Deathsport

by William Hughes

  FUTUREKILL!

  It is the year 3000. The world has been devastated by neutron war and the survivors practise peaceful co-existence in a federation of domed cities, where war is outlawed for all time.

  But Helix City has remained outside the Federation, and its political system is a totalitarian nightmare. Lord Zirpola, sadistic hereditary ruler of Helix, exercises despotic sway, punishing all opponents by sentencing them to the DEATHSPORT—a bloody gladiatorial combat where the odds are loaded and to lose is to suffer an ingeniously cruel death.

  Into the arena springs Ranger Guide Kaz Oshay, the only man with the spirit to question and the strength to defy the repressive system. Pitted against the ferocious Death Machines, he and his beautiful co-Guide, Deneer, challenge the regime . . . but can anything human succeed against such a sophisticated technology of slaughter?

  DEATHSPORT is now a major movie starring

  David Carradine and Claudia Jennings

  Directed by Henry Suso and Allan Arkush

  Produced by Roger Corman

  Screenplay by Henry Suso and Donald Stewart

  From a story by Francis Doel

  A New World Production

  PLAY DEADLY!

  Deneer was faster in her reactions. She swooped in with a terrible war cry. Her shrieking Whistler flashed in the sunlight and the man’s head fell from his shoulders in the same manner that the two who had been vanquished by Kaz Oshay had done. But the enemy Death Machine was spinning out of control, and in a great screaming flash of anti-matter, it dissolved into an empty nothingness, shattered by Deneer’s blaster pod into its constituent atoms . . .

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sphere Books Ltd, 1978

  Novelisation copyright © Sphere Books Ltd 1978

  Based on a screenplay by Henry Suso and Donald Stewart

  Published by arrangement with New World Productions Inc.

  TRADE MARK

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Hunt Barnard Printing Ltd.,

  Aylesbury, Bucks.

  “The Greatest Miracle is Unity”

  Yogi Bhajan.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Long ago, in the times of great darkness that fell between the first millennium and the new millennium that surrounds us today, the twin planets of plenty that we call home, the Earth and the Moon, were very different places from the surroundings we now know. There is little fact, but much legend, known of those times, though the antiquated dating system we still use was carried on during this period and the memories of stories handed down from generation to generation recount the folk-memories of the great tragedy that once overtook our world, plunging it into the dark age of which I now write.

  This much is known to us; that in the first millennium of plenty, man took his dating from the Birth and Death of one of his own number, believed to be the son of that mystical force we know as the consciousness. For some two thousand years from the death of this mystic, man sought to attain greater and greater heights of prowess and learning, even creating a technology that could reach out beyond our own universe in huge fuel-powered machines, so that man could carry his seed to the ends of time and space.

  This may seem a strange concept in our world, where we know that the power of the mind can accomplish the journey for us and tell us all we need to satisfy our curiosity without such mechanical endeavour and the great cost it would bring to us; but these were indeed primitive and physical times for our ancestors.

  But, like now, the Earth was rich and green and giving of plenty to the peoples and animals that roamed upon it. The moon was smaller, barren and without life as it is today. Its size was augmented only by the fall-out of material that came with the coming of the great tragedy of the people of the earth, a fall-out which gave the life forces to this barren rock and, the hand of man not being there to interfere, allowed life to evolve and grow and an atmosphere to assert itself over the face of our twin planet.

  For while man was striving ever upwards for knowledge and enlightenment, there was also a darker side of his nature made manifest in his strivings, strivings that were luring him all the time on the downward path that led almost to his own destruction.

  His darkest sin was that of pride, a force which came upon him in collectivity down the centuries. He formed societies which tried to rival one another in strength and power and that was the start of his undoing. For the only settlement between any one or group of these states and another was that out-moded concept that the history computers tell us was called “war”, and all through the history of this primitive world, wars raged unabated, each side trying to produce weapons that would stun their enemies into a total submission to their power. And as expertise and learning increased, so too did the weapons and their destructive powers, until the weapons became so powerful that they controlled man instead of he controlling them.

  As near as it is now possible to date it, the great holocaust came in the twenty-first century after the death of the great mystic of the consciousness. It was another war, one so dreadful that the whole of the earth was laid waste and unproductive and, had it not been for the tiny gleam of foresight in the minds of a few of the leaders, mankind might have died along with the world and we would not have been here to tell this story.

  Those who had the intelligence to see that the devastation would be beyond imagining gave wealth and authority to their technicians for the building of great cities, protected by domes of metal from the outer air, the main body of them hewed from the solid rock beneath, wherein whole communities might be housed, complete with all their social systems and professional needs to perpetuate their society, so that many people could survive the poisoning that was being spread across the planet.

