John Rankine - Dag Fletcher 01

by The Ring of Garamas

  Adams looked down and dropped a metre to the deck, standing between the hoops. He called up,

  “Neat. Very neat. Two linear motors to shift it along, paint pumped to the hoops from a reservoir. Should be one in every home. Outer wall swings back to let it out. Don’t for godsake monkey with any switchgear till I get out of here.”

  Carrick said, “What I like to see is a keen man. Just button up, Rod and we’ll give you a run out. When it stops, get on the parapet and excavate a site for the limpets. You’ll be breaking new ground.”

  Adams looked up without any pleasure at the four faces poked over the well head. He said, “You look a right lot of zombies up there. I reckon I’m safer by myself.”

  He sealed up and lay flat on the support lattice which linked the outside of the hoops, with Fletcher at the console and conscious that he was already two minutes past his midday deadline.

  The floor rose and locked. A vibration underfoot marked the ponderous shift of the outer door. Powell, at the window called out, “There he goes. The White Rajah, by god.”

  Once clear of the exit, Adams had shifted round to sit cross-legged on the top of his excursion module.

  All he lacked was an elephant gun.

  Shut down of the paint spray function might exist, but the control eluded Fletcher. He could and did accelerate the linear motors to a top speed of twenty kilometres in the hour, which whipped Adams to the centre span in under three minutes, but atomised paint, driven with tremendous penetrative force curtained the moving hoops in a white mist.

  Adams’s suit had turned from silver grey to a dazzling white carapace and they saw his movements were slowed up when the platform stopped and he climbed out on to the carrying structure of the cable itself.

  Minutes dragged by. Even Carrick said, “The crazy bastard. He’ll run it too fine. Burn himself to a crisp.

  He must be trying to shear through it by hand.”

  Then the distant figure raised a white arm and swung back onto the paint sprayer.

  Fletcher whipped him back and Carrick was fairly hopping with impatience to get below and dropped as soon as the gap was big enough to squeeze through.

  Adams had not moved. Reflex action had kept his grip, but he was unconscious.

  Fletcher had dropped after Carrick and went straight to the supply racks. Drums of paint and, at the end, what he knew must be provided for periodic flushings of the gear, carboys of clear solvent with a mechanical pump and spray. He sluiced down the snowman and Adams slid free off the hoops, turning steel grey under the stream.

  Carrick had his visor back and was slapping his cheeks, “Come on Rod, snap out of it. You can sleep in your bed.” Eyes opened one at a time, focused briefly and closed again. Adams said, “Why didn’t we bring that Fingalnan bint along to play nurse. It’s all set. You can have it.”

  Powell had found and activated a telescopic duralumin ladder and Adams climbed into the control room.

  Curtiss handed down six, blue-black hemisphere limpets and Carrick hung them round his belt. He said formally, “All set, Commander, make it as fast as you like.”

  Up above, a calling bleep sounded out and Curtiss said urgently, “Call from Velchanos, chief. I guess that patrol should signal when they arrive. Somebody getting anxious.”

  Fletcher spun the rheostat and the floor closed. Now he was familiar with the gear and Carrick fairly shot into vision like an electric hare.

  With the insistent nag of the call as a background, the time seemed longer; but the chronometer denied it.

  When they saw him signal for in, he had chopped two minutes off Adams’ time.

  When they washed him off the cradle and got his dome off, he was still hot to the touch and spent a half minute breathing the cool air as if it was spiced with all the perfumes of Arabia. Finally he asked thickly,

  “Will somebody tell me how the goons built it? I don’t reckon anybody can work out there for more than five minutes. They’ll never repair it and that’s a fact.”

  It was fair comment. Last out of the control room, Fletcher looked round the orderly installation and felt like a homicide. This was the summit of technical development for this planet and a major achievement for men anywhere in the Galaxy. He was setting back the clock and no one knew how it would turn out.

  There was no comfort in telling himself that he was a man under orders and that he was on the side of the righteous.

