Raiders From the Rings

by Alan E Nourse

  But he knew that there was no sense arguing the question now. He didn’t really care if his prisoners thought he was descended from traitors — why should he care what they thought? They were prisoners of war now, and nothing more, and he had other things more important to worry about.

  He checked the controls, rechecked the pre-calculated orbit to be sure the ship was following precisely, and then fought down a yawn. “Look,” he said to Tom, “I haven’t slept for two days. The ship is on automatic so it won’t require checking for a while. I’m going to try to rest, and you two would be smart to get some sleep too. We may not have much chance when we get where we’re going.”

  He threw himself down on an acceleration cot, feeling the vibration of the ship’s engines throbbing through his body as the ship moved out in the great arc that would take him to Mars and home. His body ached, and he desperately wanted to sleep, but rest was not easy. He could let his body sag and relax, but he could not throw off the vast weight of apprehension that lay on his mind, plaguing him as he thought of his father’s last words to him, and of the House of Trefon on the desert plateau above the Great Rift on Mars.

  He had to get warning there in time. Anything else was unthinkable. He thought of the long history of the House of Trefon, of the pride and honor of his grandfather and his father in that house and of the unselfish leadership they had provided the Spacer clan. If the House of Trefon were to fall to an invading fleet from Earth, far more would be lost than a few lives and a house on the Martian desert….

  He forced the thought out of his mind angrily, and thought instead of the happy days he had spent in his father’s house, the long exploratory trips they used to take down into the Rift, or north to the dessicated ruins of the Martian cities, the silent monuments of the race that had once lived on that planet before its water had gone, so very different from human beings and yet so strangely similar, from the evidence they had left behind them. As a race the Martians had perished, unable to escape a dying planet and unable to survive upon it. And eons later, another race of creatures on the blue-green planet closer to the sun had been threatened by extinction by their own hands and had survived only because a few of them had discovered a larger challenge than their own ambitions.

  Ben thought of Joyce Barron’s scornful words, and again anger rose in his mind. He knew the true story of the Spacers’ exile, of course. Every Spacer did. It was recorded in the log books of the earliest space garrisons that existed before the Great War. Parts of it had been pieced together from official documents; much had been handed down from father to son. Ben had heard the story time and again in the songs and ballads of the maukis, and that more than anything had driven it into the very fiber of his mind, for the mournful chants of the maukis were one of the most powerful forces that bound all Spacers together in their loneliness.

  So Ben Trefon knew that there had been a time when Earth had been divided against itself in a bitter war. For more than a century the two greatest nations on Earth had pitted themselves against each other, building horrible weapons and mounting massive artillery against the day when nuclear war would come. Outposts in space had become an important part of that race for armament, as the great powers competed to mount manned satellites in orbit around the Earth, armed with weapons powerful enough to smash the planet into fragments. Earth’s moon was explored and turned into a fortress; Mars and Venus were probed and even the asteroids were explored and exploited for the radioactive riches they contained.

  A nuclear war, sooner or later, had seemed inevitable. In the council halls and government strongholds on Earth the jousting had become more and more desperate, until the final blow seemed only a matter of time. By then both sides knew that the final blow would come from the space garrisons, and both sides on Earth had built their hopes and their defenses in the powerful forces beyond the planet’s surface.

  But in space an incredible thing happened. For those early pioneers in space, violent danger and sudden death were constant companions. Survival alone was a never ending, unremitting battle against fearful odds. To those men food, shelter, oxygen and water were the vital issues, and the ideas that divided the nations on Earth in their remoteness seemed petty and quibbling to these men who fought their hearts out merely to survive. It was not so strange that an esprit de corps grew up among them, a sense of closeness in the face of death, a common loyalty that seemed to override the importance of the nations of their birth and the politics of their governments. Nor was it strange that this common loyalty to themselves as men brought with it a new kind of sanity and opened their eyes to values their governments on Earth had long forgotten.

  They realized that they held in their hands weapons that could wipe their home planet barren of life. At first as individuals and then in frank conspiracy they realized that these weapons must never be used. So, when the moment of truth arrived in the councils on Earth, and the Earth forces delivered their blows at each other, expecting the massive backing of their garrisons in space, the men in those garrisons drew together shoulder to shoulder and withheld the devastating attack they were expected to deliver.

  There had surely been a conspiracy, Ben Trefon thought, but a conspiracy to draw the teeth of the warring factions on Earth. The Earth councils had raged and threatened and pleaded, and finally had gone on to fight their war as best they could, but its force was blunted as the space garrisons refused to deliver the suicidal blow. After the dust of the war had settled, those brave men in space reaped the reward of their deed as the councils on Earth turned against them in frustration and hatred. It was a bitter reward, and time did not change it. Branded as traitors, they were exiled from the planet of their birth, driven back when they attempted to come home, forced to take up a lonely, wandering life in the great emptiness of space beyond the boundaries of Earth.

