by Ryder Stacy
It must have been a hundred and twenty degrees fahrenheit by the time Rona had half pried Rock’s chair from its concrete base. And it was far too late now for any one of them to survive.
Rockson, sweat pouring down his forehead, watched as the cratered lead-rivered planet Mercury appeared. The closest planet to the Sun. The Sun was the size of a giant fireball, too brilliant to look at even for an instant. The heat was near the point that they would collapse and die, screaming their lungs out in final pain.
It was over. The fight was over. They were as good as dead.
The sky suddenly went utterly black. There was a hiss—some hidden air conditioner came on. The temperature rapidly dropped to normal levels.
The plunge into the inferno of the Sun had only been a teaser. The main event was now coming up. Twilight, artificial twilight, was falling. The stars started appearing again. The Big Dipper, the pole star, the other constellations. The stars started slowly wheeling up from the imaginary eastern horizion.
There didn’t seem to be anything dangerous . . . Then it happened. The red star Antares rose, the jewel of the southern constellation of Scorpio. Antares’s light seemed to intensify; there was the smell of ozone in the air.
Rockson’s eyes widened in horror as he saw a stream of laser-red light shoot out from the star and start tracking across the round room, searing a smoking line of white-hot destruction in the empty seats it was traversing. The star-beam kept moving; the stream of laser death was heading his way.
Just as the ray of death reached him, Rona had wrenched his seat free. Rockson turned it on its side, placing himself under the laser beam from Antares. Rona jumped aside just in time also.
The seat behind where Rock had just been was seared in half as if a blowtorch had been applied to it.
Mightily Rockson struggled with his bindings, smashing his awkwardly immobilized body again and again against the other bolted-down seats. At last the sturdy metal of the chair gave way to the immense power of the Warrior from the Surface, and he shook off the pieces and together with Rona started making the rounds of the other Freefighters, managing to free most of them before the star, which had set for a brief time, rose again in the “southeast.”
Again the false Antares started its randomly programmed death-ray crisscross of the seats. Backs of chairs, seared in half, flopped to the floor smoking hot.
It got worse. A second and a third star, blue-white Sirius and flickering Vega, also started sending out the concentrated thin beams of laser heat. The crisscrossing beams were sure to hit one of them. Those that had been helped free valiantly risked their own lives to unbind their companions, ignoring the personal danger.
McCaughlin and Archer didn’t need any help tearing their chairs out of the floor once that strategy was broached to them. And they straightened up and their massive thighs and rippling sinews broke their perches to fragments. Archer even succeeded in jerking his wrists so violently that the chains holding them tore open.
“Hit the floor, keep under the cover of the chairs, and work yourselves up the aisles to the door,” Rock ordered.
Rockson realized that there was a way to quickly remove the encumbering chains on their ankles and wrists. But it was an insanely desperate way. Still, if they were careful, and quick . . .
“Freefighters, hold up your chains as accurately as you can figure when the beams of light sweep by. The laser can free us as well as kill.”
To demonstrate, Rockson observed the killing beam of Vega as it slid hissing across the third row. He rushed over and held his chain at a precise position—he hoped—success! The chain was so hot from transmitted heat that he winced in pain, but it was severed. The dangling pieces were not a real problem, the important thing was he could use his hands unencumbered.
Chen tried it next, and then the others. In a short while, with a lot of skill and luck, they had managed to unshackle themselves.
In every scene of horror there is a comedic element. Archer looked like a big rolling grizzly as he fell to the floor and lifted his legs wide to the cutting heat of a beam from Sirius. He succeeded nicely. The big mountain man was more dexterous—when he had to be—than he looked.
Rockson thought that they had all had succeeded in cutting their chains without casualty. Then there was a cry of agony. Danik had been clipped by the beam of death as he did his chains free. “I—I’m okay,” he winced.
“Good man,” Rock said, and he meant it. Danik was shaping up. He was no longer a wimpy, fearful mole of a man. He was one of them. Rock told him as much, and Danik smiled in the flickering death light. “Thank you.”
