Raiders from the Rings

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Raiders from the Rings

  Alan Edward Nourse

  Raiders from the Rings

  by Alan E. Nourse

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. The Rumor

  2. The Raid

  3. Too Many Prisoners

  4. The Black Belt

  5. The Phantom Ship

  6. The Face of the Enemy

  7. Derelict

  8. The Cleft in the Rock

  9. The Maze

  10. The Mauki’s Chant

  Epilogue

  Raiders from the Rings

  Prologue

  THE RAIDERS could hear the mauki’s chant from the moment they boarded the ship from Earth.

  It came from somewhere deep in the heart of the craft, and they paused as soon as the outer hatchway had been forced, listening in spite of themselves in the darkness of the corridor. It came to them softly at first: a clear, sweet woman’s voice, sharp as crystal in their ears. Then it rose higher, mournful and shattering, and the words became distinct in the ancient, heart-rending lament that the raiders had heard so many times before. Urgent as their mission was, they could not help but listen for a moment, feeling the wave of sadness and longing surging up in their throats.

  Beyond them the ship’s corridor was empty; there was no sound here other than the chant. Not even the throbbing of the ship’s generators was audible in the blackness. The raiders stood transfixed for a moment. Then Petro, the leader, took a deep breath and flicked on the battle lantern at his belt.

  “She’s here, all right,” he said. “She must have the whole crew listening. Let’s go.” The three men moved down the corridor, flashing their lights cautiously. Petro pointed to an overhead conduit. “Jack, that must be the main power cable. Follow it down to the generators, and wait for the word. Tiny, you come with me. And be careful. We can’t assume that everybody’s listening to the woman.”

  Silently they moved along to a corridor crossing, then ducked down a ladder into a storage hold. It had been ridiculously simple to break into this huge, clumsy ship from Earth. From the first fleeting contact a week before, the raiders had been stalking it, watching with contempt as it moved ponderously on its way through the Asteroid Belt, unaware that it had even been spotted. Finally it moved into the shadow of a huge chunk of asteroid debris and waited, obviously depending on its radar screens to pick up any approaching vessel. With the clumsiness so typical of Earthborn men in space, the crew of the Earth ship had overlooked the fact that the asteroid they were using for concealment was blinding them completely on one side.

  It was then that the Spacer ship had moved in on its prey. Now the raiders were aboard, and the mauki was doing her part. Petro and Tiny worked their way through the pitch-black holds into the galley and down toward the brig area. They were big, powerful men but they moved like jungle cats in the darkness. Not once did they encounter one of the Earth crewmen. When they finally approached the brightly lighted mess hall just above the brig area, they saw the reason why.

  The crew were listening to the mauki. The mess hall was crowded with men; still others were jamming the approach corridors and ladders down to the woman’s cell. Some smoked, some munched slowly on the remnants of dinner, shifting to new positions for comfort, but all of them were listening intently to the haunting measures of the chant, like men in a dream from which they could not escape.

  In her tiny cell in the brig, the mauki stood gripping the bars, a tall, straight, proud woman, filling her lungs and throwing her head back as she sang.

  Entranced, her captors had become captives, straining to hear her, drawn from all quarters of the ship, leaving their work to come closer as the chant struck home. Petro winked at his companion, and ducked down a side corridor leading to the brig area. “She’s got them hooked, all right,” he said. “The child must be in there with her. Got the cutting torch ready?”

  “Yes. But I don’t see the kid.”

  Petro clicked on a handset. “Ready, Jack?”

  “All set.”

  “Then let it blow.”

  Abruptly, the power went off, plunging the mess hall into darkness. The same instant, the mauki stopped her singing, and the crewmen’s dream turned into a nightmare. Petro and Tiny dashed across into the brig, remembering landmarks, and dodged down the corridor into the cell block. A flick of Petro’s light showed a dozen barred cubicles. On the deck above shouts were rising. Men tripped over each other in alarm, and someone was yelping for battle lanterns. Petro searched the cells in the dim lantern light. “Mauki?”

