by Andre Norton
“Hey! The armory door’s open!”
“So what? That place is off limits to everybody but the C.O.”
“Blick won’t care. Let’s fight in there. There should be more room.”
Kurt quickly scanned the hall for a safe hiding place. At the far end stood what looked like a great bronze statue, its burnished surface gleaming dimly in the moonlight. As the door swung open behind him, he slipped cautiously through the shadows until he reached it. It looked like a coffin with feet, but to one side of it there was a dark pool of shadow. He slipped into it and pressed himself close against the cold metal. As he did so his hipbone pressed against a slight protrusion and with a slight clicking sound, a hanged middle section of the metallic figure swung open, exposing a dark cavity. The thing was hollow!
Kurt had a sudden idea. “Even if they do come down here,” he thought, “they’d never think of looking inside this thing!” With some difficulty he wiggled inside and pulled the hatch shut after him. There were legs to the thing—his own fit snugly into them—but no arms.
The two officers strode out of the shadows at the other end of the hall. They stopped in the center of the armory and faced each other like fighting cocks. Kurt gave a sigh of relief. It looked as if he were safe for the moment.
There was a sudden wicked glitter of moonlight on axheads as their weapons leaped into their hands. They stood frozen for a moment in a murderous tableau and then the captain’s ax hummed toward his opponent’s head in a vicious slash. There was a shower of sparks as the major parried and then with a quick wrist twist sent his own weapon looping down toward the captain’s midriff. The other pulled his ax down to ward off the blow but he was only partially successful. The keen obsidian edge raked his ribs and blood dripped darkly in the moonlight.
As Kurt watched intently he began to feel the first faint stirrings of claustrophobia. The Imperial designers had planned their battle armor for efficiency rather than comfort and Kurt felt as if he were locked away in a cramped dark closet. His malaise wasn’t helped by a sudden realization that when the men left they might very well lock the door behind them. His decision to change his hiding place was hastened when a bank of dark clouds swept across the face of the moon. The flood of light that poured down through the skylight suddenly dimmed until Kurt could barely make out the pirouetting forms of the two officers who were fighting in the center of the hall.
This was his chance. If he could slip down the darkened side of the hall before the moon lighted up the hall again, he might be able to slip out of the hall unobserved. He pushed against the closed hatch through which he entered. It refused to open. A feeling of trapped panic started to roll over him but he fought it back. “There must be some way to open this thing from the inside,” he thought.
As his fingers wandered over the dark interior of the suit looking for a release lever, they encountered a bank of keys set just below his midriff. He pressed one experimentally. A quiet hum filled the armor and suddenly a feeling of weightlessness came over him. He stiffened in fright. As he did so one of his steel shod feet pushed lightly backwards against the floor. That was enough. Slowly, like a child’s balloon caught in a light draft, he drifted toward the center of the hall. He struggled violently but since he was now several inches above the floor and rising slowly it did him no good.
The fight was progressing splendidly. Both men were master ax-men and in spite of being slightly drunk were putting on a brilliant exhibition. Each was bleeding from a dozen minor slashes but neither had been seriously axed as yet. Their flashing strokes and counters were masterful, so masterful that Kurt slowly forgot his increasingly awkward situation as he became more and more absorbed in the fight before him. The blond captain was slightly the better axman but the major compensated for it by occasionally whistling in cuts that to Kurt’s experienced eye seemed perilously close to fouls. He grew steadily more partisan in his feelings until one particularly unscrupulous attempt broke down his restraint altogether.
“Pull down your guard!” he screamed to the captain. “He’s trying to cut you below the belt!” His voice reverberated within the battle suit and boomed out with strange metallic overtones.
Both men whirled in the direction of the sound. They could see nothing for a moment and then the major caught sight of the strange menacing figure looming above him in the murky darkness.
Dropping his ax he dashed frantically toward the exit shrieking: “It’s the Inspector Generali”
The captain’s reflexes were a second slower. Before he could take off Kurt poked his head out of the open face port and shouted down, “It’s only me, Dixon! Get me out of here, will you?”
The captain stared up at him goggle-eyed. “What kind of a contraption is that?” he demanded. “And what are you doing in it?” Kurt by now was floating a good ten feet off the floor. He had visions of spending the night on the ceiling and he wasn’t happy about it. “Get me down now,” he pleaded. “We can talk after I get out of this thing.”
The captain gave a leap upwards and tried to grab Kurt’s ankles. His jump was short and his outstretched fingers gave the weightless armor a slight shove that sent it bobbing up another three feet. He cocked his head back and called up to Kurt, “Can’t reach you now. We’ll have to try something else. How did you get into that thing in the first place?”
“The middle section is hinged,” said Kurt. “When I pulled it shut it clicked.”
“Well, unclick it!”
“I tried that. That’s why I’m up here now.”
“Try again,” said the man on the floor. “If you can open the hatch, you can drop down and I’ll catch you.”
“Here I come!” said Kurt, his fingers selecting a stud at random. He pushed. There was a terrible blast of flame from the shoulder jets and he screamed skywards on a pillar of fire. A microsecond later he reached the skylight. Something had to give. It did!
