Buck Roger XXVC #00.5 Arrival

by M S Murdock

  Running. Running until her own heart pounding was louder than any other sound, louder even than the harsh breaths she gasped. Running until she knew her brother and sister were safe, decaying the Terrines in a wild scramble through the rubble of outer Chicagorg. Her heart pounded louder and louder until she heard no more.

  Light. Strong arms lifting her. Murmured words or concern.

  Beowulf’s face. Large and square and full of worry. Piercing black eyes midway between bristling white hair and bristling white moustache. Eyes that looked through her. Eyes of her father’s friend. Beowulf took her cold hands between his large brown ones and began to rub them.

  “You’re safe, Wilma. Safe. Buddy and Sally are safe. You remember me?”

  Wilma expelled a deep breath. “I remember. When can I see them?”

  “Soon. First we must talk. Your parents have given you very little choice in life. No, no, don’t ruffle up. What a baleful stare. Anger strikes in your eyes like lightning! I mean, by their loyalties to the New Earth Organization, they have marked you. RAM will never trust you as Wilma Deering, daughter of Robert and Aurelia Deering. If you wish a normal life, you will have to change your identity.”

  “Never! Those pigs killed my parents and tried to lay the blame on you! Will never work for them, or live their regimented life! And I will get even if it takes me the rest of my life.” Wilma’s voice shook with passion.

  “I take it you wish to join our ranks,” said Beowulf dryly.

  “Yes.” Wilma’s terse response was not the starry-eyed eagerness of a romantic teenager. She knew exactly what she was choosing.

  Darkness again, this time pierced by a shaft of light. A Terrine rose before her, flat, two-dimensional. She did not care. She raised her pistol and fired. The laser charge scared the center of the Terrine’s chest. A bell sounded, and the Terrine vanished. To her left two figures rose, one Terrine, one a child. She whirled and fired. One bell sounded as she burned the Terrine. A single guard appeared in front of her. Whirl, shoot, clang! Drop, shoot, clang! The dance went on and on.

  Finally the shaft of light died. In the total darkness a voice said, “Score ninety-four percent. Marksman first class.”

  Clouds White, puffy, scudding clouds, streaming by faster than thought, yet there was no wind. There was no sound. Only speed. Surrounded by clouds, Wilma thought of the angels depicted in art treasures of the blasted past, and wondered if she had died and grown wings.

  “What in RAM’s name is that?” asked the technician monitoring the video screen. The hazy image of a female figure clothed in flowing robes, with white wings sprouting from her shoulders, floated against a blue sky. . .

  “Search me, said his partner. “NEOs are crazy.”

  Wings. Wilma looked over her left shoulder. Extending behind her was a streak of silver; a metal wing that arched back, slitting through the atmosphere as if it were not there: She looked down, and her hands rested firmly on the controls of a spacecraft. She was flying, but the wings were mechanical, not supernatural.

  “That’s right, Deering. Keep her nose up.” Her flight instructor sat in the copilot’s seat, a clipboard of check sheets in his hand. “Now bring her on in. You’re doing fine. Cut landing speed by point five. There! That’s better. Keep her “steady! Fine!” The pressure blanket buoyed the plane and it bounced. “Keep her nose up, I said! Good. Hold her steady… you’re down. Ease of the throttle. Good. Make a slow turn, ninety degrees to starboard-cut your engines-power down.” The ship glided to a halt. “Well, Deering, how did your first solo flight feel?”

  “Scary,” she replied honestly.

  Noise People everywhere. People talking. Eyes that cut through the chews and riveted her to the spot, oblivious of the Crowd. Laughing, dangerous, wanton eyes that made her their target. She flushed, her fair skin, flaming like her hair; but as the eyes drew' closer the blood drained from her face, leaving it pearly white.

  “Where have they been hiding you?” The voice was mocking, light, caressing.

  “Nowhere,” she replied inanely. She struggled for control, angry she could be overcome by a look. The eyes held her. Pale sea-green laced with golden lights, surrounded by curling dark lashes, they promised an untamed personality, dangerous, passionate, and daring.

  “Then it’s lucky I saw you first,” said Kane, taking possession of her.

