“I know Scotians.”
“Eef I am not afraid for myself, eet ees no business of yours. You do not love me, to use your reedeeculous Earthy expressions.”
Fletcher said, wearily, “I guess your weight makes no difference. Okay, come along. Keep your mouth shut and your hat on and they’ll reckon I’ve brought the cabin boy.”
Ledsham looked from one to the other and like Cotgrave believed he had missed a link. It was a crazy mission at that. Philosophically, he turned to his desk and continued with a horizon sweep. It was a comfortable routine. While he was doing that, he couldn’t be expected to be doing anything else.
True to her resolve to meld with the furniture Xenia packed herself in the small freight bay at the back of the column.
Fletcher took the pilot slot with Carrick beside him. Adams and Hocker sat in the rumble.
When he turned round to check out the supercargo, Hocker said gallantly, “Stone the crows, we’ve got that green-eyed midget on the trip. Don’t sit on that ribbed deck, it’ll corrugate your enthusiasm. Sit on my knee. You can toy with my communicator.”
He even held out his hands to lift her over the squab. She leaned forward as though to take up the offer and had his left wrist in a double grip, before he could check that the green eyes were baleful as a hunting cat’s.
She said, “The only reason I do not break off your hand ees that you might be useful. Though I do not know how that could posseebly be.”
Adams said, “Give it him back Xenia. It’s just his friendly nature. No offence intended.”
Hocker unable to speak because of pain was making plans as sadistic as any Scotian’s. He hunched round in his bucket seat and considered the view.
There was not much of it. Fletcher was swinging the car to line up on a thin illuminated line he had drawn on the miniature chart spread. He had taken the car to its ceiling of two hundred metres. Below, the baked earth was invisible. They could be anywhere, hot as hell and black as the inside of a bag.
He said curtly, “Seal up. I want all the power there is,” and cut refrigeration.
The car fled on, a hurrying dark capsule, threading an infinity of darkness, silent except for the faint whine of its overdriven motors. After two hours, there was the dubious bonus of more light from one of Garamas’s small moons that appeared from dead astern and raced over the desert in a brief, spectacular passage.
The ground below was changing in character. It was more undulating, with occasional patches of grey lichen, where underground features retained a scanty water supply.
Heat levels were falling. Carrick said, “Thirty-nine Celsius,” and the statement coincided with a new onset of darkness as the moon whipped away over the horizon.
Fletcher switched to auto and pulled out the detailed pilotage manual for the quadrant. He said, “Another hundred kilometres and we meet the outlying farm areas.”
There was a change in the quality of their black shroud. Darkness was thinning out. Fletcher went down to five metres and switched in the sonar beam. Hedge-hopping, the car would be more difficult to pick up. Hablon’s military units would be in the area and to be intercepted too far from the headquarters would waste time they did not have.
Now there were lights on the ground. Backwoods Garamasians followed a traditional pattern of sober industry. To bed with the sun and up before sunrise. There was a lot to be said for the ordinary man, he had never been afraid of hard work. He deserved better leadership.
Heat level had dipped to twenty-five Celsius. They stripped off space gear, stacking it methodically on the storage racks. Adams broke out a ration pack and passed nutrient bars to all hands. Released from its confining shell, Xenia’s pollen cloud spread round the set. It had all the earmarks of a picnic on the grass.
When the car stopped and sank on its skids in the shelter of a white, adobe cube, it was difficult to believe that they had reached journey’s end without challenge. It was too simple.
Fletcher slid back the hatch and the rhythmic beat of a pump sounded from behind the wall, an isolated heart, pumping in the darkness. He sent up a pencil-slim periscope and infra-red light gave them a picture on the scanner.
A kilometre distant, across a field of blue erichthoneus, was the tower block of the commune headquarters; on a bigger scale than any other agricultural admin centre they had seen and surrounded by a pale nimbus of a light from sources on its hidden sides.
