Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  “Don’t know. As it was, we almost missed you after the quake started. Plans went completely haywire as far as she was concerned. But no more damn fool questions. I was supposed to get you oriented before they were on top of us and you’ve got it all, except for—”

  There was a sudden lurch and Jon was thrown sprawling, was suddenly picked up as though by some gigantic hand and thrown bodily toward a self-sealing hatch that closed just as he crashed heavily into it. The chamber was now all but airless. They’d been hit by a Tinker missile, and there was a gaping, ragged hole somewhere in this ship’s hide.

  He struggled to his feet. Then saw the other man, not moving, crumpled to the deck. A jagged fragment of metal was embedded in his chest. There was another sickening lurch and another. They were being clobbered with everything the Tinkership had.

  But somehow he got to the wounded man’s side. The hard eyes opened for but a moment, and the lips moved. The sounds they made were but a whisper in his earphones.

  “Six . . . nine-X. Point . . . oh one-Y. Eight six. Z—”

  And then the eyes opened wide, and the lips closed, and the man was dead.

  THE ship shuddered again, and through his helmet Kane heard a dull, booming explosion, and he knew the craft had been fatally hit. Another second and it would be pulling apart at the seams. All Tinker guns were on-target and firing at will.

  The locks! Where the hell would the locks be on this strangely designed ship?

  Lie breathed again when the hatch popped open because of the dwindling air pressure. He was aware of the conglomeration of noises in his earphones. Somewhere a man was screaming. There had been men screaming for the last full minute, but only now were the sounds beginning to register on his taut brain.

  “Where in hell is Zetterman?”

  “Don’t know—aft with the guy we were sent for I guess. Oh God.”

  “Then he’s within twenty feet of a lock if he’s still alive. But he hasn’t answered us. So what d’you want to do? We’re all that’s left and they’re almost alongside.”

  “They’d get us either way. If only we could get aft that lock’s on the port side, away from ’em—”

  Jon let the words make sense. Port side. Twenty feet away—THERE!

  In seconds the inner port was open, and then he was waiting for the outer one, not even bothering to cycle the lock down. He’d be blown a little, but a running start out would help. He wanted to communicate with the men he’d heard talking, find out what the numbers meant that the dead man Zetterman had mouthed, but the Tinkers would be monitoring everything, and they’d pick up even a helmet set at this range.

  The outer lock cracked slowly open, and what little pressure there still was in the lock held him gently against the widening opening as it dissipated entirely with a low howl into the black infinity of space. He popped out, and it was like stepping from an invisible mountainside into a night that was too dark, with stars that looked too close. Only crazily, you didn’t fall—

  He drifted on the slight momentum the spent air pressure in the lock had given him, the telltale flicker of his power pack this close to the huge gray shape that loomed less than a hundred yards to the other side of the broken ship he was leaving would mean the end of him. He thought at top speed. Of course their screens would pick him up but he gambled that he’d be discounted as simply another chunk of wreckage smashed by the Tinker guns.

  Jove loomed hugely, fantastically, slightly above him. Soon his drift would become free-fall, but he must wait until the last possible moment to use the pack. Yet if he waited too long—

  He clenched his teeth until they hurt, willed his arms to his sides, his hands away from the pack controls. The multi-hued bands of the great planet were alternately dark and bright, undulating slowly, as though readying to seize him, devour him, freeze him. The Gargantuan mass seemed but yards away rather than well over a million miles. Yet it was too close, and it was Slowly moving in upon him.

  He turned his body, tried to watch the Tinker ship. It had closed with the shattered wreck which he’d escaped, grappled to it. A port opened, and there was a pinprick of fiery light from the dark maw. Boarding in suits. But there was no orange-violet flash of a spacetender’s exhausts, so perhaps, then, he had been unnoticed.

