Lured by the scent of fresh meat, they left the axial shaft at one of the “farm” levels, ventured outboard. They expected to find corpses, but there were none. There were only the tissue-culture vats, the ranked, gleaming, upright cylinders, each with its gauge glasses, its systems to supply nutrients and to carry away waste products. Pumps were softly throbbing and sighing.
“The vats have been restocked,” Linda said flatly. “There’s protein enough here for the voyage — a voyage to anywhere … .”
I shouldn’t feel shocked, thought Falsen. I, of all people, shouldn’t feel shocked. Yet, illogically, he did.
They returned to the axial shaft, the spiral staircase. They continued their ascent, more cautiously now. They made brief explorations of storerooms and work shops. They were not surprised to find in one of the cold stores the hanging, naked, mutilated bodies. There were burn wounds, which was to be expected. There were ragged, eviscerating gashes.
They must have fought with knives and axes, Falsen thought. Vaguely he wondered why this had been so.
“Come on!” snarled Linda. “If you do find your precious Lady Mother or your darling Carlin among that lot, they’ll be of no use to you! Or only for eating, after they’ve been thawed.”
Creeping rather than running they completed their journey, came at last to the captain’s quarters. The door of the day cabin was open. They could hear voices, low and indistinct, speaking Doralan. They approached the doorway, their bare feet silent on the soft plastic deck covering.
“Come in!” called a voice, Carlin’s, speaking in English.
Hand laser ready for use, Falsen erupted through the doorway.
“I could kill you now!” he snarled, his weapon covering those behind and around the big desk. “I shall kill you soon, but first I want you to know who is killing you, and why. It should help to make your last moments uneasier.”
He stared contemputously at them, and they stared back at him and Linda with matching contempt — Carlin lolling insolently at ease behind the desk; five other women, two junior officers and three enlisted women; and the five whose uniform tunics could not conceal the fact that they were males. None of them was armed. He hated them all, the fat, satisfied sleekness of them, the treachery which had brought them to where they now stood and sat, mistresses (and masters?) of a huge, sky-cleaving ship, a vessel in which, had it not been for his intervention, they would have escaped just penalties for the crimes of mutiny and murder.
Carlin sneered.
“You,” she stated, “are as bad as we.”
“No,” said Falsen. “We would never have murdered the Lady Mother and her people … .”
“Speak for yourself, Falsen.”
“I would never have shot down an unarmed blimp.”
“Prenta had to go, and her little bedwarmer, Durl.”
“Your fellow conspirators,” he said disgustedly.
“Whatever makes you think that, Falsen?”
“Prenta and Dural tried to kill us. They murdered Pansir.”
Carlin laughed. “Pansir got in the way, I suppose. And Prenta thought that she would be doing the Lady Mother a favor by getting rid of the two Jonahs responsible for all our misfortunes. Tell me, did she use that fancy pistol I made for her? She told me that it was for catching one of the beasts alive, but I suspected that she really wanted it for you. She left you trussed up in the cave, didn’t she, just waiting for the Big Bang?
“But you got away, as I knew that you would. Your kind aren’t easily killed … .”
Your kind.
The way that she had emphasized the words was significant.
“So you know?“ demanded Falsen.
“Of course I know. We aren’t all fools, Mr. Falsen. We aren’t all like our late, unlamented Lady Mother. Some of us did more on Earth than study astronautics. Some of us read widely — your history, your myths and legends. And we know, as you know, that the interstellar drive does queer things to time as well as space, and that some people, when exposed to the temporal-precession field, revert. Revert with improvements, no nonsense about having to wait for the full moon and all the rest of it. While I was staying at your Academy I read the Dennison Report. It’s supposed to be ‘Top Secret, Destroy By Fire Before Reading’ — but I was enjoying, or not enjoying, an affair with an admiral with exotic tastes. The fat old fool was quite besotted and let me paw through his papers … .”
