by Colin Kapp
Having gained control of one of the elevator platforms, the para-ion squad had descended two kilometres to the first level and emerged through the air-locks without meeting overt opposition. They found themselves in a broad metal gallery whose railed floor showed the means by which the blocks of nickel iron from the planet's interior were transported to the elevator platforms. The gallery was empty, and even though it was brightly lit it was doubtful if the para-ion men thought to question the significance of the sling net covering the high ceiling. Certainly they saw no danger in their immediate situation, as, with weapons readied, they advanced as an orderly group to menace the bright metal tunnels leading from the gallery. They were approximately half way to their first objective when the explosive bolts which retained the great sling net to the ceiling were fired simultaneously, and the heavy metal mesh fell down to cover them.
Such was the gross weight of the net that had the men not been in para-ion state the device would have crushed them instantly. The plasticity provided by the energy shells in which each identity was encapsulated ensured that most of them survived even though they were pinned helplessly to the ground by the hideous weight. Their agonies were real, however, due to the distortion of their energy shells, and the pain would not relent until the pressures were released.
Suddenly the gallery was flooded with sound as a voice spoke to them in a slow voice amplified as if to ape the last trumpet.
"Ion warriors, we give you a simple choice. Each of you is programed for destructive reversion if you do not report for paraforming back to your normal identity within the set time. We are quite prepared to leave you where you are until this destructive reversion takes place, you understand?"
A silence had fallen over the trapped men as they listened for whatever might follow.
"But there's a second way. Most of you are Hub colonials impressed into Terran service. These we are prepared to save, using our own paraformer. The price is that those we take agree to dedicate themselves to Liam's war rather than Terra's. Whoever wishes to co-operate will please try to make some kind of sign."
Among the severly distorted men on the floor there was an immediate response, with a volley of limbs waving through the mesh. Only the officer commanding the squad showed any dissent. With a superhuman effort he managed to adjust his position and began to use a heavy-duty laser both to cut down some of the loudspeakers and to attack the fabric of the net which confined him.
Into the gallery from the side tunnels came half a dozen strangely clad men also in para-ion identity, with modulator packs of obviously improvised design. The officer turned his laser on them, but predictably without effect, and they walked towards him. Each bore a large brick of rough-cut nickel iron€”when these were dropped upon him all his movements ceased.
The strange ion-men explored the netted heap, extricated weapons through the mesh, then brought out a series of hoists with which they began to lift the net from one end and slowly to recover the trapped men. Dragging those whose energy shells were slow in returning to the original configuration, they cleared the men onto little automatic trolleys which then sped away down the tunnels towards transformation back to molecular identity, and a swift and gruelling appraisal by Liam Liam.
Only the officer, still under a pile of metal bricks, remained when the warning signals indicated that the elevator platform was again on its way down from the surface. Forgetting their previous occupation, the strange para-ion men hastily took positions around the elevator air-lock in order that they could cover the area with their weapons. Having accounted for all members of the Terran para-ion team, it was a reasonable assumption that this time the platform would be bringing only conventional commandos. Liam's ion-men began firing even before the airlock seals were broken, and continued up to the point where they realized that the two figures who emerged unscathed through the blistering radiation-fire were para-ion people of a very different class.
The first figure was that of a woman who moved with a speed and proficiency thought to be impossible in the para-ion form. She literally leaped straight into a group of ghost defenders, scattering them physically, opposing their unnatural clumsiness with such a practised and vicious expertise that they fell back in consternation. Her companion, while not propelled with the same deadly enthusiasm, took an equally forbidding stance; after two minutes the newcomers controlled the field. Baffled, Liam's ion men retreated into the corridors, while the unbelievable ghost-woman, her face glowing with triumphant contempt, strode down the middle of the gallery and called out in a loud, clear voice.
"Liam Liam?"
"I hear you, you understand?" Liam's voice came back over the loudspeakers, but this time it was shorn of its former omnipotent overtones.
"Show yourself. We have to speak."
There was a pause, during which time nothing appeared to happen, then against the bright walls at the entrance of one of the tunnels Liam Liam appeared, the random reflections highlighting the intelligent ugliness of his features.
"You should not have come here," said Absolute directly. "You played your hand too soon, and in the wrong place. The whole purpose of the Syman encounter was to discover if you'd obtained para-ion capability€”and if so, to destroy it. The fleet is waiting for only one piece of evidence that you've achieved what you have, then they'll stand-off and turn Syman into a sun. Nothing will escape."
"What would you have me do?"
"If Syman is surrendered totally and without resistance, perhaps the planet might be saved. But your ion-crew is a direct threat to any peaceful settlement. If Syman is not to be destroyed, there must be proof that your threat has been neutralized."
"What degree of proof would be acceptable?"
"Your heads would do. You could get all your men back into molecular identity and fetch them here. I will personally perform their execution.
"Or what?"
