by Brian N Ball
Khalia waited tensely. She had the sensation of being engaged herself in the ancient story she had just witnessed. It was as if, by wearing the long-dead girl’s clothing, she had a link with her. Mr. Moonman, she recalled, had tried to explain how he felt about the faraway past. You reached out into the past, and some person told you of an old memory of another’s memory, and each successive stage in recollection took you further and further back into time.
Seeing the blond girl’s image, wearing her suit, watching her run to her man, had brought Khalia almost to a feeling that she was her.
Danecki was staring in puzzled triumph at the ceiling. ‘Tell me the abort procedures for the Army!” he snapped.
“Quite useless, sir!” lisped the voice of the harem attendant. “I’m afraid they no longer have any function, sir!”
Danecki’s face sagged. The light went out of his dancing, eager eyes. “Explain!”
“Very well, sir! I think you should be informed that the Black Army, as you so delightfully call my colleagues below, is about to march. All abort and control systems have been aborted themselves! Nothing, sir, can prevent the march of the Army!”
“March? Now!” Danecki was staggered.
“Hee-hee!” tittered the invisible robotic voice. “You’ll know the way, sir?”
Khalia tried to reason with Danecki, but he was already moving. Something in the insidious tones of the automaton warned her that again it had set the scene for a betrayal. But Danecki’s strong arm swept her with him.
It would be the end. Danecki made for the dark opening through which another man had coldly set out so long before. Like the grim-faced Duty Commander, he knew the way to Level Nine. And when he got there? Danecki refused to consider it.
The journey through the buffeting black tunnel took twenty seconds. Khalia counted them, heart pounding, still in a state of nervous shock after the pitiful ancient re-enactment. She tried to warn Danecki, but the violent winds of the force-fields whirled the sounds away.
She felt her own long hair streaming behind her, and the thin stuff of the girl’s suit plucked by the harsh fingers of the field that was transporting them deep below the green and gold room. A sense of overwhelming foreboding filled her. It was not so much the appalling dangers of the fort that made her weep into the rushing darkness with utter misery, but the haunting memories of the other girl. Bitter sadness welled up inside her. Yet there was nothing she could do.
The events must take their course.
Danecki stepped into the winding, dimly-lit corridor to the noise of a dozen systems’ voices. They whined, shouted, complained, and ordered one another in a rioting confusion of metallic disharmony.
“Come on!” he called to Khalia, realizing that they were still a minute or two away from the place of bones and, beyond that, the vast underground cavern where the Black Army had stood under arms for a thousand years.
An explosion shook the corridor, showing that the internecine warfare among the systems still raged.
“I am taking over the functions of command, though I find it difficult to make decisions!” roared the voice of Security into Danecki’s face.
He and the girl were still reeling against the hard sides of the winding tunnel, as another explosion lifted them off their feet. An echo of distant thunder rippled through the shaft; the voices of the automatons were momentarily stopped.
They soon broke out again, providing a jangling accompaniment to Danecki’s and Khalia’s headlong plunge down the shaft. Remote, cold, invisible voices threatened one another while airing their confusion.
“I am under attack by maintenance systems,” complained the orderly voice of Central Command. “I find it puzzling. I shall continue to destroy them.”
“I too am able to keep up an offensive capability!” called Security. “The processes of effective decision-making continue to elude me!”
Khalia recognized the sly lisping of the harem attendant among the metallic noise: “This automaton reports the escape of the Duty Commander’s concubine. I find the situation intriguing.”
Danecki heard it too. Dross was certainly right, he thought. The robots were becoming identifiable personalities, with their own dominant traits. Yet, though the various systems were in contention for mastery of the installation, nothing had interfered with the entire purpose of its builders.
In spite of the explosions, the warring of the robots, and their crazed logic, the fort would fulfill its primary function.
The Black Army would march! Not even the past hour’s battles had imperiled the grim phalanxes in Level Nine.
Danecki slithered around the last winding curve to the place of bones. The skeletons still lay there, as they had lain for ten long centuries. The girl’s hair shone brightly; her lover’s hollow skull, with its rows of even teeth, still lay near to hers; the heavy-ribbed skeleton of the Duty Commander still sprawled full-length, skull glaring at the treacherous mistress.
“What can we do!” called Khalia after Danecki.
“I don’t know—maybe there’s some way of stopping it! The control panel—it may not be destroyed!”
He skirted the bones and rushed to the huge cavern, knowing that he was too late, that all of the passion and anger of the past few hours, as well as the willing sacrifice of the pair whose bones lay whitely in the dim corridor, were all for nothing. But he had to try!
Another metallic voice called out, this time from the cavern itself: “I shall lead the Army myself! Countdown from ten for the opening of the spin-shaft. Now!”
Danecki reeled. A roaring, rushing volume of metallic triumph blasted him back as he came to the end of the subtle, winding corridor. It was a shout of robotic exultation, a long pent-up cry of jubilant glee. It came from the serried rows of monolithic automatons in unison.
“Ten!”
“Onward!”
“Nine!”
“Destroy!” answered the voice of the leader.
“Eight!” blasted back the response.
