The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmitz

  "I've used the antidote," the captain told him. "Miss do Eldel and Vezzarn have come awake. Dani hasn't."

  "That doesn't surprise me," Yango said, after a moment.

  "Why not?" asked the captain.

  "I had a particular concern about your niece, sir. As you know." Laes Yango, after his lapse from character, had gone back to being polite. "When she became unconscious with the rest of you, I drugged her again with a different preparation. I was making sure that any unusual resistance she might show would not bring her back to her senses before I intended her to regain them."

  "Then there's an antidote to that around?"

  "I have one. It isn't easy to find."

  "What do you want?" the captain asked.

  "Perhaps we can reach an agreement, sir. I am not very comfortable here."

  "Perhaps we can," the captain said.

  He flicked off the intercom. The other two were watching him.

  "He probably does have it," he remarked. "I searched him but I'm not in your line of business. He could have it hidden somewhere. The logical thing would be to haul him up here and search him again."

  "It looks to me," said Vezzarn thoughtfully, "that that's what he wants, skipper."

  "Uh-huh."

  Hulik said, "Just before that man spoke, I heard a noise."

  "So did I," said the captain. "What did you make of it?"

  "I'm not certain."

  "Neither am I." It might, thought the captain, have been the short, angry half-snarl, half-whine of some large animal-shape, startled when his voice had sounded suddenly in the storage. . . . A snarly sort of thing, Goth had said. But the Sheem robot's locked case stood inside the locked door of that almost impregnable vault—

  Hulik do Eldel's frightened eyes told him she was turning over the same kind of thoughts. "We can get a look down into the storage from here," he said.

  There was a screen at the end of the instrument console, used to check loading and unloading operations on the ship from the control room. Its pick-up area was the ceiling of the storage compartment. The captain hurriedly switched it on. "We're wondering whether Yango's robot is in the storage," he told Vezzarn.

  Vezzarn shook his head. "It can't be there, skipper! There's no way Yango could have got into the vault without your keys. I guarantee that!"

  And there was no way Yango should have been able to get out of his handcuffs, the captain thought. He'd checked the vault before he left the storage. It was still securely locked then and the keys to it were here, in a locked desk drawer.

  "We'll see," he said.

  The screen lit up—for a second or two. Then it was dark again. The screen was still on. The light in the storage compartment had been cut off.

  But they'd seen the robot for the moments it was visible. The great dark spider shape crouched near the storage entry. Its unfettered master stood a dozen feet from it. Yango had looked up quickly as the screen view appeared, startled comprehension in his face, before his hand darted to the lighting switches beside the entry door. Cargo cases throughout the compartment had been shifted and tumbled about as though the bulky robot had forced a passage for itself through them . . . .

  That wasn't the worst of it.

  "You saw what happened to the side of the vault?" the captain asked unsteadily.

  They'd seen it. "Burned out!" Vezzarn said, white-faced. "High intensity—a combat beam! It'd take that. It's an old war robot he's got with him, skipper. You can't stop a thing like that. . . . What do we do now?" The last was a frightened squeal.

  * * *

  Laes Yango suggested, via intercom from the storage, that surrender was the logical move.

  "Perhaps you don't fully understand the nature of my pet," he told the captain. "It's been in my possession for fifteen years. It killed over eighty of my men while we were taking the ship it guarded, and would have killed me if I had not cut one of the devices that controlled it from the hand of the lordling whose property it had been. It knew then who its new master was. It's a killing machine, sir! It was made to be one. The Sheem Assassin. Your hand weapons can't harm it. And it has long since learned to obey my voice as well as its guiding instruments . . . ."

  The captain didn't reply. The last of the war robots were supposed to have been destroyed centuries before, and the deadly art of their construction lost. But Vezzarn had been right. The thing that beamed its way out of the vault must be such a machine. None of them doubted what Yango was telling them.

  They had some time left. No more time than the Agandar could help—and the robot undoubtedly was burning out the storage door while he'd been speaking to them. The door was massive but not designed to stand up under the kind of assault that had ruptured the vault from within. The two would be out of the storage quickly enough.