  By the time this last great war ended, there were none who could remember why it had been fought and the world was now a place of poisoned desert and polluted water as the globe slid back into a new dark age that was to last for nearly a thousand years.

  It is more by a miracle than by his own endeavours that man has survived and lived on into our own age of renewed plenty and the peace that only the true enlightenment of the consciousness can bring.

  For a century or more after the devastation, the survivors and then their children and their children’s children dared not venture forth beyond their protective domes, living entirely off the stores of fuel and food that their leadership had provided in their wisdom, their main work being to tend the great breeding tanks that kept their food supplies going. The memory of much of the technology they had previously achieved was slowly forgotten and with it the means of making weapons for further escalations of the destruction they had wrought upon themselves.

  Outside these domes, in the great deserts that had been formed, the Flash Winds howled, bringing their great clouds of radio-active destruction with them, clouds that meant certain death for any who stood in their path.

  But, in time, the memory of death died a little and man ventured forth to look, at least, at the new world his triumphs of technology had created for him and when he did so, the Stateman of the great Cities found that he was, after all, not alone upon the earth. Others, too, had survived: two distinct groups of descendants from man’s ancestors. And to both groups, Statemen gave the name of “Mutants”.

  There were two sides to the coin of mutation, just as there had been always two sides to man’s own nature. The largest of these groups were animal-like pr
imitives, scavengers who survived by attacking and overcoming anything still living that they could find—others of their number included, if there was no other food to be had. They had developed a saliva that poisoned all who came into contact with it and two rows of sharp razor-like teeth so that they could poison and eat even living creatures when they fell upon them.

  But there was another race also. These were the descendants of those we know to have been called the Combat Rangers in the last great war. Men and women of great individual courage who had fought that war in the open while the main body of mankind hid behind its technology of destruction. They too had developed and evolved in ways that were different from their cousins in the cities. Each was as strong as any three men, with all their powers and perceptions heightened. Their minds had found the key to the consciousness and while each one ranged for most of his life on the special horses they bred across the wastelands and deserts, they would sometimes come together in the temporary joining or union to fight their enemies, only in defence of themselves, I must hasten to add, and to propogate their kind.

  While, in common with all mankind, they had the self-powering weapons that the old technology had developed, which were known as anti-matter blasters, their main means of defence was a sword known as a Whistler, after the sound it made as it sped through the air, cleaving its way, unerring, to its target.

  To these strange men and women, who were much more than ordinary mortals, their minds joined in their enclosed order in which each was whole and free yet still part of a greater whole, the Statemen of the Cities gave the name of Range Guides.

  For most of their time, they remained entirely alone, roving free across the devastated face of the planet, but, in special circumstances, they would band together for a limited period, splitting again only when their task of defence or procreation was completed. Even their children remained with their mothers only as long as youth kept them in inexperience. Once come of age, a Range Guide was his or her own master and the mother became merely another of their kind, to be joined with or parted from whenever necessary.

  While they would kill the barbaric and primitive Mutants whenever they were seen, for a sighting meant danger and an attack, over the centuries an uneasy co-operation grew up between them and the Statemen, as the latter came to trust them and their powers.

  In the nine hundred years that followed the great devastation, a sort of trade sprang up between many of the Cities, where caravans of Statemen, guarded by the Guides who were available and agreeable, would journey from City to City to make contact and trade. For not only were these strange beings able to protect the Statemen caravans from the Mutants, they were also able to warn of the coming of the Flash Winds, smelling them on the light breezes hours ahead of their coming and warning the Statemen to take shelter from them.

  And so it came to pass in the ninth century of the dark ages of the great devastation that there came one of the Guides who held within him the seeds of the great truth and renewal that have led to our world. A special man whose descendants led the first faltering footsteps of the new mankind up to its present plateau, where the Guide descendants and the descendants of the Statemen are merged into one strong people within the protection of the consciousness. He came at a time of great danger, the greatest danger that mankind had faced since the holocaust, and mankind had waited almost too long for his coming. This is his legend, his story—the tale of Kaz Oshay, son of Oshay, Father of the worlds.

  The vast complex of Helix City was similar to many of the other great domed places of protection that had survived the holocaust. Only in the forging of relationships with the other Cities had it remained aloof. True, its caravans traded with them in a normal and peaceful manner, but it had held itself apart from the Federation that had been agreed between the other Cities, that Federation which had agreed to outlaw the concept of war for all time.

  Physically, it resembled the others, with its vast metal dome protecting it from the outside atmosphere, the small domes of its extensions grouped around it on the plain. The main part of the City was made of the old metals, lining the solid rock from which the shape of it had been cut, the light and air provided by the great humming power plants that worked from the stores of liquid fuel that had been provided by the foresight of its founders.

  But now, after nine hundred years, the stocks of fuel were running dangerously low and the Lord Zirpola, the hereditary ruler of Helix needed all he could conserve for the coming to fruition of his great plan.

