by Douglas Hill
The other occupant of the small, hurtling ship was not human. It was a small, winged alien being, resting on an adapted slingseat that was nearly a perch. From the short body, with its soft leathery plates of skin, the seemingly delicate membranes of the wings extended like half-furled sails. The head was smooth and domed, and above a blunt muzzle two bright, round eyes stared at the control panel with a concentration equal to Keill’s. The perch brought the alien's stubby legs and small feet within easy reach of the panel: and those feet, which were in fact hands – three fingers and an opposing thumb – fidgeted as if they too wanted to race over the controls.
The alien's name was Glr, a female of a race called the Ehrlil – from another galaxy, for man had found no other intelligent life in his own galaxy, when he had spread out to populate the Inhabited Worlds. The Ehrlil were a long-lived race, much given to roaming among the stars, and Glr's wanderings had brought her to man's galaxy. There she had eventually met and befriended Keill Randor, and had willingly joined him in the lonely and hazardous quest that had occupied him since the destruction of his world – a quest that had now brought them to the planet Rilyn.
---
Keill glanced up at the viewscreens as the fog thinned and fell away. The ship burst out into clear air beneath a dull, overcast sky, and swept over a shoreline where waves flopped heavily against reddish soil. The terrain beyond the shore was typical of Rilyn. It was uniformly flat and almost featureless – a reddish plain with outcrops of dark, bare rock, interrupted here and there by swathes of thick, greenish shrubbery that grew no higher than a few centimetres.
'Hard to imagine people ever wanting to live here,’ Keill said idly.
It is usually hard to understand why humans want the things they want. Glr's silent reply formed itself in Keill's mind, for her race was telepathic. And while Keill was not, Glr was able to project her thoughts into his mind, and could pick up his surface thoughts when they were dearly formed. She had met only a few humans whose minds were clear enough for that kind of communication – which was one reason why Glr often claimed to hold a low opinion of mankind.
A smile tugged at the corner of Keill's mouth, but he left the remark unanswered. A smear of a darker red had appeared on the horizon, in the forward viewscreens.
'That's what we want.' His hands moved, and the ship veered slightly, still skimming low over the empty land.
In moments the distant smear showed itself to be an upland region, where the land heaved itself into broad, rolling mounds and hummocks. Everywhere the dark rock thrust up out of the soil, as if striving to become hills – but without success. For the rock surfaces were flattened and razed, scarred with cracks and crevices, creased and pitted by erosion.
It looked almost as if some gigantic weight had settled crushingly on the land, and had then been dragged along to grind away any upthrust peak or rise. And that levelling image was reinforced by the abundance of crushed rock and cracked boulders scattered in the vales and gullies that lay between the flat-topped promontories.
There, too, the reddish soil lay heaped in drifts and dunes, as if it were light sand. Yet it was dense soil, Keill could see, held firmly by the tough green shrubbery and by a rich carpeting of flat vegetation like moss.
Nothing on Rilyn seemed to reach up, to grow vertically towards the light and the sky. The landscape seemed to cower, to prostrate itself, in its empty, silent bleakness.
Do you really hope to escape detection by flying so low?Glr asked, her mental voice sounding testy as the ship skimmed an outcropping.
Keill shrugged. 'Maybe – if whoever's here isn't being careful. There's no point in coming straight down on top of them.’
But if they are being careful, and their detectors are working?
'We'll take the chance,' Keill said.
As he spoke he slewed the ship around another shoulder of rock, and nodded at a broad expanse of open greenery ahead, like a shallow basin. 'We can set down here. If the coordinates are right, the place we're looking for isn't much of a walk from here.’
Walk?said Glr, spreading her wings, her tone implying that Keill had used a dirty word.
But before Keill could reply, he was flung to one side In his slingseat as the ship shuddered and bucked beneath him.
