The Regiments of Night

by Brian N Ball

  Dross hit her once sharply across the neck. The woman collapsed in an untidy, long-legged heap.

  Khalia was unable to keep her eyes from the screen. It took a minute or so for the tiny dart-like projectiles to snuff around the cruiser and decide that this was their target. They circled it, discarding booster rockets, and weaving small patterns in the sunlight.

  The rockets homed in and the screen burst into one single outrushing surge of glory. For a few seconds there was a new sun in the dusty reaches of space high above Earth.

  The calm, ordered voice from the control panel spoke. “Instructions, Commander!” it requested. “Ship completely destroyed. One flight of missiles returned to reserve.” There was a wait of a few seconds, and then the request was repeated. “Instructions required from Duty Commander.”

  “Duty Commander?” Wardle said, this new term deflecting him from the shock of the vessel’s end. “Eh? Duty Commander? Doesn’t it know there isn’t one?”

  The others were too shocked to listen.

  “They’re all dead!” Khalia sobbed, breaking down. “We could have saved them—we’re only a few! The ship was full!”

  Dross tried to comfort her. “No, no! You tried, my dear. Don’t blame yourself. And who can tell whether or not the other excursion boats had returned to the ship? They don’t always—there’s often a stopover at Moonbase. Yes, there is! And the Asteroids excursion too! First class hotels there—all automatic! It may be that there were no people aboard the ship!”

  “Yes! Yes!” said Wardle eagerly. “Eh, Doctor? You saw them, didn’t you, Mr. Moonman? Lots of people went on the Moonbase trip!”

  Khalia felt her neck. The woman had been crazed with rage and terror. She pushed herself clear of Mrs. Zulkifar’s unconscious body.

  Danecki spoke to her. “You did what you could. None of us could, or would, do more.”

  “One thing’s certain,” said Wardle. “There’ll be no help from the ship. We have to rely on ourselves now.”

  Again, the fort seemed to be developing a curiously menacing air. It was flooding with life. There were echoing, tinny voices down the long corridors radiating from the far end of the cavern. There was a rhythm of action in the previously dormant installation. A pattern of splintered light in the low roof began to edge into a repetitive and almost hypnotic slow cycle of movement.

  And the calm, equable voice spoke again: “Instructions, please. Duty Commander! All systems activated. No instructions received!”

  Khalia was ashamed to discover that she was losing interest in the death of the tourist ship. It mattered that she personally should survive.

  In the echoing stillness of the low cavern there was, for a few moments, only the irregular raggedness of Knaggs’s breathing. They all realized that there would be no help from outside.

  Dross was listening, Danecki saw. Wardle too. But they were waiting for the voice of the machine, not for the next anguished bout of bubbled breathing from the obviously dying man.

  “This call for a Duty Commander—” he said to the two men. “Doesn’t the installation realize the passage of time? Why is it calling for a Duty Commander when the Confederation died a thousand years ago?”

  “I wish I could answer,” said Dross. “Ask me anything about the Second Interplanetary Confederation—its laws, ethics, extant culture, religions, psychology, passions, even its depravities—and I’ll refer you to my standard works. I know them all. But Mr. Knaggs knew the robots. Why have they lasted for a thousand years? Why! That, Brigadier, we might guess!”

  Wardle’s eyes gleamed. His broad face creased into a wondering smile. “Waiting for instructions, eh, Doctor— waiting a thousand years for the right instructions!”

  “And what instructions were those, Brigadier?”

  Wardle was not smiling now. “They intended Armageddon,” he said. “The complete destruction of all life on the three planets they once held.”

  As if in answer, the ancient robotic voice put in its request again: “No instructions, Duty Commander!”

  Danecki looked down at the inert green-bronze robot.

  Khalia watched him. The grim-faced man had an uncanny fascination for her. She saw that he had checked the position of his enemy before he looked at the robot. Was this what a year’s survival in the licensed jungle of hyperspace had done to him? She knew he had seen that Jacobi had moved towards the sliver of steel with which Danecki had opened the robot.

