Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  How he and whoever yet lived among his crew had survived this hellish gravity for close to half a human lifetime was a mystery to me, which yet remained to be unraveled, but survive they had. The old man was king of all he surveyed with his blind eyes, soul shuttered behind milky shields, ruling from his seat in a shattered palace comprised of the main hull frame series of INS Broken Spear. The baroque pillars that had once bounded the great rays of energy required to leap between the stars now did little more than support a roof to keep off the rare rains and cast a penumbra against the pitiless glare. The place had a gentle reek of aging plastic lying over the dank dance of stone on shadowed stone, but otherwise it was little different from any cavern fitted out for the habitation of men.

  We did not yet know where the rest of his benighted vessel had come to her grave, but she had certainly fulfilled her ill-starred name. Finding the balance of her remains was critical, of course, in the niggardly time allotted our expedition by Sector Control and the unsympathetic laws of physics. That mankind had bent its way around the speed of light was miracle enough, but we had not yet broken past the photons cast so wide in nature’s bright net. Thus must we live with the twinned constraints of relativity and simultaneity.

  “Golly, skipper, he’s a real mess,” whispered Deckard behind me. “Just like his ship.”

  I waved my idiot engineer to silence.

  Allison Cordel, a woman still beautiful despite age and hard use, stood yet beside her commanding officer, loyal as any starman’s wife though it was the two of them together lost so far from home. Our own records, copies of dusty personnel files laboriously thermaxed from ancient microfilm, had shown that, despite the natural disadvantages of her sex, Cordel had risen to Executive Officer of Broken Spear before that ship’s collapse from heaven. Most of the female officers who came into the service under the Navy’s occasional outbreaks of gender rebalancing soon enough yielded to destiny and their biological imperatives and found more suitable work as service wives, competing as hostesses to aid their chosen man’s rise in the service in the no-less-vicious battlefields of the salon and ballroom. Not for Commander Cordel those sharp-nailed sham combats. In the time I had studied her file, I had developed a fond respect for her, nurtured in the hope that she had been one of the survivors mentioned in the desperate longwave help signal that had finally arrived at Gloster Station after laboring at lightspeed across the echoing darkness between the stars.

  Now I cast my eyes upon this woman who had served as sort of a shadow idol to me in the months of our journey to this unnamed place—Girl Friday to the great Captain’s Robinson Crusoe. Had those been her footprints that had disturbed the bright, brittle dust outside to find whatever resources had sustained them all these years? At any rate, she was yet slim as any message torpedo, her rough-spun tunic cut in homage to a uniform doubtless long since worn to raveling threads but still hinting at womanly charms beneath. Her eyes gleamed as bright with genius as any worthy man’s, her charming chestnut hair in an unbecoming style fit only for such a primitive place, shot through with a silver that lent her gravitas beyond her gender.

  “So, Captain de Vere,” she said, her voice like vacuum frost on a lander’s struts, “you are come among us. Even in the face of our pleas for you to keep your distance.”

  Despite myself I nearly bowed, so elegant was her manner. Were there women this controlled, this powerful, even among the silk-walled drawing rooms at the core of the Empire? I strongly doubted it. She might have been a duke’s consort had she remained in society, or even dowager duchess of some cluster of lucky planets. Though I supposed this woman who had fought so hard for the twinned comets of her rank would hardly shed her uniform for the love of a man or for politics either.

  I settled on a salute. “My orders are all too plain, ma’am.”

  Cordel favored Lehr with a look in which I fancied I espied the smoldering ashes of prior argument, though the flash in her eyes was lost upon his sightless gaze. She then returned her attention to me, with a focus as tight as any comm laser. “So you have told us. ‘Search and rescue with all despatch survivors and assets of Broken Spear.’ Did it never occur to you that the survivors and assets might have made their peace with fate after all these years?”

  Behind me, snickers broke out amid the ranks of my contact team. Those men would pay, later, with a thrashing or a discipline parade . . . depending on how my temper had settled by then. I knew Heminge would rat out the culprit and satisfied myself with a promise of a pointed discussion later on.