"If you have a ship, you can attempt to take it back into space. With what the fleet has waiting for you, there's scant chance of your making it alive, but at least your danger will be transferred away from the planet itself."
"Will that ensure the safety of Syman?"
"No. It will merely affect the probabilities. But it would be the only positive factor in the whole chain of decision."
"Then I have little choice, you understand?" A scurry of alarm signals indicated that a second platform had begun to leave the surface. "But it will take a little time for me to get the vessel back into the elevator."
"If time is all you need," said Absolute, "then I may be able to find it for you."
Liam saluted gravely, and ran back down the tunnel through which he had appeared. Absolute scanned the alarm signals and gained her bearings, selecting a route to the base of the elevator which was descending. Dam followed her, and she placed him precisely in front of the lock from which the commando squad was due to emerge.
"You know what to do, Lover?"
"Cover them," said Dam.
"No, you bloody fool! Kill them!"
"Kill . . .?"
"How the hell else can Liam Liam find the time to kick his ship off-planet? If these commandos get through, there'll be a running battle to the death. And when Command learns of the presence of a paraforming device down here they'll have no option but to turn Syman into a nova€”and you and I will be components of it. Don't think they'll bother to clear out their own people first. We're strictly expendable."
Dam selected his weapons gravely, and practiced covering the lock entry with a wide sweep. At his side stood Absolute, weapon rested but as alert as a hunting animal, waiting for the air-lock to cycle. As the great doors opened a blistering hail of weapon fire swept out as the commandos, not knowing what kind of reception awaited them, attempted to secure their safe emergence. They were unlucky. Unscathed by the Terran weapons, Dam and Absolute opened fire. Soon the space was filled with a tangle of dead and twisted bodies. Dam and Absolute had to clear the dead limbs from the doors before they could close the
lock and gain the elevator in an attempt to secure their own salvation in space via the pinnace they had left on the surface.
Liam Liam's ship was already under power as the elevator drove swiftly upwards. Even as the platform reached the surface, the little paraformer ship was clawing towards the heavens in a desperate attempt to pierce the net of vengeful spacecraft ranged above it.
The Terran fleet, however, was having its own problems. First had come the order to stand-off away from Syman in case it became necessary to drive the metal world into a nova. No sooner had the fleet started to manoeuvre than the space approaches had seemingly become filled with great hundred-ton masses of flying metal; the sling-ships of Syman had been joined by those from Toroliver in a concerted attempt to intercept and return to the vicinity of Syman's orbit a considerable proportion of the material distributed in recent months by the sling shuttle.
While the shielded cruisers were in very little direct danger from the inert slabs of flying metal, the presence of the objects monopolized the detectors and automatic gunnery circuits, and the fragmentation of the slabs when blown apart by missiles increased rather than decreased the navigational hazards and the incidence of alarms. Faced with the inability to maintain safe parking orbits in the vicinity of millions of tons of large nickel-iron shrapnel moving at every conceivable velocity and angle the sector commander ordered a retreat to a designated rendezvous in space.
As the warforce withdrew, the sector commander took the decision to eliminate Syman from space entirely. Two hellships dived to seed their cargoes: contra-charmed nuclei to catalyse a nuclear reaction that ran directly opposite to the normal evolution of heavy materials from elementary hydrogen. One hellship mishandled the time delay on the charge; both vessels were swallowed by the great, expanding ball of a miniature sun, newly created, which sprang into being where the metal world of Syman had previously had existence.
Taking advantage of the fleet's divided attention, the little paraformer ship bearing Liam Liam, his original crew and a full squad of Terran-trained para-ion men, streaked at suicidal speed through the litter of space debris, frenetically attempting to stay ahead of the leaping tongues of the infant sun. With a wary eye on the integrity of the radiation shields, which alone saved the ship from biological sterilization, Liam maintained a deadly calm. Those around him were still dumbfounded by the shock of Syman's wanton destruction, but Liam had already accepted the planet's loss as one of the graver sacrifices of the war. What the Syman incident had given him was sufficient experienced para-ion men to train an entire army if required; in this critical field he could soon achieve parity with Terra. Added to his previous grimness now was hope.
CHAPTER XXII
Absolute's objective, once they had gained the pinnace, had been to make for the mother-ship with all possible speed. As they had raced towards their objective she had been summoned to the radio to answer the sector commander's questions, and it was no great surprise to Dam when the stand-off order had come through shortly after they had gained the carrier.
Having lost all his para-ion companions, Dam now found himself in a class apart, with no flight or battle duties to perform. He took the opportunity to go to the navigation deck, from which point of vantage he could satisfy his curiosity about the outcome of the Syman campaign. The navigational crew paid him no attention, being fully occupied with the complex chore of manoeuvering safely to stand-off orbit in close proximity to the rest of the fleet. The operation was rendered even more hazardous by the inexplicable arrival of a great shower of metallic space-debris, surging through the space approaches, and which completely occupied the automatic alarm and gunnery systems. While the debris itself constituted only a minor hazard, the overshoot of the meteor-destruction gunnery among so many ships in close concentration added a dimension of risk which was not acceptable in a purely routine situation, and was logically followed soon after by an order to re-group at a rendezvous point well out in space.
