by Frank Borsch
Launt had saved Denetree, at least for the time being. For the others, he had failed.
And matters would get even worse.
The day after Mika's interrogation, which Launt had tried in vain to prevent, the Naahk had called him. It was not unusual for the Naahk to request a conference with Launt. He generally called to discuss minor details that Lemal Netwar had chosen from the daily reports he received. Netwar dragged out these discussions almost beyond reason, all the while looking at Launt almost pleadingly from the display screen. Launt puzzled over the Naahk's actions for a long time.
What is on his mind? he had often wondered. What does he want from me? And sometimes, when his work had piled so high that any interruption angered him, he thought, How did you get to be Naahk if you can't tell the difference between what's important and what isn't?
At first, Launt tried to be polite. The Naahk was not like typical metach. Even Launt's considerable powers of imagination could not see them developing a relationship that would allow Launt to ask these questions directly. Later, when the calls had turned into a constant disturbance, Launt had become downright abrupt.
Launt's attitude made no difference. The Naahk refused to give him any peace, and the look of pleading Launt saw in his eyes became increasingly urgent.
Then, quite suddenly one day, Launt understood. The Naahk wasn't calling him to discuss trivial administrative questions. Those issues interested him as little as they did his Tenarchs. Whatever topic of discussion the Naahk chose, it was simply an excuse for human contact. His quarters lay in the center of the Ship, yet separate from its life. From that moment on, Launt had made all other duties a secondary priority and patiently took time for the Naahk when he called.
Launt pitied the master of the Ship.
He also had an ulterior motive. From the very slowly and carefully growing relationship between him and Lemal Netwar, perhaps something good would develop. The prospect for reform, a new direction for their mission. A chance for survival.
One such discussion on the day after Mika's torture began like any other. Without warning or transition, the Naahk's face appeared on Launt's display screen, replacing the meeting minutes on which the Tenarch had been working.
"Launt, I don't want to bother you for long," Lemal began. "I just want to be certain that we correctly understood each other in our last ... encounter."
Even after all this time, Launt was still faintly amazed that he was on such familiar terms with the Naahk, even though their discussions were now his normal routine. Since his attempt yesterday to save Mika and the other traitors, however, he had been feeling sad about their relationship.
"Yes, of course," Launt replied. The Tenarch had understood. His choice was between obedience and dismissal, perhaps even death. Lemal Netwar might hesitate to give the appropriate instructions, as in the case of the traitors. But he was the Naahk, and he would force himself to perform his duty. "I'm just now working on the minutes of the most recent Tenarchs meeting. You'll have it shortly. But I can tell you now that the functional deterioration of the neutrino catcher was the main topic. The be'ketren have no idea as to the cause. Before much longer, the engineers say, we'll be forced to shut down additional systems. The energy we produce and gather isn't sufficient any more."
"I'll read the minutes carefully," the Naahk promised, looking past Launt at some point in the distance. He held his head absolutely rigid when he talked, never making the slightest movement, as though it were tightly screwed onto his backbone. He never shook his head nor did he nod. It had taken Launt a long time to get used to it. It was such a small thing, but it made the Naahk seem less than human.
Launt waited for the Naahk to continue. Lemal Netwar cleared his throat, then began to talk about optimized harvest rotation in a certain sector of the Outer Deck, saying that he expected an increase in yield from the system that would allow them to feed nearly a hundred additional metach over the long term.
Launt resisted the urge to explain to the Naahk that neither the air nor energy supply was up to the demands of additional bodies, and that they must raise fewer children. There was no point to initiating such a discussion, because when confronted with such realities, Lemal Netwar retreated into indignation. It was one respect in which the old man was losing his touch.
In other respects, his mental grasp was laser-sharp.
Lemal cleared his throat again. "Launt, I've thought about our conversation from yesterday."
Launt couldn't speak; irrational hope squeezed his chest.
"You know that I think very highly of you. You are the youngest of the Tenarchs, and by far the most capable. Yours is an intelligent, independent mind. We have too few metach like you."
No wonder, Launt thought, when the Ship does everything possible to suppress independent thinking!
"I don't want to lose you, Launt," the Naahk continued. "The Ship needs you." His eyes remained focused on the unknown distant point. He did not look at Launt's face. "Therefore, I have decided to confer on you a task of extreme importance: you will direct and supervise the apprehension of the traitors. It will be your responsibility to see that they receive justice."
"Naahk, that is ... is ... "
"No one is better suited for this task. You are not a fanatic who will condemn innocents in your zeal. You are competent! You will find and punish the guilty, and all metach will know that justice was done with complete impartiality."
"Naahk, I ... "
"I'm counting on you, Launt." Now the Naahk looked directly at his Tenarch, and Launt was frightened by the intensity of the plea in his eyes. "Don't disappoint me."
Lemal Netwar's image disappeared, but the meeting minutes had now lost all meaning. Launt finished them as though in a trance, his thoughts on the terrible choice that lay before him. He could murder the "traitors"—or sacrifice his own life. There was no real choice; if he died, someone else would take over his assignment.
