John Rankine - Dag Fletcher 01

by The Ring of Garamas

  Petrel checked, in a surge of deceleration that tried to pluck every man out of his foam couch. It was against all belief that the fabric of the ship could take it. Then the hydraulic jacks touched down for a full due and she was trying and failing to bounce herself out again.

  Red lights flickered across the screen and a raucous hooter began to sound. Grey coolant streamed past the vision ports and blanked the scanner.

  Cotgrave said, “Damage report.”

  Bennett said, “Freight bay. Pierced by a spar. Collision bulkhead closed.”

  Petrel steadied, flexed slowly to full height with a screech of tortured metal that vibrated through every module, and was still. It was over. They were down. Whether they would ever lift off again was another matter.

  Fletcher said, “Thank you, all hands. Secure the ship. Repair party outside. Mr. Bennett break out the patrol car.”

  Heat gauges depressed by the coolant started to climb again.

  Hocker, recording for the log, was looking at them in open disgust, he said, “Christ. Only look at that.

  Sixty-nine Celsius and still going up. We’ll fry out there.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dawn, on the desert side of Garamas, was not held back by any landscape feature. It flooded in a quick-moving, yellow-ochre tide over flat reaches of dung-hued gravel from a circular horizon.

  Six men, close packed in Petrel’s scout car, watched its progress on the miniature scanner, until it lipped the gorge and declared itself as if a light had been switched on in the plexiglass dome.

  Half a kilometre ahead, the flyover for the cable was out of direct vision round a twist.

  Bennett, in the pilot slot, had brought them down on a slab that angled out twenty metres below the jagged edge and Fletcher reckoned that with the shifting iridescent colours of the slab top as a back cloth the micro-grooving on the hull would be camouflage enough, unless some asbestos mountaineer actually tried to tap in a piton.

  There was not likely to be one. External heat gauges were in the red quadrant at seventy Celsius and the indicator for extra-vehicular activity was reading a maximum of fifteen minutes.

  Abe Carrick, hunched phlegmatically in his gear, stirred himself to say, “You’ll have to take us nearer Commander. If there’s a blockhouse, we could be ten minutes getting inside. That leaves ten minutes to work along the cliff. Not on.”

  That was not the only reason it had to be quick. Any local commander finding himself under attack would send out a report to Kristinobyl with a description of the attacking party. Pictures even. Although I.G.O.

  flashes had been taped over, there would be no difficulty in identifying the gear as point-of-origin Earth planet.

  Fletcher said, “Timing has to be right. They’ll expect the relief. It’s the only chance of getting inside without sending up an alarm. We’ll take a look at the ground. Then we’ll get some rest. Mr. Carrick with me. Mr. Bennett take charge here. Radio silence. Minimum movement.”

  There was no atmosphere lock on the small car and a gust of furnace heat beat in as the hatch went back. Out on the slab, they could feel the heat of the rock even through the thick, insulating foam pads of their inner soles.

  Carrick reached the cliff face and worked along the slab looking up at the overhang. Half a metre from the edge, he found what he wanted and stood fast, feet, astride, swinging a grapnel.

  It went up sure and true into a custom-built V and he leaned his weight on the line until the tines bit and held. Then he slewed round his harness until the power pack on his back was at his chest. He fed the rope to the take-off spindle and thumbed down the switch. Fending off with his feet, he appeared to walk up the wall.

  There was a pause at the top, as he checked the desert for movement, then the line snaked down and Fletcher hooked himself on.

  When they were both standing on the edge, Fletcher checked his time disk. Four minutes out of their fifteen. Also, at midday it would be hotter and suit limits might fall to twelve or less.

  They went on in silence, two apocalyptic figures, moving in a surrealist waste land. Seen close, there was more evidence that a large settlement had once been built in the area. Mounds and tumbled stones, marks of foundation trenches; it added another dimension to the desolation.

  Five minutes covered a direct line from their point of entry to where the cable should be, crossing the oblong promontory which jutted into the gorge and hid the car and the blockhouse.

