by Colin Kapp
CHAPTER XXVI
As he waited for the lifecraft to approach, Dam surveyed the assembled fleet, and realized suddenly the situation into which he had arrived. The line-up of ships was of a campaign fleet similar to that he had observed in action against Syman and to those reported to have been deployed against Rigon and Zino. Venus was obviously the assembly point for the task fleets which were sent on punitive expeditions to the 'dissident' Hub worlds, and to judge from the completeness of the array, this fleet, too, would soon be on its way.
The immediate consequence of this line of speculation was the realization that of all potential routes which might take him back to the Hub, this fleet itself represented the most direct method. While not being sure how his conveyance could be achieved, he found himself looking for ways in which he might use the great warfleet to aid him in the direction of his destination. If he allowed himself to be captured it could not help achieve his objective, because although he had para-ion capability built into his body, he was unlikely to be allowed to retain the pulse unit which activated it. He did not think he would have a reasonable chance of escape at the Hub end of the journey if he did not have access to his para-ion capabilities. The problem was therefore how to board one of the ships and retain his mobility at the end of the trip.
His first idea was that he might adopt a para-ion identity and travel as a sort of ghostly stowaway. He rejected the idea firstly because he could think of no suitable location on a ship where he might remain undetected for the entire journey, and secondly because he had no idea how long he could safely maintain a para-ion state. An alternative notion of trying to bluff his way through as a member of the regular Service force seemed even less promising until he realized that he was already wearing an authentic Terran uniform, and strictly speaking was a legitimate member of a Terran fighting force. As a lifecraft grappled for the hatch he swiftly put together the elements of his story and came to a swift decision as to how it ought to be played. Then with the para-forming pulse unit in his pocket and a prayer on his lips he went to the lock to greet the boarding party.
"Security Assassin Stormdragon," he announced in response to the yet unspoken question. "I regret the untimely arrival, but other duties delayed me I feared the fleet might get under way without me if I waited transport by normal channels." He contrived to make his voice as nonchalant as possible.
The officer's face still showed an open question. "You must be aware that tachyon dropouts within the solar planetary approaches are strictly forbidden?"
". . . Except in cases of extreme emergency."
Dam found himself quoting from the texts of the orbital transfer routines he had used on his first arrival on the Castalian Starspite. "My emergency was extreme. If you don't believe me, read the reserve energy banks."
The officer read the gauges, and his eyes widened appreciably. He must have been as aware as was Dam that a space-crash had been averted by only the narrowest of margins. "The Fleet Traffic Commander has ordered your arrest. You can explain your reasons to him."
"Willingly, but he will have to wait. Who's heading Security this trip?"
"Sub-Sector Neilson."
"Then I must speak with him first. Take me there immediately."
"I have my orders," said the officer, faintly hesitant.
"Dammit!" Dam let simulated wrath explode in his voice. "Do you think I took those risks to get here just so that I could face a tete-a-tete with a fleet traffic commander? Take me to Sub-Sector Neilson, and if anyone else thinks they've a claim on my time I'll accommodate them later."
"But . . ."
"Do you know the motto of the Assassins Service, Captain? 'The only thing forbidden is failure' . Think on it, and get me to Neilson as fast as you're able. If you delay me I'll raise a charge of obstruction against you."
The officer shrugged, and backed out through the hatch into the lifecraft. Dam followed, uncomfortably aware that he had passed only the first of many hurdles he would face on his journey back to the Hub.
Security Sub-Sector Neilson heard his story with an expression which gave no hint of his underlying feelings. Then he looked thoughtfully at the palms of his hands.
"I find all this most irregular," he said doubtfully.
"Assassination's irregular," said Dam. "But somebody has to stop Liam Liam before he brings the rest of the Hub together. The job's been given to me, since the fleets have proved incapable of the task."
"Surely I should have had official notice of your coming?"