  But he must still drift and he knew now that he had started to fall. Ever so slightly, but he was heading straight for the great mass of Jupiter, and his initial direction had been almost tangent to its orbit. The massive orb seemed even more flattened at its poles than usual, and its satellites were orbiting eratically, due, he knew, to the Geejay failure that had rocked the whole system.

  Yet even as he watched, and as slowly as they swung, Jon Kane’s practiced eye and mind detected retrograde movements, and realized that the tiny moons were slowly falling back in what he knew were approximately their former orbits. The Tinkers were somehow succeeding.

  But the suit was getting cold. Its insulation was surprisingly efficient, but it w-as still only an emergency features of the rig, to keep a man alive for a short period in the event of heater failure. And using the heater meant radiation, yet he’d have to risk it now. And soon, the pack itself. But it would be of little avail if he wandered aimlessly, and that, he had to gamble, was where the numbers came in. With the three letter combinations, they could be spherical co-ordinates. For his life, they would have to be.

  69-X. .01-Y. 86-Z. With planes of reference calculated to the median plane of planetary ecliptics relative to the Sun. Then.

  Swiftly, his brain analyzed the values, gave him an approximation. And it would be a point—

  And where he looked there was only blackness. It was the damn time factor, of course, that was lacking. Yet Zetterman would not have given him figures for yesterday or next month. They’d have to be figures for now, or for expected time of arrival at destination, but where? How far? Near Jove? The satellites? One of them? That would make the time factor next to zero. And—

  Of course! The figures would no longer be completely valid; margin of error would be wide after the gravitational imbalance that was only now beginning to be righted! If he scanned several hundred thousand miles to either side of his point of dead reckoning.

  And there it was! Callisto. He was almost astride its orbit, and because it was nearer to his reckoned point than any of the rest, it would have to be the most probable destination.

  If, of course, he was right about the time factor. If the co-ordinates referred to the location of bodies in the ship’s immediate vicinity when it was attacked.

  He was numb from the cold, and to wait longer with his powerpack would mean to become ensnared in Jove’s awful gravity field before he could make the necessary right angle break in direction and set course for the barren planetoid.

  His arms ached as he drew them up inside his suit, and his fingers were clumsy, senseless things groping for the power and heat toggles.

  Then he found them. In moments there was warmth, and then the gray satellite toward which he headed began getting larger with each passing second.

  THE ragged circle of the plain was unbroken for almost as far as he could see in the dim reflected light of the satellite’s primary, save for recent fissures in its surface that had been caused by wrenching quakes during the failure of the Geejay, and occasional pockmarks left by the wandering bits of cosmic flotsam that had been ensnared by the surprisingly slight Callistan gravity. The plain on which he had touched down was ringed with low mountain chains that looked like giant dragon’s teeth poised to impale him at any moment. And Jove itself looked weirdly tilted with its atmospheric bands now inclined steeply away from the horizontal. Its pale light cast eerie shadows across the plain; made the cracks in its surface and miniature craters deceptively large and small.

  And there was no sign of human habitation, no artificial structure shone against the dark horizon, and it meant he would have to waste precious fuel, blasting in great leaps across the moon’s not inconsiderable surface, looking.
He was not even certain for what.

  If Zetterman had intended to have him find this particular one of eleven satellites, then why had he not included grid coordinates of latitude and longitude? Or had the man been about to when death intervened?”

  Unless . . . whatever artificial installation existed on the planet could be located with the same co-ordinates! It would be ingenious . . .

  Rapidly, Jon envisioned a standard tridimensional system grid in his mind’s eye; applied it to the satellite upon which he stood, substituting its ecliptic-apparent north-south axis and solar-apparent X and Y equatorial axes for the Z, X and Y axes of the standard celestial sphere. Applying Zetterman’s co-ordinates, then, his direction would be generally north-northwest, to a point below the satellite’s surface!

  For a moment the thought sent his mind spinning back into confusion, and then he realized that by the standard spherical method of point determination, his chances would have been one in a theoretical infinity of arriving at a point exactly on the planetoid’s surface.

