The Imprisoned Earth

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Why’s the mentalist coming here exactly?” I asked.

  “How dear do you hold the Fighting Hunge?”

  “Get to the point, Doctor.”

  “The mentalists need workers in the subterranean ruins, as the draining lake made a mess of certain caverns.”

  “Are you talking about Lake Paga?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “How long until the mentalist shows up?”

  “Just a moment, I’m activating—oh-oh, the advance party is arriving. They’ve already deployed sleeping gas canisters.”

  I sniffed around me.

  “The gas is odorless,” Calidore said. “Do you feel faint?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was checking for psychosomatic responses in you, studying the state of your mental condition. By already being deployed, I meant in the launchers of the approaching vessels. Neither the vessels nor the canisters have yet reached the plateau.”

  I made a swift calculation. If Calidore knew about the approaching vessels, it would indicate his sensors had seen them. If his sensors reached that far, wouldn’t he have known about me when I’d first landed on the plateau? If that was true, he’d made the call to the mentalists—I might have been his bargaining chip or one of them, anyway. His talking here with me was simply to keep me occupied until the mentalist’s vessels landed.

  I crouched beside Schaine, removing her laser pistols.

  “As the old saying goes,” Calidore told me, “resistance is futile. The mentalist needs workers. If you do exactly as I say, I’ll remain mum regarding your presence. You can join the Hunge as a worker and receive a firsthand education about mentalist procedures and about the ancient ruins. When the time comes, I’ll help you escape so you can help me leave Aiello.”

  “You’re too kind,” I said, turning, heading for the cave entrance.

  “What are you doing?” Calidore shouted in an amplified voice. “I already told you resistance is futile. Come back, or I’ll train my x-ray emitters on you. I made a deal with the mentalist, and I don’t want you to do anything to upset it.”

  I ignored him, breaking into a sprint.

  -29-

  If Calidore had x-ray emitters and fired them at me, I didn’t feel a thing. He was bluffing, in other words. I’d played poker—

  I shook my head, as I’d reached the leather curtain. I peeked out at the plateau. Everything seemed normal.

  “Jason Bain,” Calidore shouted from the back of the cavern. “Come back or I’ll revive Schaine. She’ll have you gelded for sure. You’ll end your existence as a neutraloid.”

  Could I work with Calidore as he worked with the mentalists? Even as I thought that, a horrible cramp struck, and I doubled over in pain. What in the heck was happening to me? It worsened into an agonizing stomach cramp, and I found myself on my knees, gasping for air. Was this the result of x-rays or something else?

  “I’m fighting the mentalists,” I whispered. “I’m fighting them.”

  Abruptly, the pain left, and I was certain the Lorelai worm had done that to me. At that moment, I knew one of my priorities was ridding myself of the sarcophagus-placed worm. How I could go about doing that, I had no idea.

  “This is your last chance,” Calidore called.

  I tucked the barrels of the laser pistols in the waistband of my pants. Then I strode past the curtain onto the plateau. The guards appeared. They’d been leaning against the cliff on either side, barely out of my line of sight.

  “Where’s Schaine?” the chief asked.

  “Where do you think?” I snapped. “Can’t you hear the oracle yelling?”

  The chief paled. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said guiltily.

  It must be a crime to eavesdrop on the oracle.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll overlook it this time because we have company coming.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Attackers are going to strike. They’re coming from the sky, planning to drop sleep canisters on us and make all of us slaves.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Are you an idiot? Haven’t you been listening to me? I’ve been with Schaine speaking to the oracle. He told us about the coming attack.”

  The chief guard stared at me.

  “Would Schaine have given me these if she hadn’t told me to mount a defense?” I drew the laser pistols, waving them in their air. “Come on. We don’t have much time to prepare.”

  “We must stay here and guard Schaine,” he protested.

  “A mentalist is double-crossing us, you idiot. I need everyone working together. Get your butt in gear and follow me. Now, come on.”