  “Yes, yes!” the woman said in the darkness. “Hurry.”

  A cutting torch flared, and sparks flew up as the bars yielded to intense heat. Tiny held a tangle-gun in his hand, firing steadily as crewmen began tumbling down the ladder into the brig.

  Petro felt the woman’s hand in his. “Quickly,” she said. “There’s another way out to the main corridor.

  Your torch can cut the lock.”

  “Where’s the child?” Petro asked.

  “The child is dead. They jettisoned him without a suit.”

  A growl rose in Petro’s throat. He whistled for Tiny and followed the woman back along the row of cells. As crewmen stumbled and cursed in the darkness, the raiders burst through into the main corridor and through the holds and storage bins toward the exit hatch, with Tiny holding the rear as Petro and the woman plunged ahead. Panic reigned in the quarters below; crewmen were fighting each other as the ship’s officers roared helplessly for order. Petro found Jack waiting for them at the exit. The raiders were scrambling across into their own fleet space craft while the Earth crew was still floundering. As he slammed the airlock shut, Petro saw that the woman was still clutching in her arms the empty hood and pressure suit of a five-year-old child.

  Moments later, the raider craft shot away from the hull of the Earth ship, sliding back into the blackness behind the asteroid. “All right,” Petro said grimly. “Battle stations.” The tiny ship turned its six missile tubes to face the Earth ship. “Ready with one and two.” The mauki had been huddled in the corner of the cabin, sobbing. Now she looked up, tears still streaking her face. “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do?” Petro said harshly. “They’re butchers. Kidnapping you is one thing. Murdering a five-year-old child is something else. Well, they haven’t even got their battle lights on yet. We’ll gut them.”

  The woman was on her feet. “No, please! Let them go back home.”

  “So they can murder more of our children?”

  “You don’t understand. They were afraid of him.”

  “Of a five-year-old?”

  “Yes, they were afraid—until they heard me sing.”

  Petro stared at her, hesitating, while Jack and Tiny waited for the order. “Please,” the woman said, “let them go home.”

  Petro shrugged and turned away, striking his fist viciously in his palm. “It’s idiocy. We have them helpless.”

  “And if we killed them, we would be no better than they,” the woman said quietly. “Is that what you want? If there is ever to be an end to this war, someone has to rise above it sometime.” Petro and his men stared at one another. Then Petro sighed. “All right,” he said. “Close the tubes.

  Head back to Central, while I try to think of something to tell the Council. And make it fast.” Tiny and Jack set the course. Slowly the ship eased back and away, then lost itself in the blackness of space, moving out toward the heart of the Asteroid Belt. Hours later, with generators repaired and power restored, the hulking Earth ship sneaked out of its hiding place, scanning the area for ambush, and began its long, ponderous orbit back toward Earth.

  Th
e Earth ship knew, of course, what the raiders could have done. Every man in the crew knew that, from the captain down, and no one could understand why they had been allowed to escape. Yet in their minds the haunting chant of the captive woman still echoed; they could still hear her song of longing and loneliness. Back on Earth they would remember those words, and talk about that song for years to come.

  And that was what the mauki wanted.

  1. The Rumor

  IT WAS not really any great desire to display his skill as a pilot that led Ben Trefon to pancake his little four-seater down for a crazy pinwheel landing on the Martian desert that late afternoon in the spring. He certainly hadn’t planned it that way, and the fact that he nearly dumped the little space craft into the Great Rift before he finally got it landed on the red desert sand didn’t mean that he was particularly reckless most times. Of course, he didn’t know that half the Central Council was watching his landing from his father’s front terrace, and it was fairly common knowledge that a Spacer didn’t stay alive very long if he wasn’t a little reckless once in a while. As far as Ben Trefon was concerned, the near-disaster was mostly his father’s fault for recalling him home to Mars so suddenly, without warning or explanation, when he knew that other more exciting things were afoot.

