by Colin Kapp
"Is this your weapon, soldier?"
"Could be," said Dam. With his hands tied behind him he had no means of verifying whether or not his own weapon was still in the pouch at his hip.
"Is it, or isn't it?" A savage blow across his face. Dam spit blood from a split cheek.
"If it is, I didn't use it. I swear!"
The officer motioned to his group. "Take him in and soften him up for interrogation. Get the lab to work on the wound and the weapon. I want this character and the girl positively identified, and I want all reports available by morning. If this colonial muck thinks it can come to Terra and start raising trouble, I'll be happy to set an example that'll dissuade him from trying again."
"But I didn't do anything," said Dam. "I can explain . . ."
Another blow across his face broke a tooth and so bruised his mouth that had he dared he could have spoken only with difficulty.
"Shut up, you stinking Hub excrement!" shouted the officer. "You'll do your explaining when we know the right questions to ask. I'm damn sick of you colonial trouble-makers. It's about time a few of you were taught a lesson. And I'm just the man to do it."
Still with no understanding of what was happening, Dam was pushed into the steel cell of the hover-truck closely followed by two armed guards. A long, uncomfortable time later the truck was finally backed against a ramp, and when the door was opened he was led directly into the grim reception room of a detention complex. Here Dam was ordered to empty his pockets and strip off his clothes. His uniform was taken away and a set of shapeless coverals was issued in its place. In changing, he noticed with some concern that his blaster had not been in his hip pouch. He made a brief factual statement, which was recorded without much interest, and was then passed through to the cells.
"Softening for interrogation," Dam found, was a euphemism for an hour of being pushed, punched and kicked by four guards who appeared to take a great delight in the slow and painful demolition of "Hub trash." Dam had never before realized that the Terrans harbored such a deep-seated resentment and hatred for Hub folk. It made it even more difficult for him to understand why Terra insisted on tithe-loan service from peoples she apparently mistrusted and despised.
The hour of punishment, which left scarcely a part of his anatomy unbloodied or unbruised, was terminated by the arrival of an officer in the corridor outside, who called the guards to a hasty conference. After that, his tormentors left him alone. Dam gathered that something had been discovered about his case which altered his status, but lack of apology or offer of release made it seem unlikely that the new factor was otherwise working in his favour. Suddenly the cell lights were extinguished, and he was left alone for many hours of pained and broken sleep. Return of the light heralded a tray of dull, uninteresting food, an opportunity for a cold wash, and a further hour of solitude before the door opened again to admit the scowling figure of Port Marshal Segger.
"Hmm!" Segger grunted to himself in substantial surprise. "I thought I might be seeing you again, Major. But this is quite a bit sooner than I expected."
CHAPTER VI
A power failure having made it impossible for the great doors of the vehicle bay to be opened automatically, they had to be winched open by hand. But knowledge of the importance of Liam's mission ensured no shortage of hands for the task, and many envious glances were cast at the vacant seat in the flier. It was an indication of the seriousness of Base 22's plight that the plans originally developed to ensure his escape had already failed. Liam waited as long as possible in the vain hope that Jon Rakel could join him, but there were dangers for everyone in keeping the bay doors open to the bombardment outside, and finally he slipped into the pilot's seat and began to study the controls.
Although he was a qualified pilot on his own planet, the control layout, indicators and conventions of the Sette-built flier were sufficiently different to make Liam doubtful about his ability to handle the craft safely. Nor could he still rely on transmitted information from Base 22. It was with something akin to controlled desperation that he finally tested the engine controls and taxied out on to what was left of the concrete pad outside. He was surprised to find that dawn had broken. The view of countryside he had seen through the night-scope on his arrival now resembled a bitter moonscape of overlapping craters and churned earth.
Though what remained was precariously insufficient the miracle was that any of the concrete pad had survived. Yet the continuing bombardment made it imperative for him to leave the spot without delay; he gunned the craft forward, felt it stagger sickeningly as it reached a crater's edge, then against all odds lift clear of the shattered ground and surge skywards after what must have been the shortest take-off ever recorded for a craft of its type. As it nosed towards the overcast, a series of massive explosions shook the entire terrain. It was Liam's private guess that the ghost commandos had blown Base 22's powerplant, thus completing the destruction of the command-point. He was so busy coaxing the controls of the unfamiliar flier that he did not have the chance to turn and see the results of the blast. By the time he had learned the automatic controls for direction and rate of climb he was well above the cloudbase and had lost any opportunity of witnessing the final ending of Sette's hopes for independence.
Liam's immediate problem was finding his way back to Wanderplas spaceport in the shortest possible time. If Terran Intelligence had learned that Jon Rakel had been inside Base 22 when it was destroyed, they would send in a full-scale occupation force before the resistance organizations could regroup under a new commander. That would put the spaceport very firmly out of Liam's reach. He estimated he might have only hours before escape from the planet became almost impossible. On his journey to Base 22 he had gained only a rough idea of heading, and since the craft had approached the base under automatic control, even his notion of distance could be widely adrift.
