Destroyer of Worlds (19 page)

Eric nodded and went to search.

Sigmund took the stepping disc from its sling. He set it on the floor near the immobilized alien. His toes tingled through his armored boots as he slid the disc to the edge of the force field. “Kirsten, lift the ship to fifty miles, then maintain a velocity match with the ground.”

Only a momentary pause betrayed the questions she resisted asking. “Lifting, lifting”—at max acceleration, it would take only about a minute—“decelerating now, still rising. Fifty miles, mark. Hovering on thrusters directly over the city.”

“I'll be sending through a prisoner. In theory, it's immobilized. If it moves—blow it out the air lock. Do
not
hesitate.”

“My finger's on the switch,” she said.

Rasping sounds heralded Eric's return. He reappeared, his gloves around two solid planks. The other ends scraped along the stone floor.

Sigmund grabbed a board. “We're going to move our prisoner against a wall. Then, while you keep it there, I'll slide the stepping disc beneath.”

“Got it.” Eric lifted his plank into the force field. The field grabbed the end and held it.

Sigmund followed suit. Amid ominous groaning and the ever heavier rain of dust and debris, they shoved the alien into place.

To slide the stepping disc beneath involved lifting alien and armor. The disc was little thicker than the planks, which kept slipping off.

Eric dropped his plank. He needed both hands to roll a basketball-sized lump of rubble to the force field's edge. With the masonry chunk as his fulcrum and his board as a lever, huffing mightily, Eric raised the alien about an inch. “Now,” he grunted.

With his board, Sigmund forced the stepping disc beneath—just as Eric's board snapped. The prisoner dropped, pinning the stepping disc, not
quite
centered beneath.

With a sickening moan, part of the corridor ceiling gave way.

“We're ready to send,” Sigmund radioed. If their prisoner was unlucky, an arm or a leg might be left behind. “What about your end?”

“It goes out the air lock if it moves,” Kirsten confirmed.

“Your decision whether that's necessary, no questions asked. Err on the side of safety.” Sigmund paused for any objection. There wasn't one.

“On the count of three,” Sigmund said. He had a transport controller in his gloved hands, a thumb poised above the transmit button. “Kirsten, be alert.”

“Copy that,” she replied.

“One, two, three.” The alien—all of him—disappeared.

“Got it!” Kirsten called out. “Frozen stiff. Now how about you two?”

Cargo holds had stepping discs inlaid in their decks for ease of loading and unloading. Sigmund used his transport controller to retarget the disc here to a disc in
Don Quixote
's auxiliary cargo hold. “After you, Eric.”

Eric stepped away.

In twenty minutes, no more, the battery would be drained and the restraint field would vanish. They had that long to somehow get the prisoner into a more secure environment. Or to chuck it, and any hope for answers, out the air lock.

“Sigmund!” Eric yelled. “Get out of there.”

Sigmund stepped onto the disc. His impression, in the instant that the stepping disc activated for him, was of the whole stone structure crumbling.

 

Frozen in midair, helpless, Thssthfok considered.

Non-Pak spacefaring aliens. Either Koshbara had been slow to awaken him, or the spaceship had approached Mala unnoticed. If the latter, the aliens had a means of propulsion other than fusion drive.

There had been no time to ask for details; now Thssthfok could not. As mightily as he struggled, the force field did not permit him to speak, or even to tongue the radio controls. He could hardly breathe against the invisible restraint.

He remembered the dank stone basement of the Drar palace, and confronting the aliens, and getting snared by a restraint field. That was only a moment ago, his senses insisted. How had he gotten here, wherever here was?

He listed the possibilities. He might have been stunned by an alien weapon. For that or some other reason, he might have lost consciousness. But no: His helmet clock insisted only a moment had passed. Then somehow he had been moved instantaneously. The aliens had a means of teleportation! He must acquire the technology.

Those who had captured him were not without skill. They also had failings, to carelessly reveal so much about their technology. Or they were confident he would not survive to use what he learned. . . .

