by Douglas Hill
Go on, then – just stay away from the ship.’
Keill whirled and ran. But in that moment – whether by some instinct or accident – the half-naked giant in the distance turned, and caught sight of the figure sprinting towards them.
Immediately the huge man spoke to his companions – who turned, looked, and began to walk away.
They did not seem to hurry, but they did not stroll. And it was only a short distance to the bulky cylinder of the space cruiser that stood waiting on the next pad.
Despite his desperate speed, Keill had covered only half the distance when the three men vanished through the airlock of their ship. But not before the big man had paused for one more look back at Keill.
Keill was able to see him more closely then. He could see the vast muscles swelling beneath bronze skin.
And, faintly, the peculiar markings that the newsman had mentioned – the narrow, raised bands encircling the thick throat, the ridged belly.
He could also see the mockery behind the big man’s laughter.
Then the hatch closed, and Keill was left to watch helplessly as, in seconds, the cruiser lifted away.
He might have screamed with rage and desperation. He might have rushed to his own ship to tear with crazed hopelessness at the unbreakable seal.
Instead, he turned on his heel and walked calmly away to find the offices of the Civil Control.
The afternoon was beginning to wane by the time he had found his way. And there, too, he met frustration. The uniformed Civil Control officer in the front office was less sour than the man at the spaceport, but no more helpful. He knew nothing about the seal on Keill’s ship, or the reasons for it. The Deputy Co-ordinator was not available. No one else would be able to tell Keill anything.
‘Why don’t you just do what the letter says?’ the officer suggested. ‘Go to the hostel and wait. The Deputy will be along. It’s all you can do.’
Again the helplessness swept over Keill. Again deep anger throbbed within him. Again he was icily impassive as he turned and left the offices.
Through the gathering dusk he located the spacer hostel that the official letter had named, and took a room – indifferent to its drab, functional, none-too-clean interior. And there he waited.
It was all he could do.
He was standing at the open window of his second-floor room, ignoring the dust-laden breeze, staring out at the two moons that had risen into the night sky of Saltrenius, when the knock came. He flung open the door before the startled man who had knocked had even begun to lower his hand.
The Deputy Co-ordinator was a civil servant through and through. His name was Shenn, and he was small, grey as any Saltrenian, precise in movements and speech. Less small and less neat were the two large uniformed men behind him, with the metallic ‘CC’ gleaming on cap and collar. But the Deputy left them outside, at the door, and even managed a precise little smile as he greeted Keill.
The smile faded somewhat when Keill told him, in terms all the more unnerving for the frozen, knife-edged tone of voice, what he thought of his situation, the CC, and Saltrenius in general.
‘I fear I can explain very little to you,’ Shenn said at last. ‘Orders came to me that you were not to leave the planet.’
‘Orders from whom?’ Keill demanded.
‘Higher authority. In the government.’
‘And why,’ Keill wanted to know, ’should your government want to keep me here against my will?’
‘It seems that they received a request.’ Shenn quickly lifted a small hand before Keill could interrupt. ‘I do not know its origin – it is not for me to know. But someone of, apparently, great importance, off-world, is sending a message to Saltrenius for you. On a matter of grave urgency. We were requested to ensure that you remained, till this message arrives.’
‘Nothing more?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No idea what this mysterious message is about, or who sent it?’
‘None.’
‘Then,’ Keill said, ’you are wasting my time.’
He took hold of the Deputy before the little man could even draw breath to shout. One hand over the mouth to silence him, one hand clamped on his neck, thumb pressing the carotid artery that feeds blood to the brain. In seconds Deputy Shenn crumpled into unconsciousness, with not a sound to alert the waiting guards outside.
Keill dumped the man on the bed, knowing that he would awaken, unharmed, almost as quickly as he had collapsed. But for a second he paused, curiosity tugging at him. He wanted very much to know what lay behind the sealing of his ship, and who was the mystery person with so much influence, who was sending an unknown message. Yet he wanted even more to get off-planet, to find the three men who said they were legionaries.
The lack of time demanded that a choice must be made. And Keill’s choice was obvious.
Perhaps he would try, afterwards, to contact Saltrenius and learn more about this mystery. If there was time. If he was still alive to contact anyone.
Meanwhile...
He eased himself out of the window, and glanced down. A gloomy passageway ran behind the hostel, filled with stenches and shadows. He moved out on to the sill – then halted.
An odd sound above him, like a rustle of cloth.
He glanced up quickly. Nothing but the blank edge of the roof, the night sky above it.
A legionary’s training covers a great many physical skills, including knowing how to fall – even two storeys. He took the impact with legs well bent – rolled, and bounced to his feet again, casually rubbing one slightly bruised hip. Then he slid into a shadow, and was gone.
Spaceport security guards on minor planets do not have a difficult job. The owners of spaceships pay a small fee for the use of the port – a larger fee if passengers or freight handling are involved. But shipowners are responsible for protecting their own ships, usually managed with little more than some advanced technology in the locking mechanisms on both entrances and control panels. Few spaceships were stolen, in Keill’s day: they were too easy to trace, to difficult to re-sell. Saltrenius had not had a spaceship theft in living memory.