Since that day, many new pictures had appeared on his display. These were the traitors. They were arrested one after the other. Under torture, Mika had named several dozen names. Some of them were completely fictional. There were no metach with those names. Others had turned out to be obviously innocent. Mika must have named them in an attempt to protect the rest. But still others quickly proved to be part of the group led by Venron. They were interrogated and taken to the Pekoy. That was enough to break their resistance. They had seen what had happened to Mika. In less than a week, the entire group of fourteen metach had been apprehended. With the exception of Denetree, who seemed to have disappeared from the face of the Ship.
Launt had followed events like a spectator, simultaneously powerless and all-knowing. The Tenoy performed their duties out of sincere concern for the Ship; they did not need any incentive. Launt stood by simply to make sure that individuals arrested out of overzealousness were released—exactly as the Naahk had predicted.
Once the machinery had been set in motion, nothing could stop it.
Freme was the first to fall into their clutches. The Tenoy had seized him in his metach'ton, sitting in a circle of his comrades as they shared the smoke of the vakrin plant. He offered no resistance. Had he resigned himself to his fate? Or had he realized that there was only one chance of survival for the members of the Star Seekers: remain silent and hope that the storm blew over them? Probably the latter. Freme had not been intimidated by the sight of the Pekoy. He would have become too well acquainted with the Pekoy's instruments if Launt hadn't used his power as Tenarch to delay Freme's torture long enough for the Tenoy to seize other traitors who proved to be weaker willed.
Freme was a gaunt man with an unusually furrowed face, like that of a metach past the middle of his life. If he hadn't made the mistake of attaching himself to Venron, Freme would have joined the Tenoy and provided great service to the Ship. There were too few metach who shared with him the mix of enthusiasm, good judgment and strong nerves that made for a good Tenoy.
After Freme, the
Tenoy arrested other metach with frightening speed. Most they let go after forcing them to spend the night in a dark, unheated cell barely large enough to stand in upright. It was a valuable lesson, the Tenoy and the other Tenarchs assured each other, but an appalling injustice in Launt's view, and utter stupidity besides. Who could believe that loyalty to the Ship would be fostered this way?
Launt called up the pictures of the traitors and created a gallery of all fourteen on his display. They were pictures from happier days, taken before their arrest. The men and women laughed, and in their eyes shone expectation, not the tired hopelessness of the Naahk.
Launt stared into the faces for a long time, as though expecting them to speak.
Then a precisely modulated voice came from all around him. It could have belonged to either a woman or a man.
"Launt," said the Net, "what are you waiting for?"
The Tenarch gave a start. He erased the picture gallery from the display as if by doing so he could hide his thoughts and actions from the Net.
"What do you mean by that? I'm not waiting. I'm working."
"Not very efficiently. Why are you putting off what must be done?"
"We have yet to capture Venron's sister, Denetree," he replied quickly.
"What difference does that make?"
"The more intelligent among the metach will wonder what became of her. They might get the idea the Ship allowed mercy over justice. That would certainly not be your intention, correct?"
The Net didn't answer for several minutes. For a moment, Launt hoped he had overpowered its logic, but then he heard a sound that reminded him of a sigh and it said, "The more intelligent among the metach are intelligent enough to know that is not the case. They know there is no escape from the Ship's justice. Denetree is almost certainly dead. She might have found an unsecured hatch and followed her brother to the stars. Or she threw herself into a composter and suffocated. There is no place on the Ship where a metach can hide for two weeks."
"You're are right, of course," Launt said, wondering how well the Net could read human facial expressions. It had had more than five hundred years to analyze them.
"The metach are waiting. The Naahk warned them of the traitors' existence. He has described the danger that threatens the Ship because of them. And he has announced their punishment. If there is no punishment, the metach will doubt him and the order of things. Is that what you want?"
"No! Of course not."
"And do you doubt the order of things?"
Launt forced himself to express honest indignation. "Of course not! Who has served the Ship more loyally than I?"
"Then I fail to understand your hesitation."
"This ... this is not easy. It's a question of human life."
"That, on the other hand, I do understand," the Net replied. "But it is necessary to sacrifice their lives in order to prevent the loss of many others. Give the order."
Again, he was trapped. If he refused to give the command, he would die with the others. Nothing would be accomplished.
"Arrange the execution," Launt whispered. "The traitors will die tomorrow night."
"As you command," replied the Net.
18
The Akonian Shift closed to within a few meters of the crawler and matched its speed.
"Man, what kind of junk are the Akonians using for syntrons, anyway?" Hayden Norwell exclaimed. He played the hyperdetector recordings of the approach maneuver on a holo. The Akonian craft had missed colliding with one of the Lemurian ship's antennae by a hair. "They desperately need to install a few updates—and I'd suggest Terran ones, at that!"
"Perhaps they're flying their Shift manually?" Rhodan suggested.
"You aren't serious, are you? Even Akonians can't be that dumb!"
"No dumber than we Terrans, but certainly as proud. Why should they leave to a machine what they can do themselves?"
