First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  Then he fell to his knees as Achron shoved him violently to one side. The nurse’s frail body jerked and shuddered as the projectiles thudded into him, but he, like the sergeant, refused to die. He lifted the table leg with which he had armed himself, brought it smashing down with all his strength onto the other’s head. The wood splintered, but enough remained for a second blow, and a third. No more were necessary. The sergeant sagged to the floor, and Achron, with a tired sigh, collapsed on top of the gross body.

  “He’s dead,” muttered Brasidus, kneeling beside his friend. “He’s dead.”

  But mourning would have to wait. Hastily he shifted Achron’s body to one side so that he could get at the sergeant’s pistol. And then he saw the face of the dead man, recognizable in spite of the blood that had trickled down it.

  It was Diomedes.

  He got to his feet, ready to use the pistol. But he did not have to. Firing left-handed, Peggy Lazenby had shot down the other mob leaders, then used the weapon to ignite the tangle of wrecked furniture and the floor itself.

  “That should hold ‘em,” she muttered. “Now lead us out of here, Doctor.”

  “But you’re wounded,” Brasidus cried, looking for telltale patches of wetness on the dark material of her clothing.

  “Just bruised. I’m wearing my bulletproof undies. But come on, you two. Hurry!”

  Chapter 23

  SUDDENLY THE SPRINKLERS came on, saturating the air of the vestibule with aqueous mist and choking, acrid steam. But this was a help to the retreating defenders, a hindrance to the mob. Frightened, the rioters drew back. They had been ready enough to charge barefooted through and over blazing wreckage; now (but too briefly) the automatic firefighting system instilled in them the fear of the unknown. An acid spray, they must have thought, or some lethal gas. When their shouts made it obvious that they were inside the créche, Heraklion and his party were already halfway along the first of the lengthy corridors.

  The Doctor, it was obvious, knew his way. Without him, Brasidus and Peggy Lazenby would have been hopelessly lost. He turned into cross alleyways without hesitation, finally led them up a ramp, at the head of which was a massive door. It was shut, of course. Heraklion cursed, wrestled with the hand wheel that obviously actuated the securing device. It refused to budge.

  Peggy Lazenby pulled out her laser pistol. Heraklion stared at her ironically. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead—if you’ve all day to play around in. But long before you’ve made even a faint impression, you’ll wish that you’d kept the charge in that weapon for something more useful.”

  The mob was closer now. They did not know the direction their quarry had taken, but they were spreading through the vast building, looting and smashing. Sooner or later some of them would stumble upon the ramp leading up to the room housing the birth machine. Sooner, thought Brasidus, rather than later. He examined the pistol that he had taken from Diomedes. It was a standard officers’ model Vulcan. One round up the spout, four remaining in the magazine. He regretted having dropped the cleaver that Terry had found for him.

  “Here they are,” announced Peggy unemotionally. She fired down the ramp, a slashing beam that scarred the paint work of the walls at the foot of the incline. There was a scream, and, shockingly, there was the rapid, vicious chatter of a machine carbine. But whoever was using it was not anxious to expose himself, and the burst buried itself harmlessly in the ceiling.

  “I thought that only your people were allowed firearms,” said Heraklion bitterly to Brasidus. Brasidus said nothing. If Diomedes, armed, had been among the mob leaders, how many of his trusted lieutenants were also involved?

  Still Heraklion wrestled with the hand wheel, and still Peggy and Brasidus, pistols ready, kept their watch for hostile activity. But everything was quiet, too quiet—until at last, from the alleyway that ran athwart the foot of the ramp, there came an odd shuffling, scraping sound. Slowly, slowly the source of it edged into view. It was a heavy shield mounted on a light trolley. Whoever had constructed it had known something about modern weaponry; a slab of concrete, torn up from a floor somewhere, was its main component. Of course, it could not withstand laser fire indefinitely, but long before it crumbled and disintegrated, the riflemen behind it would have disposed of the laser weapon and its user.

