Screaming Science Fiction

by Brian Lumley

  Back there in normal space they burned in his exhaust; but Gaddy was out of hyperspace just as quickly as in, looping back on himself, coming down on them where the dumb bastards opened up on his afterimage. They never knew what hit them, vaporizing all around him as he worked all his studs at once!

  But so many Khuum fighters? What the hell?—they must be riding shotgun on something big, something huge! It was the ’Vader compensating, except Gaddy wasn’t thinking ’Vader but death to the Khuum. The machine had never experienced so much computerized destruction so fast, and it was answering Gaddy the only way it could: by speeding up the game and bringing forward The End that much faster. And to do so it was sticking up the Big Stuff on the screen, the invincible stuff, the stuff that carried the highest scores.

  But…something big, Gaddy thought. Something huge! And yes, there it was!

  Cutting in his visiblizers, Gaddy saw its dull metallic gleam for a moment where the object furrowed space behind its No-see screens, false stars sliding along its vast hull stem to stern to make him think it was empty space. A battle-station!—a mother!—launching carriers and tiny Khuum-manned suicide darts; and the carriers launching cruisers, mines, missiles; and the cruisers lining up their entropy torps; and the darts intent on death and glory, but mainly intent on nailing Gaddy. And all this hardware firming into reality as it came screaming out from under the battle-station’s No-sees.

  The battle-station was impregnable to anything Gaddy had, but he knew how to get it. The station was about to launch its last carrier; Gaddy must get the carrier before it cleared the launch-tubes and threw up its screens. Twisting and writhing like light-speed snakes of green fire, the Takka-beams leaped the light-seconds to their target. Programmed to follow the beams, the Warp-torp zigzagged around and through everything the frantic Khuum tossed at it. The Takkas found the carrier, and a micro-second later so did the torp. The carrier, still sliding out of the battle-station’s belly, warped out of existence like a small sun gone nova. And the battle-station had no option but to go nova with it!

  “Got you, you bastard!” Gaddy tried to scream, nothing coming out but a choking cough, his throat was that dry. But strange, because he did hear screams. Except…they weren’t his.

  “No—no—no!” Pavanaz danced beside the ’Vader like some demented puppet-master’s doll, clawed at the jiving bucket-seat and leaped up alongside, to wrench Gaddy’s hands—no Gaddy’s gloves—from the controls.

  Gaddy was about to trip into hyperspace; with no one at the controls his ship tore into the battle-station’s planet-wide fireball. Khuum disruptors followed it; stripped down its armor to an eggshell that withered in the nuclear furnace….

  “No!” Pavanaz sobbed again, trying to drag Gaddy out of the bucket. “You’ve killed it! Jesus, you’ve killed it!” He didn’t mean the battle-station.

  “Killed it?” Gaddy got his straps loose, fell out of the seat, somehow managed to land on his feet. And again: “Killed it?” he said. He was still reeling a little, not yet back on solid ground. Snarling, Pavanaz grabbed his throat. And Aces hit him from the side, a blow that crushed his ear and deafened him on that side for two hours. But it also knocked him loose from Gunner Gaddy.

  “His machine!” Aces said then, gasping, pointing at the ’Vader. While on the floor Pavanaz rocked and cried.

  His ’Vader, yes, which he’d programmed to cave in if anyone took it over twenty million—because he’d known that no one could ever take it over twenty million. No one human, anyway. Unless it was him. But Gaddy had, and in so doing he’d killed it.

  Twenty mill? The score, while it lasted, stood at twenty-five million and odds! The battle-station alone had been worth half of that! But who was counting? Pavanaz knew it would have been more if he hadn’t interrupted the game. Not much more, because once past the Big Twenty and the self-destructs had started to cut in, systematically junking the whole machine. And right now the ’Vader’s complex guts were going up in gray, stinking smoke and blue electrical fire, and the machine sputtered and sparked where she sat atop her own internal funeral pyre.

  “Gaddy,” said Aces, awed. “You…you’ve bust it!”

  And because Pavanaz couldn’t hear what Aces said, he couldn’t contradict him—couldn’t tell him that this had been his target, his impossible dream. Because he had known that if there ever came a time when he could clock twenty million, by then he’d be worth that much and it just wouldn’t matter. But right now it mattered a lot. The ’Vader dying there was taking his whole world, his universe with it.