  For the last twenty metres, they went along on hands and knees, zig-zagging between low banks of cover, in case any roving periscope should make a periodic sweep of the outback.

  At the edge, there was a change in texture that spelt out the deliberate work of man. Smooth ashlar, fine stone that had been imported to the site, capped the edge for four metres.

  They were directly above the cable.

  Seeing it from the ground, the carrying structure was huge, an engineering marvel for any place in the galaxy. Here it bludgeoned the mind.

  They lay flat, heads over the cornice, suit gear working at overload to clear sweat that ran down their faces like a wet mask.

  Fletcher took another look at his time disk. Ten minutes on the nose. Already past time to head back.

  A vibration from below, communicated through the stone and all the insulating layers and he held on to see what was to come.

  It was the maintenance trolley. Straddling the cable and running on rail guides set in the superstructure, it trundled out from its housing in the cliff face.

  Tubular half-hoops began to spray fine jets that shrouded the cable in white, glistening mist as it moved along.

  Fletcher gauged distance to the nearest pillar support feature and began to count. At that rate it would reach the centre span in five minutes. Twenty for the whole operation.

  It was a statistic to carry away and work on.

  He crawled to the right hand edge of the paved area and looked over. A steep ramp, ribbed with footholds had been cut into the rock and led down to the level of the cable. That was the way in. But it could only be taken slowly. If there were viewing ports on that side, nobody could reach the entry hatch, without setting himself up as a plumb target.

  Carrick was tapping his visor, holding his wrist up and pointing to his time disk in a clear mime.

  Fletcher nodded and they started back.

  Alone, he knew he would not have made it. The spectacle of the man-made bridge crossing the gorge would have held him against himself. As it was, he carried the picture like a glowing eidetic image in his mind’s eye. As hominoid, he had to be proud of a species that could build like that. It was an enduring triumph for homo sapiens, who had taken and tamed a totally hostile piece of his environment. It forced a reappraisal of the Garamasians. Whatever aspects of the social scene were out of key with his own way of life, here was vision and courage and achievement that nobody could fault.

  It went against the grain to be the one who had to destroy it. Even if it was likely to be done at the cost of his own life. Worse than that, he had put in the boot himself, giving the idea to Duvorac. He had left the whole crew mobilized to repair Petrel, but God knew what damage they would find when they eased the rock splinter out of her hull.

  Both problems were going in a wheeling cycle in his head and he checked his heat gauge. After its long session in the red quadrant, the needle had swung definitively to NON OP. There was only the time it would take for the fabric to warm through by simple conduction.

  Carrick lowered him down the cleft on a friction drag and followed on a double line. With the whole set in a red haze seen through streaming sweat and a clouded visor Fletcher orientated on the shuttle and forced his body to move. Half way up the slab he stopped, hit by a new idea. He could veer off, walk over the edge, duck the choice and end all such confrontations once and for ever. He could imagine himself floating down into oblivion. The bridge would remain. Or at least some other hand than his own would destroy it. He stood still, moving his head left
and right, heat filling his eyes and his brain and his chest in a suffocating cloud.

  Xenia’s voice, speaking from inside his head, like a commentary from a burning bush, moved him forward. She was standing in his head, a small, silver figurine arms stretched out in welcome, holding, of all thing a bronze, lighted Aladdin’s lamp in her left hand. He tried to reach her and she remained the same distance away. She was saying something that he could not quite catch and he said, “What is it?

  Say again?”

  Bennett said, “Easy, Commander, easy. It’s okay. You’re home and dry.”

  Fletcher said thickly, “Where’s Carrick?”

  Answering for himself, Carrick said, “Here Commander. I guess I was lucky, my suit kept operational right to the door, but the air conditioner’s a write-off. Now we know for a fact what the tolerance is. We have five hours to deadline. Take a spell before we work something out.”

  Xenia, concentrating to project herself at a distance, judged she had let Hocker get too close. She had heard the hatch slide away and home again and knew who had come into the cabin; but she had remained stone still, orientated to face towards the distant car, hands outstretched.

