by Glen Cook
Richard turned in his final test sheet and calmly announced that he had been deliberately answering incorrectly. The monitor asked why. Richard told him that someone had copied some of his answers. Could he retest in isolation?
Computer analysis indicated an unnatural relationship between Woracek's answers and those of Michael Dee. Richard was allowed his retest. He came in with the highest scores ever recorded.
Michael tried it the lazy way. The snake turned on him. He watched his dreams collapse like the topless towers.
He knew it was his own fault. Still, he had a perverse streak. Richard shared the blame. It was Woracek's fault, if you saw it from the right angle.
That was Michael Dee's watershed point. He had begun deceiving himself. His last bulwark of reality gone, he went adrift. He became a one-man universe whose ties to the larger existence were bonds of falsehood and hatred founded on untruth. He had chained himself in fetters so intangible and cunningly forged that even he could not define them.
He did bounce back from rejection. He found a new direction, in a field which valued men with his ability to restructure reality. He became a journalist.
The holonets, ratings foremost in the moguls' minds, had abandoned all pretense to objective reporting long ago. When Michael entered the trade drama was the bait that got the audiences to switch on. The bloodier the report the better.
Michael wanted to make it as an independent. He struggled hard for years. Then the Ulantonid War broke.
He showed a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He produced the best coverage repeatedly. His colleagues made tape after tape of disaster after disaster as the Ulantonid blitz smashed toward the Inner Worlds. Michael found the bright spots, the little victories and heroic stands. His coverage elbowed to the top.
While Boris, Gneaus, Cassius, and Richard fought for their lives in what looked a foredoomed effort to stall Ulant, Michael had fun making tapes. The Storms were impoverished by Ulant's occupation of Prefactlas. He grew rich. He set his own price for his material. In the wartime confusion he evaded taxation deftly and invested brilliantly. He bought huge chunks of instel stocks when commercial faster-than-light communication seemed nothing but wishful thinking. He got into interstellar data warehousing, a sideline that would lead to the creation of Festung Todesangst.
Everything he touched turned to gold.
He never forgave Richard. Though his fortunes soared, he was always the outsider at the party. Without that Academy diploma he could not rise above the second social rank. Service officers were the aristocrats of the age.
The war ended. Its chaos continued. Grand Admiral McGraw went rogue. Sangaree raiders continued to harry the spaceways. There were people to blame. Michael got into piracy.
He was careful. Hardly anyone ever suspected. He creamed information from his instel and data corporations to parlay a pair of broken-down destroyers into another fortune.
His extralegal adventures led him into another life-trap.
Twenty-Five: 3031 AD
Helga's World orbited far from its primary. Raging methane winds screamed across its surface. They were as cold as its mistress's heart, as unremitting in their savagery. Storm searched for the telltale heat concentration. Festung Todesangst was dug in deep, tapping the core's remaining heat.
He sent the stolen recognition codes, then injected his singleship into a low polar orbit. He went around three times before detecting the thermal anomaly. He took a fix and hit methane in a penetration ran.
Spy-eyes above and below ignored him. No missiles rose to greet him.
He had the right codes.
He smiled tightly, already worrying about the harder task of getting out.
He regretted spending an advantage that could be used but once. He hoarded those with a miser's touch. This one could be saved no longer, and could not be used again. Helga would eliminate the gaps in her protection following his visit.
He touched down. Already in EVA gear, he plunged into a violent methane wind. There was one instant of incredible cold while his suit heaters lagged in their effort to warm him.
"Poor navigation," he muttered. The doorway he wanted lay a kilometer away. The wind-chill might kill him before he got there.
It was too late to cry. Moving ship would tempt fate too much. Hobson's choice.
He started walking.
This lock had been an access portal during construction, a workmen's convenience that had not been sealed. One of Helga's weird guardians would be stationed inside, but she should be a half-century unwary. He thought he could surprise her.
He leaned into the gale, ignoring the bitter cold. Each few hundred steps he examined the glove covering his suit's left hand. He was not sure it would withstand the chill.
His odyssey went on and on. The wind and oxygen snow were gleefully malicious conspirators trying to contrive a disaster. Then there was a slackening of the gale's force. He glanced up. He had entered the lee of the lock housing.
The outer lock door stood slightly ajar. He forced himself through the gap and initiated the lock cycle.
Would the carelessness that had left the door open have allowed icing in the mechanism? The door shuddered, groaned, protesting. It whined shrilly. It broke loose and sealed. Frost formed on his suit and faceplate as breathable air flooded the chamber.
He batted the haze from his faceplate and found himself facing one of the more grotesque products of genetic engineering.
Helga's guardian was an amazon of skeletal thinness, with translucent skin, completely hairless and breathless. She was human and female only by virtue of her navel and the virgin slit between her sticklike thighs. And in her confusion at this unexpected apparition stepping from the lock.
Faceplate frosting made Storm briefly vulnerable but she wasted those seconds. She finally responded by switching on subsonics that caused an increasing dread as he approached her.
There was no humanity in her death's-head face. The little muscles under that deathlike skin never twitched in expression. Storm fought the mesmeric assault of the sonics, forced his fear to work for him. "Dead," he told himself.
