John Rankine - Dag Fletcher 01

by The Ring of Garamas

  What there is, I will leave to the Scotian specialists to unravel. We leave now for Kristinobyl. Before we arrive, you at least will be dead.”

  Like a hidden theme running behind the words, Fletcher was trying to listen to something else. Then he realised it was not from an outside source. Xenia was whispering urgently from somewhere inside his head. “Harree, theenk weeth me. Join your mind weeth mine. Theenk about the electrode on your head.

  Eet uses microvoltages we can match. Concentrate togethaire. Project all your mental energee to that point. Send som surge back up their spout. Theenk weeth me.”

  Hablon was still going on. Xenia’s contribution was interrupted by a quickly choked gasp of pain, which came definitely through normal aural channels. Anger flared redly through his mind. That and feeling for her. She was one on her own. He threw every atom of concentration into willing the current to reverse its flow.

  Hablon had stopped and was looking to his left, where Xenia’s casket must be. There was a second’s dead silence and a movement from the right, where the operator was reaching too late for a balancer to correct the circuit input and stop the blowback along the delicate wiring of the cephalograph.

  There was a small plosive plop and an acrid stench of burned-out dielectric. Also, a bonus, which she could not have planned for. The unexpected reversal had tripped more than one relay. The magnetic grips at wrist and ankle had gone slack.

  He knew without asking that she was experiencing the same and fairly shouted into her head. “Out.

  Together. Over the table.”

  There was a confused impression of many heads turning and one guard, quicker off the mark than the rest, whipping a carbine round to aim. Then he dived for the shiny tabletop and crossed it in a sliding tackle that brought his hands to Hablon’s neck.

  His back crawled, expecting the hammer thump of an old fashioned slug tearing into its tissue. But the guard had a problem. Killing Hablon with the alien would make him nobody’s friend. While he hesitated, the good minute passed. Fletcher had dropped from the table and shifted behind the General with one arm round his throat in a grip that was on the way to lifting off his head.

  Over the high shoulder, he saw Hocker, slower off the mark, stumble from a casket and walk blindly into a Garamasian guard who clubbed him obligingly with the barrel of his carbine. But Xenia was beside him.

  Her lime green suit had been reduced to fragments which fell away on the trip and long incisions from throat to navel were running with glistening ichor.

  In her hand, she now carried her own small knife, stained to the hilt with a greeny-yellow pus.

  Leaning against the box she had lately left, a tall Scotian was trying to get an air ration through a severed throat. Reptilian though he was, and a miserly user, it was a losing battle and he was giving up.

  When the circuit blew, he had been listening to Hablon and had parked the knife conveniently in a fleshy part of Xenia’s shoulder.

  Pulling it free and using it in the same movement had been pure therapy to the Fingalnan and she was actually grinning like a pleased cat when she joined Fletcher.

  Her knife probing a centimetre into the skin over Hablon’s heart was a better argument than Fletcher’s neck lock and had the advantage that the man could speak, if he had any worthwhile contribution to make.

  She said, “Tell them to stay where they are or you weell surely die.”

  Hablon, far enough on the politician’s road to be incapable of giving a direct answer temporised with,

  “What can you gain? If you kill me you will die. If you do not, you only delay your death a little time.

  There is no escape for you.”

  It was all true. Fletcher read the resignation in Xenia’s mind. She would go on with it. But she expected nothing. The knife, when it left Hablon, would find a billet in her own breast.

  The strap of the sling pouch he had carried was beside the foot of the table and he picked it out as though he had known it was there all the time.

  Movement towards them was gradual but definite. The circle was closing. Pedasun’s eyes never left Fletcher’s face. He would have moved sooner, but he had seen a personal advantage. They had nothing to lose. They were fanatics. They might very well kill Hablon and that would be no bad thing.

  Xenia sensed the movement as a mental thing, which she could not see and repeated, “Tell them to stand steell.” At the same time, she shoved the knife a few millimetres nearer its beating goal.