Norwell grunted something and dropped the subject, so Rhodan made no further comment. The immortal Terran had often encountered Akonians: as enemies, then at a cool distance and now, as he hoped, in mutual respect. For the prospectors, dealing with the Akonians was a new situation. They didn't know what to expect, and they dealt with their uncertainty in their own ways: Hayden Norwell swore; Pearl Laneaux chatted with "Mama" Kossa as though the fate and well-being of the crawler depended solely on the stream of conversation between them remaining unbroken, rather than on the syntronic umbilical cord that connected them with the Palenque.
"We're throwing out the anchor now, okay?" said the comm officer.
"Okay."
The tractor beam guided the crawler to a place on the gigantic hull where several main struts of its framework came together. In the next moment, the ship's body beneath them came to a stop and the stars spun wildly. A jolt indicated that the crawler had set down.
Pearl took a deep breath. "Here we are. Check your suits, then get out there!" She didn't speak to Alemaheyu separately; the comm officer was listening to every word spoken on board the crawler.
Rhodan had already checked out his suit during the approach and shifted to give the others as much room as possible. The two prospectors bumped into each other in the cramped confines, swore and fumbled with the beamers that, per the agreement with the Akonians, they were allowed to carry.
They left the crawler cabin. The Akonian Shift had landed on the Lemurian ship a few meters away and figures in spacesuits were just emerging. Rhodan waved to them and one of the Akonians waved back.
The two groups met in the pale light that shone from their respective airlocks. The Akonians' suits seemed brand new and custom-tailored, as they fit perfectly and emphasized their wearers' considerable height. The Terrans' suits, on the other hand, showed the wear and tear of the hundreds of worlds where they had seen use. Rhodan heard Norwell muttering indignantly; the prospector apparently had picked up on the contrast in their equipment and he didn't like it. Rhodan wasn't bothered by the inequality. Experience had taught him to rely on proven technology for critical missions rather than on the latest high-tech gadgets, which tended to fail the user just when they were needed most.
Pearl Laneaux, by far the smallest person in either group, pointed to a spot on the hull in the near distance. Without a word, the Terrans and Akonians started toward it. No one spoke, even though both sides had agreed on a frequency for communication and they also had a common language available with Intercosmo. It was just the awkwardness of the situation. Besides, they had no faces; the material comprising the helmet visors functioned like a one-way mirror. Looking at the person opposite you was merely to look at yourself.
They came to a stop. Two of the Akonians took a massive object from an antigrav platform that had followed them automatically, and began working with it. A large tarpaulin unfolded and formed itself into a kind of tent that sealed off the Akonians and Terrans from the spinning stars. Rhodan was glad to have it, because the swift movement was making him nauseous. The Akonians set their beamers to low intensity and welded the edge of the tent to the hull of the Lemurian ship. Apparently satisfied, they nodded to each other, then adjusted their beamers again and burned a circular hole in the hull about a meter and a half in diameter.
Rhodan would have preferred to not cut their way into the Lemurian ship with beamers, but the hyperdetectors had failed to find a hatch anywhere that they would be able to open. They couldn't even find the lock through which the shuttle had left the mother ship.
The cut-out section of the hull floated upward. The spinning of the Lemurian ship created an outward-directed artificial gravity that would have thrown the Terrans and the Akonians out into space if they hadn't been using their antigravs. One of the Akonians caught the steel disk with a tractor beam before it could tear through the tent and anchored it with a magnetic mounting to the surface of the hull. The tent walls stretched taut with the sudden air pressure but held.
Pearl Laneaux was apparently determined to show from the start who was in command and led the way down th
rough the opening into darkness. Akonians and Terrans followed her in alternating order. When everyone was inside, the Akonians welded the loose section back into the hull. It would hinder an emergency retreat, but they owed it to whatever remained of the ship's crew to repair the damage caused by their entrance.
They opened their helmets.
* * *
The first encounter with the Terrans shook Solina Tormas' assumptions. These were the prodigies of the galaxy? The sight of their pathetic spacesuits—they looked as though the Terrans hung them out to dry on the outer hull of their ship, and were obviously of advanced age—made it painfully clear to the historian that the golden age of the Solar Imperium was long over. These people did not represent the supermen who, under the leadership of their ultra-superman Perry Rhodan, had once brought nearly the entire galaxy under their influence. Back then, it would have been unthinkable that the Terrans would use anything but the latest and best equipment.
The second encounter gave her a prodigious shock.
When they had entered the Lemurian ship and made certain that no immediate danger threatened them, they opened their helmets.
Curious, she took stock of the Terrans. Their leader, who introduced herself as Pearl Laneaux, would have been considered a beauty even by Akonian standards if she hadn't been so short. Hayden Norwell, who introduced himself second, was somewhat taller, but even if he had been a two-meter giant his attractiveness would have been only slightly improved. His face was simply ugly; hairy and scarred and attached—or so it appeared to Solina—to a body that preferred to experience adventure from the comfort of a tri-vid couch, not a prospector who allegedly loved risks and privations.