by Colin Kapp
When the unexpected happened, none of those concerned with the maintenance of fleet security were prepared for it, or knew how to react when the details became apparent. The stateship had gradually drifted until it had assumed one of the outermost orbits of the fleet proper, a position it occupied for many hours in apparent quiescence. Then abruptly it began to transmit urgent distress signals, and at the same time its powerful motors broke into life and began to fling it tangentially away from the orbital ring.
Analysing some drastic powerplant runaway, or possibly even sabotage, the security ships watched in fascination as the small craft accelerated at a truly amazing rate and careered off wildly towards the deeps of space, all the time appealing frenziedly for an assistance which none of the parked vessels were able to supply. The main drama came with the horrified realization that if the little ship continued its present trajectory, its path would bring it remarkably close to the hellship, way out in its safety orbit.
At this point it was seriously questioned whether the stateship shoud be taken out of space by weaponry before the hellship was endangered. By the time a decision had been made, it was already too late to attempt to destroy the fleeting craft. The dilemma was resolved by the little ship itself: as it passed the diabolical carrier it revealed some very superior weaponry and the subsequent radiation flare blacked-out even the most discriminating scanners and instruments in the warfleet, causing temporary and permanent blindness to many human observers. In the circumstances, the exact course of events could never be determined, but it was certain that after the plasma cloud had cooled sufficiently to permit an examination of the scene, both the hellship and the stateship were no longer to be seen. In any case, the point became academic, because the ground forces on Lightning were already reporting massive attacks by insurgents who were beginning to overwhelm their defences.
CHAPTER XVIII
When Dam awoke he experienced an almost total lack of sensation from his epidermis. He was not bandaged, but laying inside a sterile plastic tent on a kind of water bed, with his whole body being periodically bathed with a heavy fog from diffusers above and around him. He needed only to lift one arm and view its sickly whiteness and the lacework of a hundred cuts to know that the operation had been performed as promised.
The knowledge raised in him a feeling of nausea and sick resignation, that should have been countered by a tide of anger€”but surgical shock, probably compounded by the judicious use of drugs, had robbed him of the will to fight; he relaxed back onto the trembling water bed and consciously willed himself to sleep, hoping never again to wake.
Yet wake he did, with no knowledge of how many hours or days had passed. The aseptic fog had ceased, and with the gradual drying of the skin a semblance of his normal flesh tone was returning. The multiple incisions were now reduced to the faintest white tracery which promised soon to disapear, so fine and skillful had been the surgery. There was no outward sign that the suit now lay beneath his skin, but his imagination broadly€”and wrongly€”suggested the outlines of the mesh which his eyes could not discern.
Experimentally he moved one hand to touch the other, then immediately wished he had not done so, for where flesh touched flesh there arose a sensation of a painful, crawling fire where severed nerve ends were regaining their old function with considerable protest at the dislocation. Thereafter he lay very still, attempting not to spread the excruciating sensation to other parts of his body. He was not successful. The flame spread slowly up his arms and began to tear at his chest. A medic looked in and started the fog again, which gave Dam some relief; then came Absolute, who had the fog turned off, and who returned periodically to watch him inscrutably through the fabric of the tent.
During one of her periods of absence, the tent was removed, and Dam was given an injection of something which muted the pain while leaving him drowsily conscious. When Absolute returned there was a furious argument, and finally she came over and sat on the edge of the bed.
"It's unfair, Lover, that they should make it so easy for you!"
"Easy!" Even under the drugs Dam reacted.
"When it was done to me, no drugs were allowed. It was experimental, you see. They were doubtful if all the nerve ends would repair, and wished to monitor the progress of the pain to see if it was containable. It wasn't€”but that didn't stop them. When the agony drove me berserk, they simply tied me down and let it continue."
"Is that why you don't feel pain now?" Dam asked.
"Of course I feel it, Lover€”probably more acutely than you. But when it continues at such levels, you either have to learn to contain it or go mad. You're going to have the opportunity to learn to handle it, as I did. It does marvelous things for the character."
"I don't think 'marvelous' is quite the word, Absolute. They've twisted you inside."
"You're wrong, Lover. One day you'll understand. To aid that understanding, I've forbidden them to give you any more pain killers. I want you to go through the same barrier I did."
Dam's torment lasted about a week, during which time, had they allowed it, he would have torn off his own skin in maddened attempts to relieve the intolerable fire which consumed him. Then gradually the burning faded to an itch, and the itch gave way to a tactile sensitivity which was somehow heightened by the newness of the re-connections the nerves had made through the flesh. With this sensitivity came also an acceptance of the subcutaneous suit and a loss of the sense of loathing and self-disgust which the presence of the artifact had originally induced. At last he was able to deny that he was any less of a man because of the suit's inclusion. He adopted the feeling that he had become a man plus something; the full potential of which had to be explored.
In the soft flesh of his waist, between the hip and the rib cage, his fingers could detect that small packages had been implanted on both sides. Each sat deeply, causing him no discomfort. He suspected that one of them was the nuclear-electric capsule that powered the paraforming process and the other was the micro-miniature modulator pack responsible for maintaining his identity while in the para-ion state.
