Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  Ignoring his question for the moment, she studied his bad eye. “We can fix that, I think. With the tools the Machine Master gave me and a little scrounging for parts—”

  Benel’s eyes, both of them, widened. “The Machine Master? Of Mars?”

  “Of course. I worked for him.”

  “Amazing. He’s a remarkable craftsman.”

  “More than that. And yes, he certainly knows how to build things. Unlike some people…”

  Benel shrugged. “That job is for engineers. I’m a physicist. It always amazed me how the engineers could make things look so …”

  “Useful?”

  “Elegant. It’s an art.”

  “It’s something that needs to be done. Otherwise all the bright ideas in the world would look like … that.” She pointed with scorn at the box with its vacuum hose, piled near the door.

  “Your father was good at getting things done,” Benel Kran said. “He worked for Targon Ramir, you know.”

  Visid looked as if she were searching her memory. “I … remember him, I think. He was at our house, once. A tall man, strong-looking. It was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long. But you were young then, I’d think.”

  Visid lifted her teacup, sipped. “Nine, when the war came.”

  “They say Carter Frolich turned all of them over to Prime Cornelian. Your father, and Targon Ramir …”

  “And Carter Frolich …”

  “He’s alive, you know. Blind, up in his Eagle’s Nest on Sacajawea Patera. I visited him there once. He thought I was Targon Ramir.”

  “Carter Frolich is alive?”

  “And quite mad. I doubt he could hurt or help anyone at this point. Even the light soldiers at the feeder plants leave him alone when he wanders down from his perch.”

  “Light soldiers ?’

  “Yes, and they’re our immediate concern. For the last two years, the only plasma soldiers on the planet have been the ones guarding the feeder stations. But lately they’ve been showing up again.”

  “And you’ve been neutralizing them with your box of junk.”

  “You needn’t sound so scornful. You could do better with it?” His tone held a hint of hope.

  “I should think so. And after I get this place organized …” She was studying the room, every corner, each bench, each overflowing box of parts.

  “Why,” Benel Kran said, brightening, daring to hope that his most fervent wish had come true, “this is marvelous!”

  And marvelous it proved to be. Within a week, during which the lab’s alarm registered two more light soldier incursions (but, thankfully, no attacks; both plasma soldiers wandered away from the compound, which was fortunate indeed, since, during the second incursion, Benel Kran’s weapon lay in a thousand parts on a workbench while Visid studied it minutely), Visid Sneaden had totally reorganized the lab. By the time she had finished, it looked like a Venusian version of the Machine Master’s dungeon.

  The following weeks were spent scrounging for parts and moving Visid’s own laboratory equipment into the recreation compound. Though Benel Kran had scoured the immediate vicinity thoroughly, there were treasures to be found farther afield. And with Benel’s light soldier weapon newly configured to the size of a lunchbox, with a single elegant strap supporting it over one shoulder and a thin chrome wire ending in a pencil-thin apparatus that clipped to the middle finger of either hand, ready to activate and emit a beam of light, they were able to travel away from their base and feel protected.

  It was on one of the trips, which stretched to an overnight stay, that they lay outside their tents and watched the stars hone into view after darkness. In the distance, across the miles that stretched between the edge of the city and Sacajawea Patera, they could see the lights of the jutting jewel from near the mountain’s summit where the Eagle’s Nest was brightly lit. It looked like a spike of light.

  When Visid saw Mars rise, an hour after sunset, an angry red dot, her heart was filled with a mix of emotions.

  “Did you know there was a time, before Carter Frolich and my father terraformed Venus and slowed its rotation, when a day here was two hundred and forty-three Earth days long? We would have had to wait months just to see Mars again.”

  “Everyone knows that!” Benel said. He turned to look at her in starlight. “Something’s bothering you—what is it?”

  “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” she said, to herself as much as to Benel Kran.

  “Cornelian? Yes, he definitely has something planned. I thought it would be a long time until his light soldiers came back, but here they are again—”

  As if in answer, in the distance there was a flashing beam of light from orbit to ground, which then bled into a pencil-thin shard and then winked out. On the ground in its wake rested a glowing faraway smudge of illumination.

