A clearer picture emerged. The suspected headquarters building teemed with frail six-limbed creatures—
And one figure, far more massive than the rest, with four limbs.
Using Er’ o’s voice, Ol’t’ro shouted to the bridge, “Got you!”
IN THSSTHFOK’S HELMET, an alarm flared red. His battle armor had detected an unexpected electromagnetic signature. The beam was low energy and ultra-wideband: wall-penetrating radar.
The aliens had found him.
He dashed from his command post, headed for the escape tunnels beneath the palace.
“GOT WHO?” Sigmund called.
“Check channel six,” Er’o answered.
Sigmund switched the tactical holo. A human running! About as tall as the flying squirrels: five feet.
No, not quite human. The arms were too long. The head shape was wrong. Or was that a hat or helmet? Even at max resolution, Sigmund could not distinguish clothing from body. Still studying the image, he said, “How did you find—no, don’t answer. Just keep tracking it.”
Kirsten settled into her crash couch, wincing with pain. Her good hand hovered above her controls. “Sort of like flying with one arm tied behind my back,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
The humanoid in the tactical display sped through corridors, the image jerky as Er’o struggled to follow. Sigmund said, “Can you add a distance scale?”
Grid lines appeared and Sigmund blinked. One question answered; no human moved that fast. Then who or what?
Sigmund turned to Kirsten. “Can you fly this?”
She put Don Quixote through a sharp curve, then veered back toward the building with the mysterious stranger. Through gritted teeth, she said, “Looks like yes.”
They had to know who that was running. “Eric,” Sigmund called. “Bring battle gear for the two of us to the main lock. And stepping discs. We’re going in.”
“Stepping discs?”
OL’T’RO KEPT WATCH on the humanoid racing through the headquarters building. “It’s headed deeper into the building. How are you going to get at it?”
“Comm laser,” Sigmund answered. “At this range, we can drill right through the building. Jeeves, that’s your job. Avoid the natives if you can.”
A long silence before Jeeves answered. “I don’t think I can, Sig—”
“Sigmund, permit me to control the laser.” Ol’t’ro hated to reveal one of the secrets they had uncovered, but the mission took precedence. The running figure might be one of the enemy, perhaps a straggler or deserter. “Combat evidently exceeds the device’s design pa ram e ters.”
Over the intercom, a sharp intake of breath. Ol’t’ro could not identify the source. Then they were correct—about Jeeves and that its artificial nature was meant to remain hidden. “Sigmund, we do not have time to waste.”
“Right,” Sigmund decided. A channel appeared through the firewall. “Don’t harm the natives unnecessarily.”
ERIC WAS STRUGGLING into his combat gear when Sigmund reached the main air lock. Sigmund did a quick inventory of what the engineer had chosen: handheld stunners and lasers, two sacks of grenades, and four stepping discs. He closed the inner hatch behind them.
Well, Sigmund thought, I was almost prepared. It would have been nice to have police restraint fields. The emergency protective force-field generators from the crash couches were still hot-wired into an air-lock circuit. He unplugged one field generator and put it into an outside pocket of his battle armor.
“Over the target,” Kirsten called.
“Ready when you are,” Er’o added.
Sigmund had an image of the big native building on his heads-up display. His quarry was deep inside, apparently headed for the warren of tunnels beneath the structure. Some of the passageways went far below the surface, beyond the penetration range of Don Quixote’s sensors.
The streets were too narrow to set down the ship. How could they head off their target? Once the humanoid got into the maze, it would take an army to drive it out. Sigmund didn’t have an army.
Sigmund asked, “How tall is that building, Kirsten?”
“About three hundred feet.”
Sigmund stuffed his pockets with grenades and picked up a stepping disc. “Good. Hover over the street, as close as you dare. Er’o, be ready to burn a street-level entrance for us.”
Eric’s eyes went round. “Armor or no, we can’t jump three hundred feet!”