  I hurried toward the missile battery I’d seen earlier. Stopping, I glanced back at the guards. They stood in confusion. “Hey!” I yelled, motioning with the pistols. “Hurry it.”

  Finally, they hurried after me.

  I turned toward the missile battery and began hollering instructions.

  If Calidore were crafty, he’d call the mentalist and tell the man to turn back. That would shatter my authority and allow Schaine to punish me cruelly. I was betting that Calidore wasn’t going to do that, or the mentalist wouldn’t listen if he did.

  “Get the sky-sharks up!” I bellowed. “A mentalist is making an air attack. He’ll wipe us out if we don’t move fast enough.”

  “How do you know?” a flyer asked me.

  I held up Schaine’s laser pistols. “She’s speaking with the oracle, and he’s giving her further instructions. This is going to get complicated. That’s why she handed me the pistols. So you heroes would believe me and save the Fighting Hunge from a treacherous back stab.”

  “Why is the mentalist—?”

  “He’s going to make us slaves so we have to dig for him,” I shouted. “Who wants to go back to mining for aliens?”

  Fighting Hunge stared at each other.

  “Get the sky-sharks up, pronto,” I said, “or do I have to do everything myself?”

  “You can fly a sky-shark?”

  “Damn straight, I can fly. And I guess I’ll have to do it myself. Schaine won’t be happy—”

  “No,” a Hunge said. “Let’s go. If he’s lying, we’ll know soon enough. Then we’ll land and speak to Schaine about this. He would be a fool to attempt trickery like this against us.”

  “Enough jawing,” I said. “Get your butt up there before it’s too late.”

  A lookout gave a sharp cry. We looked up at him. The man was higher up, on the cliff. He pointed into the distance, shouting again.

  The flyers and I saw specks out there, and they were coming in fast.

  “Get up in the clouds,” I said. “Hide. When they start landing, hit them from above.”

  The chief of flyers nodded, and they sprinted to their covered sky-sharks. The rest of us rushed to the missile batteries. There were three of them.

  Men set uncovered sky-sharks onto small wooden rollers, shoving them to a big steam catapult. Eight burly men loaded a sky-shark onto the steam catapult. The flyer climbed a ladder and lay down on his plank. Once the flyer was set, a loader waved to a man sitting in a gunnery-like chair. That man caused the catapult aimer to swivel out and up. He pulled a lever. With a whoosh, the catapult pusher launched the sky-shark into the air. Exhaust expelled from the back nozzle, and the plank with stubby wings zoomed up toward a fluffy white, nearby cloud. One after another, more flyers joined the first.

  At the same time, women and children ran into stone huts and other protective locations. Ground men in leather vests and pants took up various hiding spots, many bearing machine guns while others held RPGs.

  I stayed at one of the missile batteries, impressed with their decisive actions. They’d clearly trained for a surprise air raid against them.

  One of the guards handed me a Wind Runner spyglass. I aimed the telescope at the much larger specks, bringing three enclosed vessels into view. I would guess them each larger tha
n a sky raft, and I’d guess each of them used anti-gravity pods, because I didn’t spy any serious wings. It finally occurred to me that those were haulers, carriers or shuttles of some type.

  I told my finding to the guards around me. “Think about it,” I added. “They plan to shove you inside the carriers and take you away as mining slaves for the rest of your lives.”

  “Why?” asked the chief guard. “We had a good deal going.”

  “Because you can never trust a mentalist once he’s on the trail of ancient relics.” I didn’t know that to be true, but it seemed like good policy to pump the men up to fight as hard as they could.

  “Enemy approaching!” the lookout shouted.

  Our missile chief threw a switch. Our missile battery swiveled this way and that as if searching for exactly the right direction to point.

  “Down,” the chief shouted at us.

  I hit the deck as the first antiaircraft missile whooshed from its launcher, speeding with extreme prejudice at the approaching haulers.

