The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  “Goth!” he called hoarsely, which sent assorted pains stabbing through his mauled throat Then he remembered that Goth couldn’t hear him.

  He found her lying beside the couch which had skidded halfway to the end of the room and turned over. He righted it, pushed it back against the wall. Goth made small muttering noises as he picked her up carefully and placed her back on the couch; but they were noises of sleepy irritability, not of pain. She didn’t seem to have been damaged in whatever upheaval had hit the Venture. The captain discovered Hulik and Vezzarn lying nearby and let them lie for the moment. As he started back to the control desk the room’s lights came on. Some self-repair relay had closed.

  There still wasn’t time to start pondering about exactly what had happened. First things had to come first, and he had a number of almost simultaneous first things on hand. The felled Agandar was breathing; so were the other two. Yango had an ugly swelling bruise on the right side of his forehead just below the hairline, where the captain’s lucky swing had landed. He got Yango’s wrists secured behind him with the ship’s single pair of emergency handcuffs, then went quickly through the man’s pockets. In one of them was a wallet-like affair designed to hold five small hypodermics, of which three were left. That almost had to be the antidote. The captain hesitated, but only for a moment. He badly wanted to wake up Goth but he wasn’t going to try to do it with something which, considering Yango’s purpose on the Venture, might have been a killing device.

  There was nothing else on Yango’s person that seemed of immediate significance. The captain turned his attention to the ship and her surroundings. The Venture appeared to have gone on orbital drive automatically as soon as the unexplained tumult which had brought her to this section of space subsided — the reason was that she had found herself then within orbiting range of a planetary body.

  At first consideration it was not a prepossessing planet, but that might have been because its light came from a swollen, dull-red glowing coal of a sun which filled most of the starboard screen. The captain turned up screen magnification on the port side for a brief closer look. Through the hazy reddish twilight below, which was this world’s midday illumination, he got an impression of a landscape consisting mostly of desert and low, jagged mountain ranges. He went on to test the instruments and drives, finally switched in the communicators. The Venture was in working condition; the detectors registered no hostile presence about, and the communicators indicated that nobody around here wanted to talk to them at the moment. So far, not bad.

  And now — how had they got here?

  Not through Goth this time, he told himself. Not via the Sheewash Drive. During the first moments of that spinning black confusion which plucked the ship out of the cluster of Nuri globes herding them towards fire-death in a terrible star, he’d been sure it was the Drive… that a surge of klatha magic had brought Goth awake in this emergency and she’d slipped unnoticed into her cabin.

  But even before the ship began to settle out again, he’d known it couldn’t have been that. He’d seen Goth on the couch, slumped loosely against Hulik, moments before the blackness rushed and roared in on them. Something quite other than the Drive had picked them up, swung them roughly through space, dropped them at this spot -

  That great, booming voice in his mind, the one he’d assumed was a product of dream — imagination — throwing out thought impressions that came to one like the twisting shifts of a gale… In the instant before the Venture was swept away from the Worm World trap, he had seemed to hear it again, though he could bring up only a hazy half-memory now of what he’d felt it was saying.

  It had to be the vatch.

  Not a dream-vatch! A real one. Goth had believed there’d been something watching again lately.

  Well, he thought, they’d been lucky, extremely lucky, that something had been watching… and decided to take a hand for a moment in what was going on. A rough, careless giant hand; but it had brought them here alive.

  The captain cleared his throat.

  “Thank you,” he said aloud, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “Thank you, vatch! Thank you very much!”

  It seemed the least he could do. There was an impression of the words rolling away from him as he uttered them, fading quickly into vast distance. He waited a moment, half afraid he’d get a response. But the control room remained quite still.

  He broke out the bottle of ship brandy, stuck it in his jacket pocket, and half carried, half dragged Laes Yango back through the ship and into the storage. It took a minute or two to get the big man hauled up to the top of one of the less hard bales of cargo; and Yango was beginning to groan and stir about while the captain wired his ankles together and to the bale. That and the handcuffs should keep him secure, and he’d be out of the way here.

  He turned the Agandar on his back, opened the brandy bottle and trickled a little into the side of the man’s mouth. Yango coughed, spluttered, opened bloodshot eyes, and glared silently at the captain.

  The captain brought out the little container which held three needles of what should be the antidote to the drug Yango had released in the ventilation system. “Is this the antidote?” he asked.

  Yango snarled a few unpleasantries, added, “How could the witch use the drive?”

  “I don’t know,” said the captain. “Be glad she did. Is it the antidote?”

  “Yes, it is. Where are we now?”

  The captain told him he’d be trying to find out, and locked the storage up again behind him. He left the lighting turned on. Not that it would make Yango much happier. His skull was intact, but his head would be throbbing a while.

  The pirate probably had told the truth about the antidote and, in any case, everything would be stalled here until Goth came alert again. The captain made a brief mental apology to Vezzarn — somebody had to be first — and jabbed one of the needles into the little man’s arm. Under half-shut lids, Vezzarn’s eyes began rolling alarmingly; then his hands fluttered. Suddenly he coughed and sat up on the couch, looking around.

