by Anthology
Lyad hadn't learned in detail, but some of the robots appeared to have demonstrated rather alarming possibilities. Those possibilities, however, were precisely what intrigued the hierarchy most.
Mantelish smacked his lips thoughtfully and shook his head. "Not good!" he said. "Not at all good! I'm beginning to think--" He paused a moment. "Go on, Lyad."
The hierarchy was now giving renewed consideration to a curious request the plasmoid had made almost as soon as Balmordan became capable of understanding it. The request had been to find and destroy plasmoid 113-A.
The Ermetyne's amber eyes switched to Trigger. "Shall I?" she asked.
Trigger nodded.
And a specific human being. The Devagas already had established that this human being must be Trigger Argee.
"What?" Mantelish's thick white eyebrows shot up. "113-A we can understand--it is afraid of being in some way brought back under control. But why Trigger?"
"Because," Lyad said carefully, "112 was aware that 113-A intended to condition Trigger into being its interpreter."
Professor Mantelish's jaw dropped. He swung his head toward Trigger. "Is that true?"
She nodded. "It's true, all right. We've been working on it, but we haven't got too far along. Tell you later. Go ahead, Lyad."
The Devagas, naturally, hadn't acted on the king plasmoid's naive suggestion. Whatever it feared was more than likely to be very useful to them. Instead they made preparations to bring both 113-A and Trigger Argee into their possession. They would then have a new, strong bargaining point in their dealings with their dubious partner. But they discovered promptly that neither Trigger nor 113-A were at all easy to come by.
Balmordan now suggested a modification of tactics. The hierarchy had seen to it that a number of interpreters were available for 112; Balmordan in consequence had lost much of his early importance and was anxious to regain it. His proposal was that all efforts should be directed at obtaining 113-A. Once it was obtained, he himself would volunteer to become its first interpreter. Trigger Argee, because of the information she might reveal to others, should be destroyed--a far simpler operation than attempting to take her alive.
This was agreed to; and Balmordan was authorized to carry out both operations.
Mantelish had begun shaking his head again. "No!" he said suddenly and loudly. He looked at Lyad, then at Trigger. "Trigger!" he said.
"Yes?" said Trigger.
"Take that deceitful woman to her cabin," Mantelish ordered. "Lock her up. I have something to say to the Commissioner."
Trigger arose. "All right," she said. "Come on, Lyad."
The two of them left the lounge. Mantelish stood up and went over to the Commissioner. He grasped the Commissioner's jacket lapels.
"Holati, old friend!" he began emotionally.
"What is it, old friend?" the Commissioner inquired.
"What I have to say," Mantelish rumbled, "will shock you. Profoundly."
"No!" exclaimed the Commissioner.
"Yes," said Mantelish. "That plasmoid 112--it has, of course, an almost inestimable potential value to civilization."
"Of course," the Commissioner agreed.
"But it also," said Mantelish, "represents a quite intolerable threat to civilization."
"Mantelish!" cried the Commissioner.
"It does. You don't comprehend these matters as I do. Holati, that plasmoid must be destroyed! Secretly, if possible. And by us!"
"Mantelish!" gasped the Commissioner. "You can't be serious!"
"I am."
"Well," said Commissioner Tate, "sit down. I'm open to suggestions." Space-armor drill hadn't been featured much in the Colonial School's crowded curriculum. But the Commissioner broke out one of the ship's two heavy-duty suits; and when Trigger wasn't at the controls, eating, sleeping, or taking care of the ship's housekeeping with Lyad and Mantelish, she drilled.
She wasn't at the controls too often. When she was, they had to surface and proceed in normal space. But Lyad, not too surprisingly, turned out to be a qualified subspace pilot. Even less surprisingly, she already had made a careful study of the ship's controls. After a few hours of instruction, she went on shift with the Commissioner along the less rugged stretches. In this area, none of the stretches were smooth.
When not on duty, Lyad lay on her bunk and brooded.
