Day of Truth

by Brian Stableford

  The battleship was called the Falcor. It took little inspiration to guess that the sister ship would be the Aurita, although Cain Rayshade was the kind of man who might call it after himself rather than the world which paid for it to be built.

  “What are you going to do now?” Darkscar asked me. I’d been asking myself the same question. I don’t want to stay on Falcor. What I really wanted was a ship of my own, so that I could go where I wanted and didn’t have to get mixed up in the affairs of the Confereracy. But my chances of getting a ship for free when there was a war on were laughable.

  “I need your help,” said Darkscar.

  “You don’t need me,” I assured him. “I’m only one man. Not even a Beast Lord anymore. No ship, no gun, nothing. I should have stayed on Aquila. It’s all the home I can remember.”

  “You’re the only man who can help me,” he countered. “Heljanita is on Aetema.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You’ve been there. It’s in the Devil’s Tresses. The outer world in the same system as Hyla. You told me about the natives there. You’re the only man who ever made contact with them on any kind of friendly basis.”

  “It wasn’t too friendly,” I said. “They nearly killed me. If I tried again, they might. The natives have nothing to do with Heljanita in any case. They hate strangers. If I remember correctly, the Mother mentioned the toys. It doesn’t mean Heljanita’s there, though.”

  “He will be there,” asserted Darkscar. “He has a fortress there, and his fleet. And you’re right. The natives do hate his toys. They might be prepared to help us against him.”

  “No,” I said. “They hate strangers. Including you. And me. Why should they help us? It’s not their war. They already have their perfectly balanced society. They live in tunnels under the ice, scraping a living from barren country. Most of them are sexless and all but mindless. They don’t need you to help them out. They do well enough on their own.”

  “All the more reason why they should fear Heljanita. Will you at least talk to the Mother for me?”

  I thought about it. “What do you want to do?”

  He leaned forward, his face serious. “This fleet can’t win the war. With luck, it can stop the toys. It can render Heljanita powerless—for a time. But it won’t last, unless we can get rid of Heljanita himself. Now, Heljanita won’t be in space with the fleet. He’ll be on Aetema, safe in his fortress. He’s not risking anything on this invasion except several years of work. And even if he is beaten, the Beasts will suffer such losses that they won’t be able to meet him next time. The real enemy is the toymaker, and it’s the toymaker who has to be destroyed. I intend to go to Aetema and try. With Comarre and his men, I have a slim chance. With you, “I’d have more. With the natives…”

  “There’s no question of that,” I cut in.

  “At least guides! They know where the fortress is. I daren’t land on top of it. Will they take us through the mountains?”

  “No,” I said, but I wasn’t absolutely sure.

  “We can try,” he said.

  I looked up at the battleship. I’d rather have flown in her. But there was no chance of that. The only course of action I’d been offered was Darkscar’s. There was nothing to do but go with him.

  Somehow, I’d become involved in the war anyway. Perhaps Heljanita was right, and I was involved, simply because I was alive.

  ON AETERNA

  The wind was howling even louder than usual, and die snow was blasted against the windows in great sheets. Hailstones pounded the entire body of the citadel, but their efforts were reflected internally only by a land of distant whisper. The violence of the weather was only a mood. It was the middle of summer. The tower stood alone, the only cocoon of warmth for a hundred miles or more.

  The great power cables which sapped energy from the center of the planet maintained the heat and light with ease. A similar set of cables had hurled a man and a machine ten thousand years back in time. Resisting the feeble hostilities of Aetema was nothing to them.

  Heljanita the toymaker was staring at one of his machines with disbelief and growing frustration. The machine was the most sophisticated high-omega receiver in the galaxy. It could hear, sort and categorize every minute flow of high-omega energy in the galaxy. It was the keenest ear in existence. There was nothing so small that it could not detect it. There was no apparatus capable of masking or scrambling its signals so the machine could not understand them. He could hear the Confederacy’s fleet making hurried preparations for takeoff. He could pick up leakage from a hundred freighters, routine checks with their bases. He could hear a thousand beacons, a thousand broadcasts. But from a fleet of two thousand ships not a hundred light years away, he could pick up not a whisper. As far as the machine was concerned, they might just as well not exist. There was no leakage, no automatic response to stimulation signals. Nothing at all.

  Yet all spaceships in the known universe possessed high-omega apparatus. And to black them out to the extent that the machine would be unable to find them, they would have to be cut out from the power supply. If that were the case, then the fleet was totally without internal communication. How could it be expected to fight? What was it there for if not to fight? How could it be there in any case?

  It’s as though they were ghosts, thought the toymaker.

  His frustration had an edge of anger and a little fear. The toys were completely unaffected. They would deal with the fleet if and when the need arose. To them, it was simply another datum.

  “Prepare to lift,” said Heljanita. “The plan is unchanged. If the fleet moves, tell me immediately.”

  The toys standing behind him moved away, like ghosts themselves, each to its own predetermined task. Everything would go smoothly. The timing would be perfect.