The field by-passed the building on the right flank; left a low boundary wall, neatly built of irregular dry stone ran to the corner of the structure, dividing off another production area which was lying fallow and showed up as a spread of yellow ochre corrugation.
It all looked very peaceful.
Xenia said, “Eet ees decepteeve. All these places have underground access to a monorail circuit.
Supplies come een and go out that way.”
Movement from the far left made a period. A long olive-drab shuttle, flying a three-ringed pennant appeared briefly and swept out of sight.
Fletcher flicked the eyepiece shut and set his periscope to retract. Before it had clicked home in its housing, he knew what he had to do. The invisible courtyard would be stacked with military craft. A small I.G.O. scout car could be shot down before there was any chance to establish its diplomatic mission.
He said, “Hocker. Get yourself outside. Cut a hole in this wall. Go through and stop the pump.”
Whatever else was going on, there would be a maintenance staff to keep the district working.
Xenia broke her fakir’s vigil and climbed over the squab to breathe excitedly down Fletcher’s neck. It was a reminder of her physical presence which disturbed his train of thought. He made a conscious effort to exclude her and foraged on the roof rack for a couple of limpet mines which he worked on briefly and then stored in a sling bag.
Hocker using a vibrator from the car’s external tool rack, completed his seal hole and heaved himself through. The pump stopped and the silence flowed in like a tangible tide.
Two minutes later, there was the uneven cough of a tractor from across the field.
Carrick said, “You have to give it to these goons. They run a taut ship.”
There was enough light for the moving shadow to show up on the scanner. The tractor was a lightweight spindly structure with huge inflated tyres to roll over the crop without causing damage. It stopped five metres from the pump house and the scene developed like a shadow play.
Two Garamasians jumped down from the high seat, elongated comedy figures. One carried a cranked key, like a winding handle and shoved the business end home in a slot in the wall.
Fletcher had seen enough. He was moving out before the man had completed one revolution. He paused at the breach to set his laser for a wide-angle stun beam and went through in a smooth flow of effort.
The watchers saw the two men stoop to lift the counterweighted door and stop dead as it reached shoulder height. Then Hocker reappeared at the hatch.
“Fletcher says only two can play. You’re to hang on here. Rejoin Petrel if and when. That includes you, midget. Pass out that sling bag.”
As he took it from Carrick, Xenia was out and standing beside him. Seen full length, she was wearing a metallic belt round her narrow waist with a short narrow bladed knife looped dangerously in an open link.
Hocker said, “Not you. They’d think we brought the circus.”
The knife was pricking into his throat before he could settle the sling on his shoulder. It was clear enough that she would as soon push it right in as not.
He shrugged and turned away. Why should he sweat. Let Smart-Alec Fletcher sort out his own women.
But when he stood again on the floor of the pump house she was nowhere in sight.
He said, “That little silver bint followed me out. But I reckon she must have thought better of it.”
Fletcher, thinking forward to the enterprise, hardly heard, took the sling bag and ducked under the half-open door.
Climbin
g to the high bench seat, he was presented with a totally unfamiliar instrumentation spread. The buggy was, however, vibrating quietly, so he had no starting problem. Out from a plain bulkhead under the windshield, two rods curved out to fall naturally to the hands of anyone in the driving seat.
Methodically checking out combinations he tried moving them one at a time and found they would each engage at four angles. It was not until he pulled them both down that there was a soft definitive click and they began to move slowly ahead. Now he could feel free lateral play on the sticks and moved the left hand out. The buggy swung ponderously on its tracks turning right.
Once he had the trick, it was easy. Both down for forward. Left or right fed power to the drive on that side, so that it turned on the slowing wheels and moved contrary to hand shift. He crossed the field in a straight run for the tower wall.
From underneath, it was blank as a cliff. Huge to be so featureless; showing up now as a rectangular mass against faint etiolated bars of pale, blue light.