  The man’s image appeared on the interrogator’s video screen. He was devastating. Tall, slim, perfectly proportioned, there was not an ounce of extra flesh on his close-knit frame. High cheekbones and a classically straight nose gave his face an aristocratic air, and the carefully clipped, dark moustache added a rakish quality. On his left jaw a tattoo shaped like a broken crescent posed, indicating a colorful history. His dark hair curved softly around his head, occasionally curling in rebellion. The scene shifted abruptly.

  White light. Curses. The sting of a whip on bare flesh. Bitter cold. Prison. Deimos prison. The black hole where the enemies of RAM sank into oblivion and death. She heard the curses dimly, felt the blows lightly, and knew she was losing consciousness. Knew this had happened before. Knew it would happen again. Until she died. The cold closed around her; pressing against her body on all sides. Her knees were drawn up, her arms folded between them and her chin. The wet cold of condensed moisture on stone trickled slowly down her back, soaked through her suit, and congealed on her shins. Buried. That was it. She had died and was buried.”

  Terrified, she looked up. Ten feet above her was a square opening. Of course. The fuel delivery shaft.” She must have fallen asleep after the grueling race through the prison grounds, a race she had carefully planned. Once in the rabbit warren of the underground cells, she had eluded the guards and made for the shaft. She listened carefully A single set of footsteps approached. She waited. They grew nearer, passed, and faded into the distance. Wilma let out her breath. The guard would not return for an hour? She began to inch her way up the shaft, her guerrilla training finding hand: and footholds where there seemed to be none. At the top of the shaft she checked the area. It was empty of human life. She wedged her elbows against the stone and levered herself up, then rolled onto the smooth paving stones of the roof of Deimos prison.

  The piercing electronic eye of a detector swept over her; and Wilma shrank from it, but it did not record her presence. She wondered at her luck, but took it, making for freedom.

  Beowulf again. His eyes fill of pain

  “NO!”

  “There’s no use denying it, Wilma. Kane’s gone over For you.

  “He couldn’t.”

  “He did it to save your life. No one escapes from Deimos. He bought your freedom with his own.”

  “Then, when he gets the chance, he’ll come back.”

  “I don’t think so.” The pain in Beowulf’s eyes deepened. “He’s had the chance.”

  “What do you mean?” Wilma had her mentor by the collar, the anger in her shaking fingers nothing compared to the torment in her eyes.

  “Kane’s had the chance to some back. More than one. RAM has given him a lot as a man who’s found the true faith. Including freedom. It’s been months, and he’s begun flying missions for RAM.”

  His words were a knife, and Wilma sagged.

  “It’s a sore loss,” Beowulf said. “He was the best pilot we had, in spite of his wild streak.” He ran a hand over Wilma’s red hair: “Now you are our best.”

  Wilma shook her head slowly, tears streaming down her face.

  The images on the video screen came thick and fast, fragments of Wilma’s life as a NEO freedom fighter. The midnight gloom of a dark street burst into explosive white as a Terrine grenade detonated on Wilma’s heels. Faces flashed by, friend and foe she saw the stars, and the instrument panel of her spacecraft. There were other Ships, closing on her or fleeing from her guns. At intervals, Buddy’s or Sally’s face appeared, older as the months lengthened into years. There were no long vignettes, just a jumble of pictures. “I don’t envy the boys in Int
erp.” said the first technician “This is a mess.”

  “Just hope the tape’s long enough. You know what happened the last time we had to change one.”

  The first man shuddered. “How did we know the subject was going to mention the only detail Interp was after in the ten seconds it took us to change a tape? Those stuffed shirts should try this job sometime.”

  Wilma heard the words dimly as she slipped into an empty box. At first she was passive, then she recognized the box. It was a cell with her name on it, deep in the heart of Calypso. She threw herself against the walls in her mind, writhing madly in her restraints If her first imprisonment was an unpleasant experience, the second was hell, pure and simple, a hell of drugs and torture and degradation. There was a blur of agony as memories answered the call of the drug and surfaced. A series of blows left her gasping. Then hunger, hunger of such long standing it was a normal pain. She rebelled, trying frantically to push the memories back into their locked compartments, but they flowed on, unchecked.