So the guard on the perimeter of the central port buildings might have been forgiven for being half asleep, lulled by the unbroken silence and darkness around him. He might not even have felt the blow that deepened his doze into unconsciousness.
Keill lowered the guard’s body to the ground, listening carefully to the man’s breathing. He had struck with precision at the base of the skull, using only the tips of stiffened fingers, for he was not there to kill.
Even so, some people have thinner skulls than others – and he was glad to hear the guard begin softly snoring.
He slipped the guard’s pistol from its holster – a needle-gun, as he had hoped – and snapped it open, sniffing at the points of the tiny projectiles within it. Also as he had hoped, the guards used anaesthetic in their needlers. They, too, were not there to kill.
Like a shadow himself he moved through shadow towards his goal – the office of the senior security man, he with the sour expression. A dimly lit window drew him. Peering carefully in, he saw one guard, seated at the central desk with his back to the door, chewing at a handful of some nameless Saltrenian confection.
Keill ghosted to the door, opened it without a sound. Even the needle-gun seemed to whisper as he fired it. The guard, mouth still full, sagged forward onto the desk.
The metal cabinet – at which the senior officer had taken his giveaway look – was securely shut, with some form of electronic combination lock. The cabinet was sheet metal, a sturdy alloy. Keill stepped a pace away, took a deep breath, another.
Then he leaped, and drove a booted foot at full stretch into the centre of the cabinet door.
The blow had every gram of his weight perfectly poised and delivered behind it. It also had all the pent-up frustration, anger, desperation and urgency that had accompanied Keill throughout the whole of his day on Saltrenius.
The metal cabin
et boomed hollowly. And the door seemed to fold inwards, as if it had developed new hinges down its centre.
Keill stood silent for a moment, listening. But the sound, loud enough in the enclosed room, would not have carried far outside. And more than one guard must have been feeling sleepy that night. No voices were raised, no footsteps began, no alarm sounded.
He turned back to the cabinet. On one side of the door, the electronic lock had held. On the other side, the door had been completely ripped off its hinges. In a moment Keill had pulled aside the crumpled metal and was rummaging through the shelves. In another moment a thin strip of light metal lay in his hand.
The key to the seal that held his ship prisoner.
Then he was outside again, circling, more silent than the dust that swirled softly in the air. He approached his ship from the rear, rounded it cautiously. The lone guard was at least wakeful, but when he saw Keill he could not decide for an instant whether to shout or to reach for his pistol. Keill shot him before he could make up his mind.
While he was dragging the unconscious man to safety, well away from the energy blast of his lift-off, Keill heard a sound, on the threshold of audibility. Like the sound he had heard at the hostel – a soft rustle, as if of cloth. He spun round, pistol ready – but saw nothing, except his waiting ship and swirls of soft dust. Carefully, warily, he circled his ship. Nothing. The plasticrete was bare, deserted, as far as he could see in the darkness.
Quickly he returned to the seal, slipping in the key, catching the band of heavy metal as it fell away, opening the airlock hatch, moving swiftly in...
The sound again. Behind him. Not a rustle this time – more like a cloth flapping in the wind.
He was quick enough to turn, quick enough to glimpse the shape that hovered outside – like a wide sheet, like a sail, blackly silhouetted against the star-filled sky.
Then the needle bit into his neck, and it seemed that all the shadows in the world rose to engulf him in darkness.
PART TWO
THE HIDDEN ASTEROID
CHAPTER FIVE
He opened his eyes slowly, his mind sluggish, resisting wakefulness. The messages from his senses were coming to him slowly, as if from a great distance, with difficulty.
The first message they sent was frightening. He was totally immobilized. He could not move a single muscle in his body except those around his eyes and mouth.
The second message was reassuring. He still had feeling in his body – he was not paralysed. Instead, something was constraining him, something that clung to every centimetre of his skin except his face, preventing even the smallest movement.
The third message was unbelievable. Though he could not move, though his mind was far from clear, though he felt an immense weariness throughout his entire being, so that even moistening his lips with his tongue was an effort – despite all this, he felt wonderful.
The pain had gone.
The lancing fire that had seared every cell in the depths of his body, through every waking minute of the months past... Gone.
Unless, of course, he was dreaming again. Or perhaps delirious, in the final stages of the death that the pain had been a prelude to.
He rolled his eyes, up, down, sideways, to the limits of his peripheral vision. He saw the plain walls and ceiling of an unremarkable room, with cheerful diffuse lighting. He noted that he was not lying flat on his back but propped up, half-reclining, on some padded surface contoured to fit his body perfectly.
He saw all that, but it was overridden by the shock of having seen himself.
He was entirely covered by a garment that clung like a second skin, which was certainly what held him immobile. It was silvery, shiny, and apparently without a seam. From many points on the garment – and so, presumably, from Keill’s body, though he felt no discomfort – sprouted a huge array of tubes and wires, like the tendrils of some wild alien growth. The tubes and wires led on each side to a variety of complicated machinery, none of which seemed familiar to Keill in any way.