  Other than the fact that her hands were empty, she was as Fletcher had seen her, a taut, silvery nude, who could have modelled for Blake at the centre of a sunburst.

  After three sessions with the repair gang, psychic phenomena were lost on Hocker. He had a shrewd idea that the mission had struck a terminal phase and was all set to gather what flowers of today were within reach.

  Hot breath was riffling the hair on her nape and his hands had homed on her shoulders before she moved.

  Space crew reaction times had to be fast, but Hocker was left with his hands sawing foolishly on air.

  Then she was back, this time with a slender knife lunged like a fencer’s foil at his Adam’s apple.

  There was nothing to mistake either in the blazing green eyes. Nothing could make Xenia look ugly; but it was the expression on her face rather than the needle prick of the point that sent him back until his shoulders fetched up against the hatch.

  There was only marginal satisfaction to be had in what she said, fairly spitting it out, so that he could feel the air on his face, “Your commandaire ees een trouble. I try to help heem. Eef he dies I weell keell you for a sure theeng. Get out. Tell the captain, I am coming to see heem.”

  With the hatch between them, Hocker felt the reaction. He was a fool to be so easy. He had moved automatically down the companion and stopped dead, debating whether or not to go back. She had gotten the upper hand by surprise, Knowing what to expect, he could watch out for that knife. Give the tramp a thorough going over. It would add to the pleasure that she was Fletcher’s apple.

  He hesitated, held between stimuli like Pavlov’s dog. He unbuckled the heavy equipment belt from his inner suit and weighed it judiciously. A tannoy overhead solved his dilemma.

  Cotgrave’s voice said, “All hands assemble in the Command cabin.”

  When he reached it, taking his time, there was a full house. Cotgrave swinging slowly on the command island turned to watch him in and said with unusual sarcasm, “That’s nice, Dave. I’m glad you could see your way to join us. Maybe your brilliant engineer’s mind will throw light on our problem.” Thick-skinned though he was, Hocker recognized that silence was the better part. But it gave him another chip to carry.

  He edged round to the power desk and took his own seat, next to Engels. He felt no better when Xenia followed in. She had shrugged on a set of white overalls turned up at wrists and ankles and picked her way through the press to Fletcher’s vacant seat as though by right.

  Cotgrave said, “You’ve all had a stint working outside and you know the damage. I believe we can’t do the repair that has to be done in time for lift off at eighteen hundred. With radio silence on, I can’t reach Commander Fletcher. Once he blows the cable, the balloon will go up. I want your judgement. We have nine hours. I want us all to know what we’re up against. Power One?”

  Engels shifted uneasily in the spotlight. He was still in his space gear with the visor hinged back. He had just come in and it was his report that had moved Cotgrave to take time off for a conference.

  “There’s a two-metre tear in the freight bay. That, you’ll all have seen. The spar came in and went out again at an angle through the outer skin. If it had come straight up, I guess we wouldn’t be here arguing the toss. Replacing the floor of the bay is straightforward. We can do that. But the side panel’s seriously weakened. It’s a stressed job. It held up as we came in; but it bears major load at blast-off. I couldn’t guarantee that we’d take her up. That side could open like a tin can and rip right along. It ought to come out. Splice in a fresh rib.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Sure I can do it. But it takes time. A base depot would want twenty four hours.”

  “What would you want?”

  “Nothing less. Maybe more—when I have the section out and get a clear look at it.”

  Cotgrave said, “Fair enough. I’ll endorse that. Communications. What’s the score for you?”

  Johnson exchanged glances with Ledsham and got a brief nod. They were two of a kind. Taciturn to the point of being surly, in spite of their professional trade as communicators. There was even a good deal of physical similarity, both being short and dark with neat sideburns, though Johnson, senior by fifteen years had a vivid patch of white hair over his left temple. He said, “No problem, Captain. Some gear down there is shot. But nothing vital. As soon as the new panel’s in, we can wire up what we need in thirty minutes.”

