He fired.
The needles vanished in midair with little bright spurts of flame. And Sylvia laughed,
"Tobul," she said, and the ringing bugle note that was not Sylvia's was in her voice again. "Not that easily, Tobul! I'll fight you, just as I fought in the old days, to the last ditch!"
As though of its own volition, Brandon's voice came, gentle and strange to his ears, with a feel of barbaric iron under the velvet.
"That vault is all that is left to me of Mars, Kymra. It is mine by right of conquest and the blood my people shed."
"Barbarian!" Sylvia tossed her head like a war horse scenting battle. "What is in that vault is mine by right of having built it, and the blood my people shed defending it! The secret of the things you stole from us lies locked in my brain. The things of your own borrowed civilization you shall not have, either.
"This dusty shell is still Mars, and though my race is dead, its people are still mine. I'll not have them misruled by a dog of a nomad, with only four centuries of borrowed culture behind him!"
Brandon felt a blind stab of rage through Tobul's guard, and some of the velvet sloughed away from the iron ring in his voice.
"Borrowed or not, I have the knowledge. The need to rule is as strong in me as it is in you, woman of the Prira Cen!
"Your people were soft with age and culture. You conquered us, yes, because you knew more. But our blood was strong. We took what we wanted and used it against you, and we were not bound by scruples about blood-letting!
"I'm beginning to find myself again. From what I have taken from this man's mind, I see that Mars needs new rule, new strength, the knowledge that I can give it. Mars can live again. But in my way, Kymra! The way of strength and manhood."
"The way of stupid, blundering beasts," said Sylvia, her voice deep with some powerful emotion. "You slaughtered the Prira Cen, the kindliest, wisest, gentlest race on Mars, because you were jealous of our knowledge. You called it 'foreign domination,' though we never killed a man of your people, and did you more good in ten years than you yourselves could have done in a century.
"Because we kept our race pure, you were jealous of us. Because we kept the secret of our one deadly weapon, you feared us, though we did it for your own protection."
"We crushed you without it," said Tobul.
"Only because we waited, not wanting to destroy you, and were betrayed. You were taking me to Rhiannon in chains, Tobul, but I tell you that no torture you could devise could have forced me to tell the secret of that weapon. Nor," she added with deliberate malice, "another secret, which you would like now, but cannot have."
Tobul did not answer her. Silently in Brandon's mind he said, "Take the small tube from your right-hand pocket."
The vise-grip of Tobul's will on his made even a pretense of resistance impossible. Brandon dropped the useless needle gun and did as he was told.
"She has nothing but the power of her mind," murmured Tobul. "She can't fight the strength of the projector long. Fire, Brandon!"
With some foreign knowledge, he pressed a stud. A faint beam of light leaped out, splattering in blazing incandescence against the barrier of force Kymra had built around Sylvia's body.
It burned and blazed, and the force wall held stubbornly, and Sylvia's blue eyes stared at him through the fire.
"You, too, Brandy?" she said, and now the voice was her own. "She made me understand, all in a flash. She can't hold out long. It's all so mad! Brandy, she's weakening. Brandy, can't you do something!"
He couldn't, though the sweat of agony needled his face. Out of some dim distance he sensed a growing heat and glare and thought it was from the clashing energies before him, until he realized it was in the wrong direction.
The stern plates of the cabin were glowing cherry-red.
Somehow he found his voice. "The fuel tanks!" he yelled. "Got to get out. Somebody's got a heat beam on us."
Miraculously, those two warring intelligences understood. The blazing battle of force broke off. The hull plates paled-
They ran. With all their strength they leaped through the port and pelted over the desert, trailing crazy shadows from the double moons.
Light gravity and long legs took them barely out of danger. Brandon threw Sylvia flat just as the tanks let go. A thundering, howling wind swept over them with a solid wall of dust, and a vast flame pillared up into the sky.
