by Perry Rhodan
That was all Pucky had hoped to accomplish with his visit.
3/ THE DOGS OF WAR
Tu-poa's eyes gleamed in his ascetic face. The Anti walked back and forth excitedly in the room. Dr. Edmond Hugher sat in a chair, smiling as calmly and pleasantly as ever.
"Who is this Rhodan, then, Tu-poa?" Hugher was saying. "An enemy of Baalol. Very well. Then Baalol will destroy him. However peace-loving I may be, even to that extent are they my enemies who are the enemies of Baalol. How can you ever doubt, Tu-poa, that my gratitude knows no bounds?" Although he spoke with gravity the smile never left his face.
Since the death of Laoo-o, Tu-poa had become one of the most influential priests on Lepso and today he could no longer abide the doctor's perpetual smile. The galaxy itself was trembling: 10,000 space battleships must have gone into transition. Lepso's detection centers were reporting so many warp shockwaves that from time to time they had even lost count of their number.
Tu-poa and the other servants of Baalol suspected what the objective of the onrushing giant fleets might be but so far they knew nothing definite. Their espionage connection on the Crystal World had suddenly failed them. And for that there could be only one explanation:
Imperator Gonozal VIII had arrived at decisions without advising a single member of the Supreme Council of Arkon. In addition to this an incredible number of powerful warp-shocks had been detected from the area of the Solar Imperium. This meant that Rhodan's warships were on their way to join the fleet forces of Arkon in the same mission.
Tu-poa had to force himself to look at Dr. Hugher. The man's vacuous smile came close to driving him mad. He suddenly shouted in tones of anger which Hugher had never experienced with him before. "Don't take all this so calmly, Doctor! You certainly know Rhodan better than we do. You must have known, more than anybody, that we were heading into this crisis!"
The dreamy smile remained fixed in the vapid face. Dr. Edmond Hugher was not perturbed by Tu-poa's outburst of temperament. "I am grateful for the compliment, Tu-poa, but Rhodan is not as formidable to me as you have presented him to be. If he has emerged into prominence, he can as easily vanish again. Do you fear for Lepso and the temple?"
Tu-poa suddenly halted in front of him. "Hugher, how do we get rid of the huge multitude of addicts out there in the desert?" His voice rose demandingly. "Where is that phenomenal faculty of yours for always making the right decision at the right moment?"
"You expect too much of me, Tu-poa. I am of a peaceful nature. As long as I worked within a certain framework the decisions were not difficult for me to make. However this is a situation which is not in keeping with my character."
"Stop it! Stop that, once and for all!" Tu-poa shouted at him. "You invented the Liquitiv! Do you call that peace-loving? Or do you want to call it what it is-a deadly narcotic, Hugher!"
The dreamy expression in the doctor's red Arkonide eyes remained the same. There was no change in their steady, quiet gaze. The fiat-featured and slightly puffy face retained its eternal smile. "Tu-poa, you are the cult's fanatic. You should know that in my grateful devotion I have thus placed a flaming sword in the hands of Baalol."
The priest looked at the doctor as though seeing him actually for the first time. "Hugher, either you have always been insane or you've lost your mind in the past few hours," he told him despairingly.
"That's not very friendly of you," was Hugher's calm reply. "Wasn't it you who always told me that Baalol was the one and only power in the galaxy and that I could not show my gratitude in any better way than to help increase the might of Baalol? And did I not do just that when I developed Liquitiv? Will it not reduce Baalol's enemies to a bunch of harmless idiots? Why shouldn't they remain in the desert? They're being taken care of-it's the best place for them."
A sense of horror came over Tu-poa. But he was not thinking of the incurable addicts who were languishing away in the Lepso desert. He was not thinking of the many hundreds of millions who had become victimized by the liqueur. At this moment he recognized the greatest danger of all-that Perry Rhodan's son was mentally deranged.
The anti-mutant asked himself why he and his colleagues had not detected this before. Why had it never appeared strange to them that Thomas Cardif revealed hardly any reaction whatever when Perry Rhodan was mentioned in his presence? He decided to make a test with Hugher right there on the spot. But in his excitement he overlooked the fact that only one question could produce a definite result.
