by Brian N Ball
Danecki allowed himself to drift. A year of madness ended when he took the girl. The unwanted hates and mindless terrors were blotted out in the closeness of the embrace. He placed a hand on one peaked breast. She pressed the hand. She began to slide against him in the powerful rhythm of love.
“I’ll never leave you,” she whispered, still with closed eyes.
Danecki thought of the hours that remained. It would be easy to spend them here, with the girl. He pushed her aside. “The others too,” he said. “I said I’d do what I could.”
She held him strongly. “I’d rather it ended here, with you!”
Danecki felt his resolve ebbing. But the faint clamor of metallic voices brought him back to an awareness of the immediate present. “Come,” he said. “We have to try. More than ever now.”
On the way back to the winding corridor, the girl stopped him. “They were lovers,” she said.
He knew what she meant. She would not be afraid of the pitiful relics of the ancient war when they came to them again. The man and woman had fallen together. And Khalia had created a legend for them.
“I don’t think I’d mind if it came quickly for us,” she said, taking his hand.
Danecki wondered what life would be like with her. She made her own life into a web of delight. He hoped she would never know how much he detested himself for the mad year.
She noticed his scowl. “You’re ashamed! You think I’m not suitable.”
If she only knew, thought Danecki.
“Ashamed. Happy. In love. Overwhelmed. Desperate. Fearful. All of these. But ashamed only because I can’t ever be the man you deserve.”
Khalia saw that he meant it. “I’m a victim too,” she said. “Girls of my age have a year or two of freedom, then it’s on to the genetic program. Can’t you see, I’d never have the chance to find a man myself! I thought I’d be mated through the computers. We’re not allowed to choose—and now I can, and I have! On my world, you’re programmed for life if you’re a woman!”
Danecki had heard of such mad genetic experiments. But Galactic Center wouldn’t intervene, no more than it would try to stop the vendetta system on his own backward planet. There was something crude about what Khalia described, however: a central authority planned the genetic structure of the entire population. No one could opt out.
He wondered if he should tell her that the Jacobis would send out children still at school to make sure of his death if he escaped the last adult male of the clan.
She stared at him level-eyed and completely intent. “I mean it, Danecki! I’ve looked at men all my life. I wondered what I wanted. Now, I know! I said I’ll never leave you, and I mean it!”
Danecki couldn’t help saying: “All your life?”
“Where are we going?” the girl asked. “Doesn’t this lead back to the Central Command area?”
“Where else can we go? We can do nothing down here. I wondered if we could get back into the control area. It might be that I can think of something if only we knew more about the fort! But staying down here doesn’t help. The Army’s control systems are well hidden. And Batibasaga isn’t down here. Maybe if we could find the maintenance units—” He stopped. They had come to the steep coils of the corridor.
“What is it?”
Danecki considered the girl. “I could leave you down here. You’d be safe.”
“No!” She said. “I mean it!”
“All right.”
Danecki watched for the sudden swoop of giant bars, the kind that had seized Batibasaga with easy power. There was nothing. Just the smooth, metallic regularity of the walls of the tunnel.
They came to the bones, and they held each other.
From the whiteness and regularity of their teeth, the couple lying in a single heap had both been young. Danecki was irresistibly drawn to examining the white bones for scars. A neat hole had been punched through the smaller, female skull. There was no discernible mark on the skeleton of the man, whose bones lay intermixed with the woman’s.
“How did they get in?” he whispered aloud. “How! If we knew that, we might have a chance!”
“What now?” Khalia asked.
Danecki stepped over the heap of bones. “We go on.”
Beyond the next bend they were halted by a penetrating whistle of electronic static. “Technical failures reported in Level Nine! Maintenance units not able to carry out correct procedures!”
“Report!” snapped the voice of Central Command.
“My systems are not operating fully,” said the harsh voice of Central Security. “I must have priority in the use of maintenance systems!”
Danecki motioned to the girl to be still.
“I decide on priorities,” said Central Command.