  -30-

  The fight did not go as I’d expected. The missiles left the first battery one by one. They zoomed at the enemy, but none exploded. Instead, as I watched through the spyglass, I witnessed each missile flying past the haulers and continuing until it ran out of fuel. At that point, the missile plummeted out of sight.

  “Damn starmenters,” the chief swore. “They sold us defective missiles.”

  I doubted that, suspecting that the mentalist’s people had far better electronic counter warfare.

  “Can you hold the launching of the other missiles?” I asked.

  The chief stared at me, and even as I spoke, the next missile battery launched its first missile.

  “Do you have any antiaircraft guns?” I asked.

  “Our machine guns,” he said.

  I looked around the plateau. Could machine-gun fire bring down the haulers? I rather doubted it. But wouldn’t fighting be better than surrendering? I suppose it depended on what a person wanted out of life. Some believed better a live dog than a dead lion. And if one was a slave, one still had a chance of winning freedom someday.

  Calidore had said the mentalist would use gas canisters.

  “Do you have gas masks?” I asked.

  Again, the chief stared at me as if I spoke folly.

  “Guards,” I said. “Follow me.”

  I left the empty missile battery with the guards following, heading toward the cliff. “Are there any tunnel entrances we can use?”

  “No,” the one-eyed guard said.

  “What about the pit over there?” I indicated where the giant steam engine’s leather belt disappeared into the rock ground. “Can we hide down there?”

  “The belt will cut us in half if we try.”

  “First, we’re going to stop the steam engine, which will stop the belt.”

  “That is forbidden,” the one-eyed guard said.

  I whirled around. “Do you want to die?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Then, you’re going to have to listen to me. I’m the spaceman, remember? I know what the mentalist and his people are capable of. The haulers are going to drop gas canisters and maybe they have stun rays. We want to be hidden so we can boil up and kill the enemy once he lands and thereby save the Fighting Hunge.”

  The one-eyed guard narrowed his good eye at me, finally nodding.

  We headed for the giant steam engine, a huge chugging thing with a crew of seven even now stoking it with more coal shoveled into the furnace.

  “The stokers are going to fight us,” the one-eyed guard said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Regulus,” he said.

  “Regulus, convince the stokers to shut it down for us. If you have to get rough, do it, but do it fast. Do you understand?”

  Regulus looked up at the nearing haulers. Like him, I could see the front windows, although I couldn’t quite see the individual pilots peering out at us yet.

  Regulus called three other guards to him. The rest followed me.

  As we waited near the pit where the leather belt continued to churn something down there, the sky-sharks began attacking from the white cloud.

  The haulers slid toward the plateau, and the sky-sharks plunged almost straight down upon the enemy. Sky-shark machine guns began chattering. On a few, launchers fired rocket-propelled grenades.

  The hauler pilots and sensor men must have missed the sky-sharks hidden in the cloud. Maybe the flying planks were too small and unsophisticated to be noticed by the sensors. Maybe the sensor men had just gotten lazy or maybe our side had gotten lucky.

  The sky-sharks targeted the last hauler, all of them diving at it. An explosion caused the hauler to shudder. Smoke billowed from it and daring sky-shark flyers flew even closer. Lasers burned up out of the hauler hole, hitting sky-sharks. Those planks began corkscrewing, heading down. One slammed against the stricken hauler, sliding around the fuselage and then plummeting down. A grenade flew through the rent and must have exploded inside. Once more, the hauler shuddered, and then it simply broke in half.

  People fell out of the broken halves, some of them blue-colored. Equipment fell out, plunging earthward. Then, both halves of the broken hauler must have lost energy for their anti-gravity pods. That was the only explanation that made sense to me, as the two floating halves suddenly screamed down, smashing farther away in a valley.

  Fighting Hunge cheered, pumping fists and machine guns in the air.

  At the same time, the leather belt slowed down and then stopped. Regulus and his men ran to us.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Get out of sight. Things are going to turn ugly fast.”