  He marched now down a wide corridor in one of the lower levels of the City, the only sound the swishing of his great emerald cloak of office on the metal floor as he walked, and the ringing of the metal hobnails in his boots and those of his two companions as they went forward in step with a military precision. They turned a corner and entered another wide and deserted corridor, as brightly lit as the last had been. It ended some way in the distance in a huge metal door, closed now and with a large barring wheel at its centre, a secret light-code panel at its side—one of the great security doors that the Lord Zirpola had had fitted to seal off his secrets from the eyes of most of his subjects.

  Feeling the pain that was now almost a constant companion streaking through his head once more, Zirpola angrily shook the mane of white hair that tumbled down over the back of his cloak and his pale, watery blue but compelling eyes were screwed up painfully at the excess brightness that assailed them from the corridor lights.

  More and more, these days, were his senses a source of pain and distress to him, but this served only to fuel the urgency of his cruel ambitions, for he had never been a kindly man or a benevolent ruler, but always fuelled by hatred and suspicion of his fellow man. Now he was close to the fulfilment of his cherished and well-guarded plans and he could only hope that the weaknesses of his body were not going to dash the cup of triumph from his lips.

  His face was etched with lines of strain and tiredness well beyond his fifty years of life, the skin wrinkled and pasty, glistening in the light from a cold sweat of pain that seemed to ooze from the pores of his oily skin. The thin prominent blade of his nose was his most imposing feature and in his youth it had given him that special look of distinction that he felt all rulers required, but its strength now merely served to emphasise the suffering that was mirrored in his other features.

  He moved forward quickly, anxiously, as if the pain was driving him to even greater speed. His moods had become more and more mercurial of late and this sudden thrust forward came as no surprise to the men at his side, who lengthened their stride to compete with his own.

  Both of them were taller than the Lord Zirpola and stood more erect, walking with the ease of Hunters. Between the two, one stood even taller and broader than the other. Both wore the tight metallic fabric suits that singled them out as Obedience Enforcers, the cruel band who policed the City and did the Lord Zirpola’s bidding. The shorter of the pair was dressed in the conventional black, but with the silver flashes on his arm that designated a high seniority of rank. This was Polna, the man who ran the day-to-day affairs of the Enforcers.

  The other man, Ankar Moor, was the Head of the Enforcers and second in power in the City to the Lord Zirpola himself. His attire was made entirely of silver garments. He was taller and broader than any other man in the City and none knew from whence he had come. There were those who said that he had come from another City far away that bred such men, but there were others that whispered that he was a man who had deserted the Guides for a life of protection.

  Whichever was the right answer, there was a great visible mystery about him. For Ankar Moor’s head was completely encased in a great and frightening mask of leather, with just two slits for his burning black eyes and another where a normal man would have his mouth. Again rumour was the only guide, but it was said that Ankar Moor’s face had been destroyed in a great battle and was too frightening to look upon. Whatever was the answer, the man was possessed of a great intelligence and power.

  As t
hey strode towards the closed door, Ankar Moor spoke to his master, his rasping voice seeming to come through the slit from a depth greater than his own body, perhaps from the bowels of the earth itself:

  “The plans move forward, My Lord. I will order the beginning of the training on the machines this afternoon.”

  Zirpola tore himself away from the battle against the pain in his head and turned his watery blue eyes on his chief henchman:

  “They must all be trained quickly.”

  His voice was as deep and powerful as the other man’s, giving no indication of the pain he was feeling.

  Not for a second did the long strides of the three men falter as their conversation continued:

  “I have given the orders that will take all my men away from their regular duties to make them available for their training. Is that acceptable to you, My Lord?”

  It took a great effort for Ankar Moor to show deference to the other man in this way, for, in his heart of hearts, Ankar Moor deferred to no man; but his own ambitions made him wary for the moment.

  “Most certainly it pleases me—we cannot afford to lose a single day. But tell me, how long do you estimate that it will take to train them to the proficiency that will be demanded of them?”

  Polna, who was a simple man, and more pessimistic about the abilities of the clods that formed the main part of the force than was his superior, kept his silence as Ankar Moor boasted:

  “I will make my men ride in one day. They will be expert in the use of the machines in one month.”

  Zirpola gave a crooked smile that was totally lacking in warmth and humour. He put his head on one side, a sign of threat to those who knew his habits:

  “I will hold you to that claim, Ankar Moor.”

  “You will not be disappointed, My Lord.”

  They marched the final distance in silence and it was then that chance struck, underlining the urgency of Zirpola’s plans. The lights, until then so bright and steady, flickered for a moment, then died, throwing them and the whole City around them into total darkness. All three men stopped abruptly in their tracks.