by Douglas Hill
The crowd's thunderous rapture reached new heights, and then rose even higher when Keill turned and casually, as if with distaste, tossed the bent weapon aside. But it had been a studied throw –
and the U-shape of metal looped through the air towards the still half-seated form of its owner. The club-heads missed his head, but the inner curve of the U caught him neatly across the throat, so that he toppled backwards wearing his own weapon like an ungainly collar.
And a hundred thousand people were on their feet, howling the name of the man standing alone in the centre of the arena.
'Ran-dor! Ran-dor! RAN-DOR!'
Feeling slightly foolish. Keill did what was called for – raising one hand in a sweeping gesture of acknowledgement. And the entire stadium seemed in danger of collapse as the crowd stamped and shrieked its tumultuous applause.
Glr is right about showing off, Keill thought ruefully. But there's no point in making yourself bait, if the fish doesn't notice you.
If that thought was directed at me, mudhead, Glr's inner voice said sharply, kindly form it again, more dearly.
'Itwas nothing,' Keill replied, as he began to walk towards the combatants' exit from the arena, stepping round the medics who were coming out to gather up the losers. 'What about that rifleman?
As yet...Glr began. But then her silent voice rose into an urgent shout. Keill – MOVE!
With a legionary's unhesitating reflexes, Keill hurled himself into a shallow sideways dive while Glr's warning cry was still forming in his mind.
As he did so, the unmistakable crackling hiss of an energy beam sliced through the air above him.
CHAPTER TWO
Keill's swift dive ended in an athletic shoulder roll, that brought him smoothly to his feet. At once he was up and running, as Glr's voice sounded again in his mind.
I see him! Across the arena from you – near the top! Bright green tunic – and the rifle..!
But the rifle was making its own presence known. Twice more, as Keill sprinted in the direction Glr had indicated, an energy beam crackled dangerously near to him. Then Keill was at the wall of the arena, leaping to catch the top of it, pulling himself effortlessly up and over.
He's turning, running!Glr cried.
So were quite a few thousand people. The shots, the attempted killing, had sent the section of the crowd around the gunman into a screaming panic. Ahead of Keill, the steep ramp that offered passage between the tiers of seats was thronged with terrified, milling people. And among them, near the upper end of the ramp, Keill caught a glimpse of bright green, saw the glint of metal as the rifle was used like a club to clear the gunman's path.
Keill flashed up the ramp, using his reflexes to cleave through the frantic mob; Once again he glimpsed bright green, disappearing into the surging horde who were all trying to get out of the exit at once. In a few strides Keill too was at the exit, battling his way through.
He is moving towards the spaceport complex,Glr's voice came again. Towards our pad!
The stadium containing the arena was the centre of a huge, linked complex of buildings, all devoted to the administration of the Battle Rites. On the tops of some of the buildings special landing pads for spacecraft had been built, reserved for those off-world combatants who, like Keill, arrived in their own ships.
In moments Keill, guided by Glr, was bursting in through the door of one of the buildings, and hurtling up the moving walkway that spiralled through all the levels. There was no doubt that his quarry was still ahead of him. Most of the people on the walkway had drawn aside to its edges, and were staring up with expressions of surprise or fear – as people would do if they had just been thrust aside by a running man carrying an energy rifle.
Keill's headlong rush did not slow. At the topmost level of the building, there was usually a Banthein guard on duty, to protect the landing pad and the privacy of the off-world competitors. But again it was clear that the rifleman had passed this way, for the guard lay inert and bleeding by the entrance.
Keill sprang out on to the open surface of the pad, veering sideways into cover behind the nearest ship. There he waited, listening. The sun's heat was ferocious, intensified by reflection from the plasticrete of the pad, and from the gleaming surfaces of the half-dozen spacecraft, dispersed across the pad's broad expanse.
He came out on to the pad,Glr announced, but he vanished into the ship with green markings.
Near ours, at the centre.
Warily Keill edged forward, towards the blunt wedge-shape of his own ship, its sky-blue Legion circlet glistening. In the space nearest it was an angular, green-decorated vessel, bulging with exterior hardware. Keill crouched low as he drew closer. But the landing pad was silent in the sun's furnace blast.
No energy rifle spat its deadliness towards him; no figure in bright green could be seen.
He has gone to ground,Glr said, excitement in her voice. Keill glanced up, smiling, as she swooped down towards him with a thrum of wings.
Between the broad, delicate membranes of the wings Glr's body was slight, less than half Keill's height, covered with overlapping plates of thick, soft skin. Her head was high-domed, with a snubbed muzzle and two perfectly round, clear, bright eyes. Her feet, tucked up beneath her, were in fact hands, small but sturdy and capable.
'Don't come too close,'Keill warned. 'That gunman could pick you off.'
As he could have picked you off,Glr said sharply, while you postured in the arena. And you assured me that they would not be likely to kill you!
'I d on't think he was trying to,' Keill said soothingly. ' No assassin would miss by so much, so often.'
Then what was he doing?Glr demanded.
'When we find him,'Keill said reasonably, 'we'll ask him.'
And how do we find him?
