by Frank Borsch
But Venron would have been able to manage even without such a system. He knew his way around computers.
His fingers manipulated the touch screen. First, he verified that the on-board computer was not connected to the Net, then he closed the stern hatch and requested the system status. All indications were green. The shuttle was ready for takeoff.
He initiated engine start-up. The craft shuddered, then, after a few moments, the shuddering transitioned into a gentle vibration. A control lever extended itself and pressed into his hand. Venron grasped it. A countdown appeared on the display, showing the seconds until the engines were ready for ignition. The time was shorter than he had dared hope. Just a few moments more, and he ...
The image on the pilot's display suddenly changed. Venron now was looking from the shuttle's stern out on the rear part of the hangar. Large doors were sliding open, and through the openings swarmed men and women in the black uniforms of the Tenoy, their weapons aimed and ready.
"Stop right there!" a loud voice resounded through the hangar. It was not the voice of the Net, so it had to belong to one of the Tenoy. It penetrated even the nearly soundproof cockpit.
"Think of the disaster you bring on us!" the voice continued. "And on yourself! Only death waits for you outside! Come back! You can still turn around!"
It was too late for second thoughts or regrets. The Naahk would show a traitor no mercy.
Venron switched the image on the display from the stern camera back to the countdown. Still a few more seconds. He gripped the control lever more tightly, then touched a button. The Tenoy, who had nearly surrounded the shuttle, hit the floor as though cut down by a scythe.
The men and women crawled away, desperately searching for cover the hangar did not provide. Venron couldn't see any of their faces; they were hidden by their helmet visors. He was happy about that. He wouldn't have liked to see anyone he knew.
The triple cannon installed under the bow completed its sweep without Venron discharging it. He didn't have any intention of being a murderer. He only wanted to reach the stars.
The cannon was now aimed directly at the closed hatch. Venron pressed the discharge control.
A fireball exploded in front of him, immediately followed by a hailstorm of particles and debris that drummed on the cockpit canopy. A cloud of black smoke billowed through the hangar. Venron pressed the control a second time. There was a second fireball, followed by another shower of debris, but this time no smoke cloud rose. Instead, the smoke was sucked outside as though by a pump.
Venron, who had dreamed of the stars without suspecting what they actually were, who didn't realize that there was a vacuum between them, watched in astonishment for several moments as the atmosphere in the hangar streamed outward. Then he activated the engines.
The shuttle shot out of the hangar. The pressure of acceleration pushed Venron deep into his seat. It went black in front of his eyes—a merciful blackness, since it prevented him from seeing how the Tenoy were pulled by the escaping air into the vacuum where they suffocated. Venron tasted blood and felt something soft and solid rubbing against his teeth: the tip of his tongue, which he had bitten off when he clenched his jaws.
But Venron didn't feel any pain. As he grew used to the acceleration and his blood circulation returned to normal, his eyesight came back.
He saw the stars.
They were brighter than in the films. More glittering. And more colorful. In one direction, they shone red, in another white like in the photographs, and violet in a third. They were close enough to touch. They belonged to him. He had only to reach out his hand to them and ...
A jolt slammed the shuttle. The pilot seat jerked up and Venron would have been thrown against the canopy if he hadn't been automatically strapped in at takeoff. He heard the tearing of overstrained steel, then the display in front of him went dark, along with the light that had illuminated the joystick.
The stars began to spin. Faster and still faster.
Venron screamed, but the stars didn't hear him.
2
"Crawler Six to Mama. Initiating landing procedure. You'll hear from us as soon as we're down."
"Roger. Good luck and good hunting!"
Alemaheyu Kossa, hypercommunications officer of the prospecting ship Palenque, switched the crawler's channel to the background. The syntrons of both ships would exchange a constant stream of data without his intervention: position, systems status, instrument readings—an umbilical cord of communication, intangible and yet real. Alemaheyu's task was to ensure that the stream did not break. Without the data stream, the Palenque's crawlers were helpless, in a sense, blind and deaf. When they ventured out into the endless void of space, there was only one point of contact connecting them with the world: Mama Kossa.