While the flier gained altitude he searched through the library of pre-set course programs, knowing that one of them must contain the instruction for returning the craft to the point from which it had come. Sensibly, from Jon Rakel's viewpoint, all the programs were labelled in code. Not having access to the cipher, nor time to experiment to see which might adopt approximately the right heading, Liam was forced to reject the whole series and to devise his own way of locating the spaceport. He found the communications set had coverage into the spacecraft navigation bands, and he called-up the Starbucket on its emergency channel. Euken Tor answered instantly.
"Euken, I'm in a flier about two thousand kilometres off, without maps or course reference. What can you do to guide me in?"
"I could flash-up the space beacon, but it would attract too much attention with us sitting out on the pads. The whole place is shaking with Terran ferry-craft moving in. It looks like the big push has already started."
"Your analysis is right. Sette is finished. It's our own survival we have to attend to now, you understand?"
"Right! I've been running direction-finding on your transmission, so I can give you a course heading, but I can't triangulate for distance. Set your heading for the figure I shall give you, and keep going until we can pick you up on the scanner. Once we can see you, we'll talk you in. When you can see the spaceport, land on the pads as close as possible. We'll be ready for instant take-off."
"You're crazy if you think they'll let me bring a flier over the space pads."
"They'll have too much on their minds trying to control the fire."
"There's a fire on the spaceport?"
"Not yet, but there's a bowser of boro-flam in the quarantine area which should take about a quarter of the fuel complex with it if somebody was careless enough to lob a mortar through the pipe-hatch."
"You don't get killed, you understand? We need people like you."
Liam fed the directional data into the craft's computer, and was gratified to note that the new heading adopted by the flier was only marginally different from what he had derived by intuition. Then he started up the search scanners and beg
an to watch for any atmospheric craft which might attempt an interception. The flier was armed, but only with chemically-fuelled target-seeking missiles, and would be no match for a fast atmospheric marauder armed with electron cannons.
As it happened, he did not need Euken's talk-down for final positioning. Visible from a great distance, broad vapor trails stretching high above the ground betrayed the location of the spaceport as a heavy concentration of Terran ferry-craft ran a continuing shuttle service to and from the fleetships in orbit. His final aid was a huge pall of smoke seeded with tongues of high-rising flame originating, no doubt, from where someone had been careless enough to lob a mortar into a bowser of boro-flam. It was a gratifying piece of sabotage, because virtually all the spaceport's stock of chemical propellants had also joined the conflagration.
Liam was actually in sight of the Starbucket before a trio of intercepting atmospheric craft swooped down out of the sky. They had been shielded against his search scanner and had remained unnoticed until it was too late for him to take evasive action. His first thoughts were that these were some of Jon Rakel's defense forces, and would recognize the flier as one of their own. However, they made a close pass of inspection and then wheeled rapidly, obviously coming in for an attack run. Liam was left with no maneuver he could use to secure his own escape, so he took the initiative and fired off a salvo of projectiles. The homing devices on the rockets were neatly cancelled out by the electronics on the attacking craft, and the missiles spun impotently off-course and twisted aimlessly to earth. Liam held the flier on its descent course, and prayed for a miracle which would permit him time to land before the wheeling interceptors closed on him.
The explosions which shocked the sky as the three attacking craft burst apart were themselves nearly strong enough to precipitate Liam's demise. Fortunately he managed to hold control and, by the purest chance, also to avoid the masses of debris with which the air seemed suddenly filled. The excellent gunnery which had destroyed his attackers in the last instants could only have come from the concealed turret implant on the Starbucket. While it had saved his life it had also blown the Z-ship's cover of quaint pacifism; the speed of their escape had now become more critical than ever.
He made a virtual crash-landing so close to the Starbucket that he had barely five metres to run to the hatch. Strong and anxious arms helped him through the opening. Nevertheless, the only thing which saved him from probably fatal cross-fire from the hand weapons of a group of Terran shipmen was the simple fact that nobody had been able to analyze the situation in the time available€”they were using weaponfire as a warning rather than with intent to kill. There was still some apparent confusion as to whether the little tramp ship actually constituted any sort of threat. That uncertainty was suddenly dispelled when the decrepit-looking tramp made towards space.
It was conceivable that at the actual moment of the Starbucket's blast-off, the ships in orbit were unaware of the turmoil on the ground. This situation was swiftly rectified, however, because the little ship which rose between the lumbering ferry-craft was not only clearly identifiable by its outstanding drive capabilities, but was also prone to blasting out of space any other ship which too closely neared the path of its own trajectory. Equipped with a null-g counterforce of outstanding design, it was able to apply acceleration rates which would have crushed the crews of any lesser ships, and it speared towards space like a javelin hurled by some legendary god of war.