  “What’s happened?” he whispered in fright when he discovered where he was and saw Goth and Hulik unconscious on the couch beside him.

  The captain told him there’d been a problem, caused by Laes Yango, but that the ship seemed to be safe now and that Goth and Miss do Eldel should be all right. “Let’s get them awake…”

  Hulik do Eldel received the contents of the second needle. She showed none of Vezzarn’s reactions. Two or three minutes went by; then she quietly opened her eyes.

  Confidently, the captain gave Goth the third shot. While he waited for it to take effect, he began filling in the other two sketchily but almost truthfully on recent events. They were still potential trouble makers, and they might as well realize at once that this was a serious situation, in which it would be healthy for all involved to cooperate. The role played by the item in the strongbox naturally was not mentioned in his account. Neither did he refer to entities termed vatches, or attempt to explain exactly how they had arrived where they were. If Hulik and Vezzarn wanted to do some private speculating about mystery drives which might be less than reliable, he didn’t care.

  He failed to note that the eyes of his two listeners grew very round before he’d much more than gotten started on his story. Neither of them said a word. And the captain’s attention was mainly on Goth. Like Hulik, she was showing no immediate response to the drug…

  Then a full six minutes had passed, and Goth still wasn’t awake!

  There seemed to be no cause for actual alarm. Goth’s breathing and pulse were normal, and when he shook her by the shoulder he got small, sleepy growls in response. But she simply wouldn’t wake up. From what Yango had said, the drug would wear off by itself in something like another eight or nine hours. However, the captain didn’t like the looks of the neighborhood revealed in the viewscreens too well; and his companions evidently liked it less. Loitering around here did not seem a good idea — and setting off blindly through an unknown
section of space to get themselves oriented, without having Goth and the Drive in reserve, might be no better.

  He switched on the intercom to the storage, stepped up the reception amplification, and said, “Mr. Yango?”

  There was a brief, odd, unpleasant sound. Then the pirate’s voice replied, clearly and rather hurriedly, “Yes? I hear you. Go ahead…”

  “I’ve used the antidote,” the captain told him. “Miss do Eldel and Vezzarn have come awake. Dani hasn’t.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Yango said, after a moment.

  “Why not?” asked the captain.

  “I had a particular concern about your niece, sir. As you know.” Laes Yango, after his lapse from character, had gone back to being polite. “When she became unconscious with the rest of you, I drugged her again with a different preparation. I was making sure that any unusual resistance she might show would not bring her back to her senses before I intended her to regain them.”

  “Then there’s an antidote to that around?”

  “I have one. It isn’t easy to find.”

  “What do you want?” the captain asked.

  “Perhaps we can reach an agreement, sir. I am not very comfortable here.”

  “Perhaps we can,” the captain said.

  He flicked off the intercom. The other two were watching him.

  “He probably does have it,” he remarked. “I searched him but I’m not in your line of business. He could have it hidden somewhere. The logical thing would be to haul him up here and search him again.”

  “It looks to me,” said Vezzarn thoughtfully, “that that’s what he wants, skipper.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Hulik said, “Just before that man spoke, I heard a noise.”

  “So did I,” said the captain. “What did you make of it?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “Neither am I.” It might, thought the captain, have been the short, angry half-snarl, half-whine of some large animal-shape, startled when his voice had sounded suddenly in the storage… A snarly sort of thing, Goth had said. But the Sheem robot’s locked case stood inside the locked door of that almost impregnable vault -

  Hulik do Eldel’s frightened eyes told him she was turning over the same kind of thoughts. “We can get a look down into the storage from here,” he said.

  There was a screen at the end of the instrument console, used to check loading and unloading operations on the ship from the control room. Its pick-up area was the ceiling of the storage compartment. The captain hurriedly switched it on. “We’re wondering whether Yango’s robot is in the storage,” he told Vezzarn.

  Vezzarn shook his head. “It can’t be there, skipper! There’s no way Yango could have got into the vault without your keys. I guarantee that!”

  And there was no way Yango should have been able to get out of his handcuffs, the captain thought. He’d checked the vault before he left the storage. It was still securely locked then and the keys to it were here, in a locked desk drawer.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  The screen lit up — for a second or two. Then it was dark again. The screen was still on. The light in the storage compartment had been cut off.

  But they’d seen the robot for the moments it was visible. The great dark spider shape crouched near the storage entry. Its unfettered master stood a dozen feet from it. Yango had looked up quickly as the screen view appeared, startled comprehension in his face, before his hand darted to the lighting switches beside the entry door. Cargo cases throughout the compartment had been shifted and tumbled about as though the bulky robot had forced a passage for itself through them…

  That wasn’t the worst of it.

  “You saw what happened to the side of the vault?” the captain asked unsteadily.

  They’d seen it. “Burned out!” Vezzarn said, white-faced. “High intensity — a combat beam! It’d take that. It’s an old war robot he’s got with him, skipper. You can’t stop a thing like that… What do we do now?” The last was a frightened squeal.

  * * *

  Laes Yango suggested, via intercom from the storage, that surrender was the logical move.