Chen crawled over and ministered some salve to the burned-off inch of Danik’s shoulder. And applied the Plasti-seal, Century City’s combined antiseptic and healing bandage, that he had secreted.
Rockson believed that once the deadly star-beams had crossed every chair in the auditorium, the rays would cease. And he was correct. The stars stayed on, however, and they were able to see by their combined light. See enough to make their way to the door they had entered by.
There was no handle, and there was no seam wide enough to even get the thin blade of Rock’s balisong knife into. But there was a code-punch panel, the kind that requires a numerical code in order to make the door open.
The punch-code control was hexagonal, made of cold steel. In the artificial starlight Rockson’s keen mutant eyes noted that there were buttons at each corner of the metal hexagon. And one button in the middle. He read the sign next to the device.
Open door by punching in the smaller magic number in the center and then punch in the appropriate numbers 1 through 13 on each of the points of the hexagon. Reading across each line adds up to the larger sacred number. CAUTION, improper numbers will result in activation of the planetarium’s cremation cycle and the planetarium will be heated to a temperature of 451 degrees within ten seconds.
Rockson frowned. “Any ideas, gang? Danik, you should know. You live here.”
Danik flustered, “But—but each of us has our life specialty. We do not study Liberal Arts—we do not have the well-rounded curriculum that you free men have. I am a waterworks engineer. Aside from nursery school, all my education has been about engineering. No magic numbers. That is a historian’s knowledge. Stafford is a historian. I’ve not heard of sacred numbers, not once in all my life in Eden.”
“Chen,” Rock whispered, “have you any idea how to solve this thing.”
“Well, there were some things I studied about magic squares in ancient China. The ancients were fond of mathematical puzzles. But they are all based upon a set of sacred concepts. The concept is the key. Unless we know the concept behind the code, we can’t chance a try.”
“Everyone think. I’ve got to be sure of the numbers, or we will be burned alive.”
“I don’t know much math—but I think I’ve got the concept,” said Rona. “I’ve been fascinated by dismal Eden City—no friezes, no borders, ledges, parapets, nothing in the way of adornment on any of the architecture. And there is only one geometric shape aside from the cube. That shape is the seven-sided polygon. I think the smaller magic number might be seven. I counted the steps from the dock to the shore. Seven. And the steps from the ground to the entrance to Government Building is twenty-one. Try seven as the central magic number and twenty-one as the number that is the total of each line. Punch in seven in the middle, and starting at the top corner of the septagon—that’s a seven-sided polygon—try thirteen, then six then eleven, then one, then eight, then three. Of course, the numbers around the edge could be different—they just have to add up to twenty-one.”
“My God, how do you know this, Rona . . .”
“It isn’t mystically arrived it. I noticed the number of steps in the city, and the shapes of the few buildings that weren’t cubical. And I asked a guard about it—down in the dungeon. He was playing with a kind of Rubik’s cube with seven sides. It had the same puzzle about ‘magic numbers’, and—”
&nbs
p; “Never underestimate a woman,” McCaughlin said admiringly. “Heaven preserve you, fair Rona. You are the best.”
Rockson sighed heavily. “Here goes . . .” He punched in Rona’s numbers. Then he pushed the red button.
The door swung slowly open. Artificial daylight flooded into their would-be tomb.
They were free.
They cautiously ran the distance to the next building, one at a time. The streets were deserted. “It must be the sleep hours,” Danik said. “I’m tired. We all get tired at the same time . . .”
There was the sound of approaching footfalls. Rockson and the others pressed close to the building wall.
A startled pair of lower-rank Civil Guards rounded the corner. They saw the Freefighters too late. They were beset immediately, and died with startled expressions, their heat guns still in their holsters.
“I would prefer my Liberator,” McCaughlin said as the Freefighters made their way through the streets of Eden, startling the few timid passersby with their presence. He was holding one of the paper-light heat guns that the Edenites called disintegrators. Rona had the other one.