Khalia too at last understood the extent of the robotic betrayal. “It can’t be!” she said, aghast. “No! Not this one too!”
“Seven!” yelled the Black Army.
Danecki was holding himself up against the side of the tunnel. He remembered the first time he had heard the voice of the robot who was at the head of the phalanxes. It had been from an almost-human robot, not one that would ever become crazed as had the coldly-logical, maniacal Confederation’s automatons!
“How could it?” whispered Khalia. “How!”
Danecki felt his mind reeling with the same bitter, unanswerable question: How could the robot have done this!
Still clutching to a thread of reason—hanging on to the desperate hope that he had misheard, misunderstood, completely misinterpreted the meaning of what he saw and heard—Danecki stared wildly at the leader of the Black Army. An edge of memory came back. He remembered the rain sweeping across the green-bronze headpiece, giving it a clean and glistening appearance.
“Four!” roared the monoliths.
“Advance!” called their leader.
The floor of the enormous arena trembled with the Army’s barely-contained power. Danecki was unable to move.
Rank on rank they waited, poised for the opening of the great shaft that would spin them upwards through the rock and shale until they burst through scrub and forest and hurtled out into the night—to root like so many porcine monoliths among the settlements of the Outlanders!
At their head was a robot shorter than the others. A small figure, dull green-bronze in the brilliantly-lit parade ground, it dominated the entire bizarre and breathtaking scene.
“Batibasaga!” sighed the girl. “It’s Batibasaga.”
“Ready!” shrilled the familiar voice of Dross’s servitor.
“Two!” came the crashing reply.
Huge black headpieces glowed with dull fires. Hundreds of antennae swirled and flickered with excited anticipation.
“Stop them!”
Daneck
i reacted to Khalia’s call. There was the console —-another man had acted, ten centuries before. He had shown the way. Danecki ran, finding from some inner core of determination the will to act.
Danecki had wanted to move forward, but he had been too stunned by this last mad betrayal. The power of the past had caught him in its grip; earlier scenes of violence and dissimulation had reared up to sap his resolve until the Army had almost completed its countdown. Khalia’s plea brought him to instant action.
The robots paid no attention to him and the girl who followed.
“One!”
The enormous volume of sound again sent Danecki reeling and Khalia spinning against the harsh metal of the great cavern.
There was no sound after that. The clamor of the fort’s demented systems was at an end. The entire underground installation was about to complete its long-delayed destiny. The Army of legend would march.
“March!” shrilled Batibasaga.
Danecki heard Khalia’s cry: “Don’t let them! The Outlanders!”
He clambered onto the reviewing stand, ignoring the girl who was holding her head in an ecstasy of horror. He looked in frantic haste for the wall that concealed the elaborate control panel. The wall itself was gone. Liquid metal lay in a pool, and, beyond that, a light dusting of smoke. The harem attendant had been right: the controls of the Army were aborted.
In the fraction of a second that remained, Danecki yelled out all of his pent-up frustration and despair:
“Batibasaga! Stop them! They mustn’t go—destroy the fort!”
Khalia’s eyes met his.
The robots might have been dimly aware of their presence, as a man resting is conscious of the birdsong in a distant wood.
“Abort!” yelled Danecki.
The far wall of the cavern collapsed.
Khalia and Danecki felt the breath leave their bodies. They were aware of the sudden flowering of a vast molecular spin-shaft, a gaping pit of needle-lights and whirling, grinding force-fields.
Batibasaga stepped into the shaft.
The Army marched.
It was like a wall of lava—unstoppable, pulsating with red-black nuclear forces, a living wave of dense, ponderous, crushing machinery.
“I’ve failed,” said Danecki helplessly.
He knew what Khalia meant when she said over and over again: “But why? Why!”
There was nothing to do but watch the far end of the cavern, where the welcoming hole swallowed up the gigantic monsters, row on row, phalanx by phalanx.
It took only minutes for the ponderous black automatons to clear the bright parade ground. They moved swiftly, in a grim parody of a fast-stepping corps of well-drilled infantry. When they were gone, there was a ringing silence in the cavern.
Danecki pointed to the shaft. “We could go up there.”
Khalia shuddered.
“No,” he said. “Not up there.” He thought of the monsters smashing through the darkness, antennae dancing, seeking out the warmth of human bodies.
“What can we do?” whispered Khalia.
Daneeki stared at the spin-shaft. “Wait.”
The grinding shaft was quiet now, but its lights sprayed darts of colored fire into the far end of the cavern, hypnotizing them.
“How long?” whispered the girl.
“Until they clear the fort’s immediate surroundings. An hour.”
“Less.”
The voice was behind them.
* * *
CHAPTER 17
Khalia knew that the treachery of the fort was not at an end. It still breathed malignantly about them—and here was its worst, most vicious act of all. She knew the voice.
Danecki heard the voice too, and he too knew what would come next. Though the time could be measured in fractions of a second, it seemed an unutterably long hiatus.