Keill smiled. 'I go into his ship, and invite him out.'
Glr was silent for a moment, and then her laughter rose, almost reluctantly. Try not to get shot.
Think of how disappointed all the millions of your admirers would be.
'I wouldn't dream of it.'Keill grinned. 'Keep watch a moment while I get a gun. He might have some friends in there.'
As Glr wafted upwards again, Keill moved to his own ship – which, like many other competitors, he used as a dwelling while on Banthei. Once inside, he reached for the tunic of his uniform, which also bore the blue Legion circlet. Despite the heat, he always felt uncomfortable out of uniform for too long.
He did not see the tiny capsule tucked undetectably in the tunic's folds. Not till it burst, with a sound like a muffled sneeze, and enveloped him in a clinging cloud of grey vapour.
Gas, his mind told him, as his vision began to fade and his legs became unwilling to support him.
He had time to feel a slight surprise, that anyone had had the technological skill to penetrate the locking devices of a Legion ship. And he even had time, as the greyness drew him down into unconsciousness, to feel a mild regret that he would not after all be taking part in the climax of the Battle Rites of Banthei.
---
He awoke as always into full alertness, registering that he was naked but unharmed, save for a distant headache and a bitter taste in his mouth. When he opened his eyes, a sweeping glance showed him an empty, indirectly lit room, with totally featureless matt-grey walls, floor and ceiling – the whole room not more than six metres long, about three metres wide. He was alone, lying on a narrow bed that resembled a spaceman's bunk, bonded solidly to wall and floor. At the end of the bed lay his clothes – his full uniform, but without weapons.
He came to his feet, letting his inner control deal with the surge of nausea, and dressed swiftly, then began a careful examination of the room.
Artificial light emerged from a source at the junction of wall and ceiling, where there were also small vents admitting conditioned air. In one corner were minimal plumbing facilities, and on the floor nearby were containers of water and food concentrates.
Everything that the well-furnished cage ne
eds, he thought wryly.
In one end wall was the door, tightly sealed with an almost invisible seam. Keill ran his fingers over the cool, metallic surface. Then he stepped back, breathing deeply, gathering himself – and launched himself explosively forward. One leg swung up as if he were hurdling some low barrier, and his booted foot smashed against the edge of the door like a battering ram.
Very few kinds of sheet metal would have withstood that powered assault. But this room proved to be clad in a substance that Keill had not encountered before. What had seemed to his fingers to be hard and metallic became, under the impact, soft and yielding, absorbing the power of the kick, as if that very impact had somehow changed the essential nature of the metal. Yet immediately afterwards it was as before – cool and seemingly hard to the touch of a finger, the matt-grey surface unmarked.
He nodded to himself once, acknowledging defeat, and went calmly back to the bed, sitting quietly on its edge. Knowing that he could not break out left him no option but to wait, until something happened to change his circumstances. So he waited, relaxed and still, without the anger or fretful anxiety that would bum away his inner stamina.
Time passed emptily, but his relaxed patience did not fray. At times he rose to rinse his mouth out with water, to chew a few mouthfuls of food concentrates. And eventually, a change occurred. An eerie sensation floated through him, like an inner displacement, as if some unseen force was trying to rearrange the cells of his body.
He was not disturbed, for he knew the feeling. And it confirmed his guess – that he was a prisoner on a spaceship. The odd sensation was the effect of a ship entering or leaving Overlight – the mysterious field that allowed a ship to bypass real space and time, and to leap across the empty immensities between the stars.
Almost at once Glr's voice slipped into his mind. Welcome hack.
Keill had expected her, knowing that while Glr's telepathic powers had no limits in space, she could not locate him when he was moving in Overlight. Which meant that the ship carrying him had just re-entered normal space.
'Not much welcome here,'he replied flatly, and described his situation. 'Can you tell me what happened, and where I am?'
Swiftly, Glr told him. Back at the launching pad she had had to watch, unarmed and outnumbered, as men in uniforms like the rifleman had rushed from the green-marked ship towards Keill's, reappearing shortly with Keill's inert body. They had re-entered their vessel, which had lifted off almost at once. Glr had quickly taken Keill's ship up in pursuit. But of course she had lost them when their ship, reaching deep space, had vanished into the pathless void of Overlight, where they could not be tracked.
Clearly you were right,Glr added. The one with the rifle was not trying to kill you – just to draw you out of the arena.
Keill agreed. 'If they are who we think they are, they'll have special plans for me. Now – can you tell me where I am?'
As I have told you before,Glr replied, I can pinpoint the location of your mind across the galaxy. Unfortunately, that is almost how far apart we are. You have been most of a day in Overlight – and it will take me that long to catch up with you. The ship you are on is approaching a distant solar system that, according to your star charts, contains one planet inhabited by humans. A world called Golvic.
Keill felt none the wiser, for he had never heard of Golvic. But behind the barrier of his rigid self-control, he felt a keen anticipation. He had gone to Banthei for the single purpose of exposing himself, making himself bait in hope of bringing a fearsome enemy out of hiding. There could be little doubt that the plan had worked.