For an incredibly long moment it painted every detail of the scene in wicked crimson-the gaunt, worn shell of a volcanic cone dead and buried for unnumbered centuries and bared capriciously now by the restless sand, a few Cyclopean blocks of Terellan marble cut to shapeless lumps by the passing years, tumbled about a gaping hole.
Directly in front of the hole was a big, fast, convertible spaceship. From it had come the heat beam.
"Dhu Kar," said Brandon, coughing dust.
"Why does this Dhu Kar wish to kill you?" asked Tobul.
"For the same reasons I'd like to kill him," returned Brandon grimly. "Except that he's a vandal and a swine, and I'm a very charming fellow. Wait a bit. You'll see."
He got up, and Sylvia, as usual, scrambled up before he could help her. Her face was pale and a little frightened, but her blue eyes danced.
"I've always wanted real adventure," she said, with a shaky little laugh. "I'm getting it!"
They went toward the spaceship. And up out of the black pit, looking like a misshapen demon in the light of the double moons, came a squat shape bearing a burden-a radio-controlled robot carrier.
Brandon felt the tendrils of Tobul's mind reaching out to search the mind of the man who blocked his way to the vault.
"He's looting my vault," whispered Tobul. "My vault, built and sealed against time forty thousand years ago. This outland dog!"
"And what he can't carry away he'll destroy, partly to cover his tracks, mostly to keep anyone else from profiting." Brandon's tawny head came up. "Let me handle Dhu Kar myself."
"I can't afford to risk your body, Brandon."
Brandon said angrily: "Look here, Tobul—"
The iron hand of Tobul's will closed on his mind. He shrugged, and went on in silence, Sylvia's firm shoulder close to his.
Dhu Kar of Venus came out of the air lock of his ship.
He loomed hugely in the shifting light. The fish-belly white of his face and hands gleamed sharply out of the dark furs he wore against the Martian chill. He was bareheaded, according to the custom of his people, his snowy hair intricately coiled.
He held a needle gun in his hand, and his eyes were cold little chips of moonlight in his broad white face.
"Didn't know you had a woman aboard, Brandon," he said. His voice was harsh and slurring. "Yes, I recognize you, Miss Eustace. I'm glad you weren't harmed."
"He'll be happy to take you home, darling, for a small consideration. Say a million credits or so."
Brandon was advancing slowly, poised on the balls of his feet. Dhu Kar grinned.
"How right you are, Brandon. For once you're bringing me business instead of getting it away. But you can relax, Brandon. You won't have to worry about it."
He raised his gun slightly. Sylvia cried out and made a move toward Brandon. The gun hissed softly.
The needles splattered harmlessly against a wall of force, just as Brandon's had done back in the ship. And Sylvia Eustace turned and ran.
"I'm not doing this, Brandy," she yelled, her long legs flashing through the dust. "Are you all right?"
"All right!" he yelled back, and rushed after her, impelled by Tobul's furious command to get to the vault tunnel first.
Dhu Kar was staring from his gun to the running man in open-mouthed amazement. Then his jaw shut hard. The girl didn't matter-he could catch her. But Brandon—
If something was wrong with his gun, he'd try something else. He fumbled in a capacious pocket, and his powerful arm flexed.
The gas capsule burst just at Brandon's feet, Tobul, concentrating every effort on catching Kymra, was caught of
f guard. Before he could stop himself, Brandon had breathed enough of it to drop him dazed in the sand.
He floundered away to windward, and realized that Tobul, associated as he was with Brandon's physical medium, was momentarily affected, too.
Sylvia's flying form vanished into the pit mouth. Dhu Kar laughed and ran toward Brandon, very light and swift for such a big man.
Brandon got to his feet and stood swaying, lost in a roaring mist, his hands raised blindly, waiting.
A pair of vast white hands came out of the darkness toward his throat. He caught them. He fought to hold them off, but his sinews were water.
The hands got closer. There was a face behind them now, broad and pale and contentedly smiling. Brandon's white teeth showed through his tawny beard. He gulped the clean desert air and scourged his lagging strength into his arms, to hold those hands away.
But the stuff he'd breathed sent a black tide swirling through his brain. The hands and the smiling face were drowned in it.