He felt an instant of compassion, and knew it a waste. This thing was less alive than his most often resurrected soldier.
Storm approached the guardian, left hand reaching.
She looked frail and powerless. The impression was false. No man living could best her without special equipment. Pain, injury, and the normal limits of human strength meant nothing to her. She had been bred to one purpose, to attack till victorious or destroyed.
Storm's glove touched her arm lightly, discharged. The shock was supposed to scramble her neural signals and make her amenable.
It worked, but not as well as he hoped. She became less truculent, but far from docile. He took control, stripped her of her sonics, force-marched her down stairs and inclines. Every ten minutes he gave her another shock, expending more of the glove's power.
He worried. He was squandering his best weapon. If the charge went too soon he would have to kill her. He needed live bait to pass the next obstacle.
His path, as did all corridors from the surface, debouched in a dark, stadium-vast chamber, the ceiling of which was natural cavern. The floor had been machined smooth and covered with a half-meter of sand.
This, Storm thought as he crouched at the tunnel's end, is the real gateway to Festung Todesangst. This is the real guardhouse. Here the most powerful weapons were all but useless. The watchman was of a size in keeping with that of his kiosk.
Helga Dee had a bizarre sense of humor, a cockeyed way of looking at the universe. Her gateman was a reptilian thing, tyrannosaur-sized, from a world so massive that here it was as agile as a kitten. Only Helga herself, who had raised it from an egg and lovingly called it her "puppy," could control it. Through its love for her, she claimed. Storm believed she used implanted controls.
The thing subsisted on the flesh of brain donors and Helga's enemies.
A
s a defense it was primitive, crude, and devastatingly effective. And it was a glass-clear illustration of a facet of Helga Dee. Using it to back her sophisticated surface defenses was her idea of a joke.
The thing's bellow smashed at Storm. His ears ached. He saw nothing but a suggestion of shifting immensity inside the poorly illuminated cavern.
He was not here to ooh and ah at the animals in the zoo. The thing was an obstacle, not a spectacle. It required moving or removing. He took a kilo-weight packet from his tool belt, limpeted it to the amazon's back. He tossed a flare into the monster's chamber to get its attention. He hurled the guardian after it.
A vast, scaly head speared out of the gloom. The skeleton woman vanished into a fangy mouth. A huge yellow eye considered Storm.
The head rose. From the darkness came the sound of a vast bulk moving and of bones cracking.
Storm shuddered. The woman had gone to her death without a sound.
For an instant he wondered why he had not killed Helga when he had had the chance.
He waited. The munching faded. She would choose a monster that chewed its food.
The beast rumbled. Storm waited. Soon it was snoring like a healthy volcano. He waited some more, fretting at the delay.
It seemed he had been there half his life, and still he had not started. He still had to penetrate the fortress proper.
The drug was supposed to be fast, but it was old. And the poison with it was slow. He had to wait to be sure.
He wanted the monster asleep while he was below, and dead only after he made his escape. Helga might monitor its vital signs.
He made it three quarters of the way across the arena before the monster abandoned pretense. Its immensity bore down on him like some anachronistic blood-and-bone dreadnought.
It was not moving as lithely as earlier. The drug had had some effect. Storm did not panic, though fear raked him with claws of steel. He faced the charge.
He had rehearsed this confrontation for years. Rote reaction carried him through.
While backing toward his goal he set his glove to short in a single burst of power. The great head, the scimitar teeth, came down, slowly for the beast but incredibly fast in Storm's subjective perception.
He hurled himself aside, gloved hand reaching back like an eagle's talons. For an instant his fingers touched the moist soft flesh inside a gargantuan nostril. The glove blew. Charred flesh putrified the air. The beast flung back, screaming, falling over its tangled legs, tearing at its snout with its foreclaws.
Storm went sprawling. Up on adrenaline to a perilous level, he rose with a bounce astounding in a man of his age. He crouched, ready to dodge the next attack, hoping he could cat and mouse long enough to reach an exit.
The thing was preoccupied. Like a hound stung by a bee it had been snuffling; it kept pawing its nose. It tore its own flesh. When it ground its scaly snout into the sand, Storm laughed hysterically. He fled for the entrance.
The unbreachable gate had been broken. He had penetrated Festung Todesangst.
It took time to get hold of himself, to get his bearings. He wished he could quit. He wanted nothing so much as the peace and security of his study.
Giving in would not matter. He could not win anyway. Not in the long run. Why fight? Why not steal a little peace before the inevitable closed in?
That part of him which could not yield asserted itself. He resumed moving, downward, deep into Festung Todesangst.
The deeps of Helga's World were sterile and lifeless. He walked long corridors with featureless metal floors and walls, under blue-white lights. The only odor was a mild taint of ozone, the only sound a barely discernible hum. It was like walking the halls of an abandoned but perfectly maintained hospital.
The life of Festung Todesangst lay hidden behind those featureless walls. Thousands of human brains. Cubic kilometers of microchips and magnetic bubbles shuffling mega-googols of information bits. Helga's World had become the data warehouse of the human universe.