  There was a small, ragged hole roughly in the center of the slab. Brasidus nudged Peggy, drew her attention to it. She nodded. Suddenly something metallic protruded from the aperture, something that flared and sputtered as the laser beam found it. But Brasidus, at the last moment, switched his own attention from the decoy to the rim of the shield, loosed off two hasty but accurate shots at the carbine that was briefly exposed, at the hands holding it.

  Then Heraklion cried out. Under his hands the wheel had moved, was moving of its own accord. The enormously thick door was opening. The Doctor grabbed his companions, pulled them through the slowly widening gap, pushed them clear of the narrow entrance as a deadly hail of bullets splattered around it. Then he turned on the colleague who had, at last, admitted them. “Shut it! At once!” And, as the man obeyed, he demanded coldly. “You were a long time opening up. Why?”

  “We had to be sure that it was you. We couldn’t get the closed-circuit TV working.”

  “Even on this primitive planet,” commented Peggy Lazenby, “one can find oneself at the mercy of a single fuse.”

  The little crowd of refugees, with their nervous chatter, seemed out of place in these surroundings. There was an air of mystery—of holy mystery, even—that could not be dispelled by the intrusion. Tier upon tier towered the vats, empty now, but spotlessly clean and gleaming. Mile after convoluted mile ran the piping—glittering glass, glowing plastic, bright-shining metal. Bank upon bank stood the pumps, silent now, but ready, in perfect order, awaiting the touch of a switch to carry out their functions as mechanical hearts and lungs and excretory organs.

  “There’s no place like womb,” remarked Margaret Lazenby.

  “What was that, Peggy?

  “Never mind. You’re too young to understand.” Then, crisply official, “Doctor Heraklion, what now?”

  “I . . . I don’t know, Doctor Lazenby.”

  “You’re in charge. Or are you?”

  “I . . . I suppose that I am. I’m the senior doctor present.”

  “And Brasidus is the senior Security officer present, and I’m the senior Interstellar Federation’s Survey Service officer present. And what about you, Terry? Are you the senior anything?”

  “I don’t know. But the other girls usually do what I tell them to.”

  “So we’re getting some place. But where? Where? That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.” She took two nervous strides forward, two nervous strides back. “I suppose that this glorified incubator is on the phone, Doctor Heraklion?”

  “It is, Doctor Lazenby. Unluckily the main switchboard for the créche is just off the vestibule.”

  “A pity. I was thinking that you might get through to the military. Or even to the palace itself.”

  “We tried that as soon as we were warned that the mob was heading our way. But we got no satisfaction. In fact, we gained the impression that the top military brass was having its own troubles.”

  “They could be, at that,” contributed Brasidus. “That sergeant who was leading the rioters, the one with the pistol—it was Diomedes.”

  “What!”

  Heraklion was incredulous. Margaret Lazenby was not. She said, “It makes sense, of a kind. This wouldn’t be the first time that an ambitious, comparatively junior officer has organized a coup. And I think I know what makes him tick—or made him tick. There was the lust for power, of course. But, with it, there was a very deep and very real patriotism. I’m a woman, and I had to talk to him officially. I could tell, each time, how much he hated me and feared me. No, not personally, but as a member of the opposite sex.

  “There are some men—and he was one of them—to whom a world like yours would be the ultimate paradise. Men Onl
y. There are some men to whom the stratified social system of yours—cribbed, with improvements, from the real Spartans—would seem the only possible way of running a planet.

  “But . . .

  “But, Doctor Heraklion, there are other men, such as you, who would find the monosexual, homosexual setup rather unsatisfying. And you, my good Doctor, were in a position to do something about it.”

  Heraklion smiled faintly. “It’s been going on for a very long time, Doctor Lazenby. It all started long before I was born.”

  “All right. The doctors were able to do something about it. I still don’t know how this birth machine of yours works, but I can guess. I suppose that all approved Spartans make contributions of sperm cells.”

  “That is so.”

