by Brian N Ball
But how could he hope to convince them in a minute or two that he had been, until a year ago, an ordinary man, much like themselves. A man with a secure, pleasant enough life. Until the grim accident that had begun as a little interruption to the chore of ferrying the annual ship across the Sector. Accident? It hadn’t been that. Not on the Jacobis’ part. But you couldn’t explain, because no one could understand, not unless they took part in the ritual of the hunt. Once you became a licensed victim, you stopped living as a human being. You learned to exist. What could the little man with his arm around the beautiful girl know of the mindless rage that swept you when you saw yet another Jacobi challenger flashing toward your ship? What could this stout old soldier understand of a man on his own, always against superior odds? And did it matter that no one here could possibly know how he felt?
Danecki watched Dross. He knew that he had been right to trust him. Batibasaga revolved slowly on his remaining leg.
“Where is he?” asked Dross. “The man you’re running from.”
“Near,” replied Danecki.
Mrs. Zulkifar squealed angrily: “You’re putting us all in danger! I know about these hunts. You’re supposed to do it all in deep space. Not where there are innocent bystanders! You’ve no right to endanger our lives!”
Dross ignored her. “You’ve put us all in danger,” he said. “But the personal vendetta is a vile outrage to human decency, and you shall have our help.”
Batibasaga hopped to the doorway. The clatter of his progress distracted them all. Danecki was relieved when the staring eyes were withdrawn. He had felt like some grotesque specimen in a peep show while they were weighing him up.
The robot was poised, listening. “Weight about one-six-two,” it said. It pivoted slowly like some sentient gyroscope. “Nearing.”
Danecki understood at once, Dross fractionally later. Of the others, only Wardle picked out the robot’s meaning.
Mrs. Zulkifar asked for information as Danecki leapt for the doorway. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happening? It’s an outrage!” The robot answered her with considerable politeness: “The missing member of your party is here, Madam.”
That was how the last of the Jacobis saw them: an onrush of figures towards him as he readied the long heatgun. He must have been completely distraught at that moment; or perhaps he was as amazed by the numbers rushing toward him as Mrs. Zulkifar was to see him. Whatever was responsible, however, he failed altogether to notice the presence of the robot at the side of the entrance.
“Murderer!” he yelled, seeing Danecki’s lunging figure.
The weapon came down. Danecki saw the pinpoint of incandescence at its end. In the smallest unit of time, it would flower into a raging blast and take him into charred blackness. He heard one of the women sequealing horribly. Dross’s voice boomed out.
The robot acted. Batibasaga swept upward in a grotesque and frighteningly quick movement. It took the incipient blast of the fusor on what was left of its chest. In the same instant of time, the robot shot out a skeletal appendage and flicked the youth’s feet from under him.
Noise rolled in Danecki’s ears. Screams. His own voice in a bull-roaring. Wardle and Dross bellowing too. Cries of terror. And then the thin whistling of the vicious weapon.
The long fusor rolled across the floor, seemingly of its own volition. Then the room was suffused in the eerie light of the weapon’s blast. Noise and light seemed to lift the room into another plane of existence altogether, one where there could be no end to the gobbetting fury of the heatgun, and the terror of the people there.
“Get it, Batty!” yelled Knaggs.
But the robot was gibbering nonsense, adding its own high-pitched whinings to the confusion.
“Good God, Doctor, look there!” bawled Wardle in Danecki’s ear.
The heat and blast had shattered the far wall of the already battered room. Metal ran redly and a hole suddenly gaped through the wall. Dross answered Wardle, but his voice was lost in the noise. Danecki saw an array of levers through the hole. Then these too glowed red, then white and splashed down out of sight.
“Controls!” screamed Knaggs. “Get the gun, Batty! Get it!”
And still the terrible weapon spun its web of fury.
The crippled robot acted at last. It became a whirling metal scarecrow as it hopped over both Dross and the little engineer. Khalia felt the skin on her face tightening as the molten wall radiated a fierce heat into the room. She saw Danecki follow the robot as it smashed downward on to the juddering, slender shaft of the fusor. Then Danecki had the half-conscious Jacobi in his big hands, and the robot had the weapon.