  The toys had to win the war—Heljanita knew that. They were faster than men. They never made mistakes. Their actions were always the optimum strategy, based on a complete analysis of any situation. They were intelligent. And they were totally loyal to Heljanita. They obeyed his every order. They could not disobey. It was the way they were built, the very basis of their existence. They were the perfect army. They could not be stooped. Their ships were better than those of the Confederacy, despite the modifications in screen power and fine control that Darkscar had made.

  We must win, thought Heljanita. We cannot be beaten.

  “The fleet is moving,” said a smooth, melodious voice,

  “Where?” he snapped.

  “It is in the Time Gap. It is heading approximately in this direction, but since it cannot align, we cannot be sure of its destination.”

  “Are they all moving together?” he asked.

  “As far as we can tell, they are all moving in formation.”

  How do they do it? he wondered. What are they? Mind readers?

  “Are you ready for takeoff?” he asked the toy.

  “Not yet. In five or six minutes everything will be ready.”

  “I’m going to switch the power on. I’ll control it. Monitor the high-omega. If anything happens, come and tell me.”

  The toy sat down, its slender fingers lying lightly on the controls of the receiver. Heljanita made his way through the corridors of the fortress to a large, open room with a high balcony. Power banks were all around the room, with a vast distribution console making up one wall. At the far end of the room was a large, cylindrical machine with glass sides and complex controls, with connections to all the power cables which descended to the core of Aeterna. That was one machine to which the power would not be going. It was the time machine which had brought him here.

  The power cables disappeared into the center of the distributors, beside a squat bubble of metal with a large lever set into a six-inch groove. Heljanita gripped the lever and flicked the gear set in the handle to make sure of its smooth operation. He looked up to the observation tower, where he could see the driving snow and the thin, slender peak of the mountain. />
  Heljanita moved the lever, and power moved through the distributors with an audible hum. The wall came to life as blood flowed into its veins. The toymaker paused and his hand reached out to a keyboard on the wall to depress several of the switches. The lights dimmed slightly and then brightened again as he began to pull the lever. With one hand he pulled the lever and manipulated the gear. With the other, he played with the keyboard. His eyes roamed the dials in the wall, searching for danger signals and overloads. There were none. Like the toys, Heljanita was not prone to making mistakes.

  There was a slow gathering of sound: first a whispering like wind stirring dry leaves, then a grating noise like metal scraping stone. Eventually, he could hear a drumming deep in the ground which extended far below the citadel and well away into the mountain. It was growing, and it continued to grow.

  Outside, the spent snowstorm was beginning to dwindle away into nothing. The violent wind seemed to sense the presence of a greater power, and it was fading away into calmness. Heljanita glanced up and out of the glass oblongs set into the tower walls. The great black needle which was the mountain’s peak stood out starkly against the white sky, where cloud hid the wan, low-lying sun. The thin spire of rock was all he could see through the windows, but he could visualize the wide curve out into a semi-plateau that was obscured by the walls.

  Smoke rising from the plateau danced all around the peak in the dying fragments of wind. The snow and ice, which had lain on the slopes only minutes before, had already disappeared as hot steam.

  Heljanita slipped the gear switch with his thumb and pulled harder. The lever barely moved, but the drumming grew and grew.

  The smoke became a pall of dust, still ascending on a column of hot air but staying beneath the ice-filled cloud banks. A new wind was bom; a wind which came in from all directions with a steady force to replenish the climbing air. Snow crystals dragged from the other slopes by the incoming wind disappeared as though by magic as they flew above Heljanita’s mountain.

  More smoke poured upward from the ground, and nothing substantial could be seen as the tower of particles hid the peak. Heljanita spared another moment of concentration for a second glance at the effluence of the boiling rocks. He smiled slightly, more internally than externally, and manipulated more of the keys. Almost every one of the switches had been reversed by now. His thumb clicked the gear switch again. The black cloud began to thin, but he still could not see the peak. It was no longer there.

  Into the cloud rose a hundred silver needles, and another hundred, and another. Their splashes of flame lit the dust tower with glowing lamps. The black cloud came alive with inner light and remained so for a considerable time.

  Heljanita’s hands left the lever and the keyboard, and he lifted his head to watch the haloed glory of the drifting cloud. Slowly, he saw it dim and die. The air no longer rose so steadfastly. The wind began to drift a little. The ships were gone.

  The toy fleet, seven thousand strong, was in space.

  THE BATTLE OF THE TIME GAP

  The ghost fleet was less than two thousand strong. They had no chance of maintaining a formation in the Time Gap. The distortion of the nebula caused every calculation they made to be slightly in error, every turn they took to be slightly off line. The same applied to the toys, but it was far less important to them. In a battle where random factors governed strategy, the larger fleet would inevitably win.

  The toys began to assume some sort of formation as soon as they were in space. They continued to maneuver and adjust while they flew to meet the ghosts. They flew on half-speed, being in no hurry. By sheer hard work and the judicious use of power, they maintained an attacking formation. Three thousand ships formed a central core, while the rest arranged themselves in a thin outer ring with a much lower density and less coordination. The fleet looked like a battering ram under escort.