At fifteen thousand feet the air pressure dropped to the point where the automatics took over and the face plate clicked shut. Kurt didn’t notice that. He was out like a light. At thirty thousand feet the heaters cut in. Forty seconds later he was in free space. Things could have been worse though, he still had air for two hours—
X
Flight Officer Ozaki was taking a cat nap when the alarm on the radiation detector went off. Dashing the sleep out of his eyes, he slipped rapidly into the control seat and cut off the gong. His fingers danced over the controls in a blur of movement. Swiftly the vision screen shifted until the little green dot that indicated a source of radiant energy was firmly centered. Next he switched on the pulse analyzer and watched carefully as it broke down the incoming signal into components and sent them surging across the scope in the form of sharp-toothed sine waves. There was an odd peak to them, a strength and sharpness that he hadn’t seen before.
“Doesn’t look familiar,” he muttered to himself, “but I’d better check to make sure.”
He punched the comparison button and while the analyzer methodically began to check the incoming trace against the known patterns stored up in its compact little memory bank, he turned back to the vision screen. He switched on high magnification and the system rushed toward him. It expanded from a single pin point of light into a distinct planetary system. At its center a giant dying sun expanded on the plate like a malignant red eye. As he watched, the green dot moved appreciably, a thin red line stretching out behind it to indicate its course from point of first detection. Ozaki’s fingers moved over the controls and a broken line of white light came into being on the screen. With careful adjustments he moved it up toward the green track left by the crawling red dot. When he had an exact overlay, he carefully moved the line back along the course that the energy emitter had followed prior to detection.
Ozaki was tense. It looked as if he might have something. He gave a sudden whoop of excitement as the broken white line intersected the orange dot of a planetary mass. A vision of the promised thirty-day leave and six months’ extra p
ay danced before his eyes as he waited for the pulse analyzer to clear.
“Home!” he thought ecstatically. “Home and unplugged plumbing!”
With a final whir of relays the analyzer clucked like a contented chicken and dropped an identity card out of its emission slot. Ozaki grabbed it and scanned it eagerly. At the top was printed in red, “Identity Unknown,” and below in smaller letters, “Suggest check of trace pattern on base analyzer.” He gave a sudden whistle as his eyes caught the energy utilization index. 927! That was fifty points higher than it had any right to be. The best tech in the Protectorate considered himself lucky if he could tune a propulsion unit so that it delivered a thrust of forty-five per cent of rated maximum. Whatever was out there was hot! Too hot for one man to handle alone. With quick decision he punched the transmission key of his space communicator and sent a call winging back to War Base Three.
XI
Commander Krogson stormed up and down his office in a frenzy of impatience.
“It shouldn’t be more than another fifteen minutes, sir,” said Schninkle.
Krogson snorted. “That’s what you said an hour ago! What’s the matter with those people down there? I want the identity of that ship and I want it now.”
“It’s not Identification’s fault,” explained the other. “The big analyzer is in pretty bad shape and it keeps jamming. They’re afraid that if they take it apart they won’t be able to get it back together again.”
The next two hours saw Krogson’s blood pressure steadily rising toward the explosion point. Twice he ordered the whole identification section transferred to a labor battalion and twice he had to rescind the command when Schninkle pointed out that scrapings from the bottom of the barrel were better than nothing at all. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick when word finally came through.
“Identification, sir,” said a hesitant voice on the intercom.
“Well?” demanded the commander.
“The analyzer says—” The voice hesitated again.
“The analyzer says what?” shouted Krogson in a fury of impatience.
“The analyzer says that the trace pattern is that of one of the old Imperial drive units.”
“That’s impossible!” sputtered the commander. “The last Imperial base was smashed five hundred years ago. What of their equipment was salvaged has long since been worn out and tossed on the scrap heap. The machine must be wrong!”
“Not this time,” said the voice. “We checked the memory bank manually and there’s no mistake. It’s an Imperial all right. Nobody can produce a drive unit like that these days.”
Commander Krogson leaned back in his chair, his eyes veiled in deep thought. “Schninkle,” he said finally, thinking out loud, “I’ve got a hunch that maybe we’ve stumbled on something big. Maybe the Lord Protector is right about there being a plot to knock him over, but maybe he’s wrong about who’s trying to do it. What if all these centuries since the Empire collapsed a group of Imperials have been hiding out waiting for their chance?”
Schninkle digested the idea for a moment. “It could be,” he said slowly. “If there is such a group, they couldn’t pick a better time than now to strike; the Protectorate is so wobbly that it wouldn’t take much of a shove to topple it over.”
The more he thought about it, the more sense the idea made to Krogson. Once he felt a fleeting temptation to hush up the whole thing. If there were Imperials and they did take over, maybe they would put an end to the frenzied rat race that was slowly ruining the galaxy—a race that sooner or later entangled every competent man in the great web of intrigue and power politics that stretched through the Protectorate and forced him in self-defense to keep clawing his way toward the top of the heap.
