The Neutral Stars

by Dan Morgan;John Kippax

  He would never allow her to do that to him. But for tonight, just for tonight, he would taste all the dangerous fruit she offered. He grabbed for her, intent on asserting his masculine role, but her smooth flesh slipped from under his fingers as the top half of her body moved upright. She looked down at him, a black silhouette with glowing eyes.

  "Lie still!" she commanded. "This time I'll show you some real action."

  The sound was immediately familiar, an insistent, penetrating beep. . .beep. . .beep. . .beep. . going on and on, nagging, demanding his attention unconditionally. Habit and discipline were so deeply ingrained that he did the only thing possible for him. Sliding from beneath her at the very moment of penetration, he bounded off the bed and fumbled in the breast pocket of his civilian casual jacket.

  The beeping stopped as he pressed the button on his personal communicator and said: "Commander Bruce here—yes?"

  "Triple A Emergency orders just received. Vee Twelve to lift off for Orphelin system at earliest." The voice was that of Helen Lindstrom, and even through the tiny speaker of the communicator he felt that he could detect the cold disapproval of her tone.

  "Right! How do I get back?" he snapped.

  "Pursuit copter is on its way from Tenerife—ETA five minutes from now."

  "Good I I'll be waiting," he said. "Anything else?"

  "Make a direct scrambled call to President Fong immediately on your return."

  "Will do. Bruce—out." He thrust the communicator back into the jacket pocket, then turned to find himself facing Elsa's glowing eyes. .

  She flung herself at him, using nails, teeth, and all the surprising strength of her small body to cleave him to her.

  "You kept me waiting, you bastard!" She moaned and sobbed, writhing against him. "Come on! Now! Now!"

  "No, Elsa," he said firmly, grasping hold of her shoulders and pushing her away from him. "You heard the communicator. That copter will be here soon and I don't want to keep it waiting."

  "The hell with that!" she screamed. "What difference is a few minutes going to make? We've got some unfinished business, remember?"

  "I'm sorry," he said, "but that's the way it has to be. Now, will you let me put my clothes on?"

  She tore herself from his grasp and backed away, snarling and spitting like a wildcat. "That Scandinavian cow Lindstrom! This was her idea, wasn't it? Anything to stop her darling commander from getting himself laid by someone else."

  "Now you know that is complete nonsense," he said, slipping into his trousers. "She would hardly be likely to invent a Triple A Emergency just to get me out of your bed—even if she gave a damn, which I seriously doubt" He reached across to the light-switch. The rosy, concealed lighting of the ceiling flicked on.

  Elsa stood there, her shining naked body vibrating with tension, the image of her father suddenly appearing, ugly and vulpine, in her face.

  "You bastard! You bloody tin-soldier, Corps-loving bastard! Who needs you? You couldn't fuck your way out of a paper bag! Get the hell out of my bedroom!"

  Chapter Seventeen

  Conscience is a cur that will let you get past it but that you cannot keep from barking.

  ANON

  "Sorry to break in on your little vacation, Bruce," said Henry Fong. "But we had a report in from Excelsior a couple of hours ago that their colony on Orphelin Three has been off the air since the day before yesterday.'

  "And they only just decided to tell us?" Bruce said, staring at the smooth, unruffled features of the President. "Don't they know the drill?"

  "Niebohr made some excuse about hanging on in the hope that the hiatus was merely due to a technical fault. He's pretty involved with the Orphelin thing, and you know he doesn't like to call in the Corps if he can possibly avoid it."

  "On principle, or for some particular reason in this case?" Bruce said.

  "Possibly both," Fong replied unhelpfully. "How long will it take you to get there?"

  Brace shrugged. "A hundred and forty-five hours, more or less."

  "Make it a hundred and forty," Fong said. "We may have another Kepler III type incident on our hands."

  "You suspect Kilroy activity?"

  "It is always a possibility," Fong said. "That's why Im sending you and Vee Twelve. You have the experience."

  "And the record of always arriving too late," said Bruce with a touch of bitterness. "If this is a Kilroy operation they'll be away to hell and gone by now— three, four days. . . They don't usually sit around to gloat, you know."