He heard Glr's mental yelp of surprise as his hands flashed over the controls. The power had cut out – the ship's energy drive had stopped. And the electronics were dead, the screens blank, the computer-guidance system silent.
What is it? Glr cried.
There was no time for a reply. The ship struck the ground with a grinding crash, torn shrubbery and red earth fountaining up around it.
But Keill had been flying low and had already begun to slow the ship with its retro rockets. So it struck the shallow basin flat, on its belly, without tumbling – skidding forward, ploughing a deep furrow across the basin's green surface.
At last friction halted the slide, and the ship came to rest. Keill and Glr, held safe in the slingseats, together expelled the breath they had been holding and looked at each other.
Not one of your better landings.The laughter in Glr's mental voice was slightly shaky.
Keill shook his head. It's some kind of force field, a suppressor. Whoever put it there wouldn't care much how we came down.'
Glr looked at the dead controls. And what about getting up again?
'We'll come to that,' Keill said. 'We'll go and find whoever owns the suppressor field – and convince him to turn it off.’
Glr's silent laughter rose as Keill reached for the fastenings of the slingseat. But he did not complete the motion.
The ship had started to move again.
The very ground where it had come to rest fell away, with a rumble of fracturing, collapsing rock.
The ship lurched sideways, metal screeching against stone like a death-cry, and toppled with a slow finality into the yawning mouth of the pit that had opened beneath it.
CHAPTER TWO
The ship's downward plunge halted in a few seconds, with a resonant crash. Keill waited a moment, listening, then carefully released himself from the slingseat. The ship had come to test on its side, so the deck of its inner chamber was tilted steeply, but Keill moved easily up the incline towards the airlock.
Take a weapon.Glr said as she released herself from her perch. It must be some form of trap.
'Energy guns won't work,’ Keill said. The suppressor field that had knocked out the ship's drive would also affect the guns that used an adapted form of the same power source. 'I’ll just have a look – a careful look.'
The airlock had a manual failsafe that opened it readily even without power. Keill waited, sheltering within the lock, watching and listening, his body poised to meet any threat.
But no danger appeared. Only darkness, turned into twilight by the light from the opening in the rock where the ship had fallen through. And a tomb-like silence, save for a few trickles of crushed rock and gravel coming to rest around the ship. And the smell of dust, and of the musty dampness of very old stone.
Keill stepped forward, watchfully, to the edge of the lock, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness.
'It's a cave,’ he said to Glr. 'The ship's weight simply broke through the roof of a cave.'
As he spoke he dropped lightly to the ground. Behind him Glr soared out of the airlock, swooping down, on her wide wings to settle on Keill's shoulder.
I dislike caves,she said.
Keill nodded absently, intent on a survey of the ship's exterior. It seemed undamaged by the fell, as it should be: the niconium steel hull had survived far greater impacts in its time. He turned his attention to his surroundings.
It was a high-vaulted cave, not more than twenty metres wide but more than twice as long. There were patches of deeper black here and there in the curved walls that seemed to be niches, crevices, gouged into the rock. Keill stepped further away from the ship, and only then became aware that Glr's grip on his shoulder was unnecessarily fierce, an
d her wings were half-opening and closing with a nervous restlessness.
'Glr...?' He formed her name silently, in his mind, knowing that she could reach in and pick it up.
Keill, I cannot stay here.The words burst into Keill's mind rapidly, and with a quality that he had never sensed in Glr before. An edge of fear.
'There's no danger,' he replied soothingly.
But even as he formed the words, he was proved wrong – by the scratching, slithering noise behind him.
He whirled, into a fighting crouch, while Glr sprang away with a slap of wings. From the deeper darknesses of the crevices in the far wall of the cave, something – some things– were emerging.
The creatures seemed to be shaped like large inverted bowls, or perhaps helmets, the colour of the cave's dark stone. But as they pushed further out from their hiding places, Keill saw that the helmet shapes were only their heads – which tapered back into longer bodies, legless, like worms, but thick as a man's thigh. There were no recognisable features, nor did the creatures move threateningly. They had merely pushed their helmet-like heads out, as if waiting.