“We’ll get our weapons back.” Rona promised. “They’re all piled up in a side room to Stafford’s throne chamber. I saw them cart the whole pile in there and just toss them on the floor. They don’t really know what to make of them, I suppose . . .”
The group of determined Americans reached the corner just across from the Government Building. Rockson had wondered what the effective range of a heat gun was, and now was the time to find out. He peered around a corner. There were two guards, one on either side of the open doorway.
Rona touched Rock’s shoulder. “Let me and McCaughlin do the honors . . .”
Rock stared for a second into those determined green eyes. Then he said, “Okay, see if you can hit them with those pop-shooters, but get as close as you can without them noticing before firing.”
Rona and McCaughlin just walked across the empty street and sauntered toward the entrance stairs.
The guards were facing one another, their mouths moving. Idle chatter. The last remarks they would ever make in this world.
They turned when the pair of Freefighters were a quarter of the way up the stairs, and they died as they raised their weapons. Burned where they stood. Blackened and smoking human charcoal, they fell apart as they fell.
The rest of the Freefighters ran across the street, hardly containing a rousing cheer. One of the guard’s guns had fallen; heat-damaged, it sat there on the topmost step. Rock picked it up. Useless. They walked down the corridor, and into the circular throne room.
“It’s empty,” Rona exclaimed.
“Perhaps they are all asleep,” Danik said.
“Stafford’s private apartments are to the left,” Rockson stated in a low voice. “In any case, the study contains the safe. The place Stafford keeps Factor Q.”
Rock ordered the rest of the Freefighters to secure the building while he plunged into Stafford’s quarters.
Through the unlocked door and down the short corridor he ran, gun thrust ahead of him. Perhaps the real Stafford would be in there in his pj’s. Rock could try again to force the code to open the safe from Stafford. The real Stafford. Awaken him from his beauty sleep with the point of the heat gun pressed against his fat face.
Happily, Rockson came upon one of the Freefighters’ weapons—a baton—lying on the floor in a corner. He wondered if a soldier had pilfered it, played with it a while, then discarded it. He probably thought it just a heavy metal stick. Unless you activated the baton by pressing a certain area of the instrument, it didn’t do its thing.
Rock, happy for any slight improvement in the situation, picked it up. He had another weapon too—the one he’d taped to his body just before they entered Eden. The butterfly knife tucked on the inner thigh of his left leg. The slender blade, folded into its own handle hadn’t been discovered in their cursory frisk by the inhibited guardsmen.
Twenty-Seven
A steel door was shutting, a foot-thick blast-resistant door that was going to close off the room that had the safe in it. There was just a second to make it through. Rockson dived between the sliding-together masses of metal death, and rolled into the study. The twin walls of crushing steel slammed together a fraction too late to crush his feet. He had made it in.
It was utterly dark, and he had no light. Windowless buildings had that problem. He somehow thought it might not be a good idea to feel around for a light switch. Especially when he heard the muffled whispers somewhere in the room.
He eased forward in the utter darkness, trying to sense the source of those utterances. Rock snapped open his balisong knife.
A hissing sound and a red glow erupted in the far darkness. Rockson jumped to the left. The disintegrators took a fraction of a second to warm up before their heat beam shot forward—long enough for steeled reflexes to respond to the danger. The beam of intense heat burned the wall next to him. Then there was a click. The weapon had misfired, or run out of whatever juice it needed to spray hot death.
Then there was an awful silence. He lay flat, breathing through his teeth, trying to make no noise. He was blind, but the protectors of Stafford’s inner sanctum couldn’t see him, either. Perhaps they thought they had hit him, and were waiting for a movement, a sound, to prove otherwise. Well, he was not going to make that sound.
He slipped the balisong knife into his belt, felt for the explosive-bolt baton on his belt, slipped it into his grip. All silently. But after a minute, they won the waiting game. He didn’t have time to wait any longer. He got into a crouch and moved forward, trying to remember where the furnishings were in this dark room.
