Return to the Stars cotsk-2

by Edmond Hamilton

  Harn Horva was busy explaining to Lianna.

  "Our regular radar is picking up only the normal blips associated with drift. But the hot-spot scanners are getting some high-energy emissions that are not all typical of drift." His face was grim, his voice driving on to a harsh conclusion. "I'm afraid we'll have to assume that there are ships lying up in there, using the drift as a screen."

  "Ambush?" asked Lianna, her own voice perfectly steady. And Gordon's heart jumped and began to pound. "I don't see how that could be possible, Captain. I know that you've been following the tactical evasion course required by security regulations, which means that you yourself have been improvising the coordinates at random intervals. How could anyone plan an ambush without knowing our course?"

  "I could postulate a traitor," said Harn Horva, "but I think it highly unlikely. I would guess instead that telepaths are being used." His voice became even harsher. "Narath Teyn has the pick of them on his side."

  He turned to Korkhann. "Sir, I would appreciate your assistance."

  "You wish to know if there are indeed ships there," Korkhann said, and nodded. "As you say, Narath Teyn has the pick, and my race is not among them. Still, I'll do my best."

  He moved a little apart and stood quietly, his yellow eyes going strange and unfocused. Everyone was silent, waiting. The generators throbbed and thundered.

  Vagrant blips sparked and were gone on the hot-spot screens. Gordon's mouth was dry and his chest felt tight, and the rest of him was sweating.

  At last Korkhann said, "There are ships. Narath Teyn's."

  "What else?" asked Lianna. "What did you hear?"

  "Minds. Human, nonhuman, a babble of minds on the edge of battle." His slim clawed fingers opened in a gesture of frustration. "I could not read them clearly, but I think... I think. Highness, they are waiting not to capture, but to kill."

  4

  Instantly there was an outcry in the bridge room, of anger and shock. Harn Horva quelled it with one sharp order.

  "Quiet! We have no time for that." He turned again to the screens and studied them, his body taut as a drawn bow. Gordon looked at Lianna. Whatever she felt inside, she was showing nothing to the men but cool self-possession. Gordon began really to be afraid.

  "Can't you message Fomalhaut for help?" he asked.

  "Too far away. They couldn't possibly get here in time, and in any case our friends ahead there in the drift would attack instantly if they intercepted such a message. Which of course they would."

  Harn Horva straightened, the lines deep at the corners of his mouth. "I believe our only hope is to turn and run for it. With your permission, Highness..."

  "No," said Lianna, unexpectedly.

  Gordon stared at her. So did the captain. She smiled, briefly and without humor.

  "There's no need to spare me, Harn Horva, though I thank you for the intent. I know as well as you do that we might outrun their ships, but not their missiles. And the moment we change course, showing that we're aware of the ambush, we'd have a cloud of missiles after us."

  Harn Horva began talking fiercely about evasive action and missile-destroyer batteries, but Lianna was already beside the communications technician.

  "I will speak to the Royal ComCenter at Fomalhaut. Make it a normal transmission."

  "Highness!" said the Captain desperately. "They'll intercept."

  "I want them to," said Lianna, and Gordon was struck by the look in her eyes. He started to speak but Korkhann forestalled him, his feathers ruffled with emotion.

  "Your plan is a bold one, Highness, and sometimes boldness pays. But I urge you to think very carefully before you commit yourself."

  "And all of you as well. I understand that, Korkhann. I have thought. And I can see no other way." Looking at them all, she explained. "I will message Fomalhaut that I am going on to visit my cousin Narath Teyn at Marral, for an important conference. Then I propose to do exactly that."

  For a moment there was a stunned silence. Then Gordon said, "What?"

  Lianna continued as though she had not heard him. "You see what this will do. If it's known that I'm heading for Marral, and anything happens to me on the way, my cousin would certainly get the blame. At the very least it would rouse enough feeling against him so that his hopes of succeeding me would be pretty well ruined. Which stalemates our friends there in the drift. Narath Teyn won't dare let me be killed under circumstances that would shatter all his plans."