“I don’t plan to.” Sigmund smacked the emergency override on the air lock. The outer hatch opened—and snipers opened fire.
The nanofabric of the armor stiffened, distributing the impact of the tiny bullets. Sigmund hardly felt them, but it didn’t keep him from cursing. He dropped the stepping disc into the street hundreds of feet below. It landed with a crash, dark side up. Upside down. So did the second disc. He grabbed and dropped a third. It landed right side up.
Time to see how well Puppeteers built these things.
One more stepping disc remained on the air-lock deck. Transport controller in hand, he stepped onto the disc—
And reappeared on the street.
He jammed a stepping disc into a sling across his back and plunged through a ragged, smoking hole into the building.
EXPLOSIONS BOOMED ALL AROUND, the closer ones shaking the palace. Between explosions Thssthfok heard the ululations of Drar, and small-arms fire, and masonry creaking. And there was a whooshing sound he did not understand.
The comm gear in his armor sensed signals at frequencies beyond the capability of Drar radios. The signal sources changed bearing steadily.
He could not see his pursuers, but he knew he was being chased.
Thssthfok raced down the stairs, for once wishing he were more like his servants. If he had wings, he would have leapt the banister and glided down in an instant.
Still, he had almost reached the catacombs.
TANJ! THE HUMANOID had almost reached the basement.
“Er’o,” Sigmund called, “we can’t head it off.”
Sigmund lobbed a flash-bang grenade into the upcoming hallway intersection. He dashed through, ignoring the dazed natives staggering in the cross-corridor. Shots came from far behind them, and he heard Eric’s stunner.
“It is still in sensor view,” Er’o reported. “I will drive it toward you.”
Drive how? Sigmund wondered—and then a deafening roar answered his unarticulated question. Laser fire turning stone, wood, and metal to vapors and powder. Combustible dust and fumes exploding. Dust and gravel pinged off the stepping disc slung across his back.
Some of the building collapsed, the floor shaking beneath Sigmund’s boots. “Try not to bring the whole building down on him.” Or on Eric and me.
CRACKED BEAMS AND STONE SLABS RAINED down the stairwell. In an instant, the path to the tunnels was gone. The palace groaned.
A chunk of granite as big as Thssthfok’s head ricocheted off the stairwell wall into his helmet. He stopped, stunned. When he shook off the paralysis, the two mobile radio sources were much stronger. Closer.
Too close.
A BATTLE-ARMORED BIPED DISAPPEARED around a corner.
“I see it,” Sigmund shouted. “Er’o, drive it toward us.”
A roar of exploding masonry served as answer. Ruby-red glare, dazzling, shone from the stone walls.
Sigmund’s visor turned nearly opaque against the blazing light, and his eyes brimmed with tears. He couldn’t see a thing!
Something hit him, the impact staggering. Without armor, that blow would have snapped him in two. He heard the frying-bacon crackle of Eric’s stunner—stunners don’t work through armor, tanj it!—and the pop of grenades.
“Kill the laser!” Sigmund shrieked. The lurid light vanished and his visor cleared. Blinking away the tears he saw the alien bearing down on Eric. And behind Eric, tens of armed natives racing closer.
Sigmund took the force-field generator from his pocket, switched it on, and hurled it with all his strength. If he had
thrown it fast enough, and that armor was hard enough. . .
THSSTHFOK’S VISOR TURNED BLACK against the sudden glare. He turned and ran back the way he had come, the path he had taken clear in his mind’s eye.
The glare eased as he rounded the corner. His visor cleared a bit to reveal two armored bipeds taller than any Pak.
Thssthfok charged at top speed, flinging aside the first. He had almost reached the other when, with a clang, something smacked the back of his helmet. The air around him turned rigid.
He toppled forward, helpless, coming to a halt floating a handspan above the floor.
“KIRSTEN!” SIGMUND CALLED. “Is the stepping disc still in the main air lock?” Surveillance cameras would tell her—unless an unlucky shot had taken out the camera.