Now Keill was sure that the planet called Golvic would provide some new developments in the deadly search that had occupied him for so long.
---
It was a search that had begun for Keill Randor on the terrible day when he returned to his planet, Moros, and found a dead world, enveloped in a strange radiation that had wiped out all life. Keill himself had come close enough to be touched by the edge of the radiation, and afterwards found that the radiation had entered his bones, and was slowly killing him.
In the time he had left, Keill had gone out among the Inhabited Worlds on a relentless quest for some clue to the identity of the murderer of Moros. But it had seemed hopeless. No one had any information, and his time was running out. Yet, meanwhile, others had been seeking him.
He had been gathered up by a group of mysterious brilliant scientists, whom he came to know as the Overseers. And with their amazing skills and knowledge, they had healed him – by replacing his radiated bones. They gave him a new skeletal structure, made of a unique organic alloy – with a special side-effect. The material was virtually unbreakable.
If that had astonished Keill, he was astonished even more by the story that the Overseers had told him, through their elderly leader, Talis. Keill learned that the Overseers too were seeking the murderer of Moros, and had been doing so for some time before the attack on the Legions.
Talis told him that they had become aware of an evil force at work among the Inhabited Worlds.
They had been unable to learn, who or what it might be, or where it was located. But its intentions were plain to the Overseers, in their wide-ranging study of galactic events.
The force, or being, was dedicated to stirring up the horror of war wherever possible among mankind's worlds. So the Overseers had given that unknown being a suitable name. They called him... the Warlord.
The Warlord seemed to be using the old human failings – greed, fear, bigotry, power hunger – to turn people towards war, to set race against race, planet against planet. It became clear that his ultimate aim was to spread the infection so widely that the whole galaxy would be plunged into conflict. And out of the ruins of that final holocaust, the Warlord would emerge – to rule supreme over what was left of the Inhabited Worlds.
When the Overseers first understood the Warlord's existence, and the nature of his plans, they had left the separate, peaceful lives that they were leading, and had retired to a secret base, built within the interior of an uncharted asteroid. From there they kept up their investigation, sending out a host of unique monitoring devices to scan as many of the Inhabited Worlds as possible. So they hoped to learn more about the Warlord, and how to oppose him.
But they found that he was as secretive and well-hidden as themselves. He operated through agents, who did his work on other planets, sowing the seeds of war, but who had no direct contact with the Warlord himself. And the Overseers began to feet that they, too, needed an agent out among the worlds.
Then came the horror of Moros. The Legions, whose planet's only natural resource had been the martial skills of its people, had always made those skills professionally available to others. But it was well known that they would not fight on the side of aggressors or exploiters or anyone who was launching an unjust war. More often they hired out their services to those defending against such attacks.
Clearly these ethics would have posed a threat to the Warlord. So he had destroyed the Legions, in a pre-emptive strike, before they could learn of his existence and perhaps move against him.
But Keill Randor had survived that destruction, and in him, the last legionary, the Overseers had seen an ideal agent for their purposes. So they had gathered him up and healed him. And so, in turn, Keill had agreed to work with them. With life and hope restored, he had resumed his search for the murderer of Moros, knowing now just how much more was at stake than his own vengeance.
In his quest he was accompanied by Glr, the alien wanderer who had, much earlier, met and befriended Talis and the Overseers, and who had readily joined in Keill's search. Since then they had had several encounters with agents of the Warlord, and had learned much.
They had learned that some of those agents formed an elite group that called itself the Deathwing.
The leader of the Deathwing, known as The One, was the only person with direct contact with the Warlord. And eventually, inevitably, the time came when Keill Randor met a
nd faced The One.
He had barely escaped with his life – but The One had also escaped. And since then the Overseers had turned all their efforts to the more particular task of locating The One, hoping that through him they might learn the whereabouts of the Warlord.
During that time Keill had come as close as he ever had to impatience. The Overseers'
monitoring devices were concentrated on looking for clues to the location of one person among many billions. And while the Overseers laboured to gather, sift, collate and study the information from the monitors, Keill and Glr remained idle.
So Keill had devised his plan. If he could not go and find The One, he would let The One find him. He was certain that his enemy would not pass up a chance to take revenge for the way Keill had defeated him and thwarted one of the Warlord's central plans. So Keill had gone – with some sense of shame, since it went against the Legions' preference for keeping out of the limelight – to compete in the much-publicised Battle Rites.
As Keill had anticipated, the Deathwing became aware of his presence on Banthei. As he had also predicted, The One did not send men to kill him, but to capture him. It would be the Deathwing way, to seek a more prolonged and satisfying revenge.
The bait had been taken. Now, Keill thought wryly, we have to make sure the bait survives.
CHAPTER THREE
Keill had begun a series of basic Legion exercises, adapted for the cramped space, both to keep himself occupied and to rid his body of the last effects of the gas. So he was upside down, balanced on the splayed fingertips of one hand, when he sensed a change in the light within the room that was his prison.
He came effortlessly to his feet, and found to his astonishment that one wall of the room had become entirely transparent. Beyond it, five men were watching him.
