A Plague of Demons

by Keith Laumer

  "I shouldn't be telling you about it," Carnaby said with a smile. "But I guess you'll keep it under your hat."

  "You can count on me, Lieutenant," Terry said solemnly.

  "I know I can, Terry," Carnaby said.

  14

  The clangor of the General Quarters alarm shattered the tense silence of the chart deck like a bomb through a plate glass window. The navigation officer whirled abruptly from the grametric over which he had been bending, collided with the deck chief. Both men leaped for the Master Position monitor, caught just a glimpse of a vivid scarlet trace lancing toward the emerald point targeted at the center of the plate before the apparatus exploded from its mounting, mowed the two men down in a hail of shattered plastic fragments. Smoke boiled, black and pungent, from the gutted cavity. The duty NCO, bleeding from a dozen gashes, stumbled toward the two men, turned away in horror, reached an emergency voice phone. Before he could key it, the deck under him canted sharply. He screamed, clutched at a table for support, saw it tilt, come crashing down on top of him…

  On the message deck, Lieutenant Pryor clung to an operator's stool, listening, through the stridency of the alarm bell, to the frantic voice from command deck:

  "All sections, all sections, combat stations! We're under attack! My God, we've taken a hit forward-"

  The voice cut off, to be replaced by the crisp tones of Colonel Lancer, first battle officer:

  "As you were! Sections G-987 and 989 damage control crews report! Forward armaments, safety interlocks off, stand by for firing orders! Message center, flash a code six to Fleet and TF Command. Power section, all selectors to gate, rig for full emergency power…"

  Pryor hauled himself hand-over-hand to the main message console; the body of the code yeoman hung slackly in the seat harness, blood dripping from the fingertips of his dangling hand. Pryor freed him, took his place. He keyed the code six alarm into the pulse-relay tanks, triggered an emergency override signal, beamed the message outward toward the distant Fleet headquarters.

  On the command deck, Commodore Broadly clutched a sprained wrist to his chest, stood, teeth bared, feet braced apart, staring into the forward imagescreen at the dwindling point of light that was the Djann blockade runner.

  "The effrontery of the damned scoundrel!" he roared. "Lancer, launch another covey of U-95's! You've got over five hundred megaton-seconds of firepower, man! Use it!"

  "He's out of range, Commodore," Lancer said coolly. "He booby-trapped us very neatly."

  "It's your job to see that we don't blunder into traps, by God, Colonel!" He rounded on the battle officer. "You'll stop that pirate or I'll rip those eagles off your shoulders myself!"

  Lancer's mouth was a hard line; his eyes were ice chips.

  "You can relieve me, Commodore," his voice grated. "Until you do, I'm battle commander aboard this vessel."

  "By God, you're relieved, sir!" Broadly yelled. He whirled on the startled exec standing by. "Confine this officer to his quarters! Order full emergency acceleration! This vessel's on Condition Red at Full Combat Alert until we overtake and destroy that sneaking snake in the grass!"

  "Commodore-at full emergency without warning, there'll be men injured, even killed-"

  "Carry out my commands, Captain, or I'll find someone who will!" the commodore's bellow cut off the exec. "I'll show that filthy, sneaking pack of spiders what it means to challenge a Terran fighting ship!"

  On the power deck, Chief Powerman Joe Arena wiped the cut on his forehead, stared at the bloody rag, hurled it aside with a curse.

  "All right, you one-legged deck apes!" he roared. "You heard it! We're going after the bandit, full gate-and if we melt our linings down to slag, I'll have every man of you sign a statement of charges that'll take your grandchildren two hundred years to pay off!"

  15

  In the near-darkness of the Place of Observation aboard the Djann vessel, the ocular complex of the One-Who-Commands glowed with a dim red sheen as he studied the apparently black surface of the sensitive plate. "The death watcher has eaten our energy weapon," he communicated to his three link brothers. "Now our dooms are in the palps of the fate spinner."

  "The death watcher of the water beings might have passed us by," the One-Who-Anticipates signaled. "It was an act of rashness to hurl the weapon at it."

  "It will make a mighty song," the One-Who-Records thrummed his resonator plates, tried a melancholy bass chord.

