‘Adjust yours,’ she said. ‘Then we can play our swan song. We’ll soon be off this place.’
Quickly, he tuned his commlock in to her frequency. The normally weak sonar pitch that they emitted at varying and coded frequencies to open doors on Moon Base Alpha was strengthened, and set to crystal-shattering frequency. When they were ready they fired testingly at the slowly-softening walls around them. They watched with satisfaction as the green crystal exploded and cracked.
They turned and began walking along the cave, training their commlocks at random on selected surfaces. The Heart of Kalthon suddenly began screaming, its piercing, high-pitched cry beginning to sound out again. The note paralyzed them with its intensity and they were enveloped in a blinding pall of whiteness. They felt their bodies stiffen and become rigid. When the bright light surrounding them died away, they realized that they, like Koenig, had been entombed.
Their frozen eyes gazed fearfully and helplessly out from inside a large, transparent block of glass.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Increase power flow to maximum plus five,’ the Replica demanded impatiently. Triumph bobbed up and down inside him, but victory was not yet his.
‘Commander...!’ Carter ejaculated, completely taken aback by this latest imposition. ‘Our temperature is dropping rapidly... this will eliminate half our instruments...!’
The Replica turned to Yasko, and looked at her with a hard, smouldering gaze of hatred. ‘Do it!’
The Oriental girl shivered, and her numbed fingers punched and hit levers and buttons. The emergency lighting flickered and dimmed even further.
Frost crystals hung in the air and settled on the walls and equipment as the level of scarce moisture in the air turned to ice. The Alphans sat and shook at their consoles, where they had been instructed to stay. They had been ordered to remain silent unless spoken to, but Helena could contain herself no longer. ‘Life support units eleven and twelve are shut down completely!’ she commented scathingly.
The Replica heard her, but he continued his trance-like gaze at the Big Screen. The image on the screen was split into two halves; one showing the three sickly pillars of light lancing upwards, the other showing the sinister green asteroid moving slowly on its orbit in their path. ‘We’ll soon be free,’ he muttered savagely, by way of reply.
‘...the water in the re-cycling plant is frozen... hydroponics frozen... protein production units inoperative,’ Yasko sobbed from her console, still unable to break from the terrible hold of the alien.
‘Maintain power level as is...’ the Replica’s voice interrupted her rambling, raving admissions.
Carter pulled himself together. ‘John! The oxygen units have failed – we’re on emergency. We must have more power.’
‘We need all available power for the beam,’ his Commander’s impostor hissed at him.
‘Alpha is dying!’ Helena exploded from behind her console. She stormed over to him.
The Replica turned on her viciously. ‘I will not have my orders questioned! Get back to your posts...’ he stared frozenly at Helena and Carter. ‘Get back to your posts – both of you!’
The feeling of fear, the acknowledgment of failure, rose in him again. It was an irrational, crippling and mindless terror that he couldn’t explain. Disaster was impending, yet he couldn’t see why. Something was approaching...
He turned away from them, a dangerous, desperate expression imprinted on his face. ‘Increase power flow to maximum plus fifteen!’
Carter started forward again. ‘John! We can’t do it! We’ll destroy Alpha!’
‘Carter, I gave you an order...’ the Replica advanced on him threateningly.
‘That order is countermanded!’
The doors crashed open and a loud, familiar voice came from the back of the room. The amorphous, amoeboid energy of negativity inside the power-jacker expanded rupturingly. He whipped around, as though stabbed.
Replica and original became locked in a rigid, visual embrace, while the Alphans gasped and cried out in surprise and awe. Both felt an abrupt twinge of alarm as they realized that now there was no easy way of proving who was who.
‘You’re at my desk, alien,’ the real Koenig cried challengingly.
The Replica’s face cracked into a sneering mask of superiority. He spoke quietly and convincingly to the Alphans. ‘That is an image creature projected by the asteroid. Do not listen to it. Destroy it.’
Carter and Yasko turned bewilderingly to one another. But Helena stared pensively at the two Koenigs, knowing that the final battle was being fought between them.
‘Destroy it!’ the Replica repeated hatefully.
The real Koenig stepped further into the room. ‘One of us has to be for real – one an image,’ he told the stunned and frozen assembly.