The wide-winged bird on his circlet gleamed in the cold light of Diemos; the lines of his scarred, handsome face were deep and strong. He dropped Dhu Kar's wrists.
The last desperate backlash of his strength went into his forward surge, the thrust of his hands, to Dhu Kar's throat.
The Venusian laughed and flung him off. Brandon crumpled on the sand, and looked up at death. He was grinning, the reckless grin that women sighed at on the televisor screens.
Some little mocking imp in his blacked-out brain whispered: "No audience, Brandy! You can quit."
But he didn't. And death came down in two white hands.
And vanished, in a sudden, coruscating puff of light.
Tobul's voice spoke, through the stifling darkness in his mind. The velvet was all gone from it now. It was clean, barbaric steel.
"I was affected only for an instant. I could have saved you this. But Kymra was gone then, and I wanted to see how men fight today.
"That circlet you wear was the crown of my fathers, when they were nomads living on raided herds and stolen grain. Keep it, Brandon. And believe me when I say I regret having to use your body. I shall try not to do it violence."
Brandon felt a tingling fire sweep through him, and quite suddenly the effects of the gas were gone. Some vibration Tobul freed, stimulating the natural processes of his body to instantaneous reaction. He got up.
"Tobul," he said, "did you say that Kymra knew the secret of building a body for you?"
"Yes. But there is no way now of forcing her to do it. The girl fights well, for all she's a Blue Hair."
"I'll find a way," said Brandon.
Tobul's voice came deep and strong in his brain.
"I admire you, Brandon. I wish to help you all I can. But this fight is between Kymra and me. We are of opposing races, opposing creeds. The will, the actual need to rule is inherent in both of us, as the need to breathe is in you. Not the will merely for power, but for the guidance of millions of people to what we believe is a better way of life.
"We have different ways, Kymra and I. There is not room on Mars for both of them.
"We will go, Brandon. Down into the vault. Kymra is there ahead of me, but I still have some powers. One of us will not come out."
Brandon went, down into the Stygian shadow of the tunnel. Somewhere ahead was Sylvia, and Kymra of the Prira Cen, and the powerful things in the vault he could only guess at.
Behind him, outside, was sleeping Mars, resigned to the slow advance of death, living out its little days in peace.
Behind him, too, long after the tunnel roof had killed all sound from beyond, four ships came flashing down through the moonlight, drawn by the great pyre of Sylvia's flier.
Jarthur, president of the Society for the Preservation of Martian Relics, looked out at the worn stump of the volcano-a tall, weedy man with sad Martian eyes and semi-military authority.
"These things are all we have left," he said to an assistant. "These bones and shards of our history. And even these the outlanders strip from us."
He flipped open the intership radio connection.
"Cover this area thoroughly. Issue orders that everyone found here is to be arrested. If they resist, fire. Anesthetic needles. No one is to be allowed to escape."
It was cold in the tunnel, and musty with the dead smell of time. It was dark, too, but Brandon had no trouble finding his way. The square passageway, sheathed in metal of the same forgotten alloy as Tobul's ship, ran straight ahead and down.
Tobul explained it, answering Brandon's question.
"Those were troubled times. I knew that Rhiannon might be destroyed at any time. So I built this vault, sheathed in metal that will not corrode and is harder than the finest steel. It's air-tight, and filled with a preservative gas—or was, before the Venusian broke in.
"In it I had placed the sum of our knowledge, science and arts and pleasures, and with them the two secrets we took from the Prira Cen but could not use-the machine of regeneration and the weapon.
"They're still here, waiting. They mean the rule of Mars."
Presently Brandon came to massive metal doors that barred his way. The controls were locked from the inside. Tobul said:
"The projector, Brandon. The same one."
He pressed the stud. The faint beam of light focused on the door. The metal glowed, wavered, and crumbled away into fine powder.
"It upsets molecular cohesion, reducing the metal to fine particles of its original elements," Tobul explained.
