Free The Machine's Child (Company) by Kage Baker

out. Alec fell beside him, unresponsive. Only Nicholas was left conscious as the agboat rose and sped away to the sea and the ship, under strange stars. He lay staring up at them, too numb to pray in thanks or lamentation to a God whose ways passed all understanding.
     
    When the agboat settled into its place on deck, Nicholas rose to his knees unsteadily, using Alec’s battered body; then he dropped forward, sprawled on the deck and did not move again. Out of the shadows came the skull-headed servounits, crawling swiftly.
    Billy Bones and Flint lifted Alec’s body between them, and hurried off with him to the ship’s infirmary. Bully Hayes climbed into the agboat and emerged a moment later with Mendoza’s coffin and records case. As it scuttled after the others, the
Captain Morgan
was tacking around, powering up, setting every stitch of canvas she had for a run through the ancient night. She leaped away across dark water, and the sulphurous and shifting light diminished off her starboard bow and finally was lost.

ANOTHER MORNING
IN 2317 AD
    Joseph was marching along a road far to the south of Mount Tamalpais, focusing his attention on the great domed rock that rose from the sea ahead of him.
    It was a picturesque rock and probably would have held his attention anyway. A poet of that country once called it a stone cloud, shot through with rattlesnakes like lightning; the Spanish explorers had been content to describe it as looking like a Moor’s turban. There was something about it that did evoke Arabian Nights tales and the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, as it sat there on its blue bay. You half expected djinns to come barreling across the sky and plant a palace on its distant height.
    This had never happened, of course. Something else had been planted up there, though, no less fantastic, by no less extraordinary a creature.
    Joseph marched on steadily toward it, foot in front of foot in front of foot, because he had a feeling that if he stopped for a second or even took his eyes off it he’d never be able to keep going. So on down the highway he went, and the rock rose bigger and more portentous against the bright sky with every minute.
    It was afternoon when he came to the unremarkable little harbor town that looked out on the rock, dwarfed in its shadow. He loitered there a while, wandering the waterfront as though admiring the pleasure boats, pretending to contemplate the memorial engraved with the names of drowned fishermen, and making his slow but inevitable progress out along the muddy causeway that led to the rock.
    Here Joseph passed it and settled for a while on the breakwater at the harbor bar, out beyond the tolling buoys, where he watched the sunset like any tourist. As he suspected, he had to force himself to get up when it became dark enough for what he had to do. The lights of the little town were warm and inviting. He wanted terribly badly to go back there and find a cozy mortal place to relax in, even if all they served was mineral water; but the rock loomed above him.
    So he climbed it, which was what he had come all that way to do.
    What he was doing was strictly illegal, of course, and desperately foolhardy for a mortal. Morro Rock had killed its share of would-be climbers. It was also a breeding sanctuary for any number of protected seabirds, which added moral consequences to his trespass. Joseph had no intention of stealing birds’ eggs, however.
    Up he went through the darkness, crawling flat in the worst places, groping on hands and knees where he could. A long cold nightmarish while later he staggered upright in a fairly level spot, and looked down on what seemed like half the kingdoms of the world spread out before him, though in fact it was only San Luis Obispo Protectorate.
    “Wow,” said Joseph, aloud to himself. “So, here I am. No Tempter’s going to rise up at my elbow and offer me big bucks not to do this, huh? Cut me a deal?” He looked around in disgust. “Who am I