Seven Conquests Read online

  “You could strew ‘em around town,” Bailey said, getting interested. “Hide ‘em in obscure corners and-”

  Ugga-wugga-wugga, hugga-hugga me, do!

  “I wish it would stop,” Naomi said. “I came here to get to know you, Carl, not that thing.”

  Bailey sat straight. One hand, lying on the table, shaped a fist. “Why not?” he said.

  “Eh?” Diaz asked.

  Bailey rose. “Excuse me a minute.” He bowed to the girls and made his way through the dancers to the wall control. There he switched the record off.

  Silence fell like a meteor. For a moment, voices were stilled, too. Then a large tourist came barreling off his bar stool and yelled, “Hey, wha’d’you think you’re-”

  “I’ll refund your money, sir,” Bailey said mildly. “But the noise bothers the lady I’m with.”

  “Huh? Hey, who d’yuh think yuh are, you-”

  The proprietor came from around the bar. “If the lady weeshes it off,” he declared, “off it stays.”

  “What kinda discrimination is this?” roared the tourist. Several other people growled with him.

  Diaz prepared to go help, in case things got rough. But his companion pulled up the sleeve of his mufti tunic. The ID bracelet gleamed into view. “First Lieutenant Carl H. Bailey, United States Astro-military Corps, at your service,” he said; and a circular wave of quietness expanded around him. “Please forgive my action. I’ll gladly stand the house a round if-”

  But that wasn’t necessary. The tourist fell all over himself apologizing and begged to buy the drinks. Someone else bought them next, and someone after him. Nobody ventured near the booth, where the spacemen obviously wanted privacy. But from time to time, when Diaz glanced out, he got many smiles and a few shy waves. It was almost embarrassing.

  “I was afraid for a minute we’d have a fight,” he said.

  “N-no,” Bailey answered. “I’ve watched our prestige develop exponentially, being Stateside while my leg healed. I doubt if there’s an American alive who’d lift a finger against a Corpsman these days. But I admit I was afraid of a scene. That wouldn’t’ve done the name of the Corps any good. As things worked out, though…

  “We came off too bloody well,” Diaz finished. “Now there’s not even any pseudolife in this place. Let’s haul mass. We can catch the transpolar shuttle to Paris if we hurry.”

  But at that moment the proprietor’s friends and relations, who also remembered him, began to arrive. They must have been phoned the great news. Pablo was there, Manuel, Carmen with her castanets, Juan with his guitar, Tio Rico waving a bottle in each enormous fist; and they welcomed Diaz back with embraces, and soon there was song and dancing, and the fiesta ended in the rear courtyard watching the moon set before dawn, and everything was like the old days, for Señor Capitán Diaz’s sake. That had been a hell of a good furlough.

  Another jet splashed fire across the Milky Way. Closer this time, and obviously reducing relative speed. Diaz croaked out a cheer. He had spent weary hours waiting. The hugeness and aloneness had eaten farther into his defenses than he wished to realize. He had begun to understand why some people were disturbed to see the stars on a clear mountain night. (Where wind went soughing through Jeffrey pines whose bark smelled like vanilla if you laid your head close, and a river flowed cold and loud over stones—oh, Christ, how beautiful Earth was!) He shoved such matters aside and reactivated his transmitter.

  The streak winked out and the stars crowded back into his eyes. But that was all right, it meant the boat had decelerated as much as necessary, and soon a scooter would be homing on his beam, and water and food and sleep, and a new ship and eventually certain letters to write. That would be the worst part—but not for months or years yet, not till one side or the other conceded the present phase of the war. Diaz found himself wishing most for a cigarette.

  He hadn’t seen the boat’s hull this time, of course; no rosy cloud had existed to silhouette its blackness. Nor did he see the scooter until it was almost upon him. That jet was very thin, since it need only drive a few hundred pounds of mass on which two space-suited men sat. They were little more than a highlight and a shadow. Diaz’s pulse filled the silence. “Hallo!” he called in his helmet mike. “Hallo, yonder!”