  Pavanaz watched it go, then crawled into a corner and did a Kem job all over Fat Bill’s not-so-immaculately-clean floor….

  IV

  When fat Bill sloshed back to the arcade after lunch he found his private door open and Grint Pavanaz sitting (or slumped) behind his desk, head thrown back and feet propped up on the imitation mahogany. He saw Pavanaz, then the door of the wall safe where it, too, stood open. For a fat man, Bill could move fast when he had to; his tiny electric stunner was dwarfed by his pudgy fist in less time than it takes to tell. “What…?” he wheezed then, his piggy gaze transferring from Pavanaz to the safe and back again. “What…?”

  Finally Pavanaz looked at him. “Yes,” he said listlessly. “What, what.” And: “Don’t panic, Bilbo, I didn’t take anything. I was going to, but…it was depression, that’s all. By the time I had the safe open, I could see how stupid it would be.”

  Fat Bill gawped, closed his mouth and snapped the fingers of his free hand. Being fat and wet, the sound was more a plop than a snap. “Aces and Gaddy!” he said. “I saw them down the street. When the rain started up, they took a cab. They were here. They took…you?”

  Pavanaz’s face was all twisted. “Gaddy did,” he said, hurting to admit it. “That stinking rocket-jockey! But…I don’t know how, I really don’t know how! There is no one who can take me on—so how come I’m not nearly as good as him? It’s driving me nuts!” Then he scowled. “More to the point, how come you didn’t warn me about him—‘partner’?” He looked accusingly at Bill.

  “Tell you about him? Warn you? I ain’t even seen the guy in years!” Fat Bill jutted his wobbly jaw. “He was dead for all I knew! And don’t change the subject. What, you accusing me of stuff, and guilty as all get out? And my safe open?”

  “It’s safe,” said Pavanaz humorlessly. And: “You’d better tell me about Gaddy. He has a secret, and I want it. Because if he has it, others might have it too. And I’m not going back to Earth to discover I’m last in line! I was the best, and with whatever it is he’s got I’ll be the best again.”

  Fat Bill crossed to his safe. “How much?” he said.

  “I told you I didn’t take anything!” Pav snapped. “What, and have you waiting for me at the embarkation with the local cops and a warrant? That’s no way to get to Earth, and it’s sure no way to win a million!”

  “How much did they take off you, dummy!” Fat Bill snorted. And Pav didn’t much like being talked to like that, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Fat Bill had just locked he safe and changed the combination when Pavanaz answered: “He took three thousand off me.”

  “What!?” The fat man’s jaw fell open. “Three th—”

  “Three grand—three biggies,” Pavanaz cut him off. “And I fell for it like it was all new to me. And now I’m mad.”

  “But he beat you fair,” said Fat Bill. “Fair’s fair—and our partnership is dissolved. Out,” he jerked his thumb. “And take your debris with you!”

  Pavanaz didn’t move. “How’d you like to make two hundred thou?” he said, slowly. “Two hundred grand, all for your fat little self??

  “I’m listening,” Fat Bill answered, after a long moment. “But my attention span is shortening by the second.”

  “A million’s what I’m set to win on Earth,” said Pavanaz, “and twenty percent of that can be yours—partner?”

  “A new partnership?” Fat Bill grimaced. �
��So soon? And I’m to get two hundred grand out of it? Who do you want killed, Pav?”

  “Information,” said Pavanaz, “that’s all I want. And maybe—just maybe—a grubstake to Earth. Hell, you could squeeze it out of what I’ve already earned you!”

  Fat Bill scowled. “Last time, I got forty percent.”

  “But that was peanuts,” said Pav. “And this is creds!” He capitalized the last word. But as Fat Bill hesitated, he swung his legs down from the desk and stood up. “Why am I wasting my time?” he asked, of no one in particular. “People have seen me play. I can find a backer somewhere else.”

  “Hold it!” said Fat Bill as Pavanaz made to leave. “You’ll sign a contract, making me your manager on twenty percent?”

  “Damn right!” Pavanaz nodded.