  But they couldn't reach the control section immediately then. The ship's full emergency circuits had flashed into action seconds after Vezzarn's frantic question—layers of overlapping battle-steel slid into position, sealing the Venture's interior into ten air-tight compartments. At least four of those multiple layers of the toughest workable material known lay between the control room and the storage along any approach Yango might choose to take. They probably wouldn't stop a war robot indefinitely; but neither would they melt at the first lick of high intensity energy beams. And the captain had opened the intercom system all over the ship. That should give them some audible warning of the degree of progress the robot was making.

  Otherwise there seemed to be little he could do. The activating device he'd taken from Yango when the robot was stored in the vault was not where he'd locked it away. So the Agandar had discovered it on looking around after he'd knocked the four of them out. When the captain searched him, it wasn't on his person. But he hadn't needed it. There was a ring on his forefinger he'd been able to reach in spite of the handcuffs; and the ring was another control instrument. The Assassin had come awake in the vault and done the rest, including burning off its master's bonds.

  It made no difference now where the other device was stored away on the ship. They couldn't leave the section to look for it without opening the emergency walls.

  And if they had it, the captain thought, it wasn't likely they'd be able to wrest control of the robot away from the Agandar. Yango, at any rate, did not appear to be worrying about the possibility . . . .

  SMALL PERSON, announced the vatch, THIS IS THE TEST—THE SITUATION THAT WILL DETERMINE YOUR QUALITY! THERE IS A WAY TO SURVIVE. IF YOU DO NOT FIND IT, MY INTEREST AND YOUR DREAM EXISTENCE END TOGETHER—

  The captain looked quickly over at Vezzarn and Hulik. But their faces showed they'd heard nothing of what that great, ghostly wind-voice had seemed to be saying. Of course—it was meant for him.

  He'd switched off the intercom connection with Yango moments before. "Any ideas?" he asked now.

  "Skipper," Vezzarn told him, jaw quivering, "I think we'd better surrender—while he'll still let us!"

  Hulik was shaking her head. "That man is the Agandar!" she said. "If we do surrender, we don't live long. Except for Dani. He'll squeeze from us whatever we can tell him, and stop when he has nothing left to work on."

  "We'd have a chance!" Vezzarn argued shakily. "A chance. What else can we do? We can't stop a war robot—and there's nowhere to run from it!"

  Hulik said to the captain, "I was told you might be a Karres witch. Are you?"

  "No," said the captain.

  "I thought not. But that child is?"

  "Yes."

  "And she's asleep and we can't wake her up!" Hulik shrugged resignedly. Her face was strained and white. "It would take something like magic to save us now, I think!"

  The captain grunted, reached over the desk and eased in the atmosphere drive. "Perhaps not," he said. "We may have to abandon ship. I'm going down."

  The Venture went sliding out of orbit, turning towards the reddish dusk of the silent planet.

  * * *

  Vezzarn had all the veteran spacer's ingr
ained horror of exchanging the life-giving enclosure of his ship for anything but the equally familiar security of a civilized port or a spacesuit. He began arguing again, torn between terrors; and there was no time to argue. The captain took out his gun, placed it on the desk beside him.

  "Vezzarn!" he said; and Vezzarn subsided. "If you want to surrender," the captain told him, "you'll get the chance. We'll lock you in one of those cabins over there and leave you for Yango and the robot to find."

  "Well—" Vezzarn began unhappily.

  "If you don't want that," the captain continued, "start following orders."

  "I'll follow orders, skipper," Vezzarn decided with hardly a pause.

  "Then remember one thing . . ." The captain tapped the gun casually. "If Yango starts talking to us again, I'm the only one who answers!"

  "Right, Sir!" Vezzarn said, eying the gun.

  "Good. Get busy on the surface analyzers and see if you can find out anything worth knowing about this place. Miss do Eldel, you've got good hearing, I think—"

  "Excellent hearing, Captain!" Hulik assured him.