  “Ma’am—” I chose my words with care and some precision, allowing for the sort of dauntless pride which had to be in the makeup of any woman of Cordel’s achievements. “Commander, rather. With respect, it was your broadcast seeking assistance that summoned us to this place. Broken Spear was stricken from the ship list twenty-eight years ago, after she’d been missing thirty-six months from her last known course and heading.” I drew myself up, tapping the deep well of pride in the service that had always been an inspiration to me. “The Imperial Navy does not leave starmen behind.”

  “Nor starwomen, apparently,” she said with that chill still in her tone. I did fancy that a smile ghosted at the edge of her stern but striking face, even as another snicker escaped behind me.

  It would be a thrashing, I thought, and a good one, down in the ship’s gymnasium. Something to make those monkeys remember respect.

  “Enough,” said Lehr. His voice was as ravaged as his expression, a mountain slipface given over to gravity’s claims until there was only rough gravel and rude streams left to trap the unwary. “You are here. Perhaps you will profit thereby.” He leaned forward on his throne—and throne it was, for all that his seat had been the captain’s chair salvaged from Broken Spear’s bridge, the toggles and interfaces embedded in its generous arms long gone as dark as the spark within their commander’s eyes. Rocks, perhaps uncut gems, had been applied to the surfaces, creating strange patterns and half-recognizable friezes that his hand stroked as he spoke. Comfort, or some fingered language, a geological Braille reserved for his especial use?

  Lehr’s blank gaze met my face is if he were still blessed with the gift of sight. That confident stone stare clamped a hard chill upon my spine, which I sought not to show as weakness before the captain’s formidable executive officer. “We are upon a time of change here, Captain de Vere. It may be well enough that you are come among us.”

  It was a voice and manner that would recall any starman to his days as the rawest recruit, all left feet and ten-thumbed hands—much like a man grown and bearded might be yet a quaking boy before the echo of wrath bursting from an aging father. Nonetheless, my duty to my command and my orders sustained me against this unexpected onslaught of primitive emotion. “Indeed sir, and what would this time of change be?”

  The captain’s laugh was as rough as his speech, a sort of stony chuckle that gathered momentum until another layer was stripped from the gravel of his voice in a wheezing hack. The look with which Cordel favored me would have chilled a caloric insulator, but I resolutely ignored her, awaiting her commander’s pleasure.

  “I am dying, de Vere,” he finally managed to say. “And dying I divide my kingdom among my daughters.” His arm, still great-muscled and long enough to strike any man with the fist of authority, swept outward to encompass what lay behind my shoulders—the open end of his hall, where the cataclysm of Broken Spear’s demise had left a gap through which an enterprising man could have driven a herd of banths. “These green and pleasant lands we have wrested from the anger of this world must be husbanded against the days of our children.”

  I turned slowly, staring out past the strips of thermal cloth and fabric scraps that made a curtain insufficient to hide the glowing glass desert beyond. If anything the color of a verdant Terran field prospered under than hideous giant sun, it was outside my reckoning. My team—Deckard the engineer, Heminge the security man, Beaumont the political, and Marley the doctor—stared as well,
each then turning to cast a shadowed look toward me.

  When I once more faced the captain, Cordel’s face was twisted into a mask of silent misery, like a widow’s crumpled handkerchief. She betrayed nothing in her breathing, but a slight shake of her head confirmed what I already knew: to humor the ancient, failed madman in deference to his years of service and impending demise was a far better course than slaughtering his final, feeble hopes with the hard light of truth.

  “Indeed, sir,” I said slowly, holding her gaze with mine. Could this gray-eyed Valkyrie be yet a natural woman beneath the veneer of discipline? “It is a fair world you have brought forth.” In that moment, a thought surfaced, blazing bright betrayal of my just-coined policy of polite fable. I am not a man to leave a thing alone, even in face of a desirable woman’s desperation, but surely he had not breached the chain of command so horribly as to get children upon his exec. There were no other women among Broken Spear’s crew list.