He floated facedown, a surface with a not-quite-metallic sheen a handspan beneath his visor. His peripheral vision hinted at barriers on every side. Featureless walls to his left and right. In the wall in front of him, hard to see, the lower rim of a hatch and a control panel. He guessed he was in an air lock.

A thin disc lay atop the decking, beneath his belly. What purpose did the disc serve? His neck refused to bend, but with effort he shifted his eyes and—

Discontinuity!

He hung in midair above more quasi-metallic decking and a thin disc, but the confining walls had receded. A new room, then, perhaps a cargo hold—and certain proof that the aliens had instantaneous transportation.

The force field vanished.

The crash of his battle armor against the deck suggested a metal/plastic composite. Something banged off his oxy tank on its way to the floor. He recovered the fist-sized artifact and stowed it in a pocket of his armor for later study.

Thssthfok stood, the burden of his armor noticeably lightened here. Was this gravity weaker than that of Pakhome? He could not decide. His muscles had acclimated to Mala.

He began surveying his cell. The room held only empty cabinets and shelves, a sturdy but empty metal box, and the disc.

One side of his cell was curved, its area mostly taken up by a single large hatch. He was in a cargo hold. The clear rectangular expanse in that hatch revealed featureless black. In space, perhaps, the ceiling's glow overwhelming the stars. Perhaps only night.

As he approached the hatch a sullen red sun came into view. Closer still to the window he saw the curved surface of a planet, its atmosphere dappled with cloud. Mala. At this altitude the works of the Drar were invisible to the unaided eye.

His tongue flicked out to the helmet radio controls, hoping that Koshbara might have observed something useful. He heard only static. Jamming.

A sudden tap-tap.

Thssthfok's head swiveled sharply, toward the small hatch that would give access into the ship. A metal plate had been welded to the hatch where a latch, knob, or keypad belonged.

Through the small, inset window Thssthfok saw a pale oval. A face. The eyes were eerily breederlike, but everything else was
wrong
. The forehead was vertical when it should be sloped. The nose was too pronounced. The receding jaw was disturbingly short.

Drar varied enough from Pak to seem exotic. This alien was only Pak-like enough to be . . . repulsive.

More rapping, impatient. Something rectangular replaced the face in the window.

Thssthfok moved closer. The object held against the window was a
display device. Imagery moved: most performed by one of the not-quitebreeders, the rest in animation.

The demonstration was clear. Thssthfok was to remove his protective gear and clothing. (Beneath his armor, he had only a many-pocketed utility vest. His captors, like the Drar, evidently wore more.) He was to stow in the box all his things, the disc, and the fist-sized object he had recovered. Then he was to sit on his hands, heels drawn tight against his buttocks, knees spread, head between his knees, with his back against the main hatch. Once he was vulnerable, armored and armed aliens would enter and remove the box.

Helmet sensors reported nitrogen, oxygen, and a bit of carbon dioxide, easily breathable. Enough like Mala that his captors would conclude—correctly—that he could breathe it.

The main hatch, if opened, would vent the hold's atmosphere. Without his armor's magnetic boots, he would be blown into space.

And if he defied his captors and remained inside his suit? The animated instructions addressed that, too. The force field would return for a while and then he would get another chance to comply. Until, Thssthfok surmised, he cooperated—or his suit ran out of oxygen.

He needed a third option. He lifted the disc to study it. It must be important or the aliens would not want it packed for removal. A disc in the air lock and another disc—or was it the same one?—here. Either way, the disc seemed implicated in the alien teleportation technol—

Thssthfok gasped. His weight had tripled in an instant. Artificial cabin gravity, as in a Pak ramscoop—but used to punish, not to offset acceleration.

Servomotors adjusted, but within the armor his muscles strained. The apparent gravity increased further. Further. Further . . .

Thssthfok released the disc and it shot to the deck. His ears rang from the clang. After a moment the gravity eased, and he again weighed something close to normal.

Be crushed now, suffocate soon, or be seen to cooperate. It was not a hard decision. Thssthfok removed his helmet.

The stench! Horrible things, bestial things, inhabited this ship. With one sniff, Thssthfok divided the odors into two types. The first were wholly strange, as foreign as the Drar. He had learned to coexist with those.

