by John Rankine
CHAPTER TWO
Eagle Seven was diving out of the sun like a stooping falcon. She could cut a swathe through the rising air cars before their pilots knew what was happening. Carter had the main lasers locked on and was waiting for the good word with his hands on the grips.
It would be no way to start a peace mission. Koenig said, ‘Steady as you go, Captain. Once across. Turn. Come in slowly and hover over the control square.’
Meanwhile, he used all the power he had on the communications net to send out a signal on fourteen twenty, coupled with a simultaneous audio repeat from the outside P.A. system. His voice reverberated round the city.
‘This is Commander John Koenig. We come from the moon which has appeared in your sky. We ask for permission to land in your city and talk with you. We come in peace.’
Eagle Seven turned, still falling. Some of the leading air cars had the height of her and Carter looked dubious as he began the return leg. There was no answer from the ground. Seen closer, the cars had a black and silver finish which gave them the look of police tenders. They had formed into three squadrons. One was wheeling to keep station above the Eagle; one was deploying to box her in, port and starboard; the third was holding off, ready to support. There was no doubt—they were working a classic manoeuvre to force her down.
A single car peeled off the higher flight and bore in. Even before a succession of hammer blows thumped along the superstructure, Koenig had read the message. He called, ‘Jansen. Fire as you bear.’ An eye-aching thread seared out from Eagle Seven’s stern module and the air car was instant scrap, falling in a plume of black smoke.
Koenig called urgently, ‘If you attack, we are forced to defend. Do not attack. We have no wish to use our power.’
It was all strictly for the birds. Either the pilots were suicide bent to a man, or they were brainwashed into a death-or-glory stance. They came in from every quarter. Eagle Seven was shuddering along her length, and although her destructive power was away and beyond anything the cars could put out, it was only a matter of time before the sheer volume of small fire carried away some key structures.
Koenig said, ‘Out. As fast as you like.’
Carter threw every gramme of urge into a crash lift and the Eagle clawed herself up in a spectacular thrust. There was a check that strained them against their harness and a grinding jar that sent a ripple through the fabric. The damage-report panel threw up a rash of red hatchings. An air car had finally gotten itself through Jansen’s destructive guard. Flaming like a torch, it was jammed definitively between the upper rocket tubes. Jansen’s module was a shattered wreck and the security man was pinned to his swivel chair by the rapier antenna on the car’s snub cone.
Eagle Seven was falling. Carter fought the failing gear every metre of the way, pulled them half a kilometre out of the city, brought her down at a crazy angle on the slope of a sand dune, beside a wide estuary. Hover cars dropped around them in a circle.
Bitterly, Koenig considered the communications console. Acrid smoke wreathed the panel. It was a write-off. The only element of satisfaction left to him was the logged instruction to Morrow. Without his direct order, Operation Exodus would have to abort.
The hatch to the passenger module was jammed by a buckling of the frame. He left by the command-cabin emergency chute and came down ankle deep in warm sand. Bergman had opened the passenger-module service hatch and was framed in the gap. Behind him, Helena Russell, silver suit streaked with carbon, was repacking a medical bag.
There was no need to enquire about Jansen. Nobody could be alive in the crumpled rear section, where the jammed car had burned to a shell and the cladding of the Eagle was sending up a shimmer of heat haze. Helena spoke over Bergman’s shoulder. ‘I got to him, John. But he was already dead.’
Koenig nodded and turned away. From every angle, there was a black, uniformed figure walking forward, closing the circle. Alan Carter dropped through the chute, laser in hand. Koenig said sharply, ‘Put it away, Captain. I’ll try one more time. We’re here for a long stay. It’s either communicate or die.’
To leave no area of doubt about his humanity, Koenig ran down the seals of his space suit and peeled it off. He made a nice mime of unbuckling his equipment belt, with the laser in its clip, and dropped it to the sand. He walked away from the Eagle, straight backed and head tall, looking neither right nor left and aiming for a burly character, with a green sash from shoulder to hip, who seemed to be the top hand in the enterprise.