  As a matter of fact, at the age of eighteen Ben Trefon was a highly expert space pilot. From his fifth birthday on he had been familiar with the feel of space ship controls. He had handled the whole range of Spacer ships, from the tiniest one-man scooters to the great cargo ships orbiting home from the raids on Earth. He had learned the principles of inertia of motion and inertia of rest almost before he learned his ABC’s, and the laws of gravity and null-gravity seemed more natural than addition and subtraction.

  When he had later come up against the theory of interplanetary navigation, astrophysics, landing maneuvers and raiding techniques at the Spacer Academy on Asteroid Central, he had brought with him a dozen years of experience in practical, seat-of-the-pants space flying.

  But things seemed to conspire against Ben Trefon ever since his father’s message came through to him on Asteroid Central forty-eight hours before. The forthcoming raid was Ben’s first as a full-fledged participant, and the briefings and instructions had gone on all through the night. For days the excitement had been mounting until the whole raiding crew was running on raw nerve and tension… and then Dad’s message, like a dash of ice-cold water in his face: RETURN TO MARS AT ONCE. URGENT THAT I SEE YOU BEFORE THE RAID. REPEAT, URGENT.

  That in itself was unnerving. Dad didn’t go in for heavy drama. He knew as well as any Spacer the tension that built up before a major raid on Earth. He would never have sent a summons like that unless something were drastically wrong. That knowledge alone worried Ben all the way home and affected his judgment when he decided to make a powered landing on the Martian desert without the aid of his ship’s null-gravity units.

  He knew that he had trapped himself the moment he swung the little ship into its first graceful braking arc through the tenuous outer layers of the Martian atmosphere. He could have backed out and used the null-grav units in the next pass but with typical Trefon stubbornness, he decided to bull it through, and that was his real mistake. As he watched the surface of the red planet skimming by below him, he realized that he needed one more hand and one more foot than he had to keep his ship under control. He spotted his landing target, the great camouflaged patchwork of the House of Trefon resting on a low plateau near the equator on the edge of the Great Rift, and things looked all right until his third braking arc when the massive north-moving jet stream caught the little ship and carried it fifteen degrees off course. He was still farther off course as the ship swept around over the dark side of Mars; on the next pass the atmosphere was thicker and Ben’s attempt to compensate with more and more torque from the ship’s side jets made control all the harder.

  By the time he came into his final arc for landing, he was riding the little craft like a bucking bronco, trying to prevent a side-slip, with his approach speed twice too fast and the long, deep canyon of the Rift yawning larger and larger ahead of him. The ship rolled crazily as Ben fought the controls; then, in desperation, he slammed on the forward braking jet and said a quick prayer. His body strained at the safety belt as force slammed against force and the tiny ship jerked as if it had struck a stone wall. Then its nose dropped suddenly and the ground rushed up at him. One landing skid struck the edge of the Rift; in graceful slow motion the ship did an end-over-end pirouette in the air and bounced on its belly three times before coming to a stop in a cloud of red desert sand.

  Ben sat for a moment or two, gathering his wits and catching his breath as the dust settled. He could see the shiny plastic bubble of his father’s house on the dunes above him. Already a crash siren was wailing. An emergency sand-cat rolled down the hill toward him from the house, with a second following in its tracks. By the time Ben climbed out of the cockpit, feeling very foolish, the sand-cats reached him.

  He waved to the ground crew and jumped down onto the sand. The plastic lid of the first sand-cat flew up, and Elmo Peterson, his father’s chief mechanic, glared down at Ben from the controls. “Crazy kid!” he bellowed. “What were you trying to do, land that thing on its back?”

  “The jet stream caught me,” Ben said defensively, climbing into the sand-cat.

  “Well, what did you expect?” Peterson was a big man, with a shock of snow-white hair like most Spacer men. “You never heard of null-gravity, I suppose? Your dad nearly swallowed his tongue.”

