The Star Hunters: A Star Kings Novel [The Two Thousand Centuries]

by Edmond Hamilton

  He said evenly, “Try it, Fayaman. I want you to. I'm pretty sure you tipped off Cassiopeia to capture me, and this will give me all the excuse I need."

  There was a petrified silence, and then Garr Atten strode furiously out with his own weapon in his hand.

  "Either one of you starts a fight, I'll kill the survivor,” he bellowed. He looked bleakly at Mason and said, “Have you any proof that Fayaman did that?"

  "No one else here hated me enough to do it,” Mason snapped.

  "That's not proof,” said the giant Hydran. “So you've come back, Brond. I won't say I'm glad, you always were a hell-raiser, but the Marches are free to any fugitive as they always have been. But you bring any trouble here now when we're going to pull off the biggest thing in the galaxy, and it'll be the end of you!"

  CHAPTER IV

  MASON STOOD SULLENLY, as though debating in his mind whether to challenge Garr Atten or not. Actually, he was relieved that the Hydran captain had prevented a fight. The last thing he wanted was to get side-tracked into a row with Brond Holl's personal enemies, but he had had to act as the real Brond Holl would have done.

  He took his hand off his weapon, and said sulkily, “I'm not bringing any trouble, but I've still got my ideas about who made me rot a year in Sirius Prison."

  Garr Atten addressed him with grim emphasis. “Brond, you get it into your head right now that things have changed. You go off on another looting expedition, and I'll send a warning to all the star kingdoms myself."

  "What are we to do, then—take to farming?” growled Mason.

  "There's plenty of trade with the humanoids out here in the Marches—use your ships for that, not for plundering,” said Garr.

  Old Hoxie raised his nasal voice. “Seems like I've lived past my time, when the captains of the Marches ain't allowed to take a little loot where they find it."

  A murmur of agreement went up from many in the big room. And a flaming spark came into Garr Atten's tawny eyes.

  "You fools! We've got a chance to make ourselves a real star kingdom, not a runaway's hideout. The biggest chance anyone ever had. And you'd throw it away for a little loot. I say, No."

  "You still haven't told us how you're going to accomplish all this,” grumbled one man.

  "You'll know when there's no danger of any of you spilling it,” Garr answered roughly. “Till then, you wait."

  They were not happy, Mason saw, these hard-bitten outlaw captains. But also none of them felt like challenging the redoubtable Hydran leader right now. He was forcing them to take his plans on trust.

  What was Garr Atten planning? How could he expect to establish a kingdom that the galactic governments would recognize? Mason's brain began to turn over fast. It might—it just might be, that he had here a clue to the object of his mission.

  The captains were turning away, the gathering breaking up. Mason strode across the room, ignoring the hostile stare of Fayaman, and went up to Garr Atten.

  "I've got some news I think you ought to know,” he said.

  The Hydran scowled at him. “What?"

  "I can blab it all over Quroon at the top of my voice if that's what you want,” Mason said. “Is it?"

  Garr Atten turned dull red in the face. “Brond, you've been asking for me to break your neck ever since you got here. Keep on, and I'll oblige. All right, come on and tell me your precious news in private."

  He headed for the door. Mason followed him, noting that Fayaman was still watching, with an expression that seemed strangely familiar to Mason. He tried to remember where he had seen it before, and out of his personal memory banks there popped the image of a huge gray cat fixing that exact hungry and intense stare upon a young rabbit in the grass. He had a moment of hot irritation. Sooner or later this cat was going to spring and he would be forced to do something about it, no matter what vastly more important things he was concerned with. He wished Fayaman at the figurative bottom of the Coalsack.

  He did not see Fairlie and the girl Lua until he was outside, and then he saw them going away down the street arm in arm, the girl looking at Fairlie as though hanging on his every word, her hips moving with provocative grace under bright silk, her long hair swinging down her back. Mason envied Fairlie briefly, and then forgot them both for the moment.