Tu-poa did not ask Hugher: Do you know that you are Rhodan's son? This thought did not occur to him at all. Instead he asked, "Hugher, do you know how old Rhodan is?"
Still in his smiling rapture, Hugher answered him with a question: "Can you think of a more senseless question, Tu-poa? What are you getting at? Or are you trying to deny that Rhodan has found the secret of eternal life?"
Fate stepped in with a sound of alarms. The interruption prevented Tu-poa from asking the other question, which had just occurred to him: Do you know that you are Perry Rhodan's son? Ironically, the loudspeakers were blaring news of Rhodan.
"Rhodan entering Fering System with a gigantic fleet. On course for Lepso: 30 super battleships detected! About one light-hour outside farthest orbit, powerful warp-shocks indicate further fleet formations arriving...
"Further notice: the additional squadrons consist of robot warships of the Greater Imperium.
Tu-poa had been stating fixedly at the nearest loudspeaker. When it became silent he turned back to Hugher, shuddered at sight of the doctor's unchanged smiling face. It reminded him, however, that this was a major crisis situation-in which case he knew what he had to do. Without a word he left the room, which was deep within the temple pyramid. Taking the antigravitor he headed for the peak of the pyramid itself. He was no longer thinking of Dr. Edmond Hugher, alias Thomas Cardif. Even while he rose upward in the shaft he smiled maliciously.
He was thinking that for Perry Rhodan his last hour had come. For they, the servants of Baalol, had made their preparations. This time they would win the final round in the battle against the hated Terran.
When he entered the large room under the peak of the temple he encountered more than a hundred devotees who had gathered there already. All he heard was a low murmur of voices. No one seemed to be highly disturbed by the fact that Rhodan and his fleet had appeared over Lepso. This casualness of attitude strengthened Tu-poa's conviction that Rhodan's demise was near at hand.
• • •
Amidst the thunder of its impulse engines, a Stardust-class heavy cruiser rose from the spaceport at Terrania. It was the Ironduke. As the last of the Solar Fleet to depart, it also set its course for the Feting System.
Col. Jefe Claudrin, a native Epsalian, was the commander of this first of the new ships to have linear space-drive. As a cosmonaut and commander he was unexcelled. He sat calmly in his oversized, custom-designed flight seat in the Control Central and listened to the rumble of the regular propulsion system. By means of small monitor viewscreens he could see the ring-bulge engines while they pushed the 800-meter ship into space with an acceleration of 500km/sec per second.
All around Claudrin was the normal bustle of activity that was customary for any such flight yet on every deck of the Ironduke there was a feeling of suppressed tension and even the hardened veterans on duty in the Control Central could not get rid of it.
The Chief was on board along with Reginald Bell, Mercant and Deringhouse. Marshall was also there with the entire Mutant Corps plus a few special agents of Solar Intelligence. Only Rhodan and Bell had come to the Control Central as the rest of the special contingent had elected to go to their cabins. The fact that they faced a difficult mission did not deter them from first getting a little sleep.
The tension pervading the ship was related to the mystery of the Antis. These so-called god priests of Baalol were descendants of the Arkonide race who had mutated long ago. They possessed the capability of strengthening their defense screens mentally to such an extent that
energy weapons hardly had any effect on them. Moreover, they also had the ability to make the paranormal powers of other mutants ineffectual.
Only in the last few decades the Antis had shown a tendency to emerge more and more from their seclusion. They had not only demonstrated that they were anti-mutants and the devotees of a cult, it had also become apparent that their main purpose was the pursuit of political goals of power-a massive plan which was to culminate with a take-over of the Greater Imperium.
Col. Claudrin suddenly bellowed in his thunderous voice to Rhodan, which startled the latter out of his thoughts of the moment. "Sir, I might as well cut in the Kalup now. That'll probably bring us through maybe 10 minutes ahead of the Fleet but that's never been a bad idea in a setup like this."