Mantelish tried to be useful.
Repulsive might have been brooding too. He didn't make himself noticeable.
Time passed. The stretches got rougher. The last ten hours, the Commissioner didn't stir out of the control seat. Lyad had been locked in her cabin again as the critical period approached. In normal space, the substation should have been in clear detector range by now. Here, the detectors gave occasional blurry, uncertain indications that somewhere in the swirling energies about them might be something more solidly material. It was like creeping through jungle thickets towards the point where a dangerous quarry lurked.
They eased down on the coordinate points. They came sliding out between two monstrous twisters. The detectors leaped to life.
"Ship!" said the Commissioner. He swore. "Frigate class," he said an instant later. He turned his head toward Trigger. "Get Lyad! They're in communication range. We'll let her communicate."
Trigger, heart hammering, ran to get Lyad. The Commissioner had the short-range communicator on when they came hurrying back to the control room together.
"That the Aurora?" he asked.
Lyad glanced at the outline in the detectors. "It is!" Her face went white.
"Talk to 'em," he ordered. "Know their call number?"
"Of course," Lyad sat down at the communicator. Her hands shook for a moment, then steadied. "What am I to say?"
"Just find out what's happened, to start with. Why they're still here. Then we'll improvise. Get them to come to the screen if you can."
Lyad's fingers flew over the tabs. The communicator signaled contact.
Lyad said evenly, "Come in, Aurora! This is the Ermetyne."
There was a pause, a rather unaccountably long pause, Trigger thought. Then a voice said, "Yes, First Lady?"
Lyad's eyes widened for an instant. "Come in on visual, Captain!" There was the snap of command in the words.
Again a pause. Then suddenly the communicator was looking into the Aurora's control room. A brown-bearded, rather lumpy-faced man in uniform sat before the other screen. There were other uniformed men behind him. Trigger heard the Ermetyne's breath suck in and turned to watch Lyad's face.
"Why haven't you carried out your instructions, Captain?" The voice was still even.
"There was a difficulty with the engines, First Lady."
Lyad nodded. "Very well. Stand by for new instructions."
She switched off the communicator. She twisted around toward the Commissioner. "Get us out of here!" she said, chalk-faced. "Fast! Those aren't my men."
Flame bellowed about them in subspace. The Commissioner's hand slapped a button. The flame vanished and stars shone all around. The engines hurled them forward. Twelve seconds later, they angled and dived again. Subspace reappeared.
"Guess you were right!" the Commissioner said. He idled the engines and scratched his chin. "But what were they?"
* * * * *
"Everything about it was wrong!" Lyad was saying presently, her face still white. "Their faces, in particular, were deformed!" She looked at Trigger. "You saw it?"
Trigger nodded. She suspected she was on the white-faced side herself. "The captain," she said. "I didn't look at the others. It looked as if his cheeks and forehead were pushed out of shape!"
There was a short silence. "Well," said the Commissioner, "seems like that plasmoid has been doing some more experimenting. Question is, how did it get to them?"
They didn't find any answers to that. Lyad insisted the Aurora had been given specific orders to avoid the immediate vicinity of the substation. Its only purpose there was to observe and report on anything that seemed to be going on in
the area. She couldn't imagine her crew disobeying the orders.
"That mind-level control business," Trigger said finally. "Maybe it found a way of going out to them."
She could see by their faces that the idea had occurred, and that they didn't like it. Well, neither did she.
They pitched a few more ideas around. None of them seemed helpful.
"Unless we just want to hightail it," the Commissioner said finally, "about the only thing we can do is go back and slug it out with the frigate first. We can't risk snooping around the station while she's there and likely to start pounding on our backs any second."
Mantelish looked startled. "Holati," he cautioned, "That's a warship!"
"Mantelish," the Commissioner said, a trifle coldly, "what you've been riding in isn't a canoe." He glanced at Lyad. "I suppose you'd feel happier if you weren't locked up in your cabin during the ruckus?"