Falsen’s hand tightened on the butt of his hand laser, his thumb on the firing stud.
“You were marooned, of course,” went on Carlin, “from your ship. Or ships. The normal humans in the crew should have killed you. But they didn’t, which was our good fortune. Your activities, at least until you became the Lady Mother’s pet puppy, put up a smoke screen behind which we would get to work. It is a pity, though, that one of you killed Garbillen when he, with the other males, was outside the ship. We had to make his body look like that of a woman — not too successfully, as it turned out. But it doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that we have an imbalance of the sexes.
“So, Falsen, again I make you my offer. Come along with us, as navigator, to help us to find our own world out towards the Rim. As navigator, and … ”
“What about Linda?” he demanded.
“Linda? I’m not spiteful, Falsen, though I have cause to be. She’ll be quite happy left on this world, running wild and hunting food animals … .”
Behind Falsen, Linda screamed viciously and fired her pistol, keeping the firing stud depressed so that it emitted a continuous, energy-wasting beam. The thin pencil of almost invisible light splashed across Carlin, igniting the material of her tunic, swept up to the grinning cat’s face, down to the lower part of her body. The big desk burst into flames, flared briefly, smoldered ruddily and smokily. Falsen was firing too, directing his aim at the other Doralans — all of whom just stood there, staring at him unblinkingly.
The air stank of charred wood and fabric, hot metal, scorched paint.
And that was all.
Through the slowly clearing acrid fumes he glared at the hateful face before him — the supercilious cat’s face, the big, unwinking eyes.
“Have you quite finished?” asked Carlin at last. “As you may have noticed, your weapons are useless. I will tell you why. Some of our myths and legends are almost echoes of yours. Or is it the other way around? Some of us, like some of you, are affected by the temporal-precession fields of the Drive. But there is a difference. Our authorities are not yet aware of the danger. They do not know, as you know and we know, how short a way we have come from the frontier of the dark … .”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Falsen sullenly.
But he did. He did.
“If you don’t know,” said Carlin, “you soon will.”
Two of her people, a man and a woman, were tearing away the scorched, still smoldering remnants of their clothing. Falsen stared at them while Linda repeatedly pressed the firing stud of her useless, charge-depleted pistol. He saw the firm, golden flesh creep and shift and change, watched the terrifying metamorphosis of almost-human humanoid into simbor. Standing erect, the tigerlike, kangaroolike animals snarled wordlessly, unsheathed the long, razor-sharp claws of all four paws. Growling, Falsen hurled his useless hand laser at the male. The beast evaded the missile easily, fell into a crouch preparatory to the killing spring.
Falsen bared his teeth, snarling back at the simbor. At his side, Linda screamed ferociously. He fell to all fours as the change came over him, as he sloughed off the remaining shreds of his humanity. But he was still thinking like a man. There’s still a chance, he told himself. We already know that we can kill them. And, after all, they’re only … cats … .
Beside him, Linda was changed. The fur of her body was erect and bristling; her lips were drawn back from her sharp teeth as she growled deeply and ominously.
Yet Carlin laughed, then snapped a brief order. The simbors, which had been about to leap, settled reluctantly bac
k to their haunches.
She said, almost regretfully, “It would have been a good fight and could have gone either way. But I have so few, Falsen, with whom to start my colony … .”
Her hand came up from beneath the smoking ruins of the desk, holding a pistol — not a hand laser but a big, clumsy-looking weapon that could well have been copied from something in a museum.
She went on, “I made this myself, in my workshop. And the ammunition. Luckily the cartridges didn’t explode when you burned the desk.” Then, as she began firing, the noise thunderous in the confined space, “Silver bullets, of course.”
The larger of the two werewolves died before he could get to the door. The other, his mate, vainly attacking, was slammed down in mid-leap.
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Copyright © 1984 by A. Bertram Chandler
All rights reserved.
Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-5319-X
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5319-6
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