When Absolute came to observe his final checkout by the medics, she adopted an extremely professional and impersonal approach. For the first time Dam saw the dichotomy between her astuteness as a para-ion technician and the complexities of character which motivated her. He thought he could detect no less than three different aspects of Absolute: the clinically cool technologist; the quick, critical, and occasionally sadistic mentor of para-ion techniques; and beneath all this a feminine base-character almost frighteningly powerful in the strength of its emotions. He did not know whether or not these divisions were figments of his imagination, but one thing was certain: he no longer felt resentment at the way she had left him to suffer, because out of that overwhelming agony he had begun to understand the real lesson she was trying to teach him€”how to acquire that hideous inner strength that no ordinary circumstance could conquer.
Later they went to the heated-hydrogen furnace, by-passed the paraformer, and went as close as they dared to the foot of the red-hot entry ramp. Here Absolute showed Dam the radio-pulse apparatus, little larger than a small book, with which the paraformer package in his body could be activated. The actual transition was no less agonizing for being self-contained, but now Dam found he could lean towards the sensation and accept the pain with an almost savage joy, as a swimmer can enjoy a plunge into icy water and rejoice in its tonic embrace, while lesser spirits are shattered by the numbing cold.
In para-ion state, he ran ahead of her into the furnace chamber, his body adopting the parahydrogen identity of the environment, which left his as a shadowy wraith in the tide of red-hot gas. Absolute had a new trick to demonstrate. By using the enclosure chamber and gas supply of the paraformer, but not its coils, she managed to achieve a transition into para-sodium. When she reached the heated chamber, the ionised sodium lit radiantly with a brilliant yellow flare; like an immortal, naked sure goddess, she went to torment her shadowy a
colyte in the bright-red regions of an artificial Hell.
Absolute flicked the paper across the desk. Dam read it curiously but without gleaning much information from its coded jargon. The order was signed by Abel himself.
"What does it mean?" he asked.
"It means, Lover, that the honeymoon is over. Abel finally got his own way, and a new para-ion team is to be formed from the advanced trainees here. You and I are both included, because we need to study the subcutaneous-suit technique in the field."
"Which field?"
"A minor Hub world called Syman. Do you know it?"
"I know of it. But most of your para-ion team is comprised of former Hub men. What makes you think you can make us fight our own kind?"
"It's simple, really! You're all dedicated survivors, else you'd not have survived the training this far. When you go out on a mission you're put into some particularly nasty para-ion identity such as phosphorus. Either you fight as directed, or we don't admit you back through the paraformer. With men like yourselves, with such a well-developed sense of self-preservation, we seldom have trouble. Potential rebels are self-eliminating. Rather neat, don't you think?"
"It's the diabolical product of a set of sick minds," said Dam sourly.
"Come, Lover! You're a soldier. Do you need me to teach you about the ethics of war and conquest? The prize goes always to those best fitted to seize and hold it; the weaklings go to the wall. That's a fundamental fact of life."
"Fighting for survival is one thing," said Dam. "But fighting without necessity, to ensure others may not survive, is an insane perversion. In no way do the Hub worlds threaten Terra's existence. Only her craving for dominance is at stake. So we're talking about the maintenance of power mania, not the ethics of war."
"I said you'd a lot to understand, Lover. Some of us need to fight just to stay alive, else we atrophy and die. And this happens with societies no less than with people. That's the principle behind all human history; conquer or you will fall, either from external enemies or from creeping paralysis within."
Two hovertrucks came for them that same evening. Twelve men, Dam and Fiendish among them, were herded into one truck, while Absolute and a party of officers rode in the other. They were taken to a military spaceport, where the pads were dominated by an armed spacecruiser, one of the most wicked-looking war machines Dam had ever seen. It was not to this vessel, though, that the party was directed. Behind the cruiser, a craft-carrier stood nearly as high as the warcraft but fat with its cargo, which Dam guessed to be two paraformer ships.
The carrier and the cruiser made a simultaneous blast-off from the pads, and it was obvious that the function of the warcraft was to act as a diligent escort to the carrier mother-ship so pregnant with her spiteful spawn. Such an over-protective arrangement made Dam raise his eyebrows. It hinted that the para-ion team and its associated operating vessels was a facility worth guarding even at such an extreme cost as that involved in dedicating a major warcraft to the task. It further suggested that the Terrans were at last encountering serious opposition from the Hub. Of all the things that had happened to him since he had left Castalia, this latter notion was the only one that gave Dam any hope.
CHAPTER XIX
"And I tell you that Terra's attack on Syman isn't quite the idiocy it appears," said Euken Tor.
"I never said otherwise, you understand? But I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. Don't underestimate the fact that strategically, Syman is the source of most of the nickel-iron used for shipbuilding around that sector of the Hub."
"That's the point I don't buy, Liam. Do you know how they distribute that stuff? They mine it in hundred tonne slabs which are then hauled into planetary orbit by slow tugs. From there the sling-ships net the slabs and accelerate them up to a tenth of the speed of light before casting loose. The sling-ships return for the next load, while the slabs make their own way a full two light years distance to be picked up by the catch-ships feeding the foundries on Toroliver."