For once their luck was good. “It’s still there, Sigmund.”
He lased the ceiling ahead of the charging natives. Stone crashed down, and the natives turned and ran. “Make sure both inner and outer hatches are closed.”
“Done.”
The alien hovered above the floor, trapped like a bug in amber. The force field suspended its own generator just above the prisoner.
Force fields were power hogs. Maintaining the restraint would drain the generator’s battery within thirty minutes. Sooner, if the prisoner struggled.
Some half memory from a life before New Terra raised the hairs on the back of Sigmund’s neck. What was this creature? One of the enemy? Even in its armor, it looked like a goblin, some perversion of the human shape.
Tanj it, Sigmund wanted answers. This creature was going to provide them. “Eric, find some boards or poles. Clothes rods, broken furniture, I don’t care what. Make sure they’re sturdy and at least six feet long.”
Eric nodded and went to search.
Sigmund took the stepping disc from its sling. He set it on the floor near the immobilized alien. His toes tingled through his armored boots as he slid the disc to the edge of the force field. “Kirsten, lift the ship to fifty miles, then maintain a velocity match with the ground.”
Only a momentary pause betrayed the questions she resisted asking. “Lifting, lifting”—at max acceleration, it would take only about a minute—“decelerating now, still rising. Fifty miles, mark. Hovering on thrusters directly over the city.”
“I’ll be sending through a prisoner. In theory, it’s immobilized. If it moves—blow it out the air lock. Do not hesitate.”
“My finger’s on the switch,” she said.
Rasping sounds heralded Eric’s return. He reappeared, his gloves around two solid planks. The other ends scraped along the stone floor.
Sigmund grabbed a board. “We’re going to move our prisoner against a wall. Then, while you keep it there, I’ll slide the stepping disc beneath.”
“Got it.” Eric lifted his plank into the force field. The field grabbed the end and held it.
Sigmund followed suit. Amid ominous groaning and the ever heavier rain of dust and debris, they shoved the alien into place.
To slide the stepping disc beneath involved lifting alien and armor. The disc was little thicker than the planks, which kept slipping off.
Eric dropped his plank. He needed both hands to roll a basketball-sized lump of rubble to the force field’s edge. With the masonry chunk as his fulcrum and his board as a lever, huffing mightily, Eric raised the alien about an inch. “Now,” he grunted.
With his board, Sigmund forced the stepping disc beneath—just as Eric’s board snapped. The prisoner dropped, pinning the stepping disc, not quite centered beneath.
With a sickening moan, part of the corridor ceiling gave way.
“We’re ready to send,” Sigmund radioed. If their prisoner was unlucky, an arm or a leg might be left behind. “What about your end?”
“It goes out the air lock if it moves,” Kirsten confirmed.
“Your decision whether that’s necessary, no questions asked. Err on the side of safety.” Sigmund paused for any objection. There wasn’t one.
“On the count of three,” Sigmund said. He had a transport controller in his gloved hands, a thumb poised above the transmit button. “Kirsten, be alert.”
“Copy that,” she replied.
“One, two, three.” The alien—all of him—disappeared.
“Got it!” Kirsten called out. “Frozen stiff. Now how about you two?”
Cargo holds had stepping discs inlaid in their decks for ease of loading and unloading. Sigmund used his transport controller to retarget the disc here to a disc in Don Quixote’s auxiliary cargo hold. “After you, Eric.”
Eric stepped away.
In twenty minutes, no more, the battery would be drained and the restraint field would vanish. They had that long to somehow get the prisoner into a more secure environment. Or to chuck it, and any hope for answers, out the air lock.
“Sigmund!” Eric yelled. “Get out of there.”
Sigmund stepped onto the disc. His impression, in the instant that the stepping disc activated for him, was of the whole stone structure crumbling.
24
Frozen in midair, helpless, Thssthfok considered.
Non-Pak spacefaring aliens. Either Koshbara had been slow to awaken him, or the spaceship had approached Mala unnoticed. If the latter, the aliens had a means of propulsion other than fusion drive.