  "I'm well aware of that," Fong said blandly. "But there may be survivors, and there's always a chance you might learn something."

  "Like just how impotent we are? Mr. President, get me that Warp Drive and I'll really deliver you some facts—maybe even a bunch of Kilroy pelts."

  "We're working on it," said Fong.

  "And if I do find that the whole thing is a simple communications failure?"

  "Then we shall all be truly thankful," Fong said. "But whatever you find, Commander Bruce, you will report directly to me. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, Mr. President."

  "Then the blessing of the Supreme Being be with you, Commander. . .and keep your powder dry."

  Fong's image faded, and Bruce turned from the blank screen to Helen Lindstrom, who had been standing nearby during the conversation.

  "If I wasn't sure that it was impossible, I'd guess that Fong knows more about this operation than he's telling," he said.

  "Henry Fong always knows more than he's telling,".

  she said, her blue eyes scrutinizing him critically. "I'd get Maseba to fix me some shots, if I were you. You look like hell."

  "And you're out of line, Commander," snapped Bruce. "What's the ready situation?"

  "Liftoff in. . ." she glanced at the wall clock, ". . .eight minutes, fifty seconds from now."

  "Very good, Commander. You take it from the bridge. I'll join you in a couple of minutes."

  "Yessir," said Lindstrom, turning to leave. She paused in the doorway, looking back at him, a half-smile on her handsome features. "I still say you look like hell. I think maybe I saved your life with that call. You're getting kind of old for marathon shagging."

  "OUT!" growled Bruce.

  The scout from Venturer Twelve leaned as hard on its antigravs as was permissible. Lieutenant (M) Leela De Witt was with Lindstrom as they descended in a shallow spiral. Lindstrom watched the dire, interminable stretches of ruin below them; De Witt was concerned with the radiation hazards coming from the horrid black scab that once had been a happy, prosperous planet.

  Lindstrom did not resent the fact that she had been sent down, rather than a man, to head the reconnaissance team. In the Corps, there were only officers; on duty, there was no difference. But she knew that the sense of outrage she felt came from her being a woman; she resented the waste of life.

  "Are we going to get down safely?" she asked.

  "If we don't stay on surface more than one hour Earth, and if everyone's suit is one hundred percent, and if no one does anything stupid, yes."

  Lindstrom began to zip up the double closures of the rough-textured a/r suit. "It can get through this?"

  "I'm not certain, so I'm on the safe side. If I did anything else, George Maseba would carve me up for the spare-parts." When she smiled, her fragile Hindu beauty showed cheerfully.

  "All personnel zip and check suits," Lindstrom ordered. She peered down at the world whose surface was like a black, evil ghost of its former self. "P.O. Ashnagabi, put us down on the big oval—the sports ground."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  At five meters, the charred dust stirred under the antigravs' pressure. Then they touched down. Lindstrom gave her final orders. "Normal use of lock. Don't hurry. You all have your personal corns, and a map. Check needlers; you may have to kill some mad wreck who survived. Leading Crewman Griffiths, switch on each a/g lift separately before you push it outboard. If anyone is fool enough to stand in front of the lift slot, I'll fine him a month'
s pay, if he lives. Any questions?"

  Her face was impassive, but she thought: What am I trying to do? Copy Tom Bruce?

  No one gave any answers.

  Brace's personal conviction was that the Kilroys were long gone. Nevertheless, the ship, orbiting Orphelin III, was and remained at full battle alert. Whatever the fire-power ratio was with that of the enemy, he could not take chances, and therefore he had avoided taking the ship down to surface, where she would be a sitting duck for any potential enemy. Thus, he was forced to wait, scowling at his main screen and speculating on the carbonized destruction that seemed to obliterate the entire continental mass and sully the planet's predominantly blue image.

  "Well?" he demanded when Lindstrom's face at last appeared on the screen.

  She gazed at him for a moment, her features stiff, as if frozen with the horror of what she had seen. "It's bad," she said at last. The words seemed to issue unwilling from her mouth. "We landed on the outskirts of what used to be Josiahtown. There's nothing left standing, just a flattened plain of charred rubble. I've never seen anything like it."