Worse happened.
Danecki, the terrified Mr. Moonman, Dross, Wardle, and even the still-dazed Jacobi—all remained still, hypnotized by the bizarre result of the wrecking of the controls. Mrs. Zulkifar inquired in a chilling voice what Danecki had done now.
Khalia knew that something uncanny and inevitable was taking place in the ancient observation deck. The older woman’s complaint was pitifully inadequate as a response to the eerie happening.
For, among the molten debris and the shattered machinery beyond the wall, a new squat structure was taking shape. It built itself up, a cube of iron-black force-fields. Rough, whirling, spinning, grinding forces began to shake the room; the cube began outside the little observation deck, and almost at once it was within it, surrounding the amazed group of men and women. To the watchers it seemed that some evil being was asserting its power in the ruins of the titanic military base.
Knaggs recognized it for what it was. “Back!” he snapped. “Through the doorway!” He pushed Khalia violently toward the entrance of the chamber. She jerked forward, but there was no entrance now. The cube was not only in the room: it was the room. “Come on!” implored Knaggs uselessly, but the girl could not move nearer the grinding, smashing sides of the cube.
“It’s a force-field!” Wardle shouted. “Doctor, damn me if there aren’t machines working here!”
The cube held them in a threshing fog of black light now. Within the network of forces, they struggled for understanding.
“Try to get out!” Knaggs shouted. “It’s a spin-shaft! Not one of ours!”
“Yes it is!” Dross was beside himself with excitement. “A primitive artifact,” he called, trembling. “Yes!”
Knaggs hurled himself at the cube. It seemed to bend and sway under his impact, and then brute forces smashed him with incredible violence hard into the youth. Danecki heard the sound of bones snapping; the screams of bewilderment and shock came.
The noise was unbearable—worse, if that could be, than the earlier uproar. There was a grinding rush of spinning molecules at the edges of the cube. The floor tilted beneath them. Jacobi yelled in fear and pain, while Knaggs’s thin screams told how badly he had been hurt. Khalia contrived to keep her mouth closed; she watched as Mrs. Zulkifar set up a howl of terrified protest.
Danecki saw Dross smile. Dross knew what had happened. As the grip of the spin-shaft tightened and they began the plunging descent, Danecki knew that one man at least had been successful in his quest.
Khalia saw the youth’s arm snap. It was entangled in the tumbling heap of bodies; and when Knaggs violently catapulted across the space within the mesh of force-fields, the arm took the full force of his onrush. It gave way with a dull cracking sound. In the turmoil of the moment, it was one more sickening element, another fragment of horror. She saw Knaggs collapsed on the tilting floor in a heap, Dross flung into the squirming pile of bodies, Mrs. Zulkifar fallen backwards with an expression of acute embarrassment on her face. Only the grim-faced man with the wild eyes kept his balance against the forces that locked them into the confines of the grinding spin-shaft. Then she too felt the subtle and powerful sway of the tunnel. She put an arm out instinctively and felt it taken.
Above the cries and the colossal roarings of the primitive installation she heard Danecki reassuring her. “Relax. It doesn’t matter if
you don’t keep upright. Relax! This is almost free-fall.”
Danecki marveled at the calmness in his own voice. Naturally the girl was in a state of terror. Even more naturally, the hurt and dazed party were yelling to one another, to him, to their gods, to the controllers at Galactic Center who had set up the excursion, and to the attendant robots that should have been on hand to rescue them. The girl trembled, but she kept control of herself. She was watching him. He kept her hand and pressed it firmly. The skin was smooth and warm against his palm. He tried to remember the last woman he had had. The girl was talking.
“What is it? What’s happened? Have you done this?”
He couldn’t hear the words but he could see the shape of her questions. “The fort,” he mouthed. “Spin-shaft. It’s got us. It’s taking us!”
“Where?”
