But that, precisely, was the contradiction. They were too damn normal, internally and externally. They were so much like our own as to be unacceptable as true aliens. The original Dark One had operated with a totally different math, a different body of physics.
Whatever the problem’s facets, however, it was the reason for my ambassadors being brought aboard the Deneb. We’d concluded, myself as Senior Adjuster, together with Adjusters Ragan Orr and Kriloy Rog, that to keep the Fregisians in ignorance of the new danger would be both wrong and counterproductive.
I’d told them something of the situation myself. But to believe in tales told by their Collin, a warlock-warrior-mythos in his own right, was one thing. To actually see and” to personally experience travel beyond their world, was another. We’d planned a week of briefings. Later, we’d shuttle others up, students, teachers from the collegia. In part, and depending upon what would then ensue, we of the Foundation would also learn how best to continue our manipulation, our “meddling,” if you will, so as to advance them ever faster in the face of the continuing danger.
I’d not told them a thing about the host-occupiers of the Pug-Boos. The total effect would have been too shattering. Indeed, there was hardly a point now anyway, since at my last contact with the real Hooli, I’d gotten the impression that I’d not be seeing him again—ever.
Could that, I wondered, be a part of my anger toward Murie’s poor little rodentius drusus?
The star-blackened face of our sixty-year-old Admiral Drelas Mall now filled the screen. He began to say bluntly and by rote exactly what I’d expected him to say. Indeed, under the circumstances, I wondered why he bothered. His words were that I, as Senior Adjuster Commander, to whose control the Deneb had been assigned, was now relieved of all authority; that he, as of this instant, was assuming full battle-command according to code A2 of the Galactic Fleet.
I nodded, felt Murie’s small hand grip my own strongly, as if she actually knew what was happening.
“You are on notice, sir,” the admiral continued flatly, and I could even appreciate the gleam in his eyes. “Well be warping to Fomalhaut II’s Alpha in one minute. Keep your people exactly where they are. I intend challenging immediately. Any hostility, any attempt at resistance, will be met with total reprisal… . For the record, Kyrie, our monitor and its five man crew were destroyed by the second pyramid.”
The viewscreen snapped again to be instantly filled with a close of the two sets of alien ships. The blue sphere held its distance at the edge of Alpha’s atmosphere. But now, as many as five new ships formed a third pyramid directly above it.
There was an obvious connection between the sphere and the pyramids.
The Marackians, with their innate battle sense, were sharply aware that something was wrong. “Their eyes were all on me, lidded, waiting. I shrugged for their benefit, said nothing. There was nothing to say. Again. How does one explain a starship and its potential to “Good King Wenceslaus”? The warp would be painless, a few visible pyrotechnics, no more; this, as an accompaniment to the act of a specifically organized mass falling out of its parent space-time continuum and then snapping back in again… . Taking their cue from me, my stalwarts shrugged too and contentedly returned to their munchies.
—Excepting Rawl Fergis, who was ever attuned to my personal wavelength. He’d winked at me and put his spoon and bowl carefully to one side. Scratching his nose, he then wiped his lips with the napkin provided and leaned across the shapely legs of our two lovelies to whisper sotto voce, “I’ve a • mind to know what’s happening, Collin—-if you’ll tell me.”
I shook my head. “Whatever it is, there’s nothing we can do except wait and watch. Attend to that,” I gestured to the viewscreen, “moreso than that,” I nodded toward the great window of the Deneb’s bow, “and you’ll see what I see.”
The tensions building within myself, Ragan and Kriloy touched the others strongly. I mentally ticked off the seconds, watched them closely when the pyrotechnics came. There was no fear; no alarm. Indeed, they greeted the shower of flashing, elongated, sleetlike snowflakes as would a group of children—with delight and pleasure. And why not? Colorwise the bursts of bright flakes ran the gamut of the rainbow and back again. Tune, even as expressed in nanoseconds, stood quite still.