  They didn’t reply. The scooter matched velocities a few yards off. One man tossed a line with a luminous bulb at the end. Diaz caught it and made fast. The line was drawn taut. Scooter and raft bumped together and began gently rotating.

  Diaz recognized those helmets.

  He snatched for a sidearm he didn’t have. A Unasian sprang to one side, lifeline unreeling. His companion stayed mounted, a chucker gun cradled in his arms. The sun rose blindingly over the raft edge.

  There was nothing to be done. Yet Diaz fought down a physical nausea of defeat, “raised” his hands and let them hang free. The other man came behind him and deftly wired his wrists together. Both Unasians spent a few minutes inspecting the raft. The man with the gun tuned in on the American band. “You make very clever salvage, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Diaz whispered.

  “Come, please.” He was lashed to the carrier rack. Weight tugged at him as the scooter accelerated.

  They took an hour or more to rendezvous. Diaz had time to adjust his emotions. The first horror passed into numbness; then he identified a sneaking relief, that he would get a reasonably comfortable vacation from war until the next prisoner exchange; and then he remembered the new doctrine, which applied to all commissioned officers on whom there had been time to operate.

  I may never get the chance, he thought frantically. They told me not to waste myself on anything less than a cruiser; my chromosomes arid several million dollars spent in training me make me that valuable to the country, at least. I may go straight to Pallas, or wherever their handiest prison base it, in a lousy scoutboat or cargo ship.

  But I may get a chance to strike a blow that’ll hurt. Have I got the guts? I hope so. No, I don’t even know if I hope it. This is a cold place to die.

  The feeling passed. Emotional control, drilled into him at the Academy and practiced at every refresher course, took over. It was essentially psychosomatic, a matter of using conditioned reflexes to bring muscles and nerves and glands back toward normal. If the fear symptoms—tension, tachycardia, sweat, decreased salivation, and the rest—were alleviated, then fear itself was. Far down under the surface, a four-year-old named Martin woke from a nightmare and screamed for his mother, who did not come; but Diaz grew able to ignore him.

  The boat became visible, black across star clouds. No, not a boat. A small ship…abnormally large jets and light guns, a modified Panyushkin…what had the enemy been up to in his asteroid shipyards? Some kind of courier vessel, maybe. Recognition signals must be flashing back and forth. The scooter passed smoothly through a lock that closed again behind it. Air was pumped in, and Diaz went blind as frost condensed on his helmet. Several men assisted him out of the armor. They hadn’t quite finished when an alarm rang, engines droned, and weight came back. The ship was starting off at about half a gee.

  Short bodies in green uniforms surrounded Diaz. Their immaculate appearance reminded him of his own unshaven filthiness, how much he ached, and how sandy his brain felt. “Well,” he mumbled, “where’s your interrogation officer?”

  “You go more high, Captain,” answered a man with colonel’s insignia. “Forgive us we do not attend your needs at once, but he says very important.” Diaz bowed to the courtesy, remembering what had been planted in his arm and feeling rather a bastard. Though it looked as if he wouldn’t have occasion to use the thing. Dazed by relief and weariness, he let himself be escorted along corridors and tubes until he stood before a door marked with great black Cyrillic warnings and guarded by two soldiers. Which was almost unheard of aboard a spaceship, he thought jokingly.

  There was a teleye above the door. Diaz barely glanced at it. Whoever sat within the cabin must be staring through it, at him. He tr
ied to straighten his shoulders. “Martin Diaz,” he croaked. “Captain, USAC, serial number—”

  Someone yelled from the loudspeaker beside the pickup. Diaz half understood. He whirled about. His will gathered itself and surged. He began to think the impulses that would destroy the ship. A guard tackled him. A rifle butt came down on his head. And that was that.

  They told him forty-eight hours passed while he was in sickbay.”T wouldn’t know,” he said dully. “Nor care.” But he was again in good physical shape. Only a bandage sheathing his lower right arm, beneath the insignaless uniform given him, revealed that surgeons had been at work. His mind was sharply aware of its environment—muscle play beneath his skin, pastel bulkheads and cold fluorescence, faint machine-quiver underfoot, gusts from ventilator grilles, odors of foreign cooking, and always the men, with alien faces and carefully expressionless voices, who had caught him.