  “I wonder what he’s going to do,” Visid said.

  There was silence between them.

  “Whatever it is,” Visid said finally, “we have to be ready.”

  They slept then, Visid’s hand bearing the trigger mechanism of the plasma weapon, and the tiny perimeter alarms she had set giving them a good measure of security.

  Visid awoke early in the morning, before sunrise, and beheld a magnificent sight. As she stood and stretched, there, facing the dawn, were three massive comets, hugging the coming sun. Their tails pushed high into the dawning sky, triple beacons.

  “I had no idea …” Visid said.

  She woke Benel Kran, who bore witness with her.

  “I’ve never been out in early morning,” the physicist said in wonder. “They must be approaching perihelion, about to circle the Sun. I wonder where they’re heading when they come back around.”

  Visid stood regarding them quietly and then turned to stare off at the Eagle’s Nest, its glowing lights beginning to be subsumed by the blue-orange of daybreak.

  “We have to go see the blind man,” Visid said, turning to regard Benel Kran with certainty. “We have to go see Carter Frolich.”

  Chapter 7

  A pirate again!

  Well, sort of.

  Still, it felt marvelous to Shatz Abel to be in command of a ship, and on a mission. Like a man who had been in deep freeze for too long, as indeed he had been, he felt ready to take on anyone and anything—a world, the Solar System, the Universe itself!

  His only regret was that he wouldn’t get to take on Wrath-Pei, the founder of his past misery and that of so many others. For all those years of exile on Pluto the dream of rending the former Martian senator limb from limb with his bare hands had sustained him. Indeed, there had been times when he had been drunk with vengeance when no other beverage had been available; had eaten revenge when food stores had sunk to alarming levels, before another old shuttle-craft could be salvaged. He had feasted on thoughts of what he would do to Wrath-Pei when finally he had his hands on him.

  There was no doubt in Shatz Abel’s mind that these thoughts had arisen in response to the sight of blue-white Pluto looming before his ship.

  Pluto! In all his days, Shatz Abel had never thought he’d see this ice ball again. Its cracked, ugly surface, the gaping rend of Christy Chasm into which he and King Shar had descended, the fuzzily lit blot of Tombaugh City toward which they descended—

  “Hold off on that landing for a bit,” Shatz Abel suddenly growled.

  Beside him, in the copilot’s seat, Andrew instantly obeyed, but sounded almost surprised.

  “Sir?”

  “Just do what I say. I want you to find a heat source for me. Very faint, but it’ll be there.”

  The attendant pilot answered, “Of course.”

  Shatz Abel activated a switch on the pilot’s panel before him; as so often happened, his thick finger hit the wrong button and a warning light went off; a moment later the cabin door behind him slid open.

  “Problems?” a gruff voice said, and the grizzled face of Yar Pent, lately liberated from one of the late Prime Minister Acron’s Earth prisons
appeared; the fact that he had been, amazingly, justly accused of forgery, bribery, theft, robbery, and embezzlement had not stopped Shatz Abel for a moment from trusting him with his life.

  “Not a problem, just a thick finger,” Shatz Abel said, turning to look at the younger man, whose remarkable scar crossed his craggy face from forehead, across the nose, to deep under the right side of his chin. “How’s everything back there?”

  “Oh, just dicey. Just like old times, old man. A fight every minute and pickpockets galore.”

  Shatz Abel grinned, and turned to punch the right button this time. “Just keep a lid on ’em, Yar.”

  “That I’ll do,” Yar Pent said cheerily; in a moment the door slid closed behind him.

  “Let’s see if I can find …” Shatz Abel said tentatively, as a Mercator projection map of the surface of Pluto slid out before him, glowing lightly in blue and red. He traced his finger across the surface slowly, up and down, and stopped at a point.

  “Try there,” he said to Andrew, who leaned his chromed head over to look at the coordinates, then punched them into his own console.

  “Right away, sir.”