And then, and then, well there we were, hanging at best but a half-million miles of Alpha’s south pole. We’d jumped two billion miles to the system of Fomalhaut II! Seen directly through the Deneb’s bow, Alpha was as Sol’s Mars—desolate, wasted, waterless, ruined! After the hypnotic beauty of Camelot-Fregis, it was no pleasant sight.
My twelve, startled, looked instantly to each other for confirmation of this visual horror, the switch from a Fregisian Eden to a burning Sheol… . Their responses were of fear and confusion. When it was understood that they all saw the same thing, and a quick glance at me calmed them somewhat, they shrugged away their fear and settled to what would come next… . Conditioned from birth to bloody war, murder and the natural (to them) art of stoicism, they were indeed true Alphians—-or at least true Fregisians.
My eyes were glued to the viewer. While we were in transit, the two battle pyramids—and I was as yet unwilling to call them the enemy (which defines the difference, perhaps, between an Adjuster’s thinking and that of a starship’s battle commander)—had tightened considerably. The third grouping continued to hover above the sphere, at a considerable distance from their belligerent companions. It was as if they expected something.
Then Hooli came back, and in a way to almost paralyze my brain. He did it physically and verbally; a thing he had never done before.
I’d taken a second to glance toward Murie, concerned for the thoughts that must be plaguing her as to what was happening. My gaze, of necessity, passed over the sleeping Boo. Its eyes opened simultaneously and, being in a direct line with the viewscreen, it saw exactly what I had seen. A normal rodentius drusus would have had no reaction at all. But our little bastard sat up to stare in wild alarm at the ships and the sphere. Then its gaze shifted to sweep the parabola of the Deneb’s nose; saw the void and our direct proximity to the surface of Alpha. They held for seconds, as if desperately reluctant to believe what they saw, then switched to focus on me. The two small shoebuttons were no longer the eyes of a dull-brained rodent!
I whispered hoarsely, “Hooli? What?—Are you back?”
The little black eyes grew big, staring, like twin black holes as seen from a monitor scope. His reply was direct. Gone was any attempt.to ape my voice as he usually did, nor did he use the archaic Terran that he so dearly loved. It was as if he too had been caught off base; as if he’d no time at all for nonsense, no time for anything but to shriek fearfully inside my head with a voice that was wholly his. The words were white hot steel:
COLLIN! GET THEM OUT OF HERE! FOR THEIR LIVES’ SAKE, GET THEM OUT! THERE’S NO—”
His voice broke. And so did his little host. Hooli’s very fear had apparently created an unacceptable trauma. The poor little beast—and Hooli had somehow gotten him to his feet—sighed audibly, sadly and, like the fabled Camille, put a small paw to its forehead, groaned horribly and collapsed unconscious into Murie’s delectable lap. Arms akimbo, its eyes rolled so that only the whites showed. Its small toes visibly curled as if in insulin shock.
Murie, alarmed, tried instantly to revive it, to no avail.
But Hooli, if he’d really sought to aid us, had returned much too late. The Pug-Boo would survive, that I knew; indeed, that little bastard, if let alone, would survive anything but the absence of forage. I’d just remembered that it had no belly-button.…
The Deneb had, in the meantime and simultaneously, zeroed in on the double pyramid. Battle screens were up, all sensors working, all weaponry coordinated to respond to the slightest hostile act… . Which bothered the twin pyramids not one bit. Ignoring all “stand and receive” orders, they simply locked in on the Deneb and let loose with a number of pencil beams of contra-terrene particles, ant
imatter, directed toward us.
That it was CT was instantly manifest in the myriad of small to large points of released energy dotting the space between ourselves and the aliens. Where even the smallest mote—and it had instantly become an enveloping cloud— touched on a mote of space debris, the release was a flash of purest light.
