Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  "Spare me your gabbling professors! I don't need a scientist to smell something rotten here. Physical conditions are a factor—but there's also the human one!"

  "By that, do you mean to say—"

  "I am merely doing my duty, and I expect the same from you. You are a civilian, but you have also sworn to serve the Akonian people!"

  Jere von Baloy's face turned red. The admiral must have hit a sensitive spot.

  "That I have done. And that is what I am doing, I assure you. Now if you will excuse me ... "

  "One moment more. As you may be aware, officers of the fleet receive supplementary scientific training. We have analyzed your reports. And guess what we've found out? The Las-Toór has been in dilation flight for nearly thirteen standard days. What is the meaning of this? Is the journey too long for the ladies and gentlemen of the Yidari?"

  "I can assure you that the ladies and gentlemen of the Yidari are working hard. The dilation flight is part of a series of scientific experiments that are too complex to explain in a simple hypercom conversation."

  For several moments, the two men stared at each other. Takhan ta Taklir possessed the merciless glare of a man who did not allow errors and had been in a position of power for so long that he had forgotten how to excuse one.

  Jere von Baloy held his gaze.

  "I am glad that your Yidari are so diligent," the admiral said at length. "I am certain that your experiments are of the greatest interest and in the long run will contribute to the welfare of our people."

  Hartich couldn't believe his ears. The admiral was giving in? He quickly found his suspicion was justified.

  "And nothing lies closer to our hearts than the welfare of our people, am I correct, Jere von Baloy?" the Akonian admiral went on. "Since your work is so important, I will be glad to provide reinforcements."

  "Takhan, that is too kind. You—"

  "No, please ... no polite protestations. We are coming." The admiral leaned forward, filling the entire camera range. His gigantic, enlarged face hung over the men and women of the Las-Toór's control center. "And in the interest of our people's welfare, I order you to remain on your present course until our arrival. Until then, Jere von Baloy."

  The face vanished.

  Perspiration appeared on Hartich's forehead. The Akonian fleet was on its way to their position, and he was stuck as a hostage on an Akonian ship! Perry Rhodan, Pearl Laneaux and Hayden Norwell were lost on the Lemurian ship, and the commander of his own ship was a known Akonian-hater.

  The next few hours would be ... well ... interesting.

  But there was a very different thought that made the Terran sweat: what was driving Takhan von Taklir to take such drastic action? Injured pride? A need to show civilians spoiled by the government who really ran things? Or did the admiral know more than he was saying?

  28

  "Naahk! You must save them!"

  Denetree ran at the Naahk without incident. Solina assumed that even the ... Tenoy, Denetree had called them, sensed a fundamental change had taken place. The catastrophe warned of for generations had occurred: strangers had found the Ship and boarded it. The End of Time had come.

  And now the Naahk stood together with the strangers and spoke with them as though they were friends. The world must not be making much sense to the Tenoy at the moment.

  Solina Tormas had to admit that she felt pretty stunned herself. Before her stood a human wearing a cell activator, the commander of a ship whose technological level limped along thousands of years behind the level required to manufacture the life-prolonging devices. What was more, there was no civilization currently existing in the galaxy capable of developing an activator. No one was even close.

  How had this man ended up on a rust bucket like the ark? Was he fleeing something? Was he hiding? Was this ship, mighty despite its backwardness, built solely to provide him with a comfortable hiding place, where he could live as the ruler of a people kept in fear and ignorance? Or did the ark have an unknown destination? But if that were the case, then why had the Immortal chosen a means of transport that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach a destination?

  Questions and more questions burned on the historian's tongue, but remained unasked since Denetree's interruption. Solina consoled herself with the thought that she would have an opportunity later to ask the Naahk her questions. After all, now that they had established contact, they had all the time in the world.