The blow would come. Jacobi was already thrusting the sharp knife forward, impelled by his sure aim—and why shouldn’t it be sure? He had had time to weigh up distances and striking areas while Khalia and Danecki had watched the march of the frightful Army—the blow would come. And yet it seemed almost frozen in time.
Danecki could see everything, hear everything, think of everything in that intolerably long gap in time. He could see the girl’s dawning realization that death was behind him. In her eyes were the beginnings of a huge regret that they would not have a life together—a life they both knew would have been a grace. No time to love, no time at all to settle into a slow routine of growing together into a single identity—of exploring the ways they each looked at the rest of creation, of sharing those ways.
Danecki had time to review his actions, every single one of them, since the plunging descent through the spin-shaft.
He could have completed the quick instinctive movement to crush the boy’s throat under his heel. If he had made that move, there would have been no intolerably long moment of agony, no look of sudden emptiness in the girl’s eyes as she saw Jacobi behind him.
Even when the knife began to cut through the muscles of his back there was time to regret the waste of energy and effort in the programming of Dross’s robot; and there was time to wonder if, after all, Knaggs had been wrong about the controls of the millennium-old fort.
Would it all have turned out differently if he had made better decisions?
Danecki had half-turned by the time Jacobi completed the powerful stroke.
The pain drove the air from his body. He tried to breathe, but one lung couldn’t accept the air, since its controlling nerves were still paralyzed by the force of the blow.
Danecki saw Jacobi staring at him. He shook his head.
“I never wanted—” Danecki began to say.
He saw Khalia move towards him. And that was all.
Khalia stared at the handle of the knife. It protruded from beneath Danecki’s right armpit, the slim golden handle a clean regular shape against the brown skin.
Again the sense of an action that was cyclic possessed her. It was as though Danecki had died for the second time. She saw the knife thud into the midriff of the long-dead Duty Commander and the bright flowering of his blaster.
“You found the knife,” she whispered to Jacobi, who watched her as she cradled Danecki’s head. “It was with the bones. You were told where to find us.”
Jacobi began to take in the significance of the strange and eerie scene in the utterly still and silent cavern. He gestured with his good arm. “I had to!” he muttered. “I had to do it! He was a murderer!”
Khalia listened for a heartbeat. There was none. She touched the handle of the knife, wondering whether to draw it.
Jacobi saw the movement and backed off. “I’m licensed! Galactic Center approved my license—we had permission to hunt with a hyperspace ship! That’s the way our justice works! The robots knew! They told where you were!”
Khalia said: “You’ve killed him.” She groped for understanding.
Too much had happened within too short a space. First, the drugged half-sleep in the green and gold harem, where she was prepared for a ten-centuries-old passion. And then the lisping robot, with its insidious hints of secret knowledge. The tale of the Duty Commander’s mistress, and the end of the three visitors to the fort had left her in a state of shock. It had almost gone when Danecki surged into action to try to halt the crazed robot, Batibasaga.
And then the frightful Black Army had marched. The black phalanxes had rolled forward into the gulf of the spin-shaft upon their errand of destruction. All human life on Earth—such as it was on that haunted, irradiated planet—would be searched out and smashed.
Yet none of those things brought the incredulous, unbelieving start of grief. Pity, yes. Compassion for the lovers who had spied, lied, and wheedled their way into the secret, underground fort—compassion for the girl who had allowed the enemy to use her while her lover completed his mission. And a feeling of horrified pity for the few settlers on the planet, those Knaggs had known.
But the grief was
more than pity and compassion. She wiped the blood from Danecki’s lips with the tattered front of his shirt. “You killed him,” she said to Jacobi. “You killed my man. You.”
Jacobi backed off. “It was my duty! He killed by brother! My father! My sister—her children! The man was a mass murderer!”
Khalia felt that she could rip the boy apart. His terror roused the ancient, primeval blood-lust in her. She wanted to see death in his eyes. She reached for the broken arm.
Jacobi stood rooted to the spot. He was appalled by her fury, bewildered by the grinding march of the robots, utterly terrified by the combined dangers of the fort and the woman in front of him.
She took his arm and twisted it.
Jacobi screamed. He was still screaming when the lisping voice of the harem robot announced the cessation of hostilities between the Central Command System and the security networks.
“This new emergency leads me to one conclusion,” the robot said. “Since I am the only system in this installation in full possession of the facts, I have decided to offer my services as an intermediary between the two factions which have developed among the superior systems.”
Khalia felt the evil thing’s words gliding somewhere around her consciousness, but she was too full of the enjoyment of murder to register its meaning or intentions.
Jacobi could not listen. He was on the floor, and the girl’s foot was on his neck.
Neither heard their fate decided for them by the effeminate voice.
“I am not able to cope with the problems of command,” Security said loudly. “I am prepared to accept arbitration.”
“I have had my own problems,” admitted the Central Command System’s voice. “But I am ready to listen to any logical argument.”
“Very well,” lisped the harem robot. “Through a fault in our communications systems, the presence of anti-Confederation forces has not properly been appreciated.”
“That is not good,” said Security.
“It must be righted,” agreed Central Command.
“Further, there has been no intelligence of the presence of the Duty Commander,” the lisping voice went on.