But Hooli’s warning had also triggered me, so that even before the CT release, I’d hit the emergency studs of my viewscreen, calling: “Abort! Abort! Drelas! This is Kyrie Fern. Abort the mission. Abort! Abort …!”
At a hundred miles the cloud of CT hit the Deneb’s first screen. The result, a gigantic play of pyrotechnics across a huge quadrant of blackness. The interlaced web of raging, silent chaos was easily held by the screen, to waste itself: being reduced to intermittent flashes and finally to die.
But that was afterwards. For the Deneb had not been inactive. Before the antimatter had reached the screens a double grouping of tight beams had shot out to touch each separate ship of the pyramids. Like our defenseless shuttlecraft, they too were gone in instant, patterned stars of released energy.
All of it, from start to finish, had happened in a space of seconds!
Only then did the Deneb’s commander deign to reply to my attempts to intercede. I doubt much that he’d have responded at all had the blue-white sphere and the five remaining alien craft made the slightest move to counter. But they didn’t and he did….
His face filled my personal screen, eyes the color of dead snow, slitted, his lips compressed. He said harshly: “Senior Adjuster Kyrie Fern. You’ve just thirty seconds to explain yourself to my satisfaction. And I warn you, sir, that you’ve chosen to interfere with a battle commander in the very midst of an act of war! Now speak up!”
I answered bluntly, calmly. “But that’s my point, Admiral. You are not in command! I submit that Code A-2 does not apply!”
—Hooli, you little son of a bitch, I prayed. If you’re not right … by the gods, if … you’re … not … right….
Ragan had long been on his feet; Kriloy too, his face white, his features twisted in fear. Kriloy was ever for protocol and the “book,” to hide, I think, both his own incompetence and his lack of initiative.
He blurted, “Damn you, Kyrie.”
“Shut up,” I said curtly. “And don’t interfere. And keep your viewers locked on that sphere so we’ll know what’s happening. Do you understand me? That’s an order to both of you.”
Admiral Drelas Niall watched silently.
“It’s like this,” I said, returning to him. “Code 17, para L-2 states that the Senior Adjuster, retains command at all times, as long as any of his charges continues within the proximity of any potential battle encounter by a starship.”
“But not during a battle encounter, Kyrie. That’s crap and you know it.”
“You said that, not me.”
“What the hell game are you playing?”
“No game. I want my people off this ship. And in my continuing capacity as commander, I order you now to punch back to Fomalhaut I, and to allow us time for planetfall. The sphere, Admiral, and the pyramid, will still be here when you return.”
“You dare to lecture me?” Drelas’s face was suddenly white with rage, and I didn’t blame him. ‘I'd have you in irons right now, were it not—”
A voice interceded. “Attention, sir. The sphere’s moving.”
And it was, slowly. I could see it in Murie’s screen. “I repeat, Admiral,” I said harshly, “get us off this ship, now!”
At which point, Ragan—both he and Kriloy were still standing—was foolish enough to put a remonstrating hand upon my arm. He’d unknowingly risked the whirlwind. Rawl, coming instantly out of his swivel and to his feet, slid his greatsword with one lightning sniiick from the sheath across his back to hold it flat out, the point touching Ragan’s throat. Lors Sernas, at the rail, had also drawn, as had my hulking young Sir Dosh. I remember thinking how much he looked like his martyred father; the bulging eyes, the muscles twitching at the corners of his jaw….
Rawl winked at me, saying, “I’ve a mind, Collin, to show this impetuous lord the color of his blood. What say you? A small prick, perhaps, to keep him honest?”
I shook my head, careful not to show displeasure. But what I denied, our Caroween did not. “Desist, great oaf,” she shouted. “You but show your boorishness to these gentle people. Indeed, I’m bound to think, my love, that my soon-to-be Kingdom of Great Ortmund might suffer seriously with your presence. Leave off!”
Rawl ignored her. And all along the slender platform the lords of Marack and the North drew closer to my person. Some, like the level-headed Fel-Holdt, to spread their arms and to place themselves between the threatening Rawl Fergis and the scared-silly Ragan….
