The Chalice of Death (16 page)

“Not me, Helna. You.”

“And where will you go?”

“I've got a new idea,” Navarre told her. “One that can make use of the fact that Jorus and Kariad are going to ally. Tell me, can you think of a
third
world that's likely to be scared by such an alliance?”

“Morank, of course!”

“Right. So I go to Morank and offer the Polisarch some advance information on the coming alliance. If I handle it right this time, the Moranki ought to fall right in line. Meantime you go to Earth and explain the shape of things to Antrok. I'll keep you posted on what happens to me.”

“Good luck,” she said simply.

He forced an uneasy laugh. “It'll take more than luck. We're sitting ducks if Kausirn ever launches the Grand Fleet against our six ships.”

Navarre broke the contact and turned away from the myriad dials and vernier controls of the subradio set. Behind him was a mirror, and he stared at his false Kariadi face.

That would have to be changed. From now on, he would sail under his own colors; there was nothing to be gained by further masquerade.

He moved down the companionway to the washroom of the little ship, nudged the control pod that widened the sphincter, and stepped in, sealing the room behind him. A bottle of neohexathyl was in the drug cabinet; he broke the seal, poured a handful of the cool green liquid over his face and shoulders, and stepped under the radiating field of the Vibron.

He felt the plastic layers covering his face sag; with a quick twisting gesture he ripped them away—and his own features, strangely pale, appeared. He had grown accustomed to the face of Loggon Domell; seeing Hallam Navarre burst forth suddenly was startling.

A second treatment with the dissolving fluid and the Kariadi wig came off—painfully, for his own hair had grown somewhat underneath it. He stripped and rubbed neohexathyl over his body, seeing the blue stain loosen and come away under the molecular flow of the Vibron. Within minutes, all that remained of Loggon Domell, Kariadi Ambassador, was a messy heap of blue-stained plastic lying on the washroom floor.

Navarre cleaned himself, depilated his scalp, and dressed again. He grinned at himself in the mirror, and scooping up the lumps of plastic, dumped them cheerfully in the disposal unit.

So much for Ambassador Domell
, he thought. He drew the blaster at his hip, squinted into the charge-chamber for an instant to assure himself that the weapon was functioning. The tiny yellow indicator light within was glowing steadily and evenly.

He reholstered the weapon and left the washroom, feeling clean and fresh now that he was able to wear his own identity again.

Up ahead, the ship's pilot was lounging in his cabin; the ship was on hyper-drive, now, and no human hand could serve any purpose in guiding it. The silent ultronic generators would bring the ship unerringly through the nothingness of hyperspace; the pilot's job was strictly that of emergency stand-by, once the ship had entered warp.

Navarre returned to his own cabin, switched off the visual projector on his communicator, and buzzed the pilot. There was a pause; then the screen lit, and Navarre saw the man, dressed in off-duty fatigues, trying to conceal a look of sour impatience.

“Yes, Ambassador?”

“Pilot, are you busy just now? I'd like you to come to my cabin for a moment if you're not.”

The pilot's square-cut blue face showed a trace of annoyance, but he said evenly, “Of course, Ambassador. I'll be right there. Is anything wrong?”

“Not exactly,” Navarre said.

Navarre waited. A moment later the annunciator-light atop his door flashed briefly. The Earthman depressed the enameled door-control and the door pivoted inward and away. The pilot stood there, arms folded, just outside in the corridor.

“You called me, Ambassador? I—
who are you
?”

Navarre's hand tightened on the butt of his blaster. “Hallam Navarre is my name.”

“You're—you're an Earthman,” the pilot muttered, backing away. “What happened to the Ambassador? How did you get aboard the ship? And what are you going to do?”

“Much too many questions for one man to answer at once,” Navarre returned lightly. “The Ambassador, I regret to inform you, is dead. And I fear I'll need the use of your ship.”

The Kariadi was wobbly-legged with fear. He half-fell into Navarre's cabin, but the Earthman, suspecting a trick, moved forward swiftly, caught the man by the throat, and propped him up against the left-hand bulkhead.

Through a constricted throat, the man asked, “What are you going to do to me?”