  The boy was a hunter still. He was feigning unconsciousness, waiting for Danecki to cross to the space between Knaggs and the robot. Knaggs and the robot. And the sliver of steel. Khalia saw Danecki’s indecision as he paused before the wrecked automaton. She began to gather herself to shriek a warning.

  Knaggs sensed something. He had heard the calm, thousand-year-old robotic voice, or the roar of sound from the doomed tourist ship, or even Khalia’s own plea for the people in it. Something had roused him for one last, agonized effort: “Get them out!”

  The voice was clear enough and loud enough for them all to hear. But the words bubbled. The lips were almost white, and the words seemed forced through the grip of a vice.

  “Going into a Phased Alert!” announced the mechanical voice from the control banks. “No instructions! Going into a Yellow Phase Alert!”

  “—out!” cried Knaggs loudly.

  Dross’s whole figure shook with a reflection of Knaggs’s spasmodic anguish. “Mr. Knaggs! Yes! If I can! But be quiet, man! Don’t try to talk. Mr. Knaggs, if I could only express my—”

  “—not long!” burst from Knaggs’s lips. The blood flowed freely. “One system activates the others!” Then there was a bubbling noise within his throat, and his thin body writhed in an extremity of pain. Muffled words turned to screams.

  Khalia tried to keep pace with the flow of blood. She had a pad of tissue that was a wet sponge by this time.

  “We have to know,” said Danecki, holding her hand back from Knaggs’s mouth. He glanced at the Jacobi youth and kicked the steel away. The youth glared as Danecki took him by the waist and hauled him away from the dying man.

  Knaggs’s eyes opened wide.

  The others saw they held the sudden clarity of vision and understanding that comes briefly before death. The mechanical voice said: “Yellow Phase Alert. This is a Yellow Phase Alert. Following General War Instructions, this installation is now on Full Battle Alert, Yellow Phase. It remains on Yellow Alert until further orders from the Duty Commander.”

  The voice drowned out what Knaggs was trying to say. Dross, Wardle, Khalia and Danecki were around him, listening for the thin echoes of words that were all that fell from Knaggs. Danecki moved closer still. He was staring straight into Khalia’s eyes. She was sure that Danecki could not see her. The eyes were as blank as a hole in space. They were busy with the statistics of survival. She heard some of the dying message.

  “Yellow Alert… maximum danger. Afterwards… Red… Red Alert,” gasped the frail figure.

  “Red Alert?” said Danecki. “Explain it if you can.”

  “Means… revenge… systems… a few hours.”

  Knaggs’s eyes held them. The brilliance was ebbing. A thin film of darkness had begun to glaze the little engineer’s eyes. The frail body arched upwards. Blood gushed in a red flood from his mouth. To the watchers it was like the last of daylight slipping away as the eyes emptied.

  “He’s dead,” said Dross unbelievingly. “Dead!”

  The screen returned to its state of blue emptiness.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  Dazed and stunned by the sharp clarity of the tourist vessel’s end, Khalia found herself unable to accept the further shock of Knaggs’s abrupt death. The little man had been so full of urgency one moment, so frighteningly at rest the next. The proximity of the pitiful corpse made the destruction of the hyperspace vessel almost trivial by comparison; it was only an unreal background to the cold certainty of the present.

  She heard Wardle babble out a
string of orders without being able to understand what he said; she saw Mr. Moonman tremble, his gaunt length shivering violently. Dross and Mrs. Zulkifar stared from the empty screen to the dead man, each as shocked as she herself. Only the Jacobi youth and Danecki retained a measure of self-possession. Danecki moved purposefully, while the youth’s eyes followed him with a sullen promise of murder.

  The metallic voice of the Weapons Control System stuttered out a brief message: “No survivors. No survivors. Ship completely destroyed!”

  Like a refrain, the official voice of the Central Command System answered: “Duty Commander! This is Yellow Phase Alert!”

  Danecki had seen too much of violent death and the colossal shock of ships vanishing into dust to let the awe of such moments of transition distract him. He knew that Knaggs was a man he could have liked in another, lost, life. Now, he was nothing.

  While the others were totally absorbed in the silence of the little man’s death and the hideous clamor of the tourist ship’s end, Danecki was planning. He noticed that the girl was grieving over Knaggs; that Jacobi watched him with the furious patience of the hunter; that Dross was lost in some world of private speculation; and that Brigadier Wardle was still breathing excitedly at the display of primitive martial might. But none of these reactions stirred him.