  Garr Atten led the way through the swarming street. It was a way Brond Holl remembered well, past the glaring lights with the stream of human-inhuman-unhuman faces moving under them like the many colored masks of a strange chorus in a play, past darker places where the windows of the houses were shuttered and the lights discreetly dim, past a belt of the tall and grotesque polyp trees that in their strange semi-animal way writhed away from each passerby, their great sweet-stinking pennants of bloom nodding and shaking.

  * * * *

  The place they went to was a sprawling place of black stone set by itself at the edge of town in a polyp grove. The jungle seemed to claw at it with thick fingers. Millions of tiny night voices of minute creatures clamored at it from every creeper and grass blade. Mist rose from the ground and tried to hide it in a silver veil. But it was there, looking as stubborn and immovable as the man who had built it.

  The servants who let them in were familiar to Brond Holl, too, but Mason could not repress a personal quiver of distaste. These native humanoids of Quroon were more -oid than human, little scampering creatures with prominent teeth and unpleasantly naked skin. Garr Atten sent them off and led Mason into a big bare room, quite austerely furnished in comparison with the luxury the other captains indulged in.

  "All right, Brond,” he said. “We're alone here. What is it?"

  The screek and shrill of the little insect voices drifted in from the night outside, riding the currents of warm air through the windows. Mason sweated. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead and said, “I thought you might be interested to know that there's a full squadron of somebody's cruisers hanging in Dumbbell Nebula. I almost rammed them in the cloud, coming through."

  He startled Garr Atten and before the man's usual tight control took over, he said fiercely, “By God, if Orion—"

  He stopped there suddenly.

  "Why,” asked Mason innocently, “would Orionid cruisers be sitting in the nebula out there with their eyes full of dust? What are they waiting for—a signal to attack?"

  "Maybe,” said Garr Atten curtly, thinking many thoughts very rapidly as he walked up and down. “Maybe."

  The hot damp air was heavy in Mason's lungs. His nerves pricked him with sudden needles. The monotonous voices of the insect night-singers outside rasped his ears. Too much, too little—one word, a false look, a mere breath could lose him both his answer and his life.

  He made his voice harsh, challenging—Brond Holl's voice.

  "Why did you say Orion? You didn't even have to stop to think. What do you know, Garr, that the rest of us don't know?"

  Garr Atten looked at him heavily, preoccupied. “Nothing I can tell you now. You'll have to wait—"

  Mason walked up to him. “Wait,” he said. “That's fine. Me and the rest of them, we wait with a squadron of cruisers hanging over our heads until you get ready to tell us what they're there for. I don't think the others would buy it, Garr. I think they'd want to know how far their necks are stuck out, and what for."

  Something quick and quiet happened to Garr Atten's face. It made Mason's back feel cold in all that sticky heat.

  "Don't try to blackmail me, Brond,” he said. “I don't like it. I want you to keep this information from the others, yes. But you're not going to use it to force me to tell you anything."

  How far do I push it? Mason thought. How far would Brond Holl go if I were Brond Holl and thinking only of my own neck and not of what I'm really thinking about?

  Damn the heat add the crickets, or whatever the nasty-little brutes are on this stinking world—

  "I'm not going to trust my safety to you without a word of explanation, either,” he said to Garr Atten. “Those cruisers—"

 
He stopped in mid-flight, listening.

  Listening to something—

  Listening to nothing.

  The night-singer insects had all stopped singing. Beyond the open window the jungle-garden was silent, as though it held its breath.

  "Those cruisers,” Mason continued smoothly, “are a long way off.” He moved to a writing-table in the corner. “I can make you a rough chart of their position—"

  He saw a puzzlement, and then a sudden understanding, in Garr Atten's eyes. “Yes, I wish you'd do that,” Garr Atten said, and leaned over his shoulder and watched with absorbed interest as Mason wrote, Someone's in the garden—

  Garr Atten reached out and touched the lamp. The room turned black. In the same instant Mason heard Garr Atten whisper, “Move!"

  But he was already moving. He flung himself halfway across the room and before he hit the floor a tiny star, intense and blinding as a nova, flared briefly by the writing table and vanished, taking with it most of the table and a part of the neighboring stone wall—all without so much as a whisper of sound.

