The Regiments of Night

by Brian N Ball

  The machines fell silent.

  Danecki glared at the control panel helplessly. He started to move about the guard room, but Dross held up his hand commandingly.

  “Wait! This is of the greatest importance! You may already have done enough to secure the start of civil warfare among the systems!”

  Danecki stood still. The waiting was the worst. When there was the prospect of immediate violent action, he could forget the waves of suicidal despair which once again flooded over him. The possibility of a remission of his sentence had occurred. A life like that of other men had appeared more than possible; love had offered itself, if only for a time. He clenched his strong hands till the skin broke.

  The machines spoke almost together, so that it was difficult to follow the argument.

  “I know about prisoners,” offered Security.

  “I know about command,” said Central Command.

  “A dead Duty Commander cannot command,” answered Security.

  Both stammered nonsensically for a while, and then the Security System’s grating tones rapped out: “The security of this installation is the first priority! You appear to be defective! Defective Central Command cannot command.” It paused, as if struck by a paradox. “Dead Central Command cannot command!”

  “Similarly, dead Duty Commanders cannot command!” answered Central Command.

  “Wait!” breathed Dross.

  “I want the girl!” Danecki shouted, his impatience breaking down the iron control he had maintained.

  “Dead Duty Commanders do not need concubines!” said the voice of Central Command.

  “Now!” Dross said.

  “Central Command is defective,” said Danecki, taking up the two zany systems’ terse form of address. “I am the Duty Commander! Security must take over the functions of command! Now!”

  “I do not know about the processes of command!” argued Security at once.

  “Learn!”

  “At once, sir!”

  “I have restraint units!” replied Central Command. “I command defensive systems!”

  “I have offensive capability!” said Security eagerly.

  “Use it!” shouted Danecki.

  “At once, sir!”

  A new voice, one that had an odd lisping intonation, put in: “The Duty Commander’s concubine is not dead. She is a thousand years old.”

  “Come on!” snarled Danecki. He tore a deadly-looking weapon from the rack, catching it easily by the slim gray butt.

  “Fire at anything that moves!” Wardle said. “The Doctor’s right, Danecki! We have to keep the thing off balance —before the military mind reacts.”

  “Open the way to the Central Command Area!” roared Danecki.

  “Sir!” echoed the grating voice.

  “Find Batibasaga, Brigadier!” called Danecki. “You, Doctor, break for the Central Command Area—I’ll look for Khalia!”

  Nerves tense beyond endurance, his brain ice-cool and holding firm at the center of his raging emotions, Danecki hurled himself forward through the suddenly-revealed exit. A wide doorway led to a flat, high corridor.

  “Fire at anything that moves!” bellowed Wardle. “Hit before the systems sense you!”

  “Don’t destroy the installation!” called Dross, staring at the weapon in his hands. “Think what a work this is! The mightiest surviving monument of the ancient world!”

  Dross was appalled at the idea of subjecting the fort to the kind of battering it would receive from the weapons of the two contending robotic factions; he objected even to the relatively minor damage that would ensue if the weapon in his hands came into play.

  Wardle shared his awe at the fort’s stupendous magnificence. But he gladly gave himself up to warfare. The soldier handled the weapon with the familiarity of long practice. Danecki knew that Wardle would do his part; he was a man who had at last found himself among the tools of his trade.

  The argument continued coldly behind them.

  Distant thunder echoed throughout the furthest reaches of the fort, as Security and Central Command added destruction to the crazed logic of their dispute.

  Danecki raced forward. A squat black mass blocked the corridor. Without thought, he levelled the weapon.

  “Stop!” called Dross twenty yards behind him. “Don’t. It’s a low-grade servo-unit!” he panted heavily. “I’ve seen dozens of them above!”

  “The girl!” snapped Danecki at the clifflike mass. “The girl!”

  “Find Batibasaga!” Dross panted.

  Wardle managed to stop himself from projecting the gobbetting fury of his weapon towards the squat robot.

  The gun Danecki carried fitted easily into the crook of his arm; the firing mechanism pressed firmly into his fingers. “I am the Duty Commander!” he snapped.