  She could hear screaming alarms, the scurrying feet of the guards as they ran, and the whining blasts of a heavy laser. Sparks guttered on the, inside of the cell door as the laser destroyed the lock, and a crashing blow knocked the door from its hinges. The heavy metal clattered against the stone floor The opening was filled with a huge masculine silhouette, backlit by the illumination in the corridor to an eerie unreality. Wilma stood up slowly. “Who in sweet hades are you?” she asked

  “Black Barney. Deming?”

  “Yo.”

  “Twenty thousand credits-if we sell her back to NEO,” commented a voice behind the black monolith. “From RAM, more.”

  “Mrrr” said Barney. “Worth the risk.”

  “The market for political prisoners is rising, Captain. She’ll cover expenses. The rest’ll be cream.”

  Wilma thought fast. Barney was infamous, a pirate whose one god was money. She had no chance of escaping him physically, for Barney’s bionic modifications made him an awesome fighting machine. She attacked from another direction. “Sell me if you want to, idiot’ sell me back to RAM for enough credits to buy yourself a new ship. Or let me buy my freedom-at five times the price!”

  Barney’s eyes narrowed under his thatch of dark hair. He lifted Wilma by the scruff of the neck with one huge hand. His eyes gleamed red. “How can you come by five times the price?” There was contempt in his voice.

  Wilma glared into his implacable face, undaunted by the glinting metal that made up half his countenance. “I can earn it.”

  Barney’s eyes swept her up and down. “I don’t see how”

  “Put me down, you oaf!” Wilma was beyond caring that the Master Pirate was capable of snapping her neck with a pinch of his fingers. “Put me down and I’ll tell you how you can make some real money.”

  Slowly Barney lowered her to the floor, but he kept his fingers around her neck.

  “Give me a ship. Give me a crew-prisoners from Calypso. In six months I’ll pay you back a hundred times over. Your profit will be enormous-and at no real cost to you.”

  “I am to trust you?” Barney’s look was incredulous “That did not enter my mind. It’s a gamble, I warrant, but how can you really lose? Who is the most fearsome privateer in the system?”

  “I am.”

  “Agreed. It would be pointless to run from you. You can always kill me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What harm is there in giving the proposition a chance? I hate RAM. I hate them for what they did to me. I hate them for killing my parents, and I hate them for what they are trying to do to Earth. You know my record. I am one of the best pilots in the system, and I will prey on RAM without mercy.” Barney’s expressionless face was a block of granite. The coldness of the silence washed over Wilma like death. Finally he spoke. “A bargain,” he said. So she joined the ranks of piracy, slicing away at RAM’s shipping like a ruthless laser.

  The images on the video screen jumbled again, mostly fragments of raids, broken by the faces of her family, and occasionally-by Kane’s audacious smile.

  “Give her another dose,” said the first technician on the edges of Wilma’ s consciousness. “She’s slowing down again.”

  “Don’t dare,” returned his companion. “Might kill her, and you know what the supervisor would say to that.”

  Wilma sat up with a start, sweat pouring from her body. She’d had the dream again. The technicians, the needles, the images-the hell of drugged interrogation. Dear heaven, she, had thought it was fading, but this was all too clear. She ran a hand through her wet auburn hair, breathing hard. For months after her release from Calypso she had been afraid to sleep for fear of the dream. She had lived through horrors once It was entirely unthinkable she should be forced to endure them over and over in her mind. It made RAM out the winner, and Wilma had determined that would never be. The telecom beside her bed was jingling noisily. That must be what woke me up, she thought Thank you, small lifeline. She reached out and picked up the instrument.

  “Deering?” The voice was distantly mechanical.

  Sometimes Earth’s telecommunications systems left a lot to be desired. Wilma took three slow breaths willing control “Deering here,” She replied.

  “Hold please? There was a series of clicks.

  “Wilma? Turabiah here.” Wilma’s commanding officer in NEO General Carlton Turabian, was her friend as well. “I hear you’re going to Australia. To see Kane.” It was a statement and a question at the same time

  “You should pay your sources more. They’re very good.”

  “Then it’s true? Wilma this is great! Let me send someone along with you. We can try to reinitiate him

  “No.” Her mouth was set in a firm line.