  Energy-missile, lethal and silent.

  Mason scuttled the rest of the way across the room, drawing his own weapon. There was the light spung! of an ejector mechanism and then a second star burst and died beyond the window. Garr Atten, firing back. He was unhurt, then. Good. The assassin had missed—

  Good. Yes, indeed. Good for Hugh Mason, too, because they two had stood together at the table and the energy pill might have been aimed at either one of them. So who had fired it?

  Fayaman, wanting to get Brond Holl?

  One of the captains, wanting to get Garr Atten out of the way, with his insistence on a new regime of law and order?

  Or someone by the name of V'rann, wanting to get a masquerading spy of Earth by the name of Hugh Mason?

  Mason scrambled out into the hall, with Garr Atten so close on his heels they almost tripped each other. Behind them in the room there was sudden light, and as they ran along the hall the door they had just passed through vanished in a noiseless flare.'

  "The other side of the house,” said Mason. “Get out and circle around—"

  Garr Atten gave him an odd look, but he said nothing. They ran through a longish hall where half a dozen of the humanoid servants had made themselves into a tight ball in the corner, their alarmed little faces peering. They went out onto a terrace of black stone slippery with dew, and then circled back around the corner of the house. The little singers of the night were still crouched silent among their leaves and grass-blades, waiting for the giants to stop shaking their world. The air was rank with that smell of mingled life and death common to jungle no matter where you find it. And there was death lurking somewhere in the shadows under the tall polyp trees, where the greenish moonlight lay mixed with mist like sweet poison in a cup.

  Garr Atten gestured silently and they separated, each one now his own citadel of defense, creeping in shadow while the cold dew soaked into his garments, listening, halting, starting at the writhing quiver of a polyp tree be passed, darting swift as deer across the moonlit places with every nerve taut, and screaming in the expectation of sudden light and the impact of destruction.

  They stalked someone, and the someone stalked them.

  The wall of the house, with the window by which the assassin had stood, showed black and bare in the moonlight. Mason stood in the shadow between two towering polyp trees, not close to either one of them, and listened. As he listened, he wiped his hands on his coverall to get the greasy sweat off them, shifting his weapon from hand to hand. His hands were cold, and so was the rest of him despite the humid warmth.

  There was a deep silence, and it was as though this whole world had been dead for a million years.

  Then of a sudden Mason heard the stir and murmur of a polyp tree a score of yards from him, making a vague sound on the air as it writhed and twisted. Instantly, knowing that the sound meant that someone had slipped close to the grotesque tree, Mason dived away from where he was and hit the wet grass a dozen feet away.

  There was a burst of silent light where he had been.

  He rolled over and triggered a silent shot with his own missile-pistol, at the place where the polyp tree had stirred.

  His missile hit the tree, exploding in another soundless star. But there was a man close to the tree, a man whose weapon was raised for another shot at Mason, and the star touched his side.

  Darkness again, and a sound like a grunt, and then the noisy crash of the severed polyp-tree falling.

  Mason scrambled to his feet and ran forward. With his free hand he snatched out his pocket-light and flashed it.

  Chan Fairlie's body lay there, face up, his eyes wide and sightless, one hand still clutching his gun. The other hand, and arm, and part of his body, had been touched by the star and weren't there.

  Mason's thoughts raced as he looked down at the stony blue face of the dead Lyran. Had Fairlie been the agent from Orion? Had he been—V'rann?

  "If he was,” Mason thought, “he'd suspect that Brond Holl's timely escape might be a trick to get a disguised Terran agent here. But he brought that woman here with him, and that doesn't fit—"

  His mind leaped to another thought. That Lyran girl who had come to the Marches with Fairlie—she was still alive. He could find out from her—

  He spun suddenly around as he heard a step. His light caught the towering figure of Garr Atten, coming between the writhing trees.

  "I thought he'd got you,” said Garr. “Who the devil—” Then he was silent a moment as Mason swung the light onto the dead face. Finally he said, “Chan Fairlie. But he's been here only a few weeks, why should he try to—"

  He broke off and asked Mason keenly, “You never knew him before you came here, Brond?"