  “And the most important contribution—correct me if I am wrong—will be the annual shipments made by the aptly named Latterhaven Venus and Latterhaven Hera. Venus and Hera were Greek goddesses, by the way, Brasidus. Women—like me, and like Terry and the other playmates. How did the ships get their names, Heraklion?”

  “We have always suspected the Latterhaveneers of a warped sense of humor.”

  “I wonder what the mob is doing?” asked somebody anxiously.

  “We’re safe enough here,” said, Heraklion curtly.

  Are we? thought Brasidus, suddenly apprehensive. Are we? It seemed to him that the floor under his bare soles had become uncomfortably warm. He shifted his stance. Yes, the floor was heating up. He looked down, saw a crack in the polished surface. Surely it had not been there before. And, if it had been, there had not been a thin wisp of smoke trickling from it.

  He was about to tell Heraklion when a device on Peggy Lazenby’s wrist—it looked like a watch but obviously was not—buzzed sharply. She raised her forearm to her face. “Doctor Lazenby here.”

  “Captain here. What the hell are you doing? Where are you?”

  “Quite safe, John. I’m holed up in the créche, in the birth-machine room.”

  “The créche is an inferno. Admiral Ajax requested my aid to evacuate the children and to restore order in the city. We’re on the way now.”

  The floor tilted, slightly but sharply. One of the vats shattered loudly and the piping dependent from it swung, clattering and tinkling, against the vessels in the tier below, breaking them. The smell of smoke was suddenly very strong.

  “Is there only one way out of this place?” demanded Peggy sharply.

  “No. There’s a hatch in the roof. Through the records room.” Heraklion told her.

  “Then that’s the way that we have to go to escape from this alleged H-bombproof shelter of yours.” Into her wrist transceiver she said, “You’ll have to pick us off the roof, John. And while you’re about it, you can send a squad of Marines down to save the firm’s books. No, I’m not joking.”

  Luckily the hatch was clear, and luckily the ladder was readily available. Through the little room they passed—the women, the surviving nurses and doctors, then, last of all, Heraklion, Peggy and Brasidus. Brasidus had almost to pull her away from the shelves of microfilmed records, and from the glass case in which was displayed the big, flat book on the cover of which, in tarnished gold, were the words, Log of Interstellar Colonization Ship DORIC. First Captain Deems Harris.

  They were on the roof then—the tilting, shuddering roof, swept by scorching eddies and black, billowing smoke. The night sky above them was alive with the noise of engines, and from below sounded, ever louder and more frightening, the roar of the fire. Cautiously Heraklion made his way down the listing surface to the low parapet. Brasidus followed him. The two men cautiously peered over, flinching back when a sudden gust of flame seared their faces, crisping their hair and eyebrows.

  Grimes had sent down a landing party. Disciplined, uniformed men and women were handling chemical fire extinguishers, others, in a chain, were passing the children out of the blazing building. And still others had set up weapons to protect the rescuers; the rattle of heavy automatic fire was loud and insistent above the other noises.

  Peggy Lazenby had joined the two men. “Intervention,” she murmured. “Armed intervention. Poor John. He’ll be in the soup over this. But what else could he do? He couldn’t let those babies burn to death . . .”

  “As we shall do,” stated Heraklion grimly, “unless your captain does something about it, and fast.” As he spoke the roof tilted another few degrees.

  But the peculiar, irregular throbbing of the inertial drive was louder now, was deafening. Directly overhead, the glare of the fire reflected from the burnished metal of her hull, Seeker dropped through the vortex of smoke and sparks. Lower she sagged, and lower, until men and women cried out in fear and ran in panic to escape from the inexorably descending pads of her vaned landing gear. Lower she sagged, and lower—and from her open main airlock the boarding ramp was suddenly extruded, the lower end of it scant millimeters only from the heaving, cracking surface of the roof. Even Brasidus knew that he was privileged to watch an exhibition of superb spacemanship.

  Down the extended ramp ran six men. Peggy Lazenby met them, cried, “This way!” and led them to the still open hatchway. And a vastly amplified voice was booming from the ship, “Board at once, please! Board at once!”

