The Regiments of Night

by Brian N Ball

  The Regiments of Night

  Brian N. Ball

  * * *

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  No. 19

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

  1301 Avenue of the Americas New York, N. Y. 10019

  COPYRIGHT ©, 1972, BY BRIAN N. BALL

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  COVER ART BY KELLY FREAS.

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  * * *

  Dedication:

  For my daughters Jane and Amanda

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  A dim yellow sun shimmered for moments in the space that still shook with the eerie trailing dance of the hypercubes. The girl tensed.

  “I don’t know why you bother,” Mrs. Zulkifar said over her shoulder. “One sun’s much like another. This one is quite undistinguished. I don’t think I’ll trouble to leave the ship at all.”

  Khalia smiled politely. “I expect you’re right,” she said.

  But she still looked out into the blankness, waiting for the moment of transition from the weird phenomenon of Phase, when the ship would break loose from the coils of the unreal dimensions and slip into a tenable structure of space-time.

  She wanted to see the sun. The Sun. And Earth.

  Corridors of unholy power spun before her. There was a momentary blankness beyond belief as the ship pulsated with energy.

  “No,” said Mrs. Zulkifar. “I don’t think I’m up to another excursion.”

  “Nonsense!” Brigadier Wardle said heartily. “You must come with me—I promise you won’t be disappointed! Splendid ruins down there! You can’t miss Earth!”

  Mrs. Zulkifar shook her handsome head. “I may take one of the other trips,” she said. “But a whole day in the weather just isn’t for me, Brigadier.”

  They talked on, Wardle pursuing the attractive widow with a hearty enthusiasm that had been comic during the first part of the long voyage. It bored Khalia now. She wanted to see the planet.

  The entire ship was invested with a disagreeable rippling of power. The sharp angles of walls and seats blurred for a tiny fraction of time.

  Then the moment of transition from hyperspace to the comprehensible dimensions was accomplished. Khalia looked about her.

  The ship was riding smoothly alongside a belt of asteroids. The passengers could look at one another and not have to hide a secret fear of the gulfs between the stellar systems. They could leave the protective couches and look at the reassuring solidity of the planets, sure that they could make an easy planetfall if they wished.

  Time and space had been forced aside, so that the voyagers could add one more excursion to their itinerary. Galactic center never lost a ship.

  Suddenly the vessel lurched; Mrs. Zulkifar yelped.

  “What the devil—” began Wardle.

  “This is not an emergency!” a smooth metallic voice said at once. “Your captain apologizes for the discomfort. A small adjustment of course was necessary to avoid a vessel in the immediate vicinity. There is no cause for alarm. Thank you!”

  “It’s too much!” Mrs. Zulkifar complained. “Anyway, I thought there wasn’t a captain.”

  The retired soldier was happy to explain. “No more, my dear—ah—Emma! It’s a polite fiction, like pretending that the food comes from real grains and vegetables and animals. Galactic Center hasn’t used a crewed ship for a couple of centuries! Why should it?”

  “What’s another ship doing here?” the middle-aged woman with the firm figure and exquisite clothes wanted to know. “I thought the whole planet was derelict!”

  “Not altogether,” said Wardle, with a gleam of excitement. “What was the ship?” he asked the humanoid handing around drinks.

  “The captain believes it was a private vessel, sir,” said the automaton, “It didn’t respond to signals. Of course it could be the famous Dr. Dross’s supply vessel—the archaeologist, sir, you know.”

  “I know,” said Wardle.

  “Of course, sir! Perhaps Dr. Dross is exhibiting signs of his well-known eccentricity. Maybe he buzzed us deliberately, sir!”

  “Why?” asked Khalia.

  “The Doctor is averse to visitors,” explained the robot. “But don’t let that deter you from visiting the famous ruins, miss. The Doctor is obliged, by the terms of his contract with Galactic Center, to act as host to our passengers.”

  It spoke with a degree of satisfaction that Khalia found repellent. It chuckled. It was a laughing little robot. Khalia had heard its poor jokes halfway across the Galaxy.