  What was right? Only conditioning over the years had given him one set of attitudes. A different environment would have given him another.

  In the end, there was only yourself and a feeling for the truth, which ran like a carrier wave underneath all the snatches of argument. There was a purpose abroad that could be recognized, in moments of insight, as stemming from a source which was good. I.G.O. was tuned in to it more or less. Unless he was deluded into self-grandeur he had to accept that. He was not the only moral man in the universe.

  They were all waiting in the car and he said, “Take her to a hundred metres. Be ready to ride out the blast.”

  It was ten minutes after the meridian when he said, “Hold it there,” and switched in the beam that would detonate the limpets.

  After ten seconds, Bennett, reading his mind, said hurriedly, “It’s going out, Commander. Full power.

  Every relay must be hammered.”

  Fletcher said, “Keep trying Number One,” and set himself to analyse the operation from the beginning.

  He had primed the limpets himself. They had to be right. In any case every one of six could not have developed a fault. There was some factor he had overlooked. Not heat. He hefted a spare from the rack and looked at it. Marked for use up to two hundred Celsius. It was hot out there, but not so hot.

  Then he was looking at the stub lever which was brought through to the outside of the case for exceptional use by a mechanical trip wire. Carrick would have given that clearance to move when the relay tripped and released the trigger.

  He saw Carrick in his mind’s eye raising a white arm to be run back. That was it. Paint. Paint had run down the case and gummed up the release. Anybody trying to shift it would go up with the cable. There was no way of defusing the bomb once the relay had tripped.

  They were all looking at him and he followed the old military precept of giving an order when in doubt, any order being better than none. He said, “Back to the ramp, Number One. There are more ways of killing a pig than drowning it in cream.”

  Inside the blockhouse, the call signal had stopped and Fletcher had silence for his manoeuvres. It made the weight of attention more difficult to bear. They were all looking at him as though he was following a prearranged plan and nobody wanted to be rated as stupid for asking what it was.

  It came to him fully formed as he dropped into the paint bay and it could have been a personal pay-off for humility and putting confidence in the system.

  He said, as though he had gone there to do that thing, “Drain the paint tanks. Fill up with solvent. I reckon the triggers have stuck. We’ll run the trolley out and park it over the centre span. As it empties, it should wash the casing clear.”

  It was only when he had the howdah in place and was lumbering out through the tunnel, that he recognized there was no time limit on this fuse. It could blow as he reached the door and take them into the gorge before the car could lift away.

  The same thought was in Bennett’s mind and he was gunning for a crash climb with Adams and Carrick still heaving Fletcher over the coaming of the hatch.

  The car crawled for height like a crab, listing to port with half its human load in a struggling mass against the bulkhead.

  They had the hatch closed and Fletcher hurled himself into his bucket seat. Now he could see between his knees through the observation panel in the deck. The trolley was still in place and under the concentrated flow of solvent, the cable was showing black as layers of white paint washed away.

  He found himself willing it to happen, visualizing the mechanism of the lim
pets as if he could break the last resisting thread by psychokinetic force alone.

  When it happened, his mind came off load as though it had suffered a parallel rupture in its circuitry and for a count of three he saw only a flare of brilliant, multicoloured light. Then even through the car’s acoustic shell and the protective gear he heard a high-pitched scream rising and cutting out as it passed beyond audio frequency.

  Eyes focusing again and bracing himself, as the car rocked in a force nine gale with dust and small trash hammering at its hull, he saw every dial on the console going in a crazy spin.

  Carrick, breaking radio silence, was broadcasting on his external speaker in a crackle of static. “Holy cow. Only look at that.”

  For a hundred metres from the point of fracture, the huge tube, glowing with an intense cobalt nimbus, had peeled free from its supporting viaduct.

  On the near side, freak force had thrown the broken end down and an eye-aching arc was spitting into the floor of the gorge, turning the impact site into instant lava. The far end reared up, an immense brilliant elephant trunk, finding an uneasy balance, the phallic symbol of all time.