  At first, the Naahk ignored the young Lemurian woman. Lemal Netwar seemed transfixed by Rhodan's revelation. It was obvious from the Naahk's expression that he was trying to absorb and understand the implications: An activator carrier ... a brother who shared his fate, who knows the loneliness that is the inevitable price of immortality. Could he trust the man in front of him? Was he a brother, or a cunning deceiver?

  Denetree refused to be put off.

  "Naahk!" she cried again. When he still didn't react, she reached for his hand. "Naahk!"

  Solina heard a seemingly infinite clicking of metal as the Tenoy released the safeties on their weapons. Denetree had touched the Naahk! She had crossed a line.

  Netwar made no effort to shake off Denetree's grasp. His eyes were unfocused, he was caught up in his whirling thoughts. His face had frozen to a mask. When he became aware of her touch, life slowly returned to his eyes and expression. The powerfully built man trembled as though he were shaking off the implications of the meeting for the moment, and angled his body to face the young Lemurian woman.

  "You ... are ... Denetree," he said slowly.

  "Yes, I am," she answered defiantly.

  "The ... traitor."

  "The former traitor!" Denetree spoke with the determination of someone who had chosen her path, even if the price of walking that path was her life. "Where is the treason in dreaming of the stars, when even the Naahk speaks with strangers from the stars? Where is the treason when metach seek a different life than their ancestors?"

  "I ... " Netwar shook himself. "I ... " His closing lips silently brought the sentence to an end. Solina watched Lemal Netwar collapse. His shoulders slumped. His head, which he had held unmoving, fell forward until his chin hit his chest. It was as though a burden was pressing down on Netwar, a burden heavier even than the increased gravity of the outer deck, a burden that he had carried for thousands of years. That he had shouldered with a strength beyond that of any normal mortal. A burden that, faced with the young Lemurian woman standing fearlessly before him, threatened to overwhelm him.

  "You ... you understand?" Denetree seemed too surprised to release Netwar's hand from her grasp. Which was probably a good thing: the Naahk was depending on her for support. Solina doubted that he could have stayed on his feet without the contact of Denetree's hand.

  The Naahk nodded slowly. Stiffly, as though his neck vertebrae were incapable of accommodating any other movement.

  What was wrong with the Immortal? Had the shock literally struck him immobile? Or was he ill? Impossible, Solina decided. Activators prevented the aging of a living being, including natural wear and tear, and protected it from chronic diseases.

  "No," Lemal Netwar managed to say. "You are no longer a traitor. You need no longer fear for your life."

  "Thank you, but ... "

  Denetree was saved, but she had not relaxed. What else was going on?

  "What about the others?" the Lemurian woman asked the Naahk.

  "The others?"

  "The other traitors. The former traitors. The Star Seekers."

  Lemal Netwar's eyes went wide. "No ... their execution ... " He raised his free arm and looked at a metal armband. "It isn't too late!"

  He put his wrist to his mouth. "Net!" he called. "Cancel the execution!"

  No answer.

  "Net!" he called again. "Listen to me!"

  No answer.

  "It ... it isn't working," the Naahk said. "The Net seems to be out of order. Before you came, it was already showing signs of system failure. It must ha
ve switched itself off."

  System failures in the net.

  "Perhaps the problem is in your armband," Rhodan suggested. "You could try it with another one." Rhodan pointed in the direction of the armed guardians.

  "None of them carry a communicator."

  System failure ... When Solina had hacked into the net, she had slipped in a few harmless Trojan horses to protect her ability to access it. Could her actions be the cause of the breakdown?

  "Here's a stationary terminal!" called Pearl, who had been listening to the encounter from a short distance away. The translator in her suit converted what she said into Lemurian with virtually no delay. "Try it here!"

  The group moved in Pearl's direction. Solina went along, feeling numb. She suspected the effort would be in vain. She had programmed simple sleepers that should have become active only at her command. She felt sick. She had only wanted to ensure the team's safety. Now, she might be responsible for the loss of other lives.

