Space 1999 - The Time Fighters

by Michael Butterworth

  The short-haired Controller diligently began tapping out a series of combinations on her console. At length she looked up. ‘The shield is in position.’

  ‘Stand by for further orders.’

  The screen blanked out. Elizia turned to the black-suited. Interrogator and said conspiratorially, ‘We’ll warn the spaceship to stay clear.’

  The Interrogator eyed Koenig and looked doubtful. ‘My understanding of the Alien’s character indicates that his people will not heed any warnings.’

  ‘Then they will burn out in Space!’ Elizia chuckled.

  A fast-burning rage leapt up inside Koenig. He retained his temper, knowing from past experience that it would be futile to reason with women such as these. He had known what they were like when he had seen their cruel blood sports in progress. He had not really expected any better from their leader, although, being a stranger, he had at least expected to be treated with respect.

  He watched with hatred and frustration as the Interrogator turned from her instruments and asked of the other woman, ‘Do you want him here at this time?’

  Elizia regarded him coldly, as a butcher might regard his meat. ‘He might be useful – although he’s not proving himself so far.’ She motioned to the two Huntresses who had positioned themselves on either side of him. ‘Put him behind the screening panel while we run through some more of his memory films. There’s something I must get clear.’

  He was motioned inside the translucent, cell-like room dividing the Security Ward from a similar ward next door. Less than a room, it was more like the space between two panes of double glazing.

  When the door was closed on him he found himself plunged in complete silence. Through the glass he could see the women moving about, their mouths working soundlessly. They were watching the large screen set in the wall above his head, out of his view. They appeared to be arguing and he detected a strong breach between them – a breach either of opinion or policy. They seemed to have forgotten about him and he used the time to think up a plan of escape. At length Elizia faced him again. She touched a dial on the jewelled belt girdling her stomach and at once he heard a sudden inrush of noise and sounds again.

  ‘We have discovered that you are a violent species,’ she told him with some surprise. ‘You did not lead us to believe that. It seems that, like us, you also derive pleasure from the infliction of suffering.’

  ‘If you’ve been picking my mind don’t jump to conclusions,’ Koenig told her harshly. ‘We are violent only when attacked. Any other images you’ve managed to dredge up, are from the Past... from our past history on Earth.’

  ‘Be that as it may, we have decided to allow your friends in the space ship to land after all,’ she told him, pleasure flickering on her face as she observed his hopes rising. ‘Despite the imminent destruction of your home world, it seems that your people are well equipped and will send others to follow unless we put a stop to the belief that you are alive. Great though our force-field is, it wouldn’t stand up to an invasion of such magnitude, and we have no other weaponry on Entra sufficiently large to defend ourselves with. Accordingly, although your friends will be allowed to land here, you will not see them – and they will not see you.’ Her pleasure grew as she watched his changed reaction. ‘They will see Maine’s body – and they will see what they think is your body!’ She turned to the woman in black. ‘Actually the body of a prisoner who thinks he has earned some remission!’ She laughed shrilly, more at the other woman’s lack of amusement than at her macabre joke.

  Koenig’s anger burst and he hammered at the glass. But with a deft touch of her control belt she had already broken off communication and his shouts of affrontery and abuse were not heard.

  A long, amoeboid arm of brackish gasses leapt off the approaching blood world, sucked down towards Alpha by the severe gravitational forces that the two worlds were creating.

  Soon the desolate landscape of the Moon was enveloped in the choking clouds of redness. Loose rock and dust were in turn ripped from the lunar surface and sent hurtling in eddies to plunge into the strange, restless seas of ammonia on the alien planet’s surface.

  A recovered Verdeschi stood in awe on the landing platform of Eagle Nine, saved from the vapours and the cold vacuum of Space by only the thin fabric of his space suit. Clutched under his arm was the atomic trigger that he would need to detonate one of the waste piles. Each of the piles had a protective cap built of concrete and steel, designed to keep it safely apart from human and other life-forms. They were incredibly strong and they would not prove easy to open. In his other hand was the explosive device and timer that he hoped would do the trick.