  This was the history of the Spacers that every Spacer knew: the history of a group of people cast out and reviled, with cruel injustice, by a homeland that became more bitter as the years passed. And now, Ben thought sleepily, injustice was heaped upon injustice, for the outcasts could not even be left alone to live in space! There was no doubt in his mind that this was the true account of Space history … yet a nagging question remained that he could not quite answer. If this was the whole truth, then his prisoners had to be wrong. And yet he had the strange feeling that Tom and Joyce Barron, born and raised on Earth, really believed that he and his father’s house were beneath contempt, the offspring of pirates and traitors who deserved nothing more than total extermination.

  And he wondered, as he drifted to sleep, if any of them, Earthmen or Spacers, really knew the whole truth.

  • • •

  He awoke with a start, the alarm bell clanging in his ears. He had had a terrible dream; a huge black space ship had been attacking, firing wave after wave of missiles that were weaving their way inexorably toward him as his own defensive shells jammed in their tubes and refused to fire. Now he leaped from the cot and crossed the cabin in three steps, his hands on the missile controls before his eyes were completely open.

  But there was no ship in the view screen. Instead, he saw a great ruddy disc growing larger by the minute, its polar caps glistening. Ben glanced at the chronometer; he had slept almost twelve hours, and now the alarm was signaling that deceleration was finished and the ship was ready to move into braking orbits around Mars.

  Ben sighed with relief and snapped off the alarm. Between planets the ship required little attention, correcting its position automatically against the designated orbit and decelerating at precisely the rate necessary to bring ship’s orbit and planet’s orbit together to permit landing. But landing maneuvers required human skill and judgment. Only in the most extreme emergency would a pilot attempt to plot a landing for his ship without his own hands on the controls, for a few feet of miscalculation could make the difference between a safe landing and a heap of burning rubble on the desert sand.

  Now the Barrons were up, crowding be
hind Ben as he set the controls for his first braking orbit. He felt the drag of the outer reaches of the planet’s atmosphere against the ship, and peered at the disk in the view screen, searching for the landmarks he knew so well.

  Suddenly, Ben Trefon felt a chill settle in his chest. In some indefinable way, the surface of the planet looked odd, changed somehow since the last time he saw it. He searched for the shiny dome of the Botanical Experiment Station as he braked in closer to the surface. It was the first landmark he always spotted on a Mars landing, but now he could not find it. As the ship moved across the dark side of the planet, it seemed that there were a dozen glowing red patches visible in the blackness, an eerie succession of ghostly lights he had never seen before.

  As he approached the twilight zone, he dipped the ship down sharply. Now details began to appear, and Ben forgot his passengers as he gripped the controls, almost crying out at the ruin he saw spread out before his eyes across the planet surface.

  There was a great gaping scar, still smoking, where the experiment station had once stood. Ahead he saw another scar, and another. He searched for the Great Rift and found it, but the straight, clean line he had always seen now looked ragged and broken. He was still searching for the plateau that lay above it when the ship crossed again to the dark side and moved down into its final landing arc.

  Stunned, Ben Trefon watched for the bright side again. Once more he found the Rift, saw the blackened crater where another Spacer house had stood. Then he saw the familiar landmarks, the low plateau rising between the Rift and the mountains, and his eyes confirmed what he had seen fleetingly on the last sweep.

  He snapped on the null-gravity units, tapped the forward jets, and eased the ship down on a hillock overlooking the plateau. Dust rose around the ship as it settled, but Ben did not see it. He was climbing into a pressure suit before the generators stopped whining, and moments later he stepped down from the exit lock and felt the sand crunch beneath his feet as he walked to the brow of the hill.

  Below him, the House of Trefon was a smoking ruin. Fragments of plastic dome stood shattered like broken glass in the sunlight. One of the great stone arches still stood among the fragments of the others. The hangar area was a glowing crater; in the back of the house the Council chamber was split open in a heap of rubble. The cold wind sweeping down from the north flapped a colored curtain back and forth against a ruined window frame. Except for this there was no movement, no breath of life, nothing but silence and desolation.

  Numbly, Ben turned back to the ship. The radiation counter was clicking in his ear: that meant there was still activity in the craters, but the level was low. All the same, he would need a shielded suit before approaching closer.

  Inside the ship he pulled off the helmet, and then stopped dead. Tom and Joyce Barron were staring at the view screen. They looked up at him, and their eyes reflected horror and disbelief. “Where are we?” Tom said. “Why are we stopping here? What is that out there?”

  The numbness seemed to reach to Ben’s fingertips. “That’s our destination,” he said through the tightness in his throat. “Still hot. Still smoking. Take a good look.”

  “But you said we were going to your home — ” Joyce’s voice trailed off.

  Rage exploded in Ben Trefon’s mind. With a sweep of his arm he tore open a locker, hauled out heavy shielded suits, dumped them at the feet of his prisoners. “Go ahead, put them on,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to get your feet dirty. And you won’t get too close to the hot places, I’ll see to that. Well, what are you waiting for? You wouldn’t want to miss this. Put on the suits. I’ll take you on a private tour of the greatest house on Mars.”