  With stiff movements, the Naahk manipulated the display's touch screen. "Nothing," he whispered after a few seconds. "The Net isn't reacting. I can't send any messages."

  "How long until the execution?" Rhodan asked.

  The Naahk stated a time period that translated to about seven Terran minutes.

  "Where is it taking place?"

  "At the stern. It is too far away to get there in time on foot. It could not be managed even on a bicycle."

  "That isn't what I was thinking of." Rhodan activated his suit's antigrav. The Terran shot upwards.

  And then just hung there.

  Solina saw the soles of Rhodan's boots, heard him swearing—or at least thought she did; she would have thought that after thousands of years a person could break himself of such bad habits—then he dropped back to the deck and landed hard.

  "The antigrav isn't working right!" Rhodan exclaimed.

  One after another, the Akonians and Terrans tried their systems. None of them went further than two meters. Pearl did the best, but even then had the bad luck of coming down in one of the bushes.

  Denetree first watched their attempts at flying with an open mouth: the strangers could fly! Then, as they failed, with growing desperation.

  "That means they're doomed!" she cried out. Tears welled up at the corners of her eyes. "No one can save them now!"

  The only answer was silence.

  Hevror ta Gosz stepped forward. "Now, that seems a little premature," he said and pulled the long bag off his back.

  * * *

  Hevror knew that he didn't dare waste any time. The Terrans, Rhodan included, and the two Lemurians looked at him as though he had lost his mind. Solina and Robol, who knew the theory of his hobby, looked less astonished. Hevror turned to the two Lemurians. "There must be a ventilation system on board this ship. With huge air shafts, right?" His suit's built-in translator converted his question to Lemurian.

  Denetree and the Naahk nodded.

  "Is there a big air shaft somewhere close by that transports warm, used air to the fields?"

  To his surprise, the young woman answered, not the immortal Naahk, who should have known the entire ark like the back of his hand.

  "Yes," Denetree said. "Two fields further up."

  "Excellent. Take me there at once."

  The Lemurian woman, eager to save her comrades, immediately started off. Hevror followed her, along with rest of the group.

  "What are you planning?" asked Rhodan, who caught up with him seemingly without effort. His cell activator seemed to keep Rhodan totally fit; in contrast, the Naahk hobbled stiffly at the rear of the group.

  "One of us has to get to the ship's stern."

  "You?"

  "Yes."

  "And how will you manage that?"

  "With wings."

  Denetree stopped near a round hole in the ground. It had a diameter of about two meters. Through the grating that secured it against accidents came a warm if not particularly fragrant stream of air.

  Hevror held his arm over the shaft, testing for the updraft. Yes, it could work. With a little luck, a push from his antigrav ... .

  The Akonian dropped to his knees, opened the clasp on his bag, and took out the Akon-steel struts. Each individual strut was narrower than his little finger and weighed only a few grams, because it was hollow, like a bird's bones.

  "Naahk!" he called to the Lemurian leader, who was the last to take his place in the ring of spectators closely watching Hevror's movements. "Naahk, how do I find the execution site?"

  "It is at the stern in a former cargo hold—"

  "I need a description from outside!"

  Hevror had fully unfolded the struts and fit them together. He pulled a thin sheet of fabric from the bag.

  "The hatch is marked in red. It—"

  "Can it be seen from above? From the air?"

  "I think ... yes."

  While the Naahk described a series of landmarks for him, Hevror stretched the fabric over the struts, lifted the finished construction to examine it, then threw it on the ground to test its durability. It held. The wings were ready for use.

  Now came the difficult part. Hevror's wings were intended to be worn over tightly fitting clothing or the naked body, which was Hevror's preferred method of flight. Despite its compact design, his protective suit got in the way. But he couldn't take it off: he needed the antigrav to give him his initial altitude.