Danecki shrugged and fell off-balance. The girl came with him, still holding onto his hand in a timid display of strength. When he could watch her lips, and when she wriggled into a position from which she could see him too, he shouted: “Underground! Down!”
He saw that she understood. She obviously had a dozen other questions, but she did not trouble with them. Instead she was edging toward Knaggs. The little engineer’s face had a waxen look about it that Danecki knew well.
Danecki half-pushed the girl, using the quivering body of Mr. Moonman as a platform. She reached Knaggs and tried to separate him from Dross’s bulk. Dross bellowed something, his first response to the situation. Danecki saw the girl’s mouth open to shout back angrily—but then the rough sides of the tunnel let out such a roar of grinding noise that all the stunned occupants desperately tried to block it out with hands and arms.
Mind reeling, Danecki watched vast sheets of energy build up in the tunnel. Black shocks of power smashed at the cage that held them. Rococo picture frames of energy formed and dissolved as molecular spin shook the mass of the space they occupied. A wild blast of sound and splintering shards of molecules rocked the tiny cage; those that were conscious knew at once that this was the climactic moment of the plunging descent. The force-fields that contained them were battling in the structure of the ancient spin-shaft. Danecki reached out to the girl, but she was holding the lax body of the systems engineer. He saw the gratitude in her eyes as the roaring built up into a blinding, brain-shattering crescendo—where tiny universes of molecules flashed into being and disappeared in pinpoints of immense sunbursts.
And then they were through the fault in the tunnel and quite suddenly at rest on a hard glittering metal floor.
Danecki was on his feet almost instantly. The habits of the past year gripped him in an unshakable routine. His eyes swept the new hunting ground, looking for the location of the enemy.
Khalia felt a stab of pity for him. Here, in this ancient cave of blued steel—even here, in a deserted, abandoned, lifeless place—Danecki was first and foremost a hunted animal. Then she saw what made the others gasp in awe and amazement. Dross, as usual, was the first to recover.
His voice rang with reverent delight. “Dross promised you marvels! And here is the greatest! This is the find of a lifetime, ladies and gentlemen—the Hidden Fort!”
* * *
CHAPTER 5
They were in a control room, so much was apparent.
In the low-ceilinged, blue-steel cavern, the entire length of one wall was filled with sensor-pads, control seats, a huge, pale, dead screen, directional sensors—in fact, the whole apparatus of a powerful and gigantic military installation. The great room was on a far bigger scale than the wrecked observation deck above. Clearly, this had been the nerve center of the grand armies of the long-dead Second Interplanetary Confederation. It was here that their military genius had been lavished, rather than on the conventional fortress which had fallen to the crack regiments of the enemy.
Danecki automatically checked his escape route. Three corridors radiated from one end of the underground vault. Another opening nearby might or might not be an exit. At the other end of the control room was a pair of great black doors.
But of the spin-shaft that had deposited them so unceremoniously on the steel floor, there was no sign. It had appeared in the ruins like some long-asleep beast— flung them downwards—and, its duty completed, vanished.
Wardle and Dross were dazed with wonder.
“What a find! Congratulations, Doctor,” Wardle burst out. “Undamaged—untouched. Amazing! Exactly as it stood a thousand years ago!”
Dross drank in the sight of the glittering controls. “Perfect!” He advanced with shaking hands to a seat that clearly had belonged to some long-dead commander: the battle-direct chair.
The Jacobi youth was staring at his wrecked arm, apparently unable to let a single sound escape his lips; he looked no more than a schoolboy. He lay propped up on his good arm with the other at an impossible angle. Danecki let him lie in his universe of pain. He was no threat.
Mr. Moonman lay dazed beside the shattered robot. Face to face, they looked like some strange flotsam sluiced down into the cave of blue steel.
Khalia was afraid for the little engineer, and it was she who broke the spell of the two ecstatic men: “Can’t one of you do something for Mr. Knaggs?” Her voice rang around the clean, brightly-lit cavern. It bounced off crisp, blue-steel walls—setting up tiny echoes that flicked around the functional chamber like winged things. “He’s badly hurt. Can’t you see?”