The Replica turned dramatically to his audience. ‘I was on that asteroid – I know what its force is trying to do to us. It’s running out of time now... it’s the last chance it will have.’
‘That is the truth,’ the real Koenig agreed, surprisingly. ‘If it can’t drain the last of our power – it will die.’
The time-bomb inside the alien ticked to its conclusion. ‘It’s why my image was sent – to confuse us long enough to steal these last moments and complete the transfer.’
The eyes of the Alphans moved from figure to figure, gripped by the terrifying drama.
‘He is the image... he should know,’ the real Koenig agreed, cunningly. He darted quickly forward towards his console and stabbed a button. A whine of ultra-high frequency sound began to flood into the room. It gradually grew in pitch, and the Alphans cried out in pain, clasping their hands to their tortured ear-drums.
The Replica was the only one in the Centre who was unaffected by it. Realizing that he had been tricked, he launched himself at Koenig with a vicious snarl. The dreadful force that had been imprisoned inside him for so long exploded, and his form lost all feeling of its pretence.
‘Kalthon lives!’ his Creator’s singing voice burst from his lips.
‘Kalthon dies!’ Koenig contradicted him, his features contorted with pain as the note of sound rose to an unbearable pitch. As it reached the frequency needed to shatter crystal, the straining body of the alien began to slow in mid-flight. Suddenly, it came to a stop, converting back into the rigid, grotesque statue of crystal it had once been. The sound was increased still further, and before the pain-filled eyes of everyone present – it shattered.
The cold, hard fragments of jewel collapsed in a glistening, inert heap to the Command Centre floor.
Koenig stabbed at another button while he still had the strength, and the deadly sound ceased. Shaken, he staggered over to Yasko’s console. After a few fumbling moments, he began to shut down the first of the switches that were still relaying Alpha’s vital power to the energy reflectors.
‘Life Support,’ he requested urgently into the console communicator. ‘This is your Commander. Halt energy transfer...’
The Command Centre personnel began to come round from the effects of the sonic radiation. They struggled back to their posts, and with their help he was soon able to commence the massive operation of putting Alpha back on her feet.
The three energy beams flickered and dimmed. The sickly plasma caused by their powerful micro-wave transmission began to thin, and they lost their greenish hue. Soon they had vanished altogether and ten thousand miles away in space, the asteroid of Kalthon and its condensed peoples and cultures dimmed also. In a state of semi-completion it became unstable, and the energy its programmed Heart had stolen to resurrect itself began inexorably to destroy it.
Bit by bit its bio-crystal structure, containing the complex genetic code of an entire race of people, began to disintegrate. A chain reaction of explosions started, and as they did so, a desperate, frantic S.0.S. message was beamed from its surface.
Koenig’s commlock blipped. ‘Verdeschi to Moon Base Alpha, Verdeschi to...’
The Security Chief’s fraught
face appeared on its tiny screen.
Koenig stabbed at the transmitter button and spoke into it. ‘It’s OK Tony, we’ve not forgotten you. Alan’s on his way.’
The screen blanked out. A few moments later the image reappeared, accompanied by the sounds of distant explosions and cracking rock. Verdeschi spoke again. ‘After you left, John, the Heart put us on ice. We didn’t think we’d see you again, but stopping the energy flow must have fixed it. The ice block shattered.’
The screen went dead again. A mess of white lines and crackles came over. Somewhere in the distortion Koenig thought he could hear more of the explosions.
Then Verdeschi’s disembodied voice sounded, now more urgent than ever. ‘It’s over, it’s all over. The entire asteroid’s going up... for the sake of the Holy Mother of Mary, Maya, me, everyone... get us...’ His desperate plea was interrupted by Maya’s joyful voice. ‘Tony, no need. look! It’s all right Alpha, we’ve made visual contact with Eagle Three!’
‘Well thank space for that!’ Koenig grinned. ‘We’ll see you.’ He clicked off the set.
At his side Helena smiled happily. She took his arm – the real arm of the real Koenig – and in the midst of the chaos of restorative activity that was going on around them they stole a real, brief kiss. ‘Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of Kalthon,’ she whispered blissfully. ‘I couldn’t bear your awful coldness!’