  He checked with Maya over his helmet radio. ‘Four minutes to blow the concrete cap, two minutes to attach the device to the silo, six minutes to get back to the ship and six minutes at full thrust to take us clear away. Okay, I’m going down.’

  ‘Good luck, Tony.’ Her voice was concerned and tense. When he descended the steps and reached the surface she would take the ship up and keep an aerial look-out for Sandor. This had been what she meant when she had said ‘good luck’.

  After shooting Verdeschi in the back and stunning him, Sandor had kept them both hostage in the Command Centre, wasting more vital time. He had been thwarted finally by Maya, who had surprised him by adopting the form of a boa-constrictor, but had made his escape, leaving behind Eva, Cernik and Stevens who had by then more or less given up. The three apostles had been locked inside the Eagle – Eagle Nine, the ship that he and Maya were using for their getaway. Sandor himself had taken a Moon Buggy and a laser rifle and had set out for the waste dumps in a last, insane bid to stop Verdeschi from altering the Moon’s course.

  Now the madman could be anywhere – most probably crouching amongst the ridges of the Moon rocks that overlooked the dump site, waiting for Verdeschi to appear.

  Trusting to Maya to locate him, the plucky Security Chief set off down the steps, descending into the swirling red mist...

  There were men – and there were fools, Sandor thought to himself. Men who believed in honesty, and truth, and integrity, who faced Life head on. There were fools who tried to deceive and swindle and manipulate, who believed in contrivances and artificiality and whatever they faced it was not Life... and certainly never head on. Men like himself, as he used to be, before he had been forced to waste his time and energy and spoil his honour by fighting Koenig and Verdeschi. Fools like Koenig and Verdeschi.

  He had tried all his life to live by his ideals.

  He had wanted to provide a new and happy life for the Alphans.

  He had been squashed and trodden on, ridiculed, and now... martyred. For that was the way he viewed this last scene. In truth, he might kill Verdeschi and succeed. But in all likelihood he would fail and be killed himself; for he knew now that it was an ironic fact of Life that the fools always won.

  Keeping one wary eye on the Eagle craft that was hovering and circling above him like a demented demon, and one eye on the scab-shaped caps of the waste piles on the ground below him, he raised the powerful rifle to his shoulder and aimed it through the curling vapours.

  Whatever happened next he would try, with his life if necessary, to prove that one man could fight against the lies and the fakery, and win...

  Crael wept and moaned, tearing out what little was left of his hair as he thought of all the heinous, unforgivable crimes his wretched body had committed for the sake of Elizia.

  Now her insatiable appetite for sadism and pleasure had gone too far. He rued the day he had ever committed the crime that had brought him to the penal colony; for since he had been there he had committed atrocities of a far greater and far more horrendous nature.

  In fact, as she had told him on more than one occasion, his sentence had long since expired. He was a free man if he so cared to be. All he had to do was step in the Transbeamer and beam himself back to Ellna. But, like a doctor in a battle, he stayed on in a place which was intolerable.

  Since
the time when he had decided to represent the other prisoners he had watched them grow steadily more resentful. They had tolerated harsher and more extreme conditions. Now, he and some others were beginning to suspect that Ellna, their Home Planet where their wives and children were, was dead. They were beginning to suspect that Elizia and her heirarchy of sexist governesses were keeping the colony going as a vast pleasure park for their sadistic appetites. They could not bring themselves to believe that Ellna’s forces of Law and Order had grown to become as decadent as they seemed. Something had happened to Ellna – and the capture of the alien commander and his seemingly crazed declarations only went to strengthen their suspicions.

  In their agony and their misery many of the prisoners were now beginning to feel that they no longer had anything to lose by taking the law into their own hands... by overthrowing Elizia and finding out for themselves what had happened.

  Appalled at the consequences of such a mutiny – but equally appalled by the state of things as they were – Crael approached the door leading to the Reception Hall where he knew Elizia was sitting, devising her entertainments.