  "But what egg-carrier will exude the brood-nourishing honeys of strength and sagacity in response to these powerful rhymes, if the stimulus to their creation leads us to quick extinction?" the One-Who-Refutes queried.

  "In their own brief existence, these harmonies find their justification," the One-Who-Records attested.

  "The death watcher shakes himself," the One-Who-Commands stated. "Now he turns in pursuit."

  The One-Who-Records emitted a booming tone. "Gone are the great suns of Djann," he sang. "Lost are the fair worlds that knew their youth. But the spark of their existence glows still!"

  "Now we fall outward, toward the Great Awesomeness," the One-Who-Anticipates commented. "Only the blackness will know your song."

  "Draw in your energies from that-which-is-extraneous," the One-Who-Commands ordered. "Focus the full poignancy of your intellects on the urgency of our need for haste. All else is vain, now. Neither singer nor song will survive the vengeance of the death watcher if he outstrips our swift flight!"

  "Though Djann and water being perish, my poem is eternal," the One-Who-Records emitted a stirring assonance. "Fly, Djann! Pursue, death watcher! Let the suns observe how we comport ourselves in this hour!"

  "Exhort the remote nebulosities to attend our plight, if you must," the One-Who-Refutes commented. "But link your energies to ours or all is lost."

  Silent now, the Djann privateer fled outward toward the Rim.

  16

  Carnaby awoke, lay in darkness listening to the wheezing of Terry Sickle's breath. The boy didn't sound good. Carnaby sat up, suppressing a grunt at the stiffness of his limbs. The icy air seemed stale. He moved to the entry, lifted the polyon flap. A cascade of powdery snow poured in. Beyond the opening a faint glow filtered down through banked snow.

  He turned back to Terry as the latter coughed deeply, again and again.

  "Looks like the snow's quit," Carnaby said. "It's drifted pretty bad, but there's no wind now. How are you feeling, Terry?"

  "Not so good, Lieutenant," Sickle said weakly. He breathed heavily, in and out. "I don't know what's got into me. Feel hot and cold at the same time."

  Carnaby stripped off his glove, put his hand on Sickle's forehead. It was scalding hot.

  "You just rest easy here for a while, Terry. There's a couple more cans of stew, and plenty of water. I'll make it up to the top as quickly as I can. Soon as I get back, we'll go down together. With luck, I'll have you to Doc Link's house by dark."

  "I guess… I guess I should have done like Doc said," Terry's voice was a thin whisper.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I been taking these hyposprays. Two a day. He said I better not miss one, but heck, I been feeling real good lately-"

  "What kind of shots, Terry?" Carnaby's voice was tight.

  "I don't know. Heck, Lieutenant, I'm no invalid! Or…" his voice trailed off.

  "You should have told me, Terry."

  "Gosh, Lieutenant-don't worry about me! I didn't mean nothing! Hell, I feel…" he broke off to cough deeply, rackingly.

  "I'll get you back, Terry-but I've got to go up first," Carnaby said. "You understand that, don't you?"

  Terry nodded. "A man's got to do his job, Lieutenant. I'll be waiting… for you… when you get back."

  "Listen to me carefully, Terry." Carnaby's voice was low. "If I'm not back by this time tomorrow, you'll have to make it back down by yourself. You understand? Don't wait for me."

  "Sure, Lieutenant, I'll just rest awhile. Then I'll be OK."

  "Sooner I get started the sooner I'll be
back." Carnaby took a can from the pack, opened it, handed it to Terry. The boy shook his head.

  "You eat it, Lieutenant. You need your strength. I don't feel like I… could eat anything anyway."

  "Terry, I don't want to have to pry your mouth open and pour it in."

  "All right… but open one for yourself too…"

  "All right, Terry."

  Sickle's hand trembled as he spooned the stew to his mouth. He ate half of the contents of the can, then leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes. "That's all… I want…"

  "All right, Terry. You get some rest now. I'll be back before you know it." Carnaby crawled out through the opening, pushed his way up through loosely drifted snow. The cold struck his face like a spiked club. He turned the suit control up another notch, noticing as he did that the left side seemed to be cooler than the right.