From ten metres off, he could read a single word, in the local variant of Times Bold, on the leader’s sash of office. It meant nothing. Unless it was his name. ‘Spadec.’ There was a brief count when Koenig reckoned he would never find the answer. Half a dozen handguns came into aim on the centre of his chest. Nerves crawling in expectation of the blast that would leave an open hatch for his Ka, the Alphan said, ‘Spadec, my name is John Koenig. We come in peace, but we were forced to defend ourselves.’
The leader halted and raised his right hand. The handguns stayed at the aim, but some of the tension drained away. They had been told to wait.
Koenig’s surprise at finding himself still drawing breath into an airtight frame was compounded as the man spoke. He used a combination of speech tones which were an ultimate refinement of speech concepts, so that although the elements were strange, the meaning was clear. It was a skeleton key to unlock communication’s door. He said, ‘I am not Spadec. Spadec is the controlling council of our city. I am Mestor, senior counsellor for security. Who are you?’
The information had been vibrating about the planet for some time and Koenig had to clamp down on mounting frustration to keep his voice steady and factual. ‘We have tried to communicate. We are from Moonbase Alpha. Our moon was blasted from orbit round its parent planet of Earth. We are seeking a place to live.’
Mestor had a high colour and the stand-up neck of his black tunic was a tight fit on his thick neck. His eyes had a blank, fanatical look, as though he only listened closely to himself. He said, ‘You have killed many of my people. You will stand trial. Spadec will decide what is to be done with you. Tell your companions to surrender their weapons.’
The three Alphans had moved slowly and were five paces behind Koenig. Alan Carter’s laser was ready for a snap shot at Mestor. There was no doubt, he was likely to be first to fall in any shoot out. But all round the circle, there were handguns lined up on the Alphans. They would all die in the first exchange.
Koenig stalled. ‘Why did you attack us?’
‘Only a fool would wait until an adversary had the advantage over him.’ Mestor raised his voice and went on. ‘I will clap my hands five times. At the fifth, my men will fire.’
There was no way round it. Mestor could be bluffing, but the smoking car, embedded in Eagle Seven’s tail, was proof that these people held their own life cheap. Koenig called out, ‘Stalemate, Alan. We have nothing to lose by showing a friendly spirit. Neutralise the charges and drop your laser.’
To Mestor, he said, ‘Perhaps your council will understand us better. What is the name of this planet?’
‘It is Megaron.’
‘And the city?’
‘Caster.’
‘Are there many such cities? We have seen huge cities, but deserted. Caster is the first to show any sign of life.’
Mestor was staring over Koenig’s shoulder at Helena Russell. Following Koenig’s lead, she had shrugged out of her space gear and was revealed as the only female on the set. Carter’s suggestion, that charm might outweigh diplomacy, suffered a knock. Although the Megaronian kept his eyes on Helena’s elegant figure, he still spoke to Koenig and the content was no better. ‘You ask too many questions. We will ask questions. You are lucky that I do not order summary execution. You will be taken to my headquarters and interrogated, so that Spadec will have all the facts.’
Reluctantly, he looked away from Helena and made a mimed signal which would have pleased a choreographer. It embraced the Alphan g
roup, brought in selected members of his own party and gave an indication of the way they were to go. As the speech tones were an amazing shorthand, for the very essence of the spoken word, this was, in the same way, a streamlined version of a formal gestural code. Eight men ran forward from the circle and fell in, two to each Alphan. Nobody seemed to have the slightest curiosity about Eagle Seven. Mestor swung on his heel and strode away.
Koenig looked at his time disk. There was less than one hour to go before Operation Exodus ran into the sand. He spoke to the man at his left hand. ‘Do you have a communication system that I could use to speak to my people?’
There was no answer. The man had understood, but the eyes that were turned to look at him had a blank, empty look. The Megaronian was not interested. He had heard Mestor close the link and it would stay closed. He shrugged and looked away. They reached the hatch of a hover car and Koenig waited, thinking all the Alphans would stay together. But each one, with his escorts, was being led to a different car. There was a little more nonverbal communication. The right-hand marker prodded Koenig with a stiff finger and nodded for him to climb aboard.