  "That's all very fine," said Gordon, "but what happens after you get there? You know the man wants to get rid of you, and you're putting yourself squarely in his hands." He was close to Lianna now, intent only on her and quite aware of the frozen stillness around him. "No. The captain's idea is better. The chance of escaping may be small but it is a chance. This way..."

  Lianna's eyes were very wide, very cool, very gray. She smiled, a small curving of the mouth. "I thank you for your concern, John Gordon. I have considered all the objections, and this is my decision." She turned to the technician. "Fomalhaut, please."

  The technician looked uneasily at Harn Horva, who made a helpless gesture and said, "Do as Her Highness wishes." Neither he nor anyone else appeared to notice the coloring of Gordon's face, which was first red and then white. In fact, it was as though Gordon had suddenly become invisible.

  Gordon moved forward a step, without quite realizing it Korkhann's fingers closed tightly on his arm, and then more tightly, the sharp talons digging just a little. Gordon stiffened and then forced himself to relax and stand easily. He watched the screens while Lianna made her transmission to Fomalhaut. Nothing happened. The dark drift ahead remained quiescent, concerned with its own cold and ancient affairs which had nothing to do with humanity. The thought crossed his mind that Korkhann might have invented the lurking ships and the death-wish.

  "But see here," whispered Korkhann's voice beside him. The clawed fingers pointed to the hot-spot screens and the vagrant sparks that glittered there. "Each spark is a ship's generator. The drift moves. Nothing is ever still in space. As the drift moves, so must the ships, and there scanners can see where radar is as good as blind."

  "Korkhann," said Gordon softly, "my friend, you make me just the least small bit nervous."

  "You'll get used to it. And don't forget... I am your friend."

  Lianna finished her message, spoke briefly to the captain, and left the bridge. Gordon followed with Korkhann. Once below, Lianna said pleasantly, "Will you excuse us, Korkhann?"

  Korkhann bowed and strode away down the passage on his long thin legs. Lianna flung open the door of the lounge without waiting for Gordon to do it for her. When they were inside and the door closed again, she turned and faced him.

  "You must never," she said, "question my judgment or interfere with my orders in public."

  Gordon looked at her. "How about in private? Or are you ruler in the bedroom, too?"

  Now it was her turn to redden. "It may be hard for you to understand. You come from a different age, a different culture."

  "I do indeed. And I will tell you something. I will not give up my right to say what I think." She opened her mouth, and he raised his voice, not much, but there was a note in it that held her silent. "Furthermore, when I speak as a friend, as a man who loves you and is concerned only for your safety, I will not be publicly slapped in the face for it." His eyes were as steady as hers, and as hot. "I'm beginning to wonder, Lianna. Perhaps you'd do better with someone who isn't such a lout about protocol."

  "Please try to understand! I have obligations above and beyond my personal feelings. I have a kingdom I must worry about."

  "I do understand," Gordon said. "I once had an empire to worry about, remember? Good night."

  He left her standing. Out in the passage, in spite of his anger, he could not help smiling. He wondered how many times she'd been walked out on. Not often enough, he thought.

  He went along to his own cabin and lay awake wondering if her harebrained scheme would work, if they would be a
llowed to pass quietly on their way to Marral, wherever that might be. He half expected every minute to feel the impact of a missile that would blow the cruiser's fragments across half this sector of space. But time went by and nothing happened, and after a while he began to think about Lianna and what might lie ahead.

  When he slept at last his dreams were disturbed and sad. In all of them he lost her, sometimes in the midst of a lurid darkness where strange shapes walked, and sometimes in a vast throne room where she walked away from him, and away, and away, gliding backwards with her face toward him and her eyes on his, the cool, remote eyes of a stranger.

  The cruiser skirted the edge of the drift, altered course slightly to the southwest and continued on her way unmolested.

  The next "day," arbitrarily so-called in the ship's log, Korkhann met Gordon in the captain's mess, where he was toying with a gloomy breakfast all alone, having purposely waited until Harn Horva and the other officers would be finished. Lianna always took her breakfast in her private suite.