  Fletcher had one limpet out and shoved the bag onto the table. He made rapid adjustments on its face and then balanced it flat on his two palms as though holding a thin-shelled egg.

  Speaking in the lingua franca, so that everyone could judge the situation on its merits, he said, “I have set this mine for impact detonation. I only have to drop it. Unless I can take it with me, we shall all go up.”

  It saved Hablon from any direct veto. He could and did, however, begin to sweat. Higher command was normally on a knoll, unprejudiced by personal discomfort.

  Forward movement ground to an uneasy halt. Xenia said nothing, but there was a small surge of optimism on the E.S.P. link. Pedasun, nearest the bomb, took half a pace back.

  It was a small gesture, but it set the seal on belief.

  Xenia took out her knife and stood clear looking suddenly very tired and small.

  Fletcher spoke again into the silence, “Walk over to the door, Xenia, see if you can get Hocker on his legs. I’ll follow you.”

  She said, “I’ll try. But frankly you would be better without that one.”

  Every eye on the set tracked them as they crossed the floor.

  Every armed guard had unshipped a carbine and had it aimed at Fletcher’s head. He could guess the calculation that was running in each mind. Could any athletic type whip in and catch the mine as it fell?

  Pedasun had made the same appreciation and spoke up for prudence. He knew of the magazine under their feet. Sympathetic detonation would send it up. Time, as he judged, was on his side. “Let them go.

  They cannot get far. The bomb might just as well go off outside.”

  It was the obvious choice. Once in the open, they could be picked off in a safe place.

  Xenia was stooping over Hocker, slapping his cheeks with an open hand. When he stirred and sat up she said venomously, “On your feet, Lieutenant. Thees ees no time for lyeeng down. Queek.”

  He allowed himself to be led away like a dumb beast, shaking his head from side to side, while he tried to clear his eyes of double vision.

  In the corridor, they ran a gauntlet of guards drawn up along either wall. But the good word had gone ahead. There was no move to intercept.

  As they took the slope of the ramp, Hocker stumbled once against Fletcher’s arm and audience participation took a spiral up.

  Fletcher steadied the mine and centred it afresh on his extended palms. Xenia said sharply, “Watch heem. That was suggested to heem. Those treeck boxes have a two-way feed. Maybe they planted some ideas.”

  At the portico, Fletcher had knocked up the pace to a jog trot. Without check, he broke into a weaving run. Order had been restored in the square and the leading car in the convoy had been shifted along, until it stood hardly twenty metres off with its entry hatch open.

  He was inside with his bomb on the seat and Xenia crawling heroically over the hatch coaming, before the first guards had cleared the archway.

  Hocker standing outside said stupidly, “What’s the rush?”

  “We have ten seconds to get out.”

  “Why?”

  “The second mine. It’s set to blow anytime now. Get in.”

  A racing assessment of the panel, which was more familiar than that of a tractor, and he was moving off.

  Hocker was running back. He shouted over his shoulder, “I have to warn them.”

  Xenia stood up with a total mobilization of all the strength she had left, steadying herself with one hand braced against the roof. Her free arm flicked
like a whip and Hocker dropped face forward to the tiles with her knife buried to the hilt in his back. Then they were surging for the gatehouse.

  A fusillade ripped into the car’s fabric and its plexiglass dome fell away in shards.

  Ahead, the portcullis closed the way and Fletcher lobbed his bomb forward in an over-arm cast that hit it dead centre. At the same, time, he crouched down, one arm pinning Xenia to the squab and slammed in all the power they had.

  Blast, funnelling back, tore at the car. Small trash with projectile force hammered through its plating.

  Flame filled the tunnel with a furnace roar and they hurled themselves for the heart of it.

  Momentum carried them through. But the car was a write off. Automatically fighting the controls, he got level flight for the fifty metres it took to plough itself in a belly dive into the fallow field.

  Before it had properly stopped, he was out. Xenia did not move and he climbed back into the smoking wreck to find her.