CHAPTER SIX
The task of repairing the damage done to the computers and other instruments upon which the survival of the Moon Base depended began in earnest. Every sector had been hit. Worst of all, stocks of energy-providing Tiranium had been all but depleted, and urgent measures were taken to obtain fresh supplies. The valuable radioactive element which formed the basis of the Life Support Core could only usually be found in trace deposits in certain rock formations. It had to be quarried either from the Moon, or from other planetary bodies which the Alphans were fortunate enough to encounter during their headlong and helpless flight through space. The element had been increasingly important since the Moon had been wrenched from its orbit around Earth, and since the old thermonuclear reactors which they had previously depended on had run out of plutonium. Tiranium was many thousands of times more powerful than plutonium, and a few ounces could generate sufficient electricity to satisfy Alpha’s entire operational and defence needs – 100 - 500 megawatts per day for one to three months.
Practically accessible tiranium deposits on the moon had been all but exhausted, but speculative mining work was recommenced – deep in the disused lower levels of the Moon Base – while in the Command Centre, metal-detecting scanners kept a vigilant watch for likely planetary systems.
Hardest hit after the Life Support Centre and the instrumentation was the Moon Base’s food and atmospheric supply. Plants and yeasts, processed into nourishing tasty meals as good as any that had once been eaten on Earth, formed the staple diet of the Alphans. It had been discovered by early space explorers that, in self-supporting colonies like the Moon Base, and on long-distance space missions, the vegetarian diet was the most directly nourishing and the most sensible, clean and practical diet to have. In their time-honoured way the plants’ natural growth cycles provided the Base with an oxygen atmosphere, and their easily-cultivated, edible leaves and fruits provided ample food. They not only smelt good and tasted good, they looked good too – providing a missing touch of green and colour in an otherwise clinical and mechanical world.
Shermeen Goodwood, the young, pretty eighteen-year-old botanical technician who helped run the Hydroponics Section provided beauty of a different kind. She hummed a tuneless little melody to herself as she mixed the special nutrient solutions needed by the plants, and poured measured quantities of them into the water medium. The Section was like a greenhouse, with plants of all types and sizes growing from the frames and beds. Many of the plants needed their own special conditions to grow in, and the Section was divided into see-through temperature and humidity-controlled compartments. In one compartment were the giant tanks of yeast colonies. In another, Tony Verdeschi’s hops. She warmed with pleasure at the thought of the handsome Security Chief, for whom she had developed a real, helpless crush. He had his own line in homemade beer-brewing, a welcome, if sometimes dubious commodity at the Moon Base. She had been the first person he had turned to for help in growing one of the basic ingredients.
Under normal conditions, her plants were healthy. They thrived well, and produced a good supply of food. But during the power shortage they had been deprived of essential heat, and now they were in a sorry state, many of them dead. The hops were among the hardiest though, and seemed to be pulling through. Never mind, she thought light-heartedly, for she wasn’t a girl to get depressed except over matters of love. The Moon Base could live on beer for a few months while she grew fresh plants from the seed store. The prospect of living off Tony Verdeschi’s beer for a few months excited her so much that she didn’t notice Eddie, her boyfriend, enter to see what she was doing. He scowled when he saw her tending the hops. ‘You’ve gone hop-happy!’ he said jealously. ‘Since you planted this stuff for Verdeschi and that poison beer of his, you don’t know I exist!’
‘His beer is not poison, and you’re green with jealousy!’ she retorted snootily.
‘You’re darn right I am!’ He sulked nearby, angry and frustrated.
Verdeschi himself entered, holding a pewter tankard and a large glass beaker filled with a rich, brown fluid. He saw Shermeen and his face brightened. ‘Hey, Shermeen!’ he cried. ‘The moment of truth has arrived!’
Eddie cringed and hung in the background, watching Shermeen’s glowing reaction to the Security Chief.
‘Terrific!’ the botanist enthused. She put down the measuring cylinder she had been holding and came over to greet him. ‘Are we ready?’
He nodded. ‘Let’s go and let others sample our wares!’ They swept out of the room, the one smiling sweetly at Eddie, the other oblivious of the armorous feelings he was attracting.