Rhodan understood what Claudrin intended to accomplish with the manoeuvre. It was to hold the risk of a galactic war at a minimum. If the flagship of the Chief of the Solar Imperium could reach the first positions ahead of the Fleet, it might avert the chain reaction of an accidental skirmish.
The Kalup compensating converter was the heart of the linear space-drive system yet it was not a propulsion mechanism. It was a device for enclosing the Ironduke in a spherical field. This special field shielded out all electromagnetic and gravitic influences of the fourth- and fifth dimensions by either absorbing them or reflecting them. By this means the ship was able to penetrate the so-called libration zone, which was a semispace continuum lying between the fourth- and fifth-dimensional universes. In this state the warship could accelerate to velocities that were millions of times the speed of light.
When Rhodan nodded his assent, Claudrin proceeded personally with the conversion switching. The thundering of the engines subsided as the ship's impulse-converters died down. For some seconds the Ironduke hurtled onward in free fall at 0.6 speol. Then all the internal machinery appeared to come alive at once and out of the thundering inferno in the heart of the ship there emerged a new sound that struck the keynote.
"The Kalup!" said one of the officers in the Control Central.
Others around him nodded expectantly. The men of the Solar Fleet simplified everything. In the first place, Kalup referred to Dr. Arno Kalup, the greatest hyper-physicist in the Sol System, and in the second place it referred to the compensating converter that he had developed and which was now enveloping the Ironduke in the spherical field, thus opening the way for it into the zone of semispace. The Kalup distorted the field-energy structure of the impulse drive so that the thrust was independent of either fourth- or fifth-dimensional space. This resulted in an emission velocity that was about 25 million times the speed of light.
The spherical spaceship's great panoramic gallery of observation screens-otherwise known as the "panob"- was at a loss in this new environment, unable to reproduce more than a muddled impression of the universe. The usual points of light had been replaced by blurred streaks of illumination, nothing more.
"Activate 3-D sensor!" bellowed Claudrin. It was neither a sign of excitement nor of anger: he was simply unable to speak softly.
Next to him his co-pilot switched on the special sensorviewer. Its screen flamed to life and became stabilized. Under control of the compensator's tracking the 3-D system focused a star at the center of the screen. It was the sun of the Fering System.
"So," rumbled Jefe Claudrin again in his deep voice, "we made short work of 8,467 light-years-at least visually." He turned to look at everybody in the Control Central. They all knew that they had not yet conquered the distance physically but that through the special viewing system they had their target star constantly in sight The colonel swung back to the flight console. "OK!" he thundered. "Let's keep her flying, gentlemen!" It wasn't a mere figure of speech. He had deliberately used the plural form of address, thus not only including the men but himself as well.
Unchanged in color and light intensity, the Fering System's sun held steadily on the 3-D sensor screen. Within that system the second planet bore the name of Lepso. The men in the Ironduke's Control Central were looking at their target star over more than 8,000 light-years of distance. This was one of the miracles of linear space-drive: to be hurtling millions of times faster than light through semispace toward a target that was always in plain view.
Time passed. When the star on the relief screen suddenly grew large and revealed its disc, Col. Claudrin switched back. Without the least transitional jolt the Ironduke dropped back into the normal universe. Simultaneously the great panob screens cleared up and there was the ancient glory of the Milky Way before them. Somewhere among those millions of stars was the Fering Sun.
"Heavy warp-shocks coming through!" announced an officer at the hypersensor console.
From another sector of the great room the galactic positions were being announced. The tracking registers were counting the ships that were spilling out of hyperspace from transition.
"180 spacers. We're getting an identification, Colonel: a fighter squadron of the Mounders!"
The Mounders were the mercenary warriors of the Galactic Traders. They were also offshoots of the Arkonide race but they had developed differently because of the heavier gravitation of the planets they had chosen for their home bases. In the course of time they had evolved into massive giants who weighed anywhere from over half a ton to a ton. In contrast to the Springers they followed the trade of war. Whoever paid them could be sure of their help. Whoever called them, however, was fully aware that enormous payments would have to be passed across the table beforehand. For the Mounders there was only cash; they did not deal with promises. But once they had been paid their battle fee they were as good as a 'fire brigade' as they were stormy rum guzzlers. They fought with a ruthless courage that was unexcelled.