  Being a navigator himself, Cotgrave had left that section to the last. He knew basically what Sluman would have to say, but he asked, anyway, for the record.

  Number two in the section, Sluman had not previously spoken for navigation in a conference. Next to Hocker, he was the youngest crewman, thin and lanky with a long face and a wedge of brown hair falling over his forehead. He shifted it with his left hand, cleared his throat and started too loud, so that his voice fairly echoed round the cabin.

  “No damage to the trim, Captain. I’d have to weigh up when the new material’s in place. There’d be a correction to be fed in to the computer. Ideally there should be a flight trial. An error of point one of one per cent could take her into the cliff. But I guess we could do it.”

  Cotgrave pivoted slowly on his chair and looked at them all. He knew the deadline and suspected that Fletcher had fallback orders. He even had a suspicion of what they were. But as far as he was concerned, he had to go ahead as though this was a routine repair job. He said, “There it is, then. We all know what we have to do. Next team out in five minutes. Get as much rest as you can, when you come in. By the time, the Commander gets back, I want the damaged section stripped out ready for rebuilding.

  Okay?”

  As the crew filed out he met Xenia’s eye and the doubt at the back of his mind turned to certainty.

  When they were alone, she put a warm hand on his arm and said, “Nevairetheless, Captain, you are right. We must go on as eef eet ees posseeble.”

  Early in his office, at penthouse level in the security tower, Pedasun spent time at a long observation window, looking out over Kristinobyl.

  In some sense, it was more his city than the government’s.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see the strands of his power going out like invisible lines of force to every precinct. He was well placed to make a killing. Once the situation was fluid, his own organization would be the only one to remain intact, on a nationwide basis. All his main subordinates were hand picked.

  There would be no fifth column to watch.

  Nevertheless, he was not wholly at ease. There was something that did not add up about the sudden withdrawal of the I.G.O. corvette. Duvorac was no fool. He did nothing without a reason.

  But the political balance was too delicate for direct intervention. There was no getting round that key proposition.

>   He flipped the side of his thigh with his stick. Whatever the old green frog got up to, would be too late.

  He gravitated to his personal console, a wall-to-wall job, with an inset map of Garamas glowing on the three-metre screen. Pat on cue, a call sign bleeped from the tannoy and a waiting signal—the interlaced rings of Garamas with military insignia as an overlay—filled the scanner. He said, “Ring of Conquest” and knew that the distant receptor would identify his voice and clear the channel.

  There was no picture and he needed none. Hablon’s voice was unmistakable.

  “I am at Velchanos. All groups are ready. What is the situation there?”

  “There are enough transmitters in place to cover the area. Every major city has its network. In one hour we shall begin broadcasts. This time there will be riots all over the city. We shall be in a position to make arrests where we like under cover of restoring public order. By this time tomorrow, the government will be completely discredited. Then we can spread the idea that only martial law can keep the peace. You will be ready to fly in with your staff and the units you have already contacted.”

  “That is very good. I shall not forget your co-operation. Keep in touch on the hour. Garamas for Garamas.”

  “Ring of Conquest.”

  It was as well that there were no pictures. Even with the long start on dead-pan ambience, given by the Garamasian face, Hablon might have been uneasy.

  When the screen blanked, Pedasun was saying softly to himself, “Cooperation. You say co-operation.

  You dumb ox, you wouldn’t set out a box of toy soldiers without help. I’ll co-operate until you do your job. Then watch out Hablon. I’ll give you three weeks.”

  Still sitting at the desk, he took a small silver key from a fob pocket. Below the presentation tray, a deep oblong drawer pushed itself out and a video on a square cradle came up from the cavity.

  This time, he traded pictures and his own miniature screen glowed with an image that few would want in a cameo. It was the Scotian who had been spokesman at Hablon’s local conference. Pedasun named his name as though he knew it well. “Commander Toron. I have issued passes for your crews. They will be taken out to your ships in security cars. You know what to do.”