  "So far," said Korkhann, "the plan seems to be working."

  "Sure," said Gordon. "The victim is walking right into a trap; why shoot her on the way?"

  "It might be difficult for Narath Teyn to find a way to kill her on his own world without being accused of it."

  "Do you think so?"

  Korkhann shook his head. "No. Knowing Narath Teyn and his world, and his people, I don't think it will be difficult at all."

  They were silent for a time. Then Gordon said, "I think you'd better tell me all you can."

  They went into a lounge and Korkhann opened the map panel, where the tiny suns of Fomalhaut Kingdom glittered in the dark.

  "Here along the southwestern borders of the kingdom is a sort of badland, of rogue stars and uninhabited, uninhabitable worlds, with here and there a solar system capable of supporting life, like Krens, from whence I come. The peoples of these scattered systems are, like myself, nonhuman." He pointed out a tawny-yellow star that burned like a smoky cairngorm on the dark breast of drift-cloud. "That star is Marral, and its planet Teyn is where Narath keeps his court."

  Gordon frowned. "It seems a strange place for an heir to a throne."

  "Until recently, he was only sixth in line. He was born at Teyn. Intrigue runs somewhat in the blood, you see. His father was banished for it, some years before Lianna was born."

  "And what makes Narath Teyn so much more popular with the nonhumans than Lianna?"

  "He has lived his life among them. He thinks like them. He is more of them, indeed, than I am. Nonhumans are of all sorts and kinds, John Gordon, children of many different stars, products of the evolutionary conditions decreed by the environments of our separate worlds. Many are so alien as to be quite unacceptable not only to humans but to other nonhumans as well. Narath loves them all. He is a strange man, and I think not entirely sane."

  Korkhann closed the map panel gently and turned away, his plumage ruffling as it did when he was deeply disturbed.

  "Lianna would have done well to listen to you," he said, "and protocol be damned. But she's too brave to be sensibly fearful, and too much her father's daughter to stand for threats. She's angry now, and determined to put a stop to her cousin's activities." He shook his head. "I think she may have waited too long."

  Lianna gave him no chance to try and alter her decision. In the time that followed, while the tawny star grew from a distant spark to a flaming disc in the screens, she avoided being alone with him. He caught her looking at him with a curiously speculative expression once or twice, but apart from that her manner was correct and outwardly friendly. Only Gordon knew that between them now was a wall ten feet high. He did not try to climb it. Not yet.

  The cruiser went into deceleration and landed on the second of five planets that circled Marral. Teyn.

  Narath's world.

  The dust and the searing heat died away. In the bridge room Lianna stood with Harn Horva and Korkhann beside the visor screens that now scanned the area outside the ship. Gordon stood a little apart, trying to calm his jumping nerves.

  "They did receive your message?" Lianna said.

  "Yes, Highness. We have the acknowledgement on tape."

  "I'm not doubting your word, Captain. It's just that it seems strange..."

  It did seem strange, even to Gordon. The screens showed an empty land beyond the primitive and obviously little-used port with its shuttered building and cracked pads that could only accommodate a bare handful of ships. Away from the blast area there were open gladelike forests of very thin and graceful trees that were the color of ripe wheat and not unlike it in shape. The light was strange, a heavy gold that darkened to orange in the shadows. A breeze, unheard and unfelt, swayed the tall trees. Apart from that nothing moved.

  Lianna's mouth was set but her voice was silken. "If my cousin is unable to come and greet me, then I must go and greet him. I will have the land-car, Captain, and the guard. At once."

  The orders were given. Lianna came and stood before Gordon. "This is a state visit. You don't need to come with me."

  "I wouldn't miss it," Gordon said, and added, "Highness."

  A faint color touched her cheekbones. She nodded and went on and he went with her, down to the airlock to await the unloading of the car. Korkhann, beside him, gave him one bright oblique glance. Nothing more was said, and in a short time the car appeared.