  • • •

  It was a grim party that made its way down the slope to the edge of the ruins. Ben took the lead, his rage subsiding to a cold white flame. The Barrons followed close behind him. He skirted the obviously hot craters in the hangar area and moved on into the rubble-strewn entry hall. Fragments of the wall were still standing. Great chunks of the tile floor had been thrown up at angles, but Ben picked a careful path through the ruin. Some parts of the house were still recognizable, but his family’s living quarters had taken a shell directly. Not even a fragment remained.

  Ben stopped. There was no point to going on. There was not even a stir of life, no sign of human activity. Nothing could have survived such an onslaught. The house had literally been pounded into the ground. Ben knew without looking that he would find no survivors.

  In his earphones he heard a choked sob, and the girl said, “I’m going back to the ship.” Something in her voice brought a wave of shame to Ben’s mind. Irrationally he had been blaming the Barrons personally for his loss, rubbing their noses in it. “Yes, go back,” he said. “There’s nothing here for you to see.” He took her arm, guided her across the rubble and out of the danger area. “Go on up and wait in the ship,” he told her gently. “We won’t be long.”

  Tom started to follow her, but Ben caught his arm. “I’m going to need some help. You’d better stay.”

  The Earthman’s eyes were bright with suspicion. “What do you think you’re going to do here?”

  “My father was in this house,” Ben said. “We have to be sure there are no survivors. And there’s something I have to look for.”

  Reluctantly Tom followed him. For almost an hour they searched the rubble in vain. Maybe some of the people in the house had been evacuated, somehow, but Ben found the ruined shell of his father’s cruiser lying at the edge of the hangar crater. He looked no further. He knew that his father would never have left the house, no matter what the emergency, as long as anyone else remained to be evacuated.

  Later he knew that he would try to piece together the details of his father’s death, try to imagine what had happened here from the first moment of warning until the last blow was struck. But for the time being Ben simply accepted it, numbly, as he accepted the ruin of the house. Just one thing burned in his mind now, one thing that had to be done.

  He began searching for the stairs that led down to the vault. His father’s words were fresh in his mind; there was something there, something that was now his responsibility.

  With Tom’s help he found a way down the sandstone passage that led to the armored vault. It took half an hour of work to clear the passage of rubble, but they managed it. One side of the vault had been caved in under the force of a direct hit, and part of the lead shielding in the ceiling sagged, but the main archives were intact, the repository of Spacer records, deeds, documents and other official papers. If only they had come down here, Ben thought, some of them might have survived. But he knew that no Spacers under attack would ever think of hiding in the ground. For them space would seem the only safe place.

  Finally they reached the family vault. The mechanism of the door had been damaged by the bombardment, but it responded to Ben’s handprint and the door opened with a groan. Inside, on a steel table, they found a sealed pouch, and a hand-scribbled note on a piece of gray paper.

  Ben picked up the note, recognized his father’s hasty scrawl. “These are yours,” the note said, “to guard with your life and pass on to your children. The belt is your authority and identification, to be worn until its contents are demanded. The tape is also to be passed on, although its words mean nothing now. One day you may understand it. These things are yours; guard them well, and good luck, my son.”

  Inside the pouch were a belt and a spool of tape. The belt was black, a strip of elastic mesh with a capsule enclosed in the fabric. The capsule was the size of an egg, smooth and silvery as Ben removed it from its pocket in the belt. It felt metallic in his hand, and yet it was strangely warm to the touch. He replaced it in the belt and ran the belt around his waist. The elastic seemed to clasp him as though it welcomed a carrier.

  “What is it?” Tom Barron said.

  “I don’t know,” Ben replied. “My father wore it as long as I can remember. I always thought it was a gift from my mother, but
now that I think of it I’m sure Dad told me once that it was handed down by my grandfather.” Ben paused, trying to draw forth a memory that had been buried completely for years. “Once when I was very small Dad showed me these things — the belt, and the tape too. He told me that the men of the House of Trefon were some kind of guardians, ‘Keepers of the keys’ was the way he put it, but he never told me what we were guarding.”

  Tom pointed to the spool on the table. “What about the tape?”

  “That’s part of it, too.” Ben crossed the room and slid a tape player out from the wall. The tape was an ancient one, wrinkled and frayed as though played many times. It was an old style tape spool with open edges, but it fit into the player. Ben threaded it, turned the switch, and waited as the tape slowly began to unwind.

  At first there was just a crackle of static. Then, suddenly, they heard a voice, a woman’s voice, singing.

  It was a mauki chant. It was the first time Tom Barron had ever heard a mauki sing; for a moment he dismissed it as foolishness at a time like this, just a tape recording of somebody singing a song. But then he stopped, and turned, and listened, suddenly shivering in the half-lighted room.

  For Ben Trefon the voice brought back a flood of childhood memories, and a wave of loneliness that was almost unbearable. For as long as he could remember Spacer women had always sung; it was one of the things that made them maukis. Of course there were many kinds of mauki songs, but most familiar were the laments, the haunting songs of grief and loss, half ballad and half chant, that never really told a story yet always conveyed with overwhelming force their message of Spacer hopes and Spacer longings.

  And this tape was a mauki chant, so familiar and so compelling that it brought tears to Ben’s eyes. Yet, in some ways it was different from any mauki chant he had ever heard before.