  Wardle was launched on a lecture. “It must have been badly-handled to make us take evasive action. I don’t like to think there’s some incompetent blasting around just as we’re coming out of Phase.”

  “The captain said we’re not to worry,” Mrs. Zulkifar said firmly. “He should know!”

  “Damn it, there isn’t a captain!” growled Wardle.

  Mrs. Zulkifar pointedly ignored him.

  “The robots take too much on themselves!” he added, but no one was listening now.

  Khalia was looking through the scanners at the green planet. It would not be long before the big tourist ship sent out its fleet of excursion-craft to the various local attractions.

  Khalia was going to Earth. She was as excited as she could ever remember. Her face was calm enough, but inwardly she was brimming with eagerness. The rest of the long, slow haul through the Galaxy had been interesting enough. There had been a succession of often bewildering new sights. None had stirred her as the thought of the ancient planet that swam greenly about its red-yellow sun. There was little to see as yet.

  Probably the excursion would be a disappointment. According to the guidebooks, most of the land-surface was unapproachable. The deep radiation of the Third Millennium and its Mad Wars still gnawed into the planetary crust. Nothing grew on the twin continents that straddled the globe. The Southern landmass was a fiercer waste than when the human race had invented space-time travel. Parts of what had been Europe remained green.

  The scanners at last began to pick out detail. Forests and lakes under drifting white cloud made the planet a welcoming place. Here and there the remains of a tower-city thrust through the clouds, still supported on thin stilts. One blue city caught her attention. It parted the white mist like a needle in wool. Would it be on the itinerary? It wasn’t.

  Then the city was obscured by a raging storm. Khalia flicked the scanner away. Before it moved on, she saw a tiny ship hang like a fish in the clouds. And then another.

  “There were two ships!” she exclaimed.

  “What?” said the Brigadier, all bustling energy.

  “I saw them—two ships! Just before I moved the scanner on. I can’t find them now.”

  “Couldn’t be!” said Wardle heartily. “One, yes. Not two. Maybe you saw the same ship twice. Optical illusion—aftereffect on the retina.”

  “Maybe I did,” said the girl.

  Wardle caught the tone of dissatisfaction in her voice. “There just can’t be!” he went on. “One ship, yes— that would be Dr. Dross’s vessel. He’ll need supplies from Center from time to time. But there’s no reason for another ship. Not a real ship, that is, not this sort of ship. The dig down there is the only official settlement.”

  He paused. “Of course, there’d be a few hoboes,” he continued. “Eccentrics. People who’ve stranded themselves deliberately years ago. The sort of people who’d come to live on Earth out of sentiment.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Khalia. She was too happy to resent his patronizing.

  He began to talk about the planet, quite interestingly at first. He knew an amazing amount about the oldest known planet of all. He spoiled the effect by trying to impress his circle of fe
male listeners with his knowledge of the theories about the origin of human life. Khalia moved away when he began the familiar recital. The business of mythical accounts of a settlement by extra-Terrestrials was worn-out, tedious stuff.

  Yet when the ship had slipped out of the curious and frightening effect called Phase, she had become unbelievably excited. Had she been able to look at herself, she would have been deeply ashamed of the flushed cheeks, the wide open eyes, and the furious throbbing of her neck arteries. She had been totally absorbed in the moment of revelation. It hadn’t been in the least dull.

  She looked what she was, a young woman undergoing a profound sense of wonder at feelings she had not guessed could exist. She sensed the mystery of the ancient spinning globe, and it moved her strangely.

  Mrs. Zulkifar said something caustically to Wardle. The older woman regarded Khalia’s slim but well-rounded body with some dislike. Khalia knew she was talking about her.

  “—flaunting herself—” Khalia made out.

  Khalia pushed the short skirt over her legs. What made Mrs. Zulkifar such a disagreeable bitch? Khalia hoped she would not make the trip to Earth. “And I did see two ships,” she said, but under her breath. Why provoke another lecture from the Brigadier?