Knaggs heard her. His lips moved slowly in his gray-white face.
Dross was at Knaggs’s side with a speed surprising for a man of his bulk. His large, perspiring face was contorted with agonized pity. “Mr. Knaggs,” he called. Dross shook his head, still unable to believe what he could read in the engineer’s eyes. His trance of glory slipped away, and he was suddenly a broken, aging man who sees a friend dying. “How bad?” he whispered.
“It’s bad,” said Danecki. “See?”
Dross wrung his fat hands helplessly. Mr. Moonman watched as Danecki stripped the engineer’s shirt back.
Mrs. Zulkifar would not look at the little, crushed figure. “I’m going back,” she said firmly. “I didn’t want to come in the first place. Brigadier! It’s your duty to do something for a lady!” She stared defiantly at Dross. Still she refused to look at Knaggs, who was breathing raggedly in Danecki’s careful arms.
His rib cage had been crushed. Down the left side, the normally convex curve had been pushed inwards. There was only a slight reddening of the skin to indicate the force of the blows he had received when the spin-shaft formed, but the bones below the surface had the pulpy feel of multiple fractures. No man could live long with those injuries.
“He needs expert attention if he’s to live,” said Danecki. “The bones are in his lungs and there’ll be other internal punctures.”
Yet, with an incredible effort of will, the little man was forcing himself to speak.
“Don’t!” Dross implored him. “We’ll get you to the surface—I’ve a full surgical unit,” he added to Danecki.
But Knaggs wouldn’t be denied. Dross watched the thin lips in the gray face become blotched with frothy blood.
Knaggs’s voice bubbled through the redness: “Controls?” he whispered. In vain, he tried to repeat what he had said.
Dross looked to Danecki. “I must act, get him out. The shaft—the spin-shaft! Where are the controls?” His eye fell on the robot. “Batty! Up. Locate the spin-shaft controls. Get us out—Mr. Knaggs needs attention urgently!”
“Yes,” Wardle called. “Let’s get him to the surface. Quickly, now! Damn it, the robot’s not stirring!”
Dross touched the blasted frame of the robot with his foot. He stared at it helplessly. There was no sign of movement from the automaton. As he kicked it again, his foot knocked against the ancient robot head that Batty had been carrying since intercepting Danecki in the ruins above. “Wrecked!” Dross said helplessly. “It must have been put out of action by the fusor. Batty!”
Mrs. Zulkifar’s icy v
oice rang out again: “I believe you planned this, Doctor. Really, it’s too much! You and that ruffian! I’m going to report you all to Galactic Center. Now, what are you going to do about getting us out of here? Can’t you use the controls? You’re supposed to be an expert, Doctor!”
Knaggs was listening.
Danecki said in a fast urgent voice: “Be quiet! All of you!”
“—touch—controls—” Knaggs’s voice was a feeble croak.
Dross bent down. “Please don’t talk, Mr. Knaggs. We’ll find how to operate the controls—yes, they’re here! The whole Hidden Fort is here. We’ve found it, you and I, Mr. Knaggs!”
But Knaggs would not allow himself to relapse into the peace of unconsciousness. He was struggling against the pain of a score of bone fragments grinding into damaged organs; struggling, too, against the blood welling up into his mouth.
“Then get to work!” Mrs. Zulkifar ordered. She saw Danecki’s eyes and was quiet. They were the eyes of an animal, slits of fiery menace. She shivered visibly.
“He’s your systems man, isn’t he?” asked Danecki. “Your engineer?”
“He is. My friend, too,” replied Dross.
“Then listen. He’s trying to tell us something about the systems down here.”
Knaggs’s clouded but still-bright blue eyes widened. He could hear and understand. When he did manage to speak, after an agonizing minute of effort, his voice was distinct. “Don’t touch the controls… don’t touch the controls!”
“I got that,” said Danecki. “Don’t touch the controls. Why not? We want to get you to a surgical unit.”
“Leave him!” Khalia said fiercely. “It’s torture for him to breathe!”
Danecki pitied her for her youthful innocence. “Why not?” he said again.