But at the remaining stench, not
entirely
alien, Thssthfok's hands ached to rend flesh asunder. At the faint limit of sensitivity, that dominant reek
evoked defective Pak infants. For millions of years, such not-quite-right smells had triggered the reflex to destroy any mutant birth.

Somehow, these were Pak mutants.

Willing his fists to relax, Thssthfok set down the helmet and finished removing his armor. The opportunity to resist would come.

 

SIGMUND TWITCHED AS THE PRISONER
removed his helmet. Those eyes! They were so
human
. But by human standards the head was grotesque: misshapen, topped by a bony crest, totally hairless, and too large for its body. The skin looked leathery. The face had neither lips nor gums, only a hard, nearly flat, toothless beak.

Sigmund watched a holo, not the prisoner himself. Only a few fiber-optic cables penetrated into the improvised cell. There had scarcely been time, before the improvised restraint-field generator drained its battery, to empty the auxiliary cargo hold and run cables for monitoring. No active bugs, whose electronics might somehow be co-opted.

“Are you all right, Sigmund?” Kirsten asked. She shared the corridor with him, standing on the other side of the holo. The rest of the crew watched from their posts. “You look upset.”

Sigmund shivered, in the grip of déjà vu. He hoped his suspicions were misplaced. “I'm not sure.”

Within his cell the prisoner began stripping off battle gear. Inside the pressure suit he had looked humanoid, but that was only a matter of overall shape. Briskly now, having taken to heart the gravity-field lesson, he worked his way out of the suit.

His chest, like his face, was flat and leathery. The more of that body emerged, the more clearly humanoid he was. He had joints where a human had them—only the prisoner's joints were grossly enlarged. His elbows were as large as softballs. His hands were knobby, his fingers like strings of walnuts. The fingers lacked nails but the tips suggested retractable talons.

Not he. Not she, either. It. The prisoner's crotch lacked sex organs.

Sigmund's hands trembled. He willed them to stop.

“What's happening?” Baedeker demanded over the intercom. From the safety of his locked cabin, no doubt.

Only Sigmund did not believe any of them was safe. He managed
not
to order Jeeves to open the cargo-hold hatch and vent the air. He needed to know what the prisoner could tell them.

Sigmund had once seen such a creature, or at least its mummified remains. In an earlier life. In Washington, at the Smithsonian Institute, of all places.

He took a deep breath. “I know who our enemies are. It is
not
good.”

 

“The intruder entered Sol system in 2125,” Sigmund said, although Earth's calendar had meaning only to Jeeves and himself. “More than half a millennium ago.”

To be precise, a good 550 Earth years earlier. Only any claim to precision was laughable, given the gaping holes in Sigmund's and the AI's memories. By Sigmund's best approximation, the present Earth date was 2675.

From their customary seats around the relax-room table, Kirsten, Eric, and Baedeker waited for Sigmund to continue. Jeeves listened in while keeping watch on the prisoner, no longer pretending that he was on the bridge.

The Gw'oth participated from their habitat. By choice, Sigmund wondered guiltily, or because the path was blocked? Without Er' o's help, Sigmund would never have captured the prisoner—and Sigmund had welded the Gw'oth into the cargo hold.

Did
they know that they were trapped? He should know, but didn't. With equal delicacy, no one ever mentioned hiding sensors in the cargo hold, or finding and neutralizing them. It was a game of cat and mouse like Sigmund had played with Puppeteer agents back on New Terra. Aboard
Don Quixote
, the mice—that was to say, the Gw'oth—appeared to hold the advantage.

Sigmund clutched a drink bulb, more to steady his hands than from any interest in the coffee. So: 2125. Only the saga began long before that.

He started over. “Humans aren't native to New Terra. You've
always
known that. Well, it turns out humans aren't native to Earth, either.”

“What?” Kirsten and Eric shouted, nearly in unison. Baedeker's comment, orchestral and discordant, sounded equally surprised.

“The year 2125. That's when a few learned otherwise.” Sigmund's
mind's eye offered up the mummified alien he had once seen. Far away. Long ago. “Jeeves, what records do you have on the incident?”