  "Survivors?" barked Bruce.

  "Not a chance," Lindstrom said. "If anybody had lived through the initial blast, the radioactivity would have gotten them by now. I've sent parties out to search the surface, but even wearing heavy-duty suits they won't be able to do more than a fifty-minute tour. In any case, I'm pretty sure that it's hopeless." Her eyes stared at him, pleading for some comfort. "Over two hundred and fifty thousand people lived here, Tom. Two hundred thousand—"

  "And the other towns?" Bruce pursued with deliberate directness, knowing that it would be unwise to allow her to dwell on her present train of thought. Helen was a good—a first class—officer, but there were times when her female sensitivity could be a disadvantage.

  "The copters are on their way now, to check, but from what we saw on the way down I don't think the outlook for them will be any better. It looks like a typical Kilroy mass-extermination job."

  Bruce nodded. "What about the islands?"

  "I'm going to take a look at them as soon as we've done a complete check of the continental land mass," Lindstrom said. "According to briefing, this is where the people were, so if there are any survivors it's essential that we lose no time in getting to them. Do you agree?"

  "Yes, of course," Bruce said. "Rescue of survivors must have top priority, although I don't suppose the poor devils will be able to tell us a great deal. They'll probably have less idea than we have already of just what hit them."

  She was looking at him again, the shocked rigidity creeping back into her features. 'Tom, why would they do it? The Kilroys, I mean—"

  "For God's sake, woman! Pull yourself together!" snapped Bruce. "How can we possibly make any sense in guessing their reasons? Maybe Orphelin Three was the site of another one of their experiments that went wrong—like Kepler and those things on Minos IV. Or maybe they just had some new weapon they wanted to test. Forget about that kind of conjecture. Your job is to gather all the available information."

  "Yes, sir," she said, and he was pleased to see the animation of anger in her features. That way she would work better and efficiently, with less time for dangerous introspection.

  "Carry on, Commander Lindstrom!" he ordered, breaking the connection.

  Now it was a return to the waiting game. There was absolutely nothing he could do until Helen's mission was completed. Then he would be able to send his preliminary report to Fong back on Earth and request further orders, the nature of which he could already guess. What else could they be but instructions to return to base? There was nothing he could do here in the Orphelin system—the Kilroys had already moved on, about their unguessable business. He rose from his chair and began to walk away, but before he had reached the door the sudden clangor of the ship's alarm system burst into life.

  The banshee howling of the sirens damped down almost immediately, to be superseded by the urgent voice of Lieutenant Maranne, the radar officer in charge of detection units.

  "UFO approaching at estimated speed three-quarters light, bearing 360, coordinates 67C by 28D.

  "Hear this I Hear this! UFO approaching at bearing 195, coordinates 67C by 28D—estimated speed point O Seven Light. Alert all gunnery and missile systems! Hear this! Hear this! UFO approaching at bearing. . ."

  Bruce hurried along the corridor in the direction of Operations Control at a run, muttering a prayer that this time at least he might get a chance to strike back at the will-o-the-wisp enemy.

  The air in Operations Control seemed to crackle with tension as all the duty personnel sat unnaturally silent at their posts. Maranne, a coffee-skinned beauty with short-cropped black hair close to her head like a furry cap, was at her station on the main dais, overlooking the rest of the setup. Bruce hurried up to join her.

  "What have you got?" he demanded.

  She pointed down into the spherical simulator with a light-pencil, indicating the slow-moving, bright red blip.

  "For the moment he's just Charlie Nobody," she said tersely. "We're still waiting for a reply to our identification request."

  Bruce looked across at the main information display. "And your Charlie will be well in range in three and a half minutes." He dropped into the chair beside her and thumbed a button. The face of Lee Hoon

  Hock, chief gunnery officer, appeared in one of his monitor screens.

  "Sir?"

  "Lee, I want you to launch a clutch of Engelschafts—now!"

  "You've identified the UFO as alien?"