Regretfully he dismissed the idea. This was a matter of his own neck, here and now!
“It’s a big IF, Schninkle,” he said, “but if I’ve guessed right we’ve bailed ourselves out. Get hold of that scout and find out his position.”
Schninkle scooted out of the door. A few minutes later he dashed back in. “I’ve just contacted the scout!” he said excitedly. “He’s closed in on the power source and it isn’t a ship after all. It’s a man in space armor! The drive unit is cut off and it’s heading out of the system at fifteen hundred per. The pilot is standing by for instructions.”
“Tell him to intercept and capture!” Schninkle started out of the office. “Wait a second; what’s the scout’s position?”
Schninkle’s face fell. “He doesn’t quite know, sir.”
“He what?” demanded the commander.
“He doesn’t quite know,” repeated the little man. “His astrocomputer went haywire six hours out of base.”
“Just our luck!” swore Krogson. “Well tell him to leave his transmitter on. We’ll ride in on his beam. Better call the sector commander while you’re at it and tell him what’s happened.”
“Beg pardon, commander,” said Schninkle, “but I wouldn’t advise it.”
“Why not?” asked Krogson.
“You’re next in line to be sector commander, aren’t you, sir?”
“I guess so,” said the commander.
“If this pans out you’ll be in a position to knock him over and grab his job, won’t you?” asked Schninkle slyly.
“Could be,” admitted Krogson in a tired voice. “Not because I want to, though—but because I have to. I’m not as young as I once was and the boys below are pushing pretty hard. It’s either up or out—and out is always feet first.”
“Put yourself in the sector commander’s shoes for a minute,” suggested the little man. “What would you do if a war base commander came through with news of a possible Imperial base?”
A look of grim comprehension came over Krogson’s face. “Of course! I’d ground the commander’s ships and send out my own fleet. I must be slipping; I should have thought of that at once!”
“On the other hand,” said Schninkle, “you might call him and request permission to conduct routine maneuvers. He’ll approve as a matter of course and you’ll have an excuse for taking out the full fleet. Once in deep space you can slap on radio silence and set course for the scout. If there is an Imperial base out there, nobody will know anything about it until it’s blasted. I’ll stay back here and keep my eyes on things for you.”
Commander Krogson grinned. “Schninkle, it’s a pleasure to have you in my command. How would you like me to make you Devoted Servant of the Lord Protector, Eighth Class? It carries an extra shoe ration coupon!”
“If it’s all the same with you,” said Schninkle, “I’d just as soon have Saturday afternoons off.”
XII
As Kurt struggled up out of the darkness, he could hear a gong sounding in the faint distance. Bong! Bong! BONG! It grew nearer and louder. He shook his head painfully and groaned. There was light from some place beating against his eyelids. Opening them was too much effort. He was in some sort of a bunk. He could feel that.
But the gong. He lay there concentrating on it. Slowly he began to realize that the beat didn’t come from outside. It was his head. It felt swollen and sore and each pulse of his heart sent a hammer thud through it.
One by one his senses began to return to normal. As his nose reassumed its normal acuteness it began to quiver. There was a strange scent in the air, an unpleasant sickening scent as of—he chased the scent down his aching memory channels until he finally had it cornered—rotting fish. With that to anchor on he slowly began to reconstruct reality. He had been floating high above the floor in the armory and the captain had been trying to get him down. Then he had pushed a button. There had been a microsecond of tremendous acceleration and then a horrendous crash. That must have been the skylight. After the crash was darkness, then the gongs, and now fish—dead and rotting fish.
“I must be alive,” he decided. “Imperial Headquarters would never smell like this!”
He groaned and slowly opened one eye. Wherever he was he hadn’t been there before. He
opened the other eye. He was in a room. A room with a curved ceiling and curving walls. Slowly, with infinite care, he hung his head over the side of the bunk. Below him in a form-fitting chair before a bank of instruments sat a small man with yellow skin and blue-black hair. Kurt coughed. The man looked up. Kurt asked the obvious question.
“Where am I?”
“I’m not permitted to give you any information,” said the small man. His speech had an odd slurred quality to Kurt’s ear.
“Something stinks!” said Kurt.
“It sure does,” said the small man gloomily. “It must be worse for you. I’m used to it.”
Kurt surveyed the cabin with interest. There were a lot of gadgets tucked away here and there that looked familiar. They were like the things he had worked on in Tech School except that they were cruder and simpler. They looked as if they had been put together by an eight-year-old recruit who was doing his first trial assembly. He decided to make another stab at establishing some sort of communication with the little man.
“How come you have everything in one room? We always used to keep different things in different shops.”
“No comment,” said Ozaki.
Kurt had a feeling he was butting his head against a stone wall. He decided to make one more try.
“I give up,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “where’d you hide it?”
“Hide what?” asked the little man.
“The fish,” said Kurt.
“No comment.”
“Why not?” asked Kurt.
“Because there isn’t anything that can be done about it,” said Ozaki. “It’s the air conditioner. Something’s haywire inside.”
“What’s an air conditioner?” asked Kurt.