  But the ghosts, who had already gone against logic in electing to meet the toys within the nebula, did not turn away. They did not even wait to be attacked. In a loose spindle, with the long axis pointed at the head of the toys’ ram, they sped forward.

  The toys slowed to minimum speed, to hold their formation as best they could for as long as possible. They no longer maneuvered and adjusted positions. From now on, the power would be needed for combat, to keep the ships flying while they destroyed those of the enemy. They made no effort to alter their position relative to the ghosts. Any such attempt would destroy their coherency.

  Their opponents, on the other hand, were ready to try anything. They were hopelessly outnumbered. They could not win. All they had was recklessness and hope. Their sole purpose was to kill and die. The Time Wave had brought them back to restore the old order of things, but it was a futile, meaningless attempt. The ghosts could not blot out the toys, Heljanita, Darkscar and the effects of the last ten years. The day of the House of Stars was gone forever. Anything the ghosts tried was completely without meaning. But once, somewhere, they had been Beasts and Humans. They had no love for Heljanita. They knew that the toys were enemies. They attacked without regard for their lives because they had no lives.

  Heljanita knew, and the toys knew, that this fleet could not possibly exist. It had no place in their logic. But it had to be fought and destroyed. It was Time’s answer to the man who had defied it.

  The ghosts hurled their tattered spindle of ships into a tight curve to avoid the dense mass of toy ships in their path. They made no attempt to avoid the trap set by the robots, but flew straight into the thin cylinder of emptiness, between the jaws of the toys’ vise. As the thin outer wall of ships closed in, the ghosts swung out, and they met in a flurry of fire that signaled the beginning of Heljanita’s war of conquest.

  For precious moments, the ghosts were more tightly packed than the toys, and the numerical advantage paid in dead ships. But there were very few. It was difficult to hit a target in distorted space. In any case, the toys could easily afford the losses. Their thin wall held, and the ghosts were split as some soared through, while others were held in contest. The core of the toy formation came outward, pouring into the battle area and making it a sea of robot ships. The rest of the outer ring had curled right around to come at the ghosts which slipped through from either side.

  The pattern of the toy fleet began to disintegrate, but the ghost ships were already on their own. They were scattered and unable to help one another. Each ghost ship had three toys to destroy, and they had no chance at all.

  From the first moment to the last, it was simple massacre. The ghost ships were scattered all over the sky and were blown apart one by one in the calm, methodical fire of the robot gunners.

  They never tried to run. They swerved and spread, hopelessly trying to stretch the toys thin enough to neutralize the numerical advantage. But they kept attacking, kept hammering away as valiantly as they had done in the battle of the Kamak system before they had been snatched away through time.

  The ghosts lost the battle of the Time Gap. They were blasted out of existence. But their murder left a scar on the toy fleet. The cost was countable. By logic, the toys should have lost no more than two or three hundred shins in dispensing with such a vastly inferior force. But their losses were double that number, because the ghosts numbered men like Richard Stormwind, Alexander Blackstar, David Starbird and Robert Hornwing among their ranks.

  The toys were unperturbed by their losses. The battle had gone as it should. It had gone exactly as the battle with the Beast fleet would go—simple slaughter.

  In the end, it was the toys who called a halt to the battle of the Time Gap. There were so few of the enemy left that it was a waste of time to chase them. There were important things to think of, like regaining formation before crushing the Confederacy.

  Three hundred and fifty toy ships remained to fight the last remaining group of ghosts, which numbered about a hundred. That particular fragment of the battle raged in a system with a purple sun. There were another eighty or so ghost ships scattered over a vast
volume of space. As far as the toys were concerned, these were simply not worth bothering about. Even if they managed to regroup, they could not possibly be dangerous. Eighty ships were negligible. The toys did not consider the men inside them important. Richard Stormwind of Sabella was, to them, exactly the same as any other pilot and commander.

  AETERNA

  Aetema is a cold, lonely world. It is a world which is habitable but most unpleasant. It is too far away from a weak sun to provide an amicable climate for Human or Beast population.

  It is the kind of world which the Beasts have left alone. In addition, it is one of the worlds of the Devil’s Tresses, where the Beasts never go in any case—except for the misfits, the outcasts and the runaways.

  There are pleasant worlds in the Devil’s Tresses. No one needs to turn to Aetema for such shelter as it can offer. There is only one reason for anyone to come to Aetema—if he wants to be absolutely certain that he will be left alone.

  Unfortunately, if two groups with the same reason select the same planet, neither gets what they want. Hence, Heljanita finds the tunnel dwellers a nuisance, but elects to ignore them as far as possible. He despises them. That they might represent a threat is inconceivable. The tunnel dwellers hate Heljanita, but it is quite beyond them to think of doing anything about him. He simply has to be tolerated. And so there is coexistence.