What unsuspected secrets lay hidden there? How much power for someone able to possess or dispossess Helga Dee?
Immense power. But no force, not even that of Confederation, could plunder Helga's empire. Her father had promised the universe that she would bring on the Gotterdammerung rather than surrender her position. Any conqueror would have to surreptitiously deactivate a dozen thermonuclear destruct charges and disconnect all the poison stores set to kill the brains in their support tanks. He would have to deactivate Helga herself, from whom all control flowed.
It was a setup characteristic of the Dees. What was theirs was theirs forever. Only what was yours was negotiable. No one, especially an avaricious government, was going to rob the family.
Storm meant to steal from a Dee. From the coldest, most hateful, and jealous one of them all. And he would accomplish it with the help of something stolen from himself. The great prize of the queen of the dead was going to become her most severe liability.
He was going to hurt her, and he was going to enjoy doing it.
Kilometers beneath the surface, beneath even the vast main fortress, so deep that his suit had to cool instead of heat, he found the terminal he sought.
It was the master for one small, semi-independent system. It existed for one limited, cruel purpose. It was the focus from which Helga meant to engineer her revenge upon Gneaus Julius Storm. Within it lay everything known about Storm and the Iron Legion. He suspected that it contained things he did not know himself. To it came every stray wisp of information, every gossamer strand of rumor, vaguely relating to himself.
To it, also, Michael Dee came when he had some scheme afoot.
Once upon a time Helga had been a wild-eyed wanton, rushing from thrill to ever more bizarre thrill with the frenzy of a woman condemned. Being locked into the endless boredom of Festung Todesangst was the cruelest fate she could imagine. She extracted compensatory bites from his soul every minute this bottom-most system ran.
The corebrain here, the overbrain that controlled the others, was that of his daughter Valerie. She had not been ego-scrubbed before being cyborged in. Every second that passed, in a vastly telescoped subjective time, was one in which she was aware of her identity and plight.
For this cruelty he would kill Helga Dee. When the time came. When the moment was ripe.
All things in their season.
He stared at the terminal for a long time, trying to dis-remember that the soul of the machine was a daughter he had loved too much.
Age, Storm would declare when the subject arose, did not confer wisdom, only experience from which the wise could draw inferences. And even the wisest man had blind spots, and could behave like a fool, and remain so adamant in his folly that it would strangle him with a garrote of his own devising.
Storm's blind spots were Richard Hawksblood and Michael Dee. He was overly ready to attribute evil to Richard, and too trusting and forgiving with his brother.
A long time ago, much as Pollyanna had recently, Valerie had vanished from the Fortress of Iron. Storm still was not sure, but suspected the machinations of Michael Dee. Nor did he know Valerie's motives for leaving, though beforehand she had spoken often of making peace with Richard.
His memories of Valerie's case colored his behavior in Pollyanna's. He went haring off to the rescue—perhaps unwisely.
Valerie fell in love with Hawksblood.
Word of their affair filtered back. Storm flew into a rage. He accused Richard of every crime a father ever laid on a daughter's lover. Michael arranged a meeting. Fool that he was, Storm disowned her when she refused to come home.
He was sorry the instant he spoke, but was too stubborn to recall words once flown. And he became sorrier still when Helga, after gulling her own father, snatched Valerie and hustled her off to Festung Todesangst.
Poor Valerie. She went into mechanical/cerebral bondage believing her father had abandoned her, that he had used her cruelly.
Storm had been working on Helga ever since. His
vengeance thus far he deemed only token repayment for the destruction of a daughter's love.
They were hard, cruel, anachronistic men and women, the Storms and Dees, and Hawksbloods, and those who served them.
Enough, he told himself. He had crucified himself on this cross too often already. Hand trembling, he jacked his comm plug into a direct verbal input.
"Valerie?"
Came a sense of stirring into wakefulness. An electronic rustling. Then a return his equipment interpreted as "Who's there?" It contained overtones of surprise.
There was just one answer he dared give, just one that would not spark an explosion of bitterness. "Richard Hawksblood."
"Richard? What are you doing here?"
He felt her uncertainty, her hope, her fear. It hit him hard. He had an instant of nausea. Some foul worm was trying to gnaw its way out of his gut.
If he and Richard agreed on anything, it was that Helga should be punished for this.
Richard had loved Valerie. That love was one more unbridgeable gap between them.
"I came to see you. To free you. And to find out what Helga is doing to your father and me."
There was a long, long silence. He began to fear that he had lost her. Finally, "Who calls? I've slept here so long. So peacefully."
He could taste the agony of her lie. There was no peace for Valerie Storm. Helga made sure of that.
Storm replied, "Richard Hawksblood." He wished he knew their love talk, the pet names they had called one another in the night, or the all-important trivia that pass between a man and woman in love. "Valerie, what was that new complex I saw on my way down?" Between Helga's puppy and Valerie's pit he had encountered little but endless sterility and silence, except on the last few levels, where he had to slip through a construction zone as softly as a prowling kitten.
He wondered if Helga's zombie workers would have noticed if he had strutted through their midst. Personality-scrubbed, they were little more than robots. But they might be robots programmed to report anomalies.