The prospector ship's twelve crawlers were more than auxiliary craft; they were compact laboratories to which an impulse engine, a rudimentary faster-than-light drive, and a pressurized cabin, large enough for a crew of three, had been attached.
Experience had taught the men and women of the Palenque that that crew had better consist of people who could stand to be together in cramped quarters for several weeks at a stretch without going for each other's throats. It was a common truth that, after the first week together, a crawler crew felt either burning hatred or unbreakable comradeship. Teams that had worked together for years so preferred the company of their crewmates that they often shared three-person cabins on the Palenque, quarters that were only slightly more spacious than the steel cages on the crawlers.
"Crawler Four to Mama," called a shrill, chirping voice. It belonged to the Blue named Yülhan-Nyulzen-Y'sch-Takan-Nyül. Either him or his brother, Trülhan. Alemaheyu could never tell them apart. The brothers were Blues, or "Dishheads," as they were still insultingly referred to on many Terran worlds, the only nonhumans in the Palenque crew aside from Gresko the Gurrad. "We are entering the planet's shadow in 20 seconds. Exit from shadow projected in 13 minutes and 34 seconds. Don't worry when you don't hear from us, Mama!"
"You, I don't need to worry about. You're big enough to play by yourselves for a quarter of an hour. Have fun, but don't pull any crap!"
In the beginning, Alemaheyu had resisted the nickname. Prospectors were a rough breed, and while the crews had long consisted of a mix of males and females—and occasionally beings whose gender could not be determined with any accuracy—the reference to presumed femininity was a favorite strategy for insulting your coworkers. So when the crawler teams began calling him "Mama Kossa" ...
It was not until his watchfulness prevented, at the last moment, the total loss of a crawler that Alemaheyu understood the nickname was intended as a sincere indication of respect. For the men and women out there in their steel shells, he was the Palenque, the mother ship, proof that the prospectors, out among the cold and pitiless stars, had not been forgotten.
"Everything all right with you, Alemaheyu?" called Sharita Coho, commander of the Palenque.
"Of course. What else?"
"Good."
As always, the commander wore her uniform, an outfit that seemed to reflect an adolescent's idea of a spaceship captain's uniform rather than a practical, utilitarian design. And as always, she wore a beamer at her belt. Alemaheyu couldn't remember ever seeing her wear any other outfit, even away from the ship. Today, despite the uncomfortable warmth of the control center, she had fastened the front of her jacket all the way to the top. She must be sweating buckets—no, boiling alive—but apparently the extra psychological security she gained from the formality of the uniform was worth the unpleasantness.
Today, her sweatiness had a specific name: Perry Rhodan.
A low cheeping tone brought Alemaheyu back to tending his console. Since the unforgettable near-wreck of the crawler, Alemaheyu had formed the habit of checking the data stream at regular intervals. Usually, hourly checks were often enough, but here in the Ochent Nebula, with its five-dimensional anomalies, hyperstorms and unusually active stars, he
was checking more frequently.
He called up the data for each of the crawlers in quick succession. Seven of them were on the surface of various planets and moons, gathering rock samples and readings, while the other five were either on the way to a highly promising celestial body or already returning to the Palenque, their missions completed. Crawler Four was still in the communications shadow of a Jupiter-like planet five light-years from the prospecting ship.
Concentrating, Alemaheyu reviewed the data streams. Everything looked normal, no anomalies, though Crawler Nine's data did show a tiny deviation—so tiny that he almost missed it.
He zoomed in on the irregularity and directed the syntron to analyze the data status. It found that the crawler's g-force absorber currently would function at 99.93 percent capacity, which was insignificant as long as the vehicle operated on the airless surface of the moon it was surveying. This variance could possibly be deadly when the crawler lifted off and accelerated.