  “So, I may be crazy but…let’s work it out,” said the other. When they’d finished doing that, then he began to talk in earnest….

  “Gaddy was a ground staff mechanic in the Corps,” (said Fat Bill), “just a kid who patched up fighters when they got shot up. His girl and her folks lived here on Shankov’s—on the other side—in a little mountain township that got more than its fair share of sunlight by virtue of its elevation. It got a lot of exposure to the Khuum, too. The night Gaddy and his girl got married, in one of the cities under the cloud layer, the Khuum took out her village. For no good reason; it wasn’t tactical or in support or anything; just the Khuum being the Khuum. Her folks died. But…it was like they were Gaddy’s folks, too.

  “After that Gaddy was changed. He became a Gunner—for the duration. He survived because there was a girl to come back to, and because there were Khuum to keep going after. He led a love-hate life, you know? Out scouting one time, he came across a gaggle of Khuum bandits attacking an alien ship. But I’m talking alien! He’d never seen anything like it before, it was that weird. And no one ever saw anything like it since. It must have been sort of just passing through this sector.

  “That alien ship was in a bad way, crippled, its shields going down like dominoes. Gaddy didn’t know if it was friendly or what, but he knew how he felt about the Khuum. He went in, took the bandits by surprise and played all hell with them—which gave the alien ship time to get itself operational again and back in the action. Gaddy’d cut the Khuum pack down to just three when finally one of them got him and burned his fighter. He was cut up and burned, too, but he managed to eject. Spinning in space, he saw the alien ship open up with one godawful weapon that erased those three Khuum fighters like chalk off a blackboard! Then he passed out….

  “When he came round he was inside the alien ship and they were working on him, putting him right. He saw the mess he was in—mainly his hands—and passed out again. But they fixed him up with those gloves of his, put him in a life-support pod and dropped him just inside the Corps radius. Our boys picked up the alien ship on their scanners, and when they went for a look-see found Gaddy.

  He asked for out and the Corps let him go. Hell, he’d done his bit, and maybe he’d finally figured out just how lucky he’d been. The Khuum were retreating by then, and the sheer science that came out of Gaddy’s alien life-support pod put the finishing touches to it. A year later the war was over, and the Khuum had backed off wherever they’d come from.

  “Gaddy came back to Shankov’s; eventually he and his woman had their baby son—Aces. But the girl hadn’t been the same since her folks got theirs. She died young and Gaddy was left on his own with the kid. He raised him, turned him loose when he was seventeen, then dropped out of sight. Sort of retired himself—from everything. That was two or three years ago.

  “And that’s about as much as I know. I got it in bits and pieces here and there—with difficulty. See, people respect Gaddy; they let him alone. The way I see what happened here today, Aces was really kissed off and cajoled his father into taking you down a peg.”

  Pavanaz nodded sourly. “Not hard to figure,” he said. And then he frowned. “So his hands were burned up, right? And the aliens gave him those gloves?”

  “You got it. And he’s never been seen without ’em.”

  “Aliens,” said Pav, still frowning, “with weapons and an advanced technology we can’t even guess at. They were passing through and got in trouble; Gaddy pulled their nuts out of the fire; he got burned doing it, so they squared it by…that’s it! They made sure he came out of it better than when he went in!”

  “Sure,” Fat Bill shrugged, having figured it out for himself. “Naturally. He has hi-tec fingers.”

  “He cheated me!” Pavanaz was furious.

  “Hell, no,” said Fat Bill. “You ever done target shooting? You can’t disqualify a man just because he’s better equipped!”

  “The way I see it he cheated,” Pav insisted. “Where does he live?”

  “Now wait!” Fat Bill was alarmed. “Twenty percent of murder I can do without!”

  “I don’t want his life,” Pavanaz snorted (though he really wouldn’t mind, if he could do it smart), “I want his skill, his edge. Shit, the war’s over! He doesn’t need it—but I do!”

  “Let it be, kid,” said Fat Bill. “He’s outgunned you once. Gaddy’s no fool.”

  “Does he live with Aces?”

  Fat Bill shook his head. “Like I told you, they parted company when Aces got himself a job here in the spaceport. The kid lives right here, but Gaddy lives way out. On his own. He was a one-woman guy.”

  “Where?” Pavanaz demanded.