  The blood of the latest task he had had to perform was still fresh on his hands – the blood of the prisoner who, dressed in Koenig’s clothes and thinking he was being freed, had been allowed to run into the high-energy force-field in front of the Sanctuary Column.

  He announced himself gravely at the door and entered.

  ‘Yes, Crael,’ she said tonelessly.

  She was sat on her throne, bedecked in her jewellery and splendour. She wore a dreamy, serene expression on her face and he wondered what had affected her. If she had ever had such pleasant human feelings before now, she had never let them be known to him.

  ‘You promised you would not do this,’ he told her severely. ‘It is even worse than the Hunt...’

  She laughed gaily. ‘Ah, you mean the alien commander’s friends? A choice between a promise and self-preservation. They were tricked because they had to be... because they jeopardized our freedom. Because...’ She broke off dreamily, ‘...because John Koenig means a great deal to me, Crael. I don’t want him to return.’ She faced him. ‘What choice would you have made?’

  ‘I don’t mean his friends – but doing that to them was bad enough... I mean Phirley, the prisoner...’ He was almost sobbing again.

  At sight of his weakness her mood changed once more to one of scorn. ‘And what makes you so extra bold today? How can I risk all I have worked for? I am getting tired of you, Crael. I am bored by you...’ A sudden memory came to her distracted mind. ‘John Koenig thinks he can defy my love – for he has resisted me! Well, I won’t tolerate that from any man...!’

  She turned to him once more – sickness, hatred and all-consuming desire for glory in her blazing green eyes.

  ‘I have yearned for John Koenig. My body has lusted for him. Now he will pay the price. I shall love him – I shall slay him!

  ‘I will hunt him down like an animal and out of his skin I shall make a whip!’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The dry, spiky grass stretched away from him to a bleak horizon of leaning, wind-swept bushes. Perched tantalizingly on the horizon was the marble-like column of the transmitter. He doubted now whether in fact it worked as a transmitter at all. It was of little importance to him what it did.

  Of importance to him now were the fleet, scarlet figures pursuing him... and the fleet flight of the hours that were passing, each one bringing closer the time when the Moon would collide.

  As he ran across the vibrating turf, he gazed fiercely up at the dome of blue. Behind the sky, far out in the deeps of the alien sun’s territory, the two worlds were colliding. And he could not stop them.

  There were only hours left – perhaps ten, perhaps none. Perhaps the Moon had already perished. He would never have known about it; the effects of the collision would never be felt where he was.

  Elizia’s last words echoed in his mind. ‘Let him get a good start. After all, we always give the hunted a fair chance... and when he is cornered he must not die quickly...’

  A line of trees appeared and he changed direction. One line of trees looked like another, but this one might mark the wrecked Eagle. If he could make it to the Eagle he could radio Fraser and tell him that he was not dead, and get him to turn around and pick him up.

  ‘I’M NOT DEAD! I’M ALIVE!’ he screamed hoarsely as he ran. ‘I’M ALIVE!!!’

  ‘...He must not die quickly; he must suffer more than an Entran...’ the voice of the mad woman continued inside him. ‘... He is an Alien who has shown contempt for our culture and our authority – After him then! For the glory of Entra and rewards beyond your dreams...!’

  He glanced behind. The scarlet Huntresses were fanning out, bearing down on him in a long, bending line. There were thirty of them altogether and inside the colony there were many more. There were almost more gaolers now than gaoled, and they were waiting for his body to be returned.

  He was tiring quickly and they had gained on him.

  The first of the large tree boles that he and Maine had sheltered behind appeared and he staggered behind it into the shelter of the copse. Through the trees, almost too distant, lay the gleaming white roof of the buckled Eagle.

  He stumbled on across another expanse of grassland. He ran on for what seemed an eternity.

  His heart banged in his head. His legs bent like rubber. The shrill cries of the females and the sharp retorts of their electric whips sounded close behind.