  She lay across his arms like a sacrifice, streaked with carbon, hair singed and falling straight back from her head.

  It was light enough to see the adobe house over the dividing wall and he had crossed three furrows towards it, when a seismographic ripple shook the ground and threw him to his knees.

  The long wall undulated like a shaken rope. Still kneeling, he twisted round to look at the building.

  Walls were fissured from top to bottom and still moving out. A ragbag of artefacts was spilling from the widening rents. Towards the top, the single figure of a man scrabbled like a beetle at an impossible angle, lost traction and went into free fall. Dust and debris were pluming from the centre in a mushroom cloud.

  Fletcher struggled to his feet, but the simple mathematics of it was impossible. Before he could clear the next fifty metres, the section of leaning wall would be spread flat over the area he was in.

  The pump house had subsided in a heap of rubble. Petrel’s car was running clear and then circling towards him. He tried to wave it back, but it came on.

  Carrick had done the sum. There was no time for a stop to take them aboard. He ran past, turned in the narrowing angle of toppling masonry and came up from behind, two metres off the ground.

  Fletcher heaved the girl over his shoulder and grabbed for the skids. Then they were airborne, with a jerk that went a fair way to dislocating his arms.

  The draught of the falling slab fanned his back. The car’s transom was a bare metre from the leading edge. A percussive thump deafened him, so that he could hear nothing and it was only Adams’ face hanging upside down from the floor hatch, that gave a visual clue that questions were being asked.

  He felt Xenia’s weight go from his shoulders. Then Adams was there again, gripping his wrists and helping him to climb aboard.

  Carrick said, “Diplomacy’s not for you, Commander. You’re a natural born demolition man. For godsake, what did you do in there?”

  With a moving deck under his feet, Fletcher could agree with the first element in the proposition. From first to last his intervention on the political scene had brought destruction. From here on in, he would stick to his last. If Varley or anybody at all wanted an agent provocateur, they would have to find somebody else.

  He had Xenia laid out on the diagonal of the freight bay and was swabbing away the silvery ichor that welled from her incisions. How much blood she had lost, he could not tell. But none of the plasma in the emergency pack would do any good. Petrel did not carry Fingalnan blood. Only a major hospital unit in Kristinobyl would have the right setup.

  Instant sutures checked any further flow. She was alive, but with what margin, he could not tell.

  Carrick spoke again on a different tack which got an answer. “Something stirring in the heap. Military car coming out.”

  Unbelievably, it was true. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes, a long olive-drab shuttle was nosing from the dust pall.

  Fletcher thought, “Good luck to whoever it is. They’ve beaten the statistics against survival.” Then he recognized the danger. It could be Pedasun or Hablon and the whole scene might be to do over.

  He hauled himself across the squabs to the pilot seat, “Shift across. Adams, get into the bay and see that Xenia doesn’t roll about.”

  “A pleasure, chief.”

  Then he was urging the overworked car to climb to its ceiling in a tight turn that would bring them over the ruins.

  Resurrection for the Garamasian shuttle was a hesitant and marginal thing. It had lifted twenty metres from the heart of chaos and was on the brink of failure. Panels stove in, plexiglass dome awry, it was a fugitive from the breaker’s yard.

  Fletcher had it in his sights and dropped like a stone with the laser carving a bright lance path.

  The glowing line sliced along its axis. It stalled, dipped suddenly at the stern and fell away into the smoke.

  Fletcher pulled out in a climb that settled him back in the bucket seat and rocketed out into bright day.

  Almost dead ahead, a brilliant fireball was drifting down into the blue erichihoneus field.

  Petrel was coming in on a blaze of retro.

  Cotgrave said, “Not another word from I.G.O., Commander. I guess they’ve clamped right down on Duvorac. That lets us out. I reckon we can rejoin the squadron.”

  The same analysis had gone through Fletcher’s head and he was not sure why he hesitated.