There had been no time to ask for details; now Thssthfok could not. As mightily as he struggled, the force field did not permit him to speak, or even to tongue the radio controls. He could hardly breathe against the invisible restraint.
He remembered the dank stone basement of the Drar palace, and confronting the aliens, and getting snared by a restraint field. That was only a moment ago, his senses insisted. How had he gotten here, wherever here was?
He listed the possibilities. He might have been stunned by an alien weapon. For that or some other reason, he might have lost consciousness. But no: His helmet clock insisted only a moment had passed. Then somehow he had been moved instantaneously. The aliens had a means of teleportation! He must acquire the technology.
Those who had captured him were not without skill. They also had failings, to carelessly reveal so much about their technology. Or they were confident he would not survive to use what he learned. . . .
He floated facedown, a surface with a not-quite-metallic sheen a handspan beneath his visor. His peripheral vision hinted at barriers on every side. Featureless walls to his left and right. In the wall in front of him, hard to see, the lower rim of a hatch and a control panel. He guessed he was in an air lock.
A thin disc lay atop the decking, beneath his belly. What purpose did the disc serve? His neck refused to bend, but with effort he shifted his eyes and—
Discontinuity!
He hung in midair above more quasi-metallic decking and a thin disc, but the confining walls had receded. A new room, then, perhaps a cargo hold—and certain proof that the aliens had instantaneous transportation.
The force field vanished.
The crash of his battle armor against the deck suggested a metal/plastic composite. Something banged off his oxy tank on its way to the floor. He recovered the fist-sized artifact and stowed it in a pocket of his armor for later study.
Thssthfok stood, the burden of his armor noticeably lightened here. Was this gravity weaker than that of Pakhome? He could not decide. His muscles had acclimated to Mala.
He began surveying his cell. The room held only empty cabinets and shelves, a sturdy but empty metal box, and the disc.
One side of his cell was curved, its area mostly taken up by a single large hatch. He was in a cargo hold. The clear rectangular expanse in that hatch revealed featureless black. In space, perhaps, the ceiling’s glow overwhelming the stars. Perhaps only night.
As he approached the hatch a sullen red sun came into view. Closer still to the window he saw the curved surface of a planet, its atmosphere dappled with cloud. Mala. At this altitude the works of the Drar were invisible to the unaided eye.
/> His tongue flicked out to the helmet radio controls, hoping that Koshbara might have observed something useful. He heard only static. Jamming.
A sudden tap-tap.
Thssthfok’s head swiveled sharply, toward the small hatch that would give access into the ship. A metal plate had been welded to the hatch where a latch, knob, or keypad belonged.
Through the small, inset window Thssthfok saw a pale oval. A face. The eyes were eerily breederlike, but everything else was wrong. The forehead was vertical when it should be sloped. The nose was too pronounced. The receding jaw was disturbingly short.
Drar varied enough from Pak to seem exotic. This alien was only Pak-like enough to be . . . repulsive.
More rapping, impatient. Something rectangular replaced the face in the window.
Thssthfok moved closer. The object held against the window was a display device. Imagery moved: most performed by one of the not-quitebreeders, the rest in animation.
The demonstration was clear. Thssthfok was to remove his protective gear and clothing. (Beneath his armor, he had only a many-pocketed utility vest. His captors, like the Drar, evidently wore more.) He was to stow in the box all his things, the disc, and the fist-sized object he had recovered. Then he was to sit on his hands, heels drawn tight against his buttocks, knees spread, head between his knees, with his back against the main hatch. Once he was vulnerable, armored and armed aliens would enter and remove the box.
Helmet sensors reported nitrogen, oxygen, and a bit of carbon dioxide, easily breathable. Enough like Mala that his captors would conclude—correctly—that he could breathe it.
The main hatch, if opened, would vent the hold’s atmosphere. Without his armor’s magnetic boots, he would be blown into space.