by Jane Palmer
CHAPTER 7
With a clunk and a squeaking, screeching sound that set the Mott’s tusks on edge, Kulp released the robot carrying the hundred and tenth beacon. As the Mott commander had shown little trust in Kulp by demanding to watch the vital exercise, Kulp was getting his own back by bringing the squeaking down to such a fine pitch that the Mott sensed he would soon become a dentist’s nightmare.
‘Do you have to do that?’ he snapped in exasperation after the one hundred and twentieth beacon had been released. ‘I’m pretty sure you could have eliminated that noise long before now,’ knowing that there were 880 to go.
‘Time to adjust such a minor problem would be money,’ Kulp reminded him, ‘and I’m sure a little thing like that is not going to distress a Mott commander who has been in the thick of the most bloody confrontations seen on this side of the galaxy.’
There was no reply to that, so the Mott just squinted his eye in pique and backed away from the infernal equipment emitting the tooth-shattering sound. He also began to feel nauseous because of the rich atmosphere Jannu, Kulp and Tolt had saturated their ship with. Although all life forms had been compelled to adapt to one standard atmosphere, the many variations on it could cause great discomfort to those unused to them. The Mott stamped each of his four feet in turn as he realised it would be some while before he was released from their doleful company. If he had the choice, he would have preferred chasing the backward tribes on some dingy little planet on the edge of nowhere with a flash blaster. Unfortunately for him, those balmy days of carefree pleasures were over. Most of the evolving tribes stopped evolving to have flash blasters of their own.
The robot carrying the two hundred and twenty-fifth beacon juddered into its prearranged piece of space from the faulty evacuation chute below them.
Kulp announced with a degree of disappointment in his voice, ‘That’s all for this quarter. We’ll have to go down to the planet to install the next terminal.’
‘Need any help?’ Jannu asked innocently.
He nearly fell through the floor when Kulp replied, ‘Yes. You and Tolt as well. I don’t see why I should do all the work,’ then marched out of the control room.
Jannu flashed Tolt a quick shrug of the shoulders. Tolt was just as mystified. Could it be that there was a cure for the pink dye after all, or that the story about Kulp’s dealing with the Torran, Dax, had been exaggerated? They had their reply as the intercom snapped on from the dispatch bays.
‘She’s liable to be unstable. Put some suits on,’ ordered Kulp.
‘Damn,’ hissed Jannu, much to the bewilderment of the Mott, whose misgivings, having peeped over the parapet, were now putting on battle armour.
As it was in a gravitational field, a robot was not thought necessary to hold the beacon still on the planet’s surface, though blasting a hole for it to sit in was more difficult than they had anticipated. The planet was sensitive to every pinprick and immediately filled in the gaps with as much speed as they could be made. Kulp decided to line the next hole with a force field. This seemed to do the trick. Sliding the beacon down a beam from the freighter’s evacuation chute was by comparison a simple matter. That only left them to arm it to transmit its devastating signal.
‘You sure it’s not going to be too much for the planet’s crust?’ Jannu asked cautiously.
‘Of course not,’ snapped Kulp. ‘Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?’
‘Of course I do. It’s just that we’d like to know once in a while. How can you be so sure your space-distort net won’t kill the atmosphere and everything growing here?’
‘I want the Mott to think that’s the danger, you idiot. What do you think they would do if they believed the system was foolproof? What would our lives be worth if they could operate it without us?’
‘You really think the Mott would double-cross us then?’ Tolt asked with an innocence that didn’t escape the scheming Kulp.
‘Wouldn’t we double-cross them if we had the chance?’
‘That’s different,’ protested Tolt. ‘We’re prettier than they are.’
Quite convinced his partner’s brain was becoming too soggy to fit the skull the genetic engineers had designed, Kulp wondered whether the effort he had made a short while before to deal with his companions had been worth the trouble. He had lowered himself to repeat the use of one of his inventions, adapted and increased its strength tenfold, then programmed a minute robot with all the stealth of a common thief to install it. Now it seemed that his two victims were too dense to appreciate the beauty of the ignominy soon to be unleashed on them. Oh, how Kulp longed for an adversary worthy of his superior mettle.
Taking care not to let them wander out of the view of his polarised visor, Kulp moved off to check the signal’s bearing.
A tinkling shower of gravel and crystals cascaded down a cliff-face and onto the broad leaves of the vigorously growing trees below. The ground heaved and through the ancient trunks a whisper permeated the air.
‘Who are these creatures?’ it asked. ‘They are not the ones I touched...’
On the other side of the planet, the tide of one of the small seas suddenly flowed up its shore to flood a field of tall lilies. The one Moosevan had spoken to was kind. The other, who could only feel, disturbed her usual tranquillity. The planet dweller’s thoughts were saturated with the longing to touch him again. So she searched. She parted the forests with an invisible comb and turned over shifting sands, still unable to find the object of her fascination. Although she sensed the danger of the three companions with their pricking, irritating machine, the interest of her mighty being remained absorbed elsewhere.