It was no dream, he decided. And it was an odd, unlikely scene for a delirium to shape. But then – what was it?
At that moment a voice spoke in the room. A firm male voice, with a note of friendliness, even kindliness, that seemed to come from everywhere.
‘Are you awake, Keill Randor?’
Keill struggled in his throat to find his voice, found only a whisper. ‘Who are you?’
The voice did not return at once. When it did, it seemed slightly muffled, as if the speaker had turned aside, addressing someone other than Keill.
‘Amazing powers of recuperation... He shouldn’t have wakened for days yet.’
‘Days?’ Keill whispered.
The voice replied at full volume again, but with an extra firmness. ‘It is too soon, Keill Randor, for you to ask questions or receive answers. You will sleep again now, and we will speak later when you are entirely restored.’
Keill fought his voice into a desperate croak. ‘Who are you? What are you? What are you doing to me? ’
There was a pause. ‘Very well, I see that those questions deserve some answer.’ The voice grew even kindlier. ‘My name is Talis, though that will mean little to you. I am a man, much as yourself, if a good deal older.’ A chuckle. ‘And what we are doing, Keill Randor, is saving your life.’
Keill wanted to cry out, wanted to scream questions, but his mind was a darkeningjumble, unable to focus on words or their meanings, and he knew that one of the tubes in his eerie garment had slid a drug into his veins. He struggled with numbing lips, with the spreading blankness in his mind, and mumbled the only question he could manage.
‘Why?’
He was not sure he had heard the answer, as he drifted into sleep. But it had sounded like—
‘Because you are needed.’
He opened his eyes slowly, as before. But sensation flooded in upon him. His mind was not dulled this time, but alert, functioning, with a strange extra feeling of being marvellously refreshed.
And there was still no pain.
Yet his body was behaving in a disturbing way. He still could not move his head or limbs, still felt himself gripped and held in the half-lifted position – but every muscle was quivering, uncontrollably.
He glanced round, and down at himself, the memory of his previous awakening complete. He was no longer wearing the silvery garment. Instead, a light covering had been drawn over him, up to his neck.
Beneath it, he knew he was naked. And he was still lying on the same padded bed, deeply contoured to fit the shape of his body exactly.
It was the contours of the bed that gripped him, and that were trembling – vibrating over the whole surface of his body. Relaxing with relief, he saw that it was an advanced form of massage unit, designed to maintain muscle tone and circulation in an immobilized patient.
He remembered the mysterious voice that had spoken to him. It had made clear that he would sleep for days. So he must have lain on that bed for a long time in the restrictions of the strange garment. The massage unit would have kept his muscles from weakening and deteriorating too much.
How weak he might be remained to be seen. It was not the most important of the questions that clamoured in his mind. But it was probably the only one that he could answer for himself.
He inhaled deeply, aware that his body was relaxed, but testing the relaxation, letting it spread through every muscle, out of the centre of his being. Then he concentrated on his right arm, gathering his energies, focusing them, channelling them to that arm, building the power within it to a higher and higher peak...
Then, with a fierce exhalation, he released that power.
His arm ripped free of the constriction.
It was a small triumph, but an important first step – to regaining control over his own person, to putting an end to his time of lying trapped like a swaddled baby, while unknown people and strange machines did whatever they wished with him.
Yet he found that he was bathed in sweat a
fter the exertion, and his free arm was oddly heavy. He let it fall on the outside of the covering, reaching again for the inner relaxation, knowing that he would need to rest awhile before trying to summon the power to free his other arm.
At that point a human figure appeared – materialized, from empty air – before him.
And the voice that Keill had heard before spoke again, still from no specific point within the room.
‘Quite astonishing,’ it said. ‘You should not be at all strong enough, yet, to break free of the unit.’
Keill said nothing. Around him the massage unit’s vibrations dwindled and stopped, and its grip on his body eased. It became merely a comfortably contoured bed, and Keill could move again. He began making small, minimal movements, stretching and twisting, testing the state of his body, while warily studying the figure that had appeared so suddenly.
An unadorned robe covered all of the figure’s body, and extended into a heavy cowl, or hood, that was pulled forward so that the face was obscured in shadow. But from the posture of the figure, which was seated on a tall, plain chair, and the size and shape of the hands, Keill could see that he was in the presence of someone thin, elderly and probably male.
But then he saw that he was not actually in the presence of the figure. The angles of the shadowings and the faint haziness of outline told him that he was looking at a holo-image. Which explained the sudden materialization, and the apparently disembodied voice.
‘Do not be alarmed, Keill Randor. You are not among enemies.’
‘Who are you?’ Keill said sharply, glad to find that his voice was working normally. ‘What am I doing here?’
‘You asked those questions before – do you remember?’ said the voice. ‘I am Talis, who spoke to you when you awoke prematurely...’
‘I remember,’ Keill replied. ‘But you told me little, and explained nothing. Now I want explanations.’
‘That is why I am here,’ said the kindly voice. ‘But tell me first how you feel.’
‘I feel weak, as you must surely know,’ Keill said brusquely. ‘But everything seems to be functional.