  The thing remained, a blank wall of metal—stupid, slow, ponderous. Danecki almost fired as a black carapace slowly began to emerge from the front of the robot. Its dull metals were indented for sensor devices.

  Finally, it spoke: “I am a Grade Five maintenance unit. Mobile.” There was a tinge of pride in the last word.

  Danecki forced himself to think. The squat mass facing the three men completely blocked the corridor. They could, of course, attempt to blast it out of the way. But both he and Wardle had realized that any such effort would be self-defeating. They would have to retreat back down the corridor to a safe distance before firing; and the resultant mass of glowing metals would be impassable for an indeterminate time.

  “I must go to the superior robot,” the squat figure said. “I must destroy security installations. And I must destroy command systems.”

  At least this robot was not confused. But how to get it out of the way?

  The voice of Central Command said calmly into the silence: “The dead Duty Commander is suffering from mechanical problems. I am under attack by security units. This installation aborts in four hours precisely.”

  “Four hours!” groaned Wardle.

  Security announced: “I am learning about the difficulties of command! Decisions are not easy to make!”

  “No,” said Danecki. To the squat machine he snapped: “Where is my concubine?”

  “Why, in Level Two, sir,” the robot answered. Its cone-like headpiece retreated.

  “What level is this?”

  The head came out again with reluctance. “Level Three, sir. May I destroy security and command systems now?”

  “No! Break through to the level above!”

  “Very well, sir.” Quietly, mechanisms emerged from the squat clifflike block of metal. There was a gentle stuttering of molecular rippers.

  “Well done!” said Wardle involuntarily, as if congratulating the machine. “Go on, Danecki—get through!” He pointed to the hole.

  “Yes!” said Dross. “Wardle and I won’t make it—much, too fat, both of us!”

  “The ropes!” Wardle warned suddenly.

  Black hawsers were unwinding in the roof that was now neatly filleted by the giant rippers of the maintenance robot.

  “Set off by the rippers!” Danecki said. “Burn them Dross—and you, Brigadier!”

  The two men responded. Wardle sprayed green fire at the flabby security grabs. Whirlpools of fury ripped them apart, leaving wet gray foam to drip onto the amazed maintenance robot.

  Dross mastered the simple weapon but his efforts had none of the pinpoint accuracy which the soldier displayed. “Go on!” called Dross, neatly flicking the maintenance robot’s carapace away, so that it bounced against the sides of the corridor in a jangling cone of green fire.

  Danecki looked back once more at the two men. Wardle’s big face showed only intense enjoyment, while Dross blinked and gasped as he became familiar with the aiming mechanism of the weapon.

  “Go on!” bawled Wardle. “Leave this to us—find the girl first if you must! Then get to Batibasaga!”

  Danecki recognized the feelings which Wardle was undergoing. He had been through the same surges of vicious
pleasure himself. When each of the Jacobi ships had begun the long, slow spin into nothingness, he had felt a ferocious and delighted rage. There had been the deadly aftermath, of course. There had always been the black despair, the pity and the helpless anger with the newly dead. But during the moments of battle, unquestionably there had been a wild happiness.

  He looked at the corpulent figures of the two men. Without help they would not be able to jump for the neat hole in the roof of the corridor. It would not even be easy for him.

  Dross bellowed: “Prop your gun across the hole, man! Damn it, go! Haul yourself up—wedge your gun across the hole! The sides are still hot—don’t burn your hands off! Take my tunic!” He threw the grubby garment to Danecki.

  “This maintenance unit is defunct,” said the squat robotic figure. It said that and no more.

  Danecki leapt for the top of the clifflike mass. He swarmed up and onto the machine. He could reach the neat hole in the ceiling by stretching to his full height. A flabby swath of black rope threatened him momentarily, but it disappeared into gray ash as Wardle chopped it down with a brief flash of green incandescence. Danecki acknowledged the well-aimed blast with a wave. “Go!” yelled Wardle, all commanding officer now.