  The guard formed ranks around Lianna, and incidentally around Gordon and Korkhann. The airlock opened. The standard-bearer shook out the banner of the White Sun on the strange-scented wind and marched them down the ramp to the car, where he fixed the standard in its socket and stood stiffly at attention as Lianna climbed in.

  The car was a longish vehicle, unobtrusively armored and equipped with concealed firing-ports. The guard was armed. All this should have made Gordon feel more at ease. It did not. There was something about the tall swaying trees, and the way the glades led the eye along their open innocence into sudden panic of confusion and honey-colored gloom. There was something about the air, its warmth like an animal's breath, and its smell of wildness. He did not trust this world. Even the sky offended him, closing him in with a shimmering metallic curve that was almost tangible, like the roof of a trap.

  The land-car sped away along a rude and unpaved track, gentling the roughness to nothing with its airfoil cushion. The land glided past, the character of it changing swiftly from flat to rolling and then to hilly, with forests thinning on the rocky knolls. The shadows seemed to deepen, as though the planet tilted toward night.

  Suddenly someone, the driver or the standard-bearer who sat beside him or one of the guards, gave a yell of alarm and all the weapons in the car clacked to the firing-ports, even before Gordon could see what had caused the outcry. Korkhann pointed to a long hill-slope ahead.

  "See over there, among the trees..."

  There were things standing in the shadowed glades, a sinuous massing of shapes completely unidentifiable to Gordon's eyes. The men in the car had fallen silent. The soft thrumbling hiss of the airfoil jets sounded very loud in the quiet, and then from the slope there came one clear cry from a silvery horn, sweet and strange, running like fox fire along the nerves.

  And at that moment the host swept toward them down the hillside.

  5

  Lianna's voice sounded close to Gordon, sharp and urgent. "Do not fire!"

  Gordon was about to protest. Korkhann nudged him and whispered, "Wait."

  The creatures poured in a lithe and sinuous flood along the slope, spreading out and around to encircle the car, their strange shapes still made indistinct by the barred shadowings of the trees. The air rang with cries, a hooting and shrilling from inhuman throats that seemed to Gordon to be full of triumph and cruel laughter. He strained his eyes. They were large creatures. They went an four feet, but softly, not like hoofed things, springing instead like great long-legged cats, and they appeared to carry riders...

  No. He could see some of them now quite clea
rly, burnished copper and ring-spotted and smoke-colored and glossy black, and his stomach gave a lurch. Not because they were hideous. They were not, and even in that moment of shock he was struck by their outlandish beauty. But they were so improbably strange. Animal and what he had taken for rider were, centaur-like, one flesh, as though a six-legged form of life had decided to walk at least partly upright, adapting head and torso and forelimbs to a shape almost human except for the angular slenderness. Their eyes were large, slanted and glowing, cat-eyes with keen intelligence behind them. Their mouths laughed, and they moved with the joy of strength and speed, their upper bodies bending like pliant reeds.

  "The Gerrn," whispered Korkhann. "The dominant race of this planet."

  They were all around the car now, which had slowed almost to a standstill. Gordon caught a glimpse of Lianna's profile, cut from white stone, looking straight ahead. The tension inside the car was rapidly becoming painful, tangible as the build-up of forces just before one small spark sets off the explosion.

  He whispered to Korkhann, "Can you get from their minds what their intentions are?"

  "No. They're telepaths too, and far more adept at it than I am. They can guard their minds totally. I couldn't even sense that they were there, before we saw them. And I think they're shielding someone else's mind as well... ah!"

  Gordon saw then that one of the Gerrn did in fact carry a rider.

  He was a young man, only a few years older than Lianna, and as light and lithe and spare as the Gerrn themselves. He was clad in a tight-fitting suit of golden russet and his brown hair fell long around his shoulders, wind-roughened and streaked by the sun. The silver horn that had sounded the one sweet cry was slung at his side. He clung to the back of a huge black-furred male, who bore him lightly to the forefront of the host. He lifted his arms and flung them wide, smiling, a handsome young man with eyes like sapphires, and his eyes seemed to Gordon to be more strange and fey than the cat-eyes of the Gerrn.