  He was busy with the inert robot. Though Batibasaga had been put out of action, the robot still represented a considerable source of power. Its auxiliary systems—the offensive capabilities, the communicators, the memory-banks, and the analysis systems—were all at the disposal of the trapped group. They were the only resources they possessed. Such a robot could make a strong impression on the robotic fort itself. Danecki pondered the apparently-dead, green-bronze form.

  Dross said to no one in particular: “Could it be?” Wardle turned from the emptiness of the screen. “Could it be what, Doctor?”

  “Could poor Mr. Knaggs have hinted at what we both know might be here, Brigadier?”

  “The legend, Doctor?”

  “Think of it!” said Dross with a subdued triumph in his voice. “Just think of it!”

  They talked together in low tones.

  Khalia covered the corpse with her coat. She sat beside it, still amazed by the suddenness of the death that had been inevitable. She saw the Jacobi youth move slightly.

  As Jacobi moved, Danecki instinctively noticed the change in the distribution of background phenomena. He looked up and saw that the boy was trying to sit up. When he spoke, it was with a deadly quietness.

  “Don’t think you’ll escape, Danecki,” he said. “If I think you’re making it, I’ll make sure down here. Don’t you see, I can’t let you win! Not again.”

  “No one ever won,” Danecki said in the same low voice. “I don’t want to kill you. Don’t make me. You have a name?”

  Danecki saw the hate sliding from the boy’s hot eyes. They had all been the same, the Jacobi clan. Implacable hunters, always implacable. Unreasoning, violent, ruthless. How could you explain to them that you were a peaceful man who had accidentally unleashed furious energies against their clansmen?

  “Jacobi,” the youth said. “Like the others—Jacobi.”

  Dross had arranged his dead friend’s hands so that the corpse had an unnatural tidiness that was at odds with the figure Knaggs had presented in life.

  He heard the exchange between Danecki and the youth. When he spoke, it was with an intensity of feeling that matched Jacobi’s: “I will not have this talk, boy! Your feud must stop. If I have my way, you will not be able to continue in your murderous course! If you speak more of this obscenity, I’ll have you gagged!” To Danecki he said: “There will be no more killing!”

  The two women listened with fascinated attention. Mrs. Zulkifar’s eyes darted about red-rimmed sockets in frank eagerness; Khalia could not take her gaze from Danecki’s tired face. She found the eyes haunted. Green-flecked, but tired, almost hopeless eyes.

  Brigadier Wardle swallowed and spoke out: “Can’t do more for Mr. Knaggs!” he said briskly. “Our first casualty. It’s war now, Doctor! War! That ship destroyed. Now Mr. Knaggs! This place is waking up—we’ve got to make plans. Action, eh? Can’t sit around talking. We don’t know how long we’ve got. Nor how long it will take for a rescue party to reach us. If there’s going to be one!” A thought struck him. “Eh, Doctor? What about your regular supply ship from Center? Isn’t that due?”

  “Too late,” said Dross. “It might even miss me altogether on this trip. The last time it came, I told them to leave me alone for a while. No, Brigadier, as I’ve already said, I believe we’re thrust back on our own resources. The installation is indeed coming to life!”

  Wardle paced about the blue-steel cavern. “We’ll have to find a way out. At once! We can fan out—take a sector each and report back in half an hour. Eh, Doctor?”

  “Yes!” Mrs. Zulkifar said, just as eagerly. “If this Ancient Monument isn’t controlled by sensible robots, perhaps we could find a way to the surface?”

  Dross waited for Danecki.

  “No,” said Danecki, shaking his head. “Mr. Knaggs will have died for nothing if we don’t accept what he said. So long as we stay here, we’re relatively safe. Haven’t you noticed that the Control Systems haven’t addressed us directly? They call for a Duty Commander that we know has been dead for centuries. They don’t talk to us.”

  “Of course,” Wardle said. “Should have thought of it. Expect you’re right.”