  “That’s the only way to do it, Andrew.”

  The ship, a sleek wedge originally built on Earth and finding service on Titan and Mars before being hijacked from a contingent of Martian Marines in the process of raiding Callisto, shot out of its holding pattern. Its aft engines whined red-hot, and soon they stood over the icy surface the pirate had indicated.

  “Can you get any closer?” Shatz Abel said, peering through the bottom porthole, which irised open at his command between the two pilots. There was nothing but blue ice visible, the hint of a snow squall.

  The view below drew closer, but still there was nothing.

  “Bring the ship down lower, Andrew,” Shatz Abel said.

  “I wouldn’t advise that, sir,” the pilot answered. “We’ll be violating local airspace and liable to low-level attack by local forces.”

  Shatz Abel laughed. “Just do what I say, robot.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The ship descended sleekly, nose first, and stopped when Shatz Abel gave the signal.

  “I think I see something, now,” he mumbled. “Bring the view tighter if you can.”

  In the floor port, the view zoomed in, and there it was.

  “This is the only heat source within twenty kilometers,” Andrew announced. “There is a recently downed orbiter, its power sources depleting, exactly twenty point four—”

  “That’s enough, Andrew,” Shatz Abel said, studying the icy front of what had been his prison, barely visible in the side of its hill, a faint light visible in the frosted-over window.

  “Arm fore plasma charges,” Shatz Abel ordered.

  “Sir—?”

  “Just do what I say,” Shatz Abel said; and then, impatient with the robot’s hesitation, he reached over to arm them himself from the attendant’s control panel.

  “This is for you, Dalin—and me,” Shatz Abel said, firing the weapons, which slammed with blinding overforce into the side of the hill below, obliterating the hovel that had been there.

  Shatz Abel studied the blackened crater that remained, where once a hill had been.

  “That’ll do,” he said, and then ordered Andrew to land them at Tombaugh City, just as a small flotilla of Plutonian defense force ships arrived, providing escort instead of battle.

  To Shatz Abel’s delight, the local magistrate was there to greet him when he disembarked.

  “Shatz!” the man cried. A skilled and oily bureaucrat, he had progressed through many channels of Earth and Titan politics before finding himself, not to his surprise, appointed overseer of the prison planet Pluto. It had been a simple choice in the end, since he had been offered either administration or incarceration.

  “Larsen—or is that Larceny?” Shatz Abel laughed, enjoying the other man’s change of expression from charm to florid anger and back to guarded charm—all in a matter of seconds.

  The man held out his hand, which Shatz Abel did not take.

  Lowering it expertly into a sweeping gesture, Larsen exclaimed, eyeing the number of personal troops disembarking from the pirate’s ship, “Welcome to Pluto!”

  Instantly realizing his mistake, he added, “That is, welcome back to Pluto!”

  “I just visited my old quarters,” Shatz Abel said, folding his arms across his massive chest and pinning the man with a level stare. “I was thinking of paying a similar visit to Tombaugh City.”

  “No!” Larsen blanched, but instantly recovered. “I mean, what a wonderful joke!”

  “It’s not a joke—if I don’t hear what I want to.”

  “Anything! Anything!”

  “Have things been lonely without Wrath-Pei?” the pirate asked.

  Squirming, the administrator answered, “That’s not the exact … terminology I’d use.”

  “All right, I’ll be blunt. Wrath-Pei’s gone, now we’re here. And we’re going to be very good friends, right?”

  Still squirming, Larsen rejoined, “It’s not … quite that simple—”

  “Of course it is!” Shatz Abel said, gathering up the man’s tunic front in his fist and drawing him close.

  “You see,” Larsen whined, “there’s a little matter of Prime Cornelian.”

  “That’s just the point! When the time comes, you’ll side with King Shar and let Cornelian blow in the wind—right?”

  “There’s a treaty…”

  Shatz Abel loosened his grip slightly on the man’s tunic. He brought his face close to Larsen’s and growled, “You signed a treaty with Mars?”

  Trying to answer and unable out of fear, Larsen merely nodded.