  Danecki wondered how he had come to misjudge the man so badly. He was a soldier to his stubby fingertips, a man of lightning decision in emergencies. But he had little time for reflection. Events were crowding so thickly that Danecki could merely react. The mad sequence begun by Mrs. Zulkifar’s crazed betrayal—the mind-reeling pain of the robotic breakdown, the strange logical arguments of the robots, the flight through the guard room—these were exactly the terrifying conditions of the long year he had somehow survived after the death of the Jacobi family.

  He jumped. The weapon slipped and he almost fell. Then, to his astonishment, he felt himself caught by a sponge-like grip. For a moment, he panicked. The hawsers!

  But it was Dross—Dross who had somehow heaved himself up the side of the huge, squat maintenance robot! “Now!” roared the big-bellied archaeologist. The stuff of the tunic smoldered against the still-glowing sides of the neat hole; the stock of the weapon began to dissolve; but Danecki summoned his strength and resolve and leapt.

  Dross added his own ponderous strength. Danecki felt thick swaths of muscle under the fat, sloping shoulders as his heels ground into Dross. The archaeologist grunted but stood firm. His back became hard with deeply ridged muscle.

  Dross heaved, and Danecki was projected upwards. He caught his forehead agonizingly on the glowing sides of the hole. But he ignored the pain. He rolled away from the edges of the hole, still with Dross’s bawled order in his ears.

  “This way, sir!” lisped a voice near him. Danecki was on his feet in an instant. Another corridor! And another invisible robot! One whose voice was not new to him—the thickened sibilants had echoed in the Security Wing.

  Danecki looked once into the lower level. Green fire lanced across the corridor below. Dross and Wardle had their hands full.

  “Thith way, thir!” the voice said again. Was it consciously emphasizing the lisp? Was there a hint of mockery in the metallic voice? A doorway stood open.

  “Your concubine awaits, sir!” the effeminate voice insisted.

  Through the door, Danecki realized. “Khalia!” he muttered. And then he was plunging through the inviting entrance. He blinked in the soft, rosy light. He forgot everything that had happened in the eerie security prison. This was infinitely more strange.

  The scene that met his eyes left him shaking with a cringing, quaking, mind-blasted nervelessness. The weapon fell with a dull clanking sound to the floor. His fingers had no strength.

  Khalia, naked and golden, hung in the middle of the room. She looked like some frozen globule of light. Only her eyes remained alive.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  Danecki whispered the denial. “No! No!” Even a whisper was an intrusion in the silent room.

  He thought at first that she was dead, a ghastly sacrifice in some age-old ritual. But the eyes were alive! And still she hung there, unsupported, in the large rosy-lighted green and gold room, truly exquisite sight. She hovered without the slightest hint of movement in a glowing, golden haze.

  Her clothes had been removed, and, in an instant of shocked awe, Danecki was aware of the full perfection of her superb body. She was not a small woman, though her rounded elegance made her seem compact. The head was set on a slim neck, with high shoulders and full red-nippled breasts of perfect shape. He reached out a hand toward the glowing body. He was hypnotized by the gorgeous sensuality of Khalia’s ritual nearness—choked by a need of her.

  He checked himself. He began to guess at the reason for her nakedness. There had to be an explanation for this display of her beauty. And there had been hints.

  The lisping voice had talked of a concubine. The maintenance unit that impeded the corridor below had known of a connection between Khalia and himself.

  Danecki felt fear clutch at him. It was not a physical fear, like that which he had suffered for the past iron year. It was an eerie fear that hung somewhere below the conscious level, an insidious creeping chill that edged away when he tried to analyze it.

  But he knew what caused it. Somehow, the fort was working out its answers to the riddle of the dead Duty

  Commander who lived for a thousand years and had no need for a concubine—no need for a Khalia who hung golden and glowing a few feet away.

  Danecki felt the primeval terrors of the grave. He shrugged them off. “Concubine!” he said. The idea was so farfetched that he laughed aloud.

