by Frank Borsch
Venron's face disappeared. In its place appeared a long shot of a huge room. In the center stood a large, lumpy machine that Denetree did not recognize. At one end bulged two translucent domes like the eyes of an insect, but from the place where the animal would have had a mouth projected a long, three-part device. For a few moments, nothing happened. Denetree thought she saw movement behind one of the domes, but the surface was reflective and showed only what appeared to be the silhouette of a man.
Then large doors opened behind the machine. The Tenoy ran inside. The guardians wore body armor and aimed long weapons at the machine. A voice echoed through the room: "Come back! You can still turn around!"
The device on the front of the machine began to rotate toward the wall of the room, and the Tenoy dove for cover. The device stopped turning.
The image froze. "Observe closely what this murderer did!" crackled the loudspeaker.
The projection spat fire. Once, then a second time.
"Venron, no!" Denetree whispered at the recording.
A gigantic jet of fire shot out from the lower part of the machine and catapulted it through the roiling wall of flames and smoke it had created.
The wall was broken by a jagged opening, and through it Denetree saw the stars. For the space of a heartbeat she forgot her fear. The stars! Venron was not taking his own life, he had found a way to the stars!
A loud hissing noise from the loud speaker dragged her attention back to the display. It looked like invisible hands were dragging at the Tenoy with terrible force. The men and women tried to hang on, but the naked metal floor offered nothing to grasp. One after another they flew through the opening to the stars where, with eyes bulging out of their sockets and desperately flailing arms and legs, they died.
"Venron! What have you done?" Tears flowed from Denetree's eyes, for the first time she could remember. "That ... that's ... what will they do to you?"
The loudspeaker gave her the answer. "The traitor has already met his well-deserved fate. And those who helped him will share it!"
4
The crewmembers of the Palenque might resemble a randomly assorted mob hurriedly thrown together in some remote spaceport in the galactic backwoods, but Rhodan had to give them this: they were fast.
The Palenque came out of hyperspace at Crawler Eleven's last known position less than five minutes after the comm officer announced loss of contact.
"Hyperdetection!" Sharita Coho barked. In her severely tailored uniform, the commander seemed ludicrously out of place among the prospectors. The men and women of the Palenque took pride in their individualized personal appearance. Rhodan still found it hard to believe that the commander and the comm officer, for example, belonged to the same ship. Alemaheyu Kossa reminded Rhodan of Jimi Hendrix, an Old Terran rock musician who had died shortly before man's first flight to the moon, except that Alemaheyu had darker skin and usually didn't bother with a headband to keep his mane of frizzy hair under control.
"In progress," replied Omer Driscol, the hyperenergy detection officer. The stocky black man had his face so close to the holos projected above his console that his nose almost interrupted the images. "Last outliers of the hyperstorm ... "
"Those go without saying," the commander interrupted him. "Any results?"
"Nothing so far. Evaluation running." Driscol seemed unaffected by Sharita's curt tone.
Is he just used to it? Rhodan wondered. Or is he suppressing his anger out of concern for his comrades on the lost crawler?
Sharita turned her head. "Alemaheyu? Contact?"
The comm officer shook his mane. "No."
"No good. Keep trying."
The skinny Terran bent over his virtual keyboard and typed a series of commands while murmuring to himself. Rhodan thought he heard, "Come on! Come to Mama!" but decided he had to be mistaken. Not even these prospectors could be that eccentric.
"Decrease velocity to half light-speed. The crawler was moving at just ten percent light. We can cover its entire flight path in half an hour."
Tense silence reigned in the control center for several minutes, then Alemaheyu spoke up again. "Sharita."
"Have you made contact?"
"Not with Crawler Eleven, but the other crawlers have reported in. They want to help."
"There's nothing to help with. We're their eyes and ears—and we're at the scene."
"Yes, but they still want to help."