  Not much of the viaduct structure had been breached. Ten maybe fifteen metres. Repair was feasible, but it would occupy national resources for some time to come. It was just the way Varley had wanted it.

  Fletcher saw it as a wound in the ring of solidarity forged by professional men. He felt like a murderer, who would now give anything to staunch the flow of blood and have the victim say something however banal.

  Military usage bridged the gap. Bennett had finally pulled the car into level flight and went by the book.

  “Heading North North East by North. Manual navigation only, Commander.”

  Fletcher said, heavily, “Check. Hold that. Follow ground features. Quick as you like back to Petrel.”

  In Kristinobyl and every other major city on Garamas, rioting crowds stopped in their tracks. Men looked stupidly at each other and at the improvised weapons in their hands.

  Respect for authority and above all respect for property was built in from way back. As the Laodamian carrier wave collapsed, they were left with their basic attitudes uncovered by the ebbing emotional tide.

  Groups on the perimeter of the dense crowds began to peel away, anxious to get back to a home base and think it through.

  They were met by a new wave of malcontents, mainly women, who had stuck to the hearth and skillet.

  Total power failure hit like an act of god. It had not happened in living memory. A keening wail rose from every dormitory area.

  Duvorac, depending for his life on auxiliary systems, keyed in an emergency supply, which was held ready, and looked sourly at his time disk. Twenty-five minutes behind schedule. That argued more difficulty than Fletcher had expected. Time for identification. This desperate piece of surgery could be fatal to the patient.

  He set himself to wait. Nothing more could be done, until it was clear which way the government and the people would jump.

  Pedasun in his eyrie, stared at his blanked screens in disbelief. A degaussing feature in the security tower block had kept out the subliminal broadcasts and he had no personal monitor to tell him they had stopped.

  Technicians gave him a limited emergency power feed after five minutes of frenetic effort, which drove him to the edge of frenzy. When a reduced service gave him one picture of Kristinobyl’s main square, dispersal was already well advanced. There was a litter of broken paving sticks lying every-which-way, a swirl of broad paper streamers. The popular insurrection had gone out like a damp squib.

  A harassed official at the Power Centre gave him the score. “Major breakdown in the Ring circuit, Colonel. Unprecedented. Located in the desert area. Probably at the crossing of the Great Gorge. No estimate can be given for the repair. Maintenance crews are leaving Velchanos now.”

  It was too pat on cue. A coincidence too big to swallow. I.G.O. must have engineered it.

  He moved to his long window and tapped the sill with his cane in a monotonous rhythm. Somewhere there was a gain to be made from every situation. If he could pin this on to I.G.O. as an act of sabotage, there would be no need for subliminal suggestion. The ring was a symbol to every Garamasian. They would unite against any faction that struck at it. With Hablon ready to bring in his regiments they had lost nothing. In fact this could be a final proof of government ineptitude. They could not even guarantee the safety of the main prop of the economy.

  Many levels below the penthouse, Yola sprawled on her back on the tiled floor of the brig, saw the single light go out and then reappear in complementary colour on the ceiling.

  Intellectually, she knew it was all illusion, but it was evidence of a kind one part of her physical equipment was still working at normal pitch.

  The same was only marginally true over the whole field. Even pain had passed its perihelion and was reduced to a dull brutal ache.

  A small amber emergency light came on over the door and she screamed by reflex as though she was still on the table in the interrogation room.

  It had been short, but concentrated, a preliminary softening up session, so that next time she knew she could hold nothing back. The specialist staff had handled them half a dozen at a time, stripping them and pegging them out with electrodes taped to every nerve centre, and she could still hear her own screams amongst the others in a crescendo of pain.

  This was the cue-in for the next phase. She began to tremble uncontrollably and felt her bare skin begin to crawl, triggered by its own logic.