Alemaheyu considered. A hardware failure? Improbable. G-force absorbers were the product of a proven, safety-critical technology in common use for thousands of years. And the crawlers' technology had been selected with especial care: in order to save precious space, the mini-labs carried no redundant components. Every system had to function at 100 percent.
A software error? Alemaheyu went through the crawler's log data. After a few minutes of searching, he found an entry that struck him as unusual. He followed that lead, and finally found the problem. Part of a software update package installed a week earlier had somehow been skipped. This exact issue was a point of contention between him and the syntron specialists.
Alemaheyu felt that since the crawlers operated flawlessly, they shouldn't be changing things. But nobody on board listened to him. To the control-center crew on the Palenque, he was just the comm officer, not Mama.
Alemaheyu sent the update to Crawler Nine, then tested the absorber with a simulation routine. All the values showed 100 percent.
A disturbance at the entrance to the control center distracted Alemaheyu. The men and women whispered to each other, then he heard a series of "Good mornings."
Their passenger must have arrived on the bridge. The most effusive greeting even the commander herself could hope for from the control center crew was a nod and a murmur.
"Good morning, Perry," Sharita Coho said a moment later, confirming Alemaheyu's conclusion. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes, thank you. Is there any news?"
"No. No ores. And no Akonians."
Alemaheyu wondered for the nth time if he should buy Rhodan's story. The Ochent Nebula was a no-man's-land, officially unclaimed by any of the galaxy's great powers. The region bounded the spheres of influence of various Blue races and the Akonians, but up to now had proven too uninviting to inspire any desire to possess it. The number of life-bearing worlds was small, the frequency of hyperstorms high, and the strategic value precisely zero. Anyone who occupied the Ochent Nebula would take on diplomatic complications and outrageous maintenance expenses for new bases on which expensively trained soldiers would die of boredom.
But the sector was hardly deserted. In recent years it had attracted an increasing number of prospectors: Terrans, Blues, mixed crews without a common origin but united by the expectation of a big find and, most recently, Akonians. So far, the prospectors had invested considerable work and capital with nothing to show for it, but the probability of that suddenly changing grew with each day that passed.
A vein of five-dimensionally radiant quartz ... the high-tech relics of an extinct race ... an ore deposit of high purity—any such find could trigger a race of the galactic powers and change the undeclared cold war that gripped the galaxy to an active conflict.
Rhodan had come on board the Palenque to seek contact with the Akonians in order to preempt such a crisis. He wanted to draw the Forum Raglund, of which the Akonians were among the most important members, to Terra's side.
Alemaheyu had laughed loudly when he heard that. Just how naive was the Immortal, anyway? The Ochent Nebula was one of the few remaining galactic frontiers. Did he expect that the Akonians—and even the Blues, who historically could not get along with themselves—would withdraw based on his suggestion, taking a pass on the opportunity to make the find of their lives? God only knew that Alemaheyu had no love for the Dishheads and the arrogant Akonians, but to dream that they would simply pull out on the basis of a request and an analysis of the galactic political situation? Even they weren't that crazy ... .
"They'll show up yet," Rhodan said, facing the commander.
"Yes, sooner or later," she replied. It was clear that Sharita was not exactly excited about the prospect of having the Immortal on board for weeks on end.
Alemaheyu observed Perry Rhodan from the corner of his eye. He was a man of average height with dark blond hair. The simple uniform he wore revealed nothing of his rank. If Alemaheyu had encountered Rhodan on the street, he wouldn't have recognized the man who had led the human race to the stars nearly three thousand years ago. Rhodan seemed like an average man.
Really.
The Palenque's comm officer didn't have any words for it, but something changed on the ship's bridge every time Rhodan appeared. Of course, small, external things changed. The control-center crew attempted, with varying degrees of success, to suppress the curses; the conversational tone wasn't quite as rude; there was less talk in general. But all that was easy to explain. People were like that: they sought tight communities, and when they found them, they closed themselves to outsiders.