They slewed away to follow the front, rounded the corner in a controlled spin and trundled on. Precisely in the centre of this frontage an archway led into the thickness of the building as though into a mine.
Fletcher spun the buggy into the entrance and saw fifty metres of oblong section tunnel lit by brilliant roof ports and painted white. No human operator was visible, but as they approached, a maroon and white check barrier lifted like a portcullis.
The buggy was obviously recognised and given official clearance by a scanning eye.
At the end of the run the paved roadway funnelled out to a central courtyard where the architect had used up all the spare libido held back from the stark exterior walls.
The entire floor was paved with red and white squares of ridged tile. In the centre, an oval pool had violent colour patches where merope bushes appeared to grow from its indigo surface. Inner walls glowed with translucent brick; ornamented columns decorated with bird beaks ran in colonnades on two sides, a third was set with mammoth standards and an array of banners hung down, still as stonework, crimson and black, bearing the interlaced rings of Garamas and a legend that Fletcher could not read.
On the left, the olive-drab shuttle was drawn up at a semicircular entrance port. On the right, a more utilitarian working area was laid out with parking bays for farm plant. Beyond the pool, a mixed bag of military-design cars was drawn in convoy as though ready for the road, each carrying a pennant with the organization slogan and three luminous, metallic rings.
Fletcher took it all in, with a concentrated pan round the set and swung off to run into an empty slot among the tractors. Dead ahead, through the cloister, a clear window showed a long office spread. A uniformed Garamasian lifted his head from a desk-bound chore, focussed first at wheel level and then looked casually at the driving seat. Puzzled, rather than alarmed, he put down a stylus and began to walk towards the window to get more definition.
Framing a question at mental level Fletcher got a clear answer from somewhere below his feet. Xenia’s voice, as she wriggled free from the angled chassis members where she had hitched a ride, said urgently,
“The operations room ees under the left block. Through that porteeco and down. Below eet, ees the arsenal.”
It was useless to make anything of it, certainly he could not send her back, he said, “We’ll never cross the square without challenge.”
The Garamasian had made his mind up. He was back at his desk snatching up a video.
Reading Fletcher’s unspoken thought, Xenia went on, “A diversion. Send a buggee across to crash eento that tidy line. I’ll do eet.”
She was off like quicksilver, before he could reply. Seconds later, the end tractor coughed into life and backed out of its bay.
Still in reverse, it picked up speed and Xenia dived over its clumsy nose like any Minoan bull leaper. It skirted the pool with wheels overlapping the brink and was beating up to fifteen kilometres an hour as it ploughed into the middle car of the waiting line.
Reaction was immediate and positive. Suddenly, the courtyard was full of high-shouldered Garamasians, all in uniform, all carrying machine carbines.
Movement was all towards the wreck. Fletcher and Hocker crossed at a sprint and met Xenia at the entrance. She was grinning with a girl’s simple pleasure, and led without hesitation for a ramp leading down, a silver rabbit on the home run.
Short corridors with right angle turns followed the foundation structure of the block. At the second turn, a Garamasian guard hurrying to answer the call was blasted by Hocker with a yell frozen in his gullet. They left him leaning against a wall with his eye disks rolled up to show pearl grey blanks.
They were running. Footsteps beating a light tattoo on the parquet. Another level down and Xenia panted out, “Somewhere there weell be a beam barrier.”
The words were still rippling about when Hocker found it. He had gotten a pace ahead and crumpled from the knees with his momentum sliding him forward along the tiled floor.
Fletcher grabbed for Xenia and threw himself back. They went down in a tangle with his arms round her head to keep it from harm. He saw her eyes centimetres from his own, wide and green and full of appreciation. But verbal thanks were never uttered. Black night filled his eyes. Uniformed figures had swarmed in from all sides through concealed entry ports which had sliced open.
Many hands made light work of carrying them forward to the room they had come to seek. Round the walls, men in green uniforms looked round indifferently before turning again to the winking lights of the sitrep spreads they were serving. Operators, all set to shove magnetized disks on route lines, on a wall-sized operations map, rested on their rakes.