  The near-vertical rise of the final crown of the peak thrust up from the drift, dazzling white in the morning sun. Carnaby examined the rockface for twenty feet on either side of the hut, picked a spot where a deep crack angled upward, started the last leg of the climb.

  17

  On the message deck, Lieutenant Pryor frowned into the screen from which the saturnine features of Captain Aaron gazed back sourly.

  "The commodore's going to be unhappy about this," Pryor said. "If you're sure your extrapolation is accurate-"

  "It's as good as the data I got from Plotting," Aaron snapped. "The bogie's over the make-or-break line; we'll never catch him now. You know your trans-Einsteinian physics as well as I do."

  "I never heard of the Djann having anything capable of that kind of acceleration," Pryor protested.

  "You have now." Aaron switched off and keyed command deck, passed his report to the exec, then sat back with a resigned expression to await the reaction.

  Less than a minute later, Commodore Broadly's irate face snapped onto the screen.

  "You're the originator of this report?" he growled.

  "I did the extrapolation," Aaron stared back at his commanding officer.

  "You're relieved for incompetence," Broadly said in a tone as harsh as a handsaw.

  "Yessir," Aaron said. His face was pale, but he returned the commodore's stare. "But my input data and comps are a matter of record. I'll stand by them."

  Broadly's face darkened. "Are you telling me these spiders can spit in our faces and skip off, scot-free?"

  "All I'm saying, sir, is that the present acceleration ratios will keep the target ahead of us, no matter what we do."

  Broadly's face twitched. "This vessel is at full emergency gain," he growled. "No Djann has ever outrun a Fleet unit in a straightaway run."

  "This one is… sir."

  The commodore's eyes bore into Aaron's. "Remain on duty until further notice," he said, and switched off. Aaron smiled crookedly and buzzed the message deck.

  "He backed down," he said to Pryor. "We've got a worried commodore on board."

  "I don't understand it myself," Pryor said. "How the hell is that can outgaining us?"

  "He's not," Aaron said complacently. "From a standing start, we'd overhaul him in short order. But he got the jump on us by a couple of minutes, after he lobbed the fish into us. If we'd been able to close the gap in the first half hour or so, we'd have had him; but at trans-L velocities, you can get some strange effects. One of them is that our vectors become asymptotic. We're closing on him-but we'll never overtake him."

  Pryor whistled. "Broadly could be busted for this fiasco."

  "Uh-huh," Aaron grinned. "Could be-unless the bandit stops off somewhere for a quick one…"

  After Aaron rang off, Pryor turned to study the position repeater screen. On it Malthusa was represented by a bright point at the center, the fleeing Djann craft by a red dot above.

  "Charlie," Pryor called the NCOIC. "That garbled TX we picked up last watch; where did you R and D it?"

  "Right about here, Lieutenant." The NCO flicked a switch and turned knobs; a green dot appeared near the upper edge of the screen.

  "Hey," he said. "It looks like maybe our bandit's headed out his way."

  "You picked him up on the Y band; have you tried to raise him again?"

  "Yeah, but nothing doing, Lieutenant. It was just a fluke-"

  "Get a Y beam on him, Charlie. Focus it down to a cat's whisker and work a pattern over a one-degree radius centered around his MPP until you get an echo."

  "If you say so, sir-but-"

  "I do say so, Charlie! Find that transmitter, and the drinks are on me!"

  18

  Flat against the windswept rockface, Carnaby clung with his fingertips to a tenuous hold, feeling with one booted toe for a purchase higher up. A flake of stone broke away, and for a moment he hung by the fingers of his right hand, his feet dangling over emptiness; then, swinging his right leg far out, he hooked a knob with his knee, caught a rocky rib with his free hand, pulled himself up to a more secure rest. He clung, his cheek against the iron-cold stone; out across the vast expanse of featureless grayish-tan plain, the gleaming whipped-cream shape of the next core rose ten miles to the south. A wonderful view up here-of nothing. Funny to think it could be his last. H was out of condition. It had been too long since his last climb.