Lyad gave him a strained smile. "Commissioner," she said, "You're so right!"
"Then keep your seat," he said. "We'll start prowling."
They prowled. It took an hour to recontact the Aurora, presumably because the Aurora was also prowling for them. Suddenly the detectors came alive.
The ship's guns went off at once. Then subspace went careening crazily past in the screens. Trigger looked at the screens for a few seconds, gulped and started studying the floor.
Whatever the plasmoid had done to the frigate's crew, they appeared to have lost none of their ability to give battle. It was a very brisk affair. But neither had the onetime Squadron Commander Tate lost much of his talent along those lines. The frigate had many more guns but no better range. And he had the faster ship. Four minutes after the first shots were exchanged, the Aurora blew up.
The ripped hunk of the Aurora's hull which the Commissioner presently brought into the lock appeared to have had three approximately quarter-inch holes driven at a slant through it, which subsequently had been plugged again. The plugging material was plasmoid in character.
"There were two holes in another piece," the Commissioner said, very thoughtfully. "If that's the average, she was punched in a few thousand spots. Let's go have a better look."
He and Mantelish maneuvered the gravity crane carrying the holed slab of steel-alloy into the ship's workshop. Lyad was locked back into her cabin, and Trigger went on guard in the control room and looked out wistfully at the stars of normal space.
Half an hour later, the two men came up the passage and joined her. They appeared preoccupied.
"It's an unpleasant picture, Trigger girl," the Commissioner said. "Those holes look sort of chewed through. Whatever did the chewing was also apparently capable of sealing up the portion behind it as it went along. What it did to the men when it got inside we don't know. Mantelish feels we might compare it roughly to the effects of ordinary germ invasion. It doesn't really matter. It fixed them."
"Mighty large germs!" Trigger said. "Why didn't their meteor reflectors stop them?"
"If the ship was hove to and these things just drifted in gradually--"
"Oh, I see. That wouldn't activate the reflectors. Then, if we keep moving ourselves--"
"That," said the Commissioner, "was what I had in mind."
28
Trigger couldn't keep from staring at the subspace station. It was unbelievable.
One could still tell that the human construction gangs had put up a standard type of armored station down there. A very big, very massive one, but normally shaped, nearly spherical. One could tell it only by the fact that at the gun pits the original material still showed through. Everywhere else it had vanished under great black masses of material which the plasmoids had added to the station's structure.
All over that black, lumpy, lavalike surface the plasmoids crawled, walked, soared and wriggled. There were thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of different types. It looked like a wet, black, rotten stump swarming with life inside and out.
Neither she nor the two men had made much mention of its appearance. All you could say was that it was horrible.
The plasmoids they could see ignored the ship. They also gave no noticeable attention to the eight space flares the Commissioner had set in a rough cube about the station. But for the first two hours after their arrival, the ship's meteor reflectors remained active. An occasional tap at first, then an almost continuous pecking, finally a twenty-minute drumfire that filled the reflector screens with madly dancing clouds of tiny sparks. Suddenly it ended. Either the king plasmoid had exhausted its supply of that particular weapon or it preferred to conserve what it had left.
"Might test their guns," the Commissioner muttered. He looked very unhappy, Trigger thought.
He circled off, put on speed, came back and flicked the ship past the station's flank. He drew bursts from two pits with a promptness which confirmed what already had been almost a certainty--that the gun installations operated automatically. They seemed remarkably feeble weapons for a station of that size. The Devagas apparently had had sense enough not to give the plasmoid every advantage.
The Commissioner plunked a test shot next into one of the black protuberances. A small fiery crater appeared. It darkened quickly again. Out of the biggest opening, down near what would have been the foot of the stump if it had been a stump, something, long, red and wormlike wriggled rapidly. It flowed up over the structure's surface to the damaged point and thrust the tip of its front end into the crater. Black material began to flow from the tip. The plasmoid moved its front end back and forth across the damaged area. Others of the same kind came out and joined it. The crater began to fill out.