  Was it a premonition? I don’t know, maybe. We jumped into the hole in the rock, finding ledges around it. There was a deeper hole where the flat leather belt went. What the leather belt had pulled or turned, I had no idea. Maybe it was a generator for the entire plateau. What had powered Calidore’s machines, after all?

  I peered up to see what was happening.

  Rays beamed from the remaining two haulers. They targeted sky-sharks, which burned sometimes and always plunged earthward. A few of the flyers bailed out of their plummeting sky-sharks. Several of the falling men screamed faintly in terror.

  The haulers proved bigger than I’d expected, their true size becoming apparent as they approached the plateau. Some of the Fighting Hunge didn’t have proper fire control and stepped into view, their machine guns chattering as they futilely fired up at the haulers.

  Big silver canisters ejected from each hauler. The canisters tumbled and hit the plateau with metallic crashes. Each canister broke open, some exploding. There didn’t seem to be any other effect. In less than ten seconds, though, Fighting Hunge began collapsing where they stood.

  “Sorcery,” Regulus hissed from where he stood near me.

  “Odorless and colorless sleeping gas,” I said.

  “How can that be?”

  “Science,” I said.

  He frowned at me as if the word made no sense.

  I didn’t know if the gas would be lighter or heavier than air. By that I meant, would the sleep gas have a tendency to sink or rise? I’d made a choice, a guess, and would soon find out if hiding in a stone hole had been smart or stupid.

  The gas didn’t get everyone, though. Some Hunge used up one magazine after another, peppering the metal sides of the descending haulers. Could they get lucky?

  Side doors opened on the lowest hauler, and blue-skinned, helmeted humanoids leapt out. They floated down, each wearing bulky belts around their waists. Those must have been some kind of anti-gravity devices with limited juice. The blue-skinned men—tattooed that color, neutraloids, I confirmed later—carried laser carbines, and began beaming the machine-gun Hunge with uncanny accuracy.

  “We’re doomed,” Regulus moaned beside me.

  I looked at the two laser pistols in my hands, shoved one in the waistband of my pants and carefully aimed the other.
A beam rayed, hitting a neutraloid’s helmet, burning through and killing him.

  “We’re not finished yet,” I shouted.

  I picked off two more and barely survived a counter-strike as Regulus grabbed my shoulders and jerked me back from where I’d been standing. Laser beams flashed at the spot.

  “Thanks,” I told Regulus.

  “More are coming,” he said. “They jumped from the other hauler. I don’t think you saw them.”

  I slid to another location popped up and almost bought it as two beams speared at me, barely missing.

  “We have to move,” Regulus said.

  “Where to?”

  Instead of answering, Regulus slumped unconscious. So did others nearby on the shelf inside the hole.

  I blinked and realized I felt dizzy. “No,” I said in a husky voice. “They’re not getting me that easily.”

  I began to totter, but something gave me more stamina, even against sleeping gas. Ever so slowly, I headed into the deeper hole, using a ladder to go down. I must have stopped and stared at times, because suddenly a harsh-voiced man commanded me to drop my pistols.

  I looked up slowly, saw a neutraloid staring down at me—he had harsh features and burning eyes—and I began to aim one of the pistols at him. If I’d moved fast before against Esteban Dan, I must have appeared then the way the neutraloid did now against me. The next thing I knew, he’d knocked the pistol out of my hand. Then his hard, blue fist struck my face, and I felt myself falling, hitting the bottom of the hole and going unconscious.

  -31-

  I drifted or floated upon a sea of nothingness for what seemed like a long time before consciousness returned by small degrees. I floated—maybe I’d already sensed that. But this was a different kind of floating. Before, it had been a mental drift. Now, I literally floated…

  My eyelids fluttered as I tried to understand. I was buoyant, and I heard the rush of air in my ears and sensed bubbles gurgling around me. Sluggishness ruled in my brain, so I still couldn’t figure it out.