  “Count on him to be watching,” Ben said sourly. “What does he want me for, anyway?” Peterson ignored the question for a moment as he mustered the ground crew to haul Ben’s ship—on its bent landing skids—up to the hangar. Then he turned the sand-cat around on its caterpillar tracks and headed toward the house again. “Right now he may just want to take a belt to you,” he answered Ben finally. “He wasn’t the only one watching that little performance.” A moment later Ben saw what the big man meant. The House of Trefon, like all Spacer homes built on Mars or the major asteroids, was artfully concealed from detection from above. But as the sand-cat ground up the hill toward the bubble-enclosed buildings, Ben could see that the hangar area was filled with private space craft. A dozen small ships were here, old and new, with the ground crew working frantically to service them. Some of them Ben recognized at once: there was old Mitsuki Mikuta’s tiny private ship up against the hangar wall; Dan O’Brien’s flambuoyant yellow craft was being polished down by three of the ground crew, and across the hangar he could see Roger Petro’s new black-and-white family cruiser.

  Ben stared at Peterson. “Is the whole Council here?”

  “Pretty near it,” Peterson said. “And the rest will be here before long.”

  “But why? What’s going on?”

  Peterson shrugged. “Ask your dad. They don’t ask my permission for a Council meeting.” Ben fought down his rising alarm, but it wouldn’t work. “You must have heard something,” he pleaded.

  “This isn’t going to stall the raid, is it? I mean, they aren’t going to call it off for some reason?” Peterson hauled the sand-cat in through the airlock of the plastic bubble, and snapped the motor off.

  “Look,” he said patiently. “Just ask your dad, huh? I’ve got a hunch he’s looking for you.”

  “I suppose,” Ben said gloomily, climbing down to the hangar floor. “Well, thanks for the lift.”

  “Anytime,” Peterson said. “And Ben, if you need some liniment for your backside later on, I think I can find some in the shop.”

  Ben grinned and started up the ramp that led into the house. Strong and silent, that was Elmo Peterson.

  But this time, somehow, Elmo’s silence had an ominous ring to it. It was no accident that the Spacer Council was convening on the eve of a major Earth raid. Ben Trefon was certain of that. And if he had suspected trouble when his father’s summons came, he was sure of it now.

  The House o
f Trefon on Mars was not large, as Spacer houses go. You could find a dozen larger houses scattered here and there across the surface of Mars, or on Juno or Ceres, on Ganymede and Europa of Jupiter, or even on Titan and Japetus of Saturn, if you knew where to look for them. Probably no more than a dozen Spacer families were ever living in the House of Trefon at any one time… and yet this house, like all large Spacer houses, was a buzzing community in itself, with its own warehouses and storerooms, its own schools, its own laboratories and its own fabricating plants. And like other Spacer dwellings, Ben Trefon thought, it had an uncanny air of impermanence about it, as though it had been thrown together willy-nilly, a piece at a time, and might suddenly vanish again overnight in just as haphazard a fashion as it was built.

  Partly, of course, the architecture of the place led to this feeling: the tall, spidery arches, the vast expanses of the dome-ceilinged rooms, the shimmering movement of the plastic sheet walls. Spacers had enough of tight quarters and enclosed spaces in their ships; in their houses they wanted space, and freedom and long vistas. But even more important, the houses reflected the people who lived in them. No Spacer, once he was out of his childhood classrooms, ever seemed to stay in one place very long at a time. Spacers laughed with open scorn at the crowded, hive-like cities of the Earthbound people, and really felt completely at home only in the cabins of their roving ships, moving at will through the length and breadth of the solar system, through the familiar blackness and the sweeping distances of interplanetary space.

  Yet Ben Trefon now felt a surge of pleasure and contentment as he walked up the ramp and into the great receiving hall of his father’s house. He sniffed at the familiar tinge of ozone in the artificial atmosphere and listened to the soft, solid thump of his feet on the red sandstone flagstones as he crossed through to the private wings of the house. He was a small, wiry youth with a spring in his step and the first hint of premature gray in his hair. With the rich oxygen ratio in the house his cheeks were pinker than usual, and he felt the usual exhilaration in spite of the worry that was nagging at his mind.