It did not have things entirely its own way, however. The carrier ships in low orbit passed their observations on to the ship-chain which, policed the far approaches. By the time the Starbucket had clawed its way through the tenuous exosphere surrounding Sette, the ship-captain was already alert and waiting. Three Terran star-cruisers, each with the most formidable armaments available, covered the multiple projected escape paths, one of which the little ship should take if it was to attempt to pass. The automatic weaponry was calculated to reduce the chance of the tramp's escape to a statistical zero. To multiply their certainty, the Terrans further activated large fields of space-mines to cover the less-likely escape path prospects, and waited with instrumented expectancy for the fleeing craft either to be destroyed or to abort its escape attempt and to surrender.
One factor had been overlooked, however, and that was because their computers had never been programed to consider its possibility: despite having just climbed out of Sette's gravitational well, the little ship's frantic rate of acceleration had placed tachyon-space entry velocity within its grasp well before it encountered the deadly meshes of the ship-chain. Pausing only long enough to fire a salvo of self-guiding missiles at its would-be destroyers, the Starbucket leaped into tachyon space at a separation closer to planetary interference than Terran theorists had thought possible.
Suddenly become one with the strange particles of inverse space-time, the Starbucket fled at a velocity many times that of light, and despite the perfected instrumentation of the ship-chain her passage left no trace at all on the recorders. Liam Liam was on his way . . .
CHAPTER VII
The Port Marshall called for guards and had Dam transferred to an interview room. When they were alone again, he pulled a small recorder from his pocket and set it on the desk.
"Now, Major, you will please explain."
Dam related the events of the evening as accurately as he was able, concluding with his puzzlement about events in the lapse of time between his being drugged and waking beside the dead girl.
When he had finished, the port marshal shook his head.
"You're not as ingenious as I'd expected."
"I'm telling you the truth, Marshal."
"Let me tell you what I think is the truth€”if you didn't kill the girl yourself, at least you know who did."
"This is mad!" said Dam. "I'd only just met her. I'd certainly no reason to harm her. And having only just arrived on Terra€”as you yourself are able to confirm€”I'm hardly likely to know who was responsible."
"Are you saying you didn't know Tez-ann was one of my agents?"
"No, I didn't know. I was gullible enough to think her genuine. But I suppose it explains the antiestablishment literature in her room."
"Precisely! It could well be that she was proving an embarrassment to your people, which is why you wished to be rid of her. I think you drugged her, then called in your friends. They killed her and arranged to leave your unconscious body alongside to make it appear you were innocent."
"I am innocent," said Dam. "And I don't have any friends on Terra."
"Such things can be arranged. We don't underestimate Hub Intelligence here."
"I wouldn't know. I'm a space-soldier, not a secret agent."
"Yet you were briefed by Senator Anrouse only hours before your departure. Why else should someone so close to Hub Intelligence bother to make a rendezvous with a junior officer? You see, Stormdragon, we know more about you than you think."
Bewildered and unhappy, Dam was returned to his cell, his only gain being that he had learned something he had not suspected€”the existence of fierce espionage play between the Hub and the mother planet. Later he was taken to a different room and confronted by the officer who had been concerned with his arrest. The forbidding pose of the man was slightly tempered by the presence of one of Segger's aides whom Dam recognised from his visit to the Starspite. Dam sensed a schism between the regular military police and the security services as represented by the Port Marshal.
The officer put down the file of notes he had been reading, and looked at the aide before proceeding.
"Stormdragon, our investigations leave no room for doubt that the woman known as Tez-ann died as the result of weapon-fire by your hand. Radio-assay of the wound tissues gives an isotope balance consistent with that from a weapon of Castalian manufacture. Your own blaster, found at the scene, had been recently fired, and the fingerprints and the microtrace analyses of finger residues are yours and yours alone. Now what do you say?"
"I d
idn't kill her," said Dam. "I was drugged and unconscious at the time."
The officer turned over a few pages of the file.
"So you claimed. Wine and used glasses were found in the apartment, but no trace of the Gannen liqueur you described€”and no drugs. In short, Stormdragon, your whole story is a pack of unsubstantiated lies. Normally I would beat a confession out of you, or you'd die in the process, thus saving us the expense of a trial. Unfortunately, however, there are security implications in this case, and this inhibits our customary thoroughness." He looked at the aide. "How do you want this one handled, Staff?"
"As quietly as possible. We don't want the security aspect made public because it would impair the effectiveness of similar agents still in the field. I think a swift military tribunal with a weak defence and a guaranteed conviction would best suit our purposes."
"Is this what the Terrans call justice?" asked Dam aghast. "I've done nothing."
"And you count for nothing," said the officer savagely. "Colonials are all the same€”troublemakers to the core." He looked back to the aide. "Personally I think a trial is more than he deserves. I'd kick his liver out and then burn him with the rest of the offal. But if that's the way you want it, I'll have the papers prepared for the port marshal's office."
Colonel Dimede was later shown into the cell. His face was full of deep concern, and this made him look older and more frail than Dam remembered noticing before.
"Well, Dam, tell me about this mess you've got yourself into. It's not like you to get into a fight."