Admiral Drelas, ignoring the whole of it, continued, shouting, “But why, man? Dammit!” He literally spat the words out.
I sighed my relief. That he’d asked at all was an indication of surrender.
“I cannot tell you,” I said contritely. “I’m deeply sorry. Believe me.”
“That clause can be interpreted in a dozen different ways.”
“Return us, Commander. Please. At once!”
He fell silent, frowning at the slow-moving sphere in the viewscreen. Then, his gaze returning to me, he cleared his throat to say, “Adjusters Ragan and Kriloy, you are witnesses to this: Senior Adjuster Kyrie Fern. You will board your scoutship now and prepare to return these natives to their planet. The warp will begin in five minutes, provided we are not interfered with. A last point, Adjuster Kyrie, is that upon the termination of this action, I intend personally to prefer charges of mutiny against you before the Foundation Council and the Federation Navy. Is that understood, sir?”
“It is.” -
His face disappeared from the screen.
Five minutes!
I arose. “My lords,” I said to the “ambassadors,” “there’s no time now for converse. But we, all of us, must return to our world at once. Tis in the interest of Fregis and Marack that we do this. Accordingly, I ask now that you follow me, please.”
They did. And I led them, half-running, down the main corridors of the great starship; through living quarters, dining compartments, and the combo-playroom, auditorium and library. We then descended to the level of warheads, laser banks, and the great, almost silently humming generators and CT converters. A final dash brought us out onto the-shuttle and scoutcraft platform. Once there—I’d perversely ordered the reluctant Kriloy to accompany us—we boarded, the little ship as rapidly as was humanly possible, fitting ourselves like the proverbial Terran sardine into a space built to accommodate but a crew of five.
Even as we moved toward the wide exit slot the first flashes of the kaleidoscope of color denoting warp appeared through the transparent double-lift doors. The inner doors raised silently. We slid forward; waited. Then the rainbow flakes disappeared and we were back again, just like that… . Again, and without wasting a nanosecond, I caused the outer doors to lift and the inner ones to drop behind us.
We were then instantly free of the Deneb and heading back toward that beauteous water world of Camelot-Fregis.
Shifting immediately from a modified CF drive to the power of Fregis’s magnetic lines, I swung the little craft in an arc to the area of the great southern continent of Om. At which point I came about, for I intended hitting atmosphere at an angle up from the Selig Isles and the River-Sea, and then north by northeast to Glagmaron City.
To starboard, literally, since we were now cutting back, the Deneb was clearly visible. Moreover the translucence of the scoutship’s bow was such that when the ice-blue sphere and its accompanying battle pyramid also broke through warp to be suddenly there, just a few hundred miles from the Deneb, we, all of us, were then first-row witnesses to what happened.
I am positive to this day that the sphere was unaware of our presence. I’m positive, too, that whatever sensors it may have had were useless in the face of the fact that
we’d already switched to the power of Fregis’s magnetic field and in an area of surface-matter turbulence. This last was a natural probe deflector. Indeed, I doubt that the sphere’s sensors could have tracked us even if it had been aware of us and -had chosen to try.
On the other hand a logical assumption would be that as the two battle pyramids were peanuts to the power of the Deneb, so were we “peanuts” to the sphere.
They ignored us—if they were aware of us at all—and within a second a dazzling shaft of rainbow light slashed directly out from the sphere to play over the entire surface of the Deneb—and the great hulk of the beauteous starship vanished! It was just gone as if it had never been! Not even the accompanying residue glitter of fused debris associated with such events remained. It was simply gonel
For a few brief moments, I think I blanked out at the horror of it. But then I was hearing the cry of absolute anguish from Kriloy. “My God!” he was saying, over and over. “Oh, my God!”
Arthur H. Landis - Camelot 03 Page 2