“It is your function to make decisions,” agreed Security. “Nevertheless it is my function to report deficiencies.”
“Agreed!”
The net of black hawsers swept down at that precise moment.
Danecki saw them and, with the immediate reaction of a year spent in dealing with the sophisticated machinery of his ship, he yanked the girl back down the corridor to the mausoleum. The hawsers followed, great black writhing coils of a material that seemed alive.
He grabbed and levelled the primitive blaster, firing on the instant. Gobbets of black and yellow fire spewed from it.
“Run!” he yelled, but there was nowhere to run—for more writhing hawsers appeared from the further reaches of the corridor.
The black and yellow fire consumed the fibrous coils, leaving gray ash to drip to the floor. It sprayed onto the bones. The furious thunder of the weapon left Khalia gasping for breath and Danecki wild with rage at the ponderous machinery that sought them.
“Intruders!” bawled a voice above the uproar. “My systems are functioning once more in the approaches to Level Nine. Intruders!”
“Apprehend!” called Central Command.
“One is armed!” Security reported.
The blaster juddered once more and ceased firing.
Danecki slithered in the hot gray ash, pushing the girl behind him in a last despairing effort to keep the evil swathes of blackness from her. He tripped on the rib cage of the skeleton that lay alone; the knife flew down the corridor, tinkling as it went. The blaster was neatly flicked from his hand by a slim black rope as he fell.
He had a perfect picture of the rope sliding back into an orifice—with the weapon held negligently by the trigger mechanism. He heard the girl scream.
“It’s got me! Danecki!”
“Now unarmed!” reported Security in the echoing silence of the corridor.
The hawsers caught him as he tried to get to his feet. They pinioned him gently with a powerful insistence. He was trussed like some precious machine part.
Where was the girl?
But Danecki was upside down in the embrace of the coils. Their flabby strength permitted no movement. He saw the corridor brightly lit; and then he had been smoothly whipped through a black opening in the roof of the tunnel. Violent winds battered at his ears in the darkness of a shaft.
Where was he!
Danecki made a desperate effort to free himself, but the flesh-like hawsers tightened at once. When he called out, a soft bag enveloped his mouth. He choked and the bag was withdrawn. He was so relieved that he would not die of suffocation in the blackness, that he could not bring himself to repeat the call to the girl.
The journey lasted for seconds, then ended as abruptly as it had begun.
Stupefied by the light after the dense blackness of the tunnel, he staggered as the hawsers set him down. He took a couple of paces, blinking and rubbing his eyes.
Someone took his shoulder. “Ah, Mr. Danecki. You’ve joined us.”
* * *
CHAPTER 11
Danecki stumbled from pitched blackness into the soft, delicate lighting of a comfortable yet strange room.
“You too,” Wardle called to him. “Did you find the robot?”
; Danecki took in the significance of the place. It had that indefinable air of restraint that characterizes prisons. There was no doorway. He realized that he must have been thrust through some aperture by the trickery of Third Millennium engineering. The hawsers had left him with the other prisoners.
“Khalia!” he cried. “Where is she?” He blinked in the suffused glow of the room. Wardle was repeating his question. Dross took away the supporting arm and returned to the deep chair from which he had obviously just risen.
“The young lady?” said Dross. “No. She’s not here. Wasn’t she with you?”
“Danecki! Damn it, man, can’t you answer a question! Have you seen the robot—anything! We were relying on you! You’ve been away for—must be half an hour! More! And time’s going, man!”
The room infected Danecki with the hopelessness of the situation. There had to be doorways, he was thinking. But all he could see were a series of alcoves that held sleeping couches. On one was the Revived Man. In the next alcove, cradling her fine head in her arms, was Mrs. Zulkifar. But the room offered no hint of an exit. It was built to confuse, to disorient, to destroy initiative. Danecki saw where the strangeness lay. One wall seemed to be half as high again as another; but it was an illusion. The metals of the walls, floor, and ceiling were arranged in different patterns of alloys. You could read designs, characters, faces, in their subtle traceries. You could lose yourself in their weird windings which led one into another, diverting your attention from the main theme, inverting your starting point—making you question your own powers of deduction, spoiling your concentration so that you began to doubt your own sanity.