  “I agree too,” said Dross. “Had the fort known us to be intruders, we’d have been dealt with long before this. We abide by your decision, Mr. Danecki. I take it you’ll use the robot?”

  “It’s all so confusing,” Mrs. Zulkifar said plaintively.

  Wardle still retained some of his admiration for the handsome woman. “You’re not at your best—ah—Emma! Try to worry less. That is, forget it. I mean, calm yourself.” He turned to Danecki. “We’ll leave it to Mr. Danecki, eh?”

  Danecki slowly stripped the outer plates off the wrecked automaton. The fuel-cell winked jewel-like in the central core. Trails of circuits could be seen pumping oily power in a slow, smooth stream. Danecki carefully pushed membranous memory-cells aside. He was searching for spare coils of directional matter.

  “Can I help?” asked Dross.

  “I want cell-growth membranes,” said Danecki. “I could feed instructions through to the main memory circuits, if I could find some spare material.”

  “Well?” queried the Brigadier.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Well, man, can’t you do anything?”

  Danecki forced himself to understand the Brigadier’s inner turmoil. He tried not to show the instant rage in his face. “I’ll try,” he said. “It can be done by hand. But it takes time.”

  Khalia watched Danecki begin the tedious process of separating the infinitely thin tissues that made up the robot’s memory, deductive processes, and code of conduct.

  They had all put themselves in those broad, capable hands.

  Wardle was still uneasy about relying on Danecki. It was not so much what he said—Wardle had discussed the disappearance of the spin-shaft with Dross—as the glances Danecki sent over towards him.

  “What baffles me,” said Wardle, “is how we came to be allowed into the spin-shaft at all. You’d think there’d be some security apparatus to exclude unauthorized entrants.” He stared at Danecki briefly. “Eh, Doctor?”

  Danecki spoke quietly, without taking his eyes off the membranous tissues: “Security procedures could have been destroyed when the fusor melted down the controls of the spin-shaft.”

  “So they could! So they could! Well, Doctor?”

  Dross shrugged. “What does it matter? Clearly we’re accepted as legitimate entrants. What led to that is irrelevant. What I’d like to give some thought to is the central mystery of this fortification!”

  Wardle caught Danecki’s eye for a moment. “Ah, yes! Yes, Doctor! But will we have the oppor
tunity of exploring the other levels? Well?”

  “We leave it to the robot,” said Dross firmly.

  Time dragged on.

  Danecki paused from time to time to wipe his eyes. He felt the lids begin to droop and knew that he should have rest and food. He turned back to the gutted robot.

  Khalia’s shout startled him into dropping the thin folds of tissue. “Look! The screen!”

  The blue screen had sprung into life and shown the ruin on the surface above. The monitors focused on black rain and the last of the slow-dying light from a hidden sun. Blistered metal and gaunt skeletal frameworks were bleakly outlined.

  “What! What is it?” Wardle had her arm. “What did you see?”

  “There was someone in the ruins!” she said. “A man! I’m sure!”

  Danecki stared at the screen with the others. He saw the wildness of the darkening sky, the towering clouds, and the ancient jumble of a long-gone war. The only movement was the bending of branches and the surge of water under the wind’s fierce lash.

  “Are you sure?” said Wardle.

  “Yes!” she insisted.

  Wardle’s face expressed disbelief,

  “You said I didn’t see two ships,” she reminded him.

  “So I did.”

  Mr. Moonman’s dull voice put the question in all their minds: “Why should the fort want to show us this?”

  They waited for the metallic, calm voice to speak. But nothing came. There had been a brief image of the titanic ruins above, and nothing else.

  “If there was someone up there, this installation is satisfied he represents no threat,” Danecki said. “Who could it be?”

  Dross spoke. “Mr. Knaggs had dealings with one or two of the Outlanders. They come to talk occasionally. Not with me.” Dross was demolishing the hopes that the others began to show. “I’m afraid they wouldn’t be able to help us. There aren’t many of them. A few settlers who came in over the past forty or fifty years looking for a quiet life. I suppose they could have asked Center for room on one of the unsettled star systems, but they preferred to come here. They’re cut off from all advanced technology. No transport other than their own legs. No communicators. I don’t know how they live. I’ve never spoken to any of them.”