  The same thought had hit Termeron. He was struggling to sit up, shoving away a fellow nude who was lying across his legs like any cadaver in a death pit.

  She forced herself to move one balled fist pushed against her mouth in a heroic bid to plug back any sound.

  They met at the door under the amber light. Termeron shoved feebly against the panel and felt it move.

  Then they were looking along a dimly lit white-tiled corridor, which they could not remember having seen on the downward trip.

  He said, and his voice sounded infinitely distant from his own ears, “Power failure. Field too weak to hold the wards. Must get out, before they fix it. Get the others.”

  Some were already sitting up. Given a task, Yola found she could move. She was even able to think in terms of a viable future and, on that level, she was acting like the only houri in a fraternity bath house.

  But libido was too low for lechery. For the majority, she was an abstract pair of hands trying to usher in a present that they did not want to know.

  Finally, she had a round dozen on their feet and moving like zombies to join Termeron in the corridor.

  He called in, “Leave them, Yola. There’s no time. Let’s go.”

  At the end of the corridor, the line shuffled to a halt before the closed trellis of an elevator trunk and Yola said bitterly, “It’s no good. They don’t need guards down here. We can’t get out.”

  Termeron shoved the grille and it slid clear. The large service cage had sunk down to mechanical stops, a metre below floor level and there was a dark, narrow gap just above head height.

  Setting his teeth, he reached up and drew himself painfully over the lintel. Then he reached down to help Yola.

  When they were standing on the roof of the cage, in a draughty funnel with a ripe bouquet of must and axle grease, she could see a distant point of light like looking up a tall chimney.

  Termeron was checking manually round the walls of the shaft and said, “It’s all right. We can do it.

  There’s a line of holdfasts. Tell them to hurry it along and follow me. Don’t look down. Just keep looking up at me.”

  It was some way from all right, on any reasonable count; but she was feeling better all the time. There was hope in the air, struggling for a toehold in the murk. Maybe they would get out. She passed on the message, modestly leaving out the last bit, which would probably occur to the climber upward, anyway.

  Bennett circled Petr
el twice, before he brought the car into its hanger. The heat of its outer skin triggered a decontamination sequence and a cloud of heavy grey coolant shut them down in their capsule. They could have been anywhere or nowhere.

  Fletcher saw the stripped-out freight bay projected in his mind’s eye with a question mark in Tempo Inline. He checked his time disk. Fourteen hundred on the nose. Blast off at eighteen hundred. A repair crew in a base workshop would never do it in the time.

  Another thought evaded the censor and floated up for conscious evaluation. It took a positive effort to beat it back, and the chore of doing it gave it more precise definition and a form of words. “This is no more than justice. You are a homicide. What you have just done represents the loss of untold millions of man hours. You are a barbarian, family tree going back to Attilla. The only partial absolution you have is to lose your own life.”

  He threw the book at it, a man under orders. The end was justification enough. As the car clicked onto its cradle and the gas was sucked clear, he had it licked and a new voice was speaking, so loud that he looked round for Xenia. It was long range welcome, however, beamed on her one-to-one psychokinetic link. “I’m glad you decided that, Harree. I wanted to help you, but you’d always have held eet against me lataire on. You can only do what seems to be right at the time. Come and talk to me. I’m veree lonelee.”

  For all the point there was in getting the score from Cotgrave, he might just as well do that thing. But since he had the rule book out, he might as well follow it to the letter. He shrugged out of his suit and climbed down the main trunk to where Cotgrave and Engels were methodically building the replacement bulkhead.

  Cotgrave straightened wearily round face grey with strain, “Sorry Commander. Not a hope in hell of meeting your deadline.”

  “How long?”

  “Alf says another twelve hours. The crew have gone flat out. But they’re tiring. It’s wholly hot outside.

  Can’t do more than a six minute stint. Once we get the bulkhead back, refrigeration solves that, but there’s a lot of circuitry to refit. How did your mission go?”