  Xenia was still out and visibly weakening, a small, silvery toy figure strapped in his own acceleration couch. He could not tell what time she had; but even Europa’s sick bay was not fitted for alien medicare.

  It could be days before Varley ordered the squadron into Kristinobyl.

  She was one factor among many and the book said only a minor one. There was a Scotian over the city.

  He had no right to hazard the ship for one life. Europa could blast the frigate before she was in range of its armament.

  Decision came at a level below the conscious mind and brought with it a sudden clarification of all the issues as they related to himself. Whether it fitted any external pattern or not, in the last analysis, he was loyal to an individual and no system or institution whatever.

  Once sure, he was totally concentrated and single-minded. He switched in the general net and said,

  “Commander to all stations. The Fingalnan girl will die, unless we can get her to Kristinobyl. There’s a Scotian blocking the vector, which has to be shifted anyway in due course. I’m going to try. But I need a navigator, an engineer, a communicator and a gunner. The rest can take the car and go overland, hole up near the city and wait for the squadron. Press clearance tabs if you join me.”

  There was a count of three and he swivelled slowly, keeping his eyes off the co-pilot’s console, where the indicator lights would show up.

  Cotgrave said formally, “Co-Pilot to Commander. All systems go. Ready when you are.” Only then, he looked across and saw the full bank of affirmative signals.

  Fletcher said simply, “Thank you all hands. Count down as of now,” and began feeding course data to the main computer.

  There was no doubt in his mind that as soon as he had cleared the ground by a kilometre, the Scotian would have him pinpointed. It was all a matter of how soon he recognized a threat and broke station.

  There would be a debate going on in the commander’s head. If he had been told to sit over Kristinobyl, he might first try to get the order cancelled. Only a crystal ball would reach Pedasun or Hablon.

  Eventually, he would use his own initiative. It all depended on what that was.

  That much was abundantly clear to Toron in Alope’s crowded control cabin. Already, the unusual seismographic shock waves registered in the Velchanos area had put him on alert. As Petrel showed on the scanner, action stations sounded through the ship. He beamed once on the private link for Pedasun and raised only a waiting call. Intuition told him that the organization below was all to hell. Somebody should have known. Somebody should have been calling him with the s
core.

  Petrel jacked herself another ten kilometres into the gravisphere and Toron moved, calling for a course change that put his reptilian crew on the edge of G tolerance.

  The move was repeated on Petrel’s scanner. Fletcher had expected it and broke the auto chain.

  Working on manual, with his own fallible human computer, he reckoned he could offset the frigate’s heavier weight in instrumentation.

  Alope blazed through the space they should have been in with her main armament cutting a swathe that would have dissipated Petrel in incandescent gas and Fletcher was fighting a spiral that strained every seam in the corvette’s hull.

  Alope had checked, lizard-quick and was coming round for another run.

  Fletcher called for retro and the corvettes deceleration blacked half the crew. He asked, thickly, for Carrick, in his fire control, and got a burst of welcome profanity that showed the marine was still operational.

  Alope’s dive, which should have given her cone a long sight along the corvette’s spine, had taken her down steeply almost dead ahead.

  Fletcher, reduced to a living extension of the machine under his hand, was on to it knowing that it was his chance and that it was, in all likelihood, the only one he would get.

  He flung Petrel after the diving frigate, with motors in a howl, as power went into the red quadrant for overload.

  Petrel came in like a projectile fired at a standing butt, with the three rings of Alope’s jacks widening as if in a zoom lens.

  They were solid, black spiked rocks to shatter the corvette. Then they were splayed out, fragments in an exploded diagram, and Fletcher was clawing for sea room to avoid the main wreck, ploughing through a penumbra of fist-sized trash.

  Damage control lights were winking on every console, Petrel was a sieve with collision bulkheads dropping in every module.

  Fletcher had time to think that he had killed Xenia anyway, then he was manoeuvring to dive for Kristinobyl’s space port. There was still another and if he let her get into the sky it could only end one way.