  "No—nothing through yet"

  "But, sir—"

  Bruce's face darkened. "Lieutenant, I am not going to miss this opportunity; shoot!"

  "Yes, sir." Lee's startled face disappeared from the screen to reappear again less than thirty seconds later. "Missiles launched, sir."

  Bruce grunted an acknowledgment and swung his chair to look down into the simulator. A bright green line, which soon separated into six individual threads, began to crawl out from the image of V 12, heading in the direction of the UFO.

  "Acknowledgment coming in now," said Maranne's urgent voice at his elbow.

  He turned his chair and sat waiting impatiently through the brief time-lag while the ship's communications computor re-recorded the message and eliminated the Doppler distortion.

  All heads in the room turned, attention riveted, as the main screen burst into life to reveal the head and shoulders of a man in the blue uniform of a merchant spacer.

  "Excelsior Corporation freighter Medusa, ex-Earth, Fleet Director Robert Prince commanding. Repeat, identification: Excelsior Corporation freighter. . ."

  "Blast!" growled Bruce, punching his console again.

  The face of Lee appeared.

  "Destruct missiles!" ordered Bruce.

  "Yes, sir."

  The right-hand monitor screen flared into brief and brilliant light as three million credits' worth of missiles exploded in empty space.

  "Sound stand-down," Bruce said to Maranne. "And take Medusa off the main screen. Ill talk to them direct."

  The main screen went blank, and the face of the Medusa operator appeared on Bruce's central monitor.

  "Commander Bruce, Corps ship Venturer Twelve here—get me Commander Prince."

  "Tom, you bellicose bastard! You nearly blew my arse off!" said Prince a moment later. "What's going on?"

  "Kilroy strike on Orphelin Three," Bruce said tersely.

  "Bad?"

  "Prelim reports indicate the entire colony wiped out."

  "My God!" exclaimed Prince, his thinly handsome face reflecting his consternation. "Are you sure?"

  "Lindstrom's still down there searching," Bruce said, "but I can't give you much hope. Everything on the main land mass is flattened, for sure."

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  "Better leave it to Lindstrom, for the time being at least—she's got the equipment to cope."

  "Poppa Niebohr's going to blow his skull over this one," Pri
nce said. "Orphelin Three was his special baby. He had a man named MacGuinness doing a thorough fishery survey. What about the islands, by the way?"

  Bruce shrugged. "As far as we can see from here they're untouched. But that doesn't help a lot, does it? All the population was on the main continent."

  "Well, yes," said Prince. "But MacGuinness and whoever he has with him might still be down there among the islands, if the destruction didn't reach that far."

  "I'll have Lindstrom make a thorough check when she's finished on Tantaron," Bruce said. "Now how about you? What are you doing around Orphelin?"

  "Special assignment from Poppa," Prince said. "I dropped off a team of geologists and engineers at Orphelin Four on the way out and then headed for Balomain. When I heard the all-channels emergency call I decided to turn back."

  'In that case you must have had a very close call," Bruce said. "The alien attack took place only a few hours after you left the Orphelin system. About this team of yours—have you contacted them yet?"

  "No. With your permission I'd like to carry on over to Four and pick them up."

  "Of course," said Bruce. "They may be able to give us some lead on the Kilroys."

  Prince nodded. "I doubt it, but I'll come over and match orbits with you once we've got them safely aboard. Have you reported back to Earth yet?"

  "No. I'm waiting for Lindstrom's full report before doing that," said Bruce, then added, "I'd appreciate it if you didn't send anything either, for the time being. We've got to get our facts right on this thing."

  "Naturally," said Prince. "See you in a few hours' time. . . By the way, how was Elsa when you left?"

  Bruce had a sudden vision of dark, oiled limbs and a once-attractive face distorted by hate. "Elsa. . . ? Oh, she was fine. See you." He switched off abruptly, turning away from the screen in a spasm of self-disgust That whoring bitch! How could he ever have allowed her to lure him into betraying a straight, honest guy like Prince? He suddenly felt dirty.

  "I'll be in my cabin when Lindstrom calls," he said to Maranne as he rose to his feet. "Put her through to me there, will you?"