  "No,” answered Mason truthfully.

  Garr Atten nodded. “He showed no sign of recognizing you tonight. So he couldn't have had any grudge against you. It was me he was trying to kill."

  "If he's only been here a little while, why should he?"

  Garr said somberly, “He could have been put up to it by one of the captains. By someone who wants what I've got."

  "What have you got, Garr?” Mason asked boldly.

  The Hydran looked at him somberly. “You kept me from getting killed in there, Brond. I owe you something. I'll tell you."

  His big frame seemed to loom gigantic in the green misty moonlight, and his voice throbbed harshly.

  "I've got a man. Brond. A man who came here while you were in prison—and who holds the secret of a power such as the galaxy has never seen."

  Mason kept his face unmoved, but his brain shouted, Ryll Emrys!

  "And with that power,” Garr Atten said, “I can make the Marches a free kingdom. I tell you, I can smash all the star-kings like eggshells if they try to stop me!"

  A cold feeling came back over Mason, as he looked at the craggy face dark with passion and purpose. He remembered Oliphant's dying warning of a weapon of cosmic power, and it was as though for a moment he saw the galaxy and all its empires and star-kingdoms on the brink of an abyss.

  "But there's little time,” Garr Atten said tightly. “Too little! With Orion's cruisers watching out there, and my own captains against me, I've got to strike now or never."

  CHAPTER V

  THE PLANET was rolling toward dawn. Already a dimming had crept over the blazing splendor of the cluster-sky, the hosts of stars paling as a sickly green light welled up from the horizon. Then there was an upflinging of spears of green radiance, and the emerald sun rose and glared a hot light over the polypoid jungles around Quroon City.

  Garr Atten's humanoid servants had taken the dead man away for burial, chattering among themselves like apes. Garr himself paced to and fro in the big bare room that had nearly seen his death, and Mason watched him.

  "They've been demanding and demanding to know what I plan,” muttered Garr. “All right, I'll tell them. You can pass the word that the captains are all to meet here this ev
ening."

  Mason was eager to go, for he had’ his own plans and he needed to be fast. He started toward the door.

  "Remember, you're to say nothing yet about those Orion cruisers,” rumbled the Hydran.

  Mason nodded. “I won't."

  Garr Atten stared at him. Suddenly he came and stood in front of Mason and looked searchingly into his face. He said, “In some ways, Brond, you're no damned good. But I don't remember you as a liar. Will you tell me something?"

  "What?"

  "This!” said Garr. “One true word. Are you for me or against me?"

  Mason felt a queer emotion. He was on a mission for the Terran Empire, for the peace of the galaxy, and he would break men like matches to accomplish it. This Hydran was an outlaw, and a dreamer, but he was also a man.

  "I'll give you a true word, Garr,” he said. “I think you're fit to be a star-king, and I'm not against you unless I have to be."

  Garr bristled. “A man who asks for truth of a fool. I was almost ready to trust you completely. Well, pass the word to the captains."

  Mason went through the dazzling green sunrise back to the main street. There was still noise and activity in the drinking-places, and he looked into them until he found Hoxie.

  The old Terran outlaw's eyes lit up when Mason delivered Garr's message.

  "I'll sure tell all the boys,” he said. “So Garr's finally going to tell us something, eh? About time."

  "Where does Chan Fairlie live?” Mason asked.

  Hoxie grinned. “So you're after that woman of his too? Well, that ought to make Fayaman love you even more—like I told you, he's always hanging around her."

  He told him, and Mason went away from there. He went to one of the streets of black stone houses and huts that rambled casually toward the jungle, and he found Lua, the Lyran girl, sitting in front of one of them carefully combing her long black hair.

  The grotesque green polypoid trees swayed and writhed away from him as he came, and she looked up at him swiftly and startledly. Her dark eyes were wide in her clear, faintly blue face, and the striped silk pants and jacket she wore were tight on her, and Mason thought that old Hoxie was right and that this was a woman there was bound to be trouble about. He meant to find out if she was anything more than that.