  Hevror slipped his arms through the arm loops, but he couldn't reach the rear fastenings with his suit on. The Akonian struggled for a moment, then felt a strong hand pulling on the fastenings for him. The Immortal had seen the problem, and together they managed to fasten the harness. The Akonian prayed that they would hold over the bulk of the suit. For the sake of Denetree's friends—and for his own. The "sky" of the outer deck might be relatively low, but it was high enough for him to fall to his death.

  He nodded to the others. "Be right back!" he assured them with a grin and a confidence he didn't feel. He took a deep breath and leaped, his arms—the wings—stretched out to catch the rising stream of air from the shaft.

  For a fraction of a second nothing happened, and he fell toward the grating. It wouldn't kill him, but he would look ridiculous. Then the antigrav kicked in, yanked him up, and failed again.

  It was enough.

  The experience of decades told Hevror that he had enough air under the wings. He began to circle in the warm air current as it fanned out. He climbed higher and higher. His companions, along with the Naahk's flabbergasted guardians, shrank to the size of toys. Hevror looked out over the strangest landscape he had seen since he had buckled the wings on his back for the first time. That had been a half century ago. On that same day, he had resigned his position with a minor government agency—a rank that generations of his family had been working toward—and turned his back on Drorah. Whenever someone expressed a sincere interest in his passion, he described his decision as having "flown out of the cage."

  Since then, Hevror's wings had felt the winds of a hundred worlds. Hevror had looked down on buildings and ocean waves, on deserts of sand and ice, on endless plains and bottomless ravines. But nothing so far compared to the vista in the ark. It was gigantic and tiny at the same time.

  Tiny in its physical dimensions. It was just a few kilometers long, not even half a kilometer in diameter, and housed a number of inhabitants that wouldn't have merited being termed a village on Drorah. If he applied himself, as he was doing now, he could fly through the ark's entire length in a few minutes.

  And yet it was gigantic, too. Its dimensions dwarfed everything the Akonian shipyards produced using far superior technology. What an enormous effort! It was the physical expression of the indomitable will, the determination of the hundreds of thousands of people who must have worked on its construction. But where had that determination come from? Hevror could only speculate, and the answers eluded him like the haze-shrouded horizon of the outer deck.

  The Akonian continued to fly in circle
s. The toy-size figures beneath him were now gesticulating, pointing in the direction of the stern with frantic movements. They were afraid that he had lost himself in the rapture of flight and was now flying in circles without a thought for his actual mission.

  "Hevror!" he heard Solina's voice call from his suit's acoustic field. "By all the stinking glowfish of Shaghomin, what are you doing up there?"

  Hevror was surprised that their comm units were functioning within the ark. He turned his comm unit off without replying. They weren't flyers and wouldn't understand. Hevror needed all the altitude he could get, because altitude meant distance and speed.

  He spiraled further upward until his wings almost scratched the underside of the sky. As he was about to go into a dive, he thought he saw a face in a space helmet.

  The Akonian circled once more, but the face was gone. Perhaps he had only imagined it. The light, whose source he could still not locate, grew slowly weaker. Night was falling on the ark.

  Hevror pulled in his arms, abruptly ending his circling movement. Then, spreading his wings again to control his angle of descent, he dove toward his goal. He was running a big risk. He didn't know if he could hold up to the stress of the speed and direction. His concern wasn't for his wings: the Akon steel and the sheeting would have tolerated many times the stress. No, Hevror was worried about his own body. His arms could break. If that happened, he would lose control over his wings and fall to his death like Malit Balak, the inventor of the wings. His death made Malit a legend, and with one catastrophe catapulted flying from lunacy to a way of life. Hevror wondered what would happen to him if he failed now. The Akonian doubted any monument would be erected to his memory.

  The desperate Lemurian woman, the Naahk, the Tenoy, Perry Rhodan and the others fell quickly behind him. Like an arrow, Hevror shot over the outer deck toward the haze, to the place where people would die if he came too late.

  The description that the Naahk had given him proved accurate. Hevror corrected his course by slightly bending his arms, a bit of precision work that had taken him long years of training.