Keill stepped cautiously towards them. But his boot came down not on rock or gravel but on something soft, that gave beneath him. Reflexively he sprang sideways, staring down with some distaste.
This was a different sort of creature, squeezing out of a narrow crack in the cave floor. It was a dirty white in colour, and seemed to have no fixed shape as it oozed along the rocky surface – sometimes stretching out a long thin projection from itself, sometimes spreading out like a puddle of thick, viscous liquid.
It seemed anxious to get away from Keill, but its anxiety took it too near the wall. From beneath the bulky helmet-head of one of the creatures in the crevices, a long tendril lashed out – almost a filament, so thin that Keill might not have seen it in the dim light had it not been a bright orange.
The tip of the filament touched the oozing creature, and its motion stopped at once, its edges curling up like those of a dry fallen leaf. The tendril then withdrew, and the entire length of the creature slithered forward, down the wall, moving slowly towards its prey.
The tendril was a stinger of some sort, Keill realised, certainly lethal to the oozing thing. What the tendrils might do to humans was not something he was interested in finding out. As the helmet-head creature slid near, he turned, took two running steps, and sprang to grasp the lower edge of the ship's airlock. He swung himself up with acrobatic ease, and went into the ship to find Glr.
She was sitting in her slingperch, her round eyes fixed on the airlock as he came through. Caves are unpleasant enough, she said, still with that edge of fear in her inner voice. But caves with slimy ground-crawlers ... A shudder rippled across her body to the tips of her wings.
Keill knew that she would have perceived some of what had happened, through his mind. 'They can't hurt us...’ he began.
I do not fear them,Glr replied. But caves. .. Keill, l am a creature of the air, the sky, openness and freedom. Most of my race have a horror of being underground. Caves, tunnels, pits, all such things are nightmares to me, I cannot control the feeling. I must get out.
'Then let's get out,' Keill said with a smile. 'Take a lifeline up with you and fasten it so I can climb up. And I'll follow in a minute.’
Thank you,Glr said. She floated on half-spread wings to the airlock, where Keill detached one of the safety lines that could be fastened to a spacesuit if a pilot had to leave his ship in space. They were long strands of extremely tough artificial fibre – far longer than would be needed to reach from the surface down into the cave.
Glr took one end of the line, studiously not looking at the creatures that were still silently thrusting their heads out from the cave wall. Climb carefully, she said. And she rose in a sweep of wings towards the welcoming patch of light above.
Keill waited until a firm tug on the line showed that Glr had fastened her end safely, probably to some solid boulder nearby. Then he turned back inside the ship, to open the compartment that held his weaponry.
His eyes drifted across the assortment of beam-guns, useless to him now, and some of the other more sophisticated weapons. What could be used in a suppressor field? Knives and clubs? Pointless –
his own barehanded combat skills were far more lethal. But ordinary, old-fashioned explosives...
He took up two small, flat oblongs of black plastic. They were one of the variety of grenades developed by the Legions. A nick of a finger could prime them, and they would explode powerfully enough to devastate a good-sized room. Yet they were designed to be clipped fiat to a belt, where they seemed to be no more than innocent decorations or fastenings.
From another compartment he took a plain pouch, two handsbreadths wide, into which he stowed some wafers of food concentrate, a container of water and a basic medikit – the essential field pack of the legionary going into action. It too clipped neatly to his belt.
Now he was as ready as he could be. He stepped out of the airlock on to the tilted side of the ship, reaching for the lifeline. For a moment he glanced around at the cave, thinking how much it looked like a tomb, a place of burial. Then he shook himself, dismissing the morbid thought. Glr was right –
caves were unhealthy places. Effortlessly he began his hand-over-hand climb towards the light, towards the purpose that had brought him to Rilyn.