  "The intercom is yours. Make sure reception amplification stays at peak. Compartment E is the storage. Anything you hear from there is good news. D is bad news—they'll be through one emergency wall and on their way here. Then we'll know we have to get out and how much time we have to do it. G is drive section of the engine room. Don't know why Yango should want to go down there, but he could. The other compartments don't count at the moment. You have that?"

  Hulik acknowledged she did. The captain returned his attention to the Venture and the world she was approaching. Vezzarn hadn't let out any immediate howls at the analyzers, so at least they weren't dropping into the pit of cold poison the surface might have been from its appearance. The lifeboat blister was in the storage compartment; so was the ship's single work spacesuit. Not a chance to get to either of those . . . The planetary atmosphere below appeared almost cloudless. Red half-light, black shadows along the ranges, lengthening as the meridian moved away behind them . . . .

  How far could he trust the vatch? Not at all, he thought. He should act as if he'd heard none of that spooky background commentary. But the vatch, capricious, unpredictable, immensely powerful—not sane by this universe's standards—would remain a potential factor here. Which might aid or destroy them.

  Let nothing surprise you, he warned himself. The immediate range of choice was very narrow. If the compartment walls didn't hold, they had to leave the ship. If the walls held, they'd remain here, at emergency readiness, until Goth awoke. But the Agandar's frustrated fury would matter no more than his monster then—unless Yango's attention turned on the strongbox in the vault. No telling what might happen . . . but that was borrowing trouble! Another factor, in any case, was that while Goth remained unconscious, Yango would want her to stay alive. All the pirate's hopes were based on that now. It should limit his actions to some extent . . . .

  "Skipper?" Vezzarn muttered, hunched over the analyzers.

  "Yes?"

  Vezzarn looked up, chewing his lip. "Looks like we could live down there a while," he announced grudgingly. "But these things don't tell you everything—"

  "No." The Venture wasn't equipped with an exploration ship's minutely detailing analysis instruments. Nevertheless, there'd been a sudden note of hope in Vezzarn's voice. "You're sure you're coming along if we have to get out?" the captain asked.

  The spacer gave him a wry, half-ashamed grin. "You can count on me, sir! Panicked a moment, I guess."

  The captain slid open a desk drawer. "Here's your gun then," he said. "Yours, too, Miss do Eldel. Yango collected them and I took them back from him."

  They almost pounced on the weapons. Hulik broke her gun open, gave a sharp exclamation of dismay.

  "Zero charge! That devil cleaned them out!"

  The captain was taking a box from the drawer. "So he did," he said. "But he didn't find my spare pellets. Standard Empire military charge—hope you can use them!"

  They could, and promptly replenished their guns. The captain looked at the console chronometer. Just over nine minutes since he'd broken intercom contact with Yango. The lack of any indication of what the pirate was doing hadn't helped anybody's nerves here; but at least he hadn't got out of the storage compartment yet. The captain set Vezzarn to detaching and gathering up various articles—keys and firing switches to the nova gun turrets, the main control release to the lifeboat blister, the keys to the main and orbital drives . . . .

  There were mountains just below now, and the shallow bowls of plains. The dull red furnace glare of the giant sun bathed the world in tinted twilight. The Venture continued to spiral down towards a maze of narrow valleys and gorges winding back into the mountains . . . .

  They flinched together as the intercom hurled the sounds of a hard metallic crashing into the control room. It was repeated a few seconds later.

  "Compartment D!" whispered Hulik, nodding at the intercom panel. "They're through the first wall—"

  A dim, heavy snarling came from the intercom, then a blurred impression of Yango's voice. Both faded again.

  "Shut them off," the captain said quietly. "We're through listening." Eleven and a half minutes . . . and it might have been a minute or so before Yango set the Assassin to work on the wall.

  Hulik switched off the intercom system, said, a little breathlessly, "If Yango, realizes we've landed . . . ."

  "I'm going to try to keep him from realizing it," the captain told her. The ship was racing down smoothly towards the mouth of a steep-walled valley he'd selected as the most promising landing point barely a minute before.