  At least he suffered no abuse. They might have been justified in resenting his attempt to kill them. Some would call it treacherous. But they gave him the treatment due an officer and, except for supplying his needs, left him alone in his tiny bunk cubicle. Which was worse, in some respects, than punishment. Diaz was actually glad when he was at last summoned for an interview.

  They brought him to the guarded door and gestured him through. It closed behind him.

  For a moment Diaz noticed only the suite itself. Even a fleet commander didn’t get such space and comfort. The ship had long ceased accelerating, but spin provided a reasonable weight. The suite was constructed within a rotatable shell, so that the same deck was “down” as when the jets were in operation. Diaz stood on a Persian carpet, looking past low-legged furniture to a pair of arched doorways. One revealed a bedroom, lined with micro-spools—ye gods, there must be ten thousand volumes! The other showed part of an office, a desk, a great enigmatic control panel, and-

  The man seated beneath the Monet reproduction got up and made a slight bow. He was tall for a Unasian, with a lean mobile face whose eyes were startlingly blue against a skin as white as a Swedish girl’s. His undress uniform was neat but carelessly worn. No rank insignia were visible, for a gray hood, almost a coif, covered his head and fell over the shoulders.

  “Good day, Captain Diaz,” he said, speaking English with little accent. “Permit me to introduce myself: General Leo Ilyitch Rostock, Cosmonautical Service of the People of United Asia.”

  Diaz went through the rituals automatically. Most of him was preoccupied with how quiet this place was, how vastly quiet…But the layout was serene. Rostock must be fantastically important if his comfort rated this much mass. Diaz’s gaze flickered to the other man’s waist. Rostock bore a sidearm. More to the point, though, one loud holler would doubtless be picked up by the teleye mike and bring in the guards from outside.

  Diaz tried to relax. If they haven’t kicked my teeth in so far, they don’t plan to. I’m going to live. But he couldn’t believe that. Not here, in the presence of this hooded man. Still more so, in this drawing room. Its existence beyond Mars was too eerie. “No, sir, I have no complaints,” he heard himself saying. “You run a good ship. My compliments.”

  “Thank you.” Rostock had a charming, almost boyish smile. “Although this is not my ship, actually. Colonel Sumoro commands the Ho Chi Minh. I shall convey your appreciation to him.”

  “You may not be called the captain,” Diaz said bluntly, “but the vessel is obviously your instrument.”

  Rostock shrugged. “Will yop not sit down?” he invited, and resumed his own place on the couch. Diaz took a chair across the table from him, feeling knobby and awkward. Rostock pushed a box forward. “Cigarette?”

  “Thank you.” Diaz struck and inhaled hungrily.

  “I hope your arm does not bother you.”

  Diaz’s belly muscles tightened. “No. It’s all right.”

  “The surgeons left the metal ulnar bone in place, as well as its nervous and muscular connections. Complete replacement would have required more hospital equipment than a spaceship can readily carry. We did not want to cripple you by removing the bone. After all, we were only interested in the cartridge.”

  Diaz gathered courage and snapped: “The more I see of you, General, the sorrier I am that it didn’t work. You’re big game.”

  Rostock chuckled. “Perhaps. I wonder, though, if you are as sorry as you would like to feel you are. You would have died too, you realize.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you know what the weapon embedded in you was?”

  “Yes. We tell our people such things. A charge of isotopic explosive, with a trigger activated by a particular series of motor nerve pulses. Equivalent to about ten tons of TNT.” Diaz gripped the chair arms, leaned forward and said harshly: “I’m not blabbing anything you don’t now know. I daresay you consider it a violation of the customs of war. Not me! I gave no parole-”

  “Certainly, certainly.” Rostock waved a deprecating hand. “We hold…what is your idiom?…no hard feelings. The device was ingenious. We have already dispatched a warning to our Central, whence the word can go out through the fleet, so your effort, the entire project, has gone for nothing. But it was a rather gallant attempt.”