“Put you to sleep and drop you overboard in one of the escape capsules,” Navarre told him. “And then I'll pursue a journey of my own.”

He drew a dark violet ampoule of perredrin from his jacket pocket and flicked the safety off the spray-point with his thumb. Quickly he touched the tip of the ampoule to the man's arm and squeezed; the subsonic spray forced ten cubic centimeters of narcotic liquid into the pilot's blood stream instantly.

He turned gray-faced and crumpled forward within the space of three heartbeats; Navarre caught him and slung him over one shoulder. The pilot's mouth hung slackly open, and his chest rose and fell in a steady, slow rhythm, one breath-intake every fifteen seconds.

The escape-capsules—there were two of them aboard the ship—were situated aft, just above the drive compartment, in a womb-like alcove of their own. They were miniature spaceships, eleven feet long, equipped with their own precision-made drive unit. Navarre stuffed the slumbering Kariadi in head-first, making sure he was caught securely in the foam webwork that guarded against landing shock, and peered at the navigating dial.

For the convenience of laymen who might need to use the escape-capsules in a hurry, and who had no notion of how to astrogate, the engineers of Kariad had developed a shortcut; a number of possible orbits were preplotted, and the computer was equipped to select the most effective one and fit it to whatever destination the escaping passenger chose.

Navarre tapped out
K-A-R-I-A-D
on the dial, and the computer unit signaled acknowledgment and began clicking out the instructions for the drive. Navarre stepped back, slammed shut the automatically-locking hood of the capsule, and yanked down on the release lever.

The capsule quivered momentarily in its moorings; then the ship's cybernetic governor responded to the impulse and cut off the magnetic-field that held the capsule in place. Slowly, it glided down the passageway toward the outer skin of the ship. Photonic relays opened an airlock for it as it approached; Navarre watched the capsule with its sleeping voyager vanish through the lock and out of the ship, bound on an orbit of its own.

Some days later, the slumbering, pilot would be awakened by a gentle bump. He would discover he had made a perfect landing somewhere on Kariad.

Navarre turned away and made his course frontward to the ship's control center. Altering the ship's course was not so simple as merely punching out a destination on an escape-capsule's computer.

He dropped into what had been the pilot's chair, and, lifting stylus and slide rule, addressed himself to the considerable task of determining the quickest and most efficient orbit to the planet of Morank.

Morank was the fourth world of a red super-giant sun located eight light-years from Kariad, ten light-years from Jorus. Morank itself was a large and well-populated world, a busy commercial center, and, in the old days of the Starkings' League, Morank had fought a bitter three-cornered struggle with Jorus and Kariad for trade rights in their cluster.

That had been more than five hundred years before. The Starkings' League had endured ten thousand years, but it was dying, and its aggressive component worlds were beginning to thrust up their own noisy claims for independence. Morank, Jorus, and Kariad—the three most powerful worlds of their cluster, the richest, the best-situated—were foremost in the fast-rising revolt against the powerless Starkings.

Still nominally federated into the League, the three worlds jockeyed for position like so many racing animals readying themselves for a break from the post. After two hundred years, the long-overdue break finally came; Joroiran I and his bold Earthman cohort, Voight Navarre, rebelled from the dying League and declared the eternal independence of the Jorus system. Morank had come right after, and then Kariad.

Three hundred years—but for the last hundred of that time, an uneasy friendship had existed among the three powerful planets, each watching the other two warily, none making any too-overt motions toward extending its sphere of control.

Navarre smiled. An alliance between Jorus and Kariad was sure to open some eyes on Morank.

His little ship blinked back into space within landing distance of the planet. In the sky the vast bulk of Morank's feeble red sun, Draximoor, spread like an untidy octopus, tendrils of flame extending thread-like in all directions.

Navarre fed the landing coordinates into the computer. The ship plunged planetward.

And this is Earth's last chance, he thought. If Morank allows itself to be pushed in the right direction, we may yet survive. If not, there'll be no withstanding the combined fleets of Jorus and Kariad.

A landing field loomed below. The ship radio sputtered and came to life; a voice spoke, in crisp syllables of the local
lingua spacia
.

“This is Central Traffic Control speaking from the city of Ogyglan. If you intend to effect a landing on Moranki territory, please respond.”