  The installation was subterranean, then, which was logical, but which made matters all the more difficult. Unless, of course, there would be some slight surface indication. God, if only Zetterman had lived an instant longer.

  With a muttered prayer that his deductions and dead reckoning calculations were substantially more than empty rationalizations of desperation, Jon thumbed the power toggles of his suit pack and leapt lightly off across the planetoid’s hostile surface. He would, of course, have to be right. For there was only a limited amount of oxygen left in his tanks, and his power would certainly not last forever.

  He kept track of his position by the most primitive way Man knew; the orb that was the Sun. And mentally, superimposed that orb against the tri-di grid that seemed now to be stamped imperishably upon his brain, simultaneously allowing for orbital speed differential and solar parallax.

  He fell back gently to the planetoid’s volcanic terrain for a final time, and knew that the spot he sought, if it existed at all, was now within scant yards of him. Mighty Jupiter was now at zenith, yet even in its directly mirrored, undulating illumination it was more difficult to see than before, and each step was an experiment. Pumice spattered over his spaceboots, solid looking stuff which could be but a shifting overlay for some bottomless fissure or yawning crevasse. And above him and down to the horizon to every side, stars gleamed tauntingly, coldly in the blackness, as though to remind him that a man could not live forever.

  He began walking in ever widening circles. Something would show.

  VIII

  DEANNE was never certain whether her decision had been wholly a product of her own mind, seething as it had been with the awful conflict between her life’s learning and what she knew to be right, or if it had been made for her by the clanging of the ship’s alarm intercom unit in her quarters.

  She had been lucky. She had succeeded in getting back undetected from her breach of arrest; return from her vantage point atop the conference chamber had been as uneventful as her stealthy escape through the catwalk maze to it, and once safely back in her quarters she had tried to rest, to get her mind in order and to think.

  Her uncle, the Director-Gentech himself, had been beaten by B-Haaq, and B-Haaq was not a man to let an advantage be wasted. It would be only a matter of time, now. A matter of time, and the Majtech would be giving the orders, and her own fate would be in his hands. She had to decide. To stay and try to help a faltering old man or to make an outright attempt to escape even as Kane had done, and then somehow to find him! For Kane had been right! Oh, yes, Kane had been right. For power was not an end in itself, and in the last analysis, the end did not justify the means! The ITA, right or wrong . . . no! The ITA was wrong!

  The alarm clanged, and then the speaker squawked raucously.

  “Attention all officers and tech personnel! Man your combat stations! An unidentified spacecraft lies nine point three points starboard ecliptic minus twelve oh three at three hundred thousand and we are overhauling. Presence of the fugitive Kane aboard is strong probability, therefore orders are to fire to destroy. Repeating, all officers and techpersonnel, man your combat stations!. An—”

  Deanne snapped the communicator into silence with a force that nearly tore the toggle from its socket. The stupid fools! Enemies had always been destroyed in the past, and so now this enemy was to be destroyed! Regardless of the fact that they would never find Kane, alive or otherwise, if every ship aboard which he might be were blasted to bits!

  In moments, the corridors and catwalks would be alive with scurrying Cadtechs, officers and labortechs, rushing pell-mell to half forgotten battle stations, trying desperately as they did to remember precisely how the Flagship’s long silent cannon were operated. There would be no eyes for a shapeless, space-suited figure.

  She waited tensely until the clamor outside her cubicle was at its height, then swiftly opened the narrow bulkhead hatch, stepped through it and into the milling chaos of men and women, and let herself be swept toward the suit lockers, and the bank of lock ports near them.

  The corridor lights were blazing, now, and the white faces that bobbed beneath them were strained. Deanne found a suit and donned it even as the first of the craft’s spacecannon was fired. The deck shuddered beneath her feet, and she was nearly knocked off balance by a trio of guntechs who had not yet found their posts. But there was more order now, and she would have to hurry. The other ship must be close, for the guns had already begun firing barrages, and that was only done when the target was in naked-eye view.