"Then you underestimate the reach of Hub Intelligence. Had that notice gone out on transmission, Liam Liam would certainly have been forewarned."
"But papers, even . . ."
"What use is an espionage assassin who carries papers? No, Sub-Sector, the only way to ensure complete security for the operation was to tell nobody in advance, and for me to reveal my status only to those who need to know. That's why I came direct to you."
"But suppose you aren't who you say you are at all?" This was a rhetorical rather than an actual question, yet Dam sensed a diamond hardness behind Neilson's attitude.
"Hell! Would you ask an assassin to prove his ability to kill? And what sort of demonstration would satisfy you?"
"One sufficient to justify a hyper-security rating."
"You'd be a brave man to put it to that test."
Neilson reached into a drawer, took out an electron pistol, slipped the safety ring, and sighted it on Dam.
"I'm calling your bluff, Mister. In five seconds I fire. Convince me, or you're dead."
Dam's hand was already in his pocket and the control button of the pulse unit was hard against his index finger. Nevertheless he waited as long as he dared, until he saw Neilson's eyes harden with intent. Then Dam moved: he achieved para-ion state a full half-second before Neilson had intended to shoot, and the shock of Dam's transition caused Neilson to fire prematurely; the weapon-blast passed straight through Dam's body and shattered the panelling beyond, while Dam launched himself at the suddenly frightened sub-sector, smashed the pistol from his hands, threw him heavily to the floor, and overturned the heavy metal desk on top of him. Before Neilson had had time to work out what had taken place, Dam was back in normal molecular state, and the sub-sector was peering fixedly down the focusing coils of his own electron weapon.
"Convinced, Sub-Sector?" asked Dam. "You were armed, I was notyet I could have killed you fifty different ways had I chosen."
"I'm convinced!" Neilson struggled painfully out from beneath the desk, examined his bruises, and surveyed the ruins of his office. Then he took back the offered ion pistol and threw it with some disgust into a cupboard. "Para-ion . . ." His hands were still shaking with reactive shock. ". . . I've seen it used in the field with a shipful of equipment as backup, but how the hell . ."
"Hence the hyper-security tag." Dam offered the soft part of his forearm for Neilson to touch. "Feel the mesh beneath the skinthe para-ion suit is inbuilt, along with the power supply and the control module. It's the newest para-ion technique, and by far the most deadly."
"Point taken, Assassin Stormdragon. If I'd not seen it with my own eyes, I'd never have believed it possible. My apologies for doubting you."
"You'd not have been doing your job if you hadn't been healthily suspicious," said Dam, "You'll get a commendation in my reports. I too apologise, for having to offer you proof the hard way. But you now realize how imperative it is for the secret to be kept."
"I don't even like to think about it," said Neilson sorely. "And you reckon Liam Liam's to be found on Ampola?"
"It's the best information we have, though it may be only the lead-clue in a long chase. But one thing's certainI have to stop Liam Liam before he manages to incite the Hub dissidents to unite in all-out war."
Behind his answer, Dam's brain was racing. Neilson had mentioned the name of the planet Ampola, and the only thing he could glean from the context was that Ampola was the fleet's destination. Ampola was in the centr
e of the Hub territories, and the nearest habitable planet to his homeworld of Castalia. He grasped at the idea with feelings of elation and anger hopelessly intermixedhe could scarcely have expected the luck to be transported so close to the region he was trying to reach, yet the joy was crowded out by the dreadful implications of Terra's intentions towards one of the Hub's most beautiful and civilized worlds.
"Come!" Security Sub-Sector Neilson took him by the arm. "We'll find you quarters with the security detail for the flight, if that's acceptable. Once under-way, I'll arrange a session with the Sector Commander. We'll have to integrate our campaigns most carefully, so that we don't spoil your operation and you don't confuse ours. I'll tell you something, Stormdragon. With your abilities, I'm certainly glad you're on our side."