Voices. Something about “I’m sure I got him. Switch on the lights.”
Rock smiled, and froze in place. He was just a dozen feet from the voice, he could make it there in the dark . . .
He threw himself forward, swinging the deadly baton in an arc, intending to smash anything it encountered, and hit the soft Morris chair, not a man. He knew it the minute the baton demolished the plastic-and-fiber affair. And the lights came on, blinding. He spun and dove behind a cabinet. He peered over it.
There stood Bdos and his two henchmen, the martial arts masters known as Nunchaku-man and Dedman. Bdos held his familiar bullwhip in his left hand, coiling it tighter. Nunchaku-man took the twin sticks of death from his waistband and smiled a toothsome grin of evil. Dedman’s implacable huge face was enigmatic as he stood like a straight robot, holding his spear in the left hand, his other hand on the handle of his sword.
“We will see if you are as powerful a fighter as I suspect by your courage, Rockson. We will test you one at a time. Each one a fair fight. Prepare to die, intruder from the dark realm.”
Nunchaku-man stepped forward, the first of the movements that would come to render him dead. The man slowly began to circle to the left. Rockson kept his distance. The man took out his two sticks of steel linked by a chain. He was starting to swing it over his head. An opening move, tentative. Nunchaku against baton and balisong knife. Well, so be it. The huge man didn’t know Rock had the knife. It wasn’t very obvious, tucked into his waistband. It would be his little surprise.
The knife was a versatile instrument of death. And the bolt-baton was not without its own virtues. Reach was not a virtue of either, though. Rockson had to get Nunchaku-man to move in close, or get handily defeated.
Rockson had trained in the use of the baton for many months in Century City. It was one of the standard martial arts weapons most Freefighters carried. But he’d never faced a man with skill in nunchaku manipulation with the baton. The balisong he had used in mock combat against multiple “attackers” in the Century City gym. Just a test of skill, a feat that showed the potential of the weapon. Now he was in real combat, against three attackers. He doubted the other two, hanging back now, wouldn’t join in if they could help their monstrous buddy.
A baton and a balisong against nunchaku, sword, spear
, and bullwhip. One man against three towering sadistic genetic monsters.
“Piggy-face want some action?” taunted the intruder-from-the-surface. “Or is Piggy-face man afraid of me?” Rockson thought the taunt too simple, but Nunchaku-man responded with anger. And anger makes one too impulsive. The worst thing to be in a fight to the death.
Rockson let his attacker make the first move. The snarling mass of exomorphic madness stepped into Rockson’s defensive circle. He held the nunchaku by one stick, swung the other over his head and then forward with a whoosh, intending to break Rockson’s cranium to shards.
Rockson brought his baton up. The steel rod, by the flick of a recessed button, suddenly exploded out from both ends, to three times its ten-inch length. The extended weapon met the nunchaku chain. The stick intended to smash Rock’s skull swished by his nose several times in an instant. Rock had entangled the man’s weapon for good.
Now Rockson, taking either end of the long baton in his steely grip, pulled with all the tensile strength his mutant muscles could deliver. He twisted to the side, yanked his attacker past him. Then Rock made him pay for his anger.
Any ordinary knife, even a huge bowie, would have been useless in this situation. The balisong, an ancient dual-handled butterfly knife of Filipino design, could be quickly drawn and opened. Rockson let go of one end of the baton, continuing to sweep his opponent past. Nunchaku-man wasn’t bright enough to let go of his now useless, entangled weapon and roll away. He struggled.
Rock used his free hand to pull the balisong from his belt crosshand, and with the same hand opened it.
Then he delivered the blade into the back of the man’s skull, slicing into the spinal cord with a sickening snap, and twisting the thin cold blade. The blood ozzed out the open wound as the body sagged.
The cries of encouragement from the other two fighters became that of startled outrage now. One of their finest was gone within the flash of an eye. They could hardly believe it, judging from their wide eyes and their backing off a few feet.