  When Danecki’s ship cut across the whirlpools of vortexes set up by the huge cruiser, he realized that he might have a chance. The two fresh-faced boys who had flicked their dainty scout with contemptuous ease amongst the dimensional storms of hyperspace could, just conceivably, be confused. They had followed him, turning, twisting, sinking along the mazes of the continuums, always able to pick up his trail.

  And why not, thought Danecki grimly. They had the better ship, the keener sensors, the bigger screens. And the lash of outrage. Not all his years of hard-won expertise in the mysterious wastes of the gaps between the planets of his own system would save him, for, in the end, the odds were against him. Deliberately so.

  Danecki had picked on this little-used sector because it was almost as far as you could go towards the rim of the Galaxy. Here, the inexperienced boys might lose themselves in the complex of star-systems.

  Twice he had flung his little ship—the customary robust vessel allowed to the offender—out of Phase. But they had followed. The second time, a sudden gobbetting of incandescence had sheared away the auxiliary power units of his little ship, a neat chopping away of all but the big engines. A failure that occurred at any distance from a planet with a breathable atmosphere meant death.

  All he had of the ship’s once considerable emergency equipment was the simplest kind of power-glide pod. He had improvised manually for hours, desperately fighting the banks of controls so that they would not falter. He had somehow kept them working. Reaching the space-time unit of the sector that held Sol was the limit of his ship’s capacity.

  The big ship came out of hyperspace just as his own stubby little vessel jangled out of the phenomenon of Phase. For a moment he had thought it was the pursuing ship, but it was far too powerful for that. Only ships from Center had the mighty thrust of those engines which had tossed his own craft aside. What ships would visit this sector? It’s habitable planets had been poisoned a thousand years ago. Except for Earth!

  “Tourists.” Danecki muttered. “A tourist ship.” The boys would be confused. They would keep their ship in the strange peripheries of hyperspace, like a hunting beast, its sensors confused by the turmoil of the huge ship’s passing. But for how long?

  He saw a ruined city below him. Then the clamor of warning systems sent him reeling to the controls. “Tourists?” he said aloud.

  The robot evaluator answered promptly. “Yes, Danecki. This is Earth. Tourist ships visit regularly. Certain areas are clear of radiation. We should move, Danecki. The ship’s getting hot. The screens are at only three percent efficiency.”

  “Earth?” he asked.

  “You asked for the nearest breathable atmosphere, Danecki.”

  “And this is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Most of the land areas are unusable without a radiation suit.”

  “Which I haven’t got.”

  “Which the ship can’t provide.”

  “The Jacobis?”

  “Breaking out of Phase, Danecki.”

  “Power!”

  Above the ruins of a city that hung poised on its still-active stilts of force-fields, the ship hung blackly for a moment and then flashed through the sunrise and out across a blanket of high clouds. The pursuing vessel burst through the confines of the dimensional cage that protected it in hyperspace.

  “There!” called Danecki.

  The sit-rep chart focused on a landmass that was bland. No violent radioactivity shimmered evilly on the screen. The ship responded and plunged through the clouds to what had once been the plains of Kent. Danecki caught a glimpse of himself in the smooth metal of the ship. His face was unshaven. The eyes were deep in the already-deep sockets. He looked like a criminal, a hunted man that had become a thing to the last of the Jacobi clan. He made his preparations. Really, there was no decision to make.

  He was already punching a series of instructions into the manual controls. He could not trust the robot to follow his orders. The Jacobis were near—perhaps they were watching him even now, though he thought they might still be chasing one of the thousands of false trails set up by the big vessel’s shock waves.

  The robot interrupted. “Orders, Danecki?”

  “Abort yourself.”

  The cone of metal grunted and then began to give off a thin vapor. Danecki shouldered the heavy pod and made for the big port. Behind him the robot controller splashed into a pool of running metal. When the ship’s speed suddenly decreased Danecki opened the port. He looked down through the clouds. It was all to end there, where, for the human race, it had begun.

  “A race!” Danecki said aloud.

  The pod hurtled him head over heels twenty times before he found the trick of planing. When he was within two hundred feet of the ground he cut in the drive.