  “Perhaps you don’t fully understand the nature of my pet,” he told the captain. “It’s been in my possession for fifteen years. It killed over eighty of my men while we were taking the ship it guarded, and would have killed me if I had not cut one of the devices that controlled it from the hand of the lordling whose property it had been. It knew then who its new master was. It’s a killing machine, sir! It was made to be one. The Sheem Assassin. Your hand weapons can’t harm it. And it has long since learned to obey my voice as well as its guiding instruments…”

  The captain didn’t reply. The last of the war robots were supposed to have been destroyed centuries before, and the deadly art of their construction lost. But Vezzarn had been right. The thing that beamed its way out of the vault must be such a machine. None of them doubted what Yango was telling them.

  They had some time left. No more time than the Agandar could help — and the robot undoubtedly was burning out the storage door while he’d been speaking to them. The door was massive but not designed to stand up under the kind of assault that had ruptured the vault from within. The two would be out of the storage quickly enough.

  But they couldn’t reach the control section immediately then. The ship’s full emergency circuits had flashed into action seconds after Vezzarn’s frantic question — layers of overlapping battle-steel slid into position, sealing the Venture’s interior into ten air-tight compartments. At least four of those multiple layers of the toughest workable material known lay between the control room and the storage along any approach Yango might choose to take. They probably wouldn’t stop a war robot indefinitely; but neither would they melt at the first lick of high intensity energy beams. And the captain had opened the intercom system all over the ship. That should give them some audible warning of the degree of progress the robot was making.

  Otherwise there seemed to be little he could do. The activating device he’d taken from Yango when the robot was stored in the vault was not where he’d locked it away. So the Agandar had discovered it on looking around after he’d knocked the four of them out. When the captain searched him, it wasn’t on his person. But he hadn’t needed it. There was a ring on his forefinger he’d been able to reach in spite of the handcuffs; and the ring was another control instrument. The Assassin had come awake in the vault and done the rest, including burning off its master’s bonds.

  It made no difference now where the other device was stored away on the ship. They couldn’t leave the section to look for it without opening the emergency walls.

  And if they had it, the captain thought, it wasn’t likely they’d be able to wrest control of the robot away from the Agandar. Yango, at any rate, did not appear to be worrying about the possibility…

  SMALL PERSON, announced the vatch, THIS IS THE TEST — THE SITUATION THAT WILL DETERMINE YOUR QUALITY! THERE IS A WAY TO SURVIVE. IF YOU DO NOT FIND IT, MY INTEREST AND YOUR DREAM EXISTENCE END TOGETHER -

  The captain looked quickly over at Vezzarn and Hulik. But their faces showed they’d heard nothing of what that great, ghostly wind-voice had seemed to be saying. Of course — it was meant for him.

  He’d switched off the intercom connection with Yango moments before. “Any ideas?” he asked now.

  “Skipper,” Vezzarn told him, jaw quivering, “I think we’d better surrender — while he’ll still let us!”

  Hulik was shaking her head. “That man is the Agandar!” she said. “If we do surrender, we don’t live long. Except for Dani. He’ll squeeze from us whatever we can tell him, and stop when he has nothing left to work on.”

  “We’d have a chance!” Vezzarn argued shakily. “A chance. What else can we do? We can’t stop a war robot — and there’s nowhere to run from it!”

  Hulik said to the captain, “I was told you might be a Karres witch. Are you?”

  “No,
” said the captain.

  “I thought not. But that child is?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s asleep and we can’t wake her up!” Hulik shrugged resignedly. Her face was strained and white. “It would take something like magic to save us now, I think!”

  The captain grunted, reached over the desk and eased in the atmosphere drive. “Perhaps not,” he said. “We may have to abandon ship. I’m going down.”

  The Venture went sliding out of orbit, turning towards the reddish dusk of the silent planet.

  * * *

  Vezzarn had all the veteran spacer’s ingrained horror of exchanging the life-giving enclosure of his ship for anything but the equally familiar security of a civilized port or a spacesuit. He began arguing again, torn between terrors; and there was no time to argue. The captain took out his gun, placed it on the desk beside him.

  “Vezzarn!” he said; and Vezzarn subsided. “If you want to surrender,” the captain told him, “you’ll get the chance. We’ll lock you in one of those cabins over there and leave you for Yango and the robot to find.”

  “Well—” Vezzarn began unhappily.

  “If you don’t want that,” the captain continued, “start following orders.”

  “I’ll follow orders, skipper,” Vezzarn decided with hardly a pause.

  “Then remember one thing…” The captain tapped the gun casually. “If Yango starts talking to us again, I’m the only one who answers!”

  “Right, Sir!” Vezzarn said, eying the gun.

  “Good. Get busy on the surface analyzers and see if you can find out anything worth knowing about this place. Miss do Eldel, you’ve got good hearing, I think—”

  “Excellent hearing, Captain!” Hulik assured him.

  “The intercom is yours. Make sure reception amplification stays at peak. Compartment E is the storage. Anything you hear from there is good news. D is bad news — they’ll be through one emergency wall and on their way here. Then we’ll know we have to get out and how much time we have to do it. G is drive section of the engine room. Don’t know why Yango should want to go down there, but he could. The other compartments don’t count at the moment. You have that?”