  He leaned back, crossed one long leg over the other, and regarded the American candidly. “Of course, as you implied, we would have proceeded somewhat differently,” he said. “Our men would not have known what they carried, and the explosion would have been triggered posthypnotically, by some given class of situations, rather than consciously. In that way, there would be less chance of betrayal.”

  “How did you know, anyway?” Diaz sighed.

  Rostock gave him an impish grin. “As the villain of this particular little drama, I shall only say that I have my methods.” Suddenly he was grave. “One reason we made so great an effort to pick you up before your own rescue party arrived, was to gather data on what you have been doing, you people. You know how comparatively rare it is to get a prisoner in space warfare; and how hard to get spies into an organization of high morale which maintains its own laboratories and factories off Earth. Divergent developments can go far these days, before the other side is aware of them. The miniaturization involved in your own weapon, for example, astonished our engineers.”

  “I can’t tell you anything else,” Diaz said.

  “Oh, you could,” Rostock answered gently. “You know as well as I what can be done with a shot of babble juice. Not to mention other techniques—nothing melodramatic, nothing painful or disabling, merely applied neurology—in which I believe Unasia is ahead of the Western countries. But don’t worry, Captain. I shall not permit any such breach of military custom.

  “However, I do want you to understand how much trouble we went to, to get you. When combat began, I reasoned that the ships auxiliary to a dreadnaught would be the likeliest to suffer destruction of the type which leaves a few survivors. From the pattern of action in the first day, I deduced the approximate orbits and positions of several American capital ships. Unasian tactics throughout the second day were developed with two purposes: to inflict damage, of course, but also to get the Ho so placed that we would be likely to detect any distress signals. This cost us the Genghis—a calculated risk that did not pay off—I am not omniscient. But we did hear your call.

  “You are quite right about the importance of this ship here. My superiors will be horrified at my action. But of necessity, they have given me carte blanche. And since the Ho itself takes no direct part in any engagement if we can avoid it, the probability of our being detected and attacked was small.”

  Rostock’s eyes held Diaz’s. He tapped the table, softly and repeatedly, with one fingernail. “Do you appreciate what all this means, Captain?” he asked. “Do you see how badly you were wanted?”

  Diaz could only wet his lips and nod.

  “Partly,” Rostock said, smiling again, “there was the desire I have mentioned, to…er…check up on American activities during the last ceasefire period. But partly, too
, there was a wish to bring you up to date on what we have been doing.”

  “Huh?” Diaz half scrambled from his chair, sagged back and gaped.

  “The choice is yours, Captain,” Rostock said. “You can be transferred to a cargo ship when we can arrange it, and so to an asteroid camp, and in general receive the normal treatment of a war prisoner. Or you may elect to hear what I would like to discuss with you. In the latter event, I can guarantee nothing. Obviously I can’t let you go home in a routine prisoner exchange with a prime military secret of ours. You will have to wait until it is no longer a secret—until American intelligence has learned the truth, and we know that they have. That may take years. It may take forever, because I have some hope that the knowledge will change certain of your own attitudes.

  “No, no, don’t answer now. Think it over. I will see you again tomorrow. In twenty-four hours, that is to say.“

  Rostock’s eyes shifted past Diaz, as if to look through the bulkheads. His tone dropped to a whisper. “Have you ever wondered, like me, why we carry Earth’s rotation period to space with us? Habit; practicality; but is there not also an element of magical thinking? A hope that somehow we can create our own sunrises? The sky is very black out there. We need all the magic we can invent. Do we not?”

  Several hours later alarms sounded, voices barked over the intercoms, spin was halted but weight came quickly back as the ship accelerated. Diaz knew just enough Mandarin to understand from what he overheard that radar contact had been made with American units and combat would soon resume. The guard who brought him dinner in his cubicle confirmed it, with many a bow and hissing smile. Diaz had gained enormous face by his audience with the man in the suite.