It was left to the select group round the boardroom table in the middle of the floor to take executive action.
Pedasun, standing beside Hablon at the head of the table justifiably pettish at another delay, said, “Set them in the analyser. Quickly now. There is no time to waste.”
Chapter Ten
When his head cleared, convoluted whorls of mist rolling back from a deep black centre, Dag Fletcher first believed he had fetched up in a mortician’s parlour.
He was lying in a casket-shaped box, with his neck on a padded rest, on the specimen side of a large lens with the diminished eye of a busy researcher looking in. Ten centimetres from his face, the thick crystal filled the frame from edge to edge. Electrode plates pressing on his temples prevented any forward movement and set up a tension which immediately began to mount to the threshold of destructive pain.
With all its strangeness, it was recognizable enough. One way or another, any technologically advanced culture in the Galaxy had the trick of it. He was hooked to a layout that could probe into his head, and from the way they were going about it, one of the primitive kind that left a snail-trail of neural damage where it went.
Whatever he had thought, humorous, treacherous, kindly, picayune or full of ultimate truth as an egg would be winkled out and pawed over by Pedasun or some such.
Grimly, he set himself to put out a smoke screen, filling the surface of his mind with pictures. Xenia would do, having a strong emotional overtone. He tried to build an identikit portrait which they could throw on their screen.
Straight, narrow nose, level brows, serious mouth of a voluptuary, small round chin. Profoundly symmetrical like Nature her own self. Proportionate. A number sequence started in his head and he concentrated on developing it. 1. 2. 3. 5. 8. 13. 21. 34. 55. Mathematics of the Golden Section. Silver Section in this case.
A voice in Garamasian penetrated harshly into his private world, followed, from a point left, by Xenia herself saying aloud, “You are theenking about me, Harree, even at thees time. I like that.”
Then the same Garamasian voice, this time using the lingua franca of the Galaxy, grated out, “It is useless to resist, Commander. Your Lieutenant has told us all we need to know. Your ship will not arrive here. A Scotian frigate will intercept it.”
Xenia calle
d out, speaking quickly in English, “Don’t believe anytheeng you hear, I know thees too well.”
Her voice cut in an involuntary scream as some linguist used direct action to put in a period.
More Garamasian gobbledegook came from his right side and he felt weight on his feet as the whole container began to move.
From being horizontal, he was tipping forward, pivoting at a point near the waist. Finally, he was upright, more weight on his feet; but a spine-stretching residue still carried by the head harness. Now he could see the operations room through the distorting lens, as though it ran for half a kilometre, with Pedasun diminished to a small bright miniature, standing beside a lifelike, overblown status tricked out with campaign medals and a near conical hat.
The glass screen was swung clear and the two key figures leaped forward, hell bent on joining him in his box. Without the optical filter, he found they stabilised seven metres away, across a shiny tabletop and the one he had taken to be a lay figure spoke up for the duo. “Before the operator opens your head, Earthman, I will tell you that you will die. You are a terrorist. You can expect no less.”
Fletcher found his voice feeble in his own ears, when he said, “I am here as representative of the Inter Galactic Organization. If you have charges to make, your Government will deal with them. Meanwhile, I tell you that your attempt to seize power without a referendum is against the I.G.O. Charter. I formally advise you to use normal political channels for your movement.”
Hablon’s teeth showed in a smile which was a mere rictus and had no element of humour in it. Pedasun fidgeted with his cane and looked at his time disc. This was all for the birds, he did not want the old dough-bag sidetracked into a seminar on human rights.
The General, however, had posterity to think of and missed no opportunity to spread the good word.
Though logic should have told him he was wasting it on an alien about to be shuffled off. He said, “I am the Government. Garamas will change. I have no time for neutrality and the I.G.O. milk-and-water constitution. Garamas will be great as she should be. There is not much information that you can give.
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