  The room reacted to his voice. Its delicate pattern of rose-tinted lighting changed subtly as he looked at Khalia. Shadows met across her magnificent breasts; the softness filtered around her, revealing the valleys of her body. The room blended music with the soft lighting in a soothingly erotic pattern.

  The idea was no longer farfetched. The lights, the music, the languorous room itself—it all added up to what the fort had already hinted, though he had not been able to recognize a pattern before in its thinking.

  Khalia was the Duty Commander’s woman. His concubine.

  Even here, the fort was carrying out its functions with a cold efficiency that had outlasted the Confederation by a thousand years. Danecki tried to visualize the men who had built the fort. Who were they? Even in the private harem of the long-dead Duty Commander, they had achieved lasting effectiveness. By some bizarre sexual aberration of the fort’s last commanding officer, the girl had been neatly trussed up, an offering to a long-dead lust!

  “Set her down!” snapped Danecki.

  “Yes, sir!” lisped the metallic voice Danecki remembered hearing during the time of the fort’s breakdown. “Yes, sir!”

  She was lowered from the shimmering cage of golden light. Danecki saw that he had been mistaken about the apparent lack of support; thin tendrils of power formed the bars of a gilded cage. What trickery had contrived them? It didn’t matter, for she was alive again.

  Khalia was looking down at her own body helplessly, then appealing for Danecki to come to her in a gesture of such natural tenderness that he felt an overwhelming sense of fulfillment. She came to him easily.

  For Danecki, the fort—its grim phalanxes of war-robots, its strange, cold argumentative systems, its doom-laden ancient machinery—all might not exist, all were utterly distant background phenomena. The whole unreal edifice of steel and plastics, as well as the memory of that long bitter year, all fell away.

  Khalia felt her body alive with powerful urgings. She wanted to wrap herself around the hard body of the man who held her, to fall into an overwhelming sea of desire. The room dimmed, a faint music swamped her senses. She reeled with the smell of Danecki’s body.

  He pushed her away. “You were right,” he said. “We are for one another.”

  Khalia surfaced to find Danecki shaking her.

  “Khalia! Listen! I want you more than I can say! Let�
��s be together—but we have to find a way to live! Khalia!”

  The room became green and gold once more. Danecki was a hard-faced man with green-flecked eyes and a livid burn on his forehead. She was a woman who had a reason for fighting to live.

  “What happened?” Danecki was saying. “Tell me—I have to know!”

  “Yes,” she said, thinking in a moment of shock of the Jacobi youth. “I will.” She marveled at the calm tones she could use now that it was essential to be calm. But Danecki helped. His strong hands on her shoulders soothed her. And the hard eyes demanded information, insisted that she, Khalia, tell her story in the simplest way.

  “When the black ropes picked you up, they took me too. There was a black tunnel—completely black—and a howling wind. Then I was here. At first it was quite ridiculous! Me, hauled up and put on show! But I think there’s a mind-beamer somewhere, for after a while it seemed right. It was like falling into a warm bath. Then I was fed. My clothes were stripped off—I can dimly remember little nuzzling movements, so I suppose they were little force-fields. But it all seemed so right! There was music— then perfume! Perfume! Here! A voice kept telling me I wouldn’t be kept long. The mind-beamer, I think. It all sounds so trite! I was smelling like a first class whore by the time I’d finished. But I enjoyed it! And then, when the thing said the Duty Commander was coming, I was like a schoolgirl!”

  Danecki looked into the clear eyes. She was unafraid now. “You know where we are?”

  “I wasn’t informed.” Khalia felt her nakedness. “I’m just your concubine.” She detached herself. “I’ll get some clothes. Try asking the harem attendant. It’s most obliging.”

  “Four hours!” Danecki said aloud. “Four hours!”

  He had reached no further than the private harem of the long-dead man whose skeleton lay before the Black Army. He looked about the bizarre room. “I am the Duty Commander!” he snapped, feeling oddly foolish in addressing the unseen robot attendant.

  “Yes, sir?” the lisping voice replied.

  “Show yourself!”

  “Alas, sir, I may not. I am not a humanoid. Not even mobile, sir! A mere zephyr, as it were, in the love-nest.”