  “But he’s a great pilot! I should think you, of all people, would want him to return!”

  “Not under those circumstances?”

  “Then let me at least--”

  “No.” She was not willing to compromise when it came to Kane. “This trip is for me, Turabian. If there’s anything to know, I’ll tell you when I return,” she said, a little more softly. “You know I will.”

  If there was anything Carlton Turabian knew for sure, it was where Wilma Deering’s loyalty lay. “Be careful.”

  “You know I will.”

  00000

  On the other side of the world, Killer Kane stalked the confines of his prison with the chained ferocity of a cornered Tasmanian devil. His anger charged the atmosphere, draining his face of the rapier charm that was his trademark. The muscles over his cheek bones and Jaw were sharply defined by it, tense and corded. His mouth was a hard line.

  He had been stupid, and he could not forgive himself That stupidity landed him in Australia, a god forsaken hellhole inhabited by the tattered remnants of native marsupials, birds, aborigines, and the horrific dregs of RAM’s unsuccessful experiments in genetic engineering. He glared at the bars that crisscrossed the windows of his room. They offended him. He had an insane desire to throw himself against them, defying their primitive restriction, but he quelled it. With every step, he vowed revenge on Armand Zibroski.

  As chairman of the board for Ferricom, Inc., he controlled a high percentage of RAM’s mining interests. Ferricom had interests in Australia. Kane was incarcerated at the Wollongong Outpost on the edge of the Blue Mountains in Sydney Reservation. His cell was located in the central corridor on the fifth floor of Treasury, Ltd. Ferricom’s Australian subsidiary.

  When Kane awoke from his drugged sleep, he was safely incarcerated, with the anonymous face of a locked computer terminal his only companion.

  He glared at the terminal, angry yellow lights in his eyes. The computer screen gave him no answers. It was as unyielding as the stone walls of another prison. He had spent an eternity of thirty days in the priority security ward of Deimos Prison. The time was woven tightly into the fabric of his memory, even though much of it was a drugged stupor. The dark, dark walls of rough-cut stone, the cold sw
eat of condensation, the dank smell of stale water, the scratchy sound of sewer rats scrabbling across the stone, were as clear as the hour they happened. He could still feel the cut of the Terrine’s cat-o’-nine-tails ripping across his back, tearing his clothing to ribbons, then slicing flesh. The sensation was as disembodied now as it had felt then, under the influence of Doxinal.

  He closed his eyes, hearing the voice of his interrogator without fear. It was an exercise he set himself, pending the day he would bring Alonzo Khrebet to justice.

  “It is useless to resist,” said Khrebet in a voice as soft as a kitten’s fun. The whip sliced ruthlessly across Kane’s shoulders. “In the end, you will tell me all I wish to know. What were you and Deering doing at Cooperates Liaison Headquarters?”

  Kane said nothing, but his capture rolled through his mind like a looped recording. The night was deep black. He could feel the damp masonry wall at his back. He could feel Wilma’s slim shoulder against his arm, hear her quickened breathing over the footsteps of the roving band of Terrine guards. A shaft of light out through the darkness, a Terrine’s search beacon slicing into the fog at their feet. The light rose. He squinted against it as he and Wilma ducked it and ran.

  “There they are!”

  The cry brought a rush of footsteps from all directions. Another light pierced the dark, stopping Kane and Wilma in their tracks. “Looks like we’ve lost a snitch,” he said.

  “Ohm sold us out,” she agreed.

  Kane flashed Wilma a grin. His eyes danced, anticipating a fight. As the Terrines closed their half circle, Kane and Wilma launched an attack, the speed and violence of their move taking the Terrines completely by surprise. One man got a shot that missed Kane and singed one of his cohorts. The injured man swore. Wilma dodged as Kane threw one of the Terrines over his shoulder. She landed a blow to the stomach as a Terrine reached for her, then grabbed his flailing hand and bent his arm back. He sank to his knees with a moan and she kicked him flat, His head struck the street and he went limp. An unconscious Terrine rolled against her lower legs as Kane dropped him. Kane grabbed her hand as they vaulted over the body and ran.