"Interesting, but I fail to see the relevance, you understand?"
"Then you've not considered its implications. At any moment there's around a twenty year supply of nickel-iron slabs already in transit through space. If
Syman ceased production tomorrow, the foundaries on Toroliver would still have about two decades in which to look for an alternative supply; the strategic value of Syman is largely an illusion."
"You could equally say that neither Rigon nor Lightning were of direct strategic importance to the Hub. They came under Terra's guns for reasons of prestige and colonial blackmail."
"True, but each had relatively large populations, and therefore greater propaganda value. That isn't true for Syman, which has only a mining community of about ten thousand. There are perhaps another thousand in the sling-ships and space ancillaries, but in galactic terms, who would even miss them?"
"I would, you understand? But I think you were about to make your point."
"Syman is nothing but a ball of nickel-iron. It has no external atmosphere, and no surface installations. Aside from the space ancillaries, the entire population lives deep-sealed in the internal cavities left by the mining work. In short, it's a place suited par excellance for resisting damage by space bombardment. In theory, it's about the most difficult proposition Terra could have chosen. About the only way Syman could be taken is by a Terran para-ion squad."
"That agrees with my own analysis."
"Then it raises an interesting question. Knowing how precious their ion-warriors are to them, why are they deploying them against so worthless a target? I suggest they are hoping to gain the head of their favourite enemy. To me, Syman smells like a Liam-trap."
"Ah!" Liam Liam leaned back in his chair, "A good point, Euken. You've filled in a piece of the puzzle which was missing. I'd been so busy considering what were the advantages we could gain from Syman, that I'd not stopped to consider the converse."
"What are the possible advantages of Syman to us?"
"When we removed our relay ship from the Terran communications chain, the truth about Lightning managed to reach Terra. They've since had time to digest what occurred, and to complete their plans to stop it happening again. Intelligence reports suggest there's a new paraformer mother-ship already out from Terra bound for Syman. If they have developed an answer to our tactics, that ship contains it. It's vital we know what they've got aboard her."
"So we can't afford to opt out of the Syman operation even if we do suspect a trap?"
"Not if we're to stay in the race, you understand? I think now that that ship may even be both bait and jaws for the trap. Any word from Truman Wing Ai?"
"A message just came in. With the information gained from the Terrans you captured in the second Lightning episode, the labs have managed to crack the paraformer problem, although the treatment's decidedly rough. Wing reckons that if pushed, he could get a dozen volunteers into para-ion state, but he's not too confident he could get them all out again. He's pleading for more time to experiment."
"The Terran mother-ship's already on her way. That defines the time we have available. Tell Wing I want our own para-ion squad, and I want them yesterday. If the Terrans are planning to surprise us, it's only fair we prepare a few surprises of our own."
For reasons known only to themselves, the Terrans carefully maintained their fictional charge of insurrection against the mining planet of Syman. Even though a fearsome warforce was placed in a close and threatening orbit around the metal world, they did not immediately interrupt trade, but insisted on a series of meetings with the planetary council in which their threats and charges and demands became more outrageous and more ominous. Meanwhile the great elevators continued to rise to the surface bearing the gigantic slabs of nickel-iron which were expertly grappled by the slow tugs and hauled into low orbit for pickup by the sling-ships.
There was also a lesser volume of trade in the reverse direction. While sufficient oxygen could be won from the oxide traces in the mined met
al to secure the life-maintaining element in the recycled internal atmosphere, no source of nitrogen was available as a dilutent. The nitrogen came from two light years distance in huge shuttle containers which, once having been accelerated by the Toroliver sling-ships, made their own way to the vicinity of Syman, there to be caught by the two catch-ships maintained for the purpose. Base nutrients for the hydroponic gardens, planned with a twenty year delivery delay in mind, also travelled the same route, leaving to the occasional FTL starships the carriage only of people and the more urgent, intricate and exotic goods for the metal world.
There was no way by which it could have been externally distinguished, but one of the shuttles which the Syman catch-ships netted from a grazing approach and shepherded through the ship-chain to the elevator platforms on the surface was completely untypical of a normal incoming catch load. Although it had come in close to one of the usual freight trajectories, the shuttle had been in flight not for twenty years, but for only a few days, and from a distance only just beyond the scanner range of the Terran warfleet. Its second peculiarity was that the shuttle cylinder contained not liquid nitrogen, as its manifest declared, but the small paraforming ship that had been hijacked from Lightning. Smuggled swiftly away from the elevator shaft and skilfully concealed in a specially prepared mine gallery, there could have been no reason for the Terrans to even suspect that such a vessel had been concealed deep in the planet's guts.
With the ship had come a mass of communications equipment and twenty men, eight of them technicians from Wing Ai's laboratories, eleven handpicked Hub commandos, and Liam Liam. Most of the men were slightly grim-faced, with a full understanding of the difficulties and dangers with which the venture was fraught. Only Liam Liam rode the tensions and pressures with equanimity, and this was said to be because, with him, living at an extreme pitch of danger was a normal mode of life.