They hauled away a little and surfaced. Normal space looked clean, beautiful, homelike, calmly shining. None of them except Lyad had slept for over twenty hours. "What do you think?" the Commissioner asked.
They discussed what they had seen in subdued voices. Nobody had a plan. They agreed that one thing they could be sure of was that the Vishni Fleet people and any other human beings who might have been on the station when it was turned over to the king plasmoid were no longer alive. Unless, of course, something had been done to them much more drastic than had happened to the Aurora's crew. The ship had passed by the biggest opening, like a low wide black mouth, close enough to make out that it extended far back into the original station's interior. The station was open and airless as Harvest Moon had been before the humans got there.
"Some of those things down there," the Commissioner said, "had attachments that would crack any suit wide open. A lot of them are big, and a lot of them are fast. Once we were inside, we'd have no maneuverability to speak of. If the termites didn't get to us before we got inside. Suits won't do it here." He was a gambler, and a gambler doesn't buck impossible odds.
"What could you do with the guns?" Trigger asked.
"Not too much. They're not meant to take down a fortress. Scratching around on the surface with them would just mark the thing up. We can widen that opening by quite a bit, and once it's widened, I can flip in the bomb. But it would be just blind luck if we nailed the one we're after that way. With a dozen bombs we could break up the station. But we don't have them."
They nodded thoughtfully.
"The worst part of that," he went on, "is that it would be completely obvious. The Council's right when it worries about fumbles here. Tranest and the Devagas know the thing is in there. If the Federation can't produce it, both those outfits have the Council over a barrel. Or we could be setting the Hub up for fifty years of fighting among the member worlds, sometime in the next few hours."
Mantelish and Trigger nodded again. More thoughtfully.
"Nevertheless--" Mantelish began suddenly. He checked himself.
"Well, you're right," the Commissioner said. "That stuff down there just can't be turned loose, that's all! The thing's still only experimenting. We don't know what it's going to wind up with. So I guess we'll be trying the guns and the bomb finally, and then see what else we can do.... Now look, we've got--what is it?--nine
or ten hours left. The first of the boys are pretty sure to come helling in around then. Or maybe something's happened we don't know about, and they'll be here in thirty minutes. We can't tell. But I'm in favor of knocking off now and just grabbing a couple of hours' sleep. Then we'll get our brains together again. Maybe by then somebody has come up with something like an idea. What do you say?"
"Where," Mantelish said, "is the ship going to be while we're sleeping?"
"Subspace," said the Commissioner. He saw their expressions. "Don't worry! I'll put her on a wide orbit and I'll stick out every alarm on board. I'll also sleep in the control chair. But in case somebody gets here early, we've got to be around to tell them about that space termite trick."
* * * * *
Trigger hadn't expected she would be able to sleep, not where they were. But afterwards she couldn't even remember getting stretched out all the way on the bunk.
She woke up less than an hour later, feeling very uncomfortable. Repulsive had been talking to her.
She sat up and looked around the dark cabin with frightened eyes. After a moment, she got out of the bunk and went up the passage toward the lounge and the control section.
Holati Tate was lying slumped back in his chair, eyes closed, breathing slowly and evenly. Trigger put out a hand to touch his shoulder and then drew it back. She glanced up for a moment at the plasmoid station in the screen, seeming to turn slowly as they went orbiting by it. She noticed that one of the space flares they'd planted there had gone out, or else it had been plucked away by a passing twister's touch. She looked away quickly again, turned and went restlessly back through the lounge, and up the passage, toward the cabins. She went by the two suits of space armor at the lock without looking at them. She opened the door to Mantelish's cabin and looked inside. The professor lay sprawled across the bunk in his clothes, breathing slowly and regularly.
Trigger closed his door again. Lyad might be wakeful, she thought. She crossed the passage and unlocked the door to the Ermetyne's cabin. The lights in the cabin were on, but Lyad also lay there placidly asleep, her face relaxed and young looking.