Ice floes were shaken free from the poles and glaciers pushed leisurely on their ways over ground that had never seen ice before. The three intruders sensed the restless changes and still carried on with their task, trying not to be distracted by the planet’s potentially destructive power.
Moosevan did not kill. She didn’t know how to. Nor should the need ever arise, yet something was very wrong. She had called time and time again, but received no reply. The part that should have been the core of her new body was silent and still. Though she knew it was still functioning, it wouldn’t answer her command. When she reached out with her thoughts through the gate, this strange intriguing creature had extended its hand to touch them. No other sensation had ever filled her with such curiosity. From time remembered, other living things had landed on her temperate plains and come and gone in their flights across the galaxy. Some Moosevan had found amusing and friendly. She had made their temporary homes shimmer with exotic mists. Others were brutal and unreasoning, so she had shifted the ground under them to make their stays as unpleasant as possible. Energy life forms had floated like phantoms through her forests and jungles of twisted vegetation and whispered the secrets of the Universe to her, but she had never encountered anything like this one brief touch before.
Since the Old Ones had left, new species had feared the might of a world that could overwhelm them. Having to respect the very ground they trod on was too much for their own self-importance. They believed entities like Moosevan could have accidentally shuddered and split the ground beneath them. She would never have done such a thing on purpose and wondered why these three strange companions were the only ones to come after such a length of time. Her other contact from the gate was the total opposite of these creatures. Even though the message taken from her mind meant the end of the planet dweller’s existence, she had a sympathetic heart, and that was something the planet had long missed.
Moosevan was ageing. She had lived half as long as the now dwindling galaxy, and could not reasonably expect to go on forever. The Old Ones had given her the means to escape, but now she realised that the cost of using it would be too high. All she could do was wait, wait and hope she would again be able to touch that strange entity before passing from her world into infinity.
The planet dweller sighed once more, and a precariously balanced boulder said to the rock outcrop it
sat on, ‘What is she so restless about?’
‘It must be something to do with the beacon those three have just installed,’ said the rock.
‘Can’t we dissolve it?’
‘Wouldn’t be any point. They must operate the space-distort net, or we’ll have to go through all this again somewhere else.’
‘I’ve got a feeling things are going to get more complicated,’ said the boulder, swaying thoughtfully.
‘Don’t do that. It’s unbelievably uncomfortable.’
‘Why do we have to sit here like this anyway? It was far more agreeable as we were.’
‘Because we have to find out what’s going on without them suspecting,’ replied the rock irritably. ‘If we used those other shapes, they would probably forget what they were doing to try and kill us.’
‘It makes you realise how fortunate we are not to be mortal, though I would prefer the fur coat again. The mental capacity of this material is somewhat restricting.’
‘Forget the fur coat. I just told you one of those creatures would try to assassinate it on sight. You’ve got to access the Torran’s memory? Why won’t you use it?’
‘Not now. I’d much rather roll down that cliff-face and see what their reaction is.’
‘Don’t forget I’m underneath here,’ the rock reminded it. ‘You’ll have to learn to be a little more patient. None of us has had to do anything like this for aeons. It’s bound to be frustrating.’
‘Oh, just a little pitch and tumble won’t ruin everything. Tuck yourself in. Here I go!’ And away went the boulder with a reverberating crash.
Where the hell did that come from?’ yelped Tolt as he leapt out of the path of an unusually large animated rock that seemed to be chasing his heels.
‘The planet dweller probably threw it at us,’ Kulp commented dryly from a safe distance.
‘You can hardly blame her,’ said Jannu. ‘If someone was trying to distort me from my cosy little shell, I’d get a bit touchy as well.’
‘Will you two stop being so damned reasonable,’ snapped Kulp. ‘It’s beginning to make me nervous.’ He opened the casing of the beacon to reach inside it with a torch, then changed his mind. ‘I’m not going to arm this terminal until the others are in sequence. It’d be too risky with all this turbulence.’
‘The atmosphere seems reasonably stable, though.’ observed Tolt innocently, not realising Kulp was perfectly aware of what he was driving at.
‘Seems very balmy,’ added Jannu.
‘You two can go for a stroll if you like. Don’t count on there being a shuttle waiting to take you off when I start triggering the net.’
As the idea of ditching them had crossed Kulp’s mind, he would undoubtedly take the first opportunity to do it. ‘In that case I don’t think I’ll bother,’ Tolt decided.
With the beacon aligned and only waiting to be armed in readiness to twist the planet through every distortion that matched its inventor’s moral sense, Tolt and Jannu followed him back to the shuttle, disappointed that they hadn’t thought of some way to make him remove his helmet.