But it was more than that. Alemaheyu caught himself sitting bolt upright at his console instead of lounging in his usual posture. And his work ethic kicked up a notch, too. Not that he would have otherwise been tempted to take his eye off the crawlers—a mama does everything for her children, doesn't she?—but he even conscientiously took care of the bothersome minor duties that human lives didn't depend on.
And it was all because of Perry Rhodan.
It was the same for Alemaheyu as it was for the commander of the Palenque. He wasn't able to ignore the knowledge that in his long life, Rhodan had encountered an unimaginable number of people, and had mastered dangers and tests of his skill and courage that Alemaheyu could only guess at. Much as it annoyed the Palenque's comm officer, he simply wasn't able to behave naturally in Rhodan's presence—even though the Immortal hadn't so much as hinted with a single word or gesture that he expected special treatment. On the contrary: Rhodan slept in a standard cabin, ate the standard food, and performed standard duties. Yesterday, in fact, he had turned up in a hangar and helped a technician with the maintenance on one of the crawlers.
Rhodan was the friendliest and most sociable passenger the Palenque had carried in a long time, and yet it was only with an effort that Alemaheyu could keep from stuttering with excitement when he spoke with the Immortal. It was enough to drive him up the wall.
After greeting Rhodan, Alemaheyu and the rest of the control-center crew went back to their duties. There was not much to do. The crawlers did the actual work. The Palenque stood ready in case something unexpected happened. Akonians appearing, or something like that, which certainly wouldn't happen as long as they had Rhodan on board. That was life: if you wanted to avoid something, it was always on your heels. But if you were looking for it, it was nowhere to be found.
"Mild hyperstorm," the hyperdetection officer called out. "Sectors 72Z to 84R."
Not unexpected. Hyperstorms were the rule rather than the exception in this area. Alemaheyu called up the hyperdetection data. No reason to worry. The storm wasn't strong enough to endanger the crawlers. Besides, only one of them was in the affected area.
Alemaheyu made contact. "Crawler Eleven!"
"What is it, Mama?"
"There's a hyperstorm brewing along your course. Rather weak, nothing that should bother your crate."
"Okay. Then why are you calling us?"
"Because Mama always worries." The two men, Alemahe
yu Kossa on the Palenque and Mikch Theyner on the crawler, laughed. The joke had long since worn out, but they couldn't resist making it. It had been Mikch who had given Alemaheyu the nickname in the first place. "But seriously," the comm officer went on, "it's possible the data stream will be interrupted for a few minutes. I just wanted to let you know so you don't worry about it."
"Too late. Our pants are already sticky and stinky. Catch you later!"
"Be seeing you!"
Alemaheyu had barely finished speaking when the data stream broke off. The crawler had been caught in the storm. The craft would now be thoroughly shaken. It would do Mikch and his people good. Remind them of how comfortable they had it on the Palenque, remind them of their place. Very little could go wrong. Without guidance from the Palenque, the crawler was effectively blind from a navigational standpoint, but it was operating in a slow, sublight flight.
It would be hours before it came near a moon or a planet.
Sharita Coho and Rhodan had retreated to the rear section of the control center and were conversing in whispers. Alemaheyu tried to eavesdrop, but they were too far away. He only caught the word "Akonians" a few times.
A soft chirping reminded the comm officer that it was again time for a routine check. He immersed himself in the work, exchanging a few words with the crews of the various crawlers. Four reported in. The craft had left the planetary shadow and was in the process of landing on a highly promising high plateau after an optical scan of the surface.
Alemaheyu wished the crew good luck in finding pay dirt. When he returned to his status review, he felt a stab of unease. What was going on with Crawler Eleven? The data stream was still out.
"Hyperdetection!" Alemaheyu called. "What about the hyperstorm? Is it still going on?"