  But that wasn't the way to think. He had a job to do-the first in twenty-one years. For a moment, ghostly recollections rose up before him: the trim Academy lawns, the spit-and-polish of inspection, the crisp feel of the new uniform, the glitter of the silver comet as Anne had pinned it on…

  That was no good either. What counted was here: the station up above. One more push, and he'd be there. He rested for another half minute, then pulled himself up and forward, onto the relatively mild slope of the final approach to the crest. Fifty yards above, the dull-gleaming plastron-coated dome of the beacon station squatted against the exposed rock, looking no different than it had five years earlier.

  Ten minutes later he was at the door, flicking the combination latch dial with cold-numbed fingers. Tumblers clicked, and the panel slid aside. The heating system, automatically reacting to his entrance, started up with a busy hum to bring the interior temperature up to comfort level. He pulled off his gauntlets, ran his hands over his face, rasping the stubble there. There was coffee in the side table, he remembered. Fumblingly, with stiff fingers, he got out the dispenser, twisted the control cap, poured out a steaming mug, gulped it down. It was hot and bitter. The grateful warmth of it made him think of Terry, waiting down below in the chill of the half-ruined hut.

  "No time to waste," he muttered to himself. He stamped up and down the room, swinging his arms to warm himself, then seated himself at the console, flicked keys with a trained ease rendered only slightly rusty by the years of disuse. He referred to an index, found the input instructions for code gamma eight, set up the boards, flipped in the pulse lever. Under his feet, he felt the faint vibration as the power pack buried in the rock stored its output for ten microseconds, fired it in a single millisecond burst, stored and pulsed again. Dim instrument lights winked on, indicating normal readings all across the board.

  Carnaby glanced at the wall clock. He had been here ten minutes now. It would take another quarter hour to comply with the manual's instructions-but to hell with that gobbledygook. He'd put the beacon on the air; this time the Navy would have to settle for that. It would be pushing it to get back to the boy and pack him down to the village by nightfall as it was. Poor kid; he'd wanted to help so badly…

  19

  "That's correct, sir," Pryor said crisply. "I haven't picked up any comeback on my pulse, but I'll definitely identify the echo as coming from a JN type installation."

  Commodore Broadly nodded curtly. "However, inasmuch as your instruments indicate that this station is not linked in with a net capable of setting up a defensive field, it's of no use to us." The commodore looked at Pryor, waiting.

  "I think perhaps there's a way, sir," Pryor said. "The Djann are known to have strong tribal feelings. They'd neve
r pass up what they thought was an SOS from one of their own. Now, suppose we signal this JN station to switch over to the Djann frequencies and beam one of their own signal patterns at them. They just might stop to take a look…"

  "By God," Broadly looked at the signal lieutenant, "if he doesn't, he's not human!"

  "You like the idea, sir?" Pryor grinned.

  "A little rough on the beacon station if they reach it before we do, eh, Lieutenant? I imagine our friends the Djann will be a trifle upset when they learn they've been duped."

  "Oh…" Pryor looked blank. "I guess I hadn't thought of that, sir."

  "Never mind," Broadly said briskly, "the loss of a minor installation such as this is a reasonable exchange for an armed vessel of the enemy."

  "Well…"

  "Lieutenant, if I had a few more officers aboard who employed their energies in something other than assembling statistics proving we're beaten, this cruise might have made a record for itself-" Broadly cut himself off, remembering the degree of aloofness due very junior officers-even juniors who may have raked some very hot chestnuts out of the fire.

  "Carry on, Lieutenant," he said. "If this works out, I think I can promise you a very favorable endorsement on your next ER."

  As Pryor's pleased grin winked off the screen, the commodore flipped up the red line key, snapped a brusque request at the bored log room yeoman.

  "This will make Old Carbuncle sing another tune," he remarked almost gaily to the exec, standing by with a harassed expression.

  "Maybe you'd better go slow, Ned," the latter cautioned, gauging his senior's mood. "It might be as well to get a definite confirmation on this installation's capabilities before we go on record-"

  Broadly turned abruptly to the screen as it chimed. "Admiral, as I reported, I've picked up one of our forward beacon towers," Broadly's hearty voice addressed the screen from which the grim visage of the task force commander eyed him. "I'm taking steps to complete the intercept; steps which are, if I may say so, rather ingenious-"