"That's ridiculous! Tell them that they ... "
Sharita broke off when Pearl Laneaux, first officer of the Palenque, stepped up next to her and rested a hand on her arm. Pearl towered over Sharita by more than a head.
"What is it?" Sharita snapped.
"Don't do it." Pearl gazed at Sharita with doe-eyes. The two women seemed polar opposites. With her military bearing and spotless uniform, Sharita might have passed as an overeager cadet on a battlecruiser in the League of Free Terrans fleet—but the LFT didn't offer many opportunities to seventy-four-year-olds. Pearl, by contrast, seemed like gentleness personified, a delicate beauty completely at odds with the stereotype of the rough-and-ready prospector.
Their contrasting personalities could have put the two women at loggerheads all day long. And sometimes, like now, they were. But in Rhodan's view, every quarrel between the two top-ranking officers seemed to clear the air like a good storm. When the thunder and lightning faded away, the intelligence of both women had contributed to a decision.
"What?" Sharita demanded, her eyes flashing with anger.
"Don't brush off the crawler crews. Of course they can't help with the search—they know that as well as you do. The gesture is what matters to them."
"Feh! Gestures!"
"Sharita, you know how close the crawler crews are to each other. Don't make it harder for them by denying them the chance to even try to help."
Rhodan saw Sharita's neck muscles strain against the tight-fitting collar of her uniform. For a moment, there was a distinct possibility of violence. Instead, Sharita pushed Pearl aside and called: "You heard her, Alemaheyu! Let the crawlers come. But tell them that the lost time will of course be deducted from their shares. We aren't out here for the fun of it."
The search got under way as one crawler after another materialized near the Palenque. The flying laboratories shot back and forth like a flock of birds, performing their task with an agility that surprised Rhodan.
It was no use. The Palenque and the smaller craft accompanying it covered the entire sector without finding a trace of the crawler.
"I'm sorry," the hyperdetection officer finally said, rubbing his hands with a helpless look. "The sector has been swept clean. There's some cosmic dust here and there, but otherwise nothing."
"But that's impossible!" Sharita retorted vehemently. "The crawler can't have gone far!"
"Why not?" Rhodan interjected. "It could have accelerated, or even activated its faster-than-light drive. The FTL dematerialization energy signature could have been lost in the hyperstorm."
"I gave no order permitting them to do so. But ... " A grim smile appeared on Sharita's face. "But that doesn't mean much. Who here listens to my orders?"
No one in the control center dared laugh.
"Widen the hyperdetection sweep!" Sharita ordered. "Make it a radius of one light-year. I want a close look at every speck of dust!"
The control center crew went to work. Every man and woman bent over the console instruments in their niches. Every ship in the LFT fleet possessed sound and optical isolation fields in the control center that allowed each station to perform its work without interruption or distraction. On most ships, these fields ran almost constantly, with holos ensuring that the control center crew remained aware of the current situation at all stations.
On the Palenque, a contrary culture had evolved. The prospectors enjoyed the close contact with each other, and Rhodan suspected that someday they would tear out the screening field systems entirely, considering them useless junk.
Now, the pro
spectors worked in silence, focused on their own tasks yet perfectly aware of their fellow officers. Rhodan heard the occasional muffled curse and heavy breathing, but the report they were hoping for didn't come.
Rhodan caught himself tapping his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. He wasn't used to sitting inactive in moments of crisis. But the seat he had been given allowed only passive viewing of the data; he could not access the ship's syntron and its subsystems.
Sharita cleared her throat and paced. The fingers of her right hand tapped heavily on the grip of her uniform's holstered beamer. Rhodan felt each tap like a heavy drumbeat.
"Hyperdetection!" Omer Driscoll exclaimed. It was a cry of joy. "Object at distance of just one light-hour. Mass ... "
"Yes?"
"Mass triple that of a crawler," the hyperdetection officer replied tonelessly. "No idea what it is, but it isn't our people."
"Is the syntron getting a visual of it?"