---
That purpose was part of the larger purpose that had been the central driving force in Keill Randor's life
– ever since the terrible day when he had returned to Moros, to learn that every man, woman and child of the Legions had been wiped out, murdered, before they could begin to defend themselves, by a mysterious, deadly radiation that had enveloped the planet.
Keill had begun a desperate, vengeful search through the Inhabited Worlds for the unknown murderer of his world. Yet he had realised that his search would probably fail, for he too had been lightly touched by the radiation. It had settled in his bones and was slowly, surely, killing him.
But a near-miracle had intervened. Keill's survival had been noted by a strange, secretive group of brilliant elderly scientists, whom he came to know as the Overseers. They had taken him to their hidden base, inside an uncharted asteroid. And there they had saved his life, astonishingly, by replacing all his diseased bones with an organic alloy – which, among other things, was virtually unbreakable.
From the Overseers Keill had at last learned why they had saved him, and why they lived in obsessive secrecy, so that Keill saw them only as robed and hooded figures, and was never to know the position of the asteroid. Their reasons had much to do with the murder of the Legions of Moros.
Before they had hidden themselves away, the Overseers had lived normal lives, deep in their different studies of events around the galaxy. But then, slowly, they began to detect a frightening pattern in many of those events. And that had led them to give up normal life, to set up their secret base, from which they sent out unique, nearly undetectable monitoring devices through the Inhabited Worlds.
The pattern they had found had to do with warfare among mankind's planets. It had become dear that more and more small, local wars were breaking out – but not in a random, accidental way. There was some guiding principle at work. Some force, some being, was causing them, spreading war like an infectious disease among the Worlds.
The Overseers had learned nothing of who or what this mysterious maker of wars might be, though they had given him a code name, for convenience – the Warlord. But they had no doubt about the Warlord's purpose. By spreading the infection of war wherever possible, he was working slowly towards creating a conflict that would involve the entire galaxy in an ultimate, all-consuming holocaust. And out of the ruins of that final calamity, the Warlord would surely emerge, to rule the galaxy unchallenged.
And the Warlord's methods could also be perceived. He sent out agents to various worlds, who would work their way into positions of power and influence, and then turn the local pe
ople towards war
– using the human weaknesses of greed, or fear, or patriotic bigotry, or whatever else came to hand. So the infection was spread, and the Warlord's plans developed.
That was why, the Overseers told Keill, the Warlord had destroyed the Legions of Moros.
The people of Moros had learned to fight and to discipline themselves to survive the rigours of their harsh planet. Over the generations they had developed their fighting skills to an amazing degree –
and had realised that those skills were the only real natural resource that Moros possessed. So they continued to develop, to train and discipline their children, until they became an almost legendary warrior race, with a matchless mastery of the arts of warfare. And they made that mastery available, for a price, to other worlds.
But the ethics of the Legions had insisted on one inflexible rule. They would not fight on the side of aggressors, exploiters, fanatics, any of the mad or greedy perpetrators of unjust wars. Most often in their history they had fought on the side of people defending themselves against aggression – no matter how high a price had been offered by the other side. And so the Warlord would have foreseen that the Legions could be a barrier to his master plan – and that one day, if they learned of his existence, they could even move against him directly.
So the day had come of the sneak attack, the strange radiation that had spread in seconds through the atmosphere, and the terrible death of Moros.
The Overseers then knew that only they could hope to block the Warlord's evil ambition. But they needed to know more about him. And they needed a way to thwart him here and there, to disrupt his plan and slow it down while they searched for the ultimate means of stopping him.
They had their far-flung monitors – and they also had Glr, who had found her way to them before they had fled to their asteroid. But they needed the aid of a human, one who could move freely around the Inhabited Worlds, and one who stood a chance of surviving the dangers he might meet.
They found what they needed in Keill Randor, the last legionary. And Keill needed little urging to join with the Overseers, and so pursue his own search for the murderer of Moros.