Brandon shuddered, thinking what would have happened to Sylvia. The beam ate and ate into the door, crumbling a hole around the massive controls.
It went through nearly a solid foot of metal, and went dead.
"Age," snarled Tobul. "And all this time, Kymra—" He broke off. "Put your hands in the hole, Brandon."
He obeyed, remembering the cabin door on the ship and wondering if he'd be destroyed by Kymra's secret weapon as soon as he entered, or whether he'd live long enough to say goodbye to Sylvia.
The weakened metal went through, under the power impulse from Tobul's brain. The massive valves swung back—
Brandon stood frozen on the threshold.
The vault stretched away into gleaming distances filled with machines, with racks of metal scrolls and objects of a million shapes and sizes. All the life and learning of ancient Mars, the scientific powers of the Sorcerers of Rhiannon, preserved by the foresight of one man.
But it wasn't that sight, tremendous as it was, that set the blood hammering into Brandon's throat and wrists.
Directly across from the door, as though brought in just before it was closed, was a huge glass cabinet set in an intricate web of coils. These shimmered in a halo of light, at once subdued and fierce.
Beneath the cabinet were several self-sealing metal containers. On the floor of it, inside, were trays and bowls of chemicals.
Above these, in the very center of the soft, deep glow, a shimmering thing stood, already vaguely formulated.
Witch fires danced over the chemicals, whirling upward in a spiral of incandescence. As though painted by a rapid brush, line and color took shape—
The fires died down, the glass door opened, and a girl stepped out.
A tall, long-limbed girl, naked as the moon and as white. She moved with a vital grace, and her eyes were like bits of living gold, proud, unconquerable, meeting Brandon's own.
And her hair was blue, rippling down over her shoulders like the curl of a living wave over foam white coral.
Brandon heard a long, quivering sigh through his mind, and Tobul said:
"Kymra."
The girl nodded and turned to a curious thing raised on a metal tripod. It seemed to be mainly a crystal prism forming the core of a helix, which was of some material midway between crystal and metal-partially transparent, and made up of countless intricate facets.
The helix broke at its lower end into a score of shining strands which fanned out into a circle.
Sylvia Eu
stace spoke suddenly from where she stood, at one side of Kymra and a little behind her.
"What are you going to do?"
Kymra's voice was very grave when she answered. Her golden eyes watched Brandon with somber regret.
"I am going to kill," she said quietly.
Her clear, muted voice rang softly from the metal vault, heavy with regret.
"For the first time one of the Prira Cen is going to take life willfully. I'm sorry, Max Brandon, that you must be the innocent victim-doubly sorry because of what I have read in this girl's mind.
"But you-and I-are less important than Mars."
Tobul, speaking aloud through Brandon's throat, said harshly: "So you have had to come to my way at last."
She shook her head, that glorious shining hair like the forgotten sea that had lapped this island.
"No, Tobul. Because I take no pride in it, only sorrow. If my people had seen in time that they must deal with your barbarians as they would with a horde of wild beasts, humanely but firmly—" Her white shoulders shimmered through the shadowy blue.
"But they didn't," said Tobul, and his voice held a bitter satisfaction. "You'll be all alone, Kymra, in an alien world."
"No. You're not the only one who looked ahead, Tobul! My seven wisest councilors took refuge in sensitized stones, which you brought here to this vault. They knew that I would live, as they do. It was the thought-impulses of their minds that led me here, after Dhu Kar broke your sending mechanism moving it.
"Their atomic patterns are inherent in the frequencies of their consciousness. That's the secret of building bodies, Tobul. Given the consciousness and the necessary chemicals, that machine can create an identical replica, as you see in me.
"Sylvia, my dear," she added gently, "it will be quite painless. If I had any other sure weapon to use against Tobul's strength, I would, and then rebuild Brandon's body. But this force projects the consciousness into some unknown dimension, just as solar rays will. It cannot be recalled."
Her hands dropped out of sight below the prism. Brandon could see the ripple of firm muscles along her arms as she went through some complicated operation.
Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories Page 3