"Just now coming in. The outliers of the hyperstorm are still interfering with detection. And whatever it is, it's moving damned fast. But we've got something."
"Put it up!"
In the middle of the control center, a holo taller than a man appeared, like a window into the blackness of space.
The object shown in the holo was nothing more than a dark shadow racing through space, blocking the stars in sections as it flowed past. The blunt, stocky shape reminded Rhodan of a thumb. It lacked any hint of the flattened appearance to which the crawlers owed their name.
At their first sight of the object, the control crew broke out in angry curses. Rhodan felt relieved at their reaction: he had wondered if the crew of the Palenque would ever release its tension.
But at what cost ... ?
"Let's take a closer look at that thing," Sharita ordered.
Rhodan felt a vibration under his feet as the Palenque's engines accelerated to maximum and sent the ship after the object.
In the control center holo, the rotating shadow grew ever larger, its outlines becoming increasingly sharper. Rhodan thought he saw metal reflecting the dim light of the stars. Long, regular lines, and at one end ... a black abyss, framed by sharp-edged tongues of metal that twisted in all directions. One prominent spike looked like it was being pulled back and forth by the rotation of the object, almost as though it was waving. What an absurd thought.
"Hey, that thing is waving at us!" Alemaheyu exclaimed. Apparently, he had no concerns about expressing even the craziest interpretations out loud.
"Can the chatter! That thing out there is just a piece of dead metal, nothing else."
Dead metal ... Rhodan thought there was a grain of truth in what Sharita said.
The Palenque made a short hyper-light jump. When it reentered normal space, the object was immediately in front of it—at a distance of a quarter-million kilometers.
It was unmistakably a technological artifact. It reminded Rhodan of the rockets used by the human race during his time with the U.S. Space Force nearly three thousand years ago, before man discovered the Arkonides.
Except that this rocket had been torn in half. They were looking at a remnant, and the burn marks on the metal tangle at one end indicated that the split had been the result of an explosion. Had an accident occurred on board? Or had someone shot at the ship? And—Rhodan realized it was the critical question at the moment—what had happened to the other half?
He turned to the hyperdetection officer. "Any other objects like this one in the vicinity?"
Driscol hesitated, then shook his head.
Sharita gave Driscol an angry look. To Rhodan she said, "You are forgetting your status. You are on the Palenque ... "
" ... as a guest. I know. Nor am I claiming any authority to command. I just asked a question. And I only took it upon myself to do that because there isn't much time."
"You don't say!"
"I do. And there are other things you act like you're not aware of. That thing out there"—Rhodan pointed to the control center holo, in which the wreckage now took up almost all of the image—"is moving at just under light-speed, and we've matched our velocity to its."
"So?"
"That means we're in relativistic territory. At the moment I can only make a rough estimate in my head since I don't have access to the ship's syntron, but I'd guess that for each minute we spend at this speed, something like a hundred minutes are going by on Terra and the other League of Free Terrans worlds. We've got to drop out of this speed as fast as we can or we'll have wasted any chance we have of rescuing the crawler's crew."
Sharita nodded, as if agreeing only reluctantly. "That's true. Very well. First we'll haul that thing on board—who knows, it might be valuable. And then we'll find our people!"
Rhodan didn't reply. He believed he knew what had happened to Crawler Eleven. If he was right, it would not make the crew of the Palenque happy.
The Palenque returned to the original search area, combing it for a second time in a series of hyper-jumps, supported by a swarm of crawlers that were just as industrious as they were blind. When this search also proved fruitless, Sharita expanded the search radius.
While this was going on, no one worried about the wreck that had been recovered and which now rested in one of the Palenque's hangars. Not in the hanger used by Crawler Eleven—the symbolism would have been too much for the crew—but in the hangar designed to accommodate the ship's space-jet, empty because the owners of the Palenque had been unable to bring themselves to invest in the auxiliary craft. It was not a lack of curiosity that kept the prospectors from examining their discovery: the bottom line was that the wreck was something dead, and their concern was focused on the living.