Navarre flashed the answering signal. A moment later there came the okay, and with it was relayed a set of field coordinates, supplementing those he had, already computed. He acknowledged, punched the new figures into his tape, and sat back, tensely, awaiting the landing.

Chapter Sixteen

The Grand Spaceport at Ogyglan was a dazzling sight: to offset the dimness of the vast, pale red sun, batteries of photo-flood illumino-screens had been ranked along the areaway that led from the spaceport buildings to the land field itself. To Navarre it seemed as if the entire planet was glowing, but it was a muted radiance that brightened without interfering with vision.

Three burly chisel-faced Morankimar waited for him as he clambered down the catwalk of his spaceship and strode across the field.

The Morankimar were humanoid aliens, cut to the general biological pattern of the humanoid type, but approximating it not quite so closely as did the Jorans and the Kariadi. They were heavy-set creatures, nearly as broad as they were wide, with dish-like oval eyes set lemur-like in independent orbital sockets, rotating with utter disregard for each other. Their skins were coarse-grained and pebbly, a dark muddy yellow in color and unpleasant of texture. Fleshy protuberances dangled beard-fashion from their extremely sharp chins. They were sturdy, durable, long-lived creatures, quick-witted and strong.

As Navarre approached them he observed much anguished rotating of eyes. Finally, the foremost of the aliens, a bleak-visaged oldster whose skin had long since faded to a pale chartreuse, rumbled in
lingua spacia
, “Your ship bears the royal arms of Kariad. Are you perhaps the Oligocrat's Earthman?”

“Hardly,” Navarre replied, in Joran. He understood the Morankimar tongue, but it was a jawbreaking agglutinating language for which he held little fondness; only a lifelong speaker of it could hope to handle its maddening irregularities with success.

“I'm Hallam Navarre, formerly Earthman to the Court of Overlord Joroiran of Jorus. I've come to Morank bearing an important message for the Polisarch.”

“A message from Joroiran?” asked the alien, in a thickly accented version of Joran.

“No,” said Navarre. “A message
about
Joroiran. And about Oligocrat Marhaill. I think the Polisarch would be interested in what I have to say.”

“We will take you to him.”

A car was summoned; they left the spaceport and drove at a steady unflagging clip through the enormous metropolis of Ogyglan, toward the local residence of the Polisarch of Morank.

At length they came to a building that seemed to have no foundation; it drifted ten feet above the ground, terminating in a smooth glassy undersurface, mirror-bright, jet-black. The building itself was a square untapering tower, a solid block of masonry.

“This is the residence of the Polisarch,” Navarre was told.

The Earthman looked upward at the shining rectangle that hovered before him. Sleek, handsome, its sides icy blue and gleaming, it was a handsome sight.

He frowned. “What holds it up?”

“A hundred million cubic feet of graviton repulsors. The Polisarch must never touch Morankimar soil—nor may his residence.”

Navarre nodded. It was a fact he had forgotten.

A drawbridge descended from the lip of the building and they rose, the bridge rising behind them and tucking itself invisibly into place.

Navarre found himself in a wide, cream-colored marble anteroom. The shining floor was a solid slab of milky obsidian.

Two Morankimar clad in violet robes appeared from a concealed alcove and requested Navarre's blaster. Without protest he handed it over, and also, upon request, the slim curved blade beneath his vest. The palace guards evidently had monitored him by fluoroscreen.

Finally he was ushered into a vestibule that opened on an extensive drape-hung hall.

Navarre felt a curious tremor of anticipation as he crossed the threshold of the Grand Throne Room—not only because the fate of Earth hung on the skill of his powers of persuasion at this interview, but because the Morankimar Polisarch was one of the legendary figures of the galaxy and of the universe.

Rel Dominoor was his name, and he had held sway a hundred and eight years, having taken the Morankimar throne while Joroiran IV reigned in Jorus. During his years on Jorus, Navarre had learned to his sorrow the strength of this man Dominoor; nearly every attempt of his to plant a network of spies on Morank had been frustrated, and in the end he had simply abandoned hope of monitoring Morankimar activities the way he did those of Kariad and other worlds of the cluster. Old Dominoor was entirely too shrewd.