When the last of the incoming data concerning the Mounders had come through, Rhodan gave an order. "Claudrin-alert the Mutant Corps."
One of the officers took up a microphone and asked for Com Central, after which he requested a connection with the mutants' wardroom.
Rhodan was slightly irritated by such red tape. "Is all that necessary?" he asked.
The young officer appeared to be embarrassed by Rhodan's criticism but Col. Jefe Claudrin answered for him. "He's following my orders. As long as time allows, we go by the regulations. If not-my men will go to the other extreme, as necessary. Do you agree, sir?"
"Do I have a choice, Colonel?" Rhodan smirked. "You're the Commander of the Ironduke-I'm just along for the ride."
"I'll make a note of that, sir," Claudrin grinned back at him. But then he returned his gaze determinedly to his flight board.
He knew he was just passing the fourth planet of the Feting System and was now racing at 0.8 speol toward the orbit of the third planet. With surprising swiftness he grasped his own microphone and simultaneously flipped a Com switch.
"Alkher? Are you asleep or something? How come no ready signal from Fire Control?"
Brazo Alkher was the youngest officer on board the Ironduke, a somewhat lanky type who was outwardly modest and shy. But when he was called upon to perform there was no more cold-blooded weapons officer than he-nor did he panic with all guns gone except one.
Brazo's voice rang from the loudspeaker in Control Central. "Colonel, I recall that I reported fire-readiness when we took off. I don't think I've since given any announcement to the contrary."
Col. Claudrin cast a quick glance at the Chief, who nodded with a knowing smile.
"Don't sweat it, Colonel-that's also happened to me before."
An announcement came from the hypersensor station again: "New ship sightings! It's the Fleet coming out of transition. Average approach velocity-0.85. Now the last formations are coming through!"
Com Central reported, addressing Rhodan: "Sir, we're being hailed by the planetary government of Lepso. They're threatening us with military retaliation if the Solar Imperium's fleet doesn't change course immediately!"
Rhodan calmly approached the intercom panel. "Inform the government in my name that the Sola
r Imperium has no hostile intentions. We are only interested in apprehending a few criminals. And operator-just tell them that-don't get into any other conversations with them."
Col. Claudrin gave him a broad grin. "Who's going to swallow that?"
There was another report from the hypersensor station: "Robot fleet coming through. We have a strong cross-interference of simultaneous shockwaves-variable factor of quantitative estimate:, about 1,000. Registered ship count between five and six thousand."
The location of the emerging robot fleet was given. During this time the Ironduke was braking its speed further. It had crossed the third planet's orbit and was now approaching Lepso. As seen from the linear-drive warship, the planet stood off to the left of the sun, which grew larger and shed its gleaming yellow light ever more intensely across the big screens.
Across 100 million kin, Rhodan then sent his hypercom message to Lepso. His voice had a metallic sharpness to it as he spoke into the microphone: "In the name of the Solar Imperium and by order of First Administrator Rhodan-effective immediately all take-offs from Lepso are hereby prohibited. In case of violation, each ship entering outer space will be forced to return to Lepso. This is the Ironduke, under orders of First Administrator Rhodan."
Col. Claudrin nodded his satisfaction. He was pleased to note that Rhodan had given the order without using visual contact. He had also used a deeper tone of voice than usual. It was unlikely that they had recognized him by his tone.
A Com officer called through: "Sir, the Fleet reports fire-readiness. The super-class ships are overtaking us and will be with us in about five more minutes."
At this moment, John Marshall, chief of the mutants, came into the Control Central with the best telepaths in the Corps. Only one of them had dispensed with physical locomotion and that was Pucky the mouse-beaver. The target of his short tele-jump was none other than the broad lap of the Epsalian commander.