  Heraklion hustled his people into some sort of order, got them onto the gangway, the women first. He stayed with Brasidus, making sure that the evacuation proceeded in an orderly manner. Still the two men waited, although the loudspeaker was blaring, “Get a move on, there! Get a move on!”

  At last the six men and Peggy Lazenby were emerging from the hatch, she last of all. They were heavily burdened, all of them, and she, clasping it to her as tenderly as she had clasped the rescued child, carried the antique log book. “What are you waiting here for?” she demanded of Heraklion.

  He said, “We have no spaceships, but we have read books. We know of the traditions. This créche is my ship, and I shall be the last to leave.”

  “Have it your own way,” she told him.

  She and Brasidus went up the ramp after the six marines. Heraklion followed them. Just as he reached the airlock, a geyser of flame erupted from the open hatch and the once flat surface of the roof cracked and billowed and, as Seeker hastily lifted, collapsed.

  “That was my ship,” whispered the Doctor.

  “You can build another,” Peggy told him.

  “No,” he said. “No. No longer do we have any excuse not to revert to the old ways.”

  “And your old ways,” she said, “are not the old ways of Diomedes and his party. That is why he hated and feared you. But can you do it?”

  “With your help,” he said.

  “That,” she said, “is a matter for the politicians back home. But let’s get out of this damned airlock and into the ship, before we fall out. It’s a long way down.”

  Brasidus, looking at the burning building far below, shuddered and drew back hastily. It was, as she had said, a long way down.

  Chapter 24

  THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES was over, the Night of the Long Knives and the four action packed days and nights that had followed it. The power had fallen into the streets, and Admiral Ajax, warned by his own intelligence service of the scheduled assassinations of himself and his senior captains, had swooped down from the sky to pick it up. The birth machine was destroyed, the caste system had crumbled, and only the patrolling airships of the Navy kept Sparta safe from the jealous attentions of the other city-states. Cresphontes—a mere figurehead—skulked in his palace, dared make no public appearances.

  Grimes and his Seeker had played little active part in quelling the disturbances, but always the spaceship had been there, hanging ominously in the clouds, always her pinnaces had darted from one trouble spot to another, her Marines acting as ambulance men and firemen—but ambulance men and firemen backed by threatening weaponry to ensure that they carried out their tasks unmolested.

  Brasidus had rejoined his own police unit, and, to his surprise, had found th
at greater and greater power and responsibilities were being thrust upon him. But it made sense. He knew the spacemen, had worked with them—and it was obvious to all that, in the final analysis, they and the great Federation that they represented were the most effective striking force on the planet. They did not strike, they were careful not to fire a single gun or loose a single missile, but they were there, and where they had come from there were more and bigger ships with even heavier armaments.

  The universe had come to Sparta, and the Spartans, in spite of centuries of isolationist indoctrination, had accepted the fact. Racial memory, Margaret Lazenby had said, long and deep-buried recollections of the home world, of the planet where men and women lived and worked together in amity, where the womb was part of the living female body and not a complex, inorganic machine.

  And then there was the last conference in John Grimes’ day cabin aboard Seeker. The Lieutenant Commander sat behind his paper-littered desk, making a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. Beside him was Margaret Lazenby, trim and severe in uniform. In chairs facing the desk were the rotund little Admiral Ajax, the tall, saturnine Heraklion, and Brasidus. A stewardess brought coffee, and the four men and the woman sipped it appreciatively.

  Then Grimes said, “I’ve received my orders, Admiral. Somewhat garbled, as messages by psionic radio too often are, but definite enough. I have to hand over to the civil authorities and then get the hell out.” He smiled bleakly. “I’ve done enough damage already. I fear that I shall have to do plenty of explaining to my lords Commissioners.”

  “No, Commander.” Heraklion’s voice was firm, definite. “You did not do the damage. The situation, thanks to Diomedes, was already highly explosive. You were only the . . . the . . .”