During the journey to the Hub, Dam's constant fear was that some communication over the radio link from Terra would report the incident of the paraformer carrier and the escape of a para-ion warrior with special abilities. Although he took good care to read all the intelligence reports which came into the security unit where he was quartered, no such reports came through, and he was forced to conclude that the corvette which had pursued the pinnace had missed the fact of his tachyon-space leap and interpreted the flare of their own missiles as proof of his destruction.
Sub-Sector Neilson's conviction of his legitimacy now appeared complete, and the ground for Dam's interview with Sector Commander Canwolf had been so carefully prepared that Canwolf himself readily accepted the importance and integrity of the supposed assassin's mission. The meeting mainly explored the ways in which Dam's activities could be aided by the presence of the fleet. Dam played his bluff warily, insisting on absolute autonomy, but asking for a special communications channel to be reserved in case a phase of the operation required the use of fleet backup. He was issued with a radiocommunication hot-line direct to the flagship. He had no intention of making use of the facility, but it appeared to be in keeping with the part he was playing, and had a potential use as a means of arranging a diversion should one be required.
When the planetary destination had been reached and the ship ring established in orbit, Dam was taken in a lifecraft over the planet's darkside, and dropped in a space-recovery landfall pod as he had requested. In the tubular-coffin confines of the pod he was overcome by an immense tide of relief at being finally away from the Terrans and heading towards his own kind; yet he was simultaneously sad and angry, because even from the immense height at which the pod had been slipped out of orbit he could distinctly see through the faceport the blaze of exploding space-bombs where the orbiting fleet had chosen to treat some of the 'dissidents' to a foretaste of the power of Terran colonial control.
CHAPTER XXVII
Space-recovery pods, because of their brief operational life-spans, were not normally equipped with radio communications. A short-lived chemical oxygen cartridge, a measure of heat insulation, an outer husk to be burnt off by atmospheric friction during re-entry, two space-chutes, an altimeter and a retro landing rocket were the sum total of the assets with which the man-bearing cylinder was equipped. These facilities were a bare survival minimum, and fatalities resulting from the use of such pods were many; but for Dam, who needed a quiet way to make planetfall in advance of the Terran occupation forces, the risk had seemed worth while, especially with the use of a lifecraft to put him in the precise trajectory to make a theoretically safe descent.
Unlike the usual survivor of a space disaster, however, Dam additionally had the hot-line communications pack hung from his neck in front of him, and was still able to communicate with the flagship whose lifecraft had cast him into space. Shortly after the free descent began, the operator at the ship end had been replaced by Sub-Sector Neilson, who had followed his departure with great interest. "How are you faring, Assassin Stormdragon? All is well, I trust?"
"As a way of life, descent by space-pod leaves much to be desired."
"I know what you mean," said Neilson. "I only once had the misfortune to make such a descent, and I'll never forget it. That's why I decided to make it easier for you."
"Easier?" Dam sensed an undercurrent in the security chief's voice. "How?"
Neilson's voice was calm, but there was a cold edge of anticipation. "You see, my dear Assassin, I had one of the space-chutes removed from your pod."
"You did what!"
"I just told you. Do you know what happens to a pod with only one effective chute? It enters the lower atmosphere too fastnot fast enough to burn it away completely, but sufficient to generate a fine white heat. Thus you too will carry the impressions for the rest of your life . . . only the time scale has been reduced from years to minutes."
"Are you mad?"
"No, my Hub friend. But I would have been mad if I'd believed you."
"I don't understand."
"I asked you if you expected to find Liam Liam on Ampola. You immediately assumed Ampola to be our destination, and have been speaking that way ever since. But it was a trick question. We were never scheduled for Ampola, and that's not Ampola towards which you are now falling. What kind of espionage agent is it who doesn't know where he's supposed to be going?"
"Hell! If you thought I was bluffing, you gave remarkably little hint of it."