  It jerked him abruptly. He tried to see the ship but the clouds had long since closed over it.

  A year ago, thought Danecki, I couldn’t have done this. Now I think like an animal. I need food. Cover. A weapon. Then I can kill the last two of the Jacobis and —and what?

  “Dr. Dross, you can’t do that! Damn it, Doctor, you’re not handling mildewed corpse-wrappings or rusty bits of iron from the Steam Age. This is sophisticated machinery. Put it down!”

  Dross blinked at the speaker. He settled his massive paunch against a particularly interesting piece of Third Confederation robotic architecture. The carapace was in his hands. He had been trying to remove the flat humanoid face so that he could examine the brainbox. He dropped the head into the yellow mud.

  Knaggs was the kind of man you couldn’t argue with. His qualifications were the highest; Knaggs was the best in his field. Whatever antique piece of hardware came out of the ruined fort, he would run his fingers over it and say, “Yes, it might be, it’s about right for the location we found it in, Doctor, it’s a simple fusor system.” Or, “This isn’t right, Doctor, don’t forget this place has been a ruin for a thousand years and other teams have picked it over—this thing is probably an early Galactic Team’s burrow-bug directioner. Interesting, but you could pick up one in a museum at Center.”

  Knaggs examined the robotic head again. “And don’t let those things fall, Doctor,” Knaggs added. “They’ve always got a complete memory-track from that period! I could maybe get us a rundown on the last days of the fort with that!”

  Knaggs was a puny figure of a man. He was short and painfully thin. His nose poked out at the level of Dross’s broad, fat chest.

  “Mr. Knaggs, haven’t I always passed on such finds to you?” Dross spoke with a pleasant calmness.

  “Not always, Doctor, not always!”

  “And don’t I give you a free hand with anything that’s in your field?” Dros
s asked.

  “So far, Doctor, so far,” said Knaggs. “But I don’t trust you when you get your hands on these defense systems—you can’t help fiddling, Doctor, and that’s when there’ll be trouble. That and the tourists! Why can’t you all leave me to get on with my work. Doctor, it’s a miserable life when the place is crawling with inquisitive women who clutter my workshops up with the bits of gewgaws they leave behind!”

  Dross still looked calmly down at the fuming little engineer. Though he smiled, his eyes were slits. “Mr. Knaggs, I too have my difficulties. One is the problem you mention. No more than you do I like to have my diggings overrun by ignorant visitors who come to gape and leave their rubbish behind. Another of my problems is the way we have to work here. Instead of the modern equipment I’d choose, we have to employ an antiquated robot to sift through the remains of the largest single defensive installation produced in the ancient world. Both of these problems, Mr. Knaggs—” and here Knaggs recognized the subtle shift in emphasis as Dross ground out his name so that it sounded like a snarl—“are dwarfed by the presence of a—” and Knaggs moved back, but not sharply enough, for Dross had placed two enormous bulky hands on his shoulders and lifted him clean off his feet— “self-opinionated, conceited, over-bearing—”

  With each word, Dross raised the little struggling figure higher. “—totally unreasonable—” Now Dross shifted his grip and caught Knaggs against the vastness of his paunch. “—manikin who cannot let the greatest archaeologist in the entire Galaxy get on with his work.”

  Now Dross had tipped Knaggs upside down, so that he was staring in fright at the yellow mud which had so recently covered the perimeter installation where the decapitated robot lay.

  Knaggs yelled and bawled to be put down, for the mud was peculiarly uninviting, and Dross’s intention clear. “A ship!” gurgled Knaggs into the mud. He emerged to see Dross chuckling fatly.

  “Tourists!” burbled Dross. “Our tourists.”

  Knaggs glared at him. “Look at me. It’ll take me an hour to get clean. You’re mad, Dross, mad! You should be recalled! You’re completely unbalanced! You’ll never find the—” He stopped, for Dross was looking at him with a glaring intensity. Knaggs squelched to his feet. “It didn’t sound like a tourist ship,” he said.