  The torn and gaping hole in the Eagle hull veered up to him and he jumped through it, pushing himself off from the grassy slope with a last burst of strength.

  He fell heavily amongst the jumbled objects inside, bruising and cutting himself. For a moment he gasped in great lungfuls of air, trying to lie still while his body caught a few precious seconds of rest. Then he levered himself up on his shaking legs again. He threw himself into the Pilot Section and collapsed on to the flight console. He fumbled about for the right button, the one that would connect the communications monitor to the emergency battery supply sited beneath the console.

  ‘Eagle One to Moon Base Alpha,’ he shouted urgently as the set burst like magic into life. ‘Eagle One to Moon Base Alpha...’

  But although the set was working, he was getting no reply. He realized bitterly that Moon Base Alpha was probably dead – it was either dead, or else, the saving thought occurred to him, his radio message wasn’t getting through the Entran defence shield that surrounded the planet.

  The faint glimmer of hope made him continue to fight the crippling despair that had fallen on him. His mind worked feverishly in the seconds that were left, searching around the cabin for something that would be of better use to him in his plight.

  The thin black cable trailed away from the cap of the waste pile towards him. Gently, but efficiently, Verdeschi bent down on his knees in his bulky suit and placed the detonating box behind a small outcrop of rock.

  The atomic piles were hundreds of feet deep – giant steel cases entombed in concrete that went down into the Moon’s crust. When the Moon had been Earth’s nearest neighbour, Man had used them to store the lethal atomic waste that he had not dared store on his own planet. There had been many of them. But after the nuclear eruption in 1999, including the much older nuclear waste domes, there were only a handful left. They were still radioactive and would be for another quarter of a million years, if they were left alone. In their entombed state, they were perfectly harmless. Only the introduction of a ‘trigger’ – a rod of pure plutonium – would induce them to erupt again.

  The few piles left were scattered over a wide area. In the immediate vicinity of Verdeschi there were three... and it was these that he hoped to detonate. When they erupted, it did not matter in which direction that they cast the Moon. All that mattered was that when he triggered one off, the heat from that would trigger off the other two, and thus bring about a sufficiently big explosion.

  If the Moon wa
s blown on a course for the fiery, alien star, then that would be bad luck. But if that were to be their fate, then at least they had tried; their absolution would not be from the want of trying.

  If the Moon was blown away from the star and away from the colliding planet, then they would have succeeded in their task. Their only hope then was that the already fragile Moon would not completely disintegrate, but live to send them on their way for another eternity.

  He had used up three of the four minutes that had been allocated to him to blow up the cap. Carefully, he reached down to press the detonating button.

  Up above, the Eagle wheeled silently, searching for the gunman.

  Behind him, in his pack, he felt the cross-hairs of Sandor’s rifle reaching out to him like the antennae of some hideous insect.

  His radio crackled into life abruptly. ‘Tony, get down!’ Maya warned.

  He let himself fall to the floor in the low gravity. He rolled over, in time to see a lance of light stab the rock where his back had been. It came from the ridge, as they had speculated.

  Before Sandor could re-aim, Maya brought the Eagle in low towards where he was hiding. Verdeschi watched as a stab of laser light shot from the guns mounted on the roof of the Eagle. The beam hit the ridge and rocks and dust exploded into the air.

  Before the explosion had properly died away, a return beam of light lanced up from the ridge and struck the craft somewhere on its underbelly. Another laser beam shot down from the Eagle’s roof, causing a second explosion.

  More exchanges of light took place, then two things happened. Sandor’s body came tumbling slowly down the rocky slope and the great ship began to veer out of control, heading for a rocky crater rim.

  Verdeschi stared aghast through his visor. But his task was more urgent and he found his knees once more and pressed the button.

  The concrete cap boiled up in a mass of flame and rock pieces. The waste pile gaped open.

  Four minutes were gone.

  Now he was into his fifth and he was running forward in a series of long, slow strides, clutching the trigger. When he reached the silo he attached the device to the inside wall and left it.