  And sighing, Fat Bill told him. Hell, it was Pav’s neck.

  After the Khuum wars, the Corps had taken care of its men. It could afford to; not too many had come through it. Also, Gaddy must have picked up a disability pension. (The thought of that almost made Pavanaz scream!)

  Property hadn’t been so expensive then; not on a swamp like Shankov’s, which made Gizzich IV seem positively dry! Gaddy had bought himself a house surrounded by waterways. Not for security (after the Khuum, what was there to feel insecure about?), just for peace of mind. He hadn’t wanted hassle, and the only people he’d needed were his people. After his wife died he’d lived with Aces, and now he was on his own.

  Following Fat Bill’s directions, Pav had covered the eight hundred miles to Gaddy’s locality by jet-boat and steam-paddle, taking two days and a night to get there. Arriving in the local town on the evening of the second day, he’d hired a fan-driven swamp-skimmer (he was an off-worlder, here for the fishing). As darkness came down, he’d located Gaddy’s address. Then, putting out a dummy fishing line, he’d slept on board the skimmer for a few hours, coming awake at 2:00 a.m. in the morning. It was eerily quiet and all Gaddy’s lights were out.

  There was a wooden bridge over the canal to the house, but Pav didn’t want to take the chance someone would see him crossing. So he wrapped the skimmer’s breakdown oars and paddled silently across, then moored his boat in the mangroves on the rim of Gaddy’s property. Pav was equipped for a break-in but it wasn’t necessary—the place was wide open.

  In the entrance porch he took off his shoes, put on clean cloth shufflers, then crept into the main building. There were only a few internal doors, none locked; inside was as eerie and as quiet as out; security was literally nonexistent. The place was mainly a solarium (synthetic sunlight, which switched itself off nights), and a greenhouse where Gaddy gardened. Exotic plants crept all over the place, not just adding to but mainly being the décor. It was a big house and, Pav supposed, lonely.

  He carried a life-seek whose winking red indicator led him to Gaddy’s bedroom, a huge, high-ceilinged, opaque glass-walled room with a big double bed in the middle; and Gaddy was in it, just his hair showing, asleep, dreaming…and moaning. Whatever he was dreaming, it wasn’t good stuff.

  Gaddy’s clothes were all over a curving bamboo couch, and his gloves were lying on top of the other things. It was easy as that. Pavanaz took the gloves and tucked them in his shirt.

  On his way out he looked into a side room. It had been a games room of sorts, though
long out of use. There was a pool table in there, its green baize dark with dust, an antique 20th Century one-armed bandit, a dartsboard rotting in its frame on the wall, and…a ’Vader. But the machine was all of thirty years out of date. This was what Aces must have practiced on when he was kid, and it explained two things: why he was so good, and why he wasn’t good enough.

  Pavanaz didn’t bother looking at anything else but picked up his shoes, paddled a quarter-mile off in his skimmer, then fanned it back to Bogside Bassum and the hotel room he’d taken there. After he locked the door, then he took out the gloves. And just looking at them he knew that he was right, that this was where Gaddy got his magic, his unbeatable ’Vader wizardry. The gloves were…they were just…alien!

  Pavanaz sat on his bed and looked at them, examined what he could of them, tougher than good quality leather, and grained like leather, too—he’d never seen anything like them. They were long enough to come halfway up a man’s forearms, and they matched the rest of Gaddy’s kit, the leather he’d worn as a Gunner. The aliens had made them that way with their strange science.

  That was the gloves on the outside, but inside they were stranger still. Pavanaz shook one and blew into it, and looked into it—and saw nothing. It was like space in there, just an empty hole. Even shining a torch inside, there was only darkness. Light didn’t penetrate, nor would they turn inside out. Tug and twist all you like, they’d spring back to their original shape. Pavanaz grinned, because now he was sure he had Gaddy’s number. All that remained was to put the gloves on.

  Which he did….

  What it was he expected to feel would be difficult to say. A quickening of his senses? A tingling in his fingertips presaging reactions fast as lightning? A sudden awareness that the only thing in the universe faster and more adroit and slippery than his hands would be a couple of snakes screwing in hyperspace? Something of all these things, he supposed, but it wasn’t what he got.