Somebody should have warned him about protocol. It was one thing to accept the logic of an untenable situation and go for a dialogue with the authorities, but there was nothing in the small print about being dug in the ribs by a zombie on the way. Koenig hardly moved. He seemed to turn halfway, as though checking out what the man wanted. But his left fist travelled explosively into the guard’s diaphragm. The Megaronian buckled forward, leading with his chin and the Alphan could pick his spot for a right cross to the side of the jaw.
It was all very quick and the guard was still waiting for mechanical laws to sort out which way he should fall, as Koenig said, ‘Tell him not to do that. This gestural dance is a fine thing in its place, but, as commander of Moonbase Alpha, I expect the same courtesy that you would give to your own chief citizen.’
It was as well he had spoken and taken the heat out of the situation. The remaining guard listened, as though mesmerised by a talking dog, and eased his finger off of the firing stud of his handgun, where it had already taken first pressure. There was still a brief count when action hung in the balance and Koenig could feel his nerves tense; but he forced himself to move on, swinging through the open hatch into the tender.
There was a pilot, who had remained at his post, and a gunner, standing with his head in a transparent dome that swivelled in concert with the revolving platform he was on. Elbows on a twist-grip firing bar, he watched Koenig come aboard. He was the first one the Alphan had seen who looked genuinely pleased about something.
The guard at the hatch said, ‘Myndon, help me to lift Gadarn in.’
‘Is it necessary? Would it not be better to leave him to be found by the Outfarers.’
‘You take a chance saying that in front of me and the boy. Suppose one of us should tell him, eh? Where would you be then? Come on, move yourself.’
Some of the satisfaction drained out of Myndon’s face. He still counted the sight of Gadarn going down, like some log, as a precious addition to memory’s holographic web; but he saw the wisdom of keeping it a private pleasure. Gadarn was section leader of ten craft and the most notorious bastard in the flight. The stranger had made a bad enemy. Together, the two Megaronians hauled the man aboard. The pilot, a fresh-faced youngster with a golden bird sticker on the left breast pocket of his black tunic, found a round leatherette cushion and stuck it under Gadarn’s head.
There was a ping on orchestral A from the instrumentation and the pilot nipped smartly back to his cockpit. The air cars rose like disturbed flies from the sand dunes and streamed in line astern for Caster. Unlike the empty cities they had seen, this one was horizontally planned in its main features. It lay like a cartwheel on a neck of land, that was bounded by open sea to the north and by wide, sandy estuaries to the east and west. There was a broad, surface road round the perimeter and four evenly spaced diameters ran like spokes, dividing the area into eight sectors and one large, circular, central zone, which seemed to be laid out as a public park. There were no tall buildings. Mostly, two storeys had been reckoned as enough. But in the centre, one or two long blocks ran to four floors. It was to the rear of one of these that the long line of air cars directed itself and they peeled off the stick in threes, to drop onto numbered spaces in the parking lot.
Five circled the building, asking for permission to land. Then they dropped in a close laager on the flat roof. Gadarn was stirring on his squab and came to full flower as the car flexed gently on its jacks. He was still a confused man, but he remembered enough of the action to know where blame should lie. He hauled himself to his feet, gripping the handrail so that his knuckles showed white. He fairly spat out: ‘You will pay, Alphan. Be sure of that. You will pay in full and with something over for my own pleasure.’
The pilot said, ‘The Alphans are to be taken to the pound to await interrogation. Spadec instruction—fifty stroke two one four.’ It was a timely interruption. Gadarn seemed to be working towards an interim dividend on the account. His eyes, which had been fixed on Koenig in a malevolent glare, shifted over to Myndon, still at his gunnery post. ‘The hatch, Gunner; take this pig out. If he makes any show of resistance, shoot him in the knees. Even a pig from outer space will have no vital organ in his kneecaps.’