  “Who are your daughters, sir?” I asked.

  Like a metastable solution leaping to a crystalline state at the tap of a technician’s stirring rod, Cordel’s face hardened to wrath in that moment. Lehr, oblivious to anything beyond the soft stones of his eyes, said nothing.

  A long minute of silence passed, underscored by the whistling of the hot wind outside and the slow, steady hiss of dustfall within, before I saluted again and excused both myself and my party. We retreated beneath twin masks of blind indifference and bloody hatred, heading for the forge of sunlight beyond the shadows of this ruined starship palace.

  We returned with all due haste to my own ship, INS Six Degrees.

  As an expeditionary cruiser, she was designed and built for descents into the treacherous territory of planetary gravity wells. The constraints of naval architecture generally kept ships in orbit, safe from weather, natural disaster, or the less sophisticated forms of civil disturbance. Not Six Degrees. She was wrought as a great disc, capable of sliding through atmosphere layers without expending overmuch power; but now she sat balanced on tripodal struts atop a karst outcrop some kilometer and a half from Lehr’s location. It was a natural vantage for defense, with a view of the broken valleys that led toward the crystalline cliffs and a clear line of sight to the dull bulk that had once been Broken Spear.

  When aboard, I abandoned my resolve to enforce justice among my officers in favor of a swift council of war with respect to the soon-to-be-late Captain Lehr and the matter of his ship. We had reviewed a dozen major action plans in the long, cold months of transit to this system, but despite my secret hopes none of our contingencies had included finding any of the crew alive.

  I had secret orders that not even the weasel Beaumont had seen, pertaining to the handling of Broken Spear and her cargo. Six Degrees carried a planet-buster in her number two hold, most unusual armament indeed for an expeditionary cruiser, but some of the outcomes modeled in the files of my sealed orders suggested that I might be called upon to execute that most awful responsibility of command—ordering wholesale death visited upon an entire world. Even if all we eliminated was the buzz of strange arthropods, it would still be acknowledged a great and terrible crime.

  It did not rank among my ambitions to be recorded in history as de Vere the Planetkiller. But Broken Spear’s secrets needed to stay lost—a determination that I was given to understand had been reached in the highest of the ivory-screened chambers of the Imperial House.

  But no one had imagined that Lehr yet lived, king of a broken kingdom, attended upon by Cordel. And who were his so-called daughters?

  My sons, as it were, surrounded me. Deckard, wise-acre but loyal, stood at one end of the wardroom, his head deep in the hood of an inform-o-scanner brought in for our purposes.

  Heminge, stolid as his pistol but equally reliable as both peacekeeper and weapon, sat at the conference table, which had been pulled up from the deck and secured into place, a red marker in hand as he reviewed reconnaissance photography of this world, still damp from the imaging engines. The good Doctor Marley, paler and more slightly built than the rest of us, sly and twisty as ever, a master of challenge without quite rising to the level of insubordination, was down in the sick bay, making notes about his observations of Lehr and Cordel with a promise to return shortly.

  And of course there was Beaumont. My Imperial Bureau of Compliance liaison, by courtesy holding rank of Lieutenant Commander and serving without apparent qualification or experience as executive officer on my ship, forced upon me by the nature of this mission. I would have been unsurprised to find that he had separate knowledge of my charge with respect to the planet-buster. Here was a man created by Nature to climb the ladders of power like a weasel in a hydroponics farm. Were I free to do so, I would have strapped him to that bloody bedamned bomb and dropped them both into the nearest star. Instead, he currently sat opposite me, his face set in that secretive smirk which seemed to be his most ordinary expression, hands steepled before his lips as though in prayer, his black eyes glittering.

  Beaumont spoke into his fingertips: “So, Captain de Vere, such a pretty trail you have set yourself to. Do you plan to offer aid and comfort to Broken Spear’s survivors?”

  “Imperial Military Code is clear enough,” I replied. “We are required to render such assistance as our capabilities permit and to evacuate however many survivors we can accommodate, so long as those left behind are not so reduced in numbers or required skills as to be in peril of their lives.”