“No way out,” said Dross. “We’ve been over every inch.”
“But the girl!” snarled Danecki. “She was with me! We were taken together—the black ropes took us both at the same place and the same time!”
“Neat devices,” said Dross. “Yes. Just what one would have expected.”
Wardle tried to be reasonable. “Danecki, there’s not much more than five hours before this place aborts itself —try to help yourself and us! Where have you been, man! What have you seen?”
“She isn’t here,” said Dross carefully. “The rest of us were picked up immediately after Mrs. Zulkifar’s fatal step. The young lady left with you. That was our last sight of her. Jacobi hasn’t shown up either.”
“But where is she?” As he said it, Danecki realized how stupid it must sound to these two men. Yet he was hungry, battered, dirty—furious with himself for not keeping the girl away from danger. And above all, utterly desolated.
“She’s just one person!” snapped Wardle. “What about the robot—you said you could program it so that we’d have a hope of getting away! Man, we can’t worry about one girl!”
Danecki took Wardle by his tunic. Wardle was not a small man, but he hauled him bodily into the air. The Brigadier found the hard eyes glaring at him. He remembered that Danecki had killed that morning. He began to stutter an apology, but Danecki quieted him with a few gritted words: “I worry! Now you worry! Where is she?”
“Calm down,” ordered Dross.
Danecki released the stuttering figure. The hate began to edge from his face. Wardle remembered a face like Danecki’s years away in time and space—that of a man who had been executed in one of the many uprisings on his own turbulent planet. He tried to forget both faces.
“No sign at all,” said Dross. “I’m sorry. Just myself and the Brigadier. Mr. Moonman is in a state of shock. He won’t respond when we talk to him. And poor Mrs. Zulkifar. She was screaming all the time she was in the black shaft. When the hawsers delivered her, she was hit by some sort of anesthetizing spray—it caught her and then she was laid into the cubicle.”
Danecki shook his head. He looked at Wardle. “I’m sorry.”
“Ah. Yes. Nasty shock for us all, all right!”
Dross resumed his seat. “Calm yourself, Mr. Danecki. Have some food. Attend to your toilet. The necessary facilities are provided. We’re captives, but the Confederation ghosts that hold us prisoner aren’t savages. Eat! Drink! If we’re to be blown up, let us advance into extinction with some measure of physical comfort.”
Instinct hooked deep into Danecki’s mind. “Jacobi? The boy?”
“Perhaps I omitted to explain,” Dross replied. “He hasn’t appeared so far. And your feud seems rather pointless now.”
“It always was,” said Danecki.
Wardle followed Danecki’s gaze. “No way out, I’m afraid, Danecki. As the Doctor says, we’ll have to make the best of it. Strange sort of place! Weird! It’s like being inside someone’s head—I imagine the psych fellows worked out the decor. Designed to make you soften up before interrogation.”
He led Danecki to the food dispenser where he punched buttons. “Barely palatable, but what can you expect after a thousand years?”
The food was warm, soft, and filling. Danecki ate while Dross talked.
“What a place this is turning out to be, Mr. Danecki! What a monstrous installation it is! Efficient and busy after the centuries of quiescence—a morgue suddenly reopened and found to contain living things! A whole functioning world of electronic ghosts who refuse to acknowledge the passage of the years. Jailers who are as discreet and secretive as mortuary attendants—a jail with a cunning web of motifs that leave the prisoner no wish to hope! If only I could reveal this to my former colleagues at Galactic Center!”
Danecki wolfed the pappy mess. He had not realized the extent of his need for the familiar sensation of food in his belly. His eyes roved as the two men tried to contain their mounting impatience at his silence.