But with each hour that passed, it became increasingly clear that the crew of Crawler Eleven now lived only in the minds of their fellow prospectors. There wasn't the slightest trace of the vehicle to be found in the Ochent Nebula.
Rhodan watched, a helpless onlooker, as the prospectors' hopes died bit by bit. At first, sheer tension allowed them to avoid the truth. The members of the control center crew tapped into the hyperdetector's data and went through it with their own eyes in the desperate hope of discovering anomalies that the ship's syntron had overlooked. Alemaheyu Kossa wrote search programs on the fly that analyzed the incoming and stored data from fresh perspectives. But their efforts yielded no results; all they found were small, scattered clouds of cosmic dust. Exhaustion replaced tension, and desperation grew. It simply couldn't be! Their crewmates had to be alive! They fought the ever more pressing need for sleep, determined to not leave their comrades in the lurch. But the hyperdetector remained silent, and as the search radius steadily grew, the probability of finding Crawler Eleven steadily shrank.
Finally, Rhodan felt compelled to speak up. "Commander, I believe there is no point in continuing this search."
"Oh?" The glare from the bruised-looking eyes clearly added: And what makes you think you know so much about it?
"The crawler's crew is dead."
"And how can you know this? The crawler had enough air and supplies to last for weeks."
"I'm aware of that. But it doesn't matter. The crawler has been destroyed."
"That can't be." Sharita rose abruptly from her seat and stood up straight, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from her uniform jacket. "We have combed the entire area. The last vestiges of the hyper-storm have died out. The hyperdetectors are operating at full capacity. If there was even one piece of debris bigger than a speck of dust out there, we would have found it."
"Exactly."
"What do you mean by that?"
"That in all likelihood, not even a speck of dust from Crawler Eleven remains."
Sharita's right hand closed around the grip of her beamer. "Now I understand what you're trying to say! Those damned Akonians! I'll make them pay! Who else could be behind this? If not them, then it was the Dishheads! I'll ... "
Rhodan shook his head. "No. This was not their doing."
"And w
ho else, pray tell? Don't tell me it's the Arkonides, and they're the reason you're here hanging on our ... tail."
"No. My mission is what I have told you. I'm here to make contact with the Akonians through unofficial channels and improve Terra's relationship with them. Granted, the Akonians are all over the Ochent Nebula, but it wasn't the Akonians who destroyed the crawler. It was that thing there." The Immortal pointed to a small holo at the edge of the control center showing the hangar containing the recovered wreck. "Or I should say, its missing half."
Pearl Laneaux, who up to now had been occupied with the hyperdetector data at one of the consoles, spoke up. "There's something to that. The thing was moving at nearly light-speed when we retrieved it. An object's mass increases toward infinity the closer it comes to the speed of light. Even a collision with a toy ball moving at that speed would be fatal. Only the tiniest particles would be left of both bodies."
"That could be," the commander allowed. "But why is half of that thing still left? Assuming your suspicion is correct, then shouldn't there be just a single cloud of particles remaining?"
"That's true," Rhodan conceded. "But the thing may not have come apart in the collision with the crawler. What if this rocket had split in two long before? The debris would likely follow only slightly deviated trajectories. One half collided with the crawler, and our search revealed the other half, which despite its high velocity was still in the vicinity of the collision point."
Sharita closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and turned to the hyperdetection officer. "Omer, go through the stored hyperdetector data. Search for particle clouds. Maybe there's one with a mass that roughly matches that of the crawler plus a piece of debris like the one in the hangar ... even though I hope not."
The result came a few minutes later. There actually was a particle cloud in the specified sector, and its direction, velocity and mass were within the parameters of what would be expected after a collision between the crawler and a piece of debris.
Sharita quietly thanked the hyperdetection officer. "At least now we are certain." She turned to Rhodan and stared at him for a moment. "You suspected this all along, didn't you? Why didn't you say something?"