  “Show it to me.”

  “I …’

  The pirate pushed the bureaucrat away and opened his meaty fist. “Put it here—now!”

  Behind Shatz Abel, his crew spread out menacingly; the Tombaugh City officials who had come with the administrator backed fearfully away.

  “Are you sure you want to see the actual piece of paper? I could tell you what it says—”

  Letting anger blossom, Shatz Abel growled and continued to hold out his palm.

  Larsen turned, quaking, and motioned to one of his underlings; the man turned and fled.

  “And while we’re at it,” the pirate said as they waited, “how’re the pickings around here lately? Since Wrath-Pei’s demise, there must be plenty of Titan scrap in the pipeline—”

  Forgetting his fear, Larsen bubbled, “Oh, yes! In some ways, things have never been better!”

  Shatz Abel snorted. “We’ll be taking our share of that, too.”

  Instantly, the administrator’s face froze. “Oh, I didn’t mean to say there was plenty! It’s just that … it’s a little better than it was!”

  The pirate snorted again, loud enough to make Larsen jump. “As I said, we’ll be taking our share for the war effort on Earth.”

  The underling returned, running as fast as he had leaving; fighting for breath, he placed a rolled parchment tied with the red ribbon in the administrator’s hand.

  Roughly, Shatz Abel took the paper, tore off the ribbon, and opened it for inspection, his eyes narrowing as he read.

  “Aggression by Earth … ? All force necessary… ? Imprisonment of pirates … ?” At this he turned and grinned at his henchmen. “Hear that, boys? We’re to be imprisoned!”

  There rose a roar of laughter.

  Shatz Abel returned to the paper, guffawing. “… followed by summary execution… ?”

  Shaking his head, he folded the paper over on itself and creased it.

  “You don’t mind if I fold it, do you?” he asked the administrator with a mock politeness that hid a well of growing animosity.

  “Of … course … not!” Larsen squeaked.

  “Good.” Shatz Abel continued to fold the treaty, making smaller and smaller squares.

  He smiled at Larsen, held the treaty—now compacted into a f
our-sided object smaller than the width of three of the pirate’s fingers—gently between two fingers, and popped it into his mouth.

  Loudly chewing, he turned to his men for support, which was fast in coming.

  Swallowing, wiping a few crumbs of parchment from his beard, he turned back to Larsen and said, “Look! No more treaty!”

  From the pirate’s crew stepped Yar Pent, bearing a parchment tied with blue ribbon.

  “What’s this?” Shatz Abel said in mock surprise; he opened the new paper up and gave it to Administrator Larsen, who took it resignedly from the pirate.

  “Read it if you want to,” Abel said, “but you’ll sign it nevertheless. From this moment on, Pluto is an ally of Earth.”

  Dejectedly, Larsen signed the document, which Shatz Abel took back.

  “And now,” the pirate said, “I think it’s time to celebrate!”

  It was only much later, after the debauchery that followed, after a long night when the dawn of SunOne was rising over Tombaugh City, throwing its artificial and ghostly light upon the cold planet, that Shatz Abel sat with Yar Pent on the gangplank of their ship and let his guard down.

  “You realize this piece of paper means nothing,” Shatz Abel said, drawing out the crumpled parchment from his tunic.

  “Everyone here knows that,” Yar Pent replied, pausing to drain the last of a scatter of wine bottles littering the tarmac below them. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh, I worry, all right,” Shatz Abel said. “Even though we’ve thrown a scare into Larsen and his cutthroats, as soon as we leave they’ll be back in Cornelian’s pocket. They know it, and so do we. That black-hearted bug has all the weapons and most of the manpower. We can’t control Pluto, or hold any of the moon outposts on Jupiter or Uranus. He’s got us beat out here before we start.”

  “At least we can skim as much salvage and weaponry as possible before Cornelian turns his eye on us.”

  “And that’s all we can do,” Shatz Abel said grimly. “We take what we can and turn tail and run for Earth. And then we wait for the worst.”

  “It can’t be as bad as all that,” Yar said.