There was no hint of an opening in the room. Hard metal lay beneath the alloyed patterns; the ancient engineers who had constructed the prison had left no flaw in the smoothness of the whorled patterns.
“We’re in a prison within a fortress,” Dross went on. “Think of it, Mr. Danecki. A prison within a prison! But Mr. Moonman won’t have any of it. Look at him! He’s put himself beyond the reach of all the ghosts! Self-induced hypnosis, I think. He’s relapsed into the state his whole nation must have held for two centuries at the time of his planet’s disaster! Incredible the way we react to the stresses of life, isn’t it, Mr. Danecki?”
Danecki completed his toilet.
“Please!” Wardle said. “You know something—for God’s sake tell us. Danecki!”
“Yes,” urged Dross.
Danecki wondered if either of them could help. As he was eating, and while Dross talked about the fort and its prisoners, and all through Wardle’s alternate pleas and exhortations, he had barely been able to focus his thoughts on the two men. The single, insistent, maddening urge drove out everything else. The girl! Where was she!
“Down in the lowest level,” he said at last. “Level Nine, it’s called. We took a winding corridor and found an army. There’s an army of war-robots.”
“War-robots?” whispered Wardle. “Doctor?”
Dross and Wardle stared at Danecki as if at the fulfillment of a prophecy.
“Thousands of them,” said Danecki. “We saw them. Ready to march.”
“The Regiments of Night!” said Dross in a voice full of awe. “The Black Army of legend! Do you know what you’ve discovered, Mr. Danecki? Do you know!”
“I think so.”
“ ‘The Regiments of Night shall come at the end!’ ” Dross intoned gravely. “And they’ve been waiting for ten centuries for me to find them!”
“The Black Army!” whispered Wardle reverently.
Danecki could see that Wardle was in a state of simple adoration at the concept of that military machine, poised and ready to march.
“This is what I traveled to see!” the Brigadier gushed.
“You went out to find one robot, Mr. Danecki,” said Dross. “And you found an army!”
The questions poured on Danecki, a flood of excited and erudite demands for more and more detail. The men were as happy as children in an abandoned toys
hop.
At length it was Dross who put a halt to the questions. “The greatest mystery,” he said, “is still unexplained.”
“But we’ve found the Army!” said Wardle. “The Regiments—the entire Black Army!”
“Yes,” said Dross. “But the greatest mystery is why it didn’t march.”
“My God,” said Wardle softly. “Yes. They didn’t march.”
“They will,” Danecki told them. “In about five hours.”
Danecki let Dross absorb the impact of the frightening information. Wardle talked on enthusiastically about the ferocious hand-to-hand fighting that had taken place in and around the ruined surface installation. He re-created for himself the strategies of the attacking armies, the futile efforts of the defense, and the last desperate and overwhelming assault.
Dross said little. “Knaggs knew,” he said finally.
“Powerful imagery!” Wardle went on, still excited. “What powerful imagery—the Black Army! I wish I could see them—it would almost be worthwhile—” He stopped.
Dross said: “There’s more, isn’t there, Mr. Danecki?”
“Yes.” Danecki thought of the pitiful remnants in the tunnel. He had purposely left the skeletons out of his tale. He wanted Dross’s huge intelligence to come to it as starkly as the bare white bones had appeared to Khalia and himself. “There are three skeletons in the tunnel leading to the Black Army.”
Dross retreated into a stunned silence. He stared at Danecki for a few moments and then closed his eyes.
Wardle, on the other hand, was loudly amazed. “Three skeletons! Three! Left in the tunnel, you say! Left there— left to lie down there! But, it’s impossible! The installation wouldn’t have allowed it! They couldn’t have got into the fort! The only way in is through the spin-shaft—and they would have destroyed it just as we did, had they come that way! Danecki! Dross! How!”
Wardle blustered on for some minutes. During that time, Dross said nothing at all. He had subsided into the deep, comfortable chair in a state of bewildered remoteness. Danecki allowed him to remain undisturbed.