The Mott commander was doing a brisk trot around his observation chamber when the three of them entered to report their progress.
‘Why are you taking so much time?’ he demanded with a tantrum well into third gear. ‘I’ve got to make a report soon.’
‘Report away,’ Kulp told him off-handedly. ‘I’ll do things in my own good time and not be rushed by any little ringlet-covered egotist with a personal hygiene problem,’ and strode out of the chamber without apparently realising the danger in accurately describing a Mott to his face.
Jannu and Tolt remained, not sure whether it was better to keep company with Kulp while he was in that sort of mood, or wait and see what the reaction of the Mott would be. The Mott valued their ringlets above all else, or perhaps almost all else. They were an indicator of a male’s virility and valour, next to the first best appendage. Such a comment coming from a hairless, green, toad thing without either, made the Mott growl and stamp with rage until the other two thought he was going to gallop up the wall and across the ceiling. Only taking the precaution of not being in his path when he decided to do it, Jannu and Tolt waited patiently until the Mott became more rational.
‘He’s always been like that,’ commented Tolt. ‘Don’t pay any attention.’
‘Somebody gave his jar a vigorous shake when he was still an embryo and it must have affected him,’ Jannu added.
‘I don’t like that creature...’ gurgled the Mott.
This hardly surprised the other two, because, like the Olmuke, the Mott had never been known to like anyone else.
‘He can be a little trying,’ agreed Jannu. ‘As long as you keep your eye on him, he’s not liable to get up to much.’
The Mott was silent for a moment, sensing that there was something pertinent in Jannu’s angling comment.
‘What do you mean? What would he get up to if he wasn’t being watched?’
‘Oh,’ Tolt pretended to reassure, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re honest enough, and aren’t likely to go along with him.’
‘After all,’ Jannu laughed, ‘who with any sense of self-preservation would want to cross the Mott?’
‘Kulp would,’ said the Mott with accuracy unusual for his dull reasoning. ‘And how do I know I can trust either of you two?’
‘Look,’ Tolt started carefully, ‘if Kulp double-crossed you, then it stands to reason he would be double-crossing us as well.’
‘For instance?’
‘For instance,’ said Jannu, ‘just assuming this space-distort net isn’t successful: he’s got the down payment on the scheme. You can easily check to see if anything was paid to us.’
‘Not an atom, I assure you,’ Tolt agreed. ‘He has the fastest ship. We’ve only freighter-class and would never be able to outrun the Mott fleet.’
Despite the Mott’s suspicion, he wanted to believe them, even though it would mean trusting members of a different species, and that was as impossible as trusting a Mott female. He clip-clopped about the chamber for a short while, weighing up Kulp’s total disregard for a member of the most superior species in the galaxy, with what his seniors would say if they discovered they couldn’t operate the net without its inventor.
Tolt had anticipated that difficulty. ‘We know how to operate the net. He’s ironed out most of the awkward problems so it won’t be that difficult. All we want him to do now is arm the terminal on the planet, then we won’t need him any more.’
‘What about Mott engineers?’ the commander demanded.
‘Well,’ mused Jannu carefully, ‘they did have trouble operating the one they designed themselves.’
‘We couldn’t guarantee to simplify it to that extent,’ added Tolt. ‘After all, we weren’t the inventors, remember. It would be asking a lot of us.’
‘So what do you think Kulp will do?’
‘Do?’ laughed Jannu. ‘He may decide to keep to the bargain exactly as made.’
‘Then again he might not,’ said Tolt, ‘and we could never do anything unless he showed himself to be totally untrustworthy.’
That was what the Mott commander was hoping. Nothing would please him more than to have the distort-net system and the head of the creature who invented it.
‘What would you do if he didn’t prove trustworthy?’ he asked.
Jannu and Tolt looked at each other and shrugged.
Tolt grinned. ‘What else could we do but keep to our side of the bargain?’
‘As long as we get his percentage, of course,’ added Jannu quickly.
‘What? All of it?’
‘What else?’ said Jannu firmly, and the Mott could see he wasn’t going to budge on that point.
‘Something tells me we might be doing business without a certain fourth party very shortly.’ The Mott’s mouth moistened at the prospect of knowing Kulp was fatally wounded if not dead. ‘Isn’t it strange how allies find each other?’
No lo
nger aggravated by the blasting and probing of the three intruders, Moosevan soon lost interest in them. Had she not been so concerned about finding the object of her fascination, she might have given more of her colossal thought to the problem of what the three Olmuke were about to do. Even if she had, though, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
So once again she reached out through the gate. This time her touch was gentle and didn’t try to frantically grasp at the mechanism that she knew to be there. She wafted strange caressing sensations that were part of her into the pathway the Old Ones had made for her into another region of the Universe.