  “Codex three, chapter seven, subchapter twenty-one. Good enough, Captain.”

  “I’m so pleased to have your approval, Commander. I doubt that they will come. They were not pleased to see us.”

  Heminge interrupted without looking up from his photographs, though he was most certainly listening intently. “Where is the command section? The portions of Broken Spear that are identifiably hull down on this world do not include the command section.”

  “Does it matter?” snapped Beaumont.

  Heminge looked up, met the political officer’s eyes. “Yes. It does matter. Sir. Captain Lehr was sitting in a command chair. That means the command section was either at one time on the surface, having since departed, or that it survived undamaged in orbit long enough for interior components to be removed and brought down by other means.”

  Deckard spoke from the depths of his viewing hood, his voice only somewhat muffled. “There are several metallic bodies in high orbit. One might assume they represented missing sections of Broken Spear.”

  “Which suggests Lehr allowed the ship to be broken apart in orbit and made an emergency landing with the main hull section,” I said. The cargo at issue on board Broken Spear had been carried in the captain’s safe, immediately behind the bridge on that hull type. Had they landed the command section as well and taken the cargo off? Or moved it to the main hull section before bringing that down?

  It had been a terribly dangerous thing to do, whatever the reason. And the nature of Lehr’s throne underscored the fact that the object of my search could be anywhere.

  I considered my regret for the planet-buster in the belly of Six Degrees. Marley bustled into the wardroom, speaking quickly as he always did: “Only one woman on that ship, de Vere, which is one more than our lot has got. Don’t know why he thinks he has daughters—Allison Cordel hasn’t been gravid any more than I have. Not here. She would never carry to term.” Marley slid into a chair. “Lehr’s dying, I’m fairly certain. In this environment, one must assume cancer or radiation poisoning. How he lasted this long is more than a small mystery. Delusional, of course, too, seeing green fields beyond his inner horizon. Gentlemen, how are we now?”

  “Shut up,” Beaumont suggested.

  “We are being signaled,” Deckard added, emerging from his hood. He touched the personal comm unit strapped to his wrist. A cluster of microphones and screens and speaker grilles unfolded from the overhead.

  “Attention Six Degrees,” said a strange, flat voice, the caller devoid of emotion or inflectio
n. I could not even determine whether it was a man or woman who spoke. “Do you copy?”

  “This is Six Degrees, de Vere commanding,” I replied in my crispest training academy voice, waving madly at Deckard to indicate that he should track the source of the signal. “Please identify yourself.”

  “I am Ray Gun.”

  I exchanged glances with my command crew. Beaumont’s face was sour and pinched . . . he never had a sense of humor nor an imagination. The others displayed varying degrees of thoughtful interest, though Marley was smiling strangely behind his hand.

  “And you are who and where . . . ?”

  Deckard flashed one of Heminge’s photo prints, an image of one hemisphere of this world as shot from our approach to the planet. He circled it with his finger.

  “Orbit?” I mouthed.

  My chief engineer nodded.

  How could that be? But an unknown agency of Lehr’s in orbit was no stranger than what we had already seen. The associated comm lag explained the strange rhythm of this conversation, for one.

  “Ray Gun. I am one of Lehr’s daughters. Bound to Cathar, who loves me as the stars love the horizons of evening.”

  Marley twirled one index finger around his temple.

  For a woman, Ray Gun had a remarkably sexless voice. Not for her the tingling tones of Cordel’s strong contralto, an overlay of womanly charm and matronly discipline that went straight to my gut . . . and other parts. Ray Gun’s strangeness made me wonder about this Cathar.

  “And you are in orbit, Ray Gun?” I said. “How may I help you?”

  Deckard shook his head, while Beaumont looked increasingly sour. I knew perfectly well what both of my officers were about . . . trying to puzzle how there were more women in this place—unless Lehr had begat children on Cordel, shortly after arrival. But who would place a girl-child in orbit—and how? Why? This world was a conundrum and then some.