To Koenig, he said, ‘Outer space my ass. You are mutants from Hyria. Spadec will sort you out, and when interrogation is over, I shall add my voice to the sentencing ceremony.’
The city pound was a variant of the deep dungeon with the hole in the roof that had figured in the history of Earth Planet. But there were no rats and instead of a knotted rope, an elevator dropped them down an open slot in the rock wall. The Alphans had been conducted to ground level, inside the building, down a wide, central stairway that served all floors. Then they were dispatched, two at a time, for the last leg of the journey, into a circular pit that was all of fifty metres from its white-tiled floor to the distant roof.
All round the circle, the solid rock had been cut out into narrow, open cells. Each had a slab and a stone pillow with a hollow for the head. At this time, all cells were open for inspection, but metal grilles running on a track could be slid across to pen the prisoner inside. At mid-points of the circle, two larger cells served as washrooms. In the middle of the floor there was a metal pillar with a crosspiece and a selection of clips to cater to a wide range of ankle and wrist sizes.
Helena Russell said, ‘They listen, but they don’t hear. You might as well save your breath. It’s like trying to talk to patients in a geriatric ward. You think you’ve got an idea across, they nod and look as though they’ve understood; then the next thing they say shows that it wasn’t so at all. They’re on a different wavelength. Certainly, they don’t understand about the Moon. There’s just no curiosity about space at all. There was one in the car who went on about Hyria. Anything bad was likely to come from Hyria.’
Bergman said, ‘There’s something wrong. Something difficult to put a finger on. There’s a lack of spontaneous reaction. As if they were under mild sedation.’
‘That’s part of it.’ Helena Russell was suddenly sure of the clinical picture. ‘Low-level hallucinogens. Used in some ESP research. Makes the subjects more sensitive to the power of mind acting at a distance.’
Alan Carter had been prowling round the cave, only partly listening to the scientific seminar. For his money, it was all one. They were down in a hole with no way of getting out and no viable Eagle to get back to, even if they did. He said, ‘I suppose we all realise what this means to Operation Exodus? It won’t be long now before Paul has to pull the plug . . .’ He stopped. There was another angle and it was only now in the quiet vault that his mind had gotten around to it.
Bergman finished it for him. ‘Which leaves us, whether we like it or not, to live out our ration of time on Megaron.’
There was something else and all four were stock still. It was nothing surprising,
that the idea should be in every head. But the form of words used to express it might have been different for each one. In the event, Carter could have said, ‘You took the very words out of my mouth, Professor.’
Koenig, a verbaliser, who tended to see the words he spoke as a running script in his mind’s eye, had seen the sentence in full before Bergman had spoken the first two words. Helena Russell’s thought patterns were more of colour and shape, but she heard it as though Bergman had been interpreting something from inside the shell of her head. It was uncanny. She said slowly, ‘Conditions must be specially suited to ESP. Or they make them so. It would explain how they act together so well.’
Koenig said, ‘If that’s true, and I’m not saying it couldn’t be, you’d think they would know the truth without all this aggro. They should know we meant no harm.’
Bergman said, ‘They’re on the defensive against people from Hyria. They believe we could be from there. So far we’ve tangled with the military. Maybe we’ll get more sense out of the civilian administration. Or this Spadec, whoever he is.’
‘Not he, but it.’
The voice was low, with an urgent, sweet timbre. It came from the opening of a cell, which Carter had not reached on his prowling check. Its owner was on the small side, being about a metre and a half in her foam-soled sneakers. Soma type was fractionally towards the elegant end on the scale running from thin to fat. It was easy to make judgements, since the white sneakers and an electrum bracelet were all she stood up in. Dark hair brushed silkily on her shoulders. Eyes were large, golden brown and very bright. Skin was unifomly tanned a pale brown, except for a crisscross of livid streaks in slanting stripes from left hip to right shoulder.
It had cost her an effort to get on her feet and join the seminar. She put a hand to her head, as though a wave of vertigo had put a surge on her clock and Carter, with reaction times tried and tested in a demanding service, was off the mark at a spring. He caught her as she fell and held her across his arms.