruins of Jerusalem and Damascus.

  ‘Now we are where we are. Living in a world that we’ve exhausted. Poisoned. A world that some say is quite rightly turning against us. But this, in the much larger context of time, is merely another cycle. It’s happened before. The dinosaurs had their time and now we’ve had ours. The world is simply rebalancing itself. Wiping the slate clean ready to start again.’

  He was no longer reading from the autocue. The conference organizers had been given an advanced copy of his talk: some uninspiring, meaningless fluff about ‘responsible entrepreneurialism in difficult times’.

  What he wanted to say this morning – what he was going to say – was memorized.

  ‘But, ladies and gentlemen, unlike the dinosaurs, we almost certainly won’t be rendered extinct. We will, though, in the latter half of this century, inevitably experience a resource starvation that will whittle our numbers down to perhaps a few tens of millions. Perhaps even a few hundred thousand. And those that survive will adapt. Will hopefully be wiser and understand that this fragile world of ours must be treated with respect.’

  Waldstein noticed his audience stirring uneasily.

  He smiled. ‘Yes, I’m sure you’ve figured out I’m no longer reading the text that was approved for today’s lecture. But there is something that needs to be said … ’

  His gaze settled at the back of the audience, on the bank of cameras ranged there. This was going out on a dozen news-streams. Waldstein knew this was going to be seen live or re-streamed by virtually everyone on the planet – 2050, the last TED Talk. The very last of them.

  A perfect platform for him.

  ‘I’m afraid things don’t look so good for us. Changes we can’t avoid … are happening whether we like it or not. But here’s the thing. I believe the Big Die Off will not be an end for us. It’ll be a transition. A difficult one – a terribly hard one – but a transition, not an ending.’

  Off to one side he could see movement, someone attempting to attract his attention.

  They want me off the stage. They want me to finish.

  ‘Mark my words, the next twenty years will be hard years for all of us. Painfully hard ones. As things worsen, there’ll be those who will say that we could wind time back, use displacement technology to learn from all our stupid mistakes and have another go at these last fifty years, at making this a better world. To those people who will argue for that, I say this in response now … ’

  He wagged a cautionary finger at the cameras out there in the auditorium recording him. ‘If we do that – if we actually are reckless enough to meddle with time – that foolishness will end up being the biggest of all our many mistakes.’

  One of the event organizers – Dr Rajesh – was making his way across the stage towards him.

  Waldstein nodded at the man. ‘So, let me then finish … ’ It would look foolish if they attempted to force him off the stage. Foolish for him. Foolish for the organizers. The news story would be all about some undignified scuffle and not the message itself.

  ‘In conclusion, I’ll finish with this … ’ Dr Rajesh seemed to acknowledge that. He stopped where he was and allowed Waldstein to wrap things up.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve made so many, many mistakes and in the coming years we are going to be relentlessly tempted to go back and try to undo them, for ourselves, for our children. But time travel is an open doorway to Hell itself: a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed once opened. If we dare to play God with this technology, then that really will be the end of absolutely everything. Quite literally everything: this small, remote, isolated blue ball of life we call Earth and everything on it.’

  Waldstein hadn’t expected much in the way of applause and he was quite right not to. He walked offstage, past an ashen-faced Dr Rajesh, amid a deafening silence.

  Chapter 1

  1889, London

  7 February 1889

  So, I sort of got into the habit of typing a log of ‘agency’ events back in Brooklyn. I figured I might as well continue doing it here, even though I’m not even sure we’re ‘in’ the agency any more.

  Anyhow, it’s been a weird time. Compared to the time after we got recruited up until coming here, it’s been quiet. Peaceful even. All of that time before relocating here seems like a blur. So much happened to us. When I play the memories back – the Nazis, the mutants, those dinosaur things, Colonels Devereau and Wainwright, Adam Lewis – it’s like some crazy B-movie. Those guys seem like characters from a book. A book that’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.

  Of all of them, though, I do find myself thinking about Adam the most. I wonder if we could have let him stay with us, like we did Rashim and that moronic robot of his. We could have, couldn’t we? I realize that now. But back then I was so certain that everything had to be tidied up. Everything had to be put exactly where it was.

  So, I let him go back to work. I let him die.

  Maddy looked at the screen in front of her.

  And I miss him.

  Such a stupid, stupid, girly thing. She’d known h
im for no more than two days. Two days and then he was gone. And here she was countless months – a lifetime and a half – later missing him. Pining away like some precious fairy-tale princess.

  Pfft. As if they’d actually ‘been’ something.

  Mind you, they might have. If she’d made a different decision.

  ‘Sheesh, let it go, Maddy,’ she chastened herself, then looked over her shoulder to see if SpongeBubba was listening. He had a habit of sidling up silently and just standing behind you, batting big-lashed eyes and grinning like a simpleton. But he was on the other side of the dungeon perfectly inert – eyes closed and one green light on his side panel showing he was in standby mode. The others were out. Rashim, Liam and Bob had gone out that morning to visit an illegal gambling house: their stock of money was running low. Sal and Becks were down at the dockside buying some food for supper.

  Maddy was still feeling a bit twitchy about the female support unit. After all, the very same clone had been hell-bent on killing them all three months ago. They’d managed to decommission her, then reboot her: a rather messy affair that Maddy didn’t really want to dwell on. The artificial intelligence that was installed in the unit right now was the default AI. Perhaps, at some point, she might try experimenting with installing parts of Becks’s old consciousness, but for the moment … this felt safer. The downside was that the support unit was back to square one, learning from scratch how to appear less like an ice-cold, sociopathic killing machine.