  Swiftly, she slipped into an air lock, flattened herself against a narrow bulkhead as its inner port slid shut, and remained immobile as its automatic pumps cycled down to zero pressure. Now she would wait, watch and pray that no one looked into the lock in passing. It was a crazy gamble, and if Jon were not aboard . . .

  She watched the star strewn blackness, narrowed her eyelids against the awful glare in it each time a battery fired, and there was a sudden little catch in her throat as the limn of mighty Jupiter swung majestically into her field of vision. Somewhere, out there, in that awful infinity—there!

  Ice seemed to form in a lump inside her. The alien ship was a perfect target, silhouetted against the huge shining disc of Jove. And it was breaking up!

  Great gouts of fire were bursting from its engine housings, molten fragments of jagged metal glowed as they gyrated crazily from it in great showers of white-hot flame, and she could feel the awful vibration of the Flagship’s guns as they continued firing mercilessly on target.

  A tiny pinpoint of fire.

  She saw it, and in the eye searing holocaust it did not at once register on her reeling brain.

  A tiny pinpoint of blue-white fire that had not emanated from the stricken alien, but had suddenly appeared for a mere fraction of a second at a considerable distance from it! A suit pack!

  With the silent prayer at her lips that it had escaped the eyes of the others, Deanne triggered open the outer lock port and launched herself into Space.

  Somehow she knew the man was Jon Kane, even as she knew she had found him too late. She stood, rooted to the spot in the deep shadow of the ragged crag beneath which she had landed, unable even to warn him of the man who had suddenly appeared behind him. A man with a weapon in one hand, aimed straight at the Cadtech’s back! To use her radio at such a distance would mean a power output that would bring a spacetender down upon her within minutes.

  Helplessly, she watched. Watched as the other touched Jon with his weapon, forced him over the lip of a wide crater—

  “No—!”

  Her choked scream all but deafened her inside her helmet.

  Then she saw that the other followed over the lip, and realized that their destination was somewhere inside the depression itself.

  For long, silent moments she stood in maddening frustration, watching the two men disappear into the crater, as powerless to act as she had been to warn. She could not go back, now, nor coul
d she go further.

  IX

  THE crater walls had been moderately magnetized with a thin coating of metallic spray, and Kane walked before his captor down their sloping incline with greater ease than he had been able to negotiate the planetoid’s natural surface. He hesitated as the crater bottom suddenly began to yawn slowly open, and there was the prodding in his back again.

  “Keep moving, mister. There’s a ladder, and you’re first!”

  Kane moved carefully, looked over the smooth lip of the now fully opened shaft. The ladder was a thin, tubular affair with narrow rungs. He dropped to his knees, swung one leg over; held with his elbows, groped with the other foot for the next lower rung. Then felt with one hand, found the top rung, and started down.

  “I can’t cover you on the way down,” the man above him said. “But I have a fresh supply of oxygen, and I don’t think you have. And I’ve got both guns!”

  The shaft closed silently above them, and then there was sudden illumination, and Jon blinked after the half-light of the bleak world outside. The folds of his suit began to feel loose, and he knew that the shaft must also function as an air lock, and was cycling up to pressure as they descended.

  When they at length reached bottom, his captor gestured at him with a hand weapon.

  “Get your suit off. It stays with me. Whether you get it back again or not’ll be up to you. Move!”

  Jon fumbled with unfamiliarly placed dogs and buckles, then surrendered the suit, and took deep lungsfull of air.

  “Where now?” But the other couldn’t hear. His helmet was still in place, and Jon knew that whoever wanted him wasn’t taking any more chances than necessary. But as if in answer to his question, a concave panel in the shaft wall was suddenly sliding open, and the stockily built man who stepped in it covered him almost casually with a strange looking two-handed weapon. He signaled to the other, then looked at Jon as if noticing him for the first time.