Absolute had also come down to the navigation deck to observe the progress of the encounter, and Dam had taken to watching her nearly as closely as he was watching the screens portraying the activity out in space. Something about her exchange with the man called Liam Liam had caught his interest. He had the curious feeling that the two of them had met before, and that her subsequent action of allowing Liam to escape was something more than a ploy to secure her own salvation.
The screens were now cluttered with the multiple activities in progress, and it was not easy to follow the details properly, but his own battle-trained estimation was that in the confusion Liam Liam's little ship had managed to escape. If Absolute was following the same events as closely as he, she could scarcely have failed to come to the same conclusion but no hint of this showed in her face. Instead she appeared to be waiting with a trace of apprehension for what might follow.
The factor which brought both anger and relief to the margins of her eyes was the brilliant sunflare when Syman went nova. As the screens darkened protectively she rose to her feet as though the entire episode was ended, and walked straight past Dam without seeming to notice him. Although Dam's attention was engaged by the violence of the spectacle outside, the impression he caught of the will to destruct came not from the angry screens but from a sudden interpretation of the passion which inhabited Absolute. He remembered suddenly the group of dead Terran commandos which they had shot down at the foot of the elevator, and knew exactly why she had shown relief at Syman's destruction. Absolute had enabled Liam Liam and a whole para-ion squad to escape, and the death of Syman had obliterated both all the evidence of that and of the subsequent slaughter of the molecular form soldiers. Somehow it had not occurred to Dam before that his fate too had vested on the destruction of Syman. He could not however pinpoint why the event had made her angry.
Without a para-ion crew, the remaining paraforming ship in the craft-lock was useless, and the mother-ship would be nothing but a liability to the rest of the fleet in whatever action they were now to be assigned. After briefly touching the rendezvous point the mother-ship was ordered back to Terra, and this time the large escort craft was not provided. The result of this was that Absolute had no companion ship on which to travel, as she had on the outwards journey, and was quartered on the carrier itself.
Seeking to dig more deeply into the enigma of Absolute's role on Syman, Dam began studying her whenever possible, and attempting at all times to have a knowledge of her whereabouts. His purpose in this was not too clear except that there were a lot of unresolved questions to which she apparently held the key; and he was hoping that by word, deed or implication, a little piece more of the puzzle would fall into place.
Despite his vigilance, the answers actually came in an unexpected and potentially dangerous way, and arose in one of the situations where he had misjudged her intended movements. Taking advantage of his leisure, he had begun to explore the remaining paraformer ship in the craft-lock, striving to familiarize himself with the mechanisms so thoroughly that he could rebuild one for the Hub if the opportunity ever presented itself. While he had the theory of paraforming clear in his mind, he was ignorant of many of the vital engineering details. To this end he had inched himself full length into a narrow space on top of the squared helices of the paraforming unit to examine the detail of some of the connections. As he was drawing himself over the uneven surface, however, Absolute entered unexpectedly through the lock of the ship, and, unaware of his presence, made her way to the cupboard from which he had stolen the radio pulse activator.
Frozen in position, his breath consciously stilled, hoping his heartbeats were not as apparent to her as they were to himself, Dam waited, uncomfortable and anxious. He was painfully situated, and in attempting to ease himself he drew back slightly€”and the accident happened. The pulse unit which was in his coverall pocket was dislodged by a turn of the coil on which he lay and fell through the helix, to clatter loudly on to the deck below.
Whether she actually saw the object fal
l was a matter of conjecture, but she picked it up with quick alarm, glanced speculatively towards the cupboard from which it had been taken, and wheeled round, electron pistol in hand.
"Come out, whoever you are! Else I burn you where you lay." From her positioning it was obvious that she had deduced exactly where Dam was hidden.
"Don't shoot, Absolute! I'm coming down."
"Lover!" The relief in her voice was as surprising as it was emphatic, and the electron pistol was lowered. "Get the hell out of there!"
Dam wormed his way out from the top of the coil and dropped back to the floor. "Absolute, I . . ."
"You'd better hang on to this, Lover." With a swift movement of her hands she returned the pulse unit to him. "The way things are going we'll be needing all the advantage we can muster."
"We?" He suspected she was tormenting him, but there was no sign of mockery in her face. "You mean . . .?"
"I mean time's running out for the both of us. The sector commander can't prove what happened on Syman, but he's highly suspicious. Fortunately he isn't familiar with the details of para-forming, he doesn't know about the pulse units. I'm under open arrest until the ship makes planetfall on Terra, and you're to be held as a witness. Knowing their method of interrogation, we've only one option open to us."
"What's that?"
"Escape. The first instant this ship makes contact with anything, anywhere, we adopt para-ion form and attempt to fight our way out. Better to go down fighting than be taken for questioning."