"Then you'll remember giving me a demonstration of your prowess. It was a lesson I marked well. Frankly, with those abilities you'd have had no difficulty in taking over the whole ship had you felt menaced. That was a risk neither I nor the sector commander was prepared to take. Better to wait until you'd left the ship of your own accordand then arrange your destruction in a way which makes even your talents powerless. Strange as it may seem to you, we Terrans are not the fools you imagine us to be."
"I try never to underestimate the opposition. And I advise you not to do so either. Your campaign against the Hub is a war you can't possibly win."
Dam switched off the communicator pack as the pod entered the tenuous outer atmosphere of the planet towards which he was falling. The frictional heat produced by his passage through even such a rarefied gas was plainly raising the temperature of the husk to white heat. As Neilson had predicted, the pod would not burn out completely, but would continue to descend on one chute at so rapid a rate that when the disposable burn-off husk was completely gone, the pod itself would proceed to overheatand there was no possible route by which he might escape from the metal tube soon to be raised a thousand degrees Celsius above human tolerance.
He considered firing the retro rocket prematurely, but realized this would provide only a temporary palliative, and that his present height was sufficient to permit the regaining of a crucifying velocity long after the retro had burned and gone. Additionally, he would have lost the facility of being able to check his ground-approach speed assuming he reached that far without prior cremation. He watched with a fascinated fear as the great flames of the burnout of the husk began to rush past the faceplate and completely outshine the illumination from the spacebombs falling on the planet beneath. Then the husk was mainly gone, and he felt the interior heat beginning to build up. A little sector of the wall, more exposed than the rest, began to assume a cherry redness, accompanied by the overpowering stench of singed paint and cables as his life-support system itself began to be destroyed by the ever-rising temperature of the fragile little hull.
The glowing redness of the fragment of the wall turned Dam's mind instantly to two of Absolute's training exercises: firstly the sessions on the furnace environent; and secondly, the ability of the para-ion energy shell to withstand pressures which would have completely destroyed a molecular body. If survival was possible in his situation, it was so only in para-ion state. Already he could feel his uniform begin to singe, and the atmosphere was becoming impossible to breathe. He pressed the actuator button on the pulse unit in his pocket, and his body adopted the identity of the crude atmosphere in which he was immersed. He made the transition not a second too soon, because the chemical oxygen supply-candle t
ook fire, and the free liberation of the gas caused a hot steel strut section to explode with a shower of white-hot sparks that would have burned his legs away had he not been in para-ion form.
Inside his mini-hell Dam grew increasingly apprehensive about his impact velocity. The exterior of the pod itself was now beginning to burn off, and the walls had risen to a bright red heat. The external flames were streaming past the face-plate to an extent which made it impossible for him to see anything at all of the night-side of the world towards which he was rushing, and the altimeter had long since ceased to function. His agonized mental debate as to precisely when he should fire the retro-rocket, however, was terminated by the decision being taken from him. Housed in a casting taken to a temperature beyond the tolerance of the propellant inside, the retro rocket fired itself. The flaming backwash wrapped the tortured little structure in a sparkling silver fireball.
Such was the efficiency of the super-heated retro rocket in checking the pod's velocity, that the weakened metal walls actually bulged with the sudden force of the checked momentum, and Dam felt unseen pressures crushing his para-ion form down against the leading end of the pod. Then the rocket was spent, and again he was in free-fall, and to judge from the tearing whine of the atmosphere against the hull he was still travelling far too fast for even his para-ion energy shell to survive when he smashed into the ground.
Finally came the impact which he had been dreading; he was hopelessly compressed by the sudden crowding force which smashed him downwards at the same time as his ears were being smitten by a scream which he could associate only as being a demon chorus straight from Hell. So grossly was his energy shell distorted that his brain imposed a protective blanket of unconsciousness to ward off the unendurable level of pain, and Dam slipped into atide of blackness which engulfed him hungrily like the opening of some strange mouth.