  "But if he does," Hulik said, "and orders the robot to beam a hole directly through the side of the ship—how long would it be before they could get outside that way?"

  Vezzarn interjected, without looking up from his work, "About an hour. Don't worry about that, Miss do Eldel! He won't try the cargo lock or blister either. He knows ships and knows they're as tough as the rest of it and can't be opened except from the desk. He'll keep coming to the control room—and he'll be here fast enough!"

  "We've got up to thirty minutes," the captain said. "And we can be out in three if we don't waste time! You're finished, Vezzarn?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Wrap it up—don't bother to be neat! Any kind of package I can shove into my pocket—"

  The red sun vanished abruptly as the Venture settled into the valley. On their right was a great sloping cliff-face, ragged with crumbling rock, following the turn of the valley into the mountains. The captain brought the ship down on her underdrives, landed without a jar on a reasonably level piece of ground, as near the cliffs as he'd been able to get. Beside him, Hulik gave a small gasp as the control section lock opened with two hard metallic clicks.

  "Out as fast as you can get out!" The captain stood up, twisted the last set of drive keys from their sockets, dropped them into his jacket pocket, jammed the package Vezzarn was holding out to him in on top of them, zipped the pocket shut, and started over to the couch to pick up Goth. "Move!"

  Faces looked rather pale all around, including, he suspected, his own. But everybody was moving . . . .

  Chapter NINE

  The captain used the ground-level mechanism to close the lock behind them, sealed the mechanism, and added the key to the seal to the assortment of minor gadgetry in his jacket pocket. Then, while Hulik stood looking about the valley, her gun in her hand, he got Goth up on his back and Vezzarn deftly roped her into position there, legs fastened about the captain's waist, arms around his neck. It wasn't too awkward an arrangement and, in any case, the best arrangement they could make. Goth wasn't limp, seemed at moments more than half awake; there were numerous drowsy grumblings, and before Vezzarn had finished she was definitely hanging on of her own.

  "Been thinking, skipper," Vezzarn said quietly, fingers flying, testing slack, tightening knots. "He ought to be able to spot us in the screens—"

  "Uh
-huh. Off and on. But I doubt he'll waste time with that."

  "Eh? Yes, a killer robot'd be a good tracking machine, wouldn't it?" Vezzarn said glumly. "You want to pull Yango away from the ship, then angle back to it?"

  "That's the idea."

  "Desperate business!" muttered Vezzarn. "But I guess it's a desperate spot. And he wants Dani—never'd have figured her for one of the Wisdoms! . . . There! Finished, sir! She'll be all right now—"

  As he stepped back, Hulik said in a low, startled voice, "Captain!" They turned towards her quickly and edgily. She was staring up the valley between the crowding mountain slopes.

  "I thought I saw something move," she said. "I'm not sure . . . ."

  "Animal?" asked Vezzarn.

  "No . . . Bigger. Farther away . . . A shadow. A puff of dust. If there were a wind—" She shook her head.

  The air was still. No large shadows moved anywhere they looked. This land was less barren than it had appeared from even a few miles up. The dry, sandy soil was cluttered with rock debris; and from among the rocks sprouted growth—spiky, thorny, feathery stuff, clustering into thickets here and there, never rising to more than fifteen or twenty feet. "Let's go!" said the captain. "There probably are animals around. We'll keep our eyes open—"

  As they headed towards the ragged cliffs to the right of the ship, the valley's animal life promptly began to give indications of its presence. What type of life it might be wasn't easy to determine. Small things skittered out of their path with shadowy quickness. Then, from a thicket they were passing, there burst a sound like the hissing of ten thousand serpents, so immediately menacing that they spun together to face it, guns leveled. The hissing didn't abate but drew back through the thicket, away from them, and on to the left. The uncanny thing was that though their ears told them the sound was receding across open ground, towards the center of the valley, they could not see a trace of the creature producing it.

  They hurried on, rather shaken by the encounter. Though it might have been, the captain thought, nothing more ominous than the equivalent of a great swarm of harmless insects. A minute or two later Hulik said sharply, "Something's watching us!"