Command Centre was back to normal. The calm, industrious scene that met them was typical of the Command Centre on a routine day. Verdeschi, trailed by an ebullient Shermeen, held up the glass beaker. ‘All right everybody – time for the taste of a lifetime!’ He set the tankard down on Maya’s console and began pouring in the beer. Helena, Koenig and Bill Frazer looked up from their posts in mock alarm. A trace of amusement was on their faces. Although most people on Alpha never usually turned alcohol down, previous Verdeschi brews hadn’t exactly flattered the palate. The Italian seemed unaware of this, but not Shermeen, who was inwardly indignant. Verdeschi held up the foaming tankard, ‘Verdeschi’s Brew Number 22 - made for the first time with genuine, Alpha-grown hops!’ He made a mock bow at Shermeen. ‘Cultivated exclusively by our soon-to-be-famous hydroponics botanist, Miss Goodwood! Shermeen – will you please do the honours?’
With evident pride and delight, Shermeen took hold of the proffered tankard. With bright eyes, she looked around the Centre. Her eyes alighted on Maya, the woman whom she saw as a rival in her attempts to win Verdeschi’s charms. With more than simple pleasure she approached her and offered the tankard.
Maya smiled and declined. ‘Thanks, but I’d hate to ruin a beautiful friendship...’ she said, speaking loudly for Verdeschi’s benefit.
Verdeschi scowled at her. His pleasure was rapidly dissipating. The occasion he hoped would have pleased everyone, seemed to have been mis-judged.
Undaunted, Shermeen turned to Helena – but got another polite refusal. ‘As Medical Officer... I’d better not...’ the doctor said to her, not wishing to offend. Shermeen now looked visibly disconcerted. She tried Koenig, who smiled: ‘As Commander – and since I’m on duty...’ Shermeen turned to Frazer. ‘And Mr Frazer happens to be on a non-liquid diet...’ Koenig continued. Oblivious of the grateful smile Frazer flashed to Koenig, Shermeen turned back to Verdeschi.
‘Guess that just leaves you, Tony.’
Verdeschi glowered bad-naturedl
y at his colleagues. Without speaking he took the tankard and instead of tasting it first, as he ought to have done, gulped down a mouthful.
It tasted foul. He coughed and spluttered as his taste-buds protested. Chuckles of laughter burst out around him.
‘Something wrong?’ Maya asked, amused.
Verdeschi banged the tankard down. He glared at her. ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you?’
‘We might have misjudged the fermentation...’ Shermeen spoke hastily. She looked deeply upset.
‘We did something stupid,’ Verdeschi conceded, wiping the taste from his lips with the back of his hand.
‘There’s another string of hops, Tony,’ Shermeen suggested helpfully, trying hard to mend the situation. ‘We could try again.’
‘No point,’ Verdeschi told her brusquely. He turned and stalked towards his console, without noticing the look of distress his manner caused on Shermeen’s pretty face. ‘Anyway, I can’t take time off for that now.’
‘Can’t take the time...?’ she asked tearfully. ‘You mean it’s my fault...?’ She felt tears welling inside her, and before they burst she turned and fled from the Centre.
Maya and Helena exchanged disapproving looks at one another, but not over the poor botanist.
‘OK, why the disapproval?’ Verdeschi asked bad-temperedly. ‘You didn’t taste it! I wasn’t accusing her!’
‘You didn’t hear the way you sounded,’ Helena told him. ‘You made her think so.’ She looked concerned. ‘Shermeen is a very sensitive girl... very impressionable.’
‘And she’s also got a way-out-in-space, teenage crush on you, Mister,’ Maya reminded him.
‘Me? Now what’d I do? Just because she cultivated some hops for my beer? You’re all over-reacting...’ He turned to Helena. ‘Like you said, she’s impressionable. She’ll get over it ...’
‘All right, everyone – let’s all get over it and get back to work,’ Koenig interrupted them. ‘While you were out, Tony, Maya picked up what we think might be a planet. It’s too far away yet for our sensors to be sure – but if it is a planet, it might contain Tiranium. Maya